by Aristotle, was certainly promoted by his studies in zoölogy and
botany. We still regard these sciences as a necessary introduction to
medicine, and we may be sure that in old days the order of such studies
was not different. The distinction of being the father of rational
medicine need not be added to the other crowns which adorn the great
sage. Both Greeks and moderns are unanimous in awarding that honour to
Hippocrates of Kos, where there was an old guild of physicians, of which
he was neither the first nor the last of his name. Hence the works now
known as those of Hippocrates may not all be the actual writing of one
man; for as with Aristotle, so with Hippocrates, there was a school, and
the pupils followed in the master’s path. But there is no doubt whatever
as to the character and tone of his teaching. We find even a literary
grandeur in his prose, that is not the writing of any but a great
master. The famous opening of his _Aphorisms_ is probably known to most
of my hearers. But it is a puzzle to translate without dull
amplification. Here is a paraphrase: “Life is brief, yet craft grows
slowly; the right time is instantaneous, yet experience is treacherous,
and decision burdensome.” As is the style, so is the thinking out of the
problems before him. Starting from hygiene as the proper basis of
medicine, he thinks those should be regarded as the earliest physicians
who improved the food of primitive men by crushing grain, by cooking
meat, and by selecting edible vegetables. From that time onward, there
was growing up an experience of what was healthy and what the reverse.
It is this experience which he seeks to systematise by careful
observation and so to establish laws of hygiene, and the probable
natural prophylactics or remedies afforded by air, water, and climate.
He analyses with care the proper aspect for a town and decides (in the
latitudes which he knew) for the eastern as the best and the western as
the worst. He discusses the quality of the water supply, and lays great
stress upon its altitude. He sets down careful clinical records of cases
of fever--typhus, puerperal, malarious, and the like. The results of
this rational treatment of disease were far-reaching and permanent. To
cite to you the cloud of witnesses would be mere waste of time. But I
will take one instance, closely related to the history of my great
college and of medicine in Ireland.[36] The founder of the College of
Physicians in Ireland under the Cromwellians and Charles II. was John
Stearne, a grand-nephew of Archbishop Ussher, himself also a theologian
and metaphysician. Driven out of Ireland by the stress of the Rebellion
of 1641, and educated in all the medical learning of Cambridge, he
returned with the Cromwellian restoration of order and became not only a
Fellow of his college (along with some eminent Puritans from Harvard)
but a distinguished practitioner in Dublin. By his influence was founded
the Royal College of Physicians, once an adjunct to the University and
ever since a great and dignified corporation, which has for many
generations contributed eminent men to medical science.
But Stearne, like Hippocrates, not only practised; he wrote works on
life and death; he was a theorist and a philosopher. This man, writing
from the highest standpoint of Cambridge and of Dublin in the middle of
the seventeenth century, tells us over and over again that the works of
Hippocrates are wellnigh infallible, and are the only sure guide to
medical science in his day.[37] The causes of this attitude are not far
to seek. All mediæval medicine had been ruined by the admission of
supernatural influences, special interventions, the action of evil
spirits, the conjunction of hostile constellations, and other rubbish at
which we now smile, but which men of science then deplored. The first
great feature in Hippocrates is the utter ignoring of any such
influences as the special causes of disease or cure. He is afraid of no
ghost or goblin, he never mentions an incantation. And here is a
momentous passage, which probably few of you have ever read, that
expresses the mental attitude of his school. He is speaking of a class
of patients affected with impotence who are venerated among the
Scythians and even worshipped, each man fearing for himself, as he
attributes the sickness to a special visitation of his God. “Well now I
also think that these diseases are of divine ordinance and so are all
the rest, but not one of them more divine or human than the rest, but
all are homogeneous, and all from the gods. Yet each of them has its
nature, and nothing happens without a natural cause.” He then goes on to
explain the disease from the practice of too much riding, and observing
that it attacks the rich more usually than the poor, because the latter
do not live on horseback, he argues:
If this disease were indeed more divine in origin than the rest, it
ought not to attack the rich and well bred among the Scythians, but
all alike; nay rather the poor in preference, if indeed the gods
delight in honour and service from men, and show them favour
accordingly. For it is but natural that the rich should offer many
sacrifices to the gods as they have both wealth and honour; but the
poor less so, either from want of means, or want of good will
toward the gods who have not favoured them, so that the poor ought
to be specially subject to punishment for their transgressions or
mistakes. But as I said before, this disease is heaven-sent like
the rest. For everything happens according to nature.
This was the spirit that died out when the Greek world decayed, and
Europe fell a victim to ignorance and superstition. Then came the heyday
of miraculous images, of relics with power to cure, of pilgrimages, of
intercessions, of all that mental degradation which the Mediæval Church,
far from repudiating, used for its own purposes. And so the
resurrection of medical science was connected with rebellion against the
Church. Among every three physicians, are two atheists, was the word,
and even the pious Stearne, whom I have mentioned, preaches a purely
Stoic creed, and systematically ignores all the rites of his church.
Hippocrates and his school had in their day to combat similar
superstitions, just as the scientific medicine of our day has to deal
with Lourdes and with Christian Science. Within the last few years, we
have recovered from oblivion the ruins of the temple and town of
Epidauros, where the god Æsculapius had a famous shrine, and where
hundreds of pilgrims assembled to seek cures for their several ailments.
Their recreation was as well looked after as in any modern
watering-place; the theatre was the most splendid thing of the kind in
Greece, and there were porticoes, and baths, and groves to secure that
comfort and idle amusement which have a great effect on health. But as
we know from the ridicule of Aristophanes, corroborated by numbers of
inscriptions commemorating cures, the method of these Asklepiads was far
behind those of Kos; it was superstitious and not scientific. Dreams and
omens, charms and ceremonial acts still stood in the way of sound
hygiene and careful clinical observation. Not that I deny the occurrence
of cures under such treatment. The most sceptical examination of the
annals of Lourdes shows that mental influences will cure not only mental
diseases, and diseases known as nervous, but even those that seemed
absolutely physical. And what the Blessed Virgin does for the faithful
of Lourdes may doubtless be done by the influence of more human and
tangible causes. These admissions, which I make freely, will not change
the opinion now held by every true man of science. It is the opinion of
Hippocrates and his school, and that which he sought to enforce by his
theory and his practice. The great truth that work is what exhausts the
human frame, and that food supplies this waste, was laid down clearly in
their practice. The equally important principle, that no organ will keep
in health and vigour without exercise of its natural function and that
if disused it will shrink or decay, was also clearly pronounced. They
even guessed that the greatest problem of medicine (which they failed to
solve) was the passage from inorganic into organic substances.
It is of course idle to say that these practitioners were not encumbered
and shackled by many false guesses, many pretended discoveries, many
groundless speculations of their predecessors. But as the famous oath,
which every practitioner in the school of Kos took, expresses clearly
the high moral aim with which even now the physician enters on his noble
work, the solemn declaration that he will not abuse his influence or
intimacy in any house for selfish or immoral purposes, so in their
scientific aims these Greeks sought to advance human knowledge by
recording honestly their observations, even by telling of their
failures, and by seeking to leave behind them such clinical work as
might enlighten not only successors but opponents. If we compare this
truly modest and scientific attitude with that of the doctors whom
Molière scourged, and whose practice is but too well known to us from
the minute account of their treatment of princely or even royal
patients, we shall again come to the conclusion that where the Greeks
failed to teach modern Europe it was not for want of rich suggestion and
splendid anticipations of modern science.
I need hardly tell you (in conclusion) that I have not only confined
myself to touching the fringes of these vast subjects; I have
deliberately omitted large topics such as _optics_, and the correction
of optical delusions, which the Greeks attained by a subtle use of
curves, not merely sections of a large circle, but particularly by the
use of the conic section still known by its Greek name of hyperbola. I
have said nothing about their astronomy, with its prediction of
eclipses, its application to the calendar, and its use as the basis of
scientific geography. Had I attempted to weave all these matters into
the present lecture, I must have given you a kaleidoscope and not a
picture. The main fact to be impressed upon you is that the great
triumphs of the Greeks in art and in literature were not attained
without a strict education in hard thinking and close reasoning. Plato
is said to have made it the first condition of entering on a course of
philosophy that the pupil should have studied geometry.
It was in accordance with that principle that in our older universities
every student, though he were a specialist in classics, must show an
adequate knowledge of mathematics. No man in Trinity College, Dublin,
can take the degree in languages without having been taught, and having
qualified in, pure mathematics, physics, and astronomy. That was the
kind of education given by the Greeks. So far as we have departed from
it in our education; so far as we have substituted hurry for
deliberation, quantity of facts for quality of knowledge, miscellaneous
information for systematic thinking, so far we have rendered modern
culture impotent to rival their excellence.
VII
POLITICS--SOCIOLOGY--LAW
There is no department of Greek life where we feel its modernness more
intensely than when we come to consider political and social philosophy.
The Greeks, and the Romans that learned from them, write and talk like
thoroughly modern men; the discussions of Aristotle and the treatises of
Cicero are quite fit to instruct us in the present day on the
possibilities of organising human society. The rights of women, for
example, are a topic with which they were perfectly familiar. Pass into
what are justly called the Dark Ages or early Middle Ages, and you feel
that the world has gone centuries back and not forward. The reign of
superstition, the tyranny of the priest, the miseries of the churl, the
childishness of art, the utter stagnation of literature, the
substitution of fortresses for free cities, violence for law, savage
rudeness for polished urbanity--these are the astounding conditions of
an Europe most of which once had enjoyed real civilisation.
Among other causes of this strange retrogression in history, not the
least is the disappearance of Greek life and culture into the East,
where Constantinople still adhered to great Hellenic traditions at least
in law, in language, and in art. All that Roman life and thought had
borrowed from Greece was unable to make Latin culture fruitful and
permanent, because it _was_ borrowed from Greece and not really
assimilated; so it came to pass that, compared with the brightness and
buoyancy of Greek culture, the reign of the Latin through civilised
Europe was an epoch of standstill, of formalism, of intellectual
barrenness, of ossification. So long as the Romans were mere docile
pupils of the Greeks, they made great progress in the arts of life; as
soon as they felt themselves the acknowledged masters of the world and
came to look down upon their teachers, their inborn coarseness and want
of genius began to reassert itself, and but for the influence of an
Oriental creed, domesticated among them by the Greeks, they would have
relapsed, along with their barbarian invaders, into intellectual
insignificance.
When we inquire into the causes that made politics so developed a
feature among the Greeks, we shall in the first place find, even in
Homer’s societies, the habit of open discussion a leading fact in
everyday life. There is a sort of instinct to have things talked over
and reasoned out, so much so that the very king, who has come to a
decision with his council, and has ample authority to fulfil it, will
not do so without calling together an assembly of the soldiers in the
camp or the free citizens in the market-place, and seeking to obtain
their approval by acclamation. This assembly, called together to
approve, without any power of voting or of reversing the prince’s
decision, is regarded by all historians as the embryo of the
long-subsequent sovran assemblies of citizens in every Greek democracy.
There seem even to have been assertions of absolute power in the mouth
of the kings in some of the old texts of the _Iliad_, which were
expunged by editors, certainly not those of Alexandria, to whom such an
assertion could contain no offence, but by earlier editors who prepared
the poems for the free cities of Greece.[38]
The next stimulant to the development of politics was the coexistence of
many small city-states, with only a few miles square of territory, each
a little sovranty where no king could maintain the mystery of seclusion
or the obstacle of a solemn etiquette, which Xenophon perceived to be
essential conditions of the great absolute monarchy of the Persians. So
it came that the old sovranties, which Aristotle tells us had been
hereditary and limited[39] as it were a model to later nations in
constitutional sovranty, passed away, often without revolution, into
aristocracies, which were the leading type throughout the civilised
world both in classical and in mediæval times, so long as the mass of
the people were too ignorant to take upon them the management of public
affairs. Aristotle tells us that the masses easily remain quiet and
contented, provided they are kept in employment and in comfort by the
good management of the few. Such an example you are all familiar with in
the Venetian Republic, which, like Carthage of old, maintained for a
long period, without serious internal disturbance, a considerable empire
with a population busy and rich by their trade.
Where the violence or the selfishness of the few in power who were
descendants of the old families of nobles which had once been the
council of the kings, or who had themselves been local chiefs--where, I
say, the neglect or violence of these men produced intolerable
hardships, we have sanguinary revolutions, at first usually under the
leadership of an ambitious renegade or soldier of noble origin, who set
the masses against the classes. Later, the masses were strong enough to
make their revolutions by constitutional or semi-constitutional means,
and so gained a political power which they could seldom maintain without
putting to death or exiling the leaders of the nobles. A reader of
Thucydides or Xenophon will recall the manner in which the exiles worked
counter-revolutions, and thus stained the face of Greece with violence
and bloodshed. These scenes of violence play so large a part in our
Greek histories that you will wonder how any such people could be a
model to others in methods of politics, and it is for that reason that I
think it necessary to notice the matter. When we look below the surface
we shall find that there were elements of order never eradicated, and
that the crimes of the leaders of society did not infect the
common-sense, or destroy the safety, of the mass of the people, until
the general decadence in the days of Polybius and the Roman
interference.
What is this evidence? It is not to be found without some reflection,
for, as I have said, it is below the surface. There is no commoner
phrase in the mouth of Greek revolutionists, or in the mouth of those
that dreaded them, than “abolition of debts, and redivision of the
land.”[40] Aristotle mentions these as the watchword of the mob-leaders.
But when I was asked, years ago, by the late Henry Sidgwick of
Cambridge, to find him actual instances of such a revolution in
authentic Greek history, I well remember my own surprise, and his also,
when I said there were none to be found. Some such things may possibly
have happened in the great Sicilian troubles, when a tyrant drove out
the old free population, and settled a town with the surrounding churls
and his mercenary troops; but on the general face of Greek history, and
in the records of the well known states, you will not find an
instance.[41] The most radical measure to which I can point is the
reduction of debts twenty-seven per cent. by Solon, who was a very
conservative statesman, and one most anxious to guard the mercantile
good character of his city. As there was no loss of public credit to
Athens in his time, it is clear that the debts lightened by this
exceptional proceeding must have been only the debts of a class,
probably those due from poor farmers or labourers to their oppressive
landlords. If so, it was not more trenchant than the present land
legislation of the English Government in Ireland and Scotland, where the
annual rents of tenants have, in violation of old and formal private
contracts, been cut down by the state, often as much as twenty-seven per
cent.
The Greeks were great traders by sea and land and no trade can be
carried on without assured public credit. Unless investments are fairly
safe, no mercantile society can thrive. The ordinary rate of interest in
Greece, twelve per cent. per annum, appears at first hearing to be
evidence of insecurity. It is nothing of the kind. It was not higher
than the average interest[42] at Rome when that dominant people held the
trade of the world, and made themselves as safe as could be. The
difference between that and our three per cent. arises from the general
scarcity at the time of great fortunes in money, owing to the difficulty
of transit and the imperfect knowledge of a token currency. Banks and
bills of exchange they commonly used, but to lend money to citizens of a
neighbouring state, living under different laws and with strange courts
of law, was never easy, and so the areas of lending and borrowing were
not as they are now, a whole continent or even the whole globe. You
might imagine such a state of things here in your country if each State
was confined to seek investments within its own limits, in which case
you might soon find a rate of interest for imported capital not lower
than that among the Greeks.
There was another strong checking power which must always have moderated
the revolutionary transports of the Greeks. It was the existence in all
the greater cities of a large population of slaves. We know from the
history both of Argos and of Sparta that this was a standing danger to
the free population, and we may be sure that in many cases free men
composed their differences, or at least moderated their victory over
their opponents, rather than risk having both subdued by a foreign
element.
You will tell me perhaps that the fact that all the Greek world held
slaves is another antiquated standpoint, which prevents them from being
fit teachers for modern nations. But to me that question does not appear
so simple, and perhaps with the experiences of the last forty years,
even the American public that has time for reflection may have some
doubts on the matter. So great a thinker as Aristotle felt quite clear
about it; he believed that there were inferior races fit only to be
controlled, not to control, and he held that it was for their good when
these were coerced by the superior intelligence and education of Greeks.
He does not express himself, so far as I know, about the many slaves who
were Greek prisoners of war, but from his general views it is certain
that he would not approve of this form of slavery. Let me add in this
connection that he repeatedly says analogous things of those occupied
with low handicrafts, such as tinkers or cobblers, which require all
their time and leave them no leisure to educate themselves or to learn
higher things. He thinks these workers wholly unfit to be in the
governing class of any state, and maintains that wherever they gained
power it was in an extreme democracy which soon displayed the vices of
that sort of government.
You must remember that in the small Greek polity, which consisted of a
city and a territory of twenty or thirty miles square, the expedient of
choosing representatives locally and sending them to the central
assembly was never felt to be necessary. The citizen must go himself to
the assembly and spend his day there; he was liable to be chosen (often
by lot, that considers no convenience) for duties either administrative
or judicial. It was evident that those bound to earn their daily bread
must stand aside and permit the more leisured classes to do this work.
This leisured class, moreover, was greatly enlarged by the existence of
slaves, for even the poor Athenian had his manual labour done for him
and so had the necessary time for attending public duties. The Greeks
never dreamt of giving their judges or politicians large salaries, as we
do, holding that the state had a right to claim the whole life and
energy of its citizens. Against one another these citizens were amply
protected by the laws; there was no protection against the demands of
state, even when these involved the sacrifice of life itself.
Such being the general frame of mind among thoughtful Greeks and the
great object of the most perfect state being to secure the happiness,
and therefore of course the liberty, of the mass of its citizens, we
need not wonder that they paid early and constant attention to the
framing of their laws, so that these offered, first to the Romans (who
used the Attic Code when drawing up the Laws of the XII Tables) and then
to other nations, models of prudent legislation. All their theorists
further insisted, with no uncertain voice, that the success of any code
of laws must depend upon the enlightenment of the public that uses them.
I proceed therefore to speak briefly on three aspects of Greek
legislation, the _criminal_, the _civil_, and what I may call the
_international_, in order to make clear in how many ways the Greeks were
our masters, so that we may still study their methods of government with
profit. The criminal law naturally comes first, for the most urgent
essential of civilised life is public safety, enabling the citizen to go
about when and where he likes without fear of personal molestation, or
even of being the witness of violence. The Greeks were so well aware of
this that they did not think any polity civilised till men had wholly
abandoned the habit of carrying weapons, and if Aristotle or Thucydides
had been told that in America a number of respectable citizens of free
states still go armed, they would have said, “That was once the habit in
Greece also, but now we are civilised, and regard such a practice as
essentially barbarous.” If there had been any likelihood of its being
revived they would certainly have made it penal, and such seems the
proper course in any country where the losing of a man’s temper may
cause the losing of his life, as well as that of others. In modern
Europe we have happily reached that stage, and even in Ireland, where
there are often people threatened for agrarian disputes, and protected
by the police, the rest of the population walks about securely night and
day, in crowded cities and in lonely wilds, without ever thinking of
carrying a weapon.
The Attic law, which represents the highest, and also the purest Greek
feeling, was extremely jealous not only of the safety, but of the
dignity of the citizen, and any assault in the streets, even if it
caused no dangerous hurt, was severely punished by the law. As in modern
societies, even to touch a man rudely, or against his will, was punished
as an assault, and if the man assaulted happened to be performing any
official duty for the state, the offence might be considered in the
light of _lèse-majesté_, or treason against the dignity of the state.