We have quoted, in an earlier part of this chapter, a striking passage

from Demosthenes, embodying that view of the objective validity of law

under which alone political institutions can be secure. "That is law,"

said the orator, "which all men ought to obey for many reasons, and

especially because every law is an invention and gift of the gods, a

resolution of wise men, a correction of errors intentional and

unintentional, a compact of the whole state, according to which all who

belong to the state ought to live." That is the conception of law which

the citizens of any stable state must be prepared substantially to

accept, for it is the condition of that fundamental belief in

established institutions which alone can make it worth while to adapt

and to improve them. It was, accordingly, the conception tacitly, at

least, accepted in Greece, during the period of her constructive vigour.

But it is a conception constantly open to attack. For law, at any given

moment, even under the most favourable conditions, cannot do more than

approximate to its own ideal. It is, at best, but a rough attempt at

that reconciliation of conflicting interests towards which the reason of

mankind is always seeking; and even in well-ordered states there must

always be individuals and classes who resent, and rightly resent it, as

unjust. But the Greek states, as we have seen, were not well-ordered; on

the contrary, they were always on the verge, or in the act, of civil

war; and the conception of law, as "a compact of the whole state,

according to which all who belong to the state ought to live," must have

been, at the least, severely tried, in cities permanently divided into

two factions, each intent not merely on defeating the other, but on

excluding it altogether from political rights. Such conditions, in fact,

must have irresistibly suggested the criticism, which always dogs the

idea of the state, and against which its only defence is in a perpetual

perfection of itself--the criticism that law, after all, is only the

rule of the strong, and justice the name under which they gloze their

usurpation. That is a point of view which, even apart from their

political dissensions, would hardly have escaped the subtle intellect of

the Greeks; and in fact, from the close of the fifth century onwards, we

find it constantly canvassed and discussed.

The mind of Plato, in particular, was exercised by this contention; and

it was, one may say, a main object of his teaching to rescue the idea of

justice from identification with the special interest of the strong, and

re-affirm it as the general interest of all. For this end, he takes

occasion to state, with the utmost frankness and lucidity, the view

which it is his intention to refute; and consequently it is in his works

that we find the fullest exposition of the destructive argument he seeks

to answer.

Briefly, that argument runs as follows:--It is the law of nature that

the strong shall rule; a law which every one recognises in fact, though

every one repudiates it in theory. Government therefore simply means the

rule of the strong, and exists, no matter what its form, whether

tyranny, oligarchy, or democracy, in the interests not of its subjects

but of itself. "Justice" and "Law" are the specious names it employs to

cloak its own arbitrary will; they have no objective validity, no

reference to the well-being of all; and it is only the weak and the

foolish on whom they impose. Strong and original natures sweep away this

tangle of words, assert themselves in defiance of false shame, and claim

the right divine that is theirs by nature, to rule at their will by

virtue of their strength. "Each government," says Thrasymachus in the

Republic, "has its laws framed to suit its own interests; a democracy

making democratic laws; an autocrat despotic laws, and so on. Now by

this procedure these governments have pronounced that what is for the

interest of themselves is just for their subjects; and whoever deviates

from this, is chastised by them as guilty of illegality and injustice.

Therefore, my good sir, my meaning is, that in all cities the same

thing, namely, the interest of the established government is just. And

superior strength, I presume, is to be found on the side of government.

So that the conclusion of right reasoning is, that the same thing,

namely, the interest of the stronger, is everywhere just." [Footnote:

Plato, Rep. 338.--Translated by Davies and Vaughan.]

Here is an argument which strikes at the root of all subordination to

the state, setting the subject against the ruler, the minority against

the majority, with an emphasis of opposition that admits of no

conceivable reconciliation. And, as we have noticed, it was an argument

to which the actual political conditions of Greece gave a strong show of

plausibility.

How then did the constructive thinkers of Greece attempt to meet it?

The procedure adopted by Plato is curiously opposed to that which might

seem natural to a modern thinker on politics. The scepticism which was

to be met, having sprung from the extremity of class-antagonism, it

might be supposed that the cure would be sought in some sort of system

of equality. Plato's idea is precisely the contrary. The distinction

between classes he exaggerates to its highest point; only he would have

it depend on degrees, not of wealth, but of excellence. In the ideal

republic which he constructs as a type of a state where justice should

really rule, he sets an impassable gulf between the governing class and

the governed; each is specially trained and specially bred for its

appropriate function; and the harmony between them is ensured by the

recognition, on either part, that each is in occupation of the place for

which it is naturally fitted in that whole to which both alike are

subordinate. Such a state, no doubt, if ever it had been realised in

practice, would have been a complete reply to the sceptical argument;

for it would have established a "justice" which was the expression not

of the caprice of the governing class, but of the objective will of the

whole community. But in practice such a state was not realised in

Greece; and the experience of the Greek world does not lead us to

suppose that it was capable of realisation. The system of stereotyping

classes--in a word, of caste--which has played so great a part in the

history of the world, does no doubt embody a great truth, that of

natural inequality; and this truth, as we saw, was at the bottom of that

Greek conception of the state, of which the "Republic" of Plato is an

idealising caricature. But the problem is to make the inequality of

nature really correspond to the inequality imposed by institutions. This

problem Plato hoped to solve by a strict public control of the marriage

relation, so that none should be born into any class who were not

naturally fitted to be members of it; but as a matter of fact the

difficulty has never been met; and the system of caste remains open to

the reproach that its "justice" is conventional and arbitrary, not the

expression of the objective nature and will of all classes and members

of the community.

The attempt of Aristotle to construct a state that should be the

embodiment of justice is similar to Plato's so far as the relation of

classes is concerned. He, too, postulates a governing class of soldiers

and councillors, and a subject class of productive labourers. When,

however, he turns from the ideal to practical politics, and considers

merely how to avoid the worst extremes of party antagonism, his solution

is the simple and familiar one of the preponderance of the middle class.

The same view was dominant both in French and English politics from the

year 1830 onwards, and is only now being thrust aside by the democratic

ideal. In Greece it was never realised except as a passing phase in the

perpetual flux of polities. And in fine it may be said that the problem

of establishing a state which should be a concrete refutation of the

sceptical criticism that "justice" is merely another name for force, was

one that was never solved in ancient Greece. The dissolution of the idea

of the state was more a symptom than a cause of its failure in practice

to harmonise its warring elements. And Greece, divided into conflicting

polities, each of which again was divided within itself, passed on to

Macedon and thence to Rome that task of reconciling the individual and

the class with the whole, about which the political history of the world

turns.

Section 12. Summary.

We have now given some account of the general character of the Greek

state, the ideas that underlay it, and the criticism of those ideas

suggested by the course of history and formulated by speculative

thought. It remains to offer certain reflections on the political

achievement of the Greeks, and its relation to our own ideas.

The fruitful and positive aspect of the Greek state, that which fastens

upon it the eyes of later generations as upon a model, if not to be

copied, as least to be praised and admired, is that identification of

the individual citizen with the corporate life, which delivered him from

the narrow circle of personal interests into a sphere of wider views and

higher aims. The Greek citizen, as we have seen, in the best days of the

best states, in Athens for example in the age of Pericles, was at once a

soldier and a politician; body and mind alike were at his country's

service; and his whole ideal of conduct was inextricably bound up with

his intimate and personal participation in public affairs. If now with

this ideal we contrast the life of an average citizen in a modern state,

the absorption in private business and family concerns, the "greasy

domesticity" (to use a phrase of Byron's), that limits and clouds his

vision of the world, we may well feel that the Greeks had achieved

something which we have lost, and may even desire to return, so far as

we may, upon our steps, and to re-establish that interpenetration of

private and public life by which the individual citizen was at once

depressed and glorified.

It may be doubted, however, whether such a procedure would be in any way

possible or desirable. For in the first place, the existence of the

Greek citizen depended upon that of an inferior class who were regarded

not as ends in themselves, but as means to his perfection. And that is

an arrangement which runs directly counter to the modern ideal. All

modern societies aim, to this extent at least, at equality, that their

tendency, so far as it is conscious and avowed, is not to separate off a

privileged class of citizens, set free by the labour of others to live

the perfect life, but rather to distribute impartially to all the

burdens and advantages of the state, so that every one shall be at once

a labourer for himself and a citizen of the state. But this ideal is

clearly incompatible with the Greek conception of the citizen. It

implies that the greater portion of every man's life must be devoted to

some kind of mechanical labour, whose immediate connection with the

public good, though certain, is remote and obscure; and that in

consequence a deliberate and unceasing preoccupation with the end of the

state becomes as a general rule impossible.

And, in the second place, the mere complexity and size of a modern state

is against the identification of the man with the citizen. For, on the

one hand, public issues are so large and so involved that it is only a

few who can hope to have any adequate comprehension of them; and on the

other, the subdivision of functions is so minute that even when a man is

directly employed in the service of the state his activity is confined

to some highly specialised department. He must choose, for example,

whether he will be a clerk in the treasury or a soldier; but he cannot

certainly be both. In the Greek state any citizen could undertake,

simultaneously or in succession, and with complete comprehension and

mastery, every one of the comparatively few and simple public offices;

in a modern state such an arrangement has become impossible. The mere

mechanical and physical conditions of our life preclude the ideal of the

ancient citizen.

But, it may be said, the activity of the citizen of a modern state

should be and increasingly will be concerned not with the whole but with

the part. By the development of local institutions he will come, more

and more, to identify himself with the public life of his district and

his town; and will bear to that much the same relation as was borne by

the ancient Greek to his city state. Certainly so far as the limitation

of area, and the simplicity and intelligibility of issues is concerned,

such an analogy might be fairly pressed; and it is probably in

connection with such local areas that the average citizen does and

increasingly will become aware of his corporate relations. But, on the

other hand, it can hardly be maintained that public business in this

restricted sense either could or should play the part in the life of the

modern man that it played in that of the ancient Greek. For local

business after all is a matter of sewers and parks; and however great

the importance of such matters may be, and however great their claim

upon the attention of competent men, yet the kind of interest they

awaken and the kind of faculties they employ can hardly be such as to

lead to the identification of the individual ideal with that of public

activity. The life of the Greek citizen involved an exercise, the finest

and most complete, of all his powers of body, soul, and mind; the same

can hardly be said of the life of a county councillor, even of the best

and most conscientious of them. And the conclusion appears to be, that

that fusion of public and private life which was involved in the ideal

of the Greek citizen, was a passing phase in the history of the world;

that the state can never occupy again the place in relation to the

individual which it held in the cities of the ancient world; and that an

attempt to identify in a modern state the ideal of the man with that of

the citizen, would be an historical anachronism.

Nor is this a conclusion which need be regretted. For as the sphere of

the state shrinks, it is possible that that of the individual may be

enlarged. The public side of human life, it may be supposed, will become

more and more mechanical, as our understanding and control of social

forces grow. But every reduction to habit and rule of what were once

spiritual functions, implies the liberation of the higher powers for a

possible activity in other regions. And if advantage were taken of this

opportunity, the inestimable compensation for the contraction to routine

of the life of the citizen would be the expansion into new spheres of

speculation and passion of the freer and more individual life of the

man.

CHAPTER III

THE GREEK VIEW OF THE INDIVIDUAL

Section 1. The Greek View of Manual Labour and Trade.

In our discussion of the Greek view of the State we noticed the tendency

both of the theory and the practice of the Greeks to separate the

citizens proper from the rest of the community as a distinct and

aristocratic class. And this tendency, we had occasion to observe, was

partly to be attributed to the high conception which the Greeks had

formed of the proper excellence of man, an excellence which it was the

function of the citizen to realise in his own person, at the cost, if

need be, of the other members of the State. This Greek conception of the

proper excellence of man it is now our purpose to examine more closely.

The chief point that strikes us about the Greek ideal is its

comprehensiveness. Our own word "virtue" is applied only to moral

qualities; but the Greek word which we so translate should properly be

rendered "excellence," and includes a reference to the body as well as

to the soul. A beautiful soul, housed in a beautiful body, and supplied

with all the external advantages necessary to produce and perpetuate

such a combination--that is the Greek conception of well-being; and it

is because labour with the hands or at the desk distorts or impairs the

body, and the petty cares of a calling pursued for bread pervert the

soul, that so strong a contempt was felt by the Greeks for manual labour

and trade. "The arts that are called mechanical," says Xenophon, "are

also, and naturally enough, held in bad repute in our cities. For they

spoil the bodies of workers and superintendents alike, compelling them

to live sedentary indoor lives, and in some cases even to pass their

days by the fire. And as their bodies become effeminate, so do their

souls also grow less robust. Besides this, in such trades one has no

leisure to devote to the care of one's friends or of one's city. So that

those who engage in them are thought to be bad backers of their friends

and bad defenders of their country." [Footnote: Xen. Oec. iv. 3.]

In a similar spirit Plato asserts that a life of drudgery disfigures the

body and mars and enervates the soul; [Footnote: Plato, Rep. 495.] while

Aristotle defines a mechanical trade as one which "renders the body and

soul or intellect of free persons unfit for the exercise and practice of

virtue;" [Footnote: Arist. Pol. V. 1337 b 8.--Translated by Welldon.]

and denies to the artisan not merely the proper excellence of man, but

any excellence of any kind, on the plea that his occupation and status

is unnatural, and that he misses even that reflex of human virtue which

a slave derives from his intimate connection with his master. [Footnote:

Ibid. i. 1260 a 34.]

If then the artisan was excluded from the citizenship in some of the

Greek states, and even in the most democratic of them never altogether

threw off the stigma of inferiority attaching to his trade, the reason

was that the life he was compelled to lead was incompatible with the

Greek conception of excellence. That conception we will now proceed to

examine a little more in detail.

Section 2. Appreciation of External Goods.

In the first place, the Greek ideal required for its realisation a solid

basis of external Goods. It recognised frankly the dependence of man

upon the world of sense, and the contribution to his happiness of

elements over which he had at best but a partial control. Not that it

placed his Good outside himself, in riches, power, and other such

appendages; but that it postulated certain gifts of fortune as necessary

means to his self-development. Of these the chief were, a competence, to

secure him against sordid cares, health, to ensure his physical

excellence, and children, to support and protect him in old age.

Aristotle's definition of the happy man is "one whose activity accords

with perfect virtue and who is adequately furnished with external goods,

not for a casual period of time but for a complete or perfect life-

time;" [Footnote: Arist. Ethics. I. ii. 1101 a 14.--Translated by

Welldon.] and he remarks, somewhat caustically, that those who say that

a man on the rack would be happy if only he were good, intentionally or

unintentionally are talking nonsense. That here, as elsewhere, Aristotle

represents the common Greek view we have abundant testimony from other

sources. Even Plato, in whom there runs so clear a vein of asceticism,

follows the popular judgment in reckoning high among goods, first,

health, then beauty, then skill and strength in physical exercises, and

lastly wealth, if it be not blind but illumined by the eye of reason. To

these Goods must be added, to complete the scale, success and

reputation, topics which are the constant theme of the poets' eulogy.

"Two things alone there are," says Pindar, "that cherish life's bloom to

its utmost sweetness amidst the fair flowers of wealth--to have good

success and to win therefore fair fame;" [Footnote: Pind. Isth. iv. 14.--

Translated by E. Myers.] and the passage represents his habitual

attitude. That the gifts of fortune, both personal and external, are an

essential condition of excellence, is an axiom of the point of view of

the Greeks. But on the other hand we never find them misled into the

conception that such gifts are an end in themselves, apart from the

personal qualities they are meant to support or adorn. The oriental

ideal of unlimited wealth and power, enjoyed merely for its own sake,

never appealed to their fine and lucid judgment. Nothing could better

illustrate this point than the anecdote related by Herodotus of the

interview between Solon and Croesus, King of Lydia. Croesus, proud of

his boundless wealth, asks the Greek stranger who is the happiest man on

earth? expecting to hear in reply his own name. Solon, however, answers

with the name of Tellus, the Athenian, giving his reasons in the

following speech:

"First, because his country was flourishing in his days, and he himself

had sons both beautiful and good, and he lived to see children born to

each of them, and these children all grew up; and further because, after

a life spent in what our people look upon as comfort, his end was

surpassingly glorious. In a battle between the Athenians and their

neighbours near Eleusis, he came to the assistance of his countrymen,

routed the foe, and died upon the field most gallantly. The Athenians

gave him a public funeral on the spot where he fell, and paid him the

highest honours."

Later on in the discussion Solon defines the happy man as he who "Is

whole of limb, a stranger to disease, free from misfortune, happy in his

children, and comely to look upon," and who also ends his life well.

[Footnote: Herodotus, i. 30. 32.--Translated by Rawlinson]

Section 3. Appreciation of Physical Qualities.

While, however, the gifts of a happy fortune are an essential condition

of the Greek ideal, they are not to be mistaken for the ideal itself. "A

beautiful soul in a beautiful body," to recur to our former phrase, is

the real end and aim of their endeavour. "Beautiful and good" is their

habitual way of describing what we should call a gentleman; and no

expression could better represent what they admired. With ourselves, in

spite of our addiction to athletics, the body takes a secondary place;

after a certain age, at least, there are few men who make its systematic

cultivation an important factor of their life; and in our estimate of

merit physical qualities are accorded either none or the very smallest

weight. It was otherwise with the Greeks; to them a good body was the

necessary correlative of a good soul. Balance was what they aimed at,

balance and harmony; and they could scarcely believe in the beauty of

the spirit, unless it were reflected in the beauty of the flesh. The

point is well put by Plato, the most spiritually minded of the Greeks,

and the least apt to underprize the qualities of the soul.

"Surely then," he says, "to him who has an eye to see, there can be no

fairer spectacle than that of a man who combines the possession of moral

beauty in his soul with outward beauty of form, corresponding and

harmonizing with the former, because the same great pattern enters into

both.

"There can be none so fair.

"And you will grant that what is fairest is loveliest?

"Undoubtedly it is.

"Then the truly musical person will love those who combine most

perfectly moral and physical beauty, but will not love any one in whom

there is dissonance.

"No, not if there be any defect in the soul, but if it is only a bodily

blemish, he may so bear with it as to be willing to regard it with

complacency.

"I understand that you have now, or have had, a favourite of this kind;

so I give way." [Footnote: Plato, Rep. 402.--Translated by Davies and

Vaughan.]

The reluctance of the admission that a physical defect may possibly be

overlooked is as significant as the rest of the passage. Body and soul,

it is clear, are regarded as aspects of a single whole, so that a

blemish in the one indicates and involves a blemish in the other. The

training of the body is thus, in a sense, the training of the soul, and

gymnastic and music, as Plato puts it, serve the same end, the

production of a harmonious temperament.

Section 4. Greek Athletics.

It is this conception which gives, or appears at least in the retrospect

to give, a character so gracious and fine to Greek athletics. In fact,

if we look more closely into the character of the public games in Greece

we see that they were so surrounded and transfused by an atmosphere of

imagination that their appeal must have been as much to the aesthetic as

to the physical sense. For in the first place those great gymnastic

contests in which all Hellas took part, and which gave the tone to their

whole athletic life, were primarily religious festivals. The Olympic and

Nemean Games were held in honour of Zeus, the Pythian, of Apollo, the

Isthmean, of Poseidon. In the enclosures in which they took place stood

temples of the gods; and sacrifice, prayer, and choral hymn were the

back-ground against which they were set. And since in Greece religion

implied art, in the wake of the athlete followed the sculptor and the

poet. The colossal Zeus of Pheidias, the wonder of the ancient world,

flashed from the precincts of Olympia its glory of ivory and gold;

temples and statues broke the brilliant light into colour and form; and

under that vibrating heaven of beauty, the loveliest nature crowned with

the finest art, shifted and shone what was in itself a perfect type of

both, the grace of harmonious motion in naked youths and men. For in

Greek athletics, by virtue of the practice of contending nude, the

contest itself became a work of art; and not only did sculptors draw

from it an inspiration such as has been felt by no later age, but to the

combatants themselves, and the spectators, the plastic beauty of the

human form grew to be more than its prowess or its strength, and

gymnastic became a training in aesthetics as much as, or more than, in

physical excellence.

And as with the contest, so with the reward, everything was designed to

appeal to the sensuous imagination. The prize formally adjudged was

symbolical only, a crown of olive; but the real triumph of the victor

was the ode in which his praise was sung, the procession of happy

comrades, and the evening festival, when, as Pindar has it, "the lovely

shining of the fair-faced moon beamed forth, and all the precinct

sounded with songs of festal glee," [Footnote: Pindar, Ol. xi. 90.--

Translated by Myers] or "beside Kastaly in the evening his name burnt

bright, when the glad sounds of the Graces rose." [Footnote: Pindar,

Nem. 6. 65.]

Of the Graces! for these were the powers who presided over the world of

Greek athletics. Here, for example, is the opening of one of Pindar's

odes, typical of the spirit in which he at least conceived the functions

of the chronicler of sport:

"O ye who haunt the land of goodly steeds that drinketh of Kephisos'

waters, lusty Orchomenos' Queens renowned in song, O Graces, guardians

of the Minyai's ancient race, hearken, for unto you I pray. For by your

gift come unto men all pleasant things and sweet, and the wisdom of a

man and his beauty, and the splendour of his fame. Yea, even gods

without the Graces' aid rule never at feast or dance; but these have

charge of all things done in heaven, and beside Pythian Apollo of the

golden bow they have set their thrones, and worship the eternal majesty

of the Olympian Father. O lady Aglaia, and thou Euphrosyne, lover of

song, children of the mightiest of the gods, listen and hear, and thou

Thalia delighting in sweet sounds, and look down upon this triumphal

company, moving with light step under happy fate. In Lydian mood of

melody concerning Asopichos am I come hither to sing, for that through

thee, Aglaia, in the Olympic games the Minyai's home is winner."

[Footnote: Pindar, Ol. xiv.--Translated by Myers.]

This is but a single passage among many that might be quoted to

illustrate the point we are endeavouring to bring into relief--the

conscious predominance in the Greek games of that element of poetry and

art which is either not present at all in modern sport or at best is a

happy accessory of chance. The modern man, and especially the

Englishman, addicts himself to athletics, as to other avocations, with a

certain stolidity of gaze on the immediate end which tends to confine

him to the purely physical view of his pursuit. The Greek, an artist by

nature, lifted his not less strenuous sports into an air of finer

sentiment, touched them with the poetry of legend and the grace of art

and song, and even to his most brutal contests--for brutal some of them

were--imparted so rich an atmosphere of beauty, that they could be

admitted as fit themes for dedication to the Graces by the choice and

spiritual genius of Pindar.

Section 5. Greek Ethics--Identification of the Aesthetic and Ethical

Points of View.

And as with the excellence of the body, so with that of the soul, the

conception that dominated the mind of the Greeks was primarily

aesthetic. In speaking of their religion we have already remarked that

they had no sense of sin; and we may now add that they had no sense of

duty. Moral virtue they conceived not as obedience to an external law, a

sacrifice of the natural man to a power that in a sense is alien to

himself, but rather as the tempering into due proportion of the elements

of which human nature is composed. The good man was the man who was

beautiful--beautiful in soul. "Virtue," says Plato, "will be a kind of

health and beauty and good habit of the soul; and vice will be a disease

and deformity and sickness of it." [Footnote: Plato, Rep. 444,--

Translated by Davies and Vaughan.] It follows that it is as natural to

seek virtue and to avoid vice as to seek health and to avoid disease.

There is no question of a struggle between opposite principles; the

distinction of good and evil is one of order or confusion, among

elements which in themselves are neither good nor bad.

This conception of virtue we find expressed in many forms, but always

with the same underlying idea. A favourite watch-word with the Greeks is

the "middle" or "mean", the exact point of rightness between two

extremes. "Nothing in excess," was a motto inscribed over the temple of

Delphi; and none could be more characteristic of the ideal of these

lovers of proportion. Aristotle, indeed, has made it the basis of his

whole theory of ethics. In his conception, virtue is the mean, vice the

excess lying on either side--courage, for example, the mean between

foolhardiness and cowardice, temperance, between incontinence and

insensibility, generosity, between extravagance and meanness. The

various phases of feeling and the various kinds of action he analyses

minutely on this principle, understanding always by "the mean" that

which adapts itself in the due proportion to the circumstances and

requirements of every case.

The interest of this view for us lies in its assumption that it is not

passions or desires in themselves that must be regarded as bad, but only

their disproportional or misdirected indulgence. Let us take, for

example, the case of the pleasures of sense. The puritan's rule is to

abjure them altogether; to him they are absolutely wrong in themselves,

apart from all considerations of time and place. Aristotle, on the

contrary, enjoins not renunciation but temperance; and defines the

temperate man as one who "holds a mean position in respect of pleasures.

He takes no pleasure in the things in which the licentious man takes

most pleasure; he rather dislikes them; nor does he take pleasure at all

in wrong things, nor an excessive pleasure in anything that is pleasant,

nor is he pained at the absence of such things, nor does he desire them,

except perhaps in moderation, nor does he desire them more than is

right, or at the wrong time, and so on. But he will be eager in a

moderate and right spirit for all such things as are pleasant and at the

same time conducive to health or to a sound bodily condition, and for

all other pleasures, so long as they are not prejudicial to these or

inconsistent with noble conduct or extravagant beyond his means. For

unless a person limits himself in this way, he affects such pleasures

more than is right, whereas the temperate man follows the guidance of

right reason." [Footnote: Arist. Ethics. III. 14.--1119 a 11.--Translated

by Welldon.]

As another illustration of this point of view, we may take the case of

anger. The Christian rule is never to resent an injury, but rather, in

the New Testament phrase, to "turn the other cheek." Aristotle, while

blaming the man who is unduly passionate, blames equally the man who is

insensitive; the thing to aim at is to be angry "on the proper occasions

and with the proper people in the proper manner and for the proper

length of time." And in this and all other cases the definition of what

is proper must be left to the determination of "the sensible man."

Thus, in place of a series of hard and fast rules, a rigid and

uncompromising distinction of acts and affections into good and bad, the

former to be absolutely chosen and the latter absolutely eschewed,

Aristotle presents us with the general type of a subtle and shifting

problem, the solution of which must be worked out afresh by each

individual in each particular case. Conduct to him is a free and living

creature, and not a machine controlled by fixed laws. Every life is a

work of art shaped by the man who lives it; according to the faculty of

the artist will be the quality of his work, and no general rules can

supply the place of his own direct perception at every turn. The Good is

the right proportion, the right manner and occasion; the Bad is all that

varies from this "right." But the elements of human nature in themselves

are neither good nor bad; they are merely the raw material out of which

the one or the other may be shaped.

The idea thus formulated by Aristotle is typically Greek. In another

form it is the basis of the ethical philosophy of Plato, who habitually

regards virtue as a kind of "order." "The virtue of each thing," he

says, "whether body or soul, instrument or creature, when given to them

in the best way comes to them not by chance but as the result of the

order and truth and art which are imparted to them." [Footnote: Plato,

Gorgias, 506 d.--Translated by Jowett] And the conception here

indicated, is worked out in detail in his Republic. There, after

distinguishing in the soul three principles or powers, reason, passion,

and desire, he defines justice as the maintenance among them of their

proper mutual relation, each moving in its own place and doing its

appropriate work as is, or should be, the case with the different

classes in a state.

"The just man will not permit the several principles within him to do

any work but their own, nor allow the distinct classes in his soul to

interfere with each other, but will really set his house in order; and

having gained the mastery over himself, will so regulate his own

character as to be on good terms with himself, and to set those three

principles in tune together, as if they were verily three chords of a

harmony, a higher and a lower and a middle, and whatever may lie between

these; and after he has bound all these together, and reduced the many

elements of his nature to a real unity, as a temperate and duly

harmonized man, he will then at length proceed to do whatever he may

have to do." [Footnote: Plato, Rep. IV. 443.--Translation by Davies and

Vaughan.]

Plato, it is true, in other parts of his work, approaches more closely

to the dualistic conception of an absolute opposition between good and

bad principles in man. Yet even so, he never altogether abandons that

aesthetic point of view which looks to the establishment of order among

the conflicting principles rather than to the annihilation of one by the

other in an internecine conflict. The point may be illustrated by the

following passage, where the two horses represent respectively the

elements of fleshly desire and spiritual passion, while the charioteer

stands for the controlling reason; and where, it will be noticed, the

ultimate harmony is achieved, not by the complete eradication of desire,

but by its due subordination to the higher principle. Even Plato, the

most ascetic of the Greeks, is a Greek first and an ascetic afterwards.

"Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of

large and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a

figure, and let the figure be composite--a pair of winged horses and a

charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are

all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are

mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is

noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed;

and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to

him.... The right hand horse is upright and cleanly made; he has a lofty

neck and an aquiline nose; his colour is white, and his eyes dark; he is

a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true

glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and

admonition only. The other is a crooked lumbering animal, put together

anyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark

colour, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion; the mate of insolence

and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur. Now

when the charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his whole soul

warmed through sense, and is full of, the prickings and ticklings of

desire, the obedient steed, then as always under the government of

shame, refrains from leaping on the beloved; but the other, heedless of

the blows of the whip, plunges and runs away, giving all manner of

trouble to his companion and the charioteer, whom he forces to approach

the beloved and to remember the joys of love. They at first indignantly

oppose him and will not be urged on to do terrible and unlawful deeds;

but at last, when he persists in plaguing them, they yield and agree to

do as he bids them. And now they are at the spot and behold the flashing

beauty of the beloved; which when the charioteer sees, his memory is

carried to the true beauty whom he beholds in company with Modesty like

an image placed upon a holy pedestal He sees her, but he is afraid and

falls backwards in adoration, and by his fall is compelled to pull back

the reins with such violence as to bring both the steeds on their

haunches, the one willing and unresisting, the unruly one very

unwilling; and when they have gone back a little, the one is overcome

with shame and wonder, and his whole soul is bathed in perspiration; the

other, when the pain is over which the bridle and the fall had given

him, having with difficulty taken breath, is full of wrath and

reproaches, which he heaps upon the charioteer and his fellow-steed, for

want of courage and manhood, declaring that they have been false to

their agreement and guilty of desertion. Again they refuse, and again he

urges them on, and will scarce yield to their prayer that he would wait

until another time. When the appointed hour comes, they make as if they

had forgotten, and he reminds them, fighting and neighing and dragging

them on, until at length he on the same thoughts intent, forces them to

draw near again. And when they are near he stoops his head and puts up

his tail, and takes the bit in his teeth and pulls shamelessly. Then the

charioteer is worse off than ever; he falls back like a racer at the

barrier, and with a still more violent wrench drags the bit out of the

teeth of the wild steed and covers his abusive jaws and tongue with

blood, and forces his legs and haunches to the ground and punishes him

sorely.

"And when this has happened several times and the villain has ceased

from his wanton way, he is tamed and humbled and follows the will of the

charioteer, and when he sees the beautiful one he is ready to die of

fear. And from that time forward the soul of the lover follows the

beloved in modesty and holy fear." [Footnote: Plato, Phaedrus. 246.--

Translated by Jowett.]

Even from this passage, in spite of its dualistic hypothesis, but far

more clearly from the whole tenor of his work, we may perceive that

Plato's description of virtue as an "order" of the soul is prompted by

the same conception, characteristically Greek, as Aristotle's account of

virtue as a "mean." The view, as we said at the beginning, is properly

aesthetic rather than moral. It regards life less as a battle between

two contending principles, in which victory means the annihilation of

the one, the altogether bad, by the other, the altogether good, than as

the maintenance of a balance between elements neutral in themselves but

capable, according as their relations are rightly ordered or the

reverse, of producing either that harmony which is called virtue, or

that discord which is called vice.

Such being the conception of virtue characteristic of the Greeks, it

follows that the motive to pursue it can hardly have presented itself to

them in the form of what we call the "sense of duty." For duty

emphasises self-repression. Against the desires of man it sets a law of

prohibition, a law which is not conceived as that of his own complete

nature, asserting against a partial or disproportioned development the

balance and totality of the ideal, but rather as a rule imposed from

without by a power distinct from himself, for the mortification, not the

perfecting, of his natural impulses and aims. Duty emphasises self-

repression; the Greek view emphasised self-development. That "health and

beauty and good habit of the soul," which is Plato's ideal, is as much

its own recommendation tion to the natural man as is the health and

beauty of the body. Vice, on this view, is condemned because it is a

frustration of nature, virtue praised because it is her fulfilment; and

the motive throughout is simply that passion to realise oneself which is

commonly acknowledged as sufficient in the case of physical development,

and which appeared sufficient to the Greeks in the case of the

development of the soul.

Section 6. The Greek View of Pleasure.

From all this it follows clearly enough that the Greek ideal was far

removed from asceticism; but it might perhaps be supposed, on the other

hand, that it came dangerously near to license. Nothing, however, could

be further from the case. That there were libertines among the Greeks,

as everywhere else, goes without saying; but the conception that the

Greek rule of life was to follow impulse and abandon restraint is a

figment of would-be "Hellenists" of our own time. The word which best

sums up the ideal of the Greeks is "temperance"; "the mean," "order,"

"harmony," as we saw, are its characteristic expressions; and the self-

realisation to which they aspired was not an anarchy of passion, but an

ordered evolution of the natural faculties under the strict control of a

balanced mind. The point may be illustrated by a reference to the

treatment of pleasure in the philosophy of Plato and of Aristotle.

The practice of the libertine is to identify pleasure and good in such a

manner that he pursues at any moment any pleasure that presents itself,

eschewing comparison and reflection, with all that might tend to check

that continuous flow of vivid and fresh sensations which he postulates

as the end of life. The ideal of the Greeks, on the contrary, as

interpreted by their two greatest thinkers, while on the one hand it is

so far opposed to asceticism that it requires pleasure as an essential

complement of Good, on the other, is so far from identifying the two,

that it recognises an ordered scale of pleasures, and while rejecting

altogether those at the lower end, admits the rest, not as in themselves

constituting the Good, but rather as harmless additions or at most as

necessary accompaniments of its operation. Plato, in the Republic,

distinguishes between the necessary and unnecessary pleasures, defining

the former as those derived from the gratification of appetites "which

we cannot get rid of and whose satisfaction does us good"--such, for

example, as the appetite for wholesome food; and the latter as those

which belong to appetites "which we can put away from us by early

training; and the presence of which, besides, never does us any good,

and in some cases does positive harm,"--such, for example, as the

appetite for delicate and luxurious dishes. [Footnote: Plato, Rep. VIII.

558.--Translated by Davies and Vaughan.] The former he would admit, the

latter he excludes from his ideal of happiness. And though in a later

dialogue, the Philebus, he goes further than this, and would exclude

from the perfect life all pleasures except those which he describes as

"pure," that is those which attend upon the contemplation of form and

colour and sound, or which accompany intellectual activity; yet here, no

doubt, he is passing beyond the sphere of the practicable ideal, and his

distinct personal bias towards asceticism must be discounted if we are

to take him as representative of the Greek view. His general contention,

however, that pleasures must be ranked as higher and as lower, and that

at the best they are not to be identified with the Good, is fully

accepted by so typical a Greek as Aristotle. Aristotle, however, is

careful not to condemn any pleasure that is not definitely harmful. Even

"unnecessary" pleasures, he admits, may be desirable in themselves; even

the deliberate creation of desire with a view to the enjoyment of

satisfying it may be admissible if it is not injurious. Still, there are

kinds of pleasures which ought not to be pursued, and occasions and

methods of seeking it which are improper and perverse. Therefore the

Reason must be always at hand to check and to control; and the ultimate

test of true worth in pleasure, as in everything else, is the trained

judgment of the good and sensible man.

Section 7. Illustrations--Ischomachus; Socrates.

Such, then, was the character of the Greek conception of excellence. The

account we have given may seem somewhat abstract and ideal; but it gives

the general formula of the life which every cultivated Greek would at

any rate have wished to live. And in confirmation of this point we may

adduce the testimony of Xenophon, who has left us a description,

evidently drawn from life, of what he conceives to be the perfect type

of a "gentleman."

The interest of the account lies in the fact, that Xenophon himself was

clearly an "average" Greek, one, that is to say, of good natural parts,

of perfectly normal faculties and tastes, undisturbed by any originality

of character or mind, and representing therefore, as we may fairly

assert, the ordinary views and aims of an upright and competent man of

the world. His description of the "gentleman," therefore, may be taken

as a representative account of the recognised ideal of all that class of

Athenian citizens. And this is how the gentleman in question,

Ischomachus, describes his course of life.

"In the first place," he says, "I worship the gods. Next, I endeavour to

the best of my ability, assisted by prayer, to get health and strength

of body, reputation in the city, good will among my friends, honourable

security in battle and an honourable increase of fortune."

At this point Socrates, who is supposed to be the interlocutor,

interrupts. "Do you really covet wealth," he asks, "with all the trouble

it involves?" "Certainly I do," is the reply, "for it enables me to

honour the gods magnificently, to help my friends if they are in want,

and to contribute to the resources of my country."

Here definitely and precisely expressed is the ideal of the Athenian

gentleman--the beautiful body housing the beautiful soul, the external

aids of fortune, friends, and the like, and the realisation of the

individual self in public activity. Upon it follows an account of the

way in which Ischomachus was accustomed to pass his days. He rises

early, he tells us, to catch his friends before they go out, or walks to

the city to transact his necessary business. If he is not called into

town, he pays a visit to his farm, walking for the sake of exercise and

sending on his horse. On his arrival he gives directions about the

sowing, ploughing, or whatever it may be, and then mounting his horse

practices his military exercises. Finally he returns home on foot,

running part of the way, takes his bath, and sits down to a moderate

midday meal.

This combination of physical exercise, military training and business,

arouses the enthusiasm of Socrates. "How right you are!" he cries, "and

the consequence is that you are as healthy and strong as we see you, and

one of the best riders and the wealthiest men in the country!"

This little prosaic account of the daily life of an Athenian gentleman

is completely in harmony with all we have said about the character of

the Greek ideal; but it comprehends only a part, and that the least

spiritual, of that rich and many-sided excellence. It may be as well,

therefore, to append by way of complement the description of another

personality, exceptional indeed even among the Greeks, yet one which

only Greece could have produced--the personality of Socrates. No more

striking figure is presented to us in history, none has been more

vividly portrayed, and none, in spite of the originality of mind which

provoked the hostility of the crowd, is more thoroughly Hellenic in

every aspect, physical, intellectual, and moral.

That Socrates was ugly in countenance was a defect which a Greek could

not fail to note, and his snub nose and big belly are matters of

frequent and jocose allusion. But apart from these defects his physique,

it appears, was exceptionally good; he was sedulous in his attendance at

the gymnasia, and was noted for his powers of endurance and his courage

and skill in war. Plato records it of him that in a hard winter on

campaign, when the common soldiers were muffling themselves in

sheepskins and felt against the cold, he alone went about in his

ordinary cloak, and barefoot over the ice and snow; and he further

describes his bearing in a retreat from a lost battle, how "there you

might see him, just as he is in the streets of Athens, stalking like a

pelican and rolling his eyes, calmly contemplating enemies as well as

friends, and making very intelligible to anybody, even from a distance,

that whoever attacked him would be likely to meet with a stout

resistance." [Footnote: Plato, Symp. 221 b.--Translated by Jowett.]

To this efficiency of body corresponded, in accordance with the Greek

ideal, a perfect balance and harmony of soul. Plato, in a fine figure,

compares him to the wooden statues of Silenus, which concealed behind a

grotesque exterior beautiful golden images of the gods. Of these divine

forms none was fairer in Socrates than that typical Greek virtue,

temperance. Without a touch of asceticism, he knew how to be contented

with a little. His diet he measured strictly with a view to health.

Naturally abstemious, he could drink, when he chose, more than another

man; but no one had ever seen him drunk. His affections were strong and

deep, but never led him away to seek his own gratification at the cost

of those he loved. Without cutting himself off from any of the pleasures

of life, a social man and a frequent guest at feasts, he preserved

without an effort the supremacy of character and mind over the flesh he

neither starved nor pampered. Here is a description by Plato of his

bearing at the close of an all-night carouse, which may stand as a

concrete illustration not only of the character of Socrates, but of the

meaning of "temperance" as it was understood by the Greeks:

"Aristodemus said that Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and others went away--he

himself fell asleep, and as the nights were long took a good rest: he

was awakened towards day-break by a crowing of cocks, and when he awoke

the others were either asleep, or had gone away; there remained awake

only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon, who were drinking out of a

large goblet which they passed round, and Socrates was discoursing to

them. Aristodemus did not hear the beginning of the discourse, and he

was only half awake, but the chief thing which he remembered was

Socrates compelling the other two to acknowledge that the genius of

comedy was the same as that of tragedy, and that the true artist in

tragedy was an artist in comedy also. To this they assented, being

drowsy, and not quite following the argument. And first of all

Aristophanes dropped off, then, when the day was already dawning,

Agathon. Socrates, when he had laid them to sleep, rose to depart:

Aristodemus, as his manner was, following him. At the Lyceum he took a

bath, and passed the day as usual. In the evening he retired to rest at

his own house." [Footnote: Plato, Symposion, 223.--Translated by

Jowett.]

With this quality of temperance was combined in Socrates a rare measure

of independence and moral courage. He was never an active politician;

but as every Athenian citizen was called, at some time or another, to

public office, he found himself, on a critical occasion, responsible for

putting a certain proposition to the vote in the Assembly. It was a

moment of intense excitement. A great victory had just been won; but the

generals who had achieved the success had neglected to recover the

corpses of the dead or to save the ship-wrecked. It was proposed to take

a vote of life or death on all the generals collectively. Socrates, as

it happened, was one of the committee whose duty it was to put the

question to the Assembly. But the proposition was in itself illegal, and

Socrates with some other members of the committee, refused to submit it

to the vote. Every kind of pressure was brought to bear upon the

recalcitrant officers; orators threatened, friends besought, the mob

clamoured and denounced. Finally all but Socrates gave way. He alone, an

old man, in office for the first time, had the courage to obey his

conscience and the law in face of an angry populace crying for blood.

And as he could stand against a mob, so he could stand against a despot.

At the time when Athens was ruled by the thirty tyrants he was ordered,

with four others, to arrest a man whom the authorities wished to put out

of the way. The man was guilty of no crime, and Socrates refused. "I

went quietly home," he says, "and no doubt I should have been put to

death for it, if the government had not shortly after come to an end."

These, however, were exceptional episodes in the career of a man who was

never a prominent politician. The main interest of Socrates was

intellectual and moral; an interest, however, rather practical than

speculative. For though he was charged in his indictment with preaching

atheism, he appears in fact to have concerned himself little or nothing

with either theological or physical inquiries. He was careful in his

observance of all prescribed religious rites, and probably accepted the

gods as powers of the natural world and authors of human institutions

and laws. His originality lay not in any purely speculative views, but

in the pertinacious curiosity, practical in its origin and aim, with

which he attacked and sifted the ethical conceptions of his time: "What

is justice?" "What is piety?" "What is temperance?"--these were the

kinds of questions he never tired of raising, pointing out

contradictions and inconsistencies in current ideas, and awakening

doubts which if negative in form were positive and fruitful in effect.

His method in pursuing these inquiries was that of cross-examination. In

the streets, in the market, in the gymnasia, at meetings grave and gay,

in season or out of season, he raised his points of definition. The city

was in a ferment around him. Young men and boys followed and hung on his

lips wherever he went. By the charm of his personality, his gracious

courtesy and wit, and the large and generous atmosphere of a sympathy

always at hand to temper to particular persons the rigours of a

generalising logic, he drew to himself, with a fascination not more of

the intellect than of the heart, all that was best and brightest in the

youth of Athens. His relation to his young disciples was that of a lover

and a friend; and the stimulus given by his dialectics to their keen and

eager minds was supplemented and reinforced by the appeal to their

admiration and love of his sweet and virile personality.

Only in Ancient Athens, perhaps, could such a character and such

conditions have met. The sociable out-door city life; the meeting places

in the open air, and especially the gymnasia, frequented by young and

old not more for exercise of the body than for recreation of the mind;

the nimble and versatile Athenian wits trained to preternatural

acuteness by the debates of the law courts and the Assembly; all this

was exactly the environment fitted to develop and sustain a genius at

once so subtle and so humane as that of Socrates. It is the concrete

presentation of this city-life that lends so peculiar a charm to the

dialogues of Plato. The spirit of metaphysics puts on the human form;

and Dialectic walks the streets and contends in the palaestra. It would

be impossible to convey by citation the cumulative effect of this

constant reference in Plato to a human background; but a single excerpt

may perhaps help us to realise the conditions under which Socrates lived

and worked. Here, then, is a description of the scene in one of those

gymnasia in which he was wont to hold his conversations:

"Upon entering we found that the boys had just been sacrificing; and

this part of the festival was nearly at an end. They were all in white

array, and games at dice were going on among them. Most of them were in

the outer court amusing themselves; but some were in a corner of the

Apodyterium playing at odd and even with a number of dice, which they

took out of little wicker baskets. There was also a circle of lookers-

on, one of whom was Lysis. He was standing among the other boys and

youths, having a crown upon his head, like a fair vision, and not less

worthy of praise for his goodness than for his beauty. We left them, and

went over to the opposite side of the room, where, finding a quiet

place, we sat down; and then we began to talk. This attracted Lysis, who

was constantly turning round to look at us--he was evidently wanting to

come to us. For a time he hesitated and had not the courage to come

alone; but first of all, his friend Menexenus came in out of the court

in the interval of his play, and when he saw Ctesippus and myself, came

and sat by us; and then Lysis, seeing him, followed, and sat down with

him, and the other boys joined.

"I turned to Menexenus, and said: 'Son of Demophon, which of you two

youths is the elder?'

"'That is a matter of dispute between us,' he said.

"'And which is the nobler? Is that a matter of dispute too?'

"'Yes, certainly.'

"'And another disputed point is, which is the fairer?'

"The two boys laughed.

"'I shall not ask which is the richer,' I said; 'for you two are

friends, are you not?'

"'Certainly,' they replied.

"'And friends have all things in common, so that one of you can be no

richer than the other, if you say truly that you are friends.'

"They assented. I was about to ask which was the greater of the two, and

which was the wiser of the two; but at this moment Menexenus was called

away by some one who came and said that the gymnastic-master wanted him.

I supposed that he had to offer sacrifice. So he went away and I asked

Lysis some more questions." [Footnote: Plato, Lysis 206 e.--Translated

by Jowett]

Such were the scenes in which Socrates passed his life. Of his influence

it is hardly necessary here to speak at length. In the well-known

metaphor put into his mouth by Plato, he was the "gad-fly" of the

Athenian people. To prick intellectual lethargy, to force people to

think, and especially to think about the conceptions with which they

supposed themselves to be most familiar, those which guided their

conduct in private and public affairs--justice expediency, honesty, and

the like--such was the constant object of his life. That he should have

made enemies, that he should have been misunderstood, that he should

have been accused of undermining the foundations of morality and

religion, is natural and intelligible enough; and it was on these

grounds that he was condemned to death. His conduct at his trial was of

a piece with the rest of his life. The customary arts of the pleader,

the appeal to the sympathies of the public, the introduction into court

of weeping wife and children, he rejected as unworthy of himself and of

his cause. His defence was a simple exposition of the character and the

aims of his life; so far from being a criminal he asserted that he was a

benefactor of the Athenian people; and having, after his condemnation,

to suggest the sentence he thought appropriate, he proposed that he

should be supported at the public expense as one who had deserved well

of his country. After his sentence to death, having to wait thirty days

for its execution, he showed no change from his customary cheerfulness,

passing his time in conversation with his friends. So far from

regretting his fate he rather congratulated himself that he would escape

the decadence that attends upon old age; and he had, if we may trust

Plato, a fair and confident assurance that a happy life awaited him

beyond. He died, according to the merciful law of Athens, by drinking

hemlock; "the wisest and justest and best," in Plato's judgment, "of all

the men that I have ever known."

We have dwelt thus long on the personality of Socrates, familiar though

it be, not only on account of its intrinsic interest, but also because

it is peculiarly Hellenic. That sunny and frank intelligence, bathed, as

it were, in the open air, a gracious blossom springing from the root of

physical health, that unique and perfect balance of body and soul,

passion and intellect, represent, against the brilliant setting of

Athenian life, the highest achievement of the civilisation of Greece.

The figure of Socrates, no doubt, has been idealised by Plato, but it is

none the less significant of the trend of Hellenic life. No other people

could have conceived such an ideal; no other could have gone so far

towards its realisation.

Section 8. The Greek View of Woman.

In the preceding account we have attempted to give some conception of

the Greek ideal for the individual man. It is now time to remind

ourselves that that ideal was only supposed to be proper to a small

class--the class of soldier-citizens. Artisans and slaves, as we have

seen, had no participation in it; neither, and that is our next point,

had women.

Nothing more profoundly distinguishes the Hellenic from the modern view

of life than the estimate in which women were held by the Greeks. Their

opinion on this point was partly the cause and partly the effect of that

preponderance of the idea of the State on which we have already dwelt,

and from which it followed naturally enough that marriage should be

regarded primarily as a means of producing healthy and efficient

citizens. This view is best illustrated by the institutions of such a

State as Sparta, where, as we saw, the woman was specially trained for

maternity, and connections outside the marriage tie were sanctioned by

custom and opinion, if they were such as were likely to lead to healthy

offspring. Further it may be noted that in almost every State the

exposure of deformed or sickly infants was encouraged by law, the child

being thus regarded, from the beginning, as a member of the State,

rather than as a member of the family.

The same view is reflected in the speculations of political

philosophers. Plato, indeed, in his Republic, goes so far as to

eliminate the family relation altogether. Not only is the whole

connection between men and women to be regulated by the State, in

respect both of the persons and of the limit of age within which they

may associate, but the children as soon as they are born are to be

carried off to a common nursery, there to be reared together,

undistinguished by the mothers, who will suckle indifferently any infant

that might happen to be assigned to them for the purpose. Here, as in

other instances, Plato goes far beyond the limits set by the current

sentiment of the Greeks, and in his later work is reluctantly

constrained to abandon his scheme of community of wives and children.

Yet even there he makes it compulsory on every man to marry between the

ages of thirty and thirty-five, under penalty of fine and civil

disabilities. Plato, no doubt, as we have said, exaggerates the opinions

of his time; but the view, which he pushes to its extreme, of the

subordination of the family to the State, was one, as we have already

pointed out, which did predominate in Greece. It reappears in a soberer

form in the treatise of Aristotle. He too would regulate by law both the

age at which marriages should take place and the number of children that

should be produced, and would have all deformed infants exposed. And

here, no doubt, he is speaking in conformity if not with the practice,

at least with the feeling of Greece. The modern conception that the

marriage relation is a matter of private concern, and that any

individual has a right to wed whom and when he will, and to produce

children at his own discretion, regardless of all considerations of

health and decency, was one altogether alien to the Greeks. In theory at

least, and to some extent in practice (as for example in the case of

Sparta), they recognised that the production of children was a business

of supreme import to the State, and that it was right and proper that it

should be regulated by law with a view to the advantage of the whole

community.

* * * * *

And if now we turn from considering the family in its relation to the

State to regard it in its relation to the individual, we are struck once

more by a divergence from the modern point of view, or rather from the

view which is supposed to prevail, particularly by writers of fiction,

at any rate in modern English life. In ancient Greece, so far as our

knowledge goes, there was little or no romance connected with the

marriage tie. Marriage was a means of producing legitimate children;

that is how it is defined by Demosthenes; and we have no evidence that

it was ever regarded as anything more. In Athens we know that marriages

were commonly arranged by the father, much as they are in modern France,

on grounds of age, property, connection and the like, and without any

regard for the inclination of the parties concerned. And an interesting

passage in Xenophon indicates a point of view quite consonant with this

accepted practice. God, he says, ordained the institution of marriage;

but on what grounds? Not in the least for the sake of the personal

relation that might be established between the husband and wife, but for

ends quite external and indifferent to any affection that might exist

between them. First, for the perpetuation of the human race; secondly,

to raise up protectors for the father in his old age; thirdly, to secure

an appropriate division of labour, the man performing the outdoor work,

the woman guarding and superintending at home, and each thus fulfilling

duly the function for which they were designed by nature. This eminently

prosaic way of conceiving the marriage relation, is also, it would seem,

eminently Greek; and it leads us to consider more particularly the

opinion prevalent in Greece of the nature and duty of woman in general.

Here the first point to be noticed is the wide difference of the view

represented in the Homeric poems from that which meets us in the

historic period. Readers of the Iliad and the Odyssey will find depicted

there, amid all the barbarity of an age of rapine and war, relations

between men and women so tender, faithful and beautiful, that they may

almost stand as universal types of the ultimate human ideal. Such for

example is the relation between Odysseus and Penelope, the wife waiting

year by year for the husband whose fate is unknown, wooed in vain by

suitors who waste her substance and wear her life, nightly "watering her

bed with her tears" for twenty weary years, till at last the wanderer

returns, and "at once her knees were loosened and her heart melted

within her... and she fell a weeping and ran straight towards him, and

cast her hands about his neck, and kissed his head;" for "even as the

sight of the land is welcome to mariners, so welcome to her was the

sight of her lord, and her white arms would never quite leave hold of

his neck." [Footnote: Odyss. xxiii. 205, 231.--Translated by Butcher and

Lang.]

Such, again, is the relation between Hector and Andromache as described

in the well-known scene of the Iliad, where the wife comes out with her

babe to take leave of the husband on his way to battle. "It were better

for me," she cries, "to go down to the grave if I lose thee; for never

will any comfort be mine, when once thou, even thou, hast met thy fate,

but only sorrow..... Thou art to me father and lady mother, yea, and

brother, even as thou art my goodly husband. Come now, have pity and

abide here upon the tower, lest thou make thy child an orphan and thy

wife a widow." Hector answers with the plea of honour. He cannot draw

back, but he foresees defeat; and in his anticipation of the future

nothing is so bitter as the fate he fears for his wife. "Yet doth the

conquest of the Trojans hereafter not so much trouble me, neither

Hekabe's own, neither King Priam's, neither my brethren's, the many and

brave that shall fall in the dust before their foemen, as doth thine

anguish in the day when some mail-clad Achaian shall lead thee weeping

and rob thee of the light of freedom.... But me in death may the heaped-

up earth be covering, ere I hear thy crying and thy carrying into

captivity." [Footnote: Iliad vi. 450.--Translated by Lang, Leaf and

Myers.]

But most striking of all the portraits of women to be found in Homer,

and most typical of a frank and healthy relation between the sexes, is

the account of Nausicaa given in the Odyssey. Ulysses, shipwrecked and

naked, battered and covered with brine, surprises Nausicaa and her

maidens as they are playing at ball on the shore. The attendants run

away, but Nausicaa remains to hear what the stranger has to say. He asks

her for shelter and clothing; and she grants the request with an

exquisite courtesy and a freedom from all embarrassment which becomes

only the more marked and the more delightful when, as she sees him

emerge from the bath, clothed and beautiful, she cannot restrain the

exclamation "would that such a one might be called my husband, dwelling

here, and that it might please him here to abide." [Footnote: Od. vi.

244.--Translated by Butcher and Lang.] About the whole scene there is a

freshness and a fragrance as of early morning, and a tone so natural,

free and frank, that in the face of this rustic idyl the later centuries

sicken and faint, like candle-light in the splendour of the dawn.

If we had only Homer to give us our ideas of the Greeks, we might

conclude, from such passages as these, that they had a conception of

woman and of her relation to man, finer and nobler, in some respects,

than that of modern times. But in fact the Homeric poems represent a

civilisation which had passed away before the opening of the period with

which at present we are chiefly concerned. And in the interval, for

reasons which we need not here attempt to state, a change had taken

place in the whole way of regarding the female sex. So far, at any rate,

as our authorities enable us to judge, woman, in the historic age, was

conceived to be so inferior to man that he recognised in her no other

end than to minister to his pleasure or to become the mother of his

children. Romance and the higher companionship of intellect and spirit

do not appear (with certain notable exceptions) to have been commonly

sought or found in this relation.

Woman, in fact, was regarded as a means, not as an end; and was treated

in a manner consonant with this view. Of this estimate many

illustrations might be adduced from the writers of the fifth and fourth

centuries. Plato, for example, classes together "children, women, and

servants," [Footnote: Plato, Republic 431 c.] and states generally that

there is no branch of human industry in which the female sex is not

inferior to the male. [Footnote: Ibid. 455 c.] Similarly, Aristotle

insists again and again on the natural inferiority of woman, and

illustrates it by such quaint observations as the following: "a man

would be considered a coward who was only as brave as a brave woman, and

a woman as a chatterbox who was only as modest as a good man."

[Footnote: Arist. Pol. III. 1277 b 21.--Translated by Welldon.] But the

most striking example, perhaps, because the most unconscious, of this

habitual way of regarding women is to be found in the funeral oration

put by Thucydides into the mouth of Pericles, where the speaker, after

suggesting what consolation he can to the fathers of the slain, turns to

the women with the brief but significant exhortation: "If I am to speak

of womanly virtues to those of you who will henceforth be widows, let me

sum them up in one short admonition: To a woman not to show more

weakness than is natural to her sex is a great glory, and not to be

talked about for good or for evil among men." [Footnote: Thucydides ii.

45.--Translated by Jowett.]

The sentiments of the poets are less admissible as evidence. But some of

them are so extreme that they may be adduced as a further indication of

a point of view whose prevalence alone could render them even

dramatically plausible. Such for example is the remark which Euripides

puts into the mouth of his Medea--"women are impotent for good, but

clever contrivers of all evil" [Footnote: Euripides, Medea. 406.]; or

that of one of the characters of Menander, "a woman is necessarily an

evil, and he is a lucky man who catches her in the mildest form." While

the general Greek view of the dependence of woman on man is well

expressed in the words of Aethra, in the "Suppliants" of Euripides--"it

is proper for women who are wise to let men act for them in everything."

[Footnote: Euripides, Hik. 40.]

In accordance with this conception of the inferiority of the female sex,

and partly as a cause, partly as an effect of it, we find that the

position of the wife in ancient Greece was simply that of the domestic

drudge. To stay at home and mind the house was her recognised ideal. "A

free woman should be bounded by the street door," says one of the

characters in Menander; and another writer discriminates as follows the

functions of the two sexes:--"War, politics, and public speaking are the

sphere of man; that of woman is to keep house, to stay at home and to

receive and tend her husband." We are not surprised, therefore, to find

that the symbol of woman is the tortoise; and in the following burlesque

passage from Aristophanes we shall recognise, in spite of the touch of

caricature, the genuine features of the Greek wife. Praxagora is

recounting the merits and services of women:

"They dip their wool in hot water according to the ancient plan, all of

them without exception, and never make the slightest innovation. They

sit and cook, as of old. They carry upon their heads, as of old. They

conduct the Themophoriae, as of old. They wear out their husbands, as of

old. They buy sweets, as of old. They take their wine neat, as of old."

[Footnote: Aristophanes, Eccles. 215.]

And that this was also the kind of ideal approved by their lords and

masters, and that any attempt to pass beyond it was resented, is

amusingly illustrated in the following extract from the same poet, where

Lysistrata explains the growing indignation of the women at the bad

conduct of affairs by the men, and the way in which their attempts to

interfere were resented. The comments of the "magistrate" typify, of

course, the man's point of view.

"Think of our old moderation and gentleness, think how we

bore with your pranks, and were still,

All through the days of your former prognacity, all through

the war that is over and spent:

Not that (be sure) we approved of your policy; never our

griefs you allowed us to vent.

Well we perceived your mistakes and mismanagement. Often

at home on our housekeeping cares,

Often we heard of some foolish proposal you made for conducting

the public affairs.

Then would we question you mildly and pleasantly, inwardly

grieving, but outwardly gay;

'Husband, how goes it abroad?' we would ask of him; 'what

have ye done in Assembly to-day?'

'What would ye write on the side of the Treaty-stone?' Husband

says angrily, 'What's that to you?

You hold your tongue!' And I held it accordingly.

STRATYLLIS.

That is a thing which I never would do!

MAGISTRATE.

Ma'am, if you hadn't you'd soon have repented it.

LYSISTRATA.

Therefore I held it, and spake not a word.

Soon of another tremendous absurdity, wilder and worse

than the former we heard.

'Husband,' I say, with a tender solicitude, 'Why have you

passed such a foolish decree?'

Viciously, moodily, glaring askance at me, 'Stick to your

spinning, my mistress,' says he,

'Else you will speedily find it the worse for you! war is

the care and the business of men!'

MAGISTRATE.

Zeus! 'twas a worthy reply, and an excellent!

LYSISTRATA.

What! you unfortunate, shall we not then,

Then, when we see you perplexed and incompetent, shall

we not tender advice to the state!"

[Footnote: Aristoph. Lysistrata. 507.--Translated by B. B.

Rogers.]

The conception thus indicated in burlesque of the proper place of woman

is expressed more seriously, from the point of view of the average man

in the "Oeconomicus" of Xenophon. Ischomachus, the hero of that work,

with whom we have already made acquaintance, gives an account of his own

wife, and of the way in which he had trained her. When he married her,

he explains, she was not yet fifteen, and had been brought up with the

utmost care "that she might see, hear, and ask as little as possible."

Her accomplishments were weaving and a sufficient acquaintance with all

that concerns the stomach; and her attitude towards her husband she

expressed in the single phrase: "Everything rests with you; my duty, my

mother said, is simply to be modest." Ischomachus proceeds to explain to

her the place he expects her to fill; she is to suckle his children, to

cook, and to superintend the house; and for this purpose God has given

her special gifts, different from but not necessarily inferior to those

of man. Husband and wife naturally supply one another's deficiencies;

and if the wife perform her function worthily she may even make herself

the ruling partner, and be sure that as she grows older she will be held

not less but more in honour, as the guardian of her children and the

stewardess of her husband's goods.--In Xenophon's view, in fact, the

inferiority of the woman almost disappears; and the sentiment

approximates closely to that of Tennyson--

"either sex alone

Is half itself, and in true marriage lies

Nor equal, nor unequal: each fulfils

Defect in each."

Such a conception, however, of the "complementary" relation of woman to

man, does not exclude a conviction of her essential inferiority. And

this conviction, it can hardly be disputed, was a cardinal point in the

Greek view of life.

Section 9. Protests against the Common View of Woman.

Nevertheless, there are not wanting indications, both in theory and

practice, of a protest against it. In Sparta as we have already noticed,

girls, instead of being confined to the house, were brought up in the

open air among the boys, trained in gymnastics and accustomed to run and

wrestle naked. And Plato, modelling his view upon this experience, makes

no distinction of the sexes in his ideal republic. Women, he admits, are

generally inferior to men, but they have similar, if lower, capacities

and powers. There is no occupation or art for which they may not be

fitted by nature and education; and he would therefore have them take

their share in government and war, as well as in the various mechanical

trades." None of the occupations," he says, "which comprehend the

ordering of a state, belong to woman as woman, nor yet to man as man;

but natural gifts are to be found here and there, in both sexes alike;

and, so far as her nature is concerned, the woman is admissible to all

pursuits as well as the man; though in all of them the woman is weaker

than the man." [Footnote: Plato, Rep, 455 d.--Translated by Davies and

Vaughan.]

In adopting this attitude Plato stands alone not only among Greeks, but

one might almost say, among mankind, till we come to the latest views of

the nineteenth century. But there is another Greek, the poet Euripides,

who, without advancing any theory about the proper position of women,

yet displays so intimate an understanding of their difficulties, and so

warm and close a sympathy with their griefs, that some of his utterances

may stand to all time as documents of the dumb and age-long protest of

the weaker against the stronger sex. In illustration we may cite the

following lines from the "Medea," applicable, _mutatis mutandis_,

to how many generations of suffering wives?

"Of all things that have life and sense we women are most wretched. For

we are compelled to buy with gold a husband who is also--worst of all!--

the master of our person. And on his character, good or bad, our whole

fate depends. For divorce is regarded as a disgrace to a woman and she

cannot repudiate her husband. Then coming as she does into the midst of

manners and customs strange to her, she would need the gift of

divination--unless she has been taught at home--to know how best to

treat her bed-fellow. And if we manage so well that our husband remains

faithful to us, and does not break away, we may think ourselves

fortunate; if not, there is nothing for it but death. A man when he is

vexed at home can go out and find relief among his friends or

acquaintances; but we women have none to look to but him. They tell us

we live a sheltered life at home while they go to the wars; but that is

nonsense. For I would rather go into battle thrice than bear a child

once." [Footnote: Euripides, Med. 230.]

Hitherto we have been speaking mainly of the position of the wife in

Greece. It is necessary now to say a few words about that class of women

who were called in the Greek tongue Hetaerae; and who are by some

supposed to have represented, intellectually at least, a higher level of

culture than the other members of their sex. In exceptional cases, this,

no doubt, was the fact. Aspasia, for example, the mistress of Pericles,

was famous for her powers of mind. According to Plato she was an

accomplished rhetorician, and the real composer of the celebrated

funeral oration of Pericles; and Plutarch asserts that she was courted

and admired by the statesmen and philosophers of Greece. But Aspasia

cannot be taken as a type of the Hetaerae of Greece. That these women,

by the variety and freedom of their life, may and must have acquired

certain qualities of character and mind that could hardly be developed

in the seclusion of the Greek home, may readily be admitted; we know,

for example, that they cultivated music and the power of conversation;

and were welcome guests at supper-parties. But we have no evidence that

the relations which they formed rested as a rule on any but the simplest

physical basis. The real distinction, under this head, between the Greek

point of view and our own, appears to lie rather in the frankness with

which this whole class of relations was recognised by the Greeks. There

were temples in honour of Aphrodite Pandemos, the goddess of illicit

love, and festivals celebrated in her honour; statues were erected of

famous courtesans, of Phryne for example, at Delphi, between two kings;

and philosophers and statesmen lived with their mistresses openly,

without any loss of public reputation. Every man, said the orator

Demosthenes, requires besides his wife at least two mistresses; and this

statement, made as a matter of course in open court, is perhaps the most

curious illustration we possess of the distinction between the Greek

civilisation and our own, as regards not the fact itself but the light

in which it was viewed.

Section 10. Friendship.

From what has been said about the Greek view of women, it might

naturally have been supposed that there can have been little place in

their life for all that we designate under the term "romance." Personal

affection, as we have seen, was not the basis of married life; and

relations with Hetaerae appear to have been, in this respect, no finer

or higher than similar relations in our own times. Nevertheless, it

would be a mistake to conclude, from these conditions, that the element

of romance was absent from Greek life. The fact is simply that with them

it took a different form, that of passionate friendship between men.

Such friendships, of course, occur in all nations and at all times, but

among the Greeks they were, we might say, an institution. Their ideal

was the development and education of the younger by the older man, and

in this view they were recognised and approved by custom and law as an

important factor in the state. In Sparta, for example, it was the rule

that every boy had attached to him some elder youth by whom he was

constantly attended, admonished, and trained, and who shared in public

estimation the praise and blame of his acts; so that it is even reported

that on one occasion a Spartan boy having cried out in a fight, not he

himself but his friend was fined for the lapse of self-control. The

custom of Sparta existed also in Crete. But the most remarkable instance

of the deliberate dedication of this passion to political and military

ends is that of the celebrated "Theban band," a troop consisting

exclusively of pairs of lovers, who marched and fought in battle side by

side, and by their presence and example inspired one another to a

courage so constant and high that "it is stated that they were never

beaten till the battle at Chaeronea: and when Philip, after the fight,

took a view of the slain, and came to the place where the three hundred

that fought his phalanx lay dead together, he wondered, and

understanding that it was the band of lovers, he shed tears, and said,

"Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered

anything that was base." [Footnote: Plutarch, Pelopidas. ch. 18.--Ed. by

Clough.]

Greek legend and history, in fact, resounds with the praises of friends.

Achilles and Patroclus, Pylades and Orestes, Harmodius and Aristogeiton,

Solon and Peisistratus, Socrates and Alcibiades, Epaminondas and

Pelopidas,--these are names that recall at once all that is highest in

the achievement and all that is most romantic in the passion of Greece.

For it was the prerogative of this form of love, in its finer

manifestations, that it passed beyond persons to objective ends, linking

emotion to action in a life of common danger and toil. Not only, nor

primarily, the physical sense was touched, but mainly and in chief the

imagination and intellect. The affection of Achilles for Patroclus is as

intense as that of a lover for his mistress, but it has in addition a

body and depth such as only years of common labour could impart.

"Achilles wept, remembering his dear comrade, nor did sleep that

conquereth all take hold of him, but he kept turning himself to this

side and to that, yearning for Patroclus' manhood and excellent valour,

and all the toils he achieved with him and the woes he bare, cleaving

the battles of men and the grievous waves. As he thought thereon he shed

big tears, now lying on his side, now on his back, now on his face; and

then anon he would arise upon his feet and roam wildly beside the beach

of the salt sea." [Footnote: Iliad XXIV. 3.--Translated by Lang, Leaf

and Myers.] That is the ideal spirit of Greek comradeship--each

supporting the other in his best efforts and aims, mind assisting mind

and hand hand, and the end of the love residing not in an easy

satisfaction of itself but in the development and perfecting of the

souls in which it dwelt.

Of such a love we have a record in the elegies of Theognis, in which the

poet has embodied, for the benefit of Kurnus his friend, the ripe

experience of an eventful life. The poems for the most part are didactic

in character, consciously and deliberately aimed at the instruction and

guidance of the man to whom they are addressed; but every now and again

the passion breaks through which informs and inspires this virile

intercourse, and in such a passage as the following gives us the key to

this and to all the finer friendships of the Greeks:--

"Lo, I have given thee wings wherewith to fly

Over the boundless ocean and the earth;

Yea, on the lips of many shalt thou lie,

The comrade of their banquet and their mirth.

Youths in their loveliness shall bid thee sound

Upon the silver flute's melodious breath;

And when thou goest darkling underground

Down to the lamentable house of death,

Oh yet not then from honour shalt thou cease

But wander, an imperishable name,

Kurnus, about the seas and shores of Greece,

Crossing from isle to isle the barren main.

Horses thou shalt not need, but lightly ride

Sped by the Muses of the violet crown,

And men to come, while earth and sun abide,

Who cherish song shall cherish thy renown.

Yea, I have given thee wings, and in return

Thou givest me the scorn with which I burn."

[Footnote: Theognis 237.]

It was his insistence on friendship as an incentive to a noble life that

was the secret of the power of Socrates. Listen, for example, to the

account which Plutarch gives of his influence upon the young Alcibiades:

"Alcibiades, listening now to language entirely free from every thought

of unmanly fondness and silly displays of affection, finding himself

with one who sought to lay open to him the deficiencies of his mind, and

repress his vain and foolish arrogance,

'Dropped like the craven cock his conquered wing.'

He esteemed these endeavours of Socrates as most truly a means which the

gods made use of for the care and preservation of youth, and began to

think meanly of himself, and to admire him; to be pleased with his

kindness, and to stand in awe of his virtue; and, unawares to himself,

there became formed in his mind that reflex image and reciprocation of

love, or Anteros, that Plato talks of..... Though Socrates had many and

powerful rivals, yet the natural good qualities of Alcibiades gave his

affection the mastery. His words overcame him so much, as to draw tears

from his eyes, and to disturb his very soul. Yet sometimes he would

abandon himself to flatterers, when they proposed to him varieties of

pleasure, and would desert Socrates; who then would pursue him, as if he

had been a fugitive slave. He despised every one else, and had no

reverence or awe for any but him." [Footnote: Plut. Alc. ch. 4.--Ed. by

Clough.] The relation thus established may be further illustrated by the

following graceful little anecdote. Socrates and Alcibiades were fellow-

soldiers at Potidaea and shared the same tent. In a stiff engagement

both behaved with gallantry. At last Alcibiades fell wounded, and

Socrates, standing over him, defended and finally saved him. For this he

might fairly have claimed the customary prize of valour; but he insisted

on resigning it to his friend, as an incentive to his "ambition for

noble deeds."

Another illustration of the power of this passion to evoke and stimulate

courage is given in the story of Cleomachus, narrated by Plutarch. In a

battle between the Chalcidians and the Eretrians, the cavalry of the

former being hard pressed, Cleomachus was called upon to make a

diversion. He turned to his friend and asked him if he intended to be a

spectator of the struggle; the youth replied in the affirmative, and

embracing his friend, with his own hands buckled on his helmet;

whereupon Cleomachus charged with impetuosity, routed the foe and died

gloriously fighting. And thenceforth, says Plutarch, the Chalcidians,

who had previously mistrusted such friendships, cultivated and honoured

them more than any other people.

So much indeed were the Greeks impressed with the manliness of this

passion, with its power to prompt to high thought and heroic action,

that some of the best of them set the love of man for man far above that

of man for woman. The one, they maintained, was primarily of the spirit,

the other primarily of the flesh; the one bent upon shaping to the type

of all manly excellence both the body and the soul of the beloved, the

other upon a passing pleasure of the senses. And they noted that among

the barbarians, who were subject to tyrants, this passion was

discouraged, along with gymnastics and philosophy, because it was felt

by their masters that it would be fatal to their power; so essentially

was it the prerogative of freedom, so incompatible with the nature and

the status of a slave.

It is in the works of Plato that this view is most completely and

exquisitely set forth. To him, love is the beginning of all wisdom; and

among all the forms of love, that one in chief, which is conceived by

one man for another, of which the main operation and end is in the

spirit, and which leads on and out from the passion for a particular

body and soul to an enthusiasm for that highest beauty, wisdom, and

excellence, of which the most perfect mortal forms are but a faint and

inadequate reflection. Such a love is the initiation into the higher

life, the spring at once of virtue, of philosophy, and of religion.

Always operative in practice in Greek life it was not invented but

interpreted by Plato. The philosopher merely gave an ideal expression to

what was stirring in the heart of every generous youth; and the passage

which we have selected for quotation may be taken as representative not

only of the personality of Plato, but of the higher aspect of a

characteristic phase of Greek civilisation.

"And now, taking my leave of you, I will rehearse a tale of love which I

heard from Diotima of Mantineia, a woman wise in this and in many other

kinds of knowledge. She was my instructress in the art of love, and I

shall repeat to you what she said to me: 'On the birthday of Aphrodite

there was a feast of the gods, at which the god Poros or Plenty, who is

the son of Metis or Discretion, was one of the guests. When the feast

was over, Penia or Poverty, as the manner is on such occasions, came

about the doors to beg. Now Plenty, who was the worse for nectar (there

was no wine in those days), went into the garden of Zeus and fell into a

heavy sleep; and Poverty considering her own straitened circumstances,

plotted to have a child by him, and accordingly she lay down at his side

and conceived Love, who partly because he is naturally a lover of the

beautiful, and because Aphrodite is herself beautiful, and also because

he was born on her birthday, is her follower and attendant. And as his

parentage is, so also are his fortunes. In the first place he is always

poor, and anything but tender and fair, as the many imagine him; and he

is rough and squalid, and has no shoes, nor a house to dwell in; on the

bare earth exposed he lies under the open heaven, in the streets, or at

the doors of houses, taking his rest; and like his mother he is always

in distress. Like his father too, whom he also partly resembles, he is

always plotting against the fair and good; he is bold, enterprising,

strong, a mighty hunter, always weaving some intrigue or other, keen in

the pursuit of wisdom, fertile in resources; a philosopher at all times,

terrible as an enchanter, sorcerer, sophist. He is by nature neither

mortal nor immortal, but alive and flourishing at one moment when he is

in plenty, and dead at another moment, and again alive by reason of his

father's nature. But that which is always flowing in is always flowing

out, and so he is never in want and never in wealth; and, further, he is

in a mean between ignorance and knowledge. The truth of the matter is

this: No god is a philosopher or seeker after wisdom, neither do the

ignorant seek after wisdom. For herein is the evil of ignorance, that he

who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself: he

has no desire for that of which he feels no want.' 'But who then,

Diotima,' I said, 'are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the

wise nor the foolish?' 'A child may answer that question,' she replied;

'they are those who are in a mean between the two; Love is one of them.

For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful; and

therefore Love is also a philosopher or lover of wisdom, and being a

lover of wisdom is in a mean between the wise and the ignorant. And of

this too his birth is the cause; for his father is wealthy and wise, and

his mother poor and foolish. Such, my dear Socrates, is the nature of

the spirit Love.'

"I said: 'O thou stranger woman, thou sayest well; but, assuming Love to

be such as you say, what is the use of him to man?'

"'That, Socrates,' she replied, 'I will attempt to unfold: of his nature

and birth I have already spoken; and you acknowledge that Love is of the

beautiful. But some one will say: Of the beautiful in what, Socrates and

Diotima? or rather let me put the question more clearly, and ask: When a

man loves the beautiful, what does he desire?'

"I answered her, 'That the beautiful may be his.'

"'Still,' she said, 'the answer suggests a further question: What is

given by the possession of beauty?'

"'To what you have asked,' I said, 'I have no answer ready.'

"'Then,' she said, 'let me put the word "good" in the place of

"beautiful," and repeat the question once more: If he who loves, loves

the good, what is it then that he loves?'

"'The possession of the good,' I said.