aioe Crees Witerbe yrs Hy, pt if i ty i} af, j i Hest fa ne ine 2a Has te } 75 Pity Sel ehi sy ei aisete ae FS ae ot if is eres] pane saat! tte rh Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/greekviewoflifeOOdick_1 of Life , By G. Lowes Dickinson, MM. A. Fellow of King’s College, ambridge EDUCATIONAL EDITION Garden City Noew York Doubleday, Doran & Gompany, Inc. ALL RIGHTS-RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUN= TRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY,N. ¥. PREFACE TO THE SEVENTH EDITION eS preparing this edition for the press I have endeavoured to correct any positive mis-state- ment of fact. But I have not attempted to correct what may be regarded by some critics as an incom- pleteness or over-emphasis of statement. This objection is likely to be taken in particular to the first chapter. Recent research has discovered, or brought into new prominence, the tangled mass of primitive superstitions which underlay the literary and artistic presentation of Greek religion, and persisted among the populace throughout the clas- sical age. If I had taken all this into account I should have had to modify or supplement my state- ment, especially with regard to the attitude of the Greek towards death; and I should have had con- stantly to refer to the historical development of their religious conceptions and rituals. But all this, I think I may justly say, lies outside the province of this book. I have concerned myself to present the specific achievement of the Greek spirit, as reflected in the works of their most enlightened poets and thinkers. That achievement was to humanize bar- barism and enlighten superstition. It is the resulting point of view that gives a unique value to the study of Greek institutions, thought and art; Vv vi THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE and it is this point of view which I have endeavoured in the following pages to introduce to English readers unversed in Greek studies. I have to thank Miss Jane Harrison, Professor Murray, and Mr. J. T. Sheppard for valuable criticism and suggestions, which I have incorporated, as far as possible, in the text of this edition. PREFACE HE following pages are intended to serve as a general introduction to Greek literature and thought, for those, primarily, who do not know Greek. Whatever opinions may be held as to the value of translations, it seems clear that it is only by their means that the majority of modern readers can attain to any knowledge of Greek culture; and as I believe that culture to be still, as it has been in the past, the most valuable element of a liberal educa- tion, I have hoped that such an attempt as the present to give, with the help of quotations from the original authors, some general idea of the Greek view of life, will not be regarded as labour thrown away. It has been essential to my purpose to avoid, as far as may be, all controversial matter; and if any classical scholar who may come across this volume should be inclined to complain of omissions or evasions, I would beg him to remember the object of the book and to judge it according to its fitness for its own end. “The Greek View of Life,’ no doubt, is a question- begging title, but I believe it to have a quite in- telligible meaning; for varied and manifold as the phases may be that are presented by the Greek civilization, they do nevertheless group themselves Vii viil THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE about certain main ideas, to be distinguished with sufficient clearness from those which have dominated other nations. It is these ideas that I have endeav- oured to bring into relief; and if I have failed, the blame, I submit, must be ascribed rather to myself than to the nature of the task I have undertaken. For permission to make the extracts from trans- lations here printed, my best thanks are due to the following authors and publishers :—Professor Butcher, Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. E. D. A. Morshead, Mr. B. B. Rogers, Dr. Verrall, Mr. A. S. Way, Messrs. George Bell and Sons, the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press, the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford, Messrs. Macmillan and Co., Mr. John Murray, and Messrs. Sampson Low, Marston and Co. I have also to thank the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford, for permis- sion to quote at considerable length from the late Professor Jowett’s translations of Plato and Thu- cydides. Appended is a list of the translations from which I have quoted. LIST OF TRANSLATIONS USED ESCHYLUS (B.C. 525—456). “The House of Atreus” (i.e. the “Agamemnon,” “Choephorz” and “Eumenides”), translated by E. D. A. MorsHEeap (Warren and Sons). The “Eumenides,” translated by Dr.’ VERRALL (Cam- bridge, 1885). ARISTOPHANES (C. B.C. 444—380). “The Acharnians, the Knights and the Birds,” translated by JoHN HooxkHAm FrRERE (Morley’s Universal Library, Routledge). {Also the “Frogs” and the “Peace” in his Collected Works (Pickering) }. The “Clouds,” the “Lysistrata” [“Women in Revolt” ], the “Peace,” and the “Wasps,” translated by B. B. RocErs. ARISTOTLE (B.C. 384—322). The “Ethics,” the “Politics,” and the “Rhetoric,” translated by J. E. C. WELLDON (Mac- millan and Co.). DEMOSTHENES (B.C. 385—322). “Orations,” translated by C. R. Kennepy (Bell). EURIPIDES (B.C. 410—406). “Tragedies,” translated by A. S. Way (Macmillan and Co.). HERODOTUS (B.C. 484—425). “The History,” translated by S. R. Rawtinson (Murray). HOMER. The “Iliad,” translated by Lanc, LEAF AND MYERS; the “Odyssey,” translated by BUTCHER AND LANG (Mac- millan). Be THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE PINDAR (B.C. 522—442). “Odes,” translated by E. MYErs (Macmillan and Co.). PLATO (B.C. 430—347). The “Dialogues,” translated by B. Jowett (Clarendon Press). “The Republic,” translated by DaAvirs AND VAUGHAN (Macmillan and Co.). PLUTARCH. “Lives,” DrypeEn’s translation, edited by A. CLoucH (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.). SOPHOCLES (BC. 496—406). Edited and Translated by Dr. Jess (Cambridge University Press). THUCYDIDES (0b. B.C. 471), edited and translated by B. Jowett (Clarendon Press). CONTENTS CHAPTER I THe GREEK VIEW OF RELIGION . ....« e I. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. ITFOCUCCOTY Gish) tee sta et tre 1 ce Greek Religion an Interpretation of Nature : Greek Religion an Interpretation of the Passions Human Greek Religion the Founda of ciety Z Religious Festivals The Greek Conception of the Relation $f the Godsijyoat es isle oh ote kAa ese . Divination, Omens, One AVA) Ro sacrifice ANG ALOnement 29) dc) le eet ee PATIL ANG WEUMISHTOe NE en halhh erie en a ies . Mysticism . . . The Greek View of NEATH ont a feature Life ‘ . Critical and Sceptical Opinion in Greece . . Ethical Criticism . . Transition to Monotheism .... . . Metaphysical Criticism . . aes . Metaphysical ai ee ete peRUPINALY 346) ala ee a ney A OE ais ts ns ° ° e e ° CHAPTER II Tose GREEK: VIEW OF THE STATED. C0 Soh ws 1, . The Relation of the State to the Citizen - er tie GEPeK i VIEW IL) bia oo okie env cents . Artisans and Slaves . . . The Greek State Primarily Military, oar tactistvick , . Forms of Government in the Greek State . Amn && W HY The .Greek State*a “City? 1 26 : xi Wan to THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 7. ‘Faction’ and) Anarchy cu)ciin. Ue aaa gine ee ek ear 8. Property and the Communistic Ideal . . . . . Qo Spartan Po ghlrces fie lie ied ep RaeNG Ahh ont acer noe atic LR 10. Athens . . i : r WaT at hee 11. Sceptical Criticism of the Basis of the State Se a eee 12: Summaryie oie des ten brates ete is Mien. aioe CHAPTER IIT THe GREEK VIEW OF THE INDIVIDUAL. . . ree kak 1. The Greek View of Manual Labour and Trade AO Oy, . Appreciation of External Goods ..... . 139 . Appreciation of Physical aA PRAISE ae DRS HWA ES . Greek Athletics Kil ae aes . Greek Rikicoontdendinentionn of the Esthetic and Ethical Points) of; Viswaiss Hale stwe als tia a miraies and ee The ,Greek ) View :of) Pleasure yc sus) no ie es ee oD . Illustrations—Ischomachus; Socrates . . . . . 158 . The Greek View of Woman. .. . oe 6S . Protests against the Common View of Wann <7 ASL BO 10,2 Friendship ii) oct tie diet vot ave ait onl Caan a ore Nie Lan eat ay ca aay 11.) Summary isl te) Gee ya ee ee hace eg aa mn & W & 0 OND CHAPTER IV THE GREEK VIEW OF ART... Pras hs adm LT he 1. Greek Art an Expression of National Life writen dee Bes 2. Identification of the A%sthetic and Ethical Points OF VIG We eA Y Re eaidile: Un mere etntniS eur Ri amie eaee eculpture and Painting inca c i Sigs o ue) iene eee ae { iusic and the Dance cio. ual conae ateumcraes Pou etn Le 5 POREEY ie ile ie eiullge Attn old DR TOE An aa aes an ete ge ates ee Ih ip 15-0 b PRM Ss Uma a ser Rane ie. (BAS SNR RAE ek . Comedy wo pity Lave at ete HRN Sita’ Micon Mt Rae ee a ae a é SUTOMALY 4) i5))4e hi. beams ell aise atin, to conc a eae Onan kh W CHAPTER V CONCLUSION (2) S22 UC OM Se A ee iat saree ray a INDEX e . e e . e e e . e . e e e e e e 2 59 xii THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE CHAPTER I THE GREEK VIEW OF RELIGION § 1. INTRODUCTORY N approaching the subject of the religion of the Greeks it is necessary to dismiss at the outset many of the associations which we are naturally inclined to connect with that word. What we com- monly have in our mind when we speak of religion is a definite set of doctrines, of a more or less meta- physical character, formulated in a creed and sup- ported by an organization distinct from the state. And the first thing we have to learn about the reli- gion of the Greeks is that it included nothing of the kind. There was no church, there was no creed, there were no articles. Priests there were, but they were merely public officials, appointed to perform certain religious rites. The distinction between cleric and layman, as we know it, did not exist; the distinction between poetry and dogma did not exist; and whatever the religion of the Greeks may have been, one thing at any rate is clear, that it was some- thing very different from all that we are in the habit of associating with the word. I z THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE What, then, was it? It is easy to reply that it was the worship of those gods—of Zeus, Apollo, Athene, and the rest—with whose names and his- tories everyone is familiar. But the difficulty is to realize what was implied in the worship of these gods; to understand that the mythology which we regard merely as a collection of fables was to the Greeks actually true; or at least that to nine Greeks out of ten it would never occur that it might be false, might be, as we say, mere stories. So that though no doubt the histories of the gods were in part the inventions of the poets, yet the poets would conceive themselves to be merely putting into form what they and everyone believed to be essentially true. But such a belief implies a fundamental distinc- tion between the conception, or rather, perhaps, the feeling of the Greeks about the world, and our own. And it is this feeling that we want to understand when we ask ourselves the question, what did a belief in the gods really mean to the ancient Greeks? To answer it fully and satisfactorily is perhaps impos- sible. But some attempt must be made; and it may help us in our quest if we endeavour to imagine the kind of questionings and doubts which the concep- tion of the gods would set at rest. § 2. GREEK RELIGION AN INTERPRETATION OF NATURE When we try to conceive the state of mind of primitive man, the first thing that occurs to us is the bewilderment and terror he must have felt in the GREEK RELIGION AND NATURE 3 presence of the powers of nature. Naked, houseless, weaponless, he is at the mercy, every hour, of this immense and incalculable Something so alien and so hostile to himself. As fire it burns, as water it drowns, as tempest it harries and destroys; benig- nant it may be at times, in warm sunshine and calm, but the kindness is brief and treacherous. Anyhow, whatever its mood, it has to be met and dealt with. By its help, or, if not, in the teeth of its resistance, every step in advance must be won; every hour, every minute, it is there to be reckoned with. What is it then, this persistent, obscure, unnameable Thing? Whatisit? The question haunts the mind; it will not be put aside; and the Greek at last, like other men under similar conditions, only with a lu- cidity and precision peculiar to himself, makes the reply, “It is something like myself.” Every power _of nature he presumes to be a spiritual being, imper- -sonating the sky as Zeus, the earth as Demeter, the sea as Poseidon; from generation to penébation: under his shaping hands, the figures multiply and de- fine themselves; character and story crystallize about what at first were little more than names; till at last, from the womb of the dark enigma that haunted him in the beginning, there emerges into the charmed light of a world of ideal grace a pantheon of fair and concrete personalities. Nature has become a com- pany of spirits; every cave and fountain is haunted by a nymph; in the ocean dwell the Nereids, in the mountain the Oread, the Dryad in the wood; and everywhere, in groves and marshes, on the pastures or the rocky heights, floating in the current of the 4 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE streams or traversing untrodden snows, in the day at the chase and as evening closes in solitude finger- ing his flute, seen and heard by shepherds, alone or with his dancing train, is to be met the horned and goat-footed, the sunny-smiling Pan. Thus conceived, the world has become less terrible because more familiar. All that was incomprehen- sible, all that was obscure and dark, has now been _ seized and bodied forth in form, so that everywhere man is confronted no longer with blind and unintel- ligible force, but with spiritual beings moved by like passions with himself. The gods, it is true, were capricious and often hostile to his good, but at least they had a nature akin to his; if they were angry, they might be propitiated; if they were jealous, they might be appeased; the enmity of one might be compensated by the friendship of another; dealings with them, after all, were not so unlike dealings with men, and at the worst there was always a chance for courage, patience and wit. Man, in short, by his religion has been made at home in the world; and that is the first point to seize upon. ‘To drive it home, let us take an illus- tration from the story of Odysseus. Odysseus, it will be remembered, after the sack of Troy, for ten years was a wanderer on the seas, by tempest, enchantment, and every kind of danger detained, as it seemed, beyond hope of return from the wife and home he had left in Ithaca. The situation is forlorn enough. Yet, somehow or other, beauty in the story predominates over terror. And this, in part at least, because the powers with which GREEK RELIGION AND NATURE 5 Odysseus has to do are not mere forces of nature, blind and indifferent, but spiritual beings who take an interest, for or against, in his fate. The whole story becomes familiar, and, if one may say so, comfortable, by the fact that it is conducted under the control and direction of the gods. Listen, for example, to the Homeric account of the onset of a storm, and observe how it sets one at ease with the elements: “Now the Lord, the shaker of the earth, on his way from the Ethiopians, espied Odysseus afar off from the mountains of the Solymi: even thence he saw him as he sailed over the deep; and he was yet more angered in spirit, and wagging his head he communed with his own heart. ‘Lo now, it must be that the gods at the last have changed their purpose concerning Odysseus, while I was away among the Ethiopians. And now he is nigh to the Phzeacian land, where it is so ordained that he escape the great issues of the woe which hath come upon him. But methinks, that even yet I will drive him far enough in the path of suffering.’ “With that he gathered the clouds and troubled the waters of the deep, grasping his trident in his hands; and he roused all storms of all manner of winds, and shrouded in clouds the land and sea: and down sped night from heaven. The East Wind and the South Wind clashed, and the stormy West, and the North, that is born in the bright air, rolling onward a great wave.” * The position of the hero is terrible, it is true, but 1 Odyss. v 282.—Translated by Butcher and Lang. 6 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE not with the terror of despair; for as it is a god that wrecked him, it may also be a god that will save. If Poseidon is his enemy, Athene, he knows, is his friend; and all lies, after all, in the hands, or, as the Greeks said, “on the knees,” not of a blind destiny, but of beings accessible to prayer. Let us take another passage from Homer to illus- trate the same point. It is the place where Achilles is endeavouring to light the funeral pyre of Patro- clus, but because there is no wind the fire will not catch. What is he to do? What can he do? No- thing, say we, but wait till the wind comes. But to the Greek the winds are persons, not elements; Achilles has only to call and to promise, and they will listen to his voice. And so, we are told, ‘“‘Fleet- footed noble Achilles had a further thought: stand- ing aside from the pyre he prayed to the two winds of North and West, and promised them fair offerings, and pouring large libations from a golden cup be- sought them to come, that the corpses might blaze up speedily in the fire, and the wood make haste to be enkindled. Then Iris, when she heard his prayer, went swiftly with the message to the Winds. They within the house of the gusty West Wind were feasting all together at meat, when Iris sped thither, and halted on the threshold of stone. And when they saw her with their eyes, they sprung up and called to her every one to sit by him. But she re- fused to sit, and spake her word; ‘No seat for me; I must go back to the streams of Ocean, to the Ethi- opians’ land where they sacrifice hecatombs to the immortal gods, that I too may feast at their rites. * GREEK RELIGION AND NATURE 7 But Achilles is praying the North Wind and the loud West to come, and promising them fair offer- ings, that ye may make the pyre be kindled whereon lieth Patroclus, for whom all the Achaians are mak- ing moan.’ “She having thus said departed, and they arose with a mighty sound, rolling the clouds before them. And swiftly they came blowing over the sea, and the wave rose beneath their shrill blast; and they came to deep-soiled Troy, and fell upon the pile, and loudly roared the mighty fire. So all night drave they the flame of the pyre together, blowing shrill; and all night fleet Achilles, holding a two-handled cup, drew wine from a golden bowl, and poured it forth and drenched the earth, calling upon the spirit of hapless Patroclus. As a father waileth when he burneth the bones of his son, new-married, whose death is woe to his hapless parents, so wailed Achil- les as he burnt the bones of his comrade, going heav- ily round the burning pile, with many moans. “But the hour when the Morning Star goeth forth to herald light upon the earth, the star that saffron-mantled Dawn cometh after, and spreadeth over the salt sea, then grew the burning faint, and the flame died down. And the Winds went back again to betake them home over the Thracian main, and it roared with a violent swell. Then the son of Peleus turned away from the burning and lay down wearied, and sweet sleep leapt upon him.” * The exquisite beauty of this passage, even in 1Tliad xxiii. p. 193.—Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers. 8 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE translation, will escape no lover of poetry. And it is a beauty which depends on the character of the Greek religion; on the fact that all that is unintel- ligible in the world, all that is alien to man, has been drawn, as it were, from its dark retreat, clothed in radiant form, and presented to the mind as a glori- fied image of itself. Every phenomenon of nature, night and “rosy-fingered” dawn, earth and sun, winds, rivers, and seas, sleep and death—all have been transformed into Divine and conscious agents, to be propitiated by prayer, interpreted by divina- tion, and comprehended by passions and desires identical with those which stir and control man- kind. § 3. GREEK RELIGION AN INTERPRETATION OF THE HUMAN PASSIONS And as with the external world, so with the world within. The powers of nature were not the only ones felt by man to be different from and alien to himself; there were others, equally strange, dwelling in his own heart, which, though in a sense they were part of him, yet he felt to be not himself, which came upon him and possessed him without his choice and against his will. With these, too, he felt the need to make himself at home, and these, too, to satisfy his need, he shaped into creatures like himself. To the whole range of his inner experience he gave definition and life, presenting it to himself in a. series of spiritual forms. In Aphrodite, mother of Eros, he incarnated the passion of love, placing in GREEK RELIGION AND SOCIETY 9 her broidered girdle “love and desire of loving con- verse that steals the wits even of the wise”; in Ares he embodied the lust of war; in Athene, wis- dom; in Apollo, music and the arts. The pangs of guilt took shape in the conception of avenging Furies; and the very prayers of the worshipper sped from him in human form, wrinkled and blear- eyed, with halting pace, in the rear of punishment. Thus the very self of man he set outside himself; the powers, so intimate, and yet so strange, that swayed him from within he made familiar by mak- ing them distinct; converted their shapeless terror into the beauty of visible form; and by merely pre- senting them thus to himself in a guise that was im- mediately understood, set aside, if he could not an- swer, the haunting question of their origin and end. Here then is at least a partial reply to our question as to the effect of a belief in the gods on the feeling of the Greek. To repeat the phrase once more, it’ made him at home in the world. The mysterious powers that controlled him it converted into beings like himself; and so gave him heart and breathing- space, shut in, as it were, from the abyss by this shining host of fair and familiar forms, to turn to the interests and claims of the passing hour an at- tention undistracted by doubt and fear. § 4. GREEK RELIGION THE FOUNDATION OF SOCIETY But this relation to the world of nature is only one side of man’s life; more prominent and more 10 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE important, at a later stage of his development, is his relation to society; and here too in Greek civiliza- tion a great part was played by religion. For the Greek gods, we must remember, were not purely “spiritual powers, to be known and approached only in the heart by prayer. ‘They were beings in hu- man form, like, though superior to ourselves, who passed a great part of their history on earth, inter- vened in the affairs of men, furthered or thwarted their undertakings, had begotten among them sons and daughters, and followed, from generation to gen- eration, the fortunes of their children’s children. Between them and mankind there was no impassable gulf; from Heracles the son of Zeus was descended the Dorian race; the Ionians from Ion, son of Apollo; every family, every tribe traced back its origin to a “hero,” and these “heroes” were chil- dren of the gods, and deities themselves. Thus were the gods, in the most literal sense, the founders of society; from them was derived, even physically, the unit of the family and the race; and the whole social structure raised upon that natural basis was necessarily penetrated through and through by the spirit of religion. We must not therefore be misled by the fact that there was no church in the Greek state to the idea that the state recognized no religion; on the con- trary, religion was so essential to the state, so bound up with its whole structure, in general and in detail, that the very conception of a separation between the powers was impossible. If there was no separate church, in our sense of the term, as an independent GREEK RELIGION AND SOCIETY 11 organism within the state, it was because the state, in one of its aspects, was itself a church, and de- rived its sanction, both as a whole and in its parts, from the same gods who controlled the physical world. Not only the community as a whole but all its separate minor organs were under the protection oi patron deities. The family centred in the hearth, where the father, in his capacity of priest, offered sacrifice and prayer to the ancestors of the house; the various corporations into which families were grouped, the local divisions for the purpose of tax- ation, elections, and the like, derived a spiritual unity from the worship of a common god; and finally the all-embracing totality of the state it- self was explained and justified to all its members by the cult of the special protecting deity to whom its origin and prosperous continuance were due. The sailor who saw, on turning the point of Sunium, the tip of the spear of Athene glittering on the Acropolis, beheld in a type the spiritual form of the state; Athene and Athens were but two aspects of the same thing; and the statue of the goddess of wis- dom dominating the city of the arts may serve to sum up for us the ideal of that marvellous corporate life where there was no ecclesiastical religion only because there was no secular state. Regarded from this point of view, we may say that the religion of the Greeks was the inner aspect. of their political life. And we must add that in one respect their religion pointed the way to a higher political achievement than they were ever able to realize in fact. One fatal defect of the Greek civili- 12 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE zation, as is familiar to students of their history, was the failure of the various independent city states to coalesce into a single harmonious whole. But the tendency of religion was to obviate this defect. We find, for example, that at one time or another fed- erations of states were formed to support in common the cult of some god; and one cult in particular there was—that of the Delphian Apollo—whose influence on political no less than on religious life was felt as far as and even beyond the limits of the Greek race. No colony could be founded, no war hazarded, no peace confirmed, without the advice and approval of the god—whose cult was thus at once a religious centre for the whole of Greece, and a forecast of a political unity that should co-ordinate into a whole her chaos of conflicting states. The religion of the Greeks being thus, as we have seen, the bond of their political life, we find its sanction extended at every point to custom and law. The persons of heralds, for example, were held to be under divine protection; treaties between states and contracts between individuals were confirmed by oath; the vengeance of the gods was invoked upon infringers of the law; national assemblies and mili- tary expeditions were inaugurated by public prayers; the whole of corporate life, in short, social and po- _ litical, was so embraced and bathed in an idealizing element of ritual that the secular and religious as- pects of the state must have been as inseparable te a Greek in idea as we know them to have heen in constitution. RELIGIOUS FESTIVALS 13 § 5. RELIGIOUS FESTIVALS For it was in ritual and art, not in propositions, that the Greek religion expressed itself; and in this respect it was closer to the Roman Catholic than to the Protestant branch of the Christian faith. The plastic genius of the race, the passion to embody ideas in form, drove them to enact for their own delight, in the most beautiful and telling forms, the whole conception they had framed of the world and of themselves. The changes of the seasons, with the toil they exact and the gifts they bring, the powers of generation and destruction, the bounty or the rig- ours of the earth; and on the other hand, the order and operations of social phenomena, the divisions of age and sex, of function and of rank in the state —all these took shape and came, as it were, to self- consciousness in a magnificent series of publicly or- dered fétes. So numerous were these and so diverse in their character that it would be impossible, even if it were desirable in this place, to give any general account of them. But it will be worth while, for the sake of illustration, to describe one, the great city festivals of Athens, called the Panathenza. In this national féte, held every four years, all the higher activities of Athenian life were ideally dis- played—contests of song, of lyre and of flute, foot and horse races, wrestling, boxing, and the like, military evolutions of infantry and horse, pyrrhic dances symbolic of attack and defence in war, mys- tic chants of women and choruses of youths—the 14 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE whole concentring and discharging itself in that great processional act in which, as it were, the ma- terial forms of society became transparent, and the Whole moved on, illumined and visibly sustained by the spiritual soul of which it was the complete and harmonious embodiment. Of this procession we have still in the frieze of the Parthenon a marble transcript. There we may see the life of ancient Athens moving in stone, from the first mounting of their horses by isolated youths, like the slow and dropping prelude of a symphony, on to the thronged and trampling ranks of cavalry, past the antique chariots reminiscent of Homeric war, and the march- ing band of flutes and zithers, by lines of men and maidens bearing sacrificial urns, by the garlanded sheep and oxen destined for sacrifice, to where, on turning the corner that leads to the eastern front, we find ourselves in the presence of the Olympian gods themselves, enthroned to receive the offering of a people’s life. And if to this marble representation we add the colour it lacks, the gold and silver of the vessels, the purple and saffron robes; if we set the music playing and bid the oxen low; if we gird our living picture with the blaze of an August noon and crown it with the Acropolis of Athens, we may form a conception, better perhaps than could otherwise be obtained, of what religion really meant to the citizen of a state whose activities were thus habitually sym- bolized in the cult of its patron deity. Religion to him, clearly, could hardly be a thing apart, dwelling in the internal region of the soul and leaving outside, RELIGIOUS FESTIVALS 15 untouched by the light of the ideal, the whole busi- ness and complexity of the material side~of life; to him it was the vividly present and active soul of his corporate existence, representing in the sym- bolic forms of ritual the actual facts of his experi- ence. What he re-enacted periodically, in ordered ceremony, was but the drama of his daily life; so that, as we said before, the state in one of its as- pects was a church, and every layman from one point of view a priest. The question, ‘What did a belief in the gods really mean to the Greek,” has now received at least some sort of answer. It meant, to recur to our old phrase, that he was made at home in the world. In place of the unintelligible powers of na- ture, he was surrounded by a company of beings like himself; and these beings who controlled the physical world were also the creators of human so- ciety. From them were descended the Heroes who founded families and states; and under their guid- ance and protection cities prospered and throve. Their histories were recounted in myths, and em- bodied in ritual. The whole life of man, in its re- lations both to nature and to society, was conceived as derived from and dependent upon his gods; and this dependence was expressed and brought vividly home to him in a series of religious festivals. Belief in the gods was not to him so much an intellectual conviction, as a spiritual atmosphere in which he moved; and to think it away would be to think away the whole structure of Greek civilization. 16 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE § 6. THe GREEK CONCEPTION OF THE RELATION oF MAN TO THE Gops Admitting, however, that all this is true, admitting the place of religion in Greek life, do we not end, after all, in a greater puzzle than we began with? For this it may be said, whatever it may be, is not what we mean by religion. This, after all, is merely a beautiful way of expressing facts; a translation, not an interpretation, of life. What we mean by re- ligion is something very different to that, something which concerns the relation of the soul to God; the sense of sin, for example, and of repentance and grace. The religion of the Greeks, we may admit, did something for them which our religion does not do for us. It gave intelligible and beautiful form to those phenomena of nature which we can only describe as manifestations of energy; it expressed in a ritual of exquisite art those corporate relations which we can only enunciate in abstract terms; but did it perform what after all, it may be said, is the true function of religion? did it touch the con- science as well as the imagination and intellect? To this question we may answer at once, broadly speaking, No! It was, we might say, a distin- guishing characteristic of the Greek religion that it did not concern itself with the conscience at all; the conscience, in fact, did not yet exist, to enact that drama of the soul with God which is the main interest of the Christian, or at least of the Protes- tant faith. To bring this point home to us let us open the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and present to our- ¢ RELATION OF MAN TO THE GODS 17 selves, in its most vivid colours, the position of the English Puritan: “Now, I saw, upon a time, when he was walking in the fields, that he was (as he was wont) reading in his book, and greatly distressed in his mind; and, as he read, he burst out, as he had done before, crying, ‘What shall I do to be saved?’ I looked then, and saw a man named Evangelist coming to him, and asked, ‘Wherefore dost thou cry?’ “He answered, ‘Sir, I perceive by the book in my hands that I am condemned to die, and after that to come to judgment; and I find that I am not willing to do the first, nor able to do the second.’ “Then said Evangelist, ‘Why not willing to die, since this life is attended with so many evils?’ The man answered, ‘Because I fear that this burden that is upon my back will sink me lower than the grave, and I shall fall into Tophet. And, Sir, if I be not fit to go to prison, I am not fit to go to judgment, and from thence to execution; and the thoughts of these things makes me cry.’ “Then, said Evangelist, ‘If this be thy condition, why standest thou still?’ He answered, ‘Because I know not whither to go.’ Then he gave him a parchment roll, and there was written within, ‘Fly from, the wrath to come.’ ” The whole spirit of the passage transcribed, and of the book from which it is quoted, is as alien as can be to the spirit of the Greeks. To the Puritan, the inward relation of the soul to God is everything; to the average Greek, one may say broadly, it was nothing; it would have been at variance with his 18 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE whole conception of the divine power. For the gods of Greece were beings essentially like man, superior to him not in spiritual nor even in moral attributes, but in outward gifts, such as strength, beauty, and immortality. And as a consequence of this his rela- tions to them were not inward and spiritual, but external and mechanical. In the midst of a crowd of deities, capricious and conflicting in their wills, he had to find his way as best he could. There was no knowing precisely what a god might want; there was no knowing what he might be going todo. Ifaman fell into trouble, no doubt he had offended some- body, but it was not so easy to say whom or how; if he neglected the proper observances no doubt he would be punished, but it was not everyone who knew what the proper observances were. Altogether it was a difficult thing to ascertain or to move the will of the gods, and one must help oneself as best one could. The Greek, accordingly, helped himself by an elaborate system of sacrifice and prayer and divination, a system which had little connection with an internal spiritual life, but the object of which was simply to discover and if possible to affect the divine purposes. This is what we meant by saying that the Greek view of the relation of man to the gods was mechanical. The point will become clearer by illustration. § 7. DIVINATION, OMENS, ORACLES Let us take first a question which much exercised the Greek mind—the difficulty of forecasting the DIVINATION, OMENS, ORACLES 19 future. Clearly, the notion that the world was con- trolled by a crowd of capricious deities, swayed by human passions and desires, was incompatible with the idea of fixed law; but on the other hand it made it possible to suppose that some intimation might be had from the gods, either directly or symbolically, of what their intentions and purposes really were. And on this hypothesis we find developed, quite early in Greek history, a complex art of divining the future by signs. The flight of birds and other phenomena of the heavens, events encountered on the road, the speech of passers-by, or, most impor- tant of all, the appearance of the ‘entrails of the victims sacrificed were supposed to ) indicate the probable course of events. And this art, already mature in the time of the Homeric poems, we find flourishing throughout the historic age. Nothing could better indicate its prevalence and its scope than the following passage from Aristophanes, where he ridicules the readiness of his contemporaries to see in everything an omen, or, as he put it, punning on the Greek word, a “bird”: “On us you depend,” sings his chorus of Birds, “On us you depend, and to us you repair For council and aid, when a marriage is made, A purchase, a bargain, a venture in trade; Unlucky or lucky, whatever has struck ye, An ox or an ass, that may happen to pass, A voice in the street, or a slave that you meet, A name or a word by chance overheard, You deem it an omen, and call it a Bird.’ + 1 Aristop. “Birds” 717.—Frere’s translation. 20 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE Aristophanes, of course, is jesting; but how serious and important this art of divination must have appeared even to the most cultivated Athe- nians may be gathered from a passage of the tragedian A‘schylus, where he mentions it as one of the benefits conferred by Prometheus on mankind, and puts it on a level with the arts of building, metal-making, sailing, and the like, and the sciences of arithmetic and astronomy. And if anyone were dissatisfied with this method of interpretation by signs, he had a directer means of approaching the gods. He could visit one of the oracles and consult the deity at first hand about his most trivial and personal family affairs. Some of the questions put to the oracle at Dodona have been preserved to us,’ and very curious they are. ‘Who stole my cushions and pillow?” asks one bereaved householder. Another wants to know whether it will pay him to buy a certain house and farm; another whether sheep-farming is a good investment. Clearly, the god was not above being consulted on the meanest affairs; and his easy accessibility must have been some compensation for his probable ca- price. Nor must it be supposed that this phase of the Greek religion was a superstition confined to indi- viduals; on the contrary, it was fully recognized by the state. No important public act could be under- taken without a previous consultation of omens. More than once, in the clearest and most brilliant * See Percy Gardner, ‘““New Chapters in Greek History.” SACRIFICE AND ATONEMENT 21 period of the Greek civilization, we hear of military expeditions being abandoned because the sacrifices were unfavourable; and at the time of the Persian invasion, at the most critical moment of the history of Greece, the Lacedemonians, we are told, came too late to be present at the battle of Marathon, because they thought it unlucky to start until the moon was full. In all this we have a suggestion of the sort of relation in which the Greek conceived himself to stand to the gods. It is a relation, as we said, ex- ternal and mechanical. The gods were superior be- ings who knew, it might be presumed, what was go- ing to happen; man didn’t know, but perhaps he could find out. How could he find out? that was the problem; and it was answered in the way we have seen. There was no question, clearly, of a spiritual relation; all is external; and a similar ex- ternality pervades, on the whole, the Greek view of sacrifice and of sin. Let us turn now to consider this point. § 8. SACRIFICE AND ATONEMENT In Homer, we find that_sacrifice is frankly con- ceived as a sort of present.to. the gods,.for which they were in fairness bound to an equivalent return; and the nature of the bargain is fully recognized by the gods themselves. “Hector,” says Zeus to Hera, “was dearest to the gods of all mortals that are in Ilios. So was he to me at least, for nowise failed he in the gifts I loved. 22 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE Never did my altar lack seemly feast, drink-offering and the steam of sacrifice, even the honour that falleth to our due.” ? And he concludes that he must intervene to secure the restoration of the body of Hector to his father. The performance of sacrifice, then, ensures fa- vour; and on the other hand its neglect entails pun- ishment. When Apollo sends a plague upon the Greek fleet the most natural hypothesis to account for his conduct is that he has been stinted of his due meed of offerings; ‘‘perhaps,’”’ says Agamemnon, “the savour of lambs and unblemished goats may appease him.” Or, again, when the Greeks omit to sacrifice before building the wall around their fleet, they are punished by the capture of their position by the Trojans. The whole relation between man and the gods is of the nature of a contract. “If you do your part, I'll do mine; if not, not!” that is the tone of the language on either side. The con- ception is legal, not moral nor spiritual; it has noth- ing to do with what we call sin and conscience. At a later period, it is true, we find a point of view prevailing which appears at first sight to come closer to that of the Christian. Certain acts we find, such as murder, for example, were supposed to infect as with a stain not only the original offender but his descendants from generation to generation. Yet even so, the stain, it appears, was conceived to be rather physical than moral, analogous to disease both in its character and in the methods of its cure. 1 Tliad. xxiv. 66.—Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers. SACRIFICE AND ATONEMENT 23 éschylus tells us of the earth breeding monsters as a result of the corruption infused by the shedding of blood; and similarly a purely physical infection tainted the man or the race that had been guilty of crime. And as was the evil, so was the remedy. External acts and observations might cleanse and purge away what was regarded as an external affec- tion of the soul; and we know that in historic times there was a class of men, comparable to the mediz- val “pardoners,” whose profession it was to effect such cures. Plato has described them for us in striking terms. ‘Mendicant prophets,” he says, “go to rich men’s doors and persuade them that they have a power committed to them of making an atonement for their sins or those of their fathers by sacrifices or charms, with rejoicings and games; and they promise to harm an enemy whether just or un- just, at a small charge; with magic arts and incanta- tions binding the will of heaven, as they say, to do their work. . . . And they produce a host of books written by Muszus and Orpheus, who were children of the Moon and the Muses—that is what they say —according to which they perform their ritual, and persuade not only individuals, but whole cities, that expiations and atonements for sin may be made by sacrifices and amusements which fill a vacant hour.” } How far is all this from the Puritan view of sin! how far from the Christian of the “Pilgrim’s Pro- gress” with the burden on his back! To measure 1Plato’s Republic, II. 364b.—Jowett’s translation. 24 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE the distance we have only to attend, with this pas- sage in our mind, a meeting, say, of the “Salvation Army.” We shall then perhaps understand better the distinction between the popular religion of the Greeks and our own; between the conception of sin as a physical contagion to be cured by external rites, and the conception of it as an affection of the con- science which only “grace” can expel. In the one case the fact that a man was under the taint of crime would be borne in upon him by actual mis- fortune from without—by sickness, or failure in business, or some other of the troubles of life; and he would ease his mind and recover the spring of hope by performing certain ceremonies and rites. In the other case, his trouble is all inward; he feels that he is guilty in the sight of God, and the only thing _ that can relieve him is the certainty that he has been forgiven, assured him somehow or other from within. The difference is fundamental, and impor- tant to bear in mind, if we would form a clear con- ception of the Greek view of life. § 9. GUILT AND PUNISHMENT It must not be supposed, however, that the popular superstition described by Plato, however character- istic it may be of the point of view of the Greeks, represents the highest reach of their thought on the subject of guilt. No profounder utterances are to be found on this theme than those of the great poets and thinkers of Greece, who, without rejecting the common beliefs of their time, transformed them by GUILT AND PUNISHMENT 25 the insight of their genius into a new and deeper significance. Specially striking in this connection is the poetry of the tragedian A‘schylus; and it will be well worth our while to pause for a moment and endeavour to realize his position. Guilt and its punishment is the constant theme of the dramas of A‘schylus; and he has exhausted the resources of his genius in the attempt to depict the horror of the avenging powers, who under the name of the Erinyes, or Furies, persecute and torment the criminal. Their breath is foul with the blood on which they feed; from their rheumy eyes a horrible humour drops; daughters of night and clad in black they fly without wings; god and man and the very beasts shun them; their place is with punishment and torture, mutilation, stoning and breaking of necks. And into their mouth the poet has put words which seem to breathe the very stinky of the Jewish scriptures. “Come now let us preach to the sons of men; yea, let us tell them of our vengeance; yea, let us all make mention of justice. “‘Whoso showeth hands that are undefiled, lo, he shall suffer nought of us for ever, but shall go unharmed to his ending. “But if he hath sinned, like unto this man, and covereth hands that are blood-stained: then is our witness true to the slain man. “And we sue for the blood, sue and pursue for it, so that at the last there is payment. Even so ’tis written: (Oh sentence sure!) 26 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE “Upon all that wild in wickedness dip hand In the blood of their birth, in the fount of their flowing: So shall he pine until the grave receive him—to find no grace even in the grave; Sing then the spell, Sisters of hell; Chant him the charm Mighty to harm, Binding the blood, Maddening the mood; Such the music that we make: Quail, ye sons of man, and quake, Bow the heart, and bend, and break! This is our ministry marked for us from the be- ginning; This is our gift, and our portion apart, and our god- head, Ours, ours only for ever! Darkness, robes of darkness, a robe of terror for ever! Ruin is ours, ruin and wreck; When to the home Murder hath come, Making to cease Innocent peace; Then at his back Follow we in, Follow the sin; And ah! we hold to the end when we begin!” + There is no poetry more sublime than this; none © more penetrated with the sense of moral law. But 1 Aschyl. Eum. 297.—Translated by Dr. Verrall (Cam- bridge, 1885). GUILT AND PUNISHMENT 27 still it is wholly Greek in character. The theme is not merely the conscience of the sinner but the objective consequence of his crime. ‘Blood calls for blood,” is the poet’s text; a man, he says, must pay for what he does. The tragedy is the punish- ment of the guilty, rather than his inward sense of sin. Orestes, in fact, who is the subject of the drama with which we are concerned, in a sense was not a sinner at all. He had killed his mother, it is true, but only to avenge his father whom she had murdered, and at the express bidding of Apollo. So far is he from feeling the pangs of conscience that he constantly justifies his act. He suffers, not be- cause he has sinned but because he is involved in the curse of his race. For generations back the house of Atreus had been tainted with blood; mur- der had called for murder to avenge it; and Ores- tes, the last descendant, caught in the net of guilt, found that his only possibility of right action lay in a crime. He was bound to avenge his father, the god Apollo had enjoined it; and the avenging of his father meant the murder of his mother. What he commits, then, is a crime, but not a sin; and so it is regarded by the poet. The tragedy, as we have said, centres round an external objective law— “blood calls for blood.” But that is all. Of the in- ternal drama of the soul with God, the division of the man against himself, the remorse, the repent- ance, the new birth, the giving or withholding of grace—of all this, the essential content of Christian Protestantism, not a trace in the clear and concrete vision of the Greek. The profoundest of the poets 28 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE of Hellas, dealing with the darkest problem of guilt, is true to the plastic genius of his race. The spirit throws outside itself the law of its own being; by ob- jective external evidence it learns that doing in- volves suffering; and its moral conviction comes to it only when forced upon it from without by a direct experience of physical evil. Of Auschylus, the most Hebraic of the Hellenes, it is as true as of the aver- age Greek, that in the Puritan meaning of the phrase he had no sense of sin. And even in treating of him, we must still repeat what we said at the beginning, that the Greek conception of the relation of man to the gods is external and mechanical, not inward and spiritual. § 10. Mysticism But there is nothing so misleading as generaliza- tion, specially on the subject of the Greeks. Again and again when we think we have laid hold of their characteristic view we are confronted with some new aspect of their life which we cannot fit into harmony with our scheme. There is no formula which will sum up that versatile and many-sided people. And so, in the case before us, we have no sooner made what appears to be the safe and comprehensive state- ment that the Greeks conceived the relation of man to the gods mechanically, than we are reminded of quite another phase of their religion, different from and even antithetic to that with which we have hitherto been concerned. Nothing, we might be in- clined to say on the basis of what we have at pres- ent ascertained, nothing could be more opposed to MYSTICISM 29 the clear anthropomorphic vision of the Greek, than that conception of a mystic exaltation, so constantly occurring in the history of religion, whose aim is to transcend the limits of human personality and pass into direct communion with the divine life. Yet of some such conception, and of the ritual devised un- der its influence, we have undoubted though frag- mentary indications in the civilization of the Greeks. It is mainly in connection with Demeter and Diony- sus that the phenomena in question occur. But even Apollo, who in one of his aspects is a figure so typi- cally Hellenic, the ever-young and beautiful god of music and the arts, was also the Power of prophetic inspiration, of ecstasy or passing out of oneself. The priestess who delivered his oracle at Delphi was possessed and mastered by the god. Maddened by mephitic vapours steaming from a cleft in the rock, convulsed in every feature and every limb, she de- livered in semi-articulate cries the burden of the di- vine message. Her own personality, for the time being, was annihilated; the wall that parts man from god was swept away; and the divine rushed in upon the human vessel it shattered as it filled. This conception of inspiration as a higher form of madness, possessed of a truer insight than that of sanity, was fully recognized among the Greeks. “There is a madness,” as Plato puts it, “which is the special gift of heaven, and the source of the chiefest blessing among men. For prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses have conferred great benefits on Hellas, both in public 30 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE and private life, but when in their senses few or none. . . . And in proportion as prophecy is higher and more perfect than divination both in name and reality, in the same proportion, as the ancients tes- tify, is madness superior to a sane mind, for the one is only of human, but the other of divine origin.’ } Here, then, in the oracle at Delphi, the centre of the religious life of the Greeks, we have an explicit affirmation of that element of mysticism which we might have supposed to be the most alien to their genius; and the same element re-appears, in a cruder and more barbaric form, in connection with the cult of Dionysus. He, the god of wine, was also the god of inspiration; and the ritual with which he was worshipped was a kind of apotheosis of intoxication. To suppress for a time the ordinary work-a-day consciousness, with its tedium, its checks, its balanc- ing of pros and cons, to escape into the directness and simplicity of mere animal life, and yet to feel in this no degradation, but rather a submission to the divine power, an actual identification with the deity —such, it would seem, was the intention of those extraordinary revels of which we have in the “Bacche” of Euripides so vivid a description. And to this end no stimulus was omitted to excite and inspire the imagination and the sense. The in- fluence of night and torches in solitary woods, in- toxicating drinks, the din of flutes and cymbals on a bass of thunderous drums, dances convulsing every limb and dazzling eyes and brain, the harking-back, 1 Plato, Phaedrus, 244.—Jowett’s translation. MYSTICISM 31 as it were, to the sympathies and forms of animal life in the dress of fawnskin, the horns, the snakes twined about the arm, and the impersonation of those strange half-human creatures who were supposed to attend upon the gods, the satyrs, nymphs, and fauns who formed his train—all this points to an attempt to escape from the bounds of ordinary consciousness, and pass into some condition conceived, however confusedly, as one of union with the divine power. And though the basis, clearly enough, is physical, yet the whole ritual does undoubtedly express, and that with a plastic grace and beauty that redeems its frank sensuality, that passion to transcend the limitations of human existence which is at the bot- tom of the mystic element in all religions. But this orgy of the senses was not the only form which the worship of Dionysus took in Greece. In connection with one of his legends, the myth of Dionysus Zagreus, we find traces of an esoteric doc- trine, taught by what were known as the orphic sects, very curiously opposed, one would have said, to the general trend of Greek conceptions. Accord- ing to one form of the story, Zagreus was the son of Zeus and Persephone. Hera, in her jealousy, sent the Titans to destroy him; after a struggle, they managed to kill him, cut him up and devoured all but the heart, which was saved by Athene and car- ried to Zeus. Zeus swallowed it, and produced therefrom a second Dionysus. The Titans he de- stroyed by lightning, and from their ashes created Man. Man is thus composed of two elements, one bad, the Titanic, the other good, the Dionysiac; the 32 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE latter being derived from the body of Dionysus, which the Titans had devoured. This fundamental dualism, according to the doctrine founded on the myth, is the perpetual tragedy of man’s existence; and his perpetual struggle is to purify himself of the Titanic element. The process extends over many incarnations, but an ultimate deliverance is prom- ised by the aid of the redeemer Dionysus Lysius. The belief thus briefly described was not part of the popular religion of the Greeks, but it was a nor- mal growth of their consciousness, and it is men- tioned here as a further indication that even in what we call the classical age there were not wanting traces of the more mystic and spiritual side of re- ligion. Here, in the tenets.of these orphic sects, we have the doctrine of “original sin,” the conception of life as a struggle between two opposing principles, and the promise of an ultimate redemption by the help of the divine power. And if this be taken in connection with the universal and popular belief in inspiration as possession by the god, we shall see that our original statement that the relation of man to the gods was mechanical and external in the Greek conception, must at least be so far modified that it must be taken only as an expression of the central or dominant point of view, not as excluding other and even contradictory standpoints. Still, broadly speaking and admitting the limita- tions, the statement may stand. If the Greek popu- lar religion be compared with that of the Christian world, the great distinction certainly emerges, that in the one the relation of God to man is conceived as DEATH AND A FUTURE LIFE 33 mechanical and external, in the other as inward and spiritual. The point has been sufficiently illustrated, and we may turn to another division of our subject. § 11. THe Greek View oF DEATH AND A. FUTURE LIFE Of all the problems on which we expect light to be thrown by religion none, to us, is more pressing than that of death. A fundamental, and as many believe, the most essential part of Christianity, is its doctrine of reward and punishment in the world be- | yond; anda religion which had nothing at all to say | about this great enigma we should hardly feel to be a religion at all. And certainly on this head the Greeks, more than any people that ever lived, must have required a consolation and a hope. Just in proportion as their life was fuller and richer than that which has been lived by any other race, just in proportion as their capacity for enjoyment, in body and soul, was keener, as their senses were finer, their intellect broader, their passions more intense, must they have felt, with peculiar emphasis, the horror of decay and death. And such, in fact, is the char- acteristic note of their utterances on this theme. “Rather,” says the ghost of Achilles to Odysseus in the world of shades, ‘“‘rather would I live upon the soil as the hireling of another, with a landless man who had no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the dead that are no more. 1, Better, as Shakespeare has it, 1 Od. xi. 489.—Translated by Butcher and Lang. 34 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE “The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury and imprisonment Can lay on nature,” better that, on earth at least and in the sun, than the phantom kingdoms of the dead. The fear of age and death is the shadow of the love of life; and on no people has it fallen with more horror than on the Greeks. The tenderest of their songs of love close with a sob; and it is an autumn wind that rustles in their bowers. of spring. Here, for example, is a poem by Mimnermus characteristic of this mood of the Greeks: “OQ golden Love, what life, what joy but thine? Come death, when thou art gone, and make an end! When gifts and tokens are no longer mine, Nor the sweet intimacies of a friend. These are the flowers of youth. But painful age The bane of beauty, following swiftly on, Wearies the heart of man with sad presage And takes away his pleasure in the sun. Hateful is he to maiden and to boy And fashioned by the gods for our annoy.” ? Such being the general view of the Greeks on the subject of death, what has their religion to say by way of consolation? It taught, to begin with, that the spirit does survive after death. But this survi- val, as it is described in the Homeric poems, is merely that of a phantom and a shade, a bloodless and colourless duplicate of the man as he lived on 1 Mimnermus, El. 1. DEATH AND A FUTURE LIFE 35 earth. Listen to the account Odysseus gives of his meeting with his mother’s ghost. “So spake she, and I mused in my heart and would fain have embraced the spirit of my mother dead. Thrice I sprang towards her, and was minded to embrace her; thrice she flitted from my hands as a shadow or even as a dream, and sharper ever waxed the grief within me. And uttering my voice I spake to her winged words: ““Mother mine, wherefore dost thou not tarry for me who am eager to seize thee, that even in Hades we twain may cast our arms each about the other, and satisfy us with chill lament? Is it but a phan- tom that the high goddess Persephone hath sent me, to the end that I may groan for more exceeding sorrow?’ “So spake I, and my lady mother answered me anon. ‘Ah me, my child, luckless above all men, nought doth Persephone, the daughter of Zeus, deceive thee, but even in this wise it is with mortals when they die. For the sinews no more bind together the flesh and the bones, but the force of burning fire abolishes them, so soon as the life hath left the white bones, and the spirit like a dream flies forth and hovers near,’ ”’ * From such a conception of the life after death lit- tle comfort could be drawn; nor does it appear that any was sought. So far as we can trace the habitual attitude of the Greek he seems to have occupied him- self little with speculation, either for good or evil, as *QOd. xi. 204.—Translated by Butcher and Lang. 36 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE to what might await him on the other side of the temb. He was told indeed in his legends of a happy place for the souls of heroes, and of torments re- served for great criminals; but these ideas do not seem to have haunted his imagination. He was never obsessed by that close and imminent vision of heaven and hell which overshadowed and dwarfed, for the medizval mind, the brief space of pilgrimage onearth. Rather he turned, by preference, from the thought of death back to life, and in the memory of honourable deeds in the past and the hope of fame for the future sought his compensation for the loss of youth and love. In the great funeral speech upon those who have fallen in war which Thucydides puts into the mouth of Pericles we have, we must suppose, a reflection, more accurate than is to be found else- where, of the position naturally adopted by the aver- age Greek. And how simple are the topics, how broad and human, how rigorously confined to the limits of experience! There is no suggestion any- where of a personal existence continued after death; the dead live only in their deeds; and only by mem- ory are the survivors to be consoled. “I do not now commiserate the parents of the dead who stand here; I would rather comfort them. You know that your life has been passed amid mani-_. fold vicissitudes; and that they may be deemed for- tunate who have gained most honour, whether an honourable death like theirs, or an honourable sor- row like yours, and whose days have been so ordered that the term of their happiness is likewise the term of their life. . . . Some of you are at an age at which DEATH AND A FUTURE LIFE 37 they may hope to have other children, and they ought to bear their sorrow better; not only will the children who may hereafter be born make them for- get their now lost ones, but the city will be doubly a gainer. She will not be left desolate, and she will be safer. For a man’s counsels‘cannot be of equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger. To those of you who have passed their prime, say: ‘Congratulate your- selves that you have been happy during the greater part of your days; remember that your life of sorrow will not last long, and be comforted by the glory of those who are gone. For the love of honour alone is ever young, and not riches, as some say, but hon- our is the delight of men when they are old and use- less,’ ? + The passage perhaps represents what we may cali the typical attitude of the Greek. To seek consola- tion for death, if anywhere, then in life, and in life | not as it might be imagined beyond the grave, but as it had been and would be lived on earth, appears to be consonant with all that we know of the clear and objective temper of the race. It is the spirit which was noted long ago by Goethe as inspiring the se- pulchral monuments of Athens. “The wind,” he says, “which blows from the tombs of the ancients comes with gentle breath as over a mound of roses. The reliefs are touching and pa- thetic, and always represent life. There stand father and mother, their son between them, gazing at one another with unspeakable truth to nature. +Thuc. IJ, 44.—Jowett’s translation. —_—_—_— 38 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE Here a pair clasp hands. Here a father seems to rest on his couch and wait to be entertained by his family. To me the presence of these scenes was very touching. Their art is of a late period, yet are they simple, natural, and of universal interest. Here there is no knight in harness on his knees await- | ing a joyful resurrection. The artist has with more _ or less skill presented to us only the persons them- | selves, and so made their existence lasting and per- , petual. They fold not their hands, gaze not into heaven; they are on earth, what they were and what they are. They stand side by side, take interest in one another; and that is what is in the stone, even though somewhat unskilfully, yet most pleasingly de- picted.” * As a further illustration of the same point an epitaph may be quoted equally striking for its simple human feeling and for its absence of any suggestion of a continuance of the life of the dead. ‘‘Farewell” is the first and last word; no hint of a “joyful res- urrection.” “Farewell, tomb of Melité; the best of women lies here, who loved her loving husband, Onesimus; thou wert most excellent, wherefore he longs for thee after thy death, for thou wert the best of wives.— Farewell, thou too, dearest husband, only love my children.” ? 1¥From Goethe’s ‘“Italienische Reise.” I take this translation (by permission) from Percy Gardner’s “New Chapters in Greek History,” p. 319. * Percy Gardner, ‘“New Chapters in Greek History,” Dp. S20. DEATH AND A FUTURE LIFE 39 But however characteristic this attitude of the Greeks may appear to be, especially by contrast with the Christian view, it would be a mistake to suppose that it was the only one with which they were acquainted, or that they had put aside alto- gether, as indifferent or insoluble, the whole problem of a future world. As we have seen, they did be- lieve in the survival of the spirit, and in a world of shades ruled by Pluto and Persephone. They had legends of a place of bliss for the good and a place of torment for the wicked; and if this conception did not haunt their mind, as it haunted that of the me- dizval Christian, yet at times it was certainly pres- ent to them, with terror or with hope. That the Greek was not unacquainted with the fear of hell we know from the passage of Plato, part of which we have already quoted, where in speaking of the men- dicant prophets who professed to make atonement for sin he says that their ministrations ‘‘are equally at the service of the living and the dead; the latter sort they call mysteries, and they redeem. us from the pains of hell, but if we neglect them no one knows what awaits us.” * And on the other hand we hear, as early as the date of the Odyssey, of the Elysian fields reserved for the souls of the favourites of the gods. The Greeks, then, were not without hope and fear concerning the world to come, however little these feelings may have coloured their daily life; and there was one phase of their religion, which appears -1 Plato, Rep. II. 364 e.—Jowett’s translation. _— 40 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE to have been specially occupied with this theme. In almost every Greek city we hear of “mysteries,” the _ most celebrated being, of course, those of Eleusis in \ Attica. What exactly these “mysteries” were we are very imperfectly informed; but so much, at least, is clear that by means of a scenic symbolism, repre- senting the myth of Demeter and Kore or of Diony- sus Zagreus, hopes were held out to the initiated not only of a happy life on earth, but of a happy im- mortality beyond. “Blessed,” says Pindar, “blessed is he who has seen these things before he goes under the hollow earth. He knows the end of life, and he knows its god-given origin.”” And it is presumably to the initiated that the same poet promises the joys of his thoroughly Greek heaven. “For them,” he says, “‘shineth below the strength of the sun while in our world it is night, and the space of crimson- flowered meadows before their city is full of the shade of frankincense-trees, and of fruits of gold. And some in horses, and in bodily feats, and some in dice, and some in harp- playing have delight; and among them thriveth all fair-flowering bliss; and fragrance streameth ever through the lovely land, as they mingle incense of every kind upon the altars of the gods.” * The Greeks, then, were not unfamiliar with the _ conception of heaven and hell; only, and that is the _ point to which we must return and on which we - must insist, the conception did not dominate and ob- ' sess their mind. They may have had their spasms + Pindar, Thren. I.—Translation by E. Myers. ¢ CRITICAL AND SCEPTICAL OPINION 41 of terror, but these they could easily relieve by the performance of some atoning ceremony; they may have had their thrills of hope, but these they would only indulge at the crisis of some imposing ritual. The general tenor of their life does not seem to have been much affected by speculations about the world beyond. Of age indeed and of death they had a horror proportional to their acute and sensitive en- joyment of life; but their natural impulse was to) turn for consolation to the interests and achieve- ments of the world they knew, and to endeavour to’ soothe, by memories and hopes of deeds future and past, the inevitable pains of failure and decay. § 12. CriTICAL AND SCEPTICAL OPINION IN GREECE And now let us turn to a point for which perhaps some readers have long been waiting, and with which they may have expected us to begin rather than to end. So far, in considering the part played by reli- gion in Greek life, we have assumed the position of orthodoxy. We have endeavoured to place our- selves at the standpoint of the man who did not criti- cize or reflect, but accepted simply, as a matter of course, the tradition handed down to him by his fath- ers. Only so, if at all, was it possible for us to de- tach ourselves from our habitual preconceptions, and to regard the pagan mythology not as a graceful invention of the poets, but as a serious and, at the time, a natural and inevitable way of looking at the world. Now, however, it is time to turn to the other 42 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE side, and to consider the Greek religion as it ap- peared to contemporary critics. For critics there were, and sceptics, or rather, to put it more exactly, there was a critical age succeeding an age of faith. | As we trace, however imperfectly, the development _of the Greek mind, we can observe their intellect and their moral sense expanding beyond the limits of their creed. Either as sympathetic, though candid, friends, or as avowed enemies, they bring to light its contradictions and defects; and as a result of the _ process one of two things happens. LEither the an- | cient conception of the gods is transformed in the _ direction of monotheism, or it is altogether swept \ away, and a new system of the world built up, on the ‘basis of natural science or of philosophy. These tendencies of thought we must now endeavour to trace; for we should have formed but an imperfect idea of the scope of the religious consciousness of the Greeks if we confined ourselves to what we may call their orthodox faith. It is in their most critical thinkers, in Euripides and Plato, that the religious sense is most fully and keenly developed; and it is in the philosophy that supervened upon the popular creed, rather than in the popular creed itself, that we shall find the highest and most spiritual reaches of their thought. Let us endeavour, then, in the first place to realize to ourselves how the Greek religion must have ap- peared to one who approached it not from the side of unthinking acquiescence, but with the idea of discov- ering for himself how far it really met the needs ¢ CRITICAL AND SCEPTICAL OPINION 43 and claims of the intellect and the moral sense. Let us imagine him turning to his Homer, to those poems which were almost the Bible of the Greek, his ultimate appeal both in religion and in ethics; which were taught in the schools, quoted in the law- courts, recited in the streets; and from which the teacher drew his moral instances, the rhetorician his allusions, the artist his models, every man his con- ception of the gods. Let us imagine some candid and ingenuous youth, turning to his Homer and re- peating, say, the following passage of the Iliad:— ‘“‘Among the other gods fell grievous bitter strife, and their hearts were carried diverse in their breasts. And they clashed together with a great noise, and the wide earth groaned, and the clarion of great Heaven rang around. Zeus heard as he sate upon Olympus, and his heart within him laughed pleas- antly when he beheld that strife of the gods.” * At this point, let us suppose, the reader pauses to reflect; and is struck, for the first time, with a shock of surprise by the fact that the gods should be not only many but opposed; and opposed on what issue? a purely human one! a war between Greeks and Trojans for the possession of a beautiful woman! Into such a contest the immortal gods descend, fight with human weapons, and dispute in human terms! Where is the single purpose that should mark the divine will? where the repose of the wisdom that foreordained and knows the end? Not, it is clear, 1 Jliad xxi. 385.—Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers. 44 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE in this motley array of capricious and passionate wills!’ Then, perhaps, in Zeus, Zeus, who is lord of all? He, at least, will impose upon this mob of recalcitrant deities the harmony which the pious soul demands. He, whose rod shakes the sky, will arise and assert the law. He, in his majesty, will speak the words—alas! what words! Let us take them straight from the lips of the King of gods and men :— “Hearken to me, all gods and all ye goddesses, that I may tell you that my heart within my breast commandeth me. One thing let none essay, be it goddess or be it god, to wit, to thwart my saying; approve ye it all altogether, that with all speed I may accomplish these things. Whomsoever I shall perceive minded to go, apart from the gods, to suc- cour Trojans or Danaans, chastened in no seemly wise shall he return to Olympus, or I will take and cast him into misty Tartaros, right far away, where is the deepest gulf beneath the earth; there are the gate of iron and threshold of bronze, as far beneath Hades as heaven is high above the earth: then shall ye know how far I am mightiest of all gods. Go to now, ye gods, make trial that ye all may know. Fasten ye a rope of gold from heaven, and all ye gods lay hold thereof and all goddesses; yet cculd ye not drag from heaven to earth Zeus, counsellor supreme, not though ye toiled sore. But once I like- wise were minded to draw with all my heart, then should I draw ye up with very earth and sea withal. Thereafter would I bind the rope about a pinnacle of Olympus, and so should all those things be hung * CRITICAL AND SCEPTICAL OPINION 45 in air. By so much am I beyond gods and beyond men,” * And is that all? In the divine tug-of-war Zeus is more than a match for all the other gods together! Is it on this that the lordship of heaven and earth depends? This that we are to worship as highest, we of the brain and heart and soul? And even so, even admitting the ground of supremacy, with what providence or consistency of purpose is it exercised? Why, Zeus himself is as capricious as the rest! Be- cause Thetis comes whining to him about an insult put upon Achilles, he interferes to change the whole course of the war, and that too by means of a lying dream! Even his own direct decrees he can hardly be induced to observe. His son Sarpedon, for ex- ample, who is “fated,” as he says himself, to die, he is yet at the last moment in half a mind to save alive! How is such division possible in the will of the su- preme god? Or is the “fate” of which he speaks something outside himself? But if so, then above him! and if above him, what is he? Not, after all, the highest, not the supreme at all! What then are we to worship? What ts this higher ‘“‘fate’’? Such would be the kind of questions that would vex our candid youth when he approached his Homer from the side of theology. Nor would he fare any better if he took the ethical point of view. The gods, he would find, who should surely at least . attain to the human standard, not only are capable of every phase of passion, anger, fear, jealousy, and, | * Yliad. viii. 5.—Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers. 46 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE above all, love, but indulge them all with a verve and an abandonment that might make the boldest libertine pause. Zeus himself, for example, expends upon the mere catalogue of his amours a good twelve lines of hexameter verse. No wonder that Hera is jealous, and that her lord is driven to put her down in terms better suited to the lips of mortal hus- bands: “Lady, ever art thou imagining, nor can I escape thee; yet shalt, thou in no wise have power to fulfil, but wilt thou be the further from my heart; that shall be even the worse for thee. Hide thou in si- lence and hearken to my bidding, lest all the gods that are in Olympus keep not off from thee my visit- ation, when I put forth my hands unapproachable against thee.” ? § 13. ETHICAL CRITICISM The incongruity of all this with any adequate con- ception of deity is patent, if once the critical atti- tude be adopted; and it was adopted by some of the clearest and most religious minds of Greece. Nay, even orthodoxy itself did not refrain from a genial and sympathetic criticism. Aristophanes, for ex- ample, who, if there had been an established church, would certainly have been described as one of its main pillars, does not scruple to represent his Birds as issuing— “A warning and notices, formally given, To Jove, and all others residing in heaven, + Tliad i. 560.—Translated by Leaf, Lang and Myers. ETHICAL CRITICISM 47 Forbidding them ever to venture again To trespass on our atmospheric domain, With scandalous journeys, to visit a list — Of Alcmenas and Semeles; if they persist, We warn them that means will be taken moreover To stop their gallanting and acting the lover.” and Heracles the glutton, and Dionysus, the dandy and the coward, are familiar figures of his comic stage. The attitude of Aristophanes, it is true, is not really critical, but sympathetic; it was no more his intention to injure the popular creed by his fun than it is the intention of the cartoons of Punch to under- mine the reputation of our leading statesmen. On the contrary, nothing popularizes like genial ridi- cule; and of this Aristophanes was well aware. But the same characteristics of the gods which suggested the friendly burlesque of the comedians were also those which provoked the indignation and the disgust of more serious minds. The poet Pindar, for ex- ample, after referring to the story of a battle, in which it was said gods had fought against gods, breaks out into protest against a legend so little creditable to the divine nature: —‘“O my mouth, fling this tale from thee, for to speak evil of gods is a hateful wisdom, and loud and unmeasured words strike a note that trembleth upon madness. Of such things talk thou not; leave war and all strife of im- mortals aside.” * And the same note is taken up + Aristophanes, “Birds” 556.—Translation by Frere. * Pind. Ol. IX. 54.—Translation by E. Myers. ad 48 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE with emphasis, and reiterated in every quality of tone, by such writers as Euripides and Plato. The attitude of Euripides towards the popular religion is so clearly and frankly critical that a re- cent writer has even gone so far as to maintain that his main object in the construction of his dramas was to discredit the myths he selected for his theme. However that may have been, it is beyond contro- versy true that the deep religious sense of this most modern of the Greeks was puzzled and repelled by the tales he was bound by tradition to dramatize; and that he put into the mouth of his characters re- flexions upon the conduct of the gods which if they may not be taken as his own deliberate opinions, are at least expressions of one aspect of his thought. It was, in fact, impossible to reconcile with a profound and philosophic view of the divine nature the in- trigues and amours, partialities, antipathies, actions and counter-actions of these anthropomorphic dei- ties. Consider, for example, the most famous of all the myths, that of Orestes, to which we have already referred. Orestes, it will be remembered, was the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Agamem- non, on his return from Troy, was murdered by Clytemnestra. Orestes escapes; but returns later, at the instigation of Apollo, and kills his mother to avenge his father. Thereupon, in punishment for his crime, he is persecuted by the Furies. Now the point which Euripides seizes here is the conduct of Apollo. Either it was right for Orestes to kill his mother, or it was wrong. If wrong, why did Apollo command it? If right, why was Orestes punished? ETHICAL CRITICISM 49 Or are there, as A‘schylus would have it, two “rights,” one of Apollo, the other of the Furies? If so, what becomes of that unity of the divine law | after which every religious nature seeks? The di- lemma is patent; and Euripides makes no serious at- tempt to meet it. Or again, to take another example, less familiar, but even more to the point—the tale of Ion and Creusa. Creusa has been seduced by Apollo and has borne him a child, the Ion of the story. This child she exposes, and it is conveyed by Hermes to Delphi, where at last it is found, and recognized by the mother, and a conventionally happy ending is patched up. But the point on which the poet has in- sisted throughout is, once more, the conduct of Apollo. What is to be made of a god who seduces and deserts a mortal woman; who suffers her to ex- pose her child, and leaves her in ignorance of its fate? Does he not deserve the reproaches heaped upon him by his victim?— “Child of Latona, I cry to the sun—I will publish thy shame! Thou with thy tresses a-shimmer with gold, through the flowers as I came Plucking the crocuses, heaping my veil with their gold-litten flame, Cam’st on me, caughtest the poor pallid wrists of mine hands, and didst hale Unto thy couch in the cave. ‘Mother! mother!’ I shrieked out my wail— Wroughtest the pleasure of Kypris; no shame made the god-lover quail. 50 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE Wretched I bare thee a child, and I cast him with shuddering throe Forth on thy couch where thou forcedst thy victim, a bride-bed of woe. Lost—my poor baby and thine! for the eagles devoured him: and lo! Victory-songs to thy lyre dost thou chant!—Ho, I call to thee, son Born to Latona, Dispenser of boding, on gold- gleaming throne Midmost of earth who are sitting:—thine ears shall be pierced with my moan! Thy Delos doth hate thee, thy bay-boughs abhor thee, By the palm-tree of feathery frondage that rose Where in sacred travail Latona bore thee In Zeus’s garden close.’ ? This is a typical example of the kind of criticism which Euripides conveys through the lips of his characters on the stage. And the points which he can only dramatically suggest, Plato expounds di- rectly in his own person. ‘The quarrel of the philos- opher with the myths is not that they are not true, but that they are not edifying. They represent the son in rebellion against the father—Zeus against Kronos, Kronos against Uranos; they describe the gods as intriguing and fighting one against the other; they depict them as changing their form divine into the semblance of mortal men; lastly—culmination — of horror!—they represent them as laughing, posi- tively laughing!—Or again, to turn to a more meta-_— 1 Euripid. Ion. 885.—Translated by A. S. Way. TRANSITION TO MONOTHEISM 51 physical point, if God be good, it is argued by Plato, he cannot be the author of evil. What then, are we’ _ to make of the passage in Homer where he says, “two urns stand upon the floor of Zeus filled with his evil gifts, and one with blessings. To whomso- ever Zeus whose joy is in the lightning dealeth a mingled lot, that man chanceth now upon ill and now again on good, but to whom he giveth but of the bad kind, him he bringeth to scorn, and evil famine chaseth him over the goodly earth, and he is a wanderer honoured of neither gods nor men.” } And again, if God be true, he cannot be the author | of lies. How then could he have sent, as we are told he did, lying dreams to men?—Clearly, con- cludes the philosopher, our current legends need re- vision; in the interest of religion itself we must de- stroy the myths of the popular creed. § 14. TRANSITION TO MONOTHEISM The myths, but not religion! The criticism cer- tainly of Plato and probably of Euripides was prompted by the desire not to discredit altogether the belief in the gods, but to bring it into harmony with the requirements of a more fully developed con- sciousness. The philosopher and the poet came not to destroy, but to fulfil; not to annihilate, but to transform the popular theology. Such an intention, strange as it may appear to us with our rigid creeds, we shall see to be natural enough to the Greek mind, *Tliad xxiv. 527.—Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers. 52 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE when we remember that the material of their religion was not a set of propositions, but a more or less indeterminate body of traditions capable of being presented in the most various forms as the genius and taste of individual poets might direct. And we find, in fact, that the most religious poets of Greece, those even who were most innocent of any intention to innovate on popular beliefs, did nevertheless un- _ consciously tend to transform, in accordance with their own conceptions, the whole structure of the Homeric theology. Taking over the legends of gods and heroes, as narrated in poetry and tradition, Aéschylus and Sophocles, as they shaped and re- shaped their material for the stage, were evolving for themselves, not in opposition to but as it were on the top of the polytheistic view, the idea of a single su- preme and righteous God. The Zeus of Homer, whose superiority, as we saw, was based on physical force, grows, under the hands of A‘schylus, into something akin to the Jewish Jehovah. The inner experience of the poet drives him inevitably to this transformation. Born into the great age of Greece, coming to maturity at the crisis of her fate, he had witnessed with his own eyes, and assisted with his own hands the defeat of the Persian host at Mara- thon. The event struck home to him like a judg- ment from heaven. The Nemesis that attends upon human pride, the vengeance that follows crime, henceforth were the thoughts that haunted and pos- sessed his brain; and under their influence he evolved for himself out of the popular idea of Zeus the conception of a God of justice who marks and TRANSITION TO MONOTHEISM — 53 avenges crime. Read for example the following passage from the “Agamemnon” and contrast it with the lines of Homer quoted on page 42. Nothing could illustrate niore strikingly the transformation that could be effected, under the conditions of the Greek religion, in the whole conception of the di- vine power by one whose conscious intention, never- theless, was not to innovate but to conserve. “Zeus the high God! whate’er be dim in doubt, This can our thought track out— The blow that fells the sinner is of God, And as he wills, the rod Of vengeance smiteth sore. One said of old ‘The gods list not to hold A reckoning with him whose feet oppress The grace of holiness’— An impious word! for whensoe’er the sire Breathed forth rebellious fire— What time his household overflows the measure Of bliss and health and treasure— His children’s children read the reckoning plain, At last, in tears and pain. SS * DT * * Who spurns the shrine of Right, nor wealth nor power Shall be to him a tower, To guard him from the gulf: there lies his lot, Where all things are forgot. Lust drives him on—lust, desperate and wild Fate’s sin-contriving child— And cure is none; beyond concealment clear Kindles sin’s baleful glare. As an ill coin beneath the wearing touch Betrays by stain and smutch 54 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE Its metal false—such is the sinful wight. Before, on pinions light, Fair pleasure flits, and lures him childlike on, While home and kin make moan Beneath the grinding burden of his crime; Till, in the end of time, Cast down of heaven, he pours forth fruitless prayer To powers that will not hear.” + And Sophocles follows in the same path. For him | too Zeus is no longer the god of physical strength: \ he is the creator and sustainer of the moral law—of “those laws of range sublime, called into life throughout the high clear heaven, whose father is Olympus alone; their parent was no race of mortal men, no, nor shall oblivion ever lay them to sleep; a mighty god is in them, and he grows not old.” ? Such words imply a complete transformation of the Homeric conception of Divinity; a transformation made indeed in the interests of religion, but involv- ing nevertheless, and contrary, no doubt, to the in- tentions of its authors, a complete subversion of the popular creed. Once grant the idea of God as an eternal and moral Power and the whole fabric of polytheism falls away. The religion of the Greeks, as interpreted by their best minds, annihilates itself. Zeus indeed is saved, but only at the cost of all Olympus. 1 Asch. Agamem. 367.—Translated by E. D. A. Mors- head (‘“The House of Atreus’’). * Soph. O. T. 865,—Translated by Dr. Jebb. METAPHYSICAL CRITICISM 55 § 15. METAPHYSICAL CRITICISM _ While thus, on the one hand, the Greek religion by its inner evolution was tending to destroy itself, on the other hand it was threatened from without by the attack of what we should call the “scientific spirit.” A systema so frankly anthropomorphic was \ bound to be weak on the speculative side. Its appeal, as we have seen, was rather to the imagina- tion than to the intellect, by the presentation of a series of beautiful ymages, whose contemplation might offer to the mind if not satisfaction, at least acquiescence and repose. A Greek who was not too inquisitive was thus enabled to move through the calendar of splendid festivals and fasts, charmed by the beauty of the ritual, inspired by the chorus and the dance, and drawing from the familiar leg- ends the moral and esthetic significance with which he had been accustomed from his boyhood to con- nect them, but without ever raising the question, Is all this true? Does it really account for the exist- ence and nature of the world? Once, however, the spell was broken, once the intellect was aroused, the anadequacy of the popular faith, on the speculative side, became apparent; and the mind turned aside altogether from religion to work out its problems on its own lines. We find accordingly, from early times, physical philosophers in Greece free from all theological preconceptiuns, raising from the very beginning the question of the origin of the world, and offering solutions, various indeed but all alike in 56 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE _ this, that they frankly accept a materialistic basis. One derives all things from water, another from air, another from fire; one insists upon unity, another on a plurality of elements, but all alike reject the supernatural, and proceed on the lines of physical causation. The opposition, to use the modern phrase, between science and religion, was thus developed early in ancient Greece; and by the fifth century it is clear that it had become acute. The _ philosopher Anaxagoras was driven from Athens as an atheist; the same charge, absurdly enough, was one of the counts in the indictment of Socrates; and the physi- cal speculations of the time are a favourite butt of that champion of orthodoxy, Aristophanes. To fol- low up these speculations in detail would be to wan- der too far from our present purpose; but it may be worth while to quote a passage from the great come- dian, to illustrate not indeed the value of the theoriec ridiculed, but their generally materialistic character, and their antagonism to the popular faith. The passage selected is part of a dialogue between Socrates and Strepsiades, one of his pupils; and it is introduced by an address from the chorus of “Clouds,” the new divinities of the physicist: CHoRusS OF CLOUDS. Our welcome to thee, old man, who would see the mar- vels that science can show: And thou, the high-priest of this subtlety feast, say what would you have us bestow ? Since there is not a sage for whom we’d engage our won- ders more freely to do, METAPHYSICAL CRITICISM D7 Except, it may be, for Prodicus: he for his knowledge may claim them, but you, Because, as you go, you glance to and fro, and in dig- nified arrogance float; And think shoes a disgrace, and put on a grave face, your acquaintance with us to denote. STREPSIADES. Oh, earth! what a sound, how august and profound! it fills me with wonder and awe. SOCRATES. These, these then alone, for true Deities own, the rest are all God-ships of straw. STREPS. Let Zeus be left out: He’s a God beyond doubt; come, that you can scarcely deny. SOCR. Zeus indeed! there’s no Zeus: don’t you be so obtuse. STREPS. No Zeus up above in the sky? Then you first must explain, who it is sends the rain; or I really must think you are wrong. Socr. Well then, be it known, these send it alone: I can prove it by argument strong. Was there ever a shower seen to fall in an hour when the sky was all cloudless and blue? Yet on a fine day, when the clouds are away, he might send one, according to you. STREPS. Well, it must be confessed, that chimes in with the rest: your words I am forced to believe. Yet before I had dreamed that the rain-water steamed from Zeus and his chamber-pot sieve. But whence then, my friend, does the thunder descend ? that does make us quake with affright! 58 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE SOCR. Why, ’tis they, I declare, as they roll through the air, STREPS. What the clouds? did I hear you aright? SOCR. Ay: for when to the brim filled with water they swim, by Necessity carried along, They are hung up on high in the vault of the sky, and so by Necessity strong In the midst of their course, they clash with great force, and thunder away without end. STREPS. But is it not He who compels this to be? does not Zeus this Necessity send? SOCR. No Zeus have we there, but a vortex of air. STREPS. What! Vortex? that’s something I own. I knew not before, that Zeus was no more, but Vortex was placed on his throne! But I have not yet heard to what cause you referred the thunder’s majestical roar. SOCR. Yes, ’tis they, when on high full of water they fly, and then, as I told you before, By compression impelled, as they clash, are compelled a terrible clatter to make. STREPS. Come, how can that be? I really don’t see. Socr. Yourself as my proof I will take. Have you never then ate the broth puddings you get when the Panathenaea come round, And felt with what might your bowels all night in tur- bulent tumult resound ? METAPHYSICAL CRITICISM 59 STREPS. By Apollo, ’tis true, there’s a mighty to do, and my belly keeps rumbling about; And the puddings begin to clatter within and to kick up a wonderful rout: Quite gently at first, papapax, papapax, but soon pap- appappax away, Till at last, Ill be bound, I can thunder as loud pap- apappappappappax as they. SOCR. Shalt thou then a sound so loud and profound from thy belly diminutive send, And shall not the high and the infinite sky go thunder- ing on without end? For both, you will find, on an impulse of wind and similar causes depend. STREPS. Well, but tell me from whom comes the bolt through the gloom, with its awful and terrible flashes; And wherever it turns, some it singes and burns, and some it reduces to ashes: For this ’tis quite plain, let who will send the rain, that Zeus against perjurers dashes. SOCR. And how, you old fool, of a dark-ages school, and an antediluvian wit, If the perjured they strike, and not all men alike, have they never Cleonymus hit? Then of Simon again, and Theorus explain: known perjurers, yet they escape. But he smites his own shrine with these arrows divine, and ‘“Sunium, Attica’s cape,” And the ancient gnarled oaks: now what prompted those strokes? They never forswore I should say. 60 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE STREPS. Can’t say that they do: your words appear true. Whence comes then the thunderbolt, pray? SOCR. When a wind that is dry, being lifted on high, is sud- denly pent into these, It swells up their skin, like a bladder, within, by Ne- cessity’s changeless decrees. Till compressed very tight, it bursts them outright, and away with an impulse so strong, That at last by the force and the swing of the course, it takes fire as it whizzes along. STREPS. That’s exactly the thing, that I suffered one spring, at the great feast of Zeus, I admit: I’d a paunch in the pot, but I wholly forgot about mak- ing the safety-valve slit. So it spluttered and swelled, while the saucepan I held, till at last with a vengeance it flew: Took me quite by surprise, dung-bespattered my eyes, and scalded my face black and blue! + Nothing could be more amusing than this passage as a burlesque of the physical theories of the time; and nothing could better illustrate the quarrel between science and religion, as it presents itseif on the surface to the plain man. But there is more in the quarrel than appears at first sight. The real sting of the comedy from which we have quoted lies in the assumption, adopted throughout the play, that the atheist is also necessarily anti- _ | social and immoral. The-physicist, in the person + Aristoph. “Clouds” 358.—Translated by B. B. Rogers. METAPHYSICAL RECONSTRUCTION 61 of Socrates, is identified with the sophist; on the one hand he is represented as teaching the theory of material causation, on the other the art of lying and deceit. The object of Strepsiades in attending the school is to learn how not to pay his debts; the achievement of his son is to learn how to dis- honour his father. The cult of reason is identified | by the poet with the cult of self-interest; the man | who does not believe in the gods cannot, he implies, believe in the family or the state. § 16. METAPHYSICAL RECONSTRUCTION—PLATO The argument is an old one into whose merits this is not the place to enter. But one thing is certain, that the sceptical spirit which was invading religion, was invading also politics and ethics; and that towards the close of the fifth century before Christ, Greece and in particular Athens was overrun by | philosophers, who not only did not scruple to ques- | tion the foundations of social and moral obligation, | but in some cases explicitly taught that there were no foundations at all; that all law was a convention based on no objective truth; and that the only valid right was the natural right of the strong to rule. It was into this chaos of sceptical opinion that Plato was born; and it was the desire to meet and subdue it that was the motive of his philosophy. Like Aristophanes, he traced the root of the evil to the decay of religious belief; and though no one, as we have seen, was more trenchant than he in his criticism of the popular faith, no one, on — - 62 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE the other hand, was more convinced of the necessity of some form of religion as a basis for any stable | polity. The doctrine of the physicists, he asserts, that the world is the result of ‘nature and chance”’ _has immediate and disastrous effects on the whole _ Structure of social beliefs. The conclusion inevit- ably follows that human laws and institutions, like — everything else, are accidental products; that they have no objective validity, no binding force on the will, and that the only right that has any intelligible meaning is the right which is identical with might.’ Against these conclusions the whole soul of Plato rose in revolt. To reconstruct religion, he was driven back upon metaphysics; and elaborated at last the system which from his day to our own has not ceased to perplex and fascinate the world, and whose rare and radiant combination of gifts, speculative, artistic, and religious, marks the highest reach of the genius of the Greeks, and perhaps of mankind. To attempt an analysis of that system would lead us far from our present task. All that concerns us here, is its religious significance; and of that, all we can note is that Plato, the deepest thinker of the Greeks, was also among the farthest removed from the popular faith. The principle from which he derives the World is the absolute Good, or God, of whose ideas the phenomena of sense are imperfect copies. To the divine intelligence man by virtue of his reason is akin. But the reason in him has faller 1 See e.g. Plato’s “Laws” x. 887. METAPHYSICAL RECONSTRUCTION 63 into bondage of the flesh; and it is the task of his life on earth, or rather of a series of lives (for Plato _ believed in successive re-incarnations), to deliver | this diviner element of his soul, and set it free to re- unite with God. To the description of the divine: life thus prepared for the soul, from which she fell but to which she may return, Plato has devoted some of his finest passages; and if we are to indicate, as we are bound to do, the highest point to which the religious consciousness of the Greeks attained, we must not be deterred, by dread of the obscurity nec- essarily attaching to an extract, from a citation from the most impassioned of his dialogues. Speak- ing of that “divine madness,” to which we have al- ready had occasion to refer, he says that this is the madness which “is imputed to him who, when he sees the beauty of earth, is transported with the rec- ollection of true beauty; he would like to fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and look- ing upward and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad. And I have shown this of all inspirations to be the noblest and highest and the offspring of the highest to him who has or shares in it, and that he who loves the beautiful is called a lover because he partakes of it. For every soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true being; this was the condition of her passing into the form of man. But all souls do not easily recall the things of the other world; they may have seen them for a short time only, or they may have been un- fortunate in their earthly lot, and having had their hearts turned to unrighteousness through some cor- 64 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE rupting influence, they may have lost the memory of the holy things which once they saw. Few only retain an adequate remembrance of them; and they, when they behold here any image of that other world, are rapt in amazement; but they are ignorant of what that rapture means, because they do not clearly perceive. For there is no clear light of jus- tice or temperance, or any of the higher ideas which are precious to souls, in the earthly copies of them; they are seen through a glass dimly; and there are few who, going to the images, behold in them the realities, and these only with difficulty. There was a time when, with the rest of the happy band, they saw beauty shining in brightness—we philosophers following in the train of Zeus, others in company with other gods; and then we beheld the beatific vision and were initiated into a mystery which may be truly called most blessed, celebrated by us in our state of innocence, before we had any experience of evils to come, when we were admitted to the sight of apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy, which we beheld shining in pure light, pure ourselves and not yet enshrined in that living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the body, like an oyster in his shell. Let me linger over the memory of scenes which have passed away.” + § 17. SUMMARY At this point, where religion passes into philoso- phy, the discussion which has occupied the present 1 Plato, Phaedrus. 249 d.—Jowett’s translation. SUMMARY 65 chapter must close. So far it was necessary to pro- ceed, in order to show how wide was the range of the religious consciousness of the Greeks, and through how many points of view it passed in the course of its evolution. But its development was away from the Greek and towards the Christian; and it will therefore be desirable, in conclusion, to fix once more in our minds that central and primary phase of the Greek religion under the influence of which their civilization was formed into a character definite and distinct in the history of the world. This phase will be the one which underlay and was reflected in the actual cult and institutions of Greece, and must therefore be regarded not as a product of critical and self-conscious thought, but as an imaginative way of conceiving the world stamped, as it were, passively on the mind by the whole course of concrete ex- perience. Of its character we have attempted to give some kind of account in the earlier part of this chapter, and we have now only to summarize what was there said. The Greek religion, then, as we saw, in this its characteristic phase, involved a belief in a number of deities who on the one hand were personifications of the powers of nature and of the human soul, on the other the founders and sustainers of civil society. To the operations of these beings the whole of ex- perience was referred, and that, not merely in an abstract and unintelligible way, as when we say that the world was created by God, but in a more precise and definite sense, the actions of the gods being con- ceived to be the same in kind as that of man, pro- 66 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE ceeding from similar motives, directed to similar ends, and accomplished very largely by similar, though much superior means. By virtue of this un- critical and unreflective mode of apprehension the Greeks, we said, were made at home in the world. Their religion suffused and transformed the facts both of nature and of society, interpreting what would otherwise have been unintelligible by the idea of an activity which they could understand because it was one which they were constantly exercising themselves. Being thus supplied with a general ex- planation of the world, they could put aside the ques- tion of its origin and end, and devote themselves freely and fully to the art of living, unhampered by scruples and doubts as to the nature of life. Con- sciousness similar to their own was the ultimate fact; and there was nothing therefore with which they might not form intelligible and harmonious relations. And as on the side of metaphysics they were de- livered from the perplexities of speculation, so on the side of ethics they were undisturbed by the perplexities of conscience. ‘Their religion, it is true, had a bearing on their conduct, but a bearing, as we saw, external and mechanical. If they sinned they might be punished directly by physical evil; and from this evil religion might redeem them by the appropriate ceremonies of purgation. But on the other hand they were not conscious of a spiritual relation to God, of sin as an alienation from the divine power and repentance as the means of res- ‘toration to grace. The pang of conscience, the fears and hopes, the triumph and despair of the soul SUMMARY 67 which were the preoccupations of the Puritan, were phenomena unknown to the ancient Greek. He - lived and acted undisturbed by scrupulous intro- spection; and the function of his religion was rather to quiet the conscience by ritual than to excite it by admonition and reproof. From both these points of view, the metaphysical and the ethical, the Greeks were brought by their religion into harmony with the world. Neither the perplexities of the intellect nor the scruples of the conscience intervened to hamper their free activity. Their life was simple, straightforward, and clear; and their consciousness directed outwards upon the > world, not perplexedly absorbed in the contempla- tion of itself. On the other hand, this harmony, which was the essence of the Greek civilization, was a temporary compromise, not a final solution. It depended on presumptions of the imagination, not on convictions of the intellect; and as we have seen, it destroyed itself by the process of its own development. The \ beauty, the singleness, and the freedom which at- | tracts us in the consciousness of the Greek was the | result of a poetical view of the world, which did but ' anticipate in imagination an ideal that was not real- ized in fact or in thought. It depended on the as- sumption of anthropomorphic gods, an assumption which could not stand before the criticism of reason, and either broke down into scepticism, or was de- veloped into the conception of a single supreme and spiritual power. And even apart from this internal evolution, from 68 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE this subversion of its ideal basis, the harmony estab- lished by the Greek religion was at the best but partial and incomplete. It was a harmony for life, _but not for death. The more completely the Greek felt himself to be at home in the world, the more happily and freely he abandoned himself to the ex- -ercise of his powers, the more intensely and vividly he lived in action and in passion, the more alien, «bitter, and incomprehensible did he find the phenom- ena of age and death. On this problem, so far as we can judge, he received from his religion but little light, and still less consolation. The music of his brief life closed with a discord unresolved; and even before reason had brought her criticism to bear upon his creed, its deficiency was forced upon him by his feeling. Thus the harmony which we have indicated as the characteristic result of the Greek religion con- tained none of the conditions of completeness or finality. For on the one hand there were elements which it was never able to include; and on the other, its hold even over those which it embraced was tem- porary and precarious. The eating of the tree of knowledge drove the Greeks from their paradise; but the vision of that Eden continues to haunt the mind of man, not in vain, if it prophesies in a type the end to which his history moves. NansnPONnR CHAPTER II THE GREEK VIEW OF THE STATE § 1. THe GREEK STATE A “City” lates present kingdom of Greece is among the smallest of European states; but to the Greeks it would have appeared too large to be a state at all. Within that little peninsula whose whole population and wealth are so insignificant according to modern ideas, were comprised in classical times not one but many flourishing polities. And the conception of an amalgamation of thesé under a single government to the Greek idea, that even to Aristo- tle, the clearest and most comprehensive thinker of his age, it did not present itself even as a dream. To him, as to every ancient Greek, the state meant the City—meant, that is to say, an area about the size of an English county, with a population, per- haps, of some hundred thousand, self-governing and independent of any larger political whole. If we can imagine the various County Councils of England emancipated from the control of Parlia- ment and set free to make their own laws, manage their own finances and justice, raise troops and form with one another alliances, offensive and de- fensive, we may form thus some general idea of the ———— eae 70 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE political institutions of the Greeks and some meas- ure of their difference from our own. Nor must it be supposed that the size of the Greek state was a mere accident in its constitution, that it might have been indefinitely enlarged and yet re- tained its essential character. On the contrary, the limitation of size belonged to its very notion. The | greatest state, says Aristotle, is not the one whose - population is most numerous; on the contrary, after a certain limit of increase has been passed, the state ' ceases to be a state at all. ‘‘Ten men are too few for a city; a hundred thousand are too many.” Not only London, it seems, but every one of our larger towns, would have been too big for the Greek idea of a state; and as for the British empire, the very conception of it would have been impossible to the Greeks. Clearly, their view on this point is fundamentally different from our own. ‘Their civilization was one of “city-states,” not of kingdoms and empires; and their whole political outlook was necessarily deter- mined by this condition. Generalizing from their own experience, they had formed for themselves a conception of the state not the less interesting to us that it is unfamiliar; and this concepticn it will be the business of the present chapter to illustrate and explain. § 2. THE RELATION OF THE STATE TO THE CITIZEN First, let us consider the relation of the state to the citizens—that is to say, to that portion of the THE STATE AND THE CITIZEN 71 community, usually a minority, which was possessed of full political rights. It is here that we have the _ key to that limitation of size which we have seen to be essential to the idea of the city-state. For, in, the Greek view, to be a citizen of a state did not | merely imply the payment of taxes, and the posses- | sion of a vote; it implied a direct and active co- | operation in all the functions of civil and military | life. A citizen was normally a soldier, a judge, and a member of the governing assembly; and all his public duties he performed not by deputy, but in person. He must be able frequently to attend the centre of government; hence the limitation of terri- tory. He must be able to speak and vote in person in the assembly; hence the limitation of numbers. The idea of representative government never oc- curred to the Greeks; but if it had occurred to them, and if they had adopted it, it would have involved a revolution in their whole conception of the citizen. Of that conception, direct personal service was the | cardinal point—service in the field as well as in the! council; and to substitute for personal service the mere right to a vote would have been to destroy the form of the Greek state. Such being the idea the Greeks had formed, based on their own experience, of the relation of the citizen to the state, it follows that to them a society so complex as our own would hardly have answered to the definition of a state at all. Rather they would have regarded it as a mere congeries of unsatisfac- tory human beings, held together, partly by political, partly by economic compulsion, bat lacking that 72 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE conscious identity of interest with the community to which they belong which alone constitutes the citi- zen. A man whose main pre-occupation should be with his trade or his profession, and who should only become aware of his corporate relations when called upon for his rates and taxes—a man, that is to say, in the position of an ordinary Englishman— would not have seemed to the Greeks to be a full and proper member of a state. For the state, to them, | was more than a machinery, it was a spiritual bond; 'and “‘public life,” as we call it, was not a thing to ) be taken up and laid aside at pleasure, but a neces- | sary and essential phase of the existence of a com- ts f plete man. This relation of the citizen to the state, as it was conceived by the Greeks, is sometimes described as though it involved the sacrifice of the individual to the whole. And in a certain sense, perhaps, this is true. Aristotle, for instance, declares that no one | must suppose he belongs to himself, but rather that ‘all alike belong to the state; and Plato, in the con- struction of his ideal republic, is thinking much less of the happiness of the individual citizens, than of the symmetry and beauty of the whole as it might appear to a disinterested observer from without. Certainly it would have been tedious and irksome to any but his own ideal philosopher to live under the rule of that perfect polity. Individual enterprise, bent, and choice is rigorously excluded. Nothing escapes the net of legislation, from the production of children to the fashion of houses, clothes, and food. Jt is absurd, says the ruthless logic of this mathema- THE STATE AND THE CITIZEN = 73 tician among the poets, for one who would regulate public life to leave private relations uncontrolled; if there is to be order at all, it must extend through and through; no moment, no detail must be with- drawn from the grasp of law. And though in this, Plato, no doubt, goes far beyond the common sense of the Greeks, yet he is not building altogether in the air. The republic which he desiderates was realized, as we shall see, partially at Teast, in Sparta. So that his insistence on the all-pervading domina- tion of the state, exaggerated though it be, is exag- gerated on the actual lines of Greek practice, and may be taken as indicative of a real distinction and even antithesis between their point of view and that which prevails at present in most modern states. But on the other hand such a phrase as the “‘sacri- fice of the individual to the whole,” to this extent at least is misleading, that it presupposes an opposition between the end of the individual and that of the State, such as was entirely foreign to the Greek con- ception. The best individual, in their view, was also | the best citizen; the two ideals not only were not | incompatible, they were almost indistinguishable. - When Aristotle defines a state as “an association of! similar persons for the attainment of the best life possible,’ he implies not only that society is the means whereby the individual attains his ideal, but also that that ideal includes the functions of public | life. The state in his view is not merely the con- venient machinery that raises a man above his ani- mal wants and sets him free to follow his own de- vices; it is itself his end, or at least a part of it. 74 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE And from this it follows that the regulations of the_ state were not regarded by the Greeks—as they are apt to be by modern men—as so many vexatious, if necessary, restraints on individual liberty; but ra- )ther as the expression of the best and highest nature of the citizen, as the formula of the conduct which the good man would naturally prescribe to himself. So that, to get a clear conception of what was at least the Greek ideal, however imperfectly it may have been attained in practice, we ought to regard the individual not as sacrificed to, but rather as realizing himself in the whole. We shall thus come nearer to what seems to have been the point of view not only of Aristotle and of Plato, but also of the average Greek man. § 3. THe GREEK VIEW oF LAW _ For nothing is more remarkable in the political \ theory of the Greeks than the respect they habitually - express for law. Early legislators were believed to have been specially inspired by the divine power— Lycurgus, for instance, by Apollo, and Minos by Zeus; and Plato regards it as a fundamental con- dition of the well-being of any state that this view should prevail among its citizens. Nor was this conception of the divine origin of law confined to legend and to philosophy; we find it expressed in the following passage of Demosthenes, addressed to a jury of average Athenians, and representing at any rate the conventional and orthodox, if not the critical view of the Greek public: THE GREEK VIEW OF LAW 75 “The whole life of men, O Athenians, whether they inhabit a great city or a small one, is governed by nature and by laws. Of these, nature is a thing irregular, unequal, and peculiar to the individual possessor; laws are regular, common, and the same for all. Nature, if it be depraved, has often vicious desires; therefore you will find people of that sort falling into error. Laws desire what is just and | honourable and useful; they seek for this, and, when it is found, it is set forth as a general ordinance, the | same and alike for all; and that is law, which all men ought to obey for many reasons, and especially because every law is an invention and gift of the Gods, a resolution of wise men, a corrective of errors intentional and unintentional, a compact of the whole state, according to which all who belong to the state ought to live.” } In this opposition of Law, as the universal prin- ciple, to Nature, as individual caprice, is implied a ta tacit identification of Law and Justice. The identi- fication, of course, is never complete in any state, and frequently enough i is not even approximate. No people were more conscious of this than the Greeks, none, as we shall see later, pushed it more vigorously home. But still, the positive conception which lay at the root of their society was that which finds expression in the passage we have quoted, and which is stated still more explicitly in the “Memorabilia” of Xenophon, where that admirable example of the good and efficient citizen represents his hero Socrates 1Demosth. in Aristogeit. § 17.—Translation by C. R. Kennedy. 76 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE as maintaining, without hesitation or reserve, that “that which is in accordance with law is just.” The implication, of course, is not that laws cannot be improved, that they do at any point adequately cor- respond to justice; but that justice has an objective and binding validity, and that Law is a serious and _ on the whole a successful attempt to embody it in ' practice. This was the conviction predominant in the best period of Greece; the conviction under which her institutions were formed and flourished, and whose overthrow by the philosophy of a critical age was coincident with, if it was not the cause of, her decline. § 4. ARTISANS AND SLAVES We have now arrived at a general idea of the nature of the Greek state, and of its relations to the individual citizen. But there were also members of the state who were not citizens at all; there was the | class of labourers and traders, who, in some states at _ least, had no political rights; and the class of slaves _who had nowhere any rights at all. For in the Greek conception the citizen was an aristocrat. His excel- lence was thought to consist in public activity; and to the performance of public duties he ought there- fore to be able to devote the greater part of his time , and energy. But the existence of such a privileged \ class involved the existence of a class of producers to \ support them; and the producers, by the nature of | their calling, be they slave or free, were excluded ‘from the life of the perfect citizen. They had not ARTISANS AND SLAVES 77 the necessary leisure to devote to public business; neither had they the opportunity to acquire the _ mental and physical qualities which would enable | them to transact it worthily. They were therefore regarded by the Greeks as an inferior class; in some states, in Sparta, for example, and in Thebes, they were excluded from, political rights; and even in Athens, the most democratic of all the Greek com- munities, though they were admitted to the citizen- ship and enjoyed considerable political influence, they never appear to have lost the stigma of social inferiority. And the distinction which was thus more or less definitely drawn in practice between the citizens proper and the productive class, was even more emphatically affirmed in theory. Aris- totle, the most balanced of all the Greek thinkers and the best exponent of the normal trend of their ideas, excludes the class of artisans from the citizenship of his ideal state on the ground that they are de- barred by their occupation from the characteristic excellence of man. And Plato, though here as else- where he pushes the normal view to excess, yet, in his insistence on the gulf that separates the citizen from the mechanic and the trader, is in sympathy with the general current of Greek ideas. His ideal state is one which depends mainly on agriculture; in which commerce and exchange are reduced to the smallest possible dimensions; in which every citizen is a landowner, forbidden to engage in trade; and in which the productive class is excluded from all poli- tical rights. The obverse, then, of the Greek citizen, who 78 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE realized in the state his highest life, was an inferior class of producers who realized only the means of subsistence. But within this class again was a dis- tinction yet more fundamental—the distinction be- tween free men and slaves. In the majority of the Greek states the slaves were the greater part of the population; in Athens, to take an extreme case, at the close of the fourth century, they are estimated at 400,000 to 100,000 citizens. They were employed not only in domestic service, but on the fields, in factories and in mines, and performed, in short, a considerable part of the productive labour in the state. A whole large section, then, of the producers in ancient Greece had no social or political rights at all. They existed simply to maintain the aristoc- racy of citizens, for whom and in whom the state had its being. Nor was this state of things in the least repugnant to the average Greek mind. Noth- ing is more curious to the modern man than the temper in which Aristotle approaches this theme. Without surprise or indignation, but in the tone of an impartial, scientific inquirer, he asks himself the question whether slavery is natural, and answers it in the affirmative. For, he argues, though in any particular case, owing to the uncertain chances of fortune and war, the wrong person may happen to be enslaved, yet, broadly speaking, the general truth remains, that there are some men so inferior to oth- ers that they ought to be despotically governed, by the same right and for the same good end that the body ought to be governed by the soul. Such men, he maintains, are slaves by nature; and it is as much ARTISANS AND SLAVES 79 to their interest to be ruled as it is to their masters’ . interest to rule them. To this class belong, for ex- | ample, all who are naturally incapable of any but | physical activity. These should be regarded as de- | tachable limbs, so to speak, of the man who owns them, instruments of his will, like hands and feet; or, to use Aristotle’s own phase, “the slave is a tool with life in it, and the tool a lifeless slave.” The relation between master and slave thus frankly conceived by the Greeks, did not necessarily imply, though it was quite compatible with, brutality of treatment. The slave might be badly treated, no doubt, and very frequently was, for his master had almost absolute control over him, life and limb; but, as we should expect, it was clearly recognized by the best Greeks that the treatment should be genial and humane. “There is a certain mutual profit and ' kindness,” says Aristotle, “between master and slave, in all cases where the’ relation? is natural, not miprely. imposed from without by convention or force.” ? And Plato insists on the duty of neither insulting | ‘nor outraging a slave, but treating him rather with | even greater fairness than if he were in a position of | equality. Still, there can be no doubt that the Greek con- ception of slavery is one of the points in which their view of life runs most counter to our own. Cen- turies of Christianity have engendered in us the con- viction, or, rather, the instinct, that men are equal at least to this extent, that no one has a right explicitly SUATELS EON ts) boon) Dita, 80 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE to make of another a mere passive instrument of his _will—that every man, in short, must be regarded as an end in himself. Yet even here the divergence be- tween the Greek and the modern view is less ex- treme than it appears at first sight. For the modern man, in spite of his perfectly genuine belief in equal- ity (in the sense in which we have just defined the word), does, nevertheless, when he is confronted with racial differences, recognize degrees of inferiority so extreme, that he is practically driven into the Aris- totelian position that some men are naturally slaves. The American, for example, will hardly deny that such is his attitude towards the negro. The negro, in theory, is the equal, politically and socially, of the white man; in practice, he is excluded from the vote, from the professions, from the amenities of social intercourse, and even, as we have recently learnt, from the most elementary forms of justice. The general and @ priori doctrine of equality is shat- tering itself against the actual facts; and the old Greek conception, “the slave by nature,” may be de- tected behind the mask of the Christian ideal. And while thus, even in spite of itself, the modern view is approximating to that of the Greeks, on the other hand the Greek view by its own evolution was al- ready beginning to anticipate our own. Even Aris- totle, in formulating his own conception of slavery, finds it necessary to observe that though it be true that some men are naturally slaves, yet in practice, under conditions which give the victory to force, it may happen that the “natural” slave becomes the ARTISANS AND SLAVES 81 master, and the “natural” master is degraded to a slave. This is already a serious modification of his doctrine. And other writers, pushing the contention further, deny altogether the theory of natural slav- ery. ‘‘No man,” says the poet Philemon, “was ever born a slave by nature. Fortune only has put men in that position.” And Euripides, the most modern of the Greeks, writes in the same strain: “One thing only disgraces a slave, and that is the name. In all other respects a slave, if he be good, is no worse than a freeman.” ? It seems then that the distinction between the Greek and the modern point of view is not so pro- found or so final as it appears at first sight. Still, the distinction, broadly speaking, is there. The Greeks, on the whole, were quite content to sacrifice the majority to the minority. Their position, as we said at the outset, was fundamentally aristocratic; they exaggerated rather than minimized the distinc- tions between men—between the Greek and the bar- barian, the freeman and the slave, the gentleman and the artisan—regarding them as natural and funda- mental, not as the casual product of circumstances. The “equality” which they sought in a well-ordered state was proportional not arithmetical—the attri- bution to each of his peculiar right, not of equal rights to all. Some were born to rule, others to serve; some to be ends, others to be means; and the problem to be solved was not how to obliterate 1 Euripides, Ion. 854. 82 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE these varieties of tone, but how to compose them into an ordered harmony. In a modern state, on the other hand, though class distinctions are clearly enough marked, yet the point of view from which they are regarded is funda- . mentally different. They are attributed rather tg accidents of fortune than varieties of nature. The artisan, for example, ranks no doubt lower than the professional man; but no one maintains that he is a different kind of being, incapable by nature, as Aristotle asserts, of the characteristic excellence of ; man. The distinction admitted is rather one of - wealth than of natural calling, and may be obliter- ated by ability and good luck. Neither in theory nor in practice does the modern state recognize any such gulf as that which, in ancient Greece, separated the freeman from the slave, or the citizen from the non-citizen. § 5. THE GREEK STATE PRIMARILY MILITARY, NOT INDUSTRIAL The source of this divergence of view must be sought in the whole circumstances and character of the Greek states. Founded in the beginning by con- quest, many of them still retained, in their internal structure, the marks of their violent origin. The citizens, for example, of Sparta and of Crete, were practically military garrisons, settled in the midst of a hostile population. These were extreme cases; and elsewhere, no doubt, the distinction between the THE STATE PRIMARILY MILITARY 83 _ conquerors and the conquered had disappeared. Still, it had sufficed to mould the conception and ideal of the citizen as a member of a privileged and superior class, whose whole energies were devoted to maintaining, by council and war, not only the pros- perity, but the very existence of the state. The orig- inal citizen, moreover, would be an owner of land, which would be tilled for him by a subject class.' Productive labour would be stamped, from the out-' set, with the stigma of inferiority; commerce would grow up, if at all, outside the limits of the landed aristocracy, and would have a struggle to win for it- self any degree of social and political recognition. Such were the conditions that produced the Greek conception of the citizen. In some states, such as Sparta, they continued practically unchanged throughout the best period of Greek history; in oth- ers, such as Athens, they were modified by the growth of a commercial population, and where that was the case the conception of the citizen was modi- fied too, and the whole polity assumed a democratic character. Yet never, as we have seen, even in the’ most democratic states, was the modern conception | of equality admitted. For, in the first place, the institution of slavery persisted, to stamp the mass of producers as an inferior caste; and in the second place, trade, even in the states where it was most developed, hardly attained a preponderating in- fluence. The ancient state was and remained pri- marily military. The great industrial questions which agitate modern states either did not exist at all in Greece, or assumed so simple a form that they did 84 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE not rise to the surface of political life.1 How cur- ious it is, for example, from the modern point of view, to find Plato, a citizen of the most important trading centre of Greece, dismissing in the following brief sentence the whole commercial legislation of his ideal state: “As to those common business transactions be- tween private individuals in the market, including, if you please, the contracts of artisans, libels, as- saults, law-proceedings, and the impanelling of ju- ries, or again questions relating to tariffs, and the collection of such customs as may be necessary in the market or in the harbours, and generally all regulations of the market, the police, the custom- house, and the like; shall we condescend to legislate at all on such matters? “No, it is not worth while to give directions on these points to good and cultivated men: for in most cases they will have little difficulty in discovering all the legislation required.” ' In fact, throughout his treatise it is the non- commercial or military class with which Plato is al- most exclusively concerned; and in taking that line he is so far at least in touch with reality that that class was the one which did in fact predominate in the Greek state; and that even where, as in Athens, 1'There was, of course, the general opposition between rich and poor (see below). But not those infinitely com- plex relations which are the problems of modern states- manship. * Plato, Rep. IV. 425.—Translated by Davies and Vaughan. THE STATE PRIMARILY MILITARY 85 _the productive class became an important factor in political life, it was never able altogether to over- throw the aristocratic conception of the citizen. And with that conception, we must add, was bound up the whole Greek view of individual excel- lence. The inferiority of the artisan and the trader, | historically established in the manner we have in-/ dicated, was further emphasized by the fact that they were excluded by their calling from the cultiva- | tion of the higher personal qualities—from the train- ing of the body by gymnastics and of the mind by philosophy; from habitual conversance with public affairs; from that perfect balance, in a word, of the physical, intellectual, and moral powers, which was only to be attained by a process of self-culture, in- compatible with the pursuance of a trade for bread. Such, at any rate, was the opinion of the Greeks. We shall have occasion to return to it later. Mean- time, let us sum up the course of our investigation up to the present point. We have seen that the state, in the Greek view, must be so limited, both in territory and population, that all its citizens might be able to participate in person in its government and defence; that it was based on fundamental class distinctions separating sharply the citizen from the non-citizen, and the slave from the free; that its end and purpose was that all-absorbing corporate activity in which the citizen found the highest expression of himself; and that to that end the inferior classes were regarded aS Mere means—a point of view which finds its com- pletest expression in the institution of slavery. 86 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE § 6. Forms OF GOVERNMENT IN THE GREEK STATE While, however, this was the general idea of the Greek state, it would be a mistake to suppose that it was everywhere embodied in a single permanent form of polity. On the contrary, the majority of the states in Greece were in a constant state of flux; revolution succeeded revolution with startling rapid- ity; and in place of a single fixed type what we really get is a constant transition from one variety to an- other. The general account we have given ought therefore to be regarded only as a kind of limiting formula, embracing within its range a number of polities distinct and even opposed in character. Of these polities Aristotle, whose work is based on an examination of all the existing states of Greece, rec- ‘ognizes three main varieties: government by the one, government by the few, and government by the many; and each of these is subdivided into two forms, one good, where the government has regard _to the well-being of the whole, the other bad, where it has regard only to the well-being of those who ,govern. The result is six forms, of which three are good, monarchy, aristocracy, and what he calls a “polity” par excellence; three bad, tyranny, oli- garchy, and democracy. Of all these forms we have examples in Greek history, and indeed can roughly trace a tendency of the state to evolve through the series of them. But by far the most important, in the historical period, are the two forms known as FACTION AND ANARCHY 87 _ Oligarchy and Democracy; and the reason of their importance is that they corresponded roughly to gov- ernment by the rich and government by the poor. “Rich and poor,” says Aristotle, ‘are the really an- tagonistic members of astate. The result is that the character of all existing polities is determined by the predominance of one or other of these classes, and it is the common opinion that there are two polities and two only, viz., Democracy and Oligarchy.” ! In other words, the social distinction between rich and poor was exaggerated in Greece into political antagonism. In every state there was an oligarchic and a democratic faction; and so fierce was the op- position between them, that we may almost say that every Greek city was in a chronic state of civil war, having become, as Plato puts it, not one city but two, ‘one comprising the rich and the other the poor, who reside together on the same ground, and are always plotting against one another.” § 7. FacTION AND ANARCHY This internal schism which ran through almost every state, came to a head in the great Peloponne- sian War witioh divided Greece at the close of the fifth century, and in which Athens and Sparta, the two chief combatants, represented respectively the democratic and the oligarchic principles. Each ap- 1 Arist. Pol. VI. (IV) 1291 b 8.—Translation by Welldon. ? Plat. Rep. VIII. 551.—Translation by Davies and Vaughan. 88 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE pealed to the kindred faction in the states that were opposed to them; and every city was divided against itself, the party that was “out” for the moment plot- ting with the foreign foe to overthrow the party that was “in.” Thus the general Greek conception of the ordered state was so far from being realized that probably at no time in the history of the civi- lized world has anarchy more complete and cynical prevailed. To appreciate the gulf that existed between the ideal and the fact, we have only to contrast such a scheme as that set forth in the “Republic” of Plato with the following description by Thucydides of the state of Greece during the Peloponnesian War: “Not long afterwards the whole Hellenic world was in commotion; in every city the chiefs of the democracy and of the oligarchy were struggling, the one to bring in the Athenians, the other the Lace- dzmonians. Now in time of peace, men would have _had no excuse for introducing either, and no desire _ to do so; but when they were at war and both sides could easily obtain allies to the hurt of their enemies and the advantage of themselves, the dissatisfied party were only too ready to invoke foreign aid. And revolution brought upon the cities of Hellas many terrible calamities, such as have been and al- ways will be while human nature remains the same, but which are more or less aggravated and differ in character with every new combination of circum- stances. In peace and prosperity both states and individuals are actuated by higher motives, because they do not fall under the dominion of imperious FACTION AND ANARCHY 89 necessities; but the war which takes away the com- fortable provision of daily life is a hard master, and tends to assimilate men’s characters to their condi- tions. | ‘‘When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit farther and farther, and determined to outdo the report of all who had preceded them by the ingenuity of their enterprises and the atrocity of their revenges. The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal cour- \ age; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; © moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic en- ergy was the true quality of aman. A conspirator who wanted to be safe was a recreant in disguise. The lover of violence was always trusted, and his op- ponent suspected. He who succeeded in a plot was deemed knowing, but a still greater master in craft was he who detected one. On the other hand, he who plotted from the first to have nothing to do with plots was a breaker-up of parties and a poltroon who was afraid of the enemy. In a word, he who could outstrip another in a bad action was applauded, and so was he who encouraged to evil one who had no idea of it. The tie of party was stronger than the tie of blood, because a partisan was more ready to dare without asking why (for party associations are not based upon any established law, nor do they seek the public good; they are formed in defiance of the laws and from self-interest). The seal of 90 THE GREEK VIEW OF Lira good faith was not divine law, but fellowship in crime. If an enemy when he was in the ascendant offered fair words, the opposite party received them, not in a generous spirit, but by a jealous watchful- ness of his actions. Revenge was dearer than self- preservation. Any agreements sworn to by either party, when they could do nothing else, were bind- ing as long as both were powerless. But he who on a favourable opportunity first took courage and struck at his enemy when he saw him off his guard, had greater pleasure in a perfidious than he would have had in an open act of reverige; he congratulated himself that he had taken the safer course, and also that he had overreached his enemy and gained the prize of superior ability. In general the dishonest more easily gain credit for cleverness than the simple for goodness; men take a pride in the one, but are ashamed of the other. “The cause of all these evils was the love of power originating in avarice and ambition, and the party- spirit which is engendered by them when men are fairly embarked in a contest. For the leaders on either side used specious names, the one party pro- fessing to uphold the Constitutional equality of the many, the other the wisdom of an aristocracy, while they made the public interests, to which in name they were devoted, in reality their prize. Striving in every way to overcome each other, they com- mitted the most monstrous crimes; yet even these were surpassed by the magnitude of their revenges which they pursued to the very utmost, neither party observing any definite limits either of justice or —— FACTION AND ANARCHY 91 public expediency, but both alike making the caprice of the moment their law. Either by the help of an unrighteous sentence, or grasping power with the strong hand, they were eager to satiate the impa- tience of party spirit. Neither faction cared for re- ligion; but any fair pretense which succeeded in ef- fecting some odious purpose was greatly lauded. And the citizens who were of neither party fell a prey to both; either they were disliked because they held aloof, or men were jealous of their sur- viving. “Thus revolution gave birth to every form of | wickedness in Hellas. The simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared. An attitude of perfidious antagonism everywhere prevailed; for there was no word binding enough, nor oath terrible enough to reconcile enemies. Each man was strong only in the conviction that nothing was secure; he must look to his own safety, and could not afford to trust others. Inferior intellects generally succeeded best. For aware of their own deficiencies, and fearing the capacities of their opponents, for whom they were no match in powers of speech, and whose subtle wits were likely to anticipate them in contriving evil, they struck boldly and at once. But the cleverer sort, presuming in their arrogance that they would be aware in time, and disdaining to act when they could think, were taken off their guard and easily destroyed.” ? The general indictment thus drawn up by * Thuc. III. 82.—Translated by Jowett. cencisitaiaasstaee a 92 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE Thucydides is amply illustrated by the events of war which he describes. On one occasion, for example, the Athenians were blockading Mitylene; the gov- ernment, an oligarchy, was driven to arm the people for the defence™ the people, having obtained arms, immediately demanded political rights, under threat of surrendering the city to the foreign foe; and the government, rather than concede their claims, sur- rendered it themselves. Again, Megara, we learn, was twice betrayed, once by the democrats to the Athenians, and again by the oligarchs to the Lace- demonians. At Leontini the Syracusans were called in to drive out the popular party. And at Corcyra the people, having got the better of their aristocratic opponents, proceeded to a general mas- sacre which extended over seven days, with every variety of moral and physical atrocity. Such is the view of the political condition of Greece given to us by a contemporary observer to- wards the close of the fifth century, and it is a .curious comment on the Greek idea of the state. That idea, as we saw, was an ordered inequality, /political as well as social; and in certain states, and ‘notably in Sparta, it was successfully embodied in a stable form. But in the majority of the Greek states it never attained to more than a fluctuating and temporary realization. The inherent contradiction was too extreme for the attempted reconciliation; the inequalities refused to blend in a harmony of diver- gent tones, but asserted themselves in the disso- nance of civil war. PROPERTY AND COMMUNISTIC IDEAL 93 § 8. PROPERTY AND THE CoMMUNISTIC IDEAL And, as we have seen, this internal schism of the Greek state was as much social as political. The “many” and the “few” were identified respectively with the poor and the rich; and the struggle was thus at bottom as much economic as political. Gov- ernment by an oligarchy was understood to mean the _ exploitation of the masses by the classes. ‘‘An oli- | garchy,” says a democrat, as reported by Thucyd- | ides, ‘while giving the people the full share of dan- | ger, not merely takes too much of the good things, but absolutely monopolizes them.” 1 And, similarly, the advent of democracy was held to imply the spo- _ liation of the classes in the interest of the masses, either by excessive taxation, by an abuse of the judi- cial power to fine, or by any other of the semi-legal devices of oppression which the majority in power have always at their command. This substantial identity of rich and poor, respectively, with oligarch and democrat may be further illustrated by the fol- lowing passage from Aristotle: “In consequence of the political disturbances and contentions between the commons on the one hand and the rich on the other, whichever party happens to get the better of its opponents, instead of estab- lishing a polity of a broad and equal kind, assumes political supremacy as a prize of the victory, and sets up either a Democracy or an Oligarchy.” ? 1Thuc. VI. 32.—Translated by Jowett. * Arist. Pol. VI. (IV) 1296 a 27.—Translation by Welldon. etna _ 94 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE We see, then, that it was the underlying question _ of property that infused so strong a rancour into the \party struggles of Greece. From the very earliest period, in fact, we find it to have been the case that political revolution was prompted by economic causes. Debt was the main factor of the crisis which led to the legislation of Solon; and a re- division of the land was one of the measures attrib- uted to Lycurgus.1. As population increased, and, in the maritime states, commerce and trade devel- oped, the problem of poverty became increasingly acute; and though it was partially met by the emi- gration of the surplus population to colonies, yet in the fifth and fourth centuries we find it prominent and pressing both in practical politics and in specu- lation. Nothing can illustrate better how familiar the topic was, and to what free theorizing it had led, than the passages in which it is treated in the com- edies of Aristophanes. Here, for example, is an ex- tract from the ‘‘Ecclesiazuse’’ which it may be worth while to insert as a contribution to an argu- ment that belongs to every age. Praxacora. I tell you that we are all to share alike and have everything in common, instead of one being rich and another poor, and one having hundreds of acres and another not enough to make him a grave, and one a houseful 11 have not thought it necessary for my purpose, here or elsewhere, to discuss the authenticity of the statements made by Greek authors about Lycurgus. PROPERTY AND COMMUNISTIC IDEAL 95 of servants and another not even a paltry foot- boy. Iam going to introduce communism and universal equality. BLEPSyRUS. How communism? PrAx. That’s just what I was going to tell you. First of all, everybody’s money and land and anything else he may possess will be made com- mon property. Then we shall maintain you all out of the common stock, with due regard to economy and thrift. BLEPs. But how about those who have no land, but only money that they can hide? Prax. It will all go to the public purse. To keep anything back will be perjury. Biers. Perjury! Well, if you come to that, it was by perjury it was all acquired. Prax. And then, money won’t be the least use to anyone. Bieps. Why not? Prax. Because nobody will be poor. Everybody will have everything he wants, bread, salt-fish, barley-cake, clothes, wine, garlands, chickpeas. So what will be the good of keeping anything back? Answer that if you can! BLeps. Isn’t it just the people who have all these things that are the greatest thieves? Prax. No doubt, under the old laws. But now, when everything will be in common, what will be the good of keeping anything back? Biers. Who will do the field work? Prax. The slaves; all you will have to do is to 96 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE dress and go out to dinner in the evening. Biers. But what about the clothes? How are they to be provided? Prax. What you have now will do to begin with, and afterwards we shall make them for you ourselves. BLEPs. Just one thing more! Supposing a man were to lose his suit in the courts, where are the damages to come from? It would not be fair to take the public funds. Prax. But there won’t be any lawsuits at all! Bieps. That will mean ruin to a good many peo- ple. BYSTANDER. Just my idea! Prax. Why should there be any? Bieps. Why! for reasons enough, heaven knows! For instance, a man might repudiate his debts. Prax. In that case, where did the man who lent the money get it front Clearly, since everything is in common, he must have stolen it! BLEps. Sohe must! Anexcellent idea! But now tell me this. When fellows come to blows over their cups, where are the damages to come from? Prax. From the rations! A man won’t be in such a hurry to make a row when his belly has to pay for it. Bieps. One thing more! Will there be no more thieves? Prax. Why should anyone steal what is his own? Bieps. And won’t one be robbed of one’s cloak at night? PROPERTY AND COMMUNISTIC IDEAL 97 Prax. Not if you sleep at home! Buieps. Nor yet, if one sleeps out, as one used to do? Prax. No, for there will be enough and to spare | for all. And even if a thief does try admit. \ We find, then, in the Athenian state, the concepe 120 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE tion of equality pushed to the farthest extreme at all compatible with Greek ideas; pushed, we may fairly say, at last to an undue excess; for the great days of Athens were those when she was still under the influence of her aristocracy, and when the popular zeal evoked by her free institutions was directed by members of the leisured and cultivated class. The most glorious age of Athenian history closes with the death of Pericles; and Pericles was a man of noble family, freely chosen, year after year, by virtue of his personal qualities, to exercise over this democratic nation a dictatorship of character and brain. It is into his mouth that Thucydides has put that great panegyric of Athens, which sets forth to all time the type of an ideal state and the record of what was at least partially achieved in the great- est of the Greek cities: “Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. We do not copy our neighbours, but are an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while the law secures equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty a bar, but a man may benefit his country whatever be the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusive- ness in our public life, and in our private intercourse we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with ATHENS 121 our neighbour if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him, which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private intercourse, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for authority and for the laws, having an especial regard for those which are ordained for the protection of the injured, as weil as | for those unwritten laws which bring upon the trans- gressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment. Gi nT “And we have not forgotten to provide for our weary spirits many relaxations from toil; we have regular games and sacrifices throughout the year; | at home the style of our life is refined; and the delight which we daily feel in all these things helps to banish melancholy. Because of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us, so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as of our own. ‘“;hen, again, our military training is in many respects superior to that of our adversaries. Our city is thrown open to the worid, and we never expel a foreigner or prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret if reveaied to an enemy might profit him. We rely not upon management | and trickery, but upon our own hearts and hands. | And in the matter of education, whereas they from early youth are always undergoing laborious exer- cises which are to make them brave, we live at ease), and yet are ready to face the perils which they face. ° “Tf, then, we prefer to meet danger with a light 122 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE | heart but without laborious training, and with a courage which is gained by habit and not enforced by law, are we not greatly the gainers? Since we do not anticipate the pain, although when the hour comes, we can be as brave as those who never allow themselves to rest; and thus too our city is equally admirable in peace and in war. For 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 character; and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of a policy. The great impediment to action is, in our opinion, not discussion but the want of that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act, and of acting too, whereas other men are courageous from ignorance but hesitate upon reflection. And they are surely to be esteemed the bravest spirits who have the clear- est sense of the pains and pleasures of life, but do not on that account shrink from danger. “To sum up, I say that Athens is the school of Hellas, and that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself ATHENS 123 to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace. This is no passing and idle word, but truth and fact; and the assertion is veri: fied by the position to which these qualities have raised the state. For in the hour of trial Athens alone among her contemporaries is superior to the | report of her. No enemy who comes against her is indignant at the reverses which he sustains at the hands of such a city; no subject complains that his masters are unworthy of him. And we shall as- suredly not be without witnesses; there are mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this and of succeeding ages: we shall not need the praises of Homer or of any other pane- gyrist, whose poetry may please for the moment, al- though his representation of the facts will not bear the light of day. For we have compelled every land, every sea, to open a path for our valour, and have everywhere planted eternal memorials of our friend- ship and of our enmity.” ? An impression so superb as this it is almost a pity to mar with the inevitable complement of disaster and decay. But our account of the Athenian polity would be misleading and incomplete if we did not indicate how the idea of equality, on which it turned, | defeated itself, as did, in Sparta, the complementary | idea of order, by the excesses of its own develop- | ment. Already before the close of the fifth century, — and with reiterated emphasis in the earlier decades of the fourth, we hear from poets and orators praise 1Thuc. II. 37.—Translated by Jowett. 124 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE of a glorious past that is dead, and denunciations of a decadent present. The ancient training in gym- nastics, we are told, the ancient and generous culture of mind and soul, is neglected and despised by a generation of traders; reverence for age and author- ity, even for law, has disappeared; and in the train of these have gone the virtues they engendered and nur- tured. Cowardice has succeeded to courage, dis- order to discipline; the place of the statesman is usurped by the demagogue; and instead of a nation of heroes, marshalled under the supremacy of the wise and good, modern Athens presents to view a disordered and competitive mob, bent only on turning each to his own personal advantage the now corrupt machinery of administration and law. And however much exaggeration there may be in these denunciations and regrets, we know enough of the interior working of the institutions of Athens to see that she had to pay in license and in fraud the bitter price of equality and freedom. ‘That to the influence of disinterested statesmen succeeded, as the democracy accentuated itself, the tyranny of un- scrupulous demagogues, is evidenced by the testi- mony, not only of the enemies of popular govern- ment, but by that of a democrat so convinced as Demosthenes. ‘Since these orators have ap- peared,” he says, “who ask, What is your pleasure? what shall I move? how can I oblige you? the pub- lic welfate is complimented away for a moment’s popularity, and these are the results; the orators thrive, you are disgraced. . . . Anciently the peo- ATHENS 125 ple, having the courage to be soldiers, controlled the statesmen and disposed of all emoluments; any of the rest were happy to receive from the people his Share of honour, office, or advantage. Now, con- trariwise, the statesmen dispose of emoluments; through them everything is done; you, the people, enervated, stripped of treasure and allies, are be- come as underlings and hangers-on, happy if these persons dole you out show-money or send you paltry beeves; and, the unmanliest part of all, you | are grateful for receiving your own.” ! | And this indictment is amply confirmed from other sources. We know that the populace was de- moralized by payments from the public purse; that the fee for attendance in the Assembly attracted thither, as ready instruments in the hands of am- bitious men, the poorest and most degraded of the citizens; that the fees of jurors were a not unimpor- tant addition to the income of an indigent class, who had thus a direct interest in the multiplication of suits; and that the city was infested by a race of “sycophants,” whose profession was to manufacture frivolous and vexatious indictments. Of one of these men Demosthenes speaks as follows: “Ale cannot show any respectable or honest em- ployment in which his life is engaged. His mind is not occupied in promoting any political good: he at- tends not to any trade, or husbandry, or other busi- ness; he is connected with no one by ties of humanity or social union: but he walks through the market- 1Dem. Ol]. I1I.—Translation by Kennedy. 126 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE place like a viper or a scorpion, with his sting up- lifted, hastening here and there, and looking out for someone whom he may bring into a scrape, or fasten some calumny or mischief upon, and put in alarm in order to extort money.” + From all this we may gather an idea of the way in which the Athenian democracy by its own devel- opment destroyed itself. Beginning, on its first emergence from an earlier aristocratic phase, with an energy that inspired without shattering the forms of discipline and law, it dissolved by degrees this coherent whole into an anarchy of individual wills, drawn deeper and deeper, in pursuit of mean and egoistic ends, into political fraud and commercial chicanery, till the tradition of the gentleman and “the soldier was choked by the dust of adventurers and swindlers, and the people, whose fathers had fought and prevailed at Marathon and Salamis, fell as they deserved, by treachery from within as much as by force from without, into the grasp of the Macedonian conqueror. § 11. ScEPTICAL CRITICISM OF THE BASIS OF THE STATE Having thus supplemented our general account of the Greek conception of the state by a description of their two most prominent polities, it remains for us in conclusion briefly to trace the negative criticism 1 Demosth. in Aristogeit. A. 62.—Translation by Ken- nedy. THE BASIS OF THE STATE 127 under whose attack that conception threatened to dissolve. We have quoted, in an earlier part of this chapter, a striking passage from Demosthenes, embodying that view of the objective validity of law under which alone political institutions can be secure. ‘That is law,” said the orator, “which all men ought to obey for many reasons, and especially because every law is an invention and gift of the gods, a resolution of wise men, a correction of errors intentional and un- intentional, a compact of the whole state, according to which all who belong to the state ought to live.” That is the conception of law which the citizens of any stable state must be prepared substantially to accept, for it is the condition of that fundamental belief in established institutions which alone can make it worth while to adapt and to improve them. It was, accordingly, the conception tacitly, at least, accepted in Greece, during the period of her con- structive vigour. But it is a conception constantly open to attack. For law, at any given moment, even under the most favourable conditions, cannot do more than approximate to its own ideal. It is, at best, but a rough attempt at that reconciliation of conflicting interests towards which the reason of mankind is always seeking; and even in well-ordered states there must always be individuals and classes who resent, and rightly resent it, as unjust. But the, Greek states, as we have seen, were not well ordered; | on the contrary, they were always on the verge, or | in the act, of civil war; and the conception of law, as ‘fa compact of the whole state, according to which all ow 128 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE who belong to the state ought to live,’’ must have been, at the least, severely tried, in cities perma- nently divided into two factions, each intent not merely on defeating the other, but on excluding it altogether from political rights. Such conditions, in fact, must have irresistibly suggested the criticism, which always dogs the idea of the state, and against which its only defence is in a perpetual perfection of itself—the criticism that law, after all, is only the rule of the strong, and justice the name under which they gloze their usurpation. That is a point of view which, even apart from their political dissensions, would hardly have escaped the subtle intellect of the Greeks; and, in fact, from the close of the fifth cen- tury onwards, we find it constantly canvassed and discussed. The mind of Plato, in particular, was exercised _by this contention; and it was, one may say, a main _ object of his teaching to rescue the idea of justice from identification with the special interest of the strong, and re-affirm it as the general interest of all. ‘For this end, he takes occasion to state, with the utmost frankness and lucidity, the view which it is his intention to refute; and consequently it is in his works that we find the fullest exposition of the destructive argument he seeks to answer. Briefly, that argument runs as follows: It is the law of nature that the strong shall rule; a law which everyone recognizes in fact, though everyone repudi- ates it in theory. Government therefore simply means the rule of the strong, and exists, no matter what its form, whether tyranny, oligarchy, or democ- THE BASIS OF THE STATE 129 racy, in the interests not of its subjects but of itself. “Justice” and “law” are the specious names it em- ploys to cloak its own arbitrary will; they have no objective validity, no reference to the well-being of all; and it is only the weak and the foolish on whom they impose. Strong and original natures sweep away this tangle of words, assert themselves in de- fiance of false shame, and claim the right divine that is theirs by nature, to rule at their will by vir- tue of their strength. “Each government,” says Thrasymachus in the Republic, “has its laws framed, to suit its own interests; a democracy making dem- ocratic laws; an autocrat despotic laws, and so | on. Now by this procedure these governments have - pronounced that what is for the interest of them- selves is just for their subjects; and whoever de- viates from this, is chastized by them as guilty of illegality and injustice. Therefore, my good sir, my meaning is, that in all cities the same thing, namely, the interest of the established government is just. And superior strength, I presume, is to be found on the side of government. So that the conclusion of right reasoning is, that the same thing, namely, the interest of the stronger, is everywhere just.” ? Here is an argument which strikes at the root of all subordination to the state, setting the subject against the ruler, the minority against the majority, with an emphasis of opposition that admits of no conceivable reconciliation. And, as we have no- ticed, it was an argument to which the actual politi- 1 Plato, Rep. 338.—Translated by Davies and Vaughan. 130 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE cal conditions of Greece gave a strong show of plausibility. How then did the constructive thinkers of Greece attempt to meet it? The procedure adopted by Plato is curiously op- posed to that which might seem natural to a modern thinker on politics. The scepticism which was to be met, having sprung from the extremity of class- antagonism, it might be supposed that the cure would be sought in some sort of system of equality. \ Plato’s idea is precisely the contrary. The distinc- _tion between classes he exaggerates to its highest _ point; only he would have it depend on degrees, ‘not of wealth, but of excellence. In the ideal repub- lic which he constructs as a type of a state where justice should really rule, he sets an impassable gulf between the governing class and the governed; each is specially trained and specially bred for its appro- priate function; and the harmony between them is ensured by the recognition, on either part, that each is in occupation of the place for which it is naturally fitted in that whole to which both alike are subordi- nate. Such a state, no doubt, if ever it had been realized in practice, would have been a complete reply to the sceptical argument; for it would have established a “justice”? which was the expression not of the caprice of the governing class, but of the ob- jective will of the whole community. But in prac- tice such a state was not realized in Greece; and the experience of the Greek world does not lead us to suppose that it was capable of realization. The system of sterotyping classes—in a word, of caste— THE BASIS OF THE STATE 131 which has played so great a part in the history of the world, does no doubt embody a great truth, that of natural inequality; and this truth, as we saw, was at the bottom of that Greek conception of the state, of which the ‘Republic’ of Plato is an idealizing caricature. But the problem is to make the in- equality of nature really correspond to the inequality imposed by institutions. This problem Plato hoped to solve by a strict public control of the marriage re- lation, so that none should be born into any class who were not naturally fitted to be members of it; but, as a matter of fact, the difficulty has never been met; and the system of caste remains open to the reproach that its “justice” is conventional and arbi- trary, not the expression of the objective nature and will of all classes and members of the community. The attempt of Aristotle to construct a state that should be the embodiment of justice is similar to Plato’s so far as the relation of classes is concerned. He, too, postulates a governing class of soldiers and councillors, and a subject class of productive labour- ers. When, however, he turns from the ideal to practical politics, and considers merely how to avoid the worst extremes of party antagonism, his solution is the simple and familiar one of the preponderance of the middle class. The same view was dominant both in French and English politics from the year 1830 onwards, and is only now being thrust aside by the democratic ideal. In Greece it was never real- ized except as a passing phase in the perpetual flux of polities. And in fine it may be said that the problem of establishing a state which should be a 132 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE concrete refutation of the sceptical criticism that “justice” is merely another name for force, was one that was never solved in ancient Greece. The dis- solution of the idea of the state was more a symptom than a cause of its failure in practice to harmonize its warring elements. And Greece, divided into con- flicting polities, each of which again was divided within itself, passed on to Macedon and thence to Rome that task of reconciling the individual and the class with the whole, about which the political his- tory of the world turns. § 12. SUMMARY We have now given some account of the general character of the Greek state, the ideas that underlay it, and the criticism of those ideas suggested by the course of history and formulated by speculative thought. It remains to offer certain reflections on the political achievement of the Greeks, and its re- Jation to our own ideas. The fruitful and positive aspect of the Greek state, that which fastens upon it the eyes of later generations as upon a model, if not to be copied, at least to be praised and admired, is that identifica- tion of the individual citizen with the corporate life, which delivered him from the narrow circle of per- sonal interests into a sphere of wider views and higher aims. The Greek citizen, as we have seen, in the best days of the best states, in Athens for ex- ample in the age of Pericles, was at once a soldier and a politician; body and mind alike were at his SUMMARY 133 country’s service; and his whole ideal of conduct was inextricably bound up with his intimate and personal participation in public affairs. If now with this ideal we contrast the life of an average citizen in a modern state, the absorption in private business and family concerns, the “greasy domesticity” (to use a phrase of Byron’s), that limits and clouds his vision of the world, we may well feel that the Greeks had achieved something which we have lost, and may even desire to return, so far as we may, upon our steps, and to re-establish that interpenetration of private and public life by which the individual citizen was at once depressed and glorified. It may be doubted, however, whether such a pro- cedure would be in any way possible or desirable. For in the first place, the existence of the Greek citizen depended upon that of an inferior class who were regarded not as ends in themselves, but as means to his perfection. And that is an arrange- ment which runs directly counter to the modern ideal. All modern societies aim, to this extent at least, at equality, that their tendency, so far as it is conscious and avowed, is not to separate off a privi- leged class of citizens, set free by the labour of oth- ers to live the perfect life, but rather to distribute impartially to all the burdens and advantages of the state, so that every one shall be at once a labourer for himself and a citizen of the state. But this ideal is clearly incompatible with the Greek concep- tion of the citizen. It implies that the greater por- tion of every man’s life must be devoted to some kind of mechanical labour, whose immediate connec- 134 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE tion with the public good, though certain, is remote and obscure; and that in consequence a deliberate and unceasing preoccupation with the end of the state becomes as a general rule impossible. And, in the second place, the mere complexity and size of a modern state is against the identification of the man with the citizen. For, on the one hand, public issues are so large and so involved that it is only a few who can hope to have any adequate com- prehension of them; and on the other, the sub- division of functions is so minute that even when a man is directly employed in the service of the state his activity is confined to some highly specialized de- partment. He must choose, for example, whether he will be a clerk in the treasury or a soldier; but he cannot certainly be both. In the Greek state any citizen could undertake, simultaneously or in suc- cession, and with complete comprehension and mas- tery, every one of the comparatively few and sim- ple public offices; in a modern state such an ar- rangement has become impossible. The mere me- chanical and physical conditions of our life pre- clude the ideal of the ancient citizen. But, it may be said, the activity of the citizen of a modern state should be and increasingly will be concerned not with the whole but with the part. By the development of local institutions he will come, more and more, to identify himself with the public life of his district and his town; and will bear to that much the same relation as was borne by the ancient Greek to his city-state. Certainly so far as the limitation of area and the simplicity and in- SUMMARY 135 telligibility of issues is concerned, such an analogy might be fairly pressed; and it is probably in con- nection with such local areas that the average citizen does and increasingly will become aware of his corporate relations. But, on the other hand, it can hardly be maintained that public business in this restricted sense either could or should play the part in the life of the modern man that it played in that of the ancient Greek. For local business after all is a matter of sewers and parks; and however great the importance of such matters may be, and however great their claim upon the attention of competent men, yet the kind of interest they awaken and the kind of faculties they employ can hardly be such as to lead to the identification of the individual ideal with that of public activity. The life of the Greek citizen involved an exercise, the finest and most com- plete, of all his powers of body, soul, and mind; the’ same can hardly be said of the life of a county councillor, even of the best and most conscientious of them. And the conclusion appears to be, that that fusion of public and private life which was involved in the ideal of the Greek citizen, was a passing phase in the history of the world; that the state can never occupy again the place in relation to the individual which it held in the cities of the ancient world; and that an attempt to identify in a mudern state the | ideal of the man with that of the citizen, would be © an historical anachronism, Nor is this’a conclusion which need be regretted. For as the sphere of the state shrinks, it is possible that that of the individual may be enlarged. ‘The 136 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE public side of human life, it may be supposed, will become more and more mechanical, as our under- standing and control of social forces grow. But every reduction to habit and rule of what were once spiritual functions, implies the liberation of the higher powers for a possible activity in other re- gions. And if advantage were taken of this oppor- tunity, the inestimable compensation for the con- traction to routine of the life of the citizen would be the expansion into new spheres of speculation and passion of the freer and more individual life of the man. CHAPTER III THE GREEK VIEW OF THE INDIVIDUAL § 1. THe GREEK VIEW OF MANUAL LABOUR AND ‘TRADE N our discussion of the Greek view of the state we noticed the tendency both of the theory and the | , practice of the Greeks to separate the citizens proper | from the rest of the community as a distinct and | aristocratic class. And this tendency, we had occa- sion to observe, was partly to be attributed to the high conception which the Greeks had formed of the proper excellence of man, an excellence which it was the function of the citizen to realize in his own per- son, at the cost, if need be, of the other members of the state. This Greek conception of the proper excellence of man it is now our purpose to examine more closely. The chief point that strikes us about the Greek | ideal is its comprehensiveness. Our own word) “virtue” is applied only to moral qualities; but the » Greek word which we so translate should properly be rendered “excellence,” and includes a reference to the body as well as to the soul. A beautiful soul, housed in a beautiful body, and supplied with all the external advantages necessary to produce and perpetrate such a combination—that is the Greek 137 138 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE conception of well-being; and it is because labour with the hands or at the desk distorts or impairs the body, and the petty cares of a calling pursued for bread pervert_the soul, that so strong a contempt was felt by the Greeks for manual labour and trade. “The arts that are called mechanical,” says Xeno- phon, “are also, and naturally enough, held in bad repute in our cities. For they spoil the bodies of workers and superintendents alike, compelling them to live sedentary indoor lives, and in some cases even to pass their days by the fire. And as their bodies become effeminate, so do their souls also grow less robust. Besides this, in such trades one has no leisure to devote to the care of one’s friends or of one’s city. So that those who engage in them are thought to be bad backers of their friends and bad defenders of their country.”+ In a similar spirit Plato asserts that a life of drudgery disfigures the body and mars and enervates the soul; ? while Aris- totle defines a mechanical trade as one which “renders the body and soul or intellect of free per- sons unfit for the exercise and practice of virtue;” * and denies to the artisan not merely the proper excellence of man, but any excellence of any kind, on the plea that his occupation and status is un- natural, and that he misses even that reflex of hu- man virtue which a slave derives from his intimate connection with his master.* Lx er Oeaci LM. oi. * Plato, Rep. 495. 8 Arist. Pol. V. 1337 b 8.—Translated by Welldon. * Ibid. I. 1260 a 34. APPRECIATION OF EXTERNAL GCODS 139 If, then, the artisan was excluded from the citizenship in some of the Greek states, and even in the most democratic of them never altogether threw off the stigma of inferiority attaching to his trade, the reason was that the life he was com- pelled to lead was incompatible with the Greek conception of excellence. That conception we will now proceed to examine a little more in detail. § 2. APPRECIATION OF EXTERNAL Goops In the first place, the Greek ideal required for its realization a solid basis of external Goods. It recognized frankly the dependence of man upon the world of sense, and the contribution to his happiness of elements over which he had at best but a partial control. Not that it placed his Good outside himself, in riches, power, and other such _ —_—— fortune as necessary means to his self-development. Of these the chief were, a competence, to secure} him against sordid cares, health, to ensure his, physical excellence, and children, to support and ' protect him in old age. Aristotle’s definition of the happy man is “one whose activity accords with perfect virtue and who is adequately furnished with external goods, not for a casual period of time but for a complete or perfect life-time;” + and he remarks, somewhat caustically, that those who say 1 Arist. Ethics. I. 11. 1101 a 14.—tTranslated by Welldon 140 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE that a man on the rack would be happy if only he were good, intentionally or unintentionally are talking nonsense. ‘That here, as elsewhere, Aristotle represents the common Greek view we have abund- ant testimony from other sources. Even Plato, in whom there runs so clear a vein of asceticism, follows the popular judgment in reckoning high among Goods, first, health, then beauty, then skill and strength in physical exercises, and lastly wealth, if it be not blind but illumined by the eye of reason. To these Goods must be added, to complete the ' scale, success and reputation, topics which are the constant theme of the poets’ eulogy. ‘“Two things alone there are,” says Pindar, ‘“‘that cherish life’s bloom to its utmost sweetness amidst the fair flowers of wealth—to have good success and to win therefore fair fame;” 1 and the passage represents his habitual attitude. That the gifts of fortune, both personal and external, are an essential condi- tion of excellence, is an axiom of the point of view of the Greeks. But on the other hand we never find them misled into the conception that such gifts are an end in themselves, apart from the personal qualities they are meant to support or adorn. The ‘oriental ideal of unlimited wealth and power, en- joyed merely for its own sake, never appealed to their fine and lucid judgment. Nothing could better illustrate this point than the anecdote re- lated by Herodotus of the interview between Solon and Croesus, King of Lydia. Croesus, proud of 1 Pind. Isth. IV. 14.—Translated by E. Myers. PHYSICAL QUALITIES 141 his boundless wealth, asks the Greek stranger who is the happiest man on earth? expecting to hear in reply his own name. Solon, however, answers with the name of Tellus, the Athenian, giving his rea- sons in the following speech: “First, because his country was flourishing in his days, and he himself had sons both beautiful and good, and he lived to see children born to each of them, and these children all grew up; and further because, after a life spent in what our people look upon as comfort, his end was surpassingly glorious. In a battle between the Athenians and their neigh- bours near Eleusis, he came to the assistance of his countrymen, routed the foe, and died upon the field most gallantly. The Athenians gave him a public funeral on the spot where he fell, and paid him the highest honours.” 3 Later on in the discussion Solon defines the happy man as he who “is whole of limb, a stranger to disease, free from misfortune, happy in his children, and comely to look upon,” and who also ends his life well. § 3. APPRECIATION OF PHYSICAL QUALITIES While, however, the gifts of a happy fortune are an essential condition of the Greek ideal, they are not to be mistaken for the ideal itself. “A beauti- ful soul in a beautiful body,’ to recur to our former phrase, is the real end and aim of their 1 Herodotus, I. 30. 32.—Translated by Rawlinson. 142 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE endeavour. ‘Beautiful and good” is their habitual way of describing what we should call a gentleman; and no expression could better represent what they admired. With ourselves, in spite of our addiction _ to athletics, the body takes a secondary place; aiter a certain age, at least, there are few men who make its systematic cultivation an important factor of their life; and in our estimate of merit physical qualities are accorded either none or the very smallest weight. It was otherwise with the \Greeks; to them a good body was the necessary ‘correlative of a good soul. Balance was what they ‘aimed at, balance and harmony; and they could scarcely believe in the beauty of the spirit, unless it were reflected in the beauty of the flesh. The point is well put by Plato, the most spiritually minded of the Greeks, and the least apt to under- prize the qualities of the soul. “Surely then,” he says, ‘to him who has an eye to see, there can be no fairer spectacle than that of a man who combines the possession of moral ' beauty in his soul with outward beauty of form, corresponding and harmonizing with the former, _ because the same great pattern enters into both. “There can be none so fair. “And you will grant that what is fairest is love- liest ? “Undoubtedly it is. “Then the truly musical person will love those who combine most perfectly moral and physical beauty, but will not love any one in whom there is dissonance. GREEK ATHLETICS 143 “No, not if there be any defect in the soul, but if it is only a bodily blemish, he may so bear with it as to be willing to regard it with complacency. “T understand that you have now, or have had, a favourite of this kind; so I give way.” } The reluctance of the admission that a physical defect may possibly be overlooked is as significant as the rest of the passage. Body and soul, it is clear, are regarded as aspects of a single whole, so that a blemish in the one indicates and involves a blemish in the other. The training of the body is thus, in a sense, the training of the soul, and gymnastic and music, as Plato puts it, serve the same end, the production of a harmonious tem- perament. § 4. GREEK ATHLETICS It is this conception which gives, or appears at least in the retrospect to give, a character so gracious and fine to Greek athletics. In fact, if\ we look more closely into the character of the public | games in Greece we see that they were so sur- rounded and transfused by an atmosphere of imagination that their appeal must have been as much to the esthetic as to the physical sense. For in the first place those great gymnastic contests in which all Hellas took part, and which gave the tone to their whole athletic life, were primarily religious festivals. The Olympic and Nemean 1 Plato, Rep. 402.—Translated by Davies and Vaughan. \ 144 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE Games were held in honour of Zeus, the Pythian, of Apollo, the Isthmean, of Poseidon. In the en- closures in which they took place stood temples of the gods; and sacrifice, prayer, and choral hymn were the background against which they were set. And since in Greece religion implied art, in the wake of the athlete followed the sculptor and the poet. The colossal Zeus of Pheidias, the wonder of the ancient world, flashed from the precincts of Olympia its glory of ivory and gold; temples and statues broke the brilliant light into colour and form; and under that vibrating heaven of beauty, the loveliest nature crowned with the finest art, shifted and shone what was in itself a perfect type of both, the grace of harmonious motion in naked youths and men. For in Greek athletics, by virtue of the practice of contending nude, the contest itself became a work of art; and not only did sculptors draw from it an inspiration such as has been felt by no later age, but to the combatants themselves, and the spectators, the plastic beauty of the human form grew to be more than its prowess or its strength, and gymnastic became a training in esthetics as much as, or more than, in physical excellence. And as with the contest, so with the reward, everything was designed to appeal to the sensuous imagination. The prize formally adjudged was symbolical only, a crown of olive; but the real triumph of the victor was the ode in which his praise was sung, the procession of happy comrades, GREEK ATHLETICS 145 and the evening festival, when, as Pindar has it, “the lovely shining of the fair-faced moon beamed forth, and all the precinct sounded with songs of festal glee,” 1 or “beside Kastaly in the evening his name burnt bright, when the glad sounds of the Graces rose.” ” Of the Graces! for these were the powers who presided over the world of Greek athletics. Here, for example, is the opening of one of Pindar’s odes, typical of the spirit in which he at least conceived the functions of the chronicler of sport: “O ye who haunt the land of goodly steeds that drinketh of Kephisos’ waters, lusty Orchomenos’ Queens renowned in song, O Graces, guardians of the Minyai’s ancient race, hearken, for unto you I pray. For by your gift come unto men all pleasant things and sweet, and the wisdom of a man and his beauty, and the splendour of his fame. Yea, even gods without the Graces’ aid rule never at feast or dance; but these have charge of all things done in heaven, and beside Pythian Apollo of the golden bow they have set their thrones, and worship the eternal majesty of the Olympian Father. O lady Aglaia, and thou Euphrosyne, lover of song, chil- dren of the mightiest of the gods, listen and hear, and thou Thalia, delighting in sweet sounds, and look down upon this triumphal company, moving with light step under happy fate. In Lydian mood 1Pindar, Ol. XI. 90.—Translated by Myers. ? Pindar, Nem. VI. 65. 146 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE of melody concerning Asopichos am I come hither to sing, for that through thee, Aglaia, in the Olympic games the Minyai’s home is winner.” ? This is but a single passage among many that might be quoted to illustrate the point we are en- deavouring to bring into reliefi—the conscious pre- dominance in the Greek games of that element of poetry and art which is either not present at all in modern sport or at best is a happy accessory of chance. The modern man, and especially the Englishman, addicts. himself to athletics, as to © other avocations, with a certain stolidity of gaze on the immediate end which tends to confine him to the purely physical view of his pursuit. The Greek, an artist by nature, lifted his not less strenuous sports into an air of finer sentiment, touched them with the poetry of legend and the grace of art and song, and even to his most brutal contests—for brutal some of them were—imparted so rich an atmosphere of beauty, that they could be admitted as fit themes for dedication to the Graces by the choice and spiritual genius of Pindar. § 5. GREEK EtHIcs—IDENTIFICATION OF THE AESTHETIC AND ETHICAL PoINTs OF VIEW And as with the excellence of the body, so with that of the soul, the conception that dominated the mind of the Greeks was primarily esthetic. In speaking of their religion we have already remarked + Pindar, Ol. XIV.—Translated by Myers GREEK ETHICS 147 that they had no sense of sin; and we may now add that they had not what we are apt to mean by a sense of duty. Moral virtue they conceived not as obedience to an external law, a sacrifice of, the natural man to a power that in a sense is alien to himself, but rather as the tempering into due proportion of the elements of which human nature is composed. The good man was the man who was beautiful—beautiful in soul. “Virtue,” says Plato, “will be a kind of health and beauty and good habit of the soul; and vice will be a disease and deformity and sickness of it.” 1 It follows that it is as natural to seek virtue and to avoid vice as to seek health and to avoid disease. There is no question of a struggle between opposite principles; the dis- tinction of good and evil is one of order or con- fusion, among elements which in themselves are neither good nor bad. This conception of virtue we find expressed in many forms, but always with the same underlying idea. A favourite watchword with the Greeks is the “middle” or “mean,” the exact point of right- ness between two extremes. ‘Nothing in excess,” | was a motto inscribed over the temple of Delphi; and none could be more characteristic of the ideal of these lovers of proportion. Aristotle, indeed, has made it the basis of his whole theory of ethics. In his conception, virtue is the mean, vice the excess lying on either side—courage, for example, the mean between foolhardiness and cowardice, tem- 1 Plato, Rep. 444.—Translated by Davies and Vaughan. 148 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE perance, between incontinence and _insensibility, generosity, between extravagance and meanness. The various phases of feeling and the various kinds of action he analyzes minutely on this principle, understanding always by “the mean” that which adapts itself in the due proportion to the circum- stances and requirements of every case. The interest of this view for us lies in its assump- tion that it is not passions or desires in themselves that must be regarded as bad, but only their dis- proportional. or misdirected indulgence. Let us take, for example, the case of the pleasures of sense. The puritan’s rule is to abjure them altogether; to him they are absolutely wrong in themselves, apart from all considerations of time and place. Aristotle, on the contrary, enjoins not renunciation but tem- perance; and defines the temperate man as one who “holds a mean position in respect of pleasures. He takes no pleasure in the things in which the licentious man takes most pleasure; he rather dis- likes them; nor does he take pleasure at all in wrong things, nor an excessive pleasure in any- thing that is pleasant, nor is he pained at the absence of such things, nor does he desire them, except perhaps in moderation, nor does he desire them more than is right, or at the wrong time, and so on. But he will be eager in a moderate and right spirit for all such things as are pleasant and at the same time conducive to health or to a sound bodily condition, and for all other pleasures, so long as . they are not prejudicial to these or inconsistent with noble conduct or extravagant beyond his means. GREEK ETHICS 149 For unless a person limits himself in this way, he affects such pleasures more than is right, whereas the temperate man follows the guidance of right reason.” + As another illustration of this point of view, we may take the case of anger. The Christian rule is never to resent an injury, but rather, in the New Testament phrase, to “turn the other cheek.’ Aristotle, while blaming the man who is unduly passionate, blames equally the man who is in- sensitive; the thing to aim at is to be angry “on the proper occasions and with the proper people in the proper manner and for the proper length of | time.”’ And in this and all other cases the definition of what is proper must be left to the determination of ‘the sensible man.” Thus, in place of a series of hard and fast rules, a rigid and uncompromising distinction of acts and affections into good and bad, the former to be absolutely chosen and the latter absolutely eschewed, Aristotle presents us with the general type of a subtle and shifting problem, the solution of which must be worked out afresh by each individual in each particular case. Conduct to him is a free and living creature, and not a machine controlled by fixed laws. Every life is a work of art shaped by the man who lives it; according to the faculty of the artist will be the quality of his work, and no general rules can supply the place of his own direct 1 Arist. Ethics. III. 14.—1119 a 11.—Translated by Welldon. 150 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE perception at every turn. The Good is the right proportion, the right manner and occasion; the Bad is all that varies from this “right.” But the ele- ments of human nature in themselves are neither good nor bad; they are merely the raw material out of which the one or the other may be shaped. The idea thus formulated by Aristotle is typically Greek. In another form it is the basis of the ethical philosophy of Plato, who habitually regards virtue as a kind of “order.” ‘The virtue of each thing,” he says, “whether body or soul, instrument or creature, when given to them in the best way comes to them not by chance, but as the result of the order and truth and art which are imparted to them.” + And the conception here indicated is worked out in detail in his Republic. There, after distinguishing in the soul three principles or powers, reason, passion, and desire, he defines justice as the maintenance among them of their proper mutual relation, each moving in its own place and doing its appropriate work as is, or should be, the case with the different classes in a state. “The just man will not permit the several princi- ples within him to do any work but their own, nor allow the distinct classes in his soul to interfere with each other, but will really set his house in order; and having gained the mastery over himself, will so regulate his own character as to be on good terms with himself, and to set those three princi- ples in tune together, as if they were verily three 1 Plato, Gorgias, 506 d.—Translated by Jowett. GREEK ETHICS 151 cords of a harmony, a higher and a lower and a middle, and whatever may lie between these; and after he has bound all these together, and reduced the many elements of his nature to a real unity, as a temperate and duly harmonized man, he will then at length proceed to do whatever he may have to do.” 1 Plato, it is true, in other parts of his work, approaches more closely to the dualistic conception of an absolute opposition between good and bad principles in man. Yet even so, he never altogether abandons that esthetic point of view which looks to the establishment of order among the conflict- ing principles rather than to the annihilation of one by the other in an internecine conflict. The point may be illustrated by the following passage, where the two horses represent respectively the elements of fleshly desire and spiritual passion, while the charioteer stands for the controlling reason; and where, it will be noticed, the ultimate harmony is achieved, not by the complete eradication of desire, but by its due subordination to the higher principle. Even Plato the most ascetic of the Greeks, is a Greek first and an ascetic afterwards. “Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of large and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a figure, and let the figure be composite—a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses 1 Plato, Rep. IV. 443.—Translation by Davies and Vaughan, 152 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him. ... The right-hand horse is upright and cleanly made; he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose; his colour is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only. The other is a crooked lumbering animal, put together anyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark colour, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur. Now when the charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his whole soul warmed through sense, and is full of the pricklings and ticklings of desire, the obedient steed, then as always under the government of shame, refrains from leaping on the beloved; but the other, heedless of the blows of the whip, plunges and runs away, giving all manner of trouble to his companion and the charioteer, whom he forces to approach the beloved and to remember the joys of love. They at first indignantly oppose him and will not be urged on to do terrible and unlawful deeds; but at last, when he persists in plaguing them, they yield and agree to do as he bids them. GREEK ETHICS 153 And now they are at the spot and behold the flash- ing beauty of the beloved; which when the charioteer sees, his memory is carried to the true beauty whom he beholds in company with Modesty like an image placed upon a holy pedestal. He sees her, but he is afraid and falls backwards in adoration, and by his fall is compelled to pull back the reins with such violence as to bring both the steeds on their haunches, the one willing and unresisting, the un- ruly one very unwilling; and when they have gone back a little, the one is overcome with shame and wonder, and his whole soul is bathed in perspiration; the other, when the pain is over which the bridle and the fall had given him, having with difficulty taken breath, is full of wrath and reproaches, which he heaps upon the charioteer and his fellow-steed, for want of courage and manhood, declaring that they have been false to their agreement and guilty of desertion. Again they refuse, and again he urges them on, and will scarce yield to their prayer that he would wait until another time. When the appointed hour comes, they make as if they had forgotten, and he reminds them, fighting and neigh- ing and dragging them on, until at length he on the same thoughts intent, forces them to draw near again. And when they are near he stoops his head and puts up his tail, and takes the bit in his teeth and pulls shamelessly. Then the charioteer is worse off than ever; he falls back like a racer at the barrier, and with a still more violent wrench drags the bit out of the teeth of the wild steed and 154 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE covers his abusive jaws and tongue with blood, and forces his legs and haunches to the ground and punishes him sorely. “And when this has happened several times, and the villain has ceased from his wanton way, he is tamed and humbled, and follows the will of the charioteer, and when he sees the beautiful one he is ready to die of fear. And from that time forward the soul of the lover follows the beloved in modesty and holy fear.’ } Even from this passage, in spite of its dualistic hypothesis, but far more clearly from the whole tenor of his work, we may perceive that Plato’s description of virtue as an “‘order” of the soul is prompted by the same conception, characteristically Greek, as Aristotle’s account of virtue as a “mean.” The view, as we said at the beginning, is properly , esthetic rather than moral. It regards life less ~ as a battle between two contending principles, in ———— which victory means the annihilation of the one, the altogether bad, by the other, the altogether good, than as the maintenance of a balance be- tween elements neutral in themselves but capable, according as their relations are rightly ordered or the reverse, of producing either that harmony which is called virtue, or that discord which is called vice. Such being the conception of virtue character- istic of the Greeks, it follows that the motive to pursue it can hardly have presented itself to them in the form of what we call the “sense of duty.” * Plato, Phaedrus. 246.—Translated by Jowett. THE GREEK VIEW OF PLEASURE 155 For duty emphasizes self-repression. Against the desires of man it sets a law of prohibition, a law which is not conceived as that of his own com- plete nature, asserting against a partial or dispro- portioned development the balance and totality of the ideal, but rather as a rule imposed from with- out by a power distinct from himself, for the morti- fication, not the perfecting, of his natural impulses and aims. Duty emphasizes self-repression; the! Greek view emphasized self-development. That; “health and beauty and good habit of the soul,’’ which is Plato’s ideal, is as much its own recom-| mendation to the natural man as is the health and | beauty of the body. Vice, on this view, is con- demned because it is a frustration of nature, virtue praised because it is her fulfilment; and the motive throughout is simply that passion to realize one- self which is commonly acknowledged as sufficient in the case of physical development and which appeared sufficient to the Greeks in the case of the development of the soul. § 6. THE GREEK VIEW OF PLEASURE From all this it follows clearly enough that the Greek ideal was far removed from asceticism; but it might perhaps be supposed, on the other hand, that it came dangerously near to license. Nothing, however, could be farther from the case. That there were libertines among the Greeks, as every- where else, goes without saying; but the con- ception that the Greek rule of life was to follow 156 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE impulse and abandon restraint is a figment of would-be “Hellenists” of our own time. The word which best sums up the ideal of the Greeks is “temperance”; “the mean,” “order,” “harmony,” as we Saw, are its characteristic expressions; and the self-realization to which they aspired was not an anarchy of passion, but an ordered evolution of the natural faculties under the strict control of a balanced mind. The point may be illustrated by a reference to the treatment of pleasure in the philosophy of Plato and of Aristotle. The practice of the libertine is to identify pleasure and good in such a manner that he pursues at any moment any pleasure that presents itself, eschewing comparison and reflection, with all that might tend to check that continuous flow of vivid and fresh sensations which he postulates as the end of life. The ideal of the Greeks, on the contrary, aS interpreted by their two greatest thinkers, while on the one hand it is so far opposed to asceticism that it requires pleasure as an essential complement of Good, on the other, is so far from identifying the two, that it recognizes an ordered scale of pleasures, and while rejecting altogether those at the lower end, admits the rest, not as in themselves constituting the Good, but rather as harmless additions, or at most as necessary ac- companiments of its operation. Plato, in the Re- public, distinguishes between the necessary and unnecessary pleasures, defining the former as those derived from the gratification of appetites “which we cannot get rid of, and whose satisfaction does THE GREEK VIEW OF PLEASURE § 157 us good’’—such, for example, as the appetite for wholesome food; and the latter as those which be- tong to appetites “which we can put away from us by early training; and the presence of which, be- sides, never does us any good, and in some cases does positive harm’—such, for example, as the appetite for delicate and luxurious dishes.1| The former he would admit, the latter he excludes from his ideal of happiness. And though in a later dialogue, the Philebus, he goes farther than this, and would exclude from the perfect life all pleasures except those which he describes as “pure,” that is those which attend upon the contemplation of form and colour and sound, or which accompany in- tellectual activity; yet here, no doubt, he is pass- ing beyond the sphere of the practicable ideal, and his distinct personal bias towards asceticism must be discounted if we are to take him as representative of the Greek view. His general contention, how- ever, that pleasures must be ranked as higher and as lower, and that at the best they are not to be identified with the Good, is fully accepted by so typical a Greek as Aristotle. Aristotle, however, is careful not to condemn any pleasure that is not definitely harmful. Even “unnecessary” pleasures, he admits, may be desirable in themselves; even the deliberate creation of desire with a view to the enjoyment of satisfying it may be admissible if it is not injurious. Still, there are kinds of pleasures 1Plato, Rep. VIII. 558.—Translated by Davies and Vaughan. 158 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE which ought not to be pursued, and occasions and methods of seeking it which are improper and per- verse. Therefore the Reason must be always at hand to check and to control; and the ultimate test of true worth in pleasure, as in everything else, is the trained judgment of the good and sensible man. § 7. ILLUSTRATIONS—ISCHOMACHUS; SOCRATES Such, then, was the character of the Greek con- ception of excellence. The account we have given may seem somewhat abstract and ideal; but it gives the general, formula of the life which every culti- vated Greek would at any rate have wished to live. And in confirmation of this point we may adduce the testimony of Xenophon, who has left us a de- scription, evidently drawn from life, of what he conceives to be the perfect type of a ‘‘gentleman.” The interest of the account lies in the fact, that Xenophon himself was clearly an ‘‘average” Greek, one, that is to say, of good natural parts, of per- fectly normal faculties and tastes, undisturbed by any originality of character or mind, and repre- senting, therefore, as we may fairly assert, the ordinary views and aims of an upright and com- petent man of the world. His description of the “gentleman,” therefore, may be taken as a repre- sentative account of the recognized ideal of all that class of Athenian citizens. And this is how the gentleman in question, Ischomachus, describes his course of life. “In the first place,” he says, “I worship the gods. ILLUSTRATIONS 159 Next, I endeavour to the best of my ability, assisted by prayer, to get health and strength of body, reputation in the city, good will among my friends, honourable security in battle, and an honourable increase of fortune.” At this point Socrates, who is supposed to be the interlocutor, interrupts. “Do you really covet wealth,” he asks, “with all the trouble it involves?” “Certainly I do,” is the reply, “for it enables me to honour the gods magnificently, to help my friends if they are in want, and to contribute to the re- sources of my country.” Here definitely and precisely expressed is the ideal of the Athenian gentleman—the beautiful body housing the beautiful soul, the external aids of fortune, friends, and the like, and the realization of the individual self in public activity. Upon it follows an account of the way in which Ischomachus was accustomed to pass his days. He rises early, he tells us, to catch his friends before they go out, or walks to the city to transact his necessary busi- ness. If he is not called into town, he pays a visit to his farm, walking for the sake of exercise and sending on his horse. On his arrival he gives directions about the sowing, ploughing, or what- ever it may be, and then mounting his horse practises his military exercises. Finally, he returns home on foot, running part of the way, takes his bath, and sits down to a moderate midday meal. This combination of physical exercise, military training and business, arouses the enthusiasm of Socrates. ‘How right you are!” he cries, ‘and the 160 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE consequence is that you are as healthy and strong as we see you, and one of the best riders and the wealthiest men in the country!” This little prosaic account of the daily life of an Athenian gentleman is completely in harmony with all we have said about the character of the Greek ideal; but it comprehends only a part, and that the least spiritual, of that rich and many-sided ex- cellence. It may be as well, therefore, to append by way of complement the description of another personality, exceptional indeed even among the Greeks, yet one which only Greece could have pro- duced—the personality of Socrates. No more striking figure is presented to us in history, none has been more vividly portrayed, and none, in spite of the originality of mind which provoked the hostility of the crowd, is more thoroughly Hellenic in every aspect, physical, intellectual, and moral. That Socrates was ugly in countenance was a defect which a Greek could not fail to note, and his snub nose and big belly are matters of frequent and jocose allusion. But apart from these defects his physique, it appears, was exceptionally good; he was sedulous in his attendance at the gymnasia, and was noted for his powers of endurance and his courage and skill in war. Plato records it of him that in a hard winter on campaign, when the common soldiers were muffling themselves in sheep- skins and felt against the cold, he alone went about in his ordinary cloak, and barefoot over the ice and snow; and he further describes his bearing in a retreat from a lost battle, how “there you might ILLUSTRATIONS 161 see him, just as he is in the streets of Athens, stalk- ing like a pelican and rolling his eyes, calmly con- templating enemies as well as friends, and making very intelligible to anybody, even from a distance, that whoever attacked him would be likely to meet with a stout resistance.” } To this efficiency of body corresponded, in accord- ance with the Greek ideal, a perfect balance and | harmony of soul. Plato, in a fine figure, compares him to the wooden statues of Silenus, which con- cealed behind a grotesque exterior beautiful golden images of the gods. Of these divine forms none was fairer in Socrates than that typical Greek virtue, temperance. Without a touch of asceticism, he knew how to be contented with a little. His diet he measured strictly with a view to health. Naturally abstemious, he could drink, when he chose, more than another man; but no one had ever seen him drunk. His affections were strong and deep, but never led him away to seek his own gratification at the cost of those he loved. With- out cutting himself off from any of the pleasures of life, a social man and a frequent guest at feasts, he preserved without an effort the supremacy of character and mind over the flesh he neither starved nor pampered. Here is a description by Plato of his bearing at the close of an all-night carouse, which may stand as a concrete illustration not only of the character of Socrates, but of the meaning of “temperance” as it was understood by the Greeks: 1 Plato, Symp. 221 b.—Translated by Jowett. z 3 td \ 162 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE “Aristodemus said that Eryximachus, Phedrus, and others went away—he himself fell asleep, and as the nights were long took a good rest: he was awakened towards daybreak by a crowing of cocks, and when he awoke the others were either asleep, or had gone away; there remained awake only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon, who were drinking out of a large goblet which they passed round, and Socrates was discoursing to them. Aristodemus did not hear the beginning of the dis- course, and he was only half awake, but the chief thing which he remembered was Socrates compell- ing the other two to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same as that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also. To this they assented, being drowsy, and not quite following the argument. And first of all Aristophanes dropped off, then, when the day was already dawning, Agathon. Socrates, when he had laid them to sleep, rose to depart; Aristodemus, as his manner was, following him. At the Lyceum he took a bath, and passed the day as usual. In the evening he retired to rest at his own house.” * With this quality of temperance was combined in Socrates a rare measure of independence and moral courage. He was never an active politician; but as every Athenian citizen was called, at some time or another, to public office, he found himself, on a critical occasion, responsible for putting a cer- tain proposition to the vote in the Assembly. It 1 Plato, Symposion, 223.—Translated by Jowett. ILLUSTRATIONS 163 was a moment of intense excitement. A great victory had just been won; but the generals who had achieved the success had neglected to recover the corpses of the dead or save the shipwrecked. It was proposed to take a vote of life or death on all the generals collectively. Socrates, as it happened, was one of the committee whose duty it was to put the question to the Assembly. But the proposition was in itself illegal, and Socrates, with some other members of the committee, refused to submit it to the vote. Every kind of pressure was brought to bear upon the recalcitrant officers; orators threatened, friends besought, the mob clamoured and denounced. Finally, all but Socrates gave way. He alone, an old man, in office for the first time, had the courage to obey his conscience and the law in face of an angry populace crying for blood. And as he could stand against a mob, so he could stand against a despot. At the time when Athens was ruled by the thirty tyrants he was ordered, with four others, to arrest a man whom the author- ities wished to put out of the way. The man was guilty of no crime, and Socrates refused. “I went quietly home,” he says, ‘‘and no doubt I should have been put to death for it, if the government had not shortly after come to an end.” These, however, were exceptional episodes in the career of a man who was never a prominent politician. The main interest of Socrates was in- tellectual and moral; an interest, however, rather practical than speculative. For though he was 164 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE charged in his indictment with preaching atheism, he appears in fact to have concerned himself little or nothing with either theological or physical in- quiries. He was careful in his observance of all prescribed religious rites, and probably accepted the gods as powers of the natural world and authors of human institutions and laws. His originality lay not in any purely speculative views, but in the pertinacious curiosity, practical in its origin and aim, with which he attacked and sifted the ethical conceptions of his time: ‘‘What is justice?” “What is piety?” ‘What is temperance?”—these were the kinds of questions he never tired of raising, point- ing out contradictions and inconsistencies in current ideas, and awakening doubts which if negative in form were positive and fruitful in effect. His method in pursuing these inquiries was that of cross-examination. In the streets, in the market, in the gymnasia, at meetings grave and gay, in season or out of season, he raised his points of definition. The city was in a ferment around him. Young men and boys followed and hung on his lips wherever he went. By the charm of his per- sonality, his gracious courtesy and wit, and the large and generous atmosphere of a sympathy always at hand to temper to particular persons the rigours of a generalizing logic, he drew to himself, with a fascination not more of the intellect than of the heart, all that was best and brightest in the youth of Athens. His relation to his young dis- ciples was that of a lover and a friend; and the stimulus given by his dialectics to their keen and ILLUSTRATIONS 165 eager minds was supplemented and reinforced by the appeal to their admiration and love of his sweet and virile personality. Only in Ancient Athens, perhaps, could such a character and such conditions have met. The sociable outdoor city life; the meeting places in the open air, and especially the gymnasia, frequented by young and old not more for exercise of the body than for recreation of the mind, the nimble and versatile Athenian wits trained to preternatural acuteness by the debates of the law courts and the Assembly; all this was exactly the environment fitted to develop and sustain a genius at once so subtle and so humane as that of Socrates. It is the concrete presentation of this city-life that lends so peculiar a charm to the dialogues of Plato. The spirit of metaphysics puts on the human form; and Dialectic walks the streets and contends in the palestra. It would be impossible to convey by Citation the cumulative effect of this constant refer- ence in Plato to a human background; but a single excerpt may perhaps-help us to realize the condi- tions under which Socrates lived and worked. Here, then, is a description of the scene in one of those gymnasia in which he was wont to hold his con- versations: “Upon entering we found that the boys had just been sacrificing; and this part of the festival was nearly at an end. They were all in white array, and games at dice were going on among them. Most of them were in the outer court amusing them- selves; but some were in a corner of the Apody- 166 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE terium playing at odd and even with a number of dice, which they took out of little wicker baskets. There was also a circle of lookers-on, one of whom was Lysis. He was standing among the other boys and youths, having a crown upon his head, like a fair vision, and not less worthy of praise for his goodness than for his beauty. We left them, and went over to the opposite side of the room, where, finding a quiet place, we sat down; and then we began to talk. This attracted Lysis, who was con- stantly turning round to look at us—he was evi- dently wanting to come to us. For a time he hesitated and had not the courage to come alone; but first of all, his friend Menexenus came in out of the court in the interval of his play, and when he saw Ctesippus and myself, came and sat by us; aud then Lysis, seeing him, followed, and sat down with him, and the other boys joined. “TI turned to Menexenus, and said: ‘Son of Demophon, which of you two youths is the elder?’ “*That is a matter of dispute between us,’ he said. ‘And which is the nobler? Is that a matter of dispute too?’ “Yes, certainly.’ ‘And another disputed point is, which is the fairer?’ “The two boys laughed. ‘““*T shall not ask which is the richer,’ I said: ‘for you two are friends, are you not?’ “ ‘Certainly,’ they replied. “ ‘And friends have all things in common, so that ILLUSTRATIONS 167 one of you can be no richer than the other, if you say truly that you are friends.’ “They assented. I was about to ask which was the greater of the two, and which was the wiser of the two; but at this moment Menexenus was called away by some one who came and said that the gymnastic-master wanted him. I supposed that he had to offer sacrifice. So he went away and I asked Lysis some more questions.” * Such were the scenes in which Socrates passed his life. Of his influence it is hardly necessary here to speak at length. In the well-known metaphor put into his mouth by Plato, he was the “gad-fly” of the Athenian people. To prick intellectual lethargy, to force people to think, and especially to think about the conceptions with which they supposed themselves to be most familiar, those which guided their conduct in private and public affairs—yjustice, expediency, honesty, and the like—such was the constant object of his life. That he should have made enemies, that he should have been misunder- stood, that he should have been accused of under- mining the foundations of morality and religion, is natural and intelligible enough; and it was on these grounds that he was condemned to death. His conduct at his trial was of a piece with the rest of his life. The customary arts of the pleader, the appeal to the sympathies of the public, the intro- duction into court of weeping wife and children, he rejected as unworthy of himself and of his cause. 1 Plato, Lysis 206 e.—Translated by Jowett. 168 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE His defence was a simple exposition of the character and the aims of his life; so far from being a criminal he asserted that he was a benefactor of the Athenian people; and having, after his con- demnation, to suggest the sentence he thought appropriate, he proposed that he should be sup- ported at the public expense as one who had de- served well of his country. After his sentence to death, having to wait thirty days for its execution, he showed no change from his customary cheer- fulness, passing his time in conversation with his friends. So far from regretting his fate he rather congratulated himself that he would escape the decadence that attends upon old age; and he had, if we may trust Plato, a fair and confident assur- ance that a happy life awaited him beyond. He died, according to the merciful law of Athens, by drinking hemlock; “the wisest and justest and best,” in Plato’s judgment, “of all the men that I have ever known.” We have dwelt thus long on the personality of Socrates, familiar though it be, not only on account of its intrinsic interest, but also because it is pe- culiarly Hellenic. That sunny and frank intelli- gence, bathed, as it were, in the open air, a gracious blossom springing from the root of physical health, that unique and perfect balance of body and soul, passion and intellect, represent, against the brilliant — setting of Athenian life, the highest achievement — of the civilization of Greece. The figure of Soc- rates, no doubt, has been idealized by Plato, but it is none the less significant of the trend of Hellenic THE GREEK VIEW OF WOMAN _ 169 life. No other people could have conceived such an ideal; no other could have gone so far towards its realization. § 8. THe GREEK VIEW OF WoMAN In the preceding account we have attempted to give some conception of the Greek ideal for the individual man. It is now time to remind our- selves that that ideal was only supposed to be proper to a small class—the class of soldier- citizens. Artisans and slaves, as we have seen, had no participation in it; neither, and that is our next point, had women. Nothing more profoundly distinguishes the Hel- lenic from the modern view of life than the esti- mate in which women were held by the Greeks. Their opinion on this point was partly the cause and partly the effect of that preponderance of the idea of the state on which we have already dwelt, and from which it followed naturally enough that marriage should be regarded primarily as a means of producing healthy and efficient citizens. This view is best illustrated by the institutions of such a state as Sparta, where, as we saw, the woman was specially trained for maternity, and connections outside the marriage tie were sanctioned by custom and opinion, if they were such as were likely to lead to healthy offspring. Further it may be noted that in almost every state the exposure of deformed or,sickly infants was encouraged by law, the child being thus regarded, from the beginning, as a mem- 170 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE ber of the state, rather than as a member of the family. The same view is reflected in the speculations of political philosophers. Plato, indeed, in his Re- public, goes so far as to eliminate the family re- lation altogether. Not only is the whole connection between men and women to be regulated by the state, in respect both of the persons and of the limit of age within which they may associate, but the children as soon as they are born are to be carried off to a common nursery, there to be reared together, undistinguished by the mothers, who will suckle indifferently any infant that might happen to be assigned to them for the purpose. Here, as in other instances, Plato goes far beyond the limits set by the current sentiment of the Greeks, and in his later work is reluctantly constrained to abandon his scheme of community of wives and children. Yet even there he makes it compulsory on every man to marry between the ages of thirty and thirty-five, under penalty of fine and civil dis- abilities. Plato, no doubt, as we have said, ex- aggerates the opinions of his time; but the view, which he pushes to its extreme, of the subordination of the family to the state, was one, as we have already pointed out, which did predominate in Greece. It reappears in a soberer form in the treatise of Aristotle. He too would regulate by law both the age at which marriages should take place and the number of children that should be produced, and would have all deformed infants exposed. And here, no doubt, he is speaking in THE GREEK VIEW OF WOMAN _ 171 conformity if not with the practice, at least with the feeling of Greece. The modern conception that the marriage relation is a matter of private concern, and that any individual has a right to wed whom and when he will, and to produce children at his own discretion, regardless of all consider- ations of health and decency, was one altogether alien to the Greeks. In theory at least, and to some extent in practice (as for example in the case of Sparta), they recognized that the production of children was a business of supreme import to the state, and that it was right and proper that it should be regulated by law with a view to the advantage of the whole community. And if now we turn from considering the family in its relation to the state to regard it in its re- lation to the individual, we are struck once more by a divergence from the modern point of view, or rather from the view which is supposed to pre- vail, particularly by writers of fiction, at any rate in modern English life. In ancient Greece, so far as our knowledge goes, there was little or no ro- mance connected with the marriage tie. Marriage was a means of producing legitimate children; that is how it is defined by Demosthenes; and we have no evidence that it was ever regarded as anything more. In Athens we know that marriages were commonly arranged by the father, much as they are in modern France, on grounds of age, property, connection and the like, and without any regard for the inclination of the parties concerned. And 172 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE an interesting passage in Xenophon indicates a point of view quite consonant with this accepted practice. God, he says, ordained the institution of marriage; but on what grounds? Not in the least for the sake of the personal relation that might be established between the husband and wife, but for ends quite external and indifferent to any affection that might exist between them. First, for the perpetuation of the human race; secondly, to raise up protectors for the father in his old age; thirdly, to secure an appropriate division of labour, the man performing the outdoor work, the women guarding and superintending at home, and each thus fulfilling duly the function for which they were de- signed by nature. This eminently prosaic way of conceiving the marriage relation is also, it would seem, eminently Greek; and it leads us to consider more particularly the opinion prevalent in Greece of the nature and duty of women in general. Here the first point to be noticed is the wide difference of the view represented in the Homeric poems from that which meets us in the historic period. Readers of the Iliad and the Odyssey will find depicted there, amid all the barbarity of an age of rapine and war, relations between men and women so tender, faithful and beautiful, that they may almost stand as universal types of the ultimate human ideal. Such for example is the relation between Odysseus and Penelope, the wife waiting year by year for the husband whose fate is un- known, wooed in vain by suitors who waste her substance and wear her life, nightly ‘watering her THE GREEK VIEW OF WOMAN © 173 bed with her tears” for twenty weary years, till at last the wanderer returns, and “at once her knees were loosened and her heart melted within her .. . and she fell a weeping and ran straight towards him, and cast her hands about his neck, and kissed his head;” for “even as the sight of the land is welcome to mariners, so welcome to her was the sight of her lord, and her white arms would never quite leave hold of his neck.” 4 Such, again, is the relation between Hector and Andromache as described in the well-known scene of the Iliad, where the wife comes out with her babe to take leave of the husband on his way to battle. “It were better for me,” she cries, “to go down to the grave if I lose thee; for never will any comfort be mine when once thou, even thou, hast met thy fate, but only sorrow. ... Thou art to me father and lady mother, yea, and brother, even as thou art my goodly husband. Come now, have pity and abide here upon the tower, lest thou make thy child an orphan and thy wife a widow.” Hector answers with the plea of honour. He cannot draw back, but he foresees defeat; and in his anticipation of the future nothing is so bitter as the fate he fears for his wife. “Yet doth the conquest of the Trojans hereafter not so much trouble me, neither Hekabe’s own, neither King Priam’s, neither my brethren’s, the many and brave that shall fall in the dust before their foemen, as doth thine anguish in the day when some mail-clad Achaian shall lead 1 Odyss. XXIII. 205, 231.—Translated hy Bytcher and Lang. 174 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE thee weeping and rob thee of the light of freedom. . . . But me in death may the heaped-up earth be covering, ere I hear thy crying and thy carrying into captivity.” } But most striking of all the portraits of women to be found in Homer, and most typical of a frank and healthy relation between the sexes, is the account of Nausicaa given in the Odyssey. Ulysses, shipwrecked and naked, battered and covered with brine, surprises Nausicaa and her maidens as they are playing at ball on the shore. The attendants run away, but Nausicaa remains to hear what the stranger has to say. He asks her for shelter and clothing; and she grants the request, with an ex- quisite courtesy and a freedom from all embarrass- ment which becomes only the more marked and the more delightful when, as she sees him emerge from the bath, clothed and beautiful, she cannot restrain the exclamation “would that such a one might be called my husband, dwelling here, and that it may please him here to abide.” * About the whole scene there is a freshness and a fragrance as of early morning, and a tone so natural, free and frank, that in the face of this rustic idyl the later centuries sicken and faint, like candle-light in the splendour of the dawn. If we had only Homer to give us our ideas of the Greeks, we might conclude, from such passages as these, that they had a conception of woman and of her relation to man, finer and nobler in some * Yliad VI. 450.—Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers, 2 Od. VI. 244.—Translated by Butcher and Lang. THE GREEK VIEW OF WOMAN 175 respects, than that of modern times. But in fact the Homeric poems represent a civilization which had passed away before the opening of the period with which at present we are chiefly concerned. And in the interval, for reasons which we need not here attempt to state, a change had taken place in the whole way of regarding the female sex. So far, at any rate, as our authorities enable us to judge, woman in the historic age was conceived to be so inferior to man that he recognized in her no other end than to minister to his pleasure or to become the mother of his children. Romance and the higher championship of intellect and spirit do not appear (with certain notable exceptions) to have been commonly sought or found in this rela- tion. Woman, in fact, was regarded as a means, - not as an end; and was treated in a manner conso- nant with this view. Of this estimate many illustra- tions might be adduced from the writers of the fifth and fourth centuries. Plato, for example, classes together ‘“‘children, women, and servants,’ + and states generally that there is no branch of human in- dustry in which the female sex is not inferior to the male.” Similarly, Aristotle insists again and again on the natural inferiority of woman, and illustrates it by such quaint observations as the following: “A man would be considered a coward who was only as brave as a brave woman, and a woman as a chatterbox who was only as modest as a good man.” ? But the most striking example, 1 Plato, Republic 431 c. * Ibid. 455 c. * Arist. Pol. III. 1277 b 21.—Translated by Welldon. 176 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE perhaps, because the most unconscious, of this habitual way of regarding women is to be found in the funeral oration put by Thucydides into the mouth of Pericles, where the speaker, after suggest- ing what consolation he can to the fathers of the slain, turns to the women with the brief but signifi- cant exhortation: “If I am to speak of womanly virtues to those of you who will henceforth be widows, let me sum them up in one short admon- ition: To a woman not to show more weakness than is natural to her sex is a great glory, and not to be talked about for good or for evil among men.” ! The sentiments of the poets are less admissible as evidence; but some of them are so extreme that they may be adduced as a further indication of a point of view whose prevalence alone could render them even dramatically plausible. Such for ex- ample is the remark of one of the characters in “‘Menander,” ‘a woman is necessarily an evil, and he is a lucky man who catches her in the mildest form.” While the general Greek view of the de- pendence of woman on man is well expressed in the words of Aethra, in the “Suppliants” of Euripides: “It is proper for women who are wise to let men act for them in everything.” ? | In accordance with this conception of the in- feriority of the female sex, and partly as a cause, partly as an effect of it, we find that the position of the wife in ancient Greece was simply that of the domestic drudge. To stay at home and mind the 1 Thucydides II. 45.—Translated by Jowett. 2 Euripides, Hik. 40. THE GREEK VIEW OF WOMAN 177 house was her recognized ideal. “A free woman should be bounded by the street door,” says one of the characters in Menander; and another writer dis- criminates as follows the functions of the two sexes: “War, politics, and public speaking are the sphere of man; that of woman is to keep house, to stay at home and to receive and tend her husband.” We are not surprised, therefore, to find that the symbol of woman is the tortoise; and in the follow- ing burlesque passage from Aristophanes we shall recognize, in spite of the touch of caricature, the genuine features of the Greek wife. Praxagora is recounting the merits and services of women: “They dip their wool in hot water according to the ancient plan, all of them without exception, and never make the slightest innovation. They sit and cook, as of old. They carry upon their heads, as of old. They conduct the Themophoriae, as of old. They wear out their husbands, as of old. They buy sweets, as of old.” 4 And that this was also the kind of ideal approved by their lords and masters, and that any attempt to pass beyond it was resented, is amusingly illustrated in the following extract from the same poet, where Lysistrata explains the growing in- dignation of the women at the bad conduct of affairs by the men, and the way in which their attempts to interfere were resented. The comments of the “magistrate” typify, of course, the man’s point of view. 1 Aristophanes, Eccles. 215. 178 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE “Think of our old moderation and gentleness, think how we bore with your pranks, and were still, All through the days of your former prognacity, all through the war that is over and spent: Not that (be sure) we approved of your policy; never our griefs you allowed us to vent. Well we perceived your mistakes and mismanagement. Often at home on our housekeeping cares, Often we heard of some foolish proposal you made for conducting the public affairs. Then would we question you mildly and pleasantly, inwardly grieving, but outwardly gay; ‘Husband, how goes it abroad ?’ we would ask of him; what have ye done in Assembly to-day?’ ‘What would ye write on the side of the Treaty-stone?’ Husband says angrily, ‘What’s that to you? You hold your tongue!’ And I held it accordingly. STRATYLLIS. That is a thing which I never would do! MAGISTRATE. Ma’am, if you hadn’t you’d soon have repented it. LYSISTRATA. Therefore I held it, and spake not a word. Soon of another tremendous absurdity, wilder and worse than the former, we heard. ‘Husband,’ I say, with a tender solicitude, ‘why have you passed such a foolish decree ?’ Viciously, moodily, glaring askance at me, ‘Stick to your spinning, my mistress,’ says he, ‘Else you will speedily find it the worse for you! war is the care and business of men!’ THE GREEK VIEW OF WOMAN _ 179 MAGISTRATE. Zeus! ’twas a worthy reply, and an excellent! LYSISTRATA. What! you unfortunate, shall we not then, Then, when we see you perplexed and incompetent, shall we not tender advice to the state!” + The conception thus indicated in burlesque of the proper place of woman is expressed more seriously, from the point of view of the average man, in the “Oeconomicus” of Xenophon. Ischo- machus, the hero of that work, with whom we have already made acquaintance, gives an account of his own wife, and of the way in which he had trained her. When he married her, he explains, she was not yet fifteen, and had been brought up with the utmost care “that she might see, hear, and ask as little as possible.’ Her accomplishments were weaving and a sufficient acquaintance with all that concerns the stomach; and her attitude towards her husband she expressed in the single phrase: “Everything rests with you; my duty, my mother said, is simply to be modest.”? Ischomachus pro- ceeds to explain to her the place he expects her to fill; she is to suckle his children, to cook, and to superintend the house; and for this purpose God has given her special gifts, different from but not necessarily inferior to those of man. Husband and wife naturally supply one another’s deficiencies;' and if the wife perform her function worthily she 1 Aristoph. Lysistrata. 507.—Translated by B. B. Rogers. 130 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE may even make herself the ruling partner, and be sure that as she grows older she will be held not less but more in honour, as the guardian of her children and the stewardess of her husband’s goods. —In Xenophon’s view, in fact, the inferiority of the woman almost disappears; and the sentiment ap- proximates closely to that of Tennyson— “either sex alone Is half itself, and in true marriage lies Nor equal, nor unequal: each fulfils Defect in each.” Such a conception, however, of the ‘“comple- mentary” relation of woman to man, does not ex- clude a conviction of her essential inferiority. And this conviction, it can hardly be disputed, was a cardinal point in the Greek view of life. § 9. PROTESTS AGAINST THE COMMON VIEW OF WoMAN Nevertheless, there are not wanting indications, both in theory and practice, of a protest against it. In Sparta, as we have already noticed, girls, in- stead of being confined to the house, were brought up in the open air among the boys, trained in gym- nastics and accustomed to run and wrestle naked. And Plato, modelling his view upon this experience, makes no distinction of the sexes in his ideal re- public. Women, he admits, are generally inferior to men, but they have similar, if lower, capacities and powers. There is no occupation or art for PROTESTS AGAINST VIEW OF WOMAN 181 which they may not be fitted by nature and educa- tion; and he would therefore have them take their share in government and war, as well as in the various mechanical trades. “None of the occu- pations,” he says, “which comprehend the ordering of a state, belong to woman as woman, nor yet to man as man; but natural gifts are to be found here and there, in both sexes alike; and, so far as her nature is concerned, the woman is admissible to all pursuits as well as the man; though in all of them the woman is weaker than the man.” ? In adopting this attitude Plato stands alone not only among the Greeks, but one might almost say, among mankind, till we come to the latest views of the nineteenth century. But there is another Greek, the poet Euripides, who, without advancing any theory about the proper position of women, yet displays so intimate an understanding of their difficulties, and so warm and close a sympathy with their griefs, that some of his utterances may stand to all time as documents of the dumb and age-long protest of the weaker against the stronger sex. In illustration we may cite the following lines from the “Medea,” applicable, mutatis mutandis, to how many generations of suffering wives? “Of all things that have life and sense we women are most wretched. For we are compelled to buy with gold a husband who is also—worst of all!—the ‘master of our person. And on his character, good or bad, our whole fate depends, For divorce is 1Plato, Rep. 455 d—Translated by Davies and Vaughan. 182 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE regarded as a disgrace to a woman and she cannot repudiate her husband. Then coming as she does into the midst of manners and customs strange to her, she would need the gift of divination—unless She has been taught at home—to know how best to treat her bed-fellow. And if we manage so well that our husband remains faithful to us, and does not break away, we may think ourselves fortunate; if not, there is nothing for it but death. A man when he is vexed at home can go out and find relief among his friends or acquaintances; but we women have none to look to but him. They tell us we live a sheltered life at home while they go to the wars; but that is nonsense. For I would rather go into battle thrice than bear a child once.” 4 Hitherto we have been speaking mainly of the position of the wife in Greece. It is necessary now to say a few words about that class of women who were called in the Greek tongue Hetere; and who are by some supposed to have represented, in- tellectually at least, a higher level of culture than the other members of their sex. In exceptional cases, this, no doubt, was the fact. Aspasia, for example, the mistress of Pericles, was famous for her powers of mind. According to Plato she was an accomplished rhetorician, and the real composer of the celebrated funeral oration of Pericles; and Plutarch asserts that she was courted and admired by the statesmen and philosophers of Greece. But Aspasia cannot be taken as a type of the Hetere of Greece. That these women, by the variety and 1 Euripides, Med. 230. FRIENDSHIP 183 freedom of their life, may and must have acquired certain qualities: of character and mind that could hardly be developed in the seclusion of the Greek home, may readily be admitted; we know, for ex- ample, that they cultivated music and the power of conversation; and were welcome guests at supper- parties. But we have no evidence that the re- lations which they formed rested as a rule on any but the simplest physical basis. The real dis- tinction, under this head, between the Greek point of view and our own, appears to lie rather in the frankness with which this whole class of relations was recognized by the Greeks. These were temples in honour of Aphrodite Pandemos, the goddess of illicit love, and festivals celebrated in her honour; statues were erected of famous courtesans, of Phryne for example, at Delphi, between two kings; and philosophers and statesmen lived with their mistresses openly, without any loss of public reputa- tion. Every man, said the orator Demosthenes, requires besides his wife at least two mistresses; and this statement, made as a matter of course in open court, is perhaps the most curious illustration we possess of the distinction between the Greek civilization and our own, as regards not the fact itself but the light in which it was viewed. § 10. FRIENDSHIP From what has been said about the Greek view of women, it might naturally have been supposed that there can have been little place in their life for 184 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE all that we designate under the term “romance.” Personal affection, as we have seen, was not the basis of married life; and relations with Hetere appear to have been, in this respect, no finer or higher than similar relations in our own times. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to conclude, from these conditions, that the element of romance was absent from Greek life. The fact is simply that with them it took a different form, that of passionate friendship between men. Such friendships, of course, occur in all nations and at all times, but among the Greeks, they were, we might say, an institution. Their ideal was the development and education of the younger by the older man, and in this view they were recognized and approved by custom and law as an important factor in the state. In Sparta, for example, it was the rule that every boy had attached to him some elder youth by whom he was constantly attended, admonished, and trained, and who shared in public estimation the praise and blame of his acts; so that it is even re- ported that on one occasion a Spartan boy having cried out in a fight, not he himself but his friend was fined for the lapse of self-control. The custom of Sparta existed also in Crete. But the most re- markable instance of the deliberate dedication of this passion to political and military ends is that of the celebrated ‘“Theban band,” a troop consist- ing exclusively of pairs of lovers, who marched and fought in battle side by side, and by their presence and example inspired one another to a courage so constant and high that “‘it is stated that they were FRIENDSHIP 185 never beaten till the battle at Cheronea: and when Philip, after the fight, took a view of the slain, and came to the place where the three hundred that fought his phalanx lay dead together, he wondered, and understanding that it was the band of lovers, he shed tears, and said, “Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered any- thing that was base.” } Greek legend and history, in fact resounds with the praises of friends. Achilles and Patroclus, Pylades and Orestes, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Solon and Peisistratus, Socrates and Alcibiades, Epaminondas and Pelopidas,—these are names that recall at once all that is highest in the achievement and all that is most romantic in the passion of Greece. For it was the prerogative of this form of love, in its finer manifestations, that it passed beyond persons to objective ends, linking emotion to action in a life of common danger and toil. Not only, nor primarily, the physical sense was touched, but mainly and in chief the imagination and intel- lect. The affection of Achilles for Patroclus is as intense as that of a lover for his mistress, but it has in addition a body and depth such as only years of common labour could impart. ‘Achilles wept, remembering his dear comrade, nor did sleep that conquereth all take hold of him, but he kept turn- ing himself to this side and to that, yearning for Patroclus’ manhood and excellent valour, and all the toils he achieved with him and the woes he bare, 1 Plutarch, Pelopidas. ch. 18—Ed. by Clough. — 186 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE cleaving the battles of men and the grievous waves, As he thought thereon he shed big tears, now lying on his side, now on his back, now on his face; and then anon he would arise upon his feet and roam wildly beside the beach of the salt sea.” 1 That is the ideal spirit of Greek comradeship—each sup- porting the other in his best efforts and aims, mind assisting mind and hand hand, and the end of the love residing not in an easy satisfaction of itself, but in the development and perfecting of the souls in which it dwelt. Of such a love we have a record in the elegies of Theognis, in which the poet has embodied, for the benefit of Kurnus his friend, the ripe experience of an eventful life. ‘The poems for the most part are didactic in character, consciously and deliberately aimed at the instruction and guidance of the man to whom they are addressed; but every now and again the passion breaks through which informs and inspires this virile intercourse, and in such a passage as the following gives us the key to this and to all the finer friendships of the Greeks: “Lo, I have given thee wings wherewith to fly Over the boundless ocean and the earth; Yea, on the lips of many shalt thou lie, The comrade of their banquet and their mirth. Youths in their loveliness shall bid thee sound Upon the silver flute’s melodious breath; And when thou goest darkling underground Down to the lamentable house of death, 1Tliad XXIV. 3.—Translated by Lang, Leaf, and Myers. FRIENDSHIP 187 Oh yet not then from honour shalt thou cease But wander, an imperishable name, Kurnus, about the seas and shores of Greece, Crossing from isle to isle the barren main. Horses thou shalt not need, but lightly ride Sped by the Muses of the violet crown, And men to come, while earth and sun abide, Who cherish song shall cherish thy renown. Yea, I have given thee wings, and in return Thou givest me the scorn with which I burn.’ ? It was his insistence on friendship as an incentive to a noble life that was the secret of the power of Socrates. Listen, for example, to the account which Plutarch gives of his influence upon the young Alcibiades: “Alcibiades, listening now to language entirely free from every thought of unmanly fondness and silly displays of affection, finding himself with one who sought to lay open to him the deficiencies of his mind, and repress his vain and foolish arrogance, ‘Dropped like the craven cock his conquered wing.’ He esteemed these endeavours of Socrates as most truly a means which the gods made use of for the care and preservation of youth, and began to think meanly of himself, and to admire him; to be pleased with his kindness, and to stand in awe of his virtue; and, unawares to himself, there became formed in his mind that reflex image and reciprocation of love, or Anteros, that Plato talks of. . . . Though Soc- rates had many and powerful rivals, yet the natural 1 Theognis, 237. 188 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE good qualities of Alcibiades gave his affection the mastery. His words overcame him so much, as to draw tears from his eyes, and to disturb his very soul. Yet sometimes he would abandon himself to flatterers, when they proposed to him varieties of pleasure, and would desert Socrates; who then would pursue him, as if he had been a fugitive slave. He despised every one else, and had no reverence or awe for any but him.” 4 The relation thus established may be further illustrated by the following graceful little anecdote. Socrates and Alcibiades were fellow-soldiers at Potidea and shared the same tent. In a stiff engagement both behaved with gallantry. At last Alcibiades fell wounded, and Socrates, standing over him, defended and finally saved him. For this he might fairly have claimed the customary prize of valour; but he insisted on resigning it to his friend, as an incentive to his ‘ambition for noble deeds.” Another illustration of the power of this passion to evoke and stimulate courage is given in the story of Cleomachus, narrated by Plutarch. In a battle between the Chalcidians and the Eretrians, the cavalry of the former being hard pressed, Cleo- machus was called upon to make a diversion. He turned to his friend and asked him if he intended to be a spectator of the struggle; the youth re- plied in the affirmative, and embracing his friend, with his own hands buckled on his helmet; where- upon Cleomachus charged with impetuosity, routed the foe and died gloriously fighting. And thence- 1Plut. Alc. ch. 4—Ed. by Clough. FRIENDSHIP 1389 forth, says Plutarch, the Chalcidians, who had previously mistrusted such friendships, cultivated and honoured them more than any other people. So much indeed were the Greeks impressed with the manliness of this passion, with its power to prompt to high thought and heroic action, that some of the best of them set the love of man for man far above that of man for woman. ‘The one, they main- tained, was primarily of the spirit, the other pri- marily of the flesh; the one bent upon shaping to the type of all manly excellence both the body and the soul of the beloved, the other upon a passing pleasure of the senses. And they noted that among the barbarians, who were subject to tyrants, this passion was discouraged, along with gymnastics and philosophy, because it was felt by their masters that it would be fatal to their power; so essentially was it the prerogative of freedom, so incompatible with the nature and the status of a slave. It is in the works of Plato that this view is most completely and exquisitely set forth. To him, love is the beginning of all wisdom; and among all the forms of love, that one in chief, which is conceived by one man for another, of which the main operation and end is in the spirit, and which leads on and out from the passion for a particular body and soul to an enthusiasm for that highest beauty, wisdom, and excellence, of which the most perfect mortal forms are but a faint and inadequate reflection. Such a love is the initiation into the higher life, the spring at once of virtue, of philosophy, and of religion. Always operative in practice in Greek life it was not 190 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE invented but interpreted by Plato. The philosopher merely gave an ideal expression to what was stirring in the heart of every generous youth; and the passage which we have selected for quotation may be taken as representative not only of the person- ality of Plato, but of the higher aspect of a char- acteristic phase of Greek civilization. “And now, taking my leave of you, I will rehearse a tale of love which I heard from Diotima of Manti- neia, a woman wise in this and in many other kinds of knowledge. She was my instructress in the art of love, and I shall repeat to you what she said to me: ‘On the birthday of Aphrodite there was a feast of the gods, at which the god Poros or Plenty, who is the son of Metis or Discretion, was one of the guests. When the feast was over, Penia or Poverty, as the manner is on such occasions, came about the doors to beg. Now Plenty, who was the worse for nectar (there was no wine in those days), went into the garden of Zeus and fell into a heavy sleep; and Poverty considering her own straitened cir- cumstances, plotted to have a child by him, and accordingly she lay down at his side and conceived Love, who partly because he is naturally a lover of the beautiful, and because Aphrodite is herself beautiful, and also because he was born on her birthday, is her follower and attendant. And as his parentage is, so also are his fortunes. In the first place he is always poor, and anything but tender and fair, as the many imagine him; and he is rough and squalid, and has no shoes, nor a house to dwell in; on the bare earth exposed he lies under FRIENDSHIP 191 the open heaven, in the streets, or at the doors of houses, taking his rest; and like his mother he is always in distress. Like his father too, whom he also partly resembles, he is always plotting against the fair and good; he i is bold, enterprising, strong, a mighty hunter, always weenie some intrigue or other, keen in the pursuit of wisdom, fertile in re- sources; a philosopher at all times, terrible as an enchanter, sorcerer, sophist. He is by nature neither mortal nor immortal, but alive and flourish- ing at one moment when he is in plenty, and dead at another moment, and again alive by reason of his father’s nature. But that which is always flow- ing in is always flowing out, and so he is never in want and never in wealth; and, further, he is in a mean between ignorance and knowledge. The truth of the matter is this: No god is a philosopher or seeker after wisdom, neither do the ignorant seek after wisdom. For herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself: he has no desire for that of which he feels no want.’ ‘But who then, Diotima,’ — I said, ‘are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the wise nor the foolish?’ ‘A child may answer that question,’ she replied; ‘they are those who are ina mean between the two: Love is one of them. For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philosopher or lover of wisdom, and being a lover of wisdom is in a mean between the wise and the ignorant. And of this too his birth is the cause; for his father is wealthy and wise, and his mother poor and foolish. 192 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE Such, my dear Socrates, is the nature of the spirit Love.’ “T said: ‘O thou stranger woman, thou sayest well; but, assuming Love to be such as you say, what is the use of him to man?’ ““That, Socrates,’ she replied, ‘I will attempt to unfold: of his nature and birth I have already spoken; and you acknowledge that Love is of the beautiful. But some one will say: Of the beauti- ful in what, Socrates and Diotima? or rather let me put the question more clearly, and ask: When a man loves the beautiful, what does he desire?’ “I answered her, “That the beautiful may be his.’ ‘Still,’ she said, ‘the answer suggests a further question: What is given by the possession of beauty ?’ ‘““*To what you have asked,’ I said, ‘I have no answer ready.’ “‘*Then,’ she said, ‘let me put the word “good” in the place of “beautiful,’’ and repeat the question once more: If he who loves, loves the good, what is it then that he loves?’ ‘““*The possession of the good,’ I said. “And what does he gain who possesses the good?’ ‘‘ ‘Ffappiness,’ I replied; ‘there is less difficulty in answering that question.’ ‘““