CHAPTER IX.
CYRENE.
One of the most famous and flourishing of Greek settlements in distant lands was Cyrenè, on the northern coast of Africa. It occupied a site of rare beauty and fertility, a succession of natural terraces, culminating in a high and spacious table-land, and projecting with a bold curve northwards into the Mediterranean. Thus its position at once gave it the full benefit of the cool sea-breezes, and screened it effectually from the hot and unwholesome winds of the deserts in the interior. The region abounded in streams running down through deep and sheltered gorges to the sea. Both slopes and gorges were clothed in the richest vegetation, and the various elevations of the different ridges produced such differences of climate, that the successive harvests in different parts of the region lasted no less than eight months of the year. Among the many rare and valuable products of Cyrenè, the most important was a plant called Silphium, indigenous to the country, and apparently peculiar to it, whose stalk, root, and juices were highly esteemed all over Greece, and employed largely both as food and as medicine. The monopoly of this valuable plant, coupled with the other choice products of the place, made Cyrenè one of the wealthiest cities in the Grecian world. Splendid buildings, whose ruins may yet be traced, rose around the "fountain of Apollo." The beautiful parks of the Cyrenaic merchant-princes gained for the place the title of "the garden of Aphroditè."[1] Horse-breeding, the invariable accompaniment (as we have seen) of prosperity in a Greek state, was carried on largely by the great families; and in spite of the cost and difficulty of conveying racers and chariots from Africa to Greece, the Greeks of Libya were not unfrequently represented in the great equestrian competitions of the mother country, and especially in those at Delphi, whose oracle was believed to have originally enjoined the foundation of the Cyrenaic colony. Other forms of athleticism also flourished at Cyrenè, and boxers and racers from that city won many prizes in the great Greek games, Ælian has an amusing anecdote of a Cyrenaic boxer, whose teeth were loosened by an unlucky blow of his antagonist. But the champion was not discouraged by this misadventure; he swallowed his teeth, continued the contest, and was victorious![2]
Three of Pindar's Pythian Odes—the fourth, the fifth, and the ninth—commemorate victories of Cyrenaic competitors at Delphi, and embody ancient legends of Cyrenè, and of its ruling family, the "Battiadæ." The town was believed to derive its name from Cyrenè, a Thessalian nymph beloved of Apollo, who had been conveyed by her lover to Libya, and established there as queen of the continent of Africa, "the third part of Earth's expanse." But this tale of the origin of Cyrenè seems wholly unconnected, and, indeed, inconsistent with another, which tells how the country was originally peopled by Dorian immigrants from the island of Thera in the Ægean Sea, under the leadership of one Battus, whose descendants, named alternately Battus and Arcesilas, had ever since handed down the sovereignty of the colony from father to son in unbroken succession.
The name "Battus" signifies in Greek a "stammerer;" and it was said that the original founder of the colony had suffered from some impediment to speech, that he had consulted the Delphian oracle in hopes of a cure, and had been directed by the god to proceed to Libya, a country at that time hardly known to the most adventurous mariners of Greece. He obeyed the direction, and his faith was rewarded by a miracle. A lion met him in the deserts, and the sudden fright broke the string of his tongue. Thenceforth he spoke plain. According to this legend, then, the foundation of Cyrenè took place under the auspices of the Delphian oracle, and the Delphian god Apollo was supposed to view with especial favour the prosperity of the city, and the athletic and other distinctions of its citizens. Apollo was always considered as the chief patron-deity of Cyrenè. His temple occupied a conspicuous site in the town; processions in his honour were for ever passing through its streets;[3] and the fountain in its midst was known as "the fountain of Apollo." This connection between Apollo and the distant Cyrenè naturally produced legends which should explain it. One such legend was that of Battus and his visit to Delphi; another was the tale already mentioned of the loves of Apollo and the nymph Cyrenè.
But there was a third local legend, unconnected with the name of Apollo, and carrying us back into a more remote antiquity,—a time prior to the origin of the Delphian temple. Jason and his Argonauts had passed, it was said, over the deserts of Libya. Their ship had been miraculously drawn for twelve days across the sands by Medea's magic spells, and they had at last reached the fountains of the lake Tritonis. Here they were greeted by a local deity, a son of Poseidon, who presented to one of the crew—the Lacedæmonian hero Euphemus—a clod of earth, telling him to treasure it, and convey it to his home. Had he done so, his descendants in the fourth generation would have obtained the sovereignty of Libya. But through some negligence on the part of Euphemus's followers the symbolic clod was allowed to fall overboard, and was carried by the tide to Thera. In consequence the descendants of Euphemus were not allowed to enter on their sovereignty in Africa till they had first colonised Thera; and thus it was from Thera instead of Laconia, and in the seventeenth instead of the fourth generation, that Battus, the descendant of Euphemus, at last led his colonists to Cyrenè.
The first of these three legends—the loves of Apollo and the nymph Cyrenè—is charmingly told in the Ninth Pythian Ode. This poem is addressed to Telesicrates of Cyrenè, winner in the race of footmen in full armour.
Cyrenè, says the poet, was the daughter of Hypseus, a divinely-descended king of the Thcssalian Lapithæ. He describes her as a heroine of Amazonian tastes and habits, such as Virgil afterwards portrayed in his famous description of Camilla,[4]—a mighty huntress, scorning the dull home-life of an ordinary Grecian maiden:—
"Small joy she found to guide the shuttle's tortuous round,
Or share the feasts, her home-pent mates that cheered.
But brazen javelins she threw,
And savage beasts with brandished falchion slew,
Making in restful peace to dwell
The cattle of her sire, and yielding scanty space
To Slumber's sweet embrace,
When on her weary eyes at dawn he fell."
Apollo saw her on her native mountains—
"As unarmed, unaided, she defied
And grappled fearless a lion fierce."
He consulted the wise old Centaur Chiron, and bore the nymph away to Libya's "golden halls," where she became his bride, and the mother of a heavenly progeny. And there, says Pindar, she reigns yet, and shares the triumph which Telesicrates has brought to her city.
The introduction of this legend has a special appropriateness in this particular ode, if we may believe tho statement of the commentators, that Telesicrates was about to bring home to Cyrene a bride from the mother country. And certainly the general colour and contents of the Ode make this supposition extremely probable. One chief idea seems to run through it all, the blessings of a lawful and prosperous love. Telesicrates is described as a beautiful and stately hero, an ideal bridegroom:—
"Full oft upon his victories
At Pallas' yearly feasts hath gazed each wondering maid,
And silently hath prayed
For spouse or son like Telesicrates."
The dialogue between Apollo and the Centaur dwells with infinite grace and tenderness on the inseparable connection between a pure love and modest reserve and delicacy. And in the conclusion of the Ode Telesicrates is reminded of another tale of happy love in the annals of his own family, how his ancestor Alexidamus had wooed and won a daughter of the Libyan Antæus, king of Irasa:—
"Whom many a kinsman lord of high degree,
And many a stranger sought, for lair of form was she.
And afire were all to bear away
Her golden-coronalled youth's fair fruit,
But her father had purposed a nobler suit."
Antæus had heard the old tale of Danaus, who bade his daughters' suitors assemble in the Stadium of Argos, and race for their brides. This precedent he determined himself to follow:—
"His daughter's spouse the Libyan found
E'en thus. In rich array her place hard by the goal she took, the race
To guerdon; and her sire proclaimed around,
Who clasped her first, should claim the prize.
Swift o'er the course Alexidamus flies,
And seized her hand in his, and bore
His bride through nomad hosts of horsemen, raining down
Full many a leaf and crown,
And many a triumph-plume was his before."
We pass now to consider the Fourth and Fifth Pythian Odes, which were both composed in honour of a single occasion, the victory gained at Delphi in the chariot-race by Arcesilas, king of Cyrenè. The victor was not himself present to witness his triumph, but was represented by his kinsman Carrhotus, who drove the successful chariot, and who probably commissioned Pindar to produce an Ode for performance at Cyrenè, at a festival which followed on his return thither. This Ode was the Fifth Pythian; the fourth, as we shall see, was composed afterwards for a special purpose. Yet it is not unlikely that both Odes reached Arcesilas together, and were conveyed in the ship which brought Carrhotus home.
The Fifth Pythian opens with a lofty panegyric upon the power of wealth well used, and on the magnificent position of Arcesilas, at once a mighty monarch and a victor at Pytho. The king is admonished never to forget how much of this glory he owes to two constant friends, the one a god, the other a mortal, Apollo and Carrhotus. Pindar dwells at considerable length on the skill and nerve exhibited by Carrhotus. The race had been singularly disastrous to the mass of competitors. No less than forty cars had been upset; the confusion and danger must have been indescribable. Yet Carrhotus had steered his chariot through the writhing mass of cars and horses, without so much as grazing a wheel or snapping a trace, and had reached the winning-post in triumph.
"With calm strong purpose pressing on
'Mid forty fallen guiders of the rein,
Secure through all did he his chariot guide,
And from the games returned hath reached his home on Libya's plain."
Then follows a brief allusion to the legend of Battus, and to the rise of Cyrenè under the continual favour and protection of Apollo, to whom Arcesilas is taught to refer not only the material prosperity of his country, but all the enlightened and artistic civilisation which surrounds him, and the noble strains of minstrelsy which are the reward of his victory. The origin of the Carneian festival of Apollo at Cyrenè, the occasion on which the Ode was to be performed, is traced back to Thera, and thence to the Ægids of Sparta, with which illustrious house Pindar boasts a connection of his own family. Then returning to the subject of Battus, the poet describes the actual foundation of the city Cyrenè, the growth of its splendid temples, the paving of the sacred road along which the festal procession mounts still to Apollo's sanctuary, and lastly, the tomb of the heroic founder, rising in solitary grandeur "behind the mart" of the city. Elsewhere are other tombs, each enshrining the remains of a Battiad monarch, and all these dead ancestors of Arcesilas share, "as far as dead men may," in the triumph of their descendant:—
"Apart—the tomb their portion—others rest,
Great kings, before
The palace, their achievements high
Besprinkled all with dews of song
Soft streaming from the festal throng.
These, lapt in earth, the tale of bliss partake,
And share their kinsman's well-won victory;
Who now youth's song to Phœbus of the golden lyre must wake."
The Ode closes with a high encomium on the personal virtues of Arcesilas, and with a prayer for his continued good fortune. He is wise and eloquent beyond his years; bold as an eagle, strong as a fortress, cultured and skilful, a worthy subject of Apollo's favour. Pindar's language, however, seems to imply that he had formed this high opinion of Arcesilas rather on hearsay than on actual personal knowledge. It is improbable that Arcesilas had ever visited Greece; and it is at least questionable, in spite of the assertions of ancient commentators, whether Pindar had ever visited Cyrenè. Highly encomiastic as the Ode is, its compliments are of a somewhat vague and impersonal character. Pindar addresses Arcesilas rather as the ideal king than as a beloved and well-known patron. We find in his language no traces of such an intimacy as undoubtedly existed between the poet and the kings of Syracuse and Agrigentum. Pindar's praises of Arcesilas were probably sincere: Carrhotus, the friend and kinsman of the young king, had doubtless drawn his picture in flattering colours. Yet, a few years later, we find the gross misrule of this very Arcesilas leading to his own ruin, and the final overthrow of the Battiad dynasty in Cyrenè.
The Fourth Pythian Ode is probably the very finest of all Pindar's extant works. It is by far his longest poem; indeed it is more than twice as long as any other Ode, and it exhibits from first to last, both in its plan and its execution, the most consummate skill of the poet. Pindar had a special reason for the elaborate care which he bestowed on the composition of this Ode, and it was a reason which did him honour. The poem was designed to serve a friend in need—to save him from the miseries of exile, and to recover for him the favour of his offended king.
Damophilus, a noble of Cyrenè and a member of the royal house, had for some unknown reason incurred the resentment of Arcesilas, and had been forced to flee his country. He took refuge, it would seem, in Thebes, and there formed a friendship with Pindar, whose pride in his own descent from the mythical house of Ægeus would doubtless make him ready to acknowledge a kinsman in the Ægid Damophilus. The exile had apparently long resigned all hope of restoration to his native town, when the victory of Arcesilas suddenly opened to him a possibility—a bare possibility, it was true, but still a possibility—of a change in his fortunes. Pindar had been commissioned to address Arcesilas in a triumphal Ode. Might not the poet be induced to seize this favourable opportunity of saying a word in season on behalf of his unhappy friend? This hint of Damophilus's hopes was not lost on the generous Pindar, and its result was the composition of the Fourth Pythian Ode.
The rhetorical skill and tact exhibited by Pindar in pleading the cause of his friend would have done credit to the most accomplished professional advocate. The whole Ode is a connected argument of the most powerful and convincing character; yet it is not till the conclusion is reached, that it is perceived to be an argument at all. It opens with magnificent compliments to Arcesilas and Cyrenè; it proceeds to set forth in the most vivid and picturesque form a series of heroic legends recalling all the proudest memories of the house of Battus; it sketches a noble ideal of the true hero-king, and finds in Arcesilas the realisation of that ideal, the physician of his state, the restorer of times which are out of joint, the creator of that civil order which a fool can disturb, but which a wise man only can birng into being. Yet all the while, surely but secretly, in every compliment, in every myth, in every maxim, the poet is gradually paving the way towards his final conclusion,—that gentleness and not force is the true secret of greatness; that the ties of kinship should prevail over the memory of past quarrels; and that the pardon and restoration of his erring but repentant kinsman would be the crown and consummation of the glorious career of Arcesilas, and a fitting continuation to the generous traditions of his heroic house. Perhaps the best parallel which modern literature presents to the scheme of this Ode is the famous speech of Mark Antony in Shakespeare's "Julius Cæsar." The reader will remember with what infinite tact in that incomparable speech the orator prepares imperceptibly the minds of his hearers for the conclusion to which he desires to lead them, but which he does not venture to present to them till they are ready to receive it. Nay, the ultimate determination of the audience to avenge the death of Cæsar seems to come from themselves, rather than from the orator. So it is with this Ode. Pindar does hot, even at the last, ask in plain terms for the pardon of Damophilus. He urges it, indirectly alone, by allegory and maxim; and finally he draws two pictures, exhibiting with incomparable force and pathos on the one hand the miseries of banishment, on the other the happy, tranquil, law-abiding life of the returned exile, repentant and forgiven. And he leaves it to the promptings of Arcesilas's own generous heart to convert this last picture into a glorious reality, to gladden Damophilus, and to bring honour upon himself.
The argument of the Ode falls naturally into three divisions; and these divisions, as has been pointed out by a German critic,[5] stand to each other precisely as the three members of a syllogism. First comes the legend of the early prophecies, which foretold the rise of the Cyrenaic kingdom, and of the mystic clod presented by the local deity to the Argonaut Euphemus. This legend embodies the first premiss of Pindar's syllogism. The rule of the Euphemids in Cyrenè is no usurped and brutal tyranny, but a legitimate and law-abiding sovereignty, sanctioned and ordained by Heaven. Next we have the myth of Jason, the central idea of which furnishes the poet with his second premiss—that true kingship exhibits itself not in violence, but in a certain winning grace and gentleness, which secure to the true-born ruler influence over his fellow-men and favour from the gods. Last comes the conclusion, enforced by easy allegory and indirect suggestion, but nowhere nakedly stated, that Arcesilas, the representative of the Euphemid monarchy, can afford to disdain the harsh methods of proscription and cruelty, by which a vulgar tyrant is forced to maintain his power.
The substance of the legend which occupies the first of these three divisions, the myth of Euphemus and the clod which symbolised his sovereignty, has been already given: and we may now pass to the second division—the story of Jason.
Jason's father Æson had been forcibly deprived of the sovereignty of the Thessalian town Iolcos by his crafty kinsman Pelias. Jason himself was only saved from death by the interposition of friends, who conveyed the child secretly to the cave of the Centaur Chiron. There he was trained in all heroic exercises, and thence on reaching manhood he returned to claim his kingdom. On the way, in crossing a torrent, he accidentally lost a sandal. Pelias had been warned by an oracle "to beware of the One-sandalled Man," and now the mysterious warning was to be fulfilled. Suddenly the youthful hero appeared in the market-place of his native town. His aspect is thus described by the poet:—
"A hero dread, twin spears he bore, and twinfold guise of raiment wore,
For aptly to his wondrous limbs clove garb of Magnete clime,
Nor rains might pierce the pard-skin round him spread,
Nor his bright locks unshorn their bloom had shed,
But mantled round his shoulders broad! Swift to the market-place he strode,
And, testing all his dauntless mettle, stood
'Mid the gathering multitude."
The crowds gazed in wonder on such an apparition. Who could he be? Not Phœbus, surely, nor Ares. Was he some giant of old—Otus, Ephialtes, Tityus? Nay, they had perished long since. The mystery baffled all their surmises.
Suddenly, in hot haste, Pelias himself drove down from his palace—
"—Then spied, and shuddering knew too well what single sandal bound
The youth's right foot."
However, he dissembled his fear, and in a tone of assumed mockery inquired the lineage of the illustrious stranger. Jason answered courteously and simply; and then, turning from the king, inquired of the citizens where his father dwelt:—
"Trained in old Chiron's school I come, whose daughters in their cavern-home,
Philyra and Chariclo—spotless maids!—my childhood bred.
Now twice ten years fulfilled, nor tongue nor hand
Offending e'er, I seek my native land
To win the realm, where ruled of old my sire,—now passed to alien hold
Unrighteously, for there did Zeus ordain
Æolus and his sons should reign.
Well I wot hath Pelias, led by jaundiced greed astray,
Torn from my sire perforce the land of his ancient sway.
And me; when light dawned on my opening eyes,
My parents mourning made for dread of that fierce lord, and feigned me dead,
And so, 'mid funeral gloom, and women's cries,
Swathed me in purple bands, and darkling bare
At midnight from my home, to dwell 'neath Chiron's fostering care.
Thus hear ye briefly gathered all my rede;
And show me now, good townsmen mine, the cradle of my knightly line,
For sure no alien land is this to Æson's native seed!
Jason am I, the Centaur gave my name."
One would have expected that such a declaration would have sealed his death-warrant; but no—whatever Pelias felt, he concealed his resentment, and the youth reached his home unmolested—
"—He spake: and to his aged father came,
Nor came unknown,—to greet the boy, those time-worn eyes plashed tears of joy,
For glad at heart was he, his son to find
Choicest bloom of humankind."
Five days were spent in feasting with his kinsmen, who flocked in from all sides to greet the returned prince. Then on the sixth day he revealed his purpose, and the assembled company sprang from their seats, and escorted Jason to the palace of Pelias.
The interview which followed between the usurper and the youthful claimant to the throne is described in one of the most dramatic passages in all Pindar. Instead of loud invective and rude recrimination, we find exhibited on both sides a perfect courtesy of language; coupled, however, on the part of Jason, with a fearless assertion of his just rights, and on that of Pelias with a crafty dissimulation, in which vague promises and concessions were dexterously nullified by conditions involving, as he hoped, the speedy destruction of his rival. The kingdom should be restored, but Jason must first undertake an enterprise, which was demanded by the duty of the family to its dead ancestor, Phrixus; he must recover from Æëtes, king of the distant Colchos, the Golden Fleece of the ram which had conveyed Phrixus over the Hellespont.
Then follows, in Pindar's most rapid and vigorous style, a sketch of Jason's famous Quest of the Fleece—the voyage of the Argo. The story is not told in detail after the fashion of an epic poem. It is presented rather in a series of tableaux, each designed to bring out Pindar's conception of Jason as the ideal king, attaching men's minds to himself by the magical force of his innate royalty, "strong without rage," gentle, but irresistible. He draws the noblest heroes of Greece to join his expedition. They come, constrained, as it were, by a magic spell:—
"None might endure
To chew eld's cud, and lonely bide in safety at his mother's side!"
The very powers of nature minister to the young hero. The thunder roars approval as he quits the port; favouring winds bear him to the "inhospitable Euxine's mouth;" the clashing rocks, that stood as sentinels to destroy all entering ships, thenceforth remain fixed and harmless for ever. He reaches Colchos, and Medea, the weird daughter of Æëtes, succumbs to the same irresistible charm which everywhere attends the hero's progress.
Æëtes consented to restore the golden fleece, but, like Pelias, he coupled his consent with hard conditions. Jason must first yoke a team of magic fire-breathing bulls, and force them to plough a field. The king believed that the attempt to fulfil this condition would at once rid him of his unwelcome guest, but he knew not that his daughter's magic had made the guest invulnerable:—
"Then his plough of adamant Æëtes midst them sets,
While from his bulls the flames burst panting in yellow jets,
And, rending earth, their brazen hoofs rebound.
Yet these he yoked, with none to aid, and straight the shapely furrows made,
And scored a fathom deep the loamy ground,
Then spake,—'This work accomplished, let the king
That rules yon barque win from me that immortal covering,
His be the fleece tasselled with gleaming gold.'
He spake, and Jason laid aside his saffron vest, and, fortified
With trust in Heaven, his task began: nor feared the flames, made bold
By his weird hostess' hest. The plough he grasped,
Round the bulls' necks constraining fetters clasped,
Smote with fierce goad each massy frame, and to his hard task's ending came!
In speechless pain, yet groaning as amazed,
On his might Æëtes gazed."
But a new danger still awaited Jason. The fleece was guarded by a monstrous serpent, huge as the keel of a fifty-oared galley,
"Shaped amid the crash of steel."
Pindar hurries over this and the remaining points of the legend at a bound. "Time draws close," he cries—"I must hasten on. I know of a shorter path, and cannot linger on the beaten track!" The serpent was slain, he tells us, "by guile," and forthwith he conducts Jason on his homeward voyage, lingering for a moment to tell how the Argonauts touched at Lemnos, and how there their comrade Euphemus became parent of the princely race that now rules Cyrenè. To that race, he says, Apollo has promised a kingdom without end,—and the title on which that kingdom rests is the wisdom and virtue of its possessors.
Thus closes the second division of the Ode, and now Pindar begins to point his moral. He addresses Arcesilas with an allegory, designed to show the vanity of attempting to crush a noble foe by severity. Oppression and misery can never destroy true greatness; the noble oak may be hewn to serve ignoble uses, or even burnt as firewood on the hearth, but it will still assert its inborn worth, still prove itself superior to all meaner timbers:—
"E'en in decay it testifies its worth,
Whether in flames it end on winter's hearth,
Or, matched with comrade pillars tall, it prop a lordly palace wall,
Painfully doomed in alien homes to toil,
Banished from its native soil."
From this simple parable Pindar passes to exhortation. Let Arcesilas act the true king's part, to heal and not to widen the gaping wounds of his kingdom! Feeble hands can shake a nation's peace, but hard it is to restore the tottering fabric of civil order. A famous English writer has expressed the same idea in words which strikingly recall the language of the Theban poet:—
"How easy it is to shed human, blood! how much in all ages have wounds and shrieks and tears been the cheap and vulgar resources of the rulers of mankind! how difficult and how noble it is to govern in kindness, and to found an empire upon the everlasting basis of justice and affection! . . . To let loose hussars and to bring up artillery—to govern with lighted matches, and to cut, and push, and prime,—I call this, not vigour, but the sloth of cruelty and ignorance. The vigour I love consists in finding out wherein subjects are aggrieved, in relieving them; . . . in the laborious, watchful, and difficult task of increasing public happiness by allaying each particular discontent." [6]
And then, at last, the poet ventures to introduce the name of Damophilus. He dilates upon his worth and his misfortunes—struggling, like Atlas, under the burden of a world of woes. Yet even the old foes of Zeus, the Titans, were at last forgiven by the god who had overthrown them. May not Damophilus hope for a like grace from Arcesilas?—
"Yet he prays, when to the dregs is drained his cup of ill,
Home to return once more, and oft by Apollo's rill
Give all his soul to joy;—there, 'mid the throng
Poetic of his townsmen, bear the carven lyre, their quiet share,
And never more or do or suffer wrong!"
And—adds the poet in conclusion—should this blissful vision ever be realised, the gratitude of Damophilus will for ever keep alive the memory of the victory of Arcesilas, and of the noble 'stream of Theban song which commemorated that victory, and restored the exile to his home.
One would fain hope that this splendid poem secured its generous object. But on this point history is silent. We only know that the warnings of the poet did not avail to teach Arcesilas those lessons of prudence and moderation in dealing with the political troubles of Cyrenè, which might have been the salvation of the dynasty. Arcesilas perished; Battus, his son, died in exile; and Cyrenè became a republic.