DISCOVERY 



9 



accompany the words. When we see the magnificent 

 remains of Greek temples, as, for instance, at Athens 

 or Paestvim,^ it is not difficult for the imagination to 

 reconstruct the appearance which they presented when 

 thronged by worshippers at some festival. Such a 

 scene is presented by the words of these hjTnns, which 

 speak of the processions, the choir singing and dancing, 

 their long hair flowing down, the flutes plajdng, and 

 the sweet incense rising into the air, as they celebrated 

 the miraculous deliverance of the Delphic temple (in 

 278 B.C.) from the invading Gauls. The ritual had 

 become a fine art, for we hear of guilds of professional 

 performers at Athens. Strongly contrasted with such 

 stately ceremonial is a primitive piece of magic ritual, 

 appearing in a hymn found in Crete, in which the 

 worshippers " leaped " to secure fertiUty for their 

 flocks and fields, singing a kind of Rogationtide Litany. 

 But there is little permanence for a religion consisting 

 only of miracle and ritual, and less for one of magic, 

 and these types were doomed to pass away. The 

 higher aspirations of the period will come before us 

 presently in a dift'erent form ; meanwhile let us look 

 at some pictures of ordinary life at three t^.'pical centres 

 — Athens, Cos, and Alexandria. 



Comedy is a good minor in which to see contefn- 

 porarj- life. The earlier comedies produced in the days 

 of the Athenian Empire and the Peloponnesian War 

 were largely political pamphlets. But by this time 

 the keen political interest of Athens had passed away. 

 The chief writers of the later or "New" Athenian 

 Comedy, Philemon and Menander, present us merely 

 with pictures of everj^day life, a comedy not of politics, 

 in earnest or burlesque, but wholly of manners ; they 

 hold up the mirror to social and private life, and so far 

 they were among the teachers of their times. 



In their dramatic writings we are introduced to a 

 comfortable middle-class society, in which the father 

 often goes a long voyage on business and comes back 

 to find, like Odysseus, trouble at home. The son has 

 been sowing his wild oats, dicing, drinking, falhng in 

 love, and then thinking of enlisting for Caria or far-off 

 Bactria in some Foreign Legion ; hence arise complica- 

 tions and difficulties, closed by a reconcihation ; in 

 short, the kind of incidents which meet us in the late 

 Victorian novel. 



Menander intended the spectator to profit by what 

 he saw. Here is a characteristic passage from his 

 play The Guardians : 



" Smicrines. By the gods 



Onesimus. Gods ? Do vou suppose that the gods 

 have leisure enough to assign good and evil daj- by 

 dav to each man separately ? 



1 This was originally a Greek colony, set on the shores of 

 the Gulf of Salerno, about fiftj- miles south of Jvaples. 



5. WTiat do you mean ? 



0. I will make it clear to you. Speaking roughly, 

 there are a thousand cities in the world, each with 

 thirty thousand inhabitants. Do the gods ruin or 

 save each indi\adual ? 



S. How could the\- ? A laborious kind of life they 

 would have ! 



0. ' Do they, then, take no heed of us ? ' you will 

 say. W^U, in each one of us they have implanted 

 his character as the commandant of his soul. This 

 inward power is one man's ruin, if he make a bad use 

 of it, but saves another. This is our Daimon, the 

 cause of each man's prosperitv or failure. Make this 

 Power propitious to vou by doing nothing absurd or 

 foolish, so that you may prosper." 



Menander shows a genial good sense, which reminds 

 one of Horace, and, like Horace, he is a mine of pithy 

 saj-ings. 



A storj' of real Athenian life about this time is 

 brought before us in one of the newly-discovered 

 speeches of Hypereides, a clever lawyer and orator of 

 the fourth century B.C., in which a young booby of a 

 coimtry gentleman falls into the clutches of a fraudu- 

 lent vendor and a courtesan. The story is this. The 

 young man wanted to buy the freedom of a slave-lad 

 who belonged to an Egv'ptian engaged in a perfumery 

 business at Athens, but was told that this could not 

 be done, unless the freedom of his father and his brother 

 was also bought. The woman, in whose clutches he 

 had akeady been, persuaded him to buy the three 

 outright for about /120. A draft agreement was pro- 

 duced with suspicious promptness, and the vendor 

 read out the terms, the buyer of course being in a 

 hurry ; soon after it had been sealed, the buyer dis- 

 covered that he had bought not only the slaves, but 

 also their debts, which the woman had represented to 

 be small. But creditors sprang up on all sides, and 

 the total amounted to no less than /i,200. One of 

 the slaves had been the vendor's manager in the per- 

 fumery business, and these debts had of course been 

 incurred by the vendor through his manager ! No 

 wonder that " to play the Egyptian " was an Athenian 

 colloquialism for "to be a rascal " ! 



Pictures of vulgar life come before us in the island 

 of Cos in the south of the .Egean. It was a busy and 

 well-governed place, perhaps with a daily service of 

 vessels between it and the great city of Alexandria ; 

 a hterary centre, and possessing the tradition of a 

 celebrated school of medicine. But it had a seamy 

 side. The new author Herondas gives us scenes from 

 everj^day Ufe, some rather sordid, in poems containing 

 dialogues generally between women. In fact, women 

 form the subject of all of them. They gossip about 

 the " eternal servant question " ; they attend worship 



