in the Periklean period, it was always a popular thing to attack
it. Some years before or after the death of Perikles there came
to Athens the alien Hippo, the first specifically named atheist
[585] of Greek antiquity. The dubious tradition runs that his tomb
bore the epitaph: "This is the grave of Hippo, whom destiny, in
destroying him, has made the equal of the immortal Gods." [586] If,
as seems likely, he was the Hippo of Rhegion mentioned by Hippolytos,
[587] he speculated as to physical origins in the manner of Thales,
making water generate fire, and that in turn produce the world. [588]
But this is uncertain. Upon him the comic muse of Athens turned its
attacks very much as it did upon Socrates. The old comic poet Kratinos,
a notorious wine-bibber, produced a comedy called The Panoptai (the
"all-seers" or "all eyes"), in which it would appear that the chorus
were made to represent the disciples of Hippo, and to wear a mask
covered with eyes. [589] Drunkenness was a venial fault in comparison
with the presumption to speculate on physics and to doubt the sacred
lore of the populace. The end of the rule of ignorance was that a
theistic philosopher who himself discouraged scientific inquiry was
to pay a heavier penalty than did the atheist Hippo.
§ 7
While Athens was gaining power and glory and beauty without popular
wisdom, the colonial city of Abdera, in Thrace, founded by Ionians,
had like others carried on the great impulse of Ionian philosophy,
and had produced in the fifth century some of the great thinkers of
the race. Concerning the greatest of these, Demokritos, and the next
in importance, Protagoras, we have no sure dates; [590] but it is
probable that the second, whether older or younger, was influenced
by the first, who indeed has influenced all scientific philosophy
down to our own day. How much he learned from his master Leukippos
cannot now be ascertained. [591] The writings which went under
his name appear to have been the productions of the whole Abderite
school; [592] and Epicurus declared that Leukippos was an imaginary
person. [593] What passes for his teaching was constructive science
of cardinal importance; for it is the first clear statement of the
atomic theory; the substitution of a real for an abstract foundation of
things. Whoever were the originator of the theory, there is no doubt as
to the assimilation of the principle by Demokritos, who thus logically
continued the non-theistic line of thought, and developed one of the
most fruitful of all scientific principles. That this idea again is a
direct development from Babylonian science is not impossible; at least
there seems to be no doubt that Demokritos had travelled far and wide,
[594] whether or not he had been brought up, as the tradition goes,
by Persian magi; [595] and that he told how the cosmic views of
Anaxagoras, which scandalized the Athenians, were current in the
East. [596] But he stands out as one of the most original minds in
the whole history of thought. No Greek thinker, not Aristotle himself,
has struck so deep as he into fundamental problems; though the absurd
label of "the laughing philosopher," bestowed on him by some peculiarly
unphilosophic mind, has delayed the later recognition of his greatness,
clear as it was to Bacon. [597] The vital maxim, "Nothing from nothing:
nothing into nothing," derives substantially from him. [598]
His atomic theory, held in conjunction with a conception of
"mind-stuff" similar to that of Anaxagoras, may be termed the
high-water mark of ancient scientific thought; and it is noteworthy
that somewhat earlier in the same age Empedokles of Agrigentum,
another product of the freer colonial life, threw out a certain
glimmer of the Darwinian conception--perhaps more clearly attained
by Anaximandros--that adaptations prevail in nature just because the
adaptations fit organisms to survive, and the non-adapted perish. [599]
In his teaching, too, the doctrine of the indestructibility of
matter is clear and firm; [600] and the denial of anthropomorphic
deity is explicit. [601] But Empedokles wrought out no solid system:
"half-mystic and half-rationalist, he made no attempt to reconcile the
two inconsistent sides of his intellectual character"; [602] and his
explicit teaching of metempsychosis [603] and other Pythagoreanisms
gave foothold for more delusion than he ever dispelled. [604] On the
whole, he is one of the most remarkable personalities of antiquity,
moving among men with a pomp and gravity which made them think of
him as a God, denouncing their sacrifices, and no less their eating
of flesh; and checking his notable self-exaltation by recalling the
general littleness of men. But he did little to enlighten them; and
Aristotle passed on to the world a fatal misconception of his thought
by ascribing to him the notion of automatism where he was asserting a
"necessity" in terms of laws which he avowedly could not explain. [605]
Against such misconception he should have provided. Demokritos,
however, shunned dialectic and discussion, and founded no school;
[606] and although his atomism was later adopted by Epicurus, it was
no more developed on a basis of investigation and experiment than was
the biology of Empedokles. His ethic, though wholly rationalistic,
leant rather to quietism and resignation than to reconstruction,
[607] and found its application only in the later static message of
Epicurus. Greek society failed to set up the conditions needed for
progress beyond the point gained by its unguided forces.
Thus when Protagoras ventured to read, at the house of the freethinking
Euripides, a treatise of his own, beginning with the avowal that he
offered no opinion as to the existence of the Gods, life being too
short for the inquiry, [608] the remark got wind, and he had to fly
for his life, though Euripides and perhaps most of the guests were
very much of the same way of thinking. [609] In the course of his
flight, the tradition goes, the philosopher was drowned; [610] and
his book was publicly burned, all who possessed copies being ordered
by public proclamation to give them up--the earliest known instance
of "censorship of the press." [611] Partisan malice was doubtless
at work in his case as in that of Anaxagoras; for the philosophic
doctrine of Protagoras became common enough. It is not impossible,
though the date is doubtful, that the attack on him was one of the
results of the great excitement in Athens in the year 415 B.C. over
the sacrilegious mutilation of the figures of Hermes, the familial or
boundary-God, in the streets by night. It was about that time that the
poet Diagoras of Melos was proscribed for atheism, he having declared
that the non-punishment of a certain act of iniquity proved that
there were no Gods. [612] It has been surmised, with some reason,
that the iniquity in question was the slaughter of the Melians by
the Athenians in 416 B.C., [613] and the Athenian resentment in
that case was personal and political rather than religious. [614]
For some time after 415 the Athenian courts made strenuous efforts
to punish every discoverable case of impiety; and parodies of the
Eleusinian mysteries (resembling the mock Masses of Catholic Europe)
were alleged against Alkibiades and others. [615] Diagoras, who was
further charged with divulging the Eleusinian and other mysteries,
and with making firewood of an image of Herakles, telling the God thus
to perform his thirteenth labour by cooking turnips, [616] became
thenceforth one of the proverbial atheists of the ancient world,
[617] and a reward of a silver talent was offered for killing him,
and of two talents for his capture alive; [618] despite which he seems
to have escaped. But no antidote to the bane of fanaticism was found
or sought; and the most famous publicist in Athens was the next victim.
The fatality of the Athenian development is seen not only in
the direct hostility of the people to rational thought, but in
their loss of their hold even on their public polity. For lack
of political judgment, moved always by the passions which their
literary culture cherished, they so mishandled their affairs in the
long and demoralizing Peloponnesian war that they were at one time
cowed by their own aristocracy, on essentially absurd pretexts,
into abandoning the democratic constitution. Its restoration was
followed at the final crisis by another tyranny, also short-lived,
but abnormally bloody and iniquitous; and though the people at its
overthrow showed a moderation in remarkable contrast to the cruelty and
rapacity of the aristocrats, the effect of such extreme vicissitude
was to increase the total disposition towards civic violence and
coercion. And while the people menaced freethinking in religion,
the aristocracies opposed freethinking in politics. Thus under the
Thirty Tyrants all intellectual teaching was forbidden; and Kritias,
himself accused of having helped Alkibiades to parody the mysteries,
sharply interdicted the political rationalism of Sokrates, [619]
who according to tradition had been one of his own instructors.
It was a result of the general movement of mind throughout the
rest of the Hellenic world that freethinkers of culture were still
numerous. Archelaos of Miletos, the most important disciple of
Anaxagoras; according to a late tradition, the master of Sokrates;
and the first systematic teacher of Ionic physical science in Athens,
taught the infinity of the universe, grasped the explanation of
the nature of sound, and set forth on purely rationalistic lines
the social origin and basis of morals, thus giving Sokrates his
practical lead. [620] Another disciple of Anaxagoras, Metrodoros of
Lampsakos (not to be confounded with Metrodoros of Chios, and the
other Metrodoros of Lampsakos who was the friend of Epicurus, both
also freethinkers), carried out zealously his master's teaching as to
the deities and heroes of Homer, resolving them into mere elemental
combinations and physical agencies, and making Zeus stand for mind,
and Athenê for art. [621] And in the belles lettres of Athens itself,
in the dramas of Euripides [480-406 B.C.], who is said to have been
the ardent disciple of Anaxagoras, [622] to have studied Herakleitos,
[623] and to have been the friend of Sokrates and Protagoras, there
emerge traces enough of a rationalism not to be reconciled with the
old belief in the Gods. If Euripides has nowhere ventured on such
a terrific paradox as the Prometheus, he has in a score of passages
revealed a stress of skepticism which, inasmuch as he too uses all the
forms of Hellenic faith, [624] deepens our doubt as to the beliefs of
Æschylus. Euripides even gave overt proof of his unbelief, beginning
his Melanippe with the line: "Zeus, whoever Zeus be, for I know not,
save by report," an audacity which evoked a great uproar. In a later
production the passage was prudently altered; [625] but he never put
much check on his native tendency to analyse and criticize on all
issues--a tendency fostered, as we have seen, [626] by the constant
example of real and poignant dialectic in the Athenian dikastery, and
the whole drift of the Athenian stage. In his case the tendency even
overbalances the artistic process; [627] but it has the advantage of
involving a very bold handling of vital problems. Not satisfied with
a merely dramatic presentment of lawless Gods, Euripides makes his
characters impeach them as such, [628] or, again, declare that there
can be no truth in the "miserable tales of poets" which so represent
them. [629] Not content with putting aside as idle such a fable as
that of the sun's swerving from his course in horror at the crime of
Atreus, [630] and that of the Judgment of Paris, [631] he attacks
with a stringent scorn the whole apparatus of oracles, divination,
and soothsaying. [632] And if the Athenian populace cried out at
the hardy opening of the Melanippe, he nonetheless gave them again
and again his opinion that no man knew anything of the Gods. [633]
Of orthodox protests against freethinking inquiry he gives a plainly
ironical handling. [634] As regards his constructive opinions, we
have from him many expressions of the pantheism which had by his time
permeated the thought of perhaps most of the educated Greeks. [635]
Here again, as in the case of Æschylus, there arises the problem of
contradiction; for Euripides, too, puts often in the mouths of his
characters emphatic expressions of customary piety. The conclusion in
the two cases must be broadly the same--that whereas an unbelieving
dramatist may well make his characters talk in the ordinary way of
deity and of religion, it is unintelligible that a believing one should
either go beyond the artistic bounds of his task to make them utter an
unbelief which must have struck the average listener as strange and
noxious, or construct a drama of which the whole effect is to insist
on the odiousness of the action of the Supreme God. And the real
drift of Euripides is so plain that one modern and Christian scholar
has denounced him as an obnoxious and unbelieving sophist who abused
his opportunity as a producer of dramas under religious auspices to
"shake the ground-works of religion" [636] and at the same time of
morals; [637] while another and a greater scholar, less vehement in his
orthodoxy, more restrainedly condemns the dramatist for employing myths
in which he did not believe, instead of inventing fresh plots. [638]
Christian scholars are thus duly unready to give him credit for his
many-sided humanity, nobly illustrated in his pleas for the slave and
his sympathy with suffering barbarians. [639] Latterly the recognition
of Euripides's freethinking has led to the description of him as
"Euripides the Rationalist," in a treatise which represents him as a
systematic assailant of the religion of his day. Abating somewhat of
that thesis, which imputes more of system to the Euripidean drama than
it possesses, we may sum up that the last of the great tragedians of
Athens, and the most human and lovable of the three, was assuredly
a rationalist in matters of religion. It is noteworthy that he used
more frequently than any other ancient dramatist the device of a
deus ex machina to end a play. [640] It was probably because for him
the conception had no serious significance. [641] In the Alkestis its
[non-mechanical] use is one of the most striking instances of dramatic
irony in all literature. The dead Alkestis, who has died to save the
life of her husband, is brought back from the Shades by Herakles,
who figures as a brawling bully. Only the thinkers of the time could
realize the thought that underlay such a tragi-comedy.
Dr. Verrall's Euripides the Rationalist, 1897, is fairly summed up
by Mr. Haigh (Tragic Drama of the Greeks, pp. 262, 265, notes):
"He considers that Euripides was a skeptic of the aggressive
type, whose principal object in writing tragedy was to attack the
State religion, but who, perceiving that it would be dangerous
to pose as an open enemy, endeavoured to accomplish his ends by
covert ridicule.... His plays ... contain in reality two separate
plots--the ostensible and superficial plot, which was intended
to satisfy the orthodox, and the rationalized modification which
lay half concealed beneath it, and which the intelligent skeptic
would easily detect." For objections to this thesis see Haigh, as
cited; Jevons, Hist. of Greek Lit. p. 222, note; and Dr. Mozley's
article in the Classical Review, Nov. 1895, pp. 407-13. As to the
rationalism of Euripides in general see many of the passages cited
by Bishop Westcott in his Essays in the Hist. of Relig. Thought
in the West, 1891, pp. 102-27. And cp. Dickinson, The Greek View
of Life, pp. 46-49; Grote, Hist. i, 346-48; Zeller, Socrates and
the Socratic Schools, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 231; Murray, Anc. Greek
Lit. pp. 256, 264-66.
Over the latest play of Euripides, the Bacchæ, as over one
of the last plays of Æschylus, the Prometheus, there has been
special debate. It was probably written in Macedonia (cp. ll.,
408, 565), whither the poet had gone on the invitation of King
Archelaos, when, according to the ancient sketch of his life,
"he had to leave Athens because of the malicious exultation over
him of nearly all the city." The trouble, it is conjectured, "may
have been something connected with his prosecution for impiety,
the charge on which Socrates was put to death a few years after"
(Murray, Euripides translated into English Rhyming Verse, 1902,
introd. essay, p. lii). Inasmuch as the play glorifies Dionysos,
and the "atheist" Pentheus (l. 995) who resists him is slain by the
maddened Bacchantes, led by his own mother, it is seriously argued
that the drama "may be regarded as in some sort an apologia and
an eirenicon, or as a confession on the part of the poet that
he was fully conscious that in some of the simple legends of
the popular faith there was an element of sound sense (!) which
thoughtful men must treat with forbearance, resolved on using it,
if possible, as an instrument for inculcating a truer morality,
instead of assailing it with a presumptuous denial" (J. E. Sandys,
The Bacchæ of Euripides, 1880, introd. pp. lxxv-vi). Here we have
the conformist ethic of the average English academic brought to
bear on, and ascribed to, the personality of the Greek dramatist.
An academic of the same order, Prof. Mahaffy, similarly
suggests that "among the half-educated Macedonian youth, with
whom literature was coming into fashion, the poet may have
met with a good deal of that insolent second-hand skepticism
which is so offensive to a deep and serious thinker, and he
may have wished to show them that he was not, as they doubtless
hailed him, the apostle of this random speculative arrogance"
(Euripides in Class. Writ. Ser. 1879, p. 85). As against the
eminently "random" and "speculative arrogance" of this particular
passage--a characteristic product of the obscurantist functions
of some British university professors in matters of religion,
and one which may fitly be pronounced offensive to honest men--it
may be suggested on the other hand that, if Euripides got into
trouble in Athens by his skepticism, he would be likely in
Macedonia to encounter rather a greater stress of bigotry than
a freethinking welcome, and that a non-critical presentment of
the savage religious legend was forced on him by his environment.
Much of the academic discussion on the subject betrays a singular
slowness to accept the dramatic standpoint. Even Prof. Murray,
the finest interpreter of Euripides, dogmatically pronounces
(introd. cited p. lvii) that "there is in the Bacchæ real
and heartfelt glorification of Dionysus," simply because of
the lyrical exaltation of the Bacchic choruses. But lyrical
exaltation was in character here above all other cases; and it
was the dramatist's business to present it. To say that "again
and again in the lyrics you feel that the Mænads are no longer
merely observed and analysed: the poet has entered into them
and they into him," is nothing to the purpose. That the words
which fall from the Chorus or its Leader are at times "not the
words of a raving Bacchante, but of a gentle and deeply musing
philosopher," is still nothing to the purpose. The same could
be said of Shakespeare's handling of Macbeth. What, in sooth,
would the real words of a raving Bacchante be like? If Milton lent
dignity to Satan in Puritan England, was Euripides to do less for
Dionysos in Macedonia? That he should make Pentheus unsympathetic
belongs to the plot. If he had made a noble martyr of the victim
as well as an impassive destroyer of the God, he might have had
to leave Macedonia more precipitately than he left Athens.
Prof. Murray recognizes all the while that "Euripides never
palliates things. He leaves this savage story as savage as he
found it"; that he presents a "triumphant and hateful Dionysus,"
who gives "a helpless fatalistic answer, abandoning the moral
standpoint," when challenged by the stricken Agavê, whom the
God has moved to dismember her own son; and that, in short,
"Euripides is, as usual, critical or even hostile to the myth that
he celebrates" (as cited, pp. liv-lvi). To set against these solid
facts, as does Mr. Sandys (as cited, pp. lxxiii-iv), some passages
in the choruses (ll. 395, 388, 427, 1002), and in a speech of
Dionysos (1002), enouncing normal platitudes about the wisdom of
thinking like other people and living a quiet life, is to strain
very uncritically the elastic dramatic material. So far from being
"not entirely in keeping" with the likely sentiments of a chorus of
Asiatic women, the first-cited passages--telling that cleverness
is not wisdom, and that true wisdom acquiesces in the opinions
of ordinary people--are just the kind of mock-modest ineptitudes
always current among the complacent ignorant; and the sage language
ascribed to the heartless God is simply a presentment of deity
in the fashion in which all Greeks expected to have it presented.
The fact remains that the story of the Bacchæ, in which the
frenzied mother helps to tear to pieces her own son, and the God
can but say it is all fated, is as revolting to the rational moral
sense as the story of the Prometheus. If this be an eirenicon,
it is surely the most ironical in literary history. To see
in the impassive delineation of such a myth an acceptance
by the poet of popular "sound sense," and "a desire to put
himself right with the public in matters on which he had been
misunderstood," seems possible only to academics trained to a
particular handling of the popular creed of their own day. This
view, first put forward by Tyrwhitt (Conjecturæ in Æschylum,
etc. 1822), was adopted by Schoone (p. 20 of his ed. cited
by Sandys). Lobeck, greatly daring wherever rationalism was
concerned, suggested that Euripides actually wrote against the
rationalists of his time, in commendation of the Bacchic cult,
and to justify the popular view in religious matters as against
that of the cultured (Aglaophamus--passages quoted by Sandys,
p. lxxvi). Musgrave, following Tyrwhitt, makes the play out
to be an attack on Kritias, Alkibiades, and other freethinkers,
including even Sokrates! K. O. Müller, always ineptly conventional
in such matters, finds Euripides in this play "converted into a
positive believer, or, in other words, convinced that religion
should not be exposed to the subtilties of reasoning; that the
understanding of man cannot subvert ancestral traditions which
are as old as time," and so on; and in the Polonius-platitudes
of Tiresias and the worldly-wise counsels of Cadmus he finds
"great impressiveness" (Hist. Lit. Anc. Greece, p. 379).
The bulk of the literature of the subject, in short, suggests
sombre reflections on the moral value of much academic
thinking. There are, however, academic suffrages on the side of
common sense. Mr. Haigh (Tragic Drama of the Greeks, pp. 313-14)
gently dismisses the "recantation" theory; Hartung points out
(Euripides restitutus, 1844, ii, 542, cited by Sandys) that
Euripides really treats the legend of Pentheus very much as
he treats the myth of Hippolytos thirty years earlier, showing
no change of moral attitude. E. Pfander (cited by Sandys) took
a similar view; as did Mr. Tyrrell in his edition of the play
(1871), though the latter persisted in taking the commonplaces
of the chorus about true wisdom (395) for the judgments of
the dramatist. Euripides could hardly have been called "the
philosopher of the stage" (Athenæus, iv, 48) on the strength
of sentiments which are common to the village wiseacres of all
ages. The critical method which ascribes to Euripides a final
hostility to rationalism would impute to Shakespeare the religion
of Isabella in Measure for Measure, when the talk of the Duke as a
friar counselling a condemned man is wholly "pagan" or unbelieving.
In his admirable little book, Euripides and his Age (1913),
Prof. Murray repeats his account of the Bacchæ with some additions
and modifications. He adheres to the "heartfelt glorification
of Dionysus," but adds (p. 188): "No doubt it is Dionysus
in some private sense of the poet's own ... some spirit of
... inspiration and untrammelled life. The presentation is not
consistent, however magical the poetry." As to the theory that
"the veteran free-lance of thought ... now saw the error of his
ways and was returning to orthodoxy," he pronounces that "Such
a view strikes us now as almost childish in its incompetence"
(p. 190). He also reminds us that "the whole scheme of the play
is given by the ancient ritual.... All kinds of small details
which seemed like ... rather fantastic invention on the part
of Euripides are taken straight from Æschylus or the ritual,
or both.... The Bacchæ is not free invention; it is tradition"
(pp. 182-84). And in sum: "It is well to remember that, for all
his lucidity of language, Euripides is not lucid about religion"
(p. 190).
In conclusion we may ask, How could he be? He wrote plays for the
Greek stage, which had its very roots in religious tradition, and
was run for the edification of a crudely believing populace. It is
much that in so doing Euripides could a hundred times challenge
the evil religious ethic given him for his subject-matter; and
his lasting vogue in antiquity showed that he had a hold on the
higher Greek conscience which no other dramatist ever possessed.
But while Euripides must thus have made a special appeal to the
reflecting minority even in his own day, it is clear that he was not
at first popular with the many; and his efforts, whatever he may have
hoped to achieve, could not suffice to enlighten the democracy. The
ribald blasphemies of his enemy, the believing Aristophanes,
[642] could avail more to keep vulgar religion in credit than the
tragedian's serious indictment could effect against it; and they served
at the same time to belittle Euripides for the multitude in his own
day. Aristophanes is the typical Tory in religion; non-religious
himself, like Swift, he hates the honestly anti-religious man; and
he has the crowd with him. The Athenian faith, as a Catholic scholar
remarks, [643] "was more disposed to suffer the buffooneries of a
comedian than the serious negation of a philosopher." The average
Greek seemed to think that the grossest comic impiety did no harm,
where serious negation might cause divine wrath. [644] And so there
came no intellectual salvation for Athens from the drama which was
her unique achievement. The balance of ignorance and culture was
not changed. Evidently there was much rationalism among the studious
few. Plato in the Laws [645] speaks both of the man-about-town type of
freethinker and of those who, while they believe in no Gods, live well
and wisely and are in good repute. But with Plato playing the superior
mind and encouraging his fellow-townsmen to believe in the personality
of the sun, moon, and planets, credulity could easily keep the upper
hand. [646] The people remained politically unwise and religiously
superstitious, the social struggle perpetuating the division between
leisure and toil, even apart from the life of the mass of slaves;
while the eternal pre-occupation of militarism left even the majority
of the upper class at the intellectual level natural to military life
in all ages. There came, however, a generation of great intellectual
splendour following on that of the supreme development of drama just
before the fall of Greek freedom. Athens had at last come into the
heritage of Greek philosophic thought; and to the utterance of that
crowning generation the human retrospect has turned ever since. This
much of renown remains inalienable from the most renowned democracy
of the ancient world.
§ 8
The wide subject of the teaching of Sokrates, Plato, and Aristotle must
here be noticed briefly, with a view only to our special inquiry. All
three must be inscribed in any list of ancient freethinkers; and
yet all three furthered freethought only indirectly, the two former
being in different degrees supernaturalists, while the last touched
on religious questions only as a philosopher, avoiding all question
of practical innovation.
The same account holds good of the best of the so-called Sophists,
as Gorgias the Sicilian (? 485-380), who was a nihilistic skeptic;
Hippias of Elis, who, setting up an emphatic distinction between
Nature and Convention, impugned the political laws and prejudices
which estranged men of thought and culture; and Prodikos of Kos
(fl. 435), author of the fable of Herakles at the Parting of
the Ways, who seems to have privately criticized the current
Gods as mere deifications of useful things and forces, and
was later misconceived as teaching that the things and forces
were Gods. Cp. Cicero, De nat. Deorum, i, 42; Sextus Empiricus,
Adv. Mathematicos, ix, 52; Ueberweg, vol. i, p. 78; Renouvier, i,
291-93. Cicero saw very well that if men came to see in Dêmêtêr
merely a deification of corn or bread, in Dionysos wine, in
Hephaistos fire, and in Poseidon only water, there was not much
left in religion. On the score of their systematic skepticism,
that is, their insistence on the subjectivity of all opinion,
Prof. Drews pronounces the Sophists at once the "Aufklärer"
and the Pragmatists of ancient Greece (Gesch. des Monismus,
p. 209). But their thought was scarcely homogeneous.
1. Sokrates [468-399] was fundamentally and practically a freethinker,
insofar as in most things he thought for himself, definitely turning
away from the old ideal of mere transmitted authority in morals. [647]
Starting in all inquiries from a position of professed ignorance, he
at least repudiated all dogmatics. [648] Being, however, preoccupied
with public life and conduct, he did not carry his critical thinking
far beyond that sphere. In regard to the extension of solid science,
one of the prime necessities of Greek intellectual life, he was quite
reactionary, drawing a line between the phenomena which he thought
intelligible and traceable and those which he thought past finding
out. "Physics and astronomy, in his opinion, belonged to the divine
class of phenomena in which human research was insane, fruitless,
and impious." [649] Yet at the same time he formulated, apparently
of his own motion, the ordinary design argument. [650] The sound
scientific view led up to by so many previous thinkers was set forth,
even in religious phraseology, by his great contemporary Hippokrates,
[651] and he opposed it. While partially separating himself in practice
from the popular worships, he held by the belief in omens, though not
in all the ordinary ones; and in one of the Platonic dialogues he is
made to say he holds by the ordinary versions of all the myths, on
the ground that it is a hopeless task to find rational explanations
for them. [652] He hoped, in short, to rationalize conduct without
seeking to rationalize creed--the dream of Plato and of a thousand
religionists since.
He had indeed the excuse that the myth-rationalizers of the time
after Hekataios, following the line of least psychic resistance, like
those of England and Germany in the eighteenth century, explained
away myths by reducing them to hypothetical history, thus asking
credence for something no better verified than the myth itself. But
the rationalizers were on a path by which men might conceivably have
journeyed to a truer science; and Sokrates, by refusing to undertake
any such exploration, [653] left his countrymen to that darkening
belief in tradition which made possible his own execution. There
was in his cast of mind, indeed--if we can at all accept Plato's
presentment of him--something unfavourable to steady conviction. He
cannot have had any real faith in the current religion; yet he never
explicitly dissented. In the Republic he accepts the new festival
to the Thracian Goddess Bendis; and there he is made by Plato to
inculcate a quite orthodox acceptance of the Delphic oracle as the
source of all religious practice. But it is impossible to say how much
of the teaching of the Platonic Sokrates is Sokratic. And as to Plato
there remains the problem of how far his conformities were prudential,
after the execution of Sokrates for blasphemy.
The long-debated issue as to the real personality of Sokrates
is still open. It is energetically and systematically handled
by Prof. August Döring in Die Lehre des Sokrates als sociales
Reformsystem (1895), and by Dr. Hubert Röck in Der unverfälschte
Sokrates (1903). See, in particular, Döring, pp. 51-79, and
Röck, pp. 357-96. From all attempts to arrive at a conception
of a consistent Sokrates there emerges the impression that the
real Sokrates, despite a strong critical bent of mind, had no
clearly established body of opinions, but was swayed in different
directions by the itch for contradiction which was the driving
power of his dialectic. For the so-called Sokratic "method" is
much less a method for attaining truth than one for disturbing
prejudice. And if in Plato's hands Sokrates seldom reaches a
conclusion that his own method might not overthrow, we are not
entitled to refuse to believe that this was characteristic of
the man.
Concerning Sokrates we have Xenophon's circumstantial account [654]
of how he reasoned with Aristodemos, "surnamed the Little," who
"neither prayed nor sacrificed to the Gods, nor consulted any oracle,
and ridiculed those who did." Aristodemos was a theist, believing in
a "Great Architect" or "Artist," or a number of such powers--on this
he is as vague as the ancient theists in general--but does not think
the heavenly powers need his devotions. Sokrates, equally vague as
to the unity or plurality of the divine, puts the design argument in
the manner familiar throughout the ages, [655] and follows it up with
the plea, among others, that the States most renowned for wisdom and
antiquity have always been the most given to pious practices, and that
probably the Gods will be kind to those who show them respect. The
whole philosopheme is pure empiricism, on the ordinary plane of
polytheistic thought, and may almost be said to exhibit incapacity
for the handling of philosophic questions, evading as it does even
the elementary challenge of Aristodemos, against whom Sokrates parades
pious platitudes without a hint of "Sokratic" analysis. Unless such a
performance were regarded as make-believe, it is difficult to conceive
how Athenian pietists could honestly arraign Sokrates for irreligion
while Aristodemos and others of his way of thinking went unmolested.
Taken as illustrating the state of thought in the Athenian community,
the trial and execution of Sokrates for "blasphemy" and "corrupting
the minds of the young" go far to prove that there prevailed among the
upper class in Athens nearly as much hypocrisy in religious matters
as exists in the England of to-day. Doubtless he was liable to death
from the traditionally orthodox Greek point of view, [656] having
practically turned aside from the old civic creed and ideals; but
then most educated Athenians had in some degree done the same. [657]
Euripides, as we have seen, is so frequently critical of the old
theology and mythology in his plays that he too could easily have been
indicted; and Aristophanes, who attacked Euripides in his comedies
as scurrilously as he did Sokrates, would no doubt have been glad to
see him prosecuted. [658] The psychology of Aristophanes, who freely
ridiculed and blasphemed the Gods in his own comedies while reviling
all men who did not believe in them, is hardly intelligible save
in the light of parts of the English history of our own time, when
unbelieving indifferentists on the Conservative side have been seen
ready to join in turning the law against a freethinking publicist
for purely party ends. In the case of Sokrates the hostility was
ostensibly democratic, for, according to Æschines, Sokrates was
condemned because he had once given lessons to Kritias, [659] one
of the most savage and unscrupulous of the Thirty Tyrants. Inasmuch
as Kritias had become entirely alienated from Sokrates, and had even
put him to silence, such a ground of hostility would only be a fresh
illustration of that collective predilection of men to a gregarious
iniquity which is no less noteworthy in the psychology of groups
than their profession of high moral standards. And such proclivities
are always to be reckoned with in such episodes. Anytos, the leading
prosecutor, seems to have been a typical bigot, brainless, spiteful,
and thoroughly self-satisfied. Not only party malice, however, but
the individual dislikes which Sokrates so industriously set up,
[660] must have counted for much in securing the small majority
of the dikastery that pronounced him guilty--281 to 276; and his
own clear preference for death over any sort of compromise did the
rest. [661] He was old, and little hopeful of social betterment;
and the temperamental obstinacy which underlay his perpetual and
pertinacious debating helped him to choose a death that he could easily
have avoided. But the fact remains that he was not popular; that the
mass of the voters as well as of the upper class disliked his constant
cross-examination of popular opinion, [662] which must often have led
logical listeners to carry on criticism where he left off; and that
after all his ratiocination he left Athens substantially irrational, as
well as incapable of justice, on some essential issues. His dialectic
method has done more to educate the later world than it did for Greece.
Upon the debate as to the legal punishability of Sokrates turns
another as to the moral character of the Athenians who forced
him to drink the hemlock. Professor Mahaffy, bent on proving
the superiority of Athenian culture and civilization to those
of Christendom, effectively contrasts the calm scene in the
prison-chamber of Sokrates with the hideous atrocities of the
death penalty for treason in the modern world and the "gauntness
and horror of our modern executions" (Social Life in Greece,
3rd. ed. pp. 262-69); and Mr. Bleeckly (Socrates and the Athenians,
1884, pp. 55-63) similarly sets against the pagan case that of the
burning of heretics by the Christian Church, and in particular the
auto da fé at Valladolid in 1559, when fifteen men and women--the
former including the conscientious priests who had proposed to
meet the hostility of Protestant dissent in the Netherlands by
reforms in the Church: the latter including delicately-nurtured
ladies of high family--were burned to death before the eyes of
the Princess Regent of Spain and the aristocracy of Castile. It
is certainly true that this transaction has no parallel in the
criminal proceedings of pagan Athens. Christian cruelty has been as
much viler than pagan, culture for culture, as the modern Christian
environment is uglier than the Athenian. Before such a test the
special pleaders for the civilizing power of Christianity can
but fall back upon alternative theses which are the negation of
their main case. First we are told that "Christianity humanizes
men"; next that where it does not do so it is because they are
too inhuman to be made Christians.
But while the orthodoxy of pagan Athens thus comes very well off
as against the frightful crime-roll of organized Christianity,
the dispassionate historian must nonetheless note the dehumanizing
power of religion in Athens as in Christendom. The pietists of
Athens, in their less brutish way, were as hopelessly denaturalized
as those of Christian Europe by the dominion of a traditional
creed, held as above reason. It matters not whether or not we
say with Bishop Thirlwall (Hist. of Greece, 2nd ed. iv, 556) that
"there never was a case in which murder was more clearly committed
under the forms of legal procedure than in the trial of Socrates,"
or press on the other side the same writer's admission that in
religious matters in Athens "there was no canon, no book by which
a doctrine could be tried; no living authority to which appeal
could be made for the decision of religious controversies." The
fact that Christendom had "authorities" who ruled which of two
sets of insane dogmas brought death upon its propounder, does
not make less abominable the slaying of Bruno and Servetus,
or the immeasurable massacre of less eminent heretics. But the
less formalized homicides sanctioned by the piety of Periklean
Athens remain part of the proof that unreasoning faith worsens
men past calculation. If we slur over such deeds by generalities
about human frailty, we are but asserting the impossibility
of rationally respecting human nature. If, putting aside all
moral censure, we are simply concerned to trace and comprehend
causation in human affairs, we have no choice but to note how
upon occasion religion on one hand, like strong drink on another,
can turn commonplace men into murderers.
In view of the limitations of Sokrates, and the mental measure of
those who voted for putting him to death, it is not surprising that
through all Greek history educated men (including Aristotle) continued
to believe firmly in the deluge of Deukalion [663] and the invasion of
the Amazons [664] as solid historical facts. Such beliefs, of course,
are on all fours with those current in the modern religious world
down till the present century: we shall, in fact, best appraise the
rationality of Greece by making such comparisons. The residual lesson
is that where Greek reason ended, modern social science had better
be regarded as only beginning. Thukydides, the greatest of all the
ancient historians, and one of the great of all time, treated human
affairs in a spirit so strictly rationalistic that he might reasonably
be termed an atheist on that score even if he had not earned the name
as a pupil of Anaxagoras. [665] But his task was to chronicle a war
which proved that the Greeks were to the last children of instinct for
the main purposes of life, and that the rule of reason which they are
credited with establishing [666] was only an intermittent pastime. In
the days of Demosthenes we still find them politically consulting the
Pythian oracle, despite the consciousness among educated men that the
oracle is a piece of political machinery. We can best realize the stage
of their evolution by first comparing their public religious practice
with that of contemporary England. No one now regards the daily prayers
of the House of Commons as more than a reverent formality. But Nikias
at Syracuse staked the fortunes of war on the creed of omens. We can
perhaps finally conceive with fair accuracy the subordination of Greek
culture and politics to superstition by likening the thought-levels
of pre-Alexandrian Athens to those of England under Cromwell.
2. The decisive measure of Greek accomplishment is found in the career
of Plato [429-347]. One of the great prose writers of the world, he
has won by his literary genius--that is, by his power of continuous
presentation as well as by his style--no less than by his service to
supernaturalist philosophy in general, a repute above his deserts as a
thinker. In Christian history he is the typical philosopher of Dualism,
[667] his prevailing conception of the universe being that of an
inert Matter acted on or even created by a craftsman-God, the "Divine
Artificer," sometimes conceived as a Logos or divine Reason, separately
personalized. Thus he came to be par excellence the philosopher of
theism, as against Aristotle and those of the Pythagoreans who affirmed
the eternity of the universe. [668] In the history of freethought
he figures as a man of genius formed by Sokrates and reflecting
his limitations, developing the Sokratic dialectic on the one hand
and finally emphasizing the Sokratic dogmatism to the point of utter
bigotry. If the Athenians are to be condemned for putting Sokrates to
death, it must not be forgotten that the spirit, if not the letter, of
the Laws drawn up by Plato in his old age fully justified them. [669]
That code, could it ever have been put in force, would have wrought
the death of every honest freethinker as well as most of the ignorant
believers within its sphere. Alone among the great serious writers of
Greece does he implicate Greek thought in the gospel of intolerance
passed on to modern Europe from antiquity. It is recorded of him [670]
that he wished to burn all the writings of Demokritos that he could
collect, and was dissuaded only on the score of the number of copies.
What was best in Plato, considered as a freethinker, was his early love
of ratiocination, of "the rendering and receiving of reasons." Even
in his earlier dialogues, however, there are signs enough of an
arbitrary temper, as well as of an inability to put science in place
of religious prejudice. The obscurantist doctrine which he put in
the mouth of Sokrates in the Phædrus was also his own, as we gather
from the exposition in the Republic. In that brilliant performance he
objects, as so many believers and freethinkers had done before him,
to the scandalous tales in the poets concerning the Gods and the sons
of Gods; but he does not object to them as being untrue. His position
is that they are unedifying. [671] For his own part he proposes that
his ideal rulers frame new myths which shall edify the young: in his
Utopia it is part of the business of the legislator to choose the right
fictions; [672] and the systematic imposition of an edifying body of
pious fable on the general intelligence is part of his scheme for the
regeneration of society. [673] Honesty is to be built up by fraud,
and reason by delusion. What the Hebrew Bible-makers actually did,
Plato proposed to do. The one thing to be said in his favour is that
by thus telling how the net is to be spread in the sight of the bird
he put the decisive obstacle--if any were needed--in the way of his
plan. It is, indeed, inconceivable that the author of the Republic
and the Laws dreamt that either polity as a whole would ever come
into existence. His plans of suppressing all undesirable poetry,
arranging community of women, and enabling children to see battles,
are the fancy-sketches of a dilettant. He had failed completely as a
statesman in practice; as a schemer he does not even posit the first
conditions of success.
As to his practical failure see the story of his and his pupils'
attempts at Syracuse (Grote, History, ix, 37-123). The younger
Dionysios, whom they had vainly attempted to make a model ruler,
seems to have been an audacious unbeliever to the extent of
plundering the temple of Persephone at Lokris, one of Jupiter in
the Peloponnesos, and one of Æsculapius at Epidaurus. Clement of
Alexandria (Protrept. c. 4) states that he plundered "the statue
of Jupiter in Sicily." Cicero (De nat. Deorum, iii, 33, 34) and
Valerius Maximus (i, 1) tell the story of the elder Dionysios;
but of him it cannot be true. In his day the plunder of the
temples of Dêmêtêr and Persephone in Sicily by the Carthaginians
was counted a deadly sin. See Freeman, History of Sicily, iv,
125-47, and Story of Sicily, pp. 176-80. In Cicero's dialogue it
is noted that after all his impieties Dionysios [the elder, of
whom the stories are mistakenly told] died in his bed. Athenæus,
however, citing the biographer Klearchos, tells that the younger
Dionysios, after being reduced to the rôle of a begging priest
of Kybelê, ended his life very miserably (xii, 60).
Nonetheless, the prescription of intolerance in the Laws [674] classes
Plato finally on the side of fanaticism, and, indeed, ranks him with
the most sinister figures on that side, since his earlier writing
shows that he would be willing to punish men alike for repeating
stories which they believed, and for rejecting what he knew to be
untruths. [675] By his own late doctrine he vindicated the slayers of
his own friend. His psychology is as strange as that of Aristophanes,
but strange with a difference. He seems to have practised "the will
to believe" till he grew to be a fanatic on the plane of the most
ignorant of orthodox Athenians; and after all that science had done
to enlighten men on that natural order the misconceiving of which had
been the foundation of their creeds, he inveighs furiously in his old
age against the impiety of those who dared to doubt that the sun and
moon and stars were deities, as every nurse taught her charges. [676]
And when all is said, his Gods satisfy no need of the intelligence;
for he insists that they only partially rule the world, sending the few
good things, but not the many evil [677]--save insofar as evil may be
a beneficent penalty and discipline. At the same time, while advising
the imprisonment or execution of heretics who did not believe in the
Gods, Plato regarded with even greater detestation the man who taught
that they could be persuaded or propitiated by individual prayer and
sacrifice. [678] Thus he would have struck alike at the freethinking
few and at the multitude who held by the general religious beliefs of
Greece, dealing damnation on all save his own clique, in a way that
would have made Torquemada blench. [679] In the face of such teaching
as this, it may well be said that "Greek philosophy made incomparably
greater advances in the earlier polemic period [of the Ionians]
than after its friendly return to the poetry of Homer and Hesiod"
[680]--that is, to their polytheistic basis. It is to be said for
Plato, finally, that his embitterment at the downward course of things
in Athens is a quite intelligible source for his own intellectual
decadence: a very similar spectacle being seen in the case of our own
great modern Utopist, Sir Thomas More. But Plato's own writing bears
witness that among the unbelievers against whom he declaimed there
were wise and blameless citizens; [681] while in the act of seeking to
lay a religious basis for a good society he admitted the fundamental
immorality of the religious basis of the whole of past Greek life.
3. Aristotle [384-322], like Sokrates, albeit in a very different way,
rendered rather an indirect than a direct service to Freethought. Where
Sokrates gave the critical or dialectic method or habit, "a process of
eternal value and of universal application," [682] Aristotle supplied
the great inspiration of system, partly correcting the Sokratic
dogmatism on the possibilities of science by endless observation and
speculation, though himself falling into scientific dogmatism only too
often. That he was an unbeliever in the popular and Platonic religion
is clear. Apart from the general rationalistic tenor of his works,
[683] there was a current understanding that the Peripatetic school
denied the utility of prayer and sacrifice; [684] and though the
essentially partisan attempt of the anti-Macedonian party to impeach
him for impiety may have turned largely on his hyperbolic hymn to his
dead friend Hermeias (who was a eunuch, and as such held peculiarly
unworthy of being addressed as on a level with semi-divine heroes),
[685] it could hardly have been undertaken at all unless he had given
solider pretexts. The threatened prosecution he avoided by leaving the
city, dying shortly afterwards. Siding as he did with the Macedonian
faction, he had put himself out of touch with the democratic instincts
of the Athenians, and so doubly failed to affect their thinking. But
nonetheless the attack upon him by the democrats was a political
stratagem. The prosecution for blasphemy had now become a recognized
weapon in politics for all who had more piety than principle, and
perhaps for some who had neither. And Aristotle, well aware of the
temper of the population around him, had on the whole been so guarded
in his utterance that a fantastic pretext had to be fastened on for
his undoing.
Prof. Bain (Practical Essays, p. 273), citing Grote's remark on the
"cautious prose compositions of Aristotle," comments thus: "That is
to say, the execution of Sokrates was always before his eyes; he
had to pare his expressions so as not to give offence to Athenian
orthodoxy. We can never know the full bearings of such a disturbing
force. The editors of Aristotle complain of the corruption of
his text: a far worse corruption lies behind. In Greece Sokrates
alone had the courage of his opinions. While his views as to a
future life, for example, are plain and frank, the real opinion
of Aristotle on the question is an insoluble problem." (See,
however, the passage in the Metaphysics cited below.)
The opinion of Grote and Bain as to Aristotle's caution is fully
coincided in by Lange, who writes (Gesch. des Mater. i, 63):
"More conservative than Plato and Sokrates, Aristotle everywhere
seeks to attach himself as closely as possible to tradition, to
popular notions, to the ideas embodied in common speech, and his
ethical postulates diverge as little as may be from the customary
morals and laws of Greek States. He has therefore been at all times
the favourite philosopher of conservative schools and movements."
It is clear, nevertheless, if we can be sure of his writings,
that he was a monotheist, but a monotheist with no practical
religion. "Excluding such a thing as divine interference with Nature,
his theology, of course, excludes the possibility of revelation,
inspiration, miracles, and grace." [686] In a passage in the
Metaphysics, after elaborating his monistic conception of Nature,
he dismisses in one or two terse sentences the whole current religion
as a mass of myth framed to persuade the multitude, in the interest of
law and order. [687] His influence must thus have been to some extent,
at least, favourable to rational science, though unhappily his own
science is too often a blundering reaction against the surmises of
earlier thinkers with a greater gift of intuition than he, who was
rather a methodizer than a discoverer. [688] What was worst in his
thinking was its tendency to apriorism, which made it in a later age
so adaptable to the purposes of the Roman Catholic Church. Thus his
doctrines of the absolute levity of fire and of nature's abhorrence
of a vacuum set up a hypnotizing verbalism, and his dictum that the
earth is the centre of the universe was fatally helpful to Christian
obscurantism. For the rest, while guiltless of Plato's fanaticism,
he had no scheme of reform whatever, and was as far as any other
Greek from the thought of raising the mass by instruction. His own
science, indeed, was not progressive, save as regards his collation of
facts in biology; and his political ideals were rather reactionary;
his clear perception of the nature of the population problem leaving
him in the earlier attitude of Malthus, and his lack of sympathetic
energy making him a defender of slavery when other men had condemned
it. [689] He was in some aspects the greatest brain of the ancient
world; and he left it, at the close of the great Grecian period,
without much faith in man, while positing for the modern world its
vaguest conception of Deity. Plato and Aristotle between them had
reduced the ancient God-idea to a thin abstraction. Plato would not
have it that God was the author of evil, thus leaving evil unaccounted
for save by sorcery. Aristotle's God does nothing at all, existing
merely as a potentiality of thought. And yet upon those positions were
to be founded the theisms of the later world. Plato had not striven,
and Aristotle had failed, to create an adequate basis for thought in
real science; and the world gravitated back to religion.
[In previous editions I remarked that "the lack of fresh science,
which was the proximate cause of the stagnation of Greek thought,
has been explained like other things as a result of race qualities:
'the Athenians,' says Mr. Benn (The Greek Philosophers, i, 42),
'had no genius for natural science: none of them were ever
distinguished as savans.... It was, they thought, a miserable
trifling [and] waste of time.... Pericles, indeed, thought
differently....' On the other hand, Lange decides (i, 6) "that
with the freedom and boldness of the Hellenic spirit was combined
... the talent for scientific deduction. These contrary views,"
I observed, "seem alike arbitrary. If Mr. Benn means that other
Hellenes had what the Athenians lacked, the answer is that only
special social conditions could have set up such a difference,
and that it could not be innate, but must be a mere matter of
usage." Mr. Benn has explained to me that he does not dissent from
this view, and that I had not rightly gathered his from the passage
I quoted. In his later work, The Philosophy of Greece considered
in relation to the character and history of its people (1898),
he has pointed out how, in the period of Hippias and Prodikos,
"at Athens in particular young men threw themselves with ardour
into the investigation of" problems of cosmography, astronomy,
meteorology, and comparative anatomy (p. 138). The hindering
forces were Athenian bigotry (pp. 113-14, 171) and the mischievous
influence of Sokrates (pp. 165, 173).
Speaking broadly, we may say that the Chaldeans were forward in
astronomy because their climate favoured it to begin with, and
religion and their superstitions did so later. Hippokrates of Kos
became a great physician because, with natural capacity, he had
the opportunity to compare many practices. The Athenians failed
to carry on the sciences, not because the faculty or the taste
was lacking among them, but because their political and artistic
interests, for one thing, preoccupied them--e.g., Sokrates and
Plato; and because, for another, their popular religion, popularly
supported, menaced the students of physics. But the Ionians,
who had savans, failed equally to progress after the Alexandrian
period; the explanation being again not stoppage of faculty, but
the advent of conditions unfavourable to the old intellectual
life, which in any case, as we saw, had been first set up by
Babylonian contacts. (Compare, on the ethnological theorem of
Cousin, G. Bréton, Essai sur la poésie philos. en Grèce, p. 10.) On
the other hand, Lange's theory of gifts "innate" in the Hellenic
mind in general is the old racial fallacy. Potentialities are
"innate" in all populations, according to their culture stage,
and it was their total environment that specialized the Greeks
as a community.]
§ 9
The overthrow of the "free" political life of Athens was followed by
a certain increase in intellectual activity, the result of throwing
back the remaining store of energy on the life of the mind. By this
time an almost open unbelief as to the current tales concerning the
Gods would seem to have become general among educated people, the
withdrawal of the old risk of impeachment by political factions being
so far favourable to outspokenness. It is on record that the historian
Ephoros (of Cumæ in Æolia: fl. 350 B.C.), who was a pupil of Isocrates,
openly hinted in his work at his disbelief in the oracle of Apollo, and
in fabulous traditions generally. [690] In other directions there were
similar signs of freethought. The new schools of philosophy founded
by Zeno the Stoic (fl. 280: d. 263 or 259) and Epicurus (341-270),
whatever their defects, compare not ill with those of Plato and
Aristotle, exhibiting greater ethical sanity and sincerity if less
metaphysical subtlety. Of metaphysics there had been enough for the
age: what it needed was a rational philosophy of life. But the loss
of political freedom, although thus for a time turned to account,
was fatal to continuous progress. The first great thinkers had all
been free men in a politically free environment: the atmosphere of
cowed subjection, especially after the advent of the Romans, could
not breed their like; and originative energy of the higher order
soon disappeared. Sane as was the moral philosophy of Epicurus, and
austere as was that of Zeno, they are alike static or quietist, [691]
the codes of a society seeking a regulating and sustaining principle
rather than hopeful of new achievement or new truth. And the universal
skepticism of Pyrrho has the same effect of suggesting that what is
wanted is not progress, but balance. It is significant that he, who
carried the Sokratic profession of Nescience to the typical extreme of
doctrinal Nihilism, was made high-priest of his native town of Elis,
and had statues erected in his honour. [692]
Considered as freethinkers, all three men tell at once of the critical
and of the reactionary work done by the previous age. Pyrrho, the
universal doubter, appears to have taken for granted, with the whole
of his followers, such propositions as that some animals (not insects)
are produced by parthenogenesis, that some live in the fire, and that
the legend of the Phoenix is true. [693] Such credences stood for
the arrest of biological science in the Sokratic age, with Aristotle,
so often mistakenly, at work; while, on the other hand, the Sokratic
skepticism visibly motives the play of systematic doubt on the
dogmas men had learned to question. Zeno, again, was substantially a
monotheist; Epicurus, adopting but not greatly developing the science
of Demokritos, [694] turned the Gods into a far-off band of glorious
spectres, untroubled by human needs, dwelling for ever in immortal
calm, neither ruling nor caring to rule the world of men. [695] In
coming to this surprising compromise, Epicurus, indeed, probably did
not carry with him the whole intelligence even of his own school. His
friend, the second Metrodoros of Lampsakos, seems to have been the most
stringent of all the censors of Homer, wholly ignoring his namesake's
attempts to clear the bard of impiety. "He even advised men not to be
ashamed to confess their utter ignorance of Homer, to the extent of not
knowing whether Hector was a Greek or a Trojan." [696] Such austerity
towards myths can hardly have been compatible with the acceptance of
the residuum of Epicurus. That, however, became the standing creed of
the sect, and a fruitful theme of derision to its opponents. Doubtless
the comfort of avoiding direct conflict with the popular beliefs had
a good deal to do with the acceptance of the doctrine.
This strange retention of the theorem of the existence of
anthropomorphic Gods, with a flat denial that they did anything in the
universe, might be termed the great peculiarity of average ancient
rationalism, were it not that what makes it at all intelligible for
us is just the similar practice of modern non-Christian theists. The
Gods of antiquity were non-creative, but strivers and meddlers and
answerers of prayer; and ancient rationalism relieved them of their
striving and meddling, leaving them no active or governing function
whatever, but for the most part cherishing their phantasms. The God of
modern Christendom had been at once a creator and a governor, ruling,
meddling, punishing, rewarding, and hearing prayer; and modern theism,
unable to take the atheistic or agnostic plunge, relieves him of all
interference in things human or cosmic, but retains him as a creative
abstraction who somehow set up "law," whether or not he made all things
out of nothing. The psychological process in the two cases seems to
be the same--an erection of æsthetic habit into a philosophic dogma,
and an accommodation of phrase to popular prejudice.
Whatever may have been the logical and psychological crudities
of Epicureanism, however, it counted for much as a deliverance of
men from superstitious fears; and nothing is more remarkable in the
history of ancient philosophy than the affectionate reverence paid to
the founder's memory [697] on this score through whole centuries. The
powerful Lucretius sounds his highest note of praise in telling how
this Greek had first of all men freed human life from the crashing
load of religion, daring to pass the flaming ramparts of the world,
and by his victory putting men on an equality with heaven. [698]
The laughter-loving Lucian two hundred years later grows gravely
eloquent on the same theme. [699] And for generations the effect of the
Epicurean check on orthodoxy is seen in the whole intellectual life of
the Greek world, already predisposed in that direction. [700] The new
schools of the Cynics and the Cyrenaics had alike shown the influence
in their perfect freedom from all religious preoccupation, when they
were not flatly dissenting from the popular beliefs. Antisthenes,
the founder of the former school (fl. 400 B.C.), though a pupil of
Sokrates, had been explicitly anti-polytheistic, and an opponent of
anthropomorphism. [701] Aristippos of Cyrene, also a pupil of Socrates,
who a little later founded the Hedonic or Cyrenaic sect, seems to have
put theology entirely aside. One of the later adherents of the school,
Theodoros, was like Diagoras labelled "the Atheist" [702] by reason
of the directness of his opposition to religion; and in the Rome of
Cicero he and Diagoras are the notorious atheists of history. [703]
To Theodoros, who had a large following, is attributed an influence
over the thought of Epicurus, [704] who, however, took the safer
position of a verbal theism. The atheist is said to have been menaced
by Athenian law in the time of Demetrius Phalereus, who protected him;
and there is even a story that he was condemned to drink hemlock; [705]
but he was not of the type that meets martyrdom, though he might go
far to provoke it. [706] Roaming from court to court, he seems never
to have stooped to flatter any of his entertainers. "You seem to me,"
said the steward of Lysimachos of Thrace to him on one occasion,
"to be the only man who ignores both Gods and kings." [707]
In the same age the same freethinking temper is seen in Stilpo of
Megara (fl. 307), of the school of Euclides, who is said to have
been brought before the Areopagus for the offence of saying that
the Pheidian statue of Athênê was "not a God," and to have met
the charge with the jest that she was in reality not a God but a
Goddess; whereupon he was exiled. [708] The stories told of him make
it clear that he was an unbeliever, usually careful not to betray
himself. Euclides, too, with his optimistic pantheism, was clearly a
heretic; though his doctrine that evil is non-ens [709] later became
the creed of some Christians. Yet another professed atheist was the
witty Bion of Borysthenes, pupil of Theodoros, of whom it is told,
in a fashion familiar to our own time, that in sickness he grew pious
through fear. [710] Among his positions was a protest or rather satire
against the doctrine that the Gods punished children for the crimes of
their fathers. [711] In the other schools, Speusippos (fl. 343), the
nephew of Plato, leant to monotheism; [712] Strato of Lampsakos, the
Peripatetic (fl. 290), called "the Naturalist," taught sheer pantheism,
anticipating Laplace in declaring that he had no need of the action
of the Gods to account for the making of the world; [713] Dikaiarchos
(fl. 326-287), another disciple of Aristotle, denied the existence
of separate souls, and the possibility of foretelling the future;
[714] and Aristo and Cleanthes, disciples of Zeno, varied likewise in
the direction of pantheism; the latter's monotheism, as expressed in
his famous hymn, being one of several doctrines ascribed to him. [715]
Contemporary with Epicurus and Zeno and Pyrrho, too, was Evêmeros
(Euhemerus), whose peculiar propaganda against Godism seems to imply
theoretic atheism. As an atheist he was vilified in a manner familiar
to modern ears, the Alexandrian poet Callimachus labelling him an
"arrogant old man vomiting impious books." [716] His lost work, of
which only a few extracts remain, undertook to prove that all the
Gods had been simply famous men, deified after death; the proof,
however, being by way of a fiction about old inscriptions found in
an imaginary island. [717] As above noted, [718] the idea may have
been borrowed from skeptical Phoenicians, the principle having already
been monotheistically applied by the Bible-making Jews, [719] though,
on the other hand, it had been artistically and to all appearance
uncritically acted on in the Homeric epopees. It may or may not then
have been by way of deliberate or reasoning Evêmerism that certain
early Greek and Roman deities were transformed, as we have seen, into
heroes or hetairai. [720] In any case, the principle seems to have had
considerable vogue in the later Hellenistic world; but with the effect
rather of paving the way for new cults than of setting up scientific
rationalism in place of the old ones. Quite a number of writers like
Palaiphatos, without going so far as Evêmeros, sought to reduce myths
to natural possibilities and events, by way of mediating between the
credulous and the incredulous. [721] Their method is mostly the naïf
one revived by the Abbé Banier in the eighteenth century of reducing
marvels to verbal misconceptions. Thus for Palaiphatos the myth of
Kerberos came from the facts that the city Trikarenos was commonly
spoken of as a beautiful and great dog; and that Geryon, who lived
there, had great dogs called Kerberoi; Actæon was "devoured by his
dogs" in the sense that he neglected his affairs and wasted his time
in hunting; the Amazons were shaved men, clad as were the women in
Thrace, and so on. [722] Palaiphatos and the Herakleitos who also
wrote De Incredibilibus agree that Pasiphae's bull was a man named
Tauros; and the latter writer similarly explains that Scylla was a
beautiful hetaira with avaricious hangers-on, and that the harpies
were ladies of the same profession. If the method seems childish, it
is to be remembered that as regards the explanation of supernatural
events it was adhered to by German theologians of a century ago;
and that its credulity in incredulity is still to be seen in the
current view that every narrative in the sacred books is to be taken
as necessarily standing for a fact of some kind.
One of the inferrible effects of the Evêmerist method was to facilitate
for the time the adoption of the Egyptian and eastern usage of deifying
kings. It has been plausibly argued that this practice stands not
so much for superstition as for skepticism, its opponents being
precisely the orthodox believers, and its promoters those who had
learned to doubt the actuality of the traditional Gods. Evêmerism
would clinch such a tendency; and it is noteworthy that Evêmeros
lived at the court of Kassander (319-296 B.C.) in a period in which
every remaining member of the family of the deified Alexander had
perished, mostly by violence; while the contemporary Ptolemy I of
Egypt received the title of Sotêr, "Saviour," from the people of
Rhodes. [723] It is to be observed, however, that while in the next
generation Antiochus I of Syria received the same title, and his
successor Antiochus II that of Theos, "God," the usage passes away;
Ptolemy III being named merely Evergetês, "the Benefactor" (of the
priests), and even Antiochus III only "the Great." Superstition was
not to be ousted by a political exploitation of its machinery. [724]
In Athens the democracy, restored in a subordinate form by Kassander's
opponent, Demetrius Poliorkêtes (307 B.C.), actually tried to put
down the philosophic schools, all of which, but the Aristotelian in
particular, were anti-democratic, and doubtless also comparatively
irreligious. Epicurus and some of his antagonists were exiled within a
year of his opening his school (306 B.C.); but the law was repealed in
the following year. [725] Theophrastos, the head of the Aristotelian
school, was indicted in the old fashion for impiety, which seems to
have consisted in denouncing animal sacrifice. [726] These repressive
attempts, however, failed; and no others followed at Athens in that
era; though in the next century the Epicureans seem to have been
expelled from Lythos in Crete and from Messenê in the Peloponnesos,
nominally for their atheism, in reality probably on political
grounds. [727] Thus Zeno was free to publish a treatise in which,
besides far out-going Plato in schemes for dragooning the citizens into
an ideal life, he proposed a State without temples or statues of the
Gods or law courts or gymnasia. [728] In the same age there is trace of
"an interesting case of rationalism even in the Delphic oracle." [729]
The people of the island of Astypalaia, plagued by hares or rabbits,
solemnly consulted the oracle, which briefly advised them to keep
dogs and take to hunting. About the same time we find Lachares,
temporarily despot at Athens, plundering the shrine of Pallas of its
gold. [730] Even in the general public there must have been a strain of
surviving rationalism; for among the fragments of Menander (fl. 300),
who, in general, seems to have leant to a well-bred orthodoxy, [731]
there are some speeches savouring of skepticism and pantheism. [732]
It was in keeping with this general but mostly placid and non-polemic
latitudinarianism that the New Academy, the second birth, or rather
transformation, of the Platonic school, in the hands of Arkesilaos
and the great Carneades (213-129), and later of the Carthaginian
Clitomachos, should be marked by that species of skepticism thence
called Academic--a skepticism which exposed the doubtfulness of current
religious beliefs without going the Pyrrhonian length of denying that
any beliefs could be proved, or even denying the existence of the Gods.
For the arguments of Carneades against the Stoic doctrine of
immortality see Cicero, De natura Deorum, iii, 12, 17; and for
his argument against theism see Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Math. ix,
172, 183. Mr. Benn pronounces this criticism of theology "the most
destructive that has ever appeared, the armoury whence religious
skepticism ever since has been supplied" (The Philosophy of
Greece, etc., p. 258). This seems an over-statement. But it is
just to say, as does Mr. Whittaker (Priests, Philosophers, and
Prophets, 1911, p. 60; cp. p. 86), that "there has never been
a more drastic attack than that of Carneades, which furnished
Cicero with the materials for his second book, On Divination";
and, as does Prof. Martha (Études Morales sur l'antiquité, 1889,
p. 77), that no philosophic or religious school has been able to
ignore the problems which Carneades raised.
As against the essentially uncritical Stoics, the criticism of
Carneades is sane and sound; and he has been termed by judicious
moderns "the greatest skeptical mind of antiquity" [733] and "the Bayle
of Antiquity"; [734] though he seems to have written nothing. [735]
There is such a concurrence of testimony as to the victorious power
of his oratory and the invincible skill of his dialectic [736] that
he must be reckoned one of the great intellectual and rationalizing
forces of his day, triumphing as he did in the two diverse arenas
of Greece and Rome. His disciple and successor Clitomachos said of
him, with Cicero's assent, that he had achieved a labour of Hercules
"in liberating our souls as it were of a fierce monster, credulity,
conjecture, rash belief." [737] He was, in short, a mighty antagonist
of thoughtless beliefs, clearing the ground for a rational life;
and the fact that he was chosen with Diogenes the Peripatetic and
Critolaos the Stoic to go to Rome to plead the cause of ruined
Athens, mulcted in an enormous fine, proved that he was held
in high honour at home. Athens, in short, was not at this stage
"too superstitious." Unreasoning faith was largely discredited by
philosophy.
On this basis, in a healthy environment, science and energy might
have reared a constructive rationalism; and for a time astronomy, in
the hands of Aristarchos of Samos (third century B.C.), Eratosthenes
of Cyrene, the second keeper of the great Alexandrian library (2nd
cent. B.C.), and above all of Hipparchos of Nikaia, who did most of
his work in the island of Rhodes, was carried to a height of mastery
which could not be maintained, and was re-attained only in modern
times. [738] Thus much could be accomplished by "endowment of research"
as practised by the Ptolemies at Alexandria; and after science had
declined with the decline of their polity, and still further under
Roman rule, the new cosmopolitanism of the second century of the
empire reverted to the principle of intelligent evocation, producing
under the Antonines the "Second" School of Alexandria.
But the social conditions remained fundamentally bad; and the earlier
greatness was never recovered. "History records not one astronomer
of note in the three centuries between Hipparchos and Ptolemy"; and
Ptolemy (fl. 140 C.E.) not only retrograded into astronomical error,
but elaborated on oriental lines a baseless fabric of astrology. [739]
Other science mostly decayed likewise. The Greek world, already led
to lower intellectual levels by the sudden ease and wealth opened
up to it through the conquests of Alexander and the rule of his
successors, was cast still lower by the Roman conquest. Pliny,
extolling Hipparchos with little comprehension of his work, must
needs pronounce him to have "dared a thing displeasing to God" in
numbering the stars for posterity. [740] In the air of imperialism,
stirred by no other, original thought could not arise; and the mass
of the Greek-speaking populations, rich and poor, gravitated to the
level of the intellectual [741] and emotional life of more or less
well-fed slaves. In this society there rapidly multiplied private
religious associations--thiasoi, eranoi, orgeones--in which men and
women, denied political life, found new bonds of union and grounds of
division in cultivating worships, mostly oriental, which stimulated
the religious sense and sentiment. [742]
Such was the soil in which Christianity took root and flourished;
while philosophy, after the freethinking epoch following on the
fall of Athenian power, gradually reverted to one or other form
of mystical theism or theosophy, of which the most successful was
the Neo-Platonism of Alexandria. [743] When the theosophic Julian
rejoiced that Epicureanism had disappeared, [744] he was exulting in
a symptom of the intellectual decline that made possible the triumph
of the faith he most opposed. Christianity furthered a decadence
thus begun under the auspices of pagan imperialism; and "the fifth
century of the Christian era witnessed an almost total extinction of
the sciences in Alexandria" [745]--an admission which disposes of the
dispute as to the guilt of the Arabs in destroying the great library.
Here and there, through the centuries, the old intellectual flame burns
whitely enough: the noble figure of Epictetus in the first century of
the new era, and that of the brilliant Lucian in the second, in their
widely different ways remind us that the evolved faculty was still
there if the circumstances had been such as to evoke it. Menippos in
the first century B.C. had played a similar part to that of Lucian,
in whose freethinking dialogues he so often figures; but with less
of subtlety and intellectuality. Lucian's was indeed a mind of the
rarest lucidity; and the argumentation of his dialogue Zeus Tragædos
covers every one of the main aspects of the theistic problem. There
is no dubiety as to his atheistic conclusion, which is smilingly
implicit in the reminder he puts in the mouth of Hermes, that,
though a few men may adopt the atheistic view, "there will always be
plenty of others who think the contrary--the majority of the Greeks,
the ignorant many, the populace, and all the barbarians." But the
moral doctrine of Epictetus is one of endurance and resignation;
and the almost unvarying raillery of Lucian, making mere perpetual
sport of the now moribund Olympian Gods, was hardly better fitted
than the all-round skepticism of the school of Sextus Empiricus to
inspire positive and progressive thinking.
This latter school, described by Cicero as dispersed and extinct
in his day, [746] appears to have been revived in the first century
by Ænesidemos, who taught at Alexandria. [747] It seems to have been
through him in particular that the Pyrrhonic system took the clear-cut
form in which it is presented at the close of the second century by
the accomplished Sextus "Empiricus"--that is, the empirical (i.e.,
experiential) physician, [748] who lived at Alexandria and Athens
(fl. 175-205 C.E.). As a whole, the school continued to discredit
dogmatism without promoting knowledge. Sextus, it is true, strikes
acutely and systematically at ill-founded beliefs, and so makes for
reason; [749] but, like the whole Pyrrhonian school, he has no idea
of a method which shall reach sounder conclusions. As the Stoics
had inculcated the control of the passions as such, so the skeptics
undertook to make men rise above the prejudices and presuppositions
which swayed them no less blindly than ever did their passions. But
Sextus follows a purely skeptical method, never rising from the
destruction of false beliefs to the establishment of true. His aim is
ataraxia, a philosophic calm of non-belief in any dogmatic affirmation
beyond the positing of phenomena as such; and while such an attitude
is beneficently exclusive of all fanaticism, it unfortunately never
makes any impression on the more intolerant fanatic, who is shaken only
by giving him a measure of critical truth in place of his error. And
as Sextus addressed himself to the students of philosophy, not to
the simple believers in the Gods, he had no wide influence. [750]
Avowedly accepting the normal view of moral obligations while rejecting
dogmatic theories of their basis, the doctrine of the strict skeptics
had the effect, from Pyrrho onwards, of giving the same acceptance
to the common religion, merely rejecting the philosophic pretence
of justifying it. Taken by themselves, the arguments against current
theism in the third book of the Hypotyposes [751] are unanswerable;
but, when bracketed with other arguments against the ordinary belief
in causation, they had the effect of leaving theism on a par with
that belief. Against religious beliefs in particular, therefore,
they had no wide destructive effect.
Lucian, again, thought soundly and sincerely on life; his praise
of the men whose memories he respected, as Epicurus and Demonax (if
the Life of Demonax attributed to him be really his), is grave and
heartfelt; and his ridicule of the discredited Gods was perfectly
right so far as it went. It is certain that the unbelievers and the
skeptics alike held their own with the believers in the matter of
right living. [752] In the period of declining pagan belief, the maxim
that superstition was a good thing for the people must have wrought
a quantity and a kind of corruption that no amount of ridicule of
religion could ever approach. Polybius (fl. 150 B.C.) agrees with
his complacent Roman masters that their greatness is largely due
to the carefully cultivated superstition of their populace, and
charges with rashness and folly those who would uproot the growth;
[753] and Strabo, writing under Tiberius--unless it be a later
interpolator of his work--confidently lays down the same principle
of governmental deceit, [754] though in an apparently quite genuine
passage he vehemently protests the incredibility of the traditional
tales about Apollo. [755] So far had the doctrine evolved since Plato
preached it. But to countervail it there needed more than a ridicule
which after all reached only the class who had already cast off the
beliefs derided, leaving the multitude unenlightened. The lack of the
needed machinery of enlightenment was, of course, part of the general
failure of the Græco-Roman civilization; and no one man's efforts could
have availed, even if any man of the age could have grasped the whole
situation. Rather the principle of esoteric enlightenment, the ideal
of secret knowledge, took stronger hold as the mass grew more and more
comprehensively superstitious. Even at the beginning of the Christian
era the view that Homer's deities were allegorical beings was freshly
propounded in the writings of Herakleides and Cornutus (Phornutus);
but it served only as a kind of mystical Gnosis, on all fours with
Christian Gnosticism, and was finally taken up by Neo-Platonists,
who were no nearer rationalism for adopting it. [756]
So with the rationalism to which we have so many uneasy or hostile
allusions in Plutarch. We find him resenting the scoffs of Epicureans
at the doctrine of Providence, and recoiling from the "abyss of
impiety" [757] opened up by those who say that "Aphrodite is simply
desire, and Hermes eloquence, and the Muses the arts and sciences,
and Athênê wisdom, and Dionysos merely wine, Hephaistos fire, and
Dêmêtêr corn"; [758] and in his essay On Superstition he regretfully
recognizes the existence of many rational atheists, confessing that
their state of mind is better than that of the superstitious who abound
around him, with their "impure purifications and unclean cleansings,"
their barbaric rites, and their evil Gods. But the unbelievers, with
their keen contempt for popular folly, availed as little against it as
Plutarch himself, with his doctrine of a just mean. The one effectual
cure would have been widened knowledge; and of such an evolution the
social conditions did not permit.
To return to a state of admiration for the total outcome of Greek
thought, then, it is necessary to pass from the standpoint of
simple analysis to that of comparison. It is in contrast with the
relatively slight achievement of the other ancient civilizations
that the Greek, at its height, still stands out for posterity as a
wonderful growth. That which, tried by the test of ideals, is as a
whole only one more tragic chapter in the record of human frustration,
yet contains within it light and leading as well as warning; and
for long ages it was as a lost Paradise to a darkened world. It has
been not untruly said that "the Greek spirit is immortal, because
it was free": [759] free not as science can now conceive freedom,
but in contrast with the spiritual bondage of Jewry and Egypt, the
half-barbaric tradition of imperial Babylon, and the short flight
of mental life in Rome. Above all, it was ever in virtue of the
freedom that the high things were accomplished; and it was ever the
falling away from freedom, the tyranny either of common ignorance
or of mindless power, that wrought decadence. There is a danger,
too, of injustice in comparing Athens with later States. When a high
authority pronounces that "the religious views of the Demos were of
the narrowest kind," [760] he is not to be gainsaid; but the further
verdict that "hardly any people has sinned more heavily against the
liberty of science" is unduly lenient to Christian civilization. The
heaviest sins of that against science, indeed, lie at the door of
the Catholic Church; but to make that an exoneration of the modern
"peoples" as against the ancient would be to load the scales. And
even apart from the Catholic Church, which practically suppressed
all science for a thousand years, the attitude of Protestant leaders
and Protestant peoples, from Luther down to the second half of the
nineteenth century, has been one of hatred and persecution towards
all science that clashed with the sacred books. [761] In the Greek
world there was more scientific discussion in the three hundred
years down to Epicurus than took place in the whole of Christian
Europe in thirteen hundred; and the amount of actual violence used
towards innovators in the pagan period, though lamentable enough,
was trifling in comparison with that recorded in Christian history,
to say nothing of the frightful annals of witch-burning, to which
there is no parallel in civilized heathen history. The critic, too,
goes on to admit that, while "Sokrates, Anaxagoras, and Aristotle
fell victims in different degrees to the bigotry of the populace,"
"of course their offence was political rather than religious. They
were condemned not as heretics, but as innovators in the state
religion." And, as we have seen, all three of the men named taught in
freedom for many years till political faction turned popular bigotry
against them. The true measure of Athenian narrowness is not to be
reached, therefore, without keeping in view the long series of modern
outrages and maledictions against the makers and introducers of new
machinery, and the multitude of such episodes as the treatment of
Priestley in Christian Birmingham, little more than a century ago. On
a full comparison the Greeks come out not ill.
It was, in fact, impossible that the Greeks should either stifle
or persecute science or freethought as it was either stifled or
persecuted by ancient Jews (who had almost no science by reason of
their theology) or by modern Christians, simply because the Greeks
had no anti-scientific hieratic literature. It remains profoundly
significant for science that the ancient civilization which on the
smallest area evolved the most admirable life, which most completely
transcended all the sources from which it originally drew, and left a
record by which men are still charmed and taught, was a civilization
as nearly as might be without Sacred Books, without an organized
priesthood, and with the largest measure of democratic freedom that
the ancient world ever saw.