Chapter XII: Introduction (10)

The statesman who led the anti-Macedonian party at Athens was the orator Demosthenes. His brilliant series of Philippics and Olynthiac Orations are full of denunciations of the crafty monarch, full of trumpet-calls to the ancient valour of Athens which sometimes ring rather hollow to modern ears. Demosthenes was not exceptionally honest, but there is no warrant for suspecting the purity of his patriotism. He himself set the example of bearing a shield personally in the ranks, and he must have been conscious throughout his public career that he was in danger of assassination or of execution if the enemy triumphed. The wisdom of his opposition to Philip has also been questioned. Events were to prove that these Macedonian kings were not barbarians; on the contrary, their warmest aspiration was to be counted as Greeks, and they had, as they frequently testified, a great love of Greek culture and a deep veneration for Athens as the home of it. This the future was to prove; the present only showed a foreign monarch devouring piecemeal the markets of Athens in the north. Perhaps Demosthenes ought to have realised that Macedon was too strong for Athens, but no one could seriously expect old Greece to succumb to this upstart without a struggle. For one thing, Macedon had not and never acquired a really strong fleet. But her army was certainly irresistible.

Philip had learnt strategy at the feet of the Theban Epaminondas. The army he created included a _corps d’élite_ of noble horse-guards, the Companions of the King. These were the earliest first-rate mounted troops in history, and it was by their means that the dashing exploits of Alexander were subsequently achieved. For the infantry his great invention was the phalanx. This was clearly a modification of the deep formation invented by Epaminondas. It consisted of sixteen ranks armed with a spear 21 feet long. They stood in close order so that the points of the first five ranks projected from the front to present a bristling hedge of spears. The remaining eleven ranks, we are gravely informed, held their spears obliquely in the air to ward off missiles! Let the military reader find a military justification for this extraordinary arrangement. To me it seems a further confirmation of my civilian view that Greek tactics were primarily designed to prevent armies from running away. We observe that when Alexander took Persian troops into his phalanx he put twelve ranks of Persians into the lines, with a row of Macedonians _at their rear_. In any case troops standing in close formation armed with weapons 7 yards long must have been useless for any but defensive purposes; and, as a matter of fact, the victories of Alexander were generally gained by the lightning charge of the king at the head of his knights.

We need not touch upon the shabby “Sacred Wars” which caused Philip to enter Greece on the invitation of Thebes. It was at Chæroneia in 338 that Philip defeated a mixed Greek army in whose ranks Demosthenes was fighting as a hoplite. Philip was generous to the Greeks, and especially to Athens. Next year the darling wish of his heart was obtained, for he was elected president of a Panhellenic union destined to fulfil his great scheme of avenging the Persian invasions of Greece by a march to Babylon. In the next year he was murdered, and his brilliant son Alexander cannot be acquitted of complicity in the crime.

The grand idea was Philip’s, begotten perhaps from the study of Isocrates, and certainly inspired by the examples of Xenophon and Agesilaus. Unfortunately it was far from arousing any enthusiasm in Greece. Persia was a long way off, and money could be had from the Great King without fighting for it. There was a sordid scramble for bribes among the Greek statesmen. As soon as they heard of Philip’s death they broke into unseemly jubilation, and voted compliments to his murderers; they hoped that things would return to their old routine, and that there would be no more talk of antediluvian crusades. They had reckoned without Alexander, for it is seldom that a Philip is succeeded by an Alexander.

This young man who conquered the world and died at the age of thirty-three has quite naturally captivated the imagination of posterity and formed a model for ambitious generals of later days. Julius Cæsar sighed to think of his inferiority in achievement. Augustus paid a visit to his tomb, and wore his portrait on a ring. Napoleon consciously imitated him. As a soldier he was not only an organiser of victory, though of course he owed a great deal to his father in this respect, and a strategist with an eye for a battlefield, but also a dashing cavalry leader, the sort of man to ride straight for the enemy’s king, to be the first in the breach, and to leap down alone into the enemy’s town. He did this sort of thing with impunity; he never lost a battle. He was chivalrous to ladies, Bayard and Bluebeard by turns. He married a beautiful Eastern princess called Roxana, he rode a beautiful war-horse called Bucephalus. If Lysippus and Apelles may be trusted, he had the face of a Greek god. He had just that touch of dissipation which somehow rounds off the conception of a popular hero. He had the good fortune to die young, in the hour of victory.

And what is to be the sober historian’s estimate of this dazzling person? We may minimise his triumphs by pointing out that the Persian empire was helpless before him, like ripe fruit waiting to be gathered. We may certainly charge him with conquering insanely without stopping to organise, and with neglecting his own kingdom and failing to deal adequately with the political condition of old Greece. We may point to the extraordinarily rapid collapse of his empire. But then he died suddenly in the midst of his work, and left no grown heir to succeed him. In some respects I think we must all admit that he showed very remarkable gifts of statesmanship. Though

_Brogi._]

half a barbarian by origin, he was an enthusiast for Hellenism, and his plan was to spread it at the point of the spear all over the civilised world. When he destroyed Thebes he spared one house--the house of Pindar. It was as a missionary of Greek culture that he marched over the burning deserts of Asia. He took poets and artists in his train. He would stop his march every now and then to exhibit Greek athletics and Greek arts to the wondering Orientals. He planted Greek cities wherever he had time to stop, from Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile to Candahar (another version of his name). He had the art which makes a successful apostle, the gift of being all things to all men. In Egypt, the land of religion and mystery, he made a solemn pilgrimage into the desert, and got himself accepted as the son of the god called by the Greeks Ammon. In Persia he recognised the merits of the Persian provincial system, and appointed his own satraps, or even retained the existing ones. He treated Persian women with the deference to which they were accustomed, and added one to his household in the manner to which they were also accustomed. His Macedonians murmured at his Oriental dress and manners, but Alexander was always a Greek at heart, the lines of Homer always rang in his ears, and he fancied himself a reincarnation of Achilles pursuing his Phrygian Hectors over the dusty plains of Troy. He was mad, no doubt, to march so far over those weary deserts into Turkestan, through those dreadful defiles of the Hindu Khush. Only the mutiny of his army turned him back when he reached the farthest of the Five Rivers of the Punjaub. And then it was frantic lunacy to lead his army home along the burning coasts of the Persian Gulf. That experience taught him, it seems, a lesson which he might well have learnt earlier, namely, the value of sea-power for conquerors and empire-builders. When he died he was projecting a naval expedition along the coasts of Africa. The disaffection of Athens had deprived him of the fleet which ought to have belonged to a Panhellenic army, and Alexander had been forced to destroy the Persian fleet by a siege of its arsenal and headquarters, the island city of Tyre. Most conquerors have a touch of insanity, no doubt. The sanest of them is Julius Cæsar, and the maddest is Charles XII. But Alexander the Great had lucid intervals of consummate statesmanship. It is in this respect that he differs from the vulgar type of adventurer and stands among civilising conquerors like William the Norman with his Domesday Book, Napoleon with his Code, and Julius Cæsar with his Julian Laws and his calendar. This intellectual suppleness was the mark of Alexander’s Greek education, though it still remains a difficulty to trace in his career the influence of Aristotle, his tutor.

On his death at Babylon in 323 the whole empire flew to pieces. He had unwisely divided his veteran armies among his various generals, and each of them found himself established as the monarch of a large territory. Most of them naturally desired to emulate their master and secure as much of his empire as they could for themselves. Out of the confusing struggles of the next generation three great kingdoms gradually emerged: that of Macedonia, warlike and turbulent under various shortlived dynasties, that of Asia, huge and wealthy under a line of Seleucids, and that of Egypt under a long family of Ptolemies. All these kingdoms were mainly Greek. In the country, no doubt, Oriental life and language continued, but in the towns and for purposes of government both the language and the civilisation were Greek. Thus Alexander had done his work. He had actually added the whole of Asia Minor, Phœnicia, and Egypt to the Greek world. Curious traces of Hellenism are found even in distant India.

In this world of “the Successors,” as they are called, the ancient states of Greece are not altogether negligible. Rhodes continued to be free, rich, and happy. Athens, as I have remarked, was occasionally oppressed and sometimes enslaved by the Macedonian rulers to the north, but for the most part she continued as a free democracy, conducting her own affairs as vehemently as ever, though now, of course, as a second-class power. Sparta stood sullenly aloof, joining no confederacies,

_Seban & Joaillier_]

but dreadfully shrunken in population. I have alluded to her notable experiments at reform in the third century under Agis and Cleomenes. It was ended by the crushing defeat at Sellasia from the Achæan League and the Macedonians. Towns like Argos and Corinth preserved their liberties by joining the Leagues. Epirus was a new Power rising to fame by the same road as Macedon under an adventurous king called Pyrrhus. He unfortunately turned west instead of east in his search for worlds to conquer, and there met another rising power, a race of real soldiers who made short work of the Greek phalanx, even when supported by heavy cavalry in the form of Indian elephants. It was these Romans who, when they came in due course to return his visit, put “Finis” to this chapter of Greek history, and proceeded themselves to undertake the task of writing the next.

ALEXANDER IN ART

We have numerous works of art which portray Alexander the Great, and as he is said to have granted the sole right of depicting his royal form to Lysippus the sculptor, and to have commissioned Apelles as his royal painter, we may presume that most of the portraits go back to an original by one of these artists. We have enough description of the pictures by Apelles to show that he treated his model with all the obsequiousness of a court painter. There was Alexander in the guise of Zeus wielding the thunderbolt, Alexander in the company of Nike and the Heavenly Twins, Alexander leading the god of war in triumph, Alexander mounted on Bucephalus. The only relic which may give us an idea of the treatment of such subjects in pictorial art is a very fine mosaic floor at Pompeii.[107] It represents the conqueror charging bareheaded into the press of the Persian bodyguard at Issus, his greatest victory. You see Darius in his Oriental “mitre” anxious and terrified, just turning his chariot out of the battle. The scene is represented with great spirit, and Alexander’s face is happily preserved. The horses in particular are most faithfully rendered. As part of the mosaic depicts a Nile scene, with crocodiles, ibis, snakes, and a hippopotamus, we must infer that the original picture was made in Alexandria.

The same scene is depicted with greater brilliance on the famous sarcophagus from Sidon. On one side of it Alexander and Parmenio are fighting the Persians at Issus, and on the other side they are engaged in a lion hunt.[108] Few works of art can compare with this monument in magnificence or in historical interest. It is especially interesting in the history of art because it gives us the best example of the application of colour to sculpture, and completely justifies that process.[109] It also affords fine specimens of Greek mouldings and designs. The material is Pentelic marble imported from Athens. This sarcophagus is now in the museum at Constantinople.

Of the many busts and heads of Alexander, none gives us a very favourable example of the work of Lysippus. The so-called Dying Alexander is hideously strained and emotional. A head in the British Museum, however, is probably nearer to the original, though the very short upper lip and the heavy jaw make it a rather unpleasing portrait.[110] We are told that Lysippus alone was permitted to make portraits of Alexander, because “others desiring to represent the bend of his neck and the emotional glance of his eyes, failed to render his manly and leonine aspect.” It should be noted that Lysippus made a famous group of Alexander’s hunting, and another of Alexander’s troop of horse, so that the Constantinople reliefs may go back to Lysippean originals.

Alexander was worshipped even in his lifetime as a god. He claimed, among other divine claims, to be a son of Ammon. In this character he is represented with the ram’s horns of that Egyptian deity on a coin of Thrace cast by Lysimachus, one of his generals and successors.

Alexander was the first of mortals to have his portrait on Greek coins, and it is only in virtue of the divine honours paid to him that this is conceded even to the conqueror of the world. Many of the later kings followed his example, and portraiture on the coins now becomes common.

ALEXANDRIA

In studying the early civilisation of Europe, which means the history of the Mediterranean peninsulas, one must not forget that economically Egypt is the key to the whole position. In natural resources it is far the richest country in that region. Hitherto, however, it had been shut off from the rest of the world by its own peculiar civilisation and religion, though the Greeks had occasionally borrowed ideas from it and sometimes interfered in its historical course. Now Alexander gives it a Greek government and a Greek capital. In order to crush the Phœnician fleet which had been the principal naval support of the Persian Empire, he had been compelled to destroy the city of Tyre. But it was more than a strategic move. He intended the commerce and sea-power of the Levant to be henceforth in Greek hands. He succeeded brilliantly in his purpose. Phœnicia passed away from the stage of history, and only survived in her great colony of Carthage.

The city of Alexandria was laid out on a mathematical plan by Greek architects. Its situation on the delta of the Nile was exceedingly favourable to commerce, especially as the difficult navigation of its waters was mitigated by the construction of a great lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. In the division of the empire Egypt had the good fortune to fall to the share of Ptolemy, a wise and enlightened ruler, as were most of his descendants of the same name. These all pursued a policy of commerce and peaceful expansion. There was brisk traffic between Alexandria, Rhodes, Pergamum, Athens, and Syracuse, and Alexandria grew to be the greatest city in the world. It was pre-eminently Greek, but tinctured also with some of the Orientalism of its environment.

Along with commerce the Ptolemies cultivated literature by founding a sort of university or college called the Museum. It consisted of a temple of the Muses, rooms for its members, a common dining-hall, cloistered walks for the peripatetic teacher, and above all of a magnificent library, for which the kings of Egypt made it their ambition to collect all the books in the world. Half a million MSS. were gathered there in the third century. The chief librarian was the master of the whole institution, which was a place of research and literary production rather than of education. At the same time Ptolemy made a point of attracting all the foremost literary men of the Greek world to his court. It cannot be denied that the Alexandrian culture was rich and vigorous. Great strides were made in science and mathematics, new and promising forms of literature were invented, but at the same time the sheltered air of the Museum tended to produce, as is inevitably the case with collegiate institutions, a rather frigid and academic type of work. At Alexandria, for instance, the first critics arose, and the first literary scholars, whose task was mainly to elucidate and comment upon the works of Homer. One of these scholars invented the Greek system of breathings and accents to help in the recital of verse. The most famous of all of them was Aristarchus, the Father of Criticism. In science and mathematics we must mention our old friend Euclid, who reigned in the hearts of schoolboys until the day before yesterday. Here worked Archimedes, the great engineer and founder of mechanics, statics, and dynamics. His researches in these directions remained unequalled until the seventeenth century _anno Domini_. Wondrous stories are told of his inventions and of his absent-mindedness. Once as he was entering the bath the overflowing of the water gave him a valuable scientific hint. He was so pleased that he forgot to dress, but ran home through the streets crying, “Heureka! Heureka!” At Alexandria, too, lived Eratosthenes, who first measured the circumference of the earth and worked out a system of chronology for history.

_Mansell & Co._]

There were many other historians of lesser repute at the Museum.

In poetry Alexandria is connected with some important developments, chiefly literary revivals of ancient modes. Thus Apollonius the Rhodian attempted to revive the epic, and wrote a long poem in hexameter verse on the Argonautic expedition of Jason. It is of course rather cold and formal, it is a long way from Homer, but it is of considerable merit in the field of poetry. Alexandria revived also the elegiac couplet, chiefly for short epigrams, some of which have the beauty and colour of a Greek gem. We may see for an example that epigram of Callimachus from which I have taken the couplet at the head of my Introduction, and which was so charmingly translated by William Johnson Cory. I quote another elegiac epigram of Meleager’s to show how modern in tone and subject these dainty lyrics had become in the first century B.C.:

“Poor foolish heart, I cried ‘Beware,’
I vowed thou wouldst be captured,
So fondly hovering round the snare,
With thy false love enraptured.

“I cried, and thou art caught at last,
All vainly flutterest in the toils.
Lord Love himself hath bound thee fast
And meshed thy pinions in his coils.

“And he hath set thee on his fire,
In drugs thy swooning soul immersed,
In stifling perfumes of desire,
With scalding tears to quench thy thirst.”

So far it is mainly a record of revivals, but in Theocritus, who, though Sicilian by birth, passed most of his active career at Alexandria, we have the inventor of a new and most important branch of literature. With him pastoral poetry was a fresh and genuine creation. His Idylls are, as their name implies, a series of cameo pictures of shepherd life in Sicily. We have found no space here to speak of the later developments of Sicilian history, which in the fourth and third centuries became once more a desperate battleground between Carthaginian invaders and clever Syracusan tyrants like Dionysius and Agathocles. It is strange to think that the beautiful rustic life depicted by Theocritus could exist among the hills and glens of Sicily in spite of all the turmoil of history. Mr. Andrew Lang has completely vindicated Theocritus from the charge of artificiality by pointing out that the shepherds of modern Greece sing in language of refined and impassioned poetry that is perfectly natural and spontaneous. Large parts of the Idylls sound like quotations of such songs of Nature. Theocritus was, of course, the source of that pastoral convention which has produced so much that is artificial in art and literature amid much of supreme beauty. We think at once of Vergil, Spenser, Sidney, Milton, Watteau, and the Dresden shepherdess. Theocritus is the literary father of all these. In his famous Fifteenth Idyll, which describes with exquisite humour the conversation of a pair of Sicilian dames going to see a festival of Adonis at Alexandria, we have the beginnings of another literary form--the mime. This is a rudimentary style of drama which seeks to portray little genre scenes of life with no attempt at a plot. Herondas of Cos was the principal master of this art.

Two pupils of Theocritus were Bion and Moschus, both accomplished elegiac poets. Bion’s dirge for Daphnis and Moschus’ lament for Bion have provided the type for Vergil’s lament for Daphnis, for Milton’s “Lycidas,” for Shelley’s “Adonais,” and Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis.”

ATHENS AND HER PHILOSOPHERS

In Alexandria, then, the Hellenic genius was as fruitful as ever. But it was growing under glass there, and it was not pure Occidental culture. We have to think of the Greek Ptolemies, descended from Macedonian generals, as on the one hand writing Greek poetry and inviting Greek scholars to criticise it, but on the other hand accepting homage and

W. Titzenthaler, Photo. Berlin, W.]

adulation as Eastern potentates, and actually marrying their sisters after the customary manner of Pharaohs. In Egypt Father Zeus took over the horns of Amen-Ra and became Zeus Ammon. Aphrodite, the foam-born goddess, assumed her Oriental nature once more and was mated with young Adonis in weird and lascivious Eastern ritual. Adonis was no Grecian youth, but a mystic personification of the spring, and his worshippers tore their hair and made lamentation for him with the same frenzy as made the priests of Carmel cut themselves with knives in honour of Baal. All over Asia Minor Hellenism had to mingle with Asiatic elements, losing in the contact all its fine austerity and sweet reasonableness. Hence was born the worship of Cybele, an Oriental Great Mother, with horrid mysteries performed by priestly eunuchs. Even the sculpture with which the wealthy Attalids adorned their great altar of Zeus at Pergamum, though Greek in plot and execution, is of almost Asiatic luxuriance and voluptuous beauty.[111] Passion and effort replace calm and dignity even as they do in the new Asiatic schools of oratory. Alexander’s violent battering at the gates which separate East from West had produced a strange hybrid in many of the cities of Eastern Greece.

But in some quarters the pure Greek spirit still produced lovely and reasonable work in art and literature alike. It seems to me impossible to think of degeneracy in connection with the Aphrodite of Melos, known to the public as the Venus of Milo.[112] If she has the charm and suavity of Praxiteles, she has the dignity and breadth of Pheidias. Unless you follow the pedants who make some point of the arrangement of her drapery, there is not a trait of vulgarity in her aspect. No doubt if we had the original Lady of Cnidos we should know better, but at present this superb statue rightly stands as the embodiment of feminine loveliness in statuary. And yet all the archæological indications go to prove that her author lived at the very end of the second century in the Asiatic city of Antioch, on the Mæander. She was found in a cavern on the little island of Melos, hidden there by who knows what devout worshipper or terrified pirate? She is, in fact, surrounded with mystery. No one has succeeded in restoring her missing arms, though far the most plausible theory is that which would make her hold a shield for a mirror in the same manner as the Victory of Brescia. No one has found anything else in Greek sculpture which could belong to the same artist, or even to the same phase of art. I name her here only to prove that you cannot fairly close the history of Greek art with Praxiteles or any other named sculptors, seeing that an unnamed artist living two centuries later could produce a statue on the same plane of excellence.

One of the most interesting figures among the warriors who followed Alexander was Demetrius, the Besieger of Cities, who gained his title from a celebrated but unsuccessful siege of Rhodes. He gained the kingdom of Macedonia and enslaved Athens. In celebration of a naval victory gained by him in 306 B.C. he set up at Samothrace a wonderful statue of Victory standing on the prow of a warship.[113] Her wings are outspread, her drapery is blown back by the wind, she is all life and motion. Along with the Venus of Milo she is the chief glory of the sculpture galleries in the Louvre. The reader should compare her with that earlier Victory fashioned by Pæonius. He will see that her drapery is much richer and the whole conception far more sensational. Both are very beautiful statues, but a pure taste will probably prefer the earlier one.

In all this period the dear city of Pallas had not suffered any material change. She had lost most of her colonies and maritime possessions, and in external politics she was but a pawn among the kings of Macedon and Egypt. But for the most part she remained a free democracy, governed by her free Assembly. The Peiræus still remained an important centre of commerce. Intellectually Athens still ruled the world not only in virtue of her past achievements, but by the continuing pre-eminence of her philosophers. Her principal literary product

_Alinari_]

of these days was the New Comedy of Menander and his school. Menander’s work was taken over bodily by the Roman poets Plautus and Terence, who did little more than translate his comedies into Latin, and sometimes weave two of them together into one play, a process known by the not inappropriate technical name “contamination.” From the Roman comedians they passed almost direct to the Elizabethan age, so that in the history of the drama Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” begins almost where Menander left off. It must be confessed that the large fragments of Menander recently discovered do not raise our estimate of this dramatist.

If we turn now to philosophy we find the great name of Aristotle overshadowing everything else.[114] If we have a true sense of historical proportion, we shall probably admit that the words of Aristotle have conquered the world in far truer sense than the spears of his great pupil. For Aristotle is the father of the inductive method, the patron saint of all those who observe and verify facts in order to discover the laws that control them. He was born at Stagira, in Thrace, but he came to Athens to be a disciple in the Academy, that pleasant olive-grove where Plato was the master. Twenty years he spent thus in study, and then he was commissioned by Philip to teach Alexander and other noble youths of Macedon. As soon as this task was completed he returned to Athens, and there founded his famous Peripatetic school of philosophy, so called because his lectures were delivered in the shady walks that surrounded the Lyceum. In the morning he would discuss abstruse questions with an inner circle of adepts, and in the cool of the evening deliver polished lectures to a wider circle. The fame of his teaching was spread throughout the world, and all the ablest intellects of Greece gathered to hear him. All his life he received the most generous support from Alexander, who made a point of collecting strange beasts from all quarters to enrich his zoological studies. The attitude of the monarch towards learning was in striking contrast to the behaviour of the Athenian democracy. Some wretched hierophant instituted a prosecution for impiety against Aristotle, just as they had done against Socrates, and forced him to withdraw from Athens for the closing years of his life.

Aristotle took all knowledge as his province and proceeded to map it out for further investigation. It is impossible even to enumerate all his extant writings here, and they are only a small part of what he wrote. For scientific method he wrote on Logic and Dialectic, and here he was the discoverer of the syllogism and distinguished the inductive and deductive methods of reasoning. For literature he dissected Poetry and Rhetoric, laying down principles which all subsequent critics have been compelled to follow. In his Ethics he defines the nature of virtue in a sense that is truly Hellenic. Virtues are the mean between two vices. Thus liberality is the virtue of which prodigality and parsimony are the extremes; courage is the mean between foolhardiness and cowardice. For Natural Science he wrote the first treatise on zoology, enumerating about 500 different species. It was the first time in the history of the world when men had thought it worth while to observe the world around them. Most of this scientific work was beyond the reach of mankind, and remained so for two thousand years. The Romans studied him, but scarcely advanced a step. In the Dark Ages Europe lost even the power to follow him, and much of his teaching was recovered from the wise men of Arabia. The mediæval schoolmen were content with abridged translations for their scientific knowledge. It was not until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that Europe came again to be able to study and understand him. In the seventeenth and eighteenth men like Bacon and Newton began to make some advance. Even now he is our master in Logic, in Criticism, and above all in Politics.

Plato had treated Political Science in three great dialogues, the greatest of which is “The Republic.” The ostensible object of this work is to define the nature of Justice, and in order to do so Socrates and his friends set out to construct an

_Alinari_]

Ideal Republic. Before they have gone very far it is evident, and indeed it is admitted, that such a state as they envisage cannot exist upon earth, though it may be laid up in the heavens for an example. It is a small Greek city-state. Plato discerns three elements in every state, the producers, the warriors, and the thinking element. Of these he makes three rigid classes, though education, upon the importance of which Plato everywhere insists, is to provide the means of rising for all. Music and gymnastics are the twofold base of Platonic education. The thinking part of the community are to have the sole title to government. They are to live a simple communistic life, rather like the nobles of Sparta, but without their military activity. In order that nothing may disturb their absolute unity, Plato decrees that wives and children are to be held in common, as well as all property. These strange doctrines have caused Plato to be held as the father of Socialism, but it is to be observed that in Plato communism is only advocated for a restricted circle of aristocrats, and that it is based not upon economic considerations, but on ethics in a spirit of asceticism. In a later dialogue Plato regretfully admits that laws are necessary to a state, seeing that you cannot keep your philosophers on the throne when you have got them there. This admission may be occasioned by the failure of Plato to realise his ideals in actual practice. He had an extraordinary chance. He was invited over to Syracuse to mould the character and policy of the young tyrant Dionysius II. He argued that it was useless to place an ideal system of government before a young man who was not of sufficient education to appreciate it. He therefore determined to begin with the education of the prince, and began it with geometry. The issue may be easily guessed.

Aristotle approached Politics from a more practical standpoint. True to his inductive method, he first collected accounts of all the existing forms of government in the Greek world, more than a hundred in number. Unfortunately, the “Polity of Athens,” recently discovered, is the only surviving example. Then in his great treatise called “The Politics” he attempted to criticise practical statesmanship from a scientific standpoint, and in his turn also constructed something like an ideal state. For him, as for all Greek thinkers, politics was only a branch of ethics. The state came into existence for the sake of enabling men to live; it survives for the purpose of enabling men to live well. The object, therefore, of the statesman is to get the right kind of people at the head of affairs--and that means Aristocracy. Viewing all Greek society from the philosopher’s standpoint, he regarded all those whose economic position required them to be mainly interested in gaining a livelihood as too much preoccupied with sordid cares to possess political virtue or to be fit to govern. His governing class is therefore necessarily the rich class, just as it was with Plato, though neither philosopher would admit wealth as the sole or even the main criterion. Aristotle regards Monarchy as a good form of government also, if you could secure that the monarch should be better than the people he rules, and should rule for their advantage, not his own. There is also a good form of Republic or Free Constitution, in which the whole body of the citizens take their turn in office. But each of these three sound forms of government has its own special danger--Aristocracy degenerates into Oligarchy when the few rule for their own advantage, Monarchy into Tyranny, and the Free Constitution into Democracy.

It is evident in all his writings that he regards the Athenian government as a bad one, but we must remember that he only saw it in its decline. The most valuable part of his teaching is that wherein he defines the state as a partnership, not in all things, but only in those things which concern its _telos_--the good life. Also, it is made up, not of individuals, but of smaller partnerships such as the family. It is on these grounds that he criticises the doctrine of communism. Since the whole object of political life is to secure moral completeness, it is obvious that the citizen does not surrender his whole being to the state. Thus both philosophers are alike in putting aside the claims of the working classes, who, it must not be forgotten, largely

_Anderson_]

consisted of slaves. Both are therefore aristocratic. Both look upon the state as existing for moral rather than economic ends. Both regard the laws and constitution as something sacred and clearly beyond the reach of the citizens. Neither of them has conceived the idea of political progress, which, indeed, is an idea of very modern origin. Such was the philosophic ideal of the city-state, in some respects better and in some respects worse than our own.

After Aristotle Greek political thinkers took up and developed the hints he drops as to the Mixed Constitution, in which the three elements Monarchic, Aristocratic, and Democratic are to be subtly mingled as they were in Sparta and Rome.

Other schools of philosophy arose at Athens which from their more vital influence upon the lives and actions of ordinary men are quite as important in the history of human civilisation. Zeno founded in the Stoa Poikile of Athens the Stoic philosophy, and Epicurus taught the doctrines which bore his name, at the same time when Aristotle was lecturing in the Lyceum and the successor of Plato in the Academy. Both were largely concerned with the rules for right conduct in life. The Stoics taught that wisdom and virtue are the true goal of man. Virtue consists in living according to Nature, and it becomes the business of the wise man to discover what is essential and distinguish it from what is merely accidental and ephemeral. Pleasure, praise, even life itself, are among things accidental. At its best Stoicism insisted very sternly upon duty, and the contempt of pain and death. In this way it seized upon all that was noblest in the Roman character and raised up under the Empire a series of martyrs who alone withstood the tyrants because they were not afraid of death. It approaches the sublime in the mouths of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. Filtering through the Asiatic temperament and mingling in its course with the higher teaching of Pharisaism, it did much to form the philosophy of a certain Jew of Tarsus, and through him has vitally influenced Christianity. In another sphere its insistence upon Natural Law bore fruit in Roman jurisprudence and lies at the base of all the legal systems of Europe.

Epicurus, on the other hand, made pleasure the end of life, not the mere bodily pleasure with which his name has been associated, but that which in the sum of its moments goes to form what we call happiness. It was necessary to happiness that men should cast off all the degrading fears born of superstition and know that the gods--if indeed gods exist--are too much occupied themselves in enjoying celestial happiness to condescend to punish and afflict the mortals under their feet. So the Epicureans accepted a material theory, largely due to Democritus, which explained the universe on atomic principles. Death was merely the resolution of body and soul into its primordial atoms. The less noble spirits among them undoubtedly taught the maxim “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” but in such a mind as that of the Roman poet Lucretius Epicureanism is a fine and lofty thing, with its fearless spirit of inquiry and its bitter scorn of superstition.

We should mention also the Cynics, whose chief teacher was Diogenes, for they inculcated a contempt for pleasure and an asceticism which led some of them to live a hermit life, or, like mendicant friars, to carry neither staff nor scrip and to take no thought for their raiment. Needless to say, Cynicism never became a popular doctrine.

It is evident, then, that intellectual life was still in full vigour at Athens in the third century. But there was a weakening already visible. These Greeks could still think clearly, even nobly, but it was not until they made Roman converts that noble thoughts could be translated into noble action. As for the Greeks, their restless tongues and subtle brains carried them away into logic-chopping and childish love of paradox. There was a day when Athens sent on an embassy to Rome the three heads of her chief schools of philosophy. Their brilliant discourses charmed and amazed the simple Romans. Carneades proved that virtue was profitable, and the Romans were delighted. On the next day he proved that it was unprofitable, and the Romans were astonished. Cato, however, the truest Roman of them all, thought that Rome was better without such brilliant visitors. And he was probably right.

VII