Chapter LXVII: Sicilian Affairs (2)

By its situation, and the close ties of consanguinity between its population and the Ionians, Athens was destined to unite the civilisations of East and West. The comparatively large peninsula of Attica, so shut off that it is almost insular, had already developed into a political unit at an earlier stage. Aristocratic rule had, it is true, reduced the less wealthy of the peasant population to a condition of servitude, but by introducing the olive it had made agriculture profitable; and, like the Dorians in Corinth, it had recognised trade as an occupation not derogatory to men of rank. Material conditions for amelioration were far more favourable than in the neighbouring island of Ægina, where commerce concerned only the ruling class, who farmed their lands with purchased slaves. But the rapid rise of Athens from obscurity to the first rank is due to one man, in whom the union of East and West was first consummated--the wise Solon. Of noble birth and in sympathy with Dorian modes of life, he had, for all that, travelled to distant shores as a merchant, had laid aside among the Ionians all prejudice, superstition, and mysticism; above all, had acquired the power of using poetry not only for political but also for moral exhortation. He was inspired by the fullest confidence in the might, wisdom, and justice of God, and in the goodness of human nature; all it needed was liberty to exercise itself without let or hindrance,--a need which found its complement in the social order,--that other men might likewise obtain the liberty that was their right. His people had faith in him, and placed the organisation of the state in his hands. He gave the power to the whole people, _i.e._, to the changing majority of free and upright Athenians, and he gave them all access to the national assembly, to the executive committee, the deliberative council, and the national court of justice. In principle, democracy was established. And the principle of freedom and of equality can be obscured neither by abuse nor by inadequate use; the only limitation to which it is subject is due to the higher principle which Solon himself placed above it, and which never disappears, at least, in theory, from the politics of the Greeks--the principle of justice. Whatever modification it underwent, with Solon there came into existence the municipal constitution, not of Athens alone, but of Greece, which endures as long as the Greek spirit can be traced in historical continuity--the free state of free men. At the time, as a matter of fact, freedom could not be maintained in Athens. But the struggles of the great families, which for another hundred years wrestled together for supremacy, only gave the city time to absorb the Ionian spirit more fully, to develop industry and trade side by side with agriculture, to exploit that economic freedom which was never again encroached upon, and so to accumulate strength in every direction for the decisive moment. This came with the question whether Europe was to be swallowed up in the despotic world-empire of Asia, to which Homeric Greece had already ingloriously succumbed. The issue was not a question of national differences, but simply one of freedom or servitude; a servitude, too, such as the wise man often accepts, because it does not seem to threaten individual liberty. But the free state or class, the democracy of Athens, no less than the Peloponnesian aristocracy, refused to brook it. The Athenian line of battle won the victory at Marathon--it was the triumph of the Doric element. The weapon for the maritime victory of Salamis had been rapidly forged by the genius of Themistocles, a modern Ionian in every sense of the word. In defiance of all human calculations, Xerxes was defeated and compelled to renounce his pretensions to the whole of Europe.

The spirit of Greece now became a national idea; the kinsmen of the Greeks in Asia not only came over, but they made Athens,--Sparta being so tardy,--the presidial centre of a confederation unprecedented in power and extent by anything Greek; the conception of a vast Greek empire in the future, a national confederation, seemed capable of realisation at that moment, since it was possible for the first thought of it to take shape. Politically, too, Athens seemed destined to unite the Greeks of the East and of the West; and if she did so, the Greeks were bound to possess the world.

Under the auspices of these great times Attic tragedy arose as the most perfect expression of the union of Western with Eastern Hellenism, stamped with the features of the great period of its birth; for not until Æschylus, the warrior of Marathon, took the Homeric Heroic legend for the groundwork of the ancient ecstatic Dionysian festivals; not until he substituted the solemn Doric chorus for the satyrs, and reduplicated the Ionian reciter, was the drama discovered which, sublime beyond the scope of mere humanity, and still remaining a part of the worship of the god, yet bore within it the germ of development into a picture of human life, making an appeal more direct and more effective than the narrative of the rhapsodist or the song of the bard. An abundance of talent turned to this new form, which remained Athenian even when the poets came from abroad, and became more and more Athenian, human, and modern. Yet no one ventured to abandon the Homeric subject-matter and go direct to contemporary life for material. And so it continued to be, although with the decay of the Attic empire and its great poets, tragedy (whether as Attic drama or as a part of worship), no longer had any intrinsic claim to the subject-matter of the Heroic legend. Here again the authority of a great achievement condemned posterity to the depths of imitation. The form of drama known at Athens as comedy was regarded as quite another thing; and it had certainly gone far from its source in the same masquerade and the same Dionysian ecstasy by the time it was cast into shape by witty Athenian poets, and promoted to be species of literature. Comedy became drama, and followed the lines of tragedy by centring about a definite action; it was no less wonderful than the latter so long as it served the purpose of the moment and of the necessarily circumscribed circle of Athenian society; but for this very reason it exercised no universal influence, and was destined to fall to pieces with the collapse of the political and social fabric. The last literary achievement of Athens was to transform it, about the time of Alexander, into a refined, purely recitative play which occupied exactly the same relation to contemporary life as later tragedy occupied to the Heroic legends. This new comedy deserved and received the same classic _imprimatur_ as tragedy; but the same slavish subjection to a model ensued; the figures of Menander, so infinitely commonplace and provincial, alas! were doomed to make their appearance on the comic stage, like Medea and Orestes on the tragic, whether the play were written and acted in Rome or Alexandria. In this petrified and haphazard form the theory rather than the poetry of the drama was conveyed to the West. Aristotle, in particular, failed to advance from the chance illustration of actual performances to a formulated statement of the truth, and modern writers have still an unwholesome habit of tossing about the terms “tragedy” and “comedy,” at all events in theory. We have the will to admire and the capacity to understand both what has been achieved by the Athenians and the causes that led inevitably to that achievement: but the foundation of modern dramatic art is Shakespeare--or Plato, who recognised in theory that tragedians and comedians are anything but contradictory terms, and who, like Shakespeare, combined both in himself.

In the Athenian art of the fifth century, as in Æschylean tragedy, the elements of Eastern and Western Greece interpenetrate, and each heightens the effect of the other. The Parthenon is a Doric temple with an Ionic frieze. To Ionic monumental fresco painters is given the task of painting Homeric stories on the broad surfaces of Athenian and Delphic porticoes; the capacity to immortalise the deeds of contemporary life is its own contribution. From the devout spirit that inspires the poet of the Oresteia, Phidias, with all the wealth and all the art at his command, tries to create images of the gods that will satisfy the religious feeling of his time. To the Greeks they were the greatest for all time. Precisely as in the case of tragedy, such a high strain of endeavour lasts but a short time. Then the Ionic element becomes preponderant; the human, subjective aspect thrusts itself into prominence. It is inevitable, and the thing it created is worthy of admiration. But in the _pathos_ and _ethos_ of the divine types created by Praxiteles and Scopas there is nothing but the mythological character of Homer’s gods; they are immortal men, and no more; to Scopas and Praxiteles they were nothing higher than this. And it was right that it should be so; for in the meantime the comprehension of the truly divine had so far progressed that its circumscription in a person was merely symbolical, and implied no idea of physical incarnation.

Ionia’s greatest and most important contribution was that provided by the audacity of the great thinkers and observers of the sixth century, that indeed which, by setting the whole conception of the world on a new basis, was bound to destroy the fair illusion of gods in the form of men which Æschylus and Phidias might still have regarded as a truth. It was only on Ionian soil, on the soil of Homer, that man had courage and strength to fling aside all convention, all tradition, to step into the centre of the universe himself and say “Thou art naught but what I recognise as thee, thou signifiest what I discover in thee.” The idea was not at the outset formulated with this precision, but such is the spirit in which the Ionians early went to work--not the philosophers alone, but the reckless natures who in the world of action took themselves for the standard of conduct--men like Archilochus the poet, whose subjectivism combined with his brutal outspokenness and license aroused the delight and horror of his contemporaries and of posterity. A terrible moral danger lurked in this attitude, and Ionia, which changed nothing but its masters, brought an infection into the mother-country which neither the state nor society availed to overcome. But for strong natures it also provided the remedy, and the world, for its part, owes to this Ionic element the best of what the Greeks have bequeathed to her--science, philosophy, natural science, and history, though it is true that they had first to be ennobled by the Athenians. This is most easily seen in the case of history.

_Historia_ is subjective inquiry; Herodotus, not a man of powerful intellect, gives us, as he himself says, the sum of his own investigations. This includes what he has seen, heard, read, and thought, all in close juxtaposition. The subjective mind determines how and what he can and may narrate. Thucydides, the Athenian, on the other hand, writes the war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians; here it is the object which is the determining factor. The writer renders both himself and the reader account of his subject and of his method, indicates the degree of credibility for his various statements and adds his own interpretations and conclusions for what they are worth; the scientific method has thus been reached. Man has not lost his independence, but he consciously places his whole strength at the service of an idea, in this case the idea of truth; and, clear as it is to him that he cannot reach the point of presenting it pure and complete, he has no doubt that an objective truth exists and is accessible to human knowledge.

Natural science had begun, at a stroke, to explain genesis (das Werden) in general and particular by a bold hypothesis. The investigator made the laws. Natural science, in its turn, came to test its laws by a thousand patient, minute, independent observations of nature, to accumulate the facts from which the rule might be deduced in its turn. Most important for this purpose is the cultivation of that domain in which pure abstraction permits of an unbroken series of proofs, the domain of numbers and geometrical concepts. Here we have a genuine process of learning from which, in time, mathematics takes its name; here the deceptive character of sensuous perceptions is as clear as the existence of knowable laws; here are revealed the necessity and possibility of many to collaborate and continue the work. It was not by means of his religious brotherhood, which, if it had lasted, would have ultimately become a sect, that Pythagoras exercised a beneficent influence, but by the methodical organisation of study, which became scientific in so far as it turned its attention to mathematics. At the same time, in spite of all premature hypotheses, medicine, the branch of observation most closely in touch with actual life, discovered by keen observation and continuous experiment the right way to gain a knowledge of the human body, its nature, its sufferings, how to keep it healthy, or if necessary how to cure it. In astronomy and medicine we have the difference between the East and Hellas most clearly manifest. Thousands of years before, the Babylonians had already observed the heavens; thousands of years before, the Egyptians had compounded prescriptions from all kinds of drugs and simples. But this was sorcery, and even the Greeks had to pay for allowing themselves to be imposed upon by it.

In the sphere of morals the breach with that _Nomos_ of which we have spoken was a great danger: the whole edifice of the Apolline organisation fell to pieces. Democracy fairly challenged man to translate his theory into practice, and the mental attitude of the time was so political that people thought Anaxagoras a crank, because of his own free will he devoted himself to the _vita contemplativa_ and refused to mingle in the political hurly-burly. They declined to believe in his good faith, and political suspicion allied with the principle of established authority, which always naturally opposes a tendency so novel, banished him from Athens. And from the very fact that, in all other fields, this principle was so strong among the Greeks, the age that dared express and pursue every thought that rose in the mind acquires its peculiar significance. The activity, inventiveness, and audacity of the period of the sophists, with its superabundance of talent, sowed seeds without number, many of which, unproductive at the time, have been left for the modern world rightly to appreciate. Thus a science of jurisprudence would have been developed, had not the fall of the empire destroyed the sphere in which alone a uniform system of law could prevail: the practice of the legal profession thus falling into the hands of pettifoggers, while the theory of jurisprudence was left to philosophers, who were honest in their quest of the principle of justice.

Modern speculation has gradually outgrown the tendency to regard the sophists through the eyes of Plato, and to impute to them moral and intellectual indifferentism. One thing, however, is incontestable: the whole movement, coming, as it does, from Ionia, is rationalistic through and through; the intellect will acknowledge nothing on a par with itself. A prophet like Empedocles, who was a doctor, a philosopher, and a poet to boot, besides cherishing the proud conviction of being as good a sophist as any other, could go about extolling his revelation in the Peloponnesus; in Athens he would have found no place. The port of Athens, on the other hand, was laid out by a Milesian diagrammatically in the dreary chess-board style then in vogue for buildings on new sites, although it can only be satisfactory on paper, inasmuch as it neither takes account of the character of the landscape nor consists with the artistic feeling of the Greeks. Rationalistic in his teaching, again, was the only Athenian whose sophist doctrines gave offence to his compatriots, especially because instead of making a fortune like the teachers of wisdom from abroad, he neglected his affairs. We, ourselves, should hardly except Socrates from the category of sophists on account of his merits as a dialectician, had not the reactionary democracy of the restoration executed him as a person dangerous to the common weal. He chose to die rather than do the least thing that ran counter to his consciousness of rectitude, his Logos, the belief in the reality of the Good which he was not able to demonstrate by rationalistic methods; and the moral grandeur of his death has reared for the faith of the human race an image which bears eternal witness that man is free and happy if he can but base his actions on belief in the Good; he needs no future world of punishment and reward. This eccentric Silenus-faced Athenian did not aspire to become a god like Hercules, he would have been more at home in a pedantic than a heroic atmosphere: he merely did nothing which he did not think right. The claim that the will obeys the reason--in most cases such a pitiful brag!--was a truth with him. Socrates was Athenian to the core, and therefore a loyal citizen of the democratic state; but, like Solon, he combines the Ionian and the Doric temperament; and, in common with the law-giver, he is devoid of feeling for mysticism and the whole sphere of the Unknown. His life is only intelligible as an outgrowth of the history of Athens; his death makes him a type of man as he can and should be. So long as the human race survives on our planet it will be a master experience of our moral education to live through the dying hours of this old and ugly plebeian.

That we can so do, that we can have Socrates as our master, we owe wholly and solely to the loyalty and poetic genius of the man (Plato) who set himself in the days of that agony to show that--hard as it may be to define uprightness, courage, piety and what other virtues there may be--the upright and courageous and therefore happy man has demonstrated in his own person the reality of these abstractions. This alone would have sufficed to make Plato a benefactor to mankind; but this is only a small part of his labours. With all that Socrates and the school of sophistry taught him, he combines mathematics and the mysticism of Pythagoras. He founded the school which was destined to serve the purposes of organised scientific work for nearly a thousand years, and which is the prototype of all such organisations. He lays down the fundamental lines of every philosophical science, constructing, and, where he thinks he has found a better way, demolishing the foundations he himself has laid. Many of his intuitions have only been verified after the lapse of centuries and tens of centuries; others still await verification. The force inherent in him is best proved by the energy of those who assure us that he has had his day. He has set Eros as the mediator between heaven and earth; this Eros has no worthier abode than the writings of Plato; through them, even to-day, Psyche is learning the road heavenwards. But Plato is a Greek in every fibre, he can only be understood through his people, and his people through him.

Plato was a poet; and though he fixed his mind wholly on the eternal type, unduly despising the individual phenomenon, and thrusting his own individuality completely into the background, yet this individuality with its poetic genius cast light and shade in bewildering alternation over every field of contemplation, like the full moon as she fleets over the mountains and plains of Attica.

Science needed the cool judgment and caution of the systematiser. She found it in the person of Aristotle, the master-builder among men (_baumeisterlicher Mann_), as Goethe calls him. At his hands science first received systematic treatment and method--the tools of her craft. The existence of the man and his work attest for all time the unnatural character of a division of the one and indivisible body of science though it be only into natural and abstract sciences. For even in the collection of material, he laboured for all branches alike. It is idle to inquire which were the greater, his personal achievements or those which owed their birth to his example. For his successors carried on the work in his spirit, even more truly when, often after vehement controversy, they advanced beyond him, than when they rested content with merely working out the plan of the master-builder. Sprung of a family of physicians, and endowed with the Ionian temperament, the natural science of Ionia is the most substantial contribution he made to the legacy bequeathed by Plato. But he had likewise made himself familiar with all the accepted tricks of oratory at Athens, he speaks with authority on logic, rhetoric, and poetry, and he is capable of treating all literary forms with the hand of a master. Yet he did not discover his own peculiar style until he combined the bald simplicity of Ionian scientific phraseology with Attic balance and Attic elegance. Thus he became the father of scientific prose, of the text-book no less than the lecture and the practical investigation. Even in halting translations he afforded nutriment to powerful intellects. His own words will have a modern ring to the end of time.

It is a characteristic distinction between the two philosophers that Plato, the incomparable artist in words, fiercely attacked rhetoric, while Aristotle made it a cardinal item in his programme of education. It was a power and he reckoned with it accordingly, not without yielding more to contemporary taste than we can approve. To the modern mind rhetoric is the least congenial element in the culture and literature of antiquity. We can understand that in the political agitation which pervaded the Attic empire, oratory, which was a daily necessity in parliamentary debate and in the law courts, was bound to develop into an art, and that a literature should have arisen corresponding to that of our daily press. So, too, we can understand that the manifold intellectual activity of the age of the sophists, and the tentative efforts of science, needed an organ which should not only convey practical information but have an eye to effect. That this prose should become Attic, in spite of the fact that the language of Athens had barely passed through its first phase of development in tragedy, was inevitable from the time when Athens took the lead in Greece. In the sphere of language, at all events, the country attained to national unity. But to us there is at first sight something monstrous in the fact that in the age of Pericles a set form of oratory should arise which not only consciously competes with poetry but seeks to supplant it--and which actually succeeded in preventing the development of any new poetic method. The whole classic world, including the Latins, devoted no trifling labour and skill to this art of eloquence, and its art-theory ended by making poetry a mere subdivision of it. We are now coming to recognise more and more how much modern poetry in particular owes to this prose-poetry and its methods: the modern connecting-link of the rhyme was discovered beyond all dispute by that Gorgias whom Plato attacked as the champion of rhetoric; the intermediate links lie before us in an unbroken chain. Our astonishment subsides, if we so far rid ourselves of prejudice as to realise how arbitrary is every line of demarcation between poetry and prose. Not only the poems of Walt Whitman, but a great many of Goethe’s finest poems would be regarded by every Greek art-critic as prose. Prose really implies that the language proceeds on foot; the reverse,--that it soars aloft by means of this device or that,--applies to every conventionalised form of speech; whether it is cast into a regular measure or not is irrelevant in comparison with the fact that it is informed by measure. The Hellenic bias towards style manifests itself here in the creation of a definite form, and we cannot question the fact that the development of the period demanded a new style and one unhampered by the laws of metre. For at such a high point of civilisation the poetic form does not suffice for what the world has to say and wishes to hear. Empty and conventional jingle, relying on tricks of style, undoubtedly attained a bad eminence in Greek and Latin oratory; but a similar spectacle has been afforded by poetry and the arts of chisel and brush. If a man had something to say, like Aristotle, Polybius, and Plutarch, it did him no harm to clothe his thoughts in a form, the effect of which we perceive agreeably even without understanding the art to which it is due. It is the same artistic conventionality which to this day lends to French prose, whether it be that of literature or of polite conversation, the charm which the Teuton does not possess in equal measure. And the French have attained to it by a rhetorical schooling traditionally derived from the method of antiquity. That elegance is not an inborn quality with them is shown by the formlessness of so great a writer as Rabelais. Were we in a position to read the laws of Solon we should perceive that Attic elegance was likewise no gift of heaven. An art which we find still dominant in the sermons and hagiography of the Byzantines is a power not to be despised, even apart from its historical value.

Again, it was not to these conventional tricks, in the first instance, that Plato was averse. He was logician enough to appreciate the high educational value of making thought move in regulated periods (a thing that many people overlook nowadays); but the heaven-born poet felt that this intellectual mechanism was antagonistic to the direct unconscious self-revelation of emotional experience. The thing that roused him to passionate protest was the claim laid by rhetoric to the formation of youth. This had to be begun on a fresh system, the old training in music and gymnastics being no longer adequate. The question was between a scientific and philosophical education (Plato was thinking particularly of mathematics, to which we also devote attention) and a conventional and mechanical training of the mind. There is no question that the rhetoricians provided the latter. It is rhetoric that our own schools desire to achieve by the practice of speaking and writing in the mother-tongue, and rhetoric that they formerly aimed at by speaking and writing in Latin. This Plato repudiated because it was no genuine knowledge, while the fact that the rhetorician took upon himself to talk of everything, irrespective of how much he knew of his subject, and never attempted to conceal that he aimed at effect and nothing else, appeared to the disciple of Socrates wantonly immoral. And when Isocrates, the most successful and systematic teacher of rhetoric, called his form of instruction philosophy, it must have sounded like mockery in the ears of the genuine philosopher. In youth, Plato had experienced in his own case that no poetic form was suited to portray what was to him the noblest of all visions--Socrates in converse with his pupils and with the sophists. He felt within himself the capacity to embody this vision directly by the reproductive power of imagination without any other stylistic conventionality than that of his own poetic fire. Thus in the divine madness of the poet, of which he speaks later in his _Phædrus_, he found the form to suit him. This form he perfected, and created, in the height of his power, works in which we find all the merits of all kinds of poetry and rhetoric, but which are, nevertheless, something utterly apart and unique. In his old age he probably felt that the form was no longer adequate to the substance; but he did not care to abandon it; and he who has glowed with enthusiasm with the youthful Plato, in his elder years willingly gives ear to the style of his old age, because the soul within has not grown old. Great writers like Aristotle and Cicero, having safely stored this characteristic form, which was natural to one period and one person alone, in the pigeon-holes of their æsthetic system, have indeed produced admirable dialogues. They are counterfeits none the less, and it is a wholly anti-Platonic classicism which holds or would hold the dialogue to be the true, or even a particularly good, method of scientific investigation and statement. Plato’s dialogue is a miracle which will edify the world to the end of time, like Athenian tragedy and the comedy of Aristophanes; but it is specifically Athenian. This is why Aristotle at his best abandoned dialogue in favour of a plain statement of ideas. Had the efforts of Aristotle been attended with success, the quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy would have been adjusted, inasmuch as rhetorical training would have received its proper and subordinate place in the philosophical education of youth. But the unforeseen expansion of Hellenic civilisation did not allow of such root-growth, and at a later period the power was wanting. In the dialogue _De Oratore_, that work which has most of the Platonic character, Marcus Cicero, though himself of the rhetorical school, renews the attempt to subordinate rhetoric to scientific training. In so doing he reproduced the ideas of his contemporaries, the successors of Plato in the Academy. The attempt succeeded neither in Rome nor in Greece. One of the strongest signs of decadence in the time of the empire is the fact that philosophy, except where it holds its own in narrow scholastic circles, has to yield precedence to rhetoric. Where the Latin language prevailed more especially, philosophy becomes no more than a part of general education; while rhetoric, thanks to an adherence to Attic models of style that grows ever closer and more difficult, becomes more and more an empty game of words that only serves to mask the internal decay which it precipitates. And yet the sight of the clinging ivy on the trunk of the dead oak is a fair one.

For centuries the great model of all rhetoricians was Demosthenes. His inimitable greatness is most plainly manifest in their imitations, even though they be those of Cicero. He, too, is intelligible only in connection with his age and his city, the only time and place which could have brought him forth as their natural fruit. The statesmen of the great epoch of Athens had wrought with the living word, prisoned in no written document--thus, Pericles. Gradually the political pamphlet began to make its way, choosing amongst other forms that of the δημηγορία, or parliamentary speech. The leading statesmen, indeed, wrote very seldom; but the literati, whom they made their mouthpiece, in time became a power in the formation of public opinion. Pre-eminent among these was Isocrates; he too made use of the form of the δημηγορία amongst others, his studied arts of speech giving it a character which must have formed a singular contrast to the words dictated by the passion of the moment in the Pnyx. It was a result of existing conditions that the speech in the law courts was sometimes suited to produce its effect as a pamphlet pretty much in the form in which it had been delivered. The popularity of rhetoric also preserved many speeches in the courts which had no particular tendency, and thus, curiously enough, special pleading made its way into literature. But Demosthenes was the first to rise to the position of a leading statesman by the publication of orations to the people or to the courts which he had either actually made or else had reduced to this form. Simultaneously his works took their place among the most distinguished classics of his nation. His only education had been that of an advocate, which included, it must be admitted, all the arts of speech; nothing that may even remotely be called science ever touched him. In our moral judgment of him we should apply no standard but that which he recognised; he took the license which had been taken by patriotic Athenian statesmen even in the days of Themistocles. Possibly this did not tally with the Platonic standard, but then, neither did the state of Athens. The charm of Demosthenes lies in his faith in the democratic imperialistic ideals of the Athens of Pericles. That these had long been past hope, was the key to his fate; he himself was ruined by the fact. That by the power of the spoken word and the faith that alone makes the word powerful, he almost succeeded in inspiring his worn-out and selfish nation with his own patriotism, and, that in spite of everything, Athens once again entered the arena to champion liberty against Philip with the lives of her citizens--therein lies his greatness. The tragic side of this greatness heightens its fascination for one who sees through the illusions of Demosthenes and perceives the better right, historically speaking, on the side of Philip; but the fire of the passion of Demosthenes will carry even such a one away. This is not the charm to which the rhetoricians were susceptible. What held them spell-bound is what at first alienates our sympathies. Hellenic art restrained all wildness and passion, reducing it to the smoothest, most harmonious form. Demosthenes did not speak like this, of that we are sure. As a writer he practises the art of conventionalisation with the soundest judgment and the most cautious intelligence--we discover that this speaker can do whatever he pleases, his power knows no bounds; but he himself defines the narrow limits consistent with the growth of harmonious beauty; beauty, if you will, of the style in which contemporary art adorned its mausoleums; for in the case of Scopas and Leochares, too, vast pathos slumbers beneath the sweep of the beautiful line.

Athenian independence and power and that Greek liberty in opposition to which Philip looked a barbarian and a tyrant in the eyes of Demosthenes, had in truth long been but a phantom. The attempt made by Athenian statesmen, from Aristides to Pericles, to transform into an Athenian empire the confederation of cities which the repulse of the Persians had called into existence, was the greatest act of the Hellenes in the sphere of politics. The concentration of their civilisation into a unit under the hegemony of Athens was achieved. But the issue which the young Thucydides foresaw when, at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war, he determined to write his history, fell out otherwise than he perhaps anticipated or than was in all human probability to be anticipated. Athens had not strength to subdue the Peloponnesus; Sparta subdued Athens and destroyed the empire--but with the help of the Persians, who were the real victors. The result was not only the desolation and brutalisation incident to a long civil war, but a despair of any kind of favourable issue--indeed of any issue at all. The restoration of the Athenian democracy, the catastrophe of Sparta, which after Leuctra has as much as it can do in fighting for its own existence, the ephemeral rise of Thebes, due to the pre-eminence of a single man, all this has no further significance in the history of the nation except to emphasise the fact that none of these little cities could maintain a sovereignty either at home or over their neighbours; that they existed only in virtue of the general weakness. Even the Persian might, which imposes its will on the Greeks so frequently even without the aid of armed force, subsists only because no one attacks it. What this whole world lacks is a dominant will to coerce it to its own advantage. It lacks a master. Many are aware of this, many give voice to it; that state in particular,--founded in violence and yet powerful,--which Dionysius of Syracuse carved out for himself by overcoming the Carthaginians in the hour of their need, widely disseminated this feeling. The fall of his dynasty brought about a reaction, and the spirit of ancient municipal independence owed its power to the fact that the monarchy seemed to place even the personal freedom of the individual in jeopardy. How Philip would have solved the problem put in his hands on the day of Chæronea, it is idle to speculate. Long before that, the aged Isocrates had called upon him to take his place as general of the Hellenic confederacy against the Persians. And now it came to pass that his son was confronted with this same problem. He it was who solved it. He is and was the master of whom the Hellenic nation stood in need.

Demosthenes and all those who were pledged to the old ideals of sovereign cities, whether oligarchies or democracies, were naturally incapable of understanding the great king and his empire, but even Aristotle seems to have thought much as they did, although he had been Alexander’s tutor and saw clearly the need of reform in society and the petty states, and was strongly inclined to translate his political theories into practice. His historical compilations ignore the Macedonian monarchy, and his theories reveal no suspicion of what Alexander designed and executed. This ought not to astonish us, even if we see in Alexander the crowning figure of Hellenic civilisation. For all truly great men in history seem to the reflective eye of posterity like providential agents appearing at the right moment to accomplish what has long ago been augured as a need, prophesied and prepared for. As a matter of fact they accomplish the result in quite another fashion, a fashion of their own, often contrary to all anticipation, filled as they justly are with the sense that they are contributing something new and original. But contemporaries who have no power of reading history backwards from the event (even if their interpretation were likely to be sound), experience the clash of this novel contribution with all the more violence the higher they stand over the common herd, which after all only takes up the catchword, crying, “Hosannah!” on Sunday, and on Friday, “Crucify!” Even now it counts itself singularly sage for taking its catchword from Demosthenes or Aristotle for the condemnation of Alexander.

Alexander went to Asia with the intention of seizing upon the empire of the Persian king. This he accomplished, not in a wild orgy of victory but with the tenacious perseverance which took three years for the conquest and organisation of the Eastern provinces, but did not overleap itself by extravagant ambitions. It is only legend that makes him the conqueror of the world. He was a Macedonian, the hereditary king of a feudal state which the energy of his father had transformed into a military monarchy. He was a Greek in the sense which even the journalists had long since learned to express by saying that it was not race but education that made the Greek. But he was also recognised as the legitimate successor of the Achæmenides, and was himself willing to employ the Persians, side by side with Macedonians and Hellenes, in the service of the empire. His empire was accordingly not to be based on nationality, it was to rear itself over the heads of nations and states. He granted self-government in the widest interpretation of the term to kingdoms, half-civilised tribes, Hellenic and other towns; he not only respected all local peculiarities of manners and religion, he even went so far in this direction as to deliver peoples from a foreign yoke--as for instance in the case of the Egyptians. But his empire was to be more than a confederacy, it was to be an effective entity with the imperial rule supreme over all, with the imperial army a ready instrument of war in the hands of the sovereign, to compel the Universal Peace, as he called his empire, and with the king’s officers able to exercise sufficient authority for the protection, not only of the constituent parts of the empire against one another but also of the individual against the arbitrary action of the individual community. Finally, he realised the civilising mission of the state as fully as any prince has ever realised it; he took in hand the irrigation of Mesopotamia, founded cities, built harbours, and set about the scientific exploration of his newly discovered world in a style to which even the present furnishes few parallels.

The imperial government, like the imperial army, was centred, head and heart, in the king. On his person everything depended. Absolute monarchy was the only possible form for the empire. The founder of this empire, who bore as many wounds on his body as anyone among his veterans, who commanded in all battles in person, who himself, by ceaseless toil, carried on the business of administration, might well regard himself as the true king whose right to rule, even his master, Aristotle, did not dispute, though he questioned the possibility of such a man’s existence. But Alexander in no way regarded himself as a sovereign because he had the power. He regarded himself as a king by the grace of God, not in the sense of a more or less dubious legitimacy, which many great and petty sovereigns are apt to advance as sole proof of their title, but in the sense in which the genuine artist and the prophet may claim to be the depositaries of the divine spirit. It was the reverse of presumption when Alexander set the divine element in himself in the foreground. During his lifetime he exhibited the most scrupulous piety, and it is contemptible to tax him with hypocrisy; he had far more faith in miracles and oracles than we are willing to ascribe to the pupil of Aristotle, though we can readily understand it in the Macedonian and the soldier. To him it was a revelation from heaven when the Libyan god greeted him as his son. Had not his ancestor, Heracles, been the son of Zeus and of Amphitryon? For him personally it was the confirmation of his faith in his own mission, and the divinity of its ruler gave his empire a religious consecration. It was consistent with this idea that the worship of Alexander took its place above the innumerable special cults of tribes and towns, of families and communities, as the religion of the empire as a whole. There are many instances of the worship of the sovereign being assigned a place in the pantheon, side by side with that of the godhead figured under a thousand different names and shapes; for the worship of defunct monarchs, the ancient and hallowed practice of ancestor-worship offers a precedent. The adoration paid to Plato and Epicurus was of a precisely similar character. Thus, the abuses of which weaklings and miscreants on the throne, and flatterers and sycophants among subjects, have been guilty, must not be allowed to neutralise the historical and spiritual authority of the institution of the worship of the sovereign, which is inseparably bound up with the institution of the monarchy of Alexander. This monarchy is the highest phase of political and social organisation attained by antiquity. For the much-lauded Roman Empire is nothing else than this kind of monarchy, _imperium et libertas_. Cæsar actually grasped at the crown of the Greek king. So far as Italy and the West were concerned, Augustus certainly wished to be the first citizen and no more--the confidential agent of the sovereign people. But to the Greek half of his empire he was from the first both king and god, and he owed his victory not least to his own belief and that of others in the divinity of his adoptive father. From the time of Hadrian the Augustan theory was in the main exploded even in the West.

This Hellenistic state allowed Alexander’s scheme to drop; he would have granted the Persians full rights of citizenship. From henceforth these rights pertain only to the man who has been Hellenised--the legal stamp of such a condition being membership of an Hellenic community. This is clearly manifest in Egypt, where even the Roman emperor bestows Roman citizenship on no Egyptian who has not been adopted into one of the Greek cities of the country. (In this connection we may leave institutions specifically Roman out of account.) For the rest, the king strives to preserve the ideals of the elder age of Greece, the free man and the free state. Personal and economic liberty, legal redress, and liberty of emigration are for the most part secured, not only to the subjects of a single kingdom, but to all Greeks. In like manner the cities enjoy a very considerable liberty of action, in degrees ranging from nominal sovereignty down to the government by royal officials which is presently established in Alexandria. The ancient Greek municipalities of Asia, in particular, enjoyed as subjects much greater privileges than, for example, the cities of Latin countries at the present day. The country, on the contrary, was almost everywhere allotted to some municipal community; that tendency with which we are familiar in the Roman Empire, to convert nations which did not take kindly to town settlements (like the Celts, for instance) from tribes into towns, if only on paper, is equally perceptible in Syria. Egypt remained “the country,” _Chora_, but likewise remained barbarous and enslaved. One of the rocks on which the civilisation of antiquity made shipwreck was the fact that the farmer was kept in tutelage or even in bondage by the city, and that he lagged behind it in education. Slavery, as an institution, has to be reckoned with only in the western half of the empire; not in Egypt, Palestine, and large districts of Asia. A community which holds property of its own, imposes its own taxes, which has its own laws and law courts, its own constitution and elective magistrates, is free to all intents and purposes; the fact that it pays a fixed tribute to the king, and leaves to his decision or award all questions of peace and war, intercourse with foreign states, or even with communities of its own political status, and is in many respects practically subject to his control, does not materially detract from its liberty. The danger of such a situation lurks in the circumstance that it minimises interest in their own city among the most capable of its citizens. It offers no career for effective political action. Worse still, the citizen ceases to bear arms. The army consists of the royal troops, official rank goes by royal appointment, and the monarchy alone has great resources at its command. To this centre, and to courts and capitals, the stir of life and every kind of talent is drawn. Very few of the free cities, mainly those which still retained their sovereign rights, like Rhodes, remained centres of civilisation. Not one of the new settlements became such, unless it was a royal capital. Doubtless there can be no genuine patriotism when the citizen takes no part in public life either by counsel or act. Doubtless a government which rests entirely upon the capacity of the sovereign can neither he stable, nor in the long run endure. But, on the whole, we must confess that the Hellenes lived at ease under this kind of government. The ancient petty states alone chose rather to bleed to death than to forego the empty name of liberty. We may regard with sympathy the attempts at confederacies made by Crete, the Peloponnesus and Ætolia; but we cannot deny that politically they are of little importance; they are matters of no moment in the history of civilisation.

About the year 330 there were three men who stood forth as the representatives of the great ideals of life--Alexander, Aristotle, and Demosthenes. Demosthenes perishes; the time is gone by for his kind of Greek liberty and greatness; the future is for the heroes of the _vita activa_ and the _vita contemplativa_, men of action who passionately assail the Doric ideal of the _sophrosyne_, as Alexander did in taking the Achilles of Homer for his model. In many cases they are inspired solely by personal ambition, and the lust of pleasure joins hands with the love of power. The end is contempt for man and the nausea of satiety. Of such are Demetrius, the conqueror of cities, and Pyrrhus. But not a few have learned from Aristotle and Alexander what the duty of a king is. The first sovereigns of the dynasties of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, Antigonus Gonatas and Hiero of Syracuse, devoted a lifetime of toil and pains to the high duty of sovereignty. Cleomenes of Sparta, the socialistic dreamer on the throne, perishes in the attempt to renew the youth of Sparta and the Peloponnesus.

The men of contemplative life vanish from public and often from social life; they make a habit of living celibate lives in small circles and communities; doctrine alone, and that often esoteric, takes its place side by side with research. Those who translate into action what they have learned from the masters generally contribute little to scientific inquiry. Philosophy is compelled to an inevitable step, the several sciences disengage themselves from her. What remains,--metaphysical and logical speculation,--nevertheless maintains its supreme ascendancy in virtue of the fact that from this time forward the active, effective potency of philosophy shines forth, the potency which she exercises as _magistra vitæ_, as the religion of the heart and the assurance of the intellect in life and conduct. This power extends its sway over ever widening circles even though it cannot reach down to the lower classes; and the gulf between the cultured and the illiterate grows broader and broader. Athens remains the capital city of this philosophy; this is its only title to distinction. Wide as are the differences between the schools, they are agreed in this, that their ideal is the sage, the man apart, who takes his stand not only above the world but outside it--the reverse of the kingly type. The historic continuity of the ancient ideals, Ionian no less than Dorian, is unmistakable.

The various sciences flourish where the necessary means are at their disposal, that is to say, at the courts. This does not make them courtly in character, although Eratosthenes and Aristarchus were tutors of princes; not mathematics alone but all serious learning knows no royal road for kings. The library, the observatory, the scientific collections, and the medical school of Alexandria, which far surpass all others, must be looked upon as directly due to the school of Aristotle; the first two Ptolemies honoured learning, and for that reason gave it nothing but means and liberty. In the second century, their unworthy successors banished the company of scholars, who then found liberty at least in Rhodes. By tracing the course of mathematics and astronomy we can see how the scholars of the few places where they laboured with enthusiasm keep in constant touch with one another by their writings; but splendid as is the progress made by individuals, the number of those who can really follow is very small, and we feel that a general stagnation must set in if this correspondence were to die out and the few scientific institutions perish. Without the study of pure science that of the applied sciences will never make progress; it will soon lose ground. Thus it was, even in the department in which observation and practice most go hand in hand, in medicine. From his geographical, botanical, and zoölogical survey, Alexander had left behind an enormous mass of material which was at first augmented by many additions. Eratosthenes, in his map of the world, could use some of the astronomical definitions of locality which had evidently been made for the purpose. This is the origin of the network of degrees with which the globe is overlaid, and one would have thought that other scholars would have hastened to verify and complete it by further measurements of shadows. Not so. True, Eratosthenes stands at the end of the third century, when the great period of advance is over, and the evil genius of Greece gathers strength to rest satisfied with the great things achieved and, by canonising them, to put a stop to further progress. The criticism of Hipparchus, well grounded as it was in the abstract, contributed something to this end by repudiating the good attained and setting hindrances in the way of a greater attainable good, for the sake of a greatest good that was unattainable. Every department of natural science presents much the same spectacle. What has been gained by the labours of the third century, is here and there carried farther by the few (in many cases, as was inevitable, by quantitative amplification), but in the main the scientific thinking had been done; and by no means all the old ideas were transmitted, even in this petrified form. It was left for the nineteenth century, which in its own strength has advanced to an incomparable height of knowledge, to look back and appreciate at its just value the achievements and intuitions of the earlier age.