Pausanias, the Spartan by Lord Lytton

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"Art thou not, maiden," said he, "one of the many female disciples
whom the successors of Pythagoras the Samian have enrolled?"

"Nay," said Cleonice, modestly; "but my mother had listened to great
teachers of wisdom, and I speak imperfectly the thoughts I have heard
her utter when she told me she had no terror of the grave."

"Fair Byzantine," returned the Mothon, while Pausanias, leaning his
upraised face on his hand, listened mutely to themes new to his mind
and foreign to his Spartan culture. "Fair Byzantine, we in Lacedaemon,
whether free or enslaved, are not educated to the subtle learning
which distinguishes the intellect of Ionian Sages. But I, born and
licensed to be a poet, converse eagerly with all who swell the stores
which enrich the treasure-house of song. And thus, since we have left
the land of Sparta, and more especially in yon city, the centre of
many tribes and of many minds, I have picked up, as it were, desultory
and scattered notions, which, for want of a fitting teacher, I bind
and arrange for myself as well as I may. And since the ideas that now
float through the atmosphere of Hellas are not confined to the great,
nay, perhaps are less visible to them, than to those whose eyes are
not riveted on the absorbing substances of ambition and power, so I
have learned something, I know not how, save that I have listened and
reflected. And here, where I have heard what sages conjecture of a
world which seems so far off, but to which we are so near that we may
reach it in a moment, my interest might indeed be intense. For what is
this world to him who came into it a slave!"

"Alcman," exclaimed Pausanias, "the foster-brother of the Heracleid is
no more a slave."

The Mothon bowed his head gratefully, but the expression on his face
retained the same calm and sombre resignation.

"Alas," said Cleonice, with the delicacy of female consolation, "who
in this life is really free? Have citizens no thraldom in custom and
law? Are we not all slaves?"

"True. All slaves!" murmured the royal victor. "Envy none, O Alcman.
Yet," he continued gloomily, "what is the life beyond the grave which
sacred tradition and ancient song holds out to us? Not thy silver
island, vain singer, unless it be only for an early race more
immediately akin to the Gods. Shadows in the shade are the dead; at
the best reviving only their habits when on earth, in phantom-like
delusions; aiming spectral darts like Orion at spectral lions; things
bloodless and pulseless; existences followed to no purpose through
eternity, as dreams are through a night. Who cares so to live again?
Not I."

"The sages that now rise around, and speak oracles different from
those heard at Delphi," said Alcman, "treat not thus the Soul's
immortality. They begin by inquiring how creation rose; they seek to
find the primitive element; what that may be they dispute; some say
the fiery, some the airy, some the ethereal element. Their language
here is obscure. But it is a something which forms, harmonizes, works,
and lives on for ever. And of that something is the Soul; creative,
harmonious, active, an element in itself. Out of its development here,
that soul comes on to a new development elsewhere. If here the beginning
lead to that new development in what we call virtue, it moves to light
and joy:--if it can only roll on through the grooves it has here made
for itself, in what we call vice and crime, its path is darkness and
wretchedness."

"In what we call virtue--what we call vice and crime? Ah," said
Pausanias, with a stern sneer, "Spartan virtue, O Alcman, is what a
Helot may call crime. And if ever the Helot rose and shouted freedom,
would he not say, This is virtue? Would the Spartan call it virtue,
too, my foster-brother?"

"Son of Cleombrotus," answered Alcman, "it is not for me to vindicate
the acts of the master; nor to blame the slave who is of my race. Yet
the sage definers of virtue distinguish between the Conscience of
a Polity and that of the Individual Man. Self-preservation is the
instinct of every community, and all the ordinances ascribed to
Lycurgus are designed to preserve the Spartan existence. For what are
the pure Spartan race? a handful of men established as lords in the
midst of a hostile population. Close by the eyrie thine eagle fathers
built in the rocks, hung the silent Amyclae, a city of foes that cost
the Spartans many generations to subdue. Hence thy State was a camp,
its citizens sentinels; its children were brought up from the cradle
to support the stern life to which necessity devoted the men. Hardship
and privation were second nature. Not enough to be brave; vigilance
was equally essential. Every Spartan life was precious; therefore came
the cunning which characterises the Spartan; therefore the boy is
permitted to steal, but punished if detected; therefore the whole
Commonwealth strives to keep aloof from the wars of Greece unless
itself be threatened. A single battle in a common cause might suffice
to depopulate the Spartan race, and leave it at the mercy of the
thousands that so reluctantly own its dominion, Hence the ruthless
determination to crush the spirit, to degrade the class of the
enslaved Helots; hence its dread lest the slumbering brute force of
the Servile find in its own masses a head to teach the consciousness,
and a hand to guide the movements, of its power. These are the
necessities of the Polity, its vices are the outgrowth of its
necessities; and the life that so galls thee, and which has sometimes
rendered mad those who return to it from having known another, and the
danger that evermore surrounds the lords of a sullen multitude, are
the punishments of these vices. Comprehendest thou?"

"I comprehend."

"But individuals have a conscience apart from that of the Community.
Every community has its errors in its laws. No human laws, how
skilfully soever framed, but give to a national character defects as
well as merits, merits as well as defects. Craft, selfishness, cruelty
to the subdued, inhospitable frigidity to neighbours, make the defects
of the Spartan character. But," added Alcman, with a kind of reluctant
anguish in his voice, "the character has its grand virtues, too, or
would the Helots not be the masters? Valour indomitable; grand scorn
of death; passionate ardour for the State which is so severe a mother
to them; antique faith in the sacred altars; sublime devotion to what
is held to be duty. Are these not found in the Spartan beyond all
the Greeks, as thou seest them in thy friend Lysander; in that soul,
stately, pure, compact in its own firm substance as a statue within
a temple is in its Parian stone? But what the Gods ask from man is
virtue in himself, according as he comprehends it. And, therefore,
here all societies are equal; for the Gods pardon in the man the
faults he shares with his Community, and ask from him but the good and
the beautiful, such as the nature of his Community will permit him to
conceive and to accomplish. Thou knowest that there are many kinds of
music--for instance, the Doric, the Aeolian, the Ionian--in Hellas.
The Lydians have their music, the Phrygians theirs too. The Scyth and
the Mede doubtless have their own. Each race prefers the music it
cultivates, and finds fault with the music of other races. And yet a
man who has learned melody and measure, will recognize a music in them
all. So it is with virtue, the music of the human soul. It differs in
differing races. But he who has learned to know what virtue is can
recognize its harmonies, wherever they be heard. And thus the soul
that fulfils its own notions of music, and carries them up to its idea
of excellence, is the master soul; and in the regions to which it goes,
when the breath leaves the lips, it pursues the same are set free from
the trammels that confined, and the false judgments that marred it here.
For then the soul is no longer Spartan, or Ionian, Lydian, Median, or
Scythian. Escaped into the upper air, it is the citizen of universal
freedom and universal light. And hence it does not live as a ghost in
gloomy shades, being merely a pale memory of things that have passed
away; but in its primitive being as an emanation from the one divine
principle which penetrates everywhere, vivifies all things, and enjoys
in all. This is what I weave together from the doctrines of varying
schools; schools that collect from the fields of thought flowers of
different kinds which conceal, by adorning it, the ligament that
unites them all: this, I say, O Pausanias, is my conception of the
soul."

Cleonice rose softly, and taking from her bosom a rose, kissed it
fervently, and laid it at the feet of the singer.

"Were this my soul," cried she, "I would ask thee to bind it in the
wreath."

Vague and troubled thoughts passed meanwhile through the mind of the
Heracleid; old ideas being disturbed and dislodged, the new ones did
not find easy settlement in a brain occupied with ambitious schemes
and a heart agitated by stormy passions. In much superstitious, in
much sceptical, as education had made him the one, and experience but
of worldly things was calculated to make him the other, he followed
not the wing of the philosophy which passed through heights not
occupied by Olympus, and dived into depths where no Tartarus echoed to
the wail of Cocytus.

After a pause he said in his perplexity,

"Well mayst thou own that no Delphian oracle tells thee all this. And
when thou speakest of the Divine Principle as One, dost thou not, O
presumptuous man, depopulate the Halls of Ida? Nay, is it not Zeus
himself whom thou dethronest; is not thy Divine Principle the Fate
which Zeus himself must obey?"

"There is a young man of Clazomenae," answered the singer, "named
Anaxagoras, who avoiding all active life, though of birth the noblest,
gives himself up to contemplation, and whom I have listened to in the
city as he passed through it, on his way into Egypt. And I heard
him say, 'Fate is an empty name.'[28] Fate is blind, the Divine is
All-seeing."

"How!" cried Cleonice. "An empty name--she! Necessity the
All-compelling."

The musician drew from the harp one of the most artful of Sappho's
exquisite melodies.

"What drew forth that music?" he asked, smiling. "My hand and my will
from a genius not present, not visible. Was that genius a blind fate?
no, it was a grand intelligence. Nature is to the Deity what my hand
and will are to the unseen genius of the musician. They obey an
intelligence and they form a music. If creation proceed from an
intelligence, what we call fate is but the consequence of its laws.
And Nature operates not in the external world alone, but in the core
of all life; therefore in the mind of man obeying only what some
supreme intelligence has placed there: therefore in man's mind
producing music or discord, according as he has learned the principles
of harmony, that is, of good. And there be sages who declare that
Intelligence and Love are the same. Yet," added the Mothon, with an
aspect solemnly compassionate, "not the love thou mockest by the name
of Aphrodite. No mortal eye hath ever seen that love within the known
sphere, yet all insensibly feel its reign. What keeps the world
together but affection? What makes the earth bring forth its fruits,
but the kindness which beams in the sunlight and descends in the dews?
What makes the lioness watch over her cubs, and the bird, with all air
for its wanderings, come back to the fledglings in its nest? Strike
love, the conjoiner, from creation, and creation returns to a void.
Destroy love the parental, and life is born but to perish. Where stop
the influence of love or how limit its multiform degrees? Love guards
the fatherland; crowns with turrets the walls of the freeman. What but
love binds the citizens of States together, and frames and heeds the
laws that submit individual liberty to the rule of the common good?
Love creates, love cements, love enters and harmonises all things. And
as like attracts like, so love attracts in the hereafter the loving
souls that conceived it here. From the region where it summons them,
its opposites are excluded. There ceases war; there ceases pain. There
indeed intermingle the beautiful and glorious, but beauty purified
from earthly sin, the glorious resting from earthly toil. Ask ye how
to know on earth where love is really presiding? Not in Paphos, not
in Amathus. Wherever thou seest beauty and good; wherever thou seest
life, and that life pervaded with faculties of joy, there thou seest
love; there thou shouldst recognize the Divinity."

"And where I see misery and hate," said the Spartan, "what should I
recognize there?"

"Master," returned the singer, "can the good come without a struggle?
Is the beautiful accomplished without strife? Recall the tales of
primeval chaos, when, as sang the Ascraean singer, love first darted
into the midst; imagine the heave and throe of joining elements;
conjure up the first living shapes, born of the fluctuating slime and
vapour. Surely they were things incomplete, deformed ghastly fragments
of being, as are the dreams of a maniac. Had creative Love stopped
there, and then, standing on the height of some fair completed world,
had viewed the warring portents, wouldst thou not have said--But these
are the works of Evil and Hate? Love did not stop there, it worked on;
and out of the chaos once ensouled, this glorious world swung itself
into ether, the completed sister of the stars. Again, O my listeners,
contemplate the sculptor, when the block from the granite shaft first
stands rude and shapeless before him. See him in his earlier strife
with the obstinate matter--how uncouth the first outline of limb and
feature; unlovelier often in the rugged commencements of shape, than
when the dumb mass stood shapeless. If the sculptor had stopped there,
the thing might serve as an image for the savage of an abominable
creed, engaged in the sacrifice of human flesh. But he pauses not, he
works on. Stroke by stroke comes from the stone a shape of more beauty
than man himself is endowed with, and in a human temple stands a
celestial image.

"Thus is it with the soul in the mundane sphere; it works its way on
through the adverse matter. We see its work half completed; we cry,
Lo, this is misery, this is hate--because the chaos is not yet a
perfected world, and the stone block is not yet a statue of Apollo.
But for that reason must we pause?--no, we must work on, till the
victory brings the repose.

"All things come into order from the war of contraries--the elements
fight and wrestle to produce the wild flower at our feet; from a wild
flower man hath striven and toiled to perfect the marvellous rose of
the hundred leaves. Hate is necessary for the energies of love, evil
for the activity of good; until, I say, the victory is won, until Hate
and Evil are subdued, as the sculptor subdues the stone; and then
rises the divine image serene for ever, and rests on its pedestal
in the Uranian Temple. Lift thine eyes; that temple is yonder. O
Pausanias, the sculptor's work-room is the earth."

Alcman paused, and sweeping his hand once more over his lyre, chanted
as follows:

"Dewdrop that weepest on the sharp-barbed thorn,
Why didst thou fall from Day's golden chalices?
'My tears bathe the thorn,' said the Dewdrop,
'To nourish the bloom of the rose.'

"Soul of the Infant, why to calamity
Comest thou wailing from the calm spirit-source?
'Ask of the Dew,' said the Infant,
'Why it descends on the thorn!'

"Dewdrop from storm, and soul from calamity
Vanish soon--whither? let the Dew answer thee;
'Have not my tears been my glory?
Tears drew me up to the sun.'

"What were thine uses, that thou art glorified?
What did thy tears give, profiting earth or sky?
'There, to the thorn-stem a blossom,
Here, to the Iris a tint.'"

Alcman had modulated the tones of his voice into a sweetness so
plaintive and touching, that, when he paused, the hand-maidens had
involuntarily risen and gathered round, hushed and noiseless. Cleonice
had lowered her veil over her face and bosom; but the heaving of
its tissue betrayed her half-suppressed, gentle sob; and the proud
mournfulness on the Spartan's swarthy countenance had given way to a
soft composure, melancholy still--but melancholy as a lulled, though
dark water, over which starlight steals through disparted cloud.

Cleonice was the first to break the spell which bound them all.

"I would go within," she murmured faintly.

"The sun, now slanting, strikes through the vine-leaves, and blinds me
with its glare."

Pausanias approached timidly, and taking her by the hand, drew her
aside, along one of the grassy alleys that stretched onwards to the
sea.

The handmaidens tarried behind to cluster nearer round the singer.
They forgot he was a slave.

Note:

[28] Anaxagoras was then between 20 and 30 years of age.--See Ritter,
vol. ii., for the sentiment here ascribed to him, and a general view
of his tenets.

CHAPTER II.

"Thou art weeping still, Cleonice!" said the Spartan, "and I have not
the privilege to kiss away thy tears."

"Nay, I weep not," answered the girl, throwing up her veil; and her
face was calm, if still sad--the tear yet on the eyelids, but the
smile upon the lip--[Greek: dakruoen gelaoisa]. "Thy singer has
learned his art from a teacher heavenlier than the Pierides, and its
name is Hope."

"But if I understand him aright," said Pausanias, "the Hope that
inspires him is a goddess who blesses us little on the earth."

As if the Mothon had overheard the Spartan, his voice here suddenly
rose behind them, singing:

"_There_ the Beautiful and Glorious
Intermingle evermore."

Involuntarily both turned. The Mothon seemed as if explaining to the
handmaids the allegory of his marriage song upon Helen and Achilles,
for his hand was raised on high, and again, with an emphasis, he
chanted:

"There, throughout the Blessed Islands,
And amid the Race of Light,
Do the Beautiful and Glorious
Intermingle evermore."

"Canst thou not wait, if thou so lovest me?' said Cleonice, with more
tenderness in her voice than it had ever yet betrayed to him; "life is
very short. Hush!" she continued, checking the passionate interruption
that burst from his lips; "I have something I would confide to thee:
listen. Know that in my childhood I had a dear friend, a maiden a few
years older than myself, and she had the divine gift of trance which
comes from Apollo. Often, gazing into space, her eyes became fixed,
and her frame still as a statue's; then a shiver seized her limbs, and
prophecy broke from her lips. And she told me, in one of these hours,
when, as she said, 'all space and all time seemed spread before her
like a sunlit ocean,' she told me of my future, so far as its leaves
have yet unfolded from the stem of my life. Spartan, she prophesied
that I should see thee--and--" Cleonice paused, blushing, and then
hurried on, "and she told me that suddenly her eye could follow my
fate on the earth no more, that it vanished out of the time and the
space on which it gazed, and saying it she wept, and broke into
funeral song. And therefore, Pausanias, I say life is very short for
me at least--"

"Hold," cried Pausanias; "torture not me, nor delude thyself with the
dreams of a raving girl. Lives she near? Let me visit her with thee,
and I will prove thy prophetess an impostor."

"They whom the Priesthood of Delphi employ throughout Hellas to find
the fit natures for a Pythoness heard of her, and heard herself. She
whom thou callest impostor gives the answer to perplexed nations from
the Pythian shrine. But wherefore doubt her?--where the sorrow? I feel
none. If love does rule the worlds beyond, and does unite souls who
love nobly here, yonder we shall meet, O descendant of Hercules, and
human laws will not part us there."

"Thou die! die before me! thou, scarcely half my years! And I be left
here, with no comfort but a singer's dreamy verse, not even mine
ambition! Thrones would vanish out of earth, and turn to cinders in
thine urn."

"Speak not of thrones," said Cleonice, with imploring softness, "for
the prophetess, too, spake of steps that went towards a throne, and
vanished at the threshold of darkness, beside which sate the Furies.
Speak not of thrones, dream but of glory and Hellas--of what thy soul
tells thee is that virtue which makes life an Uranian music, and thus
unites it to the eternal symphony, as the breath of the single flute
melts when it parts from the instrument into the great concord of the
choir. Knowest thou not that in the creed of the Persians each mortal
is watched on earth by a good spirit and an evil one? And they who
loved us below, or to whom we have done beneficent and gentle deeds,
if they go before us into death, pass to the side of the good spirit,
and strengthen him to save and to bless thee against the malice of the
bad, and the bad is strengthened in his turn by those whom we have
injured. Wouldst thou have all the Greeks whose birthright thou
wouldst barter, whose blood thou wouldst shed for barbaric aid to thy
solitary and lawless power, stand by the side of the evil Fiend?
And what could I do against so many? what could my soul do," added
Cleonice with simple pathos, "by the side of the kinder spirit?"

Pausanias was wholly subdued. He knelt to the girl, he kissed the hem
of her robe, and for the moment ambition, luxury, pomp, pride fled
from his soul, and left there only the grateful tenderness of the man,
and the lofty instincts of the hero. But just then--was it the evil
spirit that sent him?--the boughs of the vine were put aside, and
Gongylus the Eretrian stood before them. His black eyes glittered keen
upon Pausanias, who rose from his knee, startled and displeased.

"What brings thee hither, man?" said the Regent, haughtily.

"Danger," answered Gongylus, in a hissing whisper. "Lose not a
moment--come."

"Danger!" exclaimed Cleonice, tremblingly, and clasping her hands, and
all the human love at her heart was visible in her aspect. "Danger,
and to _him_!"

"Danger is but as the breeze of my native air," said the Spartan,
smiling; "thus I draw it in and thus breathe it away. I follow thee,
Gongylus. Take my greeting, Cleonice--the Good to the Beautiful. Well,
then, keep Alcman yet awhile to sing thy kind face to repose, and this
time let him tune his lyre to songs of a more Dorian strain--songs
that show what a Heracleid thinks of danger." He waved his hand, and
the two men, striding hastily, passed along the vine alley, darkened
its vista for a few minutes, then vanishing down the descent to the
beach, the wide blue sea again lay lone and still before the eyes of
the Byzantine maid.

Chapter III.

Pausanias and the Eretrian halted on the shore.

"Now speak," said the Spartan Regent. "Where is the danger?"

"Before thee," answered Gongylus, and his hand pointed to the ocean.

"I see the fleet of the Greeks in the harbour--I see the flag of
my galley above the forest of their masts. I see detached vessels
skimming along the waves hither and thither as in holiday and sport;
but discipline slackens where no foe dares to show himself. Eretrian,
I see no danger."

"Yet danger is there, and where danger is thou shouldst be. I have
learned from my spies, not an hour since, that there is a conspiracy
formed--a mutiny on the eve of an outburst. Thy place now should be in
thy galley."

"My boat waits yonder in that creek, overspread by the wild shrubs,"
answered Pausanias; "a few strokes of the oar, and I am where thou
seest. And in truth, without thy summons, I should have been on board
ere sunset, seeing that on the morrow I have ordered a general review
of the vessels of the fleet. Was that to be the occasion for the mutiny?"

"So it is supposed."

"I shall see the faces of the mutineers," said Pausanias, with a calm
visage, and an eye which seemed to brighten the very atmosphere. "Thou
shakest thy head; is this all?"

"Thou art not a bird--this moment in one place, that moment in
another. There, with yon armament, is the danger thou canst meet. But
yonder sails a danger which thou canst not, I fear me, overtake."

"Yonder!" said Pausanias, his eye following the hand of the Eretrian.
"I see naught save the white wing of a seagull--perchance, by its dip
into the water, it foretells a storm."

"Farther off than the seagull, and seeming smaller than the white spot
of its wing, seest thou nothing!"

"A dim speck on the farthest horizon, if mine eyes mistake not."

"The speck of a sail that is bound to Sparta, It carries with it a
request for thy recall."

This time the cheek of Pausanias paled, and his voice slightly
faltered as he said,

"Art thou sure of this?"

"So I hear that the Samian captain, Uliades, has boasted at noon in
the public baths."

"A Samian!--is it only a Samian who hath ventured to address to Sparta
a complaint of her General?"

"From what I could gather," replied Gongylus, "the complaint is
more powerfully backed. But I have not as yet heard more, though I
conjecture that Athens has not been silent, and before the vessel
sailed Ionian captains were seen to come with joyous faces from the
lodgings of Cimon."

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