THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF HELLAS: AN IDEAL OF SELF-REALIZATION
[Sidenote: Introduction]
The Greek ethical ideal, a creation of the natural feelings and
impulses of the human mind and heart uninfluenced by theological
doctrines, was one of the most imperishable products of Greek life
and thought. This conception of what constitutes good life became a
part of the Greek bequest to civilization. The modern world is thus
indebted to Greece not only for priceless elements of its intellectual
and art life, but for precious elements of its moral life as well.
Throughout the medieval age, it is true, it was the ethical heritage
from Judea that shaped and colored the moral ideal of the European
peoples, but even during that period this Semitic ideal bore the deep
impress of Greek ethics, while ever since the Renaissance it is the
ethical bequest of Hellas which has steadily become an ever more and
more dominant factor in the moral life of the Western nations. The
conscience of the modern world of science is Hellenic rather than
Hebraic.
I. INSTITUTIONS AND IDEAS DETERMINING THE MORAL TYPE
[Sidenote: The city state the mold
of Greek morality and the chief
sphere of Greek moral activity]
The Greek city state was the creator of the Greek conscience; that is
to say, the relationships and activities of the Greek as a citizen, and
not his relationships and activities as a husband or father or business
man, determined his chief duties. Conscience was very little involved
in that part of his life which lay outside the civic sphere. It was
solely as a member of a city community, which was to the Greek what
the Church was to the man of medieval times, that he could live the
truly moral life and attain the highest virtue.
[Sidenote: The Greek view of man’s
nature as good]
The common Greek view of man’s nature was like that of the Chinese
moralists; that is, it conceived human nature as being essentially
good.[428] And this conception included the whole of man’s nature,
his body as well as his spirit. As we shall learn, this doctrine
influenced profoundly the Greek conception of what is permissible and
right in conduct. It made it seem right to give full, though regulated
and reasonable, indulgence to the bodily impulses and instincts. It
made the fundamental maxim of Greek morality to be, Live according to
nature. It left no place in Greek thought for the Oriental notion of an
antagonism between the flesh and the spirit. Hence asceticism with its
repressions of the bodily instincts and appetites, which is so common
an expression of the moral sentiment among the Oriental races, found no
place in Greek morality till after Greek culture had come in contact
with the religious and ethical systems of Asia.
[Sidenote: The idea of harmony in
the god world]
Closely connected with this idea of the essential goodness and oneness
of man’s nature was the conception of unity and harmony in the god
world. In passing from the Orient to Greece we leave behind not only
Indian pessimism, but Egyptian and Persian dualism. We leave behind
that conception of disharmony and conflict in the invisible world which
is such a characteristic phase of much of Oriental thought. We hear,
indeed, the faint echo of a prehistoric struggle between the earth gods
and the sky gods. But all now is peace. The Titans are chained, and the
gods that are the friends of men reign supreme.[429]
Just as that Oriental dualistic world philosophy exercised a vast
influence upon the moral ideals of the East and of the later Christian
world that inherited that system of thought, making the moral life
serious and strenuous, a fight against evil, so did the opposing Greek
conception of unity and harmony in the god world exert a profound
influence upon Greek morality, emptying the moral life of everything
like strenuousness and battle. It made Greek morality to be like the
morality of sensuous, joyous youth.
[Sidenote: The character of the
Greek gods]
In strong contrast to Hebrew morality, which, as we have seen, was
almost exclusively a religious one, springing, that is to say, from
certain conceptions of God’s character and of his relations to man,
Greek morality was in the main a lay or secular one. Aristotle, who
gave scientific form to Greek ethics, allowed hardly any place in the
moral code to religious duties. Yet, though the Greek moral ideal was
not based upon religion, it was influenced by it; for there cannot be
an entire separation of religion and morality. Religious beliefs, like
beliefs of every other kind, help to shape men’s ideas of what is right
and what is wrong in conduct.
The influence of the Greek religion upon Greek morality was not wholly
favorable. The attribution by the Greeks of human frailties and vices
to their gods tended to depress human morality, since men are never
better than their gods. It is true that the moral character of the gods
of any people is a creation of the moral consciousness of that people;
still, after once called into existence and enthroned, these divinities
react upon their creators and shape in a greater or less degree the
moral character of their worshipers.
But though there were elements in some of the Greek cults, particularly
in those of Dionysus[430] and Aphrodite in the later period,[431] that
were harmful to morality, still in general Greek morality found in
religion at once a restraining and a stimulating influence.
Even as early as the Homeric Age religion had become a moral force. It
is the fear of the gods even more than the fear of men which is the
motive force for rightdoing.[432] Odysseus’ request of Ilus of Ephyra
for poison with which to smear the points of his arrows is refused
through fear of the divine anger, and Priam in praying Achilles for the
body of Hector admonishes him to have reverence for the gods.
And throughout later times the gods are the guardians of morality.
They are the avengers of perjury. They are the punishers of him who
breaks the law of hospitality. Especially does Zeus, as the god of
hospitality, “take note of those who welcome and those who maltreat
the stranger.”[433] The shrines of all the gods are places of refuge
and sanctuary. The suppliant at the altar is sacrosanct. Here the hand
of the avenger of injury is stayed. “Mercy,” says Sophocles, “shares
the judgment seat of Zeus.” As the god of the suppliant, Zeus not only
protects but purifies and delivers. Thus were the high moral qualities
of mercy and forgiveness thrown into relief, and men, while taught
self-restraint, were imbued with reverence for these attributes of
character.
This high morality of the Greek religion reached its culmination in the
worship of the Delphian Apollo. In truth, the history of Delphi is
a large part of the history of Greek morality. It reflected from age
to age the deepening moral perceptions of the race. The oracle thus
stood in close relation with the great teachers of Greece. The ethical
impulse of Pythagoreanism seems to have gone forth from Delphi. Apollo
gave a religious sanction to the emancipation of the slave, and thus
promoted social morality. The slave given his freedom by his master at
Delphi became, as a freedman, sacrosanct.[434] Apollo stimulated also
political morality. Through the Delphic Amphictyony his influence was
exerted in mitigating the barbarities of war between Greek and Greek,
and in creating an Hellenic fraternity. Thus through religion was the
narrow sphere embraced by the ordinary moral feelings of the Greeks
broadened and brought to cover wide federations of cities and tribes.
Greek religion also exercised a stimulating influence upon morality
through the Mysteries, especially through those of Eleusis. The greater
number of these religious fraternities had an ethical aim--“the aim of
worshiping a pure god, the aim of living a pure life, and the aim of
cultivating a spirit of brotherhood.”[435]
[Sidenote: Significance for Greek
morality of the absence of a
priestly caste]
But the most noteworthy fact concerning Greek religion in its relations
to Greek morality is this--that it was a religion practically without a
priesthood. For there never arose in Greece a priestly class like that
in Egypt, in Persia, in India, and in Judea. This is a fact of supreme
importance in the history of Greek morals. It prevented the growth
of a theocratic morality, with its artificial ritual duties and its
conservative tendencies.
It is interesting to note that it was the early rise of philosophy in
the Greek cities of Ionia that saved Hellas from the domination of
a sacerdotal caste. For at the time this philosophy arose the Orphic
doctrines were overspreading Greece. Now this was a priestly religion,
that is, a religion interpreted and administered by priests. Its
triumph in Greece would have meant the establishment of a powerful
national priesthood. This misfortune was prevented by the intellectual
and philosophical movement in Ionia. It is this fact which leads
Professor Bury to pronounce the rise of the study of philosophy in
the Ionian cities one of the most important facts in the history of
Hellas; for “it meant the triumph of reason over mystery; it led to the
discrediting of the Orphic movement; it insured the free political and
social progress of Hellas.”[436] And all this meant the keeping of the
ground clear for the upgrowth and development of an essentially lay
or secular morality, a morality that found its sanctions alone in the
human reason and conscience.
[Sidenote: The doctrine of race
election; Hellenes and Barbarians]
There was one conception common to both Greek and Jew which reacted
powerfully upon the moral system of each. This was what has been called
the doctrine of race election. The Jews believed themselves to be the
“chosen people.” The Greeks believed the same concerning themselves.
They were the intellectually elect people. All other peoples were
“barbarians.” Just as the Jewish doctrine of election excluded the
Gentile world from the pale of Jewish moral sympathies, so did the
Greek doctrine of separateness cause the Greek to shut out from his
moral sympathies the entire non-Greek world. We shall see a little
further on how this race egotism dictated large sections of the Greek
code of morals.
II. THE IDEAL
[Sidenote: Patriotism the cardinal
virtue; civic and military duties]
As we have already noticed, it was out of his relations as a citizen
that the primary duties of the Greek arose. His supreme duty was
patriotism, devotion to his city. “Good citizen” and “good man” were
interchangeable terms. And since a state of war rather than of peace
was the normal relation of the Greek cities, the military virtues held
the highest place in the ideal of excellence. “Their bodies,”--thus
Thucydides makes one of his characters speak of the citizen soldiers
of a typical Greek city--“their bodies they devote to their country
as though they belonged to other men.”[437] Thus the preëminent Greek
virtue, courage, was almost synonymous with valor in war. To throw away
one’s shield was the last infamy with the Greeks as with the Romans.
This type of character, blending the civic and the military virtues, is
presented to us with incomparable charm in Plutarch’s _Lives_. Here we
see the ideal in actual flesh and blood. It is the altruistic element
in this type of character which renders it so morally attractive.
[Sidenote: The Greek virtue of
courage a form of our virtue of
self-sacrifice]
For we should not fail to note that in the Greek enumeration of the
virtues, the virtue of self-sacrifice, which we give the first place in
our own moral ideal, is hidden under courage or fortitude.[438] With
us this virtue expresses itself in a great variety of forms; with the
Greeks, in one form chiefly--self-devotion on the battlefield. This
altruism, it is true, was narrow; it did not look beyond one’s own
city; but notwithstanding this limitation it was genuine altruism, for
facing death in battle, as Aristotle says, is “the greatest and noblest
of perils.”[439] This ready self-devotion of the individual to the
common interests of his city was the most attractive feature of Greek
morality. It formed the basis of Greek civilization. When this virtue
was lost the Greek city perished, and with it Greek civilization passed
away.
Among all the cities of Greece, Sparta realized most perfectly the
military virtues of the Greek ideal. The great place so long held by
her in the ancient world she won through the loyalty of her citizens
to the soldier’s ideal of obedience, courage, and self-devotion. The
conduct of Leonidas and his companions in the pass of Thermopylæ not
only had a bracing effect upon Greek character for generations, but has
never ceased, through the inspiration of example, to add to the sum
total in the world of loyalty to duty.
[Sidenote: The virtues of
temperance and justice]
To the virtue of self-sacrifice, under the guise of fortitude, or the
facing of danger or the endurance of pain in a worthy cause, the Greeks
added temperance, justice, and wisdom.
The Greek virtue of temperance or moderation was essentially the same
as our virtue of self-control or self-denial. It meant measure in
all things, the avoidance of the too much and the too little.[440]
Everything must be in fair proportion. In building a house one should
not go “beyond bounds in size, magnificence, and expense.” In conduct
likewise the mean must always be the aim. Restraint must be laid upon
one’s appetites and desires. Excessive ambition was a grave fault, as
was an undue lack of ambition.
The Greek conception of justice was this: Do no wrong, and suffer no
wrong to self or to others--with the emphasis on the latter part of the
injunction.[441] Christianity shifted the emphasis to the first part of
the commandment.
[Sidenote: The virtue of wisdom;
mental self-culture a duty]
By the term “wisdom” the Greeks covered very nearly what we mean by
mental self-culture. Now there has been a wide divergence of opinion
among different peoples respecting this matter. Primitive races can of
course have no feeling of obligation as to intellectual self-culture;
but even a people as advanced in civilization as the Romans may
have little or no conscience concerning it. Throughout a great part
of the medieval age in Europe mental culture was looked upon with
suspicion. Very few regarded it as a duty. But since the Renaissance,
that is, since the rebirth in the European world of the Greek spirit,
intellectual culture has been coming to be regarded more and more as an
urgent and imperious duty. It is to the ancient Greeks, as implied in
what we have just said, that we are largely indebted for this ethical
feeling. To the truly representative Greek the ethical imperative to
seek self-realization called especially for the development of the
mind, “his true self.” Mere intellectual curiosity, love of knowledge
for its own sake, was, it is true, one of the creative forces of Greek
intellectualism; but the ethical motive was ever near. In the Socratic
philosophy indeed it is made the dominant motive for the reason that
virtuous conduct is by Socrates held to be dependent upon knowledge,
the knowledge of things as they really are, things human and divine.
With the philosopher the gaining of this knowledge is the aim and end
of life.
[Sidenote: The development of the
body a duty; the ethical element
in Greek athleticism]
Asceticism, a chief characteristic of which is the conception that
there is something meritorious in the illtreatment or neglect of the
body, is one of the most striking phenomena in the moral history
of mankind. The Oriental peoples especially have ever been easily
persuaded, under the influence of religious ideas, that the body should
be illtreated in the interest of the spirit.
In passing from Asia to Greece we seem to enter a new ethical
atmosphere. We leave behind every trace of asceticism. We are no
longer surrounded by unkempt, gaunt, hollow-eyed fakirs, anchorites,
and monks. In Greek thought, as we have seen, there was no trace of
that Oriental idea of a warring between body and spirit. This happy
consciousness of the Greek of harmony in his own being had most
important consequences for Greek morality. It made the development of
the body, equally with that of the soul, an ethical requirement. The
outcome was Greek athleticism, one of the most attractive phases of
Hellenic civilization.
We do not mean to say that moral feeling was to the same degree active
in calling into existence Greek athleticism that religious-ethical
feeling was active in the creation of Oriental asceticism, but simply
that the ethical motive held a place among the various motives and
sentiments at work. Without this motive the Olympian games and the
other sacred festivals into which athletic exercises and competitions
entered, would never have won the place they held in Greek life and
culture. When in later times these festivals, subjected to commercial
and mercenary influences, lost wholly or in part this religious-ethical
element, then they lost also their distinctive character, and that
morally wholesome and uplifting influence which they had exercised upon
the Greek world throughout the best days of Hellas.
[Sidenote: Identification of moral
goodness with beauty]
Just as the cultured Greek brought the intellectual domain of life
within the province of morals, so likewise did he with the æsthetic.
It was not merely his æsthetic sense which was offended by ugliness
in form, but also his moral sense. To the Greek mind, to love beauty,
sensuous and spiritual, and to be beautiful was synonymous with being
good. “He who is beautiful to look upon,” says Sappho, “is good; and
who is good will soon be beautiful.”[442] “The beautiful,” comments
Wuttke in speaking of this phase of Greek ethics, “is _per se_ the
good; in enjoying and creating the beautiful man is moral.”[443] “The
‘good’ and the ‘beautiful’”--thus G. Lowes Dickinson sums up the Greek
view--“were one and the same thing; that is the first and the last word
of the Greek ideal.”[444]
This identification by the Greeks of goodness with beauty is one of
the most important matters in Greek ethics. For the conception was not
with them an inert thing. Greek civilization in all its phases was in
a great measure the expression of this conviction. The Greeks filled
the world with beautiful things because to create beauty was with them
an ethical as well as an æsthetic impulse and necessity. They felt the
holiness of beauty.
[Sidenote: Live according
to nature sums up all moral
requirements]
All the particular requirements of Greek morality, some of the most
important of which we have now briefly commented upon, are summed up
in the formula, Live conformably to nature. The idea here embodied of
what constitutes man’s full duty springs naturally from the doctrine
that man’s nature is essentially good. If that nature be good, then
virtuousness will consist in the well-rounded symmetrical development
of all the capacities of body and mind. Pindar’s profound injunction,
“Be what you are,” embodies the essence of the teachings of the Greek
moralists. They taught that man fulfills his destiny by becoming what
he is in his innermost being--by complete self-realization.[445]
III. LIMITATIONS AND DEFECTS OF THE IDEAL
[Sidenote: Its aristocratic
character]
A chief defect of Greek ethics was its aristocratic spirit. So many
were the classes excluded in whole or in part from the moral field
that Greek morality was almost as much a class morality as that of
Brahmanic India. Entire races and classes were as completely outside
the moral pale as is the Indian pariah. It was only the higher cultured
classes of citizens who, the moral philosophers taught, were capable
of attaining the noblest virtues and living the truly moral life. All
others were regarded as living on a semimoral or nonmoral animal plane
of existence.
[Sidenote: The exclusion of
non-Greek races from the moral
sphere]
Thus throughout a great part of the historic period the Greeks
virtually excluded all non-Greek peoples from the moral domain.[446]
They regarded these non-Hellenic folk about as we regard animals,
or as many a few generations ago looked upon the black race. They
thought it right for them to make unprovoked war upon such people and
to make slaves of those they might capture. Aristotle taught that to
hunt barbarians for the purpose of getting slaves was just as right
and proper as to hunt animals for food or sacrifice.[447] In a word,
non-Greeks were regarded as being practically outside the pale of
humanity.
[Sidenote: The exclusion of slaves]
The moral status of the slave in ancient Greece was determined by the
fact that slaves were usually barbarians.[448] Since as non-Greeks
they were already outside the moral pale, it followed naturally that
as slaves they had no standing in the court of morals. Their status
was almost the same as that of domestic animals. The Greek master
never felt that he owed any moral duties to his slaves, though kind
and merciful treatment of them was enjoined by the philosophers and
moralists. According to Aristotle, the relation of slave and master
is a purely natural one, like that of body and soul. He calls slaves
“living instruments.”
[Sidenote: The exclusion of the
domestic sphere]
Out of the family relationships arise a large part of the duties making
up the moral code of the modern Western world, while in the atmosphere
of the domestic circle are nourished many of what we regard as the most
sacred and attractive of the virtues. Now these family virtues, which
we esteem so highly, found only a very subordinate place in the Greek
ideal of character, for the reason that the family, like the clan and
the tribe, was almost absorbed by the city. In Sparta the family and
family life practically disappeared. In Plato’s ideal republic the
family is sacrificed to the state.
The status of the wife in most of the Greek cities was a low one. She
was practically one of the slaves. Ethical sentiment, as was true
of the sentiment of romantic love, seems to have been almost wholly
lacking in the marriage relation.
Infancy, in its earliest stages, was in general never brought beneath
the protecting ægis of the moral sentiment.[449] In the practice of the
exposure of ill-formed, weak, defective, or unpromising newborn infants
the Greeks, like the Romans, never advanced much beyond the standpoint
of barbarians. This abandonment or destruction by parents of their
offspring did not offend the common conscience. Even the philosophers
and moralists saw nothing in the practice to censure. Evidence of how
general the custom was, is afforded by various tales and dramas which
turn on the rescue of the hero in his infancy after having been cast
out to die.[450] The story of King Œdipus is typical.[451]
In this connection a word must be said regarding chastity. We find
here one of the most serious defects of Greek morality. The virtue of
chastity was given a very low place, hardly any place at all, in the
Greek ideal of character. It was the undervaluing of this virtue that
without doubt was one of the contributing causes of the decline and
early decay of Greek civilization.
Another equally grave defect in the Greek moral character was lack of
respect for the aged. Save at Sparta and Athens, age was not reverenced
in ancient Greece.[452] In this respect the Greeks stood almost on a
level with most primitive races.
[Sidenote: The disesteem of
industrial virtues]
A marked characteristic of Greek ethical feeling was a deep prejudice
against manual and commercial occupations as unworthy of freemen.
Aristotle taught that there was “no room for moral excellence” in the
trades and employments of artisans, traders, and laborers.[453] Even
artists like Phidias and Polyclitus were looked upon as “miserable
handicraftsmen.”[454] Plato in his _Laws_ says: “He who in any way
shares in the illiberality of retail trade may be indicted by any one
who likes for dishonoring his race, before those who are judged to
be first in virtue; and if he appear to throw dirt upon his father’s
house,--by an unworthy occupation,--let him be imprisoned for a year
and abstain from that sort of thing.”[455] In some cities the person
who engaged in trade was disqualified for citizenship, and in others no
mechanic or field laborer could enter the place where the freemen met.
This feeling that labor is degrading came in after the Homeric Age,
with the rule of the oligarchs, and was the natural and inevitable
outcome of slavery. The effect of slavery is to make work seem ignoble
and servile, and to cause the industrial virtues to assume a low place
in the moral ideal, or to drop out of it entirely. The high place
assigned the industrial virtues in the moral ideals of ancient Persia
and Israel was due probably as largely to the subordinate place which
slavery held in those countries as to the influence of religious
doctrines and physical environment.
Another ground for the feeling was that hard, coarse work destroys the
suppleness and mars the beauty and symmetry of the body; and this to
the Greek way of thinking was sufficient reason why the freeman--to use
Plato’s phrase--“should abstain from that sort of thing.”
Still another reason for the feeling that the retail trades were
unworthy of citizens was the conviction that this kind of business had
“a strong tendency to make men bad.” The small merchants and traders in
Greece certainly bore a very bad reputation,[456] and it is probable
that the public disesteem of their occupation and the contempt in
which they themselves were held had the same sinister influence upon
them that the similar feeling in Old Japan had upon the petty trader
there.[457]
[Sidenote: Revenge reckoned as a
virtue]
In nothing did the ordinary Greek moral consciousness differ more
widely from the Christian than in the matter of forgiving injuries.
This was one of the virtues brought in by Christianity which to the
Greek mind was foolishness. To the Greek the taking of revenge upon an
enemy was a duty. A man should render himself useful to his friends
and dangerous to his enemies. The Greek orator, in order to justify
his resentment toward any one, always took pains to show that he had
been injured in some way by the person, and hence had good ground
for wishing to do him evil. Indeed, one who neglected to take revenge
upon his personal enemy was looked upon as a weak, pusillanimous
creature.[458]
But out of this virtue of revenge, paradoxically enough, arose the
virtue of forgiveness; for revenge was limited by the requirements
of the virtue of moderation or self-restraint. The person seeking
revenge for an injury must set reasonable bounds to his thirst for
vengeance. Hence when the age of reflection came there were teachers of
spiritual insight who, regarding the matter from this point of view,
saw forgiveness to be a virtue because it required in the one forgiving
great self-conquest and self-control.[459]
[Sidenote: Low estimation of
truthfulness]
Another serious defect in the ordinary Greek moral standard was the
low place assigned to the virtue of veracity. The Greeks, in marked
contrast to the ancient Persians, had only a very feeble sense of the
sanctity of the plighted word. Untruthfulness was ingrained in the
nation. The Homeric heroes were full of guile and deceit, and the
historic Greeks were little better. They had throughout the ancient
world a well-earned reputation for disregard of promises and oaths.
When it seemed to them necessary to lie in order to gain a desired end,
then lying appeared to them justifiable. Scythas, tyrant of Zancle, if
we may judge from a story told by Herodotus, was the only Greek who
kept his word to Darius. This man was in exile at Susa. He obtained
from the king permission, presumably on parole, to visit Sicily, and
honorably returned to Persia. The conduct of Scythas in this matter
must have been exceptional, for, in the words of Herodotus, “him Darius
regarded the most upright of all the Greeks to whom he afforded a
refuge.”[460]
The great moral teachers of Greece recognized this defect in the moral
character of their countrymen and sought to correct it by extolling the
virtue of truthfulness. After the Persian war a class of men arose,
historians and philosophers, whom Schmidt, because of their reverence
for truth, calls the ancestors of the modern men of science.[461]
Thucydides had the same sense of the sanctity of exactness in statement
of fact as has the historian of to-day. Socrates died rather than cloak
the truth before his judges. Aristotle said, “Friends and truth are
both dear to us, but it is a sacred duty to prefer the truth.”[462]
IV. THE MORAL EVOLUTION
[Sidenote: The morality of the
Homeric Age]
The historical starting point of the moral evolution in Greece is the
morality of the Homeric Age. This morality we find incarnated in the
heroes of the time, Achilles and Odysseus, for, as Wundt observes, “the
inmost moral convictions of a people are shown far more plainly in the
character of its heroes than in its gods.”[463]
The qualities of character with which, as worthy of admiration, the
poet invests his heroes show that, notwithstanding the great advance
already achieved in many of the arts of life, in morality the Greeks
of this age were still in some respects on a level with savages.
Thus the poet extols the “good Autolycus” for his skill in thievery
and perjury.[464] But stealing and lying, as with uncivilized people
generally, to be proper and right, must be adroit and “for the
good of friends and the harm of enemies.” Piracy was an honorable
occupation.[465] The bodies of enemies slain in battle were maltreated,
as is the wont of savages.[466] Conceptions of deity were crude and
unethical, the gods being represented as capricious, profligate,
partial, and unjust.
But there was a sound core in this morality. Clan virtues were firmly
inwrought in character. The virtue of loyalty to comrades was strong;
the ethical qualities of courage and self-devotion for the common good,
and of hospitality to strangers were well developed; and the domestic
virtues of chastity and constancy in woman are portrayed in such a way
as to show that, if not common, they were at least held in high esteem
and reverence.
[Sidenote: Reprobation by the
philosophers and later poets of
the Homeric tales of the gods]
From the Homeric Age onward there was a progressive purification of the
moral feelings. One evidence of this ethical progress is found in the
repudiation by the later moral consciousness of the primitive myths of
the gods. These tales, as we have just noted, were coarse, sensual, and
immoral. The philosophers of the sixth and following centuries, and
the poets of this later time, denounced these stories as unworthy and
unethical conceptions of deity. Pythagoras is said, upon his return
from Hades, to have reported seeing there the souls of Homer and Hesiod
undergoing punishment for what they had said of the gods. Pindar purges
the tales of their grosser immoral elements. Others sought to relieve
the poets of the charge of impiety by reading the myths as allegories.
The Sophists and Stoics moralized them, giving them an ethical aim
and purpose.[467] Plato, in reprobating what Hesiod says of Uranus,
declared it “the greatest of all lies in high places.” He would strike
out from the poets all passages in which they told these lies about the
gods and heroes, before allowing the boys and men to read them.[468]
In the hands of the later Attic tragedians the whole traditionary
religious mythology was spiritualized and given a deeper ethical
content and meaning.
This purifying of the Greek moral consciousness finds an exact parallel
in what is taking place in the modern Christian world respecting the
conceptions of deity found in the early chronicles of the Hebrew Bible
and transmitted as a religious bequest to the European peoples. These
ideas of God are rejected by the truer moral consciousness of to-day
as the crude notions of a gross and morally immature age. Just as this
modern rejection of these unworthy primitive conceptions of the divine
character register our own moral advance, so does the rejection, by
the later Greek thinkers and teachers, of the Homeric and Hesiodic
conceptions of the gods register the advance in ethical thought in
Greece during the interval that separates the era of these poets from
the Solonian and Platonic Ages.
[Sidenote: Ethical significance
of the transition from the
continuance to the retribution
theory]
In an earlier chapter we spoke of the continuance theory of life after
death, and of the retribution theory as marking an advance upon this in
ethical feeling.[469] At the opening of the historical period in Greece
we find the primitive unethical continuance theory in existence, but
in a state of transition into the retribution theory. The early Greek
Hades, like the Babylonian Arallu and the Hebrew Sheol, was a place
where moral distinctions were not recognized. The same phantom life
was the lot of all alike who went down to the world of shadows. The
Elysian Fields, it is true, had already been created, but these were
simply a sort of aristocratic heaven, a “Greek Valhalla,” the abode of
the great heroes of the race;[470] and Tartarus also had been called
into existence, but this was a prison house only for those who had
incurred the special enmity of the gods. The fables of Tantalus, Ixion,
and the Danaïdes show that the belief in an after life had no ethical
significance for the masses.[471]
But already in Pindar these ideas of the after life, through virtue of
an ethical necessity, have undergone great changes.[472] Just as the
poet moralizes the Homeric conception of the gods, so does he moralize
the Homeric conception of the underworld. Alongside the continuance
theory we find now the retribution theory. The life beyond the grave is
conceived as a life of rewards and punishments. The Elysian Fields have
been “opened to moral worth,” and a tribunal, called into existence
by a growing moral consciousness like that which created the Egyptian
Judgment of the Dead, has been set up, and Rhadamanthus apportions the
destiny of souls according to their merit and demerit.[473] From the
Persian war on, the life after death had ethical significance for all
men, and not simply for exceptional cases. In the literature there are
allusions in growing numbers to the retribution awaiting the wicked and
the blessedness in store for those “unstained with vice.”
In Plato this moral evolution attains a stage almost identical with
that reached by medieval Christian ethics. We find in the _Republic_
a threefold division of the realm of the dead corresponding closely
to the Schoolmen’s purgatory, heaven, and hell.[474] Punishment is
conceived as having for aim and end, in all save cases of abominable
and incurable wickedness, the purification of earth-stained souls.
All these modifications in the topography, the classifications, and the
arrangements of the underworld, like the similar changes effected by
the modern spirit in the medieval conception of hell, were the work of
a gradually clarifying moral sense, and bear witness to the progressive
development of Greek ethical thought between the Homeric and the
Alexandrian Age.
[Sidenote: The evolution of the
doctrine of divine envy into that
of Nemesis]
The early Greeks held a doctrine known as the Envy of the Gods. They
imagined that the gods were envious of the great and prosperous. Hence
they thought it was the envy of the gods which brought about the
undoing of the great and powerful. Their prayer for a friend enjoying
an unusual run of good fortune was, “May the gods not become envious.”
We find this doctrine embodied in the Herodotean story of Crœsus,
king of Lydia, whose long career of unbroken and dazzling prosperity
ends at last in dreadful reverses and sudden downfall.[475] The same
belief colors the advice which Herodotus represents Artabanus, the
uncle of Xerxes, as giving the king, who was meditating an attack on
the Greek cities. The immoderate ambition of the king, in view of the
envious nature of the gods, had awakened the apprehension of the old
and experienced counselor, and he labored to dissuade the king from
engaging in so vast a project. “Dost thou not notice,” said he, “how
the lightning smites always the highest buildings and the tallest
trees. Thus often the mighty host is overthrown by lightning sent by
the jealous gods; for the gods are jealous of mortals, and will allow
no one unduly to exalt himself.”[476] There is here no suggestion of an
ethical element. The envious gods overthrow things simply and solely
because they are big and tall and cast them into the shade.
At a still later period the Athenian general Nicias gives memorable
expression to this belief in his speech to his disheartened troops
before Syracuse. He bade them take cheer from their wretched plight
because the envious gods must certainly be disarmed by the sight of
their woeful condition and would now pity and help.[477]
But alongside this unethical doctrine of the Envy of the Gods the
Greeks held another, which seems to have been simply a modification
and outgrowth of the earlier crude conception of deity. This was
the doctrine of Nemesis. There was here full recognition of the
vicissitudes of human life. The great and the overpowerful are indeed
destroyed by the gods,--there was no denying the fact,--but not
merely because they are great, but because their greatness and their
prosperity has made them self-confident, insolent, overbearing. In
their blind arrogance they have overstepped the limits of moderation;
hence their downfall wrought by the gods.
It was under the spell of this belief that Herodotus wrote his history
of the Persian wars, although, as we have seen, he loved to rehearse
stories which illustrated the doctrine of the envious nature of the
gods. His narrative is in truth a great historical drama illustrating
the moral order of the world and teaching the impressive lesson of
how the gods punish presumptuous pride and overvaulting ambition. The
historian prepares his pious readers for the final catastrophe by
showing in vivid portrayal the transactions at the Hellespont. The
swift current of the strait has broken the bridge of boats laid upon
the waters by Xerxes. The all-powerful and audacious king orders that
the sacred Hellespont be scourged with three hundred lashes, that
fetters be cast into the rebellious waters, and that they be branded
as a slave is marked with branding irons. All this is done, and the
treacherous waters are cursed with blasphemous words.
Now follows quickly the tragic issue at Salamis of the vast
undertaking, and the return passage of the Hellespont a few months
later by the humbled and fugitive king. All this is the work of
Nemesis, the punisher of those who have lifted up their hearts in
insufferable pride and arrogance.
It is not alone in the dramatized history of Herodotus that we are
able to trace the moral effects of the Persian wars in bringing into
the foreground of the Greek consciousness the conception of Nemesis as
the vindicator of the moral government of the world. “After the battle
of Salamis,” in the words of the historian Abbott, “the instability
of human greatness and the punishment of ‘insolence’ echoes as an
undertone through all Greek thought.”[478]
This deepened moral feeling of the nation found expression both in
art and in the drama. The order given by the Athenians to Phidias to
carve a statue of Nemesis as a memorial of the war was a sanction
of that interpretation of the Persian overthrow which made it the
work of the avenging goddess. But the fullest expression of this new
ethical sentiment is found in Athenian tragedy.[479] Æschylus was the
representative of this moral awakening and advance. The doctrine of
Nemesis colors all his dramas. He was the first to give to the legend
of Niobe, originally merely a tale of the envy of Apollo, an ethical
meaning as an instance of “retribution for presumptuous sin.”[480] His
imperishable tragedy _Prometheus Bound_ makes the sufferings of the
Titan to be but the just penalty of his presumption and self-will. His
_Agamemnon_ depicts with tragic intensity the awful vengeance with
which the implacable goddess punishes unnatural crime. His _Persians_
teaches how Nemesis humbles insolent pride and “Zeus tames excessive
lifting up of heart.”
In the later Thucydides we meet with the same teaching concerning the
moral government of the world. In a memorable passage of his _History
of the Peloponnesian War_ the historian becomes the moralist and gives
his reader a tragic illustration of the workings of the law of Nemesis.
Thucydides is approaching the chapter in his history which depicts
the terrible catastrophe which befell the Athenians in Sicily. He
skillfully foreshadows the coming tragedy by preluding his narrative
of the Sicilian Expedition with an account of the arrogant and wicked
conduct of the Athenians in driving the Melians from their island home
and adding the stolen land to their own empire.[481] This high-handed
crime, like the impiety of the presumptuous Mede at the Hellespont,
arouses the avenging Nemesis. The reader forecasts the future, and
in the cruel fate of the Melians reads the doom of the Athenian army
before Syracuse.
This moralizing of the primitive unethical conception of the gods as
envious and unjust, and the evolving therefrom of the morally advanced
doctrine of Nemesis, is an instructive illustration of how, as time
passed, Greek ethical feeling was deepened and Greek ethical thought
was purified and elevated through intellectual progress and the
teachings of experience.[482]
[Sidenote: Further moralization of
the doctrine of Nemesis]
There was a still further evolution of Greek ethical thought along
the line traced above. The mutations and tragedies of life,--terrible
reverses of fortune, sudden loss of reputation and friends,
irremediable ruin following great prosperity,--these things are by a
truer moral insight recognized as the sign neither of the envy nor of
the righteous anger of the gods, but of the divine pity and love.[483]
“The wholesomeness of punishment for the wrongdoer himself is the
crown of Æschylean ethics.”[484] Phidias taught the same lofty truth
through carving the myth of Prometheus Unbound on the throne of his
Olympian Zeus. It spoke, as no other scene wrought there, of the moral
significance of suffering, of divine mercy and deliverance.[485] And
Plato’s philosophy accords with the Æschylean teaching that “Zeus has
put in suffering sovereign instruction.” “Then this must be our notion
of the just man,” he says, “that even when he is in poverty or sickness
or any other seeming misfortune, all things will in the end work
together for good to him in life and death.”[486]
In this ethical interpretation of the vicissitudes of human life, of
the miscarriage of ambitious plans, the wrecking of high hopes, the
Greek thinkers reached at last the same elevated point of view that was
attained by the great prophets of the Hebrew race.[487]
[Sidenote: The amelioration of war
rules and practices]
In the ethics of war a similar though less marked development in moral
feeling is traceable. Aside from the relapse into the practices of
savagery under the malign influence of the Peloponnesian War, there
was throughout Greek history a slow but steady amelioration of the
primitive barbarities of warfare. In the Homeric Age moral feeling had
hardly begun to exercise its influence in humanizing war and in setting
limits to the rights of the conqueror. The Greeks of Homer were in
some respects almost on the level of savages in their war practices.
The life of the captive was in the hands of his captor, and he might
be slain without offense to the common conscience. Women and children
were, as a matter of course, appropriated by the conqueror or sold
into slavery. Homer relates as something to be gloried in, how his hero
Achilles dragged the body of Hector around the walls of Troy. Such an
act of savagery evidently stirred in the poet’s listeners no feelings
of reprobation.[488]
In the historical period the mitigation of the barbarities of war was,
after the protection of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, a chief
object of the celebrated Amphictyonic League. The oath taken by the
members of the league included the following engagement: “We will not
destroy any Amphictyonic town, nor cut it off from running water,
in war or in peace.” This was one of the most noteworthy efforts in
antiquity to lay restraint upon the primitive license of war. Limits
are set to the rights of the conqueror. War begins to have rules.
From the words which Thucydides puts into the mouth of the Platæans at
the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, we gather that at that time
the common sentiment of Hellas condemned the slaughter of prisoners of
war.[489] At Athens this sentiment had found embodiment in the laws,
which forbade the slaying of war captives. But under the demoralizing
influences of the long and bitter struggle between Sparta and Athens,
the little gain which had been made in the humanizing of war during
the preceding centuries was lost. Prisoners of war were sold into
slavery or killed without the least offense being given to the numbed
conscience of Hellas.[490] Even the terrible massacre, toward the end
of the war, of the four thousand Athenian prisoners at Ægospotami, by
the Spartan Lysander, awakened no protest in Greece at large.[491]
Never has “the moral damage of war” had a more tragic illustration.[492]
During the century following the Peloponnesian War, however, there
seems to have been a positive advance in this domain. In this period
the grosser atrocities of war were in a measure mitigated by a growing
humanitarian sentiment. But all efforts to humanize war seem to have
been limited to wars between Greek and Greek. From first to last in
Greek history war against barbarians was waged practically without the
least mitigation of its primitive barbarities. It was the practice of
Alexander the Great in his campaigns in Asia to massacre the men of
non-Greek cities taken by assault, and to sell the women and children
as slaves. We hear no protest, even on the part of the philosophers,
against these atrocities so long as it is non-Greeks who are the
victims of them.
But though the efforts of the Greeks to regulate and limit the rights
of the conqueror were confined to wars of Greek against Greek, still
these efforts are significant as a sign of an awakening ethical
sentiment in this domain. This is a prophecy of a future day, distant
though it be, when the growing conscience of mankind shall have
rendered wars between civilized nations an impossible crime.
[Sidenote: Efforts to prevent war
by arbitration]
The common Greek conscience never condemned war in itself. There never
sprang up in Greece an agitation like the Peace Movement of to-day in
Christendom. How deeply ingrained in the Greek mind was the conviction
that war is a part of the established order of things is shown by the
fact that their treaties ending open hostilities were ordinarily drawn
for a limited term of years. They were merely truces, as though peace
were only an incident in international relations.
Even the philosophers regarded a state of war as the normal and natural
relation of Hellenes and barbarians. Aristotle, as we have seen,
taught that barbarians might, without moral scruple, be hunted like
wild animals.[493] Plato had no word of condemnation of war by Greek
against non-Greek. But the Greeks had an uneasy feeling respecting the
rightfulness of war between Greek and Greek; and there came a time when
the best-instructed conscience of Greece positively denounced wars
of this kind. Plato condemned wars between Hellenes and Hellenes as
unnatural.[494] This feeling had a kind of restraining influence upon
the Greek cities, and there are many instances of arbitration in Greek
history. Sometimes a single person of eminence acted as mediator; but
oftener some city or league like the Delphian Amphictyony was chosen
as the arbitrator. In the Hellenistic Age the Roman Senate frequently
undertook the commission of arbitrating quarrels. The cities concerned
were sometimes bound by oath or by a deposit of money to abide by the
decision. Oftener, however, the decisions rendered, like those by the
Hague Tribunal of to-day, depended for their execution upon the good
will and honor of the states concerned. There are instances recorded
where one or both of the parties refused to abide by the judgment of
the arbitrator.[495]
Various motives, it is true, were at work in these arbitration
treaties, but the ethical motive was certainly operative to a greater
or less degree. There was not lacking the feeling, vague though it may
have been, which was later given explicit expression by Plato, that
war between Greek and Greek was wrong and a crime against Hellenic
civilization.
But the most interesting and instructive of all the measures taken
by the Greeks to limit wars among themselves or to fence them away
from a given district was the consecration, by common consent and
agreement, of the land of Elis--wherein was situated the sacred
Olympia--to perpetual peace and the establishment of a truce of forty
days, embracing the festival period of the Olympian games, during which
it was sacrilegious for one Greek city to make war upon another. With
true vision the philosopher-historian Laurent sees in the little land
of Elis, inviolable as a temple, a prophecy of the time when the whole
earth shall be consecrated to perpetual peace--an ideal toward which
humanity unceasingly advances.[496]
[Sidenote: Socrates and his
relation to the moral movement]
From no other personage in history, aside from the founders of
universal religions, has there flowed such a stream of moral influence
as issued from the life and teachings of Socrates, the son of
Sophroniscus. All the chief ethical systems of the Greco-Roman world
were the development of germs found in his doctrines. The Cyrenaic and
Eleatic, the Cynic, Stoic, and Epicurean, the Platonic, Neoplatonic,
and Aristotelian systems had their sources here. The Stoic and
Neoplatonic systems contributed important elements to early Christian
ethics, while the Aristotelian system exercised a profound influence
upon the scholastic ethics of medieval times. In the contribution
which these various systems, especially the Stoic, have made to the
world’s common fund of ethical thought and feeling is found in large
part the measure of the ethical debt which modern civilization owes to
Hellenism.
Socrates’ aim was to replace the artificial conventional conscience
of his contemporaries by a natural rational conscience; in other
words, to replace customary communal morality by reflective individual
morality.[497] His fundamental doctrine was that virtue is dependent
upon knowledge; indeed he almost or quite made knowledge and virtue one
and the same thing. He maintained that one can no more see the right
without doing it than one can see a proposition to be true without
believing it. Therefore without knowledge--insight--there can be no
true virtue.[498]
But clearness of vision requires the purification of the intellect, the
getting rid of all false intellectual and moral notions; hence the aim
and purpose of Socrates’ unique method of cross-examination was to show
his interlocutor the baseless and mutually contradictory character of
his inherited chance-acquired ideas and beliefs, and to bring him to
that self-knowledge which is the beginning of real knowledge.[499]
This practical identification by Socrates of knowledge and virtue, this
doctrine of his that it is impossible that one should not will to do
that which he sees to be good and right, overlooks the saddest and yet
most certain fact of human experience, namely, that perversity of the
human will which causes man though seeing the good to choose the evil.
But it is a theory of human nature which, in the case of such happily
constituted souls as Socrates, in whom the authority of conscience is
sacrosanct and inviolable, is nearly or quite accordant with fact.
With such persons to see an act to be right is to do it. With them
dissonance between knowledge and volition is a moral impossibility.
Right here, however, a just criticism may be made of the Socratic
philosophy. It is true that without self-knowledge, without the
fulfilling of the Delphian requirement, “Know thyself,” one cannot be
truly moral. But neither Socrates nor the Greek philosophers in general
recognized that this self-knowledge comes through right living rather
than through right thinking. As Goethe discerningly observes, man comes
to know himself not through reflection but through conduct: “Do your
duty and thou wilt know what thou art.”[500]
And for the common moral life of the world there is a profound
teaching in this Socratic doctrine which makes knowledge the spring
of virtue.[501] There is in knowledge, in insight, in the clear
recognition of the relation of man’s highest good to virtue, an
impelling force and authority. As the world advances in true knowledge,
it will advance in true morality. The Renaissance is ever the precursor
of the Reformation. It is this fact which should make optimists of
us all, for the unceasing advance of the world in knowledge is well
assured.
In the ethical system of Socrates we have a good illustration of
the truth that great men are the product of their age. With all his
originality and profound spiritual insight, Socrates could not and did
not rise much above the plane of the common moral consciousness of his
contemporaries. He stood on essentially Greek ground. His morality was
the morality of his time and place. In his practical code of morals
he made the Greek virtue of self-control or moderation a cardinal
virtue; he laid the Greek emphasis upon the civic virtues, dying
rather than disobey or evade the decree of his city; he entertained
the common Greek ideas respecting the family and the domestic virtues;
he saw nothing to disapprove in the life of the hetæra; he viewed the
beautiful from a standpoint wholly Greek, almost identifying beauty
with goodness; he was thoroughly Greek in the aristocratic tendency
of his ethical teachings, making the practice of true virtue the
prerogative of the cultured class alone; he had the ordinary Greek
conscience in regard to slavery; and he never detached himself from
that narrow Greek prejudice which saw in the Hellenes the elect race.
He never proclaimed, as did many a later Greek and Roman moralist, the
essential unity of the human race.
[Sidenote: Plato and his ethical
system]
Socrates made virtue and man’s moral nature the subject of philosophic
reflection. His pupil, Plato, systematized his master’s teachings, and,
reducing these and the common ethical notions of his time to scientific
form laid the basis of the science of ethics.
Plato agreed with Socrates in teaching that to know the good is
necessarily to seek it. He accordingly makes wisdom the first of the
virtues, by wisdom meaning insight, the clear recognition of what
constitutes the highest good. Issuing from this primary virtue of
wisdom, like a stream from a fountain, are the virtues of courage,
temperance, and justice.
From wisdom comes courage, for perfect knowledge of good and evil casts
out fear; and moderation, for knowledge of higher and lower, of the
penalty that awaits all excess, leads to prudence and self-control; and
justice, for knowledge of one’s relations to one’s fellows creates
consideration for the rights of others. Plato here simply systematizes
and reduces to scientific form those various virtues which the common
Greek conscience recognized as constituting moral excellence.
Particularly noteworthy is Plato’s doctrine that virtue in the state is
the same as virtue in the individual. There is need of emphasis being
laid anew upon this teaching at the present time, when the disciples of
Machiavelli would give fresh vogue to the doctrine of a double standard
of morality, one for the individual and another for the state. The
modern world might well sit at Plato’s feet and learn that virtue is
ever one and the same, and that the moral law can no more be traversed
with impunity by a nation than by a single individual.
In many of his ethical teachings Plato anticipated and deeply
influenced Christian doctrines. He has been called the precursor of
the Fathers of the Church. “His ideas on virtue,” as Denis observes,
“take us far from Greece and antiquity; they seem addressed rather
to the saints and anchorites than to the citizens of Sparta and
Athens.”[502] His doctrines that the way of approach to God is through
contemplation; that withdrawal from the turmoil of public life is a
furtherance of the true life; that the body is a “prison house” of the
soul; that the soul is immortal and that there awaits it in the after
life recompense for deeds done in the flesh; that expiation for sin is
an ethical necessity; that punishment is not a deterrent and restraint
but a remedy that restores to health the sin-diseased soul[503]--all
these ideas and principles were in exact accord with the Christian
moral consciousness, and through St. Augustine and other Fathers of the
Church came to enrich and reënforce the ethical system of the monastic
and the papal Church of the medieval age.
Perhaps what is the most admirable of Plato’s teachings is embodied in
this petition: “And may I, being of sound mind, do to others as I would
that they should do to me.”[504] The significance of this lies in the
fact that it is a prayer, and that the petitioner asks that he may be
of sound mind when he reflects on what he would like to have others do
to him.
Yet notwithstanding the loftiness and nobility of much of Plato’s
ethical thought, still, like Socrates, he stood almost wholly on
Greek ground. His ethics is scarcely more than a justification of
the common Greek morality of his time. He destroys the family in the
interest of the state; he approves of the exposition of ill-formed,
unpromising infants; he makes morality to be a class thing--only select
and cultured souls are with him capable of genuine virtue. He accepts
slavery as a necessary institution of the state; he practically shuts
out the non-Greek world from the sphere of morality;[505] and with
the common Greek he believes that to do evil to one’s enemies is an
imperative duty.[506] Nor does Plato, like Hebrew seer, rise high
enough above the general Greek viewpoint to discern the great law of
moral progress, and to prevision the historical goal--ethical world
unity.
[Sidenote: Aristotle and his
ethics]
Aristotle makes Plato’s classification of the virtues the basis of
his well-rounded system of ethics. In one important respect, however,
he differs from Plato; he did not believe that knowledge of the right
necessarily leads to its practice. He recognized the fact that man
though knowing the good often perversely follows evil.
The great defect of Aristotelian ethics is its failure to rise to the
ethical conception of collective humanity. In the moral inequality
of men, which he assumes as the presupposition of his ethics, he even
exaggerated the common Greek view. He divided men so rigorously into
classes with varying grades of moral capacity that his moral system was
ethically like the caste system of the Indian Brahmans. To affirm the
moral equality of men seemed to him to be a species of treason against
the true humanity, a crime against Greek civilization.
According to Aristotle the slave was a being so morally different
from the freeman as to constitute practically another species. He was
not wholly incapable of virtue, but could practice only such servile
virtues as obedience and humility. The last, though a virtue in a
slave, was in a freeman an unworthy weakness.
Barbarians were slaves by nature. Hence it was right for the Greeks
to make war on them and reduce them to slavery, because “for that
end they were born.”[507] Plato had in his _Laws_ accepted slavery
as a political necessity; Aristotle proclaimed it as a part of the
natural order of things. This doctrine had far-reaching historical
consequences. Aristotle’s declaration that slaves are merely animated
instruments, are men incapable of virtue, worked as powerfully in
destroying ancient slavery as the _obiter dictum_ of Chief Justice
Taney of the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Dred Scott
case, that negro slaves have no rights which the white man is bound to
respect, worked for the destruction of negro slavery in the Southern
states. For, as Professor Denis says, by pushing too far the argument,
by founding slavery on natural right, Aristotle provoked thought and
protest, and led the Stoics to reject with indignation his theories
and to proclaim the moral equality of master and slave, of Greek and
barbarian.[508]
Aristotle’s ethics exercised very little influence either upon the
actual moral life or the ethical speculations of antiquity; but in the
medieval time it came to exert a profound influence upon Christian
ethics.[509] The schoolmen made it the trunk into which they grafted
Christian morals--with incongruous results, as we shall see later.
[Sidenote: Decay of the Greek city
state and the accompanying decay
of the Greek ideal of character]
The political revolution in Hellas in the fourth century B.C. had deep
import for Greek morality. That century saw the triumph of Macedonia
over the Greek cities. This meant the triumph of despotic monarchy
over city democracy. This revolution in the political realm meant a
great revolution in the realm of morals, for the reason that, as we
have seen, the old Greek ideal of excellence was largely based upon the
relation of the individual to the state. With the loss of Greek liberty
the very basis of the Greek ideal of character was removed, and the
virtues of the type tended to disappear.[510]
In the despotic monarchies of the successors of Alexander there was
little room for the growth and exercise of those virtues of citizenship
which had been nourished in the free air of the ancient city. The
virtues now in vogue and fostered by the new monarchical régime were
no longer those of the patriot citizen and the patriot warrior, but
those of the pliant subject, the servile courtier, and the mercenary
soldier. In Plutarch’s _Lives_, out of the twenty heroes and worthies
whom the biographer selected as the noblest representatives of the
virtues most highly esteemed by the Greeks, we find only two who lived
after the general loss of Greek freedom, and these[511] were men whose
characters were formed in the cities of the Achæan League, in which
the ancient liberties of Hellas were maintained till the rise of the
Roman power. It could not be otherwise, so completely were the fortunes
of the Greek moral ideal bound up with the fortunes of the Greek city
state.
But besides the decay of the free city there were other causes
contributing to the moral decadence which marked Hellenism in the
Alexandrian Age. The close contact of Greek culture with the corrupt
society of the Orient had disastrous consequences for Greek morality.
The principal courts of the Hellenistic East were plague spots of moral
contagion. The virus of gross sensual immorality was communicated to
Greece, and Greek society was fatally infected. The Orontes emptied
into the Ilissus and the Eurotas, as later it emptied into the Tiber.
And still another contributing cause of the moral decline in Hellas was
the sudden acquisition of vast individual and social wealth through the
conquest and exploitation of the East. The morals of no age or people
have been proof against suddenly acquired riches. One explanation of
this is that new and untried sources of pleasure, most often illicit
sensuous pleasure, are opened up, and the temptation to selfish
indulgence is irresistible, coming as it does before self-restraint, in
the face of these unaccustomed solicitations, has become a habit.
Still another cause of the moral degeneracy of the age, one which we
shall have occasion to speak of more at length a little further on,
is to be sought in the fact that the period was one of transition in
religion as well as in politics and social relations. Greek morality
was, it is true, based in the main upon the old system of independent
city life. Yet Greek morality was in a way braced by religion and even
in part based upon it. Now in the Alexandrian Age the religious system
of Hellas was undergoing a process of disintegration. Men were losing
faith in their ancestral gods. Philosophic skepticism was widespread.
Inevitably this movement in the religious realm caused all that part
of the moral system dependent in any degree upon the old religious
doctrines and teachings to weaken and crumble away.
[Sidenote: Ethical products of
the Hellenistic Age: Stoicism and
Epicureanism]
There were, however, two ethical products of the Hellenistic Age which
render that period one of the most important of all epochs in the moral
evolution of humanity. These were Stoicism and Epicureanism. At first
blush it may seem strange that out of the same environment there should
arise two systems of life and thought so strongly contrasted. But both
of these systems are perfectly natural, indeed inevitable, products
of an epoch, such as the Alexandrian Age was, of transition and moral
decadence. In such times strong, self-reliant, deeply moral natures
ever seek refuge in the philosophy and creed of Zeno, while those of
less sturdy faith in the moral order of the world, of a less strong
sense of duty, turn to the philosophy and creed of Epicurus.
Springing up in Greece as an offshoot of the Socratic philosophy just
after the death of Alexander, Stoicism became the creed of the select
spirits of the age. The crowning virtues of the moral ideal it held
aloft were self-control, imperturbability, the patient endurance of the
ills of life. Amidst the wreck of worlds one must stand unmoved and
erect.
In the very rigid restraint it placed upon the appetites, passions, and
emotions the Stoic ideal of character differed widely from the ordinary
Greek ideal. It approached here the ascetic type.[512] However, in
general the Stoic type of character was closely related to the historic
ideal of the Greek race. The Stoics adopted the fundamental maxim of
classical Greek morality, namely, that man should live conformably
to nature. They possessed the common Greek consciousness in the light
esteem in which they held the family relations and duties. They were
aristocratic in their moral sympathies and looked upon the multitude
with disdain. They regarded the gentler virtues, compassion and
forgiveness, as weaknesses, and ranked humility as a virtue only in the
slave.
Because of the weak sense of duty possessed in general by the Greeks,
the Stoic ideal of character did not become a really important factor
in the ethical life of the ancient world till after its adoption by the
finer spirits, like Marcus Aurelius, among the Romans, to whose sense
of “the majesty of duty” the ideal made strong and effective appeal. It
never influenced the masses, but for several centuries it gave moral
support and guidance to the best men of the Roman race.
Alongside Stoicism grew up Epicureanism, which made pleasure, not gross
sensuous pleasure, but rational refined enjoyment, the chief good, and
hence the pursuit of pleasure “the highest wisdom and morality.” But
this philosophy made pleasurable feeling dependent upon tranquillity
of mind. To secure this mental repose, one must get rid of fear of the
gods and of death. These ignoble and disquieting fears Epicurus and his
disciples sought to banish by teaching that the gods do not concern
themselves with human affairs, and that death ends all for man.
Epicureanism in its moral code was at one with the common Greek
consciousness in making moderation or prudence a cardinal virtue;[513]
but it differed radically from the ordinary Greek mode of thought in
its depreciation and neglect of the civic virtues. Hence the system was
at once a symptom and a cause of the decay of the Greek city state and
of the old moral ideal which was based so largely upon it.
The philosophy of Epicurus, as we have already said, is the natural
product of an age of transition and social dislocation. It offers
an ideal of life which is eagerly adopted by those unable to combat
trouble, by those to whom duty does not appeal as something dignified
and majestic. Hence in the decadent and unsettled age of the Roman
Empire it became the rule of life of large numbers of the cultured
classes of society, and must be regarded as one of the disintegrating
agencies of Greco-Roman civilization.
[Sidenote: Advance in humanitarian
feelings and growth in ethical
cosmopolitanism]
A general view of the society of the Hellenistic world toward the
opening of the Christian era discloses the fact that the moral
evolution so long in progress has effected such changes in the Greek
moral consciousness as to render this ethical movement an important
preparation for the incoming of the moral ideal of Christianity. These
changes are especially to be observed in the growth of humanitarian
sentiment and in a broadening of the moral sympathies.
The Greeks, compared with the Romans, were naturally a humane folk.
When it was proposed to introduce at Athens the gladiatorial games,
the orator Demonax told the people that they should first tear down
the ancestral altar to Pity, a shrine which, in the words of Lecky,
“was venerated throughout the ancient world as the first great
assertion among mankind of the supreme sanctity of mercy.”[514] One
of the motives of Pythagoras in forbidding the use of meat as food
was, seemingly, to inspire a horror of shedding blood, even that of an
animal. The laws of Athens permitted no punishment more severe than a
painless death.[515]
This natural humaneness of the Greek spirit deepened as the centuries
passed. Contrasted with the Periclean Age the Platonic Age shows,
Professor Mahaffy affirms, “a greater gentleness and softness, ... a
nearer approach to the greater humanity of Christian teaching.”[516]
We have already noted this movement in the domain of war practices and
customs, where it found expression in the amelioration of the gross,
archaic barbarities of primitive warfare. In the social sphere the
progressive evolution is evidenced by the growing mildness of slavery
and the frequency of the manumission of slaves.[517]
The broadening movement ran parallel with the humanitarian. Classical
Greek morality, as we have seen, was narrow and racial. Now one of
the most important facts in the moral evolution of Hellas was the
broadening of the moral sympathies, especially during the three
centuries immediately preceding our era. This development is connected
closely with the great expansion movement which followed the conquests
of Alexander and which resulted in the Hellenization of the East.
Everywhere the Greeks came in close contact with various peoples upon
whom they had been accustomed to look with aversion or disdain. Ancient
prejudices were dispelled, race barriers were leveled, and the moral
sympathies overspread wide areas from which they had hitherto been
excluded by ignorance and race egotism.
It would doubtless be unhistorical to represent this movement as
anything more than a tendency--a dawning recognition by select spirits
of the ethical kinship of all men, and the coextension of the moral
law with the human race. It may, however, rightly be compared with
that broadening of the moral feelings which we have traced among the
people of Israel, and which resulted in a morality at first as narrow
and exclusive as that of the Greeks, widening at last into the ethical
universalism of the great teachers of the nation.
The widening movement was represented, and was given its chief impetus,
by the Stoics. The Stoic ideal of character differed from the ordinary
Greek ideal especially in its cosmopolitanism. Influenced by the spirit
of the age in which it had birth, it ignored the old distinction
between Greek and non-Greek and proclaimed the essential brotherhood
of man.[518] The Stoic regarded the world and not his native city as
his fatherland. The Cynics, whom we may regard as extreme Stoics,
looked upon city patriotism as a narrow prejudice and refused to give
love of one’s city a place among the virtues. Just as the Greek age
was merging into the Greco-Roman the broadening movement found its
noblest representative in Plutarch, “the last of the Greeks.”[519]
His chief characteristics were his broad interests and his universal
moral sympathies. He had moved far away from the common Greek
standpoint. He had emancipated himself from the tyranny of the common
Greek prejudices. Under the influences of his time he had become a
cosmopolitan. To him the Greek was no longer an elect race. His moral
sympathies embraced all mankind. His was almost a Christian conscience,
save as to the purely theological virtues.
This enlargement of the intellectual and moral outlook of the Greek
world presaged the dawn of a new epoch in the moral evolution of
humanity. It made easier for many the acceptance of the Gospel
teachings of human brotherhood and universal love. Christian ethics was
largely debtor to the cosmopolitan spirit of Greek culture, especially
as embodied in the Stoic ideal of moral excellence.[520]
To trace further this moral development in the ancient world we must
now turn from following its course among the Greeks to follow it among
that kindred people, the Romans, who, through the political unification
of the world, reënforced this growing universalism in the moral domain,
and thereby reached that ethical conception of collective humanity
which Israel had reached through spiritual intuition, and Hellas
through philosophical reflection and widening culture.[521]