VI. MEGARA
Megara loved gold as much as Corinth did, and like her thrived on commerce; it had, however, a great poet, in whose verses the ancient city lives as if its revolutions were one with our own. Standing at the very entrance to the Peloponnesus, with a port on either gulf, it was in a position to bargain with armies and levy tolls upon trade; to which it added a busy textile industry manned with men and women who, in the honest phraseology of the day, were called slaves. The city flourished best in the seventh and sixth centuries, when it disputed the commerce of the isthmus with Corinth; it was then that it sent out, as trading posts, colonies as far-flung as Byzantium on the Bosporus and Megara Hyblaea in Sicily. Wealth mounted, but the clever gathered it so narrowly into their hands that the mass of the people, destitute serfs amid plenty,96 listened readily to men who promised them a better life. About 630 Theagenes, having decided to become dictator, praised the poor and denounced the rich, led a starving mob into the pastures of the wealthy breeders, had himself voted a bodyguard, increased it, and with it overthrew the government.97 For a generation Theagenes ruled Megara, freed the serfs, humbled the mighty, and patronized the arts. Towards 600 the rich deposed him in turn; but a third revolution restored the democracy, which confiscated the property of leading aristocrats, commandeered rich homes, abolished debts, and passed a decree requiring the wealthy to refund the interest that had been paid them by their debtors.98
Theognis lived through these revolutions, and described them in bitter poems that might be the voice of our class war today. He was, he tells us (for he is our sole authority on this subject), a member of an ancient and noble family. He must have grown up in comfortable circumstances, for he was guide, philosopher, and lover to a youth named Cyrnus, who became one of the leaders of the aristocratic party. He gives Cyrnus much advice, and asks merely love in return. Like all lovers he complains of short measure, and his finest extant poem reminds Cyrnus that he will achieve immortality only through Theognis’ poetry:
Lo, I have given thee wings wherewith to fly
Over the boundless ocean and the earth;
Yea, on the lips of many shalt thou lie,
The comrade of their banquet and their mirth.
Youths in their loveliness shall bid thee sound
Upon the silver flute’s melodious breath;
And when thou goest darkling underground
Down to the lamentable house of death,
Oh, yet not then from honor shalt thou cease,
But wander, an imperishable name,
Cyrnus, about the seas and shores of Greece,
Crossing from isle to isle the barren main.
Horses thou shalt not need, but lightly ride,
Sped by the Muses of the violet crown,
And men to come, while earth and sun abide,
Who cherish song shall cherish thy renown.
Yea, I have given thee wings, and in return
Thou givest me the scorn with which I burn.99
He warns Cyrnus that the injustices of the aristocracy may provoke a revolution:
Our state is pregnant, shortly to produce
A rude avenger of prolonged abuse.
The commons hitherto seem sober-minded,
But their superiors are corrupt and blinded.
The rule of noble spirits, brave and high,
Never endangered peace and harmony.
The supercilious, arrogant pretense
Of feeble minds, weakness and insolence;
Justice and truth and law wrested aside
By crafty shifts of avarice and pride;
These are our ruin, Cyrnus!—never dream
(Tranquil and undisturbed as it may seem)
Of future peace or safety to the state;
Bloodshed and strife will follow soon or late.*100
The revolution came; Theognis was among the men exiled by the triumphant democracy, and his property was confiscated. He left his wife and children with friends, and wandered from state to state—Euboea, Thebes, Sparta, Sicily; at first welcomed and fed for his poetry, then lapsing into a bitter and unaccustomed poverty. Out of his resentment he addresses to Zeus the questions which Job would ask of Yahweh:
Blessed, almighty Jove! with deep amaze
I view the world, and marvel at thy ways. . . .
How can you reconcile it to your sense
Of right and wrong, thus loosely to dispense
Your bounties on the wicked and the good?
How can your laws be known or understood?101
He becomes bitter against the leaders of the democracy, and prays to this inscrutable Zeus for the boon of drinking their blood.102 In the first known use of this metaphor he likens the state of Megara to a ship whose pilot has been replaced by disorderly and unskilled mariners.103 He argues that some men are by nature abler than others, and that therefore aristocracy in some form is inevitable; already men had discovered that majorities never rule. He uses hoi agathoi, the good, as synonymous with the aristocrats, and hoi kakoi, the bad, base, worthless, as signifying the common people.104 These native differences, he thinks, are ineradicable; “no amount of teaching will make a bad man good,”105—though he may merely mean here that no training can turn a commoner into an aristocrat. Like all good conservatives he is strong for eugenics: the evils of the world are due not to the greed of the “good” but to their misalliances and their infertility.106
He plots with Cyrnus another counterrevolution; he argues that even if one has taken a vow of loyalty to the new government it is permissible to assassinate a tyrant; and he pledges himself to work with his friends until they have taken full vengeance upon their foes. Nevertheless, after many years of exile and loneliness, he bribes an official to let him return to Megara.107 He is revolted at his own duplicity, and writes lines of despair that hundreds of Greeks would quote:
Not to be born, never to see the sun—
No worldly blessing is a greater one!
And the next best is speedily to die,
And lapt beneath a load of earth to lie.108
In the end we find him back in Megara, old and broken, and promising, for safety’s sake, never again to write of politics. He consoles himself with wine and a loyal wife,109 and does his best to learn at last the lesson that everything natural is forgivable.
Learn, Cyrnus, learn to bear an easy mind;
Accommodate your humor to mankind
And human nature; take it as you find.
A mixture of ingredients good and bad—
Such are we all, the best that can be had.
The best are found defective, and the rest,
For common use, are equal to the best.
Suppose it had been otherwise decreed,
How could the business of the world proceed?110