READING HALLTHE DOORSOF WISDOM |
ANTIGONUS GONATAS |
CHAPTER VIII.
ANTIGONUS AND HIS CIRCLE
The virtual inclusion of Athens in Antigonus’ sphere
effectually prevented-.him from attempting to set up any rival university in
Macedonia, even had he desired to do so. Both
politically and geographically, Athens was too close to Pella to permit of the
formation there of any independent centre of intellectual activity on a great
scale; no second Museum was possible, even had Antigonus had the money to endow
one. In fact, there was never anything in Macedonia to compare even with such
secondary seats of learning as Antioch or Pergamon. Athens was, and had to
remain, the centre of gravity of the world of thought, and of letters. She was still,
as she had been for a century, the supreme intellectual centre, the home of all
abstract thought; within her walls the great philosophic schools, not unlike
colleges, had their permanent head-quarters; and even the little schools that
still subsisted elsewhere, as at Megara or Eretria, were in the course of the
generation then living to cease to have separate existence and merge in the
Academy of Arkesilaos. Abstract thought was Athens’
strength; perhaps, too, her weakness. For to modern eyes it may look as if the
main stream of the world’s progress had already shifted to Alexandria, where
the munificent endowments of the Ptolemies were, consciously or unconsciously,
all concentrating upon the great rival, science. The glory of Alexandria was to
be shown forth in her mathematicians and astronomers, her geographers and
physicians, her scholars and encyclopaedists; but, whatever their ultimate
deserts, the immediate future did not lie with them. The immediate future lay
with the philosophers, the men whose pupils were to train the Roman and whose
teachings were to influence St. Paul; and at present Athens was their home. But
though she owed her chief importance to the philosophic schools, she was more
than a home for philosophers. She still had almost a monopoly, as against
Alexandria, of both history and comedy; if she shared tragedy with her, tragedy
had become of relatively small importance. Whatever may be thought of the New
Comedy, the enormous number of writers whom it attracted, their ability, and
their huge output, show that it was at any rate alive and a force in the then
world; and though Menander was dead, the other most prolific leaders in this
branch of art were all writing for the Athenian stage. Even more notably could
Athens hold her own in history. Timaios was living
there, writing the large book to which, with all its faults, we owe so much of
our knowledge of the Western Greeks. Timaios was a
Sicilian; but Philochoros the soothsayer was an Athenian; and had some parts of
his numerous writings survived, we should know a very great deal more about the
festivals and mysteries, the antiquities and customs, of Athens than has been
vouchsafed to us. Possibly the rhetorical Athenian history of Demochares is no
great loss; for Demochares’ profession was not history but words. But there was
in Athens at this time, perhaps already storing up material, a young man from
Euboea, who was to do a work well worth the doing, and invaluable to posterity
even in the second-hand shape in which some parts of it remain: Antigonus of Karystos, who afterwards wrote the lives of the
philosophers.
It was obvious, however, that Antigonus, the pupil of
Menedemos and Zeno, was not likely to be satisfied with a file of which the
intellectual side was represented only by details of administration; and, as
there was no possibility of making Pella a second Museum or a second Athens, he
set to work, immediately upon his accession, to gather round him a personal
circle of notable men; the bond that should hold them together was to be their
common friendship with himself. It was, in fact, to be something like
Menedemos’ circle at Eretria on a much larger scale; and of the men who came to
Pella, it was precisely those whom the king had known at Eretria who received
the earliest invitations.
His marriage with Phila offered an occasion and an
opportunity for collecting his literary friends about him; and though the war
with Pyrrhus dispersed the circle at Pella, it formed again after Pyrrhus’
death. Though two of the most prominent among Antigonus’ friends should really
be noticed later—for Hieronymus may not have written much by 276, and Bion had very
possibly not yet found his way to Pella at all—it may be convenient to give
some slight account here of Antigonus’ circle as a whole, and without
distinguishing the earlier and the later epoch, for the sake of the clearer
view thus obtained.
The formation of something like a literary circle was
not a new thing to a Macedonian king. Not to mention lesser names, Archelaus
had entertained Euripides and Agathon, and Philip had secured Aristotle himself
to be his son’s tutor. Even Kassandros knew Homer by heart, and patronized Euhemeros. But hardly one of the men who from time.to time
adorned the courts of the earlier kings realty belonged there; Euripides was
none the less an Athenian of Athens because he wrote the Bacchae at Pella. In
Aristotle alone of the great names of Hellas could Macedonia claim her share,
and that not only through his birthplace; Aristotle would not be quite
Aristotle had he not taught Alexander.
The men who drew together to Antigonus were on a
different footing. One or two, it is true, were visitors from Athens; Bion was
cosmopolitan. But when we think of Aratos or Persaios,
and still more of Hieronymus, we think of them as essential parts of the
Macedonia of Antigonus; we do not connect them with any other place. Antigonus
went very near to shaping a new thing for Macedonia, a thing that might have
been of the first importance could it have lasted. The circle was obviously
formed and held together by the king’s own personality; it included
representatives only of those aspects of the intellectual life in which he
himself was interested, poetry, philosophy, history. No man of science came to
Macedonia; science was the handmaid of the Ptolemies, and her sole
representative at Pella was Antigonus’ body physician, Aristogenes of Knidos or
Thasos, who wrote a medical compendium for the king’s use. Even when a
considerable physicist, Straton, was active in
Athens, it does not appear that Antigonus cultivated him. Antigonus stood with
the Stoics; and, to a Stoic, science had no meaning at all.
This was to be exemplified clearly in the person of
the most prominent of the poets at Pella. Antigonus had known Aratos of Soloi before; and, as already related, he came to Pella for
the king's marriage with Phila, and wrote the wedding hymn in praise of Pan.
Its success was evidently marked, and Aratsos became,
and remained, Antigonus’ court poet; for though he quitted Pella, like so many
others, in the troubles of 273, and went to Antiochus, he returned later to
Macedonia and lived there till his death. As court poet he wrote the things
that were expected of him: another hymn called the Treaty-bearers, of which the
occasion is unknown; the usual Praise of Antigonus; a series of short poems
addressed to Phila. All these are lost. But it was not by these that Aratos was
to be known to posterity.
Of the little that is recorded of the poet’s earlier
life, the one point that stands out is his Stoic sympathies.
He may himself, like so many Stoics, have been half an Oriental; for according
to one version his father’s name was Mnaseas (Manasses). His earliest teacher had been Menekrates, the grammarian of Ephesus, who wrote a poem on
agriculture. He had then passed some time in Athens, where he had frequented
the Porch; one account makes him a pupil of Zeno himself, another (not so
trustworthy), of Zeno’s pupil need not be disbelieved, it was Antigonus who put
into his hands the work of Eudoxos, and requested him
to versify that century-old star-catalogue. The
result was the much-lauded Phainomeha. Its
literary history would fill a volume. Critics, who rightly saw in it a wider
outlook than could be found in the Works and Days of Hesiod, were driven
to compare Aratus to Homer; his friend Callimachus praised his learning; a
later epigrammatist indulged in the hyperbole that Zeus had indeed made the
stars glorious, but Aratus had given them an added glory. These praises compare
strangely with the quiet, plain, and (to tell the truth) excessively dry
versification of the poem, most of which has absolutely nothing in common with
the five ringing lines in which Homer has caught something of the magic of the
stars. That Aratus adopted this style on purpose is clear; for there was a
spark of the real fire in him somewhere, and he could write poetry when he
chose. One sees this in occasional passages, such as the lines which describe
the star-set heavens at the time of the new moon,14 or the image of the paths
of the Hours as they race across the sky—a phrase, from its associations, finer
perhaps to ourselves than to a Greek; most of all in the swing of the noble
prelude. But if Aratus wrote plainly and soberly on purpose, what does all the
praise mean? It was not lavished upon him merely because he provided dry bread
for readers surfeited with literary sugar-plums.
Aratus in fact wrote as a Stoic, and wrote with a
purpose. The Phainomena was the first halting attempt
that the world had seen at a work written
with patient
plan
To justify the ways of God to man.
His real aim was to bring out the Stoic doctrine of
providence. We may perhaps compare the Phainomena for a moment with the far greater work that was to be written by one whose
sympathies were with the rival school of Epicurus; the poem of Lucretius ‘On
the nature of things’. Each of the two poets was an absolute stranger to the
scientific spirit, and cared only for science in its bearing on men. Lucretius
flung a mighty passion into his description of the evolution of the world, not
because he cared for the evolution of the world in itself, but because it gave
him a splendid lever with which to overthrow the popular gods; to free mankind from
fear of the gods was the real aim of his desire. Aratus plodded through his
star-catalogue, not because he cared for astronomy in itself, but because the
obvious utility of the stars to sailor and husbandman afforded material to
illustrate his text that Zeus takes forethought for men, his children: that the
gods care. That is why St. Paul, when speaking in a later Athens of the God who
was Lord of the heavens, and who had determined appointed seasons for men, if
haply they might feel after Him, naturally made appeal to the Stoics among his
audience by quoting Aratus.
With Aratus came two lesser poets. Alexander the
Aetolian was one of the so called Pleiades, the seven writers of tragedy of the
time, and had returned to Athens after arranging the tragic poets in the
Alexandrian library. As a poet he tried every form, tragedy, epigram, elegiacs,
narrative epics, even kinaidologiai, these last being
mimes to be accompanied by music and dancing, a species of composition of which
the wit largely consisted in calling a spade a spade, and which in consequence
furnished an effective if dangerous vehicle for attacking those in high places.
Rather better known is Antagoras of Rhodes, epic poet
and epicure ‘a terrible fellow to coin strange words.’ He only stayed two years
at Pella, for all his, affinities were with Athens and the Academy. His
masterpiece, the Thebais, may not have surpassed
other third-century attempts of the sort; and his seven famous lines on the
birth of Love disclose no particular claim to immortality. But there remains
rather an attractive little picture of him on campaign, toasting a bit of
conger eel over the camp fire and bandying chaff with Antigonus; and he left at
least one poem that rings true, the beautiful epitaph written for the tomb that
contained the ashes of both his friends of the Academy, Polemon and Krates, telling that they were lovely and
pleasant in their lives and in death were not divided.
But poetry, after all, was of small account compared
with the question whether Zeno could be induced to come to Pella. Antigonus
kept urging him to come; but the old philosopher had struck root in Athens too
deep to move, and he desired moreover to maintain the neutral attitude in
politics which he had always practised. The correspondence that passed on this occasion
between the king and his master, had it survived, would have been invaluable
for the light thrown on two notable characters; but it is hardly necessary to
repeat that the letters we have, replete with excellent sentiments, are
forgeries of a later time; that of Antigonus in particular is as unlike the
king’s brusque utterance as can well be imagined. Antigonus of course invited
Zeno as the man whom of all men he most deeply honoured; he may have wished for
him as his spiritual director, but the idea that he wanted his assistance in
reorganizing Macedonia need only be mentioned to be set aside. Of all
unpractical idealists Zeno was the very worst; and Antigonus, a man of middle
age, trained in two hard schools, that of Antipatros and that of adversity,
must have already forgotten more about the art of governing than Zeno had ever
learnt. Certainly in his youth, when under Cynic influence, Zeno had written a
famous treatise ‘on the State’; but it was not a treatise that could be of any
use to a ruler in a real earthly kingdom. His State was the ideal State of the
Cynics, of which all men were citizens, in which there were neither national
boundaries nor temples of the gods, in which all ordinary social and economic
relationships were dissolved, and property and wives alike held in common, and
which was kept together merely by the willing consent of its citizens; the
State of a philosophic Anarchist. The book survived merely as a curiosity, to
be a terrible thorn in the side of the later Stoics; they could only reply to
their opponents, who were never tired of quoting it at them, that even Zeno had
not always been Zeno.
As Zeno would not come, Antigonus asked him to send one
of his pupils instead, so that the Porch might, be directly represented at
Pella. There must have been a question who should go. Honest drudging Kleanthes, slowest of the slow, with his oddly incongruous
gift of writing great religious poetry, was out of the question; he, the only
man who could ‘shoulder Zeno’s burden’, was already marked out as his successor
in Athens. Dionysius of Herakleia, who had once been one of Menedemos’ circle,
was afflicted with hopeless ophthalmia, and was perhaps already meditating that
transference of his allegiance to the Cyrenaic doctrine of pleasure which
earned him the name of Turn-coat. Herillos of
Carthage was suspect, and more than suspect, of heresy. Ariston of Chios,
called the Siren, was persuasive of speech, and witty of pen; even today he may
please a stray reader here and there by his forcible reminder of the fact that
flying will not make men wiser or better. But he, too, was more or less of a
heretic; he had strong leanings toward undiluted Cynicism, and was moreover
rooted in Athens. The man whom Zeno finally chose was Persaios of Kition, his fellow-countryman and
favourite—scandal-whispered, his liberated slave. He was accompanied by one Philonides of Thebes, a mere name.
Zeno’s choice of a philosophic director for the king,
turned out a bad one; Persaios was not man enough for
the post. In Zeno’s company he may have been well enough; with that strong hand
removed, he degenerated from the philosopher into the courtier, and learnt
where he should have taught. He could repeat the Stoic catchwords, but the
Stoic spirit was not in him. He found favour with Antigonus, who made him tutor
of his son Halkyoneus; but the favour was extended as
a matter of course to Zeno’s friend, and Persaios sought to maintain it by being all things to all men, a dangerous doctrine in
weak hands. He wrote indeed among other things the inevitable treatise ‘On
Kingship’. But the work of his of which we hear most is one entitled Dialogues
of the Banquets; and these banquets had nothing in common with the famous
Symposia of Plato or Menedemos; it would be as true to the Greek, and truer,
apparently, to the facts, to write it Dialogues of the Boon Companions.
Because a weak side of Antigonus, as of most of the great Macedonians, was a
fondness for the feast and the wine-flask, Persaios must needs study and describe all the-details of debauchery; and if gossip was
to be believed, the hero of a particularly discreditable episode related in the
book was none other than the philosopher himself in his cups. It was not in
this way that Zeno and Menedemos had won their influence over the king. Persaios indeed was the one man whom Menedemos heartily
hated; he waged uncompromising war against him, and said once, over his wine,
that Persaios might be a sort of philosopher, but as
a man he was the worst of all that were or ever would be. This whole-hearted
verdict may be liberally discounted, for Persaios had
dissuaded Antigonus from restoring to Eretria its freedom, and Menedemos took
it bitterly to heart; but no doubt, too, this incident showed him what sort of
effect Persaios was likely to have upon the king.
Perhaps the best that can be said for Persaios is
that he had plenty of wit, was doubtless good company, and was faithful to Antigonus
as he understood it.
The most important figure, however, at Pella, from the
point of view of philosophy was not Persaios, but
that strange creature Bion of Borysthenes. The last word on Bion is, as yet,
far from having been written; for few men in the third century are harder to
judge, and few perhaps had more influence.
Bion is the lineal ancestor of that long line of
wandering teachers who were to attain to such importance in the first two
centuries of the Roman empire, and who were to lead a pagan revival side by
side with the growing advance of Christianity. In the third century the wandering
teacher was a new thing. He called himself, and others called him, a
philosopher; but his mission was, not to seek out wisdom, but to take existing
wisdom and popularize it. Many, who had neither the time nor the money to
attend a course of lectures at Athens, nevertheless desired to learn something
of the new knowledge. The ordinary man, then as now, must have longed for
something to help him in the troubles of life and console him in its sorrows,
and must have felt that his subscription to the local temple did not always
produce an adequate return in spiritual benefit. Many again in many places were
eager merely to hear some new thing; and, unless human nature has altered
considerably, there would be a small minority almost anywhere ready to adopt
the new thing as soon as they had heard it. All these men the wandering
teachers professed to serve, and doubtless, according to their lights, did
serve. But we must beware of making too much of them at this time, or of reading
into the third century before Christ facts and tendencies which belong to the
first two centuries after. Those of them whose names are known at this period
generally gave up wandering about and settled down in Athens or elsewhere; it
looks as if the demand for their services was not very insistent. But a new
movement had been started, a movement fraught with large consequences, even if
we can hardly listen to the paradox that the wandering teacher of philosophy
was the forerunner of the Christian preacher.
Much of the traditional life of Bion, as given by
Diogenes, is hardly worth setting down here. It is encumbered with stories now
universally recognized as malicious inventions; their repetition serves no good
purpose. He seems to have used his wit freely on other teachers, all and
sundry; naturally they or their adherents retaliated. That he was of very humble
Birth, and that as a boy he had once been a slave, is possible enough. But he
had studied philosophy at Athens under the best masters, Xenokrates and Krates at the Academy, Theophrastus at the
Lyceum, and the Cyrenaic Theodoros; for himself he took up a Cynic view,
tempered by that of the Cyrenaics. On coming to Pella
he found himself in conflict with Persaios and the
Stoic interest; tradition has it that the courtly Persaios refused to associate with the smuggler’s son, and appealed to Antigonus. It
seems true enough that, on some occasion, Bion did tell the king that if his
origin was in fact lowly, he would only deserve all the more honour for having
made himself what he was, a sentiment that coincided with Antigonus’ own
opinion. How long Bion stayed at Pella is not known. He taught in different
places, including Rhodes, and finally settled down at Athens, and is said to
have died at Chalcis in great want and misery, relieved at the end by Antigonus,
who heard of his plight and sent two slaves to nurse him.
It is probable that Bion’s relations with Antigonus
were very much closer than written tradition gives us any idea of. Among the
fragmentary notices that remain relative to the two men or to their sayings,
the parallels in language are too frequent and curious to be accidental; but
whether they point to the influence of the king upon Bion or Bion upon the king,
or whether they merely reflect certain language current in court circles, or
whether again the explanation is that the numerous notices of Antigonus and his
sayings in Plutarch and elsewhere derive ultimately from some writing of Bion’s
and are coloured by his style, we are bound in any case to believe in a close
association of the king and the wandering philosopher. In one passage Bion
praises some person unnamed as a good ruler, a generous giver, and one who used
large resources well; it is not likely that anyone but Antigonus can be the
ruler referred to.
The obvious view of Bion—too obvious perhaps—is written
at large in tetradifon. A professed free-thinker, like Theodoros, he had gone,
about the world-giving his lectures, taking this or that moral point and
treating it in common language, arguing it with an imaginary opponent, decking
it out with a, good story or a quotation from some poet, trying every means
that his nimble wit could suggest of winning the assent or the applause of
half-educated audiences and getting them to ‘mount the steed of learning’. But
in attempting to popularize he merely vulgarized; philosophy was dragged forth
from the quiet lecture-room into the crowded market-place, and the goddess of
the few became the mistress of the many.
That this is partly true is certain; as certain as it
is that it is only part of the truth. The first statement can be illustrated
from various sources which show things not particularly to Bion’s credit.
Plutarch quotes one saying of which the downright vulgarity struck him no less
forcibly than it does ourselves; a modern writer cites his wanton attack on the
revered Archytas as more damaging to him than all the stories concocted by his
opponents. In fact he, could not refrain from making cutting remarks about
everyone he came across; about Aratus the poet no less than Persaios,
possibly even about Pyrrhus and Antigonus himself. It was natural, in view of
his reception by Persaios, for him to revenge himself
by putting about the story that Persaios had been as
much of a slave as he had; but if the sneer at Antigonus that has come down to
us be really from Bion (it is, fortunately, though probable, by no means
certain), we should have to condemn severely one whose tongue could not spare
even his best friends. And above all, his prostitution of philosophy rests on
the weighty testimony of no less a person than Eratosthenes.
But it is Eratosthenes himself who lays stress on the
fact that this is but half the truth. Strip off the shreds and tatters, he says,
and you will find the real Bion, like Odysseus under the beggar’s rags. And
when we turn to the one poor connected piece that remains—and that at
second-hand—from all Bion’s writings, we do find something quite unexpected.
Here is no man in motley, squandering his wit on playing to the gallery.
Instead, we see one who, in all soberness, is preaching to those who will
listen a very simple and manly form of morality; a morality that we may call
elementary if we please, but that might well help some while it could harm
none. Not to seek wealth or luxury; to remember that if is as honourable to be
faithful in little as in much, and that poverty never hindered the quest for
wisdom; to do your duty in the station of life in which you find yourself, and
to be content; to look for your happiness in yourself and in nothing outside
yourself. If the wind blow fair, no harm in spreading your sails to it; but
should it change, then wrap yourself in your virtue and endure what fortune may
send, and see to it that, if fortune must strike you down, she strike down a
man and not a worm. Something of this sort was Bion’s message to his hearers:
with what power delivered we may judge, not merely from the repute he left, but
from such circumstances as these, that he persuaded the sailors of Rhodes to
put on the student’s cloak and follow him to his lecture-room, and that his
words, two generations later, were still proverbs in Pella. Something of his
power, no doubt, was due to form; he saw that the old-fashioned set speech had had
its day, and that men wanted something livelier and more realistic. Ready to
his hand lay the Diatribe; and in the imaginary dialogue with an audience which
the Cynics had invented he found the tool he wanted, and perfected it. He
talked, not at, but as it were with his hearers; and success followed the newer
and homelier way. His words, it is true, were not new. He was apt, as Menedemos
said of him, to “slay the slain” . He was not one from whom new thoughts were
to be expected, but rather one who cast existing thoughts into a form that
brought them home to men arid made them remembered. His message itself was but
the ultimate residue of the noble if deformed teaching of the Cynics, though
shot with something of a warmer humanity. Yet, now and again, even our mangled
tradition recalls some sentence which reveals Bion’s own personality, the sort
of flash in which Eratosthenes, who valued him highly, doubtless thought to see
the genuine Odysseus. Such, for instance, is the statement that slaves if
virtuous are truly free, while their masters if vicious are really slaves, a
sentiment that, if Bion really uttered it, is worthy of Epictetus.61 Such
is his protest against the belief that heaven would visit the sins of the
fathers upon the children. But most striking of all are his few words about the
dying frog; the boys stone it in sport, but the frog dies in simple earnest.
The very limpidity of the Greek phrasing serves but to reveal more clearly what
lies beneath the surface, the germs of some such passion of pity as has been
poured out on the same theme by a great modern poet. The man who, in the third
century before Christ, could turn aside to pity a tortured reptile was, as the
world went, a very strange and notable phenomenon.
Where Bion popularized, his younger contemporary Timon,
denied. Timon of Phlious, afterwards called the Sillographer, was a one-eyed man with a taste for
gardening, who began life as a dancer on the stage, but later on attached
himself to Pyrrhon of Elis, the Sceptic, and eagerly
adopted his teaching: nothing (so it ran) can be known; therefore never be
definite about anything, but always suspend your judgement; if you do this, you
will escape worry, for imperturbability will follow as automatically as the
shadow follows the body; above all, remember that nothing is good or bad, just
or unjust, and nothing matters, not even whether you live or die. It does not
seem a hopeful doctrine to sow broadcast over the world. Timon, however, who
was an extremely able man, made it pay; his studied indifference to pupils
attracted them; and though it should have been immaterial to him whether he
lived or died, he did in fact on his wanderings make a sufficient amount of
money to enable him to live very comfortably in Athens to a good old age; there
he illustrated the ‘imperturbability’ which his philosophy had taught him by
professing himself unable to work if the maid-servants made a noise in the
house.
He knew both Ptolemy and Antigonus, and at one period
of his life spent some time at Pella, where he used to help Alexander the
Aetolian with the plots of his tragedies. Timon indeed has perhaps a better
right to be classed among the poets than among the philosophers; for he wrote
poetry of every sort, both for himself and for others, and his reputation
really rests on his Silloi. This most
tantalizing poem, of which just enough remains to whet the reader’s curiosity,
was an elaborate skit on the philosophers, living and dead, the two that
received the worst handling being Zeno and Arkesilaos.
Zeno, taking his cue from the Cynics, had preached against Illusion; and
Timon retorted upon Zeno with interest. In his hands Illusion tends to become a
catchword, a phrase in which you sum up all that you dislike in those with whom
you disagree. His master Pyrrhon alone escapes
scot-free. The poem falls into three books: the first opens with the Battle of
the Philosophers, and passes on to the Fishing of the Philosophers, where Zeno,
in the person of a greedy old Phoenician woman, sitting in a dark mist of the
inevitable Illusion, angles in vain (for her weel is
small and her stupidity great) for the shoal of swimming dialecticians,
Menedemos, Diodorus, and Arkesilaos, led by the great
Plato-fish himself. In Book II Timon descends to the Shades under the guidance
of Xenophanes, the man of partial illumination (as Dante under the guidance of
Vergil), and interviews the dead philosophers; Book III deals with those yet
living. The Silloi must, however, belong to a
much later stage of Timon’s life than his sojourn in Pella.
But the Muse who found the best entertainment in
Macedonia was Klio. History in the fourth century had
paid the became obscured by the symbol; and if Ephoros was, in his way—let us
grant this much to Polybius’ appreciation—a considerable writer, he left behind
him a bitter legacy, a school that cared to set down, not what had actually
happened, but what sounded well. History, in the hands of the literary men,
threatened to strangle herself in her own presentation and to degenerate into
mere rhetoric.
It was comparatively easy, and it gave pleasure; and
many literary men of the fourth and third centuries carried on the process with
eagerness. Many of these historians had great merits ; they were often learned,
they were often industrious, they often had definite theories of how history
should be written; but whether we turn to the purely Isokratean writers like Ephoros and Theopompos, or to the men of the new semi-poetical or
Asianic style like Timaios, or to the school which,
represented by Douris of Samos, set out to vivify
history by dramatizing it, we find, or think we find (for we are dealing with
writers who are largely known to us only at second-hand), one common failing
running through all their work; the ultimate aim is not truth, but effect. And
if this was the case with the great writers, it was natural enough that their
followers should reproduce their faults without their virtues; the result was
to be seen in men like the much-read Kleitarchos,
whose work was no better than a second-rate historical novel.
Polybius, in a well-known passage, laid it down that
history would be well written when men of action were historians, or historians
men of action. He desired, he said, that men of action should write history as
of necessity, and not by the way. But in fact the men of action had already
saved history. One of the many by-results of Alexander’s career was that a new
sort of historical writing appeared in the world, and the credit of it is due
to Macedonia, and not to Greece; for the Greeks who helped the Macedonians to
start it either belonged to Macedonian cities or were in Macedonian service.
What chiefly distinguishes it from the rhetorical schools is that it was,
almost exclusively, written by men who had first lived through or played a part
in the thing they wrote, and who afterwards wrote down the thing they knew.
Probably their work was not popular, or much read; the literary men, the
rhetoricians, held the field. But it was an honest attempt toward the truth.
The place of honour is due to the three men of
Macedonia who, with the aid of the official documents, put down the true facts
of Alexander’s expedition as they had themselves seen it; Ptolemy son of Lagos,
afterwards king of Egypt, from the military side; Aristoboulos of Kassandreia from the point of view of the geographer and ethnologist; Nearchos, a Cretan by birth but settled in Amphipolis, who
told the story of the fleet which he had himself commanded. Alexander’s career
was quickly enough obscured by the usual clouds of rhetoric and
miracle-mongering; and but for these three men, and the practical Roman soldier
from Bithynia who had the good sense to use their writings, we should know
little enough of Alexander.
Antigonus himself, on each side, came of a family that
had numbered historians amongst its members. Marsyas of Pella, half-brother or
nephew of the elder Antigonus, had commanded Demetrios’ centre at Salamis and
written a history of Macedonia. Antipatros the Regent had written a history of
the Illyrian wars of the Macedonian king Perdiccas, and had also published two
volumes of his own correspondence, which must have formed a valuable quarry for
Hieronymus. Above all, Krateros, Antigonus’
half-brother, produced' a work both of great value in itself and astoundingly
modern in conception; he collected from the Athenian archives, and published,
the Athenian decrees from the earliest times to his own day, illustrating them
with the necessary commentary. It formed, in fact, a history of Athens based on
epigraphic material. Naturally his judgement was not always correct; he is said
to have occasionally inserted spurious matter, such as the draft of a treaty
which had never been completed. But it was regarded as noteworthy if he ever
gave a fact without citing either a decree of the Assembly or a judgement of
the Court in support of it; and the loss of such a work may be heartily
deplored. Whether the actual priority in the study of inscriptions belongs to
him or to Philochoros cannot be decided; both the Macedonian prince and the
Athenian antiquary were precursors of that most learned epigraphist of the next
century, Polemon of Ilion.
It was only fitting, then, that at Antigonus’ court
the outstanding literary figure should be a historian, and though Hieronymus,
in all probability, only wrote at the end of his active career, that career may
be briefly referred to here; for it not only illustrates the possibilities,
alike of adventure and of power, which lay open to the Greek in the new world,
but it also brings before us the best type of the new school of historian who
had himself played his part in that world.
Hieronymus of Cardia was a Greek of the Thracian
Chersonese, a fellow-countryman of Eumenes, whose fortunes he followed. He
shared in the siege of Nora, and went as envoy for Eumenes to Antipatros, on
which occasion the old Antigonus attempted to win him over. At Gabiene, where Eumenes was taken, Hieronymus was found
among the wounded, and kindly treated by Antigonus, whose service he afterwards
entered, remaining thenceforth a loyal adherent of the Antigonid house. In 312 Antigonus
gave him a special commission as governor of the Dead Sea, as part of a very
peculiar scheme for putting pressure on Ptolemy. From the Dead Sea came all the
bitumen used in Egypt in embalming the dead; this substance rose to the surface
and floated there in great blocks, and was collected by the local Arabs, whose
tribes fought violently with each other for the lucrative fishery. They had no
boats, but put out on rafts made of reeds, each carding three men; two were to
row and collect the bitumen, while the third carried a bow to repel enemies. Antigonus,
or Demetrios, conceived the idea of cornering the supply of bitumen, a
proceeding which, if successfully carried out, must have caused great religious
excitement in Egypt and reacted unfavourably on Ptolemy; and Hieronymus’
commission was to build boats and collect all the available bitumen into one
place. The Arabs, however, were in no mind to lose their gainful trade; they
put out in thousands on their reed rafts and assailed the boats with arrows.
This weird struggle on the malodorous lake ended in a complete victory for the
Arabs, and the project of cornering bitumen fell through.
Whether Hieronymus was really satrap of Syria also may
be doubted. But it is probable that he fought by Demetrios’ side at Salamis,
and that it is to him that we owe our understanding account of that great
victory; perhaps, too, the picture of Demetrios himself in action, an inspiring
figure on the poop of his great galley, bestriding his three fallen
armourbearers and taking his joy, like any hero of Homer, in the spear-play
and the crash of the bronze-shod beaks. He certainly fought in the battle of
the kings at Ipsos, and remained true to Demetrios after that catastrophe in
293 Demetrios, made him governor of Boeotia. He continued to live at Gonatas’
court, and perhaps accompanied the king in the war against Pyrrhus, though he
must have been nearly eighty at the time. Like Aristobulus and Polybius and
many another, he lived first and only wrote when his active career was over; it
is said that in spite of the great exertions of his life, and his many wounds,
he lived to be 104, and kept all his faculties to the end.
He wrote the history of the two generations that
followed Alexander, the Successors and their sons, the Diadochoi and the Epigonoi; he himself lived through both. His
history forms a large part of the foundation of everything that we now know
about the period which it covers. His outlook was a wide one; he was the first
to give to the Greek world a sketch (introduced into the chapters on Pyrrhus)
of the early history of Rome. Though a partisan of the Antigonids, it is
supposed that he dealt faithfully with both the elder Antigonus and Demetrios,
concealing neither their harshness nor their greed of power. There were some
who reproached him with representing Gonatas in too favourable a light; but the
writer who relates this carries little weight as a historical critic, and had
evidently not read Hieronymus himself, for he gives the statement merely, as
common report. As such it is of little value; and the possibility always
remains that Hieronymus spoke well of Gonatas because that was in accord with
facts. In reality it is not known at all what he thought or wrote of the king;
all evidence is lost. But what the king thought of Hieronymus can be guessed;
for his only recorded writing was a series of letters addressed to the
historian, in which (among other things) he gave some account of the literary
circle of which both had been members. Clearly Hieronymus was one whom he delighted to honour.
That the historian, too was interested in those philosophic questions which
appealed to the king is shown by the comparative frequency with which Hieronymus
appears as a source in later philosophic literature.
Hieronymus’ primary aim was truth, the recording of
what really did happen. This aim he achieved in full measure; the
trustworthiness of his narrative was unquestioned. But though his matter was
good, he had no gift of style; he was said to be dry, and he did not attract
readers. When read at all he was read at second or third hand; thus scarcely
the most trifling fragment of his actual words can be identified as having
survived, though something of the substance of what he wrote can be gathered
from three of the best of Plutarch’s Lives and the material portions of three
very excellent books of Diodorus. He differs somewhat from most third-century
writers, such as Ptolemy I or Aratos of Sicyon; their careers were more
important than their writings; with Hieronymus the historian overshadows the
man. And the pity of it is that, to himself, he was a soldier and a statesman,
and only turned historian in old age; consequently he taught no pupils, and
left no successor; true understanding of the history of Macedonia ends with his
death. That he was a great historian we can dimly see. It is difficult to speak
with much confidence of the place of one whose work is only known to us through
the use made of it by others; but it has been suggested, not unreasonably, that
had that work survived we might today be including Hieronymus as third in a
triumvirate of Greek historians with Polybius and Thucydides.
At the centre of the society here sketched stood the
king himself. He was about forty-three years old at the time of his marriage to
Phila; he had one natural son, Halkyoneus, born many
years since, and brought up as a prince of the blood, who three years later was
old enough to be holding high command in the army. As king of Macedonia Antigonus
married one wife and no more, a natural reaction against the excesses of
Demetrios. But the scanty details of his private life are really immaterial to
history. That he took pleasure in the feast and the wine-cup is merely to say
that he was a Macedonian king; it was a matter of course that it should be so.
The Macedonian of the third century was fond of huge banquets, and expected
that his king should get drunk on the proper occasions, as Philip and Alexander
had done. The record still remains of how Philip literally drank himself into
the good graces of the hard-riding Thessalian landowners. Even in Greece a
‘water-drinker’ was as great an oddity as he would have been among English
squires in the eighteenth century. But these things were merely for the time of
relaxation; the first Antigonus, and even Demetrios, kept business and pleasure
separate, and never drank on campaign.
The portrait of Antigonus’ features that is most
likely to resemble him must have been taken at a somewhat later time, probably
after the fall of Athens. It shows a plain, straightforward sort of face,
thoughtful, but far from good-looking; save for a somewhat similar projection
of the rounded chin, it bears no resemblance to the handsome features of
Demetrios. Antigonus in fact scarcely inherited anything from his father at all
save family loyalty; he possessed neither his genius nor his failings. What he
did possess was a dogged tenacity, surpassing that of either the first Antigonus
or Antipatros, a tenacity which rose above both good fortune and evil, which
had brought him to the throne, and was to take him much further; he was to be a
signal illustration of the superiority of character to talent.
Among the moralists of a later time, Antigonus used to
be quoted as a proof of the thesis that the sins of the fathers are not always
visited upon the children : the worthy son of a worthless father, they
concluded, can escape the punishment of the race, even as Antigonus, good
offspring of a bad root, escaped the penalty due to the sins of Demetrios. If
one is to appeal to heredity, it might be equally true to put it that he reaped
the reward due to the virtues of his mother Phila. But Antigonus himself was
Stoic enough to believe that a man stood on his own feet, and was what he made
himself. Without illusions and without enthusiasms, with little gift of
attracting men, knowing quite well that he was not a heavensent general or statesman, he nevertheless won through at the end with almost
everything that he meant to do, partly because of his inflexible determination
to do it, partly because he possessed the old Greek virtue of moderation, the
only quality (so Aristotle had said) which could hold a kingdom together; he
could distinguish the things that were possible from the things that were
chimaeras. Moderation was not a virtue that he could have learnt from his Stoic
teachers, or anywhere but in the school of life itself; but Zeno had taught him
one of his highest lessons, to be free from the great Illusion, false pride.
Whether he also acquired from his Stoic friends his capacity to bear misfortune
with dignity and calmness may be doubted: more probably his mind here ran on
parallel lines with theirs. His kindliness and generosity are frequently
noticed.
He appears to have hated shams. This was one element
of his enmity to Pyrrhus, and of his obvious knowledge that in the long run it
must be Pyrrhus and not himself that must go under. It was not always possible
for a king to prevent the worst sham of all, his worship as a god. His own
realm, indeed, he could control; and Antigonus had no occasion to consider the
question of a State worship of himself, in which so many of the kings from
Alexander downward had found a wonderful instrument of statecraft. But if an
independent community desired to render to a king divine honours, it was not
easy to stop them from doing so; and few kings in fact desired to stop them.
But it may be recorded of Antigonus, to his honour—and of him almost alone
among kings of the time of Macedonian blood—that, so far as is known, he was
never worshipped by anybody.
This side of his character can be illustrated from
some of the anecdotes told about him; it will suffice to select two that are
undoubtedly true. One is the snub, half brutal half humorous, which he bestowed
on the wretched poet who had addressed him as ‘god’,—‘the slave of the
bed-chamber doesn’t think so’. The other is not quite so obvious. While he was
besieging a town a certain philosopher insisted on reading him a treatise on
justice. It is, fortunately, possible to reconstruct the text on which the
learned man was preaching; it was the old saying, scorned in its time, but
again taken up and rehabilitated by Aristotle, that ‘justice is the good of my
neighbour’; and the king turned on him with ‘How can you prate to me of justice
and my neighbour’s good when you find me assaulting my neighbour’s city?’. Did
then Antigonus not believe in justice, and hold with Epicurus’ comment (hardly
made in earnest), that one set to administer justice was a fool not to take his
neighbour’s goods when he had the power? Antigonus in reality knew far more
about justice than that philosopher probably did; he once, in reply to one who
said everything was just for kings, had answered that nothing was just for
kings but what was just in itself: but he could not restrain the savage
impatience of the man of action, the man who has got to do something in a
position perhaps every way impossible, at the easy periods of the man of books,
the man who had not got to grips with reality. There is no truer bit of human
nature in Plutarch.
In politics, his steady determination was the dominant
factor. Through good fortune and evil he had held firmly to the belief that he
was to be king of Macedonia; and he was king. We shall see the same quality in
his wars with Egypt; we see it again, perhaps even more clearly, in the history
of his successors. It took him many years to win the allegiance of the
Macedonians ; once won, it was won for ever. Not the worst excesses of his
grandson ever shook their loyalty to the dynasty; and even after their two
great and unequal struggles with Rome, that power never felt safe from
pretenders claiming kinship with the beloved house until she had carved up and
dismembered the land in a fashion practised upon no other nation.
Beside determination stood a truly Stoic sense of
duty, a quality inherited in part, no doubt, through his mother from
Antipatros. It showed itself of course clearly in the general measures taken
for the good of the country, and in the resolve to be a Macedonian and not a
Greek king: it showed itself in a number of smaller ways. He took the work of a
king seriously: unlike Demetrios, he made himself readily accessible to his
people; it is probably to him that the story relates of a king who had complete
records compiled of all who came to him on embassies or other State affairs,
and astonished them upon their introduction by his knowledge both of themselves
and of their business. But Antigonus indeed went far beyond details of
administration; for it was he who laid down the highest view of kingship that
the ancient world ever saw.
Most of Alexander’s successors were frankly usurpers.
Their justification was their ability; they were the right men in the right
places. But however well the Lagid or the Seleucid might govern, he governed
his country for himself, as his domain; and when he sought some theoretic base
for his power—a power that had in fact no theoretic base at all—he could only
find it on the religious side, in the worship accorded to him by his subjects.
Strictly speaking, Antigonus needed no theoretic base
for his power at all. It was sufficient that he had become the legitimate
national king of an ancient monarchical country. This enabled him to put away,
once and for all, all question of a state worship of himself. But though he was
now a legitimate national king, he had become such entirely through his own
effort and abilities. He answered exactly to the description of a Successor; he
had found no hereditary realm or lawful succession waiting for him; he had won
his kingdom on the field of Lysimacheia, by his own right hand, and held it at
present by administering its affairs with intelligence. It was largely an
accident that the ancient customs of the country he ruled had enabled the
Macedonians to confer on him a kingship valid in law. It might have been
otherwise; it was somewhat of an accident that he had become a national king,
rather than a king of the type of Ptolemy. Antigonus fully recognized his own
share in the matter by the foundation of his games Basileia in honour of his own kingship, and perhaps by the change he made in the method
of dating State documents. But though he meant to be a national king in every
sense, and recognized that he had a sure basis of rule in his election by the
Macedonians, the part he had played in bringing about his own kingship
reinforced the desire he already felt, a desire inevitable from his philosophic
training and surroundings, that that kingship should justify itself in the
sight of philosophy, and should have some theoretic basis not at variance with
the highest thought of the time.
Many trains of thought contributed to form this basis,
and can be partially traced. There was first the Cynic view. The common herd
must have a master; but that master must take as his ideal the Cynic hero
Herakles, the superman toiling and suffering incessantly to drive evil out of
the world. Kingship then was a hard thing to its possessor, bringing him pain
and not pleasure, evil things rather than good. Antigonus, like many other
kings, felt this to the full; you cannot, he said, get any great good without
great hardship : and if men knew all the troubles that clung to the rag called
a diadem, none would stoop to pick it up if it lay on the dunghill at their
feet. But this was one side only.
Then there was a Stoic view. Kings need render no
account and submit to no restraint; to get a good king, then, you must have the
best man possible, for the decision in things good and bad rests with him, and
an inferior man will not understand what to do, or act conformably to the Law
that orders the universe. The best man possible is the wise man, the
philosopher; but as a practical matter you do not find philosophers at the head
of States. The next best thing, then, is that the philosopher, if he does not
actually rule, shall stand behind the chair of the ruler and advise. This, too,
Antigonus fully met; Persaios had come to him as his
philosophic director, and wrote for him, as Euphantos had done before, a treatise on kingship.
But there was still something wanting. The toil of the
king, and the direction of the philosopher, were insufficient unless applied to
the right end. Again the Stoic philosophy intervened. There were in the world
enlightened monarchs who worked hard, but who had gone astray by treating their
states as their private domains. Their exactions in the way of taxes were, said
the Stoic, little better than those of a tyrant; men were forced to pay.
Taxation should be by consent; for the true king must remember that the goods
of his people were not his; the true view must rather be that kingship is the
possession of the State.
We cannot tell when the Stoics voiced this rather
startling phrase, or in what temporal relation it stands to Antigonus’ own
view. But, even if the unnamed Stoic preceded Antigonus, he did not go the
whole way. He was thinking chiefly of property. One thing, however, followed
from his utterance: Stoicism condemned the ordinary Hellenistic kingdom, and
declared with no uncertain sound that the king of her choice must think, not of
his rights, but of his duties. And it was from the point of view of duty that Antigonus
started, when he went as far as it is possible to go on the path so marked out for a king, and put the coping-stone on
that which the philosophers were building. The occasion was that his son had
misused some of his subjects, and Antigonus, gently enough, rebuked him and
said, ‘Do you not understand, boy, that our kingship is a noble servitude?’ Of
the meaning of the words no doubt is possible, for the context is eloquent.
That which the Stoic had partially, but only partially, envisaged in theory, Antigonus
translated into personal fact; the king must be the servant of his people. The
theoretic basis of kingship was found in the duty of service. We are familiar
now with kings who have made this their highest aim; perhaps only those who
have some slight acquaintance with the ancient world can realize to what extent
it was a new conception in the third century before Christ. Kings no doubt had
sought the good of their people before Antigonus, just as men had done their
duty before the Stoics taught; but Antigonus is the first known to us who laid
down, as a rule of practice, that principle which was thenceforth held to mark
a kingly soul, and which we still consider an ideal.
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ANTIGONUS GONATAS |