Greek wars and politics 31 



VIII. THE TRAGEDIANS. 



The lives of Aeschylus (died 456 BC) Sophocles and Euripides 

 (both died 406 BC) cover a period of stirring events in the history of 

 Greece, particularly of Athens. Aeschylus had borne his part in the 

 Persian wars : he was a fighting man when Herodotus was born, and 

 Sophocles a boy. Euripides saw the rise of Athenian power to its 

 greatest height, and died with Sophocles on the eve of its fall. These 

 men had seen strange and terrible things. Hellas had only beaten off 

 the Persian to ruin herself by her own internecine conflicts. While the 

 hatred and contempt for 'barbarians' grew from sentiment into some- 

 thing very like a moral principle, Greeks butchered or enslaved brother 

 Greeks on an unprecedented scale. Greek lands were laid waste by 

 Greek armies: the devastation of Attica in particular had serious 

 effects on the politics and policy of Athens. Athens at length lost her 

 control of the Euxine corn trade and was starved out. For the moment 

 a decision was reached: the reactionary rural powers, backed by the 

 commercial jealousy of Corinth, had triumphed. No thoughtful man 

 in Athens during the time when the rustic population were crowded 

 into the city, idle and plagued with sickness, could be indifferent to the 

 strain on democratic institutions. This spectacle suggested reflexions 

 that permanently influenced Greek thought on political subjects. The 

 tendency was to accept democracy in some form and degree as in- 

 evitable in most states, and to seek salvation in means of checking the 

 foolish extravagancies of mob-rule. The best of these means was the 

 encouragement of farmer-citizens : but the circumstances of Greek 

 history made practical success on these lines impossible. In practice, 

 oligarchy meant privilege, to which a scattered farming population 

 would submit; democracy meant mob-rule sooner or later, and the 

 dominance of urban interests. The problem which Plato and Aristotle 

 could not solve was already present in the latter part of the Pelopon- 

 nesian war. Aristophanes might ridicule Euripides, but on the country- 

 and-town issue the two were agreed. 



Aeschylus indeed furnishes very little to my purpose directly. 

 The Greek antipathy to the Barbarian is very clearly marked ; but the 

 only points worth noting are that in the Persae 1 he makes Persian 

 speakers refer to their own people as ftdpftapot, and that in a bitter 

 passage of the Eumenides he expresses 2 his loathing of mutilations and 

 tortures, referring no doubt to Persian cruelties. Agriculture can hardly 

 be said to be mentioned at all, for the gift of weather-wisdom 3 is 



1 Pers 186-7, 255, 337, 391, 423, 434, 475, 798, 844. 2 Bum 186-90. 



3 Prom 454-8, 708. 



