Every Athenian citizen is expected to have children, and all the forces of religion, property, and the state unite to discountenance childlessness. Where no offspring comes, adoption is the rule, and high prices are paid for prepossessing orphans. At the same time law and public opinion accept infanticide as a legitimate safeguard against excess population and a pauperizing fragmentation of the land; any father may expose a newborn child to death either as doubtfully his, or as weak or deformed. The children of slaves are seldom allowed to live. Girls are more subject to exposure than boys, for every daughter has to be provided with a dowry, and at marriage she passes from the home and service of those who have reared her into the service of those who have not. Exposure is effected by leaving the infant in a large earthenware vessel within the precincts of a temple or in some other place where it can soon be rescued if any wish to adopt it. The parental right to expose permits a rough eugenics, and co-operates with a rigorous natural selection by hardship and competition to make the Greeks a strong and healthy people. The philosophers almost unanimously approve of family limitation: Plato will call for the exposure of all feeble children, and of those born of base or elderly parents; and Aristotle will defend abortion as preferable to infanticide. The Hippocratic code of medical ethics will not allow the physician to effect abortion, but the Greek midwife is an experienced hand in this field, and no law impedes her.

On or before the tenth day after birth the child is formally accepted into the family with a religious ritual around the hearth, and receives presents and a name. Usually a Greek has but one name, like Socrates or Archimedes; but since it is customary to call the eldest son after the paternal grandfather, repetition is frequent, and Greek history is confounded with a multiplicity of Xenophons, Aeschineses, Thucydideses, Diogeneses, and Zenos. To avoid ambiguity the father's name or the place of birth may be added, as with Kimon Miltiadou – Cimon son of Miltiades – or Diodorus Siculus – Diodorus of Sicily; or the problem may be solved by some jolly nickname, like Callimedon – The Crab.

Once the child is so accepted into the family it cannot lawfully he exposed, and is reared with all the affection that parents lavish upon their children in every age. Themistocles describes his son as the real ruler of Athens; for he, Themistocles, the most influential man in the city, is ruled by his wife, who is ruled by their child. Many an epigram in The Greek Anthology reveals a tender parental love:

I wept at the death of my Theonoe, but the hopes centered in our child lightened my sorrows. And now envious Fate has bereaved me of the boy as well. Alas! I am cheated of thee, my child, all that was left to me. Persephone, hear this cry of a father's grief, and lay the child upon his dead mother's breast.

The tragedies of adolescence are eased with many games, some of which will survive the memory of Greece. On a white perfume vase made for a child's grave a little boy is seen taking his toy cart with him down to Hades. Babies have terra-cotta rattles containing pebbles; girls keep house with their dolls, boys fight great campaigns with clay soldiers and generals, nurses push children on swings or balance them on seesaws, boys and girls roll hoops, fly kites, spin tops, play hide-and-seek or blindman's buff or tug of war, and wage a hundred merry contests with pebbles, nuts, coins, and balls. The marbles of the Golden Age are dried beans shot from the fingers, or smooth stones shot or tossed into a circle to dislodge enemy stones and come to rest as near as possible to the center. As children approach the "age of reason" – seven or eight – they take up the game of dice by throwing square knucklebones (astragali), the highest throw, six, being counted the best. The games of the young are as old as the sins of their fathers.

Athens provides public gymnasiums and palaestras, and exercises some loose supervision over teachers; but the city has no public schools or state universities, and education remains in private hands. Plato advocates state schools, but Athens seems to believe that even in education competition will produce the best results. Professional schoolmasters set up their own schools, to which freeborn boys are sent at the age of six. The name paidagogos is given not to the teacher but to the slave who conducts the boy daily to and from school; we hear of no boarding schools. Attendance at school continues till fourteen or sixteen, or till a later age among the well to do. The schools have no desks but only benches; the pupil holds on his knee the roll from which he reads or the material upon which he writes. Some schools, anticipating much later fashions, are adorned with statues of Greek heroes and gods; a few are elegantly furnished. The teacher teaches all subjects, and attends to character as well as intellect, using a sandal. [In one of the pictures at Pompeii, probably copied from the Greek we see a pupil supported upon the shoulders of another, and held at his heels by a third, while the teacher flogs him.]

The curriculum has three divisions-writing, music, and gymnastics; eager modernists will add, in Aristotle's day, drawing and painting. Writing includes reading and arithmetic, which uses letters for numbers. Everyone learns to play the lyre, and much of the material of instruction is put into poetical and musical form. No time is spent in acquiring any foreign language, much less a dead one, but great care is taken in learning the correct usage of the mother tongue. Gymnastics are taught chiefly in the gymnasium and the palaestra, and no one is considered educated who has not learned to wrestle, swim, and use the bow and the sling.

The education of girls is carried on at home, and is largely confined to "domestic science." Outside of Sparta girls take no part in public gymnastics. They are taught by their mothers or nurses to read and write and reckon, to spin and weave and embroider, to dance and sing and play some instrument. A few Greek women are well educated, but these are mostly hetairai; for respectable ladies there is no secondary education, until Aspasia lures a few of them into rhetoric and philosophy. Higher education for men is provided by professional rhetors and sophists, who offer instruction in oratory, science, philosophy, and history. These independent teachers engage lecture halls near the gymnasium or palaestra, and constitute together a scattered university for pre-Platonic Athens. Only the prosperous can study under them, for they charge high fees; but ambitious youths work by night in mill or field in order to be able to attend by day the classes of these nomadic professors.

When boys reach the age of sixteen they are expected to pay special attention to physical exercises, as fitting them in some measure for the tasks of war. Even their sports give them indirectly a military preparation: they run, leap, wrestle, hunt drive chariots, and hurl the javelin. At eighteen they enter upon the second of the four stages of Athenian life (pais, ephebos, aner, geron – child, youth, man, elder), and are enrolled into the ranks of Athens' soldier youth, the epheboi. Under moderators chosen by the leaders of their tribes they are trained for two years in the duties of citizenship and war. They live and eat together, wear an impressive uniform, and submit to moral supervision night and day. They organize themselves democratically on the model of the city, meet in assembly, pass resolutions, and erect laws for their own governance; they have archon, strategoi, and judges. For the first year they are schooled with strenuous drill, and hear lectures on literature, music, geometry, and rhetoric. At nineteen they are assigned to garrison the frontier, and are entrusted for two years with the protection of the city against attack from without and disorder within. Solemnly, in the presence of the Council of Five Hundred, with hands stretched over the altar in the temple of Agraulos, they take the oath of the young men of Athens:

I will not disgrace the sacred arms, nor will I abandon the man next to me, whoever he may be. I will bring aid to the ritual of the state, and to the holy duties, both alone and in company with many. I will transmit my native commonwealth not lessened, but larger and better than I have received it. I will obey those who from time to time are judges; I will obey the established statutes, and whatever other regulations the people shall enact. If anyone shall attempt to destroy the statutes I will not permit it, but will repel him both alone and with all. I will honor the ancestral faith.

The epheboi are assigned a special place at the theater, and play a prominent role in the religious processions of the city; perhaps it is such young men that we see riding so handsomely on the Parthenon frieze. Periodically they exhibit their accomplishments in public contests, above all in the relay torch race from the Piraeus to Athens. All the city comes out for this picturesque event, and lines the four-and-a-half-mule road; the race is run at night, and the way is not illuminated; all that can be seen of the runners is the leaping light of the torches that they carry forward and pass on. When, at the age of twenty-one, the training of the epheboi is completed, they are freed from parental authority, and formally admitted into the full citizenship of the city.

Such is the education – eked out by lessons learned in the home and in the street – that produces the Athenian citizen. It is an excellent combination of physical and mental, moral and esthetic, training, of supervision in youth with freedom in maturity; and in its heyday it turns out young men as fine as any in history. After Pericles theory grows and beclouds practice; philosophers debate the goals and methods of education-whether the teacher should aim chiefly at intellectual development or at moral character, chiefly at practical ability or the promotion of abstract science. But all agree in attaching the highest importance to education. When Aristippus is asked in what way the educated are superior to the untutored he answers, "as broken horses are to the unbroken"; and Aristotle to the same question replies, "as the living are to the dead." At least, adds Aristippus, "If the pupil derives no other good, he will not, when he attends the theater, be one stone upon another."

The citizens of Athens, in the fifth century, are men of medium freight, vigorous, bearded, and not all as handsome as Pheidias' horsemen. The ladies of the vases are graceful, and those of the stelae have a dignified loveliness, and those molded by the sculptors are supremely beautiful; but the actual ladies of Athens, limited in their mental development by an almost Oriental seclusion, are at best as pretty as their Near Eastern sisters, but no more. The Greeks admire beauty even beyond other nations, but they do not always embody it. Greek women, like others, find their fi?ores a little short of perfection. They lengthen them with high cork soles on their shoes, pad out deficiencies with wadding, compress abundances with lacing, and support the breasts with a cloth brassiere. [Plutarch tells a pretty story of flow an epidemic of suicide among the women of Miletus was suddenly and completely ended by an ordinance decreeing that self-slain women should be carried naked through the marketplace to their burial.]

The hair of the Greeks is usually dark; blondes are exceptional, and much admired; many women, and some men, dye their hair to make it blonde, or to conceal the grayness of age. Both sexes use oils to help the growth of the hair and to protect it against the sun; the women, and again some men, add perfumes to the oil. Both sexes, in the sixth century, wear the hair long, usually bound in braids around or behind the head. In the fifth century the women vary their coiffure fry knotting the hair low on the nape of the neck, or letting it fall over the shoulders, or around tire neck and upon the breast. The ladies like to bind their hair with gay ribbons, and to adorn these with a jewel on the forehead. After Marathon the men begin to cut their hair; after Alexander they will shave their mustaches and beards with sickle-shaped razors of iron. No Greek ever wears a mustache without a beard. The beard is nearly trimmed, usually to a point. The barber not only cuts the hair and shaves or trims the beard, but he manicures his customer and otherwise polishes him up for presentation; when he has finished he offers him a mirror in the most modern style' The barber has his shop, which is a center for the "wineless symposia" (as Theophrastus calls them) of the local gossips and gadflies; but he often works outside it under the sky. He is garrulous by profession; and when one of his kind asks King Archelaus of Macedon how he would like to have his hair cut the king answers, "In silence."' The women also shave here and there, using razors or depilatories of arsenic and lime.

Perfumes – made from flowers, with a base of oil – are numbered in the hundreds; Socrates complains that men make so much use of them.' Every lady of class has an armory of mirrors, pins, hairpins, safety pins, tweezers, combs, scent bottles, and pots for rouge and creams. Cheeks and lips are painted with sticks of minium or alkanet root; eyebrows are penciled with lampblack or pulverized antimony; eyelids are shaded with antimony or kohl; eyelashes are darkened, and then set with a mixture of egg white and gum ammoniac. Creams and washes are used for removing wrinkles, freckles, and spots; disagreeable applications are kept on the face for hours in the patient lust to seem, if one cannot be, beautiful. Oil of mastic is employed to prevent perspiration, and specific perfumed unguents are applied to various parts of the body; a proper lady uses palm oil on the face and breast, marjoram on the eyebrows and hair, essence of thyme on the throat and knees, mint on the arms, myrrh on the legs and feet. Against this seductive armament men protest to as much effect as in other ages. A character in Athenian comedy reproves a lady in cosmetic detail: "If you go out in summer, two streaks of black run from your eyes; perspiration makes a red furrow from your cheeks to your neck; and when your hair touches your face it is blanched by the white lead." Women remain the same, because men do.

Water is limited, and cleanliness seeks substitutes. The well to do bathe once or twice daily, using a soap made of olive oil mixed with an alkali into a paste; then they are anointed with fragrant essences. Comfortable homes have a paved bathroom in which stands a large marble basin, usually filled by hand; sometimes water is brought by pipes and channels into the house and through the wall of the bathroom, where it spouts from a metal nozzle in the shape of an animal's head, and falls upon the floor of a small shower-bath enclosure, whence it runs out into the garden. Most people, unable to spare water for a bath, rub themselves with oil, and then scrape it off with a crescent-shaped strigil, as in Lysippus' Apoxyomenos. The Greek is not fastidiously clean; his hygiene is not so much a matter of indoor toilette as of abstemious diet and an active outdoor life. He seldom sits in closed homes, theaters, churches, or halls, rarely works in closed factories or shops; his drama, his worship, even his government, proceed under the sun; and his simple clothing, which lets the air reach every part of his body, can be thrown aside with one swing of the arm for a bout of wrestling or a bath of sunshine.

Greek dress consists essentially of two squares of cloth, loosely draped about the body, and seldom tailored to fit the individual; it varies in minor detail from city to city, but remains constant for generations. The chief garment at Athens is for men the chiton, or tunic, for women the peplos, or robe, both made o£ wool. If the weather requires it these may be covered with a mantle (himation) or cloak (chlamys), suspended like them from the shoulders, and falling freely in those natural folds that so please us in Greek statuary. In the fifth century clothing is usually white; women, rich men, and gay youths, however, go in for color, even for purple and dark red, and colored stripes and embroidered hems; and the women may bind a colored girdle about the waist. Hats are unpopular on the ground that they keep moisture from the hair and so make it prematurely gray; the head is covered only in traveling, in battle, and at work under the hot sun; women may wear colored kerchiefs or bandeaux; workers sometimes wear a cap and nothing else. Shoes are sandals, high shoes, or boots; usually of leather, black for men, colored for women. The ladies of Thebes, says Dicaearcllus, "wear low purple shoes laced so as to show the bare feet." Most children and workingmen dispense with shoes altogether; and no one bothers with stockings.

Both sexes announce or disguise their incomes with jewelry. Men wear at least one ring; Aristotle wears several. The walking sticks of the men may have knobs of silver or gold. Women wear bracelets, necklaces, diadems, earrings, brooches and chains, jeweled clasps and buckles, and sometimes jeweled bands about the ankles or the upper arms. Here, as in most mercantile cultures, luxury runs into excess among those to whom wealth is a novelty. Sparta regulates the headdress of its ladies, and Athens forbids women to take more than three dresses on a journey. Women smile at these restrictions, and, without lawyers, get around them; they know that to most men and to some women dress makes the woman; and their behavior in this matter reveals a wisdom gathered through a thousand centuries.

The Athenians of the fifth century are not exemplars of morality; the progress of the intellect has loosened many o€ them from their ethical traditions, and has turned them into almost unmoral individuals. They have a high reputation for legal justice, but they are seldom altruistic to any but their children; conscience rarely troubles them, and they never dream of loving their neighbors as themselves. Manners vary from class to class; in the dialogues of Plato life is graced with a charming courtesy, but in the comedies of Aristophanies there are no manners at all, and in public oratory personal abuse is relied upon as the very soul of eloquence; in such matters the Greeks have much to learn from the time-polished "barbarians" of Egypt or Persia or Babylon. Salutation is cordial but simple; there is no bowing, for that seems to the proud citizens a vestige of monarchy; handshaking is reserved for oaths or solemn farewells; usually the greeting is merely Chaire – "Rejoice" – followed, as elsewhere, by some brilliant remark about the weather.

Hospitality has lessened since Homeric days, for travel is a little more secure than then, and inns provide food and shelter for transients; even so it remains an outstanding virtue of the Athenians. Strangers are welcomed though without 'introduction; if they come with letters from a common friend, they receive bed and board, and sometimes parting gifts. An invited guest is always privileged to bring an uninvited guest with him. This freedom of entry gives rise in time to a class of parasites – parasitoia – a word originally applied to the clergy who ate the "corn left over" from the temple supplies. The well to do are generous givers in both public and private philanthropy; the practice as well as the word is Greek. Charity – charitas, or love – is also present; there are many institutions for the care of strangers, the sick, the poor, and the old. The government provides pensions for wounded soldiers, and brings up war orphans at the expense of the state; in the fourth century it will make payments to disabled workmen. In periods of drought, war, or other crisis, the state pays two obols (34 cents) a day to the needy, in addition to the regular fees for attendance at the Assembly, the courts, and the plays. There are the normal scandals; a speech of Lysias concerns a man who, though on public relief, has rich men for his friends, earns money by his handicraft, and rides horses for recreation.

The Greek might admit that honesty is the best policy, but he tries everything else first. The chorus in Sophocles' Philoctetes expresses the tenderest sympathy for the wounded and deserted soldier, and then takes advantage of his slumber to counsel Neoptolemus to betray him, steal his weapons, and leave him to his fate. Everyone complains that the Athenian retailers adulterate their goods, give short weight and short change despite the government inspectors, shift the fulcrum of their scales towards the measuring weights, and lie at every opportunity; the sausages, for example, are accused of being dogs. A comic dramatist calls the fishmongers "assassins"; a gentler poet calls them "burglars." The politicians are not much better; there is hardly a man in Athenian public life that is not charged with crookedness; an honest man like Aristides is considered exciting news, almost a monstrosity; even Diogenes' daytime lantern does not find another. Thucydides reports that men are more anxious to be called clever than honest, and suspect honesty of simplicity: It is an easy matter to find Greeks who will betray their country: "At no time," says Pausanias, "was Greece wanting in people afflicted with this itch for treason.' Bribery is a popular way to political advancement, criminal impunity, diplomatic accomplishments; Pericles has large sums voted to him for secret uses, presumably for lubricating international negotiations. Morality is strictly tribal; Xenophon, in a treatise on education, frankly advises lying and robbery in dealing with the enemies of one's country. The Athenian envoys at Sparta in 432 defend their empire in plain terms: "It has always been the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger . . . no one has ever allowed the cry for justice to hinder his ambition when he had a chance of gaining anything by might" – though this passage, and the supposed speech of the Athenian leaders at Melos, may be exercises of Thucydides' philosophical imagination, inflamed by the cynical discourses of certain Sophists; it would be as fair to judge the Greeks from the unconventional ethics of Gorgias, Callicles, Thrasymachus, and Thucydides as it would be to describe the modern European by the brilliant bizarreries of Machiavelli, La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche, and Stirner – not saying how fair that would be. That something of this superiority to morals is an active ingredient in the Greek character appears in the readiness with which the Spartans agree with the Athenians on these mooted paints of morals. When the Lacedaemonian Phoebidas, despite a treaty of peace, treacherously seizes neon the citadel of Thebes, and the Spartan King Agesilaus is questioned about the justice of this action, he replies: "Inquire only if it is useful; for whenever an action is useful to our country it is right." Time and again truces are violated, solemn promises are broken, envoys are slain. Perhaps, however, tile Greeks differ from ourselves not in conduct but in candor; our greater delicacy makes it offensive to us to preach what we practice.

Custom and religion among the Greeks exercise a very modest restraint upon the victor in war. It is a regular matter, even in civil wars, to sack the conquered city, to finish off the wounded, to slaughter or enslave all unransomed prisoners and all captured noncombatants, to burn down the houses, the fruit trees, and the crops, to exterminate the live stock, and to destroy the seed for future sowings.' At the opening of the Peloponnesian War the Spartans butcher as enemies all Greeks whom they find on the sea, whether allies of Athens or neutrals; at the battle of Aegospotami, which closes the war, the Spartans put to death three thousand Athenian prisoners-almost the selected best of Athens' depleted citizenry. War of some kind – of city against city, or of class against class – is a normal condition in Hellas. In this way the Greece that defeated the King of Kings turns upon itself, Greek meets Greek in a thousand battles, and in the course of a century after Marathon the most brilliant civilization in history consumes itself in a prolonged national suicide.

If we are still attracted to these reckless disputants it is because they cover the nakedness of their sins with an exhilarating vigor of enterprise and intellect. The nearness of the sea, the opportunities of trade, the freedom of economic and political life form the Athenian to an unprecedented excitability and resilience of temper and thought, a very fever of mind and sense. What a change from the Orient to Europe, from the drowsy southern regions to these intermediate states where winter is cold enough to invigorate without dulling, and summer warm enough to liberate without enfeebling body and soul! Here is faith in life and man, a zest of living never rivaled again until the Renaissance.

Out of this stimulating milieu comes courage, and an impulsiveness all the world away from the sophrosyne – self-control – which the philosophers vainly preach, or the Olympian serenity which young Winckelmann and old Goethe will foist upon the passionate and restless Greeks. A nation's ideals are usually a disguise, and are not to be taken as history. Courage and temperance – andreia, or manliness, and the meden agan, or "nothing in excess" of the Delphic inscription – are the rival mottoes of the Greek; he realizes the one frequently enough, but the other only in his peasants, philosophers, and saints. The average Athenian is a sensualist, but with a good conscience; he sees no sin in the pleasures of sense, and finds in them the readiest answer to the pessimism that darkens his meditative intervals. He loves wine, and is not ashamed to get drunk now and then; he loves women, in an almost innocently physical way, easily forgives himself for promiscuity, and does not look upon a lapse from virtue as an irremediable disaster. Nevertheless he dilutes two parts of wine with three of water, and considers repeated drunkenness an offense against good taste. Though he seldom practices moderation he sincerely worships it, and formulates more clearly than any other people in history the ideal of self-mastery.

The Athenians are too brilliant to be good, and scorn stupidity more than they abominate vice. They are not all sages, and we must not picture their woman as all lovely Nausicaas or stately Helens, or their men as combining the courage of Ajax with Nestor's wisdom; history has remembered the geniuses of Greece and has ignored her fools (except Nicias); even our age may seem great when most of us are forgotten, and only our mountain peaks have escaped the obscurity of time. Discounting the pathos of distance, the average Athenian remains as subtle as an Oriental, as enamored of novelty as an American; endlessly curious and perpetually mobile; always preaching a Parmenidean calm and always tossed upon a Heracleitean sea. No people ever had a livelier fancy, or a readier tongue. Clear thought and clear expression seem divine things to the Athenian; he has no patience with learned obfuscation, and looks upon informed and intelligent conversation as the highest sport of civilization. The secret of the exuberance of Greek life and thought lies in this, that to the Greek, man is the measure of all things. The educated Athenian is in love with reason, and seldom doubts its ability to chart the universe. The desire to know and understand is his noblest passion, and as immoderate as the rest. Later he will discover the limits of reason and human effort, and by a natural reaction will fall into a pessimism strangely discordant with the characteristic buoyancy of his spirit. Even in the century of his exuberance the thought of his profoundest men – who are not his philosophers but his dramatists – will be clouded over with the elusive brevity of delight and the patient pertinacity of death.

As inquisitiveness generates the science of Greece, so acquisitiveness establishes and dominates its economy. "Love of wealth wholly absorbs men," says Plato, with the exaggeration usual in moralists, "and never for a moment allows them to think of anything but their own private possessions; on this the soul of every citizen hangs suspended. The Athenians are competitive animals, and stimulate one another with nearly ruthless rivalry. They are shrewd, and give the Semites a close run in cunning and stratagem; they are every bit as stiff-necked as the Biblical Hebrews, as pugnacious, obstinate, and proud. They bargain virulently in buying and selling, argue every point in conversation, and, when they cannot make war upon other countries, quarrel among themselves. They are not given to sentiment, and disapprove of Euripides' tears. They are kind to animals and cruel to men: they regularly use torture upon unaccused slaves, and sleep heartily, to all appearances, after slaughtering a cityful of noncombatants. Nevertheless they are generous to the poor or the disabled; and when the Assembly learns that the granddaughter of Aristogeiton the tyrannicide is living in destitution on Lemnos, it provides funds to bring her to Athens and to give her a dowry and a husband. The oppressed and hunted of other cities find a sympathetic refuge in Athens.

In truth the Greek does not think of character in our terms. He aspires neither to the conscience of the good bourgeois, nor to the sense of honor of the aristocrat. To the Greek the best life is the fullest one, rich in health, strength, beauty, passion, means, adventure, and thought. Virtue is arete, manly – literally and originally, martial – excellence (Ares, Mars); precisely what the Romans called virtus, manliness. The Athenian ideal man is the kalokagathos, who combines beauty and justice in a. gracious art of living that frankly values ability, fame, wealth, and friends as well as virtue and humanity; as with Goethe, self-development is everything. Along with this conception goes a degree of vanity whose candor is hardly to our taste: the Greeks never tire of admiring themselves, and announce at every turn their superiority to other warriors, writers, artists, peoples. If we wish to understand the Greeks as against the Romans we must think of the French vs. the English; if we wish to feel the Spartan spirit as opposed to the Athenian we must think of the Germans vs. the French.

All the qualities of the Athenians come together to make their city-state. Here is the creation and summation of their vigor and courage, their brilliance and loquacity, their unruliness and acquisitiveness, their vanity and patriotism, their worship of beauty and freedom. They are rich in passions but poor in prejudices. Now and then they tolerate religious intolerance, not as a check upon thought but as a weapon in partisan politics, and as a bound to moral experimentation; otherwise they insist upon a degree of liberty that seems fantastically chaotic to their Oriental visitors. But because they are free, because, ultimately, every office is open to every citizen, and each is ruled and ruler in turn, they give half their lives to their state. Home is where they sleep; they live in the market place, in the Assembly, in the Council, in the courts, in the great festivals, athletic contests, and dramatic spectacles that glorify their city and its gods. They recognize the right of the state to conscript their persons and their wealth for its needs. They forgive its exactions because it gives more opportunity for human development than man has ever known before; they fight for it fiercely because it is the mother and guardian of their liberties. "Thus," says Herodotus, "did the Athenians increase in strength. And it is plain enough, not from this instance only but from many examples, that freedom is an excellent thing; since even the Athenians, who, while they continued under the rule of dictators, were not a whit more valiant than any of their neighbors, no sooner shook off the yoke than they became decidedly the first of all."

In morality, as in alphabet, measures, weights, coinage, costume, music, astronomy, and mystic cults, classic Athens seems more Oriental than European. The physical basis of love is accepted frankly by both sexes; the love philters that anxious ladies brew for negligent men have no merely Platonic aim. Premarital chastity is required of respectable women, but among unmarried men after the ephebic period there are few moral restraints upon desire. The great festivals, though religious in origin, are used as safety valves for the natural promiscuity of humanity; sexual license on such occasions is condoned in the belief that monogamy may be more easily achieved during the balance of the year. No stigma is attached in Athens to the occasional intercourse of young men with courtesans; even married men may patronize them without any greater moral penalty than a scolding at home and a slightly tarnished reputation in the city. Athens officially recognizes prostitution, and levies a tax upon its practitioners.

With a career so open to talent, harlotry becomes in Athens, as in most other cities of Greece, a well-plied profession with many specialties. The lowest order of them, the pornai, live chiefly at the Piraeus, in common brothels marked for the convenience of the public with the phallic symbol of Priapus. An obol secures admission to these houses, where the girls, so lightly clad that they are called gymnai (naked), allow their prospective purchasers to examine them like dogs in a kennel. A man may strike a bargain for any period of time, and may arrange with the madam of the house to take a girl to live with him for a week, a month, or a year; sometimes a girl is hired out in this way to two or more men, distributing her time among them according to their means.

Higher than these girls in the affection of the Athenians are the auletrides, or flute-players, who, like the geisha of Japan, assist at "stag" entertainments, provide music and gaiety, perform dances artistic or lascivious, and then, if properly induced, mingle with the guests and spend the night with them. A few old courtesans may stave off destitution by developing training schools for such flute girls, and teaching them the science of cosmetic adornment, personal transfiguration, musical entertainment, and amorous dalliance. Tradition hands down carefully from one generation of courtesans to another, like a precious heritage, the arts of inspiring love by judicious display, holding it by coy refusal, and making it pay. Nevertheless same of the auletrides, if we may take Lucian's word for it from a later age, have tender hearts, know real affection, and ruin themselves, Camille-like, for their lovers' sakes. The honest courtesan is an ancient theme hoary with the dignity of age.

The highest class of Greek courtesans is composed of the hetairai – literally, companions. Unlike the pornai, who are mostly of Oriental birth, the hetairai are usually women of the citizen class, who have fallen from the respectability or fled from the seclusion required of Athenian maids and matrons. They live independently, and entertain at their own homes the lovers whom they lure. Though they are mostly brunettes by nature, they dye their hair yellow in the belief that Athenians prefer blondes; and they distinguish themselves, apparently under legal compulsion, by wearing flowery robes. By occasional reading, or attending lectures, some of them acquire a modest education, and amuse their cultured patrons with learned conversation. Thais, Diotima, Thargelia, and Leontium, as well as Aspasia, are celebrated as philosophical disputants, and sometimes for their polished literary style. Many of them are renowned for their wit, and Athenian literature has an anthology of hetairai epigrams. Though all courtesans are denied civil rights, and are forbidden to enter any temple but that of their own goddess, Aphrodite Pandemos, a select minority of the hetairai enjoy a high standing in male society at Athens; no man is ashamed to be seen with these; philosophers contend for their favors; and an historian chronicles their history as piously as Plutarch.

In such ways a number of them achieve a certain scholastic immortality. There is Clepsydra, so named because she accepts and dismisses her lovers by the hourglass; Thargelia, who, as the Mata Hari of her time, serves the Persians as a spy by sleeping with as many as possible of the statesmen of Athens; Theoris, who consoles the old age of Sophocles, and Archippe, who succeeds her about the ninth decade of the dramatist's life; Archeanassa, who amuses Plato, and Danae and Leontium, who teach Epicurus the philosophy of pleasure; Themistonoe, who practices her art until she has lost her last tooth and her last lock of hair; and the businesslike Gnathaena, who, having spent much time in the training of her daughter, demands a thousand drachmas ($1000) as the price of the young lady's company for a night. The beauty of Phryne is the talk of fourth-century Athens, since she never appears in public except completely veiled, but, at the Fleusinian festival, and again on the feast of the Poseidonia, disrobes in the sight of all, lets down her hair, and goes to bathe in the sea. For a time she loves and inspires Praxiteles, and poses for his Aphrodites; from her, too, Apelles takes his Aphrodite Anadyomene. So rich is Phryne from her loves that she offers to rebuild the walls of Thebes ifthe Thebans will inscribe her name on the structure, which they stubbornly refuse to do. Perhaps she asks too large an honorarium from Euthias; he revenges himself by indicting her on a charge of impiety. But a member of the court is one of her clients, and Hvpercides, the orator, is her devoted lover; Hypereides defends her not only with eloquence but by opening her tunic and revealing her bosom to the court. The judges look upon her beauty, an vindicate her piety.

Lais of Corinth, says Athenaeus, "appears to have been superior in beauty to any woman that had ever been seen." As many cities as claimed Homer dispute the honor of having witnessed her birth. Sculptors and painters beg her to pose for them, but she is coy. The great Myron, in his old age, persuades her; when she disrobes he forgets his white hair and beard, and offers her all his possessions for one night; whereupon she smiles, shrugs her rounded shoulders, and leaves him statueless. The next morning, burning with readolescence, he has his hair trimmed, and his beard cut off; he puts on a scarlet robe and a golden girdle, a chain of gold around his neck and rings on all his fingers. He colors his checks with rouge, and perfumes leis garments and his flesh. He seeks out Lais, and announces that he loves her. "My poor friend," she replied, seeing through his metamorphosis, "you are asking me what I refused to your father yesterday." She lays up a great fortune, but does not refuse herself to poor but comely lovers; she restores the ugly Demosthenes to virtue by asking ten thousand drachmas for an evening, and from the well-to-do Aristippus she earns such sums as scandalize his servant; but to the penniless Diogenes she gives herself for a pittance, being pleased to have philosophers et her feet. She spends her wealth generously upon temples, public buildings, and friends, and finally returns, after the custom of her kind, to the poverty of her youth. She plies her trade patiently to the end; and when she dies she is honored with a splendid tomb as the greatest conqueror that the Greeks have ever known.

Stranger than this strange entente between prostitution and philosophy is the placid acceptance of sexual inversion. The chief rivals of the hetairai are the boys of Athens; and the courtesans, scandalized to the very depths of their pockets, never tire of denouncing the immorality of homosexual love. Merchants import handsome lads to be sold to the highest bidder, who will use them first as concubines and later as slaves;' and only a negligible minority of males think it amiss that the effeminate young aristocrats of the city should arouse and assuage the ardor of aging men. In this matter of genders Sparta is as careless as Athens; when Alcman wishes to compliment some girls he calls them his "female boy-friends." Athenian law disfranchises those who receive homosexual attentions, but public opinion tolerates the practice humorously; in Sparta and Crete no stigma of any kind is attached to it;" in Thebes it is accepted as a valuable source of military, organization and bravery. The greatest heroes in the fond remembrance of Athens are Harmodius and Aristogeiton, tyrannicides and lovers; the most popular in Athens in his day is Alcibiades, who boasts of the men who love him; as late as Aristotle "Greek lovers" plight their troth at the tomb of Iolaus, comrade of Heracles; and Aristippus describes Xenophon, leader of armies and hardheaded man of the world, as infatuated with young Cleinias. The attachment of a man to a boy, or of a boy to a boy, shows in Greece all the symptoms of romantic love-passion, piety, ecstasy, jealousy, serenading, brooding, moaning, and sleeplessness. When Plato, in the Phaedrus, talks of human love, he means homosexual love; and the disputants in his Symposium agree on one point – that love between man and man is nobler and more spiritual than love between man and woman. A similar inversion appears among the women, occasionally among the finest, as in Sappho, frequently among the courtesans; the auletrides love one another more passionately than they love their patrons, and the pornaia are hothouses of Lesbian romance.

How shall we explain the popularity of this perversion in Greece? Aristotle attributes it to fear of overpopulation, and this may account for part of the phenomenon; but there is obviously a connection between the prevalence of both homosexuality and prostitution in Athens, and the seclusion of women. After the age of six the boys of Periclean Athens are taken from the gynaeceum in which respectable women spend their lives, and are brought up chiefly in companionship with other boys, or men; little opportunity is given them, in their formative and almost neutral period, to know the attractiveness of the tender sex. The life of the common mess hall in Sparta, of the agora, gymnasium,and palaestra in Athens, and the career of the ephebos, show the youth only the male form; even art does not announce the physical beauty of woman until Praxiteles. In married life the men seldom find mental companionship at home; the rarity of education among women creates a gulf between the sexes, and men seek elsewhere the charms that they have not permitted their wives to acquire. To the Athenian citizen his home is not a castle but a dormitory; from morning to evening, in a great number of cases, he lives in the city, and rarely has social contacts with respectable women other than his wife and daughters. Greek society is unisexual, and misses the disturbance, grace, and stimulation that the spirit and charm of women will give to Renaissance Italy and Enlightenment France.

Romantic love appears among the Greeks, but seldom as the cause of marriage. We find little of it in Homer, where Agamemnon and Achilles frankly think of Chryseis and Briseis, even of the discouraging Cassandra, in terms of physical desire, Nausicaa, however, is a warning against too broad a generalization, and legends as old as Homer tell of Heracles and Iola, of Orpheus and Eurydice. The lyric poets, again, talk abundantly of love, commonly in the sense of amorous appetite; stories like that which Stesichorus tells of a maiden dying for love' are exceptional; but when Theano, wife of Pythagoras, speaks of love as "the sickness of a longing soul,"' we feel the authentic note of romantic rut. As refinement grows, and superimposes poetry upon heat, the tender sentiment becomes more frequent; and the increasing delay that civilization places between desire and fulfillment gives imagination leisure to embellish the object of hope. Aeschylus is still Homeric in his treatment of sex; but in Sophocles we hear of "Love" who "rules at will the gods," and in Euripides many a passage proclaims Eros' power. The later dramatists often describe a youth desperately enamored of a girl. Aristotle suggests the real quality of romantic adoration when he remarks that "lovers look at the eyes of tile beloved, in which modesty dwells."

Such affairs in classic Greece lead rather to premarital relations than to matrimony. The Greeks consider romantic love to be a form of "possession" or madness, and would smile at anyone who should propose it as a fit guide in the choice of a marriage mate. Normally marriage is arranged by the parents as in always classic France, or by professional matchmakers, with an eye not to love but to dowries. The father is expected to provide for his daughter a marriage portion of money, clothing, jewelry, and perhaps slaves. This remains to its end the property of the wife, and reverts to her in case of a separation from her husband-a consideration that discourages divorce by the male. Without a dowry a girl has little chance o£ marriage; therefore where the father cannot give it to her the relatives combine to provide it. Marriage by purchase, so frequent in Homeric days, has by this means been inverted in Periclean Greece: in effect, as Euripides' Medea complains, the woman has to buy her master. The Greek, then, marries not for love, nor because he enjoys matrimony (for he prates endlessly about its tribulations), but to continue himself and the state through a wife suitably dowered, and children who will ward off the evil fate of an untended soul. Even with these inducements he avoids wedlock as long as he can. The letter of the law forbids him to remain single, but the law is not always enforced in Periclean days; and after him the number of bachelors mounts until it becomes one of the basic problems of Athens. There are so many ways of being amused in Greece. Those men who yield marry late, usually near thirty, and then insist upon brides not much older than fifteen. "To mate a youth with a young wife is ill," says a character in Euripides; "for a man's strength endures, beauty quickly leaves the woman's form."

A choice having been made, and the dowry agreed upon, a solemn betrothal takes place in the home of the girl's father; there must be witnesses, but her own presence is not necessary. Without such a formal betrothal no union is valid in Athenian law; it is considered to be the first act in the complex rite of marriage. The second act, which follows in a few days, is a feast in the house of the girl. Before coming to it the bride and bridegroom, in their separate homes, bathe in ceremonial purification. At the feast the men of both families sit on one side of the room, the women on the other; a wedding cake is eaten, and much wine is drunk. Then the bridegroom escorts his veiled and white-robed bride – whose face he may not yet have seen – into a carriage, and takes her to his father's dwelling amid a procession of friends and flute-playing girls, who light the way with torches and raise the hymeneal chant. Arrived, he carries the girl over the threshold, as if in semblance of capture. The parents of the youth greet the girl, and receive her with religious ceremony into the circle of the family and the worship of its gods; no priest, however, takes any part in the ritual. The guests then escort the couple to their room with an epithalamion, or marriage-chamber song, and linger boisterously at the door until the bridegroom announces to them that the marriage has been consummated.

Besides his wife a man may take a concubine. "We have courtesans for the sake of pleasure," says Demosthenes, "concubines for the daily health of our bodies, and wives to bear us lawful offspring and be the faithful guardians of our homes": here in one startling sentence is the Greek view of woman in the classic age. Draco's laws permit concubinage; and after the Sicilian expedition of 415, when the roll of citizens has been depleted by war and many girls cannot find husbands, the law explicitly allows double marriages; Socrates and Euripides are among those who assume this patriotic obligation. The wife usually accepts concubinage with Oriental patience, knowing that the "second wife," when her charms wear off, will become in effect a household slave, and that only the offspring of the first wife are accounted legitimate. Adultery leads to divorce only when committed by the wife; the husband in such case is spoken of as "carrying horns" (keroesses), and custom requires him to send his wife away. The law makes adultery by woman, or by a man with a married woman, punishable with death, but the Greeks are too lenient to concupiscence to enforce this statute. The injured husband is usually left to deal with the adulterer as he will and can – sometimes killing him in flagrante delicto, sometimes sending a slave to beat him, sometimes contenting himself with a money indemnity.

For the man divorce is simple; he may dismiss his wife at any time, without stating the cause. Barrenness is accepted as sufficient reason for divorcing a wife, since the purpose of marriage is to have children. If the man is sterile, law permits, and public opinion recommends, the reinforcement of the husband by a relative; the child born of such a union is considered to be the son of the husband, and must tend his departed soul. The wife may not at will leave her husband, but she may ask the archons for a divorce on the ground of the cruelty or excesses of her mate.' Divorce is also allowed by mutual consent, usually expressed in a formal declaration to tile archon. In case of separation, even where the husband has been guilty of adultery, the children remain with the man. All in all, in the matter of sex relations, Athenian custom and law are thoroughly man-made, and represent an Oriental retrogression from the society of Egypt, Crete, and the Homeric Age.

As surprising as anything else in this civilization is the fact that it is brilliant without the aid or stimulus of women. With their help the Heroic Age achieved splendor, the age of the dictators a lyric radiance; then, almost overnight, married women vanish from the history of the Greeks, as if to confute the supposed correlation between the level of civilization and the status of woman. In Herodotus woman is everywhere; in Thucydides she is nowhere to be seen. From Semonides of Amorgos to Lucian, Greek literature is offensively repetitious about the faults of women; and towards the close of it even tile kindly Plutarch repeats Thucydides: "The name of a decent woman, like her person, should be shut up in the house."

This seclusion of woman does not exist among the Dorians; presumably it comes from the Near East to Ionic, and from Ionic to Attica; it is part of the tradition of Asia. Perhaps the disappearance of inheritance through the mother, the rise of the middle classes, and the enthronement of the commercial view of life enter into the change: men come to judge women in terms of utility, and find them especially useful in the home. The Oriental nature of Greek marriage goes with this Attic purdah; the bride is cut off from her kin, goes to live almost as a menial in another home, and worships other gods. She cannot make contracts, or incur debts beyond a trifling sum; she cannot bring actions at law; and Solon legislates that anything done under the influence of woman shall have no validity at law. When her husband dies she does not inherit his property. Even physiological error enters into her legal subjection; for just as primitive ignorance of the male role in reproduction tended to exalt woman, so the male is exalted by the theory popular in classic Greece that the generative power belongs only to man, the woman being merely the carrier and nurse of the child' The older age of the man contributes to the subordination of the wife; he is twice her years when he marries her, and can in some degree mold her mind to his own philosophy. Doubtless the male knows too well the license allowed to his sex in Athens to risk his wife or daughter at large; he chooses to be free at the cost of her seclusion. She may, if properly veiled and attended, visit her relatives or intimates, and may take part in the religious celebrations, including attendance at the plays; but for the rest she is expected to stay at home, and not allow herself to be seen at a window. Most of her life is spent in the women's quarters at the rear of the house; no male visitor is ever admitted there, nor does she appear when men visit her husband.

In the home she is honored and obeyed in everything that does not contravene the patriarchal authority of her mate. She keeps the house, or superintends its management; she cooks the meals, cards and spins the wool, makes the clothing and bedding for the family. Her education is almost confined to household arts, for the Athenian believes with Euripides that a woman is handicapped by intellect. The result is that the respectable women of Athens are more modest, more "charming" to men, than their like in Sparta, but less interesting and mature, incapable of being comrades to husbands whose minds have been filled and sharpened by a free and varied life. The women of sixth-century Greece contributed significantly to Greek literature; the women of Periclean Athens contribute nothing.

Toward the end of the period a movement arises for the emancipation of woman. Euripides defends the sex with brave speeches and timid innuendoes; Aristophanes makes fun of them with boisterous indecency. The women go to the heart of the matter and begin to compete with the hetairai in making themselves as attractive as the progress of chemistry will permit. "What sensible thing are we women capable of doing?" ask Cleonica in Aristophanes' Lysistrata. "We do nothing but sit around wit our paint and lipstick and transparent gowns, and all the rest of it." From 411 onward female roles become more prominent in Athenian drama, and reveal the growing escape of women from the solitude to which they have been confined.

Through it all the real influence of woman over man continues, making her subjection largely unreal. The greater eagerness of the male gives woman an advantage in Greece as elsewhere, "Sir," says Samuel Johnson, "nature has given woman so much power that the law cannot afford to give her more." Sometimes this natural sovereignty is enhanced by a substantial dowry, or an industrious tongue, or uxorious affection; more often it is the result of beauty, or the bearing and rearing of fine children, or the slow fusion of souls in the crucible' of a common experience and task. An age that can portray such gentle characters as Antigone, Alcestis, Iphigenia, and Andromache, and such heroines as Hecuba, Cassandra, and Medea, could not be unaware of the highest and the deepest in woman. The average Athenian loves his wife, and will not always try to conceal it; the funeral stelae reveal surprisingly the tenderness of mate for mate, and of parents for children, in the intimacy of the home. The Greek Anthology is vivid with erotic verse, but it contains also many a touching epigram to a beloved comrade. "In this stone," says one epitaph, "Marathonis laid Nicopolis, and bedewed the marble chest with tears. But it was of no avail. What profit Math a man whose wife is gone, and who is left solitary on earth?"

The Greek family, like the Indo-European household in general, is composed of the father, the mother, sometimes a "second wife," their unmarried daughters, their sons, their slaves, and their sons' wives and children and slaves. It remains to the end the strongest institution in Greek civilization, for bath in agriculture and in industry it is the unit and instrument of economic production. The power of the father in Attica is extensive, but much narrower than in Rome. He can expose the newborn child, sell the labor of his minor sans and unwedded daughters, give his daughters in marriage, and, under certain conditions, appoint another husband for his widow. But he cannot, in Athenian law, sell the persons of his children; and each son, on marrying, escapes from parental authority, sets up his own home, and becomes an independent member of the gene.

The Greek house is unpretentious. The exterior is seldom more than a stout blank wall with a narrow doorway, dumb witnesses to the insecurity of Greek life. The material is sometimes stucco, usually sun-baked brick. In the city the houses are crowded together in narrow streets; often they rise to two stories, occasionally they are tenements housing several families; but nearly every citizen owns an individual home. Dwellings in Athens are small till Alcibiades sets a fashion of magnificence; there is a democratic taboo, reinforced by aristocratic precaution, against display; and the Athenian, living for the most part in the open air, does not endow the home with the significance and affection that it receives in colder zones. A rich house may have a colonnaded porch facing the street, but this is highly exceptional. Windows are a luxury, and are confined to the upper story; they have no panes, but may be closed with shutters, or screened with lattices against the sun. The entrance door is ordinarily made of double leaves, turning upon vertical pivots running into the threshold and the lintel. On the door of many well-to-do houses is a metal knocker, often in the form of a ring in a lion's mouth. The entrance hallway, except in the poorer dwellings, leads into an wile, or uncovered court, commonly paved with stones. Around the court may run a columned portico; in the center may be an altar, or a cistern, or both, perhaps also adorned with columns, and paved with a mosaic floor. Light and air come to the house chiefly through this court, for upon it open nearly all the rooms; to pass from one room to another it is usually necessary to enter the portico or the court. In the shade and privacy of the court and the portico much of the family's life is lived, and much of its work is done.

Gardens are rare in the city, and are confined to small areas in the court or behind the house. Country- gardens are more spacious and numerous; but the scarcity of rain in summer, and the cost of irrigation, make gardens a luxury in Attica. The average Greek has no Rousseauan sensitivity to nature; his mountains are still too troublesome to be beautiful, though his poets, despite its dangers, intone many paeans to the sea. He is not sentimental about nature, so much as animistically imaginative; he peoples the woods and streams of his country with gods and sprites, and thinks of nature as not a landscape but a Valhalla; he names his mountains and rivers from the divinities that inhabit them; and instead of painting nature directly he draws or carves symbolic images of the deities that in his poetic theology give it life. Not till Alexander's armies bring back Persian ways and gold will the Greek build himself a pleasure garden or "paradise." Nevertheless, flowers are loved in Greece as much as anywhere, and gardens and florists supply them all the year round. Flower girls peddle roses, violets, hyacinths, narcissi, irises, myrtles, lilacs, crocuses, a anemones from house to house. Women wear flowers in their hair, dandies wear them behind the ear; and on festal occasions both sexes may come for with flower garlands, lei-like, around the neck.

The interior of the house is simple. Among the poor the floors are of hardened earth; as income rises this basis may be covered with plaster, or paved with flat stones or with small round stones set in cement, as in the Near East immemorially; and all this may he covered with reed mats or rugs. The brick walls are plastered and whitewashed. Heating, which is needed for only three months of the year, is furnished by a brazier whose smoke has to find a way out through the door to the court. Decoration is minimal; but at the end of the fifth century the homes of the rich may have pillared halls, walls paneled with marble or painted imitations of it, mural paintings and tapestries, and ceiling arabesques. Furniture is scanty in the average home – some chairs, some chest a few tables, a bed. Cushions take the place of upholstery on chairs, but the seats of the rich may be carefully carved, and inlaid with silver, tortoise, or ivory. Chests serve as both closets and chairs. Tables are small, and usually three-legged, whence their name trapezai; they are brought in and removed with the food, and are hardly used for other purposes; writing is done upon the knee. Couches and beds are favorite objects for adornment, being often inlaid or elaborately carved. Leather thongs stretched across the bedstead serve as spring; there are mattresses and pillows, and embroidered covers, and commonly a raised headrest. Lamps may be hung from the ceiling, or placed upon stands, or take the form of torches elegantly wrought.

The kitchen is equipped with a great variety of iron, bronze, and earthen ware vessels; glass is a rare luxury, not made in Greece. Cooking is done over an open fire; stoves are a Hellenistic innovation. Athenian meals are simple like the Spartan and unlike the Boeotian, Corinthian, or Sicilian; but when honored guests are expected it is customary to engage a professional cook, who is always male. Cooking is a highly developed art, with many texts and heroes; some Greek cooks are as widely known as the latest victor in the Olympic games. To eat alone is considered barbarous, and table manners are looked upon as an index of a civilization's development. Women and boys sit at meal before small tables; men recline on couches, two on each. The family eats together when alone; if male guests come, the women of the family retire to the gvnaeceum. Attendants remove the sandals or wash the feet of the guest before the latter recline, and offer them water to cleanse their hands; some times they anoint the heads of the guests with fragrant oils. There are no knives or forks, but there are spoons; solid food is eaten with the fingers. During the meal the fingers are cleaned with scraps or crumbs of bread; after it with water. Before dessert the attendants fill the cup of each guest from a krater, or mixing bowl, in which wine has been diluted with water. Plates are of earthenware; silver plate appears as the fifth century ends. Epicures grow in number in the fourth century; one Pithvllus has coverings made for his tongue and fingers so that he may eat food as hot as he likes. There are a few vegetarians, whose guests make the usual jokes and complaints; one diner flees from a vegetarian feast for fear that he swill be offered hay for dessert.

Drinking is as important as eating. After the deipnon, or dinner, comes the symposion, or drinking together. At Sparta as well as at Athens there are drinking clubs whose members become so attached to one another that such organizations become potent political instruments. The procedure at banquets is complicated, and philosophers like Xenocrates and Aristotle think it desirable to set down laws for them. The floor, upon which uneaten material has been thrown, is swept clean after the meal; perfumes are passed around, and much wine. The guests may then dance, not in pairs or with the other sex (for usually only males are invited), but in groups; or they may play games like kottabos [This consisted in throwing liquid from a cup so that it would strike some small object placed at a distance.]; or they may match poems, witticisms, or riddles, or watch professional performers like the female acrobat in Xenophon's Symposium, who tosses twelve hoops at once and then dances somersaults through a hoop "set all around with upright swords." Flute girls may appear, play, sing, dance, and love as arranged for. Educated Athenians prefer, now and then, a symposium of conversation, conducted in an orderly manner by a symposiarch chosen by a throw of the dice to act as chairman. The guests take care not to break up the talk into small groups, which usually means small talk; they keep the conversation general, and listen, as courteously as their vivacity will permit, to each man in turn. So elegant a discourse as that which Plato offers us is doubtless the product of his brilliant imagination; but probably Athens has known dialogues as lively as his, perhaps profounder; and in any case it is Athenian society that suggests and provides the background. In that exciting atmosphere of free wits the Athenian mind is formed.

Old age is feared and mourned beyond wont by the life-loving Greeks. Even here, however, it has its consolations; for as the used-up body is returned like warn currency to the mint, it has the solace of seeing, before it is consumed, the fresh new, life through which it cheats mortality. It is true that Greek history reveals cases of selfish carelessness or coarse insolence towards the old. Athenian society, commercial, individualistic, and innovating, tends to be unkind to old age; respect for years goes with a religious and conservative society like Sparta's, while democracy, loosening all bonds with freedom, puts the accent on youth, and favors the new against the old. Athenian history offers several instances of children taking over their parents' Property without proof of imbecility in the elders; but Sophocles rescues himself from such an action simply by reading to the court some passages from his latest play. Athenian law commands that sons shall support their infirm or aged parents; and public opinion, which is always more fearful than the law, enjoins modesty and respect in the behavior of the young towards the old. Plato takes it for granted that a well-bred youth will be silent in the presence of his seniors unless he is asked to speak. There are in the literature many pictures of modest adolescence, as in the earlier dialogues of Plato or the Symposium of Xenophon; and there are touching stories of filil devotion, like that of Orestes to Agamemnon, and of Antigone to Oedipus.

When death comes, every precaution is taken that the soul of the departed shall be spared all avoidable suffering. The body must be buried or burned; else the soul will wander restlessly about the world, and will revenge itself upon its negligent posterity; it may, far example, reappear as a ghost, and bring disease or disaster to plants and men. Cremation is more popular in the Heroic Age, burial in the classic. Burial was Mycenaean, and will survive into Christianity; cremation apparently entered Greece with the Achaeans and the Dorians, whose nomad habits made impossible the proper care of graves. One or the other is so obligatory among Athenians that the victorious generals at Arginusae are put to death for allowing a severe storm to deter them from recovering and burying their dead.

Greek burial customs carry on old ways into the future. The corpse is bathed, anointed with perfumes, crowned with flowers, and dressed in the finest garments that the family can afford. An obol is placed between the teeth to pay Charon, the mythical boatman who ferries the dead across the Styx to Hades. [It was the custom among the Greeks to carry small change in the mouth.] The body is w placed in a coffin of pottery or wood; to "have one foot in the coffin" is already a proverb in Greece. Mourning is elaborate: black garments are worn, and the hair, or part of it, is shorn as a gift for the dead. On the third day the corpse is carried on a bier in procession through the streets, while the women weep and beat their breasts; professional waders or dirge singers may be hired for the occasion. Upon the sad of the covered grave wine is poured to slake the dead soul's thirst, and animals may be sacrificed for its food, The mourners lay wreaths of flowers or cypress upon the tomb, and then return home to the funeral feast. Since the departed soul is believed to be present at this feast, sacred custom requires that "of the dead nothing but good" shall be spoken; this is the source of an ancient saw, and perhaps of the unfailing lauds of our epitaphs. Periodically the children visit the graves of their ancestors, and offer them food and drink. After the battle of Plataea, where the Greeks of many cities have fallen, the Plataeans pledge themselves to provide for all the dead an annual repast; and six centuries later, in the days of Plutarch, this promise will still be performed.