2. Poly crates of Samos

Across the bay from Miletus, near the outlets of the Maeander, stood the modest town of Myus, and the more famous city of Priene. There, in the sixth century, lived Bias, one of the Seven Wise Men. As Hermippus said, the Seven Wise Men were seventeen; for different Greeks made different lists of them, most frequently agreeing upon Thales, Solon, Bias, Pittacus of Mytilene, Periander of Corinth, Chilon of Sparta, and Cleobolus of Lindus in Rhodes. Greece respected wisdom as India respected holiness, as Renaissance Italy respected artistic genius, as young America naturally respects economic enterprise. The heroes of Greece were not saints, or artists, or millionaires, but sages; and her most honored sages were not theorists but men who had made their wisdom function actively in the world. The sayings of these men became proverbial among the Greeks, and were in some cases inscribed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. People liked to quote, for example, the remarks of Bias—that the most unfortunate of men is he who has not learned how to bear misfortune; that men ought to order their lives as if they were fated to live both a long and a short time; and that “wisdom should be cherished as a means of traveling from youth to old age, for it is more lasting than any other possession.”⁴⁰

West of Priene lay Samos, second largest of Ionia’s isles. The capital stood on the southeastern shore; and as one entered the well-protected harbor, passing the famous red ships of the Samian fleet, the city rose as if in tiers on the hill: first the wharves and shops, then the homes, then the fortress-acropolis and the great temple of Hera; and behind these a succession of ranges and peaks rising to a height of five thousand feet. It was a sight to stir the patriotism of every Samian soul.

The zenith of Samos came in the third quarter of the sixth century, under Polycrates. The revenues from the busy port enabled the dictator to end a dangerous period of unemployment by a program, of public works that called forth the admiration of Herodotus. The greatest of these undertakings was a tunnel that carried the city’s water supply 4500 feet through a mountain; we catch some idea of Greek ability in mathematics and engineering when we learn that the two bores, begun at opposite ends, met in the center with an error of eighteen feet in direction and nine in height.*⁴¹

Samos had been a cultured center long before Polycrates. Here, about 590, the fabulous Aesop had been the Phrygian slave of the Greek Iadmon. An unconfirmed tradition tells how Iadmon freed him, how Aesop traveled widely, met Solon, lived at the court of Croesus, embezzled the money that Croesus had commissioned him to distribute at Delphi, and met a violent death at the hands of the outraged Delphians.⁴² His fables, largely taken from Eastern sources, were well known at Athens in the classic age; Socrates, says Plutarch, put them into verse.⁴³ Though their form was Oriental, their philosophy was characteristically Greek. “Sweet are the beauties of Nature, the earth and sea, the stars, and the orbs of sun and moon. But all the rest is fear and pain,”⁴⁴ especially if one embezzles. We can still meet him in the Vatican, where a cup from the Periclean age represents him with half-bald head and Vandyke beard, listening profitably to a merry fox.⁴⁵

The great Pythagoras was born in Samos, but left it in 529 to live at Crotona in Italy. Anacreon came from Teos to sing Polycrates’ charms and to tutor his son. The greatest figure at the court was the artist Theodoras, the Leonardo of Samos, Jack-of-all-trades and master of most. The Greeks ascribed to him, perhaps as a cloture on research, the invention of the level, the square, and the lathe;⁴⁶ he was a skilled engraver of gems, a metalworker, stoneworker, woodworker, sculptor, and architect. He took part in designing the second temple of Artemis at Ephesus, built a vastskias, or pavilion, for Sparta’s public assemblies, helped to introduce clay modeling into Greece, and shared with Rhoecus the honor of bringing from Egypt or Assyria to Samos the hollow casting of bronze.⁴⁷ Before Theodoras the Greeks had made crude bronze statues by riveting plates of the metal to a “bridge” of wood;⁴⁸ now they were prepared to produce such masterpieces in bronze as the Charioteer of Delphi and the Discus Thrower of Myron. Samos was famous also for its pottery; Pliny recommends it to us by telling us that the priests of Cybele would use nothing but Samian potsherds in depriving themselves of their manhood.⁴⁹