"And yet Greece would have been impossible without the city-state. Only through this sense of civic individuality, this exuberant assertion of independence, this diversity of institutions, customs, arts, and gods, was Greece stimulated by competition and emulation, to live human life with a zest and fullness and creative originality that no other society had ever known.

"For example -- in addition to numerals and family terms, such words as Sanskrit dam (as) (house), Greek domos, Latin damus, English tim-ber --dvaras, thyra, fares, door -- venas, (f)oinas, vitnum, wine -- naur, navis, nave -- akshas, axon, axis, axle -- iugam, zygon, iugum, yoke -- etc.

"It is true that the Greek language was diversified into dialects -- Aeolic, Doric, Ionic, Attic. But these were mutually intelligible, and yielded, in the fifth and fourth centuries, to a koine dialektos, or common dialect, which emanated principally from Athens, and was spoken by nearly all the educated classes of the Hellenic world. Attic Greek was a noble tongue, vigorous, supple, melodious -- as irregular as any vital speech, but lending itself readily to expressive combinations, delicate gradations and distinctions of meaning -- subtle philosophical conceptions -- and every variety of literary excellence from the 'many-billowed surge' of Homer's verse to the placid flow of Plato's prose.

"These inscriptions were written, in Semitic fashion, from right to left. Sixth-century inscriptions (e.g. at Bortyna) were made alternately from right to left and from left to right. Later inscriptions are from left to right throughout, and certain letters are turned around accordingly. The Semitic names for the letters were adopted with minor modifications, but the Greeks made several basic changes.

"Above all, they added vowels, which the Semites had omitted. Certain Semitic characters denoting consonants or breathings were used to represent a, e, i, o, and u. Later the Ionians addded the long vowels eta (long e) and o-mega (long or double o).

"Ten different Greek alphabets struggled for ascendancy as part of the war of the city-states. In Greece the Ionian form prevailed, and was transmitted to eastern Europe, where it survives today.

"In Rome the Chalcidian form was adopted from Cumae to become the Latin alphabet, and ours. The Chalcidic alphabet lacked the long e and o, but unlike the Ionia, retained the Phoenician vau as a consonant (a.v with approximately the sound of w). Hence the Athenians called wine oinos, the Chalcidians called it voinos, the Romans called it vinum, we call it wine. Chalcis kept the Semitic koppa or q, and passed it on to Rome and ourselves. Ionia abandoned it, content with k.

"Such a roll was called a biblos, from the Phoenician city, so named, whence papyrus came to Greece. A smaller roll was called biblion. Our Bible was originally ta biblia, the rolls. The Latins called a roll volumen -- wound up. When a roll formed part of a larger work, it was called a tomos, or cutting.

"The first sheet of a roll was called the protokollon -- i.e. the first sheet glued to the stick. The edges of the roll (Latin frontes, whence our frontispiece) were smoothed with pumice and sometimes colored. If the author could afford the expense, or the roll contained important matter, it might be warpped in a diphthera (membrane), or, as the Latins called it, a vellum.

"Since a large roll would be inconvenient for handling or reference, literary works were usually divided into several rolls, and the word biblos, or book, was applied not to each work as a whole, but to each roll or part.

"These divisions were seldom made by the author. Later editors divided the Histories of Heroditus into nine books, the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides into eight, Plato's Republic into ten, the Iliad and the Odyssey into twenty-four. Since papyrus was costly, and each copy had to be written by hand, books were very limited in the classic world.

"It was easier than now to be educated, though as hard as now to be intelligent. Reading was not a universal accomplishment. Most knowledge was handed down by oral tradition from one generation or craftsman to the next. Most literature was read aloud by trained reciters to persons who learned through the ear. Though we have been eye-minded since the development of printing, and writing is seldom read aloud, style and punctuation are still formed with a view to easy breathing in the reader, and a rhythmic sound in the words. Probably our descendants will be ear-minded again.

"There was no reading public in Greece before the seventh century. There were no Greek libaries until those collected by Polycrates and Peisistratus in the sixth. In the fifth century we hear of the private libraries of Euripides and the archon Eucleides. In the fourth, of Aristotle's. We know of no public library before Alexandria's, none in Athens until Hadrian.

"The lyric poetry reflected an aristocratic society in which feeling, thought, and morals were free so long as they observed the amenities of breeding. This style of urbane and polished verse tended to disappear under the democracy.

"In Chios a clan of such rhapsodes called themselves Homeridae, and claimed descent from a poet Homer who, they said, was the author of the epics that they recited throughout eastern Greece. Perhaps this blind bard was but an eponym, the imaginary ancestor of a tribe or group, like Hellen, Dorus, or Ion.

"The Greeks of the sixth century attributed to Homer not only the Iliad and the Odyssey but all the other epics then existing. The Homeric poems are the oldest epics known to us. Their very excellence, as well as their many references to earlier bards, suggest that the surviving epics stand at the end of a long line of development from simple lays to lengthy 'stitched' songs.

"If these are flaws they are lost in the brilliance of the language, and the wealth of similes that now and then, amid the shock of war, calm us with the quiet beauty of peaceful fields. 'As when flies in swarming myriads haunt the herdsman's stalls in spring time, when new milk has filled the pails -- in such vast multitudes mustered the long-haired Greeks upon the plain.'

"The Odyssey is so different from all this that from the outset one suspects its separate authorship. Even some of the Alexandrian scholars suggested this, and all the critical authority of Aristarchus was required to hush the dispute.

"The Odyssey agrees with the Iliad in certain standard phrases -- 'owl-eyed Athena,' 'long-haired Greeks,' 'wine-dark sea,' 'rosy-fingered Dawn' -- which may have been taken from the same hoard and poetical tradition into which the authors of the Iliad had dipped their pens. But the Odyssey contains an array of words apparently brought into use after the Iliad was composed.

"In the second epic we hear frequently of iron, where the earlier one spoke of bronze. We hear of writing, of private property in land, of freedmen and emancipation -- none of which are mentioned in the Iliad. The very gods and their functions are different.

"The meter is the same dactylic hexameter, as in all the Greek epics. The style and spirit and substance are so far from the Iliad that if one author wrote both poems he was a paragon of complexity and a master of all moods.

"It was Homer and Hesiod, said Herodotus, who gave definite and human form to the Olympians, and order to the hierarchy of heaven. There is much that is magnificent in Homer's gods, and we come to like them for their failings. Scholars have long detected in the poets who pictured them a rollicking skepticism hardly befitting a national Bible. These deities quarrel like relatives, fornicate like fleas, and share with mankind what seemed to Alexander the stigmata of mortality -- the need for love and sleep. They do everything human but hunger and die.

"Not one of them could bear comparison with Odysseus in intelligence, with Hector in heroism, with Andromache in tenderness, or with Nestor in dignity. Only a poet of the sixth century, versed in Ionian doubt, could have made such farcelings of the gods.

"Ball games were as varied then as now, and as popular. At Sparta the terms ballplayer and youth were synonyms. Special rooms were built in the palaestra for games of ball. These rooms were called sphairisteria, and the teachers were sphairistai. On another relief we see men bouncing a ball against the floor or the wall, and striking it back with the flat of the hand. We do not know whether the players did this in turn as in modern handball.

"Famous orators like Gorgias, famous sophists like Hippias, perhaps famous writers like Herodotus, delivered addresses or recitations from the porticoes of the temple of Zeus. It was a special holiday for men, since married women were not allowed to attend the festival. These had their own games at the feast of Hera. Menander summed up such a scene in five words:--"crowd, market, acrobats, amusements, thieves.'

"The athletes (from athlos, a contest) were selected by local and municipal elinmination trials, after which they submoitted for ten months to rigorous training under professional paidotribai (literally, youth rubbers) and gymnastai. Arrived at Olympia, they were examined by the officials, and took an oath to observe all the rules.

"Irregularities were rare. We hear of Euolis bribing other boxers to lose to him, but the penalty and dishonor attached to such ofenses were discouragingly great.

"When everything was ready, the athletes were led into the stadium. As they entered, a herald announced their names and the cities that had entered them. All the contestants, whatever their age or rank, were naked. Occasionally a girdle might be worn at the loins. Of the stadium itself nothing remains but the narrow stone slabs toed by the runners at the starting point.

"The second event was throwing the discus, a circular plate of metal or stone weighing about twelve pounds. The best throws are said to have covered a hundred feet. The third contest was in hurling the javelin or spear, with the aid of a leather thong attached to the center of the shaft.

"Stories tell of a Greek runner who could outdistance a hare. Of another who raced a horse from Coronea to Thebes (some twenty miles) and beat it. And of how Pheidippides ran from Athens to Sparta -- 150 miles -- in two days and, at the cost of his life, brought to Athens the news of the victory at Marathon, twenty-four miles away.

"The culminating events of the games were the chariot races, with two or four horses running abreast. Often ten four-horse chariots competed together. As each had to negotiate twenty-three turns around the posts at the ends of the course, accidents were the chief thrill of the game. In one race with forty starters a single chariot finished.

"So important were the games that not even the Persian invasion stopped them. While a handful of Greeks withstood Xerexes' army at Thermopylae, the customary thousands watched Theagenes of Thasos, on the very day of the battle, win the pancratiast's crown.

"Exclaimed a Persian to his general:--'Good heavens! What manner of men are these aginst whom you have brought us to fight? -- men who contend with one another not for money but for honor!' He, or the Greek inventor of the tale, did the Greeks too much credit, and not merely because the Greeks should on that day have been at Thermopylae rather than at Olympia. Though the direct prize at the games was little, the indirect rewards were great. Many cities voted substantial sums to the victors on their return from their triumphs. Some cities made them generals. The crowd idolized them so openly that jealous philosophers complained.

"Poets like Simonides and Pindar were engaged by the victor or his patrons to write odes in his honor, which were sung by choruses of boys in the procession that welcomed him home. Sculptors were paid to perpetuate him in bronze or stone. Sometimes he was given free sustenance in the city hall.

"Together with the Olympic games they formed a periodos, or cycle, and the great ambition of a Greek athlete was to win the crown of all of them. In the Pythian games contests in music and poetry were added to the physical competition. Indeed such musical tilts had been celebrated at Delphi long before the establishment of the athletic games.

"The original event was a hymn in honor of Apollo's victory over the Delphic python. In 582 contests were added in singing and in playing the lyre and the flute. Similar musical contests were held at Corinth, Nemea, Delos, and elsewhere. The Greeks believed that by frequent public competitions they could stimulate not only the ability of the performer but the taste of the public as well.

"The principle was applied to almost every art -- to pottery, poetry, sculpture, painting, choral singing, oratory, and drama. In this way and others the games had a profound influence upon art and literature, and even upon the writing of history. The chief method of reckoning time, in later Greek historiography, was by Olympiads, designated by the name of the victor in the one-stadium foot race.

"The physical perfection of the all-around athlete in the sixth century generated that ideal of statuary which reached its fullness in Myron and Polycleitus. The nude contests and games in the palaestra and at the festivals gave the sculptor unequaled opportunities to study the human body in every natural form and pose.

"Erythrae was famous for the thinness of its vases, Chaleis for brilliance of finish, Sicyon and Corinth for their delicate 'Proto-Corinthian' scent bottles and elaborately painted jugs like the Chigi vase in Rome. A kind of ceramic war engaged the potters of the rival cities. One or another of them found purchases in every port of the Mediterranean, and in the interior of Russia, Italy, and Gaul.

"In the seventh century Corinth seemed to be winning. Its wares were in every land and hand, its potters had found new techniques of incision and coloring, and had shown a fresh inventiveness in forms.

"But about 550 the masters of the Ceramicus -- the potters' quarter on the outskirts of Athens -- came to the front, threw off Oriental influence, and captured with their Black-Figure ware the markets of the Black Sea, Cyprus, Egypt, Etruria, and Spain. From that time onward the best ceramic craftsmen migrated to Athens or were born there.

"Erythrae was famous for the thinness of its vases, Chaleis for brilliance of finish, Sicyon and Corinth for their delicate 'Proto-Corinthian' scent bottles and elaborately painted jugs like the Chigi vase in Rome. A kind of ceramic war engaged the potters of the rival cities. One or another of them found purchases in every port of the Mediterranean, and in the interior of Russia, Italy, and Gaul.

"In the seventh century Corinth seemed to be winning. Its wares were in every land and hand, its potters had found new techniques of incision and coloring, and had shown a fresh inventiveness in forms.

"But about 550 the masters of the Ceramicus -- the potters' quarter on the outskirts of Athens -- came to the front, threw off Oriental influence, and captured with their Black-Figure ware the markets of the Black Sea, Cyprus, Egypt, Etruria, and Spain. From that time onward the best ceramic craftsmen migrated to Athens or were born there.

"He sketched the figures upon the clay with a light point, drew them in greater detail with a pen, filled in the background with black, and added minor touches with colored glaze. Here, too, some of the masters made lasting names. One amphora is signed, 'Painted by Euthymides, son of Pollias, as never Euphronius' - which was to challenge Euphronius to equal it.

"Nevertheless this Euphronius is still rated as the greatest potter of his age. To him, some think, belongs the great krater on which Heracles wrestles with Antaeus. To his contemporary Sosias is attributed one of the most famous of Greek vases, whereon Achilles binds the wounded arm of Patrochus. Every detail is lovingly carried out, and the silent pain of the young warrior has survived the centuries.

"To these men, and now nameless others, we owe such masterpieces as the cup in whose interior we see Dawn mourning over her dead son, and the hydria, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York, that shows a Greek soldier, perhaps Achilles, plunging his lance into a fair and not breastless Amazon.

"The most famous group in Athenian statuary, the Tyrannicides, was cast in bronze by Anterior Athens shortly after the expulsion of Hippias. Many forms of soft stone were used before the sculptors of Greece undertook to mold harder varieties with hammer and chisel. Once they had learned the art they almost demanded Naxos and Paros of marble.

"Nevertheless the age of the dictators was a period of stimulation and improvement in every Greek art -- above all, under Peisistratus and Hippias in Athens. Toward the end of this period the old rigidity of sculpture began to thaw, the rule of frontality was broken down. Legs began to move, arms to leave the side, hands to open up, faces to take on feeling and character, bodies to bend in a variety of poses revealing new studies in anatomy and action. This revolution in sculpture, this animation of stone with life, became a major event in Greek history. The excape from frontality was one of the signal accomplishments of Greece.

"Furthermore, the Doric column tapered slightly toward the top, thereby emulating the tree, and successfully contradicting the Minoan-Mycenaean style. (An undiminished shaft -- worse yet, one that tapers downward -- seems top-heavy and graceless, to the eye, while the wider base heightens that sense of stability which all architecture should convey. Perhaps, however, the Doric column is too heavy, too thick in proportion to its height, too stolidly engrossed in sturdiness and strength.)

"The Ionic capital was composed of a narrow echinus, a still narrower abacus, and between them -- almost concealing them -- emerged the twin spirals of a volute, like an infolded scroll -- a graceful element adapted from Hittite, Assyrian, and other Oriental forms. These characteristics, together with the elaborate adornment of the entablature, described not only a style but a people. They represented in stone the Ionian expressiveness, suppleness, sentiment, elegance, and love of delicate detail, even as the Doric order conveyed the proud reserve, the massive strength, the severe simplicity of the Dorian. The sculpture, literature, music, manners, and dress of the rival groups differed in harmony with their architectural styles.

"Here again, as in the supporting elements, Greek architecture sought a clear differentiation, and yet an articulated connection, of the members. The architrave -- the great stone that connected the capitals -- was in the Doric order plain, or carried a simple painted molding. In Ionic it was composed of three layers, each projecting below, and was topped with a marble cornice segmented with a confusing variety of ornamental details. Since the sloping beams that made the framework of the roof in the Doric style came down, and were secured, between two horizontal beams at the eaves, the united ends of the three beams formed -- at first in wood, then imitatively in stone -- a triglyph or triply divided surface.

"Between each triglyph and the next a space was left as an open window when the roof was of wood or of terra-cotta tiles. When translucent marble tiles were used, these metopes, or "seeing-between" places, were filled in with marble slabs carved in low relief.

"In the Ionic style a band or frieze of reliefs might run around the upper outer walls of the naos or cella. In the fifth century both forms of relief -- metopes and frieze -- were often used in the same building, as in the parthenon.

"In the pediments -- the triangles formed by the gabled roof in front and rear -- the sculptor found his greatest opportunity. The figures here might be drawn out in high relief and enlarged for view from below. The cramped corners, or tympana, tested the subtlest skill. Finally, the roof itself might be a work of art, with brilliantly colored tiles and decorative rain-disposing acroteria, or pinnacle figures, rising from the angles of the pediments.

"All in all, there was probably a surplus of sculpture on the Greek temple, between the columns, along the walls, or within the edifice. The painter also was involved. The temple was colored in whole or in part, along with its statues, moldings, and reliefs. Perhaps we do the Greeks too much honor today, when time has worn the paint from their temples and divinities, and ferrous strains have lent to the marble natural and incalcuable hues that set off the brilliance of the stone under the clear Greek sky.

Heav'n from all creatures hides the book of fate,
All but the page prescrib'd, their present state:
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:
Or who could suffer being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flow'ry food,
And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.
Oh blindness to the future! kindly giv'n,
That each may fill the circle mark'd by Heav'n:
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore.
What future bliss, he gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul, proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk, or milky way;
Yet simple nature to his hope has giv'n,
Behind the cloud topp'd hill, an humbler heav'n;
Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd,
Some happier island in the wat'ry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.
To be, contents his natural desire,
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,

"Prettier stories were told of ancient musicians who had established or developed the musical art -- of Olympus, Marsyas' pupil, who, towards 730, invented the enharmonic scale -- of Linus, Heracles' teacher, who invented Greek musical notation and estanblished some of the 'modes' of Orpheus, Thracian priest of Dionysus -- and of his pupil Musaeus, who said that 'song is a sweet thing to mortals.' These tales reflect the probable fact tht Greek music derived its forms from Lydia, Phrygia, and Thrace.

"Song entered into almost every phase of Greek life. There were dithyrambs for Dionysyus -- paeans for Apollo -- hymns for any god. There were enkomia, or songs of praise, for rich men, and epinikia, or songs of victory, for athletes. There were symposiaka, skolia, hymenaioi, elegiai, and threnoi for dining, drinking, loving, marrying, mourning, and burying.

"There were religious dances, as among the Dionysiac devotees. There were athletic dances, like Sparta's Gymnopedia, or Festival of Naked Youth. There were martial dances, like the Pyarrhic, taught to children as part of military drill. There were the stately hyporchema, a choral hymn or play performed by two choirs of which one alternately sang or danced while the other danced or sang. There were folk dances for every major event of life and every season or festival of the year.

"The choral dance broke up into singing without dancing, and dancing without singing. As Lucian put it, 'The violent exercise caused shortness of breath, and the song suffered for it.'

"In like manner there appeared musicians who played without singing, and won the applause of devotees by their precise and rapid execution of quarter tones. Some famous musicians, then as now, engrossed the receipts. Amoebeus, harpist and singer, received a talent ($6000) each time that he performed.

"Tragedy arose from satyrlike Dionysian revelers. These satyr plays remained until Euripides an essential part of the Dionysian drama. Each composer of a tragic trilogy wa expected to make a concession to ancient custom by offering, as the fourth part of his presentation, a satyr play in honor of Dionysus. Says Aristotle, 'Being a development of the satyr play, it was quite late before tragedy rose from short plots and comic diction to its full dignity.'

"Doubtless other seeds matured in the birth of tragedy. Perhaps it took something from the ritual worship and appeasement of the dead. Essentially its source lay in mimetic religious ceremonies like the representation, in Crete, of the birth of Zeus or -- in Argos and Samoa, his symbolic marrige with Hera or -- in Eleusis and elsewhere, the sacred mysteries of Demeter and Persephone or -- above all, in the Peloponnesus and Attica, the mourning and rejoicing over the death and resurrection of Dionysus.

"Such representations were called dromena -- things performed. Drama is a kindred word and means, as it should, an action. At Sicyon tragic choruses, until the days of the dictator Cleisthenes, commemorated, we are told, the 'sufferings of Adrastus,' the ancient king. At Icaria, where Thespis grew up, a goat was sacrificed to Dionysus, perhaps the 'goat song' from which tragedy derived its name was a chant sung over the dismembered symbol or embodiment of the drunken god.

"This inspiration came to one of these dancing instructors and chorus trainers, Thespis of Icaria -- a town close to the Peloponnesian Megara, where the rites of Dionysus were popular, and not far from Eleusis, where the ritual drama of Demeter, Persephone, and Dionysus Zagreus was annually performed.

Helped no doubt by the egoism that propels the world, Thespis separated himself from the chorus, gave himself individual recitative lines, developed the notion of opposition and conflict, and offered the drama in its stricter sense to history.

He played various roles with such verisimilitude that when his troupe performed at Athens, Solon was shocked at what seemed to him a kind of public deceit, and denounced this newfangled art as immoral -- a charge that it has heard in every century.

"Peisistratus was more imaginative, and encouraged the competitive performance of dramas at the Dionysian festival. In 534 Thespis won the victory in such a contest. The new form developed so rapidly that Choerilus, only a generation later, produced 160 plays.

"Only one important nation remained outside this vast system of government and trade, and that was Greece. By 510 Darius had hardly heard of it outside Ionia. 'The Athenians,' he asked -- 'who are they?'

"Meanwhile the Ionians were acting with a chaotic vigor characteristic of the Greeks. Each rebel city raised its own troops, but kept them under separate command. The Milesian army, led with more bravery than wisdom, marched upon Sardis and burned the great city to the ground.

"The Ionian Confederacy organized a united fleet, but the Samian contingent secretly made terms with the Persian satrap, and when, in 494, the Persian navy met the Ionian at Lade, in one of the major sea battles of history, the half hundred ships of the Samians sailed away without fighting, and many other contingents followed their example.

"The defeat of the Ionians was complete, and Ionian civilization never quite recovered from this physical and spiritual disaster. The Persians laid siege to Miletus, captured it, killed the males, enslaved the women and children, and so completely plundered the city that Miletus became from that day a minor town. Persian rule was re-established throughout Ionia, and Darius, resentful of Athenian interference, resolved to conquer Greece.

"All Greece was in turmoil at the news.

"The Persian arms had never yet been defeated. The advance of the Empire had never yet been stopped. How could a nation so weak, so scattered, so unused to unity, hold back this wave of Oriental conquest? The northern Greek states were loath to resist so monstrous a power. Sparta hesitatingly prepared, but allowed superstitution to delay its mobilization. Little Plataea acted quickly, and sent a large porportion of its citizens by forced marches to Marathon.

"At Athens Miltiades freed and enlisted slaves as well as freemen, and led them over the mountains to the battle field. When the rival armies met, the Greeks had some twenty thousand men. The Persians probably one hundred thousand.

"The Persians were brave, but they were accustomed to individual fighting, and were not trained for the mass defense and attack of the Greeks. The Greeks united discipline with courage, and though they committed the folly of dividing the command among ten generals, each supreme for a day, they were saved by the example of Aristides, who yielded his leadership to Miltiades. Under this blunt soldier's vigorous strategy the small Greek force routed the Persian horde in what was not only one of the decisive battles, but also one of the most incredible victories, of history.

"The Athenians recalled him and fined him fifty talents. Miltiades died soon after and the fine was paid by his son Cimon, the future rival of Pericles.

"The man who had yielded place to him at Marathon survived the pitfalls of success. Aristides was in life and manners a Spartan at Athens. His quiet staid character, his modest simplicity and undiscourageable honesty won him the title of the Just. When in a drama of Aeschylus' the passage occurred --

For not at seeming just, but being so,
He aims; and from his depth of soil below
Harvests of wise and prudent counsels grow --

all the audience turned to look at Aristides, as the living embodiment of the poet's lines.

"When the Greeks captured the camp of the Persians at Marathon, and found great wealth in their tents, Aristides was left in charge of it and 'neither took anything for himself, nor suffered others to do it.' When after the war, the allies of Athens were induced to contribute annually to the treasury of Delos as a fund for common defense, Aristides was chosen by them to fix their payments, and none protested his decisions.

"Nevertheless, he was more admired than popular. Though a close friend of Cleisthenes, who had so extended democracy, he was of the opinion that democracy had gone far enough, and that any further empowerment of the Assembly would lead to administrative corruption and public disorder.

"He exposed malfeasance wherever he found it, and made many enemies. The democratic party, led by Themistocles, used Cleisthenes' recently established device of ostracism to get rid of him, and in 482 the only man in Athenian history that was at once famous and honest was exiled at the height of his career.

"All the world knows -- though again it may be only a fable -- how Aristides inscribed his own name on the ostracon for a letterless citizen who did not know him but who, with the resentment of mediocrity for excellence, was tired of hearing him called the Just.

"Like Miltiades, he saved Athens, but could not save himself. He could defeat a great empire, but not his own lust for power. 'He received relunctantly and carelessly,' says Plutarch, 'instructions given him to improve his manners and behavior, or to teach him any pleasing or graceful accomplishment. But whatever was said to improve him in sagacity, or in the management of affairs, he would give attention to beyond his years, confident in his natural capacity for such things.'

"It was Athens' misforune that both Themistocles and Aristides fell in love with the same girl, Stesilaus of Ceos, and that their animosity outlived the beauty that had aroused it. Nevertheless it was Themistocles whose foresight and energy prepared for, and carried through, the victory of Salamis -- the most crucial battle in Greek history. As far as back as 493 he had planned and begun a new harbor for Athens at the Piraeus. Now, in 482, he persuaded the Athenians to forego a distribution of money due them from the proceeds of the silver mines at Laurium, and to devote the sum to the building of a hundred triremes.

"When Darius, before invading Greece, sent heralds to Athens and Sparta to demand earth and water as symbols of submission, both cities had put the heralds to death. Troubled by portents, Sparta now repented of this violation of international custom, and asked for two citizens to go to Persia and surrender themselves to any punishment that the Great King might exact in retribution. Sperthias and Bulis, both of old and wealthy families, volunteered, made their way to Xerxes, and offered to die in atonement for the killing of Darius' messengers.

"All day the rival fleets fought, until night put an end to the engagement before either side could win. The Greeks retired to Artemisium, the Persians to Aphetae. Considering the inequality of numbers, the Greeks justifiably looked upon the battle as a victory.

"Resolved to force action upon the Greeks, Themistocles resorted to a stratagem that would have cost him his life had the Persians won. He sent a trusted slave to Xerxes to tell him that the Greeks were intending to sail away during the night, and that the Persians could prevent this only by surrounding the Greek fleet. Xerxes accepted the advice.

"With every escape blocked, the Greeks were compelled to give fight. The superior tactics and seamanship of the Hellenes, and the confusion of tongues, minds, and superfluous ships among the Orientals, finally decided the issue in favor of Greece. Few of the Greeks died, for being all excellent swimmers, they swam to land when their boats foundered. The remnant of the Persian fleet fled to the Hellespont.

"No other man had deserved so well of Athens as Themistocles, and no one was more resolved than he to be repaid for it. He negotiated with Persia and sought to end the strife between the old and the young empire. When Aristides was placed in charge of the public revenue, he found that his predecessors had embezzled public funds, and not least lavishly Themistocles.

The Athenians passed a vote of ostracism upon him and he sought a new home in Argos. Sparta revealed secret papers to Athens which at once sent out an order for Themistocles' arrest. He fled to Corcyra, was denied refuge there, found brief asylum in Epirus, and sailed secretly to Asia where he claimed from Xerxes' successor some reward for restraining the Greek pursuit of the Persian fleet after Salamis. Lured by Themistocles' promise to help him subjugate Greece, Artaxerxes I received him into his counsels, and assigned the revenues of several cities for his maintenance.

"The most famous music teacher of his time, Damon, gave him instruction in music, and Pythocleides in music and literature. He heard the lectures of Zeno the Eleatic at Athens, and became the friend and pupil of the philosopher Anaxagoras. In his development he absorbed the rapidly growing culture of his epoch, and united in his mind and policy all the threads of Athenian civilization -- economic, military, literary, artistic, and philosophical.

"His influence was due not only to his intelligence but to his probity. He was capable of using bribery to secure state ends, but was himself 'manifestly free from every kind of corruption, and superior to all considerations of money.' Whereas Themistocles had entered public office poor and left it rich, Pericles, we are told, added nothing to his patrimony by his political career.

"It showed the good sense of the Athenians in this generation that for almost thirty years, between 467 and 428, they elected and re-elected him, with brief intermissions, as one of their ten strategoi or commanders. This relative permanence of office not only gave him supremacy on the military board, but enabled him to raise the position of strategos autokrator to the place of highest influence in the government. Under him Athens, while enjoying all the privileges of democracy, acquired also the advantages of aristocracy and dictatorship.

"The good government and cultural patronage that had adorned Athens in the age of Peisistratus were continued now with equal unity and decisiveness of direction and intelligence, but also with the full and annually renewed consent of a free citizenship. History through him illustrated again the principle that liberal reforms are most ably executed and most permanently secured by the cautious and moderate leadership of an aristocrat enjoying popular support.

"The notion that these modest sums weakened the fiber and corrupted the morale of Athens is hardly to be taken seriously, for by the same token every state that pays its judges or its jurymen would long since have been destroyed.

"Pericles seems also to have established a small remuneration for military service. He crowned this scandalous generosity by persuading the state to pay every citizen two obols annually as the price of admission to the plays and games of the official festivals. He excused himself on the ground that these performances should not be a luxury of the upper and middle classes, but should contribute to elevate the mind of the whole electorate.

"In 457 eligibility to the archonship, which had been confined to the wealthier classes, was extended to the third class, or zeugitai. Soon thereafter, without any legal form, the lowest citizen class, the thetes, made themselves eligible to the office by romancing about their income. The importance of the thetes in the defense of Athens persuaded the other classes to wink at the fraud.

"Moving for a moment in the opposite direction, Pericles (451) carried through the Assembly a restriction of the franchise to the legitimate offspring of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. No legal marriage was to be permitted between a citizen and a noncitizen. It was a measure aimed to discourage intermarriage with foreigners, to reduce illegitimate births, and perhaps to reserve to the jealous burghers of Athens the material rewards of citizenship and empire.

"To protect Athens effectively from siege by land, and at the same time to provide further work for the unemployed, Pericles persuaded the Assembly to supply funds for constructing eight miles of 'Long Walls,' as they were to be called, connecting Athens with the Piraeus and Phalerum. The effect was to make the city and its ports one fortified enclusure, open in wartime only to the sea -- on which the Athenian fleet was supreme.

"In the hostility with which unwalled Sparta looked upon this program of fortification the oligarchic party saw a chance to recapture political power. Its secret agents invited the Spartans to invade Attica and, with the aid of an oligarchic insurrention, to put down the democracy. In this event the oligarchs pledged themselves to level the Long Walls.

"'It was his desire and design', says Plutarch, 'that the undisciplined mechanic multitude should not go without their share of public funds, and yet should not have these given them for sitting still and doing nothing. To this end he brought in these vast projects of construction.'

"It seems hardly credible and yet on second thought more natural, that the stern 'Olympian' should have been keenly susceptible to the charms of woman. His self-control fought against a delicate sensibility, and the toils of office must have heightened in him the normal male longing for feminine tenderness.

"He had been many years married when he met Aspasia. She belonged to -- she was helping to create -- the type of hetaira that was about to play so active a part in Athenian life:--a woman rejecting the seclusion that marriage brought to the ladies of Athens, and preferring to live in unlicensd unions, even in relative promiscuity, if thereby she might enjoy the same freedom of movement and conduct as men, and participate with them in their cultural interests.

"We have no testimony to Aspasia's beauty, though ancient writers speak of her 'small, high-arched foot,' 'her silvery voice,' and her golden hair. Aristophanes, an unscrupulous political enemy of Pericles, describes her as a Milesian courtesan who had established a luxurious brothel at Megara, and had now imported some of her girls into Athens. The great comedian delicately suggests that the quarrel of Athens with Megara, which precipated the Peloponnesian War, was brought about because Aspasia persuaded Pericles to revenge her upon Megarians who had kidnaped some of her personnel.

"Pericles now found it admirable that his wife had formed an affection for another man. He offered her her freedom in return for his own, and she agreed. She took a third husband, while Pericles brought Aspasia home. By his own law of 451 he could not make her his wife, since she was of Milesian birth. Any child he might have by her would be illegitimate, and ineligible to Athenian citizenship. He seems to have loved her sincerely, even uxoriously, never leaving his home or returning to it without kissing her, and finally willing his fortune to the son that she bore him.

"From that time onward he forewent all social life outside his home, seldom going anywehere except to the agora or the council hall. The people of Athens began to complain of his aloofness. For her part Aspasia made his home a French Enlightenment salon, where the art and science, the literature, philosophy, and statesmanship of Athens were brought together in mutual stimulation. Socrates marveled at her eloquence, and credited her with composing the funeral oration that Pericles delivered after the first casualties of the Peloponnesian War.

"Not daring to bring any of these matters to open trial, they attacked him through his friends. They indicted Pheidias for embezzling, as they alleged, somne of the gold assigned to him for his chryselephantine Athena, and apparently succeeded in convicting him. They indicted Anaxogoras on the ground of irreligion, and the philosopher, on Pericles' advice, fled into exile. They brought against Aspasia a like writ of impiety (graphe asebeias), complaining that she had shown disrespect for the gods of Greece.

"The comic poets satirized her mercilessly as a Deianeira who had ruined Pericles, and called her, in plain Greek, a concubine. One of them, Hermippus, doubtless in turn a dishonest penny, accused her of serving as Pericles' procuress, and of bringing freeborn women to him for his pleasure. At her trial, which took place before a court of fifteen hundred jurors, Pericles spoke in her defense, using all his eloquence, even to tears. The case was dismissed.

"Within this jealously circumscribed circle of 43,000 citizens out of an Attic population of 315,000 , political power, in the days of Pericles, is formally equal. Each citizen enjoys and insists upon isonomia and inegoria -- equal rights at law and in the Assembly. To the Athenian a citizen is a man who has not only votes, but takes his turn, by lot and rote, as magistrate or judge. He must be free, ready, and able to serve the state at any time.