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ideas inherited from other peoples or earlier civilisations. It may be now established that Asia Minor and Egypt exercised considerable influence on Greek artistic development, but if such surmises occurred to writers or thinkers in the fifth century they did not win serious consideration. To themselves they stood firmly on their own feet. Their world was what they had made it, and what it would be depended equally on themselves. They were a 'chosen people' sharply conscious of the distinction between themselves and the 'barbarians' whose history contained no lessons for them. There had been to the best of their knowledge no cycles in their history leaving a tradition of rise and fall, of advance and failure, to make them suspicious or nervous about the future. And so when the crisis of the Persian danger had been successfully passed in 480 B.C. and the Greek world had been made secure for themselves by the vigour of their own minds and bodies, the will to live and to act could realise itself under conditions of mental and physical freedom such as have fallen to the lot of no other people.

The attitude of the Greeks towards experience after the Persian wars does not show any break with earlier tradition. The general estimate of life in the sixth century B.C. is known from the poems of Solon and Theognis, and differs but little from the views of the great writers of the Periclean age. Such change as there is lies in the abandonment of any attempt to use theological suppositions to interpret experience. Eschylus really belongs to the earlier epoch, while Pindar, who lived from the sixth far into the fifth century, is in harmony of outlook with Sophocles, the artist, par excellence, of the greatness of Athens. Their outlook on the world might be summarised as follows. God is immortal and omnipotent, but the belief that he is in heaven did not imply for the Greeks that all was therefore well with the world. As Solon says, man must endure the gifts of the gods, meaning that good and evil alike proceed from their hands. Man's life consists in action, but the end of action is veiled in obscurity, nor is it any use expecting a sign or

'stirring of God's finger to denote He wills that right should have supremacy On earth, not wrong.'

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The gods are in heaven and man is on earth, and must and make the best he can of the things of the earth. Courage tit and endurance are necessary in order to bear the sudden changes which Fate, i.e. the course of the world, brings about. Suffering and poverty, richness and hapthe piness, joy and sorrow, befall men according to no calculable or revealed scheme of things. Limits are In established everywhere within which man must steer his ship. 'Seek not the life of an immortal but the achievement of what is within thy power.' 'Short is the time in which the delight of man waxes, and in the same way it falls to the ground shaken by adverse doom.' 'The first of prizes is good fortune (to be comfortable), the second to be well spoken of; if a man find and possess these things he has won the highest crown.' This clear realisation of the facts of life and direct acceptance of it, without the assurance of any other help than what man can find in himself, implies sound vitality and strength of will. It may easily sink into listless indifference or even pessimism when physical vigour begins to fail. Of such weakness there is no trace in the Greeks of the great period. On the other hand, it is hard to overestimate the tonic effect on the Greeks, and on the Athenians in particular, of their triumph over the Persians. The will to live and act, to face the facts of life with level and fearless eyes, must have been immensely strengthened by the repulse of the forces of tyranny, and the value of life itself increased by the sudden disclosure to men sound in mind and body of a wide and fruitful field of action.

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The repulse of Persia did not produce any great religious revival or new conception of the ordering of the world. The gods received thanksgiving offerings for the victory, but the honour remained with men, and that victory was not taken as a sign that henceforth the gods would interpose to make clear or smooth for man the path of life. Heaven and earth did not draw closer together, and, as before, man remained dependent on himself in the struggle for existence. But he had won more confidence in the issue of action, more hope of achieving within his narrow limits security of existence, and of realising more frequently the possible good things that life can offer. External things and actions and

himself constitute his world, all the reality that concerns him, and out of that reality he has to shape his life. His constant effort, therefore, is towards a form of life which he is sufficient to achieve and which may be sufficient for himself as he knows himself to be. hopes and fears are centred in this world and life.

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It is an attractive suggestion, and one that has been revived in the most recent history of Greece, that the Funeral Oration spoken by Pericles in the second book of Thucydides was never delivered even in substance over the dead of any particular year in the war, but is rather a panegyric upon the spirit of Athens, and an exposition of her way of life, written by the historian when he knew that the tale of her days was accomplished, and appropriately inserted in his history before the slow demoralisation set in with the Plague and the long years of war. Twice in the course of that speech occurs the Greek word which is translated literally by 'self-sufficient.' Speaking of Athens Pericles observes: 'We of the present generation have made our city in all respects most self-sufficient to meet the demands of peace or war'; and a little later of the individual citizen: 'I think that each one of us is sufficient in himself to meet the most varied circumstances of life readily and gracefully.'

Self-sufficiency in this double application is the ideal of Athens in the Periclean age. It is the idea of a society founded on the reality of 'here and now,' where the state has achieved some sort of security for the individual, and the individual in his turn pledges himself quite naturally to live and die to uphold the state. There is no division of reality in this position; no contrast of the state with any more desirable or durable kingdom set up in the heavens; no division between the mortal life and body of the individual and his immortal soul. His pleasures and amusements, no less than his life and his daily bread, are most vividly felt to depend upon the self-sufficiency of his city. Separated from the fabric of the city, the individual wanders off into the indefinite extension of the natural world, and feels himself to be without form and void.

This belief that life in Athens could satisfy the

* Trans. Marchant, 'Thucydides,' II, Macmillan.

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individual rested upon one great assumption that, both in the larger sphere of political action and in the lesser mone of private affairs, more must not be expected of life

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than a fairly equal distribution of success and failure, of good and bad things, while very often the bad will preponderate. In the brief passage of consolation towards the end of the Funeral Oration, Pericles says: You know amid what changes and chances you have lived; that they may be called fortunate to whose lot has fallen an honourable grief like your grief, or an honourable death like their death, and in whose life prosperity and adversity have been equally balanced.'* The weakness of man, the burden of his sorrows and labours, is a recurrent theme in Greek literature from the earliest times, rising at moments into the cry that it were far better not to be born at all. Year by year at the performances of the great Dionysia the Athenians were confronted with the tragic aspect of life, and Pericles is only reminding them once more of facts which, perhaps, years of peace and prosperity had made dthem forget. During the fifty years since the defeat of Persia, war and peace, victories and defeats had followed each other in swift succession, and even the great disaster in Egypt had not materially hindered the general activity of Athens. Though her power on the mainland was severely restricted by the peace made by the Greek states in 445 B.C., the size and efficiency of her navy and the resources of the treasury remained as the tokens of past success and the pledge of future hopes. The course of the world has not been too hard for them. A preponderance of good things had fallen to them more than could be legitimately expected by men trained in the austere laws of life which Greek tradition affirmed. That god-given splendour which alone, according to Pindar, makes life delightful fell upon Athens not infrequently during those years, and may well have made that generation accept the experience of 'here and now' as something ultimately real and good, whose value their artists expressed in the great works on the Acropolis.

Even to those who are familiar with the artistic and

* Marchant, op. cit.

historical development of Athens there is always an element of surprise that the actual creation of the Parthenon and its sculptures belongs to the period after 447 B.C., when a generation, which had not fought either at Marathon or Salamis, had grown up. That art gives visible form to the highest conceptions of the generations who had achieved with the devotion of service the greatness of Athens, when at last the moment came for them to rebuild the temples of their gods. Their problem was to honour and delight the patron goddess of their city with a house and statue worthy of her. And in the Parthenon and the sculpture belonging to it they solved the problem, without the use of any unknown quantity, so simply and so completely as to admit of no further improvements or refinements.

For the significance of the fifth century in Athens lies in this, that for a brief period there actually existed a form of social and political life, an organised city-state, in which all aspects of mind and body were developed and satisfied, erected simply upon the basis of the recognised limits and facts of life. There was no deliberate shutting of the eye to other possibilities experienced in the past, no concealed belief that the task on which they were engaged would never be accomplished on earth. The record of the past and their own untarnished vitality urged them forward, not in conscious pursuit of an ideal, but to the exploitation of life within the limits assigned to mortality. No vision of different or spiritual modes of life dimmed or distorted their view of the actual, or reduced the expansive force of their practical energies. Concrete existence 'here and now' was their ultimate reality, and immortality, or rather changelessness of physical life for each god at an appropiate age, was the single but insuperable distinction between gods and men. And in the timelessness of artistic existence this distinction also vanishes, and before the sculptures of the Parthenon the Athenians could have repeated in perfect truth the words of Pindar: 'One race is there of men and gods and from one mother we both draw our breath; yet our strength is altogether different, for men are as nothing, but the brazen heaven abides for ever, a sure habitation; yet we have some likeness to the form or mighty mind of the immortals, although we do not

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