Chapter VI: Appendix: I (bibliographies) 361 (4)

But it must be observed that any other sentiment would have been out of character for Philoctetes at this point. The second is a fragment from his lost play, Aleites, in which some speaker, contemplating the prosperity of the wicked and the misfortunes of the good, declares that the gods ought not to order things thus for mortals, but that on the contrary the pious should have some evident profit from their piety and the unjust should pay the penalty for their wrongs that all might see.[140] But this fragment is so at variance in sentiment with Sophocles’ general attitude that it has been conjectured, not without probability, that it came from Euripides. Even if we reject this conjecture, as I think we must, we need not suppose that the sentiments which the poet puts into the mouths of his characters always represent his real view. A dramatist, as we must remind ourselves, should make the speakers in his play express sentiments in harmony with their characters and for the most part will have them utter moral ideas with which most of his audience is in sympathy, unless indeed he would play the part of innovator or prophet. As a matter of fact Sophocles’ own attitude seems to be expressed in another fragment: “No man is wise save him whom god honors; but if one look unto the gods, even if the god bid him depart from justice, there he must go. For nothing to which the gods lead men is base.”[141] This seems the key to Sophocles’ religious attitude. He is confident that however things may seem to us in our short-sightedness, if we could only see the purposes of the gods in their totality, we should know that they are good.

The bases of man’s life and action, his highest duty, Sophocles teaches is piety and discretion, σωφροσύνη. When in the Philoctetes Heracles appears, he urges upon the heroes that when they return to Troy they be mindful, in laying waste the land, to show reverence towards the gods:

But, take good heed,
Midst all your spoil to hold the gods in awe.
For our great Father counteth piety
Far above all. This follows men in death,
And fails them not when they resign their breath.[142]

And the chorus sings at the end of the Antigone:

Wise thought hath the first place in happiness
Before all else, and piety to Heaven
Must be preserved. High boastings of the proud
Bring sorrows to the height to punish pride:—
A lesson men shall learn when they are old.[143]

In the Ajax Athena says:

Then, warned by what thou seest, be thou not rash
To vaunt high words toward Heaven, nor swell thy port
Too proudly, if in puissance of thy hand
Thou passest others, or in mines of wealth.
Since Time abases and uplifts again
All that is human, and the modest heart
Is loved by Heaven, who hates the intemperate will.[144]

There is an extraordinary passage in the Oedipus Coloneus where Oedipus is made to say, when his strength fails him and he cannot go to the altar to sacrifice, but must send one of his daughters: “For I think that one soul suffices to pay this debt for ten thousand, if it come with good will (purity) to the shrine.”[145] Piety, reverence, and purity, these to Sophocles are the highest qualities of man.

For the poet the moral order was unchanging, dependent not upon caprice but having a divine source and a divine sanction; the laws of heaven are therefore superior to those of man, and man’s obedience to the higher law is made his duty and the means of his consecration. In an ode in Oedipus the King, which is called forth by the king’s harshness and by the suspicion that he is not wholly guiltless, as well as by the queen’s bold contempt for Apollo’s oracle, the chorus sings:

O may I live
Sinless and pure in every word and deed
Ordained by those firm laws, that hold their realm on high!
Begotten of Heaven, of brightest Ether born,
Created not of man’s ephemeral mould,
They ne’er shall sink to slumber in oblivion.
A Power of God is there, untouched by Time.[146]

That is, the chorus here pray that they may always show their piety and reverence by obeying the divine laws. This sentiment is repeated more than once in the extant tragedies; as when Odysseus warns Agamemnon not to refuse burial to the body of Ajax: “’Tis not he, ’tis the law of heaven that thou would’st hurt.”[147] Through this belief Sophocles justified Antigone in her decision to defy the edict of the state, for Creon had ordained that her brother Polynices might not be buried, since he had attacked Thebes. But Greek belief regarded it as a sacred duty of the next of kin to bury their dead, and this duty Antigone could not but fulfil, although she knew that death would be her lot. When Creon asks her if she did indeed dare to transgress his edict, she replies:

I heard it not from Zeus, nor came it forth
From Justice, where she reigns in the Underworld.
They too have published to mankind a law.
Nor could I think thine edict of such might
That one who is mortal thus could overrule
The infallible, unwritten laws of Heaven.
Their majesty begins not from today
But from eternity, and none can tell
The hour that saw their birth.[148]

It was for this same principle that Socrates, a generation later, gave up his life. In his defense he told his jury why: “Perhaps someone may say, ‘But Socrates, can you not go off and live in exile, give up talking and be quiet?’ This is the very point on which it is hardest to persuade some of you, for if I say that this is exile to be disobeying the god and therefore that it is impossible to keep quiet, you will not believe me, but will say that I am ironical.”[149] Socrates believed that he had a divine commission to question and examine others, and that duty he must perform as the heroine in the tragedy must perform hers, cost him what it might.

The eternal problem of human suffering, the fact that pain and misfortune are not always the result of wrong doing, but that the innocent suffer while the guilty escape, was a matter with which Sophocles was much concerned. His predecessor Aeschylus had tried to show in opposition to experience that sin always preceded pain; and in Sophocles the doom of Creon and his house is due to the king’s proud resentment wherein he sinned against heaven’s law. But in the same play the heroine Antigone, who has obeyed the divine mandates, is forced to suffer a most pathetic fate. King Oedipus was not intentionally guilty, and the fate of the innocent queen Deianeira surpasses in pathos that of any other tragic heroine. She was impelled by the tender desire to recall the love of her faithless husband, and the poet acquits her of blame, “She erred, though she intended well.”[150] But none the less she involved both husband and herself in dreadful doom.

The tragic poet found his solution of this ancient perplexing problem only in the larger view, which regarded the individual as but a slight factor in the economy of the whole. At times suffering was regarded as a means of discipline: “The soul that has been bedded in misfortune sees many things.”[151] Thus through pain one learns and has his nature developed. Theseus, in the Oedipus Coloneus, offers a kindly welcome to the exile Oedipus and his daughters, for his own sufferings in exile have produced a spirit of kindliness and charity in him. Oedipus himself in the same play is unlike the headstrong king of the earlier tragedy; suffering and time have chastened and enlightened him, though they have not made him mild in spirit.

Sophocles also displays great sympathy with human weakness and suffering. This appears in his treatment of the character of Deianeira, and above all in the tender pathos with which he brings out the human longings of Antigone, who though she has nobly obeyed heaven’s unwritten law, yet shrinks from suffering and death and from the loss of all that youth promises. It is not surprising, therefore, that we find in Sophocles mercy emphasized as a divine attribute, and this quality in the gods held up as an example to men. On this Polynices makes his appeal to Oedipus:

But seeing that Zeus on his almighty throne
Keeps Mercy in all he does to counsel him,
Thou, too, my father, let her plead with thee![152]

The sentiment is not far from Portia’s plea:

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.

Sophocles’ sympathy for undeserved suffering, his understanding of the weakness of men, of their liability to error, and his faith in the gods, all led him to try to take the larger view of the ills of life, to which the philosopher Heraclitus had already given expression when he said that god does all things for the harmony of the whole; and that while men regard some things as right and others wrong, to god all things are fair and good and right. The individual is only a part of the great whole, and when human experiences are regarded _sub specie aeternitatis_, we shall find that that which seems evil is only permitted to make a just and harmonious unity. The poet tried to conceive of the life of man,

As a great whole, not analyzed to parts
But each part having reference to all.

Looked at from this universal point of view the sufferings of Philoctetes, Antigone, Deianeira, and Oedipus are justified to men.

It was natural that Sophocles should use many Homeric concepts with reference to the condition of men and the life after death. In the Antigone alone is there any personal hope of future happiness. It may well be that the poet’s sense of what was fitting dramatically is responsible for his conservative attitude; he was dealing with traditional material, and using themes and incidents which were far remote in time from his audience. It may have seemed to him that fidelity to his subject and the requirements of artistic unity prevented his putting into the mouths of his characters sentiments which an early age could hardly have conceived. Sophocles was not animated by the iconoclasm which we shall find in the bolder Euripides; but if the future life is not pictured in Sophocles’ extant tragedies, we need not doubt for a moment that he believed in immortality. He had been initiated into the Mysteries and one of the finest expressions of the ecclesiastical confidence which the initiates felt came from his pen: “Thrice blessed are those mortals who have seen these rites and then go to the house of Hades, for they alone have life there; but all others have only woe.”[153]

Such, in brief, were the teachings of some of the greatest poets of the sixth and fifth centuries before our era. But these represent only one side of Greek thought in this time. In Athens there were influences, political, social, and intellectual, which were working profound changes. Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles belonged to an older order; the voices of the new age will concern us in our next lecture.

FOOTNOTES:

[96] Xen. ap. Stob., _Flor._ 88, 14.

[97] 165 f.; 171 f.

[98] _Frg._ 61.

[99] _Frg._ 56.

[100] _Frg._ 74, 5 ff.

[101] 167 f.; 1075 ff. (cf. 583 f.).

[102] 425-431.

[103] 383 ff.

[104] 319 ff.

[105] 1029 ff.

[106] _Frg._ 88.

[107] _Frg._ 4, 1-16.

[108] 13, especially vv. 11-32.

[109] 373-380.

[110] 731 ff.

[111] Solon 13, 31 f.

[112] _Pyth._ 3, 78 f.

[113] _Nem._ 6, 1 ff.

[114] Cf. _Ol._ 13, 83; _Pyth._ 10, 49; _Frg._ 142.

[115] _Pyth._ 2, 49 ff.

[116] _Pyth._ 9, 44 ff.

[117] _Frg._ 140.

[118] _Ol._ 1, 64.

[119] _Isth._ 3, 5 f.

[120] _Ol._ 10, 3; _Frg._ 205; _Pyth._ 3, 29.

[121] _Ol._ 1, 52.

[122] _Isth._ 6, 71.

[123] _W. and D._ 694.

[124] _Isth._ 5, 13 ff.

[125] _Nem._ 11, 13 ff.

[126] Bacch. 14, 50-63 (Jebb).

[127] _Frg._ 131.

[128] _Ol._ 2, 63 ff.

[129] _Supp._ 524 f.; 574.

[130] _Ag._ 160 ff.

[131] _Frg._ 70.

[132] _Pers._ 827 ff.

[133] _Sept._ 597-608.

[134] _Choeph._ 1065 ff.

[135] _Choeph._ 306 ff.; 400 ff.

[136] _Eum._ 264 ff.

[137] _Antig._ 621 ff.

[138] _O. C._ 1381 f.

[139] _Phil._ 446 ff.

[140] _Frg._ 103.

[141] _Frg._ 226.

[142] _Phil._ 1440 ff.

[143] _Ant._ 1347 ff.

[144] _Ai._ 127 ff.

[145] _O. C._ 495 ff.

[146] _O. T._ 863 ff.

[147] _Ai._ 1343 f.

[148] _Ant._ 450 ff.

[149] Plato, _Apol._ 37 E.

[150] _Tr._ 1136.

[151] _Frg._ 600.

[152] _O. C._ 1267 ff.

[153] _Frg._ 753.

IV

THE FIFTH CENTURY AT ATHENS

The defeat of the Persians at Salamis in 480 B.C. made Athens the first state in Greece. Not only had she suffered enormous losses in the ruin of her city and lands for the common cause, but she had borne the brunt of the naval fight at Salamis, as ten years before, with the brave men from Plataea, she had driven the Persian hordes from the plain of Marathon into the sea. The Athenians had acquitted themselves well, for they had shown the loftiest patriotism and loyalty to the cause of Hellas; now their high position was recognized even by their jealous rivals. Athens entered on a brilliant period of fifty years which has never been equalled in the world’s history. Within that time she produced statesmen, architects, artists, and poets who have never been surpassed since in any state in the same length of time. Her naval power, her wealth and culture, placed her in a supreme position.

Neither the Athenians nor the other Greeks forgot the gods to whom they believed that they owed their victory over the Persians. To Apollo at Delphi the allies sent a golden tripod set on a pillar of three bronze serpents bearing the names of those who made the offering; the Athenians on their own account erected a trophy there, and on the Acropolis they deposited the broken cables of the bridge which the Persians had built across the Hellespont. Soon they set up in the same place a colossal bronze statue of Athena made from the spoils captured at Marathon. A new temple to the goddess in place of the one destroyed by the Persians was planned by Cimon; but his ostracism in 461 B.C. stopped its building. When Pericles was able to carry out his plans for adorning Athens, he determined to enlarge the structure; as a result the Parthenon with its wondrous sculptures and great chryselephantine statue of the goddess was completed in 438 B.C. At the entrance of the Acropolis a splendid propylaea was begun and many other public buildings were erected to adorn the city. The chief divinity of Athens, the goddess Athena, now held her position without a rival; all the other gods were in second place. The conception of the goddess was essentially that fixed by the Homeric poems, and as such Phidias represented her with aegis, spear, and shield, carrying victory in her hand. She became the embodiment of the power and the glory of the state.

In an earlier lecture I referred to the part which Pisistratus played during the sixth century in fostering Orphism at Athens and in developing the mysteries at Eleusis. Now the Athenian success in driving back the Persian invaders had filled the citizens with a spirit which had little desire for the sacraments of the Orphics, and furthermore the mysteries at Eleusis satisfied all longing for mystic assurance of security and of future happiness. But Pisistratus had also emphasized the Olympian religion as set forth in the Homeric poems. Indeed, we may say that he produced a Homeric revival; for whatever the truth may be in the tradition that he had the Homeric text fixed and written down in the Attic alphabet, there can be little question that he made the Iliad and Odyssey more widely known by ordaining that the rhapsodes should recite them at the great Panathenaic festival. The emphasis given by him to the Olympian divinities resulted in the exaltation of Athena and the subordination of most local cults to her worship upon the Acropolis. It was Pisistratus also who developed and gave new magnificence to the Panathenaic festival. This was annual, but was celebrated with special splendor every fourth year. At these festivals the recitation of the Homeric poems brought before the people in impressive manner the whole pageantry of Olympus. The great procession with which the festival culminated—that procession known to us from Phidias’ frieze upon the Parthenon—had as its objective point the Acropolis, where the sacred robe and other gifts were offered to the patron goddess, Athena. Her old temple on the site once occupied by the goodly house of Erectheus was adorned at the tyrant’s orders with a peristyle and new pediment sculptures. The battle of Athena Polias and the gods against the giants replaced the old sculptures of Zeus encountering a three-headed monster and of Heracles destroying the Hydra. Thus Pisistratus made the temple of Athena the center of the united Athenian state, and established the goddess as the chief divinity of Attica.

This Olympian religion was well suited to the state in the fifth century. The Athenian success in saving Greece from the Persians had magnified the importance of Athens in the eyes of all her citizens. Their life was now one of action; they were proudly conscious of their expanding empire, their growing power, and increasing wealth. The joy which they felt in their present existence had something of the epic quality in it. Furthermore the growth of free democracy, which opened up many channels of successful activity through the state, had not yet resulted in that individualism with its disintegrating tendencies which marked the fourth century, and the common interests of the Athenians made the state the center of their thought. They regarded it as an organization existing for the benefit of all free citizens. Its unity and its power, so far as Athens was concerned, were symbolized by the goddess Athena. On her home and on her worship the resources of the state were lavished. It was inevitable that her religion should be regarded as primarily a state affair, and that at the same time she and the other protecting gods should seem to the individual citizen somewhat more removed from human interests and sympathy as they gained in the august majesty which the wealth of the empire lent them. Exactly as to many a Christian the wealth and magnificence of a splendid cathedral seem to put God farther away than the bare simplicity of some beloved chapel, so the Parthenon undoubtedly made Athena seem more august and more remote to many an Athenian than the rude and simple protecting deity of his country home.

The result of these various causes which were operative in the fifty years of Athens’ greatness was that a part of religion became a state concern, and that men’s loyalty was centered on the state. Patriotism and pride in empire took the place to a considerable extent of what may be roughly described as personal religion. This, of course, does not mean that a belief in the gods among the mass of the people had died out in any sense. The ordinary Athenian continued his worship as before at the local shrines and joined with the other citizens in paying tribute to the great divinities. But especially with many of the intellectual and leading men religion was absorbed, so to speak, into patriotism, exactly as has been the case in our own time in France and Italy. This attitude of mind finds supreme expression in the funeral oration of Pericles, which he pronounced over those who had died in the first year of the Peloponnesian War. His speech is devoted to glorifying the Athenians and to celebrating the noble service which the fallen rendered when they gave up their lives for their fatherland. There is not one syllable about the gods, one word of gratitude to heaven, or a single expression of solace to the relatives of the dead based on any hope of immortality. In the service of the state Pericles saw every incentive and every reward. This will be clear from the following paragraphs:[154]

“Such was the end of these men; they were worthy of Athens, and the living need not desire to have a more heroic spirit, although they may pray for a less fatal issue. The value of such a spirit is not to be expressed in words. Any one can discourse to you forever about the advantages of a brave defence, which you know already. But instead of listening to him I would have you day by day fix your eyes upon the greatness of Athens, until you become filled with the love of her; and when you are impressed by the spectacle of her glory, reflect that this empire has been acquired by men who knew their duty and had the courage to do it, who in the hour of conflict had the fear of dishonor always present to them, and who, if they failed in an enterprise, would not allow their virtues to be lost to their country, but freely gave their lives to her as the fairest offering which they could present at her feast. The sacrifice which they collectively made was individually repaid to them; for they received again each one for himself a praise which grows not old, and the noblest of all sepulchres—I speak not of that in which their remains are laid, but of that in which their glory survives, and is proclaimed always and on every fitting occasion both in word and deed. For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone, but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war. The unfortunate who has no hope of a change for the better has less reason to throw away his life than the prosperous who, if he survive, is always liable to a change for the worse, and to whom any accidental fall makes the most serious difference. To a man of spirit, cowardice and disaster coming together are far more bitter than death, striking him unperceived at a time when he is full of courage and animated by the general hope.

Wherefore I do not now commiserate the parents of the dead who stand here; I would rather comfort them. You know that your life has been passed amid manifold vicissitudes; and that they may be deemed fortunate who have gained most honour, whether an honorable death like theirs, or an honorable sorrow like yours, and whose days have been so ordered that the term of their happiness is likewise the term of their life. I know how hard it is to make you feel this, when the good fortune of others will too often remind you of the gladness which once lightened your hearts. And sorrow is felt at the want of those blessings, not which a man never knew, but which were a part of his life before they were taken from him. Some of you are of an age at which they may hope to have other children, and they ought to bear their sorrow better; not only will the children who may hereafter be born make them forget their own lost ones, but the city will be doubly a gainer. She will not be left desolate, and she will be safer. For a man’s counsel cannot have equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger. To those of you who have passed their prime I say: ‘Congratulate yourselves that you have been happy during the greater part of your days; remember that your life of sorrow will not last long, and be comforted by the glory of those who are gone. For the love of honour alone is ever young, and not riches, as some say, but honour is the delight of men when they are old and useless.’”

The loyalty to the state, however, which animates this oration we must remember actually resulted in the glorification of Athena and the other great gods. For they, too, were a part of the state, and had a share in its reputation and prosperity. But I must point out again that in this exaltation of the Olympic gods there was nothing of that personal relation of the individual to divinity, such as must exist in every really religious age.

Yet at the risk of repetition, I would recall the fact that the practice of religion by individuals had not ceased at Athens. The common man still paid devotion to his guardian gods, made offerings to the dead, and shared in many forms of worship. Furthermore the spread of the Eleusinian mysteries in this century, so that a new and larger initiation hall had to be erected at Eleusis, shows that thoughts of the future life and the deepest religious feelings still existed in large numbers of the citizens. We have here, then, an apparent contradiction, such as has appeared many times and in many places in the religious history of man. Many of the leaders of the state were interested in religion only as it was an affair of state, in the same way in which the army and navy were. On the other hand there were large numbers who felt a more personal interest in religion and who cultivated a more personal relation to divinity. Nor were there lacking men of the most intellectual class to deal with the higher concepts of religion which had been developing during the recent centuries. These ideas find their truest utterance in the work of the poets, and we have already seen how Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles interpreted nobler views with regard to the gods, human conduct, and man’s relation to the divinities, to all Greece and especially to Athens which had now become the intellectual center of the Hellenic world.

But another new force had been developing among the Greeks during the sixth century which was destined to deal a far greater blow to traditional religion than any other—I mean philosophy. This began in Ionia and was cultivated in other parts of greater Greece before it came to Athens. But after the Persian Wars the prominence and prosperity of that city was so great and her intellectual eminence was so high that she attracted the men of note in many departments of life. Among them was the philosopher Anaxagoras of Clazomenae who made Athens his home for about thirty years (c. 462-432 B.C.). He became a member of the most intellectual Athenian society of his day, a friend of Euripides, and an intimate of Pericles. When dangers began to threaten the state, with the prospect of war looming on the horizon, the people began to blame their great leader; to injure him, they banished one and another of his friends. The two most noted were Phidias the sculptor, of whose art the marbles of the Parthenon are still the unsurpassed witnesses, and Anaxagoras the philosopher; the charge against both was impiety. Anaxagoras taught that the sun was a red hot mass of rock, as the moon was a cold mass, like the earth. According to this teaching the sun and moon could no longer be regarded as gods, so that a charge of impiety was as easily based on such doctrines as it was on the teaching of Galileo twenty centuries later. But although the philosopher was driven out, philosophy could not be so easily banished. The eager intellectual life of Athens had caught the spark, and the flame of philosophy was never extinguished on the Athenian altars for almost a thousand years, until the Emperor Justinian closed the philosophic schools in 529 A.D.

Now philosophy aimed from the very first to explain the origin and structure of the universe by reducing all things to a single principle, or to a few principles at most. The purpose of the philosopher was to carry out a more systematic search for unity than the thought of the poet or of the ordinary man could accomplish. We have seen how Hesiod and the Orphics tried by cosmogonies to explain the origin of the world. The philosophers turned to physical science for their explanation. But in every case their work was from its very nature antagonistic to popular polytheism, which saw a separate divinity in every phenomenon. It was inevitable that the conflict should become an open one sooner or later.

Xenophanes of Colophon (flor. c. 540 B.C.) was the first to enter the lists. Driven into exile by civil disturbances at about the age of twenty-five, he lived most of his life in Sicily. He was as much a social and religious reformer and satirist as philosopher. With a frankness which passed beyond the freedom of his age he struck at the popular beliefs with regard to the gods, which taught that the gods were born and had clothes and voices and forms like mortals. He illustrated the folly of the Greeks in making the gods after their own image by reminding them that the Ethiopians made their gods flat-nosed and black, and the Thracians theirs blue-eyed and red-haired, while if cattle and horses and lions had but hands and could draw and mould and fashion like men, then each would draw and fashion the gods in his own image.[155] For the current notions of divinity he held Homer and Hesiod responsible and charged that these poets had attributed to the gods everything that was reckoned as shame and reproach among men—stealing, adultery, and cheating.[156] He likewise opposed the doctrine that the gods had taught men their knowledge, but declared that man had always learned through experience and investigation the better way for himself.[157] Xenophanes went even further than this and used the science of his day to prove that what was regarded as the appearances of the gods was merely meteorological phenomena. In the place of many gods he declared that there was but one, and he not like mortal men either in form or intelligence, but that he was wholly sight, wholly intelligence, wholly hearing—that is to say, god and the universe are identical, and the cosmos is eternal, sentient, and intelligent.[158] There could hardly have been a greater contrast than between this pantheism and the polytheism of the day. It is true that Xenophanes offers no adequate explanation of the way in which phenomena arise; he does not solve the problem of deriving the transient out of that which is permanent and fixed. But nevertheless he crudely anticipated the thought of later philosophers and theologians and began the open struggle with polytheism which was to continue for many centuries.

Another philosopher who deserves our attention here is Heraclitus of Ephesus who flourished in the early fifth century. As he surveyed the world he was impressed with the variety of phenomena that moved before him, with the fact that nothing is stable but that everything is always in process of change. He declared therefore that nothing is permanent but that all things in reality are in a state of flux and flow (πάντα ῥεῖ). The explanation for this constant change he apparently found in the crude science of the day which observed that changes in temperature cause changes of form, some solids becoming liquid and liquids gaseous. This phenomenon he thought was due to fire. Fire he regarded as universal in the cosmos—indeed, as identical with it, and he is reported as saying that this universe, which is the same for all beings, no god or mortal has made, but it has always been and is and ever will be eternal fire, which sometimes grows the brighter and again is quenched. This fire he is willing to call god; it is to him the principle which permeates the universe and causes all change within it. Such being the case, Heraclitus maintains that true knowledge is not concerned with many things but solely with the unity in the world which his teachings set forth. In his scorn for his predecessors he outdoes Xenophanes. Not only Homer and Hesiod, but Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Archilochus, and Hecateus are alike condemned. Homer and Archilochus he declares deserve to be driven from the games and flogged, such folly had they taught.[159] In his assaults on the popular religion Heraclitus did not concern himself so much with mythology as with the rites and ceremonies current in his time. He evidently attacked the representatives of the mystery religions, calling them night walkers, magi, priests of Bacchus, devotees of the wine-vat, and mystery-mongers. In another fragment he ridicules those who pray to the images of the gods, for that is as if one were to pray to a man’s house; and again he declares that if men on ordinary occasions sang songs like the hymns which they raise in honor of Dionysus they would be acting most shamelessly. Man’s duty to his mind is to devote himself wholly to the apprehension of the divine unity in the world, of that wisdom to which alone he would consent to give the name of Zeus.[160]

We have now seen from these two representatives how philosophy regarded traditional polytheism, and taught that the unity of the universe was identical with god. But neither Xenophanes nor Heraclitus offered any satisfactory explanation of the way in which multiplicity could arise out of unity. Still less did they conceive of a personal god. This concept was reserved for Plato or possibly for his great teacher. A slight approach toward an explanation of variety was made, it is true, by Heraclitus, through his “fire” and also through a doctrine which I have not mentioned, namely that “strife,” the action of opposites, is the cause of change. Now another philosopher, Empedocles of Agrigentum, whom we have already met as a mystic, offered an explanation of the cause of phenomena not dissimilar to that of Heraclitus, and yet one that marked an advance. For his elements Empedocles took the four of popular belief—earth, air, fire, water, which he said were combined in various forms by the principles of “friendship” and of “strife”; or, as we should say today in less symbolic language, by affinity and incompatibility. But like Heraclitus Empedocles fails to make clear how or why these principles act at all on his elements. In short before Anaxagoras no thinker conceived of any satisfactory formative or motive principles to explain phenomena; likewise none had arrived at a well defined distinction between a material principle and a formative principle. Anaxagoras solved the problem in a way highly satisfactory for his age and in a manner which unconsciously anticipated many of the principles of modern science. According to him all substances are elementary, existing in seeds or germs, infinite in number, infinitesimal in size. Aristotle and the ancients in general understood him to mean that these seeds or germs are minute particles of the things which we know in the mass, as for example bread or water, or flesh and bones. Some modern scholars think that he meant that the original mass of matter was infinitely divided and that every atom had in it a portion of everything else: the various combinations of these seeds, atoms, we name bread, water, or flesh and bones according to the predominance of these things in the seeds which make up the whole. Yet whether Aristotle and the ancients or the moderns be right is a matter of little moment to us now. Anaxagoras thought that these “seeds,” whatever they were, were set in motion and combined to produce the infinite diversity of the natural objects by Mind (Νοῦς).

Anaxagoras’ great service, then, was his introduction of Mind into philosophy as a formative, a motive principle to provide the cause for change and diversity. It is not to be denied that Anaxagoras conceived his principle to be as material as the elements themselves, and that he did not employ his principle fully, even after he introduced it into the world. Indeed, he did not advance beyond a mechanical concept of the cause of phenomena. But nevertheless he is significant in the history of European thought as the founder of the dualistic system which largely prevailed thereafter. His contemporaries, too, recognized him as an innovator, for we are told that the wits of Athens nicknamed him “Mind.” With the consequences of this new dualism we shall be much concerned hereafter.

Another group of men contributed to the intellectual life of that wonderful fifty years of Athenian history which began with the defeat of the Persians and ended with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. How keen the intellectual life of that time was is shown by the high excellence of the plays to which the masses of the common citizens listened in the theater. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were not enjoyed by the few but by the great body of Athenian citizens, and their plays were known even among the remote Greek colonies. The intellectual spirit of the age was stimulated to inquiry and to scepticism. Herodotus is wholly sceptical, and the agnostic tendency of the time is shown by the entire lack of mythology and superstition displayed by Thucydides. A further stimulus was furnished by the development of a higher education given by professional teachers—the Sophists.

The last half of the fifth century is often called with good reason the “Age of the Sophists.” We must understand clearly just what we mean by this term as applied to the men of this time, for today the word sophist has an unfavorable connotation. The Sophists of the fifth century neither formed a philosophic school nor were they charlatans. The most prominent among them was Protagoras of Abdera whose ability and character is shown by the fact that Pericles selected him to draw up the laws for Thurii in 444-43 B.C. Gorgias of Leontini in Sicily enjoyed such high reputation that in 427 he was sent at the head of an embassy to Athens. These Sophists were simply men devoted to the pursuit of wisdom, frequently professional teachers who undertook to give a general culture, to train their pupils to take part in society and the state. For the old training which had been gained by observation they substituted a formal discipline; they offered instruction in rhetoric, politics, music, in short in all the higher branches, as we should call them. But they had no unity of doctrine. By the close of the fifth century they had fallen somewhat into disrepute and were under suspicion, since in the Athenian state all the youths who could afford to pay the fees which these professional teachers charged belonged to the aristocratic class, which frequently voted against the democracy. The Sophists owed their great influence to the fact that they met an actual need in the small society of Athens which included an unusual number of men with eager alert minds and great intellectual curiosity. Now it should be observed that rhetoric, which formed a considerable part of the new education introduced by these professional teachers since political life was the chief career open to a young Athenian, led to habits of examination, analysis, and definition. We are all familiar with the fact that any attempt to analyze and define customary beliefs and practices is pretty certain to detect inconsistencies unobserved before; to lead, at first at least, to confusion and to doubt as to the validity of the practice or belief under consideration; and that when applied to traditional morality or religion it is likely to loosen the obligations which men have hitherto regarded. For illustrations of this truth we have only to look about us and to see how in this generation, as in the generations of our fathers, long accepted beliefs have crumbled before examination, as for example the institution of slavery, the justice of which few questioned a century and a quarter ago. So it was inevitable that in Athens some of the effects of the sophistic teaching should be destructive. And these effects were exaggerated by the great store which was set on skill in disputation. When moral or religious themes were under discussion, the point at issue was not the value of this or that position, but rather the relative skill of the disputants. We are so familiar with this in academic life, in college debates, for example, that the question of the moral effect does not rise in our minds. But it is little wonder that in the fifth century in Athens the Sophists were charged with making the worse cause the better.

Furthermore the Sophists were sceptical as to the possibility of acquiring absolute knowledge about anything. This scepticism may have been due to a failure on the part of the science of the day which led individuals to turn from nature to man as the object of their inquiry. Protagoras maintained that all knowledge was relative, since the only way in which a man can know anything is through his senses; through them he perceives that an object is hot or cold, round or square, sweet or bitter. He pointed out, also, that the same object will not always appear the same even to the same individual; hence he declared that there is no such thing as absolute truth, but that whatever seems true to you or to me at the moment is the truth for you or for me, and that it is not at all necessary that you and I should hold the same thing to be true at one and the same time. Whatever seems to the individual true is true, according to him. From this came his famous dictum that man, that is the individual, is the measure of all things.[161] It is clear that this doctrine when applied to politics, morals, or religion was upsetting.

So long as men studied nature, they were concerned with discovering the inflexible laws which govern the world. But when they turned their attention from nature to society or government, they realized that human institutions seemed to be the result on the whole of conventions agreed upon and adopted by mankind. The Sophists held in general that the form of the state, the current moral and religious beliefs and social customs had no absolute validity; that they were the results of convention; and that their only warrant was that they worked well in practice, that they were profitable to the individual and to society. This pragmatic view of institutions fell in well with the temper of the last half of the fifth century, both in the period of Athens’ imperial supremacy and in the time of her trial during the Peloponnesian War, when in passion or despair the people disregarded law and, as in the case of the Melians, all that humanity had counted sacred. It was an age when many held that might and right were identical, and for this view the Sophists, even though unwittingly, furnished arguments; for if the test of an institution or act is that it works well when put into practice, success proves validity. The Sophists, too, taught that virtue (ἀρετή) was nothing else than what we call today efficiency. It is not strange that the conservative Athenians came to look on them with suspicion.

With regard to the gods Protagoras was naturally agnostic. He began his “Treatise on the Gods” with the words: “So far as the gods are concerned, I cannot know whether they exist or do not exist; or what their nature is. Many things prevent our knowing. The matter is obscure and life is short.”[162] One may be curious to know what large matter Protagoras found for his discussion when he began with this frank confession of ignorance; but it should be observed that in this confession there is nothing necessarily antagonistic to the popular theology of his day. It only shows what the words plainly declare, that a belief in the gods cannot depend upon knowledge. Another Sophist, Prodicus, maintained that the divinities were nothing but the kindly powers of nature which man had deified;[163] and the “Gentle Critias,” one of the worst of the Thirty Tyrants, and a ready pupil of the earlier Sophists, is said to have set forth in a satyric drama the theory that the gods were the clever invention of someone who wished to scare men out of their desire to do evil.[164] The effect of such scepticism and agnosticism we can easily imagine.

Many things had been wrongly laid at the door of the Sophists, but it is small wonder that the conservative Athenian citizens came to look with distrust and alarm on these new-fangled subversive notions; that they banished Protagoras and burned his books in the market place; or finally that they should have put Socrates to death.

Into this age of intellectual ferment and readjustment, of scepticism and eager inquiry, the age of Anaxagoras and the Sophists, Socrates entered. He was at once the child of his time and the greatest fecundator of men’s minds that Europe had yet known. He was born in 469 B.C. and was forced to drink the hemlock in March, 399, so that he had completed the allotted span of life. The son of a sculptor, we are told that he followed his father’s profession in his youth, but apparently he did not continue this long. Whence he derived the means of livelihood we do not know. He received the regular Athenian education, was interested especially in geometry and astronomy; the works of the philosophers he had read, but professed that he gained little from them. One is tempted to dwell on the picturesque characteristics of this man—his refusal to teach for pay, as did the ordinary teachers, his profession of complete ignorance—his only claim to wisdom, he said himself,—his ugliness of feature, and his beauty of soul, his omnivorous interest in the work of the humble craftsmen, above all on his belief that he had a warning spirit, a daemon, which checked him when his course was wrong. Although in obedience to this inward monitor Socrates refrained from politics, he fulfilled all his civic duties in peace and in war. He conformed to the traditional religion, sacrificing and praying to the traditional gods, although he undoubtedly did not hold that they were the limited and sensual creatures of the popular belief. When he prayed he asked not for gold or silver or power, but for what the gods knew was good for him. At the close of Plato’s Phaedrus he offers this appeal: “Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, grant me beauty of the inward soul, and make the outward and the inward man to be but one.” This was the man who was charged with corrupting the youth of Athens.

Socrates had much in common with the Sophists. Although it is evident that in his earlier years he had been interested in physical science, we know that he turned away from that in the course of time, convinced that man alone was more than man could understand. He rather confined his attention to man himself, and made man and his conduct the center of philosophic inquiry. With the Sophists Socrates held that the cultivation of excellence, of virtue, whatever that might be, was the chief thing. He also identified virtue and knowledge, and like the Sophists was sceptical as to man’s ability to attain absolute knowledge. Practicability was the test he applied to various opinions. If one notion as to the state or society or anything else worked better than another, it was, therefore, in his view the better; and according to him it was by the adoption of such useful opinions that the individual became the wiser man. He held that education does not consist in putting things into people’s heads, but in leading them to discover the truths which they already possess. He therefore employed discussion as to the validity of hypotheses to bring out the latent knowledge in the minds of his young friends. This method of his—dialectic—was not identical with that of the Sophists apparently, but was not unlike theirs. It was, therefore, natural that his own time should have reckoned him as one of the professional class.

How then was he distinguished from these Sophists? Externally, first of all, by the fact that he did not teach for pay, that his purpose was unselfish, his interest being solely the elucidation of truth and so the establishment of virtue. He himself believed that he had a divine commission to serve the Athenians as a missionary. Plato makes him declare in his defence before his judges: “Men of Athens, I should be guilty of a crime indeed if through fear of death or anything else I should desert the post to which I am assigned by the god. For the god ordains ... that I should follow after wisdom and examine myself and others.”[165] He conceived of himself as the physician of the soul, and maintained that his whole business was “to persuade all, both young and old, not to care about the body or riches, but first and foremost about the soul—how to make the soul as good as possible.”[166]

As I have already said, he believed that if men could only know what justice, goodness, and temperance were they would naturally and inevitably be just and good and temperate. Vice he thought was due to a lack of knowledge; therefore he employed his questioning, dialectic, to endeavor to secure clear definitions of these and other virtues, for he was convinced that if only he and his associates could discover what virtue was, they would at once pursue virtue and flee from all wrongdoing. We may smile at the naïveté of this belief, that virtue is something that can be taught, that to be practised it needs only to be seen; but we must remind ourselves that his confidence was based on another belief, which was that virtue is the best and the most profitable for the individual; and that since each man desires the best for himself, if he sees what is right, he will follow that course unswervingly to the end. It may be said with reason that this is a utilitarian view, and so it is; but in Socrates it was combined with a power of will which enabled him to translate his convictions into reality, for it was in obedience to this conviction that the great teacher gave up his life.

Thus far we have seen that in the ferment of the last part of the fifth century in Athens there were two forces which were in a sense opposed to each other, the Sophists with their inevitable scepticism, who taught that all truth was subjective, that justice and goodness were only that which seemed just and good to the individual; opposed to them in reality was Socrates, not only in spirit but also by the doctrine which he endeavored to establish; for his search was always directed at finding the reality, was always aimed at knowledge in opposition to opinion. These objective truths, the universals, which to him were the only real things in the world, he endeavored to obtain by a process of definition which was not wholly adequate; but he turned men away from mere observation, from what seemed to be true, to search for permanent objective reality. How fruitful his teaching was, was shown by many schools, but above all by his greatest pupil, Plato. His followers have lasted to the present day.

The last third of the fifth century was a new era for Greece. The Peloponnesian War broke out in the year 431, and lasted until 404. On the one side was Athens with the empire which she had boldly built and somewhat ruthlessly held; on the other was a large number of allied states of Greece with Sparta at their head. The war ended with the complete humiliation of Athens. She lost her empire, her wealth, and a large part of her population. These disasters gave opportunity and occasion for new forces to come to the front. Early in the war the mercurial Athenians had shown themselves impatient of the leadership which had made Athens great, and they rejected Pericles. They were easily led astray by wild schemes, as when they followed the imperialistic party headed by Alcibiades and sent out the Sicilian expedition in 415, which was to meet irreparable disaster two years later. In time of distress, under the burden of political and economic misfortune, men often turn to reconsider the bases of their beliefs and actions, to test the validity of the doctrines which have hitherto guided them. This was the case at Athens. The old beliefs went by the board; society, government, and religion all became subjects of doubt and of reexamination.