sand free citizens. In military matters, it must be confessed, the importance attached by historians to miniature fleets and pygmy armies, with a ridiculously small casualty list, does strike the reader with a sense of disproportion. But for the politician it is especially instructive to see his problems worked out upon a small scale, with the issues comparatively simple and the results plainly visible. The task of combining liberty with order is in essentials the same for a state of ten thousand citizens as for one of forty millions. And in the realms of philosophy and art considerations of size do not affect us, except to make us marvel that these tiny states could do so much.

To a great extent we may find the key to the Greek character in her favorite proverb, 'No excess,' in which are expressed her favorite virtues of aidōs and sophrosuné-reverence and selfrestraint. 'Know thyself' was the motto inscribed over her principal shrine. Know and rely upon thine own powers, know and regard thine own limitations. It was such a maxim as this which enabled the Greeks to reach their goal of perfection even in the sphere of art, where perfection is proverbially impossible. They were bold in prospecting and experimenting, until they found what they deemed to be the right way, and when they had found it, they followed it through to its conclusion. Eccentricity they hated like poison. Though they were such great originators, they cared nothing for the modern fetish of originality.

In politics also they looked for a definite goal and traveled courageously along to find it. Herein they met with disastrous failures which are full of teaching for us. But they reached, it may be said, the utmost possibility of the city-state. The city-state was, as we have seen, probably evolved by natural survival from the physical conditions of the country. Being established, it entailed certain definite consequences. It involved a much closer bond of social union than any modern territorial state. Its citizens felt the unity and exclusiveness of a club or school. A much larger share of public rights and duties naturally fell upon them. They looked upon their city as a company of unlimited liability in which each individual citizen was a shareholder. They expected their city to feed and amuse them. They expected to divide the plunder when she made conquests, as they were certain to share the consequences if she was defeated. Every full citizen of proper age was naturally bound to fight personally in the ranks, and from that duty his rights as a citizen followed logically. He must naturally be consulted about peace and war, and must have a voice in for

eign policy. Also, if he was to be a competent soldier he must undergo proper education and training for it. There will be little privacy inside the walls of a city-state; the arts and crafts will be under public patronage. Inequalities will become hatefully apparent.

But for us, an imperial people, who have inherited a vast and scattered dominion which somehow or other has got to be managed and governed, the chief interest will centre in the question of how these city-states acquired and administered their empires. Above all, it is to Athens and perhaps Rome alone that we can look for historical answers to the great riddle for which we cannot yet boast of having discovered a solution-whether democracy can govern an empire.

In Greek history alone we have at least three examples of empires. Athens and Sparta both proceeded to acquire empire by the road of alliance and hegemony, Athens being naval and democratic, Sparta aristocratic and military. Both were despotic, and both failed disastrously for different reasons. Then we have the career of Alexander the Great and his short-lived but important empire, a career providing a type for Caesar and Napoleon, an empire founded on mere conquest.

Lastly, on the same small canvas, we have a momentous phase of the eternal and still-continuing conflict between East and West and their respective habits of civilization.

III

1

EXTERNAL NATURE IN GREEK POETRY 1

BY FRANCIS G. ALLINSON AND ANNE C. E. ALLINSON

It must not be assumed from the smallness of the land that the spurs to the imagination of the Greeks were few. On the contrary, within their narrow borders nature was prodigal of her inspiration. In the few miles from Thessaly to the Messenian Gulf are offered a variety of climate and an alternation of products well-nigh unparalleled for such a limited area. The warm air of the sea penetrating into sheltered valleys favors an almost tropical vegetation, while the lofty mountain ridges offer almost an Alpine climate. In Attica, in early spring, snow may occasionally be seen sprinkled on Hymettus, and glistening white on Mount Pentelicus, while oranges hang on the trees in Athens. Taygetus in the south may be a snow-covered mountain even as late as May, while in the Messenian plain below grows the palm and, more rarely, the edible date. In the Argolis are groves of lemons and oranges, and in Naxos, in the same latitude as Sparta, the tender lime ripens in the gardens. The gray-green olive is familiar throughout central and southern Greece. If we extend the survey farther north, the beeches of the Pindus range, west of Thessaly, are surrounded by the vegetation rather of northern Europe; in the interior of Thessaly the olive tree does not flourish; the northern shores of the Aegean have the climate of central Germany, while Mount Athos, whose marble walls jut far out into the Aegean and rise 6400 feet above the sea, offers on its slopes nearly all species of European trees in succession.

The different parts of Greece offer a varying development in literature. In this particular, some districts, like Acarnania, Aetolia, and Achaea, though possessed of great natural beauty, are negligible. Arcadia, though itself unproductive, inspired poetry; others, also, like Phocis, Locris, and Messenia, are inevitably drawn

[1 From Greek Lands and Letters (pp. 12-31). Boston and New York, 1909. The selection is reprinted by permission of the publishers, Houghton Mifflin Company.-EDITOR.]

into the associations of literature and history. In Epirus we find at Dodona the first known sanctuary of Zeus, the supreme god of the Greeks. In Thessaly the earliest Greeks, or Achaeans, may have first forged in the fire of their young imagination the tempered steel of the hexameter. Here was the home of Achilles, and here, perhaps, we must look for the kernel of the Iliad. Here most fitly, close to Olympus where dwelt the immortals, could the sons of men be 'near-gods.'

From the north and northwest successive waves of population descended into lower Greece to conquer, merge with, or become subject to, the previous comers. But prehistoric peoples, whether alien or Greek, like the Eteo-Cretans, the Pelasgi, the Minyae, the Leleges, the Hellenes, the Achaeans, and even great movements like the Dorian and Ionian migrations, are all foreshortened on a scenic background, as equidistant to the Greeks of the classic periods as is the vault of heaven to the eyes of children. One star, indeed, differed from another. The Dorian, for example, was of the first magnitude. But the relations of apparent magnitude and real distance were ignored or naïvely confused in the fanciful constellations of myth and saga, distant yet ever present, bending around them to their explored horizon. Heroic figures, impalpable but real as the gods themselves, intervened continually, controlling decisions, shaping policies, or determining disputed boundaries, among even the most intellectual of the Greeks. Royalty, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny alike must reckon with personified tradition.

When we emerge into the light of more authentic records, it is well, in the confusing maze of inter-cantonal contentions, to focus the mind, for the purpose of appreciating the literature, upon certain broader relations and more clearly defined epochs in Greek history, like the so-called 'Age of the Despots' within the seventh and sixth centuries, the Persian wars, and the conflicts between Attica as a pivot and the Peloponnese, Thebes, and Macedon.

It might be expected from the variety of natural charm offered by Hellenic lands, from Ilium to Sicily, from Mount Olympus to Crete, that the Greeks would show in their literature a pervasive love of nature. This was, in fact, the case. The modern eye has not been the first to discover the beauty of form and color in the Greek flowers and birds, mountain, sky, and sea. Modern critics, ignoring all historical perspective, and assuming as a procrustean standard the one-sided and sophisticated attitude that has played a leading rôle in modern literature, announced as axiomatic that

ancient Greek poets had no feeling for nature and found no pleasure in looking at the beauties of a landscape. This superficial idea still keeps cropping up, although thoughtful readers of Greek literature have long since pointed out the necessity both of a chronological analysis of the literature and of a more inclusive statement of the various forms in which a sentiment for the natural world is evinced. It is a far cry from Homer to Theocritus, and, as might well be expected in a range of six centuries and more, new elements appear from time to time, due both to changing conditions of life and civilization and also to the personal equation.

A naïve feeling for nature is uppermost in the descriptive comparisons and similes of Homer and, generally speaking, in the mythmaking of the Greeks. The concrete embodiment of natural phenomena and objects in some nature-divinity often obviated the necessity for elaborate description, and summarized their conceptions as if by an algebraic formula. The mystical element was not lacking, but by this myth-making process it became objective and real. The sympathetic feeling for nature becomes more and more apparent in lyric poetry and the drama until in Euripides there emerges, almost suddenly, the 'modern' romanticism. In the Hellenistic and imperial times, finally, the sentimental element is natural to men who turn to the country for relief from the stress of life in a city. One generalization for the classic periods may be safely made. Although the Greeks from Homer to Euripides thought of the world as the environment of man, yet they stopped short of a sentimental self-analysis. Charles Eliot Norton, more than thirty years ago, pointed out that the expression of a sentiment like Wordsworth's

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears-

is foreign to the clear-eyed Hellene, reared amongst the distinct outlines of his mountains, and from the cradle to the grave at home upon the blue and wind-swept Aegean. Certainly this is true until the speculative questionings of the Ionic philosophers had time to react upon literature. As the Greeks accepted their pedigrees from the gods and heroes, so they accepted their environment of beauty. They were not unlike the child, content to betray by a stray word or caress his unanalyzed admiration for his mother's face.

Emphasis has often been laid, and rightly, upon the keen sensi2 Cf. Fairclough, The Attitude of the Greek Tragedians toward Nature.