The Joy of Reading

chapter two

After the Fall

The fourth century before the Christian era was very different from the fifth. Gone was the artistic glory of the fifth century, together with the glow of surprising military inventiveness and discovery in the natural world. Particularly in Athens, the self-elected capital of Hellas for five or six great—indeed unforgettable—decades, the mood was somber and dark. But despite their victory in the civil war that ended just before the turn of the century, Sparta was hardly better off than Athens. The war had sapped the strength and resources of both winner and loser. There wasn’t much to look forward to for either in those sad and hopeless years.

Nevertheless, the fourth century had, because it made them, its own glories and successes. In philosophy, Plato and Aristotle achieved greatness of a different kind from that of Themistocles and Pericles. For all practical purposes democracy no longer existed. Athenian drama had fallen on hard times, religion had become secretive, and citizens looked at one another with fear and suspicion, and, despite the valiant (and ultimately self-defeating) efforts of Aristophanes and Euripides on their behalf, women were treated with the same old lack of honor and respect. In Hellas proper it was not a time to look back on with any pride or pleasure. Yet there was a new light blazing in the north, in Macedon, only recently thought of as backward and poor. And by the end of this new century the greatest and most famous of all Greeks had flamed through a world that had belonged to Persia and never would again.

His name was Alexander of Macedon. He was the third to bear a name that in after times would be borne by kings, popes, and emperors. His father, Philip, won the crown that he gave his son, and that his son wore with unexampled brilliance. Alexander was born in 356 BCE and died in 323, still a young man, but in those thirty-three short years he conquered the greatest empire ever seen until that time, defeating Persia, Egypt, and Babylon and the rest of the Near East, and threatening India, which escaped only because he died. His exploits were extraordinary in every sense of the word. If you want to know more about him, read Plutarch’s Life, in which he is compared to Julius Caesar. Even that would not have satisfied Alexander—he thought there was only one man that ever lived who could rightfully be compared to him, and that was Achilles. When he came upon the supposed tomb of that great hero on the Troad, the beach below the ruins of Troy, Alexander wept because, he said, he regretted there was no poet as great as Homer to tell his own story.

Alexander wrote nothing, nor has his story ever been told as well as it should be. However, there were small triumphs in the era, and some works that deserve their fame. I have chosen five authors to represent the time: Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and Archimedes. Any century would be proud to possess five such names.

HIPPOCRATES

460?–377? BCE

Medical Treatises

Hippocrates (fl. 400 BCE), “the father of medicine,” a friend of Socrates and Plato, was the best physician of his time. He taught medicine as well as practiced it, and he may have written some of the works that were later ascribed to him by the ancients, but this is by no means certain. Instead, these treatises—“On Ancient Medicine,” “On Airs, Waters, and Places,” “On the Sacred Disease,” and so forth—may have been written by anonymous physicians and teachers of the famous fourth-century BCE medical school of Cos and published as the works of Hippocrates, who for at least a thousand years thereafter was the greatest name in medicine. Whatever the truth of the matter, the works ascribed to Hippocrates are important. There are three things to learn from them.

They are full of medical lore—odd ideas and strange practices and treatments. For hemorrhoids, “transfix them with a needle and tie them with a very thick and large woolen thread.” For dysentery, prescribe “a fourth part of a pound of cleaned beans, and twelve shoots of madder.” For watery eyes, “take one drachm of ebony and nine oboli of burnt copper, rub them upon a whetstone, add three oboli of sapphron, triturate all these things till reduced to a fine powder, pour in an Attic hemina of sweet wine, and then place in the sun.” “Persons disposed to jaundice are not very subject to flatulence.” “Eunuchs do not take the gout, nor become bald.” “Persons above forty years of age who are affected with frenzy do not readily recover.” And so on.

Those are oddities. But not all the lore of the Hippocratic writings is odd. Much of it is based on sound observation and practical sense. It is evident, however, even to a nonphysician, that we have come a long way since the fourth century BCE. There is some satisfaction in that discovery. What if it were the other way around—if Hippocrates knew vastly more about medicine than we do?

He did know some things that are sometimes forgotten. He (or those anonymous physicians who may have published under his name) never ceases to emphasize the importance of knowing the past as well as the present of the patient, instead of just his disease—of knowing the whole person, that is, instead of that part of him that is affected by the condition concerning which the physician is a “specialist.” Even a bad diet, Hippocrates says, can be good if one is accustomed to it, which is to say if one has learned to thrive on it. The circumstances of a patient’s life must be known by a physician and will affect the treatment: whether the patient lives in a place where warm winds prevail, or cold ones do; whether the water of his city is brackish or bland. The good physician does not study and treat diseases, but diseased men, women, and children.

Above all, the good physician must strive to do good for his patient. If he cannot do good, then he must strive to do no harm. This famous injunction, which is included in the Hippocratic Oath that all physicians take even today upon entering the medical profession, is never to be forgotten. Remembering it makes a man—be he physician or not—humble in the face of life.

Finally, the third great lesson of Hippocrates is suggested in this distinctive passage:

The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future—must meditate these things and have two special objects in view with regard to diseases, namely, to do good or to do no harm. The art consists in three things—the disease, the patient, and the physician. The physician is the servant of the art, and the patient must combat the disease along with the physician.

The passage has often been commented upon. The great second-century physician Galen, in particular, was struck by two things in it that he considered eminently wise: the injunction not to do harm if the physician could not do good, and the observation that the physician is the servant of his art (or, as some Hippocratic manuscripts have it, the “servant of nature”).

The ancients were of the opinion that of all the arts (we would call them professions), three and only three are “cooperative” —but these three arts are the most important and valuable. By cooperative they meant that the art cannot be practiced without the willing cooperation of someone or something else. In the case of agriculture, that something is nature itself; the good farmer does not fight against nature, he works with it to produce his crops. In teaching, it is the student or pupil who must strive to learn, who cannot be forcibly taught, and in whom the learning takes place. It is the learner who acts in learning; the teacher merely assists the process. Finally, in the case of medicine it is the patient who gets well, not the doctor, and the patient’s cooperation in this endeavor is indispensable; he cannot be cured against his will or unless he contributes actively to the result; nor can he be cured by unnatural (in the sense of anti-natural) endeavors on the part of the physician or anyone else.

In the modern world we often forget this old wisdom, in all three professions. Modern scientific agriculture—or “agribiz,” as it is called—is an offense against nature and its results are predictably bad, if not always disastrous. Many teachers think of themselves as playing the active role in “the learning process” and are surprised when unwilling pupils seem hard to teach. And modern medicine is in danger of becoming “healthbiz,” with regimented cures and automated treatments, as like as not dialed up on a computer.

Computers are useful in medicine; Hippocrates would have welcomed them. But he would have warned of the dangers of overde-pendence on them or on any other instrument or tool. The maintenance of health and the recovery of health from illness are found in the joint efforts of two kinds of wisdom: that of the physician and that of the body itself. The body knows what it has to do and the physician, more than anything else, should not stand in the way.

PLATO

428?–347 BCE

The Republic

The Symposium

The Trial and Death of Socrates

Plato was born in Athens about 428 BCE, the son of aristocratic parents who traced their lineage, on his father’s side, to the god Poseidon, and on his mother’s to the lawgiver Solon. Plato’s early ambitions were political, but the last quarter of the fifth century in Athens was no time for an honest politician, so Plato instead founded a philosophical school, the Academy, which was in many respects the first university (besides philosophy, it taught and underwrote researches in all the sciences, law, and medicine). Plato’s own favorite study was mathematics, and he was closely associated with all of the mathematical discoveries of the fourth century. He had one eventful, and finally dangerous, brush with practical politics. He journeyed twice to Sicily, the leading Greek colony, to try to educate its unruly rulers, but gave up when he realized how little rulers desire to be educated. As to his character and talents, perhaps it is sufficient to quote Aristotle, who declared him to be a man “whom it is blasphemy in the base even to praise.” Plato lived to be about eighty years old. His Academy survived him by more than eight hundred years.

Plato wrote dialogues throughout his life. Most of them have as their main character Socrates, who was Plato’s teacher. Socrates plays many roles in the dialogues of Plato, but he is always the center of the drama as well as being—we must assume—the presenter of Plato’s own views. In his last dialogues (for example, the Laws), Plato discards Socrates and replaces him with an “Athenian Stranger” who is surely Plato himself. This protagonist is nowhere as interesting as Socrates, who enlivens the many dialogues in which he appears with his odd mannerisms and his unique way of discussing philosophy. In a sense, Socrates and Plato, although in fact two different men, are inseparable in our minds. Certainly each of them owes most of his fame to the other.

The Republic, the greatest as well as the longest of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, cannot be dated accurately, but we can guess that Plato wrote it during his middle years. It retains the freshness and charm of his earliest writings but at the same time reveals a profundity of philosophical thought that is characteristic of his later works.

Like all of the Platonic dialogues, but especially the early ones, Republic is both a dramatic and a philosophical work. It is written in the form of an account by Socrates, Plato’s teacher, of a long conversation that had occurred on the previous day, involving a number of different people of varying opinions, and also involving some very heated interchanges. Socrates had been the main speaker.

The subject of the dialogue is justice, the search for which had obsessed Socrates for years. What does justice mean? Can it be shown that justice is always a good and injustice always an evil, apart from any consideration of consequences? Socrates maintains that this can be done. The Republic is Plato’s attempt to do it.

In the dialogue, Socrates first describes a conversation with Cephalus, an elderly rich man of Athens who has been Socrates’ friend for many years. Like so many others, Cephalus does not care to strive to understand justice. The next interlocutor is Thrasymachus, the Athenian general, who is certain he already understands it: justice is the interest of the strong. Might makes right, no bones about it. Socrates describes his spirited battle of wits with Thrasymachus, who retires from the fray disgruntled and unhappy.

Socrates is not happy either. He knows that making your opponent look like a fool isn’t the best way to win an argument. Two young men, followers of Socrates, agree, and ask their master to take the time and make the effort to instruct them in the meaning of justice. I will do so, Socrates says, if you will help me, and the search begins.

It ranges far and digs deep. Plato has Socrates concede from the start that justice is a hard idea to understand in the life of a man—so hard he proposes to magnify it, as it were, and view it in the context of a state. A state is good, he finds—that is, just—when every member of it takes his rightful and proper place within it and performs his rightful and proper role. Those who are naturally laborers and merchants take those jobs, those who are naturally soldiers find themselves guarding the state, and the most competent and intelligent of all are rulers. When philosophers are kings, Socrates says to Glaucon and Adeimantus, and kings philosophers, then and then only will states be truly just. Once this conclusion is reached it is applied to individuals. The three types of citizens correspond to three parts of the soul, and only when a man is ruled by his intellectual part, with his appetitive and spirited parts playing their necessary but subservient roles, can he be said to be just.

The conversation, which occupied an entire day and the account of which fills three hundred pages, covers many subjects. Two of them are the system of education to be developed in the ideal state—the “republic” of the title—and the place of artistic productions, notably music and theater, in such a state. Socrates’—or Plato’s—ideas about education are both radical and modern. Plato held, for example, that education should be the leading concern of the state, that it should be provided free to all, and among the “all” he included girls and women, maintaining that there should be no difference between their education and that of boys and men. He was the first serious thinker in human history to take this position and one of the very few to take it before modern times.

Regarding the place of art in a just society Plato was not nearly so modern; in fact he proposed, and seems to have believed, that works of imaginative artistry—poems, songs, plays, and so forth—should be banned altogether as being essentially subversive of the state’s true health. Plato left a loophole in this severe position, and Aristotle took advantage of it in his Poetics. It is an interesting, if not a pleasant, theory nevertheless.

The English philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead once said that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” He could have said footnotes to the Republic, for almost all of Plato’s ideas are at least touched upon in this dialogue. Plato puts these ideas in the mouth of Socrates, of course. The real Socrates, on the other hand, may have been the source, or at least the inspiration, of the dialogue’s most potent images. No reader who has seriously read this greatest of philosophical books will ever forget the story of the Cave, the account of the Divided Line of knowledge, or Socrates’ retelling of the Myth of Er, which closes the dialogue. These and other moments are wonderfully dramatic whether or not they are also profoundly true. (I think the myth of the cave, when properly understood, is true.)

The Republic of Plato is far from a mere entertainment for an evening. Purchase or borrow a good translation (I suggest that of F.M. Cornford, with copious notes), block out a period of some consecutive days—ten or more would not be too many—accept no engagements of any sort, prepare a quiet space with a table close by with paper and pencils on it (for your own inevitable notes), and begin the incomparable journey. Everyone who counts for anything has taken it, and in twenty-five hundred years very few, I believe, who have seriously made the effort have been other than glad they did.

Every one of Plato’s dialogues is a human drama as well as an intellectual discourse, but none is more entertaining than the Symposium, or banquet. Here is what happens on that night when there occurred one of the most famous dinner parties ever held.

The company is large and all male. Some twenty men sit, or rather recline, on couches, around a long, low table. Socrates was not among those originally invited, but he is brought by another guest and warmly welcomed by the host, Agathon, who the day before has won the prize for his first tragedy; the party is in celebration of the victory. The first question asked by the host is whether the company shall drink hard or not. The majority say not, which opens the way for rational discourse unspoiled by drunkenness, and the female flute players, whose activities would also spoil rational discourse, are sent away. A subject is chosen, and it is decided that each guest shall speak in turn, going around the table and ending with Socrates, who all agree is the best speaker.

The subject is love. Fine speeches are made about it, but all are rather solemn until that of Aristophanes, the comic poet. To explain the power of love, Aristophanes says that once upon a time we were not divided into two sexes but instead were wholes, with both sexes in one person; round creatures, we rolled from place to place and were contented with our lot. But the gods, to punish us for some transgression, split us in half and now we go through the world seeking our other half and are not happy until we have found him or her. “A likely story!” the other guests cry. Aristophanes smiles, knowing full well that his tale is worth a dozen of their speeches.

Finally it is Socrates’ turn. He is as elusive, and his speech as strange and unexpected, as ever. He tells of a meeting long ago with a prophetess, Diotima, who taught him about love. Love is the desire for eternity implanted in a mortal being; we seek love, she said, in order through our offspring to overcome our mortality and leave something enduring behind us. Thus we can love our works as well as our children, Socrates is explaining, when suddenly the doors are thrown wide and into the banquet chamber bursts a company of half-drunken revelers who insist on joining the party—and who refuse to accept the rule of no hard drinking.

The leader of this ribald band is none other than Alcibiades, the greatest man of Athens (by now Pericles is dead), the hero who has been chosen to command the Athenian expedition against Syracuse that is to embark the next day. Alcibiades, brilliant, handsome, rich, and unpredictable, soon discovers what has been the order of the evening and demands to be heard, whether or not it is his turn. No one has ever denied Alcibiades, and he begins to speak.

His speech is one of the most moving ever made, and it produces a high drama in this dialogue. For Alcibiades discourses not of love itself but of Socrates his beloved friend, the man who above all, he says, has made him what he is but who also above all, Alcibiades admits, disapproves of what he is. For Socrates, says Alcibiades, is the most demanding of teachers and you can never satisfy him; he always wants more from you, indeed nothing less than all you can give.

Alcibiades tells stories about their life together, in the army and out, how Socrates once saved his life in battle, and how his own attempts to seduce Socrates into a life of pleasure and ease have utterly failed. Finally he describes Socrates in an unforgettable image. Socrates, says Alcibiades, is like those cheap little statues of Silenus, the god of drunkards, which are to be found in all the markets—little clay figurines that, when broken open, are found to enclose a sweet within. Socrates is just such a figure, says Alcibiades, with his short, squat body and his rolling gait, his simple courtesy, and most of all his homely manner of speech. But, says Alcibiades, when you break open those simple words and sentences and truly seek to understand them, “you find a delicious treasure at the center that is to be found in the words of no other person and which is, in short,” Alcibiades concludes, “the whole duty of a good and honorable man.” And, repeating that he will praise Socrates in this figure and drink to him, too, Alcibiades raises his glass and drinks deep. Thereafter he insists that all do likewise, whereupon the party disintegrates into a rout.

It ends hours later in another famous scene. Alcibiades is long gone, together with his companions; most of the other guests are sleeping, on or under the table; but Socrates, together with Agathon and Aristophanes and one or two others, are soberly discussing, as the first light of day shows in the windows, the nature of tragedy and of comedy. Socrates is defending the interesting proposition that “in the deepest sense they are the same.”

The banquet, or its consequences, did not end there, as Plato well knew. Alcibiades, on actually leaving this party, went on a drunken revel through the city. As a joke he, or some of his friends, or perhaps some of his enemies (in order falsely to accuse him later), defiled many of the little statues of household gods that stood outside of houses. This caused no comment at the time, and Alcibiades sailed for Syracuse in all the glory of Athenian might. Once he’d gone, however, Alcibiades' enemies became dominant in the government and accused him of impiously destroying the religious icons, and on failing to appear he was tried and convicted in absentia. No longer able to command the expedition, Alcibiades deserted to the enemy and gave over his command to Nicaeus, who shortly suffered the worst defeat in Athenian history. This led to the final defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. Socrates, harmed in reputation by his close association with the traitor Alcibiades, was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens—meaning Alcibiades?— and put to death.

Was all this in Plato’s mind when he wrote? Certainly. What then was he saying in the dialogue? Did he mean us to understand that when love is transferred from an ideal to a living person—from the idea of eternity to the man Socrates—it really does corrupt the lover? Did he mean that carelessness about solemn things, as exemplified in Alcibiades’ interruption of Socrates’ speech about love, was the real corruption of Athens and led to its fall? Or did he mean that despite these dire consequences life goes on much the same as ever, for the tragic and the comic are merely different versions of the same scene? It is interesting to speculate about these matters, but of course no final answers are possible. One thing, at least, is certain: Plato’s Symposium remains one of the great entertainments.

If the Passion of Jesus Christ is the greatest story ever told, The Trial and Death of Socrates, as described by Plato in four dialogues, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, is a close second. Socrates was an important early philosopher in his own right because he was Plato’s teacher (as Plato was the teacher of Aristotle), but his memory survives primarily because of his martyrdom. Not a few great men and women have become immortal by dying unjustly at the right time and place.

Let us set the scene. Socrates, an old man (he is about seventy), has been accused by two enemies of corrupting the youth of Athens. It is a trumped-up charge, but much anger and frustration lie behind it. Athens has finally lost the long-drawn-out Peloponnesian War and Sparta, the victor, has replaced Athens as the dominant political and economic force in Greece. The wealth and power of Athens are gone; there is not much to look forward to. Mean-spirited rulers have succeeded the great men like Pericles and Alcibiades who once led the city-state. The artistic force that had produced playwrights such as Aeschylus and Sophocles, painters and sculptors such as Phidias, and thinkers such as Socrates, seems to have played out. Business goes on but no longer with the imaginative brilliance that marked it before. From a growing, confident society, Athens has turned inward upon itself. Bitterness and nostalgic regret are the main emotions of the citizenry.

The trial itself—as was true at the time of all capital trials, for the accusers in this case are asking for the death penalty—takes place in the open, in the central place (or Agora) of Athens, before an audience of hundreds. All present male citizens of the city are jurors who will vote to decide the issue. The entire trial will occupy no more than one day.

The accusers speak first. Their charges are false, hollow. Socrates replies. His magnificent defense is, more than anything else, an explanation and justification of his entire mature life during which he has persisted, as he says, in being a kind of “gadfly” to the Athenians—an insect whose sting has driven the “animal of the state” onward to greatness.

He has been a teacher to the Athenians, he reminds them, and teachers, especially when critical of their pupils, are not always loved. Socrates knows this well. But he will not step out of character and cease to be the severe though caring teacher he has always been. He will not beg for forgiveness; he will not even beg for his life. When the verdict goes against him—by a vote that Socrates declares to be closer than he expected—the question becomes one of punishment.His accusers propose death; Socrates himself proposes a monetary fine, which his friends, he concedes, will have to help him pay. Again the decision goes against him. Death it shall be.

He has one more opportunity to speak to the men of Athens among whom he has lived and played his strange, ironic role. He takes full advantage of it, typically chastising his fellow citizens and telling them how they must live if they are to remain free, telling them to be honorable and good. He wishes them well and bids farewell in the famous, enigmatic words: “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows”

The three speeches of Socrates at his trial, as recounted by Plato in the Apology, are among the most moving ever written. No one who has any feeling for the Greece that gave us the arts and sciences, or who has any love for philosophy, can avoid the catch in the throat as he reads them. But there is more. The Crito is almost more moving than the Apology. Crito is an old man Socrates’ age and a friend of long standing, who visits Socrates in prison. He tells Socrates his escape from prison has been arranged. It will be a simple matter for him to leave the city never to return and to sojourn with his friends in some pleasant spot for the rest of his life, discoursing on philosophy. But Socrates refuses to go. Not only would he find it difficult, perhaps impossible, to survive anywhere except in the city that has been his home throughout his life but, more important, what would the Athenians think of him if he were to flee and thereby show his contempt for the laws of his city? Would not their judgment of him at his trial be thus confirmed—that he was a bad man and deserved to be punished with death? Crito and the others attempt to persuade him, to no avail.

Finally, in the Phaedo, the last visit to Socrates by his friends, and their last conversation with him, is described by Plato. Not surprisingly the talk turns to death and to the great question of what comes after it. I do not fear, says Socrates, for either I shall cease to exist altogether or, since I have been a good man, I shall enjoy the rewards of virtue in the afterlife. “For no evil,” he says, “can come to a good man, in life or death.”

The conversation ends. The executioner appears with the poison that Socrates must drink. He does so with the simple grace that has always marked his actions, and lies down to die. It does not take very long.

The Trial and Death of Socrates as described by Plato in this series of dialogues presents few problems for modern readers. Consequently many students are assigned the story to read at an early age, an age when they are not yet fully able to comprehend its meaning. It is well enough that the reading of Plato should start here, but it shouldn’t stop here. Read the Symposium and the Republic, and then Meno and Protagoras and Thaeatetus, Sophist, and Statesman—read as much Plato as you can. But keep coming back to the Apology and the Crito. Here beats the heart and here shines the soul of one of the finest men who ever lived. He can be our teacher too, as he was the teacher of the Athenians many years ago.

ARISTOTLE

384–322 BCE

Poetics

Ethics

Aristotle was born in the summer of 384 BCE in the small Greek colony of Stagira, in Macedonia—hence he is often called the Stagirite. Coming from a family of wealthy physicians, the boy received an excellent education, with the emphasis on biology, botany, and medical procedures. In his early twenties, Aristotle’s father died, and he was sent to Athens to study and work at Plato’s Academy. There he remained for twenty years, as the greatest of Plato’s many pupils. But he was gathering his forces for the inevitable break. This occurred during the twelve years, starting in 348, that he spent away from Athens, partly because of strong anti-Macedonian feelings there, partly because of his intense curiosity about the world. These were happy years, during which he married, fathered two children, and attempted to teach philosophy to the heir of the Macedonian throne, the young man who would become Alexander the Great. Aristotle is said to have spanked his pupil more than once, but the boy did not learn much from him. Alexander did, however, later rebuild Stagira, after it had been destroyed in one of his father’s campaigns. The relationship between the great philosopher and the great conqueror is a matter of conjecture—but irresistible to speculate about nevertheless.

Aristotle returned to Athens in 335. Plato being dead, and perhaps disappointed at not being named to replace him as the head of the Academy, Aristotle established his own competing institution, the Lyceum. There he worked and taught until 323 when, on the death of Alexander, Aristotle, having lost his great protector, was charged with impiety. It appears that condemnation was certain. Aristotle, declaring (in reference to the judicial murder of Socrates in 399 B.C.) that he would not give the Athenians a second chance to sin against philosophy, went into voluntary exile at Chalcis, north of Athens. He died there the next year, in 322, at the age of sixty-two.

The challenge that had been thrown down by Plato in the Republic is taken up and answered by Aristotle in the Poetics, the short, precious work that has shaped our thinking about theater and drama for more than two thousand years. The pages—only twenty or so, but rich in content—of the Poetics are filled with profound insight, and reading them makes going to the theater or the cinema more pleasurable.

Plato—or Socrates—had made the claim that the free exercise of the artistic imagination is a danger to the state, since poets and dramatists (and moviemakers and TV producers) are likely to tell stories that make people feel dissatisfied with their lot in life. Plato therefore proposed banning poets from his ideal Republic—a proposal that has offended nearly all of his readers ever since. Socrates, the protagonist of the dialogue, had left a loophole, however, conceding that though he himself could see no good that poets might do to balance the disruption he knew they could produce, someone else might see some countervailing benefit in poets and therefore allow them to return to the state—where, Socrates also conceded, they could provide much pleasure.

The good that poets can do—especially dramatists, and among them especially the writers of tragedies—constitutes the main subject of the Poetics. There are certain emotions, Aristotle says, that are in all people and that are harmful to them—emotions likely to disturb the equanimity of their lives and impede their going about their business with pleasure and success. Among these emotions he particularly mentions pity and fear, but these apparently harmless emotions clearly imply (by his argument) envy and ambition, and the implication also extends to other strong emotions, like anger and overweening desire and pride.

Aristotle’s argument goes like this. All art, he says, is imitation, and we delight in a work of art that imitates well—that is, presents to our view the similitude of real things, which in their originals may not be pleasing to our senses but, as imitated, produce pleasure for our minds. A tragedy, Aristotle goes on to say, is “the imitation of an action, complete and entire of itself, having a beginning, middle, and end, and dealing with an event or series of events of a certain seriousness and import.”

An action sufficiently important and serious that is well imitated in a play that is well written, according to rules of art that Aristotle lays down, has a profound effect on its viewers, making them share and participate in the great emotions presented on the stage and eventually—when the play is over—exorcising or driving out those troublesome emotions from their souls. The result, Aristotle concludes, is a kind of catharsis of harmful passions, leaving the spectator, as he (or she) departs from the theater and for some time afterward, purified and cleansed, more able to deal with his worldly tasks.

Whether Aristotle is a good psychologist has often been debated, but the question is really irrelevant to our appreciation of the Poetics today. The work is not only the first but also perhaps the finest—the most thorough, the most insightful, the most accurate—critique of drama ever written. It remains the basis of all dramatic criticism.

The Poetics contains some difficult passages. It is advisable, therefore, to read it more than once. Your reward comes when you begin to think about Aristotle’s discussion of types of plays and why some are better than others. Apply these critical guidelines to the next stage play you see; also to films, television shows, and other entertainments. All will become more intelligible and thus more enjoyable.

The surviving texts of Aristotle’s works offer an interesting puzzle for scholars. Despite centuries of study and speculation, no one is certain what kind of texts they are. Are they essays or treatises direct from Aristotle’s hand? If so, he must have been a careless writer, because the texts are full of contradictions, non sequiturs, and other rhetorical defects. Contrarily, do the texts consist of notes taken down by students from Aristotle’s lectures? Or are they Aristotle’s own notes, for spoken or for written works? Are the texts collections of various original sources, slapped together by a careless or ignorant editor some years, or centuries, after Aristotle’s death? Or are the texts, especially of the political treatises, the result of brutal censorship at some period between Aristotle’s death and the fifteenth century, when the texts as we have them were codified and fixed?

No one knows the answers, but there is no doubt that the form of Aristotle’s works makes them hard to read. However, not all the works are equally difficult, and compared to most, the Nicomachean Ethics is a complete and carefully written book. For this reason, among others, it has often been held to be Aristotle’s greatest work.

The Ethics is a book about virtue—about good and bad people, and about good and bad actions. “Virtue” is not a popular word today, but the idea it names, and the problems to which it points, are inescapable. We simply cannot avoid asking ourselves whether, in this situation or in that, we are doing the right or the wrong thing. And however blind we may be to ourselves, we are all prone to judge others and to declare that an individual is either a good or bad person. We recognize, too, a combination of good and bad in most people and ask ourselves how we can increase the good and decrease the bad in ourselves.

Aristotle is a great help to us, primarily for the reason that the Nicomachean Ethics is such a valuable book. He begins by saying, simply—and sensibly—that virtue is a habit: an habitual disposition, as he calls it, to choose right rather than wrong. The good and the bad, the right and the wrong among actions, of course, not things; one can be an excellent judge of wines or investments and still be a thoroughly bad person. A good person, Aristotle says, is a person who does good things not just once or twice but at least most of the time.

How to become virtuous, if we are not so already? Well, there are rules, to which Aristotle devotes many pages. Mostly they have to do with choosing the mean between two extremes of action. Courage, for example, is a virtue; to lack courage is to be cowardly, and that is one extreme; but to have too much courage, to be rash, is also a mistake, and the habitually rash person is not admired (although he is probably more admired than a coward). Similarly with prudence and temperance: there are extremes of each, and virtue lies in the middle way.

In another sense, Aristotle reminds us, there is no such thing as being too prudent, too temperate, too courageous. When those great virtues are properly understood, we begin to see that courage is a complex thing, not a simple one, involving our knowledge of consequences, control of our bodies and wills, and the recognition that often there is no completely safe choice among evils. When we realize that to be courageous is to choose—habitually, not just once or twice—as a courageous person chooses, and that is never rashly or in a cowardly way, then we comprehend that we cannot be too courageous, although we may be less than we would like to be. And so it is with all the other moral virtues.

But therein lies a great problem, as Aristotle points out. Moral choices are not made in a vacuum. Every situation is almost infinitely complicated, with consequences that reach out to touch the lives of many other persons, now and in the future. So complex, indeed, is every choice we face that we must almost conclude that each choice is unique. Rules are useful but they go only so far; when it comes right down to it, we are on our own, making the best choices we can but never being absolutely certain we are correct. When things are hardest we often ask ourselves: What would so-and-so (a good person whom we admire) do in this situation? And that is quite appropriate, says Aristotle, for good actions are, on the whole, the kind that are performed by good people. The argument is circular, Aristotle admits: although it is true that good actions are ones that are performed by good people, it is equally true that good people are those who perform good actions. So it was in Athens twenty-five hundred years ago. So it is today.

There is a useful aspect of this dilemma, as Aristotle also brings us to understand. If to be virtuous is to habitually choose rightly, then to have that habit is perhaps the most comforting of possessions. To be virtuous is to have a will we can trust. A good person can be happy in doing what he wants, because what he wants is good, not just for others but also for himself. Followers of Aristotle have seen this point and expressed it in their own way. “The greatest and most beautiful thing in the world,” says Dante, “is a righteous will.” The motto of Rabelais’s idealized Abbey of Theleme is “Do As Thou Wilt.” Dante and Rabelais mean the same thing. Indeed, we can wish no greater good to anyone than that they have such a well-formed will that when they desire something they can do it in the confidence that that thing is not only desirable but also good.

The last book of the Ethics (there are ten in all) is concerned with happiness—what it is, and how to achieve it. Regarding happiness Aristotle says many things that are surprising, but none that, on reflection, do not seem to be true. So it is throughout this book. Perhaps no book ever written has so much to say to us that is really useful.

Aristotle’s Politics is another valuable book. This work begins with a history of human communities, starting with the family, then the most simple groups, then larger groups created for the sake of life (security and other like goods), and “finally,” as he says, “for the sake of a good life.” A good life is only possible in a community wherein most members are virtuous. Again there is a certain circularity of the argument, but perhaps this is unavoidable. In any event, to live in a town or city where most people are good, and the bad are kept under reasonable control, seems to be desirable.

Towns or cities are one thing; a nation is another. Aristotle understood this, too, and he concludes the Politics with a discussion of the best kind of government. He declares that a nation living under a constitution that is accepted by all or most citizens is the best. Being the eminently practical man that he was, he admitted that such a government is never likely to be perfect and, what is more, may find it difficult to continue to exist. He recognized that, first, the rich are always desirous of governing for their own benefit, and second that the people can always turn against them and become a mob, taking things into its own hands. As always, the mean between extremes is to be sought.

The Ethics and the Politics contain inconsistencies and seeming contradictions, some apparently missing connections, and other such defects. Thus they are not always easy reading. Choosing among translations doesn’t solve the problem. Even a good translation will not supply what is most needed, and that is a teacher to stand by our side and guide us as we read. A living teacher is best. Failing that, such a book as Aristotle for Everybody, by Mortimer J. Adler (my own teacher), is almost a necessity.

EUCLID

fl. c. 300 BCE

The Elements

Little is known about Euclid. What is known is mysterious. He probably lived and produced his major work around 300 BCE, in Alexandria, the city Alexander the Great had recently founded and that was considered the intellectual and commercial center of the Hellenic world. Euclid probably did tell Ptolemy I, who ruled Alexandria in his day, that “there is no royal road to geometry”—this in response to a question by the king as to whether there was not an easier way to learn the subject that might suit a busy man and monarch. It may also be true that Euclid once gave a coin to a student who, after his first lesson, inquired about the practical value of learning mathematics, saying contemptuously, “He must needs make gain in what he learns.”

If Euclid’s life is misty and unclear, his book, The Elements, known traditionally as The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements, is clarity itself. Building on the work of all his forebearers, Euclid summed up and collated what was known in his day about geometry and also, as admiring Proclus said, “brought to incontrovertible demonstration the things which were only loosely proved by his predecessors.” As a result the Elements is both beautiful and right, infused with a brilliance that remains as wonderful today as it was when the book was first published and immediately became a classic.

“Euclid alone,” the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, “has looked on Beauty bare.” The statement makes a point about beauty—that it can exist shorn of its incorporation in things—that may be questioned. But the suggestion that mathematical truth is, somehow, the essence of the beautiful is surely interesting. Many, mathematicians and nonmathematicians alike, have felt the same way.

There is indeed something gratifying about a mathematical proof. If we assume this (set of mathematical truths), and if we follow certain rules of operation (i.e., definitions and axioms) that we have ourselves laid down in advance, then that which follows will have a certainty which is no less than that of the circling of the heavenly spheres. No less, I say; but this certainty is even greater. The planets in their revolutions are subject to the inevitable disturbances that affect all physical things. But mathematical entities are not physical. They are eternal, and eternally unchanged. The point which, according to the first Definition of Euclid’s First Book, “is that which has no part,” will never change and cannot change. Incommensurable magnitudes will remain incommensurable for ever, whatever we do, and the icosahedron (twenty-sided regular solid) inscribed in its sphere will always shimmer in our imaginations, or in that of God Himself, who cannot change it either.

The inscription over the door of Plato’s Academy was a warning: “Let no one enter here who has not studied geometry.” This was not because geometry was useful, although it was and is: ancient geometers used it for surveying, and modern engineers use it to build computers. Plato meant that geometry—in fact all mathematics—is intimately involved in making a good mind.

Much of what I have said here is no longer true, or no longer wholly true, of modern mathematics, which has its deep intellectual difficulties, as do all other sciences. But those difficulties do not apply to Euclid’s Elements: It is perfect, right, and true forevermore.

The Elements is a difficult, but not impossible, read. You may not want to read all thirteen books, but you should glance at them all, read the definitions at the beginning of each, sample their various propositions. They deal with different mathematical entities. Wander among the pages as if wandering among the galleries of a strange museum full of perfect works of art. Why did this artist create that work? You do not really know, at least the first time you look at it, but you are certain that he had a good reason. And you are aware that the whole museum hangs together, forms a unity unlike that of anything but mental places. Euclid’s book is a mental place, and one can do worse than to retreat to it. You will meet many other minds there and you will find them at peace.

ARCHIMEDES

287?–212 BCE

Scientific Writings

When Archimedes was born, in about 287 BCE in Syracuse, Sicily, mankind knew very little about the natural world it inhabited—at least understood very little scientifically about it. The distinction is important. A great deal was known, of course, about the lives of animals and plants, about the weather, about the stars, as well as about the behavior of human beings in all kinds of circumstances: hunger, fear, desire. The fact that societies had survived up to that point attests to their knowledge—rather, their lore—about the world around them. And the works of writers such as Homer, Aeschylus, and Euripides, to say nothing of Plato and Aristotle, attest to the knowledge that the Greeks (as well as other peoples) possessed of the human heart.

But for the most part, this was not scientific knowledge. The basic principles according to which things worked and acted on other things were still, for the most part, unknown. Good guesses had been made, as they had to be to get anything more than the simplest things done. But there is a difference between a guess, no matter how inspired, and a scientific principle or law, which is based on knowledge of why things work the way they do and that allows the scientist to predict with accuracy future occurrences of the same sort. The patient construction of the structure of natural laws as we know them today has been the major work of Western man for the past twenty centuries. For all intents and purposes, this work was begun by Archimedes. In many and important ways he was the first true scientist, and as a result of his work mankind knew much more, scientifically, about the natural world on the day of his death than it had on the day of his birth.

Archimedes was what we today call a physicist. He was deeply interested in the way simple machines work: levers, balances, inclined planes. He saw the same or similar principles in operation in many different situations. Today we would say he was a master experimenter with gravity.

Perhaps his most famous discovery had to do with the specific gravity of various substances, which he rightly understood differs from substance to substance. His friend, King Hieron of Syracuse, had received as a gift a certain amount of gold. Hieron has his goldsmiths fashion it into a crown. When he received the crown, he began to suspect the goldsmiths had alloyed the original gold with silver, which of course had less value. But how was he to prove this? He asked Archimedes, who puzzled over the problem for a long time. One day, as he was stepping into the public baths of Syracuse, Archimedes slopped the water in the bath over the edge—and immediately was struck by an idea. His body displaced water from the bath; gold and silver would also displace water if placed in a full basin; and since given amounts of gold and silver were different in weight, they should therefore displace different amounts of water. Archimedes was so excited by this idea that he jumped out of the bath, quite naked (he had forgotten to put his clothes back on), and ran home to experiment, shouting “Eureka!,” which in Greek means “I have found it!”

Archimedes’ hunch turned out to be correct, and so did the king’s. When Archimedes tested the metals in a water bath he found that a certain weight of silver displaces more water from the bath than the same weight of gold, because the gold is heavier, for the same amount of volume, than the silver. Archimedes therefore carefully weighed the crown and measured out an equal weight of pure gold. The gold displaced less water than the crown; thus, the crown contained silver (or some other metal, not gold). What happened to the goldsmiths is not, as far as I know, a matter of history. They certainly came to no good.

Archimedes was intrigued by this problem, but not because of the king’s concern about his crown. Rather, Archimedes was interested in the mathematical and physical principles involved, and after further study he discovered the important principle that is named after him: that a body immersed in a fluid loses as much in weight as the weight of the fluid it displaces. He wrote a treatise on this, On Floating Bodies, and I suggest that you read Book I of this work.

Archimedes’ most important discoveries, in his own view, involved the so-called method of exhaustion, whereby a sought-after goal is achieved by a succession of approximations, each closer than the last. This method, which he carried further than anyone before him, is closely akin to integral calculus. He wrote two treatises on this subject, The Method and Measurement of a Circle. Read the latter and the first two propositions of the former.

I recognize that you may not find it easy to read these and other short works of Archimedes, either in the famous edition of Sir Thomas Heath, in the slender paperback from St. John’s College Press (Annapolis, Maryland), or in the volume of Greek mathematicians and scientists in Great Books of the Western World. But I recommend that you try hard to read one short treatise by Archimedes that is highly suggestive in its implications. Called The Sand-Reckoner, it survives in the form of a letter to one King Gelon, who has asked Archimedes how many grains of sand would be required to fill the entire universe. Archimedes takes the question seriously but immediately recognizes the fundamental problem, which is not to estimate the number of grains of sand but instead to create a number system capable of expressing such large numbers.

The Greeks, with all their wit, were crippled in their scientific work by the lack of a convenient number notation, which made it not only impossible to express large numbers but also very hard to conceive of them. The Romans were similarly hampered. The creation of a workable number system is an achievement of the past few centuries to which we owe much of the scientific progress that is our civilization’s proudest boast. But Archimedes was on the track of a workable number system nearly two thousand years before the modern scientific period.

He had made significant progress toward it, as shown in The SandReckoner, when he died. His death was a ridiculous accident. Syracuse fell to the Romans in 212 after a protracted siege. A general massacre followed, but the Roman general Marcellus gave specific orders that the great sage Archimedes should not be harmed. However, during the rout, a Roman soldier came upon an old man drawing a mathematical figure in the sand. Exactly what happened between them we shall never know, but according to a two-thousand-year-old story, the soldier asked Archimedes what he was doing. The old man didn’t look up at him, saying only, “You are standing in my light,” whereupon the soldier stabbed him. That was the demise of Archimedes.