However apposite may have been the digression into which I was led when
I had got about half through the foregoing Chapter, it has had the
inconvenience of what may be called running me off the rails; and now
that I wish to proceed from the point at which it took place, I shall
find some trouble, if I may continue the metaphor, in getting up the
steam again, or if I may change it, in getting into the swing of my
subject.
It has been my desire, were I able, to bring before the reader what
Athens may have been, viewed as what we have since called a University;
and to do this, not with any purpose of writing a panegyric on a
heathen city, or of denying its many deformities, or of concealing what
was morally base in what was intellectually great, but just the
contrary, of representing things as they really were; so far, that is,
as to enable him to see what a University is, in the very constitution
of society and in its own idea, what is its nature and object, and what
it needs of aid and support external to itself to complete that nature
and to secure that object.
So now let us fancy our Scythian, or Armenian, or African, or Italian,
or Gallic student, after tossing on the Saronic waves, which would be
his more ordinary course to Athens, at last casting anchor at Piraeus.
He is of any condition or rank of life you please, and may be made to
order, from a prince to a peasant. Perhaps he is some Cleanthes, who
has been a boxer in the public games. How did it ever cross his brain
to betake himself to Athens in search of wisdom? or, if he came thither
by accident, how did the love of it ever touch his heart? But so it
was, to Athens he came with three drachms in his girdle, and he got his
livelihood by drawing water, carrying loads, and the like servile
occupations. He attached himself, of all philosophers, to Zeno the
Stoic,--to Zeno, the most high-minded, the most haughty of speculators;
and out of his daily earnings the poor scholar brought his master the
daily sum of an obolus, in payment for attending his lectures. Such
progress did he make, that on Zeno's death he actually was his
successor in his school; and, if my memory does not play me false, he
is the author of a hymn to the Supreme Being, which is one of the
noblest effusions of the kind in classical poetry. Yet, even when he
was the head of a school, he continued in his illiberal toil as if he
had been a monk; and, it is said, that once, when the wind took his
pallium, and blew it aside, he was discovered to have no other garment
at all;--something like the German student who came up to Heidelberg
with nothing upon him but a great coat and a pair of pistols.
Or it is another disciple of the Porch,--Stoic by nature, earlier than
by profession,--who is entering the city; but in what different fashion
he comes! It is no other than Marcus, Emperor of Rome and philosopher.
Professors long since were summoned from Athens for his service, when
he was a youth, and now he comes, after his victories in the battle
field, to make his acknowledgments at the end of life, to the city of
wisdom, and to submit himself to an initiation into the Eleusinian
mysteries.
Or it is a young man of great promise as an orator, were it not for his
weakness of chest, which renders it necessary that he should acquire
the art of speaking without over-exertion, and should adopt a delivery
sufficient for the display of his rhetorical talents on the one hand,
yet merciful to his physical resources on the other. He is called
Cicero; he will stop but a short time, and will pass over to Asia Minor
and its cities, before he returns to continue a career which will
render his name immortal; and he will like his short sojourn at Athens
so well, that he will take good care to send his son thither at an
earlier age than he visited it himself.
But see where comes from Alexandria (for we need not be very solicitous
about anachronisms), a young man from twenty to twenty-two, who has
narrowly escaped drowning on his voyage, and is to remain at Athens as
many as eight or ten years, yet in the course of that time will not
learn a line of Latin, thinking it enough to become accomplished in
Greek composition, and in that he will succeed. He is a grave person,
and difficult to make out; some say he is a Christian, something or
other in the Christian line his father is for certain. His name is
Gregory, he is by country a Cappadocian, and will in time become
preëminently a theologian, and one of the principal Doctors of the
Greek Church.
Or it is one Horace, a youth of low stature and black hair, whose
father has given him an education at Rome above his rank in life, and
now is sending him to finish it at Athens; he is said to have a turn
for poetry: a hero he is not, and it were well if he knew it; but he is
caught by the enthusiasm of the hour, and goes off campaigning with
Brutus and Cassius, and will leave his shield behind him on the field
of Philippi.
Or it is a mere boy of fifteen: his name Eunapius; though the voyage
was not long, sea sickness, or confinement, or bad living on board the
vessel, threw him into a fever, and, when the passengers landed in the
evening at Piraeus, he could not stand. His countrymen who accompanied
him, took him up among them and carried him to the house of the great
teacher of the day, Proaeresius, who was a friend of the captain's, and
whose fame it was which drew the enthusiastic youth to Athens. His
companions understand the sort of place they are in, and, with the
license of academic students, they break into the philosopher's house,
though he appears to have retired for the night, and proceed to make
themselves free of it, with an absence of ceremony, which is only not
impudence, because Proaeresius takes it so easily. Strange
introduction for our stranger to a seat of learning, but not out of
keeping with Athens; for what could you expect of a place where there
was a mob of youths and not even the pretence of control; where the
poorer lived any how, and got on as they could, and the teachers
themselves had no protection from the humours and caprices of the
students who filled their lecture-halls? However, as to this Eunapius,
Proaeresius took a fancy to the boy, and told him curious stories about
Athenian life. He himself had come up to the University with one
Hephaestion, and they were even worse off than Cleanthes the Stoic; for
they had only one cloak between them, and nothing whatever besides,
except some old bedding; so when Proaeresius went abroad, Hephaestion
lay in bed, and practised himself in oratory; and then Hephaestion put
on the cloak, and Proaeresius crept under the coverlet. At another
time there was so fierce a feud between what would be called "town and
gown" in an English University, that the Professors did not dare
lecture in public, for fear of ill treatment.
But a freshman like Eunapius soon got experience for himself of the
ways and manners prevalent in Athens. Such a one as he had hardly
entered the city, when he was caught hold of by a party of the academic
youth, who proceeded to practise on his awkwardness and his ignorance.
At first sight one wonders at their childishness; but the like conduct
obtained in the medieval Universities; and not many months have passed
away since the journals have told us of sober Englishmen, given to
matter-of-fact calculations, and to the anxieties of money-making,
pelting each other with snowballs on their own sacred territory, and
defying the magistracy, when they would interfere with their privilege
of becoming boys. So I suppose we must attribute it to something or
other in human nature. Meanwhile, there stands the new-comer,
surrounded by a circle of his new associates, who forthwith proceed to
frighten, and to banter, and to make a fool of him, to the extent of
their wit. Some address him with mock politeness, others with
fierceness; and so they conduct him in solemn procession across the
Agora to the Baths; and as they approach, they dance about him like
madmen. But this was to be the end of his trial, for the Bath was a
sort of initiation; he thereupon received the pallium, or University
gown, and was suffered by his tormentors to depart in peace. One alone
is recorded as having been exempted from this persecution; it was a
youth graver and loftier than even St. Gregory himself: but it was not
from his force of character, but at the instance of Gregory, that he
escaped. Gregory was his bosom-friend, and was ready in Athens to
shelter him when he came. It was another Saint and Doctor; the great
Basil, then, (it would appear,) as Gregory, but a catechumen of the
Church.
But to return to our freshman. His troubles are not at an end, though
he has got his gown upon him. Where is he to lodge? whom is he to
attend? He finds himself seized, before he well knows where he is, by
another party of men, or three or four parties at once, like foreign
porters at a landing, who seize on the baggage of the perplexed
stranger, and thrust half a dozen cards into his unwilling hands. Our
youth is plied by the hangers-on of professor this, or sophist that,
each of whom wishes the fame or the profit of having a houseful. We
will say that he escapes from their hands,--but then he will have to
choose for himself where he will put up; and, to tell the truth, with
all the praise I have already given, and the praise I shall have to
give, to the city of mind, nevertheless, between ourselves, the brick
and wood which formed it, the actual tenements, where flesh and blood
had to lodge (always excepting the mansions of great men of the place),
do not seem to have been much better than those of Greek or Turkish
towns, which are at this moment a topic of interest and ridicule in the
public prints. A lively picture has lately been set before us of
Gallipoli. Take, says the writer, a multitude of the dilapidated
outhouses found in farm-yards in England, of the rickety old wooden
tenements, the cracked, shutterless structures of planks and tiles, the
sheds and stalls, which our bye lanes, or fish-markets, or river-sides
can supply; tumble them down on the declivity of a bare bald hill; let
the spaces between house and house, thus accidentally determined, be
understood to form streets, winding of course for no reason, and with
no meaning, up and down the town; the roadway always narrow, the
breadth never uniform, the separate houses bulging or retiring below,
as circumstances may have determined, and leaning forward till they
meet overhead;--and you have a good idea of Gallipoli. I question
whether this picture would not nearly correspond to the special seat of
the Muses in ancient times. Learned writers assure us distinctly that
the houses of Athens were for the most part small and mean; that the
streets were crooked and narrow; that the upper stories projected over
the roadway; and that staircases, balustrades, and doors that opened
outwards, obstructed it;--a remarkable coincidence of description. I
do not doubt at all, though history is silent, that that roadway was
jolting to carriages, and all but impassable; and that it was traversed
by drains, as freely as any Turkish town now. Athens seems in these
respects to have been below the average cities of its time. "A
stranger," says an ancient, "might doubt, on the sudden view, if really
he saw Athens."
I grant all this, and much more, if you will; but, recollect, Athens
was the home of the intellectual, and beautiful; not of low mechanical
contrivances, and material organization. Why stop within your lodgings
counting the rents in your wall or the holes in your tiling, when
nature and art call you away? You must put up with such a chamber, and
a table, and a stool, and a sleeping board, any where else in the three
continents; one place does not differ from another indoors; your
magalia in Africa, or your grottos in Syria are not perfection. I
suppose you did not come to Athens to swarm up a ladder, or to grope
about a closet: you came to see and to hear, what hear and see you
could not elsewhere. What food for the intellect is it possible to
procure indoors, that you stay there looking about you? do you think to
read there? where are your books? do you expect to purchase books at
Athens--you are much out in your calculations. True it is, we at this
day, who live in the nineteenth century, have the books of Greece as a
perpetual memorial; and copies there have been, since the time that
they were written; but you need not go to Athens to procure them, nor
would you find them in Athens. Strange to say, strange to the
nineteenth century, that in the age of Plato and Thucydides, there was
not, it is said, a bookshop in the whole place: nor was the book trade
in existence till the very time of Augustus. Libraries, I suspect,
were the bright invention of Attalus or the Ptolemies; I doubt whether
Athens had a library till the reign of Hadrian. It was what the
student gazed on, what he heard, what he caught by the magic of
sympathy, not what he read, which was the education furnished by Athens.
He leaves his narrow lodging early in the morning; and not till night,
if even then, will he return. It is but a crib or kennel,--in which he
sleeps when the weather is inclement or the ground damp; in no respect
a home. And he goes out of doors, not to read the day's newspaper, or
to buy the gay shilling volume, but to imbibe the invisible atmosphere
of genius, and to learn by heart the oral traditions of taste. Out he
goes; and, leaving the tumble-down town behind him, he mounts the
Acropolis to the right, or he turns to the Areopagus on the left. He
goes to the Parthenon to study the sculptures of Phidias; to the temple
of the Dioscuri to see the paintings of Polygnotus. We indeed take our
Sophocles or Aeschylus out of our coat-pocket; but, if our sojourner at
Athens would understand how a tragic poet can write, he must betake
himself to the theatre on the south, and see and hear the drama
literally in action. Or let him go westward to the Agora, and there he
will hear Lysias or Andocides pleading, or Demosthenes haranguing. He
goes farther west still, along the shade of those noble planes, which
Cimon has planted there; and he looks around him at the statues and
porticos and vestibules, each by itself a work of genius and skill,
enough to be the making of another city. He passes through the city
gate, and then he is at the famous Ceramicus; here are the tombs of the
mighty dead; and here, we will suppose, is Pericles himself, the most
elevated, the most thrilling of orators, converting a funeral oration
over the slain into a philosophical panegyric of the living.
Onwards he proceeds still; and now he has come to that still more
celebrated Academe, which has bestowed its own name on Universities
down to this day; and there he sees a sight which will be graven on his
memory till he dies. Many are the beauties of the place, the groves,
and the statues, and the temple, and the stream of the Cephissus
flowing by; many are the lessons which will be taught him day after day
by teacher or by companion; but his eye is just now arrested by one
object; it is the very presence of Plato. He does not hear a word that
he says; he does not care to hear; he asks neither for discourse nor
disputation; what he sees is a whole, complete in itself, not to be
increased by addition, and greater than anything else. It will be a
point in the history of his life; a stay for his memory to rest on, a
burning thought in his heart, a bond of union with men of like mind,
ever afterwards. Such is the spell which the living man exerts on his
fellows, for good or for evil. How nature impels us to lean upon
others, making virtue, or genius, or name, the qualification for our
doing so! A Spaniard is said to have travelled to Italy, simply to see
Livy; he had his fill of gazing, and then went back again home. Had
our young stranger got nothing by his voyage but the sight of the
breathing and moving Plato, had he entered no lecture-room to hear, no
gymnasium to converse, he had got some measure of education, and
something to tell of to his grandchildren.
But Plato is not the only sage, nor the sight of him the only lesson to
be learned in this wonderful suburb. It is the region and the realm of
philosophy. Colleges were the inventions of many centuries later; and
they imply a sort of cloistered life, or at least a life of rule,
scarcely natural to an Athenian. It was the boast of the philosophic
statesman of Athens, that his countrymen achieved by the mere force of
nature and the love of the noble and the great, what other people aimed
at by laborious discipline; and all who came among them were submitted
to the same method of education. We have traced our student on his
wanderings from the Acropolis to the Sacred Way; and now he is in the
region of the schools. No awful arch, no window of many-coloured
lights marks the seats of learning there or elsewhere; philosophy lives
out of doors. No close atmosphere oppresses the brain or inflames the
eyelid; no long session stiffens the limbs. Epicurus is reclining in
his garden; Zeno looks like a divinity in his porch; the restless
Aristotle, on the other side of the city, as if in antagonism to Plato,
is walking his pupils off their legs in his Lyceum by the Ilyssus. Our
student has determined on entering himself as a disciple of
Theophrastus, a teacher of marvellous popularity, who has brought
together two thousand pupils from all parts of the world. He himself
is of Lesbos; for masters, as well as students, come hither from all
regions of the earth,--as befits a University. How could Athens have
collected hearers in such numbers, unless she had selected teachers of
such power? it was the range of territory, which the notion of a
University implies, which furnished both the quantity of the one, and
the quality of the other. Anaxagoras was from Ionia, Carneades from
Africa, Zeno from Cyprus, Protagoras from Thrace, and Gorgias from
Sicily. Andromachus was a Syrian, Proaeresius an Armenian, Hilarius a
Bithynian, Philiscus a Thessalian, Hadrian a Syrian. Rome is
celebrated for her liberality in civil matters; Athens was as liberal
in intellectual. There was no narrow jealousy, directed against a
Professor, because he was not an Athenian; genius and talent were the
qualifications; and to bring them to Athens, was to do homage to it as
a University. There was a brotherhood and a citizenship of mind.
Mind came first, and was the foundation of the academical polity; but
it soon brought along with it, and gathered round itself, the gifts of
fortune and the prizes of life. As time went on, wisdom was not always
sentenced to the bare cloak of Cleanthes; but beginning in rags, it
ended in fine linen. The Professors became honourable and rich; and
the students ranged themselves under their names, and were proud of
calling themselves their countrymen. The University was divided into
four great nations, as the medieval antiquarian would style them; and
in the middle of the fourth century, Proaeresius was the leader or
proctor of the Attic, Hephaestion of the Oriental, Epiphanius of the
Arabic, and Diophantus of the Pontic. Thus the Professors were both
patrons of clients, and hosts and _proxeni_ of strangers and visitors,
as well as masters of the schools: and the Cappadocian, Syrian, or
Sicilian youth who came to one or other of them, would be encouraged to
study by his protection, and to aspire by his example.
Even Plato, when the schools of Athens were not a hundred years old,
was in circumstances to enjoy the _otium cum dignitate_. He had a
villa out at Heraclea; and he left his patrimony to his school, in
whose hands it remained, not only safe, but fructifying, a marvellous
phenomenon in tumultuous Greece, for the long space of eight hundred
years. Epicurus too had the property of the Gardens where he lectured;
and these too became the property of his sect. But in Roman times the
chairs of grammar, rhetoric, politics, and the four philosophies, were
handsomely endowed by the State; some of the Professors were themselves
statesmen or high functionaries, and brought to their favourite study
senatorial rank or Asiatic opulence.
Patrons such as these can compensate to the freshman, in whom we have
interested ourselves, for the poorness of his lodging and the
turbulence of his companions. In every thing there is a better side
and a worse; in every place a disreputable set and a respectable, and
the one is hardly known at all to the other. Men come away from the
same University at this day, with contradictory impressions and
contradictory statements, according to the society they have found
there; if you believe the one, nothing goes on there as it should be:
if you believe the other, nothing goes on as it should _not_. Virtue,
however, and decency are at least in the minority everywhere, and under
some sort of a cloud or disadvantage; and this being the case, it is so
much gain whenever an Herodes Atticus is found, to throw the influence
of wealth and station on the side even of a decorous philosophy. A
consular man, and the heir of an ample fortune, this Herod was content
to devote his life to a professorship, and his fortune to the patronage
of literature. He gave the sophist Polemo about eight thousand pounds,
as the sum is calculated, for three declamations. He built at Athens a
stadium six hundred feet long, entirely of white marble, and capable of
admitting the whole population. His theatre, erected to the memory of
his wife, was made of cedar wood curiously carved. He had two villas,
one at Marathon, the place of his birth, about ten miles from Athens,
the other at Cephissia, at the distance of six; and thither he drew to
him the _élite_, and at times the whole body of the students. Long
arcades, groves of trees, clear pools for the bath, delighted and
recruited the summer visitor. Never was so brilliant a lecture-room as
his evening banqueting-hall; highly connected students from Rome mixed
with the sharp-witted provincial of Greece or Asia Minor; and the
flippant sciolist, and the nondescript visitor, half philosopher, half
tramp, met with a reception, courteous always, but suitable to his
deserts. Herod was noted for his repartees; and we have instances on
record of his setting down, according to the emergency, both the one
and the other.
A higher line, though a rarer one, was that allotted to the youthful
Basil. He was one of those men who seem by a sort of fascination to
draw others around them even without wishing it. One might have deemed
that his gravity and his reserve would have kept them at a distance;
but, almost in spite of himself, he was the centre of a knot of youths,
who, pagans as most of them were, used Athens honestly for the purpose
for which they professed to seek it; and, disappointed and displeased
with the place himself, he seems nevertheless to have been the means of
their profiting by its advantages. One of these was Sophronius, who
afterwards held a high office in the State: Eusebius was another, at
that time the bosom-friend of Sophronius, and afterwards a Bishop.
Celsus too is named, who afterwards was raised to the government of
Cilicia by the Emperor Julian. Julian himself, in the sequel of
unhappy memory, was then at Athens, and known at least to St. Gregory.
Another Julian is also mentioned, who was afterwards commissioner of
the land tax. Here we have a glimpse of the better kind of society
among the students of Athens; and it is to the credit of the parties
composing it, that such young men as Gregory and Basil, men as
intimately connected with Christianity, as they were well known in the
world, should hold so high a place in their esteem and love. When the
two saints were departing, their companions came around them with the
hope of changing their purpose. Basil persevered; but Gregory
relented, and turned back to Athens for a season.