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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol. 1&2)," John Addington Symonds delves into the intricate world of ancient Greek literature, offering a profound analysis of the works of poets such as Homer, Sappho, and Pindar. Symonds's literary style is characterized by its elegance and depth, combining a meticulous examination of the poetic text with a passionate engagement with its historical and cultural contexts. His exploration of themes such as beauty, love, and the human experience provides readers with an enriching perspective on the significance of these poets in the tapestry of Western literature. John Addington Symonds, a Victorian poet, biographer, and literary critic, was profoundly influenced by his own struggles with identity and societal norms, which led him to explore themes of individuality and beauty in his work. His scholarship is underscored by a groundbreaking perspective on aestheticism and homoeroticism, reminiscent of the very themes prevalent in ancient Greek poetry. Symonds' scholarly pursuits not only reflect his academic rigor but also his personal quest for authenticity and understanding in a repressive society. This work is recommended for both scholars and enthusiasts of classical literature, as it unveils the timeless relevance of Greek poetry while inviting readers to partake in Symonds's own journey of discovery. His analyses inspire a renewed appreciation for these foundational texts, making it essential reading for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of the literary heritage of the ancient world. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol. 1&2)
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the meeting point of ancient song and modern conscience, John Addington Symonds traces how Greek poetry’s evolving forms—epic, lyric, and drama—mirror the changing energies of a people, inviting readers to hear a civilization thinking aloud about beauty, fate, community, and the self.
Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol. 1&2) is a work of literary criticism and cultural history, written in the polished, reflective prose of a Victorian man of letters and first published across two series in the 1870s. Its subject is the poetry of classical antiquity and the world that fostered it. Rather than recreating the past through strict philology alone, Symonds offers a guided tour of Greek literature as a living art, linking works and moments to the festivals, cities, and beliefs that sustained them. The result is both an introduction and an interpretive argument.
Readers encounter a sequence of essays that move from foundations to refinements, attentive to continuity and change without presuming a simple, linear ascent. Symonds sets scenes, sketches intellectual climates, and balances close reading with broad cultural framing. The voice is assured, humane, and often rhapsodic, yet it remains anchored in historical sense. The mood is one of admiration tempered by inquiry: the book celebrates Greek achievement while asking how and why particular forms took shape. The experience is akin to a learned conversation that opens vistas rather than closing debates.
A central thread is the relation between art and life: poetry emerges as a public act tied to ritual and civic identity, and as a private utterance attuned to personal emotion and ethical reflection. Symonds underscores how form carries meaning—how meter, chorus, and theatrical spectacle express communal aspiration, and how lyric compression distills individual feeling. He considers how imagination meets law, how clarity coexists with intensity, and how restraint does not preclude passion. Through these tensions, the book presents Greek poetry as an education of sensibility, a schooling in measure that enlarges experience.
Symonds also portrays literature as a historical organism. He attends to the shaping forces of landscape, religion, and politics, and to the pressures that redirect tradition into new channels. Without drowning the reader in technicalities, he marks transitions across periods and genres, discerning how inherited myths and inherited forms are continually reinterpreted. His method is comparative but not mechanical: he sets works beside one another to illuminate difference as much as resemblance. The scholarly scaffolding remains present yet unobtrusive, allowing the literary portraits to retain color, movement, and a sense of lived context.
For contemporary readers, these volumes matter because they model a way of reading that fuses pleasure with disciplined attention and that treats classics neither as relics nor as mirrors of modern taste. The questions Symonds raises—about the social function of art, the ethics of representation, the balance between tradition and innovation—remain urgent. His pages suggest that aesthetic judgment can coexist with cultural humility, and that older texts can provoke fresh thought about freedom, responsibility, and communal belonging. The book invites reflection on how we inherit forms and how we might use them to think more capaciously.
Taken together, the two volumes offer a spacious, carefully paced itinerary: portraits of poets and genres, attention to origins and afterlives, and a consistent effort to connect artistic craft with the conditions that made it possible. Symonds writes to kindle curiosity and to equip it, providing enough structure to guide without foreclosing discovery. Readers can expect lucid exposition, measured enthusiasm, and a persistent sense that Greek poetry still speaks to modern dilemmas. This introduction to a world of song is also an invitation to continued study, promising a dialogue across centuries that feels both exacting and alive.
Synopsis (Selection)
Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol. 1 & 2) presents a historical and literary survey of ancient Greek poetry from its earliest formations to the Alexandrian period. The work is organized by periods and genres, relating poetic forms to religious festivals, civic institutions, performance practices, and language. It summarizes the principal features of epic, elegy, iambus, monodic and choral lyric, tragedy, and comedy, and profiles representative poets within each category. Across chapters, brief biographical notices, metrical observations, and translated examples support the exposition. The stated aim is descriptive: to trace the emergence, transformation, and continuity of Greek poetic art within its social and historical framework.
The opening chapters address the myth-making faculty and the growth of epic, focusing on Homer and the Homeric Hymns. The discussion outlines the oral background, narrative architecture, formulaic style, and heroic code that shape the Iliad and the Odyssey. Symonds contrasts emblematic figures such as Achilles and Odysseus and surveys the portrayal of women in Homeric society, noting types and functions within the poems. Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days are introduced as didactic complements, presenting cosmogony, divine genealogy, and practical ethics. Together these sections establish the epic foundations of Greek poetry and its early articulation of divine order, human endeavor, and social norms.
Attention then turns to elegiac and iambic poets of the archaic age, linking new meters and occasions to changing civic and military realities. The elegists Tyrtaeus, Mimnermus, Solon, and Theognis exemplify exhortation, reflection on love and time, political admonition, and aristocratic morality. The iambic tradition—represented by Archilochus, Semonides, and Hipponax—shows invective, personal utterance, and colloquial vigor. Symonds describes the symposium as a key setting and notes how these short forms accommodate public counsel and private experience. Metrical patterns, refrains, and recurring motifs are summarized to indicate how elegy and iambus expand Greek poetry beyond heroic narrative into topical and individual expression.
The survey proceeds to monodic lyric, especially the Aeolian singers of Lesbos. Sappho and Alcaeus are presented through their surviving fragments, with comments on performance, dialect, and the interplay of personal feeling and communal context. Anacreon’s convivial songs illustrate lighter amatory and banquet themes for aristocratic audiences. The chapter outlines typical stanzaic schemes, musical accompaniment, and the role of the poet among companions and patrons. Without reconstructing lost wholes, the analysis identifies recurrent images, addressees, and occasions that distinguish monody from earlier genres, while noting continuities in mythic exemplum and gnomic statement that link lyric craft to broader Greek ethical and aesthetic habits.
From monody the narrative moves to choral lyric and the epinician ode. Transitional figures such as Stesichorus and Ibycus bridge epic narrative and choral song, while Simonides of Ceos and Bacchylides exemplify occasional composition for public performance. Pindar’s odes receive extended treatment: their festival settings at Olympia, Delphi, Nemea, and Isthmia; their encomiastic purpose; and their characteristic structure combining myth, maxim, and praise. Discussion includes dialect mixture, metrical complexity, and chorus and dance. These sections situate choral lyric within civic ritual and patronage, emphasizing how formal design, mythical precedent, and moral reflection converge in the celebration of athletic victory and communal identity.
Tracing the rise of drama from dithyramb and satyric entertainments, the book outlines the institutions of the Athenian theater, chorus, and festivals. Aeschylus is treated first, with themes of divine justice, human suffering, and the enlargement of tragic scale and spectacle. Sophocles follows, with emphasis on dramatic architecture, character, and the interaction of fate and decision. Euripides is addressed for rhetorical innovation, psychological portrayal, and the shifting role of the gods and chorus. Attention is given to staging, masks, and the development of the trilogy and satyr play. The tragic chapters present how mythic material becomes civic reflection through performance.
A subsequent section surveys comedy, centered on Aristophanes as the exemplar of Old Comedy. The account describes his use of topical satire, personal invective, parody of contemporaries, and chorus-led parabasis within a musical and dance framework. Plots, meters, and comic devices are summarized to show the genre’s responsiveness to democratic debate and public policy. The transition toward Middle and New Comedy is sketched, with Menander marking a shift to character types, domestic plots, and reduced choral function. These observations place comedy within its festivals and audience expectations, complementing the tragic chapters by showing another mode of civic and literary commentary.
Volume 2 extends the story into the Hellenistic world, where poetry reflects courtly settings and scholarly institutions. Callimachus articulates a program favoring learned refinement and brief forms; Apollonius Rhodius composes an epic in an Alexandrian mode; and Theocritus develops bucolic idylls that frame myth and everyday scenes. Bion and Moschus represent later pastoral, while Herodas and the mime add urban realism. The Greek Anthology and epigram tradition are outlined for their range of occasional and dedicatory verse. These chapters trace changes in scale, audience, and technique, and illustrate how classical inheritance is reworked under new cultural conditions.
The concluding perspective gathers recurring themes: the relation of poetry to religion, the polis, and performance; the interplay of myth, morality, and artistic form; and the evolution from communal epic to individualized and learned composition. Throughout, the study signals issues of language and meter and the limits set by fragmentary transmission. It notes the enduring influence of Greek poets on later literatures and the challenges of translation and interpretation. The overall purpose is to provide a coherent map of Greek poetry’s phases, key figures, and genres, enabling readers to follow its chronological development and the characteristic concerns that organize its history.
Historical Context
Studies of the Greek Poets, published in two volumes in 1873 and 1876, belongs to Victorian Britain yet surveys the poetic cultures of ancient Greece from the archaic age to the Hellenistic era. Written within the English university milieu shaped by Balliol and Oriel at Oxford and the broader London publishing world, Symonds interpreted Greek literature for a readership formed by classical education and imperial self-confidence. The places he evokes are the Greek poleis and sanctuaries—Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Lesbos, Syracuse, and later Alexandria—between roughly the eighth and third centuries BCE. His historical lens moves between these ancient settings and the contemporary nineteenth-century debates on education, morality, and civic life that framed his scholarship.
The archaic period (c. 800–500 BCE) established the political and ritual ground for Greek poetry. City-states developed alongside Mediterranean colonization from c. 750 to 550 BCE, spreading Hellenic institutions to Sicily, southern Italy, and the Black Sea. Adoption of the alphabet facilitated the recording of epic attributed to Homer, while lyric flourished among aristocratic circles and public festivals. Sappho and Alcaeus of Lesbos (c. 630–570 BCE), Tyrtaeus of Sparta, and Solon of Athens (archon in 594 BCE) exemplify the blend of civic counsel and personal voice. Symonds connects these poets to the emergence of the polis, showing how song mediated law-giving, warfare, symposium ethics, and communal identity.
The fifth century BCE, marked by the Persian Wars and the rise and crisis of Athenian democracy, forms the decisive historical matrix for much of the poetry Symonds analyzes. After the Ionian Revolt (499–494 BCE), the Greeks repelled invasions at Marathon in 490 BCE and, under Xerxes, at Thermopylae and Salamis in 480 BCE, and Plataea in 479 BCE. Athens then led the Delian League from 478 BCE, transferring the treasury to Athens in 454 BCE and consolidating an empire. Democratic reforms from Cleisthenes (508/7 BCE) matured under Pericles, whose building program raised the Parthenon between 447 and 432 BCE. Against this civic and imperial backdrop, drama at the City Dionysia became a public forum for religious ritual and political reflection. Aeschylus (c. 525–456 BCE), a veteran of Marathon and Salamis, stages collective memory and hubris in Persians (472 BCE). Sophocles (497/6–406 BCE) and Euripides (c. 480–406 BCE) probe law, piety, and human suffering during the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), with works like Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannus, Medea (431 BCE), and Trojan Women (415 BCE) engaging the moral costs of empire and civil strife. Aristophanes (c. 446–386 BCE) satirizes policy and demagogy in Acharnians (425 BCE), Knights (424 BCE), and Lysistrata (411 BCE). The war’s phases—the plague at Athens (430–426 BCE), the Mytilenean and Melian debates (427 and 416 BCE), the Sicilian Expedition (415–413 BCE), and defeat at Aegospotami (405 BCE)—frame a culture of urgent public argument. Though not a historian, Symonds reads these poets as witnesses and critics of Athenian power, using their choral forms and rhetorical structures to illuminate how democratic institutions, religion, and warfare shaped Greek imagination and civic ethics.
The Macedonian conquest and Hellenistic realignment reconfigured poetic production. Philip II consolidated Macedon (359–336 BCE) and defeated the Greek coalition at Chaeronea in 338 BCE; Alexander the Great (336–323 BCE) spread Greek culture across the Near East. In Egypt, the Ptolemies founded the Library and Museum of Alexandria under Ptolemy I Soter (r. 305–282 BCE) and Ptolemy II Philadelphus (r. 285–246 BCE). Scholar-poets like Callimachus (c. 310–240 BCE), Apollonius of Rhodes (c. 295–215 BCE), and Theocritus (c. 300–260 BCE) crafted refined, erudite forms. Symonds uses these courts and institutions to explain the shift from civic theater and choral performance to learned books, private reading, and cosmopolitan patronage.
Greek religion and festival life supplied the institutional matrix of poetic genres. The Olympic Games, traditionally dated from 776 BCE, and the Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian festivals created Panhellenic circuits for victory odes. Pindar of Thebes (c. 518–438 BCE) and Bacchylides composed epinician poetry linking aristocratic arete to divine favor and city prestige. At Athens, the City Dionysia and Lenaia, formalized in the sixth century BCE and expanded in the fifth, staged tragedies and comedies funded by choregoi and judged by citizens. Symonds emphasizes how ritual processions, sacrifices, and choral dance generated poetic form, arguing that performance context, not merely text, encodes social hierarchy, civic memory, and moral instruction.
Patterns of patronage and tyranny in the archaic and classical West shaped lyric and choral production. Polycrates ruled Samos c. 538–522 BCE, attracting poets like Anacreon. In Sicily, Gelon (r. 491–478 BCE) and Hieron I of Syracuse (r. 478–467 BCE) fostered courts where Simonides, Pindar, and Bacchylides celebrated military triumphs and chariot victories, including commemorations after the Battle of Himera (480 BCE). Colonial cities such as Syracuse (founded 734 BCE) and Tarentum integrated Greek culture with local politics. Symonds traces these networks to show how commissioned song affirmed dynastic prestige and mediated relations between rulers, athletes, and citizen bodies across the Mediterranean.
Nineteenth-century events also conditioned Symonds’s enterprise. The Greek War of Independence (1821–1830), Byron’s death at Missolonghi in 1824, and the Treaty of Constantinople (1832) created a modern Greek state and galvanized British philhellenism. The Elgin Marbles reached the British Museum by 1817, shaping public taste, while Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Hisarlik (1870–1873) and Mycenae (1876) renewed debates on Homeric historicity. Educational reforms—the 1867 Second Reform Act’s expansion of the electorate, the 1870 Elementary Education Act, and the University Tests Act (1871)—broadened scholarly audiences. Under a stringent moral code that criminalized same-sex relations, Symonds drafted in the early 1870s and privately printed in 1883 a study of Greek ethics, a context that informs his cautious treatment of eros and civic virtue in the volumes.
By framing Greek poetry within the institutions of democracy, ritual, and law, the book becomes a critique of Victorian society. Symonds highlights how Athenian public debate, accountability, and festival culture allowed dissenting voices to interrogate power, implicitly contrasting this with British class stratification, censorship, and imperial complacency. His readings of tragedies about hubris and unjust war mirror anxieties about modern empire and militarism. Attention to patronage exposes plutocratic influence over art, resonating with contemporary concerns about wealth and governance. Finally, by acknowledging the centrality of eros, bodily culture, and plural civic identities in Greece, he questions restrictive moralities and advocates a more capacious, humane public ethics.
Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol. 1&2)
VOLUME 1
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.
The studies of Greek Poets, now reprinted, appeared in England in two series, published at an interval of three or four years. In preparing this edition, I have rearranged the chapters of both series in their proper order, and have made certain additions, with the view of rendering the book more complete as a survey of Greek Poetry. Thus I have inserted several new translations in the chapters on the Lyric Poets and the Anthology. The criticism of Euripides has been enlarged, and the concluding chapter has been, in a great measure, rewritten. Each chapter has undergone such revision and alteration in minor details as might remove unnecessary repetitions and bring the whole series of essays into harmony. At the same time I have judged it inexpedient to introduce radical changes into a book which professes to be the reprint of volumes already known to the English public. For this reason the chapters which deal with the Greek Tragedians have been left substantially in their original form, and bear upon their face the record of their composition as almost independent essays.
CHAPTER I.THE PERIODS OF GREEK LITERATURE.
Language and Mythology.—The Five Chief Periods of Greek Literature. The First Period: Homer—Religion and State of the Homeric Age—Achilles and Ulysses.—Second Period: Transition—Breaking-up of the Homeric Monarchies—Colonization—the Nomothetæ—Ionians and Dorians—Development of Elegiac, Iambic, Lyric Poetry—Beginning of Philosophy.—Third Period: Athenian Supremacy—Philosophy at Athens—the Fine Arts—the Drama—History—Sparta and Athens—Pericles and Anaxagoras.—Fourth Period: Hegemony of Sparta—Enslavement of Hellas—Demosthenes—Alexander and Achilles—Aristotle—the Hellenization of the East—Menander—the Orators.—Fifth Period: Decline and Decay—Greek Influence upon the World—Alexandria—the Sciences—Theocritus—the University of Athens—Sophistic Literature—Byzantium—Hellas and Christendom.
The most fascinating problems of history are veiled as closely from our curiosity as the statue of Egyptian Isis. Nothing is known for certain about the emergence from primitive barbarism of the great races, or about the determination of national characteristics. Analogies may be adduced from the material world; but the mysteries of organized vitality remain impenetrable. What made the Jew a Jew, the Greek a Greek, is as unexplained as what daily causes the germs of an oak and of an ash to produce different trees. All we know is that in the vague and infinitely distant past races were nourished into form and individuality by the varied operation of those unreckoned sympathies which attach man to nature, his primitive mother. But the laws of that rudimentary growth are still unknown; "the abysmal deeps of personality" in nations as in men remain unsounded: we cannot even experimentalize upon the process of ethnical development.
Those mighty works of art which we call languages, in the construction of which whole peoples unconsciously co-operated, the forms of which were determined not by individual genius, but by the instincts of successive generations, acting to one end, inherent in the nature of the race—those poems of pure thought and fancy, cadenced not in words, but in living imagery, fountain-heads of inspiration, mirrors of the mind of nascent nations, which we call Mythologies—these surely are more marvellous in their infantine spontaneity than any more mature production of the races which evolved them. Yet we are utterly ignorant of their embryology: the true science of Origins is as yet scarcely in its cradle.
Experimental philologers may analyze what remains of early languages, may trace their connections and their points of divergence, may classify and group them. But the nature of the organs of humanity which secreted them is unknown, the problem of their vital structure is insoluble. Antiquarian theorists may persuade us that myths are decayed, disintegrated, dilapidated phrases, the meaning of which had been lost to the first mythopœists. But they cannot tell us how these splendid flowers, springing upon the rich soil of rotting language, expressed in form and color to the mental eye the thoughts and aspirations of whole races, and presented a measure of the faculties to be developed during long ages of expanding civilization. If the boy is father of the man, myths are the parents of philosophies[1q], religions, polities.
To those unknown artists of the prehistoric age, to the language-builders and myth-makers, architects of cathedrals not raised with hands, but with the spirit of man, for humanity to dwell therein, poets of the characters of nations, sculptors of the substance of the very soul, melodists who improvised the themes upon which subsequent centuries have written variations, we ought to erect our noblest statues and our grandest temples. The work of these first artificers is more astonishing in its unconsciousness, more effective in its spontaneity, than are the deliberate and calculated arts of sculptor, painter, poet, philosopher, and lawgiver of the historic periods.
Some such reflections as these are the natural prelude to the study of a literature like that of the Greeks. Language and mythology form the vestibules and outer courts to Homer, Pheidias, Lycurgus.
It is common to divide the history of Greek literature into three chief periods: the first embracing the early growth of poetry and prose before the age in which Athens became supreme in Hellas—that is, anterior to about 480 B.C.; the second coinciding with the brilliant maturity of Greek genius during the supremacy of Athens—that is, from the termination of the Persian war to the age of Alexander; the third extending over the decline and fall of the Greek spirit after Alexander's death—that is, from B.C. 323, and onwards, to the final extinction of Hellenic civilization. There is much to be said in favor of this division. Indeed, Greek history falls naturally into these three sections. But a greater degree of accuracy may be attained by breaking up the first and last of these divisions, so as to make five periods instead of three. After having indicated these five periods in outline, we will return to the separate consideration of them in detail and in connection with the current of Greek history.
The first may be termed the Heroic, or Prehistoric, or Legendary period. It ends with the first Olympiad, B.C. 776, and its chief monuments are the epics of Homer and Hesiod. The second is a period of transition from the heroic or epical to that of artistic maturity in all the branches of literature. In this stage history, properly so called, begins. The Greeks try their strength in several branches of composition. Lyrical, satirical, moral, and philosophical poetry supplant the epic. Prose is cultivated. The first foundations of the drama are laid. The earliest attempts at science emerge from the criticism of old mythologies. The whole mind of the race is in a ferment, and, for the moment, effort and endeavor are more apparent than mastery and achievement. This period extends from B.C. 776 to B.C. 477, the date of the Athenian league. The third period is that of the Athenian supremacy. Whatever is great in Hellas is now concentrated upon Athens. Athens, after her brilliant activity during the Persian war, wins the confidence and assumes the leadership of Greece. Athens is the richest, grandest, most liberal, most cultivated, most enlightened state of Hellas. To Athens flock all the poets and historians and philosophers. The drama attains maturity in her theatre. Philosophy takes its true direction from Anaxagoras and Socrates. The ideal of history is realized by Thucydides. Oratory flourishes under the great statesmen and the demagogues of the republic. During the brief but splendid ascendency of Athens, all the masterpieces of Greek literature are simultaneously produced with marvellous rapidity. Fixing 413 B.C. as the date of the commencement of Athenian decline, our fourth period, which terminates in B.C. 323 with the death of Alexander, is again one of transition. The second period was transitional from adolescence to maturity. The fourth is transitional from maturity to old age. The creative genius of the Greeks is now less active. We have, indeed, the great names of Plato, Aristotle, and Demosthenes to give splendor to this stage of national existence; but the sceptre has passed away from the Greek nation proper. Their protagonist, Athens, is in slavery. The civilization which they had slowly matured, and which at Athens had been reflected in the masterpieces of art and literature, is now spread abroad and scattered over the earth. Asia and Egypt are Hellenized. The Greek spirit is less productive than it has been; but it is not less vigorous. It still asserts itself as the greatest in the world; but it does so relying more upon its past acquirements than on any seeds of power that remain to be developed in the future. The fifth period, the longest of all, is one of decline and decay. It extends from B.C. 323 to the final extinction of classical civilization. Two chief centres occupy our attention—Athens, where the traditions of art and philosophy yet linger, where the Stoics and Epicureans and the sages of the New Academy still educate the world and prepare a nidus for the ethics of Christianity; and Alexandria, where physical science is cultivated under the Ptolemies, where mystical theology flourishes in the schools of the Neoplatonists, where libraries are formed and the labor of literary criticism is conducted on a gigantic scale, but where nothing new is produced except the single, most beautiful flower of idyllic poetry and some few epigrams. In this fifth period, Rome and Byzantium, where the Greek spirit, still vital, overlives its natural decay upon a foreign soil, close the scene.
In these five periods—periods of superb adolescence, early manhood, magnificent maturity, robust old age, and senility—we can trace the genius of the Greeks putting forth its vigor in successive works of art and literature, concentrating its energy at first upon its own self-culture, then extending its influence in every direction, and controlling the education of humanity, finally contenting itself with pondering and poring on its past, with mystical metaphysics and pedantic criticism. Yet even in its extreme decadence the Hellenic spirit is still potent. It still assimilates, transmutes, and alchemizes what it works upon. Coming into contact with the new and mightier genius of Christianity, it forces even that first-born of the Deity to take form from itself. One dying effort of the Greek intellect, if we may so speak, is to formulate the dogma of the Trinity and to impress the doctrine of the Logos upon the author of the Gospel of St. John. The analogy between the history of a race so undisturbed in its development as the Greek, and the life of a man, is not altogether fanciful. A man like Goethe, beautiful in soul and body, exceedingly strong and swift and active and inquisitive in all the movements of his spirit, first lives the life of the senses and of physical enjoyment. His soul, "immersed in rich foreshadowings of the world," has scarcely begun to think consciously in the first period. But he feels the glory of existence, the strivings of inexhaustible energy, the desire of infinite expansion. The second period is one of Sturm und Drang. New things are learned: much of the beautiful physical activity is sacrificed; he discovers that life involves care and responsibility as well as pleasure; he concentrates his mental faculty on hard and baffling study, in which at first he halts and falters. Then he goes forth to the world and wins great fame, and does the deeds and thinks the thoughts by which he shall be known to all posterity. His physical and mental faculties are now in perfect harmony; together they offer him the noblest and most enduring pleasures. But after a while his productiveness begins to dwindle. He has put forth his force, has fully expressed himself, has matured his principles, has formed his theory of the world. Our fourth period corresponds to the early old age of such a man's life. He now applies his principles, propagates his philosophy, subordinates his fancy, produces less, enjoys with more sobriety and less exhilaration, bears burdens, suffers disappointments, yet still, as Solon says, "learns always as he grows in years." Then comes the fifth stage. He who was so vigorous and splendid now has but little joy in physical life; his brain is dry and withering; he dwells on his old thoughts, and has no faculty for generating new ones; yet his soul contains deep mines of wisdom; he gives counsel and frames laws for younger generations. And so he gradually sinks into the grave. His acts remain: his life is written.
The great name of Homer covers the whole of the first period of Greek literature.1 It is from the Homeric poems alone that we can form a picture to our imagination of the state of society in prehistoric Hellas. The picture which they present is so lively in its details, and so consistent in all its parts, that we have no reason to suspect that it was drawn from fancy. Its ideal, as distinguished from merely realistic, character is obvious. The poet professes to sing to us of heroes who were of the seed of gods, whose strength exceeded tenfold the strength of actual men, and who filled the world with valiant deeds surpassing all that their posterity achieved. Yet, in spite of this, the Iliad and the Odyssey may be taken as faithful mirrors of a certain phase of Greek society, just as the Niebelungen Lied, the romances of Charlemagne, and the tales of the Round Table reflect three stages in the history of feudalism. We find that in this earliest period of Greek history the nation was governed by monarchs each of whom claimed descent from a god. Thus the kings exercised their power over the people by divine right; but at the same time a necessary condition of their maintaining this supremacy was that they should be superior in riches, lands, personal bravery, and wisdom. Their subjects obeyed them, not merely because they were Διογενεῖς, or because they were fathers of the people, but also, and chiefly, because they were the ablest men, the men fitted by nature to rule, the men who could be depended upon in an emergency. The king had just so much personal authority as he had ability to acquire or to assert. As soon as this ability failed, the sceptre departed from him. Thus Laertes overlives his royalty; and the suitors of Penelope, fancying that Ulysses is dead, take no heed of Telemachus, who ought to rule in his stead, because Telemachus is a mere lad; but as soon as the hero returns, and proves his might by stringing the bow, the suitors are slain like sheep. Again, Achilles, while acknowledging the sway of Agamemnon, quarrels with him openly, proving his equality and right to such independence as he can assert for himself. The bond between the king in the heroic age and his chieftains was founded on the personal superiority of the suzerain, and upon the necessity felt for the predominance of one individual in warfare and council. The chiefs were grouped around the monarch like the twelve peers round Charlemagne, or like the barons whose turbulence Shakespeare has described in Richard II. The relation of the Homeric sovereign to his princes was, in fact, a feudal one. Olympus repeats the same form of government. There Zeus is monarch simply because he wields the thunder. When Herè wishes to rebel, Hephæstus advises her to submit, because Zeus can root up the world, or hurl them all from the crystal parapet of heaven. Such, then, is the society of kings and princes in Homer. They stand forth in brilliant relief against the background, gray and misty, of the common people. The masses of the nation, like the chorus in tragedy, kneel passive, deedless, appealing to Heaven, trembling at the strokes of fate, watching with anxiety the action of the heroes. Meanwhile the heroes enact their drama for themselves. They assume responsibility. They do and suffer as their passions sway them. Of these the greatest, the most truly typical, is Achilles. In Achilles, Homer summed up and fixed forever the ideal of the Greek character. He presented an imperishable picture of their national youthfulness, and of their ardent genius, to the Greeks. The "beautiful human heroism" of Achilles, his strong personality, his fierce passions controlled and tempered by divine wisdom, his intense friendship and love that passed the love of women, above all, the splendor of his youthful life in death made perfect, hovered like a dream above the imagination of the Greeks, and insensibly determined their subsequent development. At a later age, this ideal was destined to be realized in Alexander. The reality fell below the ideal: for rien n'est si beau que la fable, si triste que la vérité. But the life of Alexander is the most convincing proof of the importance of Achilles in the history of the Greek race.
If Achilles be the type of the Hellenic genius—radiant, adolescent, passionate—as it still dazzles us in its artistic beauty and unrivalled physical energy, Ulysses is no less a true portrait of the Greek as known to us in history—stern in action, ruthless in his hatred, pitiless in his hostility, subtle, vengeful, cunning; yet at the same time the most adventurous of men, the most persuasive in eloquence, the wisest in counsel, the bravest and coolest in danger. The Græculus esuriens of Juvenal may be said to be the caricature in real life of the idealized Ulysses. And what remains to the present day of the Hellenic genius in the so-called Greek nation descends from Ulysses rather than Achilles. If the Homeric Achilles has the superiority of sculpturesque and dramatic splendor, the Homeric Ulysses excels him on the ground of permanence of type.
Homer, then, was the poet of the heroic age, the poet of Achilles and Ulysses. Of Homer we know nothing, we have heard too much. Need we ask ourselves again the question whether he existed, or whether he sprang into the full possession of consummate art without a predecessor? That he had no predecessors, no scattered poems and ballads to build upon, no well-digested body of myths to synthesize, is an absurd hypothesis which the whole history of literature refutes. That, on the other hand, there never was a Homer—that is to say, that some diaskeuast, acting under the orders of Pisistratus, gave its immortal outline to the colossus of the Iliad, and wove the magic web of the Odyssey—but that no supreme and conscious artist working towards a well-planned conclusion conceived and shaped these epics to the form they bear, appears to the spirit of sound criticism equally untenable. The very statement of this alternative involves a contradiction in terms; for such a diaskeuast must himself have been a supreme and conscious artist. Some Homer did exist. Some great single poet intervened between the lost chaos of legendary material and the cosmos of artistic beauty which we now possess. His work may have been tampered with in a thousand ways, and religiously but inadequately restored. Of his age and date and country we may know nothing. But this we do know, that the fire of moulding, fusing, and controlling genius in some one brain has made the Iliad and Odyssey what they are.2
The epic poet merges his personality in his poems, the words of which he ascribes to the inspiration of the muse. The individual is nowhere, is forgotten in the subject and suppressed, while the luminous forms of gods and heroes move serenely across the stage, summoned and marshalled by the maidens of Helicon. In no other period of Greek literature shall we find the same unconsciousness of self, the same immersion in the work of art. In this respect the poetry of the heroic age answers to the condition of prehistoric Hellas, where as yet the elements of the Greek race remain still implicit in the general mass and undeveloped. We hear in Homer of no abrupt division between Dorians and Ionians. Athens and Sparta have not grown up into prominence as the two leaders of the nation. Argos is the centre of power; but Phthiotis, the cradle of the Hellenes, is the home of Achilles. Ulysses is an islander. In the same way in Homer the art of the Greeks is still a mere potentiality. The artistic sentiment, indeed, exists in exquisite perfection; but it is germinal, not organized and expanded as it will be. We hear of embroidery for royal garments, of goldsmith's work for shields and breastplates, of stained ivory trappings for chariots and horses. But even here the poet's imagination had probably outrun the fact. What he saw with his fancy, could the heroic artisans have fashioned with their tools? Is not the shield of Achilles, like Dante's pavement of the purgatorial staircase, a forecast of the future? Architecture and sculpture, at any rate, can scarcely be said to exist. Ulysses builds his own house. The statues of the gods are fetiches. But, meanwhile, the foundation of the highest Greek art is being laid in the cultivation of the human body. The sentiment of beauty shows itself in dances and games, in the races of naked runners, in rhythmic processions, and the celebration of religious rites. This was the proper preparation for the after-growth of sculpture. The whole race lived out its sculpture and its painting, rehearsed, as it were, the great works of Pheidias and Polygnotus in physical exercise before it learned to express itself in marble or in color. The public games, which were instituted in this first period, further contributed to the cultivation of the sense of beauty which was inherent in the Greeks.
The second period is one of transition—in politics, in literature, in the fine arts. Everywhere the old landmarks are being broken up, and the new ones are not yet fixed. The heroic monarchies yield first of all to oligarchies, and then to tyrannies; the tyrannies in their turn give place to democracies, or to constitutional aristocracies. Argos, the centre of heroic Hellas, is the first to change. Between 770 and 730 B.C. Pheidon usurps the sovereign power, and dies, leaving no dynasty behind him.3 Between 650 and 500 we find despots springing up in all the chief Greek cities. At Corinth the oligarchical family of the Bacchiadæ are superseded by the tyrants Cypselus and Periander. At Megara the despot Theagenes is deposed and exiled. At Sicyon the Orthagoridæ terminate in the despot Cleisthenes, whose reign is marked by an attempt to supersede the ancient Doric order of government by caste. At Mitylene, Pittacus becomes a constitutional autocrat, or dictator, for the public safety. At Samos, Polycrates holds a post of almost Oriental despotism. At Athens we find the great family of the Pisistratidæ, who supersede the dynastic tyranny in commission of the house of Codrus. What is the meaning of these changes? How does the despot differ from the heroic monarch, who held, as we have seen, his power by divine right, but who also had to depend for his ascendency on personal prowess? Gradually the old respect for the seed of Zeus died out. Either the royal families abused their power or became extinct, or, as in the case of Athens and Sparta, retained hereditary privileges under limitations. During this decay of the Zeus-born dynasties the cities of Greece were a prey to the quarrels of great families; and it often happened that one of these obtained supreme power—in which case a monarchy, based not on divine right, but on force and fear, was founded; or else a few of the chief houses combined against the State to establish an oligarchy. The oligarchies, owing their authority to no true, legal, or religious fount of honor, were essentially selfish, and were exposed to the encroachments of the more able among their own families. The cleverest man in an oligarchy tended to draw the power into his own hands; but in this he generally succeeded by first flattering and then intimidating the people. Thus in one way or another the old type of dynastic government was superseded by despotisms, more or less arbitrary, tending to the tyranny of single individuals, or to the coalition of noble houses, and bringing with them the vices of greed, craft, and servile cruelty. The political ferment caused a vast political excitement. Party strove against party; and when one set gained the upper hand, the other had to fly. The cities of Hellas were filled with exiles. Diplomacy and criticism occupied the minds of men. Personal cleverness became the one essential point in politics. But two permanent advantages were secured by this anarchy to the Greeks. The one was a strong sense of the equality of citizens; the other, a desire for established law, as opposed to the caprice of individuals and to the clash of factions in the State. This, then, is the first point which marks the transitional period. The old monarchies break up, and give place to oligarchies first, and then to despotism. The tyrants maintain themselves by violence and by flattering the mob. At last they fall, or are displaced, and then the states agree to maintain their freedom by the means of constitutions and fixed laws. The despots are schoolmasters, who bring the people to Nomos as their lord.
Three other general features distinguish this period of transition. The first is colonization. In the political disturbances which attend the struggle for power, hundreds of citizens were forced to change their residence. So we find the mother cities sending settlers to Italy, to Sicily, to Africa, to the Gulf of Lyons, to Thrace, and to the islands. In these colonies the real life and vigor of Hellas show themselves at this stage more than in the mother states. It is in Sicily, on the coast of Magna Græcia, on the seaboard of Asia Minor, in the islands of the Ægean, that the first poets and philosophers and historians of Greece appear. Sparta and Athens, destined to become the protagonists of the real drama of Hellas, are meanwhile silent and apparently inert. Secondly, this is the age of the Nomothetæ. Thebes receives a constitution from the Corinthian lovers and law-givers Philolaus and Diocles. Lycurgus and Solon form the states of Sparta and Athens. It is not a little wonderful to think of these three great cities, successively the leaders of historic Hellas, submitting to the intellect each of its own lawgiver, taking shape beneath his hands, cheerfully accepting and diligently executing his directions. Lastly, it is in this period that the two chief races of the Greeks—the Ionians and the Dorians—emerge into distinctness. Not only are Athens and Sparta fashioned to the form which they will afterwards maintain; but also in the colonies two distinct streams of thought and feeling begin to flow onward side by side, and to absorb, each into its own current, those minor rivulets which it could best appropriate.
What happens to literature in this period of metamorphosis, expansion, and anarchy? We have seen that Homer covers the whole of the first period of literature; and in the Homeric poems we saw that the interests of the present were subordinated to a splendid picture of the ideal past, that the poet was merged in his work, that the individual joys and sorrows of the artist remained unspoken, and that his words were referred immediately to the Muse. All this is now to be altered. But meanwhile, between the first and second period, a link is made by Hesiod. In his Works and Days he still preserves the traditions of the epic. But we no longer listen to the deeds of gods and heroes; and though the Muse is invoked, the poet appears before us as a living, sentient, suffering man. We descend to earth. We are instructed in the toils and duties of the beings who have to act and endure upon the prosaic stage of the world, as it exists in the common light of the present time. Even in Hesiod there has therefore been a change. Homer strung his lyre in the halls of princes who loved to dwell on the great deeds of their god-descended ancestors. Hesiod utters a weaker and more subdued note to the tillers of the ground and the watchers of the seasons. In Homer we see the radiant heroes expiring with a smile upon their lips as on the Æginetan pediment. In Hesiod we hear the low, sad outcry of humanity. The inner life, the daily loss and profit, the duties and the cares of men are his concern. Homer, too, was never analytical. He described the world without raising a single moral or psychological question. Hesiod poses the eternal problems: What is the origin and destiny of mankind? Why should we toil painfully upon the upward path of virtue? How came the gods to be our tyrants? What is justice? How did evil and pain and disease begin? After Hesiod the epical impulse ceases. Poets, indeed, go on writing narrative poems in hexameters. But the cycle, so called by the Alexandrian critics, produced about this time, had not innate life enough to survive the wear and tear of centuries. We have lost the whole series, except in the tragedies which were composed from their materials. Literature had passed beyond the stage of the heroic epic. The national ear demanded other and more varied forms of verse than the hexameter. Among the Ionians of Asia Minor was developed the pathetic melody of the elegiac metre, which first apparently was used to express the emotions of love and sorrow, and afterwards came to be the vehicle of moral sentiment and all strong feeling. Callinus and Tyrtæus adapted the elegy to songs of battle. Solon consigned his wisdom to its couplets, and used it as a trumpet for awakening the zeal of Athens against her tyrants. Mimnermus confined the metre to its more plaintive melodies, and made it the mouthpiece of lamentations over the fleeting beauty of youth and the evils of old age. In Theognis the elegy takes wider scope. He uses it alike for satire and invective, for precept, for autobiographic grumblings, for political discourses, and for philosophical apophthegms. Side by side with the elegy arose the various forms of lyric poetry. The names of Alcæus and Sappho, of Alcman, Anacreon, Simonides, Bacchylides, Stesichorus, Arion, instantly suggest themselves. But it must be borne in mind that lyric poetry in Greece at a very early period broke up into two distinct species. The one kind gave expression to strong personal emotion, and became a safety-valve for perilous passions; the other was choric and complex in its form; designed for public festivals and solemn ceremonials, it consisted chiefly of odes sung in the honor of gods and great men. To the former, or personal species, belong the lyrics of the Ionian and Æolian families; to the latter, or more public species, belong the so-called Dorian odes. Besides the elegy and all the forms of lyric stanza, the iambic, if not invented in this period, was now adapted of set purpose to personal satire.4 Archilochus is said to have preferred this metre, as being the closest in its form to common speech, and therefore suited to his unideal practical invective. From the lyric dithyrambs of Arion, sung at festivals of Dionysus, and from the iambic satires of Archilochus, recited at the feasts of Demeter,5 was to be developed the metrical structure of the drama in the third period. As yet, it is only among the Dorians of Sicily and of Megara that we hear of any mimetic shows, and these of the simplest description.
In this period the first start in the direction of philosophy was made. The morality which had been implicit in Homer, and had received a partial development in Hesiod, was condensed in proverbial couplets by Solon, Theognis, Phocylides, and Simonides. These couplets formed the starting-points for discussion. Many of Plato's dialogues turn on sayings of Theognis and Simonides. Many of the sublimer flights of meditation in Sophocles are expansions of early gnomes. Even the ethics of Aristotle are indebted to their wisdom. The ferment of thought produced by the political struggles of this age tended to sharpen the intellect and to turn reflection inward. Hence we find that the men who rose to greatest eminence in state-craft as tyrants or as law-givers are also to be reckoned among the primitive philosophers of Greece. The aphorisms of the Seven Sages, two of whom were Nomothetæ, and several of whom were despots, contain the kernel of much that is peculiar in Greek thought. It is enough to mention these: μηδὲν ἄγαν· μέτρον ἄριστον· γνῶθι σεαυτόν· καιρὸν γνῶθι· ἀνάγκῃ δ' οὐδὲ θεοὶ μάχονται—which are the germs of subsequent systems of ethics, metaphysics, and theories of art.6 Solon, as a patriot, a modeller of the Athenian constitution, an elegiac poet, one of the Seven Sages, and the representative of Greece at the court of Crœsus, may be chosen as the one most eminent man in a period when literature and thought and politics were, to a remarkable extent, combined in single individuals.
Meanwhile philosophy began to flourish in more definite shape among the colonists of Asia Minor, Italy, and Sicily. The criticism of the Theogony of Hesiod led the Ionian thinkers—Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Heraclitus—to evolve separate answers to the question of the origin of the universe. The problem of the physical ἀρχή, or starting-point, of the world occupied their attention. Some more scientific theory of existence than mythology afforded was imperatively demanded. The same spirit of criticism, the same demand for accuracy, gave birth to history. The Theogony of Hesiod and the Homeric version of the Trojan war, together with the genealogies of the heroes, were reduced to simple statements of fact, stripped of their artistic trappings, and rationalized after a rude and simple fashion by the annalists of Asia Minor. This zeal for greater rigor of thought was instrumental in developing a new vehicle of language. The time had come at length for separation from poetry, for the creation of a prose style which should correspond in accuracy to the logical necessity of exact thinking. Prose accordingly was elaborated with infinite difficulty by these first speculators from the elements of common speech. It was a great epoch in the history of European culture when men ceased to produce their thoughts in the fixed cadences of verse, and consigned them to the more elastic periods of prose. Heraclitus of Ephesus was the first who achieved a notable success in this new and difficult art. He for his pains received the title of ὁ σκοτεινός, the obscure—so strange and novel did the language of science seem to minds accustomed hitherto to nothing but metre. Yet even after his date philosophy of the deepest species was still conveyed in verse. The Eleatic metaphysicians Xenophanes and Parmenides—Xenophanes, who dared to criticise the anthropomorphism of the Greek Pantheon, and Parmenides, who gave utterance to the word of Greek ontology, τὸ ὄν, or being, which may be significantly contrasted with the Hebrew I am—wrote long poems in which they invoked the Muse, and dragged the hexameter along the pathway of their argument upon the entities, like a pompous sacrificial vestment. Empedocles of Agrigentum, to whom we owe the rough-and-ready theory of the four elements, cadenced his great work on Nature in the same sonorous verse, and interspersed his speculations on the cycles of the universe with passages of brilliant eloquence.
Thus the second period is marked alike by changes in politics and society, and by a revolution in the spirit of literature. The old Homeric monarchies are broken up. Oligarchies and tyrannies take their place. To the anarchy and unrest of transition succeeds the demand for constitutional order. The colonies are founded, and contain the very pith of Hellas at this epoch: of all the great names we have mentioned, only Solon and Theognis belong to Central Greece. The Homeric epos has become obsolete. In its stead we have the greatest possible variety of literary forms. The elegiac poetry of morality and war and love; the lyrical poetry of personal feeling and of public ceremonial; the philosophical poetry of metaphysics and mysticism; the iambic, with its satire; prose, in its adaptation to new science and a more accurate historical investigation—are all built up upon the ruins of the epic. What is most prominent in the spirit of this second period is the emergence of private interests and individual activities. No dreams of a golden past now occupy the minds of men. No gods or heroes fill the canvas of the poet. Man, his daily life, his most crying necessities, his deepest problems, his loves and sorrows, his friendships, his social relations, his civic duties—these are the theme of poetry. Now for the first time in Europe a man tells his own hopes and fears, and expects the world to listen. Sappho simply sings her love; Archilochus, his hatred; Theognis, his wrongs; Mimnermus, his ennui; Alcæus, his misfortunes; Anacreon, his pleasure of the hour; and their songs find an echo in all hearts. The individual and the present have triumphed over the ideal and the past. Finally, it should be added that the chief contributions to the culture of the fine arts in this period are architecture, which is carried to perfection; music, which receives elaborate form in the lyric of the Dorian order; and sculpture, which appears as yet but rudimentary upon the pediments of the temples of Ægina and Selinus.
Our third period embraces the supremacy of Athens from the end of the Persian to the end of the Peloponnesian war. It was the struggle with Xerxes which developed all the latent energies of the Greeks, which intensified their national existence, and which secured for Athens, as the central power on which the scattered forces of the race converged, the intellectual dictatorship of Hellas. No contest equals for interest and for importance this contest of the Greeks with the Persians. It was a struggle of spiritual energy against brute force, of liberty against oppression, of intellectual freedom against superstitious ignorance, of civilization against barbarism. The whole fate of humanity hung trembling in the scales at Marathon, at Salamis, at Platæa. On the one side were ranged the hordes of Asia—tribe after tribe, legion upon legion, myriad by myriad—under their generals and princes. On the other side stood forth a band of athletes, of Greek citizens, each one himself a prince and general. The countless masses of the herd-like Persian host were opposed to a handful of resolute men in whom the force of the spirit of the world was concentrated. The triumph of the Greeks was the triumph of the spirit, of the intellect of man, of light-dispersing darkness, of energy repelling a dead weight of matter. Other nations have shown a temper as heroic as the Greeks. The Dutch, for instance, in their resistance against Philip, or the Swiss in their antagonism to Burgundy and Austria. But in no other single instance has heroism been exerted on so large a scale, in such a fateful contest for the benefit of mankind at large. Had the Dutch, for example, been quelled by Spain, or the Swiss been crushed by the House of Hapsburg, the world could have survived the loss of these athletic nations. There were other mighty peoples who held the torch of liberty and of the spirit, and who were ready to carry it onward in the race. But if Persia had overwhelmed the Greeks upon the plains of Marathon or in the straits of Salamis, that torch of spiritual liberty would have been extinguished. There was no runner in the race to catch it up from the dying hands of Hellas, and to bear it forward for the future age. No; this contest of the Greeks with Persia was the one supreme battle of history; and to the triumph of the Greeks we owe whatever is most great and glorious in the subsequent achievements of the human race.
Athens rose to her full height in this duel. She bore the brunt of Marathon alone. Her generals decided the sea-fight of Salamis. For the Spartans it remained to defeat Mardonius at Platæa. Consequently the olive-wreath of this more than Olympian victory crowned Athens. Athens was recognized as Saviour and Queen of Hellas. And Athens, who had fought the battle of the spirit—by spirit we mean the greatness of the soul, liberty, intelligence, civilization, culture—everything which raises men above brutes and slaves, and makes them free beneath the arch of heaven—Athens, who had fought and won this battle of the spirit, became immediately the recognized impersonation of the spirit itself. Whatever was superb in human nature found its natural home and sphere in Athens. We hear no more of the colonies. All great works of art and literature now are produced in Athens. It is to Athens that the sages come to teach and to be taught. Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, the three masters of philosophy in this third period, are Athenians. It is, however, noticeable and significant that Anaxagoras, who forms a link between the philosophy of the second and third period, is a native of Clazomenæ, though the thirty years of his active life are spent at Athens. These thinkers introduce into speculation a new element. Instead of inquiries into the factors of the physical world or of ontological theorizing, they approach all problems which involve the activities of the human soul—the presence in the universe of a controlling spirit. Anaxagoras issues the famous apophthegm: νοῦς πάντων κρατεῖ, "intelligence disposes all things in the world." Socrates founds his ethical investigation upon the Delphian precept: γνῶθι σεαυτόν; or, "the proper study of mankind is man." Plato, who belongs chronologically to the fourth period, but who may here be mentioned in connection with the great men of the third, as synthesizing all the previous speculations of the Greeks, ascends to the conception of an ideal existence which unites truth, beauty, and goodness in one scheme of universal order.
At the same time Greek art rises to its height of full maturity. Ictinus designs the Parthenon, and Mnesicles the Propylæa; Pheidias completes the development of sculpture in his statue of Athene, his pediment and friezes of the Parthenon, his chryselephantine image of Zeus at Olympia, his marble Nemesis upon the plain of Marathon. These were the ultimate, consummate achievements of the sculptor's skill; the absolute standards of what the statuary in Greece could do. Nothing remained to be added. Subsequent progression—for a progression there was in the work of Praxiteles—was a deflection from the pure and perfect type.
