II. THE IONIAN CYCLADES
Sailing south from the Piraeus along the Attic coast, and bearing east around Sunium’s templed promontory, the traveler reaches the little isle of Ceos, where, if we may believe the incredible on the authority of Strabo and Plutarch, “there was once a law that appears to have commanded those who were sixty years of age to drink hemlock, in order that the food might be sufficient for the rest,” and “there was no memory of a case of adultery or seduction over a period of seven hundred years.”4
Perhaps that is why her greatest poet exiled himself from Ceos after reaching middle age; he might have found it difficult to attain, at home, the eighty-seven years that Greek tradition gives him. All the Hellenic world knew Simonides at thirty, and when he died, in 469, he was by common consent the most brilliant writer of his time. His fame as poet and singer won him an invitation from Hipparchus, codictator of Athens, at whose court he found it possible to live in amity with another poet, Anacreon. He survived the war with Persia, and was chosen again and again to write epitaphs for memorials of the honored dead. In his old age he lived at the court of Hieron I, dictator of Syracuse; and his repute was then so high that in 475 he made peace in the field between Hieron and Theron, dictator of Acragas, as hostilities were about to begin.5 Plutarch, in his perennially pertinent essay on “Should Old Men Govern?” tells us that Simonides continued to win the prize for lyric poetry and choral song into very old age. When finally he consented to die he was buried at Acragas with the honors of a king.
He was a personality as well as a poet, and the Greeks denounced and loved him for his vices and eccentricities. He had a passion for money, and his muse was dumb in the absence of gold. He was the first to write poetry for pay, on the ground that poets had as much right to eat as anyone else; but the practice was new to Greece, and Aristophanes echoed the resentment of the public when he said that Simonides “would go to sea on a hurdle to earn a groat.”6 He prided himself on having invented a system of mnemonics, which Cicero adopted gratefully;7 its essential principle lay in arranging the things to be remembered into some logical classification and sequence, so that each item would naturally lead to the next. He was a wit, and his sharp repartees passed like a mental currency among the cities of Greece; but in his old age he remarked that he had often repented of speaking, but never of holding his tongue.8
We are surprised to find, in the extant fragments of a poet so widely acclaimed and so liberally rewarded, that indispersible gloom which broods over so much of Greek literature after Homer—in whose days men were too active to be pessimists, and too violent to be bored.
Few and evil are the days of our life; but everlasting will be our sleep beneath the earth. . . . Small is the strength of man, and invincible are his errors; grief treads upon the heels of grief through his short life; and death, whom no man escapes, hangs over him at last; to this come good and bad alike. . . . Nothing human is everlasting. Well said the bard of Chios that the life of man is even as that of a green leaf; yet few who hear this bear it in mind, for hope is strong in the breast of the young. When youth is in flower, and the heart of man is light, he nurses idle thought, hoping he will never grow old or die; nor does he think of sickness in good health. Fools are they who dream thus, nor know how short are the days of our youth and our life.9
No hope of Blessed Isles comforts Simonides, and the divinities of Olympus, like those of Christianity in some modern verse, have become instruments of poetry rather than consolations of the soul. When Hieron challenged him to define the nature and attributes of God he asked for a day’s time to prepare his answer, and the next day begged for two days more, and on each occasion doubled the period that he required for thought. When at last Hieron demanded an explanation, Simonides replied that the longer he pondered the matter the more obscure it became.10
Out of Ceos came not only Simonides, but his nephew and lyric successor Bacchylides, and, in Alexandrian days, the great anatomist Erasistratus. We cannot say so much for Seriphos, or Andros, or Tenos, or Myconos, or Sicinos, or Ios. On Syros lived Pherecydes (ca. 550), who was reputed to have taught Pythagoras, and to have been the first philosopher to write in prose. On Delos, said Greek story, Apollo himself had been born. So sacred was the island as his sanctuary that both death and birth were forbidden within its borders; those about to give birth or to die were hurriedly conveyed from its shores; and all known graves were emptied that the island might be purified.11 There, after the repulse of the Persians, Athens and her Ionian allies would keep the treasure of the Delian Confederacy; there, every fourth year, the Ionians met in pious but convivial assemblage to celebrate the festival of the handsome god. A seventh-century hymn describes the “women with fine girdles,”12 the eager merchants busy at their booths, the crowds lining the road to watch the sacred procession; the tense ritual and solemn sacrifice in the temple; the joyous dances and choral hymns of Delian and Athenian maidens chosen for their comeliness as well as their song; the athletic and musical contests, and the plays in the theater under the open sky. Annually the Athenians sent an embassy to Delos to celebrate Apollo’s birthday; and no criminal might be executed in Athens until this embassy’s return. Hence the long interval, so fortunate for literature and philosophy, between the conviction of Socrates and his execution.
Naxos is the largest, as Delos is almost the smallest, of the Cyclades. It was famous for its wine and its marble, and became rich enough, in the sixth century, to have its own navy and its own school of sculpture. Southeast of Naxos lies Amorgos, home of the unamiable Semonides, whose ungallant satire on women has been carefully preserved by man-written history.* To the west lies Paros, almost composed of marble; its citizens made their homes of it, and Praxiteles found there the translucent stone which he would carve and polish into the warmth and texture of human flesh. On this island, about the end of the eighth century, Archilochus was born, son of a slave woman, but one of the greatest lyric singers of Greece. A soldier’s fortune led him north to Thasos where, in a battle with the natives, he found his heels more valuable than his shield; he took to the one and abandoned the other, and lived to turn many a merry quip about his flight. Back in Paros he fell in love with Neobule, daughter of the rich Lycambes. He describes her as a modest lass with tresses falling over her shoulders, and sighs, as so many centuries have sighed, “only to touch her hand.”14 But Lycambes, admiring the poet’s verses more than his income, put an end to the affair; whereupon Archilochus aimed at him and Neobule and her sister such barbs of satiric verse that all three of them, legend assures us, hanged themselves. Archilochus turned his back sourly upon the “figs and fishes” of Paros, and became again a soldier of fortune. Finally, his heels having failed him, he was killed in battle against the Naxians.
We learn from his poems that he was a man of rough speech to both friends and foes, with a disappointed lover’s penchant for adultery.15 We picture him as an inspired pirate, a melodious buccaneer coarse in prose and polished in verse; taking the iambic meter already popular in folk songs and fashioning it into short and stinging lines of six feet; this was the “iambic trimeter” that would become the classic medium of Greek tragedy. He experimented gaily with dactylic hexameters, trochaic tetrameters, and a dozen other meters,* and gave to Greek poetry the metrical forms that it would keep to the end. Only a few broken lines survive, and we must accept the word of the ancients that he was the most popular of all Greek poets after Homer. Horace loved to imitate his technical diversities; and the great Hellenistic critic, Aristophanes of Byzantium, when asked which of Archilochus’ poems he liked best, voiced in two words the feeling of Greece when he answered, “The longest.”16
A morning’s sail west of Paros is Siphnos, famous for its mines of silver and gold. These were owned by the people through their government. The yield was so rich that the island could set up at Delphi the Siphnian Treasury with its placid caryatides, erect many another monument, and yet distribute a substantial balance among the citizens at the end of every year.17 In 524 a band of freebooters from Samos landed on the island and exacted a tribute of a hundred talents—the equivalent of $600,000 today. The rest of Greece accepted this heroic robbery with the equanimity and fortitude with which men are accustomed to bear the misfortunes of their friends.