change. She had lost most of her colonies and maritime possessions, and
in external politics she was but a pawn among the kings of Macedon and
Egypt. But for the most part she remained a free democracy, governed by
her free Assembly. The Peiræus still remained an important centre of
commerce. Intellectually Athens still ruled the world not only in virtue
of her past achievements, but by the continuing pre-eminence of her
philosophers. Her principal literary product
[Illustration: PLATE LXXXVII. APHRODITE OF MELOS [VENUS OF MILO]
_Alinari_]
of these days was the New Comedy of Menander and his school. Menander’s
work was taken over bodily by the Roman poets Plautus and Terence, who
did little more than translate his comedies into Latin, and sometimes
weave two of them together into one play, a process known by the not
inappropriate technical name “contamination.” From the Roman comedians
they passed almost direct to the Elizabethan age, so that in the history
of the drama Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” begins almost where
Menander left off. It must be confessed that the large fragments of
Menander recently discovered do not raise our estimate of this
dramatist.
If we turn now to philosophy we find the great name of Aristotle
overshadowing everything else.[114] If we have a true sense of
historical proportion, we shall probably admit that the words of
Aristotle have conquered the world in far truer sense than the spears of
his great pupil. For Aristotle is the father of the inductive method,
the patron saint of all those who observe and verify facts in order to
discover the laws that control them. He was born at Stagira, in Thrace,
but he came to Athens to be a disciple in the Academy, that pleasant
olive-grove where Plato was the master. Twenty years he spent thus in
study, and then he was commissioned by Philip to teach Alexander and
other noble youths of Macedon. As soon as this task was completed he
returned to Athens, and there founded his famous Peripatetic school of
philosophy, so called because his lectures were delivered in the shady
walks that surrounded the Lyceum. In the morning he would discuss
abstruse questions with an inner circle of adepts, and in the cool of
the evening deliver polished lectures to a wider circle. The fame of his
teaching was spread throughout the world, and all the ablest intellects
of Greece gathered to hear him. All his life he received the most
generous support from Alexander, who made a point of collecting strange
beasts from all quarters to enrich his zoological studies. The attitude
of the monarch towards learning was in striking contrast to the
behaviour of the Athenian democracy. Some wretched hierophant instituted
a prosecution for impiety against Aristotle, just as they had done
against Socrates, and forced him to withdraw from Athens for the closing
years of his life.
Aristotle took all knowledge as his province and proceeded to map it out
for further investigation. It is impossible even to enumerate all his
extant writings here, and they are only a small part of what he wrote.
For scientific method he wrote on Logic and Dialectic, and here he was
the discoverer of the syllogism and distinguished the inductive and
deductive methods of reasoning. For literature he dissected Poetry and
Rhetoric, laying down principles which all subsequent critics have been
compelled to follow. In his Ethics he defines the nature of virtue in a
sense that is truly Hellenic. Virtues are the mean between two vices.
Thus liberality is the virtue of which prodigality and parsimony are the
extremes; courage is the mean between foolhardiness and cowardice. For
Natural Science he wrote the first treatise on zoology, enumerating
about 500 different species. It was the first time in the history of the
world when men had thought it worth while to observe the world around
them. Most of this scientific work was beyond the reach of mankind, and
remained so for two thousand years. The Romans studied him, but scarcely
advanced a step. In the Dark Ages Europe lost even the power to follow
him, and much of his teaching was recovered from the wise men of Arabia.
The mediæval schoolmen were content with abridged translations for their
scientific knowledge. It was not until the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries that Europe came again to be able to study and understand him.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth men like Bacon and Newton began to
make some advance. Even now he is our master in Logic, in Criticism, and
above all in Politics.
Plato had treated Political Science in three great dialogues, the
greatest of which is “The Republic.” The ostensible object of this work
is to define the nature of Justice, and in order to do so Socrates and
his friends set out to construct an
[Illustration: PLATE LXXXVIII. THE VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE
_Alinari_]
Ideal Republic. Before they have gone very far it is evident, and indeed
it is admitted, that such a state as they envisage cannot exist upon
earth, though it may be laid up in the heavens for an example. It is a
small Greek city-state. Plato discerns three elements in every state,
the producers, the warriors, and the thinking element. Of these he makes
three rigid classes, though education, upon the importance of which
Plato everywhere insists, is to provide the means of rising for all.
Music and gymnastics are the twofold base of Platonic education. The
thinking part of the community are to have the sole title to government.
They are to live a simple communistic life, rather like the nobles of
Sparta, but without their military activity. In order that nothing may
disturb their absolute unity, Plato decrees that wives and children are
to be held in common, as well as all property. These strange doctrines
have caused Plato to be held as the father of Socialism, but it is to be
observed that in Plato communism is only advocated for a restricted
circle of aristocrats, and that it is based not upon economic
considerations, but on ethics in a spirit of asceticism. In a later
dialogue Plato regretfully admits that laws are necessary to a state,
seeing that you cannot keep your philosophers on the throne when you
have got them there. This admission may be occasioned by the failure of
Plato to realise his ideals in actual practice. He had an extraordinary
chance. He was invited over to Syracuse to mould the character and
policy of the young tyrant Dionysius II. He argued that it was useless
to place an ideal system of government before a young man who was not of
sufficient education to appreciate it. He therefore determined to begin
with the education of the prince, and began it with geometry. The issue
may be easily guessed.
Aristotle approached Politics from a more practical standpoint. True to
his inductive method, he first collected accounts of all the existing
forms of government in the Greek world, more than a hundred in number.
Unfortunately, the “Polity of Athens,” recently discovered, is the only
surviving example. Then in his great treatise called “The Politics” he
attempted to criticise practical statesmanship from a scientific
standpoint, and in his turn also constructed something like an ideal
state. For him, as for all Greek thinkers, politics was only a branch of
ethics. The state came into existence for the sake of enabling men to
live; it survives for the purpose of enabling men to live well. The
object, therefore, of the statesman is to get the right kind of people
at the head of affairs--and that means Aristocracy. Viewing all Greek
society from the philosopher’s standpoint, he regarded all those whose
economic position required them to be mainly interested in gaining a
livelihood as too much preoccupied with sordid cares to possess
political virtue or to be fit to govern. His governing class is
therefore necessarily the rich class, just as it was with Plato, though
neither philosopher would admit wealth as the sole or even the main
criterion. Aristotle regards Monarchy as a good form of government also,
if you could secure that the monarch should be better than the people he
rules, and should rule for their advantage, not his own. There is also a
good form of Republic or Free Constitution, in which the whole body of
the citizens take their turn in office. But each of these three sound
forms of government has its own special danger--Aristocracy degenerates
into Oligarchy when the few rule for their own advantage, Monarchy into
Tyranny, and the Free Constitution into Democracy.
It is evident in all his writings that he regards the Athenian
government as a bad one, but we must remember that he only saw it in its
decline. The most valuable part of his teaching is that wherein he
defines the state as a partnership, not in all things, but only in those
things which concern its _telos_--the good life. Also, it is made up,
not of individuals, but of smaller partnerships such as the family. It
is on these grounds that he criticises the doctrine of communism. Since
the whole object of political life is to secure moral completeness, it
is obvious that the citizen does not surrender his whole being to the
state. Thus both philosophers are alike in putting aside the claims of
the working classes, who, it must not be forgotten, largely
[Illustration: PLATE LXXXIX. STATUE OF ARISTOTLE
_Anderson_]
consisted of slaves. Both are therefore aristocratic. Both look upon the
state as existing for moral rather than economic ends. Both regard the
laws and constitution as something sacred and clearly beyond the reach
of the citizens. Neither of them has conceived the idea of political
progress, which, indeed, is an idea of very modern origin. Such was the
philosophic ideal of the city-state, in some respects better and in some
respects worse than our own.
After Aristotle Greek political thinkers took up and developed the hints
he drops as to the Mixed Constitution, in which the three elements
Monarchic, Aristocratic, and Democratic are to be subtly mingled as they
were in Sparta and Rome.
Other schools of philosophy arose at Athens which from their more vital
influence upon the lives and actions of ordinary men are quite as
important in the history of human civilisation. Zeno founded in the Stoa
Poikile of Athens the Stoic philosophy, and Epicurus taught the
doctrines which bore his name, at the same time when Aristotle was
lecturing in the Lyceum and the successor of Plato in the Academy. Both
were largely concerned with the rules for right conduct in life. The
Stoics taught that wisdom and virtue are the true goal of man. Virtue
consists in living according to Nature, and it becomes the business of
the wise man to discover what is essential and distinguish it from what
is merely accidental and ephemeral. Pleasure, praise, even life itself,
are among things accidental. At its best Stoicism insisted very sternly
upon duty, and the contempt of pain and death. In this way it seized
upon all that was noblest in the Roman character and raised up under the
Empire a series of martyrs who alone withstood the tyrants because they
were not afraid of death. It approaches the sublime in the mouths of
Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. Filtering through the Asiatic temperament
and mingling in its course with the higher teaching of Pharisaism, it
did much to form the philosophy of a certain Jew of Tarsus, and through
him has vitally influenced Christianity. In another sphere its
insistence upon Natural Law bore fruit in Roman jurisprudence and lies
at the base of all the legal systems of Europe.
Epicurus, on the other hand, made pleasure the end of life, not the mere
bodily pleasure with which his name has been associated, but that which
in the sum of its moments goes to form what we call happiness. It was
necessary to happiness that men should cast off all the degrading fears
born of superstition and know that the gods--if indeed gods exist--are
too much occupied themselves in enjoying celestial happiness to
condescend to punish and afflict the mortals under their feet. So the
Epicureans accepted a material theory, largely due to Democritus, which
explained the universe on atomic principles. Death was merely the
resolution of body and soul into its primordial atoms. The less noble
spirits among them undoubtedly taught the maxim “Let us eat and drink,
for to-morrow we die,” but in such a mind as that of the Roman poet
Lucretius Epicureanism is a fine and lofty thing, with its fearless
spirit of inquiry and its bitter scorn of superstition.
We should mention also the Cynics, whose chief teacher was Diogenes, for
they inculcated a contempt for pleasure and an asceticism which led some
of them to live a hermit life, or, like mendicant friars, to carry
neither staff nor scrip and to take no thought for their raiment.
Needless to say, Cynicism never became a popular doctrine.
It is evident, then, that intellectual life was still in full vigour at
Athens in the third century. But there was a weakening already visible.
These Greeks could still think clearly, even nobly, but it was not until
they made Roman converts that noble thoughts could be translated into
noble action. As for the Greeks, their restless tongues and subtle
brains carried them away into logic-chopping and childish love of
paradox. There was a day when Athens sent on an embassy to Rome the
three heads of her chief schools of philosophy. Their brilliant
discourses charmed and amazed the simple Romans. Carneades proved that
virtue was profitable, and the Romans were delighted. On the next day he
proved that it was unprofitable, and the Romans were astonished. Cato,
however, the truest Roman of them all, thought that Rome was better
without such brilliant visitors. And he was probably right.
VII
EPILOGUE
ἡ πόλις ἡμῶν ... τὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ὄνομα πεποίηκε
μηκέτι τοῦ γένους ἀλλὰ τῆς διανοίας δοκεῖν εἶναι.
ISOCRATES.
It was, according to Isocrates, the fruit of the activity of Athens that
Hellas had ceased to be a geographical expression and had become the
definition of an intellectual standpoint. In that very true sense Greek
history cannot close. It falls into chapters which are ever to be
continued as soon as man begins to think again. Whosoever from the
beginning of his action already contemplates its final end and adapts
his means thereto in earnest simplicity, whosoever knows that pride and
vain ostentation will assuredly bring its own punishment, of whatever
land or age he may be, he is a Greek. In that sense we cannot close
Greek history. Greece, as Juvenal said in a very hackneyed phrase,
vanquished the Roman, her barbarian conqueror, and the Roman took up the
mission of extending Hellenism over the West. The history of Roman
civilisation only begins in the second century, when Rome was first
brought into contact with Greece. Elsewhere I hope we shall see how
Greek culture permeated everything at Rome after that, supplied her with
art and literature, taught her philosophy, overlaid and almost destroyed
her native religion, and even wrote her history. Losing Hellas, Europe
sank into ages of darkness: recovering her, the European nations began
to think again. Shakespeare we trace through the Latins to Menander,
Milton through Vergil to Homer and Theocritus, Bacon to Aristotle, Sir
Thomas More to Plato, and so with the others. So that every one who
reads books or enjoys art in Europe to-day is indirectly borrowing from
Greece.
Moreover, it is fairly obvious that Greece has not ceased to exist as a
geographical expression. The more we study modern Greece, the more we
are convinced that the Hellenic race is by no means extinct. Greece was,
it is true, conquered by the Romans in 146 B.C. They had been forced
partly by the aggression of Pyrrhus and partly by the expansion of their
own empire to take some action in the Eastern Mediterranean. There they
found themselves physically as men among children, intellectually as
children among men. Nothing is more striking than the almost reverent
spirit in which the Roman soldiers first moved about among the old
cities of Greece. But the Greeks were impossible neighbours, and at
last, after infinite forbearance, the Romans were compelled by their
masculine sense of order to take the responsibility of controlling
Greece. Corinth was destroyed for a warning, Macedonia made a province.
But cities like Athens and Sparta were left to govern themselves,
though, of course, their foreign policy was subject to Roman control.
Athens still continued to talk and write and teach. She became a sort of
university town to which noble Romans were sent for their studies. Even
when Achaia was added to the list of Roman provinces in the days of
Augustus it did not mean that Athens ceased to be a free city. In the
days of the Empire the more cultured emperors, like Nero and Hadrian,
loved to pass their time in Greece, in the attempt to share in her
intellectual prestige. So we have Nero performing in the Olympian Games,
and Hadrian rebuilding a large part of Athens. It was Hadrian who
attempted to complete the gigantic temple of Olympian Zeus begun by
Peisistratus. The Athenian schools of philosophy continued to attract
strangers from all parts of the world, until Christianity began to see
its bitterest foe in the Stoics, who taught many of its doctrines.
Julian the Apostate dreamed for a moment of reviving Greek philosophy,
so as to overcome Christianity by borrowing many of its doctrines, but
at last a decree of Justinian closed the Athenian schools of philosophy
in A.D. 529. Meanwhile clouds of barbarian invaders were continually
passing over the land. The Goths ravaged Greece under Alaric. The Slavs
conquered and peopled a great part of it without, in the long run,
materially altering its nationality. Norman invaders conquered it, and
not long before our own conquest Harold Hardrada entered Athens in
triumph. Then came the Latin crusaders and Venetians. All through the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there were Frankish Dukes of Athens.
In 1456 the Caliph Omar conquered her, and thenceforth, with a temporary
period of Venetian triumph, the Turks ruled Greece with a heavy hand
until the glorious War of Independence, in which Lord Byron played a
part of prophet and warrior. In 1830 Greece was declared an independent
kingdom, and shortly afterwards provided with a youthful European king
from Bavaria. The experiment was not a success. The Greeks succeeded in
getting rid of one king, and Europe obligingly furnished another from
her inexhaustible stock of younger sons. Even yet the bed of a Greek
king is not altogether a bed of roses. In 1897 the little kingdom
plunged into a war with her big neighbour, Turkey, for which she lacked
resources and organisation. Her flanks were turned, her armies miserably
routed, and she lost a great deal of the credit she had won in the War
of Independence. But her true element is still, as it was in ancient
times, the sea.
We have already seen that Greek art still crops out in occasional
masterpieces down to imperial times. With literature this is still more
the case. Long after the best of Roman literature was over and done
with, Greece kept putting forth new products. The Greek novel, for
example, in Lucian and Heliodorus is something entirely fresh and of
great importance in literary history. The biographies of Plutarch are a
new departure; so are the guide-books of such writers as Pausanias.
[Illustration: PLATE XC. THE PORTLAND VASE
_Mansell & Co._]
The case of Lucian, in particular, shows that a Syrian of the second
century A.D. could write in pure Attic Greek. In him we have the
prototype of Swift and Sterne, a brilliant mocker and a creative genius.
With him Greek literature expired laughing.
It only remains to glance at the decadence of Greek art and to see what
form it took. The Romans, when they plundered and sacked Corinth,
transported enormous quantities of plunder to Rome, and a taste for
Greek art quickly sprang up among the wealthy senators. To meet their
tastes, Greek artists were set to work. Some of their works, in the form
of portraits, we shall meet again when we come to deal with Rome. Greek
architects also evolved a Græco-Roman style, in which they blended,
sometimes with the happiest results, massive Roman strength with Greek
elegance and grace. In minor crafts such as gem-engraving Greek artists
continued to produce exquisite work for the Roman market. The famous
Portland Vase is a good example of this sort of work.[115] Although the
material is glass, it is genuine cameo-engraving, and must have involved
infinite labour. The material of the vase was composed of two layers of
glass, white over dark blue, and then the white was ground away by hand,
so as to leave the design in white upon the blue background, a scheme of
decoration imitated with great success by the Wedgwood artists. It is
one of the tragedies of the British Museum that this priceless treasure
was smashed to pieces by an insane visitor. It has, however, been
repaired with great skill. In the Greek cities of South Italy where the
taste of the patrons remained Greek we find preserved, as at Pompeii and
Herculaneum, works thoroughly Greek in all branches of art, produced at
various dates down to the first century A.D. Given good taste in the
patron, Greek artists did not cease to be capable of fine art.
But every national virtue has its characteristic defect which will come
to the surface as soon as the stimulus of national self-respect is
removed. A strong conquering breed is apt to
[Illustration: The Laocoön Group]
become cruel and vicious when it loses the power to conquer. A
sensitive, artistic people is prone to sensuality and weakness in its
latter days. An industrous commercial race degenerates into sordid
greed. That is why a loss of national pride is such a serious loss in
history. A characteristic virtue of the Greeks was, as we have seen,
their supple facility of intellect, their
[Illustration: PLATE XCI. THE FARNESE BULL
_Brogi_]
adaptability to environment. This made them, in the days of their
decline, sink readily to the position of flatterers and parasites. We
find this character attached to the “Hungry Greekling” of Juvenal’s
days. In history we meet him as the hanger-on of aristocracy or the
crafty tool of emperors. The Romans started as a virile race of
warriors, and ended as brutal gluttons with a craving for
sensationalism, which the Greeks were only too ready to supply. Hence we
get Græco-Roman art in the worst sense of the term, wretched stuff made
by sneaks to satisfy the taste of bullies. Most of the sculpture
galleries of Europe can supply examples. The Vatican and the Naples
Museum are full of them. In the nineteenth century, when the taste of
Europe had sunk to its lowest depth of artificiality, work of this kind
appealed very strongly to critics. It is only fair to them to say that
they had not much opportunity of knowing better, since genuine Greek
work of the best periods was mostly lying below the surface unexcavated.
Out of this mass of inferior material critics picked one or two examples
for admiration. Even great men like Lessing and Winckelmann based
excellent maxims of criticism on these rotten foundations. The
“Laocoön,” a sensational work by Rhodian sculptors of the first century
B.C., was taken by Lessing as the text of his great discourse on the
proper functions of the arts. We, on the other hand, can see that this
tangled triangle of writhing forms expressing violent emotion of pain
and terror has a theatrical and sensational character abhorrent to the
very spirit of Greek moderation. Exactly the same is true of the two
Farnese masterpieces, the Bull[116] and the Hercules. Such facts as
these give one cause to ponder on the mutability of taste and the
fallibility of artistic criticism. Restlessness, the symptom of nerves
overwrought, is a feature of decadence, which we can observe in the late
Greek vase-paintings. The spaces are covered with trivial ornament, the
drawing is slack, the sole aim is prettiness. The vigour of the
composition is frittered away upon trivial details. In short, the name
of the disease from which Greek art was to perish is Vulgarity. Idealism
without romanticism was the secret of Greek art at its best. When we
find romance without ideals we have reached the nadir.
[Illustration: Late Greek Vase-painting: from a _Pelike_ in the British
Museum.]
[Illustration: THE PRAYING BOY
_Mansell & Co._]
GLOSSARY