"it was impossible to buy from orators or generals knowledge of the
critical moment which fortune often gives to the careless against the
industrious. But now all our national virtues have been sold out of
the market; we have imported in their place the goods which have
tainted Greek life to the very death. These are--envy for every
bribe-taker, ridicule for any who confesses his guilt, hatred for
every one who exposes him. We have far more warships and soldiers and
revenue to-day, but they are all useless, unavailing and unprofitable
owing to treason."
To punish these seems quite hopeless.
"You have sunk to the very depth of folly or craziness or I know not
what. Often I cannot help dreading that some evil angel is persecuting
us. For some ribaldry or petty spite or silly jest--in fact, for any
reason whatsoever you invite hirelings to address you, and laugh at
their scurrilities."
He points to the fate of all the cities whom Philip flattered.
"In all of them the patriots advised increased taxation--the traitors
said it was not necessary. They advised war and distrust--the traitors
preached peace, till they were caught in the trap. The traitors made
speeches to get votes, the others spoke for national existence. In
many cases the masses listened to the pro-Macedonians not through
ignorance, but because their hearts failed them when they thought they
were beaten to their knees."
The doom of these cities it was not worth while to describe overmuch.
"As long as the ship is safe, that is the time for every sailor and
their captain to be keen on his duties and to take precautions against
wilful or thoughtless upsetting of the craft. But once the sea is over
the decks, all zeal is vain. We then who are Athenians, while we are
safe with our great city, our enormous resources, our splendid
reputation--what shall we do?"
The universal appeal of this white-hot speech is its most noteworthy
feature. The next year the disgraceful peace was ended, the free
theatre-tickets withdrawn. All was vain. In 338 Athens and Thebes were
defeated at Chaeroneia; the Cassandra prophecies of the great patriot
came true. In 330 one more triumph was allowed him. He was attacked by
the traitor Aeschines and answered him so effectively in his speech _on
the Crown_ that his adversary was banished. A cloud settled over the
orator's later life; he outlived Alexander by little more than a year,
but when Antipater hopelessly defeated the allies at Crannon in 322 he
poisoned himself rather than live in slavery.
Of all the orators of the ancient world none is more suitable for modern
use than Demosthenes. It is true that he is guilty of gross bad taste in
some of his speeches--but rarely in a parliamentary oration. Cicero is
too verbose and often insincere. Demosthenes is as a rule short, terse
and forcible. It is the undoubted justice of his cause which gives him
his lofty and noble style. He lacks the gentler touch of humour--but a
man cannot jest when he sees servitude before the country he loves.
With a few necessary alterations a speech of Demosthenes could easily
be delivered to-day, and it would be successful. Even Philip is said to
have admitted that he would have voted for him after hearing him, and
Aeschines after winning applause for declaiming part of Demosthenes'
speech told his audience that they ought to have heard the beast.
Yet all this splendid eloquence seems to have been wasted. The orator
could see much that was dark to his contemporaries, and spoke prophecies
true though vain. But the greatest thing of all was concealed from his
view. The inevitable day had dawned for the genuinely Greek type of
city. It was brilliant but it was a source of eternal divisions in a
world which had to be unified to be of any service. Its absurd factions
and petty leagues were really a hindrance to political stability.
Further, the essential vices of democracy cried aloud for a stern
master, and found him. Treason, bribery, appeals to an unqualified
voting class, theft of rich men's property under legal forms, free seats
in the theatre, belittlement of a great empire, pacifism, love of every
state but the right one--these are the open sores of popular control.
For such a society only one choice is possible; it needs discipline
either of national service or national extinction. Its crazy cranks will
not disappear otherwise. Modern political life is democratic; those who
imagine that the voice of the majority is the voice of Heaven should
produce reasons for their belief. They will find it difficult to hold
such a view if they will patiently consider the hard facts of history
and the unceasing warnings of Demosthenes.
* * * * *
No account of Greek literature would be complete without a mention of
the influence which has revolutionised human thought. It is a strange
coincidence that Aristotle was born and died in the same years as
Demosthenes. His native town was Stagira; he trained Alexander the
Great, presided over the very famous Peripatetic School at Athens for
thirteen years and found time to investigate practically every subject
of which an ancient Greek could be expected to have any knowledge.
His method was the slow and very patient observation of individual
facts. He is the complement of Plato, who tended to neglect the fact for
the "idea" or general law or type behind it and logically prior to
it. Deductive reasoning was Plato's method--that of the poet or great
artist, who worships not what he sees but the unseen perfect form
behind; inductive reasoning was Aristotle's method--that of the ordinary
man, who respects what he sees that he may by patience find out what
is the unseen class to which it belongs. This latter has been the
foundation-stone of all modern science; in the main the resemblance
between Aristotle's system of procedure and that of the greatest
liberators of the human mind, Bacon and Descartes, are more valuable
than the differences.
It would be difficult to mention any really great subject on which
Aristotle has not left some work which is not to be lightly disregarded.
His works are in the form of disjointed notes, taken down at his
lectures by his disciples. As a rule they are dry and precise, though
here and there rays of glory appear which prove that the master was
capable of poetic expression even in prose. A rather fine hymn has
been ascribed to him. As we might expect, he is weakest in scientific
research, mainly because he could not command the use of instruments
familiar to us. That a human being who possessed no microscope should
have left such a detailed account of the most minute marks on the bodies
of fish and animals is an absolute marvel; so perfect is his description
that it cannot be bettered to-day. Cuvier and Linnaeus are great names
in Botany; Darwin said that they were mere schoolboys compared with
Aristotle--in other words, botanical research had progressed thewrong
way.
Many works have appeared on Ethics and Philosophy; few of them are
likely to survive as long as Aristotle's _Ethics_ and _Metaphysics_
Sometimes our modern philosophers seem to forget their obligation to
resemble human beings in their writings. We hear so much of mist and
transcendentalism, problems, theories, essays, critiques that a book of
Aristotle's dry but exact definition seems like the words of soberness
after some nightmare. The man is not assaulting the air; his feet are on
firm ground. This is how he proceeds. "Virtue is a mean between
excess and defect." In fact, his object appears to have been to teach
something, not to mystify everybody and to cover the honourable name of
philosophy with ridicule.
It is the same story everywhere. Do we want the best book on _Rhetoric_
or _Politics_? Aristotle may supply it, mainly because he took the
trouble to classify his instances and show the reason why things
not only are of such a kind, but must inevitably be so. A course of
Aristotelian study might profitably be prescribed to every person who
thinks of talking in public; he would at least learn how to respect
himself and his audience, however ignorant and powerful it may be; he
would tend to use words in an exact sense instead of indulging in the
wild vagueness of speech which is so common and so dangerous. This
dry-as-dust philosopher who cut up animals and plants and wrote about
public speeches and constitutions found time to give the world a book on
Poetry. Modern scientists sometimes deny their belief in the existence
of such a thing as poetry, or scoff at its value; no poetic treatise
has yet appeared from them, for it seems difficult for modern science to
keep alive in its devotees the weakest glimmerings of a sense of beauty.
Herein their great founder and father shows himself to be more
humane than his so-called progressive children. His _Poetics_ was the
foundation of literary criticism and shows no sign of being superseded.
Turning his eyes upwards, he gave the world a series of notes on what he
saw there. Not possessing a telescope, he could but do his best with
the methods available. Let us not jeer at his results; rather let us
remember that this same astronomer found time to observe the heavens in
addition to revolutionising thought in the brief compass of sixty-two
years.
For the miracle of miracles is this man's universality of outlook. It
makes us ashamed of our own pretentiousness and swollen-headed pride
when we reflect what this great architectonic genius has performed. Just
as our bodies have decreased in size with the progress of history, so
our intelligences seem to have narrowed themselves since Aristotle's
day. Great as our modern scientists are, there is not one of them who
would be capable of writing an acknowledged masterpiece on Ethics,
Politics, Rhetoric, Poetry, Metaphysics as well as on his own subject.
Nor have we yet mentioned this stupendous thinker's full claim to
absolute predominance in intellectual effort. His works on Medicine were
known to and appreciated by the Arabs, who translated them and brought
them to Spain and Sicily when they conquered those countries. Averroes
commented on them and added notes of his own which contributed not
a little to the development of the healing art. More than this, and
greatest of all, during the later Middle Ages Aristotle's system alone
was recognised as possessing universal value; it was taken as the
foundation on which the most famous and important Schoolmen erected
their philosophies--Chaucer mentions a clerk who possessed twenty books,
a treasure indeed in those days; it provided a European Church with a
Theology and the cosmopolitan European Universities with a curriculum.
Greater honour than this no man ever had or ever can have. Thus,
although the Greek city-state seemed to perish in mockery with
Demosthenes, yet the Greek spirit of free discussion which died in the
great orator was set free in another form in that same year; leaving
Aristotle's body, it ranged through the world conquering and civilising.
If in our ignorance and bigotry we try to kill Greek literature, we
shall find that, like the hero of the _Bacchae_, we are turning
our blows against our own selves, to the delight of all who relish
exhibitions of perfect folly.