ix Lions
:. OGDEN
THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
GREEK THINKERS
GREEK THINKERS
A HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
By THEODOR GOMPERZ
PROFESSOR EMERITUS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA, AND MEMBER OF
TI110 IMPERIAL ACADEMY; HON. LL.D., DUBLIN AND CAMBRIDGE; HON. PH.D., KONIGSBERG
CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY FOR THE PROMOTION OF
PHILOSOPHICAL, HISTORICAL, AND PHILOLOGICAL STUDIES
AUTHORIZED EDITION
Volume II
TRANSLATED BV
G. G. BERRY, B.A.
BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
!9°5
PRINTED BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.
College
Library
€a tljc Memory
OF MY SISTER
JOSEPHINE VON WERTHEIMSTEIN
NOV. 19, l820 : JULY 1 6, 1894
I DEDICATE
THIS VOLUME
'■ " /T~\
AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
In this volume (Volumes II. and III. in the English
edition) the author has treated of Socrates, the Socratics,
and Plato, but has not been able to add an account
of Plato's pupils, including Aristotle and his successors.
The space requisite for that purpose has been absorbed
by the discussion of Plato's works with a fulness which
proved more and more absolutely necessary as the work
progressed. The author was, indeed, convinced from the
beginning that the extraction of a Platonic system from
the philosopher's writings was an impracticable task, and
that any attempt in that direction could only yield an
inadequate result. But the indispensability of not con-
fining the undertaking within too narrow bounds was first
made manifest to the author by the execution of it. The
object in view was not merely to ascertain with approxi-
mate certainty and describe with the greatest possible
clearness the progress of Plato's development. A full
appreciation of the philosopher — and that not in his capa-
city of literary artist alone — was only to be gained by an
account of the course and structure of at least the greater
works. Not otherwise do we perceive that which in Plato
is at once the most truly attractive and the most eminently
important feature : the inner workings of his powerful
intellect and profound feeling, the manifold currents of
thought and emotion, currents which sometimes flow
together, but which also, as in the " Philebus " (see Book V.
Vlll AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
chap, xviii.), occasionally cross or oppose each other. The
task of exposition is one of whose magnitude the author
is increasingly conscious ; and he can only hope that he
has not fallen too unpardonably short of its demands.
Vienna,
March, 1902.
In the second edition, which has followed the first after
so short an interval, no one will expect to find radical
alterations. But in a considerable number of passages
the author has endeavoured, not, as he hopes, altogether
without success, to effect improvements in his exposition.
TH. GOMPERZ.
Vienna,
Dcce?nbcr, 1902.
CONTENTS.
BOOK IV.
SOCRATES AND THE SOCK A TICS.
CHAPTER I.
CHANGES IN FAITH AND MORALS.
1-AGE I'AGE
§X 3 §3 io
§2 6 §4 19
CHAPTER II.
ATHENS AND THE ATHENIANS.
§ i 30 § 3 3*>
$2 33 §4 42
CHAPTER III.
THE LIFE AND WORK OF SOCRATES.
§ 1 45 § 3 55
§2 51 §4 60
CHAPTER IV.
THE TEACHING OF SOCRATES.
§ 1 66 § 4 82
§2 71 §5 85
§3 75
X
CONTENTS.
§2
CHAPTER V.
SOCRATES' END.
l'AGE j
... 92 i §4
- 98 j §5
... 100 I
PAGE
IOS
III
§1
§2
CHAPTER VI.
XENOPHON.
- 119 §3
... 126 I §4
129
136
§1
§2
§3
§4
CHAPTER VII.
THE CYNICS.
139
142
H7
iqo
§5
§7
§8
155
158
162
166
CHAPTER VIII.
THE MEGARIANS AND KINDRED MOVEMENTS.
§1
... 170
§6
185
§2
... 173
§7
187
§3
... 177
§8
195
§4
... 180
§9
198
§5
... 182
§ 10
204
§1
§2
§3
§4
§5
CHAPTER IX.
THE CYRENAICS.
209 § 6
211 § 7
215 §8
220 § 9
229
234
237
241
CONTENTS.
XI
BOOK V.
PLA TO.
§ i
CHAPTER I.
PLATO'S YEARS OF STUDY AND TRAVEL.
PAGE
249 ' §4
254 i §5
259 ! §6
1'AGE
262
266
269
S 2
CHAPTER II.
THE GENUINENESS AND CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
OF PLATO'S WORKS.
275
279
§3
§4
283
285
CHAPTER 111.
PLATO AS AN INVESTIGATOR OF ETHICAL CONCEPTS.
291 §4
. . . 296
§ 1
is ->
CHAPTER IV.
PLATO AS AN INVESTIGATOR UP ETHICAL
CONCEPTS— (continued).
308 §3
314
CHAPTER V.
PLATO'S "GORGIAS."
§ I ... .
1 I^Zll vj 0
326
§6
§2
328
§7
§3
333
§8
§4
335
§9
§5
... 337
340
341
344
352
XI 1 CONTENTS.
CHAPTER VI.
PLATO'S "EUTHYPHRO" AND "MENO."
PAGE I PAGE
§i 358 | §3 367
§2 362 ' §4 373
CHAPTER VII.
PLATO'S "SYMPOSIUM."
§1 379 §3 386
§2 383 I §4 388
BOOK IV.
SOCRATES AND THE SOCRATICS.
Aiu ical KAeai.'07js iv ra> Zevrtpw irtpi rjSupris tuv ScoKpaTTjv (pTjai Trap' ataara
dihamteiv a)j u auTus Si'/catus re nal (u5al/j.wy avifp, xa\ rw irpwrw SieAoWi t\> Siiccuov
O.TTU roii av/j.(pepuuTos KaTapuffOai ws arr«/3es ti Trpay/ua SeSpaKuri. — CLEMENS
Alexandrinus, "Strom." ii. 22, 499 P.
GREEK THINKERS.
CHAPTER I.
CHANGES IN FAITH AND MORALS.
I. The Homeric poems show us only the beginnings of
city life. The course of subsequent development was deter-
mined, as we may confidently affirm, by three main causes
— an increase in the density of population ; a corresponding
advance in the division of labour ; and a consequent accu-
mulation of greater and greater masses of humanity in
cities, which grew in number and importance. Civic life
began to gain in breadth and freedom, with results which
affected religion and morality as well. The social instincts
which, rooted as they are in the family affections, had, in
the heroic age, seldom manifested themselves beyond the
circle of blood-relationship, and then only when trans-
planted to the soil of personal loyalty, now extended their
dominion over a wider and wider area. Still greater was
the progress of social morality, though it was only gradually,
and in spite of numberless obstacles, that larger and larger
associations of men were brought within its scope. The
hostile camps which faced each other in the war of classes
long remained separated by a chasm too wide to be bridged
by any feeling of common humanity. In the second half
of the sixth century we find the Megarian aristocrat
Theognis longing to " drink the black blood " of his adver-
saries, with the same unbridled passion as had characterized
the Homeric hero praying that he might " devour his
VOL. II. B 2
4 GREEK THINKERS.
enemy raw." And so complete, at that time, was the
dominion of the spirit of faction over the minds of men,
that, in the poems of the same Theognis, the words " good "
and " bad " have lost all reference to a moral standard, and
become mere party-names for the upper and lower classes,
then at strife with each other. But we must not dwell
exclusively on the influences which kept men divided.
Other causes were at work, making for closer and closer
union, and these both deserve and will repay attentive
study.
A higher value was set on human life. In Homer's
time he who had slain a man was protected by payment of
the blood-fine from the avenging kinsman. " A life for a
life " was the exception, not the rule. Much stricter was
the ethical standard of the post-Homeric period. Every
murder, it was now held, must be expiated in blood : till
this be done, the state is polluted, the gods insulted. For
this reason the office of avenger was assumed by the state
itself; not, it is true, without intervention of those most
nearly concerned. This advance has been ascribed to that
deepening of the belief in souls to which we have already
alluded, and also to the influence of a circle of prophets
who made the Delphic oracle the medium of their efforts
in the cause of ethical reform. There may be something
in this view, but it is assuredly not the whole truth. That
the punishment of crime should be accounted a public
concern, and unpunished crime a public disgrace, was
without doubt an advance such as influences of the kind
we have just alluded to may well have helped to bring
about. But the doctrine that blood must atone for blood
is not specially distinctive of the highest stages of ethical
development. It we go to modern Arabia, we find this
doctrine prevailing among the inhabitants of the desert,
with whom the vendetta is an institution, while the
dwellers in cities content themselves with exacting the
blood-fine. Homeric practice does not, in this particular,
bear the stamp of the earliest antiquity ; rather may we
see in it just such a relaxation of primitive morality as
would naturally mark a period of migrations and warlike
THE REFORMATION OF THE GODS. 5
adventure, in which human life had been cheapened below
its normal rate, and the protective power of the ties of
kinship had been weakened. We may here note, not for the
first time (see Vol. I. p. So), that the faith and practice of
post-Homeric times appear as the true continuation of
the earliest traditions of the race, while the state of society
depicted in epic poetry is to be regarded as a temporary
deviation from the direct line of development.
Another point must be emphasized. Allowing that
this advance in civilization was in part due to the activity
of religious enthusiasts, the latter were but instruments in
a movement whose causes were of a more general order.
As roving and warlike ideals gave way before a settled
and peaceable mode of life, and the bourgeois class and
the bourgeois temperament gained predominance, men's
ideas about the world of gods could not but suffer change.
The forces of nature, which had formerly been worshipped
solely for their irresistible power, now became, in ever-in-
creasing degree, the protectors and upholders of that good
order which is indispensable for the common welfare (cf.Vol.
I. p. 133, seq.). And as the concurrent progress of natural
science introduced more and more of uniformity into men's
conception of the universe, so that in the divine govern-
ment of the world less and less room could be seen for
the operation of conflicting passions and caprices, there
was brought about a change in religious ideas which may
be described, with a near approach to truth, as a moraliza-
tion of the primitive powers of nature. The qualification
is necessary, for the religion of the Hellenes remained a
religion of nature to the end. But there now appeared, as
its central figure, a power which defended right and
punished crime — a power which generally took form as
Zeus, the god of the heavens, supreme over the other
deities, but which was also referred to simply as " God,"
without further qualification, or as " The Divine," a mode
of speech from which polytheistic faith took no serious
harm. Thus was the Greek mind led to paint its many-
coloured picture of the world of gods. We have already
seen this picture in the pages of Herodotus, and it meets
6 GREEK THINKERS.
us again in the great poets, especially the tragedians,
among whom we are bound to give precedence to
yEschylus.
2. We are unwilling to name the greatest of Greek
poets without paying due toll of reverent gratitude. The
purifying power of poetry has been more written about than
felt. He who would come under its direct influence should
glance through a play of /Eschylus. He will hardly read
twenty lines without feeling that a liberating, an ennobling,
an enlarging influence has been exerted upon his soul.
We are here faced by one of the most attractive problems
of human nature. Poetry shares with music the power
possessed in a lower degree by the other arts, and even by
the beautiful in nature, of creating that inward peace which
reigns when the whole personality dominates over its minor
elements, and of producing the intense pleasure peculiar to
this state of psychical equilibrium. How it is that such
an effect is possible, is a question which may perhaps be
answered, with more assurance than is justifiable now, in an
age when aesthetic as well as ethical problems come to be
treated on the lines of biology. But, to resume, there are
two great difficulties in utilizing the testimony of /Eschylus
and his successors as to the changes in Greek thought,
The poet is influenced by artistic considerations scarcely
less than by his speculative and religious views, and the
dramatist must endow his creations with distinctive beliefs
and dispositions, only in part harmonizing with his own.
But, after making wide allowance for these restrictions,
enough remains to render the testimony of this extraordi-
nary man, one who was not only the mirror, but also in
part the maker of his times, of the greatest possible value
to us.
To /Eschylus, more than to any other, is due the con-
ception of the supreme God, the " ruler of rulers," the " most
blessed of the blessed," as a requiting, a rewarding, and
punishing judge. Firm as a rock is the poet's faith that
every unrighteous deed must be expiated, and that, too,
on earth. We ought not to be surprised at such optimism.
Did not /Eschylus fight at Marathon, at Salamis, and at
THE OPTIMISM OF JESCHYLUS. 7
Plataea ? Did he not sec the world-compelling power of
the " great king " miraculously humbled to the dust by little
Greece, indeed, by his own modest Athens ? He who had
witnessed a divine judgment of this nature, and had been
privileged to help in the execution of it with his own right
arm, could have had little doubt in the omnipotence of
divine justice, or in its realization on earth. Such were the
thoughts amid which the poet lived and wrought, strong
in the comfortable assurance that everything evil must in
the end "make shipwreck on the rock of justice." This
was the hope from which he drew happiness.
<; When Might and Right go joined in equal yoke,
Was ever seen a fairer team than this ? "
It is for this very reason that, as we have already re-
marked, he so seldom casts a glance beyond the limits of
the present world. The raptures of the world to come,
which the Theban Pindar, largely under the influence of
the Orphic school, described with so much enthusiasm,
were of little account to his Athenian contemporary,
kindred soul as he was. But while the dramas of /Eschylus
reflect the triumphal glories of the Persian war, the
gloomy, and quasi-irrational, features of traditional Greek
religion are not wholly absent from his pages. lie, like
Herodotus, knows something of the envy and the ill will
of the gods. But these portions of his inherited faith were
placed by him as it were in the background of his scheme
of the universe. Consider the Promethean trilogy. The
Titan's guilt is his good will towards man ; for this he
endures the unspeakable torment assigned him by Zeus.
But the torment does not last for ever. The conclusion of
this powerful work had for its theme a reconciliation with
the mighty god of the heavens, and the liberation of the
benefactor of mankind from his chains. We have here
what may be truly called a process of development, an
advance to purer and higher ideals within the circle of the
gods. This strange process — the counterpart of what we
have already termed the creation in nature of peace out of
struggle (Vol. I. p. 88) — admits of but one explanation.
8 GREEK THINKERS.
The poet was under the necessity of reconciling the conflict-
ing claims of religious tradition and of his own convictions.
The two could not stand side by side without destroying
each other. But, by alternate recognition, it was possible
to do justice to both. Similar characteristics, develop-
mental, we may call them, are to be noted in the Oresteia.
At the bidding of the Delphic god, Orestes performs the
commandment, horrible in its application to him, that he
should execute vengeance upon the blood-guilty. But the
matricide is seized by the madness sent upon him by
the avenging spirits of Clytemnestra. In other words, the
humane sentiment of the poet and his age revolts against
the merciless severity of the old law of retaliation. The
foundation of the Areopagus, with its milder procedure,
forms a denouement which reconciles the claims of conflicting
ideals. There is another motive, of a still more subjective
character, which may well have contributed to the unmis-
takable deviation from tradition which occurs in these
trilogies. We may be sure that a passionate and richly
endowed nature, like that of our poet, did not attain inward
peace without a struggle. May we hazard the conjecture
that he gives us, so to speak, a materialized representation
of this slow and painful process of illumination and appease-
ment ; that he has, without knowing it, projected his own
spiritual experiences into the history of the world of gods ?
But though yEschylus is our main witness for the progress
of the gods in morals and humane feeling, yet he by no
means forsook the native soil of the Hellenic religion of
nature. The theological wavering which we have already
noticed in Herodotus, recurs in this far more strenuous
soul. In that fragment of the " Daughters of the Sun,"
which we have already had occasion to quote in another
connexion (Vol. I. p. 97), /Eschylus appears as the
prophet of that pantheistic faith which identified Zeus with
the universe — an instructive example of the suppleness and
freedom from dogmatic rigidity of the religious thought of
those days.
For with stubborn persistency the old maintained its
place side by side with the new, and might even, on
SOPHOCLES' VIEW OF DESTINY. 9
occasion, gain the upper hand. So it was in the case of
Sophocles, the second of the great tragic poets, who stands
much nearer to Homer than did his predecessor. It is
true that in the work of the later poet there are traces of
the spirit which breathes through the dramas of the earlier
one, and indeed we may almost say that every funda-
mental thought of /Eschylus is repeated by Sophocles.
But though the strain is the same, the tones have lost
their clearness, and the discords are harsher. We find
here diminished power of thought coupled with increased
wealth of observation. To use a comparison which must
not be taken too seriously, Sophocles is less of an a-priorist,
m< >re of an empiric, than ./Eschylus. There is in his work
a richer variety and a sharper delineation of individual
characters, but less of unity in the outlook upon life and
the world. At one time much ado was made about the
" moral order of the universe " which was supposed to
reign in the tragedies of Sophocles. A more impartial
and penetrating criticism has destroyed the illusion.
Sophocles, it is true, holds as firmly as /Eschylus that
the fate of man is governed by divine ordinance. But
there is often the most glaring disproportion between
character and destiny. Before the mysterious, sometimes
appalling decrees of providence the poet stands in helpless
perplexity. But though perplexed, he is not overwhelmed ;
he bows in reverence before the enigmas of divine govern-
ance. Was he not, in the judgment of his contemporaries,
" one of the most pious," and apart from his profession of
poet, " one of the honest Athenians " ? He makes no
claim to understand everything, nor is he presumptuous
enough to measure swords with the incomprehensible. It
is only occasionally that his outraged sense of justice, or
a feeling of doubt and dread, betrays him into a cry of
protest. Broadly speaking, he accepts with calmness the
hardships of human destiny. His attitude may be described
as one of renouncement, of resigned melancholy, so far as
such an expression may be applied to so wonderfully
harmonious a nature, to one so full of patriotic pride, and,
above all, to one so keenly alive to the joy of artistic
lO GREEK THINKERS.
creation. It was this temper that dictated the bitter
saying, " Not to be born is the best fate of all." It is
the same spirit that speaks to us in the works of Herodotus,
himself a personal friend of Sophocles. The instability of
good fortune, the mutability of all that is earthly, the
precariousness of human existence, are themes which are
touched upon in most ages not wholly given over to levity.
But the key varies, and the emphasis is now stronger, now
weaker, according to the individual character of the writer
and the circumstances of his age. To the earlier Greek,
life wore the aspect of an unclouded sky ; but in the
interval between Homer and Herodotus many and many
a dark mass had gathered over its clear azure (cf. Vol. I. pp.
38, 80, 130, 136). And in the complaint of Herodotus,
that Greece had been visited by heavier afflictions in his
time than in twenty preceding generations, we may find
something like a key to the peculiar and exceptional
emphasis which Sophocles, Herodotus, and, above all,
Euripides, lay on the ills of human life.
3. In Euripides, utterances of the kind we have men-
tioned no longer occur singly. The thought contained in
the lines we have just quoted from Sophocles has now
become a commonplace. This melancholy conception of
life finds its strongest expression in a quatrain which may
be thus rendered —
" Greet the new-born with sad and dirge-like note
Of mourning for the ills he must sustain ;
But, soon as death shall rescue him from pain,
Sing pagans o'er his grave with lusty throat."
If it be asked what causes of a general nature produced
this gloomy turn of sentiment, we must answer — First and
foremost, the growth of reflexion. This explanation sounds
more paradoxical than it really is. Let us imagine that
the inventive genius of our own day had succeeded in
carrying its latest and most magnificent triumphs to
undreamt-of lengths — had liberated sense-perception from
every limitation of space by which it is still hampered, had
abolished the distinction between near and far for eye as
THE PESSIMISM OF EURIPIDES. I I
well as ear. Could such things be, life might well become
an intolerable burden. A host of painful impressions would
besiege us without intermission. Without cease we should
be listening to the cries of women in travail, the groans of
the dying, Should we find compensation in the more
cheerful sounds which might simultaneously strike on our
ears ? Few would venture to say we should. Effects of a
similar nature are produced by reflexion. It diminishes in
no small measure the difference between what is near and
what is remote in point of time. It increases to an
astonishing degree the power and the habit both of
anticipating future impressions and of reviving those of
the past. It enables the past and the future to dispute
the supremacy of the present. It transforms the thought-
less gaiety of youth into the earnestness of mature age,
with its regretful retrospects and its anxious forecasts.
Such, in the period we are now considering, was the effect
of the growing tendency towards reflexion which was then
beginning to work with a force and freshness as yet
unimpaired by use. The justice of this view, with regard
to Euripides at least, is proved by those passages which
exhibit his pessimism, not as a ready-made product, but in
the make. In primitive ages, and to-day among primitive
folk, children are accounted an unquestioned blessing.
This belief is not spared by the sceptical dialectic of
Euripides. It is not only that he describes often and in
moving fashion the sorrows of parents visited by adverse
fate ; he boldly faces the question whether the childless
life is not the better one : " Children who turn out ill are
the worst of misfortunes ; those who turn out well bring
with them a new pain — the torturing fear lest some evil
befall them." It is the same when Euripides speaks of
wealth or noble birth. The joy of possession is for him
closely bound up with the anxious dread of loss. Noble
birth is a danger, because it is no protection from poverty,
and the ruined noble finds his family pride an obstacle in
the way of a livelihood. Thus the eye of the poet, like
that of the bird of night, is more at home in darkness than
in light, and spies out everywhere the evil to which the
12 GREEK THINKERS.
possession of good may give rise. We are thus led to the
consideration of the objective causes of this pessimistic
tendency. Their nature may be judged from the passage
we have already quoted from Herodotus. To the pressure
of the never-ending war we ought doubtless to add a
change for the worse in home affairs. The economic
conditions of Greece and of Athens at this time can
scarcely be called normal. We learn this from the recru-
descence of the class struggle which had been temporarily
hushed, and from the violent character which this struggle
now assumed. The revolutionary horrors, the deeds of
desperation which accompanied the varying phases of the
Peloponnesian war, and which are described in the im-
mortal pages of Thucydides, can only be explained as the
result of grave disturbance of the economic equilibrium.
We cannot but suppose that the unceasing wars of this
period must have made the poor poorer, while the
opportunities for sudden enrichment, which are never
wanting in tumultuous times, must have added to the
wealth of the wealthier class. Social contrasts were thus
greatly heightened. On this point we have the valuable
testimony of Euripides himself, in his affecting commenda-
tion of the middle condition. It is thus that men praise a
boon they have lost or fear to lose. The growing demands
for state aid raised by the multitude may, perhaps, have
been to some extent the outcome of increased desire for
the good things of life, but they were also largely due to
real distress, such as must have been occasioned by the
repeated devastations of Attica, and the hampering of
trade and industry by the protracted war.
We must further take into consideration the unrest
peculiar to all great transition periods. In the mind of
Euripides there is, after his pessimism, no more marked
feature than his inconsistency, his oscillation between
opposed tendencies of thought. Herein he is a true mirror
of an age which was cutting itself adrift from the anchorage
of authority and tradition. Just as in the cool grotto on
the coast of Salamis, his muse's favourite workshop, he
loved to sit and let the sea breeze fan his cheek, in the
EURIPIDES' TREATMENT OF THE MYTHS. 1 3
same way he delighted to suffer each shifting breath of
opinion in turn to seize upon and move his soul. Now he
sings a lofty strain in praise of that bold and fearless spirit
of inquiry which, as revealed to him in the teaching of
Anaxagoras and Diogenes, had stirred his inmost depths ;
or he descants on the happiness and celebrates the civic
virtues of their disciples. Anon, in verses of no less fire,
he "spurns the crooked deceit of those who pry into the
heavens," men whose "wicked tongue, a stranger to all
true wisdom," denies that which is divine, and claims to
know the unknowable. It is difficult to pierce through the
maze of conflicting utterances to the underlying ground of
common thought. But though difficult, it is not impossible.
Euripides continues the ethical reformation of the gods
begun by /Eschylus. "If gods do evil, then they are not
gods." This pithy sentence sums up his divinity. It
contains the essence of all the objections and all the
accusations which he never wearies of bringing forward
against the traditional religion of his countrymen. For
there is one point in which he differs entirely from his
predecessors — from Sophocles as much as from /Eschylus or
Pindar. Each one of these was what in English political
parlance is termed a "trimmer." They were continually
endeavouring to pour the new wine into the old bottles.
They rewrote the old myths in order to bring them into
harmony with their own ethical and religious sentiments.
They were at pains to eliminate all that seemed to them
objectionable or unworthy of the gods. Euripides, who in
general cannot be called naive, follows, in this respect, the
simpler and more direct procedure. He is much more
faithful to tradition than his predecessors, and one is
sometimes tempted to think that he deliberately avoids
diminishing the openings presented to criticism by the
popular beliefs. The truth is that he abandons the task
of reconciliation as hopeless. There is too wide a gulf
between tradition and his personal convictions. Instead of
softening down the more repellent features of mythology,
he reproduces them with exact fidelity, and assails the
resulting picture of the gods with scathing censure and flat
14 GREEK THINKERS.
contradiction. His audacity in this respect reminds us of
Xenophanes, whom he further resembles in his unsparing
attacks upon other fundamental points of Greek sentiment
— the exaggerated appreciation of bodily excellences, and
the idolatry lavished upon athletes victorious in the
national games.
In yEschylus the tendency towards a more ethical
conception of the gods was accompanied by faith and
trust in them ; in Euripides the same tendency was
associated with wavering and doubt. He was convinced,
indeed, that gods steeped in human passions and weaknesses
were unworthy of adoration. But did ideally perfect gods
— gods who were worthy of adoration — really exist or not ?
On this point he inclines, sometimes towards belief, some-
times towards doubt. In a certain passage, the boldest of
all he ever wrote, or at all events of all that have come
down to us, he raises, in all earnestness, the question
whether Zeus is not identical with " natural necessity," or
"the spirit of humanity." But he did not persist to the
end in this attitude of doubt and of revolt against the
religion of his countrymen. In the "Bacchai," the product of
his old age, he appears in an entirely new guise. He has
now, one may say, grown weary of logical subtleties and
petty criticism ; the forces of mysticism, hitherto latent in
his mind, have burst the bonds of restraining reason ;
henceforth he is entirely dominated by religion — a religion,
we may add, which is completely divorced from ethics.
We see the frenzied Maenads, with their ecstatic enthu-
siasms and the unbridled fervour of their cult of Dionysus,
gaining the victory over the guardians of morality and the
representatives of sober sense. It is as if the aged poet
wished to make atonement for the apostasy of the national
genius, to return to the peaceful worship of nature in which
the play of feeling is untrammelled by reflexion. Nor is
this attitude wholly foreign to his earlier works. In the
"Hippolytus" Euripides paints the picture of a chaste,
strenuously moral youth, whom he endows with features
that recall the Orphic and Pythagorean Askesis. Aphrodite,
to whom Hippolytus refuses all homage, hurls him to
ENLIGHTENMENT AND HUMANE FEELING. 1 5
destruction, by causing his stepmother Phaedra first to be
consumed by passionate love for him, and then, when he
spurns her advances, to take a fearful vengeance. On
which side are the poet's sympathies ? We may be sure
that his heart goes out in no small measure to the innocent,
ill-starred youth. But in the fate of Hippolytus he sees
more than the mere vengeance of a cruel goddess, jealously
guarding her own prerogative. To his Hellenic mind the
attempt of the youth to escape the universal dominion of
love appears as a presumptuous defiance of nature's
ordinance, which may not go unpunished. The words of
warning and counsel which the poet puts in the mouth of
the aged servant near the beginning of the drama leave no
room for doubt on this head.
Still, in greatly preponderating measure, Euripides was
a representative of the age of enlightenment and its most
far-reaching claims. Again and again he entered the lists
in defence of the equality of all human beings. It is not
the privileges of noble birth alone that he attacks without
ceasing. He has the courage to assail one of the pillars of
society, the institution of slavery, and the theory on which
it rests. He holds that, beyond the name, there is no differ-
ence between the bastard and the true born, no difference
in nature, but only in convention, between bond and free
(cf. Vol. I. p. 401, seq.). " In the breast of the despised serf
there often beats a nobler heart than in that of his master."
Thoughts such as these had possibly been already expressed
by Hippias of Elis; he had at least paved the way for them
by drawing his deep-going distinction between nature and
convention. Similar sentiments will meet us again in the
schools of the Socratics. It was long before the recognized
leaders of thought acknowledged their justice. One might
almost suppose that ancient society, founded as it was upon
slavery, was led by the instinct of self-preservation to resist
theories more subversive of it than any religious heresy.
Utterances such as those we have quoted must, we
cannot but think, have come from the heart as well as
from the head. We are justified in connecting them with
the march of enlightenment, because here, as well as in
1 6 GREEK THINKERS.
other matters, old prejudices had to be destroyed before
new sentiments could begin to grow. For this growth the
ground was cleared by the rationalistic movement. But
this movement was not itself the soil in which the new
plant throve and multiplied. We say multiplied, for it is
in the highest degree improbable that such a change of
feeling should have been confined to one or two persons.
At Athens and elsewhere, democracy had levelled the
differences between classes, and the levelling process was
not one which could be summoned to halt at an arbitrarily
chosen stage. The author of the treatise " On the Consti-
tution of Athens," to which the reader's attention has only
too often been directed (Vol. I. pp. 499, sqq.), can never
sufficiently censure the audacity of the metics and slaves.
And in so doing he lets fall by the way many a charac-
teristic remark which for us is pregnant with inferences.
The chief arm of Athens — her navy — required a great ex-
penditure of money, which, he tells us, was partly supplied
by contributions from metics and slaves. For this reason
the state was obliged to concede many rights to these
classes ; the citizens, too, could not afford to be too
niggardly in the matter of emancipations, with the result
that, as a body, they had become the " slaves of the
slaves." Another circumstance of great importance was
the following : " If it were permissible to strike an unknown
slave, metic, or freedman, there would be great danger
of assaulting a free citizen unawares," so slight was the
difference in point of dress and general appearance between
the ordinary man and the members of these classes. It
thus became the rule, we may add for our part, to treat
with less brutality those members of society who had in
former times been denied all rights, and the difference in
treatment would naturally be followed by diminished
brutality of sentiment. If we possessed the police records
of that day, they would doubtless bear witness to a dimi-
nution in crimes of violence, the victims of which are
supplied in greatest proportion by the less-protected strata
of society, and at the same time a corresponding increase
in those crimes which require cunning and a ready wit.
THE DRAWBACKS TO ENLIGHTENMENT. I J
For it is an obvious conjecture that the growth of subtlety
and inventive power, which resulted from the progress of
dialectic and rhetoric, would naturally be accompanied by
an increase in the abuse of these faculties. And this con-
jecture is only strengthened by the complaints of Euripides
himself as to the baneful influence of " too fair speech,"
and the glibness which could veil every injustice, quite as
much as by the dialogue between the personified just and
unjust causes in the " Clouds " of Aristophanes. But any
attempt to make a comparative estimate of the strength of
the conflicting influences, to weigh the good against the
evil, must be abandoned for lack of data.
There is the more reason to dwell on the humane
tendency of the age of enlightenment, because in our day
many have endeavoured to make this movement, together
with the so-called " Sophistic school " and its supposed
products, "extreme individualism" and "ethical material-
ism," responsible for all the excesses and all the horrors
which were witnessed by the close of the fifth century.
The baseless character of these charges is clear enough
from the earlier parts of our exposition, and in what follows
we shall often have occasion to return to the subject. But,
apart from this, can any one imagine that in the periods
which preceded the age of enlightenment men were any
the less selfish or less brutal in their selfishness ? Let it
be noted that it was Hesiod, who was free from the least
tendency to rationalism, that advised the farmer to make
the wage-labourer "homeless," that is, turn him adrift on
the high-road, when he had no further need for his services.
Nor was it rationalism that moved the Attic patricians (or
Eupatridse) before Solon's time to thrust the mass of the
people into serfdom, to leave them to drag out a miserable
existence as " payers of the sixth," and to sell thousands
of them as slaves into foreign countries. Nor was Theognis,
who yearns for the return of the time when the submissive
peasants of the rural districts wandered to and fro like
frightened game, and were deprived of every share in political
rights, a disciple of the sophists. That which really requires
explanation is not the renewed outbreak and the violent
vol. n. c
I Q GREEK THINKERS.
manifestations of the class-struggle in the course of the
Peloponnesian war. On the contrary, the real question to
be answered is — How did it come about that the conflict
of classes which, up to the time of Clisthenes, had been
waged, both in Greece at large and in Athens in particular,
with so much bitterness, ceased almost entirely during
the period from the end of the sixth to the middle of the
fifth century, and even then, apart from isolated outbreaks,
such as the murder of Ephialtes, wore a comparatively
mild character up to the beginning of the Peloponnesian
war ?
To this question the true answer is probably as follows :
Causes of different kinds, partly political, partly economic,
combined to produce the same happy result. We may
mention the splendid success of the Athenian empire ; the
growth of commerce and industry under the protection of
its navy ; the temporary ascendency of a middle class which
had been slowly ripening for power ; the better provision
made for the material wants of the lower classes, and that
too, in the first instance, without any merciless plundering
of the allied states ; and, not least, the legislation of
Clisthenes himself and his immediate successors, deliberately
aimed as it was at the extinction of class antipathies and
the fusion of the different elements composing the state.
There was also a psychological cause, the action of which,
though not to be exaggerated, must have been felt for a
few decades beyond the circle of Athenian predominance —
the enhanced feeling of nationality due to the Persian war,
a feeling which must have brought different classes as well
as different states nearer to each other. This was the era
of fruition in Greek as well as in Athenian history — a brief
but extraordinarily fertile interval of rest between different
phases of the class-struggle. We have already spoken of
the economic changes which inflamed this struggle and
occasioned its most acute paroxysms. If, on the other
hand, Athenian ascendency assumed a more and more
violent character, the cause is to be sought in the extreme
susceptibility of Greek political sentiment, which could
tolerate no subordination, even when defined and regulated
GREEKS AND BARBARIANS. 1 9
by law, of one state to another. Thus an unyielding temper
on the part of the allies, and a disposition on the part of
the predominant power to stretch its authority beyond
constitutional limits, gave rise to an unhappy series of
conflicts. Hence ensued various attempts at secession, to
which the Peloponnesian war, with its varying fortunes,
afforded special temptation ; and these were always followed
by punitive measures of great harshness, which it is very
easy to regard as symptoms of moral degeneracy, and set
down to the account of the age of enlightenment. But in
order to form a correct judgment on these and other accusa-
tions, it is necessary to subject the international ethics of
this and the immediately preceding period to an exami-
nation which need not be long, but promises to be fertile
in more than one respect.
4. Greek international morality falls naturally into two
sharply separated divisions, according as it concerned the
relations of different Greek states to each other, or of
Greeks to the outside " barbarian " world. In the latter
case, self-interest was allowed practically uncontrolled
sway ; in the former, definite though elastic limits were
recognized. That dominion over the barbaric races
belonged to the Hellene as of right was never seriously-
called in question, often as individual barbarians might be
credited with high human excellence. Even the poet of
the age of enlightenment preaches this doctrine, possibly
with some mental reservation which was certainly not
shared by his public, in the words, " Let the alien serve
the Hellene ; they are bondmen, we are free." The con-
viction here expressed is one which reigned undisputed up
to a comparatively late epoch. The practice of the Greeks,
at any rate, in spite of isolated utterances in opposition to
this doctrine, remained unaffected until the ground was
cut away from it by the fusion of peoples accomplished by
Alexander ; the practice, both of states, which considered
the pillage and enslavement of even the most innocent
non-Greek communities as entirely justifiable, and the
practice of individuals, whose outrages on barbarians often
stood in the most glarinc contrast with their conduct in
20 GREEK THINKERS.
other relations. It is disconcerting to find the pious dis-
ciple of Socrates and the diligent student of ethics,
Xenophon, wasting Thrace with fire and sword at the
bidding of Seuthes. For a moment one is inclined to
think that on this occasion Xenophon fell far below the
level of the current morality of his day. But this impres-
sion is soon removed by the consideration that the writer,
with his officer's sense of honour, is always concerned to
exhibit his career in the best possible light, and that he
cannot therefore in this connexion have been conscious of
any offence against the prevailing moral ideas of his
countrymen. A full generation later, no less a person
than Aristotle affirms the entire lawfulness of slave-raids
on barbarian tribes, as well as the wholesale reduction of
them to the condition of serfs. He even goes so far as to
recommend these practices in the interests of the bar-
barians themselves, on the ground of their being incapable
of self-government. Civilization had made small progress
in this quarter, if we except the above-mentioned humaner
treatment of slaves. There is only one point in which we
are able to observe any advance. According to the de-
scription in the " Iliad," one Greek hero after another stabs
the fallen Hector with sword or spear, " None came nigh
him that did not wound him." Against such wanton insult
and mutilation of the dead man)' a vigorous protest was
raised by the humaner sentiment of the fifth century ; and
these protests were uttered, not only by poets such as
Moschion the tragedian, but also by the historian Herodotus,
and, if the latter speaks truth, by the Spartan king Pau-
sanias. The victor of Plata^a is reported to have indig-
nantly rejected the suggestion that he should avenge the
ill-treatment of the dead Leonidas on the body of the
Persian general Mardonius. Much more important pro-
gress was made in what has been fitly called " inter-
Hellenic" ethics. This was due to the comparative
slowness with which the consciousness of the unity of the
Greek races developed. Homer appears hardly to know
any collective name for the Hellenic nation. This is not
the place to discuss in detail how the nation became aware
PROGRESS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW. 2 1
of its unity, how the common heritage of shrines, oracles,
public games, works of literature, and finally, the wars
waged in common against foreign enemies, fostered and
strengthened the sense of nationality in the whole race.
Nor shall we dwell here on the rise of numerous confede-
rations, organized with varying degrees of closeness or
laxity. The common interests of entire districts, the
necessity of safeguarding navigation, the desire to protect
from the changing fortunes of war certain of the more
fundamental requisites of existence, were some of the
motives which led to the formation of all kinds of combi-
nations, which were placed under the guardianship of gods
worshipped in common. Of these leagues of neighbouring
states the most important historically, because of its long-
continued, sometimes beneficial, sometimes disastrous
activity, was the Amphictyonic, which centred in the shrine
of Apollo at Delphi. The members of this league were
not only united for the protection of the Delphic oracle,
and the " Holy Land " appurtenant to it, by their oath to
assist the god against any aggressor "with mouth, with
hand, with foot, and with all their might." They were
also sworn to set certain bounds to the exercise of the
rights of war, such as not to deprive opponents of the use
of well-water, and not to raze besieged cities to the
ground. It is true that, in spite of these solemn oaths,
the holy land itself became an apple of discord between
the members of the confederacy, and that more than one
" holy war " was waged for its possession. It is true also
that complaints were raised, not without foundation, of
bribes being accepted by the Pythia, and of the misuse
of the Delphic oracle in the interests of particular states
or parties, sometimes even for anti-national ends. But,
broadly speaking, the priestly staff of the oracle deserved
well of Greece, that land of many states, by its efforts in
the cause of national unity. Not only the rights and obli-
gations connected with religion, but such matters as the
construction of roads, and even the calendar, were brought
under uniform or nearly uniform regulations emanating
from this source, Next to Delphi we must place Olympia.
2 2 GREEK THINKERS.
The games celebrated there supplied more than one occa-
sion for the profession of pan- Hellenic sentiment, and the
" truce of God," which was associated with the festival, at
least procured the neighbouring districts a temporary
respite from warfare.
For, in general, war, unceasing war, was the watchword
of Greek political life. The little nation was ever at feud
with itself. The Persian general Mardonius, if we are to
believe Herodotus, expressed, as well he might, his aston-
ishment that the Greeks, "who spoke one language," did
not prefer to settle their differences amicably, " by heralds
and ambassadors," instead of invariably resorting to arms.
It is easy to understand why the poet of enlightenment
praised the blessings of peace with such fervour, and
bewailed the unreason which ever kindled afresh the torch
of war, until the weaker party was reduced to serfdom.
And yet — so tortuous is the course of human development
— we cannot rid ourselves of a sneaking doubt whether a
Hellas blessed with perpetual peace, united in a con-
federacy, or possibly a single state, would ever have
achieved so much in art and science as did that divided
Hellas whose powers were braced, though at the same time
all too soon exhausted, by the incessant competition of
war. To pass by other historic parallels, the Italy of the
Renaissance, which is the exactest counterpart we can find
to the culminating period of Greek history, presents us
with an entirely similar spectacle, equally depressing to
the more short-sighted among the friends of humanity, and
equally cheering to those who prize what is highest in
human achievement. But, be that as it may, what the
above-mentioned factors of national unity really effected
was a toning down of the extreme brutalities of warfare.
In the foreground we may place respect for death. It is
true that even in the " Iliad " we find that to grant a truce
for the burial of the dead is considered as a duty owed to
universal humanity. But the poem as a whole contradicts
this point of view, and we can only regard the isolated
utterance as the addition of a later age. At the very
beginning of the epic, the poet declares that the wrath of
RESPECT FOR DEATH. 23
Achilles will send many brave souls of heroes to the realms
below, and give their bodies to be the prey of dogs and
birds. In another passage we have the goddess Athene,
the enemy of Troy, exclaiming, " Many a Trojan shall
sate, with the flesh and the fat of his body, Dogs and birds,
as he lies on the sand by the ships of Achaea." And the
hero Diomedes exults with grim humour over the success
of his javelin-throw ; his victim shall rot where he reddens
the ground, and " birds, rather than women, shall flock
round him." A^ain, the " Iliad " is full of combats waged
round the bodies of the fallen heroes. The two armies
endeavour, with all the force and endurance they possess, to
wrest from each other, not the spoil merely, but the stripped
bodies themselves. Even the story contained in the last
book, in which a somewhat gentler spirit prevails, rests on the
supposition that the acceptance of a ransom for a corpse
is not the rule but the exception. It requires the inter-
vention, the express command, of the supreme god, to make
Achilles forego his designs upon the body of Hector. It
is not till we come to the " Thebais," a poem of much later
date, in which, too, Greeks fight with Greeks, not with
barbarians, that we find an epic closing with the solemn
burial of all the fallen combatants, by permission of the
victor, left master of the field. From that time onward it
was an unquestioned principle that not only should dead
warriors be spared all mutilation, but also that they should
not be denied the honour of funeral rites.
Nor was it in the interests of the dead alone that the
feeling of common Hellenism asserted itself. The victor
was required to spare the life and liberty of the vanquished.
But this protection did not extend to their goods. Whether,
and to what extent, the rights of property should be re-
spected, what, in general terms, the fate of the defeated
side was to be, depended on the nature of the war, the
magnitude of the victor}', and partly on the character of
the vanquished party. The entire destruction, root and
branch, of a Greek community was seldom attempted, and
never with success ; such attempts, moreover, were only
made under cover of special circumstances, which were
24 GREEK THINKERS.
seldom considered sufficient justification. But the expulsion
of the conquered population, and the partition of its land,
as well as the reduction of independent proprietors to the
status of tributary peasants, are measures which not only
were put in actual practice by Greeks engaged in warfare
against other Greeks, but were not even regarded as exceed-
ing the limits prescribed by the laws of war, though in the
great majority of cases the victors were satisfied with a
much smaller disturbance of existing conditions. But that
butchery of prisoners which in the Homeric poems is con-
sidered " fitting," though often omitted, passed, in historical
times at least, as inadmissible between Greeks. Nor might
Greek cities be subjected to the terrible fate described in
the " Iliad : " " Flames devour the city, the men are slain by
the sword-point, Children are carried away, and with them
the low-girded women." Exceptions to the rule of mercy
are certainly not unknown, but they are few in number, and
may generally be explained, if not justified, by special
circumstances. The Thebans, who claimed to be the right-
ful lords of Bceotia, or, at least, that their city was its
natural capital, showed no pity to prisoners of war who
were natives of other Boeotian cities. The Syracusans con-
sidered the interference of Athens in the affairs of Sicily
a grievous wrong, and, after their brilliant victory over the
intruders, sent thousands of them to die in the quarries,
where nominally they were held prisoners, but in reality
perished miserably of starvation, exposure, and over-crowd-
ing. Nor did Athens preserve an unstained record under
the stress and strain of the Peloponnesian war. After the
capture of Torone, a city which had seceded from the
Athenian confederation, the women and children were sold
into slavery ; the men, however, who had been brought
prisoners to Athens, and, at the close of the war, ransomed
or exchanged, were spared the extreme penalty. Scione,
another seceding city, fared worse. Here the enslavement
of the women and children was accompanied by the
slaughter of the men, and the division of the land, which
was given by the Athenians to refugees from Plata^a. This
city had five years previously (427) been taken, after a
ME LOS.
-0
tedious siege, by the Spartans, who, under pressure from
the Thebans, had punished it for its infidelity to their cause
by the enslavement of the women, the execution of the
surviving combatants, and the complete destruction of the
walls and buildings. The similar treatment of Melos by
the Athenians appears all the more revolting when we
consider the previous history of the island. Originally a
Spartan colony, it had been long autonomous, and was
guilty of no breach of loyalty to the confederation. More
than that, it had taken no part whatever in the war, and only
took arms on being summoned by the Athenians to abandon
the neutrality it had hitherto (till 416) observed. This
violation of a neutral state is not without modern parallels
— we may mention the English bombardment of Copen-
hagen in 1807 — an<3 it does not differ in principle from the
treatment accorded to neutral merchantmen by the Spartans
in the same war. They made prizes of such ships when-
ever their interests required it, and often cruelly murdered
the captains. But what are we to think of the characteristic
description given by Thucydides of the proceedings at
Melos ? In that famous dialogue he makes the represen-
tatives of Athens state the policy of force followed by their
country in language of brutal plainness, without the least
attempt at concealment or palliation. Some few readers
have been simple enough to take for a faithful report of
actual diplomatic negotiations what is really a profound
disquisition on the law of nature, introduced by the author
in connexion with this episode. Other critics, both ancient
and modern, have supposed that Thucydides wished to
pillory the lawless and reckless procedure of the contem-
porary political leaders of Athens. We cannot accept this
view, though it is supported by the authority of Grote. In
these speeches the Athenian delegates scornfully reject
prophecies and oracles, and treat the theological interpreta-
tion of history with at best cool scepticism. This attitude,
however, is one to which Thucydides was himself inclined ;
how can he have intended to bring it into discredit ?
Further, the delegates exhibit a great disdain for fine
phrases and traditional tags {e.g. " We Athenians will use
26 GREEK THINKERS.
no fine words ; we will not go out of our way to prove at
length that we have a right to rule, because we overthrew
the Persians " *). This blunt political realism ought surely
to be taken as an expression of Thucydides's own opinions
rather than as the target of his satire. He certainly cannot
have meant to imply that the Athenians would really have
done better if they had adorned their case with the flowers
of rhetoric, or had veiled what was in truth a question of
might by hypocritical allegations of legal claims. Our
impression is that the historian has here allowed himself
to be guided by his zeal for truth, his honest hatred of
cant, and his keen political insight ; that he has endeavoured
to go straight to the heart of the matter, and show with
unadorned plainness that the essential and decisive factors
in international relations are the interests and the com-
parative strength of states. This view, that his purpose
was scientific rather than controversial, is supported by
the cool, unemotional tone in which he records the final
catastrophe.
This coolness of tone is a personal characteristic of the
historian, with his pride of intellect and his sometimes
violent repression of every ordinary feeling of humanity,
and is not shared by him with the Athenian people. This
latter may be compared to a man of not ungenerous'
though highly irascible temper. The Athenians were very
ready to listen to the suggestions of passion, but their real
humanity of disposition is shown by the fact that, even
when their fury was aroused, or when their vital interests
were at stake, they were not obstinately deaf to the voice
of repentance and forgiveness. In the same year in which
the Spartans vented their rage on the unfortunate Plataeans,
a similar bloodthirsty sentence was passed by the Athenians
on the inhabitants of Mitylene in Lesbos, a city which had
broken faith with the confederation. It was resolved that
all capable of bearing arms should be put to death, and
that the women and children should be sold into slavery.
But a wholesome revulsion of feeling soon followed. The
horrible decree was rescinded by a fresh vote of the people,
* Thuc, v. 89, trans. Jowett.
THE PROTECTION OF THE WEAK AT ATHENS. 2/
and a crew of fast oarsmen despatched to carry the happy
tidings to its destination with all the speed at their com-
mand. That even the mitigated sentence was excessive,
judging by modern standards — more than a thousand of
the most guilty among the rebels were still marked out for
the death-penalty — is an admission which it is sad to have
to make, but one which does not alter the fact that among
the Greeks none but the Athenians showed themselves
capable of any such revulsion of feeling. On the other
hand, they were incapable of the cruel deceit of the Spar-
tans, who inveigled two thousand of the most honourable
and ambitious of their Helots into a trap, under the pretext
of offering them freedom.
But however often the noble heart of the Athenian
people might obey a generous impulse, it was not by such
impulses that its policy was determined, but by the well
or ill understood interest of the state. It was an example
of Athenian generosity when, at the end of the civil dis-
order which marked the closing years of the fifth century,
an all but general amnesty was granted to the oligarchical
insurgents, and faithfully adhered to in spite of many
incitements to the contrary. The humanity of the people
was shown in the manifold provision made by law for the
protection of the weak. Among the many enactments of
this character we may note the assistance granted by the
state to men who were unable to earn a livelihood, the
right accorded to wives (or at least a particular class of
them) of taking legal action against husbands who ill
treated them, and the provision made for widows and
orphans — in particular the education at the expense of the
state of the orphans of men who had fallen in battle. In
the Homeric age no sadder lot was known than that of
such orphans. Their food was the crumbs from the men's
table, and their drink that "which wets the lips, but leaves
the throat dry." Even the slave was not, at Athens,
wholly destitute of legal protection. As a resource against
gross ill treatment on his master's part, he might take
refuge in the shrine of Theseus, where, in case his grievance
proved to be well founded, he might demand to be sold to
28 GREEK THINKERS.
a new master. A similar procedure was allowed in various
other Greek states. And even the inter-Hellenic policy of
Athens was not entirely unaffected by altruistic motives.
The defence of the weak is a favourite subject with the
Attic orators and dramatists. Whenever the interests of
the state were in harmony with this sentiment, it played
a large part in the utterances of practical politicians. A
charge of hypocrisy would be out of place here, as much
as in the case of modern England, where a strong and
genuine enthusiasm for the liberty of foreign peoples exists
and lends vigour and warmth to a policy based on interest
with which it may happen to agree ; although in other
cases the interests of England seem to be invested with
the dignity of an ethical principle. He who follows the
varying phases of Athenian politics will not fail to notice
that the appeal to law and morality becomes louder and
more frequent in proportion as the power of the state
suffers diminution. There is a kind of see-saw ; when one
end is up, the other is down. What on one occasion is
extolled as a sacred tradition, as a precious legacy from
the men of old, is, in different circumstances, mocked at as
a " weak-kneed humanitarian pose."
He who, in the face of these and kindred phenomena,
should doubt the possibility of moral progress in inter-
national relations, would be under a mistake. Community
of sentiment does not generally precede, but follow, com-
munity of interest. Humanizing influences of all kinds
may at times gain enormous strength, but they can never
triumph over the self-preserving instinct of a nation or a
political organism. Further, the prospects of progress in
this direction were never brighter than at the present
moment. No doubt it is easy to be led astray, on a super-
ficial view of the case, by the spectacle of the great wars
of the last generation. But, if we may be allowed the
expression, they were, almost without exception, pacific
wars. Their effect was to win, or to secure, internal peace
for regions of vast extent. In Europe, two great states,
with a combined population of eighty millions, have taken
the place of politically divided nationalities ; and in America
PROSPECTS OF THE CAUSE OF PEACE. 29
the giant Union has been saved from threatened disruption.
These facts alone are elements of no mean consequence in
the progress of the cause of peace, and further develop-
ments tending in the same direction are not impossible.
They are to be expected as results of that solidarity of
interests affecting, perhaps not the entire world, but large
combinations of states, which is bound to increase in pro-
portion as a more perfect division of labour and facilitated
means of intercourse create larger and larger spheres of
common economic activity, and establish closer and closer
relations between the more widely separated portions of
the globe. More and more often will it be found that
hostilities between a particular pair of states involve so
much injury to one or more other states that the latter
are compelled to prevent the conflict by a threat of inter-
vention, and to insist on a peaceful solution of the question
at issue. A threat of this kind might easily acquire a
character of permanency ; moreover, the solution adopted
would naturally be on lines dictated by considerations of
the general welfare. We should thus attain the nearest
approximation to the reign of international law and
morality which appears compatible with the necessary
division of humanity into a number of independent and
autonomous states.
But we must return to the much-subdivided Greece of
bygone days, whose productive energies were perhaps all
the greater because of its subdivision. Or rather, our
subject will now be the intellectual capital of Greece, a
part which, in virtue of its great and growing importance,
we have already found tending to usurp in our exposition
the place of the whole. But now that our story promises
to linger by the banks of the Ilissus, and beneath the
citadel-rock of the virgin-goddess, it is fitting that we
should endeavour to give the reader some familiarity with
the features of the land and its people, and to bring before
his mind the peculiar characteristics of the " school of
Greece."
GREEK THINKERS.
CHAPTER II.
ATHENS AND THE ATHENIANS.
i. THERE is one thing which even the gloomy doubter,
Euripides, never called in question, and that is the
grandeur of his native city. His tongue never wearies
of praising the " violet-crowned, glorious " Athens, the
" sons of Erechtheus, sprung from the blessed gods."
bathed in " dazzling ether," and the " holy land " in which
they lived. And now, after more than two thousand years,
his song still wakes an echo. " How poor," we exclaim,
" would mankind be now if Athens had never been ! " Let
us endeavour to give some modest account of the causes,
or rather of some of the conditions, of that unexampled
intellectual splendour whose seat this favoured spot of
earth once was.
Athens was the heiress of Miletus. There was, indeed,
little rejoicing when she entered into possession. When
the tragedian Phrynichus, the predecessor of yEschylus,
put on the Athenian stage his " Capture of Miletus," in
which he had dramatized the reconquest of that city by
the Persians after the Ionian revolt (494), the rows of
spectators were thrilled with such deep emotion that the
reproduction of the piece was forbidden, and the author of
the too effective play punished by a fine. And yet it was
precisely the ruin of Ionia that made Athens the pre-
dominant power in Greece, and the fall of Miletus that
raised her to the position of intellectual capital. The
scope of our inquiry is thus somewhat narrowed. We
shall not attempt to prove that Athens must, in any case,
CONDITIONS OF THE GREATNESS OF ATHENS. 3 1
have risen to the height she did. All we can hope to do
is to explain how it was possible for her to climb to an
eminence from which her rival had descended.
All the circumstances which we have mentioned in the
first volume (p. 4, seq.) as favourable to Greek civilization,
were found in full — indeed, in exceptional measure — in
Attica. This region, the most eastern of the Greek main-
land, turns its back on the meagre civilizations of the
North and West, and stretches out yearning arms, as it
were, to the ancient culture of the East. Standing at its
southern apex, say on the steps of the glistening temple
of Athene at Cape Sunium, one sees the island of Ceos,
the first link of an almost continuous chain stretching away
towards the Asiatic coast. In Attica, again, the most
diverse callings were followed, and the utmost variety of
characters and aptitudes collected together within a small
area. The agricultural inhabitants of the lowlands con-
trasted with the pastoral folk of the hills and the sailors
and fishermen of the long coast-line. These three groups
of the population formed, in the sixth century, three
distinct factions or parties in local politics, taking their
names from the "Plain," the "Mountain," and the "Coast."
The inhabitants of Attica considered themselves as auto-
chthonous, that is, as being originally sprung from the soil.
From this expression we are to conclude that they had
been established in the district for long ages, and that the
indigenous population had not been expelled or reduced
to serfdom by foreign conquerors. The Doric migration,
which swept over the other parts of Greece like a tidal
wave, left Attica untouched ; and the continuously pro-
gressive development which was thus rendered possible
for the young commonwealth had as happy an influence
on its after-history as a boyhood spent in quiet growth
has upon the subsequent career of a man. Nor was there
any lack of safeguards against the corresponding dangers
of torpor and provincial stagnation. Perpetual border
feuds kept the energies of the people in constant exercise,
while the naturally unfertile soil of Attica both demanded
and richly rewarded strenuous labour. Nor could they
32 GREEK THINKERS.
resist the peremptory invitation to be diligent in trade and
navigation, in professions and industries, which was con-
veyed to them by the voice of the restless sea beating upon
their shores. The population belonged to the intellectually
most active division of the Greek race — the Ionic. But
the Boeotians, on the north of the little territory, were of
yEolian, the Megarians, on the west, of Doric extraction.
It was impossible that Attica should wholly escape the
influence of such neighbourhood. Just as the Attic dialect
formed a connecting link between the other varieties of
Ionic speech on the one hand, and the Doric and yEolian
idioms on the other, so, in point of architecture, dress, and
education, Athenian culture has more than one feature in
common with the non-Ionic, especially the Doric branches.
Fragments of foreign nationalities, too, were not wanting,
such as the Phoenicians in the neighbouring island of
Salamis, and in Melite ; Thracians in Eleusis ; while one
family of high repute traced its pedigree back to Carian
ancestors ; and princely houses, such as that of the Nelidae
or the ./Eacidae, who had been expelled from other parts
of Greece, chose Athens for their home. It must be
remembered that the city was famous in every age for its
hospitality both to the men and the gods of other lands.
Everything thus conspired to favour a many-sided develop-
ment of the Athenian people, and to save them from dull
uniformity of character. This harmonizes with the natural
diversity of the landscape. To quote Ernst Curtius, " Half
an hour's walk brings us from the shade of the olive-grove
to the harbour, where we seem to have entered a totally
different country."
The Ionians of Asia Minor were marked by a certain
Oriental luxuriousness of temperament which was foreign
to the Athenians. Nor did the latter at first display the
same resolute spirit of enterprise, the same romantic passion
for adventure, as their Asiatic kinsmen. We do not find
the Athenians of the seventh and sixth centuries taking
service under Egyptian kings, as did the Milesians, or
penetrating to the oases of the Sahara like the Samians.
Herewith is closely bound up much that proved of
CONTINUITY OF ATHENIAN DEVELOPMENT. $3
advantage to the little commonwealth, the astonishing
continuity of whose development comes home to us with
greater and greater force the more intimately we become
acquainted with its history. This development was no
doubt retarded by the severity of the class-struggle, but
its character was not thereby altered. The primitive
monarchy passed almost insensibly into the aristocratic
system of government which succeeded it, and this
stage was followed by an equally progressive enlarge-
ment of the area of political rights, leading, by a
series of easy transitions, in which scarcely a step was
omitted, to the ultimate triumph of the democracy. And,
even then, the old patrician families retained their social
consideration long after their political privileges had
become extinct. Among the many beneficial effects of
this gradual development there is one which deserves
special mention. In the best ages of Athenian history
there was no feverish race for wealth, and therefore no
plutocracy. One advantage of hereditary monarchy is that
it protects the supreme position in the state from the
intrigues of ambitious place-hunters. An hereditarv
aristocracy sometimes renders a similar service to a com-
munity by barring the highest social status to the sordid
competition of greedy money-hunters. A healthier-toned
tradition is thus rendered possible, inequalities between
man and man are robbed of their sting, and some guarantee
is afforded against depreciation of the higher moral and
intellectual interests of society.
2. The phenomenon with which we are now mainly
concerned, the intellectual greatness of Athens, is one
which it is not possible to trace to its ultimate causes.
Instead of indulging in empty hypotheses, we prefer
to adduce a few facts which may conceivably have
favoured that blaze of splendour. For this purpose we
must go back a little. At Miletus, science was originally
the handmaid of utility. The navigation which centred
in the great emporium necessitated the development of
astronomical and mathematical knowledge, and on this
trunk the scion of cosmological speculation was afterwards
VOL. II. D
34 GREEK THINKERS.
grafted. At Athens, on the other hand, art had taken firm
root long before the first beginnings of scientific research.
Many circumstances combined to foster the growth of art
in connexion with handicrafts. The meagre yield of the
soil required supplementing by the earnings of industry,
and for this very reason Pisistratus and Solon encouraged
the introduction of foreign craftsmen. Lastly, the locality
furnished an abundant supply of the raw materials of art.
The designer and painter of vases found the finest pottery-
earth ready to his hand, and rich marble-quarries were at
the disposal of the sculptor and the architect. The ancients
held firmly, and no doubt rightly, that where the light is
intensest and the atmosphere purest, there the senses attain
their highest degree of keenness and refinement. Another
feature of the Attic climate which once was the subject of
enthusiastic praise, has now undergone a change for the
worse. That extent and variety of vegetation which
prompted the boast of Aristophanes that in his country
" all fruits and all herbs throve " at all times, almost
obliterating the difference between the seasons, does not
now exist in the same measure. For the destruction of
the forests has brought in its train a surprising decrease in
the rainfall, and a corresponding aggravation of the plague
of dust. But in another respect, Attica is still a highly
favoured region. There are not two days in the year
during which the sun remains invisible, and brilliant
summer weather prevails for nearly half the year. Ernst
Curtius tells us that the " produce of this soil is to-day
more delicate, finer, and more aromatic," and "that the
fruits of Attic orchards and gardens have a better flavour
than those of other lands;" further, that "no hills in Greece
yield more fragrant herbs than Hymettus, the bee-pasture
of ancient renown." Did the same natural influences pro-
duce a corresponding refinement in the human race ? We
cannot tell. So much is certain, that the shrewdness of the
Athenians, the contrast which the clarity of their intellect
presented to all "foolish simplicity," the general mental
superiority which distinguished them from other Greeks as
Greeks were distinguished from barbarians, were universally
GREEK ART.
oo
acknowledged facts, and were mentioned by Herodotus as
being such even in his day.
Science and Art are twin sisters, in spite of their
occasional estrangements. Both are to a large measure
founded on the gift of exact observation. This, for its
part, has its root in exceptional delicacy of the senses.
Where we receive one impression, as is remarked by a
profound French thinker to whom we are indebted for
many of the following thoughts, the Greek received twenty,
each one of which set in lively vibration a sympathetic
chord of emotion. To this cause we may also attribute
that sense of measure, that abhorrence of all extravagance,
that economic use of the means of expression, which dis-
tinguished the art, as well as the life and ideals of the
Greeks. Here also, since the sharply defined and at the
same time emotionally accentuated impression is always
the most permanent, we have the source of the increased
capacity of the Greek for faithfully reproducing past im-
pressions, whether received simultaneously or in succession,
whether it was the chisel or the pencil that sought to give
them final embodiment in form and colour, or whether it
was the artist in language who endeavoured to revive them
by the aid of sounds, words, and phrases, by the rhythm of
oratory or of verse. The numerous picturesque passages
of the Homeric poems, especially the " Iliad," the graphic
delineations of diseases left us by the physicians of the
Hippocratic school, the masterpieces of sculpture, and
the wonderfully vivid word-paintings of the historians
Herodotus and Thucydides, may all be regarded as off-
shoots of a single parent stem. Even in those branches
of art in which there is no attempt at imitation — in music,
for example, and architecture — the peculiar susceptibility of
the Greeks to all kinds of sense-impression manifests itself
at every turn. Their musical scale was not limited to tones
and semi-tones like ours, but possessed quarter-tones as
well. Their architecture exhibits a minute differentiation
of parts which extends to the smallest details ; thus in the
fluted columns of the Parthenon each single groove is cut
more deeply towards its extremities than in the middle of
36 GREEK THINKERS.
its length. For the Greeks, with their exceptionally keen
and active senses, employed in the execution of their works
of creative genius many artifices which easily elude our
duller perceptions, and only reveal themselves as the
reward of the most painstaking and careful analysis. The
architecture, whether of a material fabric like the Parthenon,
or of a fabric built of words and rhythms such as any
choral ode in a Greek play, requires for its understanding
a minute dissection which is often beyond the unaided
powers of eye or ear. For all the excellences which
distinguished the Greek race belong in a special measure
to the Ionians, and above all the Athenians.
The common root of artistic and scientific excellence
now lies bare before us. It is not difficult to trace the two-
fold course of development, which is in essence but a single
one, leading from the lower to the higher stages of both.
On the artistic side we see that the conditions of success
are distinct separation of parts, lucid arrangement of the
whole, strict correspondence of form to matter, of organ to
function. On the intellectual side the prime requisites are
distinctness of mental vision, systematic arrangement of
subject-matter, sharply defined logical division. For where
individual perceptions are marked by great clearness and
definiteness, it is impossible that a desire should not be
awakened to preserve the syntheses of sense, as well as
their mental copies, from becoming clouded or confused.
There can be no comfort or joy in the acquisition of a
vast stock of mental furniture, unless it be carefully and
competently arranged and classified. We have here the
source of one of the two main streams of scientific thought,
the analytic method. It seems more difficult to trace the
origin of the other stream, the deductive method, that is,
to establish a connexion between that impulse towards
the highest achievements of science which first appeared
among the Ionians, and the other manifestations of Ionian
character. For the gay holiday temperament of the Ionian,
with his delight in colour and brilliance, his contented
enjoyment of all that stimulates and satisfies eye or ear,
seems to be separated by a wide gulf from all striving
THE ANALYTIC AND THE DEDUCTIVE
after scientific rigour, all pursuit of cold and colourless
abstractions, such as the "infinite" of Anaximander. But
the contradiction is only apparent. Abstraction has its
origin in a craving for simplicity and universality which is
really a craving for relief. If the mind is not to be over-
burdened by the multiplicity of images, they must be
referred to the fewest and the simplest possible concepts.
Only thus can the manifold detail of treasured impressions
be temporarily dismissed from consciousness with no im-
pairment of the sense of possession, and with full confidence
in the power of ready reproduction. Thus the act of
abstraction, by easing the mind of its load, imparts to it
a feeling of lightness and freedom. In spite of the
plausibility of the contrary view, the spirit of the deductive
method is in its origin closely akin to sensuous delight in
the richness and variety of external objects. It must be
conceded that the evolution of the different branches of
science brings about a separation between the two, and
that it was the Doric, not the Ionic, race that most success-
fully studied the abstractions of number and measure.
The two tendencies we have described unite in producing
what we may call the systematic intellect, by which we
mean that type of intellect which is never content with
isolated facts as such, and refuses to accept or register
them except as parts of a well-ordered, well-articulated
structure, or trucrrrj/xa. Herein we may see at once the
great strength and the great weakness of Greek thought,
the source both of the most brilliant triumphs of research
and of not a few hasty and erroneous generalizations. The
inquiring mind easily becomes entangled in the meshes
of the net in which it seeks to imprison the multitude of
facts. And here we may refer to the history of that twin
sister to Science — Art — whose arrested development is held
by the best judges to be in part due to the influence of
system, to the love of rules, to the premature imposition
of rigid canons. We are now, however, concerned, not with
the shadow but with the blaze of light by which it was cast.
Let us follow the tendency we are considering to another of
its results. Mastery over the subject-matter of knowledge,
38 GREEK THINKERS.
theory, was associated with the endeavour to bring the world
of practice in its turn into subjection to supreme, all-em-
bracing principles. We shall soon have before us the man
who strove for the attainment of this aim with all the fervour
of an intense enthusiasm.
3. Hitherto we have spoken of the Ionians and of the
Athenians as if they were aggregates of uniformly endowed
and similarly constituted humanity. This procedure is a
necessity wherever it is attempted to bring out the common
element in racial or national character, but it is apt, and
nowhere more so than in the present instance, to suggest
false conclusions. For variety of individual development
is perhaps the most distinctive feature of Athenian culture.
Hence the originality, the wealth of versatile genius, by
which the age of Athenian splendour was characterized.
Never since those days has there been so complete a
fulfilment of the conditions laid down by Wilhelm von
Humboldt, and after him by John Stuart Mill. Nowhere
else have that " freedom " and that " variety of situations "
of which " individual vigour " and " manifold diversity of
character " are the outcome, been presented in the same
ample measure. It was early recognized to what extent
Athenian greatness was promoted by the reconquest and
the progressive development of political liberty.
" Not in one instance only, but everywhere alike, equality of
rights proves how excellent a thing it is. Do we not see that the
Athenians, so long as they were subject to the rule of tyrants, were
not superior in war to any of their neighbours ? But once they had
rid themselves of that rule, they took by far the foremost position."
This dictum of Herodotus * may perhaps be chargeable
with exaggeration in regard to the political power of Athens,
which certainly gained something from the shrewd states-
manship of Pisistratus, but in the sphere of intellectual
evolution it is nothing but the exact truth.
Current terms, such as "liberty" or "democracy," give
us but an imperfect picture of the workings of the Athenian
constitution. What was most essential and vital in it was
V. 78.
RICHNESS OF INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT. 39
not the assembling of the entire male population at the
Pnyx, to pass by a majority of votes resolutions by which
the state was governed. A more important feature, one
which had existed long before the rise of democracy, was
the extraordinarily minute articulation of the body politic,
by which we are reminded of the marvellously delicate
organisms revealed to us by the microscope. From the
family as smallest unit, to the largest, the state, there
extended a widening series of associations, circle after
circle. The "household," the "clan," the "brotherhood,"
the "tribe," each of these corporations united its members in
common labour, common worship, common festival ; every-
where was joyous co-operation and strenuous rivalry — rivalry
that blessed the whole by promoting the well-being of the
parts. The reform of Clisthenes did not materially change
the situation. By a singularly ingenious artifice he partially
replaced the ties of kinship by the ties of neighbourhood,
superposing the " tribe " on the " township," and thereby
effecting a happy fusion of two conflicting principles by a
compromise which went far to obviate the drawbacks and
emphasize the advantages of both. The unitary principle
which thus triumphed at once over local separatism and
the exclusive caste system of the noble and patrician
families, was far from being a hard and rigid scheme of
centralization, tending to absorb in itself all the vitality
of the smaller divisions. It was the exact opposite of this.
The community was now more richly organized than ever.
Vigorous, pulsating life, adequate on the emotional as well
as on the practical side, permeated every part of the social
organism. Community of worship and community of
interests held together in the bonds of union the members
both of the greater and of the lesser corporations. The
co-proprietorship of shrines, of burial-places, of land,
libraries, and so forth, brought men into close contact writh
each other, and diffused among them that wholesome
warmth of kindly feeling, akin to family affection, which
the Ionians in general and the Athenians in particular
deemed a necessary element in public as well as in private
life. But, the reader will exclaim in surprise, where in all
40 GREEK THINKERS.
this is the individual, his freedom, his independent develop-
ment ? Are not all these associations so many checks and
hindrances, so many means of restricting and curtailing
individual life in the interest of the community ? The
aptest answer to this question is supplied by a comparison
of Athens with Sparta. In the latter city the unremitting
tension of military organization stunted, if it did not
destroy, the associations based on ties of kinship. Even
family life, in the narrow sense, lost the greater part of its
significance. The state took over the whole responsibility
of the education of the boys. The home of the youth,
even of the young husband, was the barracks. Even men
of mature years took their meals, not in the family circle,
but in the Syssition, that is, a kind of camp-fellowship or
mess, kept up even in time of peace. The organization
of the community was almost entirely on military lines.
Associations intermediate between the state and the
individual were either lacking or had become mere ex-
pedients of mechanical subdivision. And what were the
consequences ? The citizen, trained to no efficiency except
such as served state purposes, animated by a supreme but
exclusive devotion to his country, exhibited a minimum of
individual character, perhaps less than a minimum of active
interest in science and art. At Athens we find the exact
opposite of this. The difference justifies us in saying that
all these intermediate associations were so many protective
integuments within which individual character, diversity,
and originality were enabled to grow and thrive. It is
superfluous to add that the permanent existence and the
wholesome operation of political liberty depend upon its
being supported by a broadening series of self-governing
units, without which foundation freedom must either decay
or degenerate into a tyranny of the majority, beneath which
individual liberty is crushed.
From all such tyranny of the majority Athens was
remarkably exempt. That this was a priceless blessing
and one of the chief causes of Athenian greatness, is no
modern discovery. It was recognized by Thucydides, and
by Pericles too, if we may believe the main thoughts of
NO TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY. 41
the funeral oration to be really those of the statesman, and
not merely put in his mouth by the historian.
The terse, pregnant sentences of this memorable speech
contain a panegyric of the Athenian political system, as a
system which leaves unused no force capable of serving
the common welfare, which, in this respect at least, admits
no privilege of class, and is prompt to recognize and reward
all merit, without regard to riches or rank. And the same
liberal spirit animates men's judgments on each other in
private matters. No one is offended with his neighbour
for ordering his life as seems best to him, or seeks to
embitter his existence by sour glances and all the petty
persecutions of intolerance. Life with them is bright and
joyous, free from all the vexation that comes of a fretful
spirit.
" We are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and
we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness. Wealth we
employ, not for talk and ostentation, but when there is a real
use for it. To avow poverty with us is no disgrace ; the true
disgrace is in doing nothing to avoid it. An Athenian citizen
does not neglect the state because he takes care of his own
household ; and even those of us who are engaged in business
have a very fair idea of politics. We alone regard a man who
takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless, but as a
useless member of society."
Finally, it is pointed out that "Athens is the school of
Hellas, and the individual Athenian in his own person
seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most
varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and
grace," * instead of being content to remain a mere
fraction of a man.
Who can doubt that the society thus described by
Pericles was a soil admirably fitted for the growth of
genius and originality ? The less we are burdened and
cramped by the rigid fetters of precise conventionalism,
and the more we are accustomed, within the limits of a
due regard to others' welfare and our own soul's health, to
* Thuc, ii. 40, 41, trans. Jowett.
42 GREEK THINKERS.
listen to the voice and follow the impulses of our own
nature instead of slavishly aping a set copy, the better
prospect shall we have of living out our lives in happy
activity, of preserving uncorrupted and developing to its
full stature any germ of talent that may lie dormant within
our bosoms. The spontaneous play of thought and emotion,
the free swift current of ideas, not checked or interrupted
by any rift within the soul, will then bear us on to the
greatest we have it in us to achieve. This, no doubt, is
applicable chiefly to those who are engaged in the work of
scientific or artistic production. But the number of those
who are thus occupied must of necessity be largest where
all aptitudes are not forced into one and the same political
or social mould, and thereby partly deformed, partly
stunted. And where many rich and highly developed
individualities, of more than average endowments, stand
out from the mass, it will be hard if more new sources of
beauty are not detected, and more new modes of producing
it invented, above all, if more new truths are not discovered,
there than elsewhere. One pair of eyes sees less than many.
And this is more especially true when the many eyes are
of many types, when their several excellences and defects
compensate each other, when the point of clearest vision is
for some the immediate foreground, for others the distant
horizon, while others again are best adapted for the greatest
possible number of intermediate ranges.
4. We have mentioned some of the internal causes
which favoured the intellectual productivity of the little land
and people — no larger than Luxemburg or Vorarlberg —
but external causes were not wanting which contributed
their share towards the same wonderful result. One con-
sequence of the triumphant issue of the Persian war was
that a considerable accession of material wealth fell to the
lot of Athens, now the mistress of the seas and the heiress
of those Ionian centres of commerce and industry which
had been severed from their hinterland. Athens thus
became the capital of a confederation, or rather empire,
which embraced the whole eastern half of the Greek world.
Whatever talent or intellect was to be found among the
THE BEGINNINGS OF DECAY. 43
confederate, or subject, states, flowed in a mighty stream
to the great metropolis. And thus the character of the
Athenians themselves underwent a remarkable change.
The primitive, easy-going humour of early Athens had
now disappeared to the last trace, in consequence, partly
of increased power, partly of closer contact with the Ionians
of Asia Minor, and had been replaced by that vaulting
ambition and enterprising audacity, that joyous and hopeful
energy, which had once been distinctive of Miletus, and
now found a home in the new capital. Athens became
more Ionian than it had formerly been. Alas ! the evil
genius of Ionia was not long idle. Powers strung to their
highest tension were soon overwrought ; the height of
splendour was soon followed by the beginnings of decay.
Two causes combined to produce this effect. On the one
hand, there was the passionate thirst of power, which
thought no aim too high, which regarded all past success
as nothing so long as anything still remained unachieved,
which, in the words of Thucydides, " saw in every omitted
undertaking an advantage lost," and but seldom took the
chances of failure into serious account. On the other hand,
there was the peculiar character of the Athenian political
organization, which was far better adapted to develop the
powers of a moderate-sized community than to restrain a
mighty state to the paths of peace and security. If we
may speak of political institutions as a kind of machinery
whose component parts are groups of humanity, and in the
last resort, individual men, the excellence of the Athenian
constitutional apparatus lay chiefly in the action and
reaction between the whole and the parts, rather than in
its total efficiency for the task it was intended to perform.
In particular, those institutions were quite incapable of
conducting a foreign policy conceived on the grand scale
— a task to which, judging from all hitherto recorded
experience, it is chiefly monarchies and aristocracies that
have shown themselves equal ; democracies only when a
rare stroke of luck has placed at their head a Cromwell
or a Pericles, and when, to use again the language of
Thucydides, "only the name of democracy remains; in
44 GREEK THINKERS.
reality a single man is supreme." But we, to whom the
political destinies of Athens are a matter of secondary
interest, may be permitted to linger over the age of
splendour and the brilliant achievements of its sons, un-
troubled by the gathering clouds. We turn to the study
of one of the greatest personalities of that day — the
intellectual ancestor of an illustrious line of offspring.
AN ENTHUSIAST OF SOBRIETY. 45
CHAPTER III.
THE LIFE AND WORK OF SOCRATES.
I. All centuries have produced their quota of strong, clear,
cool heads ; and there has rarely been any lack of warm
hearts. But the two are rarely combined, and the rarest
phenomenon of all is a heart of mighty power working with
all its force to keep the head above it cool, as a steam-
engine may give motion to a refrigerating machine. Such
a combination occurs but once in a millennium on any large
scale. But when it does occur, it exerts, as if to compen-
sate for its rarity, an influence which persists unexhausted
for a long train of centuries. The rarity of this pheno-
menon is due to a fundamental peculiarity of human
nature. All enthusiasm, as such, tends rather to obscurity
than to clearness of mental vision. The same, indeed, is
the effect of emotion in general. Every emotion attracts
those ideas and images which nourish it, and repels those
which do not. To perceive and judge of facts with an open
unbiassed mind is impossible except where impartiality, that
is, freedom from emotion, has first paved the way. Ben-
jamin Franklin has been called an " enthusiast of sobriety."
The term is applicable in far higher measure to Socrates.
The passion which dominated his powerful personality, the
cause for which he was eager to suffer martyrdom, was the
attainment of intellectual clearness. He thirsted for pure
concepts as ardently as any mystic ever panted for union
with the Godhead. The impulse he gave called into exist-
ence numerous schools, or rather sects, of moral philo-
sophers, in which myriads of educated men have found a
46 GREEK THINKERS.
substitute for decaying popular religions. To take the
true measure of this prodigious historical phenomenon is
one of the most important tasks with which this work is
occupied.
Socrates was the son of the sculptor Sophroniscus, and
was born at Athens in the year 469 B.C., or a little earlier.
In his youth he learnt his father's craft, and down to a late
antiquity a group representing the Graces was exhibited
on the Acropolis as his work. Possibly this may be
identical with a relief executed in the style of that period,
which has been found in that situation. However that may
be, Socrates soon renounced art in order to devote the re-
mainder of his life exclusively to speculation. He neglected
his household, and this doubtless contributed to make his
marriage with Xanthippe, by whom he had three sons,
anything but a source of happiness. He is said to have
been won for philosophy by a disciple of Anaxagoras,
Archelaus, whose acquaintance the reader has already
made (cf. Vol. I. pp. 377, 402), with whom he lived for a
time in Samos, on terms of intimate friendship. The
authority for this statement is contained in the " Pilgrim-
age " of the tragedian Ion of Chios — a trustworthy and
disinterested witness, whose testimony we have no serious
ground for calling in question. Besides, we know that the
conception of end or purpose, which played so important a
part in the thought of Socrates, dominated the system of
Anaxagoras more than that of any of the other nature-
philosophers, while, among the Anaxagoreans, it was pre-
cisely Archelaus who to the investigation of nature added
some study of the problems of human life. He was thus
the very teacher to awaken the speculative impulse in the
man who was destined, as Cicero says, to bring philosophy
down from heaven to earth, that is, to substitute man for
the universe as a subject of inquiry. Something like a
vicious circle may surely be laid to the charge of those
critics who first reject contemporary evidence, which not
even Theophrastus impugns, and then brush away quite
independent testimony to the ethical investigations of
Archelaus with the remark that a philosopher without
SOCRATES' POWER OF CONCENTRATION. 47
ethics was inconceivable as a teacher of Socrates. No
doubt the Anaxagorean did no more than drop a spark
into the soul of Socrates ; the store of fuel which was
thereby kindled was not the gift of any master. The
originality of his intellect is evinced both by the inex-
haustible fulness of thought by which he was distinguished,
and by a number of anecdotes which hinge upon his
absent-mindedness, or rather his extraordinary concentra-
tion— we might almost say his absolute possession by the
problem momentarily occupying his mind.
" One morning he was thinking about something which he could
not resolve ; he would not give it up, but continued thinking from
early dawn until noon — there he stood fixed in thought ; and at
noon attention was drawn to him, and the rumour ran through the
wondering crowd that Socrates had been standing and thinking
about something ever since the break of day. At last, in the
evening after supper, some Ionians, out of curiosity (I should
explain that this was not in winter, but in summer), brought out
their mats and slept in the open air, that they might watch him
and see whether he would stand all night. There he stood all
night until the following morning ; and with the return of light he
offered up a prayer to the sun, and went his way." *
This is the account given by Alcibiades, Socrates' com-
rade in arms during that campaign, in the " Symposium " of
Plato. We are reminded of Newton, who, late one morning-,
was found sitting half-dressed on his bed, sunk in medita-
tion ; and on another occasion remained for a long time in
his cellar, where a train of thought had taken possession of
him while in the act of fetching a bottle of wine for his
guests.
His fearlessness in battle, his indifference (Aristotle
called it magnanimity) towards all externals, his extra-
ordinary endurance of heat and cold, of hunger and thirst,
his ability to exceed all his companions in drinking without
injury to his powers of thought, — all these are traits which
are either described by Alcibiades in the " Symposium," or
are made to appear in the action of the dialogue itself.
* Plato, "Symposium," 220, trans. Jowett.
48 GREEK THINKERS.
That a powerful nature like this must have been originally
endowed with a host of strong impulses, and could only
have attained serenity of soul by a process of self-educa-
tion, is so probable in itself that we cannot refuse credence
to the ancient traditions which point that way. The Syrian
soothsayer and physiognomist, Zopyrus, as reported in the
dialogue bearing his name and written by Phaedo of Elis,
a favourite disciple of the master, saw in the countenance
of Socrates the imprint of strong sensuality. Loud protests
were raised by the assembled disciples, but Socrates silenced
them with the remark, " Zopyrus is not mistaken ; however,
I have conquered those desires." Insufficiently attested,
but not in itself improbable, considering the fiery tempera-
ment of the man, is the statement that he was subject to
occasional outbursts of violent rage. Such outbursts cannot
have been frequent, for nothing is better established than
the masterful dominion which the powerful will was wont
to exercise over every emotion. Self-command, indeed,
was an indispensable qualification for the calling of his
choice. For the great business of his life was conversation.
His was a familiar figure by the tables of the money-
changers in the market-place, or under the avenues adjoin-
ing the gymnasia. In such resorts he would enter into
conversation with youths or mature men, as the case might
be, and, seizing on some trivial occasion, would pass by
easy, unconstrained transitions to the discussion of the
deepest problems. These discourses became the pattern
of a great branch of literature — the Socratic dialogue —
which was cultivated by his disciples, and left as a legacy
to nearly all later schools of philosophy. If, however, the
great conversational artist was not to be avoided but sought
for, it was indispensable that he should not allow his inter-
locutors to feel too keenly their intellectual inferiority.
This was rendered all the easier by the fact that he had
chosen a field of inquiry which was more like an undis-
covered country than a well-explored region. v The strictly
scientific investigation of human affairs was, at that time,
as good as an absolute novelty, and it was not without
justice that Socrates maintained to the end that he was
SOCRATIC IRONY. 49
a humble and modest searcher for truth, not the proud
possessor of exhaustive knowledge. And he took con-
siderable pains to strengthen this impression. " Irony " is
the Greek name for the love of hoaxing, and in particular
for that sly profession of modesty, which is best called self-
depreciation, and which is the exact opposite of dXatoveia,
or boastful bombast. It harmonized excellently with the
refinement of the Attic intellect, and the prevailing forms
of social intercourse, carefully purged as they were of all
that was crude or clownish, and it was in a particular
measure distinctive of Socrates. The cultivation by him
of this natural tendency as a powerful dialectic weapon,
the favouring circumstance, already mentioned, of his
having chosen a practically untrodden field of research, — all
combined to produce the well-known Socratic irony, which
it would be equally incorrect to regard as a mere mask or
as a purely natural characteristic. As those whom Socrates
drew into conversation were often men of considerable
amour-propre, and as the discussion often ended, to their
great discomfiture, in proving their entire lack of the clear
ideas and exact knowledge they confidently believed them-
selves to possess, \t\o amount of " irony " or considerate
handling could prevent these colloquies from leaving
behind them a bitter taste and an unpleasant memory.
It was, indeed, Socrates' foremost aim to bring home to
himself and others the fact that the most important
questions affecting human life were as yet unsolved
riddles, that words and ideas which every one had
been accustomed from the days of childhood upwards to
bandy about with thoughtless confidence, were in truth
thickly beset with contradictions and ambiguities. Personal
humiliation, too, was not the only disagreeable impression
which was carried away by the participants in these
dialogues. A man who raises questions relating to what
has hitherto been matter of unquestioning agreement,
may easily, in spite of all professions of modesty, pass for
a conceited crank and know-all. v And he who touches on
fundamental problems, such as, " What is justice ? " " What
is piety ? " " What is the best form of government ? " is
VOL. II. E
50 GREEK THINKERS.
likely to incur worse suspicion still, and be taken for a
disturber of social peace, a dangerous agitator and revolu-
tionary. It is hard for any one to meddle with the
foundations of the social edifice and escape the accusation
of designing its overthrow. We must remember, too, how
greatly such impressions would be strengthened by the
slender means of Socrates and his lack of any regular
calling, and we shall find it astonishing that his person and
his work remained unassailed so long. Not only did he
continue for several decades, without serious opposition,
though in the full blaze of publicity, a species of activity
which was without precedent or parallel, — he succeeded in
gathering round him some of the most gifted and some of
the most illustrious youths of Athens, such as Alcibiades,
Critias, and, the relations of the latter, Plato and Charmides.
The "beggarly prater," as the comedians called him, even
found entrance to the circle presided over by Pericles, then
at the head of the state. We can judge from these facts
how great a value was set in Athens on intellect and genius,
how small a footing pretentious formalism and narrow-
minded conventionality had in the best Athenian society.
But the average Athenian, to say nothing of those who had
personal grievances against Socrates, must have looked
with very different eyes on the strange being, of whom the
great multitude knew nothing more than that he was ever,
uttering insidious speech, in which he spared nothing that
was high or holy ; that he feared no authority, not even the
sovereign Demos, whom all others flattered ; and that he
was to be seen walking about with proud mien and steady
gaze, morning and evening, clad in uncouth dress, wearing
the same threadbare garments winter and summer, "bare-
foot, as if to spite the shoemakers." The ordinary respect-
able citizen could hardly see in him anything but an idle
lounger and a blasphemous quibbler. And this judgment
was echoed by the comic poets, who brought on the stage
the well-known figure with the Silenus face and the bizarre
manners to be, along with the " mad Apollodorus," or the
lean " half-starved, boxwood-coloured Chaerephon," the butt
of their unending ridicule.
SOCRATES AND PUBLIC LIFE. 5 I
2. There was very little opportunity for correcting this
verdict. Socrates' fame as a man of courage in battle could
hardly have spread beyond the narrow circle of his comrades
in arms, for he never held a command. Nor did he play
any part in the civil broils which disturbed Athens towards
the end of the century. Possibly the Thirty Tyrants may
in the first instance have taken him for an adherent to their
cause on the strength of his personal relations to their chief,
Critias. Only on some such hypothesis can we explain his
having been appointed to command a party of four sent
to arrest an opponent of the oligarchs, Leon of Salamis.
Socrates, however, refused his co-operation ; with whatever
freedom he might criticize the real or supposed faults of
the democracy, he was by no means willing to lend his aid
to the oligarchical rule of terror. But the episode was too
trivial to win him the favour of the people, even supposing
it had been more widely known. Once only was Socrates
involved in a political incident of any importance, and on
that occasion his action led to no permanent result.
In August, 406, the Athenians had gained a brilliant
naval victory near the two islands known as the Arginusae,
between Lesbos and the coast of Asia Minor. Their
triumph, however, was embittered by a most painful
incident. The commanders failed to save the crews of a
number of seriously damaged vessels, and to recover the
bodies of the dead. Whether the generals were really to
blame or not is more than we can tell. A circumstance
not in their favour is the contradictory nature of their reply
to the charges brought against them. In the first instance,
this reply was to the effect that a storm following im-
mediately upon the battle had prevented the rescue of the
crews ; subsequently, however, they accused two officers,
who had been charged with the task of rescue, of neglect of
duty. When the subject was first raised in the assembly
of the people, a calm and dispassionate hearing was given
to the accused, and it was resolved to make further pro-
ceedings depend on the preliminary decision of the com-
petent authority, the council of five hundred. In the
interval there occurred an event which led to lamentable
52 GREEK THINKERS.
consequences. There was a celebration of the Apaturia, a
tribal festival of the Ionians, at which the Athenian people
was wont to assemble divided by "brotherhoods." On
these occasions children who had been born in the course
of the year were presented to the members of the brother-
hood, and entered in the registers, schoolboys delighted
their parents by public recitations of poetry, and so forth.
Above all, solemn sacrifices were offered to the gods who
presided over the different brotherhoods. It was a family
festival, in the strictest sense of the word, comparable to
our Christmas. Men counted up the number of their dear
ones, and every gap which death had made in their ranks
was felt with double poignancy. The popular indignation
was roused to increased bitterness against the generals
whose fault it was, or was supposed to be, that so many
citizens had met their death, and that others had been
deprived of those funeral rites which the religious feeling
of the ancients prized so highly. As if in mockery of the
joyous festival, the fathers and brothers of the victims went
about in mourning garb and with shaven heads, thus in-
flaming the passions of the multitude. Under these cir-
cumstances proceedings were reopened in the council. A
resolution proposed by Callixenus was adopted, according
to which the judicial investigation of the case was to be
dropped, and an assembly of the people was to decide the
guilt or innocence of the generals by a secret vote, affecting
the accused en bloc. A verdict of guilty was to be followed
by the execution of the generals and the confiscation of
their property. The assembly which was summoned to
deal with the case was the stormiest, outside times of actual
revolution, of which we have any record. Whether, and
to what extent, the proposal of Callixenus was illegal, is a
question on which the best authorities on Athenian con-
stitutional law are still divided in opinion. In any case it
ran counter to the spirit of the constitution, and objection
was formally taken to it on that ground by Euryptolemus
and his friends. Such action had the effect of suspending
proceedings in respect of the impugned proposal until a
judicial decision had been taken as to its alleged illegality.
TRIAL OF THE GENERALS. 53
If the allegation was sustained, the proposer and his
associates were liable to penalties of great severity. Even
at that moment, when the waves of passion ran so high,
the assembled people did not simply override these consti-
tutional forms. The assembly was divided in opinion.
Some cried that " it was a shame that the people should
be thwarted of its will;" others, that " it was a shame if the
people did not respect the laws of its own making." It
would appear that the decisive impetus was given by the
appearance of a man who had been on one of the twenty-
five shipwrecked triremes, and had with great difficulty
escaped to land on a meal-tub. He reported that the
dying wish of his comrades had been that vengeance
might be taken on the generals who had left brave and
victorious citizens in the lurch. Euryptolemus was in-
duced, by the threat of including him in the accusation, to
withdraw his objection. But all obstacles were not thereby
removed. The proceedings of the assembly were regulated
by a body of fifty men, the prytanes, consisting of the
representatives of one of the ten tribes in the council of
five hundred, and forming a species of standing com-
mittee of that council for the tenth part of the year. In
accordance with the regular rotation, the prytanes for the
time being were the representatives of the tribe Antiochis,
to which Socrates belonged. The majority of the com-
mittee refused to put the proposal of Callixenus to the
vote. This roused another storm of indignation, and the
new obstacle was overcome by the same threat as before.
Socrates alone, as his disciples Plato and Xenophon tell
us, adhered inflexibly to his conscientious convictions.
The proceedings now took their regular course. In-
timidation had so far had the result of deciding the
preliminary constitutional questions in the sense demanded
by the dominant feeling of the multitude, but the assembly
had not for all that degenerated into a riot. Euryptolemus,
the advocate for the generals, did not ask for an acquittal,
but merely that the prosecution should be conducted in
legal form against each of the accused separately, in
accordance with a custom which, though possibly not
54 GREEK THINKERS.
binding on the assembly, had the force of an established
usage, and was supported by the "decree of Cannonus."
Callixenus, on the other side, persisted in his original pro-
posal. Both speeches were listened to in silence. The
show of hands which followed gave a majority of votes to
Euryptolemus. At least such was the report of the officials
charged with the duty of counting. But this report was
challenged, perhaps not without reason. The majority of
the prytanes had only yielded to superior force, and it is
possible that the enumeration may not have been made
with absolute impartiality. A second show of hands was
demanded, and this time the result was unfavourable to
Euryptolemus. And now came the last, secret vote, and
the urns were filled with the voting-counters which were to
decide the lot of the accused. The verdict given was one
of " guilty, " which meant death for the six generals who
were in Athens, and confiscation of property for the two
who were absent.
This episode was followed, as was usual in Athens,
by a violent reaction. After the lapse of a few years an
indictment was brought against the misleaders of the
people, which drove them into exile, and in the end caused
their leader Callixenus to commit suicide. Was the fruitless
resistance of that odd creature called Socrates remembered
at this juncture ? and was he held in higher esteem on that
account ? He may have been, but it is not probable. For
us, however, a twofold interest attaches to this political
incident. It illustrates Socrates' strength of character, and
it throws a side-light on the external circumstances of his
life. If the Socratic school had not kept this episode in
remembrance, and thought it worthy of record, we should
never have known that their master had once been a
member of the council, and had not disdained to take
part in the lot-drawing that led to this office. That this
was the only office he ever held, we have the express
assurance of Plato. But the same motives which induced
him to take part in this drawing of lots, must have guided
his actions on other occasions as well. Probably he
engaged more than once in the favourite occupation of old
S OCR A TIC DEFINITIONS. 55
Athenians of the less wealthy class, and eked out the
offerings of affection which he received from his friends
with the modest pay of the heliast, or juror. In the law
courts he would certainly find food for those studies of
human nature in which he delighted. But he would obtain
material for these studies chiefly from the discussions in
which he was never weary of engaging, but which he no
doubt valued primarily for the assistance he derived from
them in thinking out his own problems. It is now time to
give some account of the form, the matter, and the results
of the investigations thus conducted.
3. "Two things may be ascribed to Socrates," so we
are informed by his intellectual grandchild, Aristotle,
"inductive reasoning and the fixing of general concepts."
The inductive reasoning, we may add, was auxiliary to the
formation of the concepts. The word " induction " is here
used in a sense somewhat different from that which it now
bears. We understand by it that intellectual operation
which elicits from a number of particular cases a general
rule affecting a whole class of facts. By the way of in-
duction we ascertain uniformities of coexistence and of
succession, whether these be ultimate or merely derivative
laws. Thus it is a correct induction which teaches us
that all men are mortal ; an incorrect one, because only
approximately complete, which affirms that in the whole
class of mammals there are none that lay eggs, but that
all bring their young into the world alive. Socratic in-
duction, like ours, proceeds by the comparison of individual
instances ; but its goal is the attainment of a norm,
valid, not for nature, but for ideas. Its chief aim is the
determination of concepts, that is, definition. The pro-
cedure employed is twofold. Sometimes a series of
instances is passed in review, and an attempt made to
ascertain what elements are common to them all, and
thus deduce a general determination of the concept. The
second species of induction starts from already existing
and current definitions, which it subjects to a scrutiny,
with the view of discovering whether, and to what extent,
they rest on elements which are really common to the
56 GREEK THINKERS.
different instances comprised under them ; or, on the other
hand, whether, and to what extent, the possession of
common characteristics is an illusion, and if so, what
modification, what extension, or what limitation will make
the definition a true expression of common characteristics.
Aristotle, in distinguishing between these two species,
reserves the name " induction " (the Greek word signifies
a " leading towards " a goal) for the first of them ; to the
second he applies the name of "parable," that is, juxta-
position for the purposes of comparison. The Platonic
dialogues, particularly those of the earlier, or Socratic
period, are full of instances of both these methods, and will
be of the greatest service to us in the task of illustrating
them. The following example, however, will be taken
from an authority whose lack of subtlety will clear him of
any suspicion of having given us his own thoughts and
methods as those of Socrates. The question arose in the
circle of disciples, so Xenophon tells us, " What is justice ?
and what is injustice ? " Socrates proposes to write in the
sand, side by side, the initial letters of the two words, and
underneath them the names of the various actions that
belong to the respective categories. In the second column
are entered such actions as lying, fraud, violence, and so
forth. Attention is now drawn to instances which seem
to contradict this arrangement. It appears, in the first
instance, that all these actions, when performed in war,
and against enemies, cease to be unjust. Thus a first
modification is arrived at. The cited modes of action are
to come under the head of injustice only when practised
against friends, in the widest sense of the word. But the
matter cannot rest here. How if a general, with the object
of reviving the sinking courage of his troops, makes a false
announcement of the near approach of allied forces ? How
if a father, whose sick child has refused his medicine,
mixes it in his food, and by this deception procures his
restoration to health ? And again, supposing we have a
friend afflicted with melancholia, how if we remove from
his possession the weapon by which he might be tempted
to take leave of life ? We thus obtain a new element in
S OCR A TIC INDUCTION. 57
the determination of the concept. In order that the actions
named may be rightly regarded as species of injustice, they
must be performed in the intention of injuring the persons
affected by them. It is true that the investigation does
not issue in a formal definition ; it is, however, an essay in
classification, such as is calculated to prepare the way for
such a definition. It is concerned principally with the
extent, not with the content, of the concept in question.
But the exacter determination of the sub-varieties of the
species " injustice " paves the way for a stricter delimitation
of the content of that concept. Whatever form the defini-
tion might have finally assumed, it could not but have
included " the employment of fraud or violence for the
injury of others than enemies in a state of war."
Thus, although Socrates was primarily concerned with
the philosophy of concepts, and to that extent followed a
line of investigation leading towards the universal, it was
only with the greatest caution and deliberation that he
passed from the particular to the general. No feature of
his method is better attested. In his dread of premature
generalizations, he is entirely at one with those inquirers
who in modern times have been considered as special
representatives of the inductive method. We are con-
tinually reminded of the Baconian precautions against
inadmissible generalizations. As to the subject-matter for
his inductions, that could only be supplied by the incidents
and the ideas which pertain to everyday life and everyday
thought. " Socrates always chose the most obvious and
the most commonly accepted starting-point for his in-
vestigations, thinking this the safest plan," says Xenophon,
and on this point he is in the closest agreement with Plato.
His discourse was full of shoemakers and smiths, of fullers
and cooks, hardly less so of oxen, horses, and asses. His
conversation thus had a certain homely flavour, and often
drew forth mocking comment, which he, however, bore with
smiling equanimity, and with that serene trust in God
which for him was synonymous with faith in the inevitable
victory of truth.
Nor was his peculiar mode of procedure limited to the
58 GREEK THINKERS.
construction of concepts. Concepts, indeed, are merely the
elements of judgments. We need not be surprised if
Socrates endeavoured to promote clearness and sureness
of judgment by direct as well as by indirect means, or
if he remained true to his methods outside the sphere of
theoretical investigation. Did he propose to cure a youth
of immature self-confidence, and shake his belief that he
was competent to manage the affairs of the state ? He
would analyze the general conception of state-craft into its
component parts, and thus, by a series of questions and
answers, lead the would-be statesman imperceptibly to the
conclusion that he was altogether lacking in the requisite
knowledge. On another occasion he uses the same method
for an entirely opposite purpose. A young man, of good
sense and ripe judgment, but over-modest, who shrinks
from taking part in the debates of the assembly, is brought
by a series of questions to perceive that he has no cause
to be shy before any one of the different classes of which
the assembly is composed, and that he need not therefore
fear to face that assembly as a whole. If special knowledge
is to be proved to be the indispensable qualification for the
public service, recourse is again had to questions. Who,
it is asked, would employ a physician, a pilot, a carpenter,
and so forth, who had been chosen by lot, instead of select-
ing a man of known and tried capacity for the task he was
required to perform ? These are comparatively trivial
examples of the Socratic method. But it remains the
same in the treatment of much more difficult and com-
plicated subjects. Unwearied, too, is the perseverance of
the master in threading the mazes of an intricate problem.
The desired solution, when apparently within easy grasp,
becomes more remote than ever ; it turns and doubles like
a hunted fox, and, though it may be finally run to earth,
the chase often ends in a confession of failure, and the long
toil must be begun afresh. The highest ethical virtue of
the researcher, inexhaustible patience, is here combined
with one of the greatest of intellectual excellences, abso-
lute freedom from prejudice. No proposition, to express
the Socratic attitude in a formula, is so self-evident, so
SOCRATES' PATIENCE AND IMPARTIALITY. 59
universally true, that we may not be called upon, good
ground being shown, to reconsider it on first principles and
test its validity anew. No assertion is so paradoxical or so
shocking as to absolve us from the duty of giving it a full
and fair hearing, of diligently scrutinizing the arguments in
its favour and weighing them with judicial impartiality.
No investigation, however laborious, is to be shirked, no
opinion, however repugnant to our feelings, is to be howled
down, or stifled in ridicule and opprobrium. The wide-
hearted, strong-headed Athenian thinker succeeded in
combining two almost irreconcilable attributes — fervid zeal
in discussing the highest concerns of man, and cool, dis-
passionate candour in the treatment of these very questions.
His judgment is uncorrupted by love, unclouded by hate.
There was, indeed, but one thing which he ever hated, to
wit, that "hatred of discourse," or "misology " which is the
great obstacle to unfettered and unprejudiced discussion.
"A life without cross-examination," that is, without dia-
logues in which the intellect is exercised in the pursuit of
the truth, is for him "not worth living."
From the form and the spirit of the Socratic dialogues
we pass on to their teaching. At this point the reader
must allow us a digression. The names of Plato, of
Xenophon, and of Aristotle have been mentioned more
than once in the preceding pages. In future chapters
we shall have occasion to treat of these men in their
character of disciples, direct or indirect, of Socrates. But
in their capacity of authorities for their master's teaching
they require some preliminary consideration now. We do
not possess a single writing of Socrates himself, with the
possible exception of four lines of verse, and these would
tell us nothing, even if their authenticity were unquestioned.
Our knowledge of his teaching rests, therefore, on the testi-
mony of others, and in greatly preponderating measure on
that of the three men we have named. In respect of the
method and spirit of Socrates they are in such complete
accord that hitherto we have been able to dispense with all
discussion of their relative trustworthiness. Now, however,
this question imperatively demands our attention.
60 GREEK THINKERS.
4. By far the greater part of our knowledge is derived
from the works of Plato. These are all written in the form
of dialogues. In all of them, with one exception, Socrates
appears as one of the characters, and usually he plays the
principal part. The magnificent homage thus rendered to
the master by the most eminent of his disciples could not
but be full of instruction for us. An artist of the first
order, a painter of word-portraits with scarce an equal, has
presented us with a marvellously clear and vivid likeness
of his revered friend. The fidelity of this delineation is
untainted by the least shadow of doubt. It is perfectly
consistent with itself and with all other accounts of the
character of Socrates. There is idealization, it must be
allowed, just as in all other works of great artists in por-
traiture. The essential features are made to stand out in
bold relief, while the subordinate traits, or those which
harmonize ill with the general effect, are lightly sketched
or left in shadow. It must be remembered, too, that Plato
nowhere lays claim to exhaustiveness of treatment, and that
his silence on various episodes in the life of Socrates, on
this or that detail of his career or his personal relations,
e.g. to Archelaus, Xenophon, and others, does not possess
the slightest evidential value.
The case is very different with the teaching contained in
the writings of Plato. As the work of an original thinker
of the first rank, they could hardly be expected to be a
bare reproduction of the teachings of Socrates. Aristotle,
who, as we shall presently see, is our chief witness on such
matters, expressly declares that one of the fundamental
doctrines of Plato, the so-called doctrine of ideas, was
foreign to Socrates. Now this very doctrine receives
manifold and varying illustration in the different writings
of Plato, and it undergoes more than one transformation,
partly in consequence of the thinker's own advance, partly
as a result of the influence of others. And yet this doctrine,
both in its primary form and in most of its modifications,
is put by Plato into the mouth of Socrates. It is as clear
as daylight that the poet-philosopher, both here and else-
where, has allowed himself full and unrestricted liberty,
PLATO AND XENOPHON. 6 I
as, indeed, was to be expected. Mow far it is true to say
that Plato started with a fund of convictions which he
shared with Socrates, to what extent he believed himself
to have elaborated and modified the main theories of the
latter in strict accordance with the spirit of the venerated
teacher, how, in his declining years, he broke with his own
past and simultaneously severed the link which bound him
to Socrates, whom he first relegated to the background
and then excluded altogether from the framework of his
dialogues, — all this will be made clear when we come to
deal with the development of Plato himself.
Much less artistic freedom, and yet not much more
historical fidelity, is to be found in the accounts left us by
Xenophon. This capable officer, who was also a gifted
author, employed the leisure of middle age in composing a
series of writings descriptive of the life and teaching of
Socrates. The most considerable of these is the work
known as the " Memorabilia," or noteworthy sayings and
doings of Socrates. Those who have acquired a familiarity
with the chief characteristics of Xenophon from the
numerous other productions of his busy pen, will approach
the study of this work and the three accessory writings,
in which it is, so to speak, framed, the " Symposium,"
the " CEconomicus," and the somewhat slight " Apology "
or defence of Socrates, with not unfavourable expectations.
For neither speculative originality nor the impulse towards
artistic adaptation is present, one would think, in sufficient
measure to impair the truthfulness of these records. Such
expectations, however, are doomed to be but imperfectly
realized. Xenophon lacked certain gifts which might have
impeded him in his undertaking, but at the same time, he
lacked some of the qualifications most important for its
success.
That Xenophon's accounts of the discourses of Socrates
do not always correspond with the truth, may be proved to
demonstration from the text of Xenophon himself. At
the beginning of the work on domestic economy he affirms
that he was himself present and heard the conversation of
Socrates with Critobulus. This statement must be a pure
62 GREEK THINKERS.
invention. For in the course of the dialogue, mention is
made of an event which Xenophon could not possibly
have heard Socrates speak of. We refer to the death of
Cyrus the Younger, who fell at Cunaxa, B.C. 401. Xeno-
phon was in the camp of Cyrus at the time, and he did
not return to Greece till many years later, long after the
execution of Socrates in B.C. 399. And we need not go
far for confirmation of the suspicion thus aroused. Witness
the detailed consideration given to Persian society, a sub-
ject with which the disciple had so much, and the master
so little, concern. The latter, indeed, had never visited
foreign countries ; in fact, after reaching man's estate, he
had, apart from a pilgrimage to Delphi, never left Athens,
except in fulfilment of his military duties. Again, the
affectionate lingering over the minutiae of agriculture is
natural enough to an enthusiastic farmer like Xenophon,
but is not a little strange in the mouth of Socrates, who never
unnecessarily set foot outside the city gate, because " fields
and trees," as Plato makes him say, "had nothing to teach
him." The " CEconomicus " must therefore be erased from
the list of strictly historical records. And it would be vain
to attempt to assign to this work, or to the " Symposium "
either, any such exceptional position as would enable us to
maintain intact the historical character of the " Memora-
bilia." We find a passage of the last-named work dealing
with peoples of Asia Minor, the Mysians and the Pisidians,
describing the peculiarities of the country they inhabit and
the manner in which they carry on war. These subjects
are here treated of precisely in the same way as in the
" Anabasis," the work, that is to say, in which Xenophon
recorded the retreat of the Ten Thousand, in which he
himself took part, and incidentally had occasion to give
an account, based on personal observation, of the above-
named tribes. The true state of the case is again as clear
as daylight. It is Xenophon himself that speaks to us
through the mouth of Socrates. Are we to conclude from
such examples as these that our author's use of the name
of Socrates is never anything but an aid to artistic effect,
that the dialogues are pure fictions, or even that Xenophon
TRUTH AND FICTION IN THE u MEMORABILIA? 63
never wished them to be regarded as anything else ?
This thesis has been maintained in recent years, but, as we
think, without any convincing force. In the first place, the
assumption that Xenophon does not claim to give a record
of actual facts in his Socratic writings is in glaring contra-
diction with the nature of the task which he set before
himself, particularly in the " Memorabilia." For in that
work he announces his intention of combating the accusa-
tions brought against Socrates at his trial, possibly with
special reference to the literary form afterwards given to
these accusations by the rhetorician Polycrates. Nor does
he make exclusive use of dialogue ; the habits of Socrates,
and particular incidents of his life are laid before us in the
form of narrative. Moreover, Xenophon declares his design
of completing in some essential parts the accounts given
by other disciples. All this would be meaningless if he
desired the conversations reported in the works to be re-
garded as mere fiction. The phrase " Wahrheit und Dich-
tung " has been very fittingly applied to the substance of
these discourses. It is improbable in the highest degree
that Xenophon should have invented everything and re-
ported nothing ; that he should have strained his not too
powerful imagination to its utmost limit, and made abso-
lutely no use of the treasures stored in his memory. And
we have unmistakable indications that by no means all of
the thoughts, the turns of phrase, the formulas, which occur
in these discourses, originated in the relatively unfertile
and commonplace mind of Xenophon himself. By the
side of almost intolerable prolixities we have passages
almost incomprehensible in their compressed brevity ; by
the side of utterances which repel by their triviality, we have
others marked by incisive originality and pungent paradox.
Dialogues, too, occur which come to no satisfactory con-
clusion ; and force us to the hypothesis that the reporter
of them overlooked or failed to understand their real scope
and point.
But how are we to draw the line of demarcation between
the authentic and the inauthentic with anything like cer-
tainty ? This is a question which has only been approached
64 GREEK THINKERS.
in recent years, but we believe a fundamentally accurate
answer has been found to it. If we are to avoid allowing
a fatal preponderance to the subjective element, particularly
to personal preferences or antipathies, for or against indi-
vidual features in Xenophon's presentation ; if we are to
render to Socrates the things that are of Socrates, and
to Xenophon the things that are Xenophon's, — it is
absolutely necessary to look for some objective standard of
judgment. Nor need the search be in vain. We possess,
on the one hand, numerous other works of Xenophon
from which we may gain a clear idea of his personal
characteristics, and even see them to a large extent growing
out of the circumstances of his life. On the other hand,
we have at our disposal certain accounts of the substance
of the Socratic teaching, which, though not very numerous,
are thoroughly trustworthy. The application of these two
criteria demands the utmost care and the nicest discrimi-
nation. It would clash with the plan of the present work to
present the reader with a full and detailed account of this
investigation. The result of the first portion of it will be
embodied in a subsequent section devoted to the life and
writings of Xenophon. The second of the criteria we have
referred to is supplied by the curt but thoroughly trust-
worthy statements of Aristotle. In him we have a witness
who unites the fullest expert knowledge with the keenest
judicial acumen ; who was near enough to that great his-
torical fact, the work of Socrates, to be accurately informed
upon it, and at the same time far enough to be unmoved
by the spell of that magic personality, and to be proof
against any leaning towards hero-worship. His exposition,
finally, is neither apologetic in tone nor characterized by an
artistic disposition of light and shadows, but is plainly and
severely matter-of-fact. Not that this is a source of
information which may be drawn upon without several
precautions. The wording of the references does not
always enable us to say with certainty whether Aristotle
has the historical Socrates in view or the Socrates of
Plato's dialogues. Moreover, he gives no connected
account of Socrates' teaching ; he only makes casual
THE WITNESS OF ARISTOTLE. 65
mention of isolated features of it, generally for a polemical
purpose, probably laying a one-sided emphasis on the weak
points it presents to criticism, It is nevertheless possible,
especially if we keep a watchful eye on the sources of
error just mentioned, to reap from those references a harvest
of untold value. It must not be forgotten, of course, that
they are incomplete. Aristotle lived in the midst of the
schools of the Socratics ; he belonged to one of the most
important of them himself, and those parts of Socrates'
teaching which were universally known to be his, and which
offered the least handle to criticism, were exactly the parts
of which he had least occasion to speak. But in respect of
the pith and marrow of Socratic doctrine, the fundamental
outline underlying all nuances of special developments, we
are not under the necessity of appealing to express docu-
mentary evidence. The nature of the mighty cause is
revealed to us by its own prodigious effects. The streams
which flowed forth from Paradise to water all the world
bore eloquent testimony to their glorious fount and origin.
VOL. II.
66 GREEK THINKERS.
CHAPTER IV.
THE TEACHING OF SOCRATES.
I. " No man errs of his own free will." These few words
embody the kernel of Socratism. This is the trunk which
we have to follow downwards to its roots, and upwards to
its many ramifications. This short sentence is a terse
expression of the conviction that every moral deficiency
has its origin in the intellect, and depends on a vagary of
the understanding. In other words — He who knows what
is right does what is right ; want of insight is the one
and only source of moral shortcoming. In view of this
doctrine we readily comprehend how Socrates was bound
to put an infinite value on clearness of conception. It is
more difficult to see how this inordinately high estimate
of the intellect and of its supreme significance for the
conduct of life came to be formed in the mind of Socrates.
Certainly the endeavour to replace hazy ideas and dim
conjecture by sharply outlined concepts and clear com-
prehension was a leading characteristic of the whole of
that age which we have referred to in a previous section
as the age of enlightenment. The zeal of that age in the
culture of the intellect, and its employment in the elucida-
tion of the chief problems both of corporate and of
individual life, the earnest endeavour to replace tradition
by self-won knowledge, blind faith by illuminated thought,
— all these tendencies have already been reviewed by us
repeatedly and in their most characteristic manifestations.
At the same time, we have had to record various one-
sided judgments into which men were misled by the new
THE INVOLUNTARINESS OF ERROR. 67
trend of thought ; for example, the leaning towards an
unhistorically rationalistic conception of the past of man-
kind, particularly with reference to the beginnings of
civilization, the origin of the state, of language, and of
society. But the intellectualism, as we have termed it,
of that age culminates in Socrates. Before his time it had
been held that the will, equally with the intellect, needed
a schooling which was to be obtained by means of rewards
and punishments, exercise and habituation. The reader
may refer to the account we have already given of the
educational theories current in that epoch. Socrates argues
just as if what Aristotle calls the irrational part of the
soul did not exist. All action is determined by the
intellect. And the latter is all-powerful. Such a thing as
knowing what is right and yet disobeying that knowledge,
believing an action wrong and yet yielding to the motives
that impel to it, is for Socrates not merely a sad and
disastrous occurrence ; it is a sheer impossibility. He
does not combat or condemn, he simply denies, that state
of mind which his contemporaries called " being overcome
by desire," and to which the Roman poet gave typical
expression in the words, "Video meliora proboque ; dete-
riora sequor " (" I see and approve of the better, but follow
the worse ").
Nothing is easier than to detect and to arraign the
one-sidedness of this point of view. What is much more
important is to yield full and entire recognition to the
element of truth contained in the exaggeration, to realize
how it was that Socrates came to take an important fraction
of the truth for the whole, and to estimate the magnitude
of the service rendered to humanity by the greatest of
the great " one-eyed men " in setting this neglected part of
truth in the most glaring light.
Although the state of mind whose existence is denied
by Socrates does really occur, its occurrence is a far rarer
phenomenon than is generally supposed. That which is
overcome by passion is often not character or conviction,
but a mere semblance of such. And want of clearness of
thought, confused conceptions, ignorance of the grounds as
68 GREEK THINKERS.
well as of the full scope and exact bearing of precepts to
which a vague and general assent is yielded, — these and
other intellectual' shortcomings go a long way towards
accounting for that chasm between principles and practice
which is the greatest curse of life. Where these intellectual
deficiencies do not altogether destroy unity of character,
they yet limit its continuance ; and it is through them that
the most contradictory opposites are enabled to lodge
peaceably together in the same breast. It is such want
of clearness and certainty that makes characters brittle
and paralyzes their powers of resistance, provides an easy
victory for wrong motives, and often gives the false
impression that it was the strength of the attack, not
the weakness of the defence, that brought about the defeat.
We even find confusion of thought bringing men to
acknowledge simultaneously several supreme standards of
judgment which contradict each other. The resulting
anarchy of soul can hardly be expressed better than in
the words of a modern French writer of comedies, who
makes one of his characters say, " Which morality do you
mean ? There are thirty-six of them. There is a social
morality which is not the same as political morality, and
this again has nothing to do with the morality of religion,
which, in its turn, has nothing in common with the morality
of business."
But in spite of all this, the assertion that right thinking
is a guarantee for right acting has a very limited sphere of
validity. It can be seriously made only when the end of
the action is unquestioned, and the sole doubt is as to the
choice of means. This is particularly the case where the
end is determined by the undoubted interest of the agent.
A husbandman sowing his field, a pilot guiding the helm,
an artisan in his workshop, must, in the great majority of
cases, have their will directed to the best possible fulfil-
ment of the task before them. Success or failure will
for them depend principally on their general acumen and
their special knowledge. In cases of this type the funda-
mental principle of Socrates is thus at least approximately
true. And nothing caused Socrates so much lasting
GROUND OF SOCRATES' VIEW. 69
astonishment as the perception, which continuously forced
itself upon him, that in the subordinate departments of life
men either possess or strive earnestly for the possession of
clear insight into the relations between means and ends,
while in their higher concerns, in matters closely affecting
their weal or woe, nothing of the kind is discernible. This
contrast made the strongest possible impression upon him,
and had a decisive influence on the direction of his thought.
He saw that in all crafts and callings, clearness of intellect
puts an end to botching and bungling, and he expected the
like progress to follow as soon as the life of individuals
and of the community should be illuminated by clear
insight and regulated by unambiguous rules of conduct,
which latter could be nothing else than a system of
means conducive to the highest ends.
" No man errs of his own free will." This utterance
has a double significance. First there is the conviction
that all the numberless shortcomings of actual occurrence
originate in insufficient development of the understanding.
And there is a second conviction, lying at the root of the
first, and conditioning it, namely, that it is only as to the
means, not the end, of actions that disagreement exists
among men. Every one without exception is supposed
to desire what is good. It is not in what they desire that
men are distinguished from each other, but simply and
solely in the measure of their capacity for realizing the
common object of endeavour — a difference which depends
entirely on their several degrees of intellectual development.
The solution we have just obtained suggests yet another
enigma. Whence comes this moral optimism of our sage ?
What was the origin of his faith that every moral deficiency
arises from error and never from depravity of heart ? The
primary answer to this question is as follows : He held it
for an undoubted truth that moral goodness and happiness,
that moral badness and unhappiness, are inseparably united,
and that only a delusion bordering on blindness could
choose the second and reject the first. A line of the comic
poet Epicharmus, slightly modified, was a favourite quota-
tion in Socratic circles —
JO GREEK THINKERS.
" No man willingly is wretched, nor against his will is blest.5'
The Greek word here translated " wretched " has a twofold
meaning, which may be understood from a comparison of
the two phrases, " a wretched life," " a wicked wretch."
Such ambiguities of language gave this optimistic belief
an appearance of self-evident truth, which it most certainly
does not possess. There is one phrase in particular whose
double meaning was especially calculated to provoke this
illusion. The Greek tu irpaxTUv, like the English to do
well, is a common expression for the two ideas of right
action and of prosperity. And thus, not only is the
unpractised thinker led into the error of identifying well-
doing with well-being ; the distinction between the
" goodness " of an action which is good in the sense of
serving the interests of the agent, and that " goodness "
which means being calculated to advance the ends of
society, tends to be obliterated. Just as we speak of a
"bad" character and at the same time of "bad" tools
or " bad " sleep, so the Greek language has no lack of
condemnatory epithets which are equally applicable to an
unserviceable implement, to a disposition of will running
counter to the common welfare, and to anything which
is in a condition incompatible with its own preservation.
Thus there are many passages in which Plato seems to
consider the fundamental principle of Socrates, " No man
errs of his own free will," sufficiently proved by a simple
reference to the fact that no one chooses voluntarily what
is bad or hurtful — a mode of reasoning which entirely
overlooks the distinctions we have just been insisting
upon.
The impatient reader has probably anticipated the
remark we are about to make. Necessary as it may be
to call attention to the misleading character of certain
linguistic usages, it cannot be that we have here touched
the root of the matter. It is not from verbal ambiguities
or from lack of nice discrimination between allied concepts
that we expect a new, vigorous, and fertile philosophy of
life to take its rise. If Socrates maintained the identity
IDENTITY OF GOODNESS AND HAPPINESS. J I
of virtue and happiness, there can be no doubt that he did
so firstly and chiefly because he had found them identical
in his own experience. It is not the language of his
countrymen, but the voice of his own inmost being, that
speaks to us here.
2. Clean thes, the second head of the Stoic school, wrote
a book " on Pleasure," in which he quoted, as a favourite
saying of Socrates, the phrase, " the same man is just and
happy." In almost verbal agreement with this quotation
are the following lines, taken from an elegy, of which
unfortunately only a fragment is preserved, composed by
Aristotle on the early death of his fellow-student, Eudemus
of Cyprus : —
" Thus by precept and deed hath he convincingly proved
That to be happy and good is for ever not two things, but one thing,
That to be either alone passes the power of man."
The man here spoken of is one who " alone, or first among
mortals," proclaimed the above doctrine — one, moreover, to
whom Eudemus, moved by " high friendship," that is, by
piety, raised an altar when he came to Athens, thus
instituting a kind of hero-worship of him (cf. Vol. I. p. 167).
This man will be identified, on an impartial consideration
of the case, not, as by some commentators ancient and
modern, with Plato, who was still alive when Eudemus
died (in 353), but with Plato's master Socrates. But one
testimony more or less matters little here. The identifi-
cation of excellence with tvSaifiovla, or happiness, is the
common property of all the Socratic school, however
manifold may have been the modifications which this
doctrine received at their hands. To its originator the
principle may have seemed self-evident or nearly so ; the
more critical eyes of the disciples saw clearly the necessity
for proof. And the greatest of the Socratic pupils, Plato,
in the most powerful of all his works, the " Republic,"
applied the whole force of his intellect to the proof of the
thesis : " The just man, as just, and because he is just, is
happy."
Before we proceed, let us dwell for a moment on the
7 2 GREEK THINKERS.
motives which led Socrates to adopt this doctrine and to
employ all the powers of his mighty intellect in preaching
and enforcing it. The main psychological factors of the
case are doubtless as follows : Socrates possessed an ideal
— an ideal of calm self-possession, of justice, of fearlessness,
of independence. He felt that he was happy because, and
in so far as, he lived up to this ideal. He looked on the
world around. He found others, too, in possession of
ideals, but half-hearted withal, lukewarm, divided in mind,
inconsistent ; and he saw that the effects of these causes
were manifold deviations from paths once entered upon,
gifted intellects and forceful characters failing, through lack
of sure guidance, to secure for their possessors inward
harmony and lasting peace. To be such a plaything of
capricious impulses seemed to him a " slavish " condition,
unworthy of a free man. This is the reproach which
Alcibiades, the most brilliant representative of the type,
addresses to himself in the " Symposium " of Plato. Such,
at least, he appeared to himself to be in comparison with
Socrates, as he listened to his instruction with beating heart
and tears in his eyes, the prey of such emotion as none
other could arouse in him, not even a finished orator like
his uncle Pericles. And such a " slavish " disposition,
according to Xenophon, was attributed by Socrates to
those who, for want of knowledge of " the good, the beauti-
ful, and the just," groped and wavered in their actions
like a traveller who has lost his way, or a clumsy arith-
metician who brings out now one, now another, answer
to the same problem. That which Socrates observed with
pain to be lacking in the character of even the foremost
of his contemporaries was inward consistency and self-
containedness — the government of the whole man by a
will at one with itself and free from all taint of division.
We have termed him the great champion of enlightenment ;
he was at the same time the man who saw most clearly,
and felt most intensely, the inevitable defects of an age of
criticism and enlightenment. Ancient faith was under-
mined ; traditional standards of conduct seemed outwardly
intact, but their authority was gone ; men's souls were
THE RIFT IN THE SOUL. 73
full of unrest and desolating discord. This distracted con-
dition, whose voice speaks to us to-day in the dramas
of Euripides, must have awakened in deeper natures a
yearning for a new theory of life, which should exercise
the same undivided dominion over man as religion had
done before. Socrates was the originator of such a
theory. Not that his ideals did not substantially agree in
many points with the traditions of his countrymen. It
was only in a few points, chiefly with reference to state
organization, that he himself subjected the traditions to a
searching examination, but he paved the way for a more
exhaustive criticism of them all. The pathos of his life lay
in the earnest struggle he maintained against all that
produced discord and schism within the soul. As Cleanthes
tells us in the passage quoted above, he "cursed as impious
him who first sundered the just from the useful," and thus,
we may add, introduced a double weight and measure in
the souls of men. It was intolerable to him that men
should follow, now an ethical ideal good enough to declaim
about on high and holy days, now an ideal of happiness
poor enough to live for in work-day moods ; that they
should now bow the knee before the image of God, and
now lend their arms to the service of an idol. He could
not tolerate that men should now unite in condemning
a perjured red-handed usurper like Archelaus of Macedonia,
and again join unanimously in casting glances of admira-
tion and envy on the same man's greatness and prosperity.*
Although the task to which Socrates applied himself was
that of securing full recognition for a rule of life already
in existence, and of justifying the acceptance of it on un-
impeachable first principles, still, he opened up a path
which could not but lead to the transformation of that
rule. For the proposition, " Virtue is happiness," early
admitted of being converted into, " Happiness is virtue."
The eudasmonism which at first was occupied chiefly, if
not exclusively, in establishing the validity of traditional
precepts, was conducted by an infallible necessity to a
* See Plato's "Gorgias."
74 GREEK THINKERS.
critical scrutiny of the whole content of these precepts.
The ground was cleared for a revolutionary reconstruction
of moral, social, and political doctrines.
But of this revolution and of those contributions to it
which may be verified as due to Socrates himself, it will be
time to speak later. What we are at present concerned to
do is to follow the fundamental principle of Socrates into
its consequences. Let us hear what Xenophon has to say
on this subject. One of those discourses which are much
too full of matter to be regarded as the product of Xeno-
phon's own intellect runs as follows : "Wisdom and virtue "
— it is true that only one particular species of virtue is
named at first, but the addition of other species afterwards
completes the idea —
" Wisdom and virtue he did not distinguish, but he deemed
that one thing was the mark of both, that a man should know and
practise the beautiful and the good, and that he should likewise
know and avoid what is foul (shameful) and bad. If he were
asked further what he thought of those who know what they ought
to do but perform the opposite, whether he thought them wise and
excellent, then he would answer, ' Not more so than unwise and
inferior.' "
In other words, he affirmed contradiction between know-
ledge and action to be an impossibility, and drew the in-
ference that all moral excellence is simply and solely
wisdom. By its application to the different departments
of life, virtue appeared to be manifold. In truth it was
one, because identical with insight or wisdom. As wisdom,
it could be taught, and — possibly because teaching of such
importance cannot slip from the mind — when once acquired,
could not be lost. We have here woven together material
taken partly from Plato and partly from Xenophon, and
thus placed before the reader the central framework of
Socrates' teaching on virtue. For it is only a central
framework that we can offer, not a complete structure.
How far Socrates advanced beyond the elementary por-
tions of his teaching by way of working it out in detail,
we are not likely ever to know with full certitude and
LOGICAL BASIS OF SOCRATES' ETHICS. 75
exactness. Here we have to distinguish between two
things — the positive content of his ethical teaching and its
logical justification. We will take the second first.
3. The pyschological ground of Socrates' belief in
what we may call the all-sufficiency of the intellect is
already known to us. It is without doubt contained in
the fact that he was so full of his own ideals as to be
unable to conceive deviation from them as other than the
result of intellectual error. But the psychological justifica-
tion of a theory is one thing, its logical justification quite
another. A man who desired proof and not declamation,
who always endeavoured to start from what was most
currently accepted and least open to doubt, could not be
satisfied with an appeal to his own feelings. He sought
for the most objective possible proof, and his task was
rendered all the easier by a particular defect in the thought
of that age — a failure to distinguish what we term the
ethics of the individual from what we term social ethics.
It was on the former that Socrates originally founded his
own ethical system. Every man desires his own well-
being. And if his action contradicts this aim, otherwise
than from devotion to an aim recognized as higher, or
from blindness due to an overmastering passion, such con-
tradiction may be ascribed to lack of knowledge, or, as we
should add, to lack of skill in the application of knowledge.
This simple reflexion seems to have been the starting-
point of the Socratic theory, so far, at least, as this was
based on grounds cognizable by the understanding.
Countless perversities of conduct, hurtful to the per-
petrators of them, appeared as deviations from a goal
which no one with a clear consciousness of its nature would
be willing to condemn. It was an easy step to look at
offences against social morality in the same light. It was
in the interests of this identification that he sought to
prove that anti-social actions are hurtful to the doers of
them. Of arguments in this sense Xenophon's " Memora-
bilia " is full. Friendship is to be cultivated because a
friend is the most useful of possessions. Family quarrels
are to be avoided because it is foolish to turn to our own
7 6 GREEK THINKERS.
hurt what Nature gave us for our good. The laws are to
be obeyed because such obedience is highly profitable ; and
so forth. We are unable to accept the view of certain
modern critics that not only the tediously long and detailed
exposition, but also the main thought, is un-Socratic. To
declare all such matter unworthy of Socrates is to overlook
several distinctions which in this connexion cannot be
neglected with impunity. What is more important, it is to
ignore the consequences which flow from the fundamental
tendency of Socratism. The passionate yearning to save
human lives from being swayed hither and thither by self-
contradictory wills, by random opinions and delusions, could
not but issue in logical demonstrations of this type. That
which was required was a reduction of " should be " to
" is," a replacing of the unprovable imperative by an indi-
cative bearing on unquestioned and undoubted human
interests. It was necessary that much should be justified
before the bar of reason which all souls of native worth
and noble nurture feel to need no justification whatever.
The uneasy feelings which these expositions rouse in the
modern reader is due partly to causes of this kind as well
as to the trivialities of Xenophon's manner, and his habit
of spinning out the most obvious thoughts to inordinate
length. Moreover, the impression is conveyed that these
exhortations, pointing, as they do, to remote advantages
obtainable at the cost of immediate and considerable
efforts and sacrifices, are ill adapted to provide efficient
motives to action. There is even something repulsive in
the idea of such motives being constantly present in the
consciousness of those who are moved by them. A mother
who nurses her sick child with the object, and only the
object, of bringing him up to be the support of her old age,
is a grotesque and revolting spectacle. But, apart from
the provision of motives, and ever-present motives, there
is another point of view, much more favourable to these
disquisitions, that of the intellectual justification, the
rational basis of ethical obligations. Considered in this
light, these disquisitions have their fitting place in the
Socratic system, nor are they without a real value of their
THE WAR AGAINST CONFUSION OF THOUGHT. *]"]
own. The objects aimed at are that of defending the
cultivation of family and friendly affections and of other
altruistic feelings before the cold scrutiny of reason, and
that of supporting the tinity of the will by the more or less
well-founded doctrine, that conflicts between the claims of
society and those of private interests are merely apparent.
By this means, though it may be impossible to create new
motives for good action, those which already exist may be
reinforced on the intellectual side, and shielded from the
attacks of the anti-social spirit. It matters little that in a
first attempt of this character more stress should have been
laid on the coarser, more palpable, and more superficial
utilities than on those of a finer order, which at the same
time are more indirect and more persistent in their
operation.
But the treatment of ethical questions from the stand-
point of reason has other uses of far deeper significance.
Goodness or benevolence of sentiment does not spring from
reflexion. It is the fruit of innate tendency, of education,
of environment. Logical demonstrations cannot call it
into existence. But supposing they find it already ex-
istent, they can do something to guide its operation. Not
ignorance so much as confusion of thought is the enemy to
be overcome. And this is the enemy on which the dia-
lectic of Socrates made unceasing war. In this struggle
the endeavour after sharply defined ideas could not but
render yeoman's service. Though clearness of concepts is
not enough to create new motives, it is enough to prevent
or retard the invasion of the soul by those motives which,
like certain fungi, thrive only in semi-obscurity. How
many an action, injurious to the common welfare, would
have been left unperformed, had not a veil of misty thought
concealed from the doer of it the fact that it belonged to a
class of actions admitted by himself to be reprehensible.
This remark applies to various doubtful practices which
are justified by the so-called ethics of business, and to
various actions prejudicial to the interests of the state,
which latter is regarded by preference as an abstraction
rather than as a collectivity of sentient human beings.
78 GREEK THINKERS.
We are reminded of the fine saying of J. S. Mill: "If the
sophistry of the intellect could be rendered impossible, that
of the feelings, having no instrument to work with, would
be powerless." And apart from all the confusion of thought
that haunts the individual brain, what a list could be made
of questions in respect of which the general mind is in the
same ill plight ! Could Socrates appear among us, how
often and how victoriously would he cross swords in dia-
lectic fence with the representatives of public opinion !
Imagine the smile of scorn with which he would drive the
legislator to confess that duelling is both commanded and
forbidden to the same persons at the same time ! How he
would enjoy proving that precisely similar incidents are
judged differently according to the section of society in
which they take place ! How he would scourge a system
of education which implants in our youth, sometimes simul-
taneously, sometimes consecutively, mutually exclusive
ideals of life ! With what pleasure would he drag into the
light of day all the glaring contradictions in which jour-
nalists and politicians daily entangle themselves, whenever
they speak of such things as " political morality " or the
" sanctity of treaties " ! We can hardly be wrong in assum-
ing that his efforts to promote the sharp delimitation of
concepts, and to dispel all the dark clouds of confusion and
contradiction that beset the mind of man, were of more
than theoretical importance ; that, in fact, they bore rich
fruit in the world of practice. If among the ancient
philosophers who came after Socrates there appeared a
great number of men distinguished by singleness of heart
and purpose, if ideals which, though open to criticism,
were yet of the highest value, came to be cherished with
impressive perseverance and practised with magnificent
consistency in the schools of the Cynics, the Cyrenaics, the
Stoics, and the Epicureans, it is to the mental discipline
instituted by Socrates that these results must largely be
ascribed.
So much for the work of Socrates on the foundations
of morality, and the critical investigation of concepts, which
was closely bound up with it. We now come to the
ALL GOOD IS UTILITY. 79
content of the Socratic ethics. Here, however, our survey
must enlarge its scope. The regulation of individual con-
duct goes hand-in-hand with that of social practice. It is
not with ethics alone, but with ethics and politics combined,
that we have now to deal. It is true that a fully elabo-
rated system of Socratic doctrine is to be looked for in
neither of these departments. But the spirit in which he
discussed the totality of these questions can be inferred
without ambiguity from certain features which are common
to the theories of his successors, and which are in the
closest possible agreement with the few well-attested details
of his personal teaching which are known to us.
"That is, and ever will be, the best of sayings," says
Plato, "that the useful is the noble, and the hurtful is the
base." The usefulness and the hurtfulness here spoken of
have reference to the community, and the "enthusiasm of
sobriety " that dictated these words of the poet-philosopher
assuredly glowed with a yet stronger fire in the bosom of
his teacher, the apostle of the intellect. He will not hear
of any good thing which is not also good, that is, useful, to
some person. " A dung-basket that fulfils its purpose is
more beautiful than an unserviceable shield of gold." This
is one of the sayings of Socrates reported by Xenophon,
one of those pungent sentences which the author of the
"Memorabilia" was absolutely incapable of inventing for
himself, and of which there is no good ground for doubting
the authenticity. Be that as it may, the promotion of
human welfare was certainly, in the opinion of Socrates,
the supreme canon of social and political practice. And
subserviency to this same highest end was in his eyes the
one standard by which to judge of the goodness or badness
of actions. But he made no attempt whatever to construct
synthetically a system of cardinal obligations. Here, just
as in the inquiry into the nature of individual happiness,
he was not ambitious enough to undertake either the
ultimate analysis of the foundations or the erection of a
superstructure of positive dogma. Nor did he essay the
delimitation of the respective spheres of the individual and
the community. All this he left to his successors.
So GREEK THINKERS.
Utilitarian ethics, or, as we prefer to say, the ethics of
consequences, may be confidently ascribed to Socrates.
Usefulness or expediency is the guiding star of his thought
on political, social, and ethical questions. He may be
termed the founder of that intellectual radicalism which,
on the one hand, is without price as an implement of
criticism and as an offensive weapon against what is
worthless in existing institutions, but which, on the other
hand, may on occasion be dangerous and disastrous when
it insists on the immediate or the violent fulfilment of its
demands, which latter are, after all, in any particular case,
nothing more than the pronouncements of fallible human
minds. Reason before authority, utility before tradition
or blind emotion — such is the battle-cry in the campaign
prepared, but only partially conducted, by Socrates. He
himself remained to a considerable extent under the sway
of the traditional sentiments of his countrymen. The
fundamental principle for which he strove to win recogni-
tion was the supremacy of enlightened reason. Here again
we discern shadow as well as light. There can be little
doubt that the recognition of this principle was calculated
to loosen many a bond of duty and affection. The reproach
was urged against it, hardly without reason, that it pro-
voked children to rebel against the "unreasonable" will
of their parents, that it commended wisdom rather than
age to the reverence of the young. Respect, too, for exist-
ing political institutions could not but be greatly impaired
by the trenchant criticism to which he subjected them.
It was in particular the appointment of officials by lot
against which, as we have already remarked in anticipation,
he was never weary of inveighing. He thus worked for a
future in which special or expert knowledge, to him and
his followers the most precious thing in the world, was
destined to play a greater part in state administration than
it did in the Athens of his day. For all that, his criticism
is not to be endorsed without reserve. Offices of cardinal
importance were neither then nor at any other time filled
by lot. And against the undoubted drawbacks of the
system wc may set certain mitigating circumstances and
SOCRATES' POLITICAL AND S OCTAL VIEWS. 8 1
certain positive advantages. Under the first head may
be placed the short tenure of office by individuals, the
great number of officials composing each separate board,
the dread of exposure which kept the incompetent from
participation in the lot-drawing which led to the more
important offices, such as membership of the hard-worked
council of five hundred. Still more weight must be
attached to the diffusion of political education thus brougth
about, and th j strengthening of public spirit. Lastly and
chiefly, the party divisions of the little commonwealth,
dangerous as they actually were, would have been far
more disastrous had it been the custom for the victorious
party to take possession, by virtue of its majority, of every
branch of the administration, thus aggravating in fatal
measure the contrast between victor and vanquished. As
it was, this contrast was greatly softened by the privilege,
accorded to the minority for the time being, of co-operating
in the public service. On the other hand, Socrates was in
complete agreement with modern sentiment when he com-
bated that prejudice against free labour which is almost
inevitable in every slave state ; when he, a son of the
people, showed himself more radical than Plato or Aristotle,
by refraining from all depreciation of "banausic" callings.
He held, and this accorded well with his high estimate of
the number of things that can be taught, that the female
sex was capable of higher developments than the great
majority of his countrymen thought possible. It would at
least be a strange freak of chance if the concordant utter-
ances on this subject of Plato, Xenophon, and Antisthenes,
all of whom reject qualitative differences of mental endow-
ment in the sexes, did not flow from a common source.
But we must not lose ourselves in details. The main
point is the emphatic assertion of the rights of criticism as
against all authority and all tradition, the measurement
of all institutions, ordinances, and precepts by a single
standard — their fitness, as ascertained by experience and
reasoned reflexion, to promote the welfare of mankind.
This standard is no doubt one whose application in human,
that is to say, in fallible hands, often leads to error ; still,
VOL. II. G
82 GREEK THINKERS.
all the philosophers of two thousand years have failed to
provide us with a better. Utilitarianism, its advantages,
the misapprehensions which prevent its being fully under-
stood, the real or apparent objections which may be raised
against it, — all these subjects will receive attention in a
later portion of this work, where we shall deal with the
more pronounced form of the fundamental doctrine given to
it by the successors of Socrates. It will then be necessary
to unravel the confused tangle of eudsemonistic, hedonistic,
and utilitarian theories, with their sub-varieties. For the
present, a single observation will suffice. It is quite possible
to reject utterly individual eudaemonism as the basis of
morals, and yet at the same time to hold firmly to social
utility as the supreme standard in ethics and politics. It
is possible to abandon even this standpoint — though for
our part, in spite of the captious objections which have been
raised against it, we know of no adequate substitute — and
yet retain the method according to which every institution,
every precept, every rule of conduct, is considered as a
means to some clearly conceived end, and tested in respect
of its appropriateness thereto. He who cleaves to this
method is at once on Socratic ground and within the
limits of rational investigation. Wherever two or three
are met together — it may be said — to discuss human con-
cerns by the light of reason, there is Socrates among them.
4. It was not directly, but through the medium of
his intellectual children, grandchildren, and still rcmoter
posterity, that Socrates exerted, upon wide circles of men
and upon distant ages, an influence which at every step
received accretions from collateral sources. It was very
different with a man of the far East, a kindred soul and
almost a contemporary of Socrates — Confucius (died 478
B.C.), who is honoured by the inhabitants of the Middle
Kingdom and the neighbouring regions as the founder of
their religion, and whose writings, regarded as canonical,
offer many points of resemblance to the utterances of
Socrates. " The extension of knowledge," we read in the
thirty-ninth book of the Li Ki, " is by the investigation of
things. Things being investigated, their knowledge became
CHINESE PARALLELS. 8
J
complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts
were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts
were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their
persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated,
their families were regulated. Their families being regu-
lated, their states were rightly governed." Thus Confucius.
On this passage, a critic of high authority, Georg von der
Gabelentz, expresses himself as follows : " We see that
where he might be expected to treat of conscience, he
speaks of knowledge and its perfecting. It is as if he
regarded morality as an affair of the intellect, and as
something which can be taught." And as basis of the
latter, Confucius gives a logical deduction of ethical obli-
gations, starting from the happiness of the agent ; conse-
quently, he has, as a matter of fact, not escaped the charge
of cudasmonism. But the superstructure built on this
foundation is a species of altruism free from extravagance
or quixotism. " Love one another ; " " Requite good with
good, and evil with justice ; " " What thou wouldst not that
another should do to thee, that do not to another ; " — such
is the tenor of some of his admonitions. And that
eudaemonism provided ethics with a foundation which made
up in solidity what it lacked in elevation. For example, in
a Chinese State paper of the ninth century of our era we
read the following sentences: "May it please your majesty!
I have heard that he who eradicates evil himself, reaps
advantage in proportion to his work ; and that he who adds
to the pleasures of others, himself enjoys happiness. Such
was ever the guiding principle of our ancient kings." By
happiness is here meant that which can be enjoyed upon
earth, for with the Chinese moral philosophers of the
Confucian school all outlook upon a hereafter of rewards
and punishments is entirely lacking. Both in this respect
and in the attitude of indecision towards the question of
immortality there is a close parallel with Socrates, who is
made by Plato, in the " Apology," to confess his entire
uncertainty as to the nature of death. Again, the pious
Xenophon, herein doubtless influenced by the Master, puts
into the mouth of his dying hero, Cyrus, all manner of
84 GREEK THINKERS.
proofs of immortality, which, however, only lead up to halt-
ing utterances on the continued existence of the soul.
This scepticism was by no means confined to Socrates.
There is still preserved a fragment of a memorial inscription
in honour of those who fell at Potidasa. If Socrates, who
also took part in that campaign, had cast his eye upon this
inscription, he would have seen in the line, "Then by the
earth his body, his soul was received by the ether," what
one might almost call an official rejection of personal
immortality. For the faith upheld by Mystics and Orphics
had in that age no firm hold on the mass of the people,
and needed to contend perpetually with unbelief. That
belief, that the soul returns to the ether as the body to the
earth, was held by Socrates' friend Euripides, as by the
philosophical comedian Epicharmus before him. That
which was called in question was the personal, not the
conscious, survival of the soul ; for the ether, or heavenly
substance, was conceived as the vehicle of a world-soul
identified with the supreme Deity. But Euripides would
not have been Euripides if in this one instance he had
held firmly to a definite conviction instead of allowing it
on the whole to preponderate over its opposite. By the
side of this pantheistic faith, his dramas exhibit complete
uncertainty on the destiny of souls ; indeed, hopes are held
out of a final extinction of consciousness. Vacillation of
this type, coupled with a progressive weakening of the
belief in the soul, seems to have been the prevailing note
of the latter part of the fifth century. Even in quarters
where no doubts were admitted as to personal survival,
there was little recognition of the dignity or the blessed-
ness of the departed, and it was nowhere maintained with
confidence that they had any part in the events of the
earth. The literary evidence of this trend of thought is
instructively supplemented by the monuments. The oldest
Athenian graves, which date from about 700 B.C., testify to
the strength of the belief in souls and the high honour in
which souls were held, by the abundance and splendour of
the gifts buried with the dead, as well as by the arrange-
ments indicating memorial sacrifices. In the course of
SOCRATES AND THEOLOGY. 85
time we notice a gradual fading away of these feelings.
The love-gifts do not cease, but at the time when
monuments are artistically most perfect, they are dis-
tinguished by an almost mechanical uniformity. At the
end of the fourth century all wealth of ornamentation
entirely disappears ; the limitations of funeral expenses
enacted by Demetrius of Phaleron are obeyed with ready
compliance, even at a time when they had ceased to be
enforced. The responsibility of this change may without
injustice be laid on the decay of the belief in souls, as well
as on the impoverishment of the people.
5. There were other matters of faith in which Socrates
held a middle position. He was neither an atheist nor a
pillar of orthodoxy. So much, at least, seems certain,
though there is great doubt on particular details. The
accounts of Socrates' trial and death bear witness to his
deep religious feeling. He regarded himself as devoted
to the service and as under the protection of the Deity.
But the exact nature of his theological belief cannot be
stated with certainty. That the gods of mythology were
the objects of his personal adoration is a priori improbable.
Had his standpoint been simply that of the popular religion,
the indictment laid against him could hardly have received
the form it did, or his accusers would not have succeeded
in winning several hundred Athenian jurors to their side.
In the other trials of a similar character, such as those of
Diagoras, Anaxagoras, and Protagoras, evidence against
the accused was supplied by their own writings. It is not
likely that in this one instance definite testimony was dis-
pensed with, and its place taken by mere hearsay. And it
may be observed that the answer given in Plato's "Apology"
to this part of the indictment is particularly weak. In fact,
it seeks to veil the impossibility of meeting the main point
by various forensic makeshifts. The accuser is nonplussed
by cross-questions and surprised into pushing his contention
far beyond its original scope, thus affording an easy handle
for attack ; the rest of the reply is made up of inconclusive
linguistic and logical artifices. We must consider, too, that
the standpoint of popular mythology was one which had
86 GREEK THINKERS.
long been regarded in philosophical circles as untenable,
and, what is still more important, that this dissent was
afterwards a feature of all the different Socratic schools,
though it appeared in the most diverse forms. Nor is it
a fact without significance that the individual deities to
whom he is represented by Plato as praying or otherwise
rendering acknowledgment, or whose existence he is said
to have maintained with any energy, are none other than,
on the one hand, Apollo, the lord of the Delphic sanctuary,
where lofty wisdom and advanced ethical culture had their
seat, and, on the other hand, the Sun and Moon, that is,
those very parts of the natural world which Plato and
Aristotle continued to regard as divine entities.
What Socrates requires of the gods, or of the deity,
is simply " the good." Wherein this consists, in any in-
dividual case, the gods, so he thinks, know better than
men. To ask from them definite goods or help in securing
definite ends, seemed to him as out of place as we might
have expected a priori that it would seem to an ethical
philosopher who would fain see man firmly planted on his
own base, that is, on his powers as conditioned by his
knowledge, as independent as may be of everything
external. Thus he put but little value on details of cultus,
and bade men worship the deity without extravagance or
over-refinement, in simple fashion, " according to the laws
of the state," in agreement with the pronouncement of the
Delphic oracle. In the " Euthyphro " of Plato Socrates is
represented as pouring out the full vials of his scorn on
all holiness resting on works and on all sectarian fanaticism,
and as coming to the sufficiently clearly expressed con-
clusion that piety is rather a disposition accompanying just
actions — -with which latter it is identified elsewhere in Plato
— than an independent virtue embracing a particular circle
of duties. That a pure heart is more pleasing to the deity
than abundance of offerings, is a declaration which is put
in the mouth of Socrates by Xenophon, who, on this
subject, was far removed from the standpoint of his master.
Not essentially different was the attitude of Socrates
towards the arts of divination. Xenophon, who had
HIS " D&MON? 87
himself a strong leaning towards these arts, reports him as
censuring men for going to the gods and the interpreters
of their signs for counsel on matters which they had the
power of knowing and doing for themselves.
One exception to this hostile attitude regarded the
Delphic oracle, that sanctuary which had already won the
sympathy of Socrates by the inscription on its wall, " Know
thyself," afterwards one of his favourite sayings. Like the
overwhelming majority of his contemporaries, he saw in
dreams manifold instances of divine intervention. But
what are we to say of the famous Satfioviov, that is, of that
voice of a god or a spirit, which played a part of no small
importance in his life ? Could we credit Xenophon,
Socrates claimed for himself, on the strength of this voice,
a prophetic gift of quite peculiar nature. He foresaw the
future, and made use of his foresight to bid his friends do
this, or leave that undone ; whereupon it went well with
those who followed his counsel, and ill with those who
rejected it. The testimony of Plato is to quite another
effect. He knows nothing of predictions, nothing of any
positive commands addressed to Socrates, or any counsel
transmitted by him to his friends. For him the pheno-
menon was one of still more peculiar type and much more
limited scope. From early youth upwards it frequently
happened to Socrates, both on important and on trivial
occasions, that he was restrained from doing what he was
on the point of doing, by compulsion from within, which
compulsion he sometimes called " a voice " (at other times
it is simply " the accustomed sign "), and attributed to a
god or spirit as much because of his inability to explain
it as because of the benefits he derived from obeying it.
The divergency between the two accounts is highly in-
structive, and calculated to inspire us with a profound
suspicion of Xenophon's testimony. He would have been
well pleased to make Socrates into a kind of soothsayer
or miracle-monger, and he was thus led, perhaps not to
introduce downright inventions of his own, but to blur the
true features of the case by additions and omissions, thus
producing a picture which had just enough in common with
88 GREEK THINKERS.
the reality to make the deception effective. But what are
we to think of the Sai/ioviov ? We can neither range it in
the category of veritable premonitions, and compare it with
Jung-Stilling's experiences of a continuous intercourse with
the Deity, confirmed at every step by the fulfilment of
expectations ; nor can we agree with various ancient writers
in considering it as merely the voice of conscience. The
statement that the $ai/i6viov held him back whenever he
felt any inclination to take an active part in politics, may
be taken to indicate that he was here guided by a species
of instinct, a dim but truthful estimate of his own capa-
bilities emerging from the sub-conscious under-currents
of psychic life. And perhaps a similar remark holds in
respect of that incident in which the inner voice restrained
him from complying with the wish of certain disciples who
desired to renew the familiar intercourse they had pre-
viously broken off. In other cases this peculiarity of
Socrates is employed by Plato in a half-jesting manner,
as affording motives for actions of little importance, merely
as an aid to dramatic effect in the construction of the
dialogue. The discourse promised to the reader gains in
interest if Socrates is represented as having been on the
point of leaving the place where it was held, or of breaking
off the conversation, and as having been detained only by
a sign from his familiar spirit. Whether the warnings that
arose from the depths of the unconscious took the form of
actual hallucinations of the sense of hearing, or whether
insignificant feelings of inhibition, such as we have all
experienced, were also regarded by Socrates as instances
of divine intervention, so that the Saifjcovtov became a
common name for psychical processes of more than one
kind — on such questions as these we are thrown back on
conjecture, and are hardly in a position to formulate even
a conjecture with any show of probability. We are nearly
as helpless in the face of the highly important question
which still remains to be considered, that of the nature of
the Supreme Deity acknowledged by Socrates. That his
position should have been a naive acceptance of tradition,
is a possibility which we are certainly entitled to neglect.
HIS VIEW OF THE SUPREME DEITY. 89
In reality, there are only two alternatives before us. The
Supreme Deity of Socrates may have been, like that of
Xenophanes, an informing mind or soul pervading the
universe. Or it may be that he regarded the Deity as a
Supreme Being, perhaps not the creator, but, at any rate, a
power that orders and shapes the world in accordance with
his own purposes. In other words, Socrates' conception of
the Deity was either a pantheistic-poetical one, or a deistic-
teleological. But merely to state these alternatives, we
fancy we hear the reader exclaim, is to decide between
them. Only the second of these modes of conceiving the
Deity seems appropriate to the sobriety of thought and the
utilitarian leanings characteristic of our sage. There is,
doubtless, much plausibility in this view. But we do not
admit that it is one to be immediately and finally adopted.
An instance which lies close at hand will make plain the
danger which lurks in such inferences. Suppose that the
belief of Socrates in his spirit-monitor were only known to
us by dim hearsay ; how confidently might we not have
rejected the story on the ground that all such mysticism
is foreign to the nature of a man who was common-sense
incarnate ! Great men commonly unite within their natures
elements of the most varied, even of the most contradictory,
character ; indeed, it is in such union that their greatness
largely consists. If we undertake to construct the unknown
part of a personality solely from the part revealed to us, we
are like to introduce into the resulting picture more unity,
but at the same time more monotony and tameness, than
the truth would warrant. Within the Socratic School the
idea of God assumed many different forms. Euclides, the
founder of the Megarian branch, enthroned the All-One of
the Eleatics ; Antisthenes, the head of the Cynics, preached
the sovereignty of a single God, conceived, it would appear,
with more of the attributes of personality.
If it be asked which of the two disciples followed the
master more closely, the question cannot be answered with
any certainty. Aristotle is silent ; Plato reports nothing,
but pursues his own path, marked out for him by the doctrine
of ideas ; there remains the least valuable of our witnesses,
90 GREEK THINKERS.
Xenophon. This author has devoted two much-discussed
sections of the " Memorabilia " to the theological problem,
which he answers in a teleological and almost exclusively
anthropocentric sense. According to this evidence, Socrates
regarded divine activity solely from the point of view of
human utility. The two dialogues (with Aristodemus and
Euthydemus) are full of allusions to the evidence of design
contained in the structure of the animal, especially the
human, body, and to the general ordering of nature in a
manner conducive to the welfare of man ; all of which
allusions are aimed at the conversion of doubters and
unbelievers by bringing home to them the fact of divine
providence. The objections which have been raised against
the genuineness of these chapters have proved to be with-
out foundation. But it is still an open question whether
their content is the intellectual property of Socrates or of
Xenophon himself. Certainly no high degree of originality
can be claimed for them. We have already met with
kindred reflections in Herodotus (Vol. I. p. 267) ; and the
problem of design is one which occupied both Anaxagoras
and Diogenes of Apollonia. These thinkers, however, we
may remark in passing, took too broad a view of the question
to set down the whole animal kingdom as created for the
service of man. There are several details in these chapters
which suggest that the voice here speaking to us is that of
the much-travelled Xenophon with his varied experiences
and practical knowledge of the world, rather than that of
his teacher Socrates. The latter, possibly, may be credited
with the main thought, the purposeful operation of the
Godhead or " universal reason ; " the exposition, however,
can hardly be his.
We shall probably not be wrong in passing a similar
verdict on a portion of the argument by which Xenophon
seeks to explain why Socrates made no attempt to con-
tinue the speculations of the nature-philosophers who pre-
ceded him. We should not, indeed, be disinclined to
believe that the incurable discrepancy of the older systems
passed in his mind for a proof that the problems they dealt
with were insoluble (cf. Vol. I. p. 494). One denies all
SOCRATES A. YD SCIENCE. 9 I
rest, another denies all motion ; one assumes a single
universal substance, another an infinite plurality of sub-
stances. That, to his thinking, the champions of such
glaringly contradictory theories proved nothing except the
hopelessness of their common efforts, that their mutually
destructive assertions, all of which were maintained with
equal confidence, appeared to him as the utterances of men
not wholly sane, — all this is possible enough. But it is not
so easy to believe that in forming a judgment on the
nature-philosophers an original thinker like Socrates stood
on the same plane as the ordinary Athenian philistine ;
that in the labours of those hardy pioneers he saw nothing
but inflated presumption and an unseemly trespassing on
the preserves of the gods. Had this been Socrates' way of
thinking, public opinion would hardly have confounded
him to such fatal purpose with the infidel " heaven-
searchers " and other representatives of the age of en-
lightenment
92 GREEK THINKERS.
CHAPTER V.
SOCRATES' END.
I. SOCRATES was nearingthe threshold of advanced old age
when the storm by which he had long been threatened
burst over his head. The pent-up forces of deep ill will
and sullen distrust which had long been accumulating in
the breasts of his fellow-citizens, now found vent in an
explosion which led to one of the most tragic events which
have darkened the annals of human civilization. To judge
rightly of this collision between a noble people and one of
the noblest of its sons is a task of extreme delicacy. We
shall endeavour, so far as is possible, to let the facts
speak plainly for themselves, and to weigh their testimony
with the strictest impartiality.
The dislike of the average Athenian for enlighteners of
every kind, let them be called " sophists " or " heaven-
searchers," is, if anything, too familiar to the reader.
Socrates was not merely confused with the representatives
of these types ; he passed for the supreme example and
pattern of them. We know this on the testimony of the
comic poets — the men, that is to say, who both knew best
what public opinion was, and who had the greatest power
of influencing it. Some of their contemptuous and spiteful
expressions have already been quoted ; we have no inten-
tion of exhausting the list. But we may remind the reader
that the same Eupolis who caricatured the so-called sophists
in " The Flatterers " did not spare Socrates either, but
placed him exactly on a level with Protagoras. Both alike
are held up to derision because they spend their time
SOCRATES AND PUBLIC OPINION. 93
ruminating on the highest subjects, but yet stoop to the
lowest expedients in order to satisfy their ordinary wants.
But while the worst said of Protagoras is that he searches
the heavens and fetches his food from the dust-hole, Socrates
is represented as a guest who steals a soup-ladle. Nor is
it a case of ill will on the part of a few individual writers
of comedy. The number and the variety of the relevant
passages which have been preserved (mostly by accident)
is far too great to admit of any such hypothesis. In addi-
tion to Eupolis, we have to mention Teleclides, Ameipsias,
and Aristophanes. To the first of these Socrates is odious
as partly responsible for those dramas which in so many
ways offended popular sentiment — the dramas of Euripides,
the poet in whose house the book of Protagoras on the
gods was read aloud. Ameipsias speaks of him as " the
best among a few, but among many the most foolish ; who
studies everything but the means of obtaining a new cloak."
In this same comedy, the " Connus," so named after Socrates'
music-teacher, the chorus was composed of " thinkers " or
" ruminators." We are reminded of the contemporary
"Clouds" of Aristophanes (first produced 423), that veno-
mous pasquinade in which the hero is not, as subsequently
in the "Birds" (414), or in the "Frogs" (405), merely an
uncouth bore whose companionship spoils the art of
Euripides. The " thinking-shop " is rather the home of
idle musing, of free-thinking heresy, a place where youths
are trained in undutifulness, and in all the vulgar arts of
lying and swindling. In view of all this heaped-up malice,
we may well wonder that Socrates continued for a quarter
of a century to live and work unmolested in a city where
freedom of thought and speech was not a recognized prin-
ciple. It is plain that the inherited tendency to intolerance,
possessing as it did a ready weapon in the existing laws,
was effectually counterpoised by the habits of life and
thought distinctive of the age of Pericles. There must
have been, we conjecture, some extraordinary circumstance
or experience that fanned into fierce flame the spark which
had smouldered so long. For such circumstances we have
not far to seek.
94 GREEK THINKERS.
The Peloponnesian war was over, and great had been
the fall of Athens. Humiliation before external foes had
been associated with the weakness caused by an embittered
civil war. From the latter the Athenian Demos had
emerged victorious (B.C. 403). But the state had been
shaken to its foundations ; the comparison between past
and present forced itself with irresistible power on every
eye, and filled every heart with grief and mourning. Men
could not but search around them for the deeper causes of
the fatal transformation, and endeavour to learn some
useful lesson from the contemplation of their misfortunes.
We imagine we can hear the querulous voice of some
aged Athenian, who has unexpectedly met a foreign friend
in the market-place. " What ! " says he, " you hardly
recognize Athens in these empty streets, this desolate
harbour ? And little wonder. Our defeats, the loss of our
navy, colonies, and tribute' has made us a poor people,
poor in hope as well as in everything else. If you want
to see cheerful faces, go to Sparta. But you will find our
proud conquerors bowing humbly before the Lord of fate
and of its holy decrees. There Zeus is not dethroned,
there Zeus has not made way for the ' King Vortex ' our
celestial wiseacres talk about so much. The Spartans
would soon put in force their ' act for the expulsion of
undesirable aliens ' if rogues of that stamp came among
them. Look at us, and look at the difference. Our young
men are as bold as you can possibly imagine ; all religious
fear has vanished long ago. And it is all the fault of the
new-fangled philosophy-teachers. True, Anaxagoras was
accused of impiety a generation ago, and sent out of the
country ; Protagoras the same. But the worst of them all
is here still : Socrates goes on in the same old way, just as
if Aristophanes (he's one of the right sort) had not exposed
him twenty years ago. And what a conceit the man has
of himself by now ! Only the other day King Archelaus
asked him to court along with all our best poets, and he
declined the honour with his usual modesty — which I call
arrogance. And then there are young foreigners from
Megara, Elis, Thebes, and as far off as Gyrene, all coming
THE UNPOPULARITY OF SOCRATES. 95
to him to benefit by his instruction. Yes, instruction ; for
though he hates to be called a teacher or sophist, the dis-
tinction is much too fine for our poor comprehension.
There he sits, in his dirty little house, with his scholars
all round him, and reads out of yellow rolls, and explains
to them, after his own fashion, the works of poets and
sophists. He lives mostly on presents from his well-to-do
'friends' or 'companions.' As for his boasting that he
knows no difference between rich and poor, and is at the
disposal of all alike, — so much the worse, say I. The other
sophists dispense their poison only when they are well paid
for it ; he scatters it abroad gratis. And would to God he
had done nothing worse than waste time and brains on the
silly problems we split our sides over when the ' Clouds '
was on the stage. If only he could have stuck to counting
the flea-lengths between Ch?erephon's eyebrow and his own
bald patch, that would not have mattered so much. But
he has taught young men to beat and bind their ' un-
reasonable ' fathers. He has shaken their faith in the
gods. Talk to the son of the Thracian woman, the bastard
Antisthenes, or to Aristippus of Cyrene, and they will soon
tell you they consider Athene, the goddess who protects
our state, as a mere name, an empty phantom. Some of
these disciples believe in no gods at -all, others in only one.
Who knows whether it is not our putting up with such
wickedness that has made our patroness angry and caused
all our disasters ?
" You don't think it likely a mere talker should have
done all this harm ? It's all simple enough. His hair-
splitting subtlety attracts all the best brains among our
young men, just as surely as the Lydian stone does a bit
of iron. These are the men he sets against religion and
makes into enemies of their country. I exaggerate, do I ?
Then listen to the facts, not to me. What greater mis-
fortune have we had in all those years of war than the mad
attempt to take Syracuse and conquer Sicily ? And who
is responsible for that lunacy, which cost us thousands of
our best citizens ? The ' fair son of Cleinias ' (Socrates'
complimentary name for him), who seduced the people into
96 GREEK THINKERS.
neglecting all the warnings of our wise and pious Nicias ;
yes, that favourite disciple Alcibiades, who also had a share
in the impious mutilation of the Hermae, and in the
insulting of the mysteries, and who finally went to Sparta
and intrigued against his country from there. And that is
not all. Just as Alcibiades destroyed our sea-power, Critias
destroyed our internal peace. Certainly he had talent.
But how did he use it ? In his tragedy ' Sisyphus,' which
was not allowed to be performed, but which went about
from hand to hand in a great number of copies, he called
belief in the gods an invention of clever men of old times.
And his life was in tune with his teaching. While here,
he was the people's worst enemy. In banishment, he
stirred up the Thessalian peasants to revolt against their
masters. And after his return what havoc he and his crew
made in the city ! And again I ask — Where did Critias get
his fine principles from, he and his gang ? They were all
of them ' companions ' of Socrates. But let him rest in
peace, he and his cousin Charmides, both of whom fell
fighting against the people. Enough of him. But let us
not forget his great-nephew Plato, another favourite of the
sophist, who does nothing but make speeches running
down our ancient and glorious constitution and the
sovereignty of the people. Only the other day I heard
him deliver himself of the remarkable sentiment that
things will never be better till the philosophers are rulers
or rulers philosophers. Perhaps he too will go abroad
some day to seek his ideal, just as his contemporary, the
son of the knight Grylus, has lately done. Haven't you
heard that Xenophon, instead of serving his own country,
has preferred to go to Asia to Cyrus the Persian pretender,
the same Cyrus who favoured our enemies, the Lacedae-
monians, so greatly ? And who do you suppose it was that
encouraged him to consult the Delphic oracle, and take its
permission to go over to the national enemy ? Who else
but his intimate friend, the grey-headed old wiseacre with
the Silenus-face and the everlasting ironical smile. It's
about time to put a spoke in his wheel. You think we
might let the old cinder burn itself out ; that it won't light
THE ACCUSERS OF SOCRATES. 97
any more bonfires in young heads ? Perhaps not. But
think of the example. What will all the young set do
when they see their chief going on with his work to the
end undisturbed, and ending his days in peace and honour ?
The affair would be simple enough if the Areopagus had
not lost its old rights ; it would just order him, fair and
square, to let the young men alone. But now there's
nothing for it but to have Socrates up before the jurors.
And one of our best men, Anytus, who was once a rich
manufacturer, but has sacrificed the best part of his
property in his country's cause, has actually taken the
matter up, and intends to lay an indictment against him.
Once let this be given out in the King Archon's court, and
we shall soon see the old man follow the example of
Anaxagoras and Protagoras. It won't cost him many tears
to leave his scolding Xanthippe ; he will take himself off
and end his days at Corinth, or Thebes, or possibly at
Megara, where they say he has plenty of devoted friends.
But let him go where he likes ; Anytus will show the same
tireless energy as when he fought with Thrasybulus against
the aristocrats, and he will not rest till he has seen the
thing through. They say he has already made sure of two
good helpers, Lycon the orator and Meletus the poet, who
will very likely get more glory out of this affair than out of
his trilogy on CEdipus. What could he have been think-
ing of to go and challenge comparison with the incompar-
able Sophocles, or even with Euripides, with whom he has
little in common beyond the smooth-brushed hair hanging
down over his cheeks ? His hawk nose, his stubby beard,
his leanness But here am I standing talking, and the
flag on the Senate-house flying already. I must be off
and get to my place in the council if I want my day's
wage. Socrates isn't going to lose me my drachma on the
top of his other crimes."
Events did not wholly fulfil the predictions of our
worthy councillor. Anytus, indeed, whom Plato represents
in the " Meno " as a fierce hater of the sophists, led on by
his own zeal and backed up by his supporters, did not fail
to bring in an indictment, which ran as follows : " Socrates
vol. 11 n
98 GREEK THINKERS.
is guilty because he does not acknowledge the gods which
the State acknowledges, but introduces other new divi-
nities ; he is further guilty because he corrupts the youth.
Punishment demanded : Death." But the accused, against
whom no warrant had been issued, falsified the expectations
of both friend and foe by obeying the summons to appear.
2. It was a fine spring morning in the year 399 B.C.
The dewdrops glittered brightly as on other days in the
cups of the anemones, the violets shed their wonted
fragrance. But that day's sun was not to reach its
meridian height before an unholy deed had been accom-
plished. It was not a holiday in the legal calendar. Great
numbers of Athenians, for the most part aged and of
slender means, had risen early that morning. They desired
to do service as jurors, for which office they were qualified
by their more than thirty years of life, their unspotted
record, and the taking of the juror's oath. Ignorant what
tasks awaited them, they betook themselves, armed with
their jurors' tablets, to the office in the market-place where
the lots were drawn. There they were distributed among
the different courts, and before it was yet well light were
on their way to their destinations, each carrying a staff
which he would find matched in colour by the lintel of the
entrance-door. Arrived there, they exchanged their staves
for tokens, the production of which at the end of the day's
proceedings entitled them to their fee of three obols (four-
pence-halfpenny) each.
Five hundred and one of these jurors had drawn a
fateful lot. When the wicket closed behind them they
were informed that they were well and truly to try the
cause of Meletus (for it was in his name that the indict-
ment was laid) and Socrates. As the charge was one of
impiety, it was the King Archon, an official chosen every
year by lot, who had conducted the preliminary inquiry,
and who now presided over the trial. The jurors took
their seats on long benches covered with matting ; accusers
and accused faced them on two adjacent platforms. Out-
side the bar stood a numerous audience. There might be
seen the massive brow of Plato, then a young man of eight
THE ACCUSERS' SPEECHES. 99
and twenty, Plato's brother Adeimantus, the haggard
Critobulus and his father Crito, Apollodorus with his
stern and penetrating gaze, accompanied by his brother
/Eantodorus. The elegant and fashionable Aristippus can
hardly have been absent, or the more rugged figures of the
Boeotians Simmias, Cebes, and Phsedondas, or the curly-
headed, young, and beautiful Phaedo, or Antisthenes, his
resolute face framed in shaggy hair.
The proceedings began with an incense-offering and a
prayer pronounced by the herald. The clerk of the court
read the indictment and the pleadings in reply. The
president then invited the representatives of the prosecu-
tion to ascend the tribune. Meletus spoke first, with
strong emphasis on his patriotic motives, and with no
little display of rhetorical art ; but his speech was not a
success. Anytus and Lycon, who followed him, were more
effective. The former disclaimed all personal animosity
against the accused. He would have been well pleased,
he declared, if Socrates had disobeyed the summons and
left the country. But now that he had put in an appear-
ance, an acquittal was undesirable, because it would
encourage the disciples to follow their master's example.
These " pupils " of Socrates and their various misdoings
figured largely in the accuser's speeches. Of the evidence
adduced by the prosecution we know nothing. It was
now the turn of Socrates. He spoke, amid frequent and
violent interruptions from Meletus, who was exasperated
by his rhetorical failure, in simple, artless style. His
speech was an improvisation, or was intended to resemble
one. It was characterized by earnestness and dignity, by
shrewdness and wit, by irony of the highest order, by
absolute self-possession, and by the disdainful omission
of all appeal to the indulgence or compassion of the judges.
Apparently it made some impression, for when the jurors
went to the tribune to deposit their voting-counters in the
two urns which stood ready to receive them, it was found
that the counters with holes in the centre, which stood for
acquittal, were only thirty short of those with a thick axle
through them.
TOO GREEK THINKERS.
The proceedings now turned on the assignment of a
penalty. In this and similar cases, the accused had to
propose an alternative punishment to the one demanded
by the prosecution. Obviously this alternative proposal
stood more or less chance of acceptance according to the
submissiveness of the defendant and the magnitude of
the penalty. In both points Socrates sorely disappointed
the expectations of the favourable portion of the jurors.
It was only with extreme reluctance, and after expressly
declaring that he was yielding to the pressure of friends
who, with Plato at their head, offered themselves as sureties
for him, that he proposed to pay the modest fine of three
thousand drachmas. At the same time, he protested in
emphatic language, such as the representatives of the
sovereign people were not accustomed to have addressed
to them, against the justice of the verdict which had been
recorded. The result was a great increase in the hostile
majority. No fewer than 360 votes were cast for the
penalty of death.
3. We have endeavoured to extract from Plato's im-
mortal description those facts as to whose historical truth
there can be no doubt. The " Apology " is not a verbatim
report. Even the externalities of judicial procedure are
described in a manner which suggests the adaptation of
the truth to the exigencies of style. There is at least one
palpable instance of this. Plato makes Socrates announce
his intention of calling a witness for the defence ; this
witness is not heard of again. In all the forensic speeches
of Attic orators which have been preserved to us, though
each of them is reported as the continuous utterance of a
single speaker, the examination of a witness is indicated
by a formula of citation addressed to him, and the paren-
thetic insertion of the word " deposition," just as in other
cases the reading of an extract from the statute-book is
indicated by a similar use of the word " law." Plato adopts
a different plan. Here, as elsewhere, he is unwilling to
follow a set pattern ; perhaps, too, he wishes to avoid all
appearance of having aimed at exhaustiveness and minute
accuracy. From the single instance, to which we have
SOCRATIC SPIRIT OF THE "APOLOGY? IOI
alluded, of discrepancy between promise and performance,
it seems only fair to assume that similar liberties have
been taken in other particulars. For example, it does not
appear to us very probable that the brother of Chnerephon
the above-mentioned witness for the defence, can have
been the only witness called in the course of the whole
trial. And in point of fact, there is a passage in the first
speech of Socrates from which this conjecture receives
strong confirmation. It is the passage where Socrates
challenges Meletus to repair his former omission, and call
as witnesses for the prosecution the fathers and brothers,
there present in court, of the young men alleged to have
been corrupted. They would, he says, be sure to give
testimony in exactly the opposite sense to that expected
of them, and would accord him their unanimous and
enthusiastic support. This support is so strongly insisted
on, and its probative force discussed at such length, that
we cannot but conjecture that something more than
a hypothetical incident is referred to. In other words,
l'lato has made use of this artifice, for stylistic or personal
reasons, in order to avoid mentioning such evidence for the
defence as actually was given in the course of the trial.
But it is necessary to consider Socrates' speeches a little
more closely and examine into their correspondence with
fact.
There is not the slightest ground for doubting that
Plato reproduces the genuine and original tone of Socrates'
speeches. And the same may be said of the spirit in
which the defence was conducted. Deviation from the
historical truth in either of these respects could not be
justified on the score of artistic freedom ; it would have
been an offence against art and duty alike. [Moreover, the
spirit and purpose of the defence is in the best possible
harmony with all we know of the historical Socrates, as
well as with the situation created by the indictment. No
one would expect to find that Socrates had been anxious
to save his life at any and every cost. But, on the other
hand, nothing warrants us in assuming that he was reso-
lute to die, either from fear of the infirmities of age or
102 GREEK THINKERS.
J
from a desire to crown his career by martyrdom, y The
truth seems rather to be that life had no value for him
unless he might be at liberty to live as he had always done,
and to practise unhindered the peculiar calling he had
chosen for himself. Within the limits thus indicated he
was ready, as we learn from the " Apology," to make the
substantial concession implied by his offer to submit to a
fine. But from this position he is not to be moved so much
as a hair's breadth ; he will hear of no compromise ; even
the idea of a tacit agreement is repulsive to him. It can-
not be denied that the course he took diminished the
chances in his favour. But that it absolutely destroyed
them is disproved by the smallness of the majority by
which he was found guilty. There is one objection which
may be raised, not without plausibility, against this view
— an objection drawn from the defiant tone of the second
speech of Socrates.
" 1 am conscious of no guilt. Not only do I deserve no
punishment, but I feel myself worthy of the highest distinction
it is in the power of the State to bestow — maintenance in the
Prytaneum."
Certainly a convicted prisoner who uses this language
seems to court rather than avoid the threatened penalty of
death. But this utterance must be judged by the context.
It immediately precedes the not inconsiderable concession
contained in the proposal of an alternative punishment. If
Socrates' strong and well-founded feeling of self-respect
was not to be wounded by this proposal, and if no colour
was to be given to the idea that he was accepting an
implied bargain— the judges to forego the death-penalty,
the accused to give up the practice of his calling — if
Socrates was to provide against all such misapprehension,
and at the same time avoid striking a heavy blow at his
own dignity, it was necessary to redress the balance by a
piece of self-assertion rising as much above the general
level of the speech, as, in consenting to a penalty, he fell
below it.
FORENSIC ART OF THE "APOLOGY* IO3
If we read the speeches for the defence with due atten-
tion, we cannot but admire the extraordinary display of
forensic skill by which they are characterized, in spite of
their apparent artlessness and simplicity of arrangement.
To the main accusation — that of religious heterdoxy — it is
clear that there was no valid answer. On the other hand,
much had been laid to the charge of Socrates by the comic
writers, especially Aristophanes, which could not only be
truthfully denied, but could easily be shown to rest on
confusion and misunderstanding. Accordingly, the refuta-
tion of these vague charges is placed in the forefront of
the defence, and their substance ingeniously condensed
into a formula of indictment to which precedence is given
over that actually employed by the prosecution. The
latter, too, is treated with considerable freedom. It is not
quoted with complete verbal accuracy, as we see from a
comparison of its authentic wording, which is preserved
elsewhere, and as is indicated by the use of the phrase,
" something of this sort." The object of the inaccuracy is
to bring into greater prominence the part of the indictment
which could be more easily met — the charge of corrupting
the youth. The defence on the main count of impiety
is handled on the principle, as old as Homer, of placing
weak troops in the centre and supporting them on both
sides by the more efficient portions of the army. Thus
Socrates reserves the strongest argument in his favour, the
appeal to the favourable disposition towards himself of
the relatives of the young men said to have been corrupted,
for the close of his speech. And in the theoretical treat-
ment of the same charge we can trace the hand of a skilled
advocate. We do not refer to the argument — valid for
Socrates and Plato, but a transparent fallacy for us — that
no one can intentionally make those with whom he comes
into contact worse, because he would himself suffer the
consequences of their deterioration. If that were so, there
could be no thieves' academies, no fathers who bring up
their sons to dishonesty, no mothers who devote their
daughters to vice. In reality the profit which he who
leads another astray derives, or hopes to derive, from
104 GREEK THINKERS.
his pernicious work may often outweigh all prospective
injury to himself ; or, at any rate, influence the will more
strongly because of its immediate nearness. Besides, the
injury to character may be, or appear to be, partial, and
such as not to affect the relations of the two parties. To
Socrates, however, and to his followers the assertion in
question was a true corollary of the more comprehensive
doctrine that no one does wrong of his own free will, and
that the virtues are one. It is not here, however, that we
recognize the master hand of the advocate, but in the
passage where Meletus — a man to whom popular favour
was of the first importance, especially in the law courts —
is driven step by step to the absurd admission that all the
Athenians, with the exception of Socrates, are experts in
education and busily occupied in promoting the moral
improvement of the young.
We have thus abundant cause to admire the technical
skill of the author — be he Socrates or Plato — of the defence.
But our astonishment grows when we extend our survey,
and, instead of regarding single passages, view the whole.
Whether jurors or mere readers were to be influenced, the
problem attacked was how to make the work of Socrates
comprehensible to men whose grade of culture made it
impossible for them to appreciate it in its true and original
form. What strikes us first of all is the fact that there is
in these speeches not a syllable of what, on the unimpeach-
able testimony of Aristotle, was the central feature of
Socrates' activity — the investigation of concepts. His
dialectic had two sides, which, to use a phrase coined by
Grote, we may call the positive and the negative arm of
his philosophy. To the great mass of his contemporaries
the second of these two was much better known than the
first. A master of the arts of criticism and debate, always
ready with captious argument and insidious irony, always
able to overwhelm his opponent with shame and confusion,
— such, with the general public, was the unenviable reputa-
tion of Socrates ; such was the character in which he had
made enemies without number. But the " Apology "
invests the unpopular figure of the controversialist with the
SOCRATES AND THE ORACLE OF DELPHI. 105
glamour of a religious mission. His passionately devoted
friend Chaerephon, now no more, went to Delphi, as his
brother will presently depose, and received from the oracle
the response that no man was wiser than Socrates. The
latter was thrown into the deepest perplexity by this
deliverance of the god, which stood in such sharp con-
trast with his own consciousness of ignorance. Surely
Apollo could not lie ; it became his duty to discover
the hidden meaning of the divine pronouncement. It
was a task from which there was no escape ; hence his
"wanderings," his attempt to probe the wisdom of all whom
the world held wise — statesmen, poets, craftsmen. This
pilgrimage had sown the seeds of hatred against him, and
was the true origin of the present indictment. He had
himself learnt from it the lesson that all other men were,
like himself, destitute of real wisdom, but, in thinking
themselves wise, suffered from a delusion from which he
was free. This, then, was the purport of the voice from
Delphi. The wisdom of man, so the Pythia meant to
say, is but a pitiful thing ; those are in the best case who
— Socrates, for example — -are fully aware of their lack of
wisdom. Before we consider the effectiveness of this plea,
we must examine into its foundation in fact. There are
here two things which must be kept strictly apart — the
response of the Delphic oracle itself, and its effect on the
career of Socrates. Of the historical reality of the former
we do not think there can be the slightest doubt. No one
could credit Plato with the unprincipled folly of attempting
to pass off an invention of his own for evidence given at
a recent trial, with the object of influencing present and
future opinion upon an event of great importance.. But
though the fact is clear of doubt, it is not easy to explain
it in any satisfactory manner. Can it have been that the
wholesome influence of Socrates' discourses }iad been re-
cognized at Delphi, and esteemed so highly that it was
thought advisable to help him by a declaration in his
favour? Or had the sympathies of the aristocratically
disposed priests of Delphi, been won by his scorn for the
helplessness of popular assemblies and the democratic
106 GREEK THINKERS.
government of ignorance ? Or was it the deep reverence
of Socrates for Apollo and his sanctuary, which at a time
of religious doubt seemed to the guardians of the oracle
worthy of a grateful recompense ? Those are questions
we shall never be able to answer. One thing, however, is
sure :\ the use made of the oracle in the " Apology " is un-
histoncal. It is represented as having given the starting
impulse to the whole of Socrates' public activity. But,
before this activity began, how could anything be known
of him at Delphi ? He owed his reputation to his work,
and it is in the highest degree improbable that the oracle
should have admitted the claims of a totally unknown
aspirant to wisdom. Nor is it conceivable that his dialectic
genius was first roused into activity by that message. As
a matter of history, it is not true that his dialectic was
exclusively devoted to the purpose here assigned to it.
But the question still remains undecided whether it is Plato
or Socrates that here speaks to us. For in glancing back,
even over one's own past, it is possible to fall into an error
of perspective. It is possible to ascribe to a particular
experience a significance which it did not possess, and an
influence it never exerted. In this case, however, the more
probable assumption is that Plato has deliberately em-
ployed a skilled artifice ; that is, if any weight is to be
allowed to the argument from effect to cause. For the
effect of this presentation of the case might well have
been very considerable. " This, then, is the truth," so
might many an unsuspecting reader exclaim, " about that
much-talked-of cross-questioning of Socrates. That in
which we could see nothing but petulant malice, offensive
and shameless quibbling, was in reality the outcome of
profound modesty, a protest against excessive praise, and,
before everything, a pious attempt to understand and
justify a divine message." We are able to give a much
more decided verdict on that portion of the defence which
is devoted to the positive arm of the Socratic philosophy.
Here, as we observe with not a little surprise, the apology
is in contradiction not only with the estimate of Socrates
formed by all his contemporaries, but, which is much more
TRUTH AND FICTION IN THE "APOLOGY." \OJ
important, with the central feature of his ethical teaching,
as known to us on unimpeachable testimony. One portion
of the " Apology " not only places in the foreground that
testing of men's wisdom which Socrates undertook in con-
sequence of the Delphic oracle, but makes it fill up his
entire life. Another portion, however, of the same speech
presents us with a totally different picture. Socrates still
describes himself as devoted to " the service of the god,"
but the similarity of phrase conceals an entire change of
meaning. Socrates now assumes the role of an exhorter
and a preacher of virtue, one who addresses all he meets —
foreigners and fellow-countrymen alike — and tries to per-
suade them to take thought for their highest interests, to
leave the struggle for honour and wealth and devote them-
selves to the well-ordering of their own souls. We need not
dwell on the improbability that such a Socrates should
have been the original of the Socrates of the comic stage.
It is enough to point out that all we know of his positive
ethical teaching is in contradiction with this account of
him. The doctrine "Virtue is knowledge" is quite irre-
concilable with it. He who knows what is good, does it :
he needs no exhortation ; it is vain to address him in the
language of persuasion or encouragement ; instruction and
the clearing up of his ideas are alone of use. We cannot,
therefore, accept the passage in question as an adequate
version of the facts. But it is just as far from being an
arbitrary invention. Plato has substituted a " protreptic "
purpose, as has recently been remarked, for the " protreptic "
effect of Socrates' discourses. More exactly, what Plato
makes out to be the direct result of conscious and delibe-
rate effort, was in truth an indirect result, sometimes aimed
at by Socrates and sometimes not. For the charm of his
talk often fascinated even those who resisted it, diverted
their interest from the externals of life, and induced them
to occupy themselves with the highest and deepest matters.
But that which produced these effects was formally an
investigation of concepts. A writer who saw in the clearing
up and deepening of conceptions an important aid to moral
progress, and who wished to impart this conviction of his
108 GREEK THINKERS.
to men who were unable to understand the connexion,
might well light on the plan of suddenly metamorphosing
the analyzer of morality into a preacher of morality.
Plato here sacrifices accuracy of facts to accuracy of
impression. He presents us with an adaptation of the
truth, not with the truth itself, which, seen through the
distorting medium of a limited intelligence, would have
appeared in the shape of gross error. His procedure
resembles that of a maker of telescopes who corrects the
action of one lens by the addition of a second of equal but
opposite curvature. And if, in either case, the correction
turns out to be excessive, as may easily happen, the necessary
imperfection of all things human must be held responsible.
4. The foregoing considerations preclude us from re-
garding the " Apology " as a perfectly faithful reproduction
of the speeches actually delivered in court. With the
means at our disposal, it is impossible to establish a clear
division between what is truth and what is fiction. But
there are two points which should not be forgotten. No
ancient author saw any harm in transforming or embellish-
ing the speeches of his hero, or in bringing them nearer to
his own ideal of perfection. In Plato's political theories,
the "useful lie," employed as medicine, plays a considerable
part ; and it would be strange if this principle had not
affected his practice as an author, or if he had allowed the
flow of his eloquence to be checked by scruples regarding
verbal truth. On the other hand, neither he nor any of
the companions of Socrates would have thought it other
than a disloyal and presumptuous act to ignore altogether
the actual speech of the master in his own defence, and
substitute for it newly invented matter. We are thus
compelled to recognize the coexistence of truth and fiction
in the "Apology," and to renounce all hope of completely
separating them. All that we can maintain with any
confidence is that the artistic structure of the whole work
is due to Plato, and that the second speech, which is both
the shortest of the three and the most closely bound up
with the course of the trial, contains the greatest proportion
of genuine Socratic property.
THE TONE OF THE "APOLOGY." 1 09
In one sense, perhaps in the highest sense, the whole
of the "Apology" may be called the property of Socrates.
The intellectual and artistic qualities of this work are no
doubt important enough, and we have been obliged to
devote considerable attention to them. But more important
still is the greatness of soul which gives colour and co-
herence to the whole marvellous creation. This is still
more characteristic of Socrates than of Plato. The mixture
or rather the intimate fusion of sober sense and fervid
enthusiasm, the disdain of all externals, the faith in the
victorious might of reasoned thought, the firm conviction
that the " good man " is proof against all strokes of fortune,
the cheerful confidence with which such a man goes his
way and suffers neither fears nor hopes to divert him from
the fulfilment of his task, — all this has made the "Apology"
a lay breviary of strong and free spirits, which even now,
after twenty-three centuries, moves men's souls and kindles
their hearts. It is one of the most virile books in the
whole of literature ; few others are so well adapted to foster
the manly virtue of self-possession. It is difficult to place
in the right light the relation of this work to religion.
There is much concerning the gods in it ; but of servile
feeling towards the gods, of fear of them, or $£t<riSai[wvia
of any kind, there is as little as in the didactic poem of
Lucretius. The divine voices whose strains reach our ears
are in truth a chorus, and they accompany, but do not
overpower, the leading part, the personality and the con-
science of Socrates. The characteristic quality of the work
is manifested most clearly in the final speech, delivered by
Socrates after sentence of death has been passed. This is
the portion of the work which we should naturally be most
ready to regard as an addition of purely Platonic origin ;
yet it is the part in which the true Socratic tone is best
preserved. The question of immortality is raised, but left
perfectly undecided. The two possibilities are discussed :
either there is a continued existence of the dead, or death .
is like a deep, dreamless sleep ; but neither alternative is
accorded any preference. On whichever side the reality may
lie, in neither case is death to be called an evil. And that
IIO GREEK THINKERS.
is not all. In the passage where the possibility of a future
existence is faced, the picture of the life to come is stripped
equally of its gloomy terrors and of its more than earthly
raptures. There is nothing here of those joys of heaven
or those torments of hell which Plato describes so often in
his other writings.
The imperturbable composure which marked Socrates
during his life accompanies him in his passage to the
world beyond. There, in spirit, he consorts with the
semi-divine heroes of the early world as with his own
friends and equals ; he cross - examines them, and
promises himself no little pleasure and instruction from
their replies. With the like genial humour he congratu-
lates himself on the fact that, in Hades at least, freedom
of thought cannot be a crime visited with capital punish-
ment. How to meet death cheerfully is a lesson which
has been learnt from the "Apology," even by those who
do not believe that they thereby enter into the joys of
Paradise.
It is possible that the example of Socrates may have
produced even greater effects than his teaching. Every
one knows that the execution of the sentence was delayed
by the necessity of awaiting the arrival of the sacred ship
from Delos, and that the condemned prisoner employed
the respite in continuing his accustomed conversations with
his disciples, and partly in versifying the fables of ^Esop.
This latter task he undertook out of deference to a divine
command which, like many others before it, had been
communicated to him in a dream. He was bidden to
occupy himself with " music," that is to say, with some
form of art. Perhaps here too we should see a suggestion
emerging from the depths of the subconscious (cf. p. 88),
and bidding him strive towards perfection by supplement-
ing a deficiency of his natural endowment. How, when
his last hour approached, he sent away his lamenting
relatives, comforted his weeping disciples, exchanged a
few friendly words with the jailor, and then quietly and
calmly drained the cup of hemlock, all this forms a picture
which it would be wasted labour to paint anew, for it
THE CASE FOR THE ATHENIANS. Ill
stands, in colours ever fresh and vivid, in the pages of
Plato's " Phaedo."
5. As long as men live on the earth that day's trial
will never be forgotten. Never will the voice of mourning
cease for the man who first gave his life to the cause of
free inquiry. Must we also regard him as a victim of
fanatical intolerance ? On this question opinions are still
divided. There are some who never weary of denouncing
that verdict as a judicial murder of the worst type, as an
ineffaceable stain on the blazon of the Athenian state.
Others, less numerous, take the part of the " law-abiding "
as against the " revolutionary," and greedily seize on
everything which seems to detract from the greatness of
Socrates. We, for our part, are convinced that the fatal
event was only in a small degree the outcome of prejudice
and misunderstanding ; that to a far greater extent and in
decisive measure it was the issue of a fully justified conflict.
Hegel, to our thinking, has rightly stated the merits of the
case. Two views of life, one might almost say two phases
of humanity, strove for mastery on that day. The move-
ment inaugurated by Socrates was one destined to confer
incalculable benefits on the human race ; for the Athens
of that day it was a doubtful blessing.^ The right of the
community to assert itself and to combat disorganizing
influences was in conflict with the right of a great person-
ality to open new paths and enter upon them in bold
defiance of rigid traditions and all the menaces of authority.
This right of the individual will be doubted by far fewer
among those to whom these pages are addressed than the
antagonistic right of the State. " Was it not entirely un-
worthy of a civilized and highly cultivated people " — thus
we can imagine many a reader exclaiming — "to violate in
such gross fashion the right of free speech ? " We answer
that the right of free speech must be reckoned, because of
its beneficent consequences, among the most precious
possessions of mankind ; but that it has nowhere and never
existed absolutely without limit. In our own century it
has found no warmer-hearted or more enlightened defender
than John Stuart Mill. Yet this ardent advocate of
I I 2 GREEK THINKERS.
individual freedom is unable to avoid recognizing limits
restrictive of it.
" No one pretends " — so runs a passage of that magnificent
book, " On Liberty" — " that actions should be as free as opinions.
On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity when the
circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to con-
stitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous
act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or
that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when
simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punish-
ment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before
the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the
same mob in the form of a placard."
And how, we may ask, if the contents of the placard
are made public in a newspaper, the day before the
meeting ? Or if the mob is not yet assembled, but may
assemble at any moment ? It is plain to all that the line
here drawn is a fluctuating one, which varies according to
the magnitude and the proximity of a threatened danger,
and according to the efficacy and trustworthiness of the
means of defence. In fact, no community, however pene-
trated its members may have been by a sense of the value
and importance of free theoretic discussion, has gone so
far as to allow such freedom always and in all circumstances,
including those in which its vital interests were at stake
And here we must remember the weakness of ancient
states. Those little city-republics were weak in numbers,
and doubly weak in the necessity they were under of
guarding against the ever-threatening danger of attack by
their neighbours. And that which in itself was an element
of strength, the homogeneity of the population, might
easily, from our present point of view, become an element
of weakness. The diffusion of doctrines dangerous to the
State may go a long way in our modern communities of
large and moderate size before the decisive step from
theory to practice becomes anything but a remote possi-
bility. A considerable fraction of the population may
be permeated by such doctrines, while other important
FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND THE ANCIENT STA TE.ll$
sections of it provide a powerful counterpoise. Consider
the contrast between the agricultural class and the bour-
geoisie, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariate. The
contrasts of this type which existed in ancient Athens had
lost much of their original sharpness through the wearing
action of time and the efforts of great statesmen directed
to this very end. The country population was subject to
town influences. It was only in the not very frequent
case of law-revision proper that the demes, or districts,
were invited to anything like independent co-operation.
The fate of Athens was decided daily on the Pnyx. That
the continuance of a state and its institution depends in
the last resort on the loyalty of the citizens is, of course, a
universal truth. But it may be affirmed in a still more
literal sense of ancient states. Any shock to the founda-
tion of the State was immediately felt. It travelled un-
hindered from the base to the summit of the edifice. There
were no intermediate elements to deaden the blow. The
interests of the State lacked the protection afforded by the
hereditary transmission of the supreme magistracy, by an
organized military power and a system of public depart-
ments. Athens possessed no royal family, no standing army,
no bureaucracy. All the greater was the need that the
State should be able to count on the loyalty of the citizens.
These consisted, as always and everywhere, of a small
minority of leaders and a great majority of led. To the
former category belonged chiefly those who could use most
skilfully the weapon of the spoken word. This superiority,
again, was acquired or enhanced by dialectical and rhetorical
training. It is thus very intelligible that a master of dialectic
who for several decades exercised a continuous influence on
many of the most ambitious and the most capable of the
rising generation, and who was at the same time the most
original thinker of his age on ethics and politics, should
become a political factor of no small importance, and a
great power for good or evil.
That the influence of Socrates was regarded by wide
circles of men as an influence for evil, is a fact which must
be regarded as the common result of several different
VOL. TI. I
114 GREEK THINKERS.
causes. The shadow cast by Alcibiades and Critias, who
grievously injured their country, upon the figure of their
master may perhaps at first sight seem an unfortunate
accident. For Xenophon is probably right in maintaining
that, with Critias at least, the chief motive for seeking the
society of Socrates was a desire for political power, and
that in what relates to the growth of character neither he
nor Alcibiades received any deep or lasting impression
from him. But, apart from this, it is intelligible enough
that among the many young men of high aims who chose
this particular form of education, some few were found
whose subsequent careers were disastrous to the State.
That which might seem better to deserve the name of an
unhappy accident is the circumstance that among those
who did the State signal service there were none who had
sat at the feet of Socrates. But the causes of this lie
deeper, and are of twofold nature. The reader is familiar
with the fact that Socrates was no friend of the existing
democratic constitution, which did not harmonize with his
doctrine of the supremacy of the intellect. Xenophon
quotes the " accuser " (probably the Anytus of the work
written by the litterateur Poly crates several years after
the trial) as bringing the following charge, among others,
against Socrates : " Socrates has made his companions
despisers of the existing laws." To this charge Xenophon
has no relevant reply to make. He merely denies that
the master ever incited his disciples to " violent " attacks
on the constitution. And there is a still more important
point. It was not merely to the order of things then
prevailing in their country towards which the friends
of Socrates maintained an attitude of aloofness or un-
friendliness, but towards that country itself as well. In
this connexion Xenophon, by his life, provided more
material for the accusation against his teacher than he
was able to destroy by the whole of his writings on
the side of the defence. And just as Xenophon was
much in Persia and Sparta, Plato was almost more at
home at Syracuse than in his native city. Antisthenes
and Aristippus deliberately shunned public life, and in
SOCRATES NO PATRIOT. I 15
the school of the former the " world-citizenship " of the
wise man was preached in plain terms and made an article
of faith. That the disciples were here following in their
master's footsteps, no one will deny.
Nor are we left entirely to conjecture. It was matter
of universal astonishment that, in spite of his great gifts,
Socrates abstained from serving the State. Plato repre-
sents him in the " Apology " as urging in his defence the
strange plea that " if a man really wishes to fight against
injustice, his place is in private, not in public life." And
this judgment is supported on the only possible grounds,
the alleged uselessness of all such effort, the hopelessness
of the political situation, the incorrigibility of the multitude.
For this is the only possible meaning of Socrates' assertion
that if he had taken an active interest in politics, he could
not have reached an advanced age, that he would again
and again have been compelled to risk his life in a conflict
with the people from which the latter would have derived
no advantage. And this, be it observed, is the very same
people which served as model for Pericles' funeral oration.
Surely, when this people had bowed beneath defeat and
had been purified by suffering, it could not have been
truly termed unmanageable material in the hands of a
benevolent and wise artificer of states. It is difficult to
think of these things without a feeling of profound regret.
One of the noblest and most teachable of peoples is
abandoned by a group of its best men, who coldly turn
their backs upon it and declare all efforts for its improve-
ment to be so much lost labour. But instead of wasting
time in regrets, let us endeavour to understand. That
Socrates and his friends were lacking in true and heart-
felt love of their home, is incontestable. But the explana-
tion is not that Socrates was, as Frances Wright said to
Bentham, though in a somewhat different sense, an
" icicle ; " but that he was full of a different and a new
ideal. " Knowledge " is not Athenian ; " sober sense "
is not Spartan ; " courage " is not Corinthian. Where
anything and everything is haled before the bar of reason,
where no tradition is respected as such, but everything
I 1 6 GREEK THINKERS.
is required to be justified by thought and reflexion, it
is impossible that a local patriotism confined to a city
of a few square miles should preserve all its ancient
strength. Indifference towards that " corner of earth
where fate had pitched one's body " was bound to be
the result (though the alleged Socratic saying we have
just cited from Epictetus may be apocryphal) where
preoccupation with universal humanity thrust everything
else into the background. It was the fate of philosophy
from the very first to exert a disintegrating influence
upon national sentiments and institutions. The reader
will remember the much-travelled, deep-thinking, old
minstrel whose trenchant criticism made an incurable
breach in Greek life. At the point we have now reached
in our historical exposition the contrast between philo-
sophic criticism and national ideals may be said to have
been both deeper and more notorious. It was the old
narrowness, the old homeliness, the old warmth and
strength of Greek life, which the philosophers now
threatened to destroy. The morality of the understanding-
was quickly followed by the cult of world-citizenship.
.Behind the latter we descry a world-empire, and behind
that again a world-religion.
Not that we have any desire to suggest that in the
spring of the year 399, Anytus, Lycon, and Meletus looked
so far ahead as all this. But if they had their doubts as
to the affection of Socrates and his friends for their country
and its constitution, if they saw in his reasonings and
investigations of concepts a danger to the national religion
and the whole national existence, and if they therefore
resolved, at a particularly critical moment in Athenian
history, to silence the spokesman of the new tendency,
we ought neither to be greatly astonished, nor yet to
attribute to these men any unusual depravity of heart
or limitation of intellect. What they wished to do
was to silence Socrates, nothing more and nothing less.
In a modern state such an object might have been much
more easily attained. The deprivation of a professorship,
the institution of a disciplinary inquisition, or, in states
SOCRATES MUST BE SILENCED. WJ
of more restricted liberty, an inhibition by the police,
an expulsion, or an administrative transference ; any one
of these means would have served the purpose. But in
Athens it was otherwise. None of these methods was
admissible ; nothing but a criminal trial could meet the
situation. And the only handle which the law provided
was a prosecution for impiety. The conservative spirit
of the Athenian democracy had so far prevailed that the
ancient and rigorous enactment, by which atheism was
punishable with death, was not abrogated, but superseded
by a more tolerant practice. We learn from Plato and
Xenophon, who had no motive for misrepresentation, and
would have greatly preferred to throw the whole responsi-
bility for the fatal issue on the accusers and judges, that
Socrates might easily have escaped death if he had liked.
He was free not to appear before the court, and yet
he appeared before it. He was free to propose the
alternative penalty of exile, and there was every proba-
bility that such a proposal would have been accepted.
And even if he did not wish to do that, he was free to
avoid the penalty of death if he would have modelled
his behaviour to some slight extent on the regular custom
of defendants, and not entirely disdained to appeal to the
pity of his judges. And lastly, even after sentence had
been pronounced, it would have been an easy matter for
him to escape from custody. Full preparations had been
made, as Plato informs us in the " Crito," to assist him in
his flight. But he was made of sterner stuff. He was
one of those whose mission it is to force the thoughts
and feelings of men into new channels. He would
consent to no compromise. His resolve was firm and un-
alterable ; either he would continue to teach or he would
cease to live.
The stories which were told in later ages of the repent-
ance of the Athenians, of a statue erected to Socrates, and
of punishment meted out to his accusers, have long been
recognized, chiefly on the ground of the chronological im-
possibilities involved in them, as pure fabrications. That
to which the execution of Socrates really gave rise was a
Il8 GREEK THINKERS.
series of literary duels. The literary presentment by
Polycrates of the case for the prosecution was followed by
a reply from the pen of that industrious and talented writer
of speeches, Lysias. The subject continued to be a favourite
theme for rhetorical exercises down to the late Roman age,
from which a specimen, the " Apology " of Libanius, has
been preserved to us. But the predominant feeling of the
Athenian people is clearly manifested by the circumstance
that, after the lapse of more than half a century, the states-
man and orator ^Eschines could hope to advance the cause
which he was then promoting by addressing the assembled
people in the following words : " Again, men of Athens,
you put to death Socrates the sophist, because it was
proved that Critias, one of the thirty destroyers of the
democracy, had been educated by him." *
The dead Socrates rose again, not only in the schools,
but also in the writings of his disciples. They never
wearied of introducing the person of their venerated master,
visiting the market-place and the gymnasia, and holding
converse with old and young, as had been his custom
during life. Thus in very truth he continued to teach,
even after he had ceased to live.
We must now turn our attention to the motley host of
the Socratics, with their divisions and subdivisions. We
begin with a man of little significance as a thinker, but of
great interest as a witness and an historical authority —
Xenophon.
* " In Timarchum," delivered B.C. 345.
XENOPHON 'S CHARA CTER. I 1 9
CHAPTER VI.
XENOPHON.
i. XENOPHON possessed in rich measure the not unmixed
blessing of personal beauty. It is a gift which, in the male
sex, is apt to be associated with arrogance and self-com-
placency. Nor did the "wondrously fair" son of Grylus
escape this misfortune. He remained for the whole of his
life a dilettante, in Goethe's sense of the word, that is, a
man who is always venturing on tasks for which he is not
fully equipped. We must, however, allow an exception in
the case of one of the fields of his many-sided activity.
Xenophon was an expert in sport, as a hunter and rider ;
and the three minor writings which he devoted to his
favourite pursuits (the works on hunting and riding, and
the book entitled " The Captain of Cavalry ") are really
the best that he ever produced. Here, where he least
affects the title, he is most of a philosopher. His observa-
tions on the psychology of animals, and the conclusions he
drew from them, show much greater acumen than his dis-
quisitions on philosophy and morals, or on history and
politics. Further, the most valuable of the talents with
which he was endowed, the gift of minute and accurate
observation, here comes into play in the most delightful
fashion. His love of nature, his simple and hearty joy in
the doings of animals, make these works as agreeable
reading as the best parts of his " CEconomicus," a book in
which the quiet enjoyment of country life and labour pro-
duces much the same refreshing and invigorating effect
upon us as the smell of newly turned earth.
120 GREEK THINKERS.
Was it want of means or was it ambition that impelled
him to leave these peaceful scenes and to enter upon a
career of adventure ? Most probably both. He was still
in the twenties when he left Athens ; he never returned,
except, perhaps, to pay a flying visit, and he died abroad
in advanced old age. At first he turned his face towards
the East. Fame and riches might be sooner won there
than in his native city. The long and harassing war had
ended in defeat, and Athens had been immediately
entangled in civic broils, in which Xenophon's party had
been worsted. As it so happened, Cyrus, the younger
brother of the Persian king Artaxerxes (Mnemon), a prince
distinguished by great liberality, and possibly by other
virtues, was at that moment raising mercenaries in Thrace
and in Greece, with the view of contesting his brother's
throne. By the good offices of a friend, Xenophon
obtained an introduction to the Persian pretender at
Sardis, and was received by him with the greatest friend-
liness.
We do not learn what position was assigned him at the
court and in the camp. Can it be true that he was only
expected to give the philhellenic prince the pleasure of his
society, and perhaps exchange repartees at the royal table
with the " clever and beautiful " Aspasia, one of the prince's
morganatic consorts ? Or was the Athenian's emphatic
denial that he had ever undertaken to serve Cyrus in a
military capacity only made because the Persian prince
had recently been the consistent supporter of Sparta against
Athens ? In any case, his connection with Cyrus did give
rise to some doubts in his mind on this score. And the
way in which he silenced these scruples reveals to us a not
very pleasing side of his character. Socrates, with whom
Xenophon was familiar, and whose advice he used to seek
at every turn, gave expression to the doubts we have
mentioned, and recommended him to consult the Delphic
oracle. The disciple followed his master's counsel in a
manner which very properly caused the latter grave dis-
satisfaction. Instead of clearly stating what he designed
to do, he inquired of the oracle which was the god from whom
" SUP PR ESS 10 VERI" IN XE NOP HON. 121
he might expect to obtain by prayer and sacrifice a successful
issue of his undertaking. This device of concealment,
which the pious Xenophon did not shrink from employing
in face of the Pythian tripod, is one of which we may be
sure he did not fail to make abundant use in his relations
with men, and in particular with his readers. And the road
from concealment to deception is terribly steep. We may
learn this from a rapid glance through the most famous of
Xenophon's books, his narrative of his Persian adventures.
We know how that campaign speedily ended in disaster.
Cyrus fell in the first battle he fought against his royal
brother ; the Greek mercenaries were soon afterwards
deprived of their commanders by a trick of the satrap
Tissaphernes, and the leaderless host of the "Ten Thousand"
began that retreat, famous for the bold and successful
conquest of countless difficulties, of which Xenophon him-
self wrote the history. The fresh, vivid, and graphic style
of the narrative entitles this work to the highest praise.
Moreover, it gives much valuable information on the
manners and customs of the peoples through whose terri-
tories the Greeks passed, generally fighting their way, on
their homeward march ; and the lifelike vigour and the
humour of the descriptions are truly delightful.
Unfortunately, there is a dark as well as a bright side
to the book. That a writer of memoirs should lay parti-
cular emphasis on his own merit, that he should place
his successes in a strong light and draw a veil over his
failures, is, perhaps, not more than may be set down to
ordinary human weakness. Of course, the man who writes
contemporary history after this fashion sinks to a level of
mediocrity far enough removed from all that is genuinely
great in historical writing. But these and cognate faults
attain, in Xenophon's " Anabasis," to a magnitude which is
highly damaging to the character, not only of the historian,
but of the man. In particular, he brings his own personality
upon the stage in a manner which gives the impression of
the most obtrusive self-glorification. Immediately after
that dark day when the host of mercenaries was plunged
in helpless confusion by the loss of its generals, Xenophon
122 GREEK THINKERS.
emerges from the obscurity in which, with the exception of
two passing references, he has hitherto studiously shrouded
himself. He now comes forward like the sun rising in his
splendour to scatter the shades of night. An encouraging
dream has instructed him upon his mission. In the early
morning he summons together first the inner, then the
outer circle of officers, to whom he offers himself as leader,
and is actually chosen by them to take the place of one
of the five murdered generals. He then dons the hand-
somest accoutrements he can lay hands on — observe his
pride in his personal appearance, and his anxiety to make
effective use of it — and addresses the assembled army in
a speech many pages long. Afterwards we have other
speeches, reported with equal fulness, just as the first
fateful dream is followed by another of the same kind.
There is an art of deception which produces false im-
pressions without the use of many false statements. Of
this art Xenophon was a master. His narrative has given
rise to a widespread opinion, held in ancient as well as
modern times, that he was the leader of the Ten Thousand
in their retreat. And yet Xenophon nowhere affirms this
by so much as a single word. According to the account
he has himself given, the army possessed a democratic
constitution ; important decisions were arrived at by a show
of hands, and, as to the executive power, Xenophon was
always one among several generals ; the man who really was
in sole command for a time was not he, but Cheirisophus
the Spartan. It was only in the last phase of the under-
taking, when the retreat from Asia had been effected, that
the majority of the survivors entered the service of the
Thracian prince Seuthes under Xenophon, who was not the
first in command, but the most influential of the generals.
But he shows such skill in the grouping of facts ; he con-
trives with such logical consistency to ascribe to himself the
initiative in every important resolution ; he places himself
so persistently in the foreground of the narrative, — that the
reader imperceptibly receives an impression which in reality
is in flat contradiction with the author's own words. And
this impression is strengthened by a number of petty
XENOPHONIGNOREDBYEPHORUSANDDIODORUS. I 23
anecdotes such as are seldom related except of great men
in positions of high authority, and scarcely ever by a great
man of himself. A heavy snowfall surprises the army by
night when encamped on the Armenian mountains ; men
and beasts lie buried in the drifts ; Xenophon is the first to
rise and warm himself by splitting wood ; others follow his
example, presently light a fire, and thus save themselves
and the rest from the imminent danger of freezing to death.
Another time a foot-soldier in heavy marching order com-
plains of the difficulty of climbing a toilsome hill ; Xenophon
dismounts from his horse, thrusts the man out of the ranks,
loads himself with his heavy equipment, and thus diverts
the smouldering ill will of the company from the commander
to the refractory comrade. Another artifice employed for
the same purpose was the anonymous publication of his
work. In his " Hellenica " Xenophon alludes to a descrip-
tion of the expedition in question written by Themistogenes
of Syracuse. From the earliest times there has never been
any doubt that what he referred to was his own book, and
that the pseudonym thus assumed by him was either a
purely fictitious name, or one borne by some complaisant
comrade in arms. That such precautions were neither
superfluous nor wholly successful may be gathered from the
remarkable fact that the historian Diodorus wrote a tolerably
exhaustive account of the retreat of the Ten Thousand
without once mentioning the name of Xenophon till he
came to the episode of Seuthes. Now, Diodorus, who wrote
in the Augustan age, drew his materials from Ephorus, a
younger contemporary of Xenophon, and both must have
been familiar with the " Anabasis." Their silence is thus
deeply significant. It was not the result of ignorance ;
they were acquainted with the claims put forward by
Xenophon, and they rejected them.
But the hollowness of these claims is evinced most
clearly by the subsequent career of Xenophon himself, or
rather by his total lack of a career. The marvellous
achievement of that handful of Greeks, who succeeded in
finding their way home from the heart of the Medo-Persian
Empire, and, in spite of all the snares laid for them by the
124 GREEK THINKERS.
Great King, marched from the neighbourhood of Babylon
to the shore of the Black Sea, made a profound impression
on contemporary opinion, not less as an admirable example
of Hellenic resource and energy, than as a first revelation
of the interior weakness by which the apparently resistless
world-power was already affected. If Xenophon really was
the leading spirit in that memorable undertaking, how was
it that his talent for command, a talent which in those
stormy days of Greek political life could never lack employ-
ment, lay fallow during the rest of his life ? After he had
spent a few more years in Asia Minor, serving the Spartan
king Agesilaus in apparently no very exalted capacity, he
returned unpromoted to Greece, and presently (he had in
the mean time been condemned to banishment from Athens)
fought at Coronea in the army of Agesilaus, who was
opposed on this occasion by an Athenian contingent as
well as by the Thebans. He now disappears into the
obscurity of private life, from which he never again emerges
except as a versatile and prolific author.
Here begins the happiest part of his life. The patron
he had hoped to find in Cyrus had been found in Agesilaus.
The faithful services of the adjutant were rewarded by a
grant of land in the neighbourhood of Olympia. Very
characteristic of Xenophon is the act of pious ingenuity,
or ingenious piety, by which he contrived at once to enlarge
his new possessions and to provide for the gratification
of his favourite tastes. A tenth of the booty taken by
the Ten Thousand had, according to Greek custom, been
appropriated to the gods ; it was to be divided between
Apollo and his sister Artemis. The execution of the
scheme was reserved for the generals. Xenophon fulfilled
his part, as far as Apollo was concerned, by placing a
votive offering in the Athenian treasure-house at Delphi ;
but he employed the sum set aside for Artemis, not with-
out oracular guidance, in the purchase of land adjoining his
own modest estate at Scillus. Here he erected a miniature
shrine to the goddess, modelled on the temple at Ephesus,
and instituted a yearly tithe-offering and festival, in which
the men and women of the town, and indeed of the whole
XENOPHON'S SONS. I 25
district, were to meet together and enjoy the hospitality
of the goddess. The central feature of the festival, dedi-
cated as it was to the goddess of the chase, and held on
land well stocked with game, naturally enough consisted of
a hunt, in which the youth of the neighbourhood took part,
Xenophon's own sons at their head. Here in the shadow of
the solemn forest, by the cool waters, teeming with fish and
conchylia, of the river Selinus, beneath the plumes of the
grove enclosing the sanctuary, the aging soldier of fortune
found consolation for many a vanished dream of glory. It
had not, indeed, been granted him to found a new dynasty in
that city by the Black Sea, where he had hoped to lord it
while he lived, and be succeeded by his sons. Still, here
was a manorial seat where he might spend a noble leisure,
relieved of the petty cares of life ; where he might tame
his steeds, follow the chase, till the soil, and practise the
writer's art. He saw his sons, now in the flower of their
youth, growing up, strong and beautiful, by his side, and he
was able to complete their education, which had begun in
Sparta, in accordance with his ideals. Nor were his efforts
wholly vain, as is shown by the universal grief at the
untimely death of his firstborn on the field of Mantinea.
Some of the most illustrious pens in Greece, that of
Isocrates, and even that of Aristotle among them, were
stirred to busy rivalry by the heroic death of that young
officer of high promise. It was not only that they desired
to honour Grylus ; they wished also to offer respectful
sympathy and consolation to the stricken father. He, for
his part, was in sore need of comfort. The same victories
of Thebes which had robbed him of his son had deeply
humiliated both the land of his birth and the land of his
adoption, and had, moreover, destroyed all his hopes of a
panhellenic union. He had been driven from hearth and
home. Athens, indeed, had opened the gates so long
closed to him ; but it was not in Athens, now an alien city
for him, that he spent the last years of his life. He went
to Corinth, and there, about the year 350, in the midst of
restless literary activity, he closed his long and chequered
career.
126 GREEK THINKERS.
2. A mixed character is as difficult to do justice to as
the shifting hues of a many-sided talent. Both are com-
bined in Xenophon. It is not strange, therefore, that his
reputation has greatly fluctuated, that the early centuries
paid him excessive honour, while the modern tendency is
to load him with undeserved obloquy. The truth is that
his talents rose well above the line of mediocrity, but that
the same cannot be said of his character, even when we
judge him, as we are bound to do, according to the
standards of his time. There is some temptation to say
of him that his character injured his talent ; that his self-
complacent vanity deceived him as to the limits of his
powers, and induced him to engage in so great a diversity
of tasks as seriously to impair the value of his work. But
this formula, like all others which destroy the unity of
a personality, appears on closer examination to be an
inaccurate expression of the facts. If we look deeper
we shall find this unedifying versatility foreshadowed in his
intellectual endowment as well as in his moral qualities,
namely, in the excessive suppleness of his mind and tastes,
in that lack of a solid centre of resistance which is as
characteristic of the thinking and expressing as of the
willing and acting personality.
To such an extent does he possess this attribute of
adaptability that we find him maintaining contradictory
theses in different works with equal emphasis. At one
time he champions the primacy of knowledge and its un-
conditional sovereignty over the will ; at another he is for
the omnipotence of training and habit, and their educational
allies, reward and punishment. In one passage, treating of
the two sexes, he lays emphasis on the natural differences
of their endowment, and the consequent justification in
nature of the separation of their tasks ; elsewhere he insists
that, given the necessary instruction, women would attain
the same degree of courage as is usual among men. Nor
does it make much difference to Xenophon whether he
preaches these contradictory doctrines in his own name, or
whether he puts them in the mouth of his revered master
Socrates. This intellectual flexibility is coupled with the
XENOPHON'S VERSATILITY. I 27
wish to rival the most admired authors, each in his own
special branch of literature. Has Thucydides eclipsed all
the historians who preceded him, but left his great work
unfinished ? Xenophon is at once ready to step into the
breach and write a continuation, in which he even imitates
the peculiar colouring of the Thucydidean style. Has
Plato produced, in the " Symposium," a marvel of poetic
delineation and philosophic insight ? Xenophon imme-
diately makes use of the same framework to exhibit a new
picture of Socrates and his friends, one which, though not
competing in magnificence with the portrait painted by
Plato, is intended to surpass it in naturalness and truth
to life.
A borrowed costume is admirably adapted to set off
the defects of a figure which it does not fit. Flowing folds
of drapery become unsightly and ridiculous when they
cover puny limbs. Thus a comparison of copy with original
may be trusted to teach us something about the peculiari-
ties of Xenophon. The speculative inadequacy, not to say
poverty, of his intellect is nowhere more clearly manifested
than in his " Symposium." Nothing can be more striking
than the clumsiness with which philosophical discussions are
here tacked on to the introductory matter, or the short-
winded haste with which the thread is dropped when it has
barely been taken up. It is as if one were to wedge in
the question of the possibility of teaching virtue between
such phrases as " How do you do ? " and " How hot it is
here ! " in a drawing-room conversation. That which makes
the " Symposium " worth reading is exclusively the by-
play of the dialogue, the pithy humour of Socrates' jests
on his own ugliness, and the boldly realistic description of
the pantomimic display and the acrobatic feats with which
the company were regaled by the pupils of the Syracusan
ballet-trainer. Here Xenophon is in his element, just as
a similar description in the " Anabasis " shows him at his
literary best. And there are several passages of like
character in the " Hellenica " which prove how well his
talent was suited to the genre style. One of these describes
the meeting between Agesilaus, seated on the grass and
128 GREEK THINKERS.
plainly clad, and the satrap Pharnabazus blazing with gold
and accompanied by men carrying costly carpets. Then
there is the extraordinarily long and elaborate account of
King Otys' wooing through the intermediary of Agesilaus.
Lastly there is the story of how the Spartan Sphodrias
escaped the death-penalty by the intercession, proffered
with much shame and hesitation, of Prince Archidamus,
who loved the condemned man's son. More than one fresh
and vivid simile, learnt in nature's school, testifies to our
author's talent for exposition, and there are several passages
of deep and moving pathos. We may mention the murder
of Alexander the tyrant of Pherse, and the picture of his
wife, her soul divided between hatred and anxiety, waiting
the issue of the crime of which she has compelled her
brothers to be the instruments. Above all, we have the battle
at Phlius, and the fine description, with which the narrative
ends, of the women ministering to the wearied victors
and at the same time weeping for joy. But Xenophon
fell immeasurably short of his predecessors, of Herodotus
as well as Thucydides, in the very point in which, pluming
himself as he did on his philosophy, he thought to surpass
them — in reflexion. It is true that there are several
excellent speeches in the " Hellenica," admirably suited to
their respective occasions, such as that of Theramenes, that
of Critias, and that of Procles the Phliasian. But it is
probable, in view of the particular circumstances of that
conflict among the Athenian oligarchs, and in view of the
known close relations between Procles and his friend, King
Agesilaus, that Xenophon here had abundant sources of
information to draw upon, and did not need to trust to his
own constructive powers. When, however, he comes to
express his own thoughts on politics — and it is almost
exclusively in the later books of the history that he does
so — we are reminded of the depth and far-sightedness of
Thucydides solely by the operation of the law of contrast.
These self-complacent sententious utterances are in part
mere military technicalities, in part the threadbare common-
places of morality. When he attempts to deduce historical
occurrences from their deeper causes, it is generally the
HIS THEOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS. I 29
pious element in his mind that governs the direction of his
search. We have already had an opportunity of noting the
skill with which he contrived to reconcile a perfectly
genuine religiousness with the pursuit of his worldly
interests. As an historian he often employed similar means
to help himself out of a difficulty. The long and energetic
rule of his patron xAgesilaus ended with the profound
humiliation of Sparta. But Xenophon's theological prin-
ciples saved him from the necessity of investigating the
relations of cause and effect, and of searching for the
possible mistakes by which Agesilaus might have con-
tributed to the ruin of his country. He regarded the
disaster at Leuctra, and the whole chain of events which
led up to it, as the work of an angry deity taking vengeance
for the illegal occupation of the Theban Acropolis by a
Spartan general.
3. The " Hellenica " has been the object of much
unjust as well as just censure. The author enjoyed the
protection and the society of a ruler who, as we learn
from Plutarch, was distinguished by particularly winning
manners, and was accustomed to treat his dependents
with excessive favour and indulgence. In writing the
history of his own time, Xenophon was for the most part
engaged in writing the history of Agesilaus. And if we
acknowledge that he was unable to free himself from the
spell of his illustrious patron's thoughts and sentiments, we
are acknowledging no more than that Xenophon was not
a great man. Circumstances conspired against his inde-
pendence of judgment with a force to which many a
sturdier spirit might well have succumbed. It is also easy
to understand how Xenophon came to hold that over-rated
monarch in still higher esteem than did his contemporaries
and immediate successors. Judicial exactness in the ap-
portioning of praise and blame is not to be looked for as
from favourite to patron, and in the present case there is
no serious ground for assuming any wilful distortion of
historical truth. His silence on certain important events
of that day, such as the founding of Megalopolis, or the
institution of the second Athenian maritime confederacy,
VOL. 11. K
130 GREEK THINKERS.
testifies to the limitations of his horizon ; but here again
we have no occasion to scent partisanship. His attitude
towards the civil broils of Athens is precisely that of a
moderate aristocrat, and he was in the fullest sympathy
with Theramenes, whom Aristotle, as we have recently
learnt, valued above all the other politicians of that age.
We need not approve of his turning his back on his
country immediately on the outbreak of a fierce faction-
fight, one which ended in the defeat of his own party.
But we ought not to be harder on him than the whole of
antiquity was. His own city forgave him, though late, and
we shall do well not to be more Athenian than the
Athenians. Another charge which has been brought
against Xenophon is that of injustice towards his great
Theban contemporaries. To our thinking, the charge has
no foundation. Indeed, we are disposed to forgive the
son of Grylus many sins for the sake of his hearty hatred
of the Theban policy. Thebes was a cancer in the body
of Hellas. Its temporary ascendency was in a high
degree responsible for the subjugation of Greece. We
must not lay too much stress on the Persian proclivities
which were traditional at Thebes, and for which even the
great Pelopidas claimed credit at the court of the " Great
King." For second-rate states which aim at the leading
position in a nationality must always, from the nature of
the case, work in the interests of foreign dominion, what-
ever the views and inclinations of their chief statesmen may
be. Xenophon's lack of sympathy for the Beusts and
Dalwigks of Greece only testifies to the strength of those
pan- Hellenic sentiments which he was bound to cherish if
he was not to despise himself. And the warm commenda-
tion which he nevertheless bestows on the generalship
displayed by Epaminondas at Mantinea, in the very battle
where his own son was cut off in the promise of his youth,
exhibits his character in a more pleasing light than almost
any other fact we know about him.
Xenophon did more than make a little history, and
write much of it ; he also invented history. For us, at anv
rate, he is the oldest representative of that branch of
THE " CYROPjEDIA," AN HISTORICAL NOVEL. 131
literature which we call the historical novel. His own
production, it is true, belongs to an inferior variety of the
species, for it is very far from being a picture of an age
or a people. The " Cyropaedia " reminds us less of the
creations of Walter Scott and Manzoni than of those
popular tales which give a glorified picture of a great ruler
set in a framework of fiction. But while the moderns
generally restrain their inventive faculty to the field of
minor incident, Xenophon did not hesitate to remodel, and
as he doubtless thought, to improve the central facts of
history. We need not stop to study the exact details of
this procedure, nor to consider whether it was justifiable.
Our concern is to know the author's mind, and the more
pliable the raw material of history proved in his hands, the
better for us. We find, in fact, that he recast his materials
in the exact likeness of his own ideals, and the latter are
consequently presented to us in this work with exceptional
clearness of outline. Unstable spirit as he was, he yet
did not altogether lack a certain stock of fundamental
principles in morals and politics. In order to understand
them, it is advisable to keep in mind their common source,
which was a strong antipathy to the democratic institutions
of Athens. He was thus to a certain extent in agreement
with his greater contemporary Plato. But the agreement
did not go very far. To the real and supposed disad-
vantages of popular rule Plato opposed a social and
political ideal of the highest originality. Xenophon, on
the other hand, sought and found salvation in actually
existing forms of government. They might be of Greek
or of barbarian origin, they might be monarchical or aristo-
cratic ; the great thing was that they must be removed as
far as possible from any resemblance to the Athenian
democracy. Among his heroes are Cyrus, who founded a
monarchy of the patriarchal type in Persia, and Lycurgus,
the author of the Lacedaemonian constitution, in which a
limited monarchy was combined with aristocratic institu-
tions. Over-subtle critics have supposed it necessary to
distinguish between two stages in the mental development
of Xenophon — an earlier, in which he favoured absolute
I32 GREEK THINKERS.
monarchy, and a later, in which he gave the preference to
aristocratic forms of government. Such refinements are
put out of court by the fact, which is generally known and
admitted, that in the idealized picture of Persia contained
in the " Cyropaedia," the author has not scrupled to embody
many a feature which in reality belonged to Sparta.
Xenophon has himself remarked that the ideally perfect
ruler of the patriarchal type is even in the most favourable
conditions only met with occasionally as an isolated
historical phenomenon. In writing the " Cyropaedia " he
cannot have meant to make so rare, not to say so unheard-
of, a gift of fortune the basis of a permanent institution
intended for constant use, and to recommend it seriously
for adoption by the Greeks, to whose small city-states it
was applicable only in exceptional instances. He was
disgusted with the dilettantism, the inconstancy, the lack
of strict adherence to principle, which he, and many others
of like mind, took to be the chief characteristic of con-
temporary Athens and its administration. By way of
remedy he laid stress on the absolute necessity of intro-
ducing a more rigid discipline, and of constructing an
official hierarchy with a strict system of grades, after the
military pattern. Responsibility was to be increased by
concentration, and the division of labour was to be carried
into the minutest detail. This last requirement leaves us
in some doubt. We cannot tell how far it was due to
Xenophon's knowledge of the East and its primaeval
civilization, which in this particular was superior to that
of Greece, and how far to the influence of Plato's theory,
which latter, as we must not forget, owed something to
Egyptian inspiration. At any rate, this requirement is
formulated with a precision which is as far removed from
the ordinary Greek view as it is closely related to the
conclusions developed in Plato's " Republic."
Such thoughts as these constitute the central kernel of
the " Cyropaedia." For shell, we have a fantastically embel-
lished account of the triumphant career of the Persian
conqueror. We need hardly say that the latter is invested
with attributes intended to mark him out as an eminent
XENOPHON'S IDEAL STATE. I 33
realization of the ideal ruler. But the execution of this
portrait is not especially characteristic of Xenophon. His
taste, and perhaps still more that of the select Spartan
circle in which he moved, finds freer expression in the
abundant accessory matter which forms the seasoning to
an otherwise somewhat tedious book. There is a good deal
of humour, of a blunt guard-room type, and an intense,
but restrained, erotic element. And Xenophon would not
be Xenophon if he did not assign a prominent place to
sport, particularly that art of horsemanship which he praised
with so much eloquence.
Three political writings of Xenophon still remain to be
considered. These are : his panegyric on " the Lacedae-
monian Constitution," in which, however, he dwells more
on the social than the strictly political institutions of
Sparta ; the dialogue, " Hiero ; " the work, " On the
Revenue of Athens." The second of these, a dialogue
between the Sicilian prince Hiero and the wise poet
Simonides, seems at first sight not a little perplexing. The
first portion of the work is an elaboration, in the true
Platonic spirit, of the thesis that the tyrant, or ruler by
force, leads a far from enviable life, and can never enjoy
real happiness. The second portion, however, contains the
picture of an ideal tyranny — a rule founded on violence or
usurpation, and explains the conditions under which such a
rule can serve the public welfare and the happiness of the
tyrant himself. It is not at once obvious in which of these
contradictory sections the author is really in earnest. But
a closer examination removes all doubt, and shows that
the preponderance of interest lies with the second or con-
cluding portion. Simonides here recommends a policy such
as we describe by the words " Caesarism " or " imperialism."
The energetic maintenance of peace and order at home,
an imposing display of armed power sufficient to command
respect abroad, radical measures of philanthropic tendency
emanating from the royal initiative, — such are the methods
by which the disorderly element is to be kept in check, and
the citizens compensated for the loss of self-government.
We need not stop to consider the points of agreement
134 GREEK THINKERS.
or difference between this political ideal and that of the
" Cyropaedia." The old hypothesis is probably not far
from the truth, according to which the dialogue was intended
to recommend its author to Dionysius, a prince whose good
graces were much sought after by other Greek writers
besides Xenophon.
The third of the above-named works also shows every
sign of having been written for a special occasion. It was
composed when Xenophon was a very old man. He had
been received back again by his native city from which he
had once been banished, and he desired to show his grati-
tude, perhaps also to secure a better welcome for himself
and still more for his sons. For this purpose he presented
his country with a plan of reform, intended as a remedy
for its shattered finances. He suggested that the silver-
mines at Laurium should be exploited on a greatly extended
scale, and that the State, instead of farming them out as
before, should work them itself, at least in large measure.
Nor was this to be the only instance of nationalization.
Why, he asked, should not the State possess a mercantile
navy as well as ships of war ? Why should inns and
lodging-houses be all in private hands ? Everything was
to be done to give a powerful impulse to trade and
industry, and every citizen without exception was to receive
a share of these public undertakings, in the shape of a
fixed, though perhaps moderate, annuity, paid him by the
State. We naturally ask by what means these far-reaching
plans were to be realized. But the answer is one we find
some difficulty in taking seriously. Our bold financier
expects abundant assistance from capitalists, and that not
only from Athenians, who might regard the annuity which
they, like all other citizens, would receive, as at any rate
partial interest on their outlay. He also counts on large
advances from foreign States and princes, even from Persian
satraps, who are to be won over by " honourable mentions "
— by orders and decorations, as we should say. It will amuse
our currency financiers to learn from Xenophon that gold
can, and that silver can never, suffer depreciation from over-
production. It was not Xenophon who invented the panacea
AN ADVOCATE OF NATIONALIZATION. I 35
of nationalization. We have already met with it in con-
nection with Hippodamus of Miletus (see Vol. I. p. 409, seq).
That this leaning was in accord with the tendencies of the
age we learn from the instance of Plato, who did not shrink
from the nationalization of the family. But along with all
that is chimerical in Xenophon's schemes, we find many
details which testify to his ripe and extensive knowledge
of the world and of business. In one passage we find the
idea of mutual insurance expressed with surprising clear-
ness ; in another there are excellent arguments against that
attitude which is common among radicals of all ages, and
which is expressed in the cry, " Either everything now and
at once, or else nothing at all." Although in this project
of his Xenophon has several points of contact with the
contemporary demagogues, who insisted on the main-
tenance of the less-propertied classes at the public cost, the
means which he advocated for the attainment of that end
often betray his old way of thinking. When he recom-
mends a policy of energetic philanthropy, vigorous inter-
ference on the part of the State, and in particular a system
of rewards and prizes by which an influence is to be exerted
on the most diverse departments of life, he is giving utter-
ance to thoughts which occur in the " Cavalry Officer," the
" Cyropsedia," and the " Hiero," as well as in the work we
are now considering.
There is yet another point in which Xenophon remained
true to himself to the end — in his attitude towards things
divine. Perhaps we ought here to speak of superstition
rather than religion. At any rate, Xenophon showed him-
self primitive and superstitious in his beliefs, in more than
one sense of the words. We must not make too much of
the fact that he always and everywhere assumes and expects
the direct intervention of the gods. This goes no further
than to show that he was entirely uninfluenced by the
enlightenment of the age, as represented, say, by Anaxa-
goras. He was well aware that his own way of thinking
was not that of his times, and he excuses his exceptional
position in characteristic fashion. He is anticipating objec-
tions against his continual introduction of references to the
136 GREEK THINKERS.
gods in his exposition of military technicalities. " A man
who has often been in danger" — it is in such terms as
these that he justifies himself — "will be less inclined to be
surprised at my procedure in this matter." It is as if
Xenophon, with his astonishing naivete, were bent on
corroborating by precept as well as example the old
observation that gamblers, huntsmen, soldiers, miners, and
sailors are more prone to superstition than other classes.
His attitude towards the divine powers is completely
described by the phrase : Do ut des. It is always his
zealous endeavour to conciliate their good will by offerings ;
and he frequently and emphatically repeats his conviction
that the gods are more inclined to aid with their wholesome
counsel, imparted by means of Xenophon's beloved art of
divination, those who remember them in prosperity than
those who only turn to them in the stress of misfortune.
4. We have now fulfilled our design (cf. p. 64) of
giving the reader a tolerable acquaintance with Xenophon's
life and writings. We have not done so for his own sake,
for he can hardly claim a niche to himself in the series of
Greek thinkers, but in view of the importance attaching to
his accounts of the words and the teaching of Socrates.
The question as to what is trustworthy and what untrust-
worthy in these accounts is one which we have already
answered in great part by implication. The positive results
of our inquiry into the subject have been incorporated in
our sections on the life and work of Socrates. But now
that the reader has been familiarized with Xenophon's
character, it may not be superfluous to lay before him a few
samples of the matter which Xenophon offers as Socrates',
but which we are entirely unable to receive as such.
The " Memorabilia " contains so much that is un-
Socratic, and so much that is unworthy of Socrates, that
some modern scholars, desiring to reconcile their respect
for the portrayer with their respect for the portrayed,
have gone so far as to pronounce considerable portions
of the work spurious additions of later hands. In the case
of one critic in particular, this violent procedure has led to
the excision of the greater part of the " Memorabilia." Such
UNSOCRATIC ELEMENTS IN "MEMORABILIA." 1 37
extravagances of criticism, accompanied as they are by an
equally arbitrary rejection of other well-attested writings
of Xenophon, are not altogether without a value of their
own. They supply an undesigned corroboration of the
view that the traditional estimate of Xenophon is in con-
tradiction with the impression inevitably produced by an
impartial study of his works.
On reading these reports of Socratic teaching we are
at once struck by a circumstance which leads us strongly
to suspect their fidelity. The dialectic method, of which
Socrates was the acknowledged master, has here been
thrust completely into the background. In its place we
have a series of long-winded and unctuous discourses, full
of positive dogmatism, and devoid of any trace of cross-
examination, or of any penetrative elucidation of concepts.
If this was the best that the great Athenian had to offer
to the youths in the gymnasium and the men in the
market-place, he would never have been able to captivate
and permanently influence the best brains of his age. So
conventional a preacher of the hackneyed and obvious
could never have roused or provoked the nimble-witted
Athenians ; they would have fled from him as an intoler-
able bore. That it is quite possible to moralize with
spirit Xenophon has shown to his own cost, by incorporat-
ing in his work the celebrated apologue of Prodicus (cf.
Vol. I. p. 429).
The brightness, variety, and life of this borrowed
matter only brings out more clearly how flat and monoto-
nous are the speeches which make up the bulk of the
" Memorabilia." It is true enough that the commonplaces
of to-day were once fresh and original. But, stretch this
principle to its utmost limit, and it will still be necessary
to acknowledge that the plain and simple thoughts of the
teacher of Plato and the contemporary of Thucydides are
here set forth with intolerable prolixity, and smothered
beneath a load of illustrations, any one of which would
have been all but superfluous if it had stood alone.
Consider, for example, the dialogue with Lamprocles,
Socrates' eldest son, and its terribly diffuse elaboration of
138 GREEK THINKERS.
the thought that all ingratitude is wrong, and that the
worst kind is ingratitude towards parents, to whom we owe
so much, and who mean well by their children even when,
as Xanthippe sometimes did, they scold them without due
cause. Immediately afterwards comes a never-ending
exhortation to patience, an inordinately protracted "in-
duction," a long series of particular instances, all leading
up to the conclusion : " If you wish your brother to treat
you well, treat him well yourself first." The practical
advice which Socrates gives to Aristarchus does indeed
contain a spark of philosophy. He is exhorted to rise
above the current prejudice which brands manual labour
as unworthy of a free man. But there is not the faintest
glimmer of philosophy in the counsel given to Eutherus to
choose a calling which does not require a great expenditure
of physical energy, in order that he may not be obliged
to relinquish it by declining years. Finally we note the
exhaustive discussion of the advantage of having a body
strengthened by care and exercise, and the string of
precepts regarding behaviour at table, forbidding us, for
example, to eat meat or dainties without bread, to eat
too much of them, or too many sorts of them. Surely it
was not for the sake of imparting instruction such as this
that Socrates brought down philosophy from heaven to
earth. And when at last Xenophon does come to the
Socratic dialectic, after keeping us waiting for many a
weary page, the method yields but meagre fruit in his
hands. We may well believe him when he exclaims,
almost with a sigh, " But to give a complete account of
all his definitions would be a most laborious undertaking."
In other words, it would be too much to expect the retired
officer to plunge into the subleties of dialectic. To sum
up, Xenophon was a brave country squire, an excellent
condottitre and sportsman, and he wrote tales of war
and adventure full of humour and graphic delineation, but
poverty-stricken in point of thought. It is one of the
most amusing, and yet one of the most depressing caprices
of literary destiny that has handed his works down to us
among the authorities on the history of philosophy.
ANTISTHENES. 1 39
CHAPTER VII.
THE CYNICS.
I. AMONG the companions of Socrates there was none to
whom Xenophon stood in closer relations than he did to
Antisthenes, whose portrait he painted with lifelike fidelity
in his " Symposium." In him he saw and admired that
originality which he himself so greatly lacked. For fidelity
to the teaching of the master was in this case united with
a considerable faculty of independent thought. Anti-
sthenes indeed, was more than a disciple; he continued and
developed what Socrates had begun. This is apparent
primarily from his method, which has not a single feature
to remind us of Socrates. The latter had lived and moved
in the investigation of concepts, but with Antisthenes such
investigations play an entirely subordinate part. The very
terms in which he expresses himself in regard to definitions
betray a feeling of contempt rather than of respect for
that philosophical method. Nor is there anything to be
wondered at in this. Essays in definition sufficed for the
founding of the Socratic ethics ; they were inadequate for
the purpose of developing it. The old kernel could only
grow in a new shell. As for the kernel itself, Antisthenes
held to it with strenuous perseverance. To give shape to
the Socratic ideal was the task of his life. Socrates had
insisted with all the force and passion of his nature on
inexorably rigid consistency of thought, on the undivided
unity of the will, on the unlimited rights of criticism, on
the rational deduction of all rules of life. liur. he had
been, in the main, satisfied with the theoretical recognition
140 GREEK THINKERS.
of these demands. There were, indeed, some points in
which he dissociated himself from the view of life held by-
most of his fellow-citizens. He differed from them not
only in his condemnation of Athenian political institutions,
but in the cardinal matter of the value to be placed on
external goods, life itself included, all of which he esteemed
as insignificant when weighed against inward peace and
the welfare of the soul. But he never went to the length
of a complete breach with all existing codes and standards.
And yet it was precisely in the direction of such a breach
that the development of his teaching naturally led. Reason
can never be for long a mere auxiliary and subordinate. If
she is summoned to protect that which has not originated
in herself, she soon seizes the reins of power, and in the
end destroys everything which she has not herself produced.
The ally throws off the mask and appears as mistress.
Thus Socrates laid down premisses, and his disciples drew
from them the inevitable conclusions. And the processes
of thought employed in the rearing of the superstructure
could not but be essentially different from those which
had done service in laying the foundations.
Both in the form and in the substance of the Socratic
teaching we detected a tendency towards utilitarianism.
But the tendency was masked to some extent by the
method of definitions. Socrates subjected to a searching
examination the meaning of those words in which men
incorporate their judgments of value ; he tested and sifted
the underlying thought, and endeavoured to transform
hazy, contradictory notions into sharply defined, self-con-
sistent concepts. But this procedure of his, though leading
in particular instances to innovation or paradox, really had
its root and base in contemporary beliefs. He worked
with ideas, not facts. He sought to introduce order and
clarity into traditional and current estimates of values, and
had no dealings with anything calculated to destroy or
radically to modify those estimates. If ever he did attempt
anything of the kind, it was by roundabout means, and,
strictly speaking, without complete logical justification.
For instance, he cherished the conviction that in State
me r/fOD : o/- .: ociae eei- : / .5//: /■• :. : 4 :
affairs far too subordinate a part was assignee to special
knowledge. But in spite of all his utilitarian leanings, he
never formulated the doctrine that the common interest
direction of the man most capable of conducting it. In-
stead of that, he investigates the conception of a statesman
or of a king, determines its content by the aid of analogies
with pilots, physicians, farmers, and so for::., and finally
reaches the conclusion that kings or statesmen who lack
the requisite knowledge do not come under too concept —
that, in fact, they aro not really kings or statesmen at ah.
An "ought" is thus smuggled into the determination of
what " is." A disciple who desired to follow still further
the path or. -which the master hid entered, and to attack
the problem of the wholesale renovation of public and
private life, could not possibly remain content with the
method of definition.
If we ask what other methods remained, we shah
hardly find more than two. Toe first of these is one
which we may term the method of abstract construction.
It was employed by Plato among the Socratics, and in
still greater measure by the school of Jeremy Bentham. It
consists, first of ail, in an analysis, parti)- psychological, partly
sociological, of the nature and the neeos of men. Con-
clusions are drawn as to relations between the individual
and society, and on these foundations, sometimes with the
additional support of an appeal to more or less authentic
history, the fabric of a complete scheme of society is reared,
including a code of rules to govern individual conduct.
Those who are deterred from following this path, by
their want of talent for systematic speculation, or by their
lack of confidence in long-drawn-out inferences, have an
alternative plan at their disposal. They will look primarily
for actual patterns and examples of their ideal society, and
aim at their reproduction. This method, which we may
call that of concrete empiricism, often apucars in a special
form which the following remarks are intended to elucidate.
The evils by which a reformer believes his age to be
oppressed, and for which he seeks a remedy, admit of a
142 GREEK THINKERS.
twofold interpretation. They may be regarded either as
the signs of incomplete development, or as the effects of
degeneracy and decay. It is to the second of these inter-
pretations that a member of a highly civilized society is
more especially prone, and that for a very simple reason —
the present may be easily compared with the past, but not
with the future. And though the burdens of to-day may
really be light compared with those of a bygone age, they
seem heavier to us because it is we who bear them. The
eulogist of the past has thus become a proverb. That
which is foreign or remote is often seen through a trans-
figuring haze which veils its imperfections and multiplies
its excellences. And the effects thereby produced upon
susceptible minds are the same in all ages. Those who
originated the myth of a golden age, or that of a paradise
of human innocence, were the precursors of a long train
of religious sectarians and philosophic reformers. All of
them, in a manner, resemble Christopher Columbus. They
sail to a new world, hoping all the while for nothing more
than a new route to a part of the old. For when con-
ventional fetters and the manifold exigencies of an intricate
society oppress the soul, where else shall a man turn despair-
ing eyes but to the far-off primaeval sources of civilization,
that antiquity whose idealized picture passes so readily for
a type and forecast of the future? Heart and brain are here
moved by a common impulse ; the heart yearns regretfully
for the vanished gladness of youth, and the brain, active
but not self-confident, knows its own helplessness. In
such a case men hear the cry, from the lips of a Rousseau
or of an Antisthenes, according to the century, " Let us
return to Nature."
2. Of the writings of Antisthenes, which were largely
composed in the form of dialogues, we possess but scanty
remnants. Nor are we adequately informed as to the
events of his life. Me was born at Athens, but his mother
was a Thracian woman. The fact that he was only half
Greek is one of some importance in the history of Cynicism.
It must, at any rate, have made it easier for him to break
with accepted standards, religious as well as social. A
THE LIFE OF ANTISTHENES. 1 43
full-blooded Hellene, even if he had shared Antisthenes'
exclusive belief in a single supreme deity, would hardly have
permitted himself the blasphemous exclamation, " If I could
but lay hands on Aphrodite, I would shoot her " — that is,
with the bow and arrows of her son. To us these words
seem to possess no small biographical significance. We
cannot think that so fierce an outcry would have been wrung
from the lips of any whose bosom had not harboured violent
passions, whose heart had not been sorely wounded and tor-
mented. And it seems likely that his outward circumstances
were not exempt from sudden changes ; for that proletarian
poverty of his, of which we read so much, ill agrees with
the statement that he enjoyed the costly instruction of the
rhetorician Gorgias. Probably some adverse stroke of
fortune robbed him of a comfortable, though not aristo-
cratic, home, and plunged him into the depths of want.
It was not till he had arrived at mature manhood that
he joined the circle of Socrates' disciples — a " belated
learner," to quote Plato's gibe, and turned from rhetoric
to philosophy. Nature had dowered him with an iron
will and a susceptible disposition, more especially sensitive
to painful impressions of every kind. His ready and
powerful intellect preferred concrete images to logical
formulae, and he had little taste for subtle distinctions or
for adventurous speculation. He possessed a powerful,
creative imagination, and a gift of vivid exposition, fascinat-
ing by its homely pith and vigour. In an age when Plato
wrote, the fastidious Athenian public counted him among
its standard and favourite authors. And though there is
something that repels us in the censorious tone of his
attacks upon men of genius like Pericles and Alcibiades,
it may be pleaded in mitigation that he had himself drunk
the cup of bitterness. His history was probably that of a
worldling who had recklessly broken with his own past,
and henceforth judged himself with the same inexorable
severity which he meted out to others. But it is now time
to pass in review the speculative foundations of Cynicism.
Socrates had made reason the arbiter of life. But
thought and reflexion are impossible without materials in
144 GREEK THINKERS.
the way of facts. These are partly supplied, so far as
ethical and political questions are concerned, by that
analysis of human nature and consequent synthesis which
we have already mentioned and illustrated by the example
of Plato. But Antisthenes followed the other method,
which was more congenial to him, namely, the immediate
utilization of the data of experience. Discontented with
the mode of life then prevalent, and sickened by the
artificiality and manifold corruption of contemporary
society, he looked for salvation in a return to primitive
and natural conditions. He contrasted the elaborately
stimulated wants, the weakness and enervation of civilized
man, with the independence, the unimpaired force, the, as
he supposed, superior health and longevity of the animals.
Caring little, as he in general did, for the natural sciences
and their auxiliary, mathematics, he went so far as to
write a book " On the Nature of Animals." No vestige
of this work has been preserved, but its purport may be
gathered from numerous utterances of the Cynic school,
and from a number of imitations produced by later
admirers. There can be no doubt that its object was to
derive from the animal world authoritative models and
suggestions for the shaping of human life. This method,
it is clear, was inadequate, taken by itself, to effect the
desired purpose, even if one could follow the Cynics in
their fearless acceptance of results which offend all refined
sentiment and bid defiance to social usage. From the
study of animals they passed to the study of primitive
man. The idealization of uncivilized peoples was no
novelty in Greek literature. The tendency appears as
early as in the Homeric poems, where we find the
nomads of the North, who lived on milk, praised as
" the justest of men." But the Cynics took the savage
for their teacher in all seriousness, just as Diderot and
Rousseau did in a later age. They glorified the state
of nature with inexhaustible eloquence and ingenuity, and
they never wearied of anathematizing the pernicious
influence of civilization. In Plato's reproduction of the
work of Protagoras, " On the Aboriginal Condition of
THE NEW PROMETHEUS. 1 45
Mankind," the purpose assigned to the foundation of the
first cities is that of protection against wild beasts and
human injustice. " On the contrary," reply the Cynics,
"city-life was the beginning of all injustice; lying and
fraud had their origin here, just as surely as if cities had
been founded for the express purpose of encouraging
them." Again, the work we have just mentioned con-
tains allusions to the helplessness of man, contrasted with
the protection which the animals derive from the possession
of wings, of thick fleeces, of tough skins, of natural armour
and weapons of offence. Hence was inferred the indis-
pensability of civilization, and its chief auxiliary, fire, for
the gift of which due honour was paid to the benevolent
demi-god Prometheus. " On the contrary," once more the
Cynics reply, " man's helplessness is the effect of his
effeminacy. Frogs and various other animals have as
delicate a frame as man, but they are protected by the
hardening which comes of exposure, just as the human
face and eye need no protection in order to defy all the
inclemencies of the weather." In general, every creature
is capable of living in the situation in which it is naturally
placed. Otherwise the first men could not have maintained
their existence, for they lacked the use of fire just as
much as dwelling-places, clothing, and artificially prepared
food. Over-subtlety and the busy spirit of invention have
done little to bless mankind. The greater men's efforts
to obviate the hardships of life, the harder and the
more toilsome has life become. x^.nd herein lies the true
significance of the Prometheus-myth. The Titan was not
punished because Zeus hated the human race, but because
that gift of fire had sown the seeds of civilization, and
therewith those of luxury and all corruption. We may
remark, in passing, that this same interpretation of the
Promethean legend commended itself to the kindred soul
of Rousseau.
In this exposition we meet with two elements of vital
importance in the doctrine of the Cynics. The arbitrary
will of man is contrasted with the immanent reasonable-
ness of Nature. All things, when left as Nature created
VOL. IT. L
I46 GREEK THINKERS.
them, serve the purpose of their being, and when man
attempts to improve them he only introduces disorder and
confusion. Those who regard existing conditions of state
and society as the product of chance and arbitrary caprice,
as a lapse from original perfection, have obviously no
alternative but to refer man to Nature as the eternal source
of well-being. Further, the teaching drawn from a con-
sideration of animal and primitive human life needed to
be supplemented by what we may term, with approximate
accuracy, a primordial revelation. The interpretation of
the Prometheus legend, to which we have just alluded,
gives us a suggestive hint in this connection. It is at
first not a little surprising that the men who denied the
plurality of gods and contested the truth of the Hellenic
religion should have occupied themselves at all with these
legends, except for the purpose of casting doubt and
ridicule upon them. But we find, as a matter of fact, that
Antisthenes, and his disciple Diogenes after him, made a
careful study of the mythological histories of gods and
heroes. He wrote a long series of works — commentaries
on the Greek bible, we might call them — in which he
pressed the Homeric poems into the service of Cynic
doctrine by means of an ingenious, but altogether unhis-
torical. exegesis. It may be suggested that perhaps these
treatises were written in jest. But they constitute far too
large a proportion of the total literary output of Anti-
sthenes. A still stronger objection is the fact that the
methods of interpretation and adaptation employed in
them were permanently retained by a branch of the Cynic
school, and were handed on to the Stoic school which
succeeded it. The latter, having made its peace with
society and the powers that be, doubtless found these
methods useful for the purpose of bridging over, if not
filling up, the chasm between philosophy and popular
belief. But the Cynics, who maintained an attitude of
uncompromising revolt against the religion of the people,
had another motive. Although they denied the plurality
of gods and the current interpretation of the myths
relating to them, they could neither weaken the authority
THE KEY-NOTE OF CYNICISM. 1 47
of Homer nor free their own minds from the magic spell
of legendary lore. Instead of denying and rejecting, they
preferred to read between the lines and to explain away,
till their temerities of exegesis displayed greater audacity
than mere bald negation would have done. But that
which turned the scale was doubtless that need of a con-
crete empirical datum which the Cynics, with all their
revolutionary recklessness, deemed a necessary support in
their war with society. The rough and somewhat plebeian
intellect of Antisthenes was ill at ease in the airy regions
of pure reason and abstract construction ; it required a
foothold of facts, whether authentic or fictitious. We are
reminded of the " cranks " of to-day, all of whom prefer to
found their Utopias on violent interpretations of Scripture
rather than renounce the authority of the Bible itself.
Thus to the revelation supposed to be contained in Nature
and primitive man, there was added a second revelation,
the vehicle of which was imagined to be those earliest
productions of the human mind to which we give the
names of legend and saga.
3. But if we are to reach the heart of Cynicism, it is
not enough to trace the paths of thought habitually
followed by the mind of its founder. The same road often
carries many different vehicles propelled by very different
forces. It will now be our task to search for these motive
forces, and make ourselves acquainted with their nature.
To understand the key-note of Cynicism, the temper
out of which that whole scheme of life sprang as from a
germ, we need not go further afield than to the Europe of
to-day. The author of "War and Peace" represents his
hero, at a certain point of his career, as a prey to " that
indescribable, purely Russian (!) feeling of contempt for
all that is conventional, artificial, the work of man — for all
that the majority of mankind regard as the highest good."
We are assured by one of the most competent judges
that this sentiment dominates almost the whole of contem-
porary Russian literature. We will give another quotation
from the same great Russian author — he is speaking this
time in his own name : " We look for our ideal before us,
148 GREEK THINKERS.
while in reality it lies behind us. The progress of man-
kind is not a means but an impediment to the realization
of that ideal of harmony which we carry about in our
bosoms." There arises a question, the answer to which will,
perhaps, throw some light on the state of mind we are
considering. The occurrence and wide diffusion of such
sentiments in modern Russia points to their being some-
thing different from a mere reaction against excessive
civilization. If that were their true character, we should
expect to find them further West.
We are inclined to conjecture that even a moderate
degree of civilization may be felt as excessive when it is
imposed from without, and, so to speak, grafted on an un-
suitable stock. In more general terms, the situation to
which we refer is one where elements, some making for
civilization, others hostile to it, are found existing side by
side, but not fused together, in the same individual or
national character. We may here recall the semi-barbarian
origin of Antisthenes, and the fact that not a few of his
successors belonged to the outer fringe of Greek culture.
Diogenes and Bion came from Pontus, Metrocles and
his sister Hipparchia from Southern Thrace, while the
satirist of the school, Menippus, was a Phoenician and born
in slavery. A similar observation applies to the members
of the earlier Stoic school, who professed what may be
described as a not too radically modified Cynicism. At
their head also stood a half-Greek, and not many of them
were natives of the central seats of Hellenic civilization,
Often, too, plebeian birth produced much the same effect
as foreign origin, while not infrequently the two stigmas
were combined. Cynicism has accordingly been named,
not inappropriately, " the philosophy of the Greek pro-
letariate." In the eighteenth century we see the cult of
Nature and the revolt against civilization originating with
a man who at one time was obliged to earn his bread as
a servant and again by copying music, though he knew
himself to be a literary genius with scarce an equal.
Similarly the movement we are now considering may well
have owed some of its force to the contrast between a well-
THE INDIVIDUALISM OF THE AGE. 1 49
founded self-esteem and a mean situation. These external
influences were no doubt seconded by those inward con-
flicts, of which we have seen examples in our study of
Euripides. More than one soul must have been torn by
such conflicts in a day when the authority of tradition was
reeling under repeated blows, and when Religion, hitherto
supreme ruler of men's lives, had been deposed and her
throne left vacant. Nor could the gradual extinction of
political liberty fail to release much energy, which now
began to be directed towards the remodelling of individual
and corporate life. Some of Byron's poems have been
spoken of as parliamentary oratory seeking an abnormal
outlet. In like manner we may speak of the Cynic
movement, with its intensified craving for personal free-
dom and self-assertion, its defiant accentuation of indi-
vidual independence, as an abnormal manifestation of
political liberalism. It is as if the individual had
despaired of society and now put forth all his energies
to save himself from the common shipwreck. This indi-
vidualism was the key-note of the age, the dominating
feature of whole departments of intellectual life. It was
associated with a profound sensitiveness to the misery
of human existence, with that gathering stream of pes-
simism whose progress has long been under our observa-
tion, and the two together produced effects which went
far beyond the isolated phenomenon of Cynicism. For
proof it will suffice to adduce the significant fact that
in nearly all the philosophies of any vogue the technical
terms denoting " the supreme good " were words of nega-
tive import. Freedom from pain, freedom from grief,
freedom from excitement, freedom from passion, freedom
from illusion, — such were the names chosen to denote the
highest goal of human endeavour. In other cases the
nomenclature does not tell so plain a story. But even then,
that which is represented as the highest attainable, and for
the attainment of which all the powers of man must be
strained to their utmost, is not positive happiness but
mere freedom from suffering. This wide diffusion of a
keen sensitiveness to the misery of existence is a fact which
150 GREEK THINKERS.
we shall do well to bear in mind. We shall thus be enabled
to understand much that would otherwise seem strange in
the inner workings of Cynicism, and we shall be saved
from hasty and unjust judgments.
It was, as we have seen, an age when new claims were
making themselves heard. Existing usages and institutions
had been called in question. It was necessary to prosecute
vigorously the work of criticism, and on its results to found
a new system of social, and still more of individual, practice.
For these purposes the chief available instrument was the
intellectualistic radicalism of Socrates, which gained in
influence the longer it engaged the public attention. The
resistance which meets all innovations, as such, diminishes
with familiarity, and what was at first a breach with custom
becomes, in time, a new custom itself.
4. We have already referred to the fidelity of Anti-
sthenes to his master's teaching. Indeed, so far as relates
to the foundations of ethics, the two may be said to have
held identical doctrine. For Antisthenes, no less than for
Socrates, virtue is something that can be taught, an in-
alienable possession, a " weapon that cannot be wrested
from the hand ; " for both it is essentially one with wisdom,
and, at least when united with " Socratic strength," sufficient
to secure the happiness of man. But when it comes to
a more exact definition of what constitutes happiness, a
difference becomes apparent. Self-sufficiency (avrapKua)
of the individual is now placed conspicuously in the fore-
ground, and strong emphasis is laid on the proposition :
" The wise man will shape his life, not by precedent, but
by the laws of virtue." Depreciation of external goods and
the pleasures they can procure was from the first a feature
of the Socratic spirit. But Antisthenes gave new definite-
ness and point to the original maxims. The complex
concept of tvSai/uovia, or well-being, received different
interpretations, as was only natural, from disciples who
differed in character and social position, and the expression
of a particular one-sided view would call forth an equally
one-sided insistence on the opposite standpoint. Thus
while a man of the world like Aristippus might admit
HERACLES AS A PATRON SAINT. I5I
passive enjoyment, provided it were not allowed to grow
into a necessity, as part of his scheme of life, Antisthenes
took the opposite line, preached in round terms the total
rejection of such enjoyment, and raised this rejection to
the rank of a fundamental principle. " Better madness
than pleasure," is a phrase of his which reminds us of
the outbreak of fierce hatred against the goddess of love,
to which we have already referred. Heracles was the
model whom he and the other Cynics held up for imitation,
the patron saint, so to speak, of the school. Antisthenes
wrote a dialogue entitled " Heracles," and, with this for
guidance, his followers delighted to tell again the story
of the hero's laborious and militant life, identifying, by
ingenious allegories, the foul monsters which he vanquished
with the vices and lusts that beset the souls of men. For a
foil to this ideal of strenuous energy, they took Prometheus,
the quibbler and " sophist," the misguided victim of his
own pride and contentious spirit, whose liver — this was
their subtle reading of the old myth — swelled when he
was praised and contracted when he was blamed, and who
was finally redeemed from his torments by the merciful
interposition of Heracles himself.
The resistance of an inert world soon convinced the
Cynic, if he had not known it from the first, that his ideals
stood little chance of realization within the pale of existing
institutions. He therefore did his utmost to place his own
person outside the circle of social life. He renounced all
the cares of property ; he formed no family ties ; he abode
in no settled dwelling-place. Not only did he hold aloof
from politics, but, in his capacity of "world-citizen," he
viewed with indifference the fortunes of his own city and
nation. He chose the life of a beggar. His long, shaggy
hair and beard, his wallet or beggar's pouch, his staff, his
cloak of coarse cloth — the only covering he wore winter
or summer, — these were the outward tokens of his sect,
the marks which sometimes procured him honour, but
more often contempt and even blows. Even the luxurious
Alexandria of Trajan's time was full of these philosophic
begging-friars ; and when Julian ascended the throne,
152 GREEK THINKERS.
towards the close of the fourth century, the movement
was by no means extinct. All the motives that govern
the life of the average man, particularly the craving for
wealth and power, all the ideals to which the common
herd look up in respectful admiration, passed with the
Cynics for " illusion." " Freedom from illusion " was their
motto. The sight of the poor deluded multitude, forsaken
of reason and virtue, filled them with a feeling of contempt
which either vented itself in mockery and satire or awoke
a spirit of missionary enterprise. Some, like Crates sur-
named " the Door-opener," intruded into private houses,
and imparted unsought counsel, heedless of abuse ; others,
like Bion and Teles, delivered sermon-like harangues, of all
degrees of excellence, before public audiences. No act
was too rash for the intrepid Cynic, and in the days of the
Roman Empire, it was generally an adherent of this school
that would address the emperor in the theatre, and voice
the well- or ill-founded discontent of the masses, occasion-
ally drawing down upon himself a heavy penalty. The
wisest emperors, however, avoided gratifying the wishes of
brawlers who yearned for a martyr's crown. The annals
of the sect record at least one instance of voluntary, self-
imposed martyrdom. Peregrinus committed suicide by
burning before the assembled multitude at the Olympic
festival. This act of self-immolation, which was intended
as an imitation of Heracles, the patron saint of the Cynics,
was laughed to scorn by Lucian, in his work, " The End of
Peregrinus," with more zest than wit.
But we must leave these later manifestations of the
Cynic temper, and endeavour to gain a clearer idea than
we have yet succeeded in obtaining of its source and
origin. An insatiable thirst for freedom, a profound
sensitiveness to the ills of life, an unshakable faith in the
majesty and all-sufficiency of reason, and a corresponding
abysmal contempt for all traditional ideals, — such are the
moods and the convictions which lie at the root of
Cynicism, and which are expressed by the representa-
tives of the school in language of which some relics still
remain.
THE SONG OF THE BEGGAR'S WALLET. 1 53
" Bowed by no yoke of desire nor laden with fetters of thraldom,
One thing alone do we honour, immortal Freedom, our Mistress."
Thus sings the poet of the school, Crates of Thebes,
who also glorified the tn'\pa, or beggar's wallet of the Cynics,
symbolic of their life, in verses parodying a passage of the
"Odyssey" which relates to Crete —
" Pera, so name we an isle, girt round by the sea of Illusion,
Glorious, fertile, and fair, land unpolluted of evil ;
Here no trafficking knave makes fast his ships in the harbour ;
Here no tempter ensnares the unwary with venal allurements.
Onions and leeks and figs and crusts of bread are its produce.
Never in turmoil of battle do warriors strive to possess it ;
Here there is respite and peace from the struggle for riches and
honour."
Antisthenes made unceasing war upon accepted ideals,
upon the belief in civilization, even upon the old-time
glories of the nation, hitherto held sacred from attack.
The dialogues which he wrote in furtherance of his
campaign have perished except for a few sparse relics,
and it is to the allusions and imitations of later writers,
especially Dion of Prusa, who was born between 40 and
50 A.D., that we owe the possibility of forming a fairly
full, but not too trustworthy, idea of their contents. We
have already referred to the dialogue in which he con-
trasted Heracles, the primaeval pattern of Cynic strength
and thoroughness, with the vain quibbler Prometheus.
Another work in which he gave expression to his contempt
for civilization would seem to have had for its theme the
unjust condemnation of Palamedes, a man whom the
ancients had regarded almost as the human counterpart
of Prometheus. To him were ascribed the invention of
regular meals, of the alphabet, of arithmetic, of army
organization, of signalling by fire, of the game of draughts ;
in short, of a vast number of the aids to civilization. But
the myth added that the Greeks had condemned him on
a false charge, and stoned him to death beneath the walls
of Troy. Antisthenes asks, with bitter scorn — How was it
possible that progress and refinement should have borne
154 GREEK THINKERS.
such fruit ? In particular, how came the Atridae, who, as
rulers and leaders of armies, could not fail to find those
inventions of the greatest use, to allow their teacher to be
accused and sent to a shameful death ? This episode from
the legendary past is put forward as another proof that the
imagined blessings of civilization, its alleged refining and
elevating influence, are empty illusions. In a dialogue
entitled "The Statesman," Antisthenes, as we are not
surprised to learn, heaped unmeasured condemnation on
all the most famous statesmen of Athens. The wealth
and power which they had won for their country, and
for which they were chiefly honoured, were in his eyes
not a valuable but a fatal gift, like that golden fleece
which kindled the fratricidal strife of Atreus and Thyestes,
with all its heritage of horrors and crimes.
Similar contempt for the greatest Athenian statesman,
and a similar assertion that these men had made their
country stronger and richer but not better, are to be met
with in Plato's " Gorgias." The coincidence would seem to
justify the inference that on this matter Socrates thought
much as his disciples did. Much more astonishing is the
audacity with which Antisthenes— if he really was Dion's
model — assailed the glorious memory of the great war for
freedom. He would appear to have argued somewhat as
follows : The victories of that war would have been truly
great only if the Persians had stood high in point of
wisdom and valour. On that hypothesis, their defeat
would have meant that the Greeks, and in particular the
Athenians, possessed these qualities in still higher measure.
But that hypothesis had not been realized. In order to
support this contention, Antisthenes gave an exhaustive
account (probably in his " Cyrus ") of the Persian mode of
education, and severely condemned it. He urged, further,
that in Xerxes the Persians had not possessed a king or
commander in the true sense of the words, but only a man
who could wear a lofty bejewelled head-dress and sit on
a golden throne. A multitude which quaked before a
man like that, and which had to be driven to battle by
the lash, was not an army whose defeat argued any signal
DIOGENES OF SINOPE. I 55
merit on the part of the victors. Again, if those famous
battles had been won by virtue of moral superiority, how
was it that the Athenians suffered defeat in their turn
during the course of the war, and finally, in the time of
Conon, gained a second naval victory over the Persians ?
Such shiftings of fortune only proved that neither side
possessed thorough training and discipline, just as in a
contest between two unskillful wrestlers, each will throw
the other in turn.
5. One would have thought that even the most radical
of radicals would have been satisfied with an audacity of
criticism which did not spare the most sacred memories
of the nation — a criticism which to Athenian patriots may
well have seemed a retrospective justification of the
sentence passed on Socrates. And yet we learn that in
point of fearlessness Antisthenes was far outstripped by
his pupil Diogenes. The latter compared his teacher to a
trumpet which gives forth a mighty sound, but has no ears
to hear it. That is to say, he did not think Antisthenes
sufficiently in earnest with his doctrine. And, in truth,
Diogenes was the first to realize the Cynic ideal in its
entirety. He may be called the father of practical Cyni-
cism. The strength of intellect and of will that he mani-
fested in the pursuit of his aims made him one of the
most popular figures of antiquity. Some of his contem-
poraries, indeed, regarded him as a caricature of his
spiritual grandsire, and dubbed him " Socrates gone
mad," but his repute grew with the centuries. The high
esteem in which he came to be held may be inferred from
the writings of Plutarch and Lucian, in which his name
has almost superseded that of Antisthenes. Further
testimony is contained in the speeches of Dion, and still
more in the letters of the Emperor Julian. Upon the latter
the personality of Diogenes made an impression, the
strength of which may be judged from the bold freaks
of exegesis to which he was driven in order to reconcile
his respect for the man with his distaste for certain cardinal
doctrines of the sect. And yet between the philosopher
who lived in a tub and the philosopher who sat on the
156 GREEK THINKERS.
throne of the empire, there was an interval of half a
thousand years.
This prodigious popularity of Diogenes has not illumined
but rather obscured, the facts of his life ; for he early became
the central figure of a luxuriant growth of anecdote and
legend. His father was named Hicesias, and carried on
the business of a banker or money-changer at Sinope, on
the coast of the Black Sea. Diogenes was banished from
his native city, and migrated to Athens, where he was won
for philosophy by Antisthenes. He lived to extreme old
age, spending his time alternately at Athens and at Corinth.
His death, which took place in the latter city in the year
323, is said to have been on the same day as that of
Alexander the Great. There is a story, probably a fiction,
to the effect that in his youth he had been guilty of coining
false money, and that this was the reason of his banishment.
This story seems to have arisen from a misunderstanding
of a passage in his dialogue, " The Panther." He there
stated that he had received from the Delphic oracle a
command to "recoin the money." But the Greek word
vofxiafia, which is here used, has a double significance — it
may denote either current coin or current usages and
recognized rules of conduct. It must have been in the
second of these senses that the word was used in the
oracular response, with reference to a readjustment of
ethical values.
Another story, which is also open to doubt, though it
was repeated by many authors and formed the subject of
two ancient monographs, relates how he was captured by
pirates and sold as a slave to Xeniades the Corinthian.
According to Dion, who is usually well informed on
Diogenes, it was of his own free choice that he left
Athens to live in Corinth after the death of Antisthenes.
But even if we grant that Diogenes really did act as tutor
to the sons of Xeniades and educate them on his famous
and original plan, everything points to the conclusion that
he was soon perfectly at liberty to live and teach at Corinth
exactly as he had done at Athens. For in spite of all
uncertainties in matters of biographical detail, we have
THE LIFE OF DIOGENES. I 5 /
fairly trustworthy information on his habits and mode of
life. He put aside all care or thoughts for property and
the means of subsistence ; by a process of ascetic training
he reduced his wants to the absolute minimum. And yet
his face was radiant with health, strength, and cheerfulness.
For every one who addressed him he had an apt and ready
answer, roughly sarcastic or gracefully courteous, as the
case might be. He was as friendly with the lowest as he
was proud with the greatest of men ; and, in spite of the
gross violations of decency by which he sought to show
his entire independence of convention and opinion, the
astonishment which he aroused was coupled with universal
respect and all but universal admiration. It is still possible
to point out the spot which was his favourite haunt while
he lived in the luxurious pleasure-loving city of Corinth.
It was the cypress grove on the high ground of Craneion,
a residential quarter of the city. In this fair pleasaunce,
not far from a temple of Aphrodite, and the mausoleum
of Lai's, the ironical despiser of pleasure loved to sun
himself and breathe an air famous for its aromatic fresh-
ness. Here he might be seen, seated on the grass in
the midst of a circle of reverent disciples, whom he held
spell-bound by his talk ; and here tradition places the
scene of his interview with the great Alexander. Of the
manner of his death varying accounts arc given. According
to some, like many other adherents of the Cynic and Stoic
sects, he took his own life. He was buried not far from
Craneion, by the side of the road leading to the Isthmus,
and a dog, carved in Parian marble, was placed over his
grave. He had adopted as a title of honour the opprobrious
epithet of " dog" (Greek kvmv, hence " Cynic"), which had
been applied to him, and perhaps to his teacher before him.
Similarly, political parties have sometimes appropriated
the nicknames given them by opponents ; thus the Gueux
(beggars) of the Netherlands, and the Tories (highway-
men). " Heavenly Dog " is the name given to Diogenes,
doubtless with allusion to the Dog-star, by the poet
Cercidas in verses dedicated to his honour.
Diogenes influenced posterity more by his example
158 GREEK THINKERS.
than by his writings. Among his pupils was Crates, a
well-born Theban, who divided his not inconsiderable
property among his fellow-citizens, and adopted the life
of a beggar. In this he was followed by two converts
from Maroneia in Thrace, Metrocles and his famous sister
Hipparchia, who became the life-companion of the mis-
shapen beggar-philosopher. His poems, some specimens
of which we have already quoted, consisted partly of
parodies, in which even the wise Solon was not spared,
and partly of tragedies. A few relics of the latter have
been preserved, a few lines in praise of the world-citizenship
and the freedom from care of those who possess nothing.
Of the other pupils of Diogenes the two who most deserve
special mention are the Syracusan slave Monimus, the
aggressive enemy of universal " illusion," and Onesicritus,
who accompanied Alexander in his campaigns, and was
not a little struck by the resemblance between the life of
Indian penitents and that of the Cynics. The statesman
Phocion and the rhetorician Anaximenes are also mentioned
as his pupils in a wider sense of the word.
Of the seven book-dramas of Diogenes, all of which
dealt with mythological subjects, we only possess three or
four lines of slashing invective against " filthy and unmanly
luxury." His prose works are lost without a trace. It is
quite impossible to distinguish in detail between what is
genuine and what is spurious in the sayings attributed to
him. To avoid repetition, the little we know of his personal
teaching will be incorporated in the general exposition and
criticism of Cynic doctrines to which we now proceed.
6. The extant remains of the hortatory speeches of
Teles, the date of which is about 240 B.C., contain a sedi-
ment of general Cynic teaching, the common property, we
venture to say, of the school. The chief feature here
brought before our eyes is that reversal of ordinary judg-
ments of worth, in respect both of virtue and of happiness,
which is denoted by the technical term of d'Sia^opla, or
indifference. It may at first seem as if an attitude of
indifference were inconsistent with any judgments of worth
at all, new or old. But the contradiction is only apparent.
THE PARADOXES OF DIOGENES. T 59
The doctrine of dSiafyopta is not to be understood as im-
plying that the externals of life were to the Cynics matter
of entire and absolute indifference. If so, it would have
been impossible for them to project a new ideal of social
and political order. The true meaning of the doctrine is
as follows : The man who has gained perfect freedom for
his own soul, who has vanquished " illusion," is superior to
all external circumstances. Sickness, banishment, death,
deprivation of funeral rites, all that men in general regard
as the direst calamities, cannot disturb his peace of mind.
On the other hand, all the so-called good things of life
— power, riches, honour — are incapable of affording him
pleasure. But for the man who has not yet attained this
goal of inward emancipation, who is still struggling to
overcome illusion and to cast off the yoke of passion,
outward circumstances are not indifferent. It is in this
connexion that the readjustment of values, the reversal of
common judgments of worth, takes place. The beggar
wins freedom more easily than the king ; the needy and
the despised have an advantage over the possessors of
wealth and honour. Indifference is thus not for him
who is still climbing, but for him who stands on the
summit ; he has conquered all illusion, and the way now
lies open for him, not to happiness merely, in the ordinary
sense, but to such bliss as the gods enjoy.
Once we have familiarized ourselves with this mode of
thought, we shall be able to understand how Diogenes was
led to the extreme paradoxes of which his dramas were
full. His constant aim was to exhibit the pernicious
effects of conventional ideas, their power of destroying
inward peace. He was never tired of depicting the misery
which arises out of a false estimate put on things in them-
selves indifferent, not merely for those primarily concerned,
but for distant generations as well, through the emotional
shock produced by the narration and dramatic reproduction
of the original events. " There they sit together in the
theatre," we may imagine Diogenes exclaiming; "they are
dissolved in tears and racked by unspeakable horror, all
because of a ' Thyestean banquet ' or the marriage of
l6o GREEK THINKERS.
CEdipus with his own mother." And yet this horror
rested upon pure imagination. The example of fowls, or
dogs, or asses, and the brother-and-sister marriages of the
Persians teach us, so he thought, that the union of near
kin is not necessarily against nature. Similarly, he justified
cannibalism by an appeal to the customs of many peoples,
and by an'argument drawn from the Anaxagorean physics.
Since all contained parts of all, human flesh was not a
unique or privileged substance. Diogenes was not here
concerned so much with the establishment of rules for
conduct, as with the enforcement of the doctrine that the
wise man is "self-sufficient," and absolutely independent
of the power of fate. Even when destiny brings upon him
calamities as horrible as those which overtook Thyestes or
CEdipus, he can convince himself, by a flawless chain of
reasoning, that no real evil has befallen him. It must,
however, be conceded that in framing these paradoxes
Diogenes was influenced to a certain extent by mere
delight in the bizarre as such, and the wish to astonish
the honest bourgeois by a dazzling exhibition of dauntless
courage. We need not go far to find modern parallels.
The little that we know of the Cynic ideals of the state
and society creates a very different impression. Here
every feature stands in close relation with historical reality,
with the actual circumstances of the day, or of the recent
past, or the near future ; and for this reason the seriousness
of those projects is not to be doubted. There is much
significance in the mere fact that the " Republic " of
Diogenes, a work whose genuineness has been questioned,
but which is amply guaranteed by the testimony of the
earliest Stoics, contained the picture of an ideal political
and social order. It proves that the vagrancy and the
mendicancy of the Cynic, as also his withdrawal from
public affairs, were regarded by the founders of the school
as temporary makeshifts, and not intended as permanent
and normal elements in the perfect life. The leading
features of their ideal were the removal of all barriers
that divide man from man, that is to say, the abolition of
national and social distinctions and of the privileges based
HIS POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IDEAS. l6l
on sex. The form of government which they proposed
was doubtless an enlightened and provident despotism. It
is difficult, at all events, to see how their boundless con-
tempt for the deluded multitude could have been reconciled
with any scheme giving that multitude an effective share
in government, while a dominant aristocracy would have
been made impossible by the provisions of their social
programme. There is great truth in the observation, first
made by Plutarch, that Alexander realized the Cynic ideal
on its political side by the foundation of his world-empire.
It is noticeable, too, that in Egyptian state-papers of the
Ptolemaic era passages occur which agree both in sentiment
and expression with the teachings of the Cynic school.
Lastly, that division of mankind into Hellenes and bar-
barians, to which even Aristotle clung, was vehemently
rejected by the great Alexandrian scholar Eratosthenes,
whose teacher, Ariston, was remarkable among the Stoics
for his leanings towards Cynicism. A movement which
implied the disparagement of the old city-states, which
sapped the national sentiment of Greece, and which
cherished ideals incompatible with a graded social
organization, thus provided a fitting prelude and accom-
paniment to the monarchical transformation and the
partial Orientalizing of Hellas. The Cynic and Stoic
dream of a single flock under a single shepherd was
temporarily realized, and even after the decay of two
empires survived for centuries as an ideal.
Our information on the social scheme of Diogenes is
scanty and confined to a few provisions regarding property
and population. We read of a proposal to introduce a
kind of paper-money, the so-called "bone-money," which
was to replace the precious metals as a medium of ex-
change, and prevent the accumulation of movable wealth.
Quite unconsciously, for his method was anything but
historical, the Cynic has here imitated the iron currency
of the Spartans. We are not told how he proposed to
deal with landed property, but there can be little doubt
that he would either have entirely prohibited the private
ownership of land, or else confined it within the narrowest
VOL. II. m
1 62 GREEK THINKERS.
possible bounds. It is clear that there was no room for
a law of inheritance under a system subversive of the
family. That " community of children " was a fundamental
feature of the scheme, is stated in so many words ; and we
need not hesitate to accept an assertion which is probable
in itself and is nowhere contradicted. Diogenes is here in
agreement with the early Stoics, as well as with Plato,
whose similar scheme, however, was only intended to be
applied to the ruling class. It is said that Diogenes further
proposed the community of wives ; but, from the context
in which we find both this statement and a similar one
regarding the founders of the Stoic school, it is plain that
what he really advocated was something which we should
now term "free love," but which may be described with
greater fidelity to the Cynic ideal as a system of loveless
unions subject to no control on the part of the State. In
this instance zeal for unlimited individual freedom, from
the yoke of passion as well as from the yoke of society,
gained the victory over every other consideration. But,
here as elsewhere, nature sometimes proved stronger than
theory. The only liaison which is reported with any detail
as having occurred among members of this group is that
between Crates and Hipparchia, a woman who did not
disdain the Cynic dress and the Cynic life ; and this,
at all events, was evidently no casual and temporary
association, but an instance of genuine love.
7. It is not easy to discern the connexion between the
social morality of the Cynics and their fundamental ethical
postulates. If we possessed the " Republic " of Diogenes,
or any remnant whatever of the relevant works of Anti-
sthenes (" On the Beautiful and the Just," " On Justice and
Courage," " On Injustice and Impiety "), our task would be
easier. We might then hope to discover the method by
which social obligations were deduced from the conception
of individual happiness as based on self-sufficiency and the
conquest of desire. But as it is, we are left to conjecture.
All we can say is that there is no lack of connecting-
links between that ideal of happiness on the one hand and
the rudiments of social virtue on the other. The stern
CYNIC SOCIAL ETHICS. 1 63
subjection in which the Cynic was expected to keep his
passions, primarily to be sure in the interests of his own
inward peace, could not but turn to the advantage of those
who would have suffered if those passions had been let
loose. This thought finds expression in the concluding
lines of the passage we have already cited from the bur-
lesque poem of Crates ; and the condemnation of jealousy
and exclusive family affection which we find in Plato and
the Stoics illustrates the same tendency. If, then, no one
is allowed to own more than is required for the satisfaction
of his most elementary needs, if all possession beyond this
is to be regarded as hurtful to the possessor, there is an end
of every occasion and every motive for plundering, enslaving,
or oppressing others. Lastly, the unconditional rejection of
all prejudices founded on distinctions of origin or of status
choked at the fount the well-spring of pride and presump-
tion ; though it must be allowed that new temptation to
these sentiments was provided by the Cynic's lofty con-
sciousness of superior virtue and his fine intellectual disdain
for the deluded multitude. In reality, however, the Cynic
was influenced by altruistic motives in afar higher degree than
his ethics required him to be. Diogenes was universally
praised for his kindness and his gentleness, and his suc-
cessors were conspicuous by their efforts to help and reform
their fellow-men. Nor is this all ; a clear note of sympathy
with the suffering and the oppressed runs through all the
literary relics of the school. A less pleasant feature was an
inveterate suspicion of the rich and the high-placed, which
was ready to impute sordid motives on the least occasion.
Both characteristics may perhaps be justly laid to the
account of the half proletarian origin and the wholly pro-
letarian mode of life which were common in this sect.
The ethical system of the Cynics derived neither increase
of content nor reinforcement of motive from religion. Here,
if anywhere, it is necessary to keep theology and religion
strictly apart. The Cynics had the first, but lacked the
second. With their clearness of intellect and their confi-
dence in intellect, with their tendency to demand a radical
solution of every problem, with their peculiar and exacting
164 GREEK THINKERS.
ideal of virtue, they could not fail to recognize the con-
tradictions, the absurdities, the unworthinesses of current
polytheism ; nor could they rest satisfied with any of the
compromises which for so long had served to bridge the
gulf between the old faith and the new. The Cynics thus
became the first to preach, without reserve or qualification,
that simplest form of theology — monotheism — a doctrine
which commended itself to them as much by its accordance
with the universal reign of law as by its freedom from
mythical accretions at variance with their own views on
morality. It is only by convention that there are many
gods ; by nature there is but one. The Godhead resembles
no other being ; there is no likeness of Him whereby He
may be known. These two propositions, which occurred
in the writings of Antisthenes, comprise the sum of Cynic
theology so far as known to us.
In any case, the Deity was to them a colourless abstrac-
tion, not unlike the " First Cause " of the English Deists.
They saw in the " Supreme Being " no Father caring for his
children, no Judge punishing sin ; at the most a wise and
purposeful Governor of the world. That the Cynic felt
himself bound by any but the weakest of personal relations
to the Godhead, there is not a trace of evidence to show.
The best confirmation of this statement is the fruitlessness
of the most zealous endeavours to make a case for the other
side. Jakob Bernays, who saw in the adherents of " the most
purely deistic sect of antiquity " the precursors and un-
witting auxiliaries of the movement in favour of Biblical
religious forms, would only too gladly have credited them
with some touch of the spirit which animated their suc-
cessors. But when he speaks of their " consciousness of
union with God," and the " feeling of power springing
therefrom," he has no better proof to offer than an arbitrary
misinterpretation of a manifest joke, one of the many which
are, rightly or wrongly, ascribed to Diogenes. The latter,
as a piece of dialectic sword-play, undertook to prove that
the wise man need envy no one, for he possesses all things.
" Everything is the property of the gods " (note that the
Cynic adopts the popular polytheistic standpoint) ; " the
CYNIC SCORN FOR POPULAR RELIGION. I 65
wise are the friends of the gods ; among friends all things
are common ; therefore everything is the property of the
wise." Nor is it any wonder that with men who identified
happiness with self-sufficiency, the loss of the feeling of
dependence involved the loss of all truly religious emotion.
For the rest, we may distinguish two phases in the
attitude of the Cynics towards the popular religion.
Venomous scorn for it, for its practices and its ministers,
was displayed by the earliest founders of the sect. Anti-
sthenes is said to have declined to contribute towards an
offering to Cybele, the mother of the gods, with the remark
that " doubtless the gods know their duty, and support their
own mother." When an Orphic priest extolled the happi-
ness of the initiated in the world beyond, he is reported to
have exclaimed, "Why, then, do you not die ? " Diogenes,
too, is said to have expressed his contempt for the Eleu-
sinian mysteries in the words, " Pataecion the thief" (a
Greek Cartouche), " having been initiated at Eleusis, is
more certain of bliss than Agesilaus or Epaminondas."
But both Antisthenes and Diogenes loved to dwell on the
myths and elicit profound meanings from them by dexterous
turns of exegesis. Such exercises were not to the taste of
their successors, who were still more assiduous in their
attacks upon popular beliefs. Their least deadly weapon
was parody, some examples of which, marked by undeniable
wit, were composed by Crates and Bion on the model of
the Homeric poems. With Menippus the Syrian and his
fellow-countryman Meleager, parody rose to satire, and they
undertook a thorough sifting of current views on life, as well
as of religious opinion. Echoes of their writings reach us
from the pages of Lucian, a scoffer who, much as he dis-
liked the Cynics, may often be observed standing on their
shoulders. The summit of achievement in the aggressive
line was reached by CEnomaus of Gadara, who lived in the
second century A.D., the author of a blustering invective,
steeped in " Cynic bitterness." In " The Detected Jugglers "
the oracles were scourged as the offspring of falsehood and
fraud. A long series of responses given by the god at
Delphi was passed in review, and arraigned, not merely for
I 66 GREEK THINKERS.
the ambiguity which was the veil of ignorance and for their
incompatibility with the self-determination of the indi-
vidual, but for their subservience to tyrants, for a barbarity
which went to the length of enjoining human sacrifices, and
for their glorification of immoral poets and useless athletes.
8. When we survey Cynicism as a whole, the impression
received varies very greatly, according to whether we fix our
attention on the doctrines of the sect or the individual work
of its members, and again according to whether we consider
its immediate, its remoter, or its remotest consequences.
The ethics of the school were purely individualistic. The
end of actions was the happiness of the agent ; this, again,
rested upon his independence of the external world, and
this upon the development of his judgment and the steeling
of his will by constant exercise and renunciation. None of
the precepts that have been preserved to us relate to the
promotion of the general welfare. The most that can be
cited is their adoption of Heracles as a patron saint and
model. But his unwearied labours were chiefly commented
upon with reference to the rooting up or the taming of the
passions which militate against happiness. In reality,
however, benevolent and philanthropic sentiments were
regarded as part of the typical Cynic character. Again
and again we meet with the picture of the man who mixes
with the masses, with the degraded and the despised by
choice, strives earnestly after the healing of their souls, and,
if reproved for keeping such company, answers, in words
strangely reminiscent of a passage in the Gospel (Matt. ix.
n) : " The physicians also go about among tit sick, but are
themselves whole." We have no means of gauging the
influence of the Cynic moral sermon. In any case it did
something towards paving the way for what may be called
a softened and less one-sided form of Cynicism, and helped
to make possible the widespread dominion of the Porch.
Thus, indirectly at least, Cynicism contributed to momentous
and deep-reaching changes in both political and social
relations, foremost among which we may mention the
substitution of monarchy for the regime of small republics,
and (the spiritual counterpart of this, if we may call it so)
CYNIC RADICALISM. 1 67
the triumph of monotheism over polytheism. Western
humanity owes a great and incontestable debt of gratitude
to these men. They introduced new standards of value,
and upheld an ideal of plain, simple, and natural living,
which soon purged itself of its original taint of dross, and
remained an enduring possession of the civilized world.
The thirst for pleasure, for gold, and for power has not,
for all that, disappeared from among men. But the mere
existence of an opposing principle, one to which mankind
has again and again reverted, often most strenuously when
the need was greatest, has prevented the mighty forces of
greed and selfishness from acquiring universal and undis-
puted sovereignty.
But while Cynicism has aided progress as by the working
of a wholesome leaven, it must not be denied that the full
realization of its ideals would have been the direst calamity
which could have befallen mankind.
" The good and evil cannot dwell apart :
The world's a mixture "
says Euripides, and his words are particularly applicable to
Socratism, a movement whose fairest fruits and foulest
weeds grew side by side. No greater blessing could have
been conferred upon the world than the preaching of the
doctrine that all human ordinances and precepts must
submit to stand before the bar of reason, there to be
judged by the measure of their fitness for their purposes,
their usefulness, their salutary operation. But it is one
thing to erect a supreme court of judgment to proclaim
the indefeasible rights of criticism ; it is quite another to
assign to criticism the work of positive construction, and so
transform the judge into an architect. Attempts of this
nature are fore-doomed to failure in every age. But their
success was a pure impossibility in an age which lacked
the historical sense altogether, and had not mastered the
deeper problems of psychology. It was not a mere risk,
it was an absolute certainty, that the more patent and
palpable, but on the whole less important, utilities would
thrust into the background others of greater moment but
1 68 GREEK THINKERS.
less easily discerned. Men who took pattern by the brute
and the savage, and who, with such examples to guide them,
proceeded to lop off the excrescences of civilization, were
sure to lay violent hands on much that is the fruit of an
evolution, leading in the main from the lower to the higher,
whose stages must be measured in myriads of years.
There is an extreme case which throws a lurid light
on this subject. We need not be horrified — so Diogenes
thought — at the idea of a "Thyestean meal." Let us
examine the matter. What is there, traditional morality
apart, to hinder the enlightened, civilized man from feasting
on the flesh of his own child, of his friend, of any man ?
Not conscience ; for the forbidden act is neither directly
nor indirectly hurtful to any sentient being. The true
obstacle is a deep-rooted instinct of reverence, resting in
the last resort on the power of association. Between an
honoured or a loved personality, or one merely respected
as human, and its now soulless husk, the mind has created
a bond almost too strong to be broken. Thus it is with
the body bereft of life ; but things which never possessed life
may also have a claim on our forbearance, our reverence,
even our self-sacrificing devotion ; for example, portraits,
graves, the soldier's flag. And if we do violence to our
nature, if we succeed in breaking by main force the bonds
of association, we lapse into savagery, we suffer injury in
our own souls by the loss of all those feelings which, so to
speak, clothe the hard bed-rock of naked reality with a
garniture of verdant life. On the maintenance of these
overgrowths of sentiment, on the due treasuring of acquired
values, depend all the refinement, the beauty, and the grace
of life, all ennobling of the animal instincts, together with all
delight in and pursuit of art — all, in short, that the Cynics
set themselves to root up without scruple and without pity.
There is, no doubt, a limit — so much we may readily con-
cede to them and their not too uncommon imitators of the
present day — beyond which we cannot allow ourselves to be
ruled by the principle of association without incurring the
charge of folly or superstition. The latter, indeed, is nothing
else than the result of carrying the principle to extravagant
AN APPRECIATION OF CYNICISM. 1 69
lengths. A man who can lightly leave the house of his
fathers, in which he and his have passed through the
manifold vicissitudes of life, may justly be taxed with
want of feeling. But he who cannot tear himself away
from the old home, even though the walls are crumbling
to instant ruin, can only be called superstitious or over-
sensitive, according to the nature of his motives.
In the comparative estimation of original and acquired
values, it is not often that a priori reasoning succeeds in
tracing the frontier-line with complete exactness. In this,
as in all great questions affecting human life, any delimita-
tion that is to be of use must be in the nature of a com-
promise between competing claims based on specific
experience. The reason is obvious. The high degree of
complication which obtains in all human affairs, and the
discrepancy, not in exceptional cases but in the average
case, between the immediate and the remote results of a
given institution or action, justify us in dismissing as
chimerical all proposals to solve moral or social problems
on the lines of the simpler problems of mechanics, by a
calculation of the joint effect of known causes. The
radicalism which forgets this is in every country and in
every age doomed to sterility. A noble people breaks
with its past and goes forth in quest of liberty. It finds,
however, nothing better than equality ; the dissolution of
unifying bonds destroys the cohesion of society, robs it of
all power of corporate action or resistance, and leaves it the
ready prey of a despot. Then, for at least a century, that
people stumbles along blindly from one short-lived experi-
ment to another. Such is the universal experience of
history ; and Cynicism, so far as it aimed at the immediate
realization of a new moral and social ideal, was no exception
to the rule. Considering it, however, as one among many
factors in human progress, we may say that the world would
have been poorer without it, and that it exercised a most
salutary influence by its antagonism to the forces of inert
conservatism and narrow-minded prejudice.
J 7° GREEK THINKERS.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE MEGARIANS AND KINDRED MOVEMENTS.
i. To the east of Athens, not far from the Diomean gate, on
a low hill flanking the mighty cone of rock named Lyca-
bettus, there stood a shrine of Heracles, and a gymnasium
which was used by the illegitimate sons of Athenian citizens.
It was in this building, named the Cynosarges, that the
half-breed Antisthenes taught, under the protection of the
patron saint of the Cynics. We may be sure that ethics
was not the only subject on which he gave instruction.
Probably the Homeric studies which occupied so large a
place in his writings, and which were pursued with much
vigour in other Cynic circles, were not unrepresented in his
curriculum. Thirdly, and perhaps lastly, he no doubt
devoted some attention to the metaphysics of knowledge.
This subject formed the connecting-link between his teach-
ing and that of the other Socratic schools, in particular the
Megarian, as it was called. And as the two mutually illus-
trate each other, while the successors of Antisthenes tended
more and more towards an exclusive devotion to ethics, we
have thought it best to omit this particular branch of the
first Cynic's work in our general account of Cynicism, and
treat of it in connexion with the doctrines of the Megarian
and kindred Socratic schools.
We cannot approach this subject without an expression
of regret that our sources of information yield so slender a
stream. Nor is it merely the niggardliness of the record
of which we have to complain. The mighty genius and
the wonderful literary art of Plato have thrust into the
HARD CASE OF THE MEGARIANS. T 7 I
background the doctrines and the writings of his Socratic
comrades and rivals. They were left stranded, off the main
line of philosophic development ; and, in addition to neglect,
they had to suffer contempt and obloquy at the hands of
both Plato and Aristotle. The cursory allusions with which
they are honoured by the two great leaders of thought are
almost without exception of a polemical nature, nor are
the polemics marked by too strict a regard for historical
truth and justice. The reader is presented with a curt
rejection of an opponent's theory ; he is not assisted
towards any understanding of the state of mind out of
which it arose, or of the problems it was intended to solve.
" Grey-bearded beginners," " poverty-stricken intellects,"
"Antisthenes and other uneducated persons," " simplicity,"
" silliness," — such are the terms of opprobrium with which
we are introduced to the doctrines now under consideration.
In order, therefore, to understand these doctrines and judge
them rightly, we must divest them of the partisan disguise
under which they are presented to us ; and our first
endeavour must be to ascertain how they arose and what
were the exact limits of their original application.
It is, indeed, no small injury that has been done by the
heavy hand of the two great philosophers. Though the
wish to do justice remains, the power is almost gone. But
in addressing ourselves to the task of doing our part in the
righting of a prescriptive wrong, we have the valuable
assistance of powerful allies. In recent times Herbart and
his followers were troubled by the very same difficulties of
thought as Antisthenes and the Megarians. Nothing,
therefore, could be more natural than that from this quarter
should come the first impulse towards an impartial estimate
of the solutions which had been proposed by those
depreciated philosophers.
First of all, we owe the reader some account of Megara
and the thinkers who had their home there. The mere fact
that the name of the city was also the name of a philo-
sophical school is not without significance. The truth is
that the leaders of that school found their course marked
out for them to some extent by the peculiar situation and
172 GREEK THINKERS.
history of their country. Megara was a near neighbour of
Athens, and between the two cities there existed an imme-
morial border-feud. But in the race for power Athens had
far outstripped her rival. The latter, after a beginning full
of promise, after having sent colonists to the Bosporus
where they founded Byzantium, and to Sicily where they
founded a second, the Hyblean, Megara, experienced first
a sudden arrest of development and then a rapid decline.
That war of classes, whose grim echoes reach us in the lines
of Theognis, had here raged with greater violence and per-
tinacity than elsewhere, and had shattered the fabric of
the State. Megara had the misfortune to lack that which
carried other Greek cities past the stormiest phases of the
class-struggle, a not too short-lived tyranny. It is not sur-
prising that there was little friendly intercourse, and not
much good will, between the neighbour-cities. The Athenian
with his metropolitan pride looked down on the rustic and
provincial Megarian, whom he was always ready to accuse
of boorishness and dishonesty. " Megarian tricks " is the
term used by the Attic comedians to stigmatize an ill-bred
practical joke. Abuse of this nature was probably requited
in kind, with all the added bitterness which comes of unsuc-
cessful rivalry. Thus it was the natural destiny of Megara,
once philosophy took root in its soil, to become the centre
of the opposition to the systems which came from Athens.
And this is what actually happened. The Athenian schools
of philosophy may be compared with the main column of a
victorious army ; the Megarians resemble a body of sharp-
shooters who hover on the enemy's flank, harass his rear-
guard, and check his advance. To spy out the joints in the
Athenian harness, to pursue the dogmatic schools — Aristo-
telian, Stoic, Epicurean — with a running fire of pungent
criticism, was a task for which the thinkers of Megara were
always ready and willing. Perhaps, too, some influence
should be allowed to the difference of race ; the positive
Dorian temperament, with its love of clear-cut, precise
statement, and its tendency to rigidity of ideas formed
a strong contrast to the greater wealth of thought, the
greater versatility and suppleness of the Ionian intellect.
EUCLID ES OF MEGARA. 1 J J
And it may be that the same taste for the grotesque, which
could on occasion find vent in knockabout farce, lent zest
to the construction of logical pitfalls. Of all the schools
which flourished at Athens, the only one towards which the
Megarians maintained an attitude of habitual friendliness,
not even in this instance uninterrupted by skirmishes, was
the Cynic school ; and this, with its clientele of half-breeds,
proletarians, and cosmopolitans, was precisely the one
whose connexion with the general life and thought of
Athens was the slightest.
Thus the spirit of criticism throve and grew strong in
the bracing highland air of the little Dorian settlement.
But its ultimate influence was to extend far beyond the
bounds of its original home. From it sprang the great
sceptical movement which, stubbornly true to its real self
under manifold changes of form, has continued through the
centuries to work its appointed task. Some positive systems
it has utterly overthrown, upon others it has forced radical
revision ; everywhere it has resisted the benumbing influence
of dogma ; and, in its capacity of a leaven and corrective, has
rendered service to the progress of thought whose magnitude
it would be difficult to exaggerate.
2. The founder of the Megarian school was Euclides.
He appears to have belonged to the older generation of the
pupils of Socrates. But it was not by Socrates alone that
he was influenced. Among the scanty records of his teach-
ing we find no statement more full of significance than the
one which ascribes to him a blending of Socratic doctrine
with Eleatic. Socrates had taught the unity of virtue, and
its absolute identity with Good. The Eleatics had asserted
the unity of Being. In the mind of Euclides the two
doctrines were fused together. He held that the unity of
Being was identical with the Good. According to trust-
worthy accounts, he " designated the One Good by many
names, sometimes speaking of it as Wisdom, sometimes
as Deity." And the Good constituted for him the whole
of Being ; to its opposite, the Not-Good, he denied all
existence. These curt notices require some explanation,
and supply abundant food for reflexion. First of all, we
174 GREEK THINKERS.
have here the earliest instance of a tendency which left its
impress on several successive periods of philosophy — the
tendency to retain the teaching of Socrates, but not to rest
satisfied with it. Socratism was haunted by a sense of its
own incompleteness. Socrates himself had brushed aside
the physical and metaphysical speculations of his prede-
cessors. But his disciples, both of the first and of the
second generation, resumed the discarded studies, and
endeavoured to combine them with their master's ethical
teaching. Not only did this impulse towards fusion give
rise, as we shall see later, to the Stoic and Epicurean
schools ; it dominated the life-work of Plato, whose con-
stant effort was to supplement Socratism by means of the
earlier forms of thought — Heraclitism, Eleaticism, Pytha-
goreanism. As a richly developed organism, producing
new and complicated structures at every phase of its
growth, contrasts with the most elementary types of life,
so the speculations of Plato contrast with the humbler
attempts of Euclides. The latter merely ethicized, if the
term is permissible, the metaphysics of Elea, and supplied
the ethics of Socrates with a concrete or objective basis.
That which gained by this procedure was not the Socratic
doctrine, but the doctrine of the All-One, which, without
receiving any increase of fruitfulness, was in a manner
rounded off and carried to its natural completion. For
Parmenides, the One Existent had been primarily that
which fills space, and secondly a primordial entity endowed
with thought ; Melissus had promoted it to the possession
of feeling and a consciousness of its own blissful state.
When Euclides the Socratic goes on to identify it with the
Good, and applies to it the name of Deity, may we not, in
spite of all the ambiguities attaching to the word "good,"
conclude that to the functions of thought and feeling there
has now been added an element of will ? We observe, not
without some amusement, that all the elements of human
personality which were so strictly banished from the Eleatic
universe have been carefully reunited, though by no means
fused into a living personality ; and we recognize the
astonishing and invincible force of the personifying instinct.
THE ONE AND THE MANY. 1 75
That which seems to us the strangest feature in this system,
the denial of the reality of evil, the identification of the
Not-Good with the non-existent, has no lack of parallels,
nearer or more remote, modern as well as ancient. The
great Abelard is famous as the first of the mediaevals who
essayed to distinguish between the " good " in the ethical
sense and the " good " as identified with reality by means
of the mediating conception of perfection. We remember
how the genius of Augustine was displayed in the attempt
to represent evil as purely privative. Similarly, there have
been optimists among the moderns who held evil to be
only " appearance." Even thinkers of the most recent
times have not always withstood the temptation to
confound the utterly distinct spheres of the morally good
and the merely stable or existence-conserving. This is
particularly apt to be the case with those inquirers who
undertake to found ethics upon zoology, and who do not
scruple to identify the moral virtues with the qualities which
win success in the struggle for existence.
The Megarians, as a school, may be described by the
term Neo-Eleatics. That which was new in their procedure
was the nature of the subject-matter to which they applied
the old canons of thought. This is at once apparent from
a cursory glance at the two chief problems to which these
philosophers devoted themselves. In technical language
they are known as the Problem of Inherence and the
Problem of Predication. Two questions are raised : " How
can a subject possess many different predicates ? " and
" How can a predicate belong to many different subjects ? "
For example : " How can a tree be at one and the same
time green, leafy, fruitful, and so forth ? " and " How can
the one green, or greenness, be attached, at the same time,
to many trees, to grass, to rivers, and other things ? " In
other words, " Plow is the unity of a thing to be reconciled
with the plurality of the attributes which inhere in it ?
and how is the unity of an attribute to be reconciled
with the plurality of the things in which it occurs ? " As
will be seen, the two questions are at bottom one. It is
concerned with the relation of unity to plurality. Now, the
176 GREEK THINKERS.
Eleatics had denied all possibility of any such relation.
Their successors, the Megarians, did the same. The chief
difference was that the earlier thinkers gave their chief
attention to the many in succession, to the problem of
variation and change, and were governed in their treatment
of it by the two postulates regarding matter which had
gradually been developed by the nature-studies of the
Physicists.
Before we proceed, a word of explanation, we had almost
said of appeasement, may be necessary. For the reader
may be inclined to protest, with some impatience, that
these are idle and perversely subtle questions, wilfully and
violently dragged into the field of discussion by quibblers
bent on winning cheap triumphs. But such a view of the
situation may be shown to be altogether wide of the mark.
These same questions provided constant employment for
the ancient intellect, and that by no means exclusively
within the limits of the Megarian school and the cognate
circle of the early Cynics. In the problem of predication,
more particularly, we shall see one of the main motives of
the most illustrious doctrine of the most illustrious among
Greek thinkers : we shall discover it to be one of the roots of
Plato's doctrine of ideas. Even when this brilliant creation
had been given to the world, his mind was far from having
found satisfaction. The question, " How can the many
beautiful things participate in the one beauty without the
latter being torn into shreds and fragments ? " vexed the
soul of the great philosopher to the end of his days. From
the problem of predication, again, there sprang a controversy
upon the true nature of universal concepts and their relation
to individual things which occupied the keenest and pro-
foundest brains of the Middle Ages. Far and wide men
debated the question with as much warmth as if it had
been one of practical politics. In the twelfth century, and
again in the fourteenth, the lecture-rooms of the Sorbonne
and the convocation-halls of the clergy rang with the
discussion of it. Lastly, the whole educated world was
divided by it into two hostile camps, which, under the
leadership of the Dominican and Franciscan orders, were
THE ANCIENT HERBARTIANS. I J J
ever ready to rally to the battle-cries of Realism and
Nominalism. Nor can we take refuge in the supposition
that the ancient and the mediaeval world were victims of
an illusion which has spared the moderns. Not so many
years back, an eminent historian of philosophy emphatically
rejected the view that the great controversy of the Middle
Ages can now be treated as old lumber, or as an infantile
disease which modern thought has outgrown. The main
problem is regarded by many metaphysicians as still
unsolved, and, more than that, the purely negative solution
of it which the Megarians preferred has been championed
in our own century by a school of philosophy whose
influence was once powerful and is not yet extinct. Johann
Friedrich Herbart * and his followers held that "An
existence, as such, is not only incapable of possessing many
attributes ; it cannot possess a single attribute distinct from
itself." And considerable light is thrown on the close
relationship between Megarian and Eleatic doctrine, when
we learn that for Herbart the two contradictions which
" pervade all phenomena, all our empirical concepts," are
"the contradiction of the thing with many attributes, and
the contradiction of change."
3. There is thus no reason for doubting the sincerity of
the ancient Herbartians ; at the same time, it seems not
superfluous to give a more exact account of the origin of
these difficulties, especially as they have become entirely
foreign to the habits of thought of many of us. The root
and ground of them is perhaps to be discerned in those
judgments which have recently been called " contaminating "
judgments, or judgments of identity. They are of the
following type : " The building which I see before me is my
friend's house ; " " The man of whom I dreamt last night
is my father ; " " The chief intermediary between ancient
philosophy and modern culture is Cicero the Roman." In
such cases the predicate is placed on a footing of complete
equality with the subject, is asserted to be one with it or
identified with it ; the word " is " fulfils the same office as
* Born 1776, died 1841.
VOL. II. N
178 GREEK THINKERS.
the sign = in arithmetical or algebraical notation. When
the mind had once become familiar with this use of the
copula, it was inevitable that it should find a stumbling-
block in another class of judgments, all those, namely, in
which the predicate denotes a quality ascribed to the subject,
as, " This leaf is green," or " Socrates is musically educated."
Nothing could have been more natural than that the
precisely similar use of the same linguistic expedient
in both classes of judgment should in the first instance
have led to the opinion that its function was the same in
both. But this view was attended with serious difficulties.
If " this leaf " and " green " were to be connected, so to
speak, by the sign of equality, a twofold objection presented
itself. For neither is this leaf green and nothing but green,
nor is greenness a property of this leaf and nothing else. As
long as this form of judgment was not kept strictly separate
from the " contaminating " type, a deceptive impression
was produced that there was no room in this leaf for any
other quality, such as extension, or shape, and that green-
ness, or the property of being green, which really belongs
to a great many other things, was contained in this leaf
exclusively. Thus the employment, in cases incompatible
with identity, of the form of speech commonly used to
denote identity raised the double question we have already
stated — How is it possible to ascribe many predicates to
one subject and many subjects to one predicate ?
This was not the first difficulty to which the use of the
verb "to be" gave rise. A prominent use of this word is
to denote existence, and when employed in this sense it
expresses duration and continuance, as opposed to all
manner of mutation and change. Now, the objects of
sense, at all events, exhibit incessant superficial variations ;
and the due perception of this fact, in the absence of a
theory of matter sufficiently advanced to point out the
persistent substratum, led to a denial of being or existence,
in the strict sense, to the physical universe. The reader
has already been made acquainted with this phase of
thought in connexion with the Eleatic school ; our chief
reason for recurring to the subject is to show clearly the
THE PROBLEM OF PREDICATION. I 79
intimate relationship between the earlier problem of change
and the twofold problem of predication and inherence which
emerged later on. There is, further, a collateral offshoot
of the problem of change which deserves, at least, a passing
mention. The attribution of existence to the varying
properties of the objects of sense was soon recognized, even
outside Eleatic circles, as not wholly free from difficulty.
The double use of the word " is," as copula and as denoting
persistence, led to such judgments as " This leaf is green "
being considered illegitimate, because they seemed to
exclude all possibility of the leaf afterwards turning yellow
or red. Some, therefore, as, for example, Lycophron (Vol.
I. p. 493), simply omitted the word " is " in predication ;
others evaded the difficulty, and others like it, by employing
locutions such as "The sun shines," instead of "The sun is
bright."
With regard, however, to the main problem in its two-
fold form, the linguistic stumbling-block might have been
soon removed by the simple reflexion that the copula is
called upon to perform several fundamentally distinct
functions. What lent the puzzle vitality was the circum-
stance that the difficulties of language were associated with
difficulties of thought, and those of no mean order. It was
not enough to recognize that the qualifying or modifying
judgments do not imply fusion or contain any statement of
identity ; the further question presented itself — What, then,
do they contain ? Still more indispensable than the above
negative result was its positive complement — an account of
the true import of those judgments and of the justification
we have for enunciating them. What, it might be asked,
is the integrating bond which gives unity and coherence to
the many properties, predicates, or attributes in the one
subject to which they are attached ? And wherein consists
the unity of a predicate which is affirmed of many, in other
respects vastly differing subjects ? The phenomenalistic
doctrines of which our exposition will more than once have
to take account will compel us to consider the first of these
problems. The second, the problem of predication in the
narrow sense, is one which exhibits a far greater wealth of
180 GREEK THINKERS.
development than its fellow, and we shall have to recur to
it when we come to the Platonic doctrine of ideas. All the
same, it will be necessary to give at least a sketch of the
chief phases of its history before we proceed.
4. Here again we find a difficulty of language and a
difficulty of thought entwined together. The first is not
new to the reader. We have already had several occasions
to notice it (Vol. I. pp. 195, 434). The fact that abstractions
on the one hand, and the objects of sense on the other, are
designated by the same part of speech, the noun, at once
testifies to a corresponding assimilation in the minds of the
originators of languages, and does not a little to promote
and perpetuate the same confusion in the minds of those
who speak them. We talk of whiteness and blackness, of
heat and cold, as if they were things, and the result is that
we experience an ever-growing difficulty in recognizing the
illusion. To this must be added — omitting minor con-
siderations— that among the objects of cognition there are
some of great value, some even of paramount dignity,
which can only be designated by substantives, or, at least,
are commonly so designated. We affirm things to be blue
or red, but we also speak of their blueness or redness ; we
speak of the goodness of that which is good and the justice
of that which is just, and wc soon find ourselves driven to
choose between holding such abstractions to be unreal, and
regarding them as realities or existences more or less of
the nature of things. Let us imagine a mind — we are
here approaching the main philosophical problem — which
has long pondered over this riddle, and which finds a
difficulty in dealing with the world of matter. The many
and diverse objects of sense, lacking as they do all per-
manence and continuity, are, on this account alone, held
in contempt, and denied all share in true Being. How,
then, do they come to possess common attributes ? from
what source are order and symmetry, above all, beauty,
imparted to them ? Let us imagine a mind at grapple
with this question, and we shall understand how the ground
was prepared for the vision which flashed on the intellectual
eye of Plato. The heaven of ideas, that is, of universal
REALISM AND NOMINALISM. l8l
concepts regarded as real existences, begins to overarch the
phenomenal world of sense. An intellect of comprehensive
range, little disposed to the study of detail, but living and
working among the universals, whether of metaphysics, of
ethics, or of mathematics, sees in that vision the one thing
which is — the sole reality. But the matter cannot end here.
The relations of those higher realities to the lower individual
objects still need clearing up. Are the former the glorious
originals, the latter the tame copies ? Or are we to speak
of an indwelling of the ideas in the things, or a participation
of the things in the ideas ? These and kindred questions
give rise to endless discussion.
But one fine day the shrill voice of dissent intrudes
upon the conference. Doubts begin to be audibly expressed
touching the reality of those forms which have revealed
themselves to the rapt vision of the seer. The individual
thing, lately banished in disgrace to the realm of shadows,
reasserts its title to full existence, and claims to be taken
more seriously than those incorporeal essences which no
eye has ever seen, and whose reality is vouched for by no
process of valid proof. A reaction sets in, the force of which
is in large measure due to the teaching of a sound instinct
that illusions such as language engenders have to do with
the matter. It is not with things but with mere names that
you are dealing : such is the cry that greets the architect of
this heavenward-soaring edifice of brilliant theory. Horses
we know, and men we know ; sweet things, cups, tables, are
not unfamiliar to us. But with your equinity and your
humanity, with sweetness, cuppishness, and tabularity we
are unacquainted. Thus exclaims Antisthenes, and he is
echoed by another writer, favourable to him but hostile to
Plato, the historian Theopompus. " Nominalism " is the
term used to describe this reaction against the form of
thought called " Realism." As a movement it dates from
the fourth century ; though the note of protest had been
sounded earlier, as in certain memorable utterances of the
so-called sophist Antiphon, which have already engaged our
attention (Vol. I. p. 434). Sturdy common sense, hostility to
all that is visionary or extravagant, perhaps, too, a strong
1 82 GREEK THINKERS.
feeling of individuality for which a particular person, or indeed
a particular thing of any kind, was the type of complete
reality, may well have been among the forces which swelled the
tide of reaction. And it was part of the Cynic temperament
to press the extreme view, to insist on the radical solution,
rather than seek for a via media. In every department of
thought, in morals, politics, or theology, this school could
tolerate no hint of compromise. In the case of Antisthenes,
philosophical antagonism to Plato may have been heightened
by the personal pique to which he gave expression in his
" Sathon," a violently polemical work, in which he did not
spare even the name of his great adversary. But we cannot
decide the question with certainty, any more than we can
determine who was the aggressor in the quarrel. On the
other hand, there is a circumstance of a different order to
which we may safely point as having conditioned his
nominalism. Antisthenes was influenced by the Eleatics ;
possibly through the medium of his teacher, Gorgias, him-
self the pupil of Zeno ; possibly through other channels.
We learn from an allusion in Plato, of the most unmistake-
able kind, that he shared with that school its fundamental
postulate concerning the incompatibility of unity with
plurality. But while unable to reject this main postulate of
the Eleatics, he was equally unable to accept their cardinal
doctrine of the unreality of individual things ; thus the one
possibility which remained open to him was to take refuge
in nominalism. For as he could not reconcile the unity of
an attribute or of a universal concept with the participation
in it of a host of individual things deemed by him to be
real, he was under the same necessity of denying the
objective reality of universals as the Eleatics had been of
denying that of particular existences.
5. Closely connected with his solution of what may be
called the problem of predication in the narrow sense, is his
logical treatment of the other branch of that problem, that
of inherence, as it may be termed when regarded from the
metaphysical point of view. He maintained that of one
subject there cannot be affirmed many predicates, nor even
one predicate different from itself.
THE ANTISTHENIC EPISTEMOLOGY. I S3
There is unambiguous testimony to the effect that he
held no judgment admissible except those in which the
subject and the predicate are the same. In other words, he
is reported to have disallowed all propositions but those of
the identifying type, such as, " Sweet is sweet ; " " The good
is good." At this point, we naturally feel some astonish-
ment, if not dismay. Here is a thinker, the author of many
works, the preacher of many doctrines, who rejects all the
forms of assertion which are capable of conveying real
information, and accepts only those which are void of all
content, which carry our thought never a step further, but
leave it to revolve in an aimless circle. From this difficulty,
if we are not mistaken, the following considerations afford
a means of escape.
Antisthenes treated of definitions. Such, for him, is a
proposition which sets forth "what it (the object of defini-
tion) is or was." Aristotle, we may remark by the way,
clearly followed this precedent in constructing his meta-
physical terminology. Antisthenes thus drew a distinction
between the simple elements of knowledge and the com-
binations of them. The former, which he compared with
elementary speech-sounds, were regarded by him as in-
capable of being subsumed under determinate concepts. In
their case the question " What ? " had no answer. They
were objects of perception, not of cognition in the strict
sense of the word. A man who inquired their nature could
only be referred to his own experience ; what was new and
strange to him could only be brought to his knowledge by
a statement of the resemblances between it and other things
with which his experience had already familiarized him.
Supposing, for example, that some one who had never seen
silver was to be taught the whiteness or the metallic lustre
of that substance, the right thing to do would be to tell
him that it was " like tin." The case was otherwise with
combinations or complexes of experiences which, in pursu-
ance of the same metaphor, he compared with syllables.
Just as the latter might be adequately taken account of by
pointing to their constituent elements, so also might the
syntheses of experience, the only true " objects of cognition."
184 GREEK THINKERS.
This cognition was, indeed, nothing else than a conscious-
ness of the elements of which the objects were compounded.
All that one had to do was to enumerate them, which, as he
remarked, was a " long story." The expression is not with-
out a suggestion of contempt, and was no doubt deliberately
used in disparagement of the great significance attached by
Socrates and many Socratics to the construction of defini-
tions. On the substratum of these empirical syntheses, the
transcendental reality of them, to use the modern termi-
nology, these nominal definitions have nothing to tell us.
Antisthenes, like many modern nominalists, ignored these
questions altogether. He would also seem to have neglected
the distinction between those attributes which belong to the
essence of a thing and those which have a merely external
or accidental attachment to it. Each new lesson of ex-
perience could, on these principles, be incorporated in the
meaning of a name, and be ever afterwards regarded as
comprised in its connotation. From this standpoint we can
understand how Antisthenes was able to formulate or employ
propositions containing new information, and yet declare them
to be merely identical judgments. Let us imagine, for
example, that the discovery had been made in his day that
whales, in spite of their fish-like form, do not lay eggs, but
bring their young into the world alive. He would at once
have found room for the new attribute in the nominal defi-
nition of a whale, and thenceforth he would have been fully
justified in regarding the proposition, "Whales (that is to
say, creatures having many points of resemblance to fishes,
but producing living young) bring their young into the
world alive," as an identical judgment. Old truths, such
as " All men are mortal," could be treated by him in a
similar manner. He would have declared mortality to be
part of the meaning of the word " man." Thus propositions
such as in modern terminology are called synthetic (that
is, involving a putting together) were for him transformed
into propositions of the kind we describe as analytic
because they involve a breaking up into parts.
These considerations will serve to illustrate another
doctrine which is ascribed to Antisthenes. lie is reported
MERITS AND DEFECTS OF NOMINALISM. 185
as having maintained that all contradiction is impossible.
For, if two persons use the same name, there are two con-
ceivable alternatives. They may use that name in precisely
the same sense, with full and concordant knowledge of its
import ; in that case the harmony of thought will neces-
sarily produce harmony of utterance. But if this condition
is not fulfilled, the two persons are not speaking of the
same thing ; and there is no contradiction in making
different affirmations of different things. This is the
furthest point up to which we can follow the Antisthenic
theory of knowledge with any certainty. Any advance
beyond this is checked both by the meagreness of the
sources, and by difficulties of a critical order. The allusions
contained in the^writings of Plato are not meant to be taken
as strictly historical, and that which is historical in them is
by no means easy to separate, with any exactness, from the
additions and modifications of a poet-philosopher who
always allowed himself a free hand in dealing with facts.
The statement that Antisthenes placed the " investigation
of names " in the forefront of his theory of knowledge is
sufficiently intelligible from what we have already said.
It by no means justifies us in transforming a thinker who
manifestly set out from Eleatic premisses into an adherent
of the anti-Eleatic Heraclitus, or a nominalist who con-
trasted names with realities into a champion of the nature-
theory of language which regarded names as the truest
copies of things.
6. The critical examination of these doctrines need not
detain us long. Both their weakness and their strength
are on the surface. It was something gained merely to
have abandoned the exclusive investigation of concepts.
Sole devotion to such investigations, to speak more exactly,
would in all probability have brought about a wide prevalence
of such faults as Aristotle castigated, severely but not unjustly,
in a passage which we have already quoted (Vol. I. p. 319).
The supreme end of all scientific endeavour is the know-
ledge of the order of the world, in the widest sense of the
phrase, the gaining of some insight into the laws of succes-
sion and coexistence which obtain in the physical as well as
1 86 GREEK THINKERS.
in the psychical sphere. The teaching of Antisthenes may
be described as a small step in this direction, because it laid
exclusive stress on the combinations of empirical data, not
on the mere elements of them, and because it shelved the
question, which transcends all experience, of their real
essence. Ontological speculation, a relatively unfertile
study at the best, was thus thrust on one side, and its
neglect tended, in principle at least, to promote inquiry
into the connexions of phenomena. It is true that this
advance — if we may so term it — assumed a form which
gave occasion to well-grounded objections directed against
what has always been the weak side of nominalism, namely,
its tendency to suggest that science is in reality nothing
more than a well-constructed language — " une langue bien
faite," to use the words of Condillac. Thus, in our example,
the truly important thing is the discovery that the
characteristic of producing living young coexists with the
form of a fish, not the mere fact that an old word
thereby receives a new meaning. But this truth tends
to be obscured by a procedure which, instead of giving
prominence to the above synthesis as such, passes lightly
over it, packs it into the definition of a word, and sub-
ordinates it to the newly acquired opportunity for analysis.
Such a procedure gives at least no guarantee that the work
of ascertaining facts and estimating evidence shall be
appreciated at its true worth and allowed that position in
the mind of the inquirer which is its due. But the mischief
lies still deeper. Let us concede to our nominalist full
justification in his protest against the regarding of universals
as things, against the hypostatizing or objectifying of them ;
we have still a point to make against him. Even though
he may see nothing but names where his opponents see
entities, the common use by mankind of those general
names cannot be a mere arbitrary caprice. There must be
some necessity, either in the mind or outside it, which has
dictated the employment of such names, and it is for our
nominalist to tell us what that necessity is. This challenge
was taken up, in the Middle Ages, by Peter Abelard,* who
* Born 1079, died 1142.
ABELARD, LOCKE, AND BERKELEY. I 87
hit on that compromise between nominalism and realism
which is known as conceptualism. The counterparts of
general names are, according to this system, on the sub-
jective side universal concepts, and on the objective side
uniformities or congruities of things — a theory which was
afterwards championed by John Locke, and which, properly
speaking, merely restores the natural unsophisticated view
of the matter, freed from foreign accretions. But not even
here could thought find rest. When men began to subject
universal concepts to a closer scrutiny, a new question (first
formulated with any precision by Bishop Berkeley) presented
itself : Do we really possess the power of constructing such
universal concepts ? or is that to which we give the name
merely a conglomerate of many individual ideas derived
from sense, perhaps nothing more than a single idea, of
whose distinguishing peculiarities we make abstraction, in
order that we may use it as a representative of the class
to which it belongs ? Thus from the same deep well arose
a continual succession of ever-fresh problems, with which
the minds of thinkers have busied themselves without
ceasing. And if we have dwelt on them at considerable
length, our object has been to guard, as emphatically as
possible, against leaving the impression that the paradoxes
of those early solutions can with any show of justice be
attributed to a vain love of paradox as such, or to a desire
to win applause by brilliant exhibitions of intellectual
dexterity.
7. When two persons do the same thing, it is the same
with a difference. We are reminded of this saying when
we compare Antisthenes with the Megarians. The former
was an Empiricist, who set out from the presuppositions of
the Eleatic method ; the latter were opponents of Empiri-
cism, who firmly adhered to the Eleatic results. They were
entirely at one with him in his denial of the compatibility of
unity with plurality and in his deductions from that denial,
but in nothing else. Of the points of contact between the
later representatives of the two tendencies, and of their
mutual approach, we shall have to speak in the sequel.
The Megarians inherited yet another legacy from the
1 88 GREEK THINKERS.
Eleatics in the Zenonian dialectic which they cultivated,
and which their opponents condemned under the name of
Eristic. This was the most conspicuous part of their work,
and it left its stamp on the school of Megara in the eyes of
posterity. What their guiding motives may have been, we
are in many cases no longer able to determine. One of
the chief of them was no doubt the same as that which had
governed Zeno in his pioneer labours, the desire to expose
the contradictions which, to use the language of Herbart,
traverse the whole fabric of our empirical concepts. The
keenness and nimbleness of intellect which they thus
developed was pressed into the service of controversy ; and,
lastly, they probably found some stimulus in the mere joy
of detecting ambiguities of expression and obscurities of
thought. These thinkers were never remarkable for breadth
of interests or many-sided productivity. But they devoted
themselves with ever-increasing assiduity to a task more
congenial to their character of strict, one might almost say
rigid formalists — that of laying bare, with merciless severity,
all the delinquencies, of language or of matter, committed
by those outside their own circle. They became a race of
logical martinets, whose criticism was not without its terrors
for Zeno the Stoic, or for Epicurus, and whose earnest
endeavours after microscopic exactitude imposed an ofttimes
unwelcome yoke on minds of greater fertility than their
own.
At the head of this group of fighting-cocks stood a man
who was noted for his personal gentleness — Euclides. Yet
he was by no means deficient in keenness of intellect. He
clearly discerned the laxity of the Socratic induction,
against which he urged an objection that may be reproduced
as follows : Either the analogy amounts to complete identity,
and then it is better to draw our conclusions from the thing
itself than from the objects chosen to illustrate it ; or else
the identity is incomplete, and then the comparison intro-
duces a surplus — a surplus, we may add, which tends to con-
fuse our judgment. To take a concrete example, he would
have preferred to deduce the necessity of expert know-
ledge in statesmen from a consideration of the governing
THE MEGARTAN FALLACIES. r 89
facts of political life, not from the halting analogies
supplied by the callings of the physician, the pilot, the
husbandman, and the like, in which partial resemblances are
accompanied by fundamental differences (cf. p. 141). For
the rest, the only other feature of his method known to
us is his preference for attacking the conclusions of an
adversary rather than his premisses — a piece of information
from which we may at least gather how great a space was
filled by controversy in his works, written, we are told, in
dialogue form, as well as in his oral teaching. Of his pupils
the best known is Eubulides, who probably confined himself
to lecturing, as no writings of his are mentioned. Among
those who enjoyed his instruction, but did not become pro-
fessional philosophers, were the orator Demosthenes and an
historian named Euphantus. He is generally regarded as
the author of certain famous fallacies which we shall now
have to take into careful consideration. To us, who from
our youth upwards have had our fill, perhaps more than our
fill, of logical and grammatical pabulum, many of these pro-
ductions of ancient ingenuity may seem somewhat flat and
stale. And we are somewhat too ready to assume a wilful
neglect of distinctions which, though familiar enough to
us, had in those days not yet been drawn or generally
recognized.
Eubulides devoted his chief attention to those arguments
by which he sought to illustrate, in Zeno's manner, the
difficulties bound up with our apprehension of the world of
sense. Among these we must place the argument of " The
Heap " (Sorites), an argument which deeply impressed both
contemporaries and posterity, on which the subtle logician
Chrysippus wrote a treatise in three books, without, as far
as we can judge, ever really mastering the difficulties raised
by it, and in face of which Cicero was still practically help-
less. The question was as follows : If two grains of wheat
are a small number of such grains, may we not say the same
of three ? And if of three, why not of four ? And so the
catechism proceeds till we arrive at ten, when we are asked,
by way of application — How can ten grains make a heap?
Another form of the same argument goes by the name of
I90 GREEK THINKERS.
" The Bald-head." Who has a bald head ? Surely not the
man who has lost but a single hair. Nor yet he who has
lost only two, or three, or four, and so on. If, then, it is
concluded, no addition or subtraction of a unity can trans-
form a small number of wheat-grains into a heap, or a full
head of hair into a bald head, how is it possible that either
transition should ever be accomplished ? This argument,
to which the Stoics gave a name which we may render
" the Theorem of Continuity," was naturally illustrated by
a great variety of examples ; thus we learn from Cicero
that it was applied with equal effect to the antitheses of
rich and poor, of famous and obscure, of long and short, of
broad and narrow, and many other pairs of opposites. In
the eyes of its author the theorem without doubt possessed
the highest significance, and ranked as a new proof of the
contradictory nature of empirical concepts, on a par with the
cognate grain of millet argument devised by Zeno, with
which the reader is already familiar (Vol. I. pp. 192, seg.).
For our part, we hold this piece of reasoning to be worthy
of the closest attention. In order to judge it rightly, we
have to draw a distinction between two classes of cases — a
distinction which may be easily explained in connexion
with the main instance, the Heap argument itself. If we
are to understand by the word " heap " a confused, indistinct
assemblage, then this confusedness or indistinctness is a
quality admitting of degrees, and we can return a very
simple answer to the question put to us. We say that this
quality does actually increase and decrease with the number
of objects. The collection becomes more confused by each
addition of a unit, more distinct by each subtraction of one,
that is, it becomes more or less of a heap. But if it be
desired to give a precise definition of a heap, we may apply
the term to a collection of objects, the number of which is
too great to be taken in at a glance. On this view there
exists an absolute limit, different, to be sure, for different
persons, or for the same person in different psychical states,
but perfectly definite for a given person in a given state,
and at this limiting number the collection will begin or
cease to be a heap. For the Bakairi Indian, who cannot
THE "HEAP." 191
count up to three without the help of his fingers, this
threshold will occupy a very different position from that
which it will have in the case of a trained observer who has
had practice in this class of experiment, or of an arithmetical
virtuoso like Dase, capable of counting several dozen
objects at a single glance.
In the first case the fallacy derives its plausibility from
the fact that language misleads us into taking differences of
degree for absolute differences. And even in the second
case a cognate difficulty presents itself. For the fact to
which we have just called attention, that the same collection
may be a heap for A and not a heap for B, is an almost
fatal stumbling-block for the unschooled mind, held fast in
the shackles of language, which straightway looks for an
objective existence behind every word. But, even apart
from this, our second case involves a real, material difficulty
— almost identical with the one we have already encountered
in the grain of millet argument. For it is a matter of not
unreasonable astonishment that a purely quantitative
difference, which, on the analogy of numberless similar
instances, we might have expected to perceive only as a
more or a less, should produce a qualitatively new effect
upon our consciousness at a definite stage of the increase or
decrease. In the one case, consequent upon an increase of
intensity in a disturbance of the air, there emerges a
previously non-existent sensation of sound ; in the other,
as a consequence of an increase in the number of wheat-
grains, we have the loss of a previously existent ability to
count them at a glance. By such phenomena as these our
attention is directed to a fact, not a little surprising in
itself, at variance with the most familiar analogies, and
therefore extremely perplexing in the earlier stages of
thought, the fact, namely, that in certain, by no means
isolated, cases a change which, on the objective side, is
purely quantitative, may have for its result a qualitative
change in sensation, in the faculty of judging, and, we may
add. even in the emotional state. For it is possible by such
means to transform a pleasurable feeling into its opposite ;
as when a gentle tickling, felt as agreeable, is made painful,
192 GREEK THINKERS.
or even unbearable, by mere increase of intensity, or when
a luxuriously warm bath is turned into a torture by mere
rise of temperature.
Finally, we have to note another effect of that relative
and subjective element which we have already met with
in the different capacities for discrimination of different
individuals, and in the practice or want of practice of any
one observer, his state of undivided or distracted attention.
Our mode of appreciating riches or poverty, greatness or
smallness, and so on, varies very considerably with the
materials for comparison which we have at our disposal
in each case. This circumstance still further narrows the
possibility of returning an unambiguous answer to the
question — At what point of such and such an increase or
decrease does a given predicate begin to be affirmable of a
given subject ? But the difficulty vanishes the moment
we replace the positive by the comparative. The thing
or being considered will actually become richer or poorer,
greater or smaller, broader or narrower, with every addition
or subtraction of even a single unit of the appropriate
species.
It is not a metaphysical, but a logical difficulty which is
embodied in a sophism which has been much canvassed
under the name of the " Liar." It runs thus : " If a man
lies and says he lies, does he lie or does he tell the truth ? "
It is made to appear that the man does both simultaneously,
which was held to be a logical impossibility. One's first
idea is to answer, "The statement about the false state-
ment is true, but the latter remains false all the same."
Or if it is habitual lying, not a particular lie, that is
referred to, we may answer, with Aristotle, " There is no
impossibility in supposing that the man habitually lies, but
that in this particular instance (in the proclamation of his
own mendacity) he is telling the truth." But, on the first
hypothesis at any rate, the difficulty lies deeper. Can we —
this is the question — describe as mendacious an utterance
which is so designated by the utterer himself ? First
we must get a clear idea of what a lie is. We must take
the conception to pieces, so to speak, and see what are
THE "LIAR." 193
the elements that compose it. There are two of them : the
divergence from truth of a statement, and the accompany-
ing intention to deceive. In the case before us, the first is
present and the second absent. Or rather, as in the Greek
word for "to speak falsely" the subjective element is less
prominent than in our " to lie," the truth-contradicting
nature of a statement ought to have been distinguished
from its capacity to deceive. The words contain an
untruth, but the accompanying confession takes away
from them the power of producing the ordinary effect of
an untruth. Elements usually found associated together,
and in such association making up the every-day meaning
of the word " to lie," are for once disjoined. In this dis-
junction lies the peculiarity of the case. One might almost
say that the supposed statement leaves the mouth of the
speaker as an untruth, but does not reach the mind of the
hearer as such. The question thus did not admit of a
simple answer, but only of one hedged round with
numerous reservations. The fact that Chrysippus, and
Theophrastus as well, wrote bulky volumes on this very
sophism shows that there was a stage of thought in which
the distinctions we have just been suggesting were not easy
to establish. Men were not as yet possessed with that
distrust of language which animatse us moderns and
frequently causes us to see in words a far from adequate
expression of the facts. On the contrary, there reigned a
simple and unsuspecting faith that the range of an idea
and the range of that word which answers to it roughly and
on the whole, must in every case exactly coincide. And
yet we might just as well expect political and natural
boundaries to be identical with each other, not only often,
but always, and without exception.
A sophism of somewhat similar type is the one known
as the " Electra," or as " The Man in Disguise." Suppose
Electra, the heroine of the tragedies by Sophocles and
Euripides bearing her name, as also of the " Grave-offering "
of /Eschylus, — suppose this Electra to be asked whether
she knows or does not know her brother, who has been
brought up at a distance from her, but now stands, a
VOL. II. 0
194 GREEK THINKERS,
stranger, before her : her answer may be shown to be false
in every possible case. If she answers in the negative, she
lays herself open to the rejoinder that she does know
Orestes, for she is well aware that he is her brother ; if she
answers in the affirmative, then it may be put to her that
she does not know Orestes, for she is unaware that the man
before her is Orestes himself. By " knowing Orestes " is
meant, in the first instance, being aware of the family tie
which connects her with Orestes, but, in the second case,
the identifying Orestes with the stranger now present. The
confusion is increased by the circumstance that the two
pieces of knowledge, that of the family tie and that of
the external appearance of the near relation, usually go
together. Another variety of the same argument is " The
Man in Disguise." My father stands disguised before me,
and if I am asked whether I know my father, my answer
must inevitably be open to objection. The word " to know "
is here used, firstly, of the knowledge of an object ; secondly,
of the knowledge of its presence. Here, too, the effect of
the mere equivocation is strengthened by the fact that
usually I can recognize what I know, though in the present
case I am prevented from doing so by a special contrivance.
This sophism seems transparent enough to us, but that it
made no slight impression on those who were contemporary
with its invention, and on posterity as well, appears from
several considerations. For example, Epicurus, in an
epistemological section of his chief work, " On Nature,"
vigorously denounces the " Sophist who propounded the
Man in Disguise."
Another argument of but slender value is known as
"The Horned Man." "Have you lost your horns?"
" No." " Then you must have them ; for what one has not
lost, one must possess." The same fallacy was perhaps a
little more effective in the following shape : " Have you
ceased beating your father ? " When the person interro-
gated had sufficiently recovered from his first indignation
at the suggestion to be brought to answer a plain Yes or
No, it became possible — so it was thought — to wring from
him a confession that he had been guilty of that most
ALEXINUS AND STILPO. 1 95
horrible impiety. For " I have not ceased " was construed
as equivalent to " I continue," since the victim was not
allowed to append the explanation : " The only reason why
I have not ceased is that I never began." Even this piece
of dialectical horse-play is not without a value of its own.
It forces us to recognize that there are questions which
cannot be answered by a bare Yes or No without producing
unintentionally a false secondary impression. Such ques-
tions should not be called unmeaning, but misleading. In
ordinary life the only questions asked and answered are
those which rest on some valid presupposition. If a man
denies having lost an article, or having ceased from an
action, there is behind his words a tacit implication that he
had formerly possessed the article or performed the action.
Similarly in the question, " Is Napoleon in the next room ? "
and in the perfectly correct negative reply, we see an
expression of the assumption that the subject of discourse
is some person now in this house, or else in this town, or at
the very least somewhere upon earth, and not a man who
has been dead for many years. The confusion of negation
absolute with such negation as involves a partial affirma-
tion is even to-day by no means unheard of in philosophical
argumentation. As we shall possibly have occasion to show
later on, it is the neglect of this very distinction that some-
times endows the so-called axiom of the " Excluded
Middle," in itself an utterly barren formula, with an
illegitimate content, and makes it the source of arbitrary
metaphysical assumptions.
8. The last-named variety of the " Horned Man " is
ascribed to Alexinus, one of the most combative among
the Megarians, who was named in jest Elenxinus (from the
Greek tXzyxoc, refutation), and whose witty and important
polemic against a doctrine of the Stoic Zeno will occupy
our attention in the sequel. But prior to Alexinus is
Stilpo, the contemporary of the Cynics Crates and Metro-
cles. Next to Euclides, the founder of the school, he
enjoyed the highest consideration of any of the Megarians ;
his personal character won him universal reverence. He
revived the study of ethical problems, herein differing from
I96 GREEK THINKERS.
all other members of the school, and declared " freedom
from emotion " (diraQua) to be the aim of life. Although
in this point he approximated to the Cynics, he was dis-
tinguished from them by the fact that he avoided neither
civic nor family life, so that his contemporaries were able
to call him " a thorough man of the world." There is a
lamentable disproportion between our knowledge of his
work and the reputation he enjoyed among the ancients.
The princes of his time, especially the first of the Ptolemies,
paid him high honour; "all Hellas looked up to him;"
" when he came to Athens, all the mechanics left their
workshops in order to see him ; " he was stared at " like
a freak of nature." On the other hand, out of his nine
dialogues (they were not distinguished by any charm of
style) we possess but a single miserable little sentence :
" Then Metrocles turned on Stilpo in a fury." Even these
few words tell us something. We learn from them that
Stilpo introduced his own personality in at least some of
his dialogues — a thing which Plato never did. This mode
of writing dialogue was also that of Aristotle, and we may
observe, in parenthesis, it must have been practised by
Diogenes ; otherwise he could not have treated, in his
" Panther," of the oracular response that had been imparted
to him (cf. p. 1 56). There is a further point in which Stilpo
reminds us of Diogenes. Just as the latter named one of
his dialogues " Ichthyas," after a member of the Megarian
school, so Stilpo wrote a dialogue for which the title was
supplied by the name of the Cynic Metrocles. In both
cases the object aimed at was doubtless that of settling an
account with an adherent of another school. This settle-
ment of accounts can hardly have been carried out in a
hostile spirit, for the relations of the two schools were
fairly friendly, in spite of occasional friction, and in spite of
the raillery with which Crates deluged even Stilpo in his
burlesque gallery of philosophers. In any case the two
last-named men were near enough to each other in their
leaching to leave a lasting impression on one and the same
mind. Zeno, the founder of the Stoa, was a pupil of Stilpo
no less than of Crates. Jn him there took place a complete
STILPO AND THE PROBLEM OF PREDICATION, 1 97
fusion of the two tendencies which had already drawn
close to each other. This approximation was assisted by
the circumstance that Stilpo, setting out from the epistemo-
logical postulates of the Eleatics and Megarians, had
arrived at the same negative conclusions as had been
accepted in the Cynic school since the time of Antisthenes.
For he, too, gave the most serious attention to the
problem of predication, and he ended, precisely as Anti-
sthenes did, by denying the possibility of predication
altogether. Like Antisthenes, again, he argued against
the substantial existence of generic concepts, not merely,
we may be sure, in the particular shape which this doctrine
took in the hands of Plato, but in its most general form.
At this point we must endeavour to place the difficulties of
the problem, as felt in that stage of thought, in a still
clearer light than was thrown upon them at the beginning
of the present chapter. We have not yet mentioned the
case in which the predicate is expressed by a noun instead
of an adjective. But this is the very case in which the
bewildering spell of language is exerted most potently.
Two sentences such as, " A is a man " and " B is a man " (in
which the " a " is a modern addition, foreign to the Greek,
which does not possess an indefinite article), gave rise to an
impression that A was thereby completely identified with
B, and that the two were fused into a single entity.
Men were helpless in face of the double question : " How
is it possible — supposing these two propositions to be true —
for A and B to be two entities, and how is it possible for
either of them to be anything else beside man ? " Few will
quarrel with Stilpo for not being satisfied with the Aristo-
telian solution of the problem, according to which the
universal, Man, is immanent, as " secondary substance," in
each particular man. On the contrary, all predication of the
kind was for him as inadmissible as it was for Abelard, who
declared that to predicate a thing of a thing was monstrous
(" rem de re prasdicari monstrum "). He even thought that
in the phrase "to be a man" nothing was conveyed. The
phrase did not apply to this man more than to that ; it
therefore applied to neither of them ; therefore to no one at
198 GREEK THINKERS.
all. In the same way, it seemed to him that the individual
Socrates was divided into two by the two statements :
" Socrates is white " (that is, identical with the white), and
" Socrates is musical " (that is, identical with the musical).
It is fortunate for the subsequent reputation of the
Megarian school that these paradoxes, the boldest of those
which proceeded from its adherents, were propounded by
Stilpo, who is protected by the unlimited reverence paid
him by all antiquity from the suspicion of having merely
indulged in an idle and wanton exhibition of subtlety. In
reality, these were serious difficulties with which he had to
wrestle, difficulties which occupied the energies of the whole
of that generation and of a considerable part of the Middle
Ages, and which no one can hope to master unless he will
go back to phenomena, and free himself altogether from the
misleading tyranny of language. If, however, we may
believe a well-informed writer, Stilpo's negations had for
their positive background the old Eleatic doctrine of the
All-One ; and thus the absurdities which he believed him-
self to have detected in the world of sense were no doubt
welcomed by him as so many corroborations of that
doctrine.
9. It is possible, nevertheless, that, while he held the
processes and the relations of the world of experience to be
incomprehensible, he did not deny their reality. This, at
least, clearly seems to have been the position adopted by
his contemporary and fellow-pupil Diodorus, surnamed
Cronus. The latter permits us to say of a movement " it
has taken place," but not " it is taking place." Surely the
only meaning we can attach to this distinction is that he
recognizes motion as a fact, but denies that it is thinkable
or conceivable. We may disregard the fact that to this
dialectician is ascribed a corpuscular theory, involving the
assumption of indivisible particles, and contradicting the
fundamental doctrine of the Eleatics ; for it may at least be
regarded as probable that Diodorus merely admitted that
theory for the sake of argument, in order to attack the
conceivability of motion on that hypothesis too. - His argu-
ments on the subject differ little from those of Zeno, and
D 10 DOR US OX MOTION. 1 99
we consider it unnecessary to pass them in review. There
is, however, one exception. Unfortunately, it happens that
this one new proof is not easy to understand, while the
exposition of it in the writer who is our authority for it, is
by no means free from obscurities. It begins with the
distinction between the pure motion of a mass, that is,
motion shared by all the parts of it, and preponderating
motion ; the statement is then made that the latter must
precede'the former. The hypothesis is then set up that two
particles of a body are moving, while a third is at rest. The
next assumption is that the inertia of the particle which is
not moving is overcome by the motion of the other two. A
fourth particle, hitherto at rest, is now set in motion by the
first three. The four moving particles then disturb the
peace of a fifth, and the process is repeated on a continually
increasing scale until the motion extends to the whole of
the ten thousand particles composing the mass. " It would
be absurd," the argument concludes, " to say that a body
is moving preponderatingly (by which must be meant, in
virtue of the preponderating majority of its particles), of
which 9998 particles are (originally) at rest, and only two
in motion." Diodorus would thus appear to have con-
sidered the above-described process absurd, because an over-
whelming majority is governed and overpowered by an all
but evanescent minority. If this really was his meaning,
he must have had a very childish idea of mechanics. For
the process described by him is so little suited to the service
of an argument against the possibility of motion in general,
that it provides us with a representation, perfectly true to
the facts, of the propagation of motion from a given point
onwards, and of the gradual increase of motion. And there
is absolutely nothing at all which is contrary to reason in
that process if we suppose either that the impulse, which
acts directly on only two particles, or even on a single one,
is strong enough in itself to overcome the inertia of an
enormous number of particles, or that the same effect is
produced less by the strength of the original impact than
by the absence of adhesive or frictional resistance combined
with a latent tendency to motion in the particles at rest.
200 GREEK THINKERS.
Take, for example, the case of an avalanche ; here the first
impulse is exceedingly small, but it is enough to occasion
the fall of a great mass of snow lying loosely on an inclined
plane. Or perhaps the real difficulty with Diodorus was
to understand how the transmission is effected when an
impulse, primarily manifesting itself as the motion of a few
particles, and, as far as our perception goes, exhausting
itself in such motion, is, nevertheless, communicated to a
large mass. But in view of the inadequacy of our single
source of information, it seems hardly worth while to
elaborate hypotheses on the subject, still less to discuss the
problem itself and the difficulties which may have attached
to it at that early stage of thought.
Of much greater importance is the argument which
Diodorus directed against the concept of possibility. Here
we prefer to pass at once to the conclusion, and leave the
process of inference by which it was reached to be con-
sidered afterwards. Cicero, in writing to his friend Varro,
jestingly alludes to that doctrine as follows : " You must
know that if you are going to visit me, your coming is a
necessity ; otherwise, your coming would be in the number
of the impossibilities." The possible was for Diodorus
coextensive with the actual ; nothing that did not actually
happen was to be called possible. We can well understand
how so paradoxical a thesis gave rise to a fierce contro-
versy, in which the close affinity of the subject to all the
puzzles of fate and free will inflamed the passions of the
disputants to fever heat. But at this distance of time we
need have no great difficulty in recognizing that this pro-
position is only a profession of faith in the universal empire
of causality, couched, it must be admitted, in terms which
lend themselves very readily to misuse. If an event which
we designate as possible never becomes actual, then one or
other of the conditions necessary to its realization must
have been lacking at every moment ; in other words, its
realization has not been possible. How is it, then, that in
spite of all that, we continually distinguish between the
realities of the future and its possibilities ? and that we often
speak of the latter without regard to the former ? No
CHANCE AND CAUSALITY. 201
doubt it is, in the first place, our ignorance, our limited
vision of the future, that is responsible for this distinction.
But, in the present connexion, this point of view may be
ignored. It played no part in the ancient controversies
on the subject ; the pros and cons were discussed on the
assumption that our knowledge of the future has no limit.
But even on this assumption, the keen-witted Stoic Chry-
sippus had something to urge against the proposition of
Diodorus. The signet-ring on my finger, so he protested,
may remain unbroken to all eternity, but it is breakable all
the same. The mere possibility of its being broken, and
the realization of that possibility at some future date, are
two different things. Without any doubt Chrysippus was
perfectly right, and we are all of us perfectly right in
thinking and speaking of possibilities, capacities, forces, and
powers without regard to their realization, their exertion,
their translation into actual and palpable fact. But the
proposition of Diodorus is also perfectly true. The contra-
diction between the two assertions may be resolved by
a distinction which is not far to seek. Actuality and
possibility coincide as soon as we envisage the totality of
the factors which are concerned in the happening or the
failure to happen of any one isolated event. If the ring of
Chrysippus remains unbroken to all time, some one of the
conditions requisite for the fracture must be always in
abeyance, and the fracture is therefore impossible. It is
very different if we limit our survey, and consider only a
portion of the conditions which must be fulfilled before a
given process can begin. The case is just the same with
what we may almost call the complementary question — Is
there, or is there not, such a thing as chance ? We all of
us answer this question in the negative, so far as the word
"chance" is understood to imply a denial of universal,
exceptionless causality. But yet we make use of the idea
every day and every hour ; and here again we are entirely
within our rights so long as we direct our attention, not to
the sum of things, or to a comprehensive circle of processes,
but to a narrowly bounded region of fact.
We call it an accident when a dream is fulfilled. But we
202 GREEK THINKERS.
must not, by the use of this word, dispute that both dream
and fulfilment are causally conditioned. What we deny is
that the two chains of causation are linked together, and
that we have any justification in concluding from a recur-
rence of the dream to a recurrence of the fulfilment. An
orchard glows with luxuriant wealth of blossom ; a May
frost blights the promised harvestage. In such a case we
speak of an unfortunate accident, without in the least
wishing to imply that the fatal spring-frost was sent other-
wise than by causal necessity to destroy that which exist-
ing factors had up to now been able to produce. The
courageous act which saves a human being from death
threatened by fire or water is a fortunate accident relatively
to the person saved, though it may be the natural and
necessary outcome of the character and habits of the
rescuer. And, in general, the cases in which we speak of
accident or chance are those where a group of causes, in
itself adapted to produce certain effects, is interfered with,
and its operation nullified by a second, unrelated group of
causes. Turning now to the mode of proof employed by
Diodorus, we find it to have been something like the
following : All that is past is what it is of necessity ; its
being otherwise belongs to the realm of the impossible ;
but the possible cannot proceed from or be caused by the
impossible ; therefore neither can the present or the future
be other than they respectively are or will be ; the notion
of mere possibility thus falls to the ground. The defects of
this proof are sufficiently obvious. But we have not the
slightest ground for assuming that the author of the argu-
ment recognized its fallacious character. Why should he
have been more sharp-sighted than the half-dozen dialec-
ticians who treated of his thesis after him, with as it would
seem entirely fruitless labour ? Our criticism, however,
will be somewhat to this effect. If in the premisses necessity
is to be understood as causal necessity, the argument
assumes to begin with the very truth it is intended to
prove. It is what the logicians call an argument in a circle,
a petitio principii. This, too, is the most favourable judg-
ment we can pass on the demonstration, which, on such a
THE MEGARIANS AND ARISTOTLE. 203
construction, is as harmless as it is unnecessary, being merely
a roundabout mode of proving that which, for a believer in
the unlimited sovereignty of cause, needs no proof whatever.
It is otherwise if we understand by necessity — and this seems
to have been the meaning of Diodorus — the special irrevo-
cability which belongs to the past as such. The argument
must then be ranged in that large class of fallacies that
spring from the a priori prejudice requiring the effect to re-
semble the cause — a rule which holds good only for a limited,
though important, category of natural phenomena, as in the
conservation of matter and of energy. The invalidity of
the argument, so construed, is immediately obvious. In
exactly the same way, it might be proved that the past
cannot give rise either to the present or the future. For
how, it might be asked, can there proceed from the past
that which is contrary to it, or not-past, that is to say, either
the present or the future ?
But we have not yet finished with that much-discussed
proposition. It still remains to inquire what motive may
have led Diodorus to the formulation of it. This, for once,
is a question which seems to admit of being answered with
tolerable certainty. Beginning with the days of Eubulides,
there raged a fierce and bitter war between Aristotle and
the Megarians. We know, in particular, how the former
attacked the use made by Aristotle of the concept of
possibility. This quarrel will best be treated later on in
connection with the Aristotelian philosophy itself. For the
present we content ourselves with the remark that Aristotle
places potential existence by the side of actual existence
on an almost equal footing, and employs it not merely as
an aid to thought or expression, but as affording a real
ground of explanation, in much the same manner as many
physicists of to-day use their " forces," or the older schools
of psychology their " powers of the soul." On the other
hand, the Megarians, impelled by the same instinct which
had led both them and Antisthenes to protest against the
hypostatizing of abstractions, attacked this Aristotelian
concept also, and endeavoured to show that the notion of
possibility has no independent value, but only serves to
204 GREEK THINKERS.
express our expectations of future reality. Out of this
controversy — which, in the judgment of Hermann Bonitz,
one of the most careful of Aristotelian students, by no
means issued in a victory for Aristotle — it is very probable
that this argument of Diodorus arose. For the rest there
was sense and wisdom even in the whims and fancies of
this eminent man. To his five daughters, all of whom he
educated as dialecticians, he gave strange names, among
them, it would appear, one otherwise borne only by men.
He even used particles, such as Indeed and But, as names
for his slaves, evidently by way of giving a drastic example
of the lordly freedom with which it becomes man to
demean himself towards language, of which he should be
the master, not the servant. The same may be said of his
assertion that it is the business of a word always to mean
nothing more or less than what the utterer of it wishes it
to mean. It is clear that he takes up a definite position as
champion of the " conventional theory " of language (cf.
Vol. I. p. 394), and on the basis of this theory sets himself
to choke the most prolific source of dialectical and meta-
physical errors.
10. Following the line of philosophical tradition, we
have included Diodorus among the Megarians. But, in
point of fact, he was born at Iasos in distant Caria ; and it
was only as being indirectly the pupil of Eubulides, who
had himself migrated to Megara from Miletus, that he was
connected with that school. We cannot tell whether his
labours as teacher, from which, among others, Zeno, the
founder of the Stoa, drew profit, were carried on at Athens
or at Megara. The history of philosophy sometimes follows
the example of astronomy, which, for the sake of a more
convenient grouping, unites widely distant stars, not with-
out some violence, into a single constellation. The seed
which Socrates had scattered had sprung up gradually
in many parts of Greece, even in regions hitherto left
untouched by the speculative movement ; and in more
than one place there were close affinities between the
Socratic and the Zenonian dialectic. To these must be
added the powerful influence of the Cynic tendency ; thus
PHsEDO OF EL IS. 205
the division by schools and sects within the main pale of
Socratism is not a matter free from all artificiality. For
example, Stilpo was trained by a Corinthian dialectician
named Thrasymachus, who for his part was a pupil's pupil
of Euclides ; yet he was also reckoned among the disciples
of Diogenes the Cynic. Megara was his home and the
scene of his labours ; but it must not be forgotten that he was
not a pupil of Megarians only. Again, Alexinus both was
born and died at Elis. While other dialecticians, such as
Clinomachus of Thurii, were only outwardly connected
with the Megarians by but slender ties, there was a strong
bond of affinity between the Megarian and the Elian-Eretrian
schools. We are here met by the figure of Phsedo, a name
dear to all admirers of the art of Plato. He was a man of
noble birth and of great personal beauty, more memorable for
his romantic career than his intellectual significance. Torn
from his home at Elis as a prisoner of war, he became a
slave at Athens, and there was dragged down to such a depth
of degradation as the youths of the modern world seldom
know. He was redeemed from slavery by Socrates and his
friends, became a favourite disciple of the Athenian sage, and,
after the death of the latter, worked as teacher and author
in his native city. Of his dialogues we possess the sorriest
remnants, only a few words and sentences which practically
teach us nothing. We have already mentioned (p. 48)
his dialogue "Zopyrus." "Simon," another of his dialogues,
took its title from the name of a shoemaker, whose shop
Socrates frequented or was supposed to have frequented.
On the contents of this work we have only scanty informa-
tion, but it has been inferred, not without some probability,
that it contained an application of the Socratic ethics
to simple middle-class conditions, in opposition to all
that Phasdo considered as one-sided over-tension, or as
decadence.
With this Elian branch the ancients joined, by a some-
what external connexion, the Eretrian, because the chief
representative of the latter, Menedemus of Eretria in
Eubcea, counted the obscure successors of Phasdo among
his teachers, in addition to other Socratics, particularly
206 GREEK THINKERS.
the great Stilpo of Megara. In the case of the teacher we
have already noted the disproportion between his reputation
and our knowledge of what that reputation was founded
upon. The contrast is still more glaring in the case of
the pupil, and it is heightened by the following circum-
stance : One of his fellow-Eubceans was Antigonus of
Carystus, whose hand wielded alternately the chisel of the
sculptor and the style of the historian. He wrote memoir-
like biographies of contemporary philosophers, showing that
taste for detail of the genre order which marked both
the literary and the artistic productions of the Hellenistic
age. He was without doubt personally acquainted with
Menedemus ; probably he was among his disciples ; and
through his agency we possess the exactest information
on the personality and the career of the Eretrian philosopher.
The latter was descended from a noble family, but his
father was a master-builder of no very great means. He
was of middle stature, of powerful, sinewy build, and
bronzed by the sun. He was the foe of all pedantry, and
even in the management of his school he displayed a
certain free-and-easy manner. Each of his numerous
pupils sat or stood, as pleased him best ; the seats were
not arranged in a circle, as elsewhere. Between him and
Asclepiades, the friend of his youth, there was a bond of
life lived completely in common which was not disturbed
even by the marriage of Menedemus with a widow, and of
his friend with her daughter. He was a lover of poetry.
Among his favourite poets were Homer and ^Eschylus ;
in satyric drama he assigned the first place to his fellow-
countryman Acha;us. Among contemporaries, the didactic
poet Aratus, who, like himself, was intimate with the
Macedonian king Antigonus Gonatas, and Lycophron of
Chalcis in Eubcea, were on familiar terms with him.
We possess a description, written by the last-named poet,
of those Symposia which the hospitable philosopher loved
to arrange. The participants, including the pupils who
would appear at dessert, regaled themselves with con-
versation richly seasoned with wit, in addition to moderate
refreshments of wine and food, till the cock-crow warned
THE PERSOXALITY OF MENEDEMUS. 207
them that it was time to break up. He possessed great
acuteness and readiness of mind ; in his disposition strict-
ness was united with gentleness. The first of these
qualities was displayed by him in dealing with the son
of his familiar friend, whom he excluded from his school
and refused to salute, until he had recalled him to the
right path from certain errors of which the nature is not
known to us. Even in regard to his scientific opponents,
he showed himself courteous and kind. For example,
when the wife of his adversary, Alexinus, was on a pilgrim-
age to Delphi, he provided her with an escort to protect
her from highwaymen. For, to use modern terms, the
professor had become president of the small independent
state. As ruler, too, he distinguished himself by circum-
spection and energy. At a time when the states of Greece,
Athens among them, were outbidding each other in self-
humiliation before the Diadochi, he earned fame by a
behaviour which was as far removed from undignified
flattery as it was from insolent defiance. Perfectly in
accordance with this reputation of his are a few lines
written by him which are still extant, and which form
the opening sentences of a letter to Antigonus Gonatas,
congratulating him on his victory over the Celts at Lysi-
machea (278 B.C.). Soon afterwards his political opponents
succeeded in procuring his banishment, and he died, aged
74, at the court of that prince in Macedonia.
Of all his philosophical contemporaries, Stilpo was the
one whom he honoured most highly for his elevated strain
of thought. In his teaching, which was only imparted
orally, he came very near Socrates. He laid strong
emphasis on the oneness of virtue and its essential identity
with wisdom. In religion he was as liberal as Stilpo ; but
the polemics of the scoffers, who appeared to him to be
engaged in " slaying the slain," were little to his taste.
His logical innovations, as well as the cognate propositions
of Diodorus, must be left for treatment later on. Another
feature connecting him with Diodorus and Stilpo is what
we may call a strengthened feeling of reality — a feeling on
which the giant strides of natural science were assuredly
208 GREEK THINKERS.
not without some influence. Among the contemporaries
of our philosopher were to be reckoned investigators
like Herophilus, the founder of the empirical school in
medicine ; Euclid, one of the masters of geometry and
optics ; and Aristarchus of Samos, the Copernicus of the
ancient world (cf. Vol. I. p. 121). In the forties and fifties
of the nineteenth century the powerful development of
thought on the lines of natural science displaced, almost
without a struggle, the a priori systems of Schelling and
Hegel ; if we are not mistaken, something very like this
took place in the first quarter of the third century before
Christ. As our exposition proceeds, the analogy will
appear with greater and greater clearness. For the present,
our survey does not extend beyond a small portion of that
great picture. The campaign inaugurated by the sound
judgment and sturdy common sense of the Cynics against
hypostatized abstractions achieved great and growing
success. In Diodorus and Stilpo a close observation will
detect the same tendencies. But in the case of the
Eretrians, by which term Menedemus is more especially
meant, we are expressly told that they " denied the sub-
stantial existence of generic qualities, and only recognized
their presence in concrete individual things." In the
contemplation of these men, however, that which attracts
and pleases us most is the interval of peace in the bitter
feud between philosophy and practical life, an interval of
reconcilement with national manners and morals, during
which philosophy, without raising infinite pretensions, was
able to accomplish much sound and useful work. Mene-
demus of Erctria, the philosopher at the head of a little
commonwealth, who was unjustly railed at by his opponents
as being a Cynic, but was in reality full of warm-hearted
love for his country, is a figure on which the eye of the
historian gladly rests, as on a sun-illumined peaceful island
in the midst of a troubled sea.
CLIMATE AND SITUATION OF CYRENE. 209
CHAPTER IX.
THE CYRENAICS.
i . The torch which Socrates had kindled cast its rays not
only over Eubcea or Elis : they penetrated to the furthest
landmarks of the Greek world. Precisely at one such
frontier point, situated on the coast of Africa, there grew up
a branch school of Socratism, which flourished for several
generations, and finally became extinct, only to rise again
in the school of Epicurus, in which new form it was destined
to divide for centuries with the Stoa the dominion over
men's minds and hearts.
In the modern Vilayet of Barka, lately separated from
Tripoli, to the east of the Great Syrtis, a number of Greeks
had early settled, and, in course of time, founded five cities,
of which Cyrene was the oldest, and enjoyed the highest
consideration. Ancients and moderns agree in praising the
superb site of this city, and the richness of the surrounding
country. Sheltered on the south, by a chain of mountains,
from the sand and the heat of the desert ; situated 2000
feet above sea-level, on a terrace of the uplands which
descend, staircase fashion, towards the sea ; blessed with a
wonderful climate, the equability of which reminds us of the
Californian coast ; built on the "gleaming bosom " (to use
Pindar's picturesque phrase) of two mountain-domes, round
about a spring which issues in a mighty gush from the
limestone, — Cyrene presented in the old days, and still
presents to the traveller who visits its ruins, "the most
bewitching landscape that can ever meet his eye " (Heinrich
Barth). Down over the green hills and the deep-cut
VOL. II. 1'
2IO GREEK THINKERS.
ravines, overgrown with broom and myrtle, with laurel and
oleander, the eye is carried smoothly onward to the blue
sea below, over which, in days gone by, immigrants sailed
from the island of Thera, from the Peloponnese, and from
the Cyclades, to this royal seat, made, one might almost
say, for the express purpose of dominating the surrounding
country and the Berber tribes that dwell there. The skill
of the Greeks in hydraulic engineering and in road-making
achieved great triumphs here. By the construction of
galleries, of cuttings, and of embankments, the succession
of terraces which formed the natural configuration of the
ground was converted into a number of highways, which
wound in serpentine curves from the seashore to the heights.
The steep walls of rock at the side of the roads are pierced
with openings, richly decorated by the architect and the
painter. These are the entrances to countless sepulchral
chambers — a city of the dead, without parallel on earth.
Every watercourse was tapped before it ran dry in its
limestone bed, and the innumerable conduits thus supplied
were used to irrigate fields and gardens. On the mountain
slopes were pastured flocks of sheep whose wool was
valued at the highest price ; and in the rich grass of the
meadows there gambolled noble horses accustomed to win
prizes at the festival games of the motherland.
It must be admitted that for many years the pulse of
intellectual life beat somewhat lazily in the far-off colony.
Unending fights with natives, who had been but partially
won over to Greek civilization ; big wars with the great
neighbouring power, Egypt, consumed the strength of the
people. Again and again it became necessary to replenish
the population by fresh drafts of immigrants. Intervals of
rest between foreign wars were filled up by constitutional
struggles, in which monarchy, here never for long subject
to restraint, maintained its existence to a late period (the
middle of the fifth century), when it had disappeared in
nearly every other part of the Greek world. The only
parallel to Barca and Cyrene in this respect was supplied
by the island of Cyprus, which further resembled them in its
peripheral position and its half-Greek population. The oldest
ARTSTIPPUS OF CYRENE. 211
form of poetry maintained its existence side by side with the
oldest form of constitution to a later date than elsewhere.
The Telegonia, the latest of the poems composing the so-
called Epic Cycle, was written by Eugammon, in Cyrene, at
a time (a little before the middle of the sixth century) when
the epic was already out of date in Ionia and the mother-
land, and had yielded place to the subjective forms of
poetry. The Cyrenaic made no noteworthy contribution to
the scientific and literary output of Greece until it had been
united with Egypt, and had found peace under the sceptre
of the Ptolemies. To this epoch belong some of the most
famous of its sons — the learned and refined court-poet
Callimachus, the polymath Eratosthenes, the strongly
critical thinker Carneades. But before that time the soil of
Libyan Hellas had already received the seed of Socratism
into its bosom, and had brought forth rich fruit of a kind
all its own.
2. The apostle of the new doctrine was Aristippus. It
is said that this son of Cyrene met with a disciple of
Socrates at the Olympic festival, was deeply stirred by
what he heard from him, and induced to go to Athens and
attach himself to the Socratic circle. Of the further course
of his life we know little, except that he gave instruction for
p;iy Tor which reason Aristotle calls him a sophist), and that,
like Plato and /Eschines, he made a considerable stay at
the Syracusan court. His literary activity is shrouded in
almost impenetrable darkness. That several writings have
been attributed to him erroneously, and others foisted upon
him in the interests of particular doctrines, there seems to
be no doubt. But as we find a younger contemporary of
Aristippus, so competent a judge and so well-informed as
Aristotle, acquainted not only with particular doctrines of
his, but also with the arguments on which they rested, we
cannot but suppose that they were committed to writing.
Another contemporary, the historian Theopompus, accused
Plato of having plagiarized from Aristippus. The charge
was quite unfounded, but it could never have been made
at all if the Cyrenaic had left absolutely no philosophical
writings behind him. We, however, possess but a few lines
2 12 GREEK THINKERS.
of them, nor does any fragment remain of the history of
Libya attributed to him. Lost, too, are a couple of
dialogues, entitled " Aristippus," in which the Megarian
Stilpo and Plato's nephew Speusippus are introduced
discussing his doctrines. Yet we are not without some
knowledge of his personality, a sharply outlined sketch of
which was preserved by the ancient world. Aristippus
possessed the mastery of a virtuoso over the art of life and
the art of dealing with men. He joins hands with the
Cynics in their endeavour to be equal to all vicissitudes of
fate ; but he has less faith than they in renunciation, and
in the necessity of seeking salvation by flight from the
difficulties and dangers of life. The man who makes himself
master of a horse or of a ship, so he is reported to have
said, is not the man who declines its use, but the one who
knows how to guide it in the right direction. A similar
attitude seemed to him to be the right one to adopt towards
pleasure. His well-known saying, " I possess, but am not
possessed," is reported, rightly or wrongly, as having been
originally uttered with reference to the celebrated Jiettzra
Lais ; but its application was much wider than that. " To
be master of things, not mastered by them," is the expres-
sion by which Horace characterizes the life-ideal of
Aristippus. " Every colour," to quote the same poet again,
" every condition, every situation clothed him equally well."
His equanimity gained him the almost unwilling praise of
Aristotle, who relates how a somewhat self-assertive utter-
ance of Plato once drew from him the curt, cool rejoinder,
" How unlike our friend ! " meaning Socrates. In his dis-
position there was a peculiar strain of sunny cheerfulness
which kept him both from anxious care about the future,
and from violent regrets for the past. The almost un-
exampled combination of great capacity for enjoyment and
great freedom from wants, his gentleness and calmness in
face of every provocation, made a profound impression on
his contemporaries. And though his was a peaceable
nature, averse from all contention, and therefore from all
participation in public life, there was yet not wanting in
it an element of courage, which found expression, passively
POSTERITY ON ARISTIPPUS. 2 I 3
rather than actively, in contempt for wealth and indifference
to suffering. Even Cicero places Aristippus by the side of
Socrates, and speaks of the " great and divine excellences "
by which both men compensated any offences of which they
may have been guilty against custom and tradition. As
late as the eighteenth century, the spirit of the age was in
sympathy with characters of this type. Montesquieu illus-
trates, without knowing it, the above words of self-description
ascribed to Aristippus, in a phrase bearing reference to his
own character : " My machine is so happily compounded
that I am sufficiently sensitive to things to enjoy them, but
not enough to suffer from them." And the abbes who
frequented the salons of society ladies had no reason for
preferring the rags of unwashed Cynics to the fashionable
dress of the perfumed philosopher. But with us of the
present day that type has to some extent lost favour.
With the children of the nineteenth century, a strong,
fervid, if one-sided, nature counts for more than the
calculating wisdom and the all-round culture of the artist in
life. But at least it should not be forgotten that this man
with the clear cool brain was exceptionally qualified to
examine and appreciate the facts of human nature with
dispassionate impartiality. In Plato we find the expressions,
" men of refinement," and " men of superior refinement,"
applied to a set of philosophers whom we have every reason
to identify with Aristippus and his followers. And it is
quite true that subtlety in discrimination, keenness of
analysis, strictness in the deduction of consequences, were
pre-eminently distinctive of the school of Cyrene.
The field of scientific interest was, for Aristippus, con-
fined within almost as narrow bounds as for his master,
Socrates. He was just as far removed as the latter from
all investigations of nature, while against mathematics he is
reported to have raised the not very far-sighted objection
that it stood on a lower level than the handicrafts, because
no part is played in it by " the better and the worse," that
is, by considerations of utility and human welfare. His
interest thus centres chiefly in ethics, or the science of the
well-being of man ; he is completely at one with Socrates
214 GREEK THINKERS.
in this, and he is moved by kindred motives. His earnest
endeavour after clearness and definiteness in the treatment
of ethical questions is a feature which he may, perhaps, be
said to have inherited from Socrates. But in Aristippus
this tendency assumes a fundamentally different form. In
point of method, he joins hands with Antisthenes. With
both philosophers, dialectic and the search for definitions
are thrust far into the background. The sure basis which
they sought, was found, not in ideas, but in facts. At
the same time, Aristippus avoided building upon fictitious
empirical data, such as the Antisthenic conception of the
primitive age. In him we find the first attempt to work
back to the fundamental facts of human nature, its
" Urphanomene," to use Goethe's expression. For him,
as for his teacher, happiness (tuSatfiovia) is at once goal and
starting-point. But for the purpose of establishing its true
nature, he follows the path, not of conceptional determina-
tion or definition, but of the ascertainment of facts. As the
constituent element in tvSai/iovia (a shifting-hucd concept,
varying between happiness and the highest good), he
recognizes pleasurable sensation. For this, children and
animals strive with an instinctive impulse, just as they seek
to avoid pain. Here is the root-phenomenon, the at once
incontestable and fundamental fact on which must be based,
according to his view, every attempt to fix a code of rules
for the conduct of human life. In order to follow the line
of thought taken by Aristippus and his school, it is indis-
pensable to be familiarly acquainted with the speculations
of modern Hedonists. It is only thus that the meagre
extracts, from which our knowledge of the Cyrenaic moral
system is derived, become intelligible to us, only thus can
the dead doctrines speak to us with a living voice. If the
pursuit of pleasure is to serve as an unassailable foundation
for the construction of rules to govern human life, it is
necessary to observe strictly a distinction which was in-
sisted on by Aristippus with as much zeal and as much
consistency as afterwards by Jeremy Bentham. Pleasure,
as such, must always and everywhere be regarded as a
good, and the necessity, which, of course, occurs with great
ARISTIPPUS, EPICURUS, AND BENTHAM. 215
frequency, of abstaining from pleasure, must in each case
be supported by cogent reasoning. The argument involves
a strict separation of the pleasurable feeling from the
circumstances which produce it, accompany it, or arise out
of it ; and all confusion of the kind must be guarded against
with extreme care. At the risk of the worst misunder-
standings, both Aristippus and Bentham held with un-
shakable firmness to the position that pleasure qua pleasure
is always a good, no matter what the case may be with its
causes or its consequences. From the one or from the
other there may arise an excess of pain ; the good is then
outweighed by the evil in the other scale, and the only
rational mode of action is to abstain from it. In other
cases, again, actions accompanied by painful feelings are the
indispensable means for the gaining of pleasurable feelings
— the price, as it were, which must be paid for them, a call
upon us which must be met without flinching if our object
is a positive balance of pleasure. The art of life is thus
resolved into a species of measurement or calculation, such
as Plato describes at the close of the " Protagoras " — a result
which he represents as arising legitimately out of the funda-
mental teachings of Socrates, but which he does not appear
to accept with entire inward satisfaction.
3. But before we come to the application of the doctrine,
let us return once more to its logical justification. The
pleasure most worth striving for was not considered by
Aristippus, as it was afterwards by Epicurus, to consist in
mere freedom from pain ; but he was just as far from
assigning such pre-eminence to violent pleasures, or those
which are bound up with the appeasement of passionate
desire. The name of " pleasure " denoted for Aristippus,
not, perhaps, the zero on the Epicurean scale of emotion,
but still a fairly low reading on the positive side of it, The
mere absence of pain and the mere absence of pleasure
were both regarded as " middle states."
It is by no means clear what was the precise method
which Aristippus followed in constructing his more exact
definition of "pleasure." We only know that he looked
upon it as a kind of " gentle motion " finding its way into
2l6 GREEK THINKERS.
consciousness, and contrasted it with the rough or tumultuous
motion which is felt as pain. He cannot in this have been
guided simply by observation of natural processes ; for
children and animals, to which he was all ready to appeal,
seek the more violent pleasures as eagerly as the gentler
kinds, if not more so. Was it the short duration of the most
intense pleasures, or the admixture of pain arising from
want and passionate desire (the ordinary precursors of those
pleasures), or was it both factors together, that decisively
influenced his judgment and his choice ? We have every
reason to frame some such conjecture. For nothing lay
further from his way of thinking than the arbitrariness of
a mere fiat of authority conceived as declaring the gentler
pleasures to be the only admissible species, and ignoring all
the others. Some rational ground for his preference appears
to be alluded to in the statement, attributed to him, that
"one pleasure is not different from other pleasures." Perhaps
the least forced interpretation of this strange sentence is
as follows : Aristippus (and the same may be said of
Bentham) did not deny differences between pleasures in
respect of intensity, duration, their purity, that is, freedom
from admixture. What he attacked was the recognition, on
a priori grounds, of qualitative distinctions between them,
or distinctions in respect of their worth. So construed, the
above sentence is nothing more than a protest against the
claim to assign to one class of pleasures a precedence before
others which is not supported by any process of reasoning,
but rests entirely on so-called intuitive judgments.
Partial or isolated pleasures, however, were regarded by
him as being immediately worthy of pursuit, not merely as
a means for the attainment of that " sum of pleasurable
sensations " to which was given the name of happiness or
well-being. The language of the ancient excerpt is here in
almost verbal agreement with that of a modern utilitarian,
who, on this point at least, remained a strict Hedonist :
" The ingredients of happiness are very various, and each of
them is desirable in itself, and not merely when considered
as swelling an aggregate." A reply was thus provided to the
objection which lay close at hand, and was indeed speedily
PLEASURE, WISDOM, AND HAPPINESS. 21 7
raised, that human life offers on the whole a balance of
pain rather than of pleasure. However inevitable this
concession to pessimism might seem to be, it remained
none the less desirable to seek the maximum of attainable
pleasure, no matter whether this maximum did or did not
exceed the sum of all the pain experienced in a lifetime.
" Wisdom " was declared to be a good, but not an end in
itself ; rather was it a means towards the end just described.
It preserved the wise man from the worst enemies of hap-
piness— from superstition, and from the passions which,
like " the passions of love and envy, rest on empty imagina-
tion." But the wise man could not remain exempt from all
emotions, he could not escape sorrow and fear, because
these had their origin in nature. Yet the wisdom based
on such true insight was not in itself enough to guarantee
happiness unconditionally. The wise man could not
expect a life of perfect happiness, nor was his opposite,
the bad man, absolutely and entirely miserable. Each
condition would only prevail "for the most part ;" in other
words, wisdom and its opposite possessed a tendency to
bring happiness and misery respectively. And even to
create the tendency — note the correction of Socratic one-
sidedness — wisdom alone was not sufficient ; training, the
education of the body not least of all, was indispensable
for this purpose. Similarly, to some extent consequently,
the virtues were not an exclusive privilege of the wise. Some
of them might be found in the unwise as well.
This spirit of moderation and circumspection, this
cautious avoidance of exclusiveness and exaggeration,
present us with a welcome contrast to the impression
produced by most ancient systems of ethics — an impression
which the reader has possibly already received from the
Cynic system. But here again points of contact are not
wanting between the two great ethical ramifications of
Socratism. It is true that Antisthenes, in expressing his
elevation above wants and all manner of dependence, his
hatred towards the slavery of sensual pleasure, falls into
the exaggeration, not to say unnaturalness, of professing
an absolute and entire hostility to and contempt for all
2l8 GREEK THINKERS.
pleasure ; on the other hand, there is attributed to him a
saying that pleasure is a good, but "only that pleasure
which is followed by no repentance." To this Aristippus
might very well have assented ; only he would have
formulated the proposition somewhat more precisely by
asserting that pleasure is a good even in the excepted
case, though it is then equalled or outweighed by the evil
of repentance.
This hedonistic system, of which we have before us a
somewhat meagre sketch, but one clearly describing many
of its main features, has been hitherto treated by us as if
it had been entirely the work of Aristippus. This, however,
is more than we are able to affirm with absolute certainty.
The elaborate discussion of first principles, clearly dis-
cernible even in the epitome, the unmistakable traces of a
defensive attitude towards criticism, the cautious limitations,
rare in pioneers, with which so many propositions are put
forth, — all this suggests that there are other possibilities.
Perhaps that excerpt may not have related to the founder
of the school, but to his successors. Aristippus bequeathed
his system to his daughter Arete, who again brought up her
son to be a philosopher. We may pause here to note that
this is the one instance in the whole history of philosophy
in which the thread of tradition passed through the hand of
a woman — a circumstance which may, perhaps, have contri-
buted something to the fineness of the resulting product.
Now, this " mother's pupil," Aristippus the younger, we find
mentioned as the author of one of the propositions of the
Cyrenaic ethics ; and it would appear at least not impossible
that the elaboration of the system may have been the work
of Arete and her son. There is a piece of external evidence
which favours this assumption, without, however, raising it
to the rank of a certainty. In speaking of hedonistic ethics,
Aristotle names, not Aristippus, but Eudoxus, who, in
addition to rendering considerable services to mathematics
and astronomy, constructed an ethical system closely akin
to that of the Cyrenaics and based on the same fundamental
phenomena. This ignoring of Aristippus will be easier to
understand if we suppose that he left behind him, not a
AN AUSTERE HEDONIST. 2IO,
completed system, but merely the suggestions of one.
The argument, however, is inconclusive, for the Cyrenaic
theory of knowledge, which Plato almost certainly has in
his mind, and combats, in the " Theaetetus," is also not
deemed worthy of mention by Aristotle. It is not alto-
gether beyond the bounds of possibility that personal
dislike and a contempt for the " sophist " Aristippus may
have been responsible for the silence of the Stagirite in
both cases alike.
But, whether this conjecture be well founded or no, we
must in any case use our utmost endeavour to keep the
Cyrenaic doctrine of pleasure separate from the personal
idiosyncrasies and the easy-going temperament which
distinguished the founder of the school. How necessary
it is to keep the two apart, appears with special clearness
from the parallel case, already mentioned, of Eudoxus, who,
equally with Aristippus, based his ethics on the pursuit of
pleasure, but who in his own life, as Aristotle tells us,
remained exceptionally aloof from all pleasure-seeking, and
won many adherents to his doctrine through the respect
which was paid him on this very account. We may also
call to mind Jeremy Bentham, and his long life of cheerful
labour, exclusively devoted to the furtherance of the general
welfare. Lastly, we shall presently learn, from the history
of the Cyrenaic school, that the view of life held by
its members underwent manifold changes, that the two
questions, "Is happiness attainable?" and "What does hap-
piness consist in ? " received widely different answers, while
the basis of the doctrine remained unaltered in all essential
points. The peculiar nature of this basis, its deduction of
moral precepts from the well-being of the agent himself, is
something common to all the ethical systems of antiquity ;
they all rest on a eudaemonistic, or, if the term is preferred,
on an egoistic foundation. But whether the end and object
of life is named tvSatfiovia, or whether this somewhat
vague composite notion is analyzed into its elements, the
individual sensations of a pleasurable kind which together
make up happiness, the principle is unaffected. Two
questions, however, are of great importance, "What is the
2 20 GREEK THINKERS.
practical content " of this or any other ethical system ? and
" How are the rules of conduct recognized by this system
theoretically deduced from the fundamental principles ? "
4. On the content of the Cyrenaic moral system there
is a great dearth of accurate and detailed information ; this
very deficiency, however, supplemented as it is by one or
two positive statements of fact, seems to indicate that the
ideal of life cherished by these Socratics was not too widely
divergent from the traditional one. Aristippus himself is
reported to have said, in reply to an inquiry as to what
philosophy was good for, " Chiefly to enable the philosopher,
supposing all laws were abolished, to go on living as before."
The historical value of such apophthegms is certainly
trifling enough ; still, a saying like the above, though we
find it quoted with the primary object of showing the wise
man's superiority to the compulsion of law, would hardly
have been put in the mouth of the leading Cyrenaic if his
doctrine had differed so much from accepted standards as
did, for example, the system of the Cynics. This impression
is strengthened by the fact that we nowhere meet with any
hint of a breach with social tradition on the part of the
Cyrenaics, and that even those members of the school who,
like Theodorus, gave deep offence by their religious heresies,
were on the best of understandings with the rulers of the
day ; whence we may gather that they did not offend
against tradition by their mode of life as well.
That by "pleasure" the Cyrenaics did not mean the
pleasures of sense exclusively, it is hardly necessary to state.
They pointed out, among other things, that the same im-
pressions received by the eye or ear produce different
emotional effects according to the verdict passed on them
by the intelligence : thus the cries of pain which distress us
when they proceed from real sufferers affect us pleasurably
when they occur in the artistic presentation of a tragedy on
the stage. It is true that the school, or, more correctly, a
part of it, assigned the greatest intensity to bodily feelings,
in support of which view they appealed to the preponderating
use of corporal punishment in education and in the adminis-
tration of the criminal law. At this point we may consider
HEGESIAS "THE ADVOCATE OF DEATH." 22 1
the process of development through which the ethical
doctrines of the Cyrenaics passed — a development marked
by the same twofold tendency towards refinement and
towards pessimism which characterized the whole culture
of the age (cf. p. 148). Four generations after Aristippus
came Hegesias, who earned the appellation Ilu<TiOavaTog,
" The Advocate of Death." In a work entitled " The
Suicide," more correctly, " The Suicide by Starvation," as
also in his lectures, he depicted the ills of life in so moving
a fashion that the authorities of Alexandria felt themselves
obliged to prohibit him from lecturing, in order to avert the
danger arising from a propaganda of suicide. After this,
we are not surprised to learn that he held happiness to
be unattainable, and enjoined upon the wise man the task
of avoiding evils rather than that of choosing goods. More
astonishing, to those at least who have not learnt to see
the deeper inward connexions between the different
ramifications of Socratism, is the recurrence, among the
Cyrenaics, of the Cynic doctrine of ddia<f>op(a. This in-
difference to all externals was justified by Hegesias, not
in the same way as by the Cynics, but on the ground that
nothing is in its own nature pleasurable or painful, that it
is the newness or the rarity of a thing, on the one hand,
or the fact of satiety with it, on the other, from which the
pleasure or the pain arises. Such was his argument — an
exaggerated expression of a correct perception that habit
both increases the power of endurance and blunts the edge
of feeling. In the Socratic doctrine of the involuntariness
of all evil-doing, we may see the germ of that indulgence
towards the erring which Hegesias inculcated with so great
emphasis. Not to hate, but to instruct, was the burden of
his exhortation, by which we are reminded of certain modern
thinkers, such as Spinoza and Helvetius, who set out from
the same premisses.
Among the contemporaries of Hegesias was Anniceris,
in whose hands the Cyrenaic ethics attained its highest
degree of refinement. Consonantly with the general
character of the age, he was hardly more confident than
Hegesias in the anticipation of positive happiness. But he
22 2 GREEK THINKERS.
pronounced the wise man happy, even where the amount
of pleasure falling to his personal share was very incon-
siderable. He appears to have taught that the portion
allotted to the individual was supplemented by those
sympathetic emotions which are comprised under the names
of friendship and gratitude, of piety and patriotism. It is
true that even he rejected as psychologically inadmissible
the formula which states that "the happiness of a friend
is to be chosen for its own sake," just as in a later day
Helvetius saw a psychological absurdity in the formula,
" The good for the sake of the good." The happiness of
others, to Anniceris' thinking, could never be an immediate
object of feeling. But he did not, like most Hedonists,
look for the origin of altruistic emotions, considered as
secondary products, exclusively in utility. Friendship did
not, for him, rest solely on benefits received ; good will
alone, apart from any active manifestation of it, was a quite
sufficient basis. Above all, he did full justice to the highly
important psychological truth that altruistic feelings, how-
ever generated, gradually acquire an independent force of
their own, which they preserve even when — an exceptional
case, he seems to have thought — they yield no balance of
pleasure. He not only recognized this phenomenon as a
fact, but he also justified the self-sacrifice which is its
corollary, by affirming that the wise man, though holding
firmly to pleasure as the supreme end, and setting his face
against all diminution of it, will yet submit to such diminu-
tion in his own case for love of a friend. He extended
the same recognition and approval to patriotic self-sacrifice ;
in neither case are we informed what were the arguments
by which he defended his attitude.
We thus come to the highly important question of
the bridge, which, in the Cyrenaic moral system, taken in
the widest sense, led from the pursuit of happiness by the
individual to the recognition of social obligations and the
value of altruistic sentiment. That the system in question,
in all its shades and varieties, did seek, and claim to have
found, such a connecting link, there can be no manner of
doubt. Although they detected a more than common
LINKS BETWEEN EGOISM AND ALTRUISM. 223
element of convention in current judgments on what is
just and what unjust, what excellent and what reprehensible,
although they expressly declared that right and wrong exist
by custom and enactment, not by nature — a view which,
like Hippias of Elis, they probably supported by an appeal
to the disagreement on such matters of different ages and
peoples — still, they held it for an established truth, as we
have documentary evidence to show, that the wise man will
avoid all that is unjust or wrong. In the absence of trust-
worthy and exhaustive records bearing on a particular point
of history, analogy may be called in to help ; and we may
here call to mind the methods followed by the promulgators
of cognate doctrines in other ages. The first and nearest
of such connecting bridges is contained in the doctrine of
" well-understood interest." This species of moral calculus,
which preaches the avoidance of evil because of the injurious
consequences to the agent himself, and supplies a like motive
for well-doing, is by no means foreign to the "enlightenment"
of modern times. If we desire acquaintance with this mode
of thought in its quintessence, we may find an exposition of
it, marked by more than common cogency and consistency
of formulation, in a little book written by the Frenchman
Volney, the deistic author of " The Ruins," namely, his
" Catechism of Good Sense." Again, the English divine
Paley interpolates the rewards and punishments of a future
life between "private happiness" as "our motive," and "the
will of God " as " our rule," thus extending worldly wisdom
so as to bring the life beyond the grave within its scope.
We have already alluded to the concluding speech in Plato's
" Protagoras," and later on we shall have to consider it
more minutely. It is not improbable that Plato wrote this
with an eye to his fellow-pupil Aristippus ; and the same
may be said of that part of the " Phaedo " in which virtue
is treated as the result of prudence. Considerations of a
similar nature occupy the central position in the moral
system of Epicurus, who, however, while generally following
the footprints of the Cyrenaics in ethical questions, was
prevented by the strain of enthusiasm in his nature from
finding exclusive satisfaction in their mode of deducing
224 GREEK THINKERS.
obligations. This " regulation of egoism " was not limited
to a commendation of well-doing by maxims, such as the
proverbial " Honesty is the best policy," or, " If honesty
had not existed, it would have had to be invented." At
this stage of thought, that which mediates between indi-
vidual self-love and the general weal is not so much the
hortatory ethics of prudence as the power of law,
supplementing and controlling that of public opinion.
Both these factors appear in this connexion in the
Cyrenaic teaching. Regard for " legal penalties " and for
public opinion was held by them also to be a solid
guarantee of good conduct. In the modern world, however,
the chief trump held by the representatives of this stage
of thought has been legislative reform. To give the law
such a shape that individual interest may coincide with
public interest, was the aim which Helvetius placed before
himself, and which Bentham strove to realize with all the
ingenuity at his command, and all the resources of his rich
faculty of invention.
The second mode of connexion rests on an appreciation
of altruistic feelings as an element in individual happiness.
It culminates in the injunction to cultivate these feelings, to
forget their assumed selfish origin, to choose and persevere
in a life of entire devotion to the welfare of one's fellow-
creatures as a means towards one's own happiness. As a
typical expression of this view, we may quote the dictum of
d'Alembert, " Enlightened self-love is the principle from
which springs all self-sacrifice," or Holbach's definition
(borrowed from Leibnitz) of virtue as the " art of making
one's self happy by means of the happiness of others."
There is a third stage in this search for a connecting-
link, in which it is deemed sufficient to recognize certain
psychological facts. There are numerous cases where habit
and the association of ideas convert what was originally a
means to something else into an end in itself, as when, for
example, the avaricious man begins to seek for its own sake
the wealth which he first desired as an instrument, or when
the drunkard, overmastered by his acquired craving, con-
tinues to indulge his vice after it has ceased to afford him
HEDONISM AND UTILITARIANISM. 225
any pleasure. Of this nature, it is contended, are the social
feelings. They are rooted and grounded in selfishness ;
they derive their force from praise and blame, from rewards
and punishments, from regard to the good opinion and the
good will of others, from solidarity of interests ; gradually
they acquire such strength that they are enabled to break
loose from their roots, and exert an entirely independent
influence over the soul. Traces both of the second and
the third of these attempts to bridge the gap between
Hedonism and social ethics may be discerned in Epicurus
as well as in his predecessors, the Cyrenaics. To this
category we may refer the details already reported con-
cerning the ethical doctrine of Anniceris, as well as a
proposition adduced in the excerpt of which we have
made so much use, and not limited by that authority to
one particular branch of the school : " The prosperity of our
fatherland, equally with our own, is by itself enough to fill
us with joy."
5. Even the above rapid survey is enough to satisfy us
that Hedonism, or the theory which makes the pleasure and
pain of the agent the sole original source of human actions,
by no means involves denying the possibility of unselfish
conduct, still more that it harbours no design of banishing
unselfishness from the world. Many of the most reso-
lute champions of this doctrine have been at the same
time warm-hearted philanthropists ; for example, Jeremy
Bentham and other progress-enthusiasts of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. In their hands Hedonism was
transformed into something often confused with it, but
fundamentally different from it — Utilitarianism, or the
system of ethics which has chosen for its guiding-star
the general welfare, or " the greatest happiness of the
greatest number." There are several factors common to
ancient and modern eras of enlightenment, which have
favoured the rise of this doctrine, and which have given it
the same powerful impulse in the France of the eighteenth
century as in the Greece of the fourth and third before
Christ. The following may be taken to be the chief of
them : a decay of the theological mode of thought in
VOL. II. Q
2 26 GREEK THINKERS.
educated circles ; a faculty of observation enormously
heightened by the rejection of every tendency to embellish-
ment ; a desire to place individual and corporate life on a
strictly rational, even specially scientific, basis, and for this
purpose to discard all fair seemings, and set out from the
most unassailable and the most indubitable premisses, which
latter, partly because they possess these very qualities, are
apt to be at the same time the least subtle and the most
obvious of their kind.
But our attention is due, not only to the inspiring
principles, but also to the results of these tendencies of
thought. Few will deny that some fragment of truth is
present in each of them. But, taken together, do they
contain the whole truth ? We crave permission to state
some of the reasons for which we hesitate to answer this
question in the affirmative.
Hedonism, to our thinking, does not deserve the re-
proaches commonly levelled against it. But it hardly seems
to give an adequate account of the facts it is intended to
explain. Like many other ancient doctrines, it suffers from
a defect which is the reverse side of a great merit : it strains
after a higher degree of simplicity than the facts really
exhibit. That supposed fundamental phenomenon, which
it and the most illustrious of its adepts — Bentham — place
at the root of all human endeavour, the desire for pleasure
and the dread of pain, does in truth lie at a very consider-
able depth. But it is not the deepest to which the eye of
the searcher can penetrate. Let us consider, for example,
the human, or rather animal, craving for food. Is it true
that man and beast desire food for the sake of the pleasure
which accompanies the consuming it ? If we examine the
matter closely, it will appear, we think, that the case is
otherwise. Our desire for food is something immediate,
arising from the instinctive impulse towards the preservation
and the enhancement of life ; the pleasure is an accessory
phenomenon, associated with this as with all other actions
which promote life and its vigorous manifestation. Probably
we shall not go far wrong if we interpret the facts somewhat
as follows. The combination of matter which composes
CRITICISM OF THE HEDONISTIC THEORY. 22 "J
an animal organism is subject to continual dissociation,
which would be definitive if the loss were not repaired.
This combination possesses at the same time a tendency to
persist — a primordial fact which also appears in the reaction
of the cell against injurious influences, and of which, as of
some kindred facts in nature, no ulterior explanation seems
attainable. We may mention the principle of heredity,
which rests on the tendency of a process which has once
begun to continue indefinitely, and the First Law of Motion,
in which the same tendency is displayed in its most compre-
hensive application. Now, the processes that take place
within the organism are, in part at least, attended by
phenomena of a psychical order, particularly by emotional
excitement ; and it thus happens, by virtue of one of the
least striking but perhaps most far-reaching of teleological
adjustments, that the processes conducive to its preservation
are felt as pleasurable, while those which are unfavourable
are felt as painful. Pleasure and pain may thus pass for
phenomena accompanying those primitive tendencies, but
not for the tendencies themselves. In the above remarks,
the germ of which is to be found in Aristotle, we have
considered man as a part of nature, not as something
existing by the side of nature. They will have been
misunderstood, however, if it is supposed that man,
endowed with reason and feeling, is to be taken as a mere
slave and tool of his primary impulses. For by virtue of
the images and ideas stored in his consciousness, or,
more correctly, by virtue of the dispositions of will arising
out of them, he is enabled to offer resistance to even
the strongest of these impulses ; he can resolve to die,
indeed to die of hunger. But so long as, and in so far as,
he has entered no veto against his natural instincts, they
produce their effects in him immediately, without reference
to possible pleasure, even when their satisfaction has pleasure
for a consequence. In this, as in other cases, Socratism and
the cognate modern schools of thought have overshot the
mark in the rationalization of human life. It was a great
thought, that the whole code of conduct ought to be based
on the foundation of a single impulse. But this Monism or
2 28 GREEK THINKERS.
Centralism, if we may be allowed the expression, cannot
hold its ground, we think, against the richer variety, the
Pluralism or Federalism of nature.
To a certain extent the case is similar with the second
of the questions which present themselves when we set
about criticizing the foundations of Hedonism — the question
as to the origin of the sympathetic or social feelings. At
first sight, indeed, it would appear as though the most
recent advances of science had provided those old doctrines
with new and powerful support. In defending the theory
that the selfish feelings alone are original, and that the
altruistic feelings are strictly dependent upon them, the
Cyrenaics and Epicurus, as also their modern successors,
the most consistent of whom were Hartley * and the older
Mill,f attempted to show that habit and the association
of ideas were the sole means by which this, so to speak,
chemical transmutation of feelings and volitional impulses
was effected. Those thinkers to whom the above-mentioned
means seemed insufficient to work, in the course of an
individual life, such a change as that from the crudest
egoism to self-sacrificing devotion, would, at the present
day, have had at their disposal another solution of the
problem, and one less open to criticism. We refer, of
course, to the theories of descent and evolution which
belong to our times. Even though we carefully avoid all
exaggeration and misuse of these theories, particularly of
the most important of them, the doctrine of selection, they
still do something to explain the advance of altruism.
They make it easier than it formerly was to believe that
in the course of untold generations those dispositions of
mind which favour social or corporate life, more especially
amenability to discipline, have gained greater and greater
strength through the development of the organs of volitional
inhibition. But if we entrust ourselves to the guidance of
these theories, we arc carried back to a far-distant past, at
which the question as to the original or derived character
of the social feelings becomes impossible for us to answer,
* Born 1704, died 1757. f Born 1775, died 1836.
THE CYRENAIC EPISTEMOLOGY. 229
or, if construed strictly, loses its meaning. For the same
feelings may be both original and derived — original in
man, derived in some one or other of his brutish ancestors.
In respect of those modes of feeling which relate to the
elementary social combinations, this possibility may at
once be admitted to be a reality. The herd precedes the
horde. Even in the former, the innate sympathetic feelings
may already be observed exerting a widely extended in-
fluence. The same may be said of all that concerns the
preservation of the species. The case is here much the same
as with the feelings and adjustments which relate to the
preservation of the individual life. The "chemistry of feel-
ings " here entirely refuses the services which it renders in
not a few other cases, including some taken from the emo-
tional life of animals. The dog which has learnt " from love
to fear, from fear to love" his master, may have been educated,
by the agency of associations connected equally with benefits
received and with punishments suffered, up to the point of
self-sacrifice. But we must regard in a very different light
that instinct, which is implanted in so many animals, of
caring for their offspring, even when yet unborn, with a
devotion which pain cannot quench. Take the case of the
salmon, for example, which pines away almost to a skeleton
in the course of the long voyage from the sea to the river
waters suited for spawning.
6. In the theory of knowledge, the analytic intellect of
the Cyrenaics penetrated to still greater depths than in
ethics. We cannot take account of their work in this field
without making the reader to some extent a partner in our
investigation. The regrettable loss of all the works of this
school, the meagreness and the one-sidedness of the notices
relating to them, almost all of which are of a polemical
character, compel us to linger for some time over the
subject, and to give it a detailed consideration, the length
of which will, we hope, be rewarded by its fruits.
The Cyrenaic theory of knowledge was compressed into
a formula which occurs in the same form in different and
independent accounts, and therefore must certainly have
been taken from the original documents. It runs as
23O GREEK THINKERS.
follows : " Our modes of being affected (Greek ttcSy]) are
alone knowable." For the explanation of this proposition .
our authorities appeal to the most diverse instances of
sense-perception. They allege — in the spirit, partly perhaps
in the very words, of the Cyrenaics — that we do not know
that honey is sweet, that chalk is white, that fire burns, or
that the knife-blade cuts : all that we can report is our own
states of feeling ; we have a sensation of sweetness, we feel
ourselves burnt or cut, and so on. The first impression
received by the attentive reader of this book may possibly
be that in these utterances we are again confronted by the
Leucippic-Democritean doctrine touching the subjective
nature of most sensations ("According to convention,
there are a sweet and a bitter, a hot and a cold," and so
on. Cf. Vol. I. p. 320). But this impression will not bear
examination. For there is no repetition of what formed
the counterpart of that declaration concerning the sub-
jective or secondary properties of things, namely, a pro-
clamation of atoms and the void as strictly objective
realities. Not only so, but nothing else is introduced as a
strictly objective existence to take the place of atoms and
the void. We must consider, too, that our records, inade-
quate as they are, present us, in their central features at
any rate, with the testimony of competent and well-
informed students of the earlier philosophers ; and these
would not have omitted to mention the identity or approxi-
mate identity of two doctrines. Still, the present is not an
unsuitable occasion to allude to the theory of Leucippus, if
only as the starting-point, and almost indispensable pre-
miss of the theory now engaging our attention. In the
latter we have, without any doubt, a continuation and ex-
pansion of the earlier attempt, related to it as the theories
of Berkeley or Hume are to those of Hobbes or Locke.
Expositions in some detail of this theory of knowledge
occur in three different quarters. There are two late philo-
sophical authors, namely, the empiric physician, Sextus
(about 200 A.D.), and a Peripatetic, or adherent of the
Aristotelian school, named Aristocles, who came about a
generation earlier, and of whom the ecclesiastical historian
CYRENAIC SCEPTICISM. 23 I
Eusebius has preserved considerable fragments in his
" Praeparatio Evangelica." Lastly there is Plato. This
reversal of the natural order in which the profound philo-
sopher, the contemporary of Aristippus, is made to yield
precedence to late authors who were immeasurably in-
ferior to him in every respect, is based upon the following
reason. Those two later authorities treat expressly and
deliberately of Aristippus and his school ; Plato gives us,
in a section of the " Therctetus," what purports to be a
secret doctrine of the sophist Protagoras, but really belongs,
as we believe, along with Friedrich Schleiermacher and
several others, to Aristippus. This conjecture — for con-
jecture it is, though anything but a random or reckless one
— rests entirely on the agreement between Plato's expo-
sition and the above-mentioned accounts, which, neverthe-
less, are thereby supplemented to a not inconsiderable
degree, and, so to speak, illuminated from within.
Aristoclcs, in truth, gives us little more than the formula
quoted above, to which he subjoins a lengthy polemic,
betraying his total inability to appreciate his opponent's
standpoint. Sextus is an adherent and advocate of sceptic
principles. As such he is at pains, as we have already
remarked a propos of Democritus (Vol. I. p. 359), to make
the representatives of other schools into allies of scepticism.
It is thus not surprising that he clothes his account of the
Cyrenaic theory of knowledge in the language of his own
school, and that he gives the sceptical or negative side of
that theory the predominance. But that which more par-
ticularly moves our astonishment in this short account of
the scepticism of the Cyrenaics, as in the parallel account
given by Plutarch, is the lavish use of words expressing
dogmatic assurance, such as "true," "incontrovertible,"
"unshakable," "infallible," "reliable," "sound." How is
this contradiction to be explained ? For this purpose it
seems necessary to penetrate more deeply into the mind
of these philosophers and the guiding principles of their
thought. What at first may here seem hypothetical, will,
we hope, gradually improve its claim to be fact in the
course of the investigation.
232 GREEK THINKERS.
The distinction between primary and secondary quali-
ties, the great achievement, rich in consequences, of Leu-
cippus, had drawn the attention of thinkers to the subjective
element in sense-perception generally. This exaltation of
the subject, this insistence on his cardinal significance for
the genesis of sensation, natural and obvious as it seems,
was a comparatively late development ; when, however, it
had once appeared, its influence on the mind of inquirers
could not but gain in strength as it became more and more
familiar to them. The question was bound to be raised
whether those perceptions to which absolutely objective
validity was still conceded, were in reality fully entitled
to the distinction. For example, the perception of colour
was held to be subjectively conditioned, but not that of
forms. This violent separation of what was so closely
related could not be maintained intact when once attention
had been drawn to a number of illusions to which the eye
is subject even outside the field of colour-perception.
New difficulties were raised by the staff which appears
broken when dipped in water, by the different apparent
magnitudes of one and the same object as viewed by the
two eyes, by the double vision which may be the result
either of a pathological condition or of sideward pressure
upon one eye. The sense of touch itself, which passed for
the type of true objectivity, was found, on closer observa-
tion, to labour under grave deficiencies. Thus the fact that,
when two fingers are crossed, a single pellet may be felt as
two, supplied much matter for thought. (A few, but not
all, of these illusions are mentioned in the account given by
Sextus ; others are referred to in the section of Aristotle's
Metaphysics which deals with the relativistic schools of
thought.) Some, no doubt, were satisfied with the reflexion
that the message of the one sense, or of the one organ, may
be corrected by that of another, just as the normal condi-
tion corrects the testimony of the abnormal one. But what
guarantee have we — so might the doubters answer — that
equally grave deceptions do not occur in other cases,
where no correction is attainable ? And, apart from that,
had not Democritus already pointed out that it is not the
DISTRUST OF THE SENSES. 233
number, not the majority or minority, whether of persons
or of conditions, that can decide between truth and false-
hood (cf. Vol. I. p. 360) ? Here we call to mind the violent
attacks of the Eleatics on the testimony of the senses in
general. This tendency of thought to be hostile to sense
was necessarily reinforced by the growth of reflexion, and
especially by the placing of such observations as we have
just mentioned in the forefront of discussion. Nor was
Eleaticism by any means dead ; it lived on in the school of
those Socratics whose home was at Megara, and whom we
took leave to call " Neo-Eleatics," as being the heirs of
Zeno and his predecessors. There can be no doubt that
the old cry, " The senses are liars ; do not believe them !
Truth dwells outside and above the world of sense," was
now raised more loudly than before. It woke the strongest
echo in the mind of Plato. But the opponents of the
Eleatics — Protagoras, for example — had successors as well,
and we ask with what weapons could the old conflict be
continued ? The proposition, " All that is perceived is
real " had from the first a subjective tinge, which appears
in the reference to " man " as the " measure of all things,"
but which finds its clearest expression in the treatise
" On the Art." This sophist's discourse, filled with the
spirit of Protagoras, contains a passage which runs as
follows : " If the Non-Existent can be seen like the
Existent, I do not understand how any one can call it non-
existent, when the eyes can see it and the mind recognize
it as existent " (cf. Vol. I. p. 454). That which in an earlier
generation had been a casual glimpse, a fleeting inspiration,
now became the central stronghold for the defence of the
witness of the senses. Its champions abandon, so to speak,
their advanced posts and outworks to the enemy, and retire
to the inmost parts of the fortress, the sensations them-
selves. These are no longer held as the pledges and
guarantees of something external ; while the adversary
receives the most sweeping concessions, his most effective
weapon of attack is wrested from his hands. However
freely we admit that sensation can bring no valid testimony
to the nature, or even the existence, of external objects,
234 GREEK THINKERS.
the sensation itself remains undeniable ; it possesses un-
conditional validity or truth in itself, and, in combination
with the other processes of consciousness, makes up a sum
of knowledge which is perfectly adequate for all human
purposes.
7. He who encounters for the first time this renunciation
of belief in an external world may be excused if he imagines
himself in a madhouse. " If you believe in the truth of
this doctrine of yours " — it was in such terms as these that
Bishop Berkeley and his adherents were apostrophized —
" you may just as well run your head against a lamp-post,
for the non-existent post cannot possibly hurt your equally
non-existent head." To which the reply was regularly
returned, "We do not deny the sensation of resistance,
nor any of the other sensations of which is composed the
image or idea of a post, of a head, and of the whole external
world ; that which we deny, or that, at least, of which we
know nothing" — as one section of the school affirms — "is
that mysterious something assumed by you to lie behind
those phenomena which are present to our as to every other
similar consciousness, and which are bound together by
unalterable laws of sequence and coexistence." What "we
call the idea of a tree, the idea of a stone, the idea of a
horse, the idea of a man " — so we are told by a modern
advocate of this school of thought, the older Mill, in his
" Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind " — are
the ideas of a certain number of sensations, received
together so frequently that they coalesce as it were, and
are spoken of under the idea of "unity." Similarly, we
read in Plato's " Theaetetus : " " To such a group [of
sensations] is assigned the name of man, of stone, of beast,
and of every other thing." Plato is here dealing with
thinkers on whose subtlety he lays particular emphasis,
whom he places in the sharpest contrast with the materialists,
who believe in nothing but what they can grasp in their
hands. He says of them, further, that they resolve every-
thing into processes and events, completely banishing the
concept of Being. He represents them, by the aid of that
transparent fiction of a secret doctrine of Protagoras,
THE IDEAS OF MATTER AND SUBSTANCE. 235
as the successors of the great sophist ; and, lastly, he
describes for us a theory of sensation which is peculiar to
them, one to which we shall presently have to pay some
attention. The reader will probably be satisfied that the
only contemporaries of Plato to whom this picture could apply
were those who maintained that " modes of being affected
are alone knowable," that the "external thing" supposed
to underlie a group of such modes was " possibly existent,"
but, in any case, " inaccessible to us " (Sextus). Again,
we must express regret for the scantiness of our informa-
tion. We do not know how these earliest representatives
of the school of thought now called phenomenalistic,
settled accounts with traditional views. Did they under-
take to explain the origin of the latter ? Did they, like
an English psychologist and a German-Austrian physicist
of our own day, point to the psychical processes in virtue
of which an aggregate of possibilities of sensation " appears
to acquire a permanent existence which our sensations
themselves do not possess, and consequently a greater
reality than belongs to our sensations " ? Or did they
appeal to the fact that " the colours, sounds, odours of
bodies are fleeting," while the " tangible," exempt in the
main from temporal and individual change, remains as a
"persistent kernel," appearing as the background, sub-
stratum, or "vehicle of the fleeting qualities attached to
it," and retained as such, by force of mental habit, even
when " the conviction has gained ground, that sight, hearing,
and touch are intimately related to each other ? " or lastly,
did they contemplate the possibility that the conception of
material substance arises from the confluence of those two
streams of thought ? These are questions which we
cannot answer. But we should not be in the least surprised
to learn that they never advanced beyond the rudiments
of the problem, although they can hardly have neglected
all criticism of the concept of Being.
The account which Plato gives of their theory of
sensation must also be taken as authentic only in essentials.
Many a detail in the picture may well be due to that creative
intellect which was hardly ever satisfied with the bare
236 GREEK THINKERS.
reproduction of other men's opinions. For this reason we
shall only advert to the main features of that theory.
According to it, two elements, an active and a passive,
come into play in the production of every sensation. This
co-operation is designated as movement, and connected, in
jest or earnest, with the Heraclitean doctrine of perpetual
flux. From the meeting of two such elements, which only
by meeting acquire their characters of active and passive,
sensation and the object of sensation take their rise
simultaneously — colours along with visual sensations, sounds
along with auditory sensations, and so forth. It is denied
that a previously existing hard, soft, warm, cold, or white
thing is perceived ; all this enters upon existence simul-
taneously with the perception. But how are we to conceive
of this process which creates, at one and the same time, the
subjective sensation and the objective quality, if not the
object possessing the quality ? Plato, as we have remarked,
terms the process movement, and clearly attributes to it a
spatial character. What we have called the elements con-
cerned in the movement, Plato leaves somewhat indefinite,
and the consequence is a certain regrettable want of clear-
ness, which may or may not have been intended. In the
reasoning on which the doctrine is founded there is no
mention of the material or corporeal ; the emphatically
repeated denial of all absolute existence, the " activities,
processess, and all the invisible," which are placed in such
strong contrast with tangible things, lead us far away from
the material world. Or rather, they would take us entirely
out of it, were it not for the fact that the substitutes for
the strict concept of matter which were used by many
ancient thinkers, Plato and Aristotle among them, laboured
under a remarkable degree of haziness. Thus the possi-
bility is not entirely excluded that, in the original exposition
at least, some species of matter, devoid of form and qualities,
was designated as the subject of that movement. But we
must not lose sight of yet another possibility, namely, that
Aristippus himself may have had in view a purely material
process. This last and more natural supposition gave rise
to the reproach, urged against the Cyrenaics, of moving in
THE OLDEST INDUCTIVE LOGIC.
237
a circle, by resolving the corporeal into sensations, and then
deducing sensation from the corporeal. The justice of
this reproach is to say the least, doubtful. For in no case
can it be contended that the phenomenalist, merely as such,
is debarred from studying the physiology of the senses or
natural science in general. He will, of course, begin by
declaring that bodies or material substances are for him
nothing but complexes of permanent possibilities of sensa-
tion, or else similar abstractions resting in the last resort on
sensations. But he is none the less at liberty to treat of
the bodily conditions of each special sensation, and of the
material conditions of any other process he may choose to
consider. It is possible to contest the admissibility of his
analysis, but not the legitimacy of this application of it.
The procedure of the Cyrenaics may quite possibly have
resembled that which we have just described. This would
accord with the circumstance that they were accused of
having reintroduced into their system at a later stage the
physics and logic which they began by banishing from it.
For the crown of their doctrinal edifice (its fourth and fifth
parts) is stated to have been concerned with " causes "
(physics), and "grounds of proof" (logic).
8. What more especially was the character of this logic
of theirs, is a question to which we should be glad to be
able to give an answer. There is an entire lack of positive
statements on the subject. Yet it might have been con-
jectured a priori that in ancient times, as in modern, a
phenomenalistic theory of knowledge and a hedonistic-
utilitarian system of ethics were accompanied by an empirical
and inductive tendency in logic. That such a logic did
exist in the schools of the later Epicureans, we learnt, more
than thirty years ago, from a work of Philodemus, which
had lain concealed by the ashes of Herculaneum. When
we first attempted the reconstruction of that mutilated
treatise, we were able to point to traces, hitherto un-
observed, of similar doctrines in the schools of the Sceptics
and of the Empiric physicians. What was the common
root ? Light has been \ thrown on this question by Ernst
Laas, who drew attention to a pregnant reference to this
238 GREEK THINKERS.
subject, which had previously been overlooked, in Plato's
" Republic." This passage deals with the preservation in
the memory of past events, with the careful consideration
of what happened first, what afterwards, what at the same
time, and with the deduction, from such sources, of the safest
possible forecast of the future. The language employed,
for all its picturesqueness, strongly reminds us of the ex-
pressions used by more recent authors well acquainted with
the inductive logic of later antiquity. We shall hardly go
wrong if we connect this passage, not, as was done by
another investigator, with Protagoras, but with Plato's
contemporary, Aristippus. The conclusion which we draw
from all our data taken together is that Aristippus laid the
foundations for a system of logic which should be nothing
else than a body of rules for ascertaining the sequences and
the coexistences of phenomena. The Cyrenaic was, no
doubt, prepared for weighty objections against his views,
and such were probably raised in abundance by his con-
tentious and inquisitive opponents. " You do not believe
in the reality of external things " — so may his critics well
have exclaimed — "at least you deny that they can be
known ; where, then, do you leave room, we do not say for
science, but the most elementary foresight ? What is the
foundation of the commonest empirical truths which no one
denies, not even yourself? How can you infer to-morrow
from to-day ? Whence do you learn that fire burns, that
water quenches thirst, that men are mortal, that there is
any permanence in those connexions and co-ordinations on
which the whole conduct of life depends, as well as the
special methods and processes of the artist, the mechanic,
the physician, the pilot, the farmer, and the rest ? " We
shall not be guilty of any great recklessness in conjecture
if we assume that the Cyrenaics felt themselves compelled
to return some answer to these questions, and not admit, if
only by silence, that in renouncing all cognizable objects
they also renounced all knowledge and all regulation of
conduct in accordance with knowledge. And the very
answer which their epistemological assumptions allowed them
to give is contained in that allusion of Plato to which we
THE DENIAL OF ILLUSIONS. 239
have referred. There is in that passage no mention of
objects, but only of events and happenings ; and similarly
it is quite possible that the inductive logic alluded to above
may have grown out of a mode of apprehending the world
which neither sought nor found behind things or existences
anything else than complexes of phenomena, bound together
by fixed laws. There is thus something more than a small
probability that the earliest emergence of a radical criticism
of knowledge was accompanied by the first formulation of
that canon of knowledge which not only can be associated
with such criticism, but has once more been so associated
in our own century, that is to say, the rules governing
the ascertainment of purely phenomenal successions and
coexistences.
But it is time to return from this digression, to leave
the Cyrenaic treatment of the chief problem of knowledge,
known to us as it is only in its main features, for a subject on
which all doubt may be said to be excluded — the Cyrenaic
doctrine of sensation, borrowed by them from Protagoras,
but certainly further elaborated by Aristippus. That,
properly speaking, there are no illusions of the senses,
that, on the contrary, every sensation is the natural and
necessary result of the factors which produce it, is a highly
important truth which Plato, in the " Thesetetus," proclaims
with all the clearness that can be desired, in close connexion
with undoubted Cyrenaic doctrines. It is not the majority
or the minority of the subjects who feel in this or that
manner, it is not the regularly predominating or the casually
occurring state of the individual percipient that can establish
a fundamental distinction between sensations ; although, as
we may add, the conclusions which we draw from the two
classes of sensation may be of very different values for the
ordering of life. That the authors of this theory were far in
advance of their century is clear from the fact that some
of the most eminent of our own contemporaries have not
thought it superfluous to proclaim and insist upon those same
truths. In 1867 Hermann Helmholtz wrote as follows : —
"A red-blind person sees cinnabar as black or as a dark-
yellowish grey, and that is the proper reaction for his peculiarly
240 GREEK THINKERS.
constituted eye. He only needs to know that his eye is different
from those of other men. In itself, the one sensation is no truer
and no falser than the other [' My sensation is true for me,' as we
read in the ' Thesetetus '], even though those who see red have the
great majority on their side. The red colour of cinnabar only
exists at all in so far as there are eyes made like those of the
majority of mankind. Cinnabar has exactly the same title to the
property of being black, that is, to the red-blind."
And again : " A sweet thing which is sweet for no one is
an absurdity." In the following year another philosophical
physicist, to whom we have already alluded, explained his
views on the same question in these words —
" The expression, ' sense-illusion,' proves that we are not yet
fully conscious, or at least have not yet deemed it necessary to
incorporate the fact into our ordinary language, that the senses
represent things neither wrongly nor correctly. All that can be truly
said of the sense-organs is that under different circumsta?ices t/iey
produce different sensations and perceptions. . . . And it is usual
to call the unusual effects deceptions, or illusions."
We have still to consider a negative circumstance of
some importance. The problems of change, of inherence,
of predication, which played so great a part in the in-
vestigations of the Megarians, the Cynics, and even of
Plato, are entirely absent from all reports of the teaching
of the Cyrenaics. Nor should we be surprised at this, for
all these riddles are offshoots of the concept of Being, which
the authors of the theory of sensation expounded in the
" Thesetetus " endeavoured, as Plato expressly informs us,
to abolish altogether. The desire to be rid of the difficulties
which attend this concept was, we may be sure, a consider-
able factor in the thought of the earlier as of the later
phenomcnalists. There is an entire lack of evidence to
show how far their criticism of the concept of Being took
a polemical turn, directed against members of other Socratic
schools. It is possible that this very subject had its part
in the controversies which raged between Aristippus and
Antisthenes, and again between Theodorus, a late member
of the African school, and Stilpo the Megarian.
THEODORUS OF CYRENE. 24 1
9. The discord of the Socratics was less persistent in the
field of ethics than in that of metaphysics. We find them,
as ethical teachers, continually reproducing the features of
their common ancestor. We notice what may almost be
called a reversion to an original type, a force working to
overcome the divergences of special developments, or at
least to bring them nearer together. It is precisely this
fact of which we are reminded by a name we have just
mentioned — that of Theodoras. In the line of philosophical
descent he was a great-grandchild of Aristippus, but in his
manner of life, as well as in his teaching, he was almost as
much a Cynic as a Cyrenaic. In early life he was driven
from his home by party conflicts ; he worked as a teacher
at Athens and Corinth, as a statesman in the court of
Ptolemy I., and he was sent on a diplomatic mission to
Lysimachus. Finally he returned to his native city, where
he assisted the Egyptian governor Magas, by whom he was
held " in high honour," and there he died. He was thus
a philosopher of the world and the court, though he was
anything but a courtier. On the contrary, the strong self-
assurance, the frank fearlessness of his demeanour towards
the great, was the most striking feature in his character,
and reminded men of Diogenes and his successors. In his
cosmopolitanism, again, and in his disparagement of state-
citizenship, he was equally Cynic and Cyrenaic ; while the
Cynic element predominated in his contempt for friendship,
which, as he thought, is unnecessary to the self-sufficing
wise man, while it is wholly foreign to the bad, whose
inclinations rarely survive the advantages flowing from
them.
The judgments which Theodoras passed on the figures
of the popular religion were at least as bold as, if not bolder
than, those of some among his Socratic contemporaries
(especially Stilpo and Menedemus, see p. 207). Whether
his appellation of " Atheist " was fully deserved or no,
we cannot tell. The greater number of our authorities
attribute atheistic sentiments to him ; others aver that he
only scourged the gods of mythology ; others, again, state
that it was from the important critical labours of Theodoras
VOL. II. R
242 GREEK THINKERS.
that Epicurus derived his own (by no means atheistic)
teaching on religious subjects. Possibly we have here some
reason to conjecture that Theodorus included in his attack
the belief in Providence and in special divine interventions.
This would certainly have been quite enough to raise the
prospect of an accusation before the Areopagus, from which
he was protected by Demetrius of Phalerum, who conducted
the administration of Athens between 317-6 and 307-6.
It was enough, too, to cause him to be ranged among the
deniers of the Deity by the side of Diagoras and Prodicus
(cf. Vol. I. pp. 408, 430), and to prompt a late ecclesiastical
writer to say of him that " he denied the Deity, and therefore
incited mankind to perjury, theft, and violence."
The truth is that his ethics showed some touch of that
more spiritual quality we have already noticed in Hegesias
and Anniceris. For him, it is plain, the word " pleasure "
was too thickly beset with misleading associations to be
used as a name for that happiness or well-being which all
the Socratics alike regarded as the end of life. In its place
he employed an expression drawn rather from the emotional
than the sensual sphere — " joy," or " cheerfulness," the
opposite of which was " sorrow," or " melancholy." The
one true good (that is, the one effective means of attaining
that end) was wisdom or justice, which he seems to have
regarded as essentially identical, while the opposites of
these were the only true evil. Pleasure and pain, both
understood in the narrower sense, as the Greek word for
the second of them, irovog, shows clearly enough, take their
stand among the " middle " things, or things indifferent in
themselves — the u^id^opa, to use the language of the Cynics
and Stoics. This doctrine, which we only know in outline,
is, in any case, chargeable with lack of due regard to the
external conditions of existence, and with the same strain
of exaggeration which marks the two schools of thought
just mentioned. It is not, however, easy to understand
how the same compiler to whom we owe the above curt but
valuable notices was able to add, almost in a breath,
that " in certain circumstances " the wise man, as conceived
by Theodorus, would steal, or commit sacrilege and other
BION OF BORYSTHENIS. 243
crimes. A reporter without malice would certainly not
have omitted to give us some more exact account of those
remarkable " circumstances " which would have sufficed
temporarily to dethrone the supreme good, justice.
Unless we suppose this statement to be a clumsy in-
vention, there seem to us to be only two possibilities. It
may have been that in some piece of dialectic our Cyrenaic
used names generally applied to morally reprehensible
actions, to denote quite other and innocent ones, much as
we speak of "justifiable homicide," or regard other acts as
sometimes justified by necessity. We may compare the
reasonings of Socrates on the abstraction of arms to
prevent suicide, on various deceptions practised for the
sake of saving life, and on similar subjects (see p. 56). Or
it may be that he was treating of "academic instances" of
quite exceptional character in the spirit of that imaginative
casuistry which robs ordinary moral standards of their
applicability — casuistry such as we shall encounter in the
case of the Stoics, e.g. the necessity of incest, if the preserva-
tion of the human race depended on it. It is different with
certain utterances, advocating Cynic freedom in sexual
matters, which are ascribed to Theodorus, himself half a
Cynic, and which may very well be authentic.
If Theodorus was half a Cynic, his pupil Bion was
three-quarters of one. He was born at Borysthenis, on the
Dnieper, attended the philosophic schools of the motherland,
and learnt not only from the Cynics, but from Theodorus,
Crates the Academic, and Theophrastus the Peripatetic.
He became a travelling teacher, but while he adopted the
Cynic dress, he broke with the Cynic custom by receiving
payment for his instruction. He was, moreover, an un-
commonly prolific author, both in prose and verse. Wit
and intellect he possessed in remarkably high degree, and
the shafts of his satire flew indiscriminately in all directions.
In two lines of burlesque verse — all that remains to us of
his poetry — he tears the venerable Archytas to pieces ; and
this, in our eyes, is more damaging to him than all the evil
talk which went the rounds concerning him, and which
Erwin Rohde long ago pronounced with perfect justice to
244 GREEK THINKERS.
be nothing but venomous slander. Vengeance was hereby
taken for his violent attacks as well on the popular religion
as on philosophers of every shade. The part which he
played reminds us sometimes of Voltaire, whom he further
resembles in the circumstance that a deathbed conversion
was invented for him. Some knowledge of Bion's literary
manner may be gained from the imitations of Teles (cf.
p. 158), particularly from the highly ingenious dialogue be-
tween " Poverty " and the " Circumstances of Life." As for
the content of his teaching, it may be termed a softened
Cynicism which has taken over from Hedonism the idea,
foreign to itself, of adaptation to circumstances, and which
preaches not so much the rejection of pleasure as content-
ment with such pleasure as may be attainable in each given
case.
The following seems to be the net result of those
adaptations, transformations, and fusions which we have
described in this and the preceding chapters. The smaller
twigs on the tree of Socratism gradually wither ; the
Megarian and the Elian-Eretrian schools die out. Cynicism
maintains its existence in its stricter form as a sect ; but
whatever it possesses of the scientific spirit and method is
transferred to a new and less crude movement — that of the
Stoa. The latter is confronted by Epicureanism, an out-
growth of Hedonism ; but the two are inwardly in closer
connexion than the fierceness of their brother's battle would
lead us to conjecture. For Epicurus and Zeno are now
nearer together than, say, Aristippus and Antisthenes had
been. Socratism thus advances in a double stream, allying
itself, on the Cynic side, with the Heraclitean physics,
and, on the Cyrenaic side, with that of Democritus. So
developed, and with these additions, the teaching of
Socrates becomes the religion, not of the masses in general,
but of the masses of the educated, and continues to be so
for a series of centuries. The process of transformation
was accomplished, as is plain, with an astonishing degree
of regularity. In the chain, forged chiefly out of ethical
material, there occur, in the one case as in the other, links
of natural philosophy ; and the whole fabric constitutes
THE COURSE OF PHILOSOPHIC DEVELOPMENT. 245
a system capable of satisfying the religious, moral, and
scientific needs of myriads of men. Those who performed
the work of carrying on and extending the tradition, were
men of eminent intellect, but yet not the most eminent of
all. Certain substances are termed conductors of heat or
of electricity, and in the same way minds of a certain type
may be called conductors of thought. Such minds are to
be distinguished from those which open up fresh paths.
Not that we accept as true the popular theory of genius.
No one, we think, is entirely independent of his pre-
decessors. No one can conjure up, as if out of nothing, a
purely novel fabric, unexampled in all its parts. The
true distinction seems to be contained in the following
considerations.
An intellect of the first order, having found and selected
the elements of a world-theory, will combine and develop
them in such manner as may best accord with its own
powerful and strongly marked individuality, and, for this
very reason, there will be small prospect of gaining the
adherence, within a short interval, of any very extensive
section of society. At the same time, such an intellect, out
of the abundance of its wealth, will exert an influence
upon many later generations, with which it will continually
present new points of contact, and thus upon the intellectual
life of mankind at large. Of such a type was the great
man we now have to study. He, too, imparted fresh life
to Socratism by an infusion of foreign elements, notably
Pythagoreanism, but the influence of the new product
remained, in the first instance, limited to much narrower
circles. The comprehensive developments, the intellectual
phenomena on the vast scale, to which we have just referred,
stand in immediate connexion with the Cynic and Cyrenaic
Socratism out of which they arose. The next two books
of this work will hardly do much towards making their
evolution more intelligible. Still, we shall have little cause
to repent having spent a very considerable time on Plato,
his pupil Aristotle, and the circle of their disciples.
BOOK V.
PLATO.
Aia rh a.TroAtL<p9riuai rod apiarou (pvKaKos ; Twos ; i) 8' bs 6 'A8e//xcu"ros.
Aoyov, ?\v 5' £ycl>, fxovaiKrj Kexpa/Litvov, os ,uovos 4yyiy6jj.evos crunrip dpeTTJs Sia
fliov Vo(/ce?T£ exo^ri. — Plato, " Republic," viii. 549 B.
A DEFINITION OF GREATNESS. 249
CHAPTER I.
PLATO'S YEARS OF STUDY AND TRAVEL.
I. An eminent contemporary has propounded a peculiar
definition of a " great man." According to him, a great
man is several men in one. There is no genius to whom
this saying applies better than it does to Plato. Highly as
we admire the force of his talent and the magnitude of
his achievements, still greater astonishment is roused by
their multiplicity. The poet in him was at least on an
equal footing with the thinker. And in the thinker the
most contradictory excellences balance each other. On
the one hand, there is the power of constructing a massive
edifice of thought ; on the other is the piercing subtlety by
which that edifice is again and again undermined, by which
the products of his own, as well as of other men's thought,
are subjected to an unwearied scrutiny, carried into the
minutest detail. Sceptic and mystic by turns, at once a
constructive and an analytical genius, Plato exhibited the
many-sided wealth of his endowment not only in the long
series of his writings : in the school which he founded, we
see, in the course of the ages, first one then the other of
these two tendencies coming into prominence ; they relieve
each other alternately for almost a thousand years.
The mighty influences, of many different kinds, that
have radiated from this extraordinary personality, are not
yet extinguished or attenuated by time. But lately
immanuel Kant has been called a Platonist by a writer
who wished to do him honour. One halt ot the
philosophic world still holds fast to Plato's view of the
25O GREEK THINKERS.
supersensual, while the other and less ambitious half con-
templates with admiration his methods of conceptual
analysis. Adventurous reformers, full of plans for the
renovation of the social order, hail the "Republic" as
an early and brilliant model of their labours ; while those
who cling stubbornly to inherited forms of faith render
ardent homage to the creator of the " Phaedo." The sober
champions of utility and severe rationalism claim Plato
for their intellectual ancestor ; but the dreamy mysticism
of East and West derives its pedigree from the same
source. It grew from the latest branch of his school —
Neo-Platonism — and traces of the relationship are still to
be detected by the eye of the expert even in that symbolism
which finds its material expression in the dances of ecstatic
dervishes.
According to the most trustworthy accounts, Plato was
born in the spring of the year 427 B.C., in the island of
^Egina, situated not far from Athens, where his father,
Ariston, had settled temporarily. His father claimed de-
scent from Codrus, the last King of Athens. His mother,
Perictione, also belonged to a highly esteemed family ;
Solon, who was connected with it, had sung its praises in
verse, as also had Anacreon and other poets. Plato, who
only mentions himself three times in his dialogues, and
that casually, dwells with affectionate pride on these family
memories. And in his works he has raised more than one
monument to several of his kinsmen : to the brothers
Glaucon and Adeimantus ; to his half-brother Antiphon ;
to his maternal uncle Charmides ; above all, to his mother's
cousin Critias. Without any doubt his rich mental en-
dowment was an inheritance from his mother's family.
We have already, in studying the beginnings of social
science, met with the name of Critias (Vol. I. p. 389, seg.).
He worked several veins of literature, both prose and
verse ; some, indeed, he may be said to have opened up
for the first time — descriptions of constitutions, of national
customs, and (if we except the poet Semonides) of types of
character. He grew up in the school of Enlightenment,
and in his book-drama " Sisyphus " (cf. Vol. I. p. 389) he
PLATO'S KINSMAN CRITIAS. 25 I
spoke of faith in the gocls as an invention of prudent men,
concerned for the welfare of society. In that work he
adopted an attitude of hostility to all forms of theology,
even those possessed of metaphysical refinements. This
fact is in agreement with the little that we know of his
materialistic psychology and his theory of knowledge —
subjects which he treated in books entitled " Aphorisms "
and " Conversations." Posterity, however, has not pre-
served the memory of Critias the poet or Critias the
thinker so much as of Critias the statesman. The part he
played in the Athenian faction-fights which marked the
close of the fifth century, his position at the head of the
so-called Thirty Tyrants, have made him one of the best-
hated characters in Greek history. And there can be no
doubt that, as champion of the aristocracy, he shrank from
no extremity of violence ; that those were grievous political
sins which he expiated with his life at the end of the civil
war (403). But we have no ground whatever for supposing
him to have been under the sway of ignoble motives. The
very manner in which Aristotle (while spreading a veil, out
of regard for Plato, over his political actions) couples his
personality with that of Achilles, shows clearly that he had
been considerably impressed by it. When we are told that
Critias, the champion of the aristocracy, attempted, when
an exile in Thessaly, to excite the tributary peasants against
their masters (about 406), we may at first gather the im-
pression that he was lacking in character. But the story is
not fully authenticated, to begin with, and, even if it were, it
would not be sufficient foundation for the above unfavourable
judgment. For a man who was opposed to the system by
which the city bourgeoisie and proletariate reigned supreme
on the Pnyx, might very well be in favour of a free peasant
class. Our interest, however, is confined to two points —
the fact that a man remarkable for his great abilities and
strong passions belonged to the number of Plato's near
relations, and the influence which, to quote Niebuhr, " so
intellectual a man, so gifted with the power to charm and
to subdue . . . must have exercised over his great-nephew.
Before his banishment, his position was perfectly justifiable,
252 GREEK THINKERS.
as much so as that of any one else who ever opposed an
administration full of abuses ; when he went into exile,
Plato was still very young, and did not see him again till
he returned as one of the Tyrants." However greatly the
young Plato may have abhorred the excesses of that reign
of terror, he doubtless considered it the product of an
imperious necessity. His love and admiration for Critias
continued undiminished, and, together with his grief for his
uncle Charmides, who also fell in that struggle, may have
contributed to estrange him from Athens and its demo-
cratic constitution. That these sentiments persisted un-
changed for a long course of years was a result which the
leaders of the people, on its restoration to power, did their
best to effect. Did not one of them, Anytus, act as the
chief accuser of Socrates ?
Critias and Charmides had also sought the company of
Socrates in days gone by, and probably it was through the
intermediary of the latter that Plato, as a youth of twenty,
had been brought under the spell of the great conversational
wizard. Before that he had studied music under Dracon,
who had learnt from Damon, a man of high intellectual gifts
and a friend of Pericles ; he had then occupied himself
with painting and poetry. He now renounced these
favourite tastes, or rather, he enlisted them almost entirely
in the service of philosophy. If, as the legend goes, he
devoted a complete tragedy to the flames at that time, it
would seem that the poetic, descriptive, and dramatic wealth
of his dialogues rose in full vigour from the ashes.
Socrates, however, was not the only thinker with whom
Plato consorted familiarly. He had already made the
acquaintance of Cratylus, whose name he immortalized in
one of his dialogues. This man was a belated Heraclitean,
related to the sage of Ephesus much as the Neo-Hegelians
are to Hegel. He grotesquely exaggerated the teaching of
the master. The latter had given concrete expression to
his view of the continued movement and change of all
things in the saying that it is impossible to step into the
same river twice. But this was not enough to satisfy
Cratylus. For the river, according to him, becomes a new
EARLY ACQUAINTANCE WITH CRATYLUS. 253
one during the short space of time occupied in entering it.
Finally, as Aristotle tells us, this extreme Neo-Heraclitean
rejected the use of language, the definiteness of which he
conceived to be in contradiction with the indefiniteness of
fleeting existence, and suggested pointing with the finger
as a substitute. In some of the works of his mature age,
Plato describes, with delightful humour, that caricature of a
doctrine and its champions, the circle of his own teacher.
To them the world appeared as though afflicted with a
perpetual cold in the head, while things were as leaky
vessels from which the water streams unperceived. But
these men themselves might be truly called " fleeting," for
their character had nothing in it fixed or abiding. Argument
with them was barren, if not impossible ; they were always
ready to produce new riddles from their quiver, and discharge
them like arrows upon their opponent ; before the latter
could recover from the shock of the first, he was struck by
a second. But in spite of all this biting satire on the shift-
ing-hued but hollow dialectic of those out-of-date philo-
sophers, Plato's early acquaintance with Heraclitean doctrine
did not fail to exert a permanent influence upon him. Aris-
totle at least — and his testimony on this point is decisive —
traces such an influence in the fact that the things of sense,
by reason of their unceasing variation, were not held by
Plato to be proper objects of knowledge. And it is quite
true that the investigation of nature did not enter till late
into his scientific labours, and then played a relatively un-
important part in them.
But we are not to think of Plato's youth as entirely
taken up with artistic and philosophic interests. We may
be sure that he spent some portion of his early years in the
camp, perhaps as a cavalryman. Even in ordinary times,
the young Athenian was required to perform garrison and
sentry duty. Much more so at an epoch like this, when
Athens was straining every nerve to meet the attack of
Sparta. Universal levies of all capable of bearing arms
were not infrequent at this time. And when the great war
was over, neutrality was impossible in the party struggle
which formed its tragic epilogue. Even had it been possible,
254 GREEK THINKERS.
the youthful nephew of Charmides, and great-nephew of
Critias, would none the less have been found on the side of
the kinsmen whom he honoured so highly, and who were at
the same time the most influential party-leaders of the day.
With all these facts present to our minds, we see how
improbable it is that Plato's career of authorship should
have begun early. This impression is strengthened by
considerations of another kind. From the beginning Plato
wrote all his works in the form of dialogues, and in these,
apart from one exception, Socrates is always introduced,
generally as the central figure. It is, of course, not impos-
sible that this homage — the most magnificent in the whole
history of literature — was paid during the lifetime of its
object. But it is far more intelligible if we regard it as an
offering to the dead. A much deeper significance attaches,
on this view, to what would otherwise be simply an expres-
sion of esteem or a literary artifice. The image of the dead
whom we have loved, especially if they have been taken
from us suddenly, haunts us waking or sleeping. Thus it
was with Plato ; the disciple could not bear to part from the
master who had been violently torn from him. The artistic
impulse, together with the promptings of grateful affection,
constrained him to resume the prematurely interrupted
converse, to give some share in it to contemporaries and
posterity, to put his own best thoughts and feelings in the
mouth of the departed. We may assume, then, though with
something less than absolute certainty, that with Plato, as
with his companions, the writing of Socratic dialogues did
not precede, but followed, the death of Socrates.
2. The spring of 399 marked an epoch in Plato's life in
more than one way. With this date his years of study end,
and his years of travel begin. We have no ground for
assuming that his safety was threatened, be the story true
or false that he ascended the tribune to speak in defence
of his friend, but was compelled to desist by hostile cries
from the jurors, directed, as we may suppose, more against
his family than his person. On the other hand, it may well
have been that he felt at first as if life in Athens had now
been embittered for him. But what was more important
THE BEGINNING OF PLATO'S TRAVELS. 255
was that with the death of that friend who had been almost
a father to him, the strongest tie which bound him to his
home had been broken. We may be sure that he had
before then been seized by a longing to see the world.
But the wish not to lose sooner than was necessary the old
man whom he loved, was well adapted to keep the taste for
travel in check. Now, however, that draught of hemlock
had removed the last obstacle.
Plato spent some dozen years abroad. But we can
hardly suppose that these years were not interrupted by
longer or shorter visits to his own city. And we may be
sure that his travels were something different from a mere
restless hurrying to and fro. He did not aim, as Herodotus
and Hecataeus had done, at filling his memory and his
tablets in the shortest possible time with a motley collection
of impressions and information. He desired to see and
admire the wonders of nature and art — the Pyramids of
Egypt no less than the snowy cap of the Sicilian volcano.
He wished, further, to gain knowledge of those subjects
which were more fully studied abroad than in the Athens
of that day. Not least of all, his object was to see the
" men of many cities," and learn to know their "mind."
Three stages of his travels are recorded : Egypt, Lower
Italy, and Sicily. But before visiting these distant countries,
he resided for a while at Megara, where the orphaned dis-
ciples clustered round Euclides (cf. p. 173), perhaps because
he was the oldest of their number. After this stay at
Megara came, as we are told, his visit to the Nile valley,
which, doubtless, consumed a considerable space of time.
The empire of the Pharaohs was no longer in existence.
But the Persian conquest (525 B.C.) had only touched the
surface of the political and social order. At this very time
— about 400 — there occurred an outburst of national hate.
The foreign yoke was broken and superseded by the
ephemeral authority of native dynasts, supported by Greek
and Libyan lances. The primaeval civilization of that great
people made a profound impression on Plato. In the
" Timaeus," one of his latest works, he makes an Egyptian
priest say to Solon : " You Greeks are boys." The continuity
256 GREEK THINKERS.
of tradition, lasting unbroken for thousands of years ; the
immovable solidity of the priestly regulations governing all
intellectual life ; the fixity of style, crystallized long ago,
and now apparently unchangeable, in music and the plastic
arts, the " hoary science ; " — all this was for him an imposing
spectacle. Still more so were the hereditary transmission
of employments, the highly developed bureaucracy, the
strict separation of callings and their far-advanced sub-
division— an idea of which last may be gained from the very
modern-sounding description given by Herodotus of medical
specialists. (" Some are oculists . . . others dentists ;
others, again, treat internal diseases.") The division of
labour, in sharp contrast to Athenian many-sidedness and
versatility, was a corner-stone of his social and political
thought ; no doubt the observation of Egyptian institutions
was here in close alliance with the demands which resulted
from the Socratic primacy of the intellect. The compulsory
education prevalent in Egypt seemed to him worthy of
imitation, as did also their concrete methods of arithmetical
instruction, based on profound pedagogic insight, in which
garlands, fruits, drinking-cups, were passed from hand to
hand amid the "jests and merriment" of the children.
And he praises with great fervour the custom, fixed for
ages by an unchanging legislation, of familiarizing the
young with beautiful music and beautiful gestures.
Plato made a stay of considerable length at Heliopolis,
the original seat of Egyptian religion and priestly wisdom,
where, at about the commencement of our era, the geographer
Strabo was shown the apartments formerly occupied by the
Athenian philosopher. Situated on an artificial eminence
some five miles to the north-west of the ancient Memphis
and modern Cairo, the Temple of the Sun, together with
the buildings which housed its great army of priests, may
be regarded as a peaceful University town, presenting a
sharp contrast to the noise and bustle of the neighbouring
metropolis. In this neighbourhood, which is not very
attractive now, but which in those days was diversified by
the great ship-canal and the lakes fed from it, we may
imagine Plato walking for his pleasure, perhaps in the
PLATO'S EGYPTIAN IMPRESSIONS. 257
long-vanished Avenue of the Sphinx. His mind may
well have been filled with reverent awe by the great age
of the magnificent temple-grounds, of whose former glories
the only remaining witness is an obelisk of rose-granite,
towering to a height of more than sixty feet, now the
centre of a swaying mass of vegetation, but in ancient
days one of two ornaments placed on both sides of the
main entrance. From the inscription, which is legible to
this day, Plato might learn, if he had a linguist for his
guide, that the monument had been raised, more than
fifteen centuries before his own birth, by King Usirtasen I.
Plato's friend, the philosopher and astronomer Eudoxus,
also visited Heliopolis, not long afterwards, and spent
sixteen months there, devoting himself to observations of
the stars ; a few decades earlier, Democritus had measured
his strength against that of the Egyptian mathematicians
fcf. Vol. I. p. 318). From these facts we may draw two
inferences. There can have been no insuperable linguistic
difficulty in the exchange of thought, whether we suppose
that communication between the Greek investigators and the
Egyptian scholars was established by means of interpreters,
or whether there were already among the priests some
who, like the arch-priest Manetho a century later, possessed
an adequate knowledge of Greek. We may conjecture, too,
that the Hellenes still had something to learn from the
astronomical observations, reaching back for centuries, of
the Egyptians ; while it is doubtful whether the creators of
mathematics were any longer in advance of their gifted
pupils. Whichever of these two studies it was that Plato
followed — Cicero says both (astronomy and arithmetic) —
he shows himself very well informed on Egyptian matters.
Even where he exhibits Egyptian ideas in the playful guise
of myth, there is nothing arbitraiy in his manipulation of
them. He preserves the peculiar form of the names of
divinities, which he does not, like Herodotus, replace by
corresponding names from the Hellenic pantheon, even to
the point of violating the laws of Greek phonetics. Thus
he speaks of Theuth ; he knows that the ibis bird is sacred
to him, and he calls him the inventor of writing, of astronomy,
VOL. II. S
258 GREEK THINKERS.
of surveying, and of arithmetic ; thus completely agreeing
with the hieroglyphics, which name the god Dhuti the Lord
of Writing, the first writer of books, the calculator of the
heavens, the overseer of the survey, and so on. There is a
long and somewhat ambiguous passage in Plato's " States-
man," in which we may perhaps see evidence of the pains
taken by his friends among the priests to give him an exalted
opinion, yet one not too crudely at variance with fact, of the
importance of their order. And in reality their power was
increasing at that period, while the reputation of the warrior
caste, after a series of defeats in the field, was sinking lower
and lower. The church, indeed, was the only guardian of
the national culture and traditions. She possessed the
key to the heart of the people. For that reason she was
flattered and courted, both by the foreign autocrats, by
the Persians, as by the Ethiopians before them and the
Macedonians after them, and by those native pretenders
to the throne who, when not engaged in resisting alien
conquerors, were continually quarrelling among themselves.
A short sea-voyage brings the traveller from the mouths
of the Nile to the shore of Cyrene. Here, too, Plato made
some stay, and was much in the company of Theodorus,
an eminent mathematician, who had been trained in
astronomy and music, and who had early turned aside
from " pure speculation " to the special sciences. Later
authors include him in the circle of the Pythagoreans.
Plato, however, who introduces him into three of his
dialogues as an interlocutor, terms him repeatedly and
emphatically a friend of Protagoras. This friendship must
have been matter of general knowledge ; otherwise Plato,
who desires to do honour to Theodorus, his former teacher,
but is a little out of sympathy with Protagoras, would
hardly have mentioned it. In passing, there is one inference,
at least, which we may draw with certainty. The procedure
of Protagoras in discussing the foundations of mathe-
matics, and (according to our view ; see Vol. I. p. 455) in
maintaining theii origin in experience, cannot have been
regarded by the representatives of that science as an act of
hostility.
ARCHYTAS OF TARENTUM. 259
The next goal of his wanderings was Lower Italy,
whither he was probably urged by the same desire of com-
pleting his mathematical education. For this was the land
of the Pythagoreans. The brotherhood, dispersed a century
earlier, had probably left more numerous traces in Tarentum
than in any other city. Witness not only the many mem-
bers of that school whose home was Tarentum, men of
whom, it must be admitted, we know little more than their
names ; the Attic comedy comprised several works entitled
"The Tarentines," which made Pythagorean peculiarities
the target of their ridicule. Certainly the Pythagorean
adept, with his serious mode of life, his not infrequently
morose character, and his occasional leaning towards ascetic
self-torture, stood out in sufficiently sharp contrast with the
luxury of that wealthy city. According to Plato's own
testimony, Tarentum at Carnival-time (so we may render
" the Feast of Dionysus " ) was like nothing so much as a
drunken man. Social conditions were exceptionally stable
in this town, which was situated between the Tarentine
gulf with its excellent harbour, and the mare piccolo with
its incomparable wealth of edible shell-fish. Class-contrasts
were softened, for Nature poured out her gifts with lavish
hands, and at the same time the rich endeavoured, intelli-
gently and successfully, to relieve the privations of their
less-propertied fellow-citizens. The form of government
was a moderate democracy, and at the head of the State
there stood for a succession of years the very man for whose
sake Plato took up his residence in Tarentum, and with
whom he was connected by a friendship celebrated through-
out antiquity. This man was Archytas, a name which our
story cannot pass over in silence.
3. Of all the Greeks known to us as having been
characterized by an harmonious combination of many-sided
talents, Archytas was perhaps the most eminent. Of con-
siderable importance as a statesman and commander, a
profound thinker, a distinguished investigator, to some
extent a pioneer, in several departments of knowledge, he
was at the same time a lover of cheerful society, an excellent
flute-player, and a kind master to his slaves, with whose
260 GREEK THINKERS.
children he did not disdain to play, even inventing a new
toy for them, the rattle. He was as far as Pericles was
from practising any of the arts of the demagogue (cf. p. 43),
and it is not a little to the credit of his fellow-citizens that
they allowed their " foremost man " to work for them, to
guide their fortunes and therewith those of the confederacy
of South Italian cities to which they belonged. Archytas
was seven times elected Strategus, he was successful in
war with the neighbouring Messapians and Lucanians,
and he maintained the dignity of his country, even when
confronted by the then all-powerful Syracuse. He lived a
full life of varied activity, and his good fortune followed him
to the end, for he perished in a storm at sea and was spared
the infirmities of old age.
In his intellectual work, the first place is taken by
his contributions to mathematical and physical science.
Mechanics, as a branch of mathematical physics, was
actually founded by him. He was also the inventor of the
first automaton known to us — a wooden pigeon balanced
by a weight hanging from a pulley, and caused to fly by
the escape of compressed air from a valve. As a geometer
he earned the praises of the greatest ancient authority,
Eudemus. The latter names him, Leodamas of Thasus,
and Theaetetus the Athenian as the men who " enriched the
subject with new theorems, and arranged the parts of it in
a more scientific sequence." He advanced the theory of
proportion, and solved the much-discussed problem of
the duplication of the cube. He also did good work in
acoustics and the theory of music. The fragments of
certain writings on logic and ethics, which have been
attributed to him, are, in part, demonstrably spurious. But
that his investigations were not confined to the special
sciences seems clear from the circumstance that Aristotle,
in a lost work comprising three books, treated " Of the
Philosophy of Archytas." The not very numerous frag-
ments whose genuineness is undoubted afford us but few
glimpses of his deeper thought. There are, however, two
utterances of his, both of them significant, and inwardly
connected with each other, which we are unwilling to pass
THE WORK OF ARCH YT AS. 26 1
by. Influenced, possibly, by the Pythagorean harmony of
the spheres, Archytas discusses the limited receptivity of the
sense of hearing, and compares the organs of sense with
vessels which, having once been filled, can hold no more.
In the other passage he raises the question — Why are the
component parts of plants and animal bodies, so far as
special adjustments permit, of a rounded form ? In this
connexion he cites the trunks and branches of trees, as well
as human arms and legs. Although his answer to the
problem — that the cause is " the proportionality of the
similar " — is not transparently clear to us, still the breadth
of view implied in his raising the question at all, and his
evident disdain of the comfortable teleological pillow, are
sufficiently noteworthy. The similarity between the two
investigations lies in the fact that neither of them recognizes
any sharp line of division between the organic and the in-
organic world. It is clear that Archytas had much to give.
But assuredly the most important of the benefits which
Plato received from him was the collective impression
produced by his great and noble personality and the high
station which he either then occupied or was shortly to
attain. This impression was in harmony with one of
Plato's ideals, which thus received a new and powerful
impetus. For Plato found here, in casual and temporary
union, that which it was his dearest wish — a wish expressed
with the most passionate accents of his eloquent lips — to
see permanently and universally combined : political power
and scientific insight. His earnest endeavours, stimulated
without doubt by this example, to procure a share in the
same blessing for another important part of the Greek
world, brought him again and again to the land where he
went through the richest, and yet also the saddest, ex-
periences of his life. There the hand of the philosopher
did in very truth grasp the levers of history — with what
result we shall presently see. Now, the way to this land
was pointed out to him, and opened up for him, by
Archytas himself and his Pythagorean companions, in
virtue of their friendly relations with the high-minded
Syracusan prince, Dion.
262 GREEK THINKERS.
4. The highly favoured soil of Sicily early became a
prize for contending nationalities and parties. The island
of Demeter and Core was fertilized with blood. Both
these wars and these party-struggles were favourable to
the rise, the continuance, and the extension of despotic
rule.
In the other parts of the Hellenic world there were two
distinct phases of tyranny. The earlier of these sprang for
the most part from the war of classes, the later from the
use of hired troops. In Sicily the two phases were imper-
ceptibly fused together. Indeed, the two causes we have
named were there operative from the first. Gelo had long
ago (480) employed mercenaries in his victorious struggle
with the Carthaginians. The pre-Greek population of the
island supplied suitable material in proverbial abundance,
and repeated contests with the great neighbouring power
in the south-west made it necessary to take full advantage
of this resource. Moreover, the war of classes had raged
more fiercely and persistently here than elsewhere. The
mixture of Greek with native blood may have been to
blame, or the hot climate, or the luxuriant fertility of the
soil ; in any case want of moderation was the dominant
factor in both the public and the private life of the Siceliots.
Unbridled in desire, insatiable in pleasure, ruthless in
revenge, these wild, passionate natures showed little incli-
nation towards those perpetual compromises which are the
indispensable condition for the successful working of a
political constitution. Here the Demos expelled the rich ;
there it schemed to plunder them, and was driven by them
out of the city. Every such conflict offered a welcome
handle to the usurper. Although there were instances in
which a tyranny displaced an oligarchy, this fate was
usually reserved for democracies. " In Italy," says Treit-
schke, speaking of mediaeval and modern times, " democratic
republicanism everywhere succumbed to tyranny." In
Sicily the same natural tendency was materially assisted
by a special circumstance. " Packed full of miscellaneous
crowds of humanity," is the phrase by which Thucydides
makes Alcibiades describe the cities of Sicily, the suggestion
AT THE COURT OF D 10 AYS I US. 263
being that they are thus marked out as the easy prey of a
conqueror. The same circumstance made them a still
easier prey for the representatives of force and absolutism.
Moreover, that miscellaneity and that populousness were
the result, partly of various accidental coincidences, but
partly also of deliberate scheming. Among the causes
which contributed to these effects, we may mention the
expulsion of entire populations both by the national enemy,
the Carthaginian, and by the fiercely contending rival
factions ; the settling of mercenary troops in homes granted
them as part of their hire ; and, lastly, the unscrupulous
efforts of powerful rulers consciously and persistently
directed towards the strengthening of their own authority
by diminishing the homogeneity, and with it the capacity
for resistance of the burgher class. Thus in Sicily the
maxim of absolutism, " Divide et impera," was practised
throughout the fifth and fourth centuries, with disastrous
consequences unparalleled in the remainder of the Hellenic
world.
The pinnacle of perfection in Sicilian tyranny, as also
the highest development of that island's power, are both
associated with the name of Dionysius I. Beginning as a
subordinate official, he crept by demagogic by-paths into
the possession of a sceptre, which he afterwards maintained
with stubborn energy and the most far-sighted circum-
spection. He was not a military genius. In the course of
his reign of thirty-eight years he suffered almost as many
defeats as he gained victories. If, however, none of his
defeats proved crushing ; if, time after time, he converted
initial disaster into final triumph ; if he stemmed the flood
of Carthaginian conquest, extended his own authority over
the greater part of Sicily and a not inconsiderable part of
Lower Italy ; if his influence counted for much in Epirus
and the Greek motherland ; — these results were due to his
iron will and his inexhaustible fertility of resource. When
his near kinsman Dion brought Plato to court, he was forty-
three years of age, and had sat for eighteen years on the
throne of Syracuse. As might be expected, we have next
to no detailed information on the intercourse of the two
264 GREEK THINKERS.
men. Their early estrangement and its far-reaching after-
effects are all that is known to us.
In the mean time, Plato had an opportunity of viewing
the residential city at his leisure. In those days Syracuse
was the first city in the Hellenic world. It occupied the
position which Athens had already lost, and Alexandria
had not yet won. As soon as the sovereign's guest left
the palace on the " Island of Quails " (Ortygia) — an island
which once had been the whole of Syracuse, and has since
become so again — there lay spread before him in the wide
plain and on the encircling heights a brilliant capital,
surging with a good-humoured, pleasure-loving crowd, all
eyes and ears. Let us accompany him in one of his sallies.
His way takes him to the outer ring of the city, past the
Latomia, or disused quarries, excavations which are now
overgrown with rank vegetation, and in which, a quarter
of a century before Plato's visit, thousands of Athenian
war-prisoners had come to a miserable end. Sadly his
mind reverts to those victims of an unblest enterprise ; but
his thoughts are bitter when he remembers the authors of
it, champions of an imperialistic policy, which, as pupil of
Socrates, he utterly detests. But his melancholy reflexions
are cut suddenly short. He is caught up and carried away
by a passing wave of humanity, which does not stop till
it halts before the street-stage of a professional reciter.
The latter proceeds to regale his auditory with sketches
of Syracusan every-day life, delivered in broad Doric, with
strongly emphasized comic effects, a lively play of gesture,
and sharply marked changes of voice. These monologues
and duologues, which went by the name of " mimes," and
of which our knowledge is gained rather from imitations
than from the few actual fragments, bore titles such as
" The Tunny-fisher," "The Mother-in-law," "The Women
at Breakfast," " The Seamstresses," and were distinguished
by their powerful realism, their irresistible wit, their pithy
aphorisms. Henceforth they were included in Plato's
favourite reading. If he afterwards produced dialogues
which were masterpieces of individual characterization, his
debt was probably greater to the homely prose of the Sicilian
SOPHRON AND EPICHARMUS. 265
mime-writer than to the tragic and comic poets of Athens.
Not but what the muse of Sophron sometimes took higher
flights into the realm of mythology ; one of his works was
entitled " Prometheus," and in another Hera appeared as
a character. This would have been impossible without the
freest handling of the mythical material — an example from
which Plato may perhaps have learnt something. But let
us return to Syracuse. It is a day of festival, and the
theatre is open. The crowd streams in to the spectacle,
and the stranger follows them. Here he makes a closer
acquaintance with the comic poet Epicharmus, whose
native gifts of an observant eye and a sober, well-balanced
judgment have been supplemented in the home of his
adoption (he was born, like Hippocrates, in the island of
Cos) by many new elements of varied culture. He had
met Xenophanes at the Court of Hiero, and the death
of that prince, in 467, was soon followed by his own, at
an advanced age. No other comic poet ever displayed
equal skill in the combination of jest with earnest, or
commended the philosophical tenets of his day to the ear
and brain of his audience with such subtle drollery.
Suppose his theme the doctrine of Heraclitus ; he was
not content to clothe the theorem of universal flux in such
verses as —
" Naught is constant, naught abiding ; all things whirl in ceaseless
change."
The " Theorem of Becoming " must also be illustrated
by a comic episode invented for the purpose. A tardy
debtor justifies his delay by the remark that since contract-
ing the debt he has become an entirely new man, and is
therefore not bound by the old obligation. The creditor
allows the excuse to pass, and adds a pleasant surprise in
the shape of an invitation to dinner next day. But when
the expectant guest arrives at the house of this most
hospitable creditor, the latter has him turned back by his
slaves, and declares, in answer to his angry protests, that he,
too, has become a new man since yesterday. If Plato saw
such scenes as these enacted, he must have been pleasantly
266 GREEK THINKERS.
reminded of his distant home and the Heraclitean ex-
travagances of Cratylus, the teacher of his youth. There
were other impressions, too, of a more permanent kind, that
Plato received from Epicharmus, and of these we shall
have to treat more minutely in the sequel.
The day is brought to an end by a walk up the gentle
slopes of Epipolae, whence charming prospects are to be
had over the city quarters lying at the beholder's feet, as
well as over the adjacent sea and country. Here Plato's
astonishment is roused by the colossal walls and fortifica-
tions, far in excess of the customary Greek scale ; and he
admires the energy of his royal host, an energy which no
obstacle can daunt. Such reflexions, however, did not
open his heart towards Dionysius. Not but what there
were points of contact between the two men. The tyrant
was no pleasure-seeker. The heavily laden tables of
Syracuse, the refinements of that art of cookery which
had first been reduced to a system in that city, were as
little congenial to him as to Plato. He lived soberly and
temperately, absolutely devoted to his work on the great
task of his life. But the objects to gain which his will-
power was strung to its highest tension were not such as a
disciple of Socrates could view with sympathetic approval.
Certainly Plato never addressed to Dionysius those moral
sermons which a tainted tradition has put in his mouth.
He had not come to court to tell the "tyrant" that he
must of necessity be unhappy, though no doubt this was
his conviction. But if he had thought it an unworthy thing
to keep his conviction for the nonce locked up in his own
bosom, he would never have accepted the invitation of a
prince who was then a man of mature years, whose success
was at its zenith, and whom he could never hope to convert.
We may be sure that he acted with unfailing courtesy.
But this did not exclude a certain inward coolness and
shy reserve, such as Dionysius, in virtue of his peculiar
temperament and position, was the very man to detect
quickly and to feel keenly.
5. Tyranny has always resembled a coin subject to
violent fluctuations of value. That pendulum, the general
CAREER AND CHARACTER OF DIONYSIUS. 267
judgment, has more than once swung from the one extreme
of bitter hatred and contempt to the opposite extreme of
envious and even reverential admiration. The " most
bloodstained of all creatures,'' the lawless " adversary of
all right and justice," is not seldom transformed into a
monarch of renown, whom contemporaries and posterity
alike praise for his glorious and beneficent deeds. Such a
reaction, too, possesses a peculiar power of hastening its own
progress. The more respected a government is, the more
assured does its position become ; and the more assured its
position, the more easily can it dispense with the less
reputable expedients of administration. Again, Dionysius
desired something more than merely to be feared. Like
Napoleon, he understood the art of winning by kindness as
well as that of terrifying by severity. He was also a poet,
endowed with all the proverbial irritability of the class.
But in order to achieve as much as he did in this sphere
— he was awarded a prize for tragedy at Athens, not
long before his death — it was necessary for him to study
carefully the works of the old poets, and this took up a
considerable part of his not too generous allowance of
leisure. All this is hardly compatible with dulness or
coarseness of mind. There is a line of his verse which
runs as follows : " Despotic power, the mother of all
wrong." The Greek word here used, rvpavvig, betrays still
more clearly the fact that he was unable to put his own
position away from his thoughts. Very probably the con-
text of that line of verse contained a discussion, in an
allusive form, of the points for or against his own character.
Be this as it may, he had every right to claim for himself
that he had solved, though by unconstitutional and illegal
methods, a problem which was incapable of being solved
constitutionally. At the time when he seized the sceptre,
the Greek population of Sicily was in deadly peril. The
victorious march of Carthage had begun. Selinus, Himera,
Agrigentum, had been taken in the space of a few years ;
the inhabitants of three cities had been massacred or driven
into exile ; nowhere among the Greeks could be perceived
the faintest sign of a united resistance, based on definite
268 GREEK THINKERS.
alliances. On the contrary, their quarrels among them-
selves had served as an invitation to the national foe.
Dionysius did not thrust the boundary of Carthaginian
dominion very far back towards the West, but he definitively
checked its otherwise inevitable advance eastwards. He
might well imagine he possessed a title to grateful recogni-
tion on the part of the Greeks, and think himself worthy
to receive what Gelo and Hiero, his models in small things
as well as great, had received before him, the consecrating
homage of the poets, the thinkers, the great festival
assemblies of Hellas. But all these expectations were
grievously disappointed. At Olympia, where Hiero had
won those brilliant victories which Pindar and Bacchylides
had immortalized, there awaited him nothing but scorn and
insult. The mob, hounded on by the orator Lysias against
the " tyrant of Sicily," began to storm the tent, all draped
in purple and gold, which was occupied by the Syracusan
deputation under the sovereign's own brother. The poems
of Dionysius were received with hisses. Under the stress
of these humiliations he is said to have been nearly
driven mad.
For all this, it remains questionable whether the wound-
ing of the great monarch's pride by the lack of deference
on the part of Plato was the sole cause of the final rupture.
It may be that Dionysius was here guided by a feeling of
mistrust — that watchful, consuming mistrust which filled
his life with torment and made him the type of the " dark-
browed ogre " surrounded by spies and police agents. His
brother-in-law Dion, who was soon to be his son-in-law as
well, was a prince of majestic presence and great natural
gifts. In him Dionysius saw the mainstay of his dynasty.
He could not but note with concern how the impressionable
young man gradually surrendered to the spell of the
stranger's forceful speech and thought. He scented disaster
in the air, and his despot's conscience gave him licence to
meet the coming danger with a violent remedy. When
Plato left Syracuse in the company of the Spartan
ambassador, Dionysius requested the latter to rid him for
ever from all anxiety on Plato's account. Pollis fulfilled
PLATO SOLD AND RANSOMED. 269
this commission, in what he no doubt thought the least
objectionable way, by setting his companion ashore at
yEgina. A fierce feud was then raging between Athens
and its island neighbour. Every Athenian caught on
^Eginetan soil was doomed — so the people had decreed —
either to death or to slavery. It was the milder penalty
that fell to Plato's lot, perhaps because he had come against
his will ; perhaps, too, because he had been born in the
island. Thus his experience included the sharpest contrasts
of fortune — to-day a guest in a king's palace, to-morrow a
slave in the market-place waiting for a lord and master.
A little more, and that great light would have been
extinguished in the dull prison of a menial existence. But
fate was in league with philosophy. A wealthy Cyrenian,
named Anniceris, who had known Plato since the latter's
visit to Cyrene, happened to be for the moment in ^Egina.
He hastened to purchase Plato's freedom, and conveyed him
away from the island. Some Athenian friends collected a
sum of money — two to three thousand drachmas, we are
told — and this was offered to Anniceris to repay him for
his outlay. The offer was generously declined, and the
money used to buy the land on which Plato's school was
built. The whole story reads sufficiently like a novel, but
there is no serious reason to doubt its authenticity, supported
as it is by the testimony of good witnesses and a casual
allusion of Aristotle.
6. In one of the most charming passages in his works
Plato brings before us his master, Socrates, fleeing from the
bustle and uproar of the city in the company of a young
friend. The two hasten to pass the gate, choose themselves
a cool resting-place, and there, reclining on a gentle slope
of turf under the leafy awning of a spreading plane, begin
that exchange of thought and discourse which makes up
the dialogue " Pha:drus." It is a cheering thought that the
profound feeling for natural beauty which speaks to us in
this description does not, in Plato's case, bear witness to an
ungratified longing. When, at the age of fort)", lie returned
to Athens to reside there permanently, he formed the resolu-
tion of establishing himself as a teacher — an unparalleled
270 GREEK THINKERS.
step for a scion of an illustrious family. It had been
chiefly in the neighbourhood of the gymnasia that
Socrates had consorted with the youths who desired instruc-
tion. Plato followed the precedent thus set, as Antisthenes
had perhaps already done (in the Cynosarges, see p. 170),
and as Aristotle afterwards did (in the Lyceum). The
three great gymnasia of Athens were thus brought into
permanent association with philosophy. Plato chose the
Academy, and thereby gave the name a symbolic meaning
for all time.
This gymnasium was situated about twenty minutes'
walk outside the " Double Gate " that led from the
magnificent street known as the " Dromos " (or racecourse)
into the suburb of " Potters' Town." The road by which it
was approached was thickly bordered with public monu-
ments of all kinds, notably with graves of the honoured
dead, including Pericles and the tyrannicides Harmodius
and Aristogeiton. In its neighbourhood were many holy
places, particularly an altar dedicated to Athene, set in a
ring of twelve olive trees. The nature-lover Cimon, the
same who had planted the market-place with trees, had,
by means of artificial irrigation, transformed the hallowed
precinct into a veritable park. Here, by the side of broad
carefully kept paths, were stretches of thick turf, shady
avenues, and quiet lounge-spaces under gigantic trees,
numbered among the wonders of Athens. Here, where
(to quote Aristophanes) " the elm held whispering converse
with the plane," Plato had perhaps once gambolled with
other boys, " fragrant with hedge-blooms and innocence."
He now acquired a plot of ground, near the shrines and the
gymnasium, where, in the centre of a garden of moderate
extent, a building stood which was to be long the centre of
his school. I Icrc Plato fixed his own residence, and spent
the remainder of his life in familiar intercourse with a
circle of intimate disciples. Here took place those frugal
banquets which contrasted to such great advantage
with the many courses of the generals' dinners — those
banquets seasoned with wit and intellect, which were
imitated in all schools of philosophy, and which found a
THE ACADEMY. 2/1
reflex in a special type of literature. They were held,
sometimes in commemoration of the founder's birthday,
sometimes in connexion with sacrifices offered to the patron
goddesses of the institution. These were the Muses, who
in all places of education — except the gymnasia, where
their place was taken by Hermes — were honoured by a
great festival every month, probably also by a humble
daily offering, just as all proceedings in the law courts,
all meetings of the Assembly, were preceded by minor
sacrifices. To the Muses, whose shrine was erected by
Plato, probably in the garden, were added the Graces.
Their statues were placed there by Plato's nephew, who
also provided them with an inscription, the words of which
are still extant —
" Goddesses, take this gift of goddesses, Muses of Graces ;
These Speusippus set up, grateful for knowledge bestowed."
The lectures were delivered in halls in which, besides
the V^Qpa, or chief seat, there were placed rows of stone
benches, such as have recently been discovered at Delos
and Olympia, in the immediate proximity of gymnasia.
The liberality with which such institutions were treated by
the local authorities (demes) was, perhaps, due not least
of all to the prospect of material advantages. For the
presence of a large number of students and the increased
use of the gymnasium brought additional employment and
profit to the inhabitants of the district in which it was
situated. Plato gradually gathered round him a band of
young men from all parts of Greece. Only a minority had
chosen science for their calling in life ; most of them sought
general culture, chiefly as a preparation for politics. It
would appear that the larger part of them belonged to the
propertied classes. We learn from the gibes of the comic
poets that the young Academics affected a certain studied
elegance of dress and manner. They might be known by
the careful arrangement of their hair, their dainty caps,
and exquisite walking-sticks — matters in which they pre-
sented a contrast, probably intentional, to the less civilized
fashions of the rival school of Antisthep.es (cf. p. 151).
Financially, the school must have been mainly supported
2/2 GREEK THINKERS.
by voluntary contributions from the pupils. We find
mention of occasional assistance received from a few
friends of great wealth, such as Dion of Syracuse, but
without an abundance of fees, whether fixed in amount
or left to the discretion of the student, it is hard to see
how the institution could have maintained its existence.
Had Plato defrayed all expenses out of his own means, so
singular a circumstance would not have passed unnoticed.
Nor was his financial position any too brilliant. This appears
partly from the fact that his father received a grant of land
in the conquered island of yEgina, partly from the story of
his redemption from slavery by his friends, and the use,
already referred to, which was made of the money declined
by Anniceris. Nor are these inferences contradicted by
Plato's will, a document which, but for a single lacuna, has
been preserved entire. The Academy, as we shall now briefly
designate the institution, could not, in its modest beginnings,
compete for a moment in extent and magnificence with
the school founded by Aristotle, the tutor of princes. Still,
the two institutions had certain fundamental features in
common. It is a remarkable fact, though one which can
be strictly proved and satisfactorily explained, that neither
of them possessed a library in which the founder's works
were preserved. Neither of them possessed the rights of
a corporation from the first or for a long time to come ;
they were the property of the founder, and were transferred
by testamentary disposition from him to others, who again
bequeathed them to definite individuals. There was no
regular endowment or trust fund ; instead, an earnest appeal
was made to the conscience of the heirs, who were adjured
to keep the institution accessible to all " fellow-students of
philosophy," and to maintain it as common property, "just
as if it were a holy place," to quote a significant clause
from the will of Theophrastus. The president or " leader "
of the school was always in the first instance nominated by
the founder ; afterwards the office was generally filled by
election. In the Academy, as in many mediaeval universities,
the appointment was made by the direct, secret vote of all
the young men. The result was occasionally unexpected ;
PLATO AS A TEACHER. 273
and sometimes, as in the case of the third head of the
school, was arrived at by a bare majority. Mere con-
siderations of courtesy were sometimes allowed to prevail ;
thus we read that Socratides, who had been elected solely
because of his seniority, voluntarily renounced a dignity
which he had not earned in any way. It seems natural to
infer from all this that the president was by no means the
only teacher — a point on which we have little detailed
information that we can trust, beyond the statement that
Plato himself was assisted by Speusippus and Menedemus
of Pyrrha. It is equally clear that instruction did not
necessarily come to a standstill during the temporary
absence of the head ; as, for example, when Plato visited
Sicily for the second and third time.
There can be no doubt that Plato's own work as a
teacher covered most of the branches of philosophy. That
notes of his lectures were taken down by pupils, and some-
times published afterwards, we learn from casual allusions
of Aristotle and from the title of one of his lost works. A
certain amusing incident, a favourite story of Aristotle's,
teaches us that some at least of Plato's lecture-courses
were open to an extensive circle of auditors, and that if
the expectations aroused by the title were disappointed,
even Plato himself could not escape a fiasco. Besides
lectures, his work included the discussion of philosophical
problems in classes consisting of a much smaller number of
pupils. These discussions, echoes of which reach us in
some of the later dialogues, may not inaptly be compared
to the exercises of a German Seminar. Possibly we have
in this circumstance the explanation of a statement which,
taken absolutely, is not quite credible, namely, that in his
later years (when, be it observed, his fame was greatest and
his pupils most numerous) he delivered his lectures in his
own little garden and nowhere else. Still greater intimacy
with the master was enjoyed by at least a select portion of
the disciples, some of whom, it would appear, were every
day invited by him to share his midday meal. Not a few
of them, in any case, must have taken part in the banquets
to which we have already referred. It is clear that Plato
VOL. II. T
274 GREEK THINKERS.
found his most effective recreation in cheerful and refined
converse over the wine-bowl ; and here, too, he saw one of
the most potent instruments of education. His successors
were of the same mind ; some of them — the affable
Speusippus, the ponderous Xenocrates, the indefatigable
Aristotle — did not disdain to draw up " Rules for the
Table" and "Drinking-codes," thus providing a wholesome
discipline for their guests even in external matters. Of the
powerful impulses which proceeded from the Academy, and
of the personality of its members, it will be time to speak
later on, at a more suitable stage of this exposition.
For the effects produced by the foundation of this school
did in truth reach out far into the ages. At the entrance
of the Academy stood an antique monument, used as the
starting-point in torch-races, instituted in honour of the
friend of man, the Titan Prometheus. Ten lines of runners
— ten being the number of the Attic tribes — took up their
stand at measured intervals, and, passing their torches from
hand to hand, strove to carry them to the goal still burning.
The great Athenian schools of philosophy were engaged in
a similar contest. It was the earnest endeavour of all of
them to preserve undimmed and bear onwards through
successive generations that flame which had been kindled
from the Promethean spark. And in this contest the
school of Plato, which outlived all the others, carried off
the prize.
We have now followed up to a certain point the life-
journey of the man who founded the Academy. Here, for
the present, we leave the subject, at least in its more
external aspect. His ship has gained the sheltering
harbour from which it will not yet for a while be driven
to face the storms again. In the mean time we shall
endeavour to trace the course of Plato's inner development
during the interval, with such guidance as may be had from
the products of his genius.
DATA OF THE INQUIRY. 275
CHAPTER II.
THE GEXUIXEXESS AND CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER OF
PLATO'S WORKS.
I. The problem which we hope to solve in the next
section is beset with difficulties of no common order. In
no case — not even if the external conditions had been the
most favourable we can think of — would it have been an
easy one. Let us indulge for once in a vision of what
might have been. Let us imagine that some one intimate
with Plato — his nephew Speusippus, for example — had done
something which would have cost him no more than a
quarter of an hour of his leisure, and would have rendered
a lasting service to the history of philosophy — suppose he
had jotted down on some loose sheet the chronological
order of his uncle's writings, and that this memorandum
had been preserved. We should not then have been
deprived of the most important auxiliary in the study of
Plato's mental history. Gaps, it is true, would still have
remained, such as those which, in Goethe's case, for
example, are filled up with the help of copious diaries, an
extensive correspondence, a great number of conversations
reported by contemporaries. But our present problem
might have been regarded as solved in the main. Still, the
historian's difficulties would not even then have been
entirely removed. The two main lines of inquiry — that
which follows the chronological sequence, and that which
follows the connexion of ideas — would still have crossed
each other at every turn. As things are, the case
is vastly worse than this. When we have to do with a
276 GREEK THINKERS.
thinker whose career was one of restless advance (and
Plato was such a thinker), the standpoint of development
cannot be neglected with impunity. But it is only here
and there that the necessary materials lie ready to our
hand. Thus, in respect of the " Laws," we learn from
Aristotle that this dialogue was subsequent to the
" Republic ; " from other authorities, that it was published
posthumously, and consequently that it was the work of
Plato's extreme old age. Here, then, the literary tradition
comes up to our ideal ; the relative order of the two works,
and the exact date of one of them, though not of both,
are known to us with absolute certainty. The inquiring
spirit of our century has not, however, been deterred
by the obstacles which stand, mountain-high, across its
path. The chronological order and the authenticity of
Plato's writings have been the subjects of endless
investigation and discussion, with the result, happily,
that out of a great number of widely divergent views,
something like an agreement has been evolved — at least so
near an approach to agreement as contains the promise of
further progress in the same direction.
These doubts respecting genuineness are the reverse
side of an extraordinary, indeed an unparalleled, piece of
good fortune. Of all the original thinkers of ancient
Greece, Plato is the only one whose works have been pre-
served entire. All that he ever wrote has come down to
us, and something more as well. This something more is
still sub judice. Even in ancient days, experts were not
altogether of one mind on the subject. Our authorities
speak of " genuine " dialogues, of doubtful dialogues, of
dialogues " rejected by all." This last class, some of
which have been lost, need not trouble us further. But
the doubtful dialogues grew, during the first two-thirds
of the nineteenth century, to be a terribly large frac-
tion of the whole. That critical sense which had been
exercised in the field of history, philology, and, not least of
all, theology, was gradually cultivated to an unnatural and
excessive degree of keenness. Things came to such a pass
at last that even the boldest quailed and began to doubt
EXTREMES OF MODERN SCEPTICISM. 277
his right to doubt. Only a quarter of Plato's works had
survived the ordeal ; of the remaining three-fourths each
had, by at least one vote, been condemned as spurious.
We may note, in passing, that this verdict contained an
unintentional, but exaggerated, tribute to the genius of
Plato. Only the most perfect of his creations were judged
worthy of him. And yet this extravagance of scepticism
might have been avoided if Aristotle's warning had been
heeded. For he closes his criticism of the " Laws " with
the following remark, aimed at Plato's writings in general :
" There is genius and intellect, originality and stimulus, in
them all ; still we can hardly expect to find them faultless
in every part." It was overlooked that the career of even
the most gifted artist has its stages of preparation, its
moments of weariness ; and that to disallow all his sketches,
preliminary essays, and only half-successful studies, is much
the same thing as to strip away from a chain of mountain-
peaks the lesser heights which lead up to them and the
passes which divide them. Nor is it only by the perfection
of his art that Plato has diminished the credit of his own
works. The very breadth and greatness of his intellect
has contributed, indirectly, to the same result. The un-
remitting practice of the most searching self-criticism is so
far from being to every one's taste that not every one can
as much as understand or believe in it. " Is it credible,"
wrote a hot-headed critic at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, " that Plato can have intended to contro-
vert a fundamental point of his own system ? " On the
ground of this incredibility a particular work (the
" Sophist ") was rejected, just as in our own day a second
has been condemned because, as is asserted, it is not given
to the " originator of a theory ... to hit on such over-
whelming objections " as those which are urged in the
" Parmenides " against the doctrine of ideas. Moreover,
the hypercritical method seemed in danger of revolving in
a perpetual circle. One critic objected to work A because
of its real or supposed discrepancy with B ; another sus-
pected B because of its real or supposed discrepancy with
A. It became necessary, as the more clear-sighted —
278 GREEK THINKERS.
Friedrich Schleicrmacher, for example — had early per-
ceived, to provide criticism with an unassailable basis of
operations : to establish a nucleus of works whose authen-
ticity should be raised above all doubt, and which should
then serve as an unimpeachable standard to try the claims
of the residue. In order to avoid every possibility of error
in this preliminary work, it became desirable to discover
and collect a mass of such testimony as even the most
hardened doubter would shrink from challenging. In this
category the foremost place was very properly given to the
citations contained in the writings of Aristotle — passages
in which the reference is implicit, as well as those where a
work of Plato is mentioned by name.
A path was thus entered upon which has, in point of
fact, led to the establishment of solid results. But here, as
elsewhere, the wrong road lay hard by the right. Arrived
at the parting of the ways, criticism took the wrong turn
unawares, and strayed further and further away from the
true course. The value of the testimony collected was, we
do not say over-estimated, but misestimated. That which
is attested by Aristotle is genuine beyond question ; but
that which is not attested by him is not therefore spurious,
or even sullied by the least taint of doubt. Only the half of
Aristotle's works are in our hands ; and, more than that,
the citations contained in that half are all incidental in
character ; they are chiefly of a polemical nature, and their
occurrence is purely a matter of chance. The " argument
from silence " has thus, in this instance, no force whatever.
To take an example, the " Protagoras," one of the greatest
and most brilliant of the dialogues, and one against which
no whisper of suspicion has ever been breathed, is nowhere
mentioned by Aristotle ; and it is only in recent years that
certain references to it have been discovered, such as would
hardly be deemed adequate to establish the genuineness of
a disputed work. On the other hand, a single piece of
positive testimony may be of the highest importance, not
only for a particular work, but for the whole family to
which it belongs, if it guarantees the authenticity of a
dialogue such as the " Lesser Ilippias," which has been
treated with scant respect by modern criticism.
UNAVOIDABLE DISCREPANCIES. 2/9
2. That relative inferiority of a production which pro-
vokes distrust is only a particular variety of a compre-
hensive class, that of deviations from the normal type, or
type deduced from the other works of the same master.
Thus a picture bearing on its front the name of Titian may
be adjudged as spurious, not only if it is marred by faults
such as Titian could not have been guilty of, but also if it
exhibits a number of peculiarities foreign to all the known
styles of that artist. In the application of this canon great
breadth of judgment is required, and the more so the longer
the active career of the artist, the greater the number, and
more especially the variety, of his works. These con-
siderations are relevant in an especial measure to the case
of Plato. Even supposing he never penned a line before
he was thirty, his literary activity must have lasted a full
half-centi.ry. The projects of social reform contained in
his "Republic" and "Laws" bear entirely different com-
plexions, and in the presentations of his other doctrines
there are not wanting similar instances of deep-seated dis-
crepancy. His literary manner — for example, his handling
of the dialogue form — is by no means always the same ; his
language undergoes manifold transformations both in style
and vocabulary. Thus three of his latest works ("Timaeus,"
" Critias," "Laws") contain nearly 1500 words which are
absent from his other works, and some, indeed, from the
whole of the literature of his time. What, then, is proved if
in a particular dialogue we detect a small number of words
or phrases not met with elsewhere in Plato, or even if we
find a few thoughts which have no close parallels in his
other works ? Indeed, we must be prepared to encounter
serious contradictions, not only in thought, but in that
which lies deeper and should therefore be less subject
to change — in tone and sentiment. In the "Apology,"
Aristophanes the comic poet is represented as being,
morally, the chief prosecutor of Socrates, and consequently
responsible for his execution. But in the " Symposium,"
Socrates and the author of the " Clouds " are boon com-
panions, and on the friendliest of footings. Let us suppose,
what is contrary to fact, that one or other of these two
2 So GREEK THINKERS.
dialogues had not been proof against every assault. The
assertion that both works could not possibly have come
from the same hand might very easily in such a case have
gained all but universal acceptance, or even have become
a shibboleth by which the true and only " scientific critics "
would have recognized each other with unfailing certainty.
There is only one kind of discrepancy which possesses
absolute probative force — conflict with the ascertained facts
of history, above all, references or allusions to persons,
events, modes of thought or speech, such as may be shown
by irrefragable proofs to have lain outside all possible
knowledge of the alleged author of a given work. On such
a basis, for example, rests the universal rejection of the
work " De Mundo," once attributed to Aristotle. For this
work contains, in such numbers as exclude the hypothesis
of chance, doctrines and technical terms which we know,
on trustworthy authority, to have been first current in the
post-Aristotelian Stoic school. The Platonic corpus, how-
ever, affords but few openings for the use of this critical
weapon, the most effective of those with which we are here
concerned. There is thus abundant need for caution ;
and additional warning is supplied, not only by the con-
tradictions, bordering on the grotesque, which obtain
between the subjective "feeling for what is Platonic" of
this and that particular investigator, but also by an ob-
jective fact of considerable weight. Internal grounds of
suspicion, such as are not of convincing force taken by
themselves, necessarily produce a stronger or weaker effect
according to the presumption which arises out of the way
in which a work has been preserved. Let us suppose,
for example, that a work were to make its appearance
to-morrow, purporting to be part of the literary remains
of Goethe, but, at the same time, arousing the distrust of
the best experts by its form or matter. The circumstance
that Goethe's literary remains have been uninterruptedly in
the keeping of trustworthy hands would carry great weight
in the final decision of the point. On the other hand,
when, a few decades ago, certain letters were given to the
world which were alleged to have been written by the
LISTS OF PLATO'S WORKS. 28 1
unfortunate Queen Marie Antoinette, there was no similar
counterpoise to the internal evidences of forgery which at
once presented themselves. For the editor of these profit-
able letters had no better account to give of their origin
than that some of them had formerly been in the possession
of an unnamed member of the Convention, and the rest
in that of an equally unnamed antiquary. The Platonic
cycle occupies an intermediate position between these two
extremes. It is true, as we have already remarked, that
Plato's writings were not preserved in a library attached to
his school ; but there must have been a fairly large group
of intimate disciples who were well able to distinguish
what was genuine from what was spurious, and these men
can have had no motive, worthy or unworthy, for remaining
silent when occasion arose for a timely protest against
fraud or error. Nor are we altogether dependent on the
testimony of late manuscripts. Some of the disputed
dialogues are authenticated by replies to them which
appeared within a century of Plato's death, or by the
testimony of ancient papyrus-rolls found in Egypt (Lysis,
Euthydemus, Laches). The composition of the entire
body of works is known to us from a list, compiled,
about the year 200 B.C., by the learned Aristophanes of
Byzantium, then director of the Alexandrian Library, and
used by him as the basis of his critical edition. Only
a part of this list, it is true, has been preserved to us,
namely, the enumeration of those fifteen dialogues which
Aristophanes arranged in trilogies, while our intermediary
authority says of the rest nothing more than " the remain-
ing writings singly and in no fixed order." There is hardly
any doubt, however, that a later list, that of Thrasyllus,
which contains the thirty-six works known to us, arranged
in tetralogies, is based on the list of Aristophanes, and
may be accepted as representing it in regard to the lost
portion.
At the same time, there are indications in the ancient
tradition itself which suggest doubts as to its absolute
trustworthiness. Of the thirteen letters included in the Pla-
tonic collection — more exactly twelve, as the first purports
282 GREEK THINKERS.
to have been written by Dion to Dionysius — there is one,
the twelfth, which in our manuscripts has the following
note appended to it : " The Platonic authorship is con-
tested." Of similar import is the statement that Thrasyllus,
who had included the " Anterastae " in his edition, yet
qualified a casual allusion to that dialogue with the pro-
viso: "if, indeed, the 'Anterastae' is the work of Plato."
These qualifying clauses and expressions of doubt had
their origin, as has been conjectured with great probability,
in the catalogues of the great libraries themselves. When
the librarians at Pergamum or Alexandria had volumes
offered to them of somewhat suspicious origin, they would
naturally, and quite rightly, incline rather towards purchase
than rejection. For a work was thus saved from threatened
destruction, while such suspicions as could not be imme-
diately confirmed or allayed might be placed on record by
a note in the catalogue. Thus between the incontestably
authentic and the incontestably spurious there might easily
come into being an intermediate zone of doubtful works.
Other works whose Platonic authorship was disputed in
antiquity, some of them for stated reasons, are : the
" Hipparchus," " Alcibiades II.," and the " Epinomis," which
last was ascribed to Philippus of Opus, the pupil and
amanuensis of Plato, who edited the " Laws." (We must
place in quite a different category the ineptitudes of certain
Stoics and Neo-Platonists, who had the hardihood to deny
Plato's authorship of works — the " Phaedo " and the
" Republic " among them — whose teaching they found
unpalatable.) Now, since those librarians' catalogue-notes,
as well as the other expressions of doubt which deserve
any consideration, have come to our knowledge quite
casually, we are unable to judge with any certainty of
their extent ; and the critic remains at liberty to include
in his sceptical raids those works which do not labour
under any stigma that we know of. Only he must proceed
with the very greatest caution, for reasons which we have
already stated. As regards the results which have been
obtained in this direction, it seems less important to
register the author's personal views than to sum up the
ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE DATES. 283
present position of the inquiry in a few words. Besides the
minor writings already mentioned, there are three dialogues
— the " Theages," the " Minos," and the " Clitophon " — none
of them of any great length, which are regarded by the great
majority of investigators as un-Platonic. The " Greater
Hippias," " Alcibiades I.," and the "Ion" have not been
condemned so emphatically ; but here again the verdict is
on the whole unfavourable. In all other instances the case
for rejection is represented by not more than a limited
number of specialists, and it is unnecessary to mention
details at the present stage. The letters are the subject of
a controversy which is not yet settled. Practically no one
believes in the genuineness of them all ; the bulk of them,
however, in spite of the low esteem in which they were
held a short time ago, have recently found champions of
note.
3. Ancient tradition, from which we thus derive a
certain amount of assistance in discussing problems of
authenticity, leaves us almost entirely in the lurch when we
come to the question of chronological order. Here we
distinguish between absolute and relative dates. Of the
former there is a most deplorable lack ; in respect of the
latter, though tradition yields next to nothing, a great deal
of learned ingenuity has been expended, and finally, after
many failures, certain positive results have been established,
and certain methods discovered, the continued application
of which promises a considerable harvest still to come. Of
the data furnished by tradition there is but one — the posi-
tion of the " Laws " as the terminal point of Plato's literary
activity — which is both absolutely trustworthy and at the
same time instructive in any great degree. When, on the
other hand, wc read in a late author, " The story goes that
Plato wrote the ' Phsedrus ' first of all ; the subject " (to a
great extent erotic) " is particularly congenial to a youthful
writer," we feel that the fact has grown out of the reason
given for it. Nor is there any more weight in an anecdote
reported by the same author and prefaced with " it is said,"
to the effect that when Plato read his " Lysis " aloud,
Socrates exclaimed, " By Heracles ! What a number of
284 GREEK THINKERS.
untrue stories the young man has been telling about me ! "
A little more consideration, but not much, is due to a
couple of dates which the majority of investigators regard
as established by internal evidence. It is supposed that
the composition of the " Meno " cannot have been anterior
to 395, nor that of the "Symposium" to 384, because in
the first-named dialogue there is mention of an incident
which occurred in the earlier year, the bribing of Ismenias
the Theban by the Persians ; while the second dialogue
alludes to a dispersion of the Arcadians by the Spartans
which we cannot but identify with the destruction of
Mantinea, effected in the later of the two years. The
first of these dates possesses no great significance, for
it would hardly occur to any one to place the " Meno "
before the year in question, preceded as it must have been
by the " Protagoras " and its kindred dialogues.
The comparative study of the language and matter of
Plato's works has been prolific in a very different degree.
Here, too, many mistakes have been made, and have
betrayed themselves by the glaring contradictions to which
they led ; still the residue of definitively acquired results is
very considerable and steadily increases. If at the close of
one dialogue a problem is left unsolved, while in a second
dialogue a solution is found for it ; if a subject is treated
pkiyfully and tentatively in the one, with depth and mastery
in the other ; if in the one a foundation is laid, and in the
other a superstructure reared upon it ; if an investigation is
here projected, and there actually entered upon ; if dialogue
A contains clearly anticipatory references to B, or D is
obviously reminiscent of C ; — in all such cases the relative
order of the two works in question is settled beyond a
doubt. At this point we can imagine the reader asking,
with some surprise — But is not an author's advance, his
progress towards perfection, the surest criterion for the
chronological arrangement of his works ? So it is, without
a doubt. The inquiry we are considering has for its object
the elucidation of this very progress, this development both
of the thinker and of the author. But that object can only
be attained by circuitous methods, for the very simple
THE METHOD OF STATISTICS. 285
reason that different people hold very different standards
of perfection, both in matter and in style ; in short, the
method allows far too much liberty to subjective and
arbitrary appreciations. Accordingly, this inquiry did not
reach anything like a tranquil haven until the endeavour
was made to obtain data of as objective and external a
character as possible. We refer to linguistic criteria and
the method of verbal statistics.
4. There is hardly a single author of ancient or modern
times whose works have been subjected to so thorough-
going a linguistic analysis as those of Plato. The labour
which has been expended on things trifling in themselves
may seem foolish or perverse to the outsider ; but Jakob
Grimm's " devotion to the little " has perhaps nowhere else
been more richly rewarded. The results obtained can here
only be indicated in outline.
Certain combinations of particles, meaning roughly
" but how ? " " but perhaps," "but yet," are entirely absent
from the half of Plato's works. On the other hand, they
occur with great frequency in his latest work, and with
increasing frequency in a series of other writings of his. It
has been rightly inferred that the first group belongs to his
early period, the second to his advanced age. A precisely
similar result has been obtained in another quarter, and
quite independently, by an examination of his vocabulary.
As we have already remarked by the way, certain dialogues
contain an extraordinarily large number of words which are
foreign to all the other writings of Plato. This group is con-
nected, not only by the common tendency towards innova-
tion, but by the common character of some of the innovations,
with a work known to be the latest that Plato wrote — the
" Laws." And there are other peculiarities of style, ranging
from the most obvious to the most subtle, from the dis-
placement of one particle of comparison by another, or a
preferential use of special formulae of affirmation and
special superlatives, to the imponderabilia of syntax, word-
arrangement, and accent — all indicating, in a manner which
excludes chance, a surprisingly close relationship between
the members of this group. That which gives us confidence
2 86 GREEK THINKERS.
in these results is the astonishing agreement between many
different investigations — an agreement which greatly pre-
ponderates over the undeniable discrepancies. That such
discrepancies were bound to occur seems clear from the
nature of the case ; we will content ourselves here with
mentioning a few of the chief sources of error. There are
other distinctions, besides those of date, between the
different works of an author ; some, for example, may be
more popular, others of a more strictly scientific character, —
this distinction must affect the style, and may disturb the
similarity natural to two works which are chronologically
near to each other. Further, we have to take account of
the possibility that the form in which a given work lies
before us may be that of a revision, such as is demanded by
a new edition, so that the inference from style to date of
composition loses something of its cogency. Another work
may occupy the position of a belated straggler : a thinker
may have desired to complete a group of his youthful
writings by a subsequent addition, which is thus connected
with an earlier phase by its matter, and a later by its form.
These are some of the possibilities which diminish the
chronological applicability of verbal statistics, and there is
an observed fact which merits mention along with them.
The linguistic development of Plato, astonishing as was its
extent, did not follow a uniform straight line. There are
instances in which we find our author adopting a habit of
language, letting it grow upon him, and then gradually
dropping it. For all that, the method of verbal statistics
may be held worthy of confidence, provided that the con-
sequences to which it leads are, on the whole, consistent
with each other, and do not contradict either the other
criteria we have enumerated, the facts vouched for by
reliable tradition, or the indications supplied by Plato him-
self. The method would stand condemned if it required
us, for example, to place the " Laws " before the " Re-
public," to reverse the order of the trilogies constructed by
Plato (" Republic "— " Timaeus "— " Critias ; " " Theaetetus "
— " Sophist " — " Statesman "), or to misinterpret clearly
retrospective or anticipatory references. The case would
LIMITS OF THE METHOD. 287
be worse still if the results of this method took away all
possibility of forming some conception, commensurate with
the general facts of humanity and the individual data, of
the course of development followed by the thinker and the
author. However, none of these unfavourable possibilities
is realized. The determination of chronologically separate
groups, and the distribution among these groups of the
individual dialogues (with a few, but not unimportant,
exceptions) are problems which may be regarded as finally
solved ; the more ambitious task of settling the chronological
order within all the groups cannot as yet be said to have
been completed.
Building on these foundations, we propose to give an
account of Plato's literary and philosophical development,
for which purpose we shall divide his career into several
stages. All his works of undoubted authenticity will be
examined, more or less thoroughly, for the most part in
the order of their composition. But this plan will not
exclude occasional glances forwards and backwards ; when
necessity arises, chronological proximity will yield to
similarity of subject.
288 GREEK THINKERS.
CHAPTER III.
PLATO AS AN INVESTIGATOR OF ETHICAL CONCEPTS.
I. Exactly sixty years ago a German student of antiquity,
a man whose blunt and homely common sense was neither
exalted nor impaired by over-refinement, gave expression to
a truth which, to us at least, has always seemed self-obvious.
It was then that Karl Friedrich Hermann asserted the
existence of a purely Socratic period at the commencement
of Plato's literary career. Nothing, indeed, could be more
natural than that a devoted disciple, even if a genius,
perhaps all the more because a genius, should set out in
the first instance on paths already trodden by his master,
before opening up and entering upon new ones adapted
to his own slowly ripening individuality. What is at first a
conjecture becomes a certainty as soon as we find among
the works of the pupil, say Raphael or Plato, productions
permeated throughout by the spirit or the manner of Peru-
gino or Socrates. In the present case, internal evidence
is supported by documentary testimony of the first rank.
Aristotle, who during the last twenty years of Plato's life
was among the most intimate of his disciples, reports that
the doctrine of self-existent concepts or archetypes was an
innovation of Plato, entirely foreign to Socrates. We at
once judge it probable that in Plato's earliest writings this
continuation of the Socratic doctrine of concepts did not
appear — -an hypothesis which is amply borne out by the
facts. There are a number of Plato's works which contain
no trace of the so-called doctrine of ideas. And since
these very works exhibit the characteristics of the early
PLATO'S DEVELOPMENT. 289
linguistic period, while in most of them the composition
is marked by relative simplicity, there is much to commend
and little to discountenance the assumption that in these
we have before us the firstfruits of Plato's muse. It is true
that K. F. Hermann was not the first to speak of a Socratic
period, but his predecessors, in building on the foundation
of truth thus won, had committed the error of ascribing to
that period some of those very dialogues in which the
doctrine of ideas is expounded.
In this first series of his writings Plato appears as an
ethical conceptualist. That is to say, the subject-matter of
his inquiry is Ethics, and the mode of it the investigation of
concepts. In process of time this germ will undergo mani-
fold differentiation. The living content of Ethics, besides its
mere concepts, will be accorded greater and greater promi-
nence. From moral philosophy the thinker will press on to
the study of its psychological foundations. He will enter
deeply into the problems of the soul's nature and destiny,
not uninfluenced, in these matters, by the speculations of
the Orphics and the Pythagoreans. On the other hand, for
reasons which we have already noticed shortly (cf. p. 180,
sqq.), and which we shall discuss more particularly later on,
he came to see in concepts real essences, to the knowledge
of which the soul has attained in a previous existence. A
bridge will thus be constructed between a psychology tinged
with religion and ontology or metaphysic. Again, the
content of ethics will be widened ; the thinker's gaze will
pass on from the individual personality to the social and
political organism. Lastly, after several important writings
have dealt separately with different sections of the great
whole, a mighty edifice will be raised, Plato's master-work,
appearing from its name (the " Republic ") to be dedicated
to politics or extended ethics alone, but really housing, in
its many chambers, all the parts of the Platonic system.
But the attainment of this culminating height is followed
by no cessation or interruption of activity ; it rather marks
the beginning of a new and laborious task, which may
be shortly described as one of revision. The aging, but
unwearied thinker subjects the whole of his intellectual
VOL. II. U
29O GREEK THINKERS.
stock to a searching examination. That which survives
the ordeal is retained and defended against objections —
his own as well as those of other critics — nor is the defence
wholly unvaried by episodes of aggression. The residue
is partly remodelled, partly allowed to drop. An entirely
new addition — the only one — is supplied by Plato's late-
matured theory of Nature. This concluding phase is,
chronologically, the best-authenticated of all. It may be
regarded as definitely established that the "Sophist"
and the " Statesman," the " Tima^us," " Critias," and
" Philebus," form, together with the " Laws," a single
group, and that the latest in the series ; while the middle
group, as was to be expected, is less immune from
boundary-disputes affecting its limits in both directions.
The first question to be considered is — When did Plato
begin to write ? Hardly before the death of Socrates, as
we have already said, but certainly not long after that
fateful event, and thenceforth his literary activity must
have been fairly continuous. This last point is usually
considered doubtful. It is generally assumed that at the
most he took up the pen in the intervals between his
travels, but that during the time occupied by them he
lacked the necessary leisure and quiet. But this assump-
tion has no justification. Change of residence and environ-
ment, if not too feverishly rapid, rather stimulates a
productive nature than diminishes its output. We recall
Descartes in the camp before Breda, or Goethe's sojourns in
Rome. Plato needed no cumbrous outfit for the greater
part of his work, certainly not for that part of it which is
here in question. All he wanted was his head, his heart,
and writing-materials. With so richly endowed a nature
as his, head and heart must have been full to overflowing,
even at that early period of his life. We find no difficulty,
therefore, in the thought of Plato busy over his dialogues
at Tarentum or Cyrene, in Egypt or Sicily ; and we even
think that the freer life abroad was more favourable to
artistic creation than his position at the head of a compli-
cated institution. We can imagine, too, how the sojourner
among strangers must have rejoiced to conjure up before
THE " LESSER HIPPIAS." 29 I
his mind's eye the happy scenes of his youth and home,
to transport himself once more to the shady avenues and
the " semicircles " of the gymnasia, where the voice of
Socrates — the voice that had stirred up a new life within
him — first fell on his ear and sank into his soul.
2. Such are the scenes to which we shall shortly be
introduced. But not more than an indefinite outline forms
the setting of the dialogue which appears to have been the
earliest composed, that is, if too great simplicity of structure
and corresponding smallness of range may be taken as
indications of an early date. We refer to the so-called
" Lesser Hippias." The reader has already made the
acquaintance (Vol. I. p. 431) of the teacher of youth who
bore this name. He is here matched against Socrates ;
the third interlocutor, Eudicus, unknown to us from any-
other source, is an all but mute character in the dialogue.
Hippias has just delivered, apparently within the gymna-
sium, a speech on Homer as an exhibition of rhetoric.
The bulk of the audience has dispersed ; Socrates remains
behind, and, a propos of the speech, raises questions on the
character of Homeric heroes. Hippias having declared
Achilles to be the best, Nestor the wisest, and Ulysses the
" wiliest," Socrates fastens on this last characteristic as
a subject of cross-examination. To begin with, he drives
Hippias to replace the ambiguous word "wily " by " false,"
and thus to contrast Ulysses with the true and straight-
forward Achilles. He then wrings from him the admission
that the false do not lie from lack of ability or knowledge,
but that their falseness rests on insight and understanding.
A Socratic induction, setting out from the sophists'
favourite art of arithmetic, leads to the result that the
particular department in which any one excels is also that
in which he is best able to deceive. Supposing, for
example, that a bad arithmetician wished to impart false
information on the product 3 x 700, he might conceivably
tell the truth by mistake ; a good one, whatever other
number he might mention, would be careful to avoid 2100.
But if we allow that the same department in which each
ijerson can best tell the truth is also that in which he can
292 GREEK THINKERS.
lie best, the above antithesis between the characters of the
two Homeric heroes cannot be maintained.
After a few humorous digressions, in which the " Iliad "
itself is laid under contribution for proofs that even Achilles
himself was not always at pains to be truthful ; after several
instances of somewhat exaggerated self-depreciation on the
part of Socrates ; and after a few scornful references to
the unexampled many-sidedness of the sophist, who was
shoemaker as well as poet, tailor as well as mnemonist
(Vol. I. p. 431) ; — after these interludes, which, so to speak,
provide a resting-place in the middle of the little dialogue,
the discussion of the main question is resumed. Hippias
had, rightly enough, explained those lapses from truth of
Achilles which Socrates had mentioned, as involuntary.
It was no intention to deceive, but the force of external
circumstances, that had brought his actions into disaccord
with his words ; it was the desperate position of the army
that had prevented him from withdrawing, as he had
threatened. The question then arises — Which is the
better man, he who errs voluntarily, or he who does so
involuntarily ?
Again Socrates enters the familiar path of induction.
Of two runners, singers, or wrestlers, that one is always
the better who runs slowly, sings false, is thrown by his
adversary, only when he wishes ; the worse of the two is
he whose inferior performance is involuntary. The case
is the same with the use of tools, including the organs of
sense and motion. Every one would prefer to have eyes
and feet with which he can see badly or walk lamely on
purpose, rather than such as make dim vision or limping
a necessity. The same is true of a rudder, a bow, of an
animal and its soul, lastly of a human soul too, which
is used as an instrument. The cavalier prefers a capable
horse-soul, the commander a capable soldier-soul, to one
which is incapable and therefore likely to err involuntarily.
After additional illustrations, drawn from the practice of
medicine, music, and so on, we come to the threshold
of the strange question — Is not he who does wrong
voluntarily better than he whose faults are involuntary ?
VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY ERROR. 293
The startled Hippias is asked whether justice is anything
else than either a power, a kind of wisdom, or both
together ; in all three cases the affirmative answer turns
out to be inevitable. In the first case the more capable
or efficient soul is the juster, in the second the wiser soul,
in the third the soul which combines both excellences ;
the less capable and the less wise soul is the more unjust.
Now, it has been shown that in all departments the more
capable and wise is the one who can produce good or evil,
beauty or ugliness, at pleasure ; while the failures of the
less gifted are involuntary. Accordingly, the conclusion
is drawn, guarded by an important reservation, that " the
better and more capable soul, when it does injustice, will do
so voluntarily, but the inferior soul involuntarily." And
the reservation is repeated when the result is still further
expanded by the substitution of the good man for the just
man : " He therefore who errs and does unjust and dis-
graceful things voluntarily, if such a man exists at all, can
be none other than the good man." Hippias declares that
he cannot agree to this, and Socrates answers, " Nor I
either." And yet the proposition necessarily follows from
the preceding discussion. "As I have said before, I wander
to and fro when I attempt these problems, and do not
remain consistent with myself. With me, or any other
amateur, perhaps there is nothing surprising in that. But
when you trained intellects go astray too, it is a black look-
out for us. It does away with our last hope of coming to
you to be put right."
In this little dialogue we notice, not only the uncommon
skill with which the argument is conducted to its conclusion,
but also the easy grace with which the goal is concealed
from view, and agreeable resting-places provided by the
way. We are particularly struck by a peculiar species
of wit, which occurs frequently in other works of Plato's
youth. We refer to certain humorous turns drawn from
the material of the dialogue itself, such as : " My dear
Hippias, you are imitating Ulysses and deceiving me ; " or
(in a passage where the sophist is to be reminded of an
admission which he would have preferred to be forgotten) :
294 GREEK THINKERS.
" You arc not practising your art of memory just now."
Turning to the content and the real purpose of the dialogue,
we must first remind the reader of that Socratic doctrine
which is already familiar to him, and which affirms that
no man errs of his own free will (cf. p. 66). To this
doctrine Plato held with unshakable firmness through all
the changes and shiftings of his opinions. There are works
belonging to all of his periods which bear sufficient witness
to this. It is thus utterly incredible that he should have
seriously called this doctrine in question, particularly in a
dialogue obviously so near his Socratic starting-point, and
that he should have combined with this doubt an assertion
by which common-sense is defied no less than Socratism,
to the effect that voluntary wrong-doing is better than
involuntary. That Plato is not in earnest in all this is
evident from the entirely conditional form in which he
presents the argument on voluntary wrong-doing. More-
over, Socrates does not disguise his dissatisfaction with the
conclusion, in spite of the necessity with which it appears
to flow from the discussion leading up to it.
For the rest, the dialogue is unintelligible, except on the
assumption — no very violent one in the case of a work by
a beginner — that it was intended for a restricted circle of
readers, the author's intellectual kin, all well acquainted
with the fundamental Socratic doctrines. Such readers
would easily see through the contradiction between the
dialogue's apparent conclusion and their master's doctrine
of will. The paradoxical thesis — that the voluntary evil-
doer is superior to the involuntary — is supported by an
induction which begins with lifeless instruments, goes on
to our bodily organs of sense and motion, to the souls of
animals and men of which we make use, and then passes,
by an imperceptible transition, to our own souls and our
own actions, — a transition which takes us from the region
of means to that of ends, and then from the region of
subordinate ends to the supreme end of life. That which
is shown to hold good of those who purposely sing, row, or
ride badly, is transferred in the end to the man who acts
wrongly or unjustly. The error of such a transference may
PLATO "ERRS VOLUNTARILY:' 295
be explained as follows : Every subordinate end may
under circumstances be set aside in favour of another end
which is recognized as being of superior worth : a man
may miss the mark voluntarily ; the good runner may
desire to run slowly in order to spare his health ; the
man who is skilled in a game may play badly to win the
favour of his opponent ; the good rider may purposely
sit his horse badly to warn his pupil against the like fault.
Can we conclude from such instances as these that the just
man may also, on occasion, wish to act unjustly ?
Certainly not, for it is at this point that the quality of a
man's will comes into play. He cannot, as we say, act
contrary to his moral character when this is once fixed, nor
can he, as the Socratics said, ever give up voluntarily that
happiness or well-being which is the supreme aim of life,
and with which justice is bound up in the most intimate
manner : if he does so at all, it must be unintentionally
and by mistake. The proposition — He who voluntarily
chooses the worse shows a more complete mastery over
the appropriate instruments, and is thus superior to the
man who involuntarily chooses the worse or less effective
means — loses its applicability, as may easily be seen, when
we come to the last member of the series. Plato was well
aware, we have no doubt, of the exact point at which the
induction fails, and he set the reader the task of finding it
out too. He himself " errs of his own free will." In this
he had a twofold object. Firstly, he desired to provide
new support for the Socratic doctrine of the involuntariness
of all evil-doing by clearly stating the contradiction from
which that doctrine alone, as he thought, can save us.
On the other hand, he takes delight in showing how a
moralist like Hippias, possessing ingenuity and eloquence,
but unschooled in dialectics, may be driven into a corner
and finally compelled to choose between an absurdity and
a truth which shocks by its strangeness.
The correctness of this interpretation is also evidenced
by the first part of the dialogue. The question here discussed
relates to the identity of the truthful man and the liar ; as
proof of such identity the supposed untruthfulness of Achilles
296 GREEK THINKERS.
is adduced. But the pointed character of the objections
which Hippias is made to urge against this argument leaves
no doubt on which side Plato himself stood. The purport
of the discussion can hardly have been other than the
following : The truthful man and the liar would, in fact,
be the same, for each would be identical with the possessor
of the fullest knowledge on the subject of discourse, if such
knowledge, or, more generally, mastery over the instruments
of action, were the only factor by which an action is deter-
mined. But this hypothetical identification, one which
could easily be extended to a number of other instances
(physicians, soldiers, and pyrotechnists are respectively
the same as poisoners, bandits, and incendiaries !), is a
reductio ad absurdum of the hypothesis, and we may be
sure it is meant to be nothing else. An early hint is
given to the reader of truths which clearly appear from
the main part of the dialogue and its conclusion, the
truths, namely, that action involves something more than
mastery over means — the choice of ends ; that these, for
their part, are again means to the highest end, which is
imposed by nature ; that the moral character of the agent
depends on his disposition, as we say, that is, from the
Socratic point of view, on his insight into the foundations
of that supreme end, well-being, or, to express the same
thing differently, into the value of the good things of life.
We shall very soon be brought back to this fundamental
distinction, and we shall have a good deal to hear about it.
3. A dialogue of somewhat greater length, the " Laches,"
is more elaborately staged. As the purpose of this work
may be determined more clearly and certainly than that
of the " Lesser Hippias," we may take still less account
of the decorative by-play, and proceed without further
parley to extract the kernel from its enclosing husk. Just
as, in the " Hippias," a display of oratory by a sophist, so
in the " Laches," an exhibition of fighting by a fencing-
master, supplies an occasion for discussion. Among the
spectators have been Lysimachus and Melesias, the un-
renowned sons of the illustrious statesmen Aristides and
Thucydides. Their earnest desire is to bring up their
THE "LACHES." 297
sons, who are named after their famous grandfathers, to be
worthy of their inheritance ; and they accordingly seek
the counsel of the eminent generals Laches and Nicias on
the educational value of the art of fence. Socrates, who is
present, is also drawn into the discussion ; Laches honours
him for his courage in battle, and the two youths are
fascinated by his powers of conversation. He at once
takes the lead in the discussion, and turns it, as a matter
of course, in the direction of fundamental questions. As
the subject under consideration is a training in military
excellence, he begins by pointing out the propriety of
giving some thought to the end rather than the means ;
and the main problem now becomes the investigation of
that part of the total excellence or virtue which is called
courage. He next fastens on an attempted definition,
which represents the first thoughts of his military inter-
locutors. Courage is steadfastness, a remaining at one's
post in battle. He recalls the fact that many races win
their greatest successes in war by simulated flight. The
first case mentioned is that of the Scythian cavalry. Then
the restrictions are removed, one by one. The Scythians
are not alone in this respect, nor are the instances confined
to cavalry. It was by a manoeuvre of the same kind that
the Lacedaemonian infantry turned the scale at Plataea.
Standing firm in battle thus appears, with increasing clear-
ness, to be too narrow a definition. Courage is in essence
the same whether displayed by horse or foot, on land or
sea. And more : there is another courage which is shown
in facing diseases and privations of all kinds ; other varieties,
again, appear in the contest with pleasures and desires.
Under such pressure the search for the most general
possible definition proceeds, with the result that courage is
declared to be " a certain endurance of the soul." But
whereas the former definition turned out to be too narrow,
the reverse is now the case. For while courage is
necessarily understood to be something noble and praise-
worthy, endurance is seen to be not always deserving of
these epithets. An attempt is therefore made to limit
the concept ; in order to deserve the name of courage,
298 GREEK THINKERS.
endurance needs to be combined with wisdom or know-
ledge. But this at once raises a new question — Knowledge
of what ? Suppose two soldiers of equal endurance, which
of them is to be accounted the more courageous : the one
whose endurance rests on the knowledge that his isolation
will not last long, that the enemy is inferior in quality and
numbers to his own side, and is, moreover, in the less
advantageous position ? Or is he the braver who is in
the reverse situation ? Surely the latter — though his
endurance is the less wise of the two. Similarly, he who
endures, being equipped with a knowledge of the rider's
art, or the bowman's, or the slinger's, is to be deemed less
courageous than the man who shows equal endurance
without such equipment. In an extreme case, to be sure,
as when a diver without knowledge of his art hazards his
life, endurance becomes foolhardiness, which is an ignoble
quality and contrasts with courage, already acknowledged
to be always noble and praiseworthy. The attempt, there-
fore, to distinguish between genuine and spurious courage
on these lines has failed and must be abandoned ; a new
path must be struck out.
One of the interlocutors now recalls what is to him a
familiar saying of Socrates, to the effect that every one is
good in that in which he is wise. If, then, the courageous
man is a good man, his courage must be a kind of wisdom.
The question arises — What kind ? Surely not the wisdom
of the performer on the flute or lyre ? Rather is it that
wisdom which consists in the knowledge of what is dangerous
and what not, in war as in other things. But an objection
presents itself. Is it not the experts who, in every depart-
ment, know most exactly the dangerous and the safe ? In
the case of diseases this knowledge belongs to the physician,
in agriculture to the husbandman, and so forth. To this
it is answered that the physician, for example, can only
tell what promotes health and what aggravates disease ;
whether for a given patient sickness is more to be feared
than health, whether it is better for him to get well again
or to die, is a question beyond medicine. It is the same
with those to whom is ascribed the most discerning eye for
THE DEFINITION OF COURAGE. 299
"the signs of future events " — the soothsayers. They may
know whether sickness, death, or impoverishment awaits a
given person ; they may foretell his victory or defeat ; but
which lot is the better for him, it is no more for the
soothsayer to judge than any other man.
Thus the knowledge of what is dangerous and what
safe claims a place to itself, apart from and above all kinds
of special knowledge. In passing, courage, which is not
allowed to be identical with fearlessness, is denied to
animals, even the stoutest-hearted among them, to children,
and to the unintelligent who are undismayed by danger
because they are unaware of its existence. The discussion
now returns to the main point, and soon reaches its goal.
Dangers prove to be identical with future evils. The know-
ledge of them, and of their opposite goods, is now relieved
of the limitation contained in the reference to the future, or
rather, of all limitation of time whatever. Evils are evil
and goods good, whether they are past, present, or future.
Courage has thus been shown to be the same as the
knowledge of goods and evils. Even this result does not
remain unassailed. But the objections urged against it are
not of a very searching order. The conclusion arrived at
is certainly not marked out for rejection, but for subsequent
completion. For that virtue in its essence and kernel is
all of one kind, and identical with the knowledge of good
and evil — this, too, is Socratic doctrine, and is not disputed
at the close of the dialogue. The only question asked is
how this result may be squared with the view which had
been adopted previously, namely, that courage is one part
of virtue among other parts. First, we notice that this view-
was not derived from argument, but was simply borrowed
from current everyday opinion. It might seem, therefore,
that the above objection came to no more than a recognition
of the fact that Socratism and the general voice were here
in disagreement, and that the commonly accepted division
of virtue into distinguishable parts must be abandoned.
But such an hypothesis hardly docs justice to Plato's inten-
tion. The relation of the particular virtues to the wisdom
which is their essence constituted a problem which was to
300 GREEK THINKERS.
occupy his powers of thought For a long time yet, and not
to be finally solved till he came to write the " Republic."
Even at this early period the notion of courage is not for
him exhausted in the practice of wisdom in regard to the
evils of life. An indication of this is supplied by a passing
mention of "pleasures and desires," which latter have their
appropriate place assigned to them afterwards, when the
problem comes to be solved. Whether Plato had already
found the solution when he wrote the " Laches," and only
held it in reserve, or whether he was still struggling with the
difficulties of the problem, may seem doubtful ; the second
hypothesis, however, seems the more probable. On all
other points Plato leaves the attentive reader, who can
interpret his hints, in no doubt as to his meaning. Thus
the conclusion, taken together with the preceding remarks
on the unintelligent courage of animals, children, and fools,
indicate clearly enough how he proposes to decide a ques-
tion which was left unanswered at an earlier stage. It is
not the greatness of the danger or the inadequacy of the
means of defence, including serviceable kinds of special
knowledge, that provides us with a measure of courage. In
the quoted case of two soldiers who maintain their positions
with equal endurance, the prize does not necessarily go to
the one who is in the least favourable situation. For since
courage is nothing else than a wise appreciation of the
goods of life, manifested principally in face of threatened
evils, that prize belongs only to him who possesses such
wisdom in the fuller measure ; of two soldiers, for example,
that one will gain it who cherishes the clearer and surer
conviction that death is preferable to a dishonoured life, to
personal slavery, or the humiliation of his country.
4. The dialogue " Charmides " is charmingly dramatic
and full of life. Its theme is awtypoamn], a virtue for which
it would be hard to find an adequate name in any modern
language. Discretion, moderation, temperance, modesty,
self-control — each of these words contains a part, but none
the whole of it. " Health of soul " is the etymological
meaning of the Greek word, and this has been aptly rendered
in recent times by the German Heilsinnigkeit, or healthy-
THE " CHARMIDES." 30I
mindedness. But such a literal translation readily opens
the door to misunderstandings. When we speak of healthy
and wholesome natures, or the like, that which is dimly
present to our minds by way of contrast is artificiality, lack
of vigour and spontaneity, weakness or perversion of the
primitive instincts and impulses of human nature. Not so
with the Hellene. For him the great foe was excess ; and
health of the soul meant for him, principally, the subjugation
of exuberant force to the normal measure, to a standard
determined mainly by the interests of society as a whole.
This quality was the chief ingredient in Greek virtue or ex-
cellence ; it was the part which most often took the place
of the whole, as in Xenophon's saying about Socrates :
" Wisdom and virtue he did not distinguish " (p. 74).
The concept fares much the same in the present little
dialogue, which, possibly even more than the " Laches," is of
the purely Socratic type.
The " Charmides " might almost be called a family
conference, for the chief dramatis persona, next to Socrates,
are two near relations of Plato. Socrates has returned
home after the battle at Potidaea (September, 432), and
immediately proceeds to the palaestra of Taureas, where
he meets his friends. He takes his seat among them, but
not before Chaerephon has greeted him with his customary
enthusiasm, and demanded an account of his experiences.
Critias is present, and bids Socrates heartily welcome.
Soon Charmides is spied in the distance — a youth of
bewitching beauty, on whom all eyes are at once riveted
as on a statue. He is the cousin and the ward of Critias.
Chaerephon remarks that Charmides has so beautiful a
figure that when his limbs are bared his face passes un-
noticed, whereupon Socrates answers, " According to your
description he must be altogether irresistible ; let us hope
he is not lacking in a certain something else — quite a trifle,
I assure you." "And what might that be?" "A soul as
well developed as his body." Critias sings the praises of
his young kinsman's philosophic mind and poetical talent,
which latter, as Socrates remarks in reply, is the common
inheritance of the family from Solon downwards. He now
302 GREEK THINKERS.
proposes to strip the soul of the beautiful youth. An
occasion for addressing him is presented by a slight
ailment from which Charmides has been suffering, a head-
ache on rising, of which he has lately complained to
Critias. On this pretext Charmides is bidden approach.
His appearance produces a general commotion. All round
the semicircle there is disturbance and confusion, due to
the desire of each to have the new-comer for his neighbour,
so that the two who sit at the ends are pushed from their
places, and one of them sent sprawling. Socrates himself is
disconcerted ; we must remember that the ancient Hellene
was moved by the beauty of a boy in the same way as the
modern man is by that of a girl or woman. Asked whether
he knows a cure for headache, Socrates replies in the
affirmative. The cure is a leaf ; but it cannot produce its
effect without the aid of a charm. It belongs, furthermore,
to the number of those remedies which act on more than
one part of the body. He has but lately learnt the remedy
at the camp in Thrace ; and the native physician who
communicated it to him was of opinion that there are
many maladies which the Greek physicians fail to subdue
simply because they are ignorant that the soul needs
treatment as well as the body. This Thracian, a disciple
of Zalmoxis (who believed in immortality), affirmed that
the well-being of the part depends on the health of the
whole. The charms which act upon the soul are, according
to him, salutary discourses producing (raxppoavvr}. Socrates
has sworn to the Thracian physician not to use his remedies
except in conjunction ; and he cannot now undertake to
treat the head until Charmides has submitted his soul to
the „ process of " conjuration." Critias extols his young
relation as possessing the virtue in question (which gives
Socrates another occasion to sing the praises of the whole
family, mother's side as well as father's), and Charmides is
requested to say whether he is or is not endowed with
the quality of awtyjioavv)). With modest blushes, which
increase his beauty, he declares himself unable to answer
the question. To say Yes would be self-praise ; to say
No would be to set at naught the authority of his elder
DEFINITIONS OF TEMPERANCE. XQX
o^o
kinsman. It is accordingly proposed to make common
search for the answer, and the way is thus paved for a
discussion of awfypoouvii itself.
This discussion begins, naturally enough, with the
narrowest and most external view of the subject. In the
opinion of the young man, aiorppoavvii consists in quietness
and calmness of behaviour, shown in walking in the streets,
in speaking, and in all other actions. But Socrates has no
difficulty in proving that quickness is better than slowness
in activities both of the body and of the soul, in reading
and writing, in running and wrestling, in leaping and
playing the lyre, as also in learning, comprehension, and
discussion. Quietness or slowness, therefore, cannot be
identical with the quality under consideration, which is to
be regarded as something altogether excellent and praise-
worthy. After some hesitation, Charmides makes what to
Plato's thinking is evidently a step in advance by remarking
that (juxppoauvT) is something which causes men to feel and
show shame, that it is therefore the same as shame or
modesty. This time he is encountered with a poetical
quotation which does duty for a complete induction — the
following line of the " Odyssey : " —
" Modesty, comrade unmeet for a man whom necessity pinches/'
The confession is thus wrung from him that modesty is not
always advantageous, is not always a good thing, which
rrixHpfxxrvvi) must be allowed to be. The confusion between
good in the moral sense and good in the sense of mere
utility ought not to trouble us, for, according to Socratic-
Flatonic principles, that which is morally good is at the same
time that which universally brings profit or happiness.
Pressed to continue his efforts, Charmides produces a third
definition — a far more comprehensive one than the first two.
According to this new definition, (riofpijoauvij is " doing
one's own business." Once more Socrates drives him into a
corner. The schoolmaster writes other people's names as
well as his own, the schoolboy writes the names of enemies
as well as of friends — are they therefore deficient in
ThJfji()oavvii ? And could a state flourish in which it should
304 GREEK THINKERS.
be forbidden to weave garments, build houses, or make
utensils for others ? An exchange of glances between
Charmides and Critias, together with the growing un-
easiness of the latter, leave no doubt that he is the real
author of the definition, which Charmides began by
describing as the work of some one else. Accordingly,
the elder of the two cousins takes, as requested by Socrates,
the place of the younger and weaker one in the conference,
with which change the second and more difficult portion of
the dialogue begins.
At first Critias defends his definition by the aid of
subtle distinctions between the concepts expressed by such
words as " doing," " making," " producing." Socrates had
already guessed that by the phrase "one's own business"
the good was intended. But, even with this proviso, he
misses the element of 'knowledge in the definition. He
asks Critias whether awtypoavvr) is or is not to be ascribed to
those also who do good without knowing it ? How is it,
for example, with the physician, who usually, but not
invariably, benefits both his patient and himself by the
cure he effects ? In the first case, the physician must be
allowed a share in o-w^poa-uvj?, in so far as he has done
good. But, owing to his inability to distinguish between
the abnormal cases and the exceptions which are their
opposites, he himself never knows when he is exhibiting
that quality and when not (compare the kindred argument
in the "Laches"). Critias prefers to take back his words
rather than admit that a man can have any part in
ato^poavvr] without self-knowledge. Thus knowledge comes
to occupy the central position in the discussion. The virtue
for which search is being made is declared to be a sort of
knowledge ; more particularly it is contrasted with the
special knowledge of the physician, the architect, and so
forth, and affirmed to be " the science of other sciences and
of itself," or, as it is presently put in somewhat altered form,
" the knowledge of knowledge and of ignorance."
The definition thus propounded by Critias is now made
the subject of a close and prolonged examination, the result
of which may be summarized as follows : Such a knowledge
THE SCIENCE OF SCIENCES. 305
of knowledge is pronounced impossible. All knowledge,
it is urged, equally with all sense-perception, must relate
to an object, which must be other than itself. But the
formula concerned is not therefore rejected unconditionally.
A distinction is drawn between a knowing of that which
one knows — a reflex, as it were, of the primary knowledge,
which adds nothing to it, and which, by a repetition of the
process, may be multiplied ad infinitum — -and a knowledge
of the fact that one knows or does not know a given
thing. The latter is accepted as a possible element in
knowledge, one which is favourable to all science by
facilitating its acquisition and guarding its possession.
Such recognition, indeed, could hardly be avoided in view
of the important part played in the Socratic system by the
distinction between real and apparent knowledge, by self-
knowledge and criticism. But the content of abxpporrvvri,
or even of virtue in general, cannot be supplied by a species
uf knowledge which is equally applicable to all sciences.
For the most exact possible distinction between knowledge
and ignorance, together with the resulting elimination of
all seeming knowledge and seeming art, would not be
enough to make our life happy. If there were no sham
physicians, commanders, sea-captains, and so on, then we
should certainly be in the best of positions as regards the
preservation of our health and our safety in war or on sea.
Faultless quality, too, would be guaranteed in all pro-
ductions of the handicrafts, and the predictions of sooth-
sayers would never deceive us. But well-being and
happiness would still be not quite within our grasp. To
gain happiness we need a special science with a special
subject-matter, and this — the reader, with the " Laches "
in his memory, has doubtless already guessed it— this
subject-matter is none other than good and evil.
"Wretch!" cries Socrates, addressing Critias, "why have
you been leading me round in a circle for so long ? " This
phrase alone (there is an exact parallel to it in the
" Gorgias ") would be sufficient proof that we have here
the true conclusion of the dialogue. Any doubt that may
remain is removed by a comparison with the " Laches."
VOL. II. X
o
06 GREEK THINKERS.
Just as in that dialogue, so here in the " Charmides," that
which is placed in the brightest light is the art of life,
which takes precedence over all the special arts subordinate
to it, and is designated, as seems sufficiently clear, by the
phrase, " Science of sciences." Still, this kind of know-
ledge is not explicitly identified with awtypocrvvii. Thus
the dialogue runs its course, without, apparently, reaching
any conclusion. Socrates roundly takes himself to task
for his unskilfulness in the search, and expresses particular
regret that he has not succeeded in curing Charmides. He
comforts himself, however, with the hope that the virtuous
youth will not need it, for he already possesses aw^poavvt),
and therefore happiness as well. Asked if it is so,
Charmides can say neither Yes nor No. " How should
I have knowledge of that thing, the essence of which even
you profess your inability to determine ? But I do not
altogether agree with you, Socrates, and I think I have
very great need of your ' conjuration.' Nor is there any
reason why I should not be subjected by you to the
process day by day, until you are able to declare I have
had enough."
What is to be our verdict on the unsatisfactory con-
clusion of the dialogue ? Is it to be set down entirely to
the account of that first Platonic manner, in which the
tangled threads of thought are not completely unravelled,
but the reader is invited to take his share of mental labour ?
Not entirely, in our opinion. One important point, at least,
receives sufficient illumination. The essential ground of
all virtue, the well-spring of happiness, is found in the
knowledge of the aims of life, in insight into goods and
evils and their relative values. Here the " Charmides " is
in exact agreement with its twin brother, the " Laches."
And a further point of agreement is that in both dialogues
the special virtue considered, cruj^poavvii in one, courage in
the other, does not stand out with the same clearness and
certainty. It is true that hints are thrown out for our
guidance, but they rather serve to point out the direction
in which the author's thought is travelling, than to tell of
a goal which he has already reached. From this point of
RELATIONSHIP TO THE "REPUBLIC" 507
view the definition of auxppoauvii, as " doing one's own busi-
ness," is not a little significant. For, in the " Republic "
the highest importance is attached to the principle of the
division of labour, the avoidance of all trespass on the
rights and duties of others. Indeed, this principle is, in
that later work, somewhat violently identified with the
essence of justice. The further fact that the economic
aspect of this same principle is touched upon in both
dialogues makes their agreement still less like a chance
coincidence. Lastly, the kernel of awtypoovvr), which, in
Plato's mind at least is closely akin to justice, is seen in
the " Republic " to be the right delimitation of different
spheres of activity — the due co-ordination, namely, of
those parts of the soul which are respectively fitted for
obedience and command. The conjecture can hardly be
resisted that thoughts of this type had already begun to
dawn upon Plato's mind when he wrote the " Charmides,"
but that they had not yet acquired the full clearness of
maturity.
One remark more before we take our leave of this
graceful dialogue. If we have used the words "knowledge,"
"science," "art," almost without distinction, we have but faith-
fully followed the example of our original. All knowledge
is here regarded as the foundation upon which rests some
kind of practice, the exercise of some art, though it is
quite true that within this circle of ideas a distinction is
occasionally recognized between the productive and the
unproductive arts. The arts, for example, of arithmetic
and land-surveying are contrasted, in this point, with the
arts of the architect and the weaver.
;o8 GREEK THINKERS.
CHAPTER IV.
PLATO AS AN INVESTIGATOR OF ETHICAL CONCEPTS —
{continued).
I. The summit and crown of this period of Plato's creative
activity is to be found in the " Protagoras." In this work
lie exhibits the full measure of his literary powers. He
overflows with humour, raillery, and exuberant invention.
His dramatic and descriptive talent puts forth its most
exquisite flowers. A crowded canvas is spread before our
eyes, but the picture, with all its diversity, is held as in a
frame by the strict unity of the thought.
The stage-setting of this dialogue, and not a few of its
details, have already been treated by us on earlier occasions
(Vol. I. 389, 438, sqq., 586). It is enough for us here to
trace the march of thought and to discuss the probable
motive of the work. Protagoras has promised the young
1 1 ippocrates, who has been introduced to him by Socrates
in the house of Callias, instruction in morals and politics ;
the discussion accordingly begins with the question whether
such instruction is possible, or, in other words, whether
virtue can be taught. Socrates doubts that possibility, and
supports his doubts by two arguments. The Athenians,
whom he "holds wise, as do all other Greeks," evidently
do not believe that political virtue can be taught, and is
the object of special professional knowledge. For in all
those departments where they acknowledge such skill and
trained experts who possess it, these experts alone have
their ear and confidence ; naval architects, for example,
in ship-construction. In politics, on the other hand, the
SOCRATES AND CURRENT VIEWS OF LIFE. 309
Athenians draw no such distinctions ; the shoemaker and
the smith, the shopkeeper and the carpenter, — all, in short,
rich, poor, noble, or mean, are equally welcome to them as
counsellors ; no one is required to furnish proof of education
or training. Again, their most prominent statesmen, who
procure for their own sons the most careful instruction in
other matters, do not pass on to them their own special
wisdom, either directly or through the medium of profes-
sional teachers ; on the contrary, they let them grow up
almost wild, as is illustrated by examples taken from the
family of Pericles. Any one who has the least familiarity
with the views of Socrates will see at once that neither
the doubts nor the reasons are seriously meant. Socrates
did not really hold the Athenians wise, for he con-
tinually attacked their public conduct ; nor did their
statesmen appear to him to be models of exalted intelli-
gence. It was, indeed, for him matter of perpetual and
indignant complaint that men in general, his own country-
men among them, recognized the need of systematic
knowledge and professional training only in the smaller
details of life, and not in their highest concerns. The
objections here put in his mouth by Plato serve but to
start a discussion which is intended to illustrate two things :
the helplessness of even the greatest celebrity of the day
when called on to face cross-examination by Socrates ; and,
secondly, the inner connexion of the fundamental Socratic
doctrines. Or perhaps we should rather combine the two,
and speak of the contrast which Socratism, rigidly con-
sistent, and therefore dialectically triumphant, presents to
the contradictions of those current views on life of which
the Sophists are the spokesmen and interpreters.
Protagoras sets himself to remove the doubts which
have been raised, and for this purpose he first of all recites
a myth and then delivers a speech of some length. These
specimens of magnificent and impetuous oratory are master-
pieces of Platonic art. Here, as elsewhere in his works,
Plato employs a species of caricature which is common to
him and the comic poet Aristophanes. lie rivals or out-
bids the burlesqued author in his own peculiar excellences,
3IO GREEK THINKERS.
and at the same time gives great prominence to his defects,
which he doubtless exaggerates. This refined species
of caricature achieves two results instead of one. The
original suffers both eclipse and disparagement, while
in the double process the second part is made more
effective by the first. For the real or apparent attempt to
do justice by dispensing light as well as shadow lulls the
suspicions of the reader and disarms criticism. In the
present case the note of satire is so unobtrusive that even
eminent scholars of the present day have allowed them-
selves to be deceived. George Grote says in round terms
of the speech here put in the mouth of Protagoras, which
he takes quite seriously, that he considers it " one of the
best passages in Plato's works." The truth is that we
have here a framework of confused and contradictory
thought wrapped up in a covering of brilliant rhetoric, full
of spirit and life. Both framework and covering, it is true,
are Plato's own work, and the exact amount of resemblance
between the original and the caricature is impossible to
determine.
Stripped of its attractive but irrelevant accompani-
ments, and of all its rhetorical tinsel, the train of thought
allotted to Protagoras is as follows : After the foundation
of human society, it was ordained by Zeus that Hermes
should distribute " justice and reverence " among all men.
For this reason the Athenians, like others, rightly assume
that every one has his share in political virtue. The cor-
rectness of this assumption is further evinced by the cir-
cumstance that when any one lacks (!) justice or any other
part of political virtue, the world does not expect him to
confess it, these qualities being regarded as indispensable.
" And they say that all men ought to profess to be honest,
whether they are so or not." Soon there follows another
contradiction. His reference to a command of the Supreme
God can only be a mythological expression of the assump-
tion that men possess an instinctive or innate moral sense,
from which fact it follows that the Athenians " rightly "
believe every man to possess his share of virtue. And yet
Protagoras immediately undertakes to " prove " that the
THE SPEECH OF PROTAGORAS. 31 I
Athenians do not regard political virtue as a spontaneous
gift of Nature, but as something to be acquired by practice
and instruction. Otherwise they would have pitied, instead
of punishing, the backward in virtue, just as they pity those
whom Nature has treated shabbily in other respects. For
punishment is meant to deter, and is inflicted for the sake
of improvement or education.
Protagoras now addresses himself to the second objec-
tion raised by Socrates, that is, to the question why
" superior men " do not impart their superiority to their
sons. He launches out, first of all, into an eloquent de-
scription of the perversity with which these eminent men
would be chargeable, if it were really true that, while ex-
pending the utmost care on their children's education in
comparatively minor matters, they neglect those others on
which their weal and woe, their life and death, depend.
But however " wonderful " this inconsistency may be,
Plato and Socrates none the less believed it to be a reality,
and their pained surprise at it and similar inconsistencies
was the main motive of their whole ethical thought. In
the present passage the place of an explanation is taken
by a lively and widely discursive description of the in-
fluence in the direction of morality which is exercised at all
stages of life and from all sides on every member of a civic
society. At the same time, no small efficiency is ascribed
to school-instruction, in connexion with which the follow-
ing remark occurs : " And this is done by those who can do
most ; now those who can do most are the rich, and their
sons begin school at the earliest age and leave it at the
latest." One is moved to ask, with some surprise, whether
the level of wealth and the level of morality do in reality
generally agree. The task of explaining the abnormal
fact — that many good men have bad sons — is not ap-
proached till late in the speech, and then, as it would seem,
with some little reluctance. The solution finally proposed
is as follows : When so much is done, by so many people,
for so long time together, for the development of a particular
quality, the amount finally produced depends, not on the
quantity of instruction received, but on natural aptitude
312 GREEK THINKERS.
alone. If, for example, flute-playing had the same im-
portance for life in a community as justice has ; if, in
consequence, there were, an equally general and per-
sistent competition in making men good flute-players ;
then we should not find the sons of the best musicians
becoming the best in their turn, but simply those
whose gift for music was the greatest. It is as clear as
daylight that this argument leaves practically no room for
teachers of morality and their work. Naturally Prota-
goras does not accept a conclusion so disastrous for a pro-
fessional teacher of virtue. But he escapes it, not by any
argument drawn from the nature of the case, but by a full-
sounding phrase : " If there be any of us who can surpass
the rest, by however little, in the promotion of virtue, that
is something to be thankful for. I myself, as I believe, am
such a man, and I contribute more than others towards
. . ." and so on.
At last the torrent of sonorous rhetoric ceases to flow,
and Protagoras is " really silent." Socrates, who has been
listening " like one bewitched," and now only recovers his
composure by degrees, expresses himself as all but satis-
fied. There is only one small matter which still troubles
him — observe the thin end of the wedge. Protagoras has
lumped together " reverence and justice " in speaking of
their distribution by Hermes, and in other parts of his
speech he has associated justice with piety and other
virtues. Socrates would now like to know his opinion on
the unity of virtue. Are the different parts of virtue
related to each other as the different parts — eyes, nose,
mouth — of a face ? Or are they like the parts of a lump
of gold ? In other words, are they homogeneous or hete-
rogeneous ? Can they be possessed separately ? or does a
man acquire all parts simultaneously as soon as he becomes
master of one ? The latter, be it observed, is the Socratic
view ; it is only because all virtue consists in wisdom
(and is therefore one) that it can be taught. Plato
takes no little pleasure in making Protagoras maintain
the possibility of teaching virtue, while denying the
grounds on which Ithat possibility rests. For the sophist
PL A TO'S F. I LLA CIES.
olo
answers, as one who is no follower of Socrates must
answer ; he takes his stand on the common judgment
which knows nothing of that unity of all virtue. On the
contrary, there are, in his opinion, " many who are brave
but unjust, and many others who are just but not wise."
The arguments which Socrates opposes to this view
are at first surprisingly weak. He asks whether justice is
just ; and Protagoras dares not say No, lest he should be
obliged to say it is unjust. A precisely similar question
is asked about piety, and is answered in a similar manner.
Socrates continues his questions ; and, through fear of
being obliged to say that justice is impious or piety unjust,
Protagoras is led to affirm the piety of justice and justice
of piety. The two virtues thus appear to be joined by
a bond which excludes the possibility of their being
essentially different. Every one must at least feel the
fallacious character of the argument. To bring it out
clearly, we need only reflect that "pious" and "just" are
predicates which cannot be affirmed, in any intelligible
sense, of every subject. Even among human beings there
are some to whom they are not applicable — those, for
example, who are not responsible for their actions ; while
their application is still more restricted when we come
to existences in general, and most of all in the case of
abstractions such as the virtues. The epithets " pious " and
"just" are attached, in the first place, to particular dis-
positions of human minds, then to the actions which spring
from these dispositions, to the persons who possess them,
and, lastly, to modes of action and feeling. There is as
little sense in saying that justice is just or piety pious
as there is in saying that roundness is round or redness
red. The denial of such an assertion by no means implies
that we assign the predicate " unjust " to justice, or that of
" impious " to piety, any more than in refusing the predicate
"just" to an infant or a tree, a flower or a stone, we mean
to affirm that any one of them is unjust. Of course, men
have always been only too ready to smuggle into the simple
denial of a statement the affirmation of its opposite — to
pass lightly from the contradictory negative to that which
314 GREEK THINKERS.
is merely contrary. Again, it is anything but obvious that
the predicate " pious " belongs to justice, or vice versd. In
fact, to speak of piety as just seems absolutely meaningless.
And if a somewhat lax use of the concept " piety " enables
the believer in God to call justice pious, in the sense of
being pleasing to God, this is not enough to justify even
the identification of justice with God-pleasing, not to speak
of anything more.
The second fallacy which we have to note in this con-
nexion is of a still more rudimentary character. The
essential sameness of wisdom and awtypoavvr) is supposed
to be evinced by the fact that the opposites of " folly "
both in the intellectual and in the moral sense, are
expressed by a single Greek word — dtypoavvi}. The proof
is clinched by an appeal to the axiom that no concept can
have more than one opposite. It is needless to say that
in this passage the want of sharp discrimination between
the different meanings of a word has produced a proof
which falls to the ground as soon as we realize the
ambiguity. Possibly Plato might have learnt from Prodicus
the art of making such useful distinctions, if he had regarded
the " wisdom " of that teacher with a little less contempt.
Here, for all his genius, he is guilty of precisely that fallacy
which is called " equivocation " in the technical language of
logic. We admit that Plato now and then uses weak and
even fallacious arguments consciously ; but of this practice,
in our judgment, the present passage is not an instance.
For, in what follows, there is no hint by which the reader
might be warned either that a fallacy has been employed
in sport, or that arguments of slender weight have been
stationed, like sharpshooters, in advance of more serious
proofs. No such hint, we say, is offered. On the contrary,
the perplexity of Protagoras is represented as fully justified,
and marks the entrance of the dialogue upon its critical
stage.
2. Pressed hard in dialectic, Protagoras at last takes
refuge in the pleasant fields of poetry. That is to say, he
ceases to give short and precise answers ; he loses himself
in digressions, and threatens to relapse into that eloquence
AN EXERCISE IN INTERPRETATION. 3 T 5
by which Socrates had once before been reminded of the
long-sustained note given out by metal vessels in response
to a short, sharp blow. Socrates now declares himself
unable to retain his opponent's answers in his memory.
He is forgetful, he says, and must beg Protagoras to take
account of his infirmity. The stronger must always adapt
himself to the weaker, if the two are to work in harness.
If he and Crison of Himera, the swiftest runner of the day,
were required to run in step together, that could only be
done by Crison reducing his speed, not by the opposite
method. The dialogue, and with it the feast of reason
which the onlookers are enjoying, threatens to come to an
untimely end. Hereupon Callias, in whose house the scene
is laid, Critias, and Alcibiades, lastly also Prodicus and
Hippias, offer their mediation ; and the occasion is taken
to sketch the interveners in a few rapid strokes, in which
the two sophists are somewhat severely caricatured. At
length an exchange of roles is agreed upon : Protagoras
is to ask questions, and Socrates is to answer them. The
former is thus enabled to leave the thorny field of ethical
concepts, and turn his attention to the interpretation and
criticism of poetry — an exercise which he regards as " the
principal part of education." With a touch of that school-
masterly spirit which we have already noticed in him (cf.
Vol. I. pp. 441, sqq., 458), he proposes to examine some
passages from a poem of Simonides as to their " correct-
ness " or " incorrectness."
What follows may be described, in a phrase coined by
Plato elsewhere, as a " laborious pastime." By an abuse
of ingenuity, one speaker finds stumbling-blocks in the
poem under discussion, and the other endeavours to remove
them by subtle quibblings. Simonides had, in the first
place, pronounced it " hard " for any one " to become truly
good, four-square in hand and foot and mind, a work of
faultless art." And yet, further on in the same poem, he
had spoken of the saying of Pittacus, " It is hard to be
good," as inadequate, on the ground that " only a god can
have part in such a privilege," while human character is
ever the plaything of fate. He therefore renounces all
316 GREEK THINKERS.
pursuit of " unattainable, spotless perfection," and professes
himself ready to " love and honour " every one " who
never willingly does anything base ; but against Necessity
the gods themselves fight in vain." The case is much as
if the poet, improving upon himself, had corrected his first
assertion : " It is hard to be good," by exclaiming, " But
what am I saying ? It is not hard ; it is a sheer impossi-
bility to reach so high a goal."
Plato, speaking through the mouth of Socrates, now
engages in what was evidently at that time a favourite
intellectual pastime. In doing so he employs, as earlier in
the dialogue, that style of caricature in which the original
is outshone. Here the butt is not so much Protagoras,
whose criticism of poetry was rather marked by a leaning
towards pedantry, as Hippias and Prodicus. The explana-
tion proposed by Socrates is violent, linguistically speaking,
in the highest degree ; moreover, Plato is perfectly well
aware that it is so. Accordingly, to provide against that
attempt being taken seriously, he makes Socrates begin
with the pleasant fiction that the Cretans and Spartans,
who of all Greeks were the most hostile to culture and
innovation, were in reality the sophists' warmest friends,
but that the sophists of those countries kept their wisdom
concealed. Protagoras, in the beginning of the dialogue,
had said much the same of his predecessors, as he called
them — Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, and the others. Socrates
further explains that the Lacedaemonians instituted their
" expulsions of aliens " for no other purpose than that they
might enjoy the society of the sophists undisturbed. And
there are other jests of the same kind. Thus the prologue
warns us to expect a burlesque, and there is an epilogue
which expresses with unvarnished plainness the view that
all such virtuosity is arbitrary and sterile. Contradictory
explanations, he says, can be maintained with equal show
of reason, but true certainty can never be reached, for
it is impossible to go to the poets themselves and obtain
authoritative decisions. The main purpose of this inter-
lude, which is doubtless also intended for the recreation
and entertainment of the reader, is obvious enough,
THE NA TURE OF VIRTUE. 3 I 7
and may be set out as follows : Socrates extracts out of
the poem by Simonides a maxim to the effect that
" it is hard to become good ; impossible to remain so per-
manently." But he proceeds as though his own original,
and even paradoxical, thesis, " No man errs of his own
free will," were the common property of " all wise men,"
and, among them, of the Cean poet, who "was not so un-
educated as to believe " that any one ever did evil volun-
tarily. Now, the two thoughts are in the most glaring
contradiction with each other. For to say that no one errs
voluntarily is merely to give expression to the view that
every fault is the result of an error, and that all right-doing
is the consequence of correct thinking. But the maxim
attributed to Simonides, according to which virtue is hard
to gain and impossible to keep, is the exact opposite to the
theory of Socrates ; for the knowledge which he regarded as
the foundation of all virtue might be hard of acquisition,
but once gained, could never be lost. The Socratic
doctrine — that the intellect alone determines action — leads,
by a necessary development, to the proposition, " Virtue
rests on knowledge ; it can, therefore, be taught, but cannot
be lost." With this thesis there is here conjoined, indirectly,
the antithesis, " Virtue can be lost ; it cannot therefore be
taught, and hence does not rest on knowledge." Plato
represents the great sophist and his famous companions as
receiving this self-contradictory explanation with hearty-
approval, and thus once more throws into relief the con-
fusion and inconsistency of thought which marked the most
eminent writers and teachers of the age, and from which
Socrates alone was free. Once more, too, the aim of
exalting Socrates above all the notabilities of the day is
accompanied by another and nobler aim — that of present-
ing the Socratic ethics as a complete and well-rounded
system.
But Plato is not satisfied with hints, such as those only
can understand who are familiar with the spirit of Socratism.
The progress of the dialogue supplies him with an occasion
to exhibit the inner connexion of those doctrines in a clearer
light. For Socrates resumes the discussion on the unity of
}l8 GREEK THINKERS.
virtue as soon as Protagoras, pacified by a few expressions
of respect, has reconciled himself once more to the part of
answerer. He begins with the admission that there is a
certain affinity between the other parts of virtue, but not
between them and courage. There is no lack, he contends,
of examples which show that a man may be unintelligent,
unjust, dissolute, irreligious, and yet at the same time
courageous. Socrates sets about proving that even courage
— real courage, as distinguished from mere recklessness —
is coupled with knowledge. The demonstration, however,
proceeds, in the first instance, by the defective method
already known to us from the " Laches," the unsatisfactory
character of which is here again indicated by Plato in the
clearest possible manner. The knowledge which is first
spoken of is not that of ends, but that of means. It is
contended that the most skillful diver, horseman, or foot-
soldier is always also the most courageous. It is only the
accompanying knowledge that makes their confidence
something praiseworthy, constitutes it the virtue which we
name courage. To this argument Plato represents Prota-
goras as answering, with equal point and seriousness, that
such a union of confidence and knowledge certainly does
increase efficiency, but only in the same way as does the
combination of strength and knowledge which is possessed,
for example, by the trained wrestler. But just as the
second instance gives us no right to identify knowledge
with bodily strength, no more does the first justify us in
regarding it as the same as confidence, or the highest stage
of confidence — courage. In this part of the discussion
Protagoras displays a somewhat surprising degree of logical
training. He knows that not every judgment can be con-
verted simpliciter ; that the proposition, " The courageous
are confident," cannot without more ado be converted into
" The confident are courageous." (Simple conversion is
illegitimate where the subject has a narrower extension than
the predicate ; thus : " All negroes are men," but not " All
men are negroes.") One might almost conjecture that,
possibly in his " Antilogies," the sophist had given expres-
sion to some of the elementary truths of logic, and that
THE CALCULUS OF PLEASURE AND PA IX. 3 I 9
Plato has here worked with a twofold object. He desires
both to correct, through the mouth of Protagoras, the above-
mentioned misapprehension of Socrates' doctrine of the
unity of wisdom and courage — a misapprehension which
seems to have originated in the circle of disciples — and at
the same time to assign to its source, in broadly allusive
style, a species of wisdom of whose profundity he had no
very great opinion.
At this point the problem is dropped, to reappear
presently in a more fundamental shape. The dialogue
enters on its final phase, in which Socrates combats the
opinion of "the many" that man errs voluntarily ; that he
knows the good, but does not do it because he is over-
powered by pleasure or other emotions (such as anger, fear,
love, sorrow). Socrates proposes to prove the untenable
character of the ordinary view and to establish the actual
supremacy of the intellect. Protagoras cordially assents.
The prospect is held out that in the course of the inquiry
the relation of courage to the other parts of virtue will
become plain. The discussion takes the form of a con-
versation with the many. Their assumption that a man
often knows evil as evil and yet does it, is characterized as
ridiculous. Every one — this is the gist of the proof —
desires what is best for himself ; he further identifies good
with pleasure, evil with pain, and accordingly strives always
after a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of pain ; he
therefore avoids pleasure only when it is the source of
still greater pain, and only chooses pain when a greater
amount of pleasure results from it. The being overcome
by pleasures means in reality nothing else than that the
smaller but nearer pleasure is preferred to the greater and
more remote, the reason of which preference is that near-
ness magnifies goods to the mind just as it does objects to
the eye. In such cases our judgment is deceived. Errors
of this kind are avoided by him who knows how to count,
to measure, to weigh correctly in questions of pleasure and
pain. The right conduct of life is thus reduced in the last
resort to a species of calculus, or mensuration, that is, to
some kind of wisdom or knowledge. Its opposite, on the
320 GREEK THINKERS.
other hand, the supposed condition of being overcome by-
pleasure or emotion, turns out, now the mask is stripped
from it, to be nothing but ignorance, and indeed the
greatest and most fatal ignorance of all.
Here follows the application to the special case of
courage. If " it is not in human nature " to go in quest
of evils which one has recognized as such, but, at the most,
to choose the lesser of two evils when there is no other
escape, then the common conception of courage and
cowardice cannot be right. It is said, possibly, that
cowards go where there is "safety," the courageous where
there is " danger." But if danger is the same thing as an
evil in prospect, how can such a statement be accorded with
the conviction, which has just forced itself upon us, that no
one will ever choose an evil which he knows to be such ?
How is it, for example, with war ? Is it noble or base to
go to battle ? If it is noble or praiseworthy, as is conceded,
then it must necessarily be also good or useful. If, then,
cowards avoid going to battle, which is something noble
and good, there can be no other reason than their ignorance,
that is — as we may add in completion — their defective
knowledge of the relative values of goods such as freedom
and life (compare our discussion of the " Laches "). The
opposite of cowardice can, therefore, be only wisdom or
true knowlege. Thus courage, to which Protagoras wished
to assign a place apart, is triumphantly reduced to wisdom,
like the other virtues.
Towards the close of the dialogue Socrates declares
that throughout the discussion his sole aim has been to
discover what virtue really is, and what is the truth about
it. The result arrived at is not stated with dogmatic pre-
cison, but its nature is indicated clearly enough. Socrates
first of all expresses his surprise at the exchange of roles
which has been effected between himself and Protagoras
He himself had begun by denying that virtue could be
taught ; now, however, he has reduced all the parts of it
to knowledge, after which step the proof that it can be
taught first begins to be feasible. For if virtue were
something different from knowledge, as Protagoras has
THE INNER CONNEXIONS OF SOCRATISM. 32 I
been endeavouring to show, it is clear that the teaching
of it would be an impossibility. But now that virtue has
been revealed as knowledge, it would be strange if it could
not be taught. That it cannot, is a thesis which ought
really to be maintained by Protagoras, who began by
assuming that it can, while afterwards he did his best
to represent it as anything else rather than a kind of
knowledge. Both have failed in point of forethought ;
Epimetheus (afterthought) has overthrown them both ; and
thus the dialogue takes a conciliatory turn with a grace-
fully humorous reminiscence of the sophist's myth. The
adversaries part as good friends who hope to meet again
and help each other in the pursuit of truth. Plato evidently
regards as complete the dialectic reverse suffered by the
representative of ordinary views of life and the world,
and he exploits, for the purpose of commending Socratic
doctrine, such reputation as Protagoras still enjoyed at
the moment of writing. For he makes him predict the
future renown of his opponent, to whose earnestness and
skill he accords " ungrudging " and cordial praise.
3. On the purpose of the dialogue little remains to be
said. It is partly concerned with the dialectic superiority
of Socrates, but at the same time, as we have already had
occasion to observe, the inner connexions of his teaching
arc not unregarded. The initiated are helped to a clearer
perception of them ; while the uninitiated are encouraged to
attempt, under Plato's guidance, the task of arranging, in a
coherent and articulate system, what is presented to them
in the form of isolated and dispersed fragments of doctrine.
In this aspect the " Protagoras " reminds us of the camnina
fracta, that is, disjointed portions of verse, the piecing
together of which used to be a favourite school-exercise,
or of the problem presented by an ancient ruin to the
arch;eologist who desires to restore the dislocated members
of the edifice to their original situations. The more
attentive reader, that is to say, is introduced to a train of
thought of which the successive stages, already in part
indicated by us, may be summarized as follows : Virtue
is inalienable because it can be taught ; it possesses this
VOL. II. V
322 GREEK THINKERS.
capacity of being taught, on the one hand, and organic
unity on the other, because it rests entirely on knowledge ;
it rests solely and entirely on knowledge — here we have
the cardinal thought, the keystone of the arch — because
the noble or praiseworthy, which forms its content, is at the
same time the good or useful, which the agent, so far as he
is not the victim of error, always chooses and prefers,
because it is, in the last resort, that which brings pleasure
to himself.
These words, " in the last resort," may perhaps give
pause, and rightly so, to more than one reflecting reader of
these pages. The identification of virtue with happiness
is an heirloom from Socrates which continually recurs in
Plato's works. Less frequent, but by no means un-
exampled, is the reduction of happiness to pleasurable
sensations. Hence arises the possibility of constructing a
bridge between the content of virtue and that of pleasure.
But such a work of conciliation requires as a basis the
proof, either that virtue, whatever be the motive for which
it is sought, always yields the greatest pleasure, or that the
pursuit of the greatest possible amount of pleasure can
only be successful when it follows the paths of virtue.
What strikes us in the present passage is not merely that
no such demonstration is supplied, but that the necessity
of one is not so much as hinted at. But it would only
make matters worse to dismiss the argument as not
seriously meant, intimately connected as it is with such
characteristic and far-reaching articles of the Socratic and
Platonic faith as the involuntariness of all error and the
foundation of all right-doing on knowledge. There is,
however, a parallel passage which illuminates the point
at issue and ends our perplexity.
The reader of the Platonic " Laws " is reminded of the
" Protagoras " by a passage in the fifth book, and that in a
manner which may well cause him surprise and some little
emotion. It is affecting to observe how the thinker, after
the lapse of half a century, is still engaged, with unabated
intensity of devotion, upon the same problems which
occupied his youth. Here we meet once more with the
PLATO'S HEDONISM. 323
same hedonistic point of view, as we may shortly term it ;
and the manner of its expression closely resembles that
employed at the close of the " Protagoras." But this time
the omission which we noticed before does not recur; there is
present also a background of idealism, the place of which,
in the " Protagoras," is taken by a reservation — by the ex-
pression, that is to say, of a doubt as to whether pain and
pleasure do really exhaust the whole of what we mean by
good and evil. At this stage, in the work of his old age,
Plato turns abruptly away from ideals of life and things
divine, with the words, " But we have not yet spoken of
these things from the human standpoint. This, however,
we must now do, for it is to men, not gods, that we address
ourselves. By human concerns wc mean pleasures and
pains and the desires connected with them ; to these things
all mortal creatures cleave with passionate striving." There
follows, just as in the earlier work, the exposition of a
species of moral mensuration or arithmetic. Pleasures and
pains are compared in respect of their " number, extent,
and intensity. We choose the lesser pain, if coupled with
a greater pleasure, but not the lesser pleasure, if coupled
with a greater pain ; " this time, too, account is taken of the
" neutral state, which we are very willing to choose instead
of pain, but not instead of pleasure." Up to this point,
Plato's procedure is exactly the same in both works. He
states the facts of human nature ; he points out conditions
which are valid for all volition without exception — note the
frequent and strongly emphatic use, in the " Protagoras "
as well as the " Laws," of the word " men." But while no
attempt is made, in the closing portion of the first-named
dialogue, to set in a clear light the connexion between the
natural foundation of morality and the system of precepts
built upon it, this omission is repaired in the " Laws." A
line of argument is here entered upon, the express purpose
of which is to prove that "the noblest life wins for us also
that prize on which all our hearts are set — the prepon-
derance of joys over sorrows." There is a detailed expo-
sition of the advantages which " the reasonable, courageous,
temperate, and healthy life " has over the life which is
324 GREEK THINKERS.
" unreasonable, cowardly, dissolute, and diseased." Finally,
the life which is guided by virtue is praised as the one
which is " happier both in detail and in gross." The
absence of this intermediary matter from the " Protagoras "
may perhaps be partly set to the account of the author's
youth, and his as yet incomplete mastery of his craft.
Partly, also, our surprise on this head is lost in a more
general cause for wonder. How is it, we may ask, that in
the whole series of his youthful works, Plato is so niggardly
with sentiment and emotion, and, even in passages where
he touches upon the highest human concerns, gives us only
cold outlines, to which we must add the colouring ourselves ?
He speaks to us again and again of the " good," but seldom
or never tells us what that is in which the good consists.
In treating of the " Laches " we thought it necessary to
repair this omission. We spoke of the advantages of
freedom over slavery, of the saving one's country over the
permitting its destruction, of honour over dishonour. In so
doing we believe we rightly supplemented Plato's thought.
But the deficiency was there to be supplemented. In these
dialogues he avoids, as if of set purpose, all that goes
beyond the discussion of concepts. Can it be that the
quondam poet guards himself with jealous care from all
fervour of emotion as the greatest danger to which an
incipient philosopher is exposed ? Or is it repugnant to the
youth to assume the solemn mien of the ethical preacher ?
Or, lastly, has the pupil resolved to tread nowhere but in
the footsteps of his master, whose province was the criticism
of concepts and the exposure of fallacies ? Is it for this
reason that he so carefully shuns all exhortation — at once
the domain and badge of those sophists from whom he is
anxious to distinguish himself? Did he regard dialectic
subtlety as something superior and refined (ko/u^ov), at the
same time disdaining the exhortatory style as common-
place and a little vulgar (tyopriKov) ? Probably it was a
mixture of all these motives that stamped the firstfruits of
Plato's muse with their character of reserve — a quality no-
where more marked than in the closing portion of the " Pro-
tagoras," where such words as " happiness," " blessedness,"
PLATO'S ECONOMY OF EMOTION. 325
and all others of high and solemn sound will be sought
for in vain.
This attitude of reserve was not to be maintained or
long. It soon disappeared, and for ever. At the same
time, that sunny light-heartedness. by which the first series
of Plato's works is irradiated, suffered at least temporary
eclipse. The strains that now meet our ear are deeper,
stronger, and more moving than those we have hitherto
heard. We stand at the portal of the magnificent edifice
named " Gonnas."
326 GREEK THINKERS.
CHAPTER V.
PLATO'S "GORGIAS."
I. The scenery of the " Gorgias " is marked by the same
indefiniteness of outline as that of the " Hippias." The
Sicilian rhetorician, like the Elian teacher of wisdom, has
just been delivering an address to a numerous auditory in
some place of public resort — probably in the hall of a
gymnasium. Socrates arrives late, accompanied by his faith-
ful Ch?erephon. He desires to put a question to Gorgias,
which the latter can the less decline to answer as he has a
moment ago publicly announced his readiness to reply to
every questioner.
The point at issue is nothing less than the nature and
essence of Rhetoric. Before long a dialogue is in progress,
and in the course of it Socrates displays his usual acumen
and subtlety, while the rhetorician appears as a genuine lover
of truth, to whose nature all disputatiousness is foreign.
After the opening sentences, the rhetorician Polus of
Agrigentum, a young man and full of youthful enthusiasm,
takes upon himself to enter the lists in place of the master,
who is already tired. He embarks upon a eulogy of his
art ; and his speech, though short, provokes amusement by
its strongly marked Gorgianic style. But as it is the
nature of rhetoric, not its value, which is in question,
Gorgias himself, at the request of Socrates, re-enters the
discussion — which we reproduce, with occasional comments.
The first and most general definitions — "knowledge of
discourse," " artificer of persuasion " — having proved too
comprehensive, a process of narrowing down begins, which
RHETORIC AND ITS MISUSE.
327
leads to the result that rhetoric is the art of persuasion, as
exercised in lavo-courts and popular assemblies, in respect of
questions touching justice and i?ijustice as well as others. A
distinction is then drawn between two kinds of persuasion :
one of them produces belief without knowledge ; the other
produces knowledge as well. It is agreed that the orator
does not impart knowledge in the true sense of the word,
for the reason that it is a sheer impossibility to enlighten a
mass-meeting on such great subjects as justice and injustice,
in a short space of time. (No notice is here taken of the
distinction between the exposition of a complete system
of law, whether positive or ideal, and that application of
established legal maxims to particular cases which is com-
mon in legal practice, and is not necessarily a lengthy
process.) It is pointed out, next, that it is the " orators,"
Themistocles and Pericles, for example, and not the "master
workmen," with their special knowledge, who have decided,
and still decide, such matters as the building of fortifica-
tions or the construction of docks. (Here the distinction is
neglected between matters of principle, such as depend on
political considerations, and matters of detail ; nor is any
notice taken of the fact that Themistocles and Pericles were
not mere orators, but possessed a most competent knowledge
of statecraft.) Gorgias now boasts of the great influence
which the power of speech enables him to exercise over
specialists of all kinds and over their clients : for example,
he is sometimes more successful than his brother Herodicus
in prevailing upon the latter's patients to follow the
directions of their physician. From all this the conclusion
is drawn that the orator, ivithout possessing knozvlcdge,
appears to the ignorant to possess it. In this connexion the
question is asked whether the ability to dispense with
knowledge, which is thus claimed for the orator, extends to
questions touching the just and the unjust. Gorgias will
not admit this for a moment. The pupil who has not
acquired such knowledge from previous instruction receives
it from him, the teacher ; and in fact the school of rhetoric
was, in that period, regarded as a place of general educa-
tion, and of preparation for public life. Socrates takes note
o
28 GREEK THINKERS.
of this declaration, and turns it against Gorgias. The
latter had previously endeavoured to clear rhetoric from
the reproach which, on the ethical side, so often attaches
to the application of it. He had spoken of the abuse of
rhetoric, for which, as he said, the teacher could no more
be held responsible than could a fencing-master whose
pupil should employ the skill imparted to him for the
purpose of committing parricide (cf. Vol. I. p. 471). Here
Socrates claims to detect a contradiction. If the teacher
of rhetoric instructs his pupil on justice and injustice, as
Gorgias now contends, then, Socrates urges, there can be
no possibility, on the pupil's side, of misusing rhetoric. For
the knowledge of the good includes — according to the
hypothesis of Socratism, be it observed, not otherwise —
both the will to do good and the actual doing of it ; other-
wise what is here said of the possible misuse of the art
lacks justification.
2. Here Polus rushes in to the aid of his master, and
contends that the apparent contradiction is merely the
result of the false shame which prevented Gorgias from
admitting the superfluousness of knowledge for the orator
in questions of justice and injustice as well as others. This
interposition, apart from its ill-natured accompaniment,
seems to us to be justified, if only we distinguish, in the
case of one who uses the art of speech as an instrument
of evil-doing, between the orator and the man. Polus here
pleads for the purely formal character of rhetoric, exactly
as we moderns do, and as Aristotle did, who recognized
that the power of speech, like other valuable possessions —
bodily strength, health, riches, the general's art — may be
used both rightly and wrongly (cf. Vol. I. p. 472). That
Plato should be acquainted with this eminently rational
view of the matter, that he should express it by the mouth
of Polus, as previously by that of Gorgias, and that he
should yet go on to combat it, is perhaps a little surprising,
all the more so when we consider the nature of the invec-
tives which he proceeds to hurl against rhetoric. These
invectives, be it observed, are directed against rhetoric as
a whole, not against that part of it which may be succinctly
AN UNJUST CONDEMNATION OF RHETORIC. 329
described as a collection of barristers' tricks, and which
Aristotle, nevertheless, did not disdain to teach, under the
assumption that only what he, not very intelligibly, calls
the " correct " use would be made of it. Rhetoric, Socrates
affirms, is the mere semblance of an art, a species of
" flattery," akin to the arts of dress and of cookery (more cor-
rectly, that of preparing tempting dishes). Like these, and
like sophistic, it aims only at pleasure, and stands in sharp
contrast to those arts whose end is the good — gymnastics
and medicine in the physical sphere, legislation and the
administration of justice in the moral. Such is the tenor
of the condemnation which, in vehement language, is pro-
nounced against rhetoric, which latter, it is further con-
tended, cannot properly be called an art at all, but, like the
other pseudo-arts with which it is compared, rests on mere
routine or crude experience, instead of scientific knowledge.
The harsh injustice of this verdict astonishes us ; all the
more so when we consider from whom it proceeds. Apart
from elocution and gesticulation, which, as Plato himself
recognized, are adjuncts of secondary importance, rhetoric
is in reality the art of exposition in language ; and it is no
exaggeration to say that one of the mightiest masters of
speech has here uttered a fierce accusation against an art
of which he was himself an illustrious representative. Plato
was an artist in style ; and if he was a philosopher first and
foremost, it may equally well be said that Pericles and
Themistocles — to take the examples already cited — were
statesmen before everything else.
The circumstance that a production of the intellect is
addressed to " assemblies " in the form of a speech, instead
of seeking out individual members of such assemblies in the
form of a book, cannot be regarded as a distinction of fun-
damental importance, nor was it so regarded by Plato in
another passage (of the " Phaedrus "). Nothing remains
except the endeavour to exert an immediate influence on
men's actions ; but neither is this a feature common to all
speeches (consider the genus panegyric, and display-oratory),
nor is it confined to them, for, to pass over journalism, as
unknown to the ancients, it is also characteristic of pamphlets
330 GREEK THINKERS.
and occasional writings. In truth, Plato was unable to state
any essential distinction between the oratorical exposition
of thought and any other kind of exposition in language
addressed to a wide public, as were, for instance, his own
dialogues, and he confesses as much, indirectly, in a subse-
quent passage, where he classes all poetry under the head
of rhetoric. That great writers, such as Plato was, do not
seek only to " instruct," and that great orators, such as
Demosthenes was, do not aim solely at " persuasion," it
seems almost superfluous to say. And the last man to
deny it ought surely to have been that author whose
works contain so many richly coloured apologues, so many
fervid exhortations, and among whose younger contem-
poraries was that orator whose effusions have been termed
" reason made red-hot by passion."
On the other hand, nothing could be more just than the
comparison of rhetoric to the art of the toilet. Just as a
shapely figure is set off to advantage by a beautiful dress,
so the garment of artistically perfect speech exhibits the
full comeliness of its intellectual and emotional content.
But if this art of " dressing-up," which Socrates censures,
can be also used to hide physical defects and produce a
false semblance of beauty, this application of it, and the
reprehensible character of such application in particular
cases, are, in reference to the art itself, accidental and
external, as the misuse of exposition in language is in refer-
ence to rhetoric. Why, lastly, every kind of practical skill
which is directed towards pleasure or enjoyment should
necessarily rest on mere routine, and not on the knowledge
of cause and effect, we are entirely unable to understand.
Such an assertion surprises us, even when it dates, as here,
from an epoch which knew nothing of the " physiology of
taste," whether in the narrowest or widest sense of the word,
and to which the chemistry of cookery was as foreign as the
elements of aesthetics. This attitude, moreover, was not
long maintained ; Plato himself quashed his own verdict
against rhetoric, and, in the " Phaedrus," undertook to re-
construct, on a new and psychologically sounder basis, the
art which, in the " Gorgias," he had condemned root and
ETHICAL AND POLITICAL CRITICISM. 33 I
branch. But our astonishment, for which we have so many
and so excellent reasons, diminishes when we discern, in
the further course of the dialogue, what Plato's real inten-
tion was — to criticize the dominant ethics and politics of
his time. It is with this criticism that the heart of the
dialogue is concerned ; the criticism of rhetoric as a hand-
maid to statecraft is merely the door by which entrance is
gained to those higher regions.
The art of oratory bestows upon its adepts preponder-
ant influence in political life : so far, Socrates and Polus
are agreed. Whether such influence is a prize worth the
seeking is a question on which their views are wide as the
poles asunder. At first, indeed, Polus cannot believe the
disagreement serious. Socrates himself, so he thinks, would
not despise the possession of the most effective means of
becoming powerful. Or are not the powerful to be esteemed
happy ? And are not the orators in a position to carry their
will and pleasure everywhere into effect ? Their pleasure,
certainly, answers Socrates, but not their will ; and for this
reason they cannot be termed truly powerful. The astonished
Polus is instructed that means and end must always be
kept strictly separate. The end of all action is happiness
or well-being. That is what every one wills. But those
miss their aim who seek it by the paths of injustice. Their
pleasure is then to employ means which frustrate the end
which they truly will. For only the just, the good man, is
happy ; the unjust is miserable and unblessed. For this
reason neither the popular leader nor the tyrant — the jux-
taposition occurs several times in this connexion, to the
surprise of ancient as well as modern readers — is truly
powerful or truly happy, although they are able, as Plato
continually repeats with the strongest emphasis, to kill,
plunder, and banish whom they please. The ethical dis-
cussion, we observe, is thickly interspersed with outbreaks of
the most passionate political antipathy. These outbreaks
will occupy us later on.
Here we are concerned solely with the ethical temper
which is displayed by Socrates with so much pathos, and
which makes the " Gorgias " so noteworthy a contribution
332 GREEK THINKERS.
to the world's literature. Socrates, or rather Plato, knows
that in this temper he stands alone. But even if all the
Athenians and all foreigners, if the most highly esteemed
citizens, if " Pericles and his whole house," if Nicias the
son of Niceratus (cf. Vol. I. p. 516), were to bear witness
against him, he would still, though " standing alone," abide
by his assertion that to suffer injustice is " better " than
to do injustice. He will not allow himself to be thrust out
"from this his possession, and from the truth," but will con-
tinue to hold that the doing of injustice is a dire calamity
to the doer of it, direst of all when he remains unpunished.
Rhetoric, accordingly, would then, and only then, render us
the greatest service in its power, if it enabled us to accuse
effectually and consign to appropriate punishment ourselves,
our " parents, children, friends, or country, whenever any of
them has done wrong."
If, on the other hand, it is an enemy who has done
wrong, then — Plato is still far removed from the principle
of love towards enemies — it would be another salutary
application of rhetoric to shield him from the penalty which
is his due, to make him even, if that were possible, "an
immortal villain." From this conviction he is not to be moved
even by the example of Archelaus, who by perjury, murder,
and treachery of every kind, paved himself a way to the
Macedonian throne, and who recently, after reaching the
summit of power, passed out of this life, surrounded with
splendour and envied by all (cf. p. 73).
Envied by all — yes, rightly, and also rightly condemned
by all. Such, practically, is the rejoinder of Polus, who
refuses to admit the power of wrong-doing to make men
wretched, though, at the same time, he resolutely approves
it to be base and blameworthy. Thus Socrates is once
more confronted by that double standard of judgment, that
dualistic view of life (" dividing," Plato calls it in the
" Laws"), that disposition to set happiness here and virtue
there, which always has found, and still finds acceptance
with ordinary minds, but which drew from Socrates the
most vehement contradiction. At the close of this section
he gives expression to this protest in a remarkable series
CALLICLES ON THE STRONG MAN 333
of arguments by which it is sought to extract from current
ideas of value themselves the conclusion that the disgracef?tl
(as we shall henceforth call it) is at the same time harmful
to the agent.
The reasoning here employed is closely parallel with that
by which, a little earlier in the dialogue, it is proved that
punishment is to the advantage of the evil-doer himself.
3. Just as Polus had been summoned into the arena by
the dialectic defeat of Gorgias, so now Callicles hastens to
the aid of the discomfited Polus. His mode, too, of offering
assistance is the same. What had in the first instance been
said of the teacher is now said of the pupil — that false
shame has involved him in avoidable admissions. One
such admission, Callicles contends, was that by which he
conceded the doing of injustice to be more disgraceful than
the suffering of it. He has, in fact, confounded two funda-
mentally different things, having been betrayed into so
doing by Socrates, who is accustomed to turn verbal ambi-
guities to his own advantage in debate. Nature is one thing,
Convention another and very different thing. The naturally
disgraceful is the naturally evil, and under this head comes
the suffering of injustice. It is only the slave, not the free
man, whom it beseems to endure wrong, and to be unable
to protect himself and those dear to him from attack.
Convention, on the other hand, is the work of the many
and weak, who, with an eye to their own advantage, have
so framed the laws, so distributed praise and blame, that
the strong are deterred from making use of their strength.
1 [ere follows a passage with which the reader has
already made acquaintance (Vol. I. pp. 405, sag.). It con-
tains a glorification of the man of force and genius, whom
the multitude vainly seek to enslave and drag down to
their own mean level. We are astonished at the glamour
which Plato casts over the young, half-tamed lion whom he
here depicts breaking his bonds and arising in the might of
his inborn majesty. We admire the artistic power with
which he has delineated the, to him, ethically repellent
character of the " overman." Can it be that, while re-
pelled by the misuse of genius, he still felt the attraction
334 GREEK THINKERS.
of genius itself? Had he before his eyes the romantic
figure of Alcibiades, whom he had seen in his impression-
able youth ? And did his distaste for the burdensome yoke
of " collective mediocrity " help him mix his colours ? Be
that as it may, the example of the animal world, as well
as that of international relations (the right of conquest), is
pressed by Callicles into the service of his theory. But
Socrates soon compels him to modify that theory in a
significant manner. There is more strength in the union
of many than in the strongest individual, and Callicles is
fain to confess that, in comparison with the one strong man,
the despised multitude is the stronger. If this is so, and
might is right here as elsewhere, then convention, which
has been established by the many, and which, because of
this its origin, has met with such contempt, finds its justifi-
cation in the doctrine of force itself. Callicles now performs
a remarkable volte-face, and declares that it was not physical
superiority, but superiority in wisdom and courage, that he
has had in his mind, and which he has regarded as giving
a title to rule. Hero-worship and the cult of force pass
into the background, and in their stead we find a preference
expressed for aristocratic institutions. Such kaleidoscopic
changes of sentiment were probably frequent enough in the
minds of restless politicians who were discontented with
popular government, and at the same time lacked strict
mental discipline. As if in scorn, Plato joins, in the person
of Callicles, want of logical exactness with contempt for
philosophy, which latter is said by Callicles to be a good
enough occupation for the years of youth, but as unworthy
of a mature man as the lisping of a child or a schoolboy's
games. He who lingers over them too long loses his man-
hood, and is exposed defenceless to every attack — any one
who likes may box his ears with impunity. Socrates
proceeds with his task of cross-examination untroubled by
this abusive speech. The better, by which is now meant
not the stronger but the wiser, have a mission to rule and
to profit by their authority. This assertion needs explana-
tion. Ought the physician, for example, who is the wiser
man in respect of foods and drinks, to consume them in
THE GOSPEL OF LIBERTINAGE. 335
greater quantities than his less-instructed fellows ? Or
ought the most expert weaver to possess the largest cloak,
to wear better and handsomer clothes than others ? Callicles
rather rudely rejects these interpretations. By " wisdom "
he meant knowledge of politics, and by the "better" he
meant those who possess such wisdom and are not deficient
in courage. These are the men whom it befits to rule in
the State, and it is just that the rulers should have many
advantages over their subjects.
The aristocratic ideal of the State thus championed is
now subjected to what we may call a flanking attack. Are
the rulers, asks Socrates, to rule themselves as well as
others ? At first it seems as if a question of individual
ethics had been irrelevantly introduced into a political
discussion. But in reality it is not so. Plato also has an
aristocratic ideal of government ; he, too, believes in the
rule of the "wise and brave." But it must be a just rule,
and, therefore, one founded on self-mastery. It thus
becomes important that he should indicate the precise
point at which he and Callicles part company. In this way
both the question itself may be explained, and the answer
which is represented as being given to it. For Callicles
gives frank expression to that which " others think, but are
ashamed to say ; " he preaches a gospel of pleasure and
libertinage. Happiness, according to him, consists in being
servant to none. He who would live rightly should allow
his desires to increase as much as possible, and be in a
position to satisfy them by the exercise of courage and
wisdom. Having thus set up a target, Plato proceeds to
batter it without mercy. But he who now speaks to us
through the mouth of Socrates knows much of which the
latter never dreamed. It is, to put it shortly, a pupil of
the Pythagoreans that speaks to us here ; and this new
development, this entry on the scene of an element which
never afterwards wholly disappears from Plato's thought,
must now engage our attention for a moment.
4. In the dialogues which we have hitherto passed under
review, we discovered no traces of mathematical train-
ing. In the " Gorgias " such traces occur not infrequently,
336 GREEK THINKERS.
sometimes in close connexion with questions of ethics.
Thus " geometrical equality " is mentioned as a principle
" of great potency among gods and men," and is contrasted
with the lust of wealth and rule, which latter is even
ascribed to lack of geometrical training. We read, more-
over, of " sages " who have taught these and kindred
subjects; Epicharmus is quoted, as also another "Sicilian
or Italian ; " the Pythagorean punning comparison between
the body and a grave (awfxa : arj/jia) is employed ; before
long we shall meet with other Pythagorean analogies and
Orphic images. No one of these indications is convincing
by itself; considered in the mass, and taken together
with the absence of all such features from the group of
writings already treated by us, they possess considerable
probative force. We may, perhaps, gather from them that
the author of the " Gorgias " had already spent some time in
Lower Italy, and had there been initiated into Orphic and
Pythagorean modes of thought, whether it was there also
that he wrote the work, or whether he waited till his return,
which may well have preceded his first Sicilian journey.
The nearer we approach the conclusion of the dialogue, the
more numerous do the indications of such influence become.
The ideal of pleasure-seeking and personal passion set
up by Callicles is combated with two kinds of weapons
— arguments and analogies. The latter, which, on this
occasion, possess by far the greater convincing force, are
designated by Plato himself as having been borrowed from
his new masters. The soul of the passionate pleasure-
seeker is compared with a leaky tub, which must be con-
tinually filled afresh without rest or slackening ; while
the life of self-command or temperance is likened to the
tranquil possession of impervious vessels brimful of precious
things. Socrates seeks to prove that the good is not to be
sought for the sake of pleasure, but that everything else,
pleasure included, should be sought for the sake of the
good. Well-being is no longer reduced, as in a passage of
the " Protagoras," another of the " Republic," and, finally,
in the " Laws," to pleasurable sensation, but is deprived of
this content. Instead, we have formal principles, such as
PLATO AND TOLSTOI. 337
were not far to seek for a student of mathematics and
an ethical philosopher acquainted with the Pythagorean
physics. At various critical stages in the dialogue where
we expect enlightenment on the purpose of life, what we
actually find is discourse, made emphatic by iteration, on
regularity and order, even on harmony. The soul which
participates in regularity and order is pronounced good,
like a house or a utensil possessed of the same qualities ;
all which has not order is pronounced bad. Bodily health,
too, and every other kind of physical excellence, is identified
with the same principle. Functions to be performed, or
services to be rendered, by the utensil, the house, the body,
or the soul, are ignored altogether, or are at most declared
impossible of realization apart from the above qualities. The
purpose of virtue is the doing of that which is " befitting,"
in other words, of that which is just towards men or pious
in relation to the gods. The virtuous man will seek what
he ought to seek, and avoid what he ought to avoid in
every department of life, pleasures and pains not excepted,
and he will endure patiently when duty requires it. The
word " right " is also employed as a predicate. The
perfectly good man will do " well and nobly " whatever he
does ; and his well-doing (we have already discussed the
ambiguity of the formula in the original Greek ; c{. p. 70)
will place well-being, or happiness, within his grasp. Lastly,
we read in this connexion of "law" and that which is
" legal ; " but how we are to arrive at a knowledge of this
law, which can hardly be identified with fluctuating positive
legislation, we are left in ignorance.
5. But though the outlines of the picture may be some-
what deficient in sharpness, the colours could not be
imagined stronger. There is deep, nay, stern seriousness
in these pages. " The one thing needful is to live rightly ;
nothing less is at stake than the whole ordering of our
life.'' Cries such as this break forth from time to time,
and remind us — this is not the only instance — of the great
moralist of modern Russia.
The whole of society, its leaders and representatives,
are passed in review ; they are weighed in the balance, and
VOL. II. ^
33b GREEK THINKERS.
found wanting. Socrates returns to the " arts of flattery,"
and this time he includes among them the music and the
poetry of his age. He strips from poetry its garment of
verse, and in the residue, addressed as it always is to the
masses, he detects " rhetoric " pure and simple. Against
musicians and poets he makes the explicit charge that they
seek the pleasure, not the profit, of hearers and readers ;
and thus, we observe in passing, he indirectly admits what
was at first denied, namely, that the means of exposition,
known collectively as rhetoric, are in themselves capable of
being used rightly as well as wrongly. The same admis-
sion has already been made by implication in the passage
where rhetoric is said to be put to a good use when the
guilty man accuses himself by its aid ; and in the closing
words of the dialogue the same view is affirmed with
emphasis.
When the poets have been placed under the ban, the
tragedians among them, and no exception made in favour
of, say, Sophocles, the statesmen are added to the list.
Nor does Plato now confine himself to contemporaries.
" We do not know of any one who has ever shown himself
a good statesman in this city," he complains ; nor is Solon,
the friend and kinsman of his own ancestor Dropides,
exempted from the general indictment, though he is else-
where praised as the wisest of the " seven wise men." As
for the great statesmen of his own century — Cimon, Pericles,
Miltiades, and Themistocles — he cites them by name, and
condemns them collectively. They were no better, he
declares, than herdsmen who should make the animals
entrusted to their care wilder instead of tamer. In the
case of the Athenians this greater wildness was shown by
their behaviour towards their leading politicians. Cimon
they banished temporarily (by the process known as " ostra-
cism ") ; Themistocles they banished for life ; Miltiades,
too, was punished severely. Socrates admits, in response
to the vehement protest of Callicles, that these men were
able servants of the people (we should rather say, effective
instruments of public opinion) ; that they were competent
and willing to satisfy in the completest manner the desires
POETS, STATESMEN, SOPHISTS, CONDEMNED. 339
of the multitude. They might therefore be aptly compared
to Thearion the baker, Mithoecus the cookery expert, and
Sarambus the vintner, the first of whom was able to
provide wonderful loaves, the second equally wonderful
dishes, and the third the most delectable wines. But, as
for that which is of true service to man, the statesmen
knew as little of it as these three men ; such knowledge is
only for the physician and the trainer in questions relating
to the care of the body, and, where the soul is concerned,
for those who have specially studied its needs. " You
praise the men who feasted the citizens and satisfied their
desires, and people say that they have made the city great,
not seeing that the ulcerated and swollen condition of the
State is to be attributed to these elder statesmen ; for they
have filled the city full of harbours and docks, and walls
and revenues and all that, and have left no room for justice
and temperance." *
The statesmen disposed of, a similar but somewhat
more mildly conceived verdict is passed ujoon the sophists.
The reasons are the same in both cases. " No statesman,"
Socrates tells us, " can ever suffer evil unjustly at the hands
of the State which he has governed ; " if the people rise up
against him, that proves he has insufficiently performed his
task of educating them. The case is similar with those
sophists or teachers of virtue who complain of unjust
treatment by their pupils, in such matters as the payment
of fees. Callicles, who reveals himself as a despiser of the
" good for nothing " sophists, and objects to their being
placed on a level with statesmen, is met with the reply that
the sophist and the rhetorician (the term is here syno-
nymous with "popular leader" or "statesman") are the
same, or very nearly the same thing. The only difference
is that sophistic ranks just as much above rhetoric (in the
hierarchy of the pseudo-arts) as legislation and gymnastics
rank above legal administration and medicine (in the
hierarchy of the true arts— the arts designated as higher
are those which aim at the production, or the apparent
production, of permanent conditions ; the lower, at the
* 5 1 S E, trans. Jowett.
34° GREEK THINKERS.
removal, real or apparent, of temporary derangements)-
The sophists are evidently in good company for once, that
of the great statesmen and still greater poets.
The yawning chasm which divides Socrates from con-
temporary society and its canons of judgment portends for
him — as he is well aware, even without the warning given
him by Callicles — a danger of no small magnitude. Let him
cherish, if he will, his conviction that he " alone, or in
company with but very few, pursues the right method in
politics " — his faith will not save him from persecution. He
will be summoned before the judges, and he will fare
there much as would a physician who should be accused by
a confectioner before a jury of children. What defence
could the poor man raise against the charge of making the
children's lives a burden to them by bitter medicines, by
hunger and thirst, even by burning and cutting, while the
accuser has dispensed to them nothing but sweetmeats ?
Socrates, therefore, being ignorant of the arts of flattery,
quite expects to be condemned to death ; this, however, is
not so much to be dreaded as that he should descend into
the lower world with a load of injustice burdening his
soul.
6. The working out of this last thought occupies the
closing portion of the dialogue. It begins with an account
of how the dead are judged. In this description, which is
full of striking allusions to Orphic doctrines, Socrates
himself professes to see, not a mere tale, but a statement
of the truth. It had been a primordial enactment of the
gods that the souls of the pious and just should go to the
Islands of the Blessed, while those of the godless and
the unjust should be exiled to the house of punishment
called Tartarus. But the manner of executing the judg-
ment underwent a far-reaching change, soon after Zeus
obtained the sovereignty. Before that time, living judges
had judged men about to die, but still living, like them-
selves ; and much injustice had been the consequence.
For the living defendants had veiled their corrupted souls
with the covering of bodily beauty, or the splendour
of wealth and noble birth, by which means they had
THE JUDGMENT OF THE DEAD. 34 1
procured much false testimony in their own favour. The
judges, too, had been subject to error, for their souls were
also behind veils of ears and eyes and other bodily organs.
Now, however, the dead are judged by the dead, naked
souls by naked souls ; Minos, /Eacus, and Rhadamanthus,
three sons of Zeus, have that office. The stripped soul
now shows its quality and the manner of its earthly pil-
grimage. All its misdeeds have left their mark upon it :
lying and deceit have made it crooked ; perjury and
injustice have branded it with scars and wales as though
it had been scourged ; pride and dissolute living have
destroyed all its symmetry and beauty. The judges,
therefore, discern without fail the character of the souls
before them, and send them to the appointed place of
punishment, where those which are still curable are cleansed
by discipline, and the incurable help to reform others who
see them suffer. Among the worst souls are to be found
those of powerful princes and tyrants ; nor will the soul of
the much-envied Archelaus be elsewhere than in the
midst of them. For it is but rarely that he to whose lot
fulness of power has fallen can preserve himself pure. Only
a few have done so, among whom must be reckoned the just
Aristides, the son of Lysimachus. He, however, who has
the best right to await the future with confidence is the
philosopher who has kept himself clear from the reproach
of doing "many men's business." Thus Socrates for his
part hopes that when he presents his soul to the judges in
the underworld, it will be among those which are least
corrupted ; and, in conclusion, he calls upon Callicles and
all others to follow his example. In all that discussion in
which they have just been engaged, one thesis alone
remained firm and unshaken, namely, that men should be
more on their guard against the doing than the suffering of
wrong, and that neither for individual nor for community
is there any end so worthy to be pursued with zeal and
earnestness, as the being, rather than the seeming to be,
good. Towards this end may rhetoric, like everything
else, render its due share of service !
7. With these full chords closes that psalm of justice,
34 2 GREEK THINKERS.
as we may be permitted to term the " Gorgias." The work
charms the soul of every reader by its content still more
than by the greatness of its plan and its perfect execution.
It produced, moreover, a powerful immediate effect. A
Corinthian farmer, according to a statement in a lost
dialogue of Aristotle, read the book, and without delay
left his fields and vineyard in order to become a pupil of
Plato. The aged Gorgias himself, whose name the dialogue
bears, lived to see it published, and is reported to have
exclaimed, in pained admiration of what could not but
appear to him a violent caricature of his art, " Athens has
produced a new Archilochus ! " The debate on the value
of rhetoric, nay, on its very right to exist, was continued
for centuries, with an ever-repeated reference to the Platonic
dialogue. Thus the rhetorician Aristides, as late as the
middle of the second century A.D., composed two orations
in defence of his art, and devoted a third to the justifica-
tion of the " four statesmen " whom Plato assailed. And
the Neo-Platonist Porphyrius answered him in a work of
seven books.
Here we pause for a few reflexions on the subject of
historical appreciations. That Plato's condemnation of all
Athenian statesmen, and of the four in particular, far over-
shoots the mark, it is quite superfluous to say. To this
we have a witness whom none can reject — Plato himself.
Hard upon the end of the dialogue, we find him hastening
to eulogize a particular Athenian statesman, Aristides — a
piece of self-correction that it warms the heart to see. In
the "Phaedrus" he speaks of Pericles in another and more
respectful tone ; and, in the " Meno," the statesmen, while
placed below the philosophers, are still to a considerable
degree rehabilitated. For the rest, the injustice of that
unfavourable verdict is palpable. The comparison of states-
men with shepherds presupposes their possession of a power
which few politicians have ever attained in constitutionally
governed states. Again, the fact of their being punished
by the people is represented as a proof of their pernicious
influence, without any regard to the question whether such
punishment is undeserved or richly deserved, as in the case
PLATO ANSWERS POLYCRATES. 343
of Miltiades. And their use of the unlimited power attri-
buted to them is painted in the darkest colours ; by a
" union of the most diametrically opposed," as the rhetorician
Aristides calls it, their rule is assimilated to that of tyrants ;
the popular leaders are spoken of as despots who are able
to rob, murder, and banish whom they choose.
Whence, we naturally ask ourselves, comes this bitter-
ness on Plato's part so far in excess of all reasonable
limits ? Is it to be attributed, as we may at first be inclined
to suppose, to the execution of his master ? Without doubt
that deed of horror had deeply wounded his soul. But
since that time an interval of at least several years, for in it
falls his Italian sojourn, had elapsed ; and these were the
years during which those dialogues were almost certainly
composed which centre in the " Protagoras," and which
breathe throughout a spirit of lighthearted cheerfulness.
The flame of wrath must in the mean time have been fed
with fresh fuel. We now call to mind the political situa-
tion which had been created by the naval victory of Cnidus
(Midsummer, 394). The very party which counted Anytus
among its leaders was then triumphant. The Laconizers,
among whom were Plato's friends and kinsmen, were the
vanquished side, and had doubtless been subjected to much
harsh and unjust treatment. The hero of the hour, the
man who was being acclaimed as the restorer of the
State and the democracy, was Conon, who had defeated
Sparta, and who, by rebuilding the long walls, had re-
sumed and crowned the work of Themistocles, Cimon,
and Pericles.
These same topics had also been treated of by Poly-
crates, in his lampoon on the memory of Socrates (cf.
p. 114). This work, probably a poor performance in itself,
was brought into undeserved prominence by the political
situation, and for that reason called forth a counterblast
in the " Gorgias." As Polycrates had singled out the
martyred philosopher's anti-constitutional sentiments for
special attack, it was natural that the reply should in
like manner, be political in tone, and that it should take
vengeance upon those statesmen (and their predecessors)
344 GREEK THINKERS.
whom the pamphleteer had glorified. Polycrates, as we
may confidently infer from the " Apology " of Libanius
(cf. p. 1 1 8), had charged Socrates with making the Athe-
nians "lazy," and, no doubt, fond of talk too — a cognate
fault which the "beggarly prater" was sure to en-
courage. Plato answers by retorting the charge. Not
Socrates, but " Pericles made the Athenians lazy and fond
of talk, and not only that, but cowardly and avaricious as
well." It is Pericles whom he names, but he cannot have
had this statesman alone, or even principally, in view. For
he specifies "payment of the people" as the instrument of
corruption. But what Pericles contributed to this practice
was, as we have recently learnt, merely a modest beginning ;
he introduced, that is to say, the payment of the dicasts, or
jurors. The more important payment of the ecclesiasts,
or men who attended the assembly of the people, did not
begin until the nineties, soon after which beginning it was
considerably increased. In both these later developments
the responsibility lay with Agyrrhius, a powerful and
popular politician of the day ; and it is against this man,
in all probability, that Plato's outburst is mainly directed.
But if Plato went further, and condemned the statesmen
of Athens in the lump, without sparing even the most
ancient and most honoured names, this too was in response
to the challenge of Polycrates. The latter had entered into
comparisons. With those who found much to censure in
the Athenian democracy, as Socrates and his friends did,
he contrasted the great men who were reverenced as the
founders of the State, Solon among them, and even the
mythical Theseus. These heroes, as being men of action,
not wordy pedants and quibblers, were held up by him as
the most fitting objects of popular admiration ; just as, in
modern Germany, the followers of a revolutionary theorist
might be referred back to " Bismarck and Old Fritz." The
extravagance of the onslaught was met by equal extrava-
gance in the rejoinder, which admitted no redeeming
quality in any statesman who had ever engaged in Athenian
politics.
8. Where the waves of passion run so high, the helm of
FALLACIES OF THE " GORGIAS." 345
logic generally refuses its office. And in truth the " Gorgias "
must be reckoned, from the argumentative point of view,
among the weakest products of Plato's pen. A rapid
review of the chief fallacies contained in it may perhaps
afford us a useful glimpse into the less admirable side of
the Platonic and Socratic conceptual philosophy.
Polus, as we remember, was thrown into confusion as a
result of his admission that the doing of injustice is more
disgraceful and more ignoble than the suffering of it.
The argument has the following form : That alone is
disgraceful which causes either momentary pain or lasting
injury. Now, the doing of injustice is not the more
painful ; it must therefore be the more harmful. From
this the inference was drawn that the doing of injustice
is more harmful to the doer himself than is the suffer-
ing of it to the sufferer. Every one must see that the
judgment, " This or that mode of action is disgraceful,"
does no more than express the displeasure of the person or
persons by whom it is affirmed, and gives no information
whatever on the grounds of that displeasure. At the very
most it implies that some such grounds do really exist. It
is not even safe to go a step further, and assert that the
action in question cannot with justice be pronounced dis-
pleasing unless it is in some way detrimental to the welfare
of some sentient being. (For this would be to exclude the
predicate " disgraceful " from the sphere of aesthetics, and
limit it to that of ethics, or rather that part of ethics which
is concerned with utility.) But, conceding this point, there
is no process of dialectical magic which can conjure out of
the above proposition any means of deciding who the beings
are whom an act of wrong-doing injures, or any proof that
the doers, rather than the sufferers, of injustice are in the
worse case. Plato claims to discover the Socratic faith in
the power of injustice to destroy happiness already con-
tained in current opinion, but he only does so by first
importing it there himself. Immediately afterwards we
find the same method pressed into the service of a kindred
thesis.
The proposition to be established i> that punishment,
346 GREEK THINKERS.
when rightly inflicted, is always and everywhere salutary,
or useful, to the person punished. The mode of proof is as
follows : Whenever anything acts upon anything else, the
passive side of the process is similar in quality to the active.
Thus, if A strikes B quickly or violently, B experiences a
rapid succession of blows, or violent blows, that is, such as
cause him violent pain. " As is the action of the agent, so
is the suffering of the patient." Now, he who punishes
rightly, punishes justly. When justice is done, justice is
also suffered. The just is noble ; the noble is good, and
therefore also either pleasurable or useful. Since, then,
punishment does not give pleasure, it must perforce be
useful.
The very starting-point of this demonstration is no
more than a half-truth. In a causal process there are some
qualities which are repeated in the effect, and others which
are not. If A strikes quickly, B is struck quickly. But
that to the violence of the blow must correspond the
intensity of the pain, is not by any means clear. It is not
merely that the blow may fall on a part of the body affected
by permanent or temporary, total or partial anaesthesia ;
such possibilities may be reckoned under the head of
abnormalities, or rare and negligible exceptions. But
the fact that sensitiveness is modified by individual and
racial endowment, by the novelty or strangeness of the
impression, by hardening or the reverse ; that the Redskin,
with nerves of steel, will feel a blow differently from the
more tender-fibred European ; that one accustomed to the
lash is not affected by it in the same way as he who has
hitherto been exempt from it ; that the same blow is less felt
after heavier than after lighter strokes ; — these and similar
facts deserve serious consideration, because they throw a
strong light on the importance of the subjective factor in
sensation. It would be easy to quote far more complicated
cases, and to prove from them that the relation between
the external agent or stimulus and the sensation thereby
produced is far removed from the simplicity which Plato
here attributes to it.
But we arc very willing to leave on one side all the
THE END OF PUNISHMENT. 347
psychological and psychophysical questions which arise in
this connexion. For suppose the first step in the proof to
be as unassailable as it is the opposite, the argument which
follows will still be open to the strongest objection. The
same criticism is applicable to it which we were obliged to
pass on the reasoning by which it is preceded. Admitted
that the just is noble, the noble good, the good, when not
pleasurable, useful, — the question still remains open : useful
to whom ? Why precisely to the person punished, and not
rather to society, the protection of which, after all, is one
of the uncontested ends of punishment ?
To pass from the form of proof to the result obtained,
how widely have opinions differed, and still differ, on the
end of punishment ! We see some penalties imposed with
a view to religious expiation, others intended to deter, or
to make offenders harmless ; and all of them adapted to
their several purposes. How can it be maintained that all
alike are fitted to exert a cleansing or reforming influence
on the souls of those on whom the)- fall ? We call to
mind, lastly, that there is a psychological counterpart to
the tanned hide of the much-flogged rogue. We remember
the blunted conscience of the inveterate villain, the incor-
rigible, the "incurable" in general. Of such Plato treats in
his "judgment of the dead," and to the punishing of them
he assigns no other end than the deterring of others. But
in this he contradicts the thesis laid down in the passage we
are considering. To the hardened criminal there comes
through punishment at least as much "justice" as to the
novice in crime ; and yet " justice " is here represented as
something in its own nature salutary and useful to the
person punished, no matter what his character ma)- be.
That which is most noteworthy in this, as in the preceding,
argument, is the state of mind out of which it arises — the
tendency to interrogate current judgments and notions in
the hope of gaining from them that illumination which
nothing but the direct investigation of facts can supply.
To this point it is perhaps worth while to devote a moment's
consideration.
When Socrates first cast an inquirer's eye over the
34-8 GREEK THINKERS.
world of concepts, there awaited him not a few surprises,
and those of no mean magnitude. This hitherto un-
explored world could not but produce, in almost as great
degree as the material universe, the impression of an
organized whole. The well-ordered fabric of superior and
subordinate concepts, broadening downwards in the direc-
tion of concrete reality, and tapering upwards towards the
most comprehensive abstractions, was bound to fascinate
and charm the mind of the beholder as much by its
magnificence as by the mystery of its origin. The
acquisitions which in the course of centuries, nay, millen-
niums, had been gained by the obscure labour of analyzing
and combining thought upon the material of sensation, and
preserved in the storehouse of language, were sure to
produce an impression all the more imposing because at that
time the disadvantageous side of the processes concerned
had hitherto passed all but unnoticed. Words are the
helpful servants of thought ; but, useful as they are, they
diligently foster and faithfully cherish their master's errors.
The Greek knew but one tongue, his own, and that only in
a late literary phase ; he was, therefore, without any means
of shaking off the heavy yoke of language. Nothing was
known of what we call the " life of words," of the caprices
of linguistic usage, which, advancing upon the stepping-
stones of analogy, now generalizes the meaning of a
word beyond all admissible bounds, and again, with equal
arbitrariness, performs the reverse process of restrictive
specialization. In short, the natural history, as well of
speech as of thought, was entirely unknown, and, in the
absence of any corrective, the cult of concepts was soon
carried to the length of superstition.
It frequently happened, in the course of these first
essays in the study of notions, that commuity of meaning
was looked for, where all that really existed was a com-
munity of name, brought about by a long series of imper-
ceptible transitions. Such, for example, was the case
with the attempts to define the good and the beautiful.
On the other hand, where language had erected a
boundary-post, there, it was assumed, some difference
WEAK ATTACK ON HEDONISM. 349
must exist, deeply rooted in the inmost essence of things.
This mode of treatment was soon extended from single
concepts to combinations of them, that is, to judgments.
Widely diffused beliefs, particularly those relating to
values, were credited with little less than infallibility.
Where assent could not be yielded to them, tireless
energy was expended in interpretation, until traditional
judgments had been explained into an entirely artificial
agreement with private conviction. Thus it came about
that, as with Plato in the present case and elsewhere,
traditional judgments were looked upon as a kind of mine,
in which one might go burrowing after truths, which by
no possibility could be found there. This disposition to
delight in ideas and fight shy of facts may be illustrated —
to avoid disputed questions of philosophic method — by that
" law of nature " which did not become obsolete till the
nineteenth century, or by the mental attitude of those
man)- jurists who, to use a humorous expression of Rudolf
von Jhering, keep their telescope pointed to the "heaven
of ideas," and there cast about for discoveries which only
the solid ground of human needs and relationships could
have in store for them.
Two more fallacies lie ensconced in that part of the
dialogue which may be shortly described as a refutation
of Hedonism. It is proposed to prove the thesis that
pleasure is not among the number of goods or " good "
things. If it were so, then, it is contended, ''good" men
would have the greatest share of it, since they are " good "
in no other way than by participation in " the good." In
reality, however, they have no such preponderating share.
Cases are cited in which not the good man, but his opposite,
not the brave man, but the coward, enjoy the greater
pleasure. It is true they also suffer more pain, but this
point, though it finds mention, is not pursued further. The
instance adduced is that of war : when the enemy with-
draws from the land, the coward rejoices with a greater joy
than the brave man ; and similarly he is more distressed
when his country is invaded. Here, as we may remark by
the way, the Plato of the earlier " Protagoras " or the later
350 GREEK THINKERS.
" Laws " might have had recourse to his moral arithmetic
or mensuration. He might have weighed the pleasures
and pains characteristic of the coward and the brave man
respectively against each other, the result of which process,
we may be sure, would not have been to show a balance in
favour of the first-named ; and he might have pointed out,
in addition, that the pleasures of the brave man exceed those
of the coward by at least that overplus which is the result
of his equanimity and tranquil stability of character. But
Plato has here confined his attention to what may be called
momentary or acute pleasures, as distinguished from per-
manent or chronic states ; and indeed the general distinc-
tion between the temporary and the fleeting was so deeply
impressed upon the mind of the author of the " Gorgias,"
that, in comparison with it, even the difference between
pleasure and pain recedes into the background. The
repugnance which he now manifests for pleasurable sen-
sations of a violent or passionate character causes him to
attach to the word " pleasure " a narrower meaning than
that which it has formerly borne, and will again bear, for
him : it has ceased to be, and has not yet become again,
the raw material of happiness. Otherwise he would most
probably have found, precisely as in the " Laws," that the
" life of courage " does indeed contain " a smaller number
and a less intense degree of pleasures and pains," but yet
exhibits, on the whole, " a greater balance of pleasure than
the life of cowardice."
Here, however, we arc concerned only with the logical
form of the proof. And in this connexion we may well
be astonished by the iridescent ambiguity of the word
" good." Pleasure is represented as not being a good, or
good thing, on the ground that good men obtain less of it
than bad men. Now, the men whom we call good are
those whose disposition of will appears to us worthy of
praise, in forming which estimate the Socratics laid the
chief stress on the knowledge or wisdom by which the will
is determined. On the other hand, by a good or good
thing we understand a valuable possession, whether it be
an object of the external world or an element of the inner
DIFFERENT MEANINGS OF "GOOD:' 35 I
life. Need we quote an example to show how little the
one has to do with the other ? For Plato, as for others,
bodily health and strength are among the number of goods.
But what full vials of scorn would he have poured out over
the contention that those less richly endowed with these
good things, the physically feeble and the ailing, ought
therefore not to be called " good " in the ethical sense !
In order to understand this fallacy, we must bear in mind
that while Plato, as we have just observed, sometimes
recognizes a variety of goods, of which wisdom is the
highest, he also, on occasion, designates this quality as
not merely the highest, but the only good. Such, in all
probability, was his thought in writing the present passage.
His reasoning remains faulty all the same, but his negative
conclusion becomes comprehensible as the converse of an
intelligible positive proposition. In wisdom, knowledge, or
virtue, he sees at once the quality which makes men good,
and the only good thing, that is, the one legitimate object
of human strivings.
The second paralogism which we encounter here may
be rapidly disposed of. Plato had first of all illustrated
the inferiority of the life of pleasure and desire by such
analogies as that of the leaky tub — comparisons to which,
as approximately faithful images of actual facts, consider-
able probative force must be allowed. But this is not
enough for the author of the " Gorgias." He is striving
after that formal rigour of proof with which his mathe-
matical studies have made him familiar. He wishes to
prove that the proposition, " Pleasure is a good," contains
a contradiction in itself. By "pleasure" he again means
only that species of it which is bound up with the satisfac-
tion of desire. There is, no doubt, considerable point in
the appeal, which he now makes explicitly, having already
suggested it by a figure, to the fact that ever}- satisfaction
of a desire or need implies a previous want, that is, a feeling
in some degree painful. But we can see no merit whatever
in the argument which follows, and which is put forward as
if it were conclusive, to the effect that because every
pleasure (of the kind considered) includes a pain in itself,
352 GREEK THINKERS.
it is therefore not a good, since good cannot contain evil.
To which it may be answered that the one thing is just as
possible and just as impossible as the other ; the principle
of contradiction is, if applicable at all to either case, equally
so to both. The truth is, of course, that it is applicable to
neither. For the psychical process connected with the
appeasement of a desire, say, with the slaking of thirst,
does not involve the coexistence of mutually exclusive
contradictories, such as are pleasure and pain, but only a
rapid succession of the two states.
9. This fallacy seems to us to be of less importance
than its root in Plato's mind. For, this time it is neither
insufficient logical training nor incomplete emancipation
from the bonds of language that has caused his error.
The same inner contradiction appears to him admissible in
one region of thought which is regarded as the lower, and
inadmissible in another, higher, region. We have here
touched on a point of no mean importance for the under-
standing of the whole dialogue.
Clear and certain traces of the doctrine of ideas will be
vainly sought for in the pages of the " Gorgias." But it
may be maintained with confidence that the spirit of the
new teaching already overshadows this work. It betrays
its presence by that distinction between the two spheres,
conceived as separated by a wide chasm, which we shall
soon find designated respectively as the world of true being
and the world of mere semblance. It betrays itself most
of all by a sentence thrown out casually in the " judgment
of the dead " — a sentence from which our present interpreta-
tion derives no little support — to the effect that corporeality
is an impediment to pure knowledge. Similarly, we shall
find the other Orphic and Pythagorean elements which
emerge in this dialogue employed in the construction and
the articulation of the doctrine of ideas.
The dialogue contains sundry other indications which
mark it as belonging to a transition period ; and is not
free from the contradictions characteristic of such works.
In a passage near the beginning of it, the Socratic doctrine,
" He who knows the good does it," is used as a weapon
NEW ETHICAL STANDARDS. 353
against Gorgias. It is urged that if the teacher of rhetoric
has imparted to his pupil the true knowledge of justice and
injustice, all misuse of rhetoric for unjust purposes becomes
impossible. But this accords ill with what we read further
on : " It is impossible to be freed from injustice in any
other way " (than by punishment). What then, we ask,
if the pupil was already affected with injustice ? How can
bare instruction remove the injustice from his soul ? Nor
do the words last quoted stand alone. Discipline and
punishment are referred to repeatedly, and with the
greatest emphasis, as the principal reforming and educating
agents. There is, further, more than one allusion to deeply
corrupted, and even incurably depraved souls, and this
although Socratism knows no source of evil but error, and
no remedy save instruction and enlightenment — a theory
with which the practice of the Cynics and the Cyrenaics, as
far as we are acquainted with it, was in complete agreement.
In the " Gorgias," on the other hand, as well as in later
works, Plato admits, both indirectly and explicitly, that
other impulses assist in the determination of the will
besides those that spring from (perfect or imperfect) know-
ledge. The evil will appears as an entirely independent
factor, like a disease which needs a cure, or an ulcer which
calls for excision. The Socratic intellectualism begins
to lose ground in favour of a less one-sided view of human
nature, which is destined, finally, to issue in the doctrine of
the three parts of the soul. It is true that at the same time
Plato holds firmly to such propositions as, " No one errs
of his own free will;" but they gradually acquire the
significance of what our historians of civilization call
"survivals." Plato allows them to stand unimpeached,
but unceasingly digs away their foundations from beneath
them.
As we have already hinted, it is Plato's ethics, and not
merely its psychological basis, that undergoes transforma-
tion. The change appears most unmistakably in that
passage of the "judgment of the dead" where souls are
spoken of as deformed by sin, and where "symmetry and
beauty " are treated as marks of moral goodness. A foreign
VOL. II. 2 A
354 GREEK THINKERS.
and dangerous substance, one might almost say an explosive,
is here introduced into the fabric of the Socratic ethics.
For who will vouch that the new canon of beauty will
always yield the same results as the old canon of utility ?
Here again, as we may remark by the way, Plato adds
to his intellectual property a new and valuable element,
which, though certainly not the whole of ethics, constitutes
a by no means despicable part of it. Fulness and con-
sistency never advance, pari passu, in the beginnings of a
system of thought or belief; sometimes in no part of its
history. The additions which are inevitable when account
is taken of previously neglected elements always occasion,
in the first instance, a loss of logical unity, until at last
an effort, sometimes a successful effort, is made towards
reconciliation.
Nor were such efforts wanting in the case of Plato. In
his last work, his philosophic testament, as it may be called,
he explicitly compares the several ethical standards —
"beauty and truth," "virtue and honour" — which, in the
" Gorgias," had appeared in merely casual juxtaposition ;
and he now asserts their entire compatibility, not only
with each other, but with that well-being which, almost on
the same page of the earlier work, was designated as the
end of life, and which is now once more analyzed into
pleasurable sensations. But the strength of his faith is
no longer what it was. In the " Gorgias " Plato proclaims
the coincidence of virtue and happiness as an axiomatic
verity ; he knows a thousand tongues will contradict him,
yet he thunders his message, with triumphant assurance,
into the ears of the world. It is not a little surprising,
after this, to find that, when he reaffirms the same thesis
in the " Republic," he is at pains to support it by a long-
drawn-out series of arguments, rising by a tortuous course
from the individual to society. Lastly, in the "Laws,"
when his race is run, the aged thinker holds, indeed, with-
out wavering, to the faith of his youth ; but it is rather
because he is inwardly penetrated by a sense of its salutary
influence than because he is convinced of its demonstrable
truth. He even lets slip the observation that, supposing the
" GORGIAS," "REPUBLIC," AND "LAWS." 355
whole arsenal of arguments should be found insufficient,
it would still be incumbent on every not wholly incompetent
legislator to come to the rescue, and, by means of a " lie
with a purpose" — the most useful of its kind — to make
provision for the education of mankind.
But for us, who are still at the " Gorgias," this is a long
way to look ahead. The old Socratic doctrine, " Moral
goodness and happiness are inseparably united," dominates
the dialogue. It has drawn new and strengthening nourish-
ment from the Orphic representation of wrong-doing as
something that invariably stains and burdens the soul. It
is further reinforced by the hopes of a hereafter and the
terrors of a world below which it derives from the same
source. Here, in brief, we have the inmost kernel of the
dialogue, on the origin and plan of which we desire to cast
one farewell glance before we pass on.
The deep resentment which had been aroused in Plato's
breast by the fate of his beloved master was kindled afresh
and fanned into fiercer flame by the condition of the State,
by the triumph of the party from whose midst had come
the author of that unhappy deed, and by the venomous
pamphlet of Polycrates, in which the master's memory was
blackened, and the disciples covered with obloquy. He
sought relief in an outburst of violent indignation, which
was directed, in the first place, against the statesmen of
Athens, and, in the second, against the art — rhetoric —
which was the instrument at once of their education and
of their power. This conflict issues, finally, in a duel, in
which Plato, single-handed, and speaking through the
mouth of Socrates, combats the whole of society, together
with all the makers and all the spokesmen of public
opinion — poets, musicians, teachers of youth. Even the
most revered elements are not spared. It is not without
a purpose that Plato names, among those with whom
Socrates places himself in antagonism, the personally most
blameless of contemporary statesmen, Nicias the son of
Niceratus. All the members of Athenian society, even
those of them who stand on the highest moral level,
labour, so he would suggest, under one great and decisive
356 GREEK THINKERS.
defect. They lack the Socratic faith in the indissoluble
oneness of justice and happiness ; and with this they
also lack that absolute and impregnable fixity of the
good will which excludes all possibility of lukewarmness
or vacillation.
Plato proceeds to develop his ideal, and presently holds
out what for him is the most important element in it as
the only fit object of study and pursuit. He begins by
rejecting all popular ideals, those professed openly as well
as those cherished in secret : hero-worship, the not wholly
unselfish rule of the most capable, the life of unbridled
pleasure-seeking. Having eliminated these, he proceeds,
with increasing earnestness, to explain the one thing
needful, and sketches a pattern in which the features of
strict Socratism are blended with those of the Orphic and
Pythagorean faith. To the former category belong the
indifference to all externals which is here carried, to speak
with Callicles, to the length of " turning the whole of life
inside out." Nowhere else does Plato stand so near his
fellow-pupil Antisthenes as in the " Gorgias." It is not
only that they entirely agree in their condemnation of the
statesmen (cf. p. 154), nor that they display a common
contempt for all the ordinary goals of human action, with-
out excepting the labours of those who work for the safety
of the State. They are also at one in their depreciation of
" pleasure," which elsewhere in Plato appears as an element
of happiness, and is here regarded almost exclusively from
the standpoint of the appeasement of desire. The most
powerful are, in general, also the worst of men — such is the
import of a passage in the "judgment of the dead" which
is entirely Cynic in colouring (cf. p. 159). In the same
passage we are told that the wise are those who may hope
most confidently for blessedness hereafter — a pronounce-
ment in harmony with the Orphic teachings handed down
to us by Pindar and Empcdocles. Thus, in the midst of
that majestic finale, Socratism and Orphic Pythagoreanism,
Plato's two guides for the remainder of his life, join hands
together.
Out of the fusion of these elements will crrow the
A FAREWELL GLANCE AT THE " GORGIAS." S57
system of thought which occupies the central and principal
phase in our philosopher's development.
To expound this doctrine of the soul and of ideas will
shortly be our task. But before we approach it, we must
first spend some little time by the way.
15§ GREEK THINKERS.
CHAPTER VI.
PLATO'S "EUTHYPHRO" AND " MENO."
I. Far be from us the presumption of assigning to every
dialogue of Plato its exact position in the series of his
works. Still, there are among these writings some which,
apart from their inclusion in a definite group, may with
certainty be pronounced anterior to some dialogues and
posterior to others. Such a dialogue is the " Euthyphro."
We have good grounds for the view that it followed the
" Protagoras " and the " Gorgias " and preceded the
." Republic." What these grounds are will appear in our
analysis of this little work, the general plan of which is as
follows : —
Socrates and Euthyphro meet hard by the office of the
magistrate known as the " King Archon." They ask each
other what occasion has brought them together there.
Socrates has been summoned to appear before the court.
The accusation proceeds from a young and little-known
man. " Meletus, I think, is his name. Do you know him ?
Perhaps you remember his lank hair, his scrubby beard,
and his hawk nose?" Not even so much as this is
known by Euthyphro of the man who has dared to bring
an accusation against Socrates on a capital charge. Yet
Meletus — so Socrates himself remarks with scathing
sarcasm— is taking hold of politics by the right end ; he
begins by protecting the youth against their corrupters,
just as a careful gardener sees first of all to the welfare of
the still tender shoots. Euthyphro, on the other hand, is
not a defendant, but an accuser; moreover, it is his own
THE NATURE OF PIETY. 359
father whom he wishes to prosecute. The facts of the
case are as follows : His father possesses an estate in the
island of Naxos. A day-labourer employed by him killed
one of his slaves in a drunken brawl. This labourer was
thereupon bound hand and foot and thrown into a ditch,
and a messenger sent to Athens to bring back instructions
on the procedure to be adopted against the murderer.
But before the messenger returned, hunger and cold had
made an end of the life which had been treated with such
scant respect. The son now considers himself under an
obligation to bring the case before a court of justice, lest
the blood-guiltiness of his father, which has aroused the
displeasure of the gods, should go unpunished. Socrates
disapproves of an action so contrary to natural duty. But
Euthyphro, who is a soothsayer by profession, vaunts his
accurate acquaintance with divine law. Socrates welcomes
the opportunity of deepening his knowledge of such
matters ; it will, as he hopes, turn to his advantage in his
coming trial. Thus the ground is prepared for a thorough-
going discussion of the esseiica .oX_pieJ;y.
In reply to the question — What is pious, and what
impious ? Euthyphro at first merely refers _to_ Jthe^idass of
inst-.-inr.cs._tfi which his o\vn action belongs. It is pious, he ^/
says, to accuse evil-doers, and, in so doing, to spare neither
father nor mother nor any one else. He finds " strong
confirmation " of this maxim in the eynmple _ get- hy the
gods. Did not Zeus dethrone Cronos because he devoured
his own children ? and did not Cronos himself, for a similar
cause, mutilate his father Uranus ? Socrates raises diffi-
culties. War^ strife, and hatred among the gods have
alw.-iys seemed jo_Jiim_incredible things. It is possrble
that precisely this negative attitude of his towards those
old tales may have something to do with the indictment
of Meletus. Still, he would gladly take this opportunity
of being taught better by an expert. But, first of all, he
would like a plain answer to his question. For Euthyphro
has not as yet delivered his opinion on the essence of piety,
but only mentioned particular cases of it.
Euthyphro accedes to this request, and informs Socrates
^60 GREEK THINKERS.
that 'Jprous "_mgans pleasing to the gods, " impious " dis-
pleasing to them. Delighted as he is with the manner of
this answer, Socrates is not entirely satisfied with its sub-
stance. Moreover, the objection which rises to his lips is
one which Euthyphro has himself suggested, by his talk
of the conflicts and en mities__QLth£_gods. What is pleasing
to one god may very well be displeasing to another ; one
and the same thing may, for aught we know, be hated by
Cronos and loved by Zeus, be acceptable to Hephaestus
and an abomination to Hera. /fhi.s uncertainty, too^would
affect questions of good and evil, of fair and foul, of just
and unjust ; not such matters as admit of exact determi-
nation by weight, measure, and number. This objection
is surmounted by a^restrictive addition : that is^pious
which is pleasing tpf all the gods. But a new question at
once presents Kse\(—ts_that which is pious pious because it
Jtleasefjh^ with it becauseU is
pivusf^ ^
Of these alternatives the second is preferred,* on
grounds to which we shall return later on. But, on this
view, the preceding discussion has failed of its end ; it has
not brought to light the essence of piety, but only an
accidental attribute of it; ±he factv namely, that it is
pleasing to the - gods^ Here ends the first, negative,
portion of the dialogue, the barrenness of which becomes
a subject of jesting to both interlocutors. Socrates himself
alludes to his profession of statuary, and to the ancestor
of his guild, Daedalus, who was reported to have made
statues which moved ; even so, none of their conclusions
will consent to stand firm. But this gibe, he goes on to
say, is not quite in place ; for it was Euthyphro who was
responsible for those conclusions. To which Euthyphro
replies, "As far as I am concerned, they would never
budge an inch ; you are the Daedalus that has breathed
into them a spirit of unrest."
The discussion is beginning to flag, when Socrates
gives it a new and powerful impulse. On-T^-initia±ive,
the concept of " piety " is subsumed under that of "justice."
The latter is expressly designated as the " more extensive,
HOW CAN A/EN SERVE THE GODS? 36 1
/
,for tlic-pkui^ia_a^43arf^Lthe^just.M It becomes of impor-
tance to distinguish tkat_part_5f4u^ic^\yliich xelalcs to^tbe
gods ancLthe "service of_the^ods " from the part which
relates. JxLjaien. The, word we have translated " service "
may also be rendered "tendance,*" and is used as well of
the care bestowed on domestic animals as of the worship
paid to the gods. In regard to the former of these two
uses, it appears, on closer examination, that such care or
" tendance " is directed towards the welfare of the object
tended. The question is accordingly asked — Hdw=-=£k»es
this tendance prefrt-4ke_gods ? Are we to suppose that by
our pious actions_\ve_make the gods_better than tjiey wpre ?
The tendance due to the gods must rather be interpreted
as '^sej3Qcjg_" in thgjriarrower sense^as analogous to that
which is rendered by servants to their master. This species
of service is now examined more closely.
He who serves a physician, a shipbuilder, an architect,
assists^ towards the aitajmri^nt_of_an end — the restoration
of health, the construction of a ship or a house. What
then — thus Socrates questions Euthyphro, who is " so well
informed on things divine " — what is that " marvellous
work, in the doing of which the -gods, use us as their
servants " ? As no satisfactory answer is forthcoming,
Socrates lends a helping hand. He points out that
"victory in war" is the "chief part" of a general's work,
that " the obtaining of food from the earth " is the principal
achievement of the farmer, and he desires to be told, with
equal clefiniteness, what is the most important part of the
work of the gods. Euthyphro, however, is unable to
satisfy him, and Socrates expresses his disappointment in
words which point the way towards the understanding of
the dialogue : " You might have told me in a few words,
if you had liked, what that chief part is ; but you were
unwilling to instruct me. ( Otherwise you would not have
turned away again when you were so near the goal\" It
has long been recognized that in this passage Plato desires
to suggest the solution of the riddle, and that this solution,
as is gathered more particularly from the " Republic," would
run somewhat as follows : " TiiC-_WQrk_QX.tbi. gxuis-is^the
362 GREEK THINKERS.
good, and to be_^ious Js^Jtobe the organ of their will, as
thus~olrected."
But, to go back a little, Euthyphro, an orthodox
adherent of the popular religion and a believer in holiness
by works, explains piety as consisting in sacrifice and
prayer. Socrates has little difficulty in bringing these two
actions under the more general heads of giving_jmiL-
asking. He proceeds to elicit the admission that men
cannot give to the gods anything which is of any use to
the latter ; and that piety, on this view of its nature, is
reduced to a kind of " trading," in which the gods, who
give us every good gift and get nothing of value in return,
have very much the worst of the bargain. Euthyphro,
who has followed this argument with growing uneasiness,
withdraws to a position of greater safety by insisting that
offerings brought to the-gods are to be regarded as gifts
of honourpas^fce-kens of reverence whiclt-wm-thetr-good will.
Socrates draws his attention to the fact that the pious has
once more been resolved into that which pleases the gods.
Thus the investigation has ended exactly where it began.
" My art," says Socrates, jestingly, " is even superior to that
of my ancestor, Daedalus, for I not only make my figures
—the arguments — move, as you say I do, but I cause them
to revolve in a circle, which brings them back to their
starting-point." He goes on to say that he is greatly dis-
appointed, and complains bitterly that the knowledge
which might be of the highest value to him in his defence
against Meletus, is being withheld from him by the
selfish obstinacy of Euthyphro. For no one can possibly
imagine that a son could bring himself to act in such a
manner towards his aged father unless he were possessed
of the most exact information on the nature of piety and
impiety.
2. The purpose of the dialogue is no doubt in part
apologetic. It cannot be for no cause that the figure of
Meletus appears behind that of Euthyphro. The one is
the counterpart of the other. Ro^^fthejji_take--their
st ai^-on-4liQHe__traditional opinipns_on_th?rigs divine whir.h
the Socratic cross-exainination shows to be confused and
THE PURPOSE OF THE " EUTHYPHRO." 363
self-contradictory. Chastisement is meted out to the
criminal levity which, on the strength of such chaotic views,
presumes to threaten the life, in the one case of a father,
in the other of a national benefactor. But the aim of the
dialogue goes considerably further than this. Not only
does the criticism of prevalent religious teaching possess an
independent value of its own ; it is a mistake to ascribe to
the dialogue, as was formerly customary, a purely sceptical
or negative tendency. Against such a view is to be set
the manner in which Socrates himself, that is to say Plato,
comes forward, at the critical stage of the discussion, with
a suggestion that raises it above the level of mere criticism
— we refer to his attempt to subsume piety under the
concept of justice. There is also that near approach to a
positive result which is indicated to us by the significant v
hint already mentioned (" . . . when you were so near the
goal "). The possibility of recognizing these facts is due
to a comparison with the " Republic ; " and the same
parallel affords us a deeper insight into the motives which
guided Plato in the composition of the " Euthyphro," besides
assisting towards a determination of its chronological
position.
In the " Gorgias," no less than in the " Protagoras,"
piety is reckoned among the chief virtues. It is placed by
the side of justice, and distinguished from it as regulating
the relations of men towards the gods, while justice
regulates those of men towards each other. Plato after-
wards abandoned this standpoint ; in the " Republic " he
acknowledges only four virtues out of the five, and it is
precisely piety that has disappeared. Not that he ever
took up an attitude of indifference towards religion. The
difference is simply this — that he has ceased to recognize
a special sphere of duty having exclusive reference to the
Deity or the divine. The change involves no diminution,
rather an increase, of reverence for the Deity, which is
more and more identified with the principle of good itself ;
it implies an ever-widening divergence from popular anthro-
pomorphism. Piety, viewed in this light, becomes a dis-
position of mind accompanying well-doing, with a reference
364 GREEK THINKERS.
towards the Source of all good. Sacrifice and prayer, so
we may expand the thought suggested in the " Euthyphro,"
are valuable as expressions of such a disposition, when it
has depth and sincerity ; otherwise they are of no value
at all.
With this changed conception of piety we can hardly
avoid connecting the criticism bestowed on the myths, the
rejection of those legends which presuppose among the
gods, war, hate, enmity, and therefore the opposites of
goodness and justice. The second book of the " Republic "
here supplies a copious commentary to the curt text of the
" Euthyphro." Criticism of the myths, and that rejection
of anthropomorphism on which such criticism rests, had
long ago found entrance into the schools of the philosophers.
Xenophanes, as our readers will remember, had paved the
way for them. Since then the ethical regeneration of
religion, as we have shown by the example of the tragedians,
had made continuous progress. But we may conjecture
that Plato does more here than simply follow the stream
of contemporary thought ; that he is, in fact, specially
influenced by Orphic doctrines. The " fall of the soul by
sin" (cf. Vol. I. p. 128, sqq.) was meant to trace the origin
of evil within the circle of human existence, back to free
choice and individual initiative, and, to this extent at least,
to relieve the Deity from responsibility for evil — a theory
which, no doubt, also involved a limitation of divine power.
These same paths of thought we shall see trodden by Plato.
But how was it possible for him — the attentive reader
lay perhaps ask — to distil out of accepted religious ideas,
)y the mere analysis of concepts^ a new view of piety, alien
tp the national consciousness ? Is everything quite square
in this discussion ? Certainly not, we reply, without, for
all that, desiring to assail Plato's good faith by a single
breath. He is under the spell of what we have taken the
liberty to call the superstition of concep-ts. He fully believes
that he is merely extracting from traditional judgments of
value their genuine kernel, divested of contradictions and
confusions, while, in reality, he is substituting for them
something entirely different. There are two points at
,L(TGI£AJ~U£FECTS OF THE " EUTHYREULpA 365
which this process of unconscious transformation is clearly
apparent.
Socrates, after suggesting that the concept of piety may
be subsumed under that of justice, wins and keeps the
assent of Euthyphro to this proposition. But in so doing
he commits, as appears on closer examination, an act of
log[oil_yiojejice. For the subordination in question is one
which it is entirely impossible to deduce from the promise
supplied Jay -the popular faith of which Euthyphro is the
r^pre^efttatmr. One of the most keen-sighted interpreters
of Plato, one, too, who has done much towards the elucida-
tion of this dialogue, Hermann Bonitz, endeavoured to
cloak the violent character of this procedure by ascribing
to the Greek word which corresponds to our "justice" a
wider meaning, " mprality " in general. He also pointed to
certain casual combinations of words, such as " pious and
just," " pious and lawful," as proving how near to each
other were the corresponding concepts in the mind of the
Greeks. But neither expedient seems to us admissible.
The family of words to which "just" and "justice"
belong does indeed betray a tendency to stand for " right-
doing " in general, but even then only in the sense of the
social morality that regulates human relations. And the
frequent occurrence of the formulas quoted, while it may
rightly be held to prove the close affinity of the concepts
in question, fails entirely to establish the particular relation-
ship ascribed to them ; for it was never the mode to connect
genus and species by the word " and." -Ca-ordinntion nnd
subordination — arc twu. indubitably different things ; the
popular mind may have agreed with the " Gorgias "
in assuming the former relation, or with the "Euthyphro"
in preferring the letter but it n;mnnt possibly have done
hath. together — ^
,-f"r" \Ve pass on to the second point — the discussion of the
/ question whether the ^iii2Us_jsj2ious bccause_jjL_is--plca>; i 1 1 g
to £he gods, or whether._the crods are, please*! -\vtt-h — i-t-
l^-c^n^e it^js pious. The decision in favour of the second
; alternative is without doubt to be regarded as homage
1 paid to human reason, on behalf of which a declaration of
366 GREEK THINKERS.
autonomy is hereby put forth. But the mode in which
this decision is arrived at is open, in our opinion, to grave
rTpgicai-efejectlQ^. Plato is seeking to prove that the concept
under investigation cannot have for its content that which
is pleasing to, or loved by, the gods. To speak of some-
thing as " loved " implies, he contends, an object which is
loved as well as a subject which loves, as much so in the
case of loving as in that of leading or carrying. He then
emphasizes the idea of causality, with the remark, that
whether a thing is loved, led, or carried, there must be some
reason for it. All this may be quite true and yet not involve
the conclusion, which is tacitly but unmistakably drawn from
%.r that- the rnrij^nFor^li^ independent^
^jjjpjji^r^ will -amLpleasure ofjjjyjne beings. The possibility
remains open that the object— loved by the gods^may_ be
that^ quality of submissiveness_ to divine commajads, which
is, common to certain actions and dispositions of mind.
This is the position^To^Tcatly^un assailable — which many
believers in revealed religion have taken up. He who
brieves he- has- sufficient guarantee for the authenticity of
particular announcements of the divine -will, and who
further feels himself constrained to obey that will, whether
by fear, by hope, by love, or a combination of motives —
such a one will decide the question in the sense rejected by
Plato. Like certain nominalists of the Middle Ages, he
may re£Q^uice--a4Latternpts to -rationalize the idea of piety ;
he may frankly admit the ''omnipotence of the divine
pleasure," and yet affirm that, whatever may be the out-
come of the divine will, obedience to that will, or "what
is pleasing to God," comprises for him the whole content
of piety.
The above was already written, when my attention was
called to the surprising parallel presented to the funda-
mental thoughts of the " Euthyphro " by Kant's " Religion
within the Limits of Unassisted Reason." If the thinker of
Konigsberg had desired to illustrate Plato's dialogue, he
could hardly have expressed himself otherwise than in the
following passage, which was written without any reference
to it : —
PLATO AND KANT. 367
". RHicrinn 1^ the rpcpo-nition of all our duties as divine
£a«uiiaiids_ . . By this generic definition of religion
provision is made against the erroneous notion that it is
an aggregate of particular duties, having immediate
reference to God, and we are guarded from the assumption
that in addition to the civic duties of man towards man,
there is an obligation to render court-services, and that zeal
in the latter may possibly atone for neglect of the former.
In a universal religion there are no special duties towards
God ; He can receive nothing from us ; we cannot act either
upon Him or in His behalf. If any one finds such a
duty in the reverence due to God, he does not reflect
that this is no particular act of religion, but a religious
temper accompanying all our acts of duty without
distinction."
3. The second of the two dialogues which we feel com-
pelled to place after the " Gorgias," while deficient in the
well-rounded symmetry of the first, is no less full of matter.
Indeed, the " Meno " may perhaps be said to suffer from
repletion ; it is possibly the exuberant wealth of thought
that has injured its artistic form. Without any word of
preparation or introduction, the young Thessalian Meno
puts to Socrates the question, " Can you tell me whether
virtue can be taught, or whether it is acquired by practice,
or whether it comes to man in some third way, whether
by natural endowment or otherwise ? " Socrates declares
his inability to answer the question. How could he know
how virtue is acquired, when the very nature of virtue is
still for him a matter of uncertainty. Meno, however,
who in his own country has enjoyed the instruction of
Gorgias, will doubtless be more exactly informed on this
point. The youth takes up the challenge by defining the
virtue of man as civic efficiency, and that of woman as
obedience to her husband and skill in housekeeping, lie
intimates his readiness to go on and delimit, in like manner,
the virtue of the free man and the slave, of the boy, the
girl, and the greybeard. Socrates, however, does not want
to be introduced to a " swarm of virtues," but to virtue
itself in its unit)-. This, according to Meno, is the capacity
368 GREEK THINKERS.
of ruling men. Against this definition two objections are
raised. It is not applicable to the virtue of the boy or the
slave, and, even within the sphere of its applicability, it
stands in need of limitation : rule must always be exercised
in accordance with justice. But justice is itself a virtue,
and cannot, therefore, serve in the definition of virtue in
general. As such logical refinements are strange to Meno,
the ethical investigation is interrupted by a discussion of a
different subject, which is meant to be a sort of preparatory
training. The concepts of form and colour are subjected
to examination, and form is stated to be that which is
always associated with colour. This definition is rejected
as implying a reference to that which is as yet unknown.
The following is then proposed as a pattern of correct
definition : " Form is the limit of the corporeal." It is now
the turn of colour ; the definition offered is that of Gorgias,
and rests on the Empedoclean physics : " Colour is an
efflux of the corporeal, corresponding to sight (that is, to
the pores in the organ of vision), and affecting perception."
This definition is criticized as being high-sounding, but in
reality inferior to the second definition of form — perhaps
on the ground that it relates to the physical conditions of
the colour-sensation, not the sensation itself.
A return is now made to the ethical subject, and Meno
professes agreement with certain words of a lyric poet :
"To rejoice in the beautiful and to be capable of it." The
context of this phrase is not known to us, but it can hardly
have meant anything else than, " Receptivity for all that is
beautiful (noble, good), combined with the corresponding
active faculties." From these words of the poet the young
Thessalian is represented as extracting, not without some
violence, a definition of the virtuous man : it is the man
who desires the beautiful, or honourable, and is able to
obtain it. This attempt is analyzed with thoroughness.
First of all, the beautiful or honourable is identified with
the good. Then follows the assertion, in conformity with
the Socratic teaching, that no one ever desires what is evil,
knowing it to be such. The distinguishing excellence of
the virtuous cannot, therefore, consist in the universal desire
THE SUBSTANCE OF THE "MENO? 369
for what is good ; and the main weight of the definition is
now made to rest on the second clause, which relates to the
acquisition of the good. But this acquisition must be by
means which piety and justice allow ; thus, as justice is
itself a part of virtue, we are once more landed in a vicious
circle. The definition includes a reference to a part of the
thing to be defined. Meno here launches into a complaint
against the Socratic manner. He has now learnt by
personal experience, so he declares, what he had often
before heard from others — that Socrates is only able to
confuse and to disconcert. He compares the Socratic cross-
examination to the electric shock of a torpedo. This fish
benumbs those whom it touches ; and similarly he, Meno,
is "benumbed in mouth and soul," and does not know what
to answer. He now understands why Socrates never leaves
his native place. Abroad, he might very easily find himself
on his trial for witchcraft. Socrates replies that the com-
parison with the torpedo would be appropriate only if that
fish were itself numb and communicated its own condition
to others. For he is himself a searcher, and does no more
than impart to others a perplexity which is first his own.
His expression of readiness to continue the search and
investigation is met by Meno with the proposition that
search and investigation are impossibilities. The object
sought is either already known, and then the search is
unnecessary ; or else it is not known, and then the searcher
will not recognize it, even if he finds it.
Our readers will remember a certain sceptical utterance
of Xenophanes to which the second part of this proposition
bears a strong resemblance — a resemblance which appears
with the greatest clearness in the original Greek. At the
same time, they will not have forgotten that this scepticism
of Xenophanes was limited to the domain of the super-
sensual, in regard to which verification is beyond our reach.
Though Socrates, rightly enough, applies the epithet
" eristic " to the proposition thus generally stated, he at the
same time takes it in serious earnest, and opposes to it the
doctrine of Reminiscence, which, in its turn, he founds on
the dogma of immortality and the transmigration of souls.
VOL. II. 2 B
370 GREEK THINKERS.
He cites lines of the poet Pindar, to the Orphic-Pythagorean
content of which he joins the inference that the soul, in the
course of its pilgrimage, has seen all and experienced all,
so that all seeking and learning is nothing else than
recollection. There is no impossibility, "seeing that the
whole of nature is inwardly related, and the soul has learnt
everything," in the supposition that a single memory may
be basis enough for the recovery, by courageous and inde-
fatigable search, of all that has been forgotten. Meno is
incredulous, but the truth of the assertion is made clear to
him by an example. His young slave is called forward,
geometrical figures are drawn in the sand, and the boy is
led, entirely by the method of question and answer, to
acknowledge, or rather to enounce spontaneously, a few
elementary propositions in geometry. The inference is
drawn that by the same means he may attain to the
understanding, not only of geometry, but of all science ;
and that, since no positive instruction is imparted, but a
knowledge of which he was previously unconscious, is, as it
were, elicited from him, this knowledge must have been
slumbering in his soul, and he must have acquired it in a
former existence.
The investigation is assisted in yet another manner by
the geometer. The latter does not always return a direct
answer to a given question, but sometimes pronounces a
problem solvable on a particular assumption. The main
problem of the dialogue, " Can virtue be taught ? " is
treated in a similar way. Virtue, it is affirmed, can be
taught if it is a kind of wisdom or knowledge. The validity
of the hypothesis is proved as follows : Virtue is a good
in all circumstances. All goods are useful. But they can
only be useful when rightly used. This is true, not only of
such goods as health, strength, beauty, riches ; qualities of
the soul, courage, for example, are no less capable of doing
harm as well as good, according to the use made of them.
Right use, however, is conditioned by knowledge. "All
activities and operations of the soul issue in happiness,
when they are guided by wisdom, and in the opposite of
happiness when they are guided by folly." If, then, virtue
ENTER ANYTUS. 37 I
is a quality of the soul, and is at the same time necessarily
useful, it must be wisdom.
The goal of the investigation thus appears to have been
reached by an indirect path ; and not only the possibility of
teaching virtue, but also its essence, seem to be established.
But the spirit of doubt awakes once more. This time it
takes a form with which our study of the " Protagoras "
has already made us familiar. If a subject can be taught,
must there not be teachers and students of it ? At this
point Anytus appears, most opportunely, as Socrates says,
and seats himself by the interlocutors. (We catch here a
glimpse of the same stage-setting that has already done
duty so often : a semicircle or other resting-place in some
locality accessible to the public, probably in the ante-room
or the precincts of a gymnasium.) The new-comer is the
son of the rich and sensible Anthemion, a man who has
acquired his wealth, not by gift, like the Theban Ismenias,
lately enriched by Persian bribes, but by his own industry
and ability. The son of such a father has no doubt been
well brought up, and has received a good education ; how
else would the Athenians have placed him in the highest
posts ? Here is a man who may be fitly questioned about
teachers of virtue, and who will be able to say whether
there are any or not. Thus Anytus, who is, moreover,
bound to Meno by ties of hospitality, is drawn into the
discussion.
The dialogue now descends from the heights of abstract
generality to the lower levels of actual facts. Asked
whether the teachers sought for may not be found in the
sophists, Anytus, who holds that class of men in abhorrence,
answers by an outburst of violent abuse, introduced, doubt-
less, for the purpose of displaying the speaker's irritable
temper and his hostility to culture — an hostility which will
one day make him the accuser of Socrates. The sophists,
however, who are not followers of Socrates, and who, in
respect of fundamental ethical problems, are no wiser than
their public, are not accepted by Plato, any more than by
Anytus, as the true and genuine teachers of virtue. These
are now sought for in a new quarter — in the ranks of the
372 GREEK THINKERS.
great statesmen. Thus we are faced once more by the
second of the difficulties raised in the " Protagoras : " Why
do statesmen not impart their own virtue and excellence
to their sons after them ? For our attention is a second
time called to the failure of paternal education ; moreover,
four statesmen are mentioned by name whose sons have
remained far in the rear of their fathers' greatness. The
selection of instances exhibits, in part, a remarkable agree-
ment with the " Gorgias," and, in part, a no less remarkable
divergence. Anytus follows the discussion with growing
uneasiness — doubtless because his own son is anything but
a triumph of education. His irritation at length finds
expression in an exhortation to prudence, or rather in an
unmistakable threat, which he addresses to Socrates. The
two are once more alone, and the result of the discussion,
in its present stage, is pronounced self-contradictory. Two
equally cogent syllogisms confront each other in un-
appeasable opposition : —
1. Virtue is knowledge ;
Knowledge can be taught :
Therefore virtue can be taught.
2. Knowledge can be taught ;
Virtue cannot be taught :
Therefore virtue is not knowledge.
But here this dilemma is not the last word of the
investigation. Not in vain have complaints been voiced
against the resultless and purely negative character of
Socratic discussions. A way of escape from the irrecon-
cilable antinomies is provided by the distinction between
scientific knowledge and right opinion. The former is, and
remains, " by far the more valuable." Its greater worth
rests on its permanence. But right opinion, when it is
present in the mind, may replace the rarer and less easily
attainable possession. If we are seeking the way to Larissa,
Meno's home, and no one is at hand who has already passed
over the road and knows it well, good service may yet be
rendered us by a guide who, without knowledge, has right
SCIENCE AND OP IN IOW 373
opinion. The only difference is that opinions are fugitive ;
they run away from the mind as a slave from his master,
and they must be bound fast before they can attain their
full value. The work of binding them is performed by the
apprehension of grounds or causes, which, assisted by the
Reminiscence already spoken of, transforms the fleeting
opinions into permanent knowledge. The successful states-
men who, as has already been seen, are unable to impart
their own excellence to others, do not possess scientific
knowledge, but only right opinion. In this they resemble
soothsayers and poets, to whom right opinion comes as a
divine gift.
A solution has thus been found for a part, though not
the whole, of the difficulties raised. For the remainder, as
the disputants admit, a solution is still to seek, and it is
urged that the question, " Can virtue be taught ? " cannot
rightly receive a final answer until the nature of virtue has
been ascertained. With these admissions, and with the
significant request, addressed to Meno, that he will bring
his friend Anytus to a gentler frame of mind — a change
" which will be to the advantage of the Athenians " — we
reach the end of the dialogue, on which not a little yet
remains to be said.
4. The " Meno " is for us a biographical document of no
mean rank. Here for the first time we, in a manner, find
ourselves sitting at Plato's feet. For the dialogue bears
the unmistakable stamp of its author's vocation. His mind
is busy with questions of method, and these constitute for
him a link between widely separated provinces of know-
ledge ( hypothetical reasoning). lie arranges a preparatory
exercise, in which the pupil is braced for his attack upon a
more difficult problem (the definition of form). His work
as teacher has broadened his horizon ; the dialectical
student of ethics has become a thinker whose survey
embraces a number of particular sciences. He already
knows by experience the propaedeutic value of mathematical
instruction. He has observed with astonishment how the
deductive procedure leads the pupil to results which he
almost appears to spin out of himself, thus displaying a
3 74 GREEK THINKERS.
knowledge which has never been communicated to him.
Nor are these the only instances in which the practice of
teaching has introduced him to new problems. He has
been led to question the possibility of learning and teaching
in general. Thus he has been conducted to a theory of
knowledge of which his earlier works — apart from an
isolated hint in the " Gorgias " (corporeality as an impedi-
ment to knowledge) — present no trace. " His earlier
works," we say, and we are prepared to prove that the
phrase is no empty assertion. This same proof, however,
is bound up most intimately with the question as to the
true aim of the dialogue.
The " Meno " is a point of junction in the scheme of
Plato's writings. In it threads are gathered together which
proceed from two different dialogues. Two such threads
stretch across from the " Protagoras." There, as here, we
find discussed the two problems : (i) How can virtue be
knowledge, and therefore communicable by teaching, when
it is impossible to point to any teachers of it ? (2) How,
on the same hypothesis, can the fact be explained that
excellent statesmen do not educate their sons to equal
excellence with themselves ? In the " Meno," as we have
seen, the second of these difficulties finds its solution ; and
it is precisely this circumstance (as was long ago perceived
by Schleiermacher) which establishes the relative dates of
the two dialogues beyond controversy. For it would be a
sheer absurdity to lay afresh before the reader a problem
which had already been solved. Closely connected with
the fundamental distinction between " scientific knowledge "
and " right opinion," there meets us that more indulgent
judgment of Athenian statesmen which offers so note-
worthy a contrast with the venomous scorn poured out
upon them in the " Gorgias." This contrast could not fail
to attract attention permanently ; and, since these are no
writings of a 'prentice hand, it was without doubt intended
to be noticed. In the present, as in the former dialogue,
four statesmen of the first rank arc named ; two of them
are the same in both, the two others vary in accordance
with the needs of the context In the «' Gorpias " the
THE STATESMEN REHABILITATED. 375
statesmen are declared to have exercised no influence
whatever for good ; in the " Meno " they are still accorded
no more than the second place after the philosophers, but
there is no more contemptuous brushing aside of names
held in universal respect. Which is the more probable
hypothesis ? That Plato intentionally emphasized his
advance from a moderate to an immoderate paradox, and
his abandonment of the well-thought out, carefully con-
structed theory on which the former rested ? Or that he
desired to give the reader a sufficiently intelligible hint that
he had at last learnt to mitigate and limit an extravagant
opinion, which wounded the strongest feelings of his
countrymen ? The latter, without a doubt ; and for this
reason the " Meno " must be put later, not only than the
" Protagoras," but also than the " Gorgias."
Here we may give expression to a conjecture that this
" apology " to the statesmen of Athens is nothing less than
the main feature and raison d'etre of the whole dialogue.
It occupies the closing portion of the work, and remains in
our minds as a parting impression. From this point of
view, too, the general plan of the dialogue may be ex-
plained. For the purposes of a palinode to the "Gorgias"
— to use a strong, perhaps too strong, expression — there
was need of an appropriate form, one which should spare
the author's self-respect as much as possible. Accordingly,
the plan commended itself to him of tacking his retractation
to a discussion of the second of the difficulties raised in the
" Protagoras." It is true that in the last-named work Plato
almost certainly inclined to the opinion that the statesmen
were lacking in wisdom, and that their manifold failures
as educators helped to prove the fact. But he had by no
means expressed that opinion with the same harsh bluntness
as in the " Gorgias ; " rather he had appeared to leave the
decision hanging in the balance. Thus it was easy for an
ingenious author, never at a loss for an expedient, to make
a show of returning to the question, as one still unanswered,
in a dialogue the personages of which are represented, not,
we may be sure, without a deep-lying reason, as hungering
for positive solutions, as weary of everlasting banter and
37 6 GREEK THINKERS.
mystification. The famous image of the torpedo is not, in
our opinion, applicable to the historical Socrates alone.
Plato himself, at the threshold of the positive portion of
the dialogue, allows himself to be swayed by the long
unsatisfied desires of his readers, and presents them with
the expositions which so fully occupy the remainder of the
work. And although the latter are by no means destitute
of independent interest (when did Plato ever write anything
that was ?), the goal to which they all lead is the above-
mentioned " apology " to the statesmen.
We have still to consider the objection that this apology
is meant ironically — an unfortunate conjecture of Schleier-
macher's, which we need not controvert at great length.
Praise ironically meant must, before everything else, be
inappropriate or exaggerated. But what contemporary of
Plato, in particular what Athenian, could have viewed in
that light the position assigned to Athenian statesmen in
the " Meno," where they rank as second to the " philo-
sophers ;" that is, to Socrates and his disciples ? "A truly
strange order of merit," ninety-nine out of a hundred
readers would probably exclaim, " and one which is any-
thing but just to our great men ! " That more than justice
had been done to them, is an idea which not even the
hundredth reader would have entertained for a moment.
How, in such circumstances, was the idea of irony to occur
to any one ? Was it possibly suggested by the personality
of the men whom Plato chose as representatives of their
class ? This point deserves a little consideration.
Of the four men whom Plato condemns so mercilessly
in the " Gorgias," two — Themistocles and Pericles — re-
appear without change ; two others — Miltiades and Cimon
— are now necessarily passed over. Miltiades, the eminent
father of an eminent son, could not appropriately be
mentioned in a context which starts from the question :
Why do great statesmen not leave equally great sons
behind them ? Cimon, too, had to disappear, for the
reason, if for no other, that it would have been the height
of literary ineptitude to call attention, by naming the son
even without the father, to the one exception to the rule which
PLATO'S ALTERED TONE. T>77
the author is maintaining. Whom, then, do we find in the
two places thus vacated ? Thucydides, the son of Melesias,
and — Aristides ! This last name decides once for all the
question we are considering. And it would be equally
decisive of the point even if Plato had not taken care to
close up, as we may say, every avenue of error by the
warm and unstinted praise which, in the "Gorgias" itself,
that work so hostile to the statesmen, he bestows upon the
"just" son of Lysimachus.
Nor does it seem impossible to explain the difference
in tone and in attitude towards practical politics which
distinguishes the " Meno " from the " Gorgias." In the
latter, the keynote is flight from the world, and a defiant
turning away from reality ; in the former there is an
endeavour to do justice in some measure to actual society
and its more prominent representatives. In the one we see
a high-flying contempt of any and every compromise ; in
the other a search — often to be repeated — for a middle
course, a workable substitute for the intellectual and moral
perfection which is so hard of attainment. The voice which
speaks to us in the " Gorgias " is that of a disciple cut to
the quick by the attack upon his master, of an author whose
hands are still free, and whose project of founding a school
has been but lately conceived. Or, possibly, he has just
entered upon the work, his bosom swelled with proud and
measureless hopes which no experience has as yet taught
him to moderate. He is ridiculed for an unheard of
enterprise, deemed unworthy of his noble birth, and re-
proached for his avoidance of public life, his wasting of rich
gifts on logic-chopping and word-picking in the petty arena
of his lecture-hall. Against all which scorn and reproach,
on the part of friends and kinsmen perhaps still more
than of opponents, he puts on the armour of inflexible
obstinacy.
A few years have passed. The young school thrives,
though not without conflicts. To the master's feet there
throng ambitious youths, anxious to possess themselves of
the weapons needful for political strife. The interests of
the new institution, the demands it is required to fulfil, the
378 GREEK THINKERS.
quarrels it has to sustain, form so many links binding its
director closer to life. The charge of estrangement from
the world no longer leaves him indifferent. His self-
appreciation has become surer and more moderate ; for
which reason it now finds less violent expression. Nor
is caution still a despised virtue tfor him ; rivals are
busily spying out every joint in his harness. May we not
discern in this phase of Plato's emotional life — a phase to
be followed by others of very different kinds — the soil out
of which the " Meno " sprang ?
To the threads which connect our dialogue with the
" Protagoras " and the " Gorgias " there is joined another
which stretches forward to the " Phsedo." I mean the
retrospective reference in the last-named dialogue to the
doctrine of Reminiscence and to the exposition of it given
in the " Meno." Schleiermacher was fully justified in saying
that the author of the " Phsedo " alludes to the " Meno "
" perhaps more definitely and more explicitly than in any
other place to any earlier wrork." We are thus brought to
the works in which the doctrine of ideas is expounded, and
to these the next few sections will be devoted.
GOETHE ON GREEK LORE. 379
CHAPTER VII.
PLATO'S "SYMPOSIUM/'
I. ARISTOTLE speaks in a certain passage of Plato's " love-
speeches." The allusion is to the " Symposium ; " still,
the same designation might have been applied with almost
equal propriety to the greater part of the " Phaedrus."
So intimately connected in subject are these two dialogues,
which we are under the necessity of treating separately.
In both, considerable space is taken up by that particular
variety of erotic sentiment which played so large a part in
Greek life, and to which we are obliged to devote a few
observations, chiefly historical, if the content of the two
dialogues is to be understood aright.
Two years before his death, Goethe expressed himself to
the Chancellor Miiller in a manner which the latter reports
as follows : " He explained the true origin of that aberration
by the fact that, judged by the purely aesthetic standard, man
is far more beautiful, more excellent, nearer to perfection
than woman. Such a feeling, he said, having once arisen,
easily acquires a brutal, grossly material character. The
love of boys is as old as humanity, and may be said to be
contained in nature, although it is against nature." But, of
course, " the advances which civilization has made upon
nature must be held firmly and not abandoned on any
account."
Besides this aesthetic point of view, there are other
factors to be taken into consideration, of which the first is
that determination towards the male sex of the natural
instinct which occurs in the military life of primitive
^8o GREEK THINKERS.
o
peoples, and under various other conditions involving
scarcity of women. The great antiquity of this tendency
in the Greek race, particularly in the Dorian branch of it,
is attested by prehistoric rock-inscriptions on the island of
Thera, as also by deeply rooted customs of the Cretans
and Spartans. But there is also an ideal factor of con-
siderable strength which comes into play here — the relation
of fidelity between protector and protected, gratitude for
deliverance from danger, admiration for superior courage,
and that tender care of the younger and weaker, for which
the vicissitudes of war and migration offer such manifold
opportunity. Historical truth is here endangered by the
utter strangeness, to the minds of at least the great majority
among us, of this whole mode of feeling. In the case of all
ancient personalities with whom we feel lively sympathy,
words and actions having reference to the love of boys are
almost inevitably watered down by us or explained away
in a quite arbitrary manner ; . while we reject beforehand
any reports of this character, not wholly free from doubt,
which may be extant concerning them. It is necessary,
therefore, to remember that the sentiment in question
appeared in as many, if not more, varieties and grada-
tions, than the love of women at the present day. Here,
as elsewhere, a noble scion was often grafted upon a
savage stock. Devotion, enthusiastic, intense, ideal, was
not unfrequently the fruit of these attachments, the
sensual origin of which was entirely forgotten. Similar
phenomena are not uncommon to-day (we omit all refer-
ence to exceptionally constituted members of highly civi-
lized communities) among the Albanians, whose ancestors,
the Illyrians, were racially akin to the Hellenes. " The
aspect of a beautiful boy " — thus Johann Georg Hahn, the
author of " Albanian Studies," reproduces the utterances of
a son of the soil — " is purer than sunshine. ... It is the
highest and strongest passion of which the human breast is
capable. . . . When the loved one appears unexpectedly
before him, he changes colour. . . . He has eyes and ears
only for his beloved. He does not venture to touch him
with his hand ; he kisses him only on the brow ; he sings
VARIETIES OF SENTIMENT, 38 1
his verses in his honour only, never in that of a woman."
Soon we shall hear similar accents from Plato's lips.
But even where this erotic sentiment is not entirely
ennobled and transfigured, it is often restrained and held
in check by strong opposing forces. The Spartan king
Agesilaus, whose feelings and behaviour may be taken as
typical of the best society of his country, was highly sus-
ceptible to boyish beauty. But he strove, with all the
power at his command, not to make the least concession to
the impulses which were thus excited in him. Not for all
the gold in the world, so his companion Xenophon makes
him say on one occasion, would he renew the conflict which
lie once sustained victoriously, when he refrained from
kissing a boy whose beauty had bewitched him. Such
austere severity was far removed from the laxer temper of
the poet Sophocles, who, as his contemporary Ion relates,
when staying in the island of Chios, once enticed to himself
by a playful artifice a boy who had just given him to drink,
and stole a kiss from him. Here, in all probability, the
erotic impulse itself was weaker, as well as the resistance
offered to it. One might almost speak of trifling gallantry,
as opposed to strong, but bridled, passion. From such
examples we may learn that it is folly to pass wholesale
judgments on the phenomenon of " Greek love," to see in
some cases mere brutal instinct, in others entire freedom
from such inclinations, and thus to divide ancient humanity
into two sharply distinguished groups. It is true that we
find different epochs wearing very different aspects in regard
to this question.
In the picture of society which the Homeric poems
spread before us, the love of boys has left no trace. In
importing this element into the friendship of Achilles
and Patroclus, a later age did violence to the ancient
poem. The romantic love of woman was also but scantily
represented in epic literature, as in the early Greek world
in general. The germs of it, which lay scattered in local
sagas, were not to burst into flower before the age of
Hellenistic literature. Still, the relations of men and
women are penetrated by a warmth and tenderness which
382 GREEK THINKERS.
becomes more and more foreign to the sentiment of suc-
ceeding ages. It would be in vain, for example, to seek a
parallel to the parting of Hector and Andromache in tragic
poetry. Moreover, the influences which brought about
what we may call the depreciation of woman art not
difficult to discover. As Ionic civilization tended more
and more towards the Oriental fashion of secluding women,
as rural life lost ground before city life, as democracy drew
ever-increasing numbers within its pale, and the growing
interest of politics made rhetoric and dialectic the favourite
occupations of men — as, in a word, the life of the sexes
became divided by an ever-widen inginterval, these changes
were accompanied by a corresponding diminution in the
dignity and significance of woman, and in the respect paid
to her by the men of at least the higher strata of society.
" We marry in order that we may beget legitimate children,
and know that our households are left in the keeping of
some one we can trust " — this typical saying sufficiently
characterizes the ordinary Greek, or at any rate Athenian
marriage, which in most cases was a marriage of con-
venience. And at the epoch with which we are here
concerned, this process was steadily advancing. In the
narrative of Herodotus women play important, often
decisive, parts, and not unfrequently inspire passionate
devotion. In Thucydides, on the other hand, there is so
little mention of wives, or of women in general, that the
reader sometimes feels as though he had been transported
into a community consisting exclusively of males, a sort of
inverted Amazon republic. And if we find a somewhat
different picture in the pages of Xenophon, we must reflect
that the works of this much-travelled soldier are no true
mirror of Athenian life and sentiment. Into the void thus
created, a void rather which, so far as the romance of love
is concerned, had existed from the beginning, there now
intrudes that form of erotic feeling which we have already
encountered, and of which the " Phaedrus " and the
" Symposium," together with their prelude, the " Lysis,"
afford us so ample a view.
First of all the " Lysis." The matter of this dialogue
SPEECHES IN PRAISE OF EROS. 383
need not trouble us ; we shall find it developed to greater
richness and maturity in the brilliant luminary of which
this work is the modest satellite. But the introduction,
extending as it does to unusual, one might almost say to
undue length, is in this connexion of inestimable value.
The ardent, yet reverential devotion of Hippothales to the
beautiful Lysis, his changes of colour, his manner of hiding
himself and hanging with admiring glances on every move-
ment of his beloved, — all this forms a finished picture,
contrasting with the similar but fugitive touches of other
dialogues. Here, too, Plato opens up to us a completer
view of the inner workings of the gymnasia, the true
nursery-grounds of affection between beautiful boys, whose
beauty was there displayed unveiled, and their companions
of a slightly greater age. A series of life-like tableaux
passes before us : a troop of begarlanded youths offering
sacrifice to Hermes, whose festival is being kept ; another
group amusing themselves with dice in a corner of the hall ;
in the background, the aged slaves employed to take charge
of the boys, warning them with growing insistence that it is
time to go home, and grumbling at the long delay in their
foreign jargons.
2. The theory of love, however, is the subject of one of
the most magnificent works of art that Plato's pen ever
produced — the " Symposium." Agathon, the still youthful
tragic poet, has gained his first triumph on the stage
(B.C. 416), and a select circle has assembled in his house to
celebrate the event. As the same company met yesterday,
and drank deeply in the victor's honour, it is resolved that
to-day the wine-cup shall be enjoyed moderately, and with
no compulsion. The flute-girl is dismissed ; speeches in
praise of the god of love are to provide the entertainment.
Phaedrus, the proposer of the idea, opens the contest.
Foremost among the benefits which Eros confers on
mankind, is the sense of honour. The lover is nowhere
so ashamed of a cowardly or mean action as in the presence
of the object of his affection. A state or an arm}-, that
should consist only of lovers and loved, would be invincible.
Not men only, but even women, are willing to die for those
384 GREEK THINKERS.
whom they love. As an instance, A'icestis is mentioned,
who was ready to face death for her husband Admetus.
Then follows more accessory matter of a mythological
character. The speech ends with the praise of the god
as the oldest and the most honourable of the gods, as well
as the most helpful towards the attainment of virtue and
happiness.
The next speech reported is that of Pausanias. He
reproaches his predecessor for confusing two different
species of love. For love is twofold, just as there is a
distinction between the heavenly and the common Aphro-
dite. The worshippers of the latter love women as well
as boys, and in both they love the body more than the
soul. But that love wh'ich is under the guardianship of
the heavenly goddess is directed towards the sex which
is by nature stronger and more capable of reason ; more-
over, it prefers youths to boys whose future development
is still uncertain. It is those who occupy themselves with
the latter who have caused it to be commonly said that
it is disgraceful to show favour to a lover. The whole
question, to be sure, lacks clear and certain regulation.
Not in Elis and Bceotia (that is, among Greeks of ^Eolian
descent), where the reproach just mentioned is never
uttered. Nor yet in Ionia, nor in other lands where Greeks
live under barbarian governments ; for, to the barbarians,
the love of boys, philosophy, and gymnastics are equally
odious, seeing that their princes go in terror of high spirit
and close friendship. But in Sparta and Athens the
established rules are fluctuating and uncertain. It is of
moment to ascertain their hidden significance. The truth
is, that mere love of the body, which comes to an end with
the bloom of youth, is bad ; as also is, on the part of him
who is loved, regard to external advantage, to wealth and
power. Only when the two are bound together by the
common pursuit of perfection, of wisdom, and the other
parts of virtue, is their union profitable to them ; and it
is honourable to give ear to a lover for the sake of
excellence.
The distinction contained in this second speech has
LOVE AS A UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLE. 385
served to advance the division of the subject, and thus
to prepare for its treatment later on by Socrates. The
third speech, that of Eryximachus, now renders similar
service by enlarging the bounds of the discussion. It is
perhaps also intended to mark the extreme point which
had been reached by prae-Platonic speculation in this
field. For it is on the philosophy of nature that the
physician Eryximachus founds his reasoning. The art
of medicine itself teaches us, in respect of bodily desires,
to distinguish two kinds of love, according as they arc
directed towards what is wholesome or what is injurious,
according as the appetite is healthy or diseased. Further,
it is the physician's task to reconcile in friendship and love
those elements in the body which are most inimical to
each other, the opposites, namely, of warm and cold, moist
and dry, and the like (cf. Vol. I. p. 148). Similar in kind
is the procedure of gymnastics, of agriculture, and of music ;
in treating of which the speaker quotes Heraclitus. Here,
too, that distinction between the heavenly love and the
common has place, according as music, rhythm, and the
cadence of verse engender lust and licence, or the seemly
ordering of the soul. In the same way, the fruits of the
earth depend for their thriving upon the right combination
and harmonious fusion of the elemental opposites. All
this is the work of the love that is " seemly," while the love
that is wild and wanton proves fatal to the welfare of plants
and animals alike. Finally, the art of divination is intro-
duced as a go-between in the love of gods and men — a
thought which to us seems violent to the point of scurrility,
but was certainly not so regarded by Plato. For by making
Socrates take up the idea again, along with others scattered
through the earlier speeches, he impresses upon it the
mark of his approbation. As for the part which he does
not agree with, Plato may spare himself the trouble of
criticizing it, because he has already done so in the " Lysis."
In this dialogue the two natural theories of love, as we may
call them — the attraction of like to like, and that of like
to unlike — are discussed with reference to the teachings of
the nature-philosophers (almost certainly Empedocles on
VOL. 11. 2 C
386 GREEK THINKERS.
the one side and Heraclitus on the other). Both are
rejected. The attraction of likes is objected to as at best
a half-truth, for the more the bad communes with the bad
the more hateful does his companion become to him
Indeed, the predicate " like," as is added with some
subtlety, cannot be applied to the individual bad man
even in respect of himself ; for he is altogether changeable
and incalculable. Suppose, then, that by " likes " is meant
the good only ; even then a host of doubts remain. For
like can gain from like nothing, good or bad, which he
cannot gain from himself. If it be said that the good
is friendly with the good, not as like, but as good ; this,
too, will not stand, for the good man is sufficient to
himself. Nor does the opposite theory, the one repre-
sented by Eryximachus in our dialogue, fare any better.
The objection raised against it is that there can be no
friendship between love and hate, just and unjust, good
and evil.
3. Then follow the speeches of the two poets, Ari-
stophanes and Agathon, in which, as was to be expected,
the jest far outweighs the earnest. Here, accordingly, we
recognize such a resting-place as the artist-hand of Plato
loved to prepare in the middle of his works.
The speech of the great comedian is filled with a
grotesque humour worthy of the author of " Gargantua."
Men were originally divided into three sexes ; for besides
men and women there were also men-women. They also
possessed double bodies, which, being round and sup-
ported by four arms and four feet, were able to move with
prodigious velocity. They were enormously strong, and
full of pride, so that they threatened the very dominion of
the gods. The latter, therefore, took counsel together;
what should be done with man. Opinions were divided,
for annihilation of the human race meant the loss of all
sacrifices and offerings. At last Zeus came to the rescue
with a suggestion. " Let us bisect mankind," he said,
" then will each one of them be the weaker, and we shall
receive all the more sacrifices." This was done. Men
were sliced down the middle, as an egg is cut through
SPEECHES OF ARISTOPHANES AND AG ATI ION. 387
with a thread. Each half was now filled with yearning
for its lost complement ; and as the whole had originally
belonged to one or other of the three sexes, so was the
direction of this yearning determined. Hence arose the
different species of lovers' desires — a subject which is
treated at length and with no lack of plainness. Thus
was produced the condition in which mankind now is.
Whether the matter is to end here or not, remains un-
certain. If we provoke the gods again by our impiety,
then, it is to be feared, we shall be split a second time,
and be left like the bas-reliefs which adorn gravestones.
Meanwhile, we come nearest bliss when the yearnings just
spoken of are fulfilled. Praise, therefore, be given to Eros,
who, if we fail not in piety, will yet perhaps restore us to
our original nature, and make us whole and happy. Even
in this irreverent burlesque there is an element of serious
thought. Desire for one's own was one of the current
explanations of love, one which is fully discussed in the
" Lysis," and which Socrates, when his turn comes to speak,
will think not unworthy of refutation.
As a well-kept pleasure-garden differs from a park left
to nature, so the trim, starched speech of Agathon contrasts
with the wild exuberance of Aristophanes. The former
speaks like a delicately trained orator of the school of
Gorgias. His effort is as poor in profound thought as it
is rich in subtle, ingenious, and seductive turns of expres-
sion. Eros is not, as Phsedrus had said, the oldest, but
rather the youngest of the gods. In support of this asser-
tion a multitude of proofs are adduced. Not in his reign,
but under his forerunner, " Necessity," were those wars of
the gods, those mutilations and other violent deeds of
which legend tells. He is young, too, because he flees
from old age, whose all too rapid advance he far outstrips
in his still more rapid flight. With his youthful age his
softness and tenderness well agree. To all hard souls he
is a stranger. By virtue of his suppleness he moulds him-
self upon the soul ; thus his entrance and his departure
are alike unperceived. lie loves to dwell among flowers;
where blossoms are and fragrance, there he alights and
388 GREEK THINKERS.
makes his home. As Agathon is bent on ascribing to Eros
all imaginable excellences, he is not afraid to number
temperance among his attributes, playfully arguing that
temperance is the mastery over pleasures and desires, and
that the god of love is stronger than these. A little later,
to be sure, he speaks of luxury as one of the gifts of love.
To Eros, likewise, he refers the origin of all arts and
sciences, seeing that they all have sprung from some long-
ing or desire. He concludes with a series of artistically
grouped clauses, plentifully adorned with rhymes and
antitheses. Nor, lastly, does he fail to confess that in the
speech just offered to the god, jest has been mingled with
earnest.
Plato's knowledge of and power over artistic effect are,
perhaps, nowhere displayed with so much brilliance as in
this part of the work. It borders on the miraculous that
one mind should have been capable of all these creations,
in particular the two last. The contrast between the two
speeches is obvious enough. But apart from this, calcula-
tion of the exactest sort is employed. The Socratic cross-
examination, which follows, could have no better foil than
Agathon's speech. The contradictions between the various
discourses, and of the last with itself (Eros the oldest and
also the youngest god, Eros the source both of temperance
and of its opposite), cry aloud as it were for a discussion
that will clear the air. The jingling peroration of Agathon
strengthens this impression to the uttermost. The reader is
sick of sweetmeats, and longs for plainer but more nourish-
ing diet. And when at last the dialectic of Socrates leads
him back to the heights of pathos and inspiration, the effect
upon him is doubled by the contrast with the artificialities
with which he has been sated.
4. Socrates remarks that he has evidently misunderstood
the agreement. The previous speakers have merely set
themselves to praise love, without regard to truth or false-
hood. He desires to speak nothing but the truth, and he
begins with a series of questions addressed to Agathon, of
which the result may be summarized as follows : All love
is love of something ; something, moreover, of which one
SOCRATES SPEAKS. 389
stands in need. This object of love is either to be gained
now, or, if possessed already, to be retained in the future.
Eros is therefore necessitous ; and since it is beauty that
he desires, and the beautiful is good, he is in need of the
good. Now follows a dialogue within the dialogue. For
Socrates affirms that the accurate knowledge which he
possesses of the nature of Eros has been derived from the
instruction of a prophetess, Diotima of Mantinea. The
artifice is similar to that employed in the " Phaedrus,"
where Socrates ascribes the inspiration, which he feels
descending upon him, to the influence of the neighbouring
sanctuary of the nymphs. The object sought is to justify
the poetic flights of Plato as coming from the mouth of
Socrates, as well as the exposition by the latter, a little
further on, of a specifically Platonic doctrine.
He, too, had praised Eros as a great god and fair,
exactly as Agathon has been doing, and Diotima had
shown him his error by the same arguments which he has
just repeated. Eros is in truth neither good nor fair, nor
yet is he foul or evil, but something between the two.
Further, he is no god at all ; but just as little is he a
mortal. In this respect, too, he is a mean, a great spirit
mediating between gods and men. Diotima next named
to him the parents of Eros. These are Wealth and Poverty.
They met on the birthday feast of Aphrodite, when Poverty
stood begging at the door, and Wealth, who was drunk with
nectar, lay slumbering in the garden of Zeus. To him
then came Poverty, who wished to have a child by Wealth,
and so conceived Eros. The latter is also a philosopher,
that is, one who desires wisdom. For as he is neither poor
nor rich, so is he also neither wise nor without under-
standing, but in a mean between the two. Now, the
advantage which Eros brings to men is that he (as
befits one conceived on the birthday of the goddess of
beauty) teaches them to desire the beautiful. But among
things beautiful is the good, and it is through possessing
the good that the happy have obtained happiness. All
men, at all times, desire the good ; and if it is not said
that the)' always love, the reason is that by the name <>{
3 90 GREEK THINKERS.
" love " a part is generally understood, and not the whole,
much as the word " poetry " is used in a restricted sense of
the making of verse, whereas its full meaning (iroi^aig, from
iroiuv, to make) includes all creating or making.
That, then, which men love is not their own, as
Aristophanes thought ; for a man is ready to have his
own feet and hands hewn off if he thinks them useless.
Desire is for the good, and, indeed, for the perpetual
possession of the good. But this permanent and unbroken
tenure is obtained by means of generation, which is both of
body and of soul, and always takes place in the beautiful,
since ugliness repels from generation. Love is thus directed,
not towards the beautiful, but towards generation in the
beautiful, and its aim is immortality. Diotima also referred
him to the example of the animals, which for the sake of
generation, and in the protection of their offspring, are
ready to fight against the most unequal odds. Nor is it in
any essentially different manner that continuity and per-
manence are secured in the individual, within whom there
is unceasing change. He is, indeed, spoken of as one, but
the greybeard is in no part of himself the same as when he
was a child. Nor yet is it only flesh and blood, and bone
and hair, that come and go in endless succession ; the same
holds also of the things of the soul — of character and dispo-
sition, of opinions, desires, sorrow, joy, fear, and even know-
ledge, the passing away of which is called forgetting, and
the continuance of which is only apparently made possible
by exercise — in reality, new knowledge takes the place of
that which has been lost. This, indeed, is the only means
whereby things mortal may abide ; that which is old and
worn out must leave behind it something new and other
than itself, though of the same kind.
Socrates was astonished by this teaching, but the wise
Diotima bade him look also upon the ambition of man —
that hunger for an immortal name and an undying
memory by which the best of men are moved to do the
greatest deeds. Such men are they whose souls, rather
than their bodies, are filled with the impulse towards
generation, and who desire to bring into the world that
LOVE'S PERFECT WORK. 39 T
which is of the same pattern as their own souls — wisdom
and all virtue. To this class belong poets and other
creative artists. The greatest and fairest part of wisdom
is that which has to do with the ordering of cities and
families ; the name of it is Temperance and Justice. He
who is seized by such longing seeks the beautiful, in order
to engender in it ; and if he finds a fair body inhabited by
a fair, noble, and richly gifted soul, he rejoices greatly at the
union. At once he breaks forth into discourse of virtue
and of what things are excellent in man : thus he begins
to form the youth. By this means there is woven round
the two a stronger bond than that of husband and wife.
Their offspring, too, is fairer and more immortal ; it is such
offspring as Homer fathered, or Hesiod, or great law-givers
like Solon and Lycurgus. For the sake of such offspring,
not for their mortal posterity, men have had temples raised
to them.
Diotima next turned to the perfected mysteries of love,
and expressed a doubt whether Socrates would be able to
follow her. For it now became necessary, she said — the
youthful love of a fair body being taken as a starting-
point — to acknowledge that the beauty of any one body is
own sister to the beauty of any other ; that it would be
folly not to allow the beauty of all bodies to be one and
the same. He who acknowledges this begins to love all
fair bodies ; but the vehemence of his love for one is abated.
Next, he regards beauty in the soul as higher than that of
bod\-, and, in consequence, the superior soul is sufficient
object for his love and care, even when attended with little
physical charm, and draws forth from him the teachings
which help youth towards perfection. He is thus con-
strained to behold beauty in actions and in character, and
to confess that here, too, all beauty is akin, so that hence-
forth beauty of body is but a small thing in his eyes.
From action he passes on to knowledge, in order that he
may discern, the beauty of the sciences. He now ceases
entirely from gazing in slavish subjection on the beauty of
;i boy, a man, or an action ; instead, the whole ocean of
beauty is spread before him ; and again he brings to the
392 GREEK THINKERS.
birth fair and noble teaching, until, strengthened thereby
and grown to full stature, he perceives one only science,
which is the science of the beautiful.
But having thus arrived at the goal of his love's journey,
he suddenly becomes aware of something inaivellous in its
essence, beautiful, and itself the archetype of all beauty.
This "ever is, and neither becomes nor decays, neither
increases nor diminishes ; it is not in part fair, in part foul
nor fair at some times, foul at others ; it is not fair by one
comparison and foul by another, nor fair to some and foul
to other eyes. He will not now figure to himself the
beautiful as having form, as a face or other part of the
body, nor yet as teaching or knowledge, nor as existing in
something other than itself, . . . but as something which
exists in itself and for itself, and is everywhere the same.
All else that is beautiful has part in it in such wise that
while these other things arise and pass, itself is neither
increased thereby nor diminished, nor suffers any manner
of change." This ascent, however, which leads step by step
to the " sight of the beautiful itself, pure, absolute, and
unmixed, not laden with flesh and colour and the other
lumber of humanity," is also the way to a life of virtue, to
friendship with God and immortality. Socrates declares
that by Diotima's words he was convinced — a conviction
which he is now endeavouring to impart to others — " that
human nature has no better help in this quest than Eros."
Just as Aristophanes is addressing himself to answer, a
troop of revellers bursts into the house. At their head is
Alcibiades, a flute-girl on his arm, a thickly woven garland
of ivy and violets and a mass of ribands on his head.
With these he begins to adorn Agathon, in honour of his
victory. Suddenly, and not without alarm, he perceives
Socrates. After the exchange of a few friendly jests, he
delivers an encomium upon Socrates, whom he also decks
with ribands. His speech exhibits a strange mixture of
emotions—fear, devotion, shame, admiration. He has
always desired to flee from Socrates, as from the voice of
his own conscience, but the siren-song of the philosopher
alwavs entices him back. He has often wished that
DATE OF THE "SYMPOSIUM? 393
Socrates were no longer among the living, and yet he is
certain he would feel the loss of him as a grievous mis-
fortune. His praise of Socrates (cf. pp. 47, 72) culminates
in a narrative which exhibits in the clearest light his
master's abstinence and self-control — in short, his tempe-
rance ; while the frank candour of the speaker, excessive
for any but a half-drunken man, moves the loud laughter
of the company. The banquet draws to a close. Some
of the guests take their departure ; others fall asleep. The
first cock-crow finds none left but Socrates, Agathon, and
Aristophanes, who are eagerly discussing the nature of
dramatic art. At last Aristophanes is overpowered by
fatigue ; Agathon a little later, when the dawn is well
advanced. Socrates alone holds out. He now walks to the
Lyceum, where he takes a bath. After that he spends
the day in his usual occupations, and it is not till evening
that he seeks rest in his own house.
That Plato is an artist may be seen in almost every line
that he has written ; in the " Symposium " he claims the
title for himself, by preaching the cult of beauty. The
dialectician and the moralist, which sometimes seek to stifle
the poet in him, here pass into the background, or rather
are enlisted into the service of metaphysical poesy. It may
be confidently affirmed that in this work Plato is more him-
self than in others. He no longer appears as a mere disciple
of Socrates ; and he is just as little an adherent of the
Orphic-Pythagorean doctrines, with which the endeavour
after a merely vicarious immortality is in direct contradiction.
May we infer a date for the composition of the work ?
Probably only to the extent of placing the dialogue, which
was written after 384, later than the series of purely Socratic
writings (an allusion to the " Charmides " well accords with
this), but not to the extent of placing it before all the
writings which show traces of Orphic-Pythagorean influence.
Against such a supposition may be set the single fact that
a result worked out in the " Mcno " — " right opinion " as
something intermediate between knowledge and ignorance
— is here seized upon and employed in the discussion as if
394 GREEK THINKERS.
it were a self-evident truth. But the modes of thought
acquired in Lower Italy have not yet gained so great a
hold upon him that he cannot, under the influence of a
powerful impulse, throw off the fetters for a time. And, in
truth, it must have been a powerful impulse in obedience to
which the author of the "Symposium" placed himself in
fundamental contradiction to the views expressed both in
his earlier and his later works. What a chasm yawns
between the judgment here pronounced upon the poets and
the estimate of them contained in the " Gorgias," between
the justification of ambition in this dialogue and its rejection
in the " Republic," not to speak of love itself, which in the
" Theaetetus " is ignored, along with its significance for
study and the formation of youth, and which, in the
" Phaedo," is scorned, along with everything else that has
its origin in sense — while, here, it is a ladder on the rungs
of which the earnest striver may climb to the sight of the
sublimest visions, and thereby be brought near to moral
perfection and the likeness of God ! But it is time to
inquire into the inner structure of this remarkable work.
What link, it may be asked, joins the " love-speeches "
which form the main portion of the dialogue, to Alcibiades'
hymn in praise of Socrates, which brings up the rear ? This
apparently accidental after-thought is, in our opinion, the
true root from which the whole work sprang. The praise of
Socrates, indeed, is a theme which Plato is always ready and
willing to enlarge upon. But he had a definite motive and
occasion for placing such praise in the mouth of Alcibiades —
we refer to the pamphlet of Polycrates, already mentioned
by us more than once, the effect of which was felt for so
long. This writer had spoken of Socrates as the teacher
of Alcibiades— in what tone and with what intention can
easily be guessed. In a similar manner Prodicus and
Anaxagoras had been reproached for having educated
Theramenes and Pericles respectively (cf. Vol. I. pp. 426,
5S2). But while the memory of Theramenes was honoured
by many, and that of Pericles by most, Alcibiades, in spite of
the admiration inspired by his personality and genius, was
all but universally reprobated for the ruin he brought upon
SOCRATES AND ALCIBIADES. 395
the Athenian Empire. Xenophon labours for pages together,
after his own somewhat clumsy fashion, in the cause of the
defence. He acknowledges, not without reluctance, that
Socrates might perhaps have done better to instruct both
Alcibiades and Critias in self-control first and in politics
afterwards ; still, his example, Xenophon contends, exer-
cised the best of influence on the two young and ambitious
men, as long as their intercourse with him lasted ; it was
afterwards that Alcibiades was corrupted, by life, by women,
by foreign potentates, by the Athenian people itself, all
through no fault of Socrates. What a different method is
that of Plato !
Instead of meeting the charge directly, he presents the
reader with a life-like portrait of Alcibiades, whom he
introduces describing his relations to Socrates with the
proverbial truthfulness of wine, and in a manner which
disarms the accusation : " He compels me to acknowledge
that all the time I am busy over the concerns of the
Athenians I am myself full of imperfections, which I neglect
to remedy. . . . Therefore I run away from him and avoid
him, and, when I see him, I am ashamed of my confession."
If only he had been more in the company of Socrates — so
every reader of the " Symposium " was bound to say — how
much better would it have been for Athens ! But what, the
same reader might perhaps ask — what about that liaison
between the two men, which, in Socratic circles at least,
used to be matter of jesting ? Plato himself had touched
on the subject, harmlessly enough, in his youthful works,
as, for example, in the introduction to the " Protagoras,"
which runs as follows : " Where have you been, Socrates ?
Put I need not ask. Where else should you have been but
in pursuit of the fair Alcibiades ? " But after the appearance
of Polycrates' libel, he may well have thought it advisable
to speak a word of enlightenment on the subject ; which is
exactly what he does, with a plainness that could not be
surpassed, in the present encomium. This, again, provided
him with a natural occasion for treating of Socrates' attitude
towards erotic sentiment in general. It was precisely the
well-known incontinence of Alcibiades against which he
396 GREEK THINKERS.
wished the temperance of his wise friend to stand out in
vivid contrast.
At this point the apologetic purpose merges into Plato's
craving to delineate his own peculiar erotic mysticism. It
is here hardly possible for us moderns to enter into his
feelings. All we can do is to point out analogies — kindred
phases .of sentiment in Mohammedan Persians, Hafiz, for
example ; the extravagances of mediaeval chivalry ; above
all, Dante and his Beatrice. For as the last-named opened
the gates of Paradise to the Italian poet, so Plato, guided
but not overmastered by the erotic impulse, rose to the
vision of the ideal of beauty and of all the ethical and
religious grandeur with which it is so closely associated.
No proof, we think, is needed that in the teaching ascribed
to the wise woman of Mantinea, the author of the
" Symposium " is giving utterance to his own deepest
feeling and most intimate experience. From no other
source could he have derived that warm glow and colour of
life. Features, too, are not wanting of the most individual
and personal kind. The rivalry with the great poets of the
past, the confident hope of winning, by his works, immortality
like that of Homer, the " discourses about virtue " which are
the fruit of love, and the earnest endeavour to educate and
ennoble the beloved youth — all this is something more
than Platonic doctrine : it is part of Plato's own life. We
venture, though with some hesitation, to go a step further,
and name, as the chief object of this etherealized affection,
Dion, to whom Plato dedicated an epitaph replete with
memories of passionate feeling. Quite in accordance with
Diotima's rule, Dion was no immature boy, but a youth
of about twenty, distinguished in appearance and highly
gifted, when Plato, who was some fifteen years elder, first
met him at Syracuse. Philosophy was not the only subject
of their conversations ; they were busy with projects of
political and social regeneration, which the philosopher
hoped he might one day realize by the aid of the prince.
On this view there is point and pertinence in that otherwise
irrelevant mention of legislative achievement among the
fruits of the love-bond.
PLATO'S PERSONAL EXPERIENCE. 397
But on the wide ocean of Beauty to which the river of
Love conducts us, there rises into view an enchanted island,
radiant with imperishable glory — we mean that meta-
physical creation which is known as the doctrine of Ideas.
With this creation, with its intellectual roots and ramifica-
tions, with the influences it has exerted, and with the trans-
formations which it has undergone, it will now be our task
to make ourselves acquainted.
END OF VOL. II.
PRINTED BV WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLE.S.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES
COLLEGE LIBRARY
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