The History of the Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece, Volume 1 (of 3)

I DEDICATE the following work to you, my dear Son, as a token of my gratitude for the cheerful patience with which you have aided me in completing it, despite the calamity that overtook me in the midst of my labours. Whatever may be the fate of the publication it will always recall to me some of the happiest hours of my life, rendered so chiefly by beholding the contented serenity with which you subdued the irksomeness of studies so little suited to your years. At length, however, you are delivered from lexicographers and scholiasts. The final page has been written, the last proof read. I escape from a task commenced before you were born, and you from a four years’ apprenticeship to the craft and mystery of authorship. All that now remains is to watch the reception which the fruit of our toil may meet with in the world. It has been produced and has grown up under very peculiar circumstances. Whithersoever we have travelled, the wrecks of Grecian literature have accompanied us, and the studies to which these pages owe their existence have been pursued under the influence of almost every climate in Europe. Nay, if I pushed my researches still further and visited the portion of Africa commonly supposed to have been the cradle of Hellenic civilisation, it was solely in the hope of qualifying myself to speak with some degree of confidence on the subject of those arts which represent to the Modern World so much of the grandeur and genius of Greece. Here, probably, the action of pestilential winds, and of the sands and burning glare of the desert commenced that dimming of the “visual ray,” which, in all likelihood, will wrap me gradually in complete darkness, and veil for ever from my sight those forms of the beautiful which have been incarnated, if I may so speak, in marble. This is a language which neither you nor your sister can read to me. All that sweet Olympian brood which used to smile upon me with kindly recognition when I was a solitary wayfarer in lands not my own, will, as far as I am concerned, be annihilated. Those twelve mystical transformations of Aphroditè into stone, which may be beheld all together at Naples, and appeared to me more lovely than its vaunted bay, or even the sky that hangs enamoured over it, will, I conjecture, be seen of me no more, or seen obscurely as through a mist. Homer, however, and Æschylus, with Plato and Thucydides and Demosthenes, will be able still through the voices of my children—voices more cheerful and willing than ministered to the old age and blindness of Milton—to project their beauty into my soul. I will not, therefore, repine; but, imitating the example of wiser and better men, submit unmurmuringly to the will of God. Had things been otherwise ordered, I might have continued these researches. As it is, I take leave of them here. Our friend, Mr. Keightley, who has visited Italy for the purpose, will perform for the Romans what I have endeavoured to accomplish for the Greeks; and his extensive and varied learning, the excellence of his method, and the pleasing vivacity of his style, will, probably, ensure for his work a still greater degree of popularity even than that which his very successful productions already enjoy.

Believe me, my dear son, Ever affectionately yours, J. A. ST. JOHN.

London, October 13th, 1842.

INTRODUCTION.

Many moral phenomena appear to baffle the sagacity of statesmen, because, confiding too implicitly in experience, they omit to widen the range of their contemplation so as to embrace the whole circle of the people’s existence whose fortunes and character they desire to comprehend. To be successful in such an inquiry it is requisite to lay open, as far as possible, the influence on that people of climate and geographical position, to break through the husk and shell of customs, manners, laws, religions, that we may come to the kernel of its moral nature, to that inner organization, intellectual and physical, of which the external circumstances of its civil and political life are but so many fluctuating symbols.

To accomplish this, however, even in the case of a contemporary nation, among whom we may behold in full activity all the material movements of society, is no easy task. But the difficulty must be very much augmented, when, in addition to the obstacles which necessarily under the most favourable circumstances beset every avenue to a people’s inner life, those are added arising out of the distance on the track of time at which the nation we are considering happens to stand, the scantiness and contradictory nature of the reports that reach us, and more, perhaps, than all, the atmosphere of prejudice through which we are apt to view whatever in any degree differs from our own manners and institutions. But this consideration, though it should bespeak indulgence for the unavoidable errors even of the most diligent investigator, can certainly be no reason for abstaining from all further investigation. For, notwithstanding the disadvantages under which we labour, it is still possible to extract from the fragments remaining of ancient literature materials for reconstructing something more than the skeleton of antiquity. We can invest the bones with sinews and muscles, clothe them with flesh and skin, spread over the whole colours that shall resemble life; and if we cannot steal from heaven celestial fire to kindle this image of surpassing beauty, that, at least, is the only thing which exceeds our power.

In saying this, I merely state my opinion of what is possible, not by any means what I conceive myself to have effected in the present work. I am but too sensible of how far the execution falls short of “the ample proposition that hope made,” when, many years ago, the idea suggested itself to me at that ardent and flattering season of life in which we are apt to imagine all things within our reach. But as

Every action that hath gone before Whereof we have record, trial did draw Bias, and thwart; not answering the aim And that unbodied figure of the thought That gave ’t surmised shape;

so, no doubt, in my own case, the realisation will be found to be a very imperfect embodying of the ideal plan.

Few subjects, however, abound more in interest or instruction than the one I have here ventured to treat. The inquiry turns upon the institutions and moral condition of a people to whose fortunes history affords no parallel; of a people that, like the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, which the servant of the prophet saw from the top of Carmel, contained within itself the seeds of mightiest and most momentous events. The Hellenes can never, in fact, by any but the uninformed be regarded in the same light as ordinary political communities. Their power, vast and astonishing for the age in which they flourished, arose entirely out of their national character and the spirit of their institutions. It was the power of intellect. They were in reality the sun and soul of the ancient world, and darted far into the darkness around them those vivifying rays which, reflected from land to land, have since lighted up the world.

Athens, the wisest and noblest of Grecian states,