Hesiod, and Theognis/Chapter 8
CHAPTER II.
THEOGNIS IN OPPOSITION.
From the indistinctness of our knowledge as to the sequence of events in Megara, it is impossible to fix the point of time when Theognis began to be a political plotter; but as, during the whole of his mature life, his party was in opposition, it will be enough to trace the adverse influence of the dominant democracy upon his career till it terminated in exile. We have seen that he was a member of a club composed of exclusive and aristocratic members, meeting ostensibly for feasting and good-fellowship, but really, as their designation "the good"—in a sense already explained—clearly indicated, designed and pledged to cherish the traditions of a constitution to which they were devoted, and which for the time being was suffering eclipse.
Of this club a certain Simonides was president, one Onomacritus a boon-companion, and Cyrnus, to whom are addressed some two-thirds of the extant verses of Theognis a younger member, of whom, politically, the greatest things were expected. Though its soirees seem to have been often noisy and Bacchanalian, we must suppose the Aristocratic Club at Megara to have been as busy in contemporary politics as the "Carlton" or the "Reform" in our general elections; and there are tokens that Theognis was a sleepless member of the Committee, although some of his confrères, of whom little more than the names survive, cared more for club-life than club-politics. There was one notable exception. In spite of the waywardness of youth, and the fickleness characteristic of one so petted and caressed by his friends, Cyrnus must have lent his ears and hands to various schemes of Theognis for upsetting the democracy, and restoring the ascendancy of the "wise and good." At times it is plain that Cyrnus considered himself to have a ground of offence against Theognis; and there are verses of the latter which bespeak recrimination and open rupture, though of course the poet compares himself to unalloyed gold, and considers his good faith stainless. The elder of the pair was probably tetchy and jealous, the younger changeable and volatile; but there is certainly no reason for supposing that Cyrnus's transference of his friendship to some other political chief resulted in either party-success or increase of personal distinction, for his name survives only in the elegiacs of Theognis, as indeed that poet has prophesied it would, in a fragment the key to which Hookham Frere finds in a comparison of bardic celebration with the glory resulting from an Olympic victory:—
Are borne triumphant on the wings I gave,
(The swift and mighty wings, Music and Verse).
Your name in easy numbers smooth and terse
Is wafted o'er the world; and heard among
The banquetings and feasts, chaunted and sung,
Heard and admired: the modulated air
Of flutes, and voices of the young and fair
Recite it, and to future times shall tell;
When, closed within the dark sepulchral cell,
Your form shall moulder, and your empty ghost
Wander along the dreary Stygian coast.
Yet shall your memory flourish green and young,
Recorded and revived on every tongue,
In continents and islands, every place
That owns the language of the Grecian race.
No purchased prowess of a racing steed,
But the triumphant Muse, with airy speed,
Shall bear it wide, and far, o'er land and main,
A glorious and imperishable strain;
A mighty prize gratuitously won,
Fixed as the earth, immortal as the sun."—(F.)
But, to catch the thread of Theognis's story, we must go back to earlier verses than these, addressed to the young noble whom he regarded with, a pure and almost paternal regard—the growth, it may be, in the first instance of kindred political views. The verses of Theognis which refer to the second period of his life begin with a caution to Cyrnus to keep his strains as much a secret as the fame of his poetry will allow, and evince the same sensitiveness to public opinion as so many other of his remains. He cannot gain and keep, he regrets to own, the goodwill of his fellow-citizens, any more than Zeus can please all parties, whilst—
"Some call for rainy weather, some for dry."
What the advice was which required such a seal of secrecy begins to appear shortly, in a fragment which presages a revolution, in which Cyrnus is looked-to to play a leader's part. It is interesting as a picture of the state of things which one revolution had brought about, and for which Theognis was hatching a panacea in another. Slightly altered, to meet the political sense of the "good" and "bad," the "better-most" and the "worse" in Megarian parlance, the following extract from Mr Frere is a faithful transcript:—
Our common people are no more the same;
They that in skins and hides were rudely dressed,
Nor dreamed of law, nor sought to be redressed
By rules of right, but, in the days of old,
Without the walls, like deer, their place did hold,
Are now the dominant class, and we, the rest,
Their betters nominally, once the best,
Degenerate, debased, timid, and mean;
Who can endure to witness such a scene?
Their easy courtesies, the ready smile
Prompt to deride, to flatter, to beguile!
Their utter disregard of right or wrong,
Of truth or honour! Out of such a throng
Never imagine you can choose a just
Or steady friend, or faithful to his trust.
But change your habits! let them go their way!
Be condescending, affable, and gay!
Adopt with every man the style and tone,
Most courteous, most congenial with his own!
But in your secret counsels keep aloof
From feeble paltry souls, that at the proof
Of danger and distress are sure to fail,
For whose salvation nothing can avail."—(F.)
The last lines assuredly betoken the brewing of a conspiracy; but the poet goes on to lament a state of things where a generation of spiritless nobles replaces an ancestry remarkable for spirit and magnanimity. Though a government by an aristocracy of caste, if of this latter calibre, could not be upset, he has evident misgivings in reference to the present leaders of the party, whose pride he likens to that which ruined the centaurs, destroyed "Smyrna the rich and Colophon the great," and made "Magnesian ills"—in reference to the punishment of the oppressive pride of the Magnesians by the Ephesians at the river Mæander—a by-word and a proverb in the verse of Archilochus, as well as of Theognis. In such a posture of affairs our poet professes an intention to hold aloof from pronounced politics and party—
Nor with the proud and arbitrary few:"—(F.)
just as elsewhere he advises Cyrnus to do, in a couplet which may be translated—
But 'twixt both sides, as I, the mid-way take."—(D.)
He was old enough to foresee the danger of reprisals, and, from policy, counselled younger blood to abstain from injustice and rapine, when the tide turned,—
Nor trample on the bounds of property."—(F.)
but he soon found that his neutrality only procured abuse of both friends and foes; a discovery which he expresses thus:—
Do well or ill, they hold me not their friend.
From base and noble blame is still my fate,
Though fools may blame, who cannot imitate."—(D.)
It was hard, he thought, that his friends should look coolly upon him, if, with a view to the wellbeing of his party, he gave no offence to the opposite faction,—if, as he puts it,
As of hid rocks at sea the pilots steer."—(D.)
And he is almost querulous in his sensibility to public opinion, when he sings,—
From time to time encounter praise or blame:
The vulgar pass unheeded: none escape
Scandal or insult in some form or shape.
Most fortunate are those, alive or dead,
Of whom the least is thought, the least is said."—(F.)
It is as if he administered to himself the comfort which Adam gives Orlando—
Their graces serve them but as enemies?
No more do yours; your virtues, gentle master,
Are sanctified and holy traitors to you."
—'As you like it,' II. iii.
But a candid study of the character of Theognis induces the impression that his neutrality was only fitful or temporary. A great deal of his counsel to his friend exhibits him in the light of a politic watcher of events, at one time deprecating what at another he advocated. Who would recognise the champion of the "wise and good" and of their policy, pure and simple, in these verses, breathing a spirit of progress and expediency?—
Idle and old abuses to defend.
Take heed! the very measures that you press,
May bring repentance with their own success."—(F.)
There is also an inconsistency to be accounted for doubtless upon politic grounds, in the discrepant advice which he gives Cyrnus as to the friend to be chosen in the crisis then imminent. At one time he is all for "determined hearty partisans," and deprecates association with reckless associates, as well as with fair-weather friends:—
Avoid him, Cyrnus, as a treacherous haven.
Those friends and hearty comrades, as you think,
Ready to join you, when you feast or drink,
Those easy friends from difficulty shrink."—(F.)
But anon he is found subscribing to the principle that "no man is wholly bad or wholly good," and recommending his friend to conciliate, as we say, Tom, Dick, and Harry, so as to be "all things to all men."
His party views, his temper, and his plan;
Strive to avoid offence, study to please
Like the sagacious inmate of the seas,[1]
That an accommodating colour brings,
Conforming to the rock to which he clings:
With every change of place changing his hue;
The model for a statesman such as you."—(F.)
Perhaps the clue to this riddle is, that circumstances about this time drove Theognis into a more pronounced course,—as men get desperate when they lose those possessions which, whilst intact, justify them in being choice, and conservative, and exclusive. Either in a fresh political revolution and a new partition of the lands of the republic, or, as Mr Grote thinks, in a movement in favour of a single-headed despot accomplished by some of Theognis's own party, who were sick of the rule of the "bad rich," he lost his estate whilst absent on an unfortunate voyage. Thenceforth he is a conspirator at work to recover his confiscated lands by a counter-revolution: thenceforth his verses are a mixture of schemes for revenge, of murmurs against Providence, and of suspicion of the comrades whose partisanship he hoped might yet reinstate the old possessors of property. The two or three fragments which refer more or less directly to this loss may be given together. Here is one which speaks to the extent and nature of it:—
Has saved a remnant: all the rest is gone
To ruin and the dogs: the powers divine
I murmur not against them, nor repine:
Mere human violence, rapine, and stealth
Have brought me down to poverty from wealth."—(F.)
In another he invokes the help of Zeus in requiting his friends and foes according to their deserts, whilst he describes himself as one who—
That scarce escaping, trembling and half drowned,
Crosses a gully, swelled with wintry rain,
Has crept ashore in feebleness and pain."—(F.)
The bitterness of his feelings at the 'wrong' he has suffered is intensified, in the sequel of this fragment, into the expression of a wish "one day to drink the very blood" of them that have done it. But perhaps the most touching and specific allusion to his spoliation is where the return of spring—to send another's plough over his ancestral fields—brings up to his remembrance the change in his fortunes:—
That warns the ploughman to his task again,
Strikes to my heart a melancholy strain—
When all is lost, and my paternal lands
Are tilled for other lords with other hands,
Since that disastrous wretched voyage brought
Riches and lands and everything to nought."—(F.)
A kindred feeling of pain breathes in another passage à propos of autumn and its harvest-homes. And this pain he seeks to allay sometimes by reminding himself that womanish repinings will but gratify his foes, and at other times by plans for setting Providence to rights. Now he admits that patience is the only cure, and that, if impatient,—
Controls the froward, weak children of man."
Now again, he seems to think sullen resistance is a better policy; and in another curious musing he argues against the justice of visiting the sins of the fathers on the children:—
A person of an honourable mind,
Religiously devout, faithful, and kind,
Is doomed to pay the lamentable score
Of guilt accumulated long before.
••••••••
Quite undeservedly doomed to atone,
In other times, for actions not his own."—(F.)
In the midst of these conflicting emotions it is pleasant to find that he can extend a welcome out of the remnant of his fortunes to such hereditary friends as one Clearistus, who has come across the sea to visit him; and it is consistent with his early habits that he should try the effect of drowning care in the bowl, though he is forced to admit that this factitious oblivion soon gives place to bitter retrospects, and equally bitter prospects.
We must not however suppose that Theognis and his fellow-sufferers brooded altogether passively over their wrongs. His famous political verses, likening the state to a ship in a storm, betray a weakness in the ruling powers, eminently provocative of the émeute or insurrection which was to follow:—
With all the crew raging in mutiny!
No duty followed, none to reef a sail,
To work the vessel, or to pump or bale:
All is abandoned, and without a check
The mighty sea comes sweeping o'er the deck.
Our steersman, hitherto so bold and steady,
Active and able, is deposed already.
No discipline, no sense of order felt,
The daily messes are unduly dealt.
The goods are plundered, those that ought to keep
Strict watch are idly skulking, or asleep;
All that is left of order or command
Committed wholly to the basest hand.
In such a case, my friend, I needs must think
It were no marvel though the vessel sink.
This riddle to my worthy friends I tell,
But a shrewd knave will understand it well!"—(F.)
It is easy to discern in the last couplet a hint to his partisans to take advantage of this posture of affairs, and the fragments which serve as a context revert to the drowning state, discuss who is staunch and what is rotten in it, and imply generally that the sole reason for not striking is distrust of the number and fitness of the tools:—
A single vessel could embark the whole!
So few there are: the noble manly minds,
Faithful and firm, the men that honour binds;
Impregnable to danger and to pain
And low seduction in the shape of gain."—(F.)
But the time comes when such a chosen few have to be resorted to, as a last resource, in preference to the ruin certain to overtake them if, after their plots have been divulged, they sit still and await it. There is extant a passage of some length, which Mr Frere ingeniously conceives to have been the heads of Theognis's speech to the conspirators. Its conclusion represents the oath of the malcontents, a formula pledging assistance to friends and requital to foes to the very uttermost. It breathes the courage of desperation, but does not hold out a prospect of success which could justify the resort to action. The precise nature of what followed we know not. An elegiac and subjective poet like Theognis is readier to moralise than to describe. The outbreak may have had a gleam of success, or may have been crushed at the beginning by the foresight of its opponents, or the despair and faint heart of its promoters. It seems quite clear, however, that, perhaps by the aid of an armed force from some democratic state, most likely Corinth, the insurrection is beaten to its last breathing-place. Here is a fragment which vividly pictures the hurried resolve of the party of Cyrnus and Theognis to abandon their country and ill-starred enterprise:—
Announces danger from the mountain's height!
Bridle your horses and prepare to fly;
The final crisis of our fate is nigh.
A momentary pause, a narrow space,
Detains them; but the foes approach apace!
We must abide what fortune has decreed,
And hope that Heaven will help us at our need.
Make your resolve! At home your means were great;
Abroad you will retain a poor estate;
Unostentatious, indigent, and scant,
Yet live secure, at least from present want."—(F.)
Such, then, was the issue of all our poet's plotting and club-intrigues, his poetic exhortations, and his hopes of a saviour in Cyrnus. Not only did he fail of the aggrandisement of his party and the recovery of his estate: he had henceforth also to realise the miseries of exile.
- ↑ The creature referred to is the Sea-Polypus—Sepia Octopodia of Linnæus—which is referred to in Hesiod's 'Works and Days' (524) under the epithet of "the boneless."