The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene, Vol. 1

INTRODUCTION

so that I may place the facts and, if possible, some of the causes before the reader. We are so accustomed to thinking of countries as large political entities whose populations are counted by the tens of millions that it is difficult even for the most imaginative of us today to grasp the outlook on life of a people for whom the city—a group of perhaps only a scant ten or twenty thousand citizens, plus their slaves and retainersPlato (Laws, p. 737 E) places the ideal number of citizen landholders at 5,040. Beloch estimates the population of Athens (432 BC) at 30,000 citizens, male and female of all ages, 20,000 to 25,000 metics (resident aliens), and 60,000 slaves.—was an autonomous unit. This unit could, on its own, decide for peace or war, and to its citizens, other Greek cities must have appeared as countless as the leaves of the trees to which the Ionian poet Mimnermus likened the generations of man.Mimnermus, fragment 2 (Bergk).

Scattered all through the country we call Greece today—through Asia Minor, the islands of the Aegean, and the coasts of Italy and Africa—any one of these many independent and sovereign democracies, oligarchies, or tyrannies might easily be out of the sight of another. By the very vastness of Hellas (Greece), they were lost to the knowledge of their neighbors, living in a retirement broken only by the trader’s ship or the arrival of some new stranger, perhaps driven from his own city by political exile or crime. If we could imagine that some Icarus, more successful than the legendary one, should have taken his flight from Larissa or the Vale of Tempe and, moving southward at an inconceivable height, should find a central point from which he might embrace in a glance every spot where Greeks had built a temple to their gods, he would behold more than a thousand glittering cities scattered from the Black Sea to the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar), from far Macedonia to the sands of the Libyan desert. A map of Hellas would be spread before him that would resemble one of the star charts of our modern astronomers. But this chart would be full of intermittent stars as well. Some, of the third magnitude only, might suddenly blaze out and become stars of the first magnitude, or, again, disappear entirely. How often, when reading Greek history, have we shuddered at the intimation that “the city walls were razed to the ground and the inhabitants sold into slavery!”Compare Synesius, Catastasis, 1570 (301) A: “I have long been listening to the Greek historians how ‘the enemy left the women and children behind as a token of the devastation wrecked during the war.’” Compare Thucydides (iii. 68), who describes the fate meted out to the Plataeans. The condition of life in these cities was dynamic rather than static.