READING HALL

THE 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.

CHAPTER IX

THE RECKONING WITH PYRRHUS

ANTIGONUS GONATAS