THE FALL OF ATHENS.*
WE should like to know whether the young or the old read Mr•. Church's various skilful and interesting classical stories with the greater avidity. They are stories in a very secondary sense ; for though there is a thread of personal narrative running through them on which the classical reminiscences are skilfully hung, that thread is too slight to be of any very deep interest. For instance, in this volume the author makes his hero state at p. 292:—" I left the city [Athens], or rather was carried away from it, after the murder of the generals, and did not set foot in it till the other day," the fact being that he had returned to it again during its siege by Lysander, had shared the famine which reduced Athens to capitulation, and had actually made his offer to the heroine, and been refused by her, before joining Xenophon on the expedition against Persia which ended in the retreat of the Ten Thousand. For a hero to forget entirely the crisis of his own love-affair at a moment when he was eager to renew it, shows no very passionate interest in the emotions of his own heart ; and we rather suspect that the story had once ended before the narrative of Xenophon's retreat from Persia, and had been lengthened subsequently by the intro- • The Fall of Athens : a Story of the Peloponneiciart War. By the Roy. A. J. Church, M.A., formerly Professor of Latin in University College, London. With 16 Illustrations. London: Seeley and Co. duction of that lively and brilliant episode. However this may be, it is clear that the hero's sentimental life was not Mr. Church's first concern, since he could manage to ignore altogether the crisis of the love-affair, and speak as if his hero's return to the city during the siege, and his short dream of love at Marathon, had never taken place.
Indeed, the real interest of the book,—and a very great in- terest it is,—is the graphic revival of the great story of the last days of the supremacy of Athens, and of the spasmodic struggles of the democracy to regain it. How keen the interest of that struggle is, even Shelley, who was not apt to identify himself much with real events of any kind, has recognised in the fine concluding chorus of " Hellas ":— " Although a subtler Sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew, Another Athens shall arise And to remoter time Bequeath, like sunset to the skies, The splendour of its prime ; And leave, if nought so bright may live, All earth can take, or Heaven can give."
That is the kind of feeling concerning Athens to which Mr. Church's story appeals. And we venture to say that this bright rehearsal of the last naval victory of Athens over Sparta, of the waste of it through the quarrels of the naval com- manders and the capricious impulses of the Athenian people, of the fatal disaster of /Egos Potami, and the vain attempt of Alcibiades to play off one Persian satrap against another, of his murder, and the blockade of Athens by Lysander, with all the calamities which preceded and followed its surrender, of the evil dream of the ascendency of the Thirty Tyrants, and the counter-revolution which terminated their rule, of the various tergiversations of Theramenes, of the trial and death of Socrates, and of the retreat of the Ten Thousand, will be read at least as eagerly by the older men to whom it recalls their first experience of the fascinations of history, as it will by the young to whom it gives their earliest taste of one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of the world. Mr. Church himself certainly took a great deal more interest in his historical study, than he did in the rather pallid love-story on which the history is strung.
What is it which makes the short story of the rise and fall of Athens so singularly fascinating to all who read it for the first time ? It is, we think, in great measure the singularly mobile and individual character of the great city, whose ambitions, hopes, fears, generosities, revenges, and even caprices, are so like the emotions and passions of a lively, eager, changeable, and quick-witted boy, who catches in a moment the significance of an event, and is excited either to a sudden impulse of generous sympathy or of angry resentment, according to the mood of the adviser who has the most skill in eliciting that boy's characteristic bias. Mr. Church opens his story very skilfully with an incident which shows the Athenian character at its best, but was very near showing it at its worst. A number of prisoners had been taken in a ship of Thurii, one of the Italian colonies of Athens which had revolted against her, and it had been proposed to the Assembly by the Senate that all the prisoners guilty of this revolt should be put to death. The proposal was not ill-received, but one of the flatterers of the Athenian mob hoped to gain their favour by improving on this severe punishment, and proposing that they should be beaten to death with clubs, as would become a matricide,—for the revolt of a colony was regarded as an attempt on the life of a mother A proposal so savage produced something like a shock over the angry Assembly. Still it did not fail to meet with a seconder ; nor, for some minutes, did anyone rise to oppose. The presiding officer was indeed about to put the question when a citizen rose from one of the back benches, and catching the president's eye, intimated his wish to address the Assembly. Proceeding to the tribunal, from which all speeches were delivered, he began with that diffidence of manner which was one of the truest passports to the favour of an Athenian audience. As a matter of fact, the man was a practised speaker, but he feigned a hesitation and timidity which did not belong to him. After some preliminary observations, intended to express the apprehension with which he ventured to offer his opinion, he went on I do not venture to interpose for a moment, men of Athens, between your just anger and the guilty men who deserve to feel its weight. Yet, I would say to you, do not condemn even these men unheard. There may be some who may be able to advance, not a justifica- tion indeed, but an excuse ; you may find at least differences of guilt ; you may find means for exercising the compassion for which, even when it has been most deeply injured, the city of Athens is famous. I move that the prisoners be brought before the Assembly.' The officers in charge of the men had contem- plated the possibility of this proposal being made, and had their prisoners at hand ; they filed in in a long procession, guarded on each side by archers. When half of them had taken their places in the prisoners' dock, if it may be so called, there was a pause of two or three minutes. The next prisoner entered alone, accom- panied, however, by two archers—a precaution which seemed te be a testimony at once to his value and to his strength. As he stood erect in the full sight of the Assembly, an irrepressible murmur of delighted surprise ran along the benches. The pas- sionate admiration for manly beauty which existed in the heart of every Greek would have been sufficient of itself to account for the sensation. A more magnificent form had never been seen in Athens. Nearly 7 ft. in height, he was so marvellously well proportioned that his stature did not strike the spectator as unusual till some opportunity of contrasting it with some familiar object near him occurred. His noble features, closely resembling the face of the Phidian Zeus, and set off by a fair complexion and the light chestnut hair which fell in long curls over his shoulders, added to the favourable impression. But this favour rose into enthusiasm when it became known who this magnificent stranger really was. Darlene of Rhodes," Dorieus of Rhodes,' ran from mouth to mouth. Not a few had seen him, either in the early days at Thurii, when the colony was still faithful to Athens, or at one or other of the Greek Games. All knew his name, for he was beyond all comparison the most famous athlete of his time. Three times had he been victorious in the severest of the Olympian contests,—the pancratium (a combination of wrestling and box- One such victory entitled a man to the honour of a statue in his native city ; but to win it so often was an almost un- paralleled distinction. It was only in the very prime of his youth and strength that a man was equal to the tremendous exertion ; that this youth and strength should remain so long at their cul- minating point was almost a miracle.* Nor had Olympia been the only scene of his victories. He had won seven prizes at the Nemean and eight at the Isthmian Games. All his life long he had been the consistent enemy of Athens; he had even inflicted upon her more than one humiliating defeat. There was actually recorded against him in the archives of the city a sentence of death. But all was forgotten under the magnetism of so splendid a personality. The whole assembly rose to their feet with a shout of 'Hail, Dorieus, son of Hercules, thrice victor at Olympia I' Eumedes hastened to withdraw his motion, which be now heartily repented of having made, and a vote was passed by acclamation that Dorieus, eon of Diagoras, should be the guest of the Athenian people so long as he should choose to favour them with his company, and, when he might wish to depart, should be free to go without the payment of ransom, one of the two State ships being put at his disposal to convey him to any place that he might select. The favour shown to the great athlete was extended in a fit of generosity to his companions, so far, at least, that their lives wore spared and their ransom set at a moderate sum."
That is just the kind of incident to enlist a boy's sympathy for the people of whom it was characteristic; and the chequered history of Athens is full of surprises of this kind, in which now the better and now the worse emotions of a quick-witted people got the upper hand. No doubt such a story has in it all the exciting interest and vivacity of a vivid biography rather than of a reflex of mixed political motives of a more or less complex and intricate kind. And that is just what Mr. Church's narrative makes of the tragedy of the Athenian State. You see the passion, the hope, the fear, the panic, the despair, less of a State, then of an individual heart, yet of an individual heart magnified by a multiplier which indefinitely heightens its scale and the intensity of its fears and hopes. The particular incident in the passage just quoted, which, as Mr. Church admits, hardly fits in chronologically with the great historical collapse which followed, is however very happily chosen to engage the sympathies of the reader for the too often selfish and cruel Assembly that was so soon to meet the crisis of its fate. The whole story of that crisis is fall of interest, and is very well and brightly told ; nor do we greatly resent even the forgetfulness of the hero, °allies, who manages to ignore altogether the visit to Athens, during the course of which he had found the lady too proud to accept an offer from one who was, she thought, her superior in race, and therefore likely to be dragged down by his union with her. Callias appears, like Gibbon, to have sighed as a lover, and obeyed as a son (of Athens), but fortunately in the end his exile from Athens furnishes Hermione with an excuse for accepting him. The love-story is not a very exciting one, but the rehearsal of the great naval and political catastrophe of the most brilliant of Greek cities is full of a kind of interest which is perfectly unique, and which no one could enter into with more vivacity and sympathy than Mr. Church.
* "The Olympia Games were celebrated every fourth year ; hence there must have been eight years between the first and the third of Dorieus's victories. If he was live-and-twenty on the first occasion, he must have been thirty-three on the third, and thirty.threo was almost old ago for a boxer."
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