Chapter V: Freethought in Greece (3)

The fact remains that the story of the Bacchæ, in which the
frenzied mother helps to tear to pieces her own son, and the God
can but say it is all fated, is as revolting to the rational moral
sense as the story of the Prometheus. If this be an eirenicon,
it is surely the most ironical in literary history. To see
in the impassive delineation of such a myth an acceptance
by the poet of popular "sound sense," and "a desire to put
himself right with the public in matters on which he had been
misunderstood," seems possible only to academics trained to a
particular handling of the popular creed of their own day. This
view, first put forward by Tyrwhitt (Conjecturæ in Æschylum,
etc. 1822), was adopted by Schoone (p. 20 of his ed. cited
by Sandys). Lobeck, greatly daring wherever rationalism was
concerned, suggested that Euripides actually wrote against the
rationalists of his time, in commendation of the Bacchic cult,
and to justify the popular view in religious matters as against
that of the cultured (Aglaophamus--passages quoted by Sandys,
p. lxxvi). Musgrave, following Tyrwhitt, makes the play out
to be an attack on Kritias, Alkibiades, and other freethinkers,
including even Sokrates! K. O. Müller, always ineptly conventional
in such matters, finds Euripides in this play "converted into a
positive believer, or, in other words, convinced that religion
should not be exposed to the subtilties of reasoning; that the
understanding of man cannot subvert ancestral traditions which
are as old as time," and so on; and in the Polonius-platitudes
of Tiresias and the worldly-wise counsels of Cadmus he finds
"great impressiveness" (Hist. Lit. Anc. Greece, p. 379).

The bulk of the literature of the subject, in short, suggests
sombre reflections on the moral value of much academic
thinking. There are, however, academic suffrages on the side of
common sense. Mr. Haigh (Tragic Drama of the Greeks, pp. 313-14)
gently dismisses the "recantation" theory; Hartung points out
(Euripides restitutus, 1844, ii, 542, cited by Sandys) that
Euripides really treats the legend of Pentheus very much as
he treats the myth of Hippolytos thirty years earlier, showing
no change of moral attitude. E. Pfander (cited by Sandys) took
a similar view; as did Mr. Tyrrell in his edition of the play
(1871), though the latter persisted in taking the commonplaces
of the chorus about true wisdom (395) for the judgments of
the dramatist. Euripides could hardly have been called "the
philosopher of the stage" (Athenæus, iv, 48) on the strength
of sentiments which are common to the village wiseacres of all
ages. The critical method which ascribes to Euripides a final
hostility to rationalism would impute to Shakespeare the religion
of Isabella in Measure for Measure, when the talk of the Duke as a
friar counselling a condemned man is wholly "pagan" or unbelieving.

In his admirable little book, Euripides and his Age (1913),
Prof. Murray repeats his account of the Bacchæ with some additions
and modifications. He adheres to the "heartfelt glorification
of Dionysus," but adds (p. 188): "No doubt it is Dionysus
in some private sense of the poet's own ... some spirit of
... inspiration and untrammelled life. The presentation is not
consistent, however magical the poetry." As to the theory that
"the veteran free-lance of thought ... now saw the error of his
ways and was returning to orthodoxy," he pronounces that "Such
a view strikes us now as almost childish in its incompetence"
(p. 190). He also reminds us that "the whole scheme of the play
is given by the ancient ritual.... All kinds of small details
which seemed like ... rather fantastic invention on the part
of Euripides are taken straight from Æschylus or the ritual,
or both.... The Bacchæ is not free invention; it is tradition"
(pp. 182-84). And in sum: "It is well to remember that, for all
his lucidity of language, Euripides is not lucid about religion"
(p. 190).

In conclusion we may ask, How could he be? He wrote plays for the
Greek stage, which had its very roots in religious tradition, and
was run for the edification of a crudely believing populace. It is
much that in so doing Euripides could a hundred times challenge
the evil religious ethic given him for his subject-matter; and
his lasting vogue in antiquity showed that he had a hold on the
higher Greek conscience which no other dramatist ever possessed.

But while Euripides must thus have made a special appeal to the reflecting minority even in his own day, it is clear that he was not at first popular with the many; and his efforts, whatever he may have hoped to achieve, could not suffice to enlighten the democracy. The ribald blasphemies of his enemy, the believing Aristophanes, [642] could avail more to keep vulgar religion in credit than the tragedian's serious indictment could effect against it; and they served at the same time to belittle Euripides for the multitude in his own day. Aristophanes is the typical Tory in religion; non-religious himself, like Swift, he hates the honestly anti-religious man; and he has the crowd with him. The Athenian faith, as a Catholic scholar remarks, [643] "was more disposed to suffer the buffooneries of a comedian than the serious negation of a philosopher." The average Greek seemed to think that the grossest comic impiety did no harm, where serious negation might cause divine wrath. [644] And so there came no intellectual salvation for Athens from the drama which was her unique achievement. The balance of ignorance and culture was not changed. Evidently there was much rationalism among the studious few. Plato in the Laws [645] speaks both of the man-about-town type of freethinker and of those who, while they believe in no Gods, live well and wisely and are in good repute. But with Plato playing the superior mind and encouraging his fellow-townsmen to believe in the personality of the sun, moon, and planets, credulity could easily keep the upper hand. [646] The people remained politically unwise and religiously superstitious, the social struggle perpetuating the division between leisure and toil, even apart from the life of the mass of slaves; while the eternal pre-occupation of militarism left even the majority of the upper class at the intellectual level natural to military life in all ages. There came, however, a generation of great intellectual splendour following on that of the supreme development of drama just before the fall of Greek freedom. Athens had at last come into the heritage of Greek philosophic thought; and to the utterance of that crowning generation the human retrospect has turned ever since. This much of renown remains inalienable from the most renowned democracy of the ancient world.

§ 8

The wide subject of the teaching of Sokrates, Plato, and Aristotle must here be noticed briefly, with a view only to our special inquiry. All three must be inscribed in any list of ancient freethinkers; and yet all three furthered freethought only indirectly, the two former being in different degrees supernaturalists, while the last touched on religious questions only as a philosopher, avoiding all question of practical innovation.

The same account holds good of the best of the so-called Sophists,
as Gorgias the Sicilian (? 485-380), who was a nihilistic skeptic;
Hippias of Elis, who, setting up an emphatic distinction between
Nature and Convention, impugned the political laws and prejudices
which estranged men of thought and culture; and Prodikos of Kos
(fl. 435), author of the fable of Herakles at the Parting of
the Ways, who seems to have privately criticized the current
Gods as mere deifications of useful things and forces, and
was later misconceived as teaching that the things and forces
were Gods. Cp. Cicero, De nat. Deorum, i, 42; Sextus Empiricus,
Adv. Mathematicos, ix, 52; Ueberweg, vol. i, p. 78; Renouvier, i,
291-93. Cicero saw very well that if men came to see in Dêmêtêr
merely a deification of corn or bread, in Dionysos wine, in
Hephaistos fire, and in Poseidon only water, there was not much
left in religion. On the score of their systematic skepticism,
that is, their insistence on the subjectivity of all opinion,
Prof. Drews pronounces the Sophists at once the "Aufklärer"
and the Pragmatists of ancient Greece (Gesch. des Monismus,
p. 209). But their thought was scarcely homogeneous.

1. Sokrates [468-399] was fundamentally and practically a freethinker, insofar as in most things he thought for himself, definitely turning away from the old ideal of mere transmitted authority in morals. [647] Starting in all inquiries from a position of professed ignorance, he at least repudiated all dogmatics. [648] Being, however, preoccupied with public life and conduct, he did not carry his critical thinking far beyond that sphere. In regard to the extension of solid science, one of the prime necessities of Greek intellectual life, he was quite reactionary, drawing a line between the phenomena which he thought intelligible and traceable and those which he thought past finding out. "Physics and astronomy, in his opinion, belonged to the divine class of phenomena in which human research was insane, fruitless, and impious." [649] Yet at the same time he formulated, apparently of his own motion, the ordinary design argument. [650] The sound scientific view led up to by so many previous thinkers was set forth, even in religious phraseology, by his great contemporary Hippokrates, [651] and he opposed it. While partially separating himself in practice from the popular worships, he held by the belief in omens, though not in all the ordinary ones; and in one of the Platonic dialogues he is made to say he holds by the ordinary versions of all the myths, on the ground that it is a hopeless task to find rational explanations for them. [652] He hoped, in short, to rationalize conduct without seeking to rationalize creed--the dream of Plato and of a thousand religionists since.

He had indeed the excuse that the myth-rationalizers of the time after Hekataios, following the line of least psychic resistance, like those of England and Germany in the eighteenth century, explained away myths by reducing them to hypothetical history, thus asking credence for something no better verified than the myth itself. But the rationalizers were on a path by which men might conceivably have journeyed to a truer science; and Sokrates, by refusing to undertake any such exploration, [653] left his countrymen to that darkening belief in tradition which made possible his own execution. There was in his cast of mind, indeed--if we can at all accept Plato's presentment of him--something unfavourable to steady conviction. He cannot have had any real faith in the current religion; yet he never explicitly dissented. In the Republic he accepts the new festival to the Thracian Goddess Bendis; and there he is made by Plato to inculcate a quite orthodox acceptance of the Delphic oracle as the source of all religious practice. But it is impossible to say how much of the teaching of the Platonic Sokrates is Sokratic. And as to Plato there remains the problem of how far his conformities were prudential, after the execution of Sokrates for blasphemy.

The long-debated issue as to the real personality of Sokrates
is still open. It is energetically and systematically handled
by Prof. August Döring in Die Lehre des Sokrates als sociales
Reformsystem (1895), and by Dr. Hubert Röck in Der unverfälschte
Sokrates (1903). See, in particular, Döring, pp. 51-79, and
Röck, pp. 357-96. From all attempts to arrive at a conception
of a consistent Sokrates there emerges the impression that the
real Sokrates, despite a strong critical bent of mind, had no
clearly established body of opinions, but was swayed in different
directions by the itch for contradiction which was the driving
power of his dialectic. For the so-called Sokratic "method" is
much less a method for attaining truth than one for disturbing
prejudice. And if in Plato's hands Sokrates seldom reaches a
conclusion that his own method might not overthrow, we are not
entitled to refuse to believe that this was characteristic of
the man.

Concerning Sokrates we have Xenophon's circumstantial account [654] of how he reasoned with Aristodemos, "surnamed the Little," who "neither prayed nor sacrificed to the Gods, nor consulted any oracle, and ridiculed those who did." Aristodemos was a theist, believing in a "Great Architect" or "Artist," or a number of such powers--on this he is as vague as the ancient theists in general--but does not think the heavenly powers need his devotions. Sokrates, equally vague as to the unity or plurality of the divine, puts the design argument in the manner familiar throughout the ages, [655] and follows it up with the plea, among others, that the States most renowned for wisdom and antiquity have always been the most given to pious practices, and that probably the Gods will be kind to those who show them respect. The whole philosopheme is pure empiricism, on the ordinary plane of polytheistic thought, and may almost be said to exhibit incapacity for the handling of philosophic questions, evading as it does even the elementary challenge of Aristodemos, against whom Sokrates parades pious platitudes without a hint of "Sokratic" analysis. Unless such a performance were regarded as make-believe, it is difficult to conceive how Athenian pietists could honestly arraign Sokrates for irreligion while Aristodemos and others of his way of thinking went unmolested.

Taken as illustrating the state of thought in the Athenian community, the trial and execution of Sokrates for "blasphemy" and "corrupting the minds of the young" go far to prove that there prevailed among the upper class in Athens nearly as much hypocrisy in religious matters as exists in the England of to-day. Doubtless he was liable to death from the traditionally orthodox Greek point of view, [656] having practically turned aside from the old civic creed and ideals; but then most educated Athenians had in some degree done the same. [657] Euripides, as we have seen, is so frequently critical of the old theology and mythology in his plays that he too could easily have been indicted; and Aristophanes, who attacked Euripides in his comedies as scurrilously as he did Sokrates, would no doubt have been glad to see him prosecuted. [658] The psychology of Aristophanes, who freely ridiculed and blasphemed the Gods in his own comedies while reviling all men who did not believe in them, is hardly intelligible save in the light of parts of the English history of our own time, when unbelieving indifferentists on the Conservative side have been seen ready to join in turning the law against a freethinking publicist for purely party ends. In the case of Sokrates the hostility was ostensibly democratic, for, according to Æschines, Sokrates was condemned because he had once given lessons to Kritias, [659] one of the most savage and unscrupulous of the Thirty Tyrants. Inasmuch as Kritias had become entirely alienated from Sokrates, and had even put him to silence, such a ground of hostility would only be a fresh illustration of that collective predilection of men to a gregarious iniquity which is no less noteworthy in the psychology of groups than their profession of high moral standards. And such proclivities are always to be reckoned with in such episodes. Anytos, the leading prosecutor, seems to have been a typical bigot, brainless, spiteful, and thoroughly self-satisfied. Not only party malice, however, but the individual dislikes which Sokrates so industriously set up, [660] must have counted for much in securing the small majority of the dikastery that pronounced him guilty--281 to 276; and his own clear preference for death over any sort of compromise did the rest. [661] He was old, and little hopeful of social betterment; and the temperamental obstinacy which underlay his perpetual and pertinacious debating helped him to choose a death that he could easily have avoided. But the fact remains that he was not popular; that the mass of the voters as well as of the upper class disliked his constant cross-examination of popular opinion, [662] which must often have led logical listeners to carry on criticism where he left off; and that after all his ratiocination he left Athens substantially irrational, as well as incapable of justice, on some essential issues. His dialectic method has done more to educate the later world than it did for Greece.

Upon the debate as to the legal punishability of Sokrates turns
another as to the moral character of the Athenians who forced
him to drink the hemlock. Professor Mahaffy, bent on proving
the superiority of Athenian culture and civilization to those
of Christendom, effectively contrasts the calm scene in the
prison-chamber of Sokrates with the hideous atrocities of the
death penalty for treason in the modern world and the "gauntness
and horror of our modern executions" (Social Life in Greece,
3rd. ed. pp. 262-69); and Mr. Bleeckly (Socrates and the Athenians,
1884, pp. 55-63) similarly sets against the pagan case that of the
burning of heretics by the Christian Church, and in particular the
auto da fé at Valladolid in 1559, when fifteen men and women--the
former including the conscientious priests who had proposed to
meet the hostility of Protestant dissent in the Netherlands by
reforms in the Church: the latter including delicately-nurtured
ladies of high family--were burned to death before the eyes of
the Princess Regent of Spain and the aristocracy of Castile. It
is certainly true that this transaction has no parallel in the
criminal proceedings of pagan Athens. Christian cruelty has been as
much viler than pagan, culture for culture, as the modern Christian
environment is uglier than the Athenian. Before such a test the
special pleaders for the civilizing power of Christianity can
but fall back upon alternative theses which are the negation of
their main case. First we are told that "Christianity humanizes
men"; next that where it does not do so it is because they are
too inhuman to be made Christians.

But while the orthodoxy of pagan Athens thus comes very well off
as against the frightful crime-roll of organized Christianity,
the dispassionate historian must nonetheless note the dehumanizing
power of religion in Athens as in Christendom. The pietists of
Athens, in their less brutish way, were as hopelessly denaturalized
as those of Christian Europe by the dominion of a traditional
creed, held as above reason. It matters not whether or not we
say with Bishop Thirlwall (Hist. of Greece, 2nd ed. iv, 556) that
"there never was a case in which murder was more clearly committed
under the forms of legal procedure than in the trial of Socrates,"
or press on the other side the same writer's admission that in
religious matters in Athens "there was no canon, no book by which
a doctrine could be tried; no living authority to which appeal
could be made for the decision of religious controversies." The
fact that Christendom had "authorities" who ruled which of two
sets of insane dogmas brought death upon its propounder, does
not make less abominable the slaying of Bruno and Servetus,
or the immeasurable massacre of less eminent heretics. But the
less formalized homicides sanctioned by the piety of Periklean
Athens remain part of the proof that unreasoning faith worsens
men past calculation. If we slur over such deeds by generalities
about human frailty, we are but asserting the impossibility
of rationally respecting human nature. If, putting aside all
moral censure, we are simply concerned to trace and comprehend
causation in human affairs, we have no choice but to note how
upon occasion religion on one hand, like strong drink on another,
can turn commonplace men into murderers.

In view of the limitations of Sokrates, and the mental measure of those who voted for putting him to death, it is not surprising that through all Greek history educated men (including Aristotle) continued to believe firmly in the deluge of Deukalion [663] and the invasion of the Amazons [664] as solid historical facts. Such beliefs, of course, are on all fours with those current in the modern religious world down till the present century: we shall, in fact, best appraise the rationality of Greece by making such comparisons. The residual lesson is that where Greek reason ended, modern social science had better be regarded as only beginning. Thukydides, the greatest of all the ancient historians, and one of the great of all time, treated human affairs in a spirit so strictly rationalistic that he might reasonably be termed an atheist on that score even if he had not earned the name as a pupil of Anaxagoras. [665] But his task was to chronicle a war which proved that the Greeks were to the last children of instinct for the main purposes of life, and that the rule of reason which they are credited with establishing [666] was only an intermittent pastime. In the days of Demosthenes we still find them politically consulting the Pythian oracle, despite the consciousness among educated men that the oracle is a piece of political machinery. We can best realize the stage of their evolution by first comparing their public religious practice with that of contemporary England. No one now regards the daily prayers of the House of Commons as more than a reverent formality. But Nikias at Syracuse staked the fortunes of war on the creed of omens. We can perhaps finally conceive with fair accuracy the subordination of Greek culture and politics to superstition by likening the thought-levels of pre-Alexandrian Athens to those of England under Cromwell.

2. The decisive measure of Greek accomplishment is found in the career of Plato [429-347]. One of the great prose writers of the world, he has won by his literary genius--that is, by his power of continuous presentation as well as by his style--no less than by his service to supernaturalist philosophy in general, a repute above his deserts as a thinker. In Christian history he is the typical philosopher of Dualism, [667] his prevailing conception of the universe being that of an inert Matter acted on or even created by a craftsman-God, the "Divine Artificer," sometimes conceived as a Logos or divine Reason, separately personalized. Thus he came to be par excellence the philosopher of theism, as against Aristotle and those of the Pythagoreans who affirmed the eternity of the universe. [668] In the history of freethought he figures as a man of genius formed by Sokrates and reflecting his limitations, developing the Sokratic dialectic on the one hand and finally emphasizing the Sokratic dogmatism to the point of utter bigotry. If the Athenians are to be condemned for putting Sokrates to death, it must not be forgotten that the spirit, if not the letter, of the Laws drawn up by Plato in his old age fully justified them. [669] That code, could it ever have been put in force, would have wrought the death of every honest freethinker as well as most of the ignorant believers within its sphere. Alone among the great serious writers of Greece does he implicate Greek thought in the gospel of intolerance passed on to modern Europe from antiquity. It is recorded of him [670] that he wished to burn all the writings of Demokritos that he could collect, and was dissuaded only on the score of the number of copies.

What was best in Plato, considered as a freethinker, was his early love of ratiocination, of "the rendering and receiving of reasons." Even in his earlier dialogues, however, there are signs enough of an arbitrary temper, as well as of an inability to put science in place of religious prejudice. The obscurantist doctrine which he put in the mouth of Sokrates in the Phædrus was also his own, as we gather from the exposition in the Republic. In that brilliant performance he objects, as so many believers and freethinkers had done before him, to the scandalous tales in the poets concerning the Gods and the sons of Gods; but he does not object to them as being untrue. His position is that they are unedifying. [671] For his own part he proposes that his ideal rulers frame new myths which shall edify the young: in his Utopia it is part of the business of the legislator to choose the right fictions; [672] and the systematic imposition of an edifying body of pious fable on the general intelligence is part of his scheme for the regeneration of society. [673] Honesty is to be built up by fraud, and reason by delusion. What the Hebrew Bible-makers actually did, Plato proposed to do. The one thing to be said in his favour is that by thus telling how the net is to be spread in the sight of the bird he put the decisive obstacle--if any were needed--in the way of his plan. It is, indeed, inconceivable that the author of the Republic and the Laws dreamt that either polity as a whole would ever come into existence. His plans of suppressing all undesirable poetry, arranging community of women, and enabling children to see battles, are the fancy-sketches of a dilettant. He had failed completely as a statesman in practice; as a schemer he does not even posit the first conditions of success.

As to his practical failure see the story of his and his pupils'
attempts at Syracuse (Grote, History, ix, 37-123). The younger
Dionysios, whom they had vainly attempted to make a model ruler,
seems to have been an audacious unbeliever to the extent of
plundering the temple of Persephone at Lokris, one of Jupiter in
the Peloponnesos, and one of Æsculapius at Epidaurus. Clement of
Alexandria (Protrept. c. 4) states that he plundered "the statue
of Jupiter in Sicily." Cicero (De nat. Deorum, iii, 33, 34) and
Valerius Maximus (i, 1) tell the story of the elder Dionysios;
but of him it cannot be true. In his day the plunder of the
temples of Dêmêtêr and Persephone in Sicily by the Carthaginians
was counted a deadly sin. See Freeman, History of Sicily, iv,
125-47, and Story of Sicily, pp. 176-80. In Cicero's dialogue it
is noted that after all his impieties Dionysios [the elder, of
whom the stories are mistakenly told] died in his bed. Athenæus,
however, citing the biographer Klearchos, tells that the younger
Dionysios, after being reduced to the rôle of a begging priest
of Kybelê, ended his life very miserably (xii, 60).

Nonetheless, the prescription of intolerance in the Laws [674] classes Plato finally on the side of fanaticism, and, indeed, ranks him with the most sinister figures on that side, since his earlier writing shows that he would be willing to punish men alike for repeating stories which they believed, and for rejecting what he knew to be untruths. [675] By his own late doctrine he vindicated the slayers of his own friend. His psychology is as strange as that of Aristophanes, but strange with a difference. He seems to have practised "the will to believe" till he grew to be a fanatic on the plane of the most ignorant of orthodox Athenians; and after all that science had done to enlighten men on that natural order the misconceiving of which had been the foundation of their creeds, he inveighs furiously in his old age against the impiety of those who dared to doubt that the sun and moon and stars were deities, as every nurse taught her charges. [676] And when all is said, his Gods satisfy no need of the intelligence; for he insists that they only partially rule the world, sending the few good things, but not the many evil [677]--save insofar as evil may be a beneficent penalty and discipline. At the same time, while advising the imprisonment or execution of heretics who did not believe in the Gods, Plato regarded with even greater detestation the man who taught that they could be persuaded or propitiated by individual prayer and sacrifice. [678] Thus he would have struck alike at the freethinking few and at the multitude who held by the general religious beliefs of Greece, dealing damnation on all save his own clique, in a way that would have made Torquemada blench. [679] In the face of such teaching as this, it may well be said that "Greek philosophy made incomparably greater advances in the earlier polemic period [of the Ionians] than after its friendly return to the poetry of Homer and Hesiod" [680]--that is, to their polytheistic basis. It is to be said for Plato, finally, that his embitterment at the downward course of things in Athens is a quite intelligible source for his own intellectual decadence: a very similar spectacle being seen in the case of our own great modern Utopist, Sir Thomas More. But Plato's own writing bears witness that among the unbelievers against whom he declaimed there were wise and blameless citizens; [681] while in the act of seeking to lay a religious basis for a good society he admitted the fundamental immorality of the religious basis of the whole of past Greek life.

3. Aristotle [384-322], like Sokrates, albeit in a very different way, rendered rather an indirect than a direct service to Freethought. Where Sokrates gave the critical or dialectic method or habit, "a process of eternal value and of universal application," [682] Aristotle supplied the great inspiration of system, partly correcting the Sokratic dogmatism on the possibilities of science by endless observation and speculation, though himself falling into scientific dogmatism only too often. That he was an unbeliever in the popular and Platonic religion is clear. Apart from the general rationalistic tenor of his works, [683] there was a current understanding that the Peripatetic school denied the utility of prayer and sacrifice; [684] and though the essentially partisan attempt of the anti-Macedonian party to impeach him for impiety may have turned largely on his hyperbolic hymn to his dead friend Hermeias (who was a eunuch, and as such held peculiarly unworthy of being addressed as on a level with semi-divine heroes), [685] it could hardly have been undertaken at all unless he had given solider pretexts. The threatened prosecution he avoided by leaving the city, dying shortly afterwards. Siding as he did with the Macedonian faction, he had put himself out of touch with the democratic instincts of the Athenians, and so doubly failed to affect their thinking. But nonetheless the attack upon him by the democrats was a political stratagem. The prosecution for blasphemy had now become a recognized weapon in politics for all who had more piety than principle, and perhaps for some who had neither. And Aristotle, well aware of the temper of the population around him, had on the whole been so guarded in his utterance that a fantastic pretext had to be fastened on for his undoing.

Prof. Bain (Practical Essays, p. 273), citing Grote's remark on the
"cautious prose compositions of Aristotle," comments thus: "That is
to say, the execution of Sokrates was always before his eyes; he
had to pare his expressions so as not to give offence to Athenian
orthodoxy. We can never know the full bearings of such a disturbing
force. The editors of Aristotle complain of the corruption of
his text: a far worse corruption lies behind. In Greece Sokrates
alone had the courage of his opinions. While his views as to a
future life, for example, are plain and frank, the real opinion
of Aristotle on the question is an insoluble problem." (See,
however, the passage in the Metaphysics cited below.)

The opinion of Grote and Bain as to Aristotle's caution is fully
coincided in by Lange, who writes (Gesch. des Mater. i, 63):
"More conservative than Plato and Sokrates, Aristotle everywhere
seeks to attach himself as closely as possible to tradition, to
popular notions, to the ideas embodied in common speech, and his
ethical postulates diverge as little as may be from the customary
morals and laws of Greek States. He has therefore been at all times
the favourite philosopher of conservative schools and movements."

It is clear, nevertheless, if we can be sure of his writings, that he was a monotheist, but a monotheist with no practical religion. "Excluding such a thing as divine interference with Nature, his theology, of course, excludes the possibility of revelation, inspiration, miracles, and grace." [686] In a passage in the Metaphysics, after elaborating his monistic conception of Nature, he dismisses in one or two terse sentences the whole current religion as a mass of myth framed to persuade the multitude, in the interest of law and order. [687] His influence must thus have been to some extent, at least, favourable to rational science, though unhappily his own science is too often a blundering reaction against the surmises of earlier thinkers with a greater gift of intuition than he, who was rather a methodizer than a discoverer. [688] What was worst in his thinking was its tendency to apriorism, which made it in a later age so adaptable to the purposes of the Roman Catholic Church. Thus his doctrines of the absolute levity of fire and of nature's abhorrence of a vacuum set up a hypnotizing verbalism, and his dictum that the earth is the centre of the universe was fatally helpful to Christian obscurantism. For the rest, while guiltless of Plato's fanaticism, he had no scheme of reform whatever, and was as far as any other Greek from the thought of raising the mass by instruction. His own science, indeed, was not progressive, save as regards his collation of facts in biology; and his political ideals were rather reactionary; his clear perception of the nature of the population problem leaving him in the earlier attitude of Malthus, and his lack of sympathetic energy making him a defender of slavery when other men had condemned it. [689] He was in some aspects the greatest brain of the ancient world; and he left it, at the close of the great Grecian period, without much faith in man, while positing for the modern world its vaguest conception of Deity. Plato and Aristotle between them had reduced the ancient God-idea to a thin abstraction. Plato would not have it that God was the author of evil, thus leaving evil unaccounted for save by sorcery. Aristotle's God does nothing at all, existing merely as a potentiality of thought. And yet upon those positions were to be founded the theisms of the later world. Plato had not striven, and Aristotle had failed, to create an adequate basis for thought in real science; and the world gravitated back to religion.

[In previous editions I remarked that "the lack of fresh science,
which was the proximate cause of the stagnation of Greek thought,
has been explained like other things as a result of race qualities:
'the Athenians,' says Mr. Benn (The Greek Philosophers, i, 42),
'had no genius for natural science: none of them were ever
distinguished as savans.... It was, they thought, a miserable
trifling [and] waste of time.... Pericles, indeed, thought
differently....' On the other hand, Lange decides (i, 6) "that
with the freedom and boldness of the Hellenic spirit was combined
... the talent for scientific deduction. These contrary views,"
I observed, "seem alike arbitrary. If Mr. Benn means that other
Hellenes had what the Athenians lacked, the answer is that only
special social conditions could have set up such a difference,
and that it could not be innate, but must be a mere matter of
usage." Mr. Benn has explained to me that he does not dissent from
this view, and that I had not rightly gathered his from the passage
I quoted. In his later work, The Philosophy of Greece considered
in relation to the character and history of its people (1898),
he has pointed out how, in the period of Hippias and Prodikos,
"at Athens in particular young men threw themselves with ardour
into the investigation of" problems of cosmography, astronomy,
meteorology, and comparative anatomy (p. 138). The hindering
forces were Athenian bigotry (pp. 113-14, 171) and the mischievous
influence of Sokrates (pp. 165, 173).

Speaking broadly, we may say that the Chaldeans were forward in
astronomy because their climate favoured it to begin with, and
religion and their superstitions did so later. Hippokrates of Kos
became a great physician because, with natural capacity, he had
the opportunity to compare many practices. The Athenians failed
to carry on the sciences, not because the faculty or the taste
was lacking among them, but because their political and artistic
interests, for one thing, preoccupied them--e.g., Sokrates and
Plato; and because, for another, their popular religion, popularly
supported, menaced the students of physics. But the Ionians,
who had savans, failed equally to progress after the Alexandrian
period; the explanation being again not stoppage of faculty, but
the advent of conditions unfavourable to the old intellectual
life, which in any case, as we saw, had been first set up by
Babylonian contacts. (Compare, on the ethnological theorem of
Cousin, G. Bréton, Essai sur la poésie philos. en Grèce, p. 10.) On
the other hand, Lange's theory of gifts "innate" in the Hellenic
mind in general is the old racial fallacy. Potentialities are
"innate" in all populations, according to their culture stage,
and it was their total environment that specialized the Greeks
as a community.]

§ 9

The overthrow of the "free" political life of Athens was followed by a certain increase in intellectual activity, the result of throwing back the remaining store of energy on the life of the mind. By this time an almost open unbelief as to the current tales concerning the Gods would seem to have become general among educated people, the withdrawal of the old risk of impeachment by political factions being so far favourable to outspokenness. It is on record that the historian Ephoros (of Cumæ in Æolia: fl. 350 B.C.), who was a pupil of Isocrates, openly hinted in his work at his disbelief in the oracle of Apollo, and in fabulous traditions generally. [690] In other directions there were similar signs of freethought. The new schools of philosophy founded by Zeno the Stoic (fl. 280: d. 263 or 259) and Epicurus (341-270), whatever their defects, compare not ill with those of Plato and Aristotle, exhibiting greater ethical sanity and sincerity if less metaphysical subtlety. Of metaphysics there had been enough for the age: what it needed was a rational philosophy of life. But the loss of political freedom, although thus for a time turned to account, was fatal to continuous progress. The first great thinkers had all been free men in a politically free environment: the atmosphere of cowed subjection, especially after the advent of the Romans, could not breed their like; and originative energy of the higher order soon disappeared. Sane as was the moral philosophy of Epicurus, and austere as was that of Zeno, they are alike static or quietist, [691] the codes of a society seeking a regulating and sustaining principle rather than hopeful of new achievement or new truth. And the universal skepticism of Pyrrho has the same effect of suggesting that what is wanted is not progress, but balance. It is significant that he, who carried the Sokratic profession of Nescience to the typical extreme of doctrinal Nihilism, was made high-priest of his native town of Elis, and had statues erected in his honour. [692]

Considered as freethinkers, all three men tell at once of the critical and of the reactionary work done by the previous age. Pyrrho, the universal doubter, appears to have taken for granted, with the whole of his followers, such propositions as that some animals (not insects) are produced by parthenogenesis, that some live in the fire, and that the legend of the Phoenix is true. [693] Such credences stood for the arrest of biological science in the Sokratic age, with Aristotle, so often mistakenly, at work; while, on the other hand, the Sokratic skepticism visibly motives the play of systematic doubt on the dogmas men had learned to question. Zeno, again, was substantially a monotheist; Epicurus, adopting but not greatly developing the science of Demokritos, [694] turned the Gods into a far-off band of glorious spectres, untroubled by human needs, dwelling for ever in immortal calm, neither ruling nor caring to rule the world of men. [695] In coming to this surprising compromise, Epicurus, indeed, probably did not carry with him the whole intelligence even of his own school. His friend, the second Metrodoros of Lampsakos, seems to have been the most stringent of all the censors of Homer, wholly ignoring his namesake's attempts to clear the bard of impiety. "He even advised men not to be ashamed to confess their utter ignorance of Homer, to the extent of not knowing whether Hector was a Greek or a Trojan." [696] Such austerity towards myths can hardly have been compatible with the acceptance of the residuum of Epicurus. That, however, became the standing creed of the sect, and a fruitful theme of derision to its opponents. Doubtless the comfort of avoiding direct conflict with the popular beliefs had a good deal to do with the acceptance of the doctrine.

This strange retention of the theorem of the existence of anthropomorphic Gods, with a flat denial that they did anything in the universe, might be termed the great peculiarity of average ancient rationalism, were it not that what makes it at all intelligible for us is just the similar practice of modern non-Christian theists. The Gods of antiquity were non-creative, but strivers and meddlers and answerers of prayer; and ancient rationalism relieved them of their striving and meddling, leaving them no active or governing function whatever, but for the most part cherishing their phantasms. The God of modern Christendom had been at once a creator and a governor, ruling, meddling, punishing, rewarding, and hearing prayer; and modern theism, unable to take the atheistic or agnostic plunge, relieves him of all interference in things human or cosmic, but retains him as a creative abstraction who somehow set up "law," whether or not he made all things out of nothing. The psychological process in the two cases seems to be the same--an erection of æsthetic habit into a philosophic dogma, and an accommodation of phrase to popular prejudice.

Whatever may have been the logical and psychological crudities of Epicureanism, however, it counted for much as a deliverance of men from superstitious fears; and nothing is more remarkable in the history of ancient philosophy than the affectionate reverence paid to the founder's memory [697] on this score through whole centuries. The powerful Lucretius sounds his highest note of praise in telling how this Greek had first of all men freed human life from the crashing load of religion, daring to pass the flaming ramparts of the world, and by his victory putting men on an equality with heaven. [698] The laughter-loving Lucian two hundred years later grows gravely eloquent on the same theme. [699] And for generations the effect of the Epicurean check on orthodoxy is seen in the whole intellectual life of the Greek world, already predisposed in that direction. [700] The new schools of the Cynics and the Cyrenaics had alike shown the influence in their perfect freedom from all religious preoccupation, when they were not flatly dissenting from the popular beliefs. Antisthenes, the founder of the former school (fl. 400 B.C.), though a pupil of Sokrates, had been explicitly anti-polytheistic, and an opponent of anthropomorphism. [701] Aristippos of Cyrene, also a pupil of Socrates, who a little later founded the Hedonic or Cyrenaic sect, seems to have put theology entirely aside. One of the later adherents of the school, Theodoros, was like Diagoras labelled "the Atheist" [702] by reason of the directness of his opposition to religion; and in the Rome of Cicero he and Diagoras are the notorious atheists of history. [703] To Theodoros, who had a large following, is attributed an influence over the thought of Epicurus, [704] who, however, took the safer position of a verbal theism. The atheist is said to have been menaced by Athenian law in the time of Demetrius Phalereus, who protected him; and there is even a story that he was condemned to drink hemlock; [705] but he was not of the type that meets martyrdom, though he might go far to provoke it. [706] Roaming from court to court, he seems never to have stooped to flatter any of his entertainers. "You seem to me," said the steward of Lysimachos of Thrace to him on one occasion, "to be the only man who ignores both Gods and kings." [707]

In the same age the same freethinking temper is seen in Stilpo of Megara (fl. 307), of the school of Euclides, who is said to have been brought before the Areopagus for the offence of saying that the Pheidian statue of Athênê was "not a God," and to have met the charge with the jest that she was in reality not a God but a Goddess; whereupon he was exiled. [708] The stories told of him make it clear that he was an unbeliever, usually careful not to betray himself. Euclides, too, with his optimistic pantheism, was clearly a heretic; though his doctrine that evil is non-ens [709] later became the creed of some Christians. Yet another professed atheist was the witty Bion of Borysthenes, pupil of Theodoros, of whom it is told, in a fashion familiar to our own time, that in sickness he grew pious through fear. [710] Among his positions was a protest or rather satire against the doctrine that the Gods punished children for the crimes of their fathers. [711] In the other schools, Speusippos (fl. 343), the nephew of Plato, leant to monotheism; [712] Strato of Lampsakos, the Peripatetic (fl. 290), called "the Naturalist," taught sheer pantheism, anticipating Laplace in declaring that he had no need of the action of the Gods to account for the making of the world; [713] Dikaiarchos (fl. 326-287), another disciple of Aristotle, denied the existence of separate souls, and the possibility of foretelling the future; [714] and Aristo and Cleanthes, disciples of Zeno, varied likewise in the direction of pantheism; the latter's monotheism, as expressed in his famous hymn, being one of several doctrines ascribed to him. [715]

Contemporary with Epicurus and Zeno and Pyrrho, too, was Evêmeros (Euhemerus), whose peculiar propaganda against Godism seems to imply theoretic atheism. As an atheist he was vilified in a manner familiar to modern ears, the Alexandrian poet Callimachus labelling him an "arrogant old man vomiting impious books." [716] His lost work, of which only a few extracts remain, undertook to prove that all the Gods had been simply famous men, deified after death; the proof, however, being by way of a fiction about old inscriptions found in an imaginary island. [717] As above noted, [718] the idea may have been borrowed from skeptical Phoenicians, the principle having already been monotheistically applied by the Bible-making Jews, [719] though, on the other hand, it had been artistically and to all appearance uncritically acted on in the Homeric epopees. It may or may not then have been by way of deliberate or reasoning Evêmerism that certain early Greek and Roman deities were transformed, as we have seen, into heroes or hetairai. [720] In any case, the principle seems to have had considerable vogue in the later Hellenistic world; but with the effect rather of paving the way for new cults than of setting up scientific rationalism in place of the old ones. Quite a number of writers like Palaiphatos, without going so far as Evêmeros, sought to reduce myths to natural possibilities and events, by way of mediating between the credulous and the incredulous. [721] Their method is mostly the naïf one revived by the Abbé Banier in the eighteenth century of reducing marvels to verbal misconceptions. Thus for Palaiphatos the myth of Kerberos came from the facts that the city Trikarenos was commonly spoken of as a beautiful and great dog; and that Geryon, who lived there, had great dogs called Kerberoi; Actæon was "devoured by his dogs" in the sense that he neglected his affairs and wasted his time in hunting; the Amazons were shaved men, clad as were the women in Thrace, and so on. [722] Palaiphatos and the Herakleitos who also wrote De Incredibilibus agree that Pasiphae's bull was a man named Tauros; and the latter writer similarly explains that Scylla was a beautiful hetaira with avaricious hangers-on, and that the harpies were ladies of the same profession. If the method seems childish, it is to be remembered that as regards the explanation of supernatural events it was adhered to by German theologians of a century ago; and that its credulity in incredulity is still to be seen in the current view that every narrative in the sacred books is to be taken as necessarily standing for a fact of some kind.

One of the inferrible effects of the Evêmerist method was to facilitate for the time the adoption of the Egyptian and eastern usage of deifying kings. It has been plausibly argued that this practice stands not so much for superstition as for skepticism, its opponents being precisely the orthodox believers, and its promoters those who had learned to doubt the actuality of the traditional Gods. Evêmerism would clinch such a tendency; and it is noteworthy that Evêmeros lived at the court of Kassander (319-296 B.C.) in a period in which every remaining member of the family of the deified Alexander had perished, mostly by violence; while the contemporary Ptolemy I of Egypt received the title of Sotêr, "Saviour," from the people of Rhodes. [723] It is to be observed, however, that while in the next generation Antiochus I of Syria received the same title, and his successor Antiochus II that of Theos, "God," the usage passes away; Ptolemy III being named merely Evergetês, "the Benefactor" (of the priests), and even Antiochus III only "the Great." Superstition was not to be ousted by a political exploitation of its machinery. [724]

In Athens the democracy, restored in a subordinate form by Kassander's opponent, Demetrius Poliorkêtes (307 B.C.), actually tried to put down the philosophic schools, all of which, but the Aristotelian in particular, were anti-democratic, and doubtless also comparatively irreligious. Epicurus and some of his antagonists were exiled within a year of his opening his school (306 B.C.); but the law was repealed in the following year. [725] Theophrastos, the head of the Aristotelian school, was indicted in the old fashion for impiety, which seems to have consisted in denouncing animal sacrifice. [726] These repressive attempts, however, failed; and no others followed at Athens in that era; though in the next century the Epicureans seem to have been expelled from Lythos in Crete and from Messenê in the Peloponnesos, nominally for their atheism, in reality probably on political grounds. [727] Thus Zeno was free to publish a treatise in which, besides far out-going Plato in schemes for dragooning the citizens into an ideal life, he proposed a State without temples or statues of the Gods or law courts or gymnasia. [728] In the same age there is trace of "an interesting case of rationalism even in the Delphic oracle." [729] The people of the island of Astypalaia, plagued by hares or rabbits, solemnly consulted the oracle, which briefly advised them to keep dogs and take to hunting. About the same time we find Lachares, temporarily despot at Athens, plundering the shrine of Pallas of its gold. [730] Even in the general public there must have been a strain of surviving rationalism; for among the fragments of Menander (fl. 300), who, in general, seems to have leant to a well-bred orthodoxy, [731] there are some speeches savouring of skepticism and pantheism. [732]

It was in keeping with this general but mostly placid and non-polemic latitudinarianism that the New Academy, the second birth, or rather transformation, of the Platonic school, in the hands of Arkesilaos and the great Carneades (213-129), and later of the Carthaginian Clitomachos, should be marked by that species of skepticism thence called Academic--a skepticism which exposed the doubtfulness of current religious beliefs without going the Pyrrhonian length of denying that any beliefs could be proved, or even denying the existence of the Gods.

For the arguments of Carneades against the Stoic doctrine of
immortality see Cicero, De natura Deorum, iii, 12, 17; and for
his argument against theism see Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Math. ix,
172, 183. Mr. Benn pronounces this criticism of theology "the most
destructive that has ever appeared, the armoury whence religious
skepticism ever since has been supplied" (The Philosophy of
Greece, etc., p. 258). This seems an over-statement. But it is
just to say, as does Mr. Whittaker (Priests, Philosophers, and
Prophets, 1911, p. 60; cp. p. 86), that "there has never been
a more drastic attack than that of Carneades, which furnished
Cicero with the materials for his second book, On Divination";
and, as does Prof. Martha (Études Morales sur l'antiquité, 1889,
p. 77), that no philosophic or religious school has been able to
ignore the problems which Carneades raised.