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

INTRODUCTION

The chronic condition of a Greek city, therefore, was war from without and war from within. Let it be remembered that in talking of Hellas, we are in the presence not of thirty cities, but of over one thousand, if I may accept the estimate once given to me by the late Alfred Croiset when speaking of the period of the Peloponnesian War. Yet all these cities—politically independent though they were, except for the shifting and ephemeral alliances they made for greater security against each otherCompare Thucydides iii. 11: “A mutual fear is the only secure basis for an alliance.”—were linked together in a cultural sense. They recognized the same gods, shared common traditions of ancestry, showed devotion to the shrine of the Delphic Oracle, participated in the sacred games at Olympia (in which warring cities might take part under an inviolate covenant of peace), and possessed a language common to them all.

There was a strong bond of culture in religion and language that made each of these thousand cities a participant in a larger community of racial sentiment and an ever-present consciousness of a common ancestry in the remote past. This ancestry, sprung from gods and heroes, made them all members of the great Hellenic race.Just as the citizen of a Greek town had in this sense two countries, the more highly cultured might be said to have in a way two religions. There was in Greece, as well as in Rome, the religion of the masses—crude in its conceptions, of which we hear much in the works of St. Clement of Alexandria—and the religion of the highly cultured, which sought its goal in “philosophy.” Plato takes great pains, for whatever reason, to show us that Socrates was pious in his attitude to the gods, that he adhered to all the forms of the popular religion. His last words in the Phaedo are, “We owe a cock to Aesculapius; see that the debt is paid.” This consciousness of an ancestry and destiny shared by all, under the gods and sanctified by the prophetic utterances of the priestess at Delphi, is the golden thread that runs through all Greek literature. It sparkles in Demosthenes as brightly as in Homer or Pindar, and we have glimpses of it in Synesius eight centuries later. It gave a wider horizon for the aspirations of the Greek mind, but it never led the cities to permanent political cohesion. Isocrates, it is true, made a determined effort to rally all the Greek cities in a combined movement against Persia. He dreamed of a great Panhellenic policy which should make a new Hellas united against the rest of the world, but he was a voice crying in the wilderness, and the Athenians, as well as the other Greek states, were deaf to his appeal.