Guardian (ancient Greece)

“ From the beginning every citizen seemed thus to be placed under the immediate shelter of that goddess’s ægis which should be extended over him in peace and in war. In other parts of Greece the child’s first bed, and too frequently his last, was a shield. [338] In accordance with this custom we find Alcmena cradling her twin boys Heracles and Iphicles in Amphytrion’s buckler; and the same practice prevailed, as might have been expected, at Sparta, where war constituted to men the sole object of life. ”

“ The ideal of Athena is in some ways more difficult for us to comprehend than that of Zeus, partly because it is less universally human, and more peculiarly characteristic of Greece and even of Athens. The notion of the mother goddess is common to most religions; that of the "queen and huntress, chaste and fair" is at least familiar to us in literature, and readily commends itself to the imagination. ”

“ The envoy from Phlius,—while complimenting Athens on the proud position which she now held, having the fate of Sparta in her hands,—dwelt on the meed of honor which she would earn in Greece, if she now generously interfered to rescue her ancient rival, forgetting past injuries and remembering only past benefits. In adopting such policy, too, she would act in accordance with her own true interests; since, should Sparta be crushed, the Thebans would become undisputed heads of Greece, and more formidable still to Athens. ”

“ The diamond resists when the largest rock yields. The true tendency of civilisation, therefore, is to reduce unwieldy empires into compact bodies, which the light of education can penetrate and render luminous. Vast empires are but opaque masses of ignorance.
From precisely the same causes arose the peculiar notions of the Greeks on the subject of government; that is, the citizens of each state applied to one another the principle which regulated the conduct of communities. Every man experienced an aversion to yield obedience to his neighbour, every man was ambitious to rule ”

“ On the other hand, there is no evidence that in Greece—at least, in the best period of Greek art—any statesman held the views as to the official religion frankly expressed in Rome, that it was expedient for this religion to be accepted by the common people, but that educated men could only reconcile their consciences to taking part in it by a philosophical interpretation. ”

“ An imagination so entirely materialistic may belong to a more primitive stage than any we can find among the Greeks. As soon as religion has reached the polytheistic stage the gods are regarded as travelling from image to image, just as they travel from temple to temple. Even in Æschylus' Eumenides it will be remembered that when Orestes, by the advice of Apollo, clasps as a suppliant the ancient image of Athena at Athens, the goddess comes flying from far away in the Troad when she hears the sound of his calling. ”

“ Greece no longer occupies in the map of the world the position it occupied in antiquity. It has been lifted out of the centre of civilisation, to be cast upon its outskirts, or, which is the same thing, civilisation has shifted its seat. Nor are the Greeks any longer what they formerly were, though perhaps by a fortunate combination of circumstances they might still be rendered so. At present there is the same difference between them and their ancestors as between a jar of Falernian, and an empty jar. The clay, indeed, is there, beautifully moulded, and the purple hue of life is on the cheek ”

“ To persons so thinking no calamity short of the entire extinction of their race could appear so intolerable as beholding that sacred city, with the tombs of their ancestors, the sanctuaries of their gods, the venerable but immoveable symbols of their faith and mythological history, delivered over to be trodden down or obliterated with sword and fire by barbarian slaves, strong only from their countless numbers. Yet even to this did the love of freedom reconcile the Athenian people. ”

“ Similarly, when at a later time the Roman conquest of Greece spread Hellenic influence to the West, there also the types of the Greek deities came to be adopted or adapted to new mythological meanings. Greek art practically became cosmopolitan; its influence was broadened; but at the same time its essential nature, in its harmony with the imagination of the Hellenic race, was lost or obscured. ”

“ It is perhaps easier to realise the feeling of a primitive people about this matter in the case of a sacred building than in that of the actual image of a god. A temple does not, indeed—in Greece, at least—belong to the earliest phase of cult; for it is the dwelling of the god, and its form, based on that of a human dwelling-house, implies an anthropomorphic imagination. We find, however, in Homer that the gods are actually thought of as inhabiting their temples and preferring one to another, Athena going to Athens and Aphrodite to Paphos as her chosen abode. ”

“ In the prehistoric age the Athenians and all the Dorian peoples were conquering peoples: and all of them made their conquests under the leadership of kings. In the next age, which came between the heroic period and the beginning of Greek history in the proper sense of the word, the great majority of the Greek peoples had ceased to acquire new territory within Greece and had also ceased or were ceasing to be monarchically governed: two peoples, the Spartans and the Argives, were exceptional both in continuing to make territorial conquests and in still living under kingly rule. ”

“ In ancient Greece generally, and more especially at Athens, men gave to their wives and families only such time and care as they could spare from more engrossing occupations. By nature the Athenians were intensely political. And while Athens was a ruling power, and every citizen had a part in the game of politics played on a great scale, it was to public life that their thoughts and energies were directed, and the life of the home remained very much in the background. Every scholar is familiar with the contemptuous language applied by Aristophanes and Euripides to women ”

“ The hardy mountain life developed a free and independent spirit, and as the mountains cut off the dwellers in the different plains from each other, separate city-states were formed, each with its own laws and government. This separation of communities was a source of weakness to the country as a whole, but it developed the spirit of freedom and independence in the city dweller as well as in the mountaineer. As all parts of Greece were within easy reach of the sea, the Greeks naturally became sailors. ”

“ It was impossible for any ordinary Greek to think of the gods in other than human form. He had, indeed, no such definite dogma as the Hebrew statement that "God created man in His own image"; for the legends about the origin of the human race varied considerably and many of them represented crude philosophical theorising rather than religious belief. But the monstrous forms which we find in Egypt and Mesopotamia as embodiments of divine power were alien to the Greek imagination ”

“ The building of the temples, by which Athens was adorned, the people delighted, and the rest of the world astonished, and which now alone prove that the tales of the ancient power and glory of Greece are no fables, was what particularly excited the spleen of the opposite faction, who inveighed against him in the public assembly, declaring that the Athenians had disgraced themselves by transferring the common treasury of the Greeks from the island of Delos to their own custody. ”

“ The tendency of state religion was, as a rule, conservative, for reasons that we have already noticed; innovations in the matter of ritual are dangerous, for the new rite may not please the gods as well as the old; and the same feeling applies to the statues that form the centres of ritual. Pericles, for example, doubtless wished to make the Athena Parthenos of Phidias the official and visible representation of the goddess of Athens, and thereby to raise the religious ideals of the Athenians. ”

“ And by one of those coincidences which we meet so often both in the history of art and in that of literature, just at the time when the material conditions, the spirit of the people, and the rapid advance of art gave the utmost scope for artistic creation, there arose the man of transcendent genius to give full expression to the religious and artistic aspirations of the time. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. It is true that there was an interval between the defeat of the Persians and the period of highest attainment in Greece ”

“ In ancient Greece, even at the golden prime of that splendid narrow culture which exhibited itself so incomparably in art, in literature, and in civic virtue, the moral rules which concern liberty and life, and the simpler of the moral rules which concern rights of property, were defined very perfectly as between the fellow-citizens of each state, and between the kindred states, but very imperfectly beyond that strict limit of familiar association. The stranger, the alien, the enslaved captive, the barbarian of the non-Hellenic world, were not human fellows to the Greek ”

“ It is man's prerogative and duty to act, not blindly, but in the light of the past and the future.
There is trace in Greece, as everywhere else in the ancient world, of a worship of nature, which grovelled in the material slime. This appears in the mythology as monsters, especially as serpents which some hero, personifying or concentrating in himself the genius of some Grecian tribe, destroys. Perhaps one hideous form of earth-worship had its seat, in very early times, at Delphusa and Delphi, and was expelled thence by a Dorian colony, who settled there, and built the temple of Apollo. ”

“ The chief glory of the defense lay with Sparta and Athens. The united army was sent into Thessaly to defend the defile of Tempe, but discovering that they were unable to do this, since another pass over Mount Olympus was open in the summer, they retreated to the isthmus of Corinth, and left all Greece north of [pg 220] Mount Citheron and the Megarid territory without defense. Had the Greeks been able to maintain the passes of Olympus and Ossa, all the northern States would probably have joined in the confederation against Persia ”

“ The ancient connexion which apocryphal tradition recorded between races so opposite, seemed a typical prophecy of that which actually existed in the historical times. And if formerly Greece had derived something of civilization from Egypt, she now paid back the gift by the swords of her adventurers; and the bravest and most loyal part of the Egyptian army was composed of Grecian mercenaries. At the same time Egypt shared the fate of all nations that intrust too great a power to auxiliaries. Greeks defended her, but Greeks conspired against her. ”

“ The citizens likewise of Miletos, after the unsuccessful revolt of Aristagoras, were transported into Persia, as were those also of Eretria and Carystos in Eubœa. [19] Like the Israelites, these Greeks long preserved in captivity their national manners and language, though surrounded by strangers and urged by every inducement to assimilate themselves to their conquerors. A similar fate overtook the inhabitants of Thebes, who were sold into slavery by Alexander, as were those of Mycene by the Argives, and the Corinthians by Mummius. ”

“ And the great delivery from the Persians not only gave the Greeks a confidence in themselves which justly increased their national pride and thereby strengthened their national ideals, but it also gave occasion to a confidence in the gods and a gratitude to them which found expression in numerous buildings and offerings. ”

“ There seems to be good ground for believing, that if the Greeks did not borrow their philosophy from the East, they at least derived from them many of the vain and luxurious habits which at length rendered that philosophy of none effect. No one appears to have paid a single visit to Persia, or Syria, or Egypt, without bringing back along with him some pestilent new freak in the matter of dress or furniture, wholly at variance with republican simplicity. ”

“ Gods imply a greater power of generalisation and a higher stage of religious development. It was not thought likely that the gods would show themselves to mortal eyes, as had been their habit in the Golden Age, except perhaps upon some occasion of a great national crisis; and even then it was the heroes rather than the gods who manifested themselves. But the ordinary Greek believed that the gods actually existed in human form, and even that their characters and passions and moods were like those of human beings. ”

“ The beginning of the change seems to have taken place at an early stage in the development of Greek art. In pre-Hellenic times we find representation of gods and goddesses in human form upon gems and other small works of art, and also in statuettes that were either objects of worship or dedicated in shrines; but we have at present no evidence as to whether monumental images of the gods were made in human form, though some objects of worship, such as the double-axe, were certainly set up in regular shrines. ”

“ The action was tried before the court of Heliæa, and numerous were the examples of men who had suffered death for crimes committed against bondsmen. Not, therefore, without reason did the orator eulogise the humane spirit of the law, or dwell upon the beneficial effects which a knowledge of its existence must produce among those barbarous nations who furnished Greece with servile labourers. ”