The Life of Greece

It was a proof of Athenian courage, and of the vitality of Athenian democracy, that Athens stood off her enemies for ten years more. The government was put upon an economical footing, taxes and capital levies were collected to build a new fleet, and within a year of the defeat at Syracuse Athens was ready to contest Sparta’s new mastery of the sea. Just as recovery seemed assured, the oligarchic faction, which had never favored the war, and, indeed, looked to a Spartan victory to revive aristocracy in Athens, organized a revolt, seized the organs of government, and set up a supreme Council of Four Hundred (411). The Assembly, cowed by the assassination of many democratic leaders, voted its own abdication. The rich supported the rebellion as the only way of controlling the class war that had crossed the lines of the war between Athens and Sparta—much as the struggle of the middle classes against aristocracy united the liberal factions in England and America in the American Revolution. Once in power, the oligarchs sent envoys to make peace with Sparta, and secretly prepared to admit the Spartan army into Athens. Meanwhile Theramenes, leader of a center party of moderate aristocrats, led a counterrevolution, and replaced the Four Hundred—which had ruled some four months—with a Council of Five Thousand (411). For a brief while Athens enjoyed that combination of democracy and aristocracy which seemed to Thucydides and Aristotle²⁶ (aristocrats both) to have been the best and fairest government that Athens had known since Solon. But the second revolt, like the first, had forgotten that Athens depended for its food and life upon its navy, whose personnel, barring a few leaders, had been disfranchised by both revolutions. Incensed at the news, the sailors announced that unless the democracy were restored they would besiege Athens. The oligarchs waited hopefully for a Spartan army; the Spartans as usual were tardy; the new government took to its heels, and the victorious democrats restored the old constitution (411).

Alcibiades had secretly supported the oligarchic revolt, hoping that it might smooth a way for his return to Athens. Now the re-empowered democracy, perhaps ignorant of these intrigues, but knowing how badly Athens had fared since his exile, called him home with a promise of amnesty. Deferring his triumph at Athens, he took charge of the fleet at Samos, and moved into action with a celerity and success that brought Athens a brief moment of happiness. Speeding through the Hellespont, he met and completely destroyed a Spartan fleet at Cyzicus (410). After a year’s siege he captured Chalcedon and Byzantium, and thereby restored Athens’ control of the food supply from the Bosporus. Sailing back south he encountered another Spartan squadron near the isle of Andros, and defeated it with ease. Returning now (407) to Athens, he was welcomed with universal acclaim: his sins were forgotten, only his genius was remembered, and Athens’ desperate need of an able general.²⁷ But Athens, while celebrating his victories, neglected to send him money for the pay of his crews.

Once again Alcibiades’ lack of moral scruple ruined him. Leaving the greater number of his vessels at Notium (near Ephesus) in command of one Antiochus, with strict instructions to stay in port and under no circumstances to give battle, he himself went with a small force to Caria to raise funds for his men by something less than due process of law. Antiochus, itching for fame, left his haven and challenged a Spartan flotilla under Lysander. Lysander accepted the taunt, killed Antiochus in a hand-to-hand fight, and sank or captured most of the Athenian ships (407). When news of this catastrophe came to Athens the Assembly acted with characteristic haste; it censured Alcibiades for leaving his fleet, and removed him from command. Alcibiades, fearing now both Athens and Sparta, fled to a refuge in Bithynia.

Desperate, the Athenians ordered that the gold and silver in the statues and offerings on the Acropolis should be melted down for the building of a new flotilla of 150 triremes, and offered freedom to those slaves, and citizenship to those aliens, who would fight for the city. The new armada defeated a Spartan fleet off the Arginusae Islands (south of Lesbos) in 406, and Athens again thrilled with the news of victory. But the Assembly was furious when it learned that its generals* had allowed the crews of twenty-five ships, sunk by the enemy, to drown in a storm. Hotheads protested that these souls, for lack of proper burial, would wander restlessly about the universe; and accusing the survivors of negligence in not attempting a rescue, they proposed that the eight victorious generals (including the son of Pericles by Aspasia) should be put to death. Socrates, who happened to be a member of the presiding prytany for the day, refused to put the motion to a vote. It was presented and passed over his protests, and the sentence was carried out with the same precipitation with which it had been decreed. A few days later the Assembly repented, and condemned to death those who had persuaded it to execute the generals. Meanwhile the Spartans, weakened by the defeat, offered peace again; but the Assembly, moved by the oratory of the drunken Cleophon, refused.²⁸

Led now by second-rate men, the Athenian fleet sailed north to meet the Spartans under Lysander in the Sea of Marmora. From his hiding place in the hills Alcibiades saw that the Athenian ships had taken up a strategically perilous position at Aegospotami, near Lampsacus. He risked his life to ride down to the shore and advise the Athenian admirals to seek a more sheltered place; but they distrusted his counsel, and reminded him that he was no longer in command. On the next day the decisive battle was fought; all but eight of the 208 Athenian ships were scuttled or taken, and Lysander ordered the execution of three thousand Athenian captives.²⁹ Learning that Lysander had issued orders for his assassination, Alcibiades sought refuge in Phrygia with the Persian general Pharnabazus, who assigned him a castle and a courtesan. But the Persian King, persuaded by Lysander, ordered Pharnabazus to kill his guest. Two assassins besieged Alcibiades in his castle, and set fire to it; he came out naked and desperate, seeking the privilege of fighting for his life; but before his sword could touch his assailants he was pierced by their arrows and javelins. He died at the age of forty-six, the greatest genius and most tragic failure in the military history of Greece.

Lysander, now absolute master of the Aegean, sailed down from city to city, overthrowing the democracies and setting up oligarchic governments subject to Sparta. Entering the Piraeus unresisted, he proceeded to blockade Athens. The Athenians resisted with their accustomed bravery, but within three months their stock of food was exhausted, and the streets were full of dead or dying men. Lysander gave Athens bitter and yet lenient terms: he would not, he said, destroy a city that had in time past performed such honorable services for Greece, nor would he enslave its population; but he demanded the leveling of the Long Walls, the recall of the oligarchic exiles, the surrender of all but eight of the surviving Athenian ships, and a pledge to support Sparta actively in any further war. Athens protested, and yielded.

Supported by Lysander, and led by Critias and Theramenes, the returning oligarchs seized the government, and established a Council of Thirty to rule Athens (404). These Greek Bourbons had learned nothing; they confiscated the property and alienated the support of many rich merchants; they plundered the temples, sold for three talents the wharves of the Piraeus which had cost a thousand,³⁰ exiled five thousand democrats, and put fifteen hundred others to death; they assassinated all Athenians who were distasteful to them politically or personally; they put an end to freedom of teaching, assemblage, and speech, and Critias himself, once his pupil, forbade Socrates to continue his public discourses. Seeking to compromise the philosopher to their cause, the Thirty ordered him and four others to arrest the democrat Leon. The others obeyed, but Socrates refused.

All the sins of the democracy were forgotten as the crimes of the oligarchs increased and multiplied. The number of men, even of substantial means, who began to seek an end to this bloody tyranny grew from day to day. When a thousand armed democrats under Thrasybulus approached the Piraeus, the Thirty found that hardly any but their immediate partisans could be persuaded to fight for them. Critias organized a small army, went out to battle, and was defeated and killed. Thrasybulus entered Athens, and restored the democracy (403). Under His guidance the Assembly behaved with unwonted moderation: it decreed death for only the highest surviving leaders of the revolution, and allowed them to escape this sentence by exile; it declared a general amnesty to all others who had supported the oligarchs; it even repaid to Sparta the hundred talents that the ephors had lent to the Thirty.³¹ These acts of humanity and statesmanship gave to Athens at last the peace that she had not known for a generation.

VII. THE DEATH OF SOCRATES

Strange to say, the only cruelty of the restored democracy was committed upon an old philosopher whose seventy years should have put him beyond the possibility of being a danger to the state. But among the leaders of the victorious faction was the same Anytus who years before had threatened to revenge himself upon Socrates for dialectical slights and the “corruption” of his son. Anytus was a good man: he had fought bravely under Thrasybulus, had saved the lives of oligarchs who had been taken captive by his soldiers, had been instrumental in arranging the amnesty, and had left in undisturbed enjoyment of his property those to whom it had been sold after confiscation by the Thirty. But his generosity failed when it came to Socrates. He could not forget that when he had gone into exile his son had stayed in Athens with Socrates, and had become a drunkard.³² It did not appease Anytus to observe that Socrates had refused to obey the Thirty, and (if we may take Xenophon’s word for it) had denounced Critias as a bad ruler.³³ To Anytus it seemed that Socrates, more than any Sophist, was an evil influence both on morals and on politics; he was undermining the religious faith that had supported morality, and his persistent criticism was weakening the belief of educated Athenians in the institutions of democracy. The murderous tyrant Critias had been one of Socrates’ pupils; the immoral and treasonable Alcibiades had been his lover; Charmides, his early favorite, had been a general under Critias, and had just died in battle against the democracy.* It seemed fitting to Anytus that Socrates should leave Athens, or die.

The indictment was brought forward by Anytus, Meletus, and Lycon in 399, and read as follows: “Socrates is a public offender in that he does not recognize the gods that the state recognizes, but introduces new demoniacal beings” (the Socratic daimonion); “he has also offended by corrupting the youth.”*³⁵ The trial was held before a popular court, or dikasterion, of some five hundred citizens, mostly of the less educated class. We have no means of knowing how accurately Plato and Xenophon have reported Socrates’ defense; we do know that Plato was present at the trial,³⁷ and that his account of Socrates’ “apology” agrees in many points with Xenophon’s. Socrates, says Plato, insisted that he believed in the state gods, even in the divinity of the sun and moon. “You say first that I do not believe in gods, and then again that I believe in demigods. . . . You might as well affirm the existence of mules, and deny that of horses and asses.”³⁸ And then he referred sadly to the effects of Aristophanes’ satire:

I have had many accusers, who accused me of old, and their false charges have continued during many years; and I am more afraid of them than of Anytus and his associates. . . . For they began when you were children, and took possession of your minds with their falsehoods, telling of one Socrates, a wise man, who speculated about the heavens above, and searched into the earth beneath, and made the worse appear the better cause. These are the accusers I dread; for they are the circulators of this rumor, and their hearers are too apt to fancy that speculators of this sort do not believe in the gods. And they are many, and their charges against me are of ancient date, and they made them in days when you were impressionable—in childhood, or perhaps in youth—and the cause when heard went by default, for there was none to answer. And hardest of all, their names I do not know and cannot tell, unless in the chance case of a comic poet. . . . That is the nature of the accusation, and that is what you have seen yourselves in the comedy of Aristophanes.³⁹

He lays claim to a divine mission to teach the good and simple life, and no threat will deter him.

Strange, indeed, would be my conduct, O men of Athens, if I who, when I was ordered by the generals whom you chose to command me at Potidaea and Amphipolis and Delium, remained where they placed me, like any other man, facing death—if, I say, now when, as I conceive and imagine, God orders me to fulfil the philosopher’s mission of searching into myself and other men, I were to desert my post through fear of death. . . . If you say to me, Socrates, this time we will let you off, but upon one condition, that you are not to inquire and speculate in this way any more . . . I should reply: Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone whom I meet, after my manner, and convincing him, saying: O my friend, why do you, who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth? Wherefore, O men of Athens, I say to you, do as Anytus bids, and either acquit me or not; but whatever you do, know that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times.⁴⁰

The judges appear to have interrupted him at this point, and to have bidden him desist from what seemed to them insolence; but he continued in even haughtier vein.

I would have you know that if you kill such a one as I am, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me. . . . For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by the God; and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. . . . And as you will not easily find another like me, I would advise you to spare me.⁴¹

The sentence of guilty was pronounced upon him by the small majority of sixty; had his defense been more conciliatory it is likely that he would have been acquitted. He had the privilege of proposing an alternative penalty in place of death. At first he refused to make even this concession; but on the appeal of Plato and other friends, who underwrote his pledge, he offered to pay a fine of thirty minas ($3000). The second polling of the jury condemned him by eighty more votes than the first.⁴²

It still remained open to him to escape from the prison; Crito and other friends (if we may follow Plato) prepared the way with bribery,⁴⁵ and probably Anytus had hoped for such a compromise. But Socrates remained himself to the last. He felt that he had but a few more years to live, and that “he relinquished only the most burdensome part of life, in which all feel their powers of intellect diminished.”⁴⁶ Instead of accepting Crito’s proposal he examined it from an ethical point of view, discussed it dialectically, and played the game of logic to the end.⁴⁷ His disciples visited him daily in his cell during the month between his trial and his execution, and he seems to have discoursed with them calmly until the final hour. Plato pictures him as fondling the hair and head of the young Phaedo, and saying, “Tomorrow, Phaedo, I suppose that these fair locks will be cut”—in mourning.⁴⁸ Xanthippe came in tears, with their youngest child in her arms; he comforted her, and asked Crito to have her escorted home. “You die undeservedly,” said an ardent disciple; “Would you, then,” Socrates answered, “have me deserve death?”⁴⁹

After he was gone, says Diodorus,⁵⁰ the Athenians regretted their treatment of him, and put his accusers to death. Suidas makes Meletus die by public stoning.⁵¹ Plutarch varies the tale: the accusers became so unpopular that no citizen would light their fires, or answer their questions, or bathe in the same water with them; so that they were at last driven in despair to hang themselves.⁵² Diogenes Laertius reports that Meletus was executed, Anytus exiled, and a bronze statue put up by Athens in memory of the philosopher.⁵³ We do not know if these stories are true.*

The Golden Age ended with the death of Socrates. Athens was exhausted in body and soul; only the degradation of character by prolonged war and desperate suffering could explain the ruthless treatment of Melos, the bitter sentence upon Mytilene, the execution of the Arginusae generals, and the sacrifice of Socrates on the altar of a dying faith. All the foundations of Athenian life were disordered: the soil of Attica had been devastated by the Spartan raids, and the slow-growing olive trees had been burned to the ground; the Athenian navy had been destroyed, and control of trade and the food supply had been lost; the state treasury was empty, and private fortunes had been taxed almost to extinction; two thirds of the citizen body had been killed. The damage done to Greece by the Persian invasions could not compare with the destruction of Greek life and property by the Peloponnesian War. After Salamis and Plataea Greece was left poor, but exalted with courage and pride; now Greece was poor again, and Athens had suffered a wound to her spirit which seemed too deep to be healed.

Two things sustained her: the restoration of democracy under men of judgment and moderation, and the consciousness that during the last sixty years, even during the War, she had produced such art and literature as surpassed the like product of any other age in the memory of man. Anaxagoras had been exiled and Socrates had been put to death; but the stimulus that they had given to philosophy sufficed to make Athens henceforth, and despite herself, the center and summit of Greek thought. What before had been formless tentatives of speculation were now to mature into great systems that would agitate Europe for centuries to come; while the haphazard provision of higher education by wandering Sophists was to be replaced by the first universities in history—universities that would make Athens, as Thucydides had prematurely called her, “the school of Hellas.” Through the bloodshed and turmoil of conflict the traditions of art had not quite decayed; for many centuries yet the sculptors and architects of Greece were to carve and build for all the Mediterranean world. Out of the despair of her defeat Athens lifted herself with startling virility to new wealth, culture, and power; and the autumn of her life was bountiful.

BOOK IV

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF GREEK FREEDOM

399-322 B.C.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK IV

B.C.

399-60:

Agesilaus king at Sparta

397:

War between Syracuse and Carthage

396:

Aristippus of Cyrene and Antisthenes of Athens, philosophers

395:

Athens rebuilds the Long Walls

394:

Battles of Coronea and Cnidus

? 393:

Plato’s Apology; Xenophon’s Memorabilia; Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae

391-87:

Dionysius subjugates south Italy

391:

Isocrates opens his school

390:

Evagoras Hellenizes Cyprus

387:

Peace of Antalcidas, or King’s Peace; Plato visits Archytas of Taras, mathematician, and Dionysius I

386:

Plato founds the Academy

383:

Spartans occupy Cadmeia at Thebes

380:

Isocrates’ Panegyricus

379:

Pelopidas and Melon liberate Thebes

378-54:

Second Athenian Empire

375:

Theaetetus, mathematician

372:

Diogenes of Sinope, philosopher

371:

Epaminondas victorious at Leuctra

370:

Diocles of Euboea, embryologist; Eudoxus of Cnidus, astronomer

367-57:

Dionysius II dictator at Syracuse; Dion plans reforms

367:

Plato visits Dionysius II

362:

Epaminondas wins and dies at Mantinea

361:

Plato’s third visit to Syracuse

360:

Praxiteles of Athens and Scopas of Paros, sculptors; Ephorus of Cyme and Theopompus of Chios, historians

359:

Philip II regent in Macedonia

357-46:

War between Athens and Macedonia

357-46:

Exile of Dionysius II

356-46:

Second Sacred War

356:

Birth of Alexander the Great; burning of second temple at Ephesus; Isocrates’ On the Peace

355:

Isocrates’ Areopagiticus

B.C.

354:

Assassination of Dion

353-49:

The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus

351:

Demosthenes’ Philippic I

349:

Philip attacks Olynthus; Demosthenes’ Olynthiacs I and II

348:

Heracleides of Pontus, astronomer; Speusippus succeeds Plato as head of the Academy

346:

Demosthenes’ On the Peace; Isocrates’ Letter to Philip

344:

Timoleon rescues Syracuse; Demosthenes’ Philippic II

343:

Trial and acquittal of Aeschines

342-38:

Aristotle tutor of Alexander

340:

Timoleon defeats the Carthaginians

338:

Philip defeats Athenians at Chaeronea; death of Isocrates

336:

Assassination of Philip; accession of Alexander and Darius III

335:

Alexander burns down Thebes, and begins his Persian campaigns

334:

Aristotle opens the Lyceum; battle of the Granicus; choragic monument of Lysicrates

333:

Battle of Issus

332:

Siege and capture of Tyre; surrender of Jerusalem; foundation of Alexandria

331:

Battle of Gaugamela (Arbela); Alexander at Babylon and Susa

330:

Apelles of Sicyon, painter; Lysippus of Argos, sculptor; Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon; Demosthenes’ On the Crown

329-8:

Alexander invades central Asia

327:

Deaths of Cleitus and Callisthenes

327-5:

Alexander in India

325:

Voyage of Nearchus

324:

Exile of Demosthenes

323:

Death of Alexander; Lamian War

322:

Deaths of Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Diogenes

CHAPTER XIX

Philip

I. THE SPARTAN EMPIRE

SPARTA now assumed for a spell the naval mastery of Greece, and offered to history another tragedy of success brought low by pride. Instead of the freedom which she had promised to the cities once subject to Athens, she levied upon them an annual tribute of a thousand talents ($6,000,000), and established in each of them an aristocratic rule controlled by a Lacedaemonian harmost, or governor, and supported by a Spartan garrison. These governments, responsible only to the distant ephors, practiced such corruption and tyranny that soon the new empire was hated more intensely than the old.

In Sparta itself the influx of money and gifts from oppressed cities and obsequious oligarchs strengthened the internal forces that had long been leading to decay. By the fourth century the ruling caste had learned how to add private luxury to public simplicity, and even the ephors had ceased, except in outward show, to observe the Lycurgean discipline. Much of the land, by dowries and bequests, had fallen into the hands of women; and the wealth so accumulated gave to the Spartan ladies—free from the care of male children—an ease of life and morals hardly befitting their name.¹ The repeated division of some estates had impoverished many families to a point where they could no longer contribute their quota to the public mess, and therefore lost the rights of citizenship; while the formation of large properties through intermarriage and legacies had created in the few remaining “Equals” a provocative concentration of wealth.* “Some Spartans,” Aristotle writes, “own domains of vast extent, the others have nearly nothing; all the land is in the hands of a few.”³ The disfranchised gentry, the excluded Perioeci, and the resentful Helots made a population too restless and hostile to permit the government to engage, on any large scale of space or time, in those external military operations which imperial rule required.

Meanwhile civil war among the Persians was affecting the fortunes of Greece. In 401 the younger Cyrus rebelled against his brother Artaxerxes II, enlisted Sparta’s aid, and recruited an army from the thousands of Greek and other mercenaries left idle in Asia by the sudden termination of the Peloponnesian War. The two brothers met at Cunaxa, between the converging Tigris and Euphrates; Cyrus was defeated and slain, and all of his army was captured or destroyed except a contingent of twelve thousand Greeks whose quickness of mind and foot enabled them to escape into the interior of Babylonia. Hunted by the King’s forces, the Greeks chose, in their rough democratic way, three generals to lead them to safety. Among these was Xenophon, once a pupil of Socrates, now a young soldier of fortune, destined to be remembered above all by the Anabasis, or Ascent, in which he later described with engaging simplicity the long “Retreat of the Ten Thousand” up along the Tigris and over the hills of Kurdistan and Armenia to the Black Sea. It was one of the great adventures in human history. We are amazed at the inexhaustible courage of these Greeks, fighting their way on foot, day by day for five months, through two thousand miles of enemy country, across hot and foodless plains, and over perilous mountain passes covered with eight feet of snow, while armies and guerrilla bands attacked them in the rear and in front and on either flank, and hostile natives used every device to kill them, or mislead them, or bar their way. As we read this fascinating story, made so dull for us in youth by the compulsion to translate it, we perceive* that the most important weapon for an army is food, and that the skill of a commander lies as much in finding supplies as in organizing victory. More of these Greeks died from exposure and starvation than from battle, though the battles were as numerous as the days. When at last the 8600 survivors sighted the Euxine at Trapezus (Trebizond), their hearts overflowed.

As soon as the vanguard got to the top of the mountains, a great cry went up. And when Xenophon and the rear guard heard it they imagined that other enemies were attacking in front—for enemies were following behind them. . . . They pushed ahead to lend aid, and in a moment they heard the soldiers shouting, “The sea! the sea!” and passing the word along. Then all the troops of the rear guard likewise broke into a run, and the pack animals began racing ahead. . . . And when all had reached the summit, then indeed they fell to embracing one another, and generals and captains as well, with tears in their eyes.

For this was a Greek sea, and Trapezus a Greek city; they were safe now, and could rest without fear of death surprising them in the night. The news of their exploit resounded proudly through old Hellas, and encouraged Philip, two generations later, to believe that a well-trained Greek force could be relied upon to defeat a Persian army many times its size. Unwittingly Xenophon opened the way for Alexander.

Perhaps this influence was already felt by Agesilaus, who in 399 had succeeded to the throne of Sparta. Persia might have been persuaded to overlook Sparta’s aid to Cyrus. But to the ablest of the Spartan kings a war with Persia seemed only an interesting adventure, and he set out with a small force to free all Greek Asia from Persian rule.* When Artaxerxes II learned that Agesilaus was easily defeating all Persian troops sent against him, he dispatched messengers with abundant gold to Athens and Thebes to bribe these cities into declaring war upon Sparta.⁶ The effort readily succeeded, and after nine years of peace the conflict between Athens and Sparta was renewed. Agesilaus was recalled from Asia to meet, and barely defeat, the combined forces of Athens and Thebes at Coronea; but in the same month the united fleets of Athens and Persia under Conon destroyed the Spartan navy near Cnidus, and put an end to Sparta’s brief domination of the seas. Athens rejoiced, and set to work energetically, with funds supplied by Persia, to rebuild her Long Walls. Sparta defended herself by sending an envoy, Antalcidas, to the Great King, offering to surrender the Greek cities of Asia to Persian rule if Persia would enforce among the mainland Greeks a peace that would protect Sparta. The Great King agreed, withdrew his financial support from Athens and Thebes, and compelled all parties to sign at Sardis (387) the “Peace of Antalcidas,” or the “King’s Peace.” Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros were conceded to Athens, and the major Greek states were guaranteed autonomy; but all the Greek cities of Asia, along with Cyprus, were declared the property of the King. Athens signed under protest, knowing that this was the most disgraceful event in Greek history. For a generation all the fruits of Marathon were lost; the Greek states of the mainland remained free in name, but in effect the power of Persia had engulfed them. All Greece looked upon Sparta as a traitor, and waited eagerly for some nation to destroy her.

II. EPAMINONDAS

As if to strengthen this feeling, Sparta assumed the authority to interpret and enforce the King’s Peace among the Greek states. To weaken Thebes she insisted that the Boeotian Confederacy violated the autonomy clause of the treaty, and must be dissolved. With this excuse the Spartan army set up in many Boeotian cities oligarchic governments favorable to Sparta and in several cases upheld by Spartan garrisons. When Thebes protested, a Lacedaemonian force captured her citadel, the Cadmeia, and established an oligarchy subject to Spartan domination. The crisis aroused Thebes to unwonted heroism. Pelopidas and six companions assassinated the four “Laconizing” dictators of Thebes, and reasserted Theban liberty. The Confederacy was reorganized, and named Pelopidas its leader, or boeotarch. Pelopidas called to his aid his friend and lover Epaminondas, who trained and led the army that reduced Sparta to her ancient isolation.

Epaminondas came of a distinguished but impoverished family which proudly traced its origin to the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus a thousand years before. He was a quiet man, of whom it was said that no one talked less or knew more.⁷ His modesty and integrity, his almost ascetic life, his devotion to his friends, his prudence in counsel, his courage and yet selfrestraint in action, endeared him to all the Thebans despite the military discipline to which he subjected them. He did not love war, but he was convinced that no nation could lose all martial spirit and habits and yet maintain its freedom. Elected and many times re-elected boeotarch, he warned those who proposed to vote for him: “Bethink yourselves once more; for if I am made general you will be compelled to serve in my army.”⁸ Under his command the lax Thebans were drilled into good soldiers; even the “Greek lovers” who were so numerous in the city were formed by Pelopidas into a “Sacred Band” of three hundred hoplites, each of whom was pledged to stand by his friend, in battle, to the death.

When a Spartan army of ten thousand troops under King Cleombrotus invaded Boeotia, Epaminondas met it at Leuctra, near Plataea, with six thousand men, and won a victory that influenced the political history of Greece and the military methods of Europe. He was the first Hellene to make a careful study of tactics; he counted on facing odds in every battle, and concentrated his best fighters upon one wing for offense, while the remainder were ordered to follow a policy of defense; in this way the enemy, advancing in the center, could be disordered by a flank attack on its left. After Leuctra Epaminondas and Pelopidas marched into the Peloponnesus, freed Messenia from its century-long vassalage to Sparta, and founded the city of Megalopolis as a stronghold for all Arcadians. Even into Laconia the Theban army descended—an event without precedent for hundreds of years past. Sparta never recovered from her losses in this campaign: “She could not stand up against a single defeat,” says Aristotle, “but was ruined through the small number of her citizens.”⁹

Winter coming, the Thebans withdrew to Boeotia. Epaminondas, overreaching himself in typical Greek style, began to dream now of establishing a Theban Empire to replace the unity that Athenian or Spartan leadership had once given to Greece. His plans involved him in a war with the Athenians; and Sparta, thinking to rehabilitate herself, made an alliance with Athens. The hostile armies met at Mantinea in 362. Epaminondas won, but was killed in action by Gryllus, son of Xenophon. The brief hegemony of Thebes left no permanent boon to Hellas; it liberated Greece from the despotism of Sparta, but failed, like its predecessors, to create beyond Boeotia a coherent unity; and the conflicts that it engendered left the Greek states disordered and weakened when Philip came down upon them from the north.

III. THE SECOND ATHENIAN EMPIRE

Athens made a final attempt to forge such a unity. Through her rebuilt walls and fleet, the dependability of her coinage, her long-established facilities for finance and trade, she slowly won back commercial supremacy in the Aegean. Her former subjects and allies had learned from the wars of the last half century the need for a larger security than individual sovereignty could bring; and in 378 the majority of them combined again under Athens’ leadership. By 370 Athens was once more the greatest power in the eastern Mediterranean.

Industry and trade were now the substance of her economic life. The soil of Attica had never been propitious to common tillage; patient labor had made it fruitful through tending the olive tree and the vine; but the Spartans had destroyed these, and few of the peasants were willing to wait half a generation for new olive orchards to yield. Most of the farmers of prewar days were dead; many of the survivors were too discouraged to go back to their ruined holdings, and sold them at low prices to absentee owners who could afford long-term investments. In this way, and through the eviction of peasant debtors, the ownership of Attica passed into a few families, who worked many of the large estates with slaves.¹⁰ The mines at Laurium were reopened, fresh victims were sent into the pits, and new riches were transmuted out of silver ore and human blood. Xenophon¹¹ proposed a genial plan whereby Athens might replenish her treasury through the purchase of ten thousand slaves and their lease to the contractors at Laurium. Silver was mined in such abundance that the supply of the metal outran the production of goods, prices rose faster than wages, and the poor bore the burden of the change.

Industry flourished. The quarries at Pentelicus and the potteries in the Ceramicus had orders from all the Aegean world. Fortunes were made by buying cheap the products of domestic handicraft or small factories, and selling them dear in the home market or abroad. The growth of commerce and the accumulation of wealth in money instead of in land rapidly multiplied the number of bankers in Athens. They received cash or valuables for safekeeping, but apparently paid no interest on deposits. Soon discovering that under normal conditions not all deposits were reclaimed at once, the bankers began to lend funds at substantial rates of interest, providing, at first, money instead of credit. They acted as bail for clients, and made collections for them; they lent money on the security of land or precious articles, and helped to finance the shipment of goods. Through their aid, and even more through speculative loans by private individuals, the merchant might hire a ship, transport his goods to a foreign market, and buy there a return cargo—which, on reaching the Piraeus, remained the property of the lenders until the loan was repaid.¹² As the fourth century progressed, a real credit system developed: the bankers, instead of advancing cash, issued letters of credit, money orders, or checks; wealth could now pass from one client to another merely by entries in the banker’s books.¹³ Businessmen or bankers issued bonds for mercantile loans, and every large inheritance included a number of such bonds. Some bankers, like the exslave Pasion, developed so many connections, and acquired by a discriminating honesty so widespread a reputation for reliability, that their bond was honored throughout the Greek world. Pasion’s bank had many departments and employees, mostly slaves; it kept a complex set of books, in which every transaction was so carefully recorded that these accounts were usually accepted in court as indisputable evidence. Bank failures were not uncommon, and we hear of “panics” in which bank after bank closed its doors.¹⁴ Serious charges of malfeasance were brought against even the most prominent banks, and the people looked upon the bankers with that same mixture of envy, admiration, and dislike with which the poor favor the rich in all ages.¹⁵

The change from landed to movable wealth produced a feverish struggle for money, and the Greek language had to invent a word, pleonexia, to denote this appetite for “more and more,” and another word, chrematistike, for the busy pursuit of riches. Goods, services, and persons were increasingly judged in terms of money and property. Fortunes were made and unmade with a new rapidity, and were spent in lavish displays that would have shocked the Athens of Pericles. The nouveaux riches (the Greeks had a name for them—neoplutoi) built gaudy houses, bedecked their women with costly robes and jewels, spoiled them with a dozen servants, and made it a principle to feed their guests with none but expensive drinks and foods.¹⁶

In the midst of this wealth poverty increased, for the same variety and freedom of exchange that enabled the clever to make money allowed the simple to lose it faster than before. Under the new mercantile economy the poor were relatively poorer than in the days of their serfdom on the land. In the countryside the peasants laboriously turned their sweat into a little oil or wine; in the towns the wages of free labor were kept down by the competition of slaves. Hundreds of citizens depended for their maintenance upon the fees paid for attendance at the Assembly or the courts; thousands of the population had to be fed by the temples or the state. The number of voters (not to speak of the general population) who had no property was in 431 some forty-five per cent of the electorate; in 355 it had mounted to fifty-seven per cent.¹⁷ The middle classes, which had provided by their aggregate number and power a balance between the aristocracy and the commons, had lost much of their wealth, and could no longer mediate between the rich and the poor, between an unyielding conservatism and a Utopian radicalism; Athenian society divided itself into Plato’s “two cities”—“one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, the one at war with the other.”¹⁸ The poor schemed to despoil the rich by legislation or revolution, the rich organized themselves for protection against the poor. The members of some oligarchic clubs, says Aristotle, took a solemn oath: “I will be an adversary of the people” (i.e., the commons), “and in the Council I will do it all the evil that I can.”¹⁹ “The rich have become so unsocial,” writes Isocrates, about 366, “that those who own property had rather throw their possessions into the sea than lend aid to the needy, while those who are in poorer circumstances would less gladly find a treasure than seize the possessions of the rich.”²⁰

In this conflict more and more of the intellectual classes took the side of the poor.²¹ They disdained the merchants and bankers whose wealth seemed to be in inverse proportion to their culture and taste; even rich men among them, like Plato, began to flirt with communistic ideas. Pericles had used colonization as a safety valve to reduce the intensity of the class struggle;²² but Dionysius controlled the west, Macedonia was expanding in the north, and Athens found it ever more difficult to conquer and settle new lands. Finally the poorer citizens captured the Assembly, and began to vote the property of the rich into the coffers of the state, for redistribution among the needy and the voters through state enterprises and fees.²³ The politicians strained their ingenuity to discover new sources of public revenue. They doubled the indirect taxes, the customs dues on imports and exports, and the hundredth on real-estate transfers; they continued the extraordinary taxes of war time into peace; they appealed for “voluntary” contributions, and laid upon the rich ever new opportunities (“liturgies”) to finance public enterprises from their private funds; they resorted every now and then to confiscations and expropriations; and they broadened the field of the property-income tax to include lower levels of wealth.²⁴ Any man burdened with a liturgy could by law compel another to take it over if he could prove that the other was wealthier than he, and had borne no liturgy within two years. To facilitate the collection of revenue the taxpayers were divided into a hundred “symmories” (cosharers); the richest members of each group were required to pay, at the opening of each tax year, the whole tax due from the group for the year, and were left to collect during the year, as best they could, the shares due from the other members of the group. The result of these imposts was a wholesale hiding of wealth and income. Evasion became universal, and as ingenious as taxation. In 355 Androtion was appointed to head a squad of police empowered to search for hidden income, collect arrears, and imprison tax evaders. Houses were entered, goods were seized, men were thrown into jail. But the wealth still hid itself, or melted away. Isocrates, old and rich, and furious at being saddled with a liturgy, complained in 353: “When I was a boy, wealth was regarded as a thing so secure as well as admirable that almost everyone affected to own more property than he actually possessed. . . . Now a man has to be ready to defend himself against being rich as if it were the worst of crimes.”²⁵ In other cities the process of decentralizing wealth was not so legal: the debtors of Mytilene massacred their creditors en masse, and excused themselves on the ground that they were hungry; the democrats of Argos (370) suddenly fell upon the rich, killed twelve hundred of them, and confiscated their property. The moneyed families of otherwise hostile states leagued themselves secretly for mutual aid against popular revolts. The middle classes, as well as the rich, began to distrust democracy as empowered envy, and the poor began to distrust it as a sham equality of votes stultified by a gaping inequality of wealth. The increasing bitterness of the class war left Greece internally as well as internationally divided when Philip pounced down upon it; and many rich men in the Greek cities welcomed his coming as the alternative to revolution.²⁶

Moral disorder accompanied the growth of luxury and the enlightenment of the mind. The masses cherished their superstitions and clung to their myths; the gods of Olympus were dying, but new ones were being born; exotic divinities like Isis and Ammon, Atys and Bendis, Cybele and Adonis were imported from Egypt or Asia, and the spread of Orphism brought fresh devotees to Dionysus every day. The rising and half-alien bourgeoisie of Athens, trained to practical calculation rather than to mystic feeling, had little use for the traditional faith; the patron gods of the city won from them only a formal reverence, and no longer inspired them with moral scruples or devotion to the state.* Philosophy struggled to find in civic loyalty and a natural ethic some substitute for divine commandments and a surveillant deity; but few citizens cared to live with the simplicity of Socrates, or the magnanimity of Aristotle’s “great-minded man.”

As the state religion lost its hold upon the educated classes, the individual freed himself more and more from the old moral restraints—the son from parental authority, the male from marriage, the woman from motherhood, the citizen from political responsibility. Doubtless Aristophanes exaggerated these developments; and though Plato, Xenophon, and Isocrates agreed with him, they were all conservatives who might be relied upon to tremble at any doings of the growing generation. The morals of war improved in the fourth century, and a wave of Enlightenment humanitarianism followed the teachings of Euripides and Socrates, and the example of Agesilaus.²⁷ But sexual and political morality continued to decline. Bachelors and courtesans increased in fashionable co-operation, and free unions gained ground on legal marriage.²⁸ “Is not a concubine more desirable than a wife?” asks a character in a fourth-century comedy. “The one has on her side the law that compels you to retain her, no matter how displeasing she may be; the other knows that she must hold a man by behaving well, or else look for another.”²⁹ So Praxiteles and then Hypereides lived with Phryne, Aristippus with Lais, Stilpo with Nicarete, Lysias with Metaneira, the austere Isocrates with Lagiscium.³⁰ “The young men,” says Theopompus, with a moralist’s exaggeration, “spent all their time among flute-girls and courtesans; those who were a little older devoted themselves to gambling and profligacy; and the whole people spent more on public banquets and entertainments than on the provision necessary for the well-being of the state.”³¹

The voluntary limitation of the family was the order of the day, whether by contraception, by abortion, or by infanticide. Aristotle notes that some women prevent conception “by anointing that part of the womb upon which the seed falls with oil of cedar, or ointment of lead, or frankincense commingled with olive oil.”*³² The old families were dying out; they existed, said Isocrates, only in their tombs; the lower classes were multiplying, but the citizen class in Attica had fallen from 43,000 in 431 to 22,000 in 400 and 21,000 in 313.³³ The supply of citizens for military service suffered a corresponding decrease, partly from the dysgenic carnage of war, partly from the reduced number of those who had a property stake in the state, partly from unwillingness to serve; the life of comfort and domesticity, of business and scholarship, had replaced the Periclean life of exercise, martial discipline, and public office.³⁴ Athletics were professionalized; the citizens who in the sixth century had crowded the palaestra and the gymnasium were now content to exert themselves vicariously by witnessing professional exhibitions. Young men received some grounding, as epheboi, in the art of war; but adults found a hundred ways of escaping military service. War itself had become professionalized by technical complications, and required the full time of specially trained men; citizen soldiers had to be replaced with mercenaries—an omen that the leadership of Greece must soon pass from statesmen to warriors. While Plato talked of philosopher kings, soldier kings were growing up under his nose. Greek mercenaries sold themselves impartially to Greek or “barbarian” generals, and fought as often against Greece as for her; the Persian armies that Alexander faced were full of Greeks. Soldiers shed their blood now not for a fatherland, but for the best paymaster that they could find.

Making honorable exceptions for the archonship of Eucleides (403) and the financial administration of Lycurgus (338-26), the political corruption and turbulence that had followed the death of Pericles continued during the fourth century. According to the law, bribery was punished with death; according to Isocrates,³⁵ it was rewarded with military and political preferment. Persia had no difficulty in bribing the Greek politicians to make war upon other Greek states or upon Macedon; at last even Demosthenes illustrated the morals of his time. He was one of the noblest of one of the lowest groups in Athens—the rhetors or hired orators who in this century became professional lawyers and politicians. Some of these men, like Lycurgus, were reasonably honest; some of them, like Hypereides, were gallant; most of them were no better than they had to be. If we may take Aristotle’s word for it, many of them specialized in invalidating wills.³⁶ Several of them laid up great fortunes through political opportunism and reckless demagogy. The rhetors divided into parties, and tore the air with their campaigns. Each party organized committees, invented catchwords, appointed agents, and raised funds; those who paid the expenses of all this frankly confessed that they expected to “reimburse themselves doubly.”³⁷ As politics grew more intense, patriotism waned; the bitterness of faction absorbed public energy and devotion, and left little for the city. The constitution of Cleisthenes and the individualism of commerce and philosophy had weakened the family and liberated the individual; now the free individual, as if to avenge the family, turned around and destroyed the state.

In or near 400 the triumphant democrats, to insure the presence of the poorer citizens at the ekklesia and thereby to prevent its domination by the propertied classes, extended state payment to attendance at the Assembly. At first each citizen received an obol (17 cents); as the cost of living rose this was increased to two obols, then to three, until in Aristotle’s time it stood at a drachma ($ 1) per day.³⁸ It was a reasonable arrangement, for the ordinary citizen towards the end of the fourth century, earned a drachma and a half for a day’s work; he could not be expected to leave his employment without some recompense. The plan soon gave the poor a majority in the Assembly; more and more the well to do, despairing of victory, stayed home. It was of no use that a revision of the constitution in 403 confined the power of legislation to a body of five nomothetai, or lawmakers, selected from the citizens chosen by lot for jury service; this new group also inclined to the side of the commons, and its interposition lowered the prestige and authority of the more conservative Council. Perhaps in consequence of the payment for attendance, the level of intelligence in the Assembly seems to have fallen in the fourth century—though our authorities for this are prejudiced reactionaries like Aristophanes and Plato.³⁹ Isocrates thought that the Assembly should be paid by Athens’ enemies to meet frequently, since it made so many mistakes.⁴⁰

These mistakes cost Athens both her empire and her freedom. The same lust for wealth and power that had undermined the first Confederacy now wrecked the second. After the fall of Sparta at Leuctra Athens felt that it might again expand. In organizing the new empire she had pledged herself not to permit the appropriation of land outside of Attica by Athenian subjects.⁴¹ Now she conquered Samos, the Thracian Chersonese, and the cities of Pydna, Potidaea, and Methone on the coasts of Macedonia and Thrace, and colonized them with Athenian citizens. The allied states protested, and many of them withdrew from the Confederation. Methods of coercion and punishment that had been used and had failed in the fifth century were used, and failed, again. In 357 Chios, Cos, Rhodes, and Byzantium declared a “Social War” of rebellion. When two of Athens’ ablest generals, Timotheus and Iphicrates, judged it unwise to give battle in a storm to the rebel fleet in the Hellespont, the Assembly indicted them for cowardice. Timotheus was fined the impossible sum of one hundred talents ($600,000), and fled; Iphicrates was acquitted, but never served Athens again. The rebels fought off all attempts to subdue them, and in 355 Athens signed a peace acknowledging their independence. The great city was left without allies, without leaders, without funds, and without friends.

Possibly subtler factors entered into the weakening of Athens. The life of thought endangers every civilization that it adorns. In the earlier stages of a nation’s history there is little thought; action flourishes; men are direct, uninhibited, frankly pugnacious and sexual. As civilization develops, as customs, institutions, laws, and morals more and more restrict the operation of natural impulses, action gives way to thought, achievement to imagination, directness to subtlety, expression to concealment, cruelty to sympathy, belief to doubt; the unity of character common to animals and primitive men passes away; behavior becomes fragmentary and hesitant, conscious and calculating; the willingness to fight subsides into a disposition to infinite argument. Few nations have been able to reach intellectual refinement and esthetic sensitivity without sacrificing so much in virility and unity that their wealth presents an irresistible temptation to impecunious barbarians. Around every Rome hover the Gauls; around every Athens some Macedon.

IV. THE RISE OF SYRACUSE

Despite a full measure of political turbulence, Syracuse, throughout the fourth century, was one of the richest and most powerful cities in Greece. Dionysius I, unscrupulous, treacherous, and vain, was the most capable administrator of his time. By turning the island of Ortygia into a fortress-residence for himself, and walling in the causeway that bound it with the mainland, he had rendered his position almost immune to attack; and by doubling the pay of his soldiers, and leading them to easy victories, he secured from them a personal loyalty that kept him on the throne for thirty-eight years. Having established his government, he changed his early policy of severity to one of conciliatory mildness, and a kind of egalitarian despotism.* He gave choice tracts of land to his officers and his friends, and (as a military measure) assigned nearly all the residences on Ortygia and the causeway to his soldiers; all the remaining soil of Syracuse and its environs he distributed equally among the population, free and slave. Under his guidance Syracuse flourished, though he taxed the people almost as severely as the Assembly taxed the Athenians. When the women became too ornate Dionysius announced that Demeter had appeared to him in a dream and bidden him order all feminine jewelry to be deposited in her temple. He obeyed the goddess, and the women for the most part obeyed him. Soon afterward he “borrowed” the jewelry from Demeter to finance his campaigns.⁴³

For at the bottom of all his plans lay the resolve to expel the Carthaginians from Sicily. Envious of Hannibal’s resort to battering machines in the siege of Selinus, Dionysius gathered into his service the best mechanics and engineers of western Greece, and set them to improve the tools of war. These men invented, among many new engines of offense and defense, the katapeltes, or catapult, for throwing heavy stones and similar projectiles; this and other military innovations passed from Sicily to Greece, and were taken up by Philip of Macedon. A call was sent out for mercenaries, and the armorers of Syracuse manufactured in unheard-of quantities weapons and shields to fit the habits and skills of each group of soldiers engaged. Land battles among the Greeks had heretofore been fought by infantry. Dionysius organized a large body of cavalry, and here, too, gave hints to Philip and Alexander. At the same time he poured funds into the building of two hundred ships, mostly quadriremes or quinqueremes; in speed and power this was such an armada as Greece had never seen.†

By 397 all was ready, and Dionysius sent an embassy to Carthage to demand the liberation of all Greek cities in Sicily from Carthaginian rule. Anticipating a refusal, he invited these cities to expel their foreign governments. They did; and still enraged by the memory of Hannibal’s massacres, they put to death, with tortures seldom used by Greeks, all Carthaginians who fell into their hands. Dionysius did his best to stop the carnage, hoping to sell the captives as slaves. Carthage ferried over a vast army under Himilcon, and war went on at intervals in 397, 392, 383, and 368. In the end Carthage recovered all that Dionysius had won from her, and after the bloodshed matters stood as before.

Whether through lust for power, or feeling that only a united Sicily could end Carthaginian rule, Dionysius had meanwhile turned his arms against the Greek cities in the island. Having subjugated them, he crossed over into Italy, conquered Rhegium, and mastered all southwest Italy. He attacked Etruria and took a thousand talents from its temple at Agylla; he planned to plunder the shrine of Apollo at Delphi, but time did not permit. Greece mourned that in the same year (387) liberty had fallen in the west, and in the east had been sold to Persia by the King’s Peace. Three years before, Brennus and the Gauls had stood in triumph at the gates of Rome. Everywhere the barbarians on the fringe of the Greek world were growing stronger; and the ravages of Dionysius in southern Italy paved the way for the conquest of its Greek settlements first by the surrounding natives, and then by the half-barbarous Romans. At the next Olympic games the orator Lysias called upon Greece to denounce the new tyrant. The multitude attacked the tents of Dionysius’ embassy, and refused to hear his poetry.

The same despot who, after capturing Rhegium, offered freedom to its inhabitants if they would bring him nearly all their hoarded wealth as ransom, and then, when the wealth had been surrendered, sold them as slaves, was a man of wide culture, not prouder of his sword than of his pen. When the poet Philoxenus, asked by the dictator for his opinion of the royal verses, pronounced them worthless, Dionysius sentenced him to the quarries. The next day the King repented, had Philoxenus released, and gave a banquet in his honor. But when Dionysius read more of his poetry, and asked Philoxenus to judge it, Philoxenus bade the attendants take him back to the quarries.⁴⁴ Despite such discouragements Dionysius patronized literature and the arts, and was pleased for a moment to entertain Plato, who was then (387) traveling in Sicily. According to a widespread tradition reported by Diogenes Laertius, the philosopher condemned dictatorship. “Your words,” said Dionysius, “are those of an old dotard.” “Your language,” said Plato, “is that of a tyrant.” Dionysius, we are told, sold him into slavery, but the philosopher was soon ransomed by Anniceris of Cyrene.⁴⁵

The dictator’s life was ended not by any of the assassins whom he feared, but by his own poetry. In 367 his tragedy, The Ransom of Hector, received first prize at the Athenian Lenaea. Dionysius was so pleased that he feasted with his friends, drank much wine, fell into a fever, and died.

The harassed city, which had borne with him as an alternative to subjection by Carthage, accepted hopefully the succession of his son to the throne. Dionysius II was now a youth of twenty-five, weak in body and mind, and therefore, thought the crafty Syracusans, likely to give them a mild and negligent rule. He had able advisers in Dion his uncle, and Philistius the historian. Dion was a man of wealth, but also a lover of letters and philosophy, and a devoted disciple of Plato. He became a member of the Academy, and lived, at home and abroad, a life of philosophical simplicity. It occurred to him that the malleable youth of the new dictator offered an opportunity of establishing, if not quite the Utopia that Plato had described to him,⁴⁶ at least a constitutional regime capable of uniting all Sicily for the expulsion of the Carthaginian power. At Dion’s suggestion Dionysius II invited Plato to his court, and submitted himself to Plato’s tutoring.

Doubtless the young autocrat put his best foot forward, and concealed from his teacher that addiction to drink and lechery⁴⁷ which had drawn from his father the prediction that the dynasty would die with his son. Deceived by the youth’s apparent willingness, Plato led him towards philosophy by its most difficult approaches—mathematics and virtue. The ruler was told, as Confucius had told the Duke of Lu, that the first principle of government is good example, that to improve his people he must make himself a model of intelligence and good will. All the court began to study geometry, and to stand in diplomatic awe over figures traced in the sand. But Philistius, eclipsed by Plato’s ascendancy, whispered to the dictator that all this was merely a plot by which the Athenians, who had failed to conquer Syracuse with an army and a fleet, would capture it through a single man; and that Plato, having taken the impregnable citadel with diagrams and dialogues, would depose Dionysius and put Dion on the throne. Dionysius saw in these whispers an excellent escape from geometry. He banished Dion, confiscated his property, and gave Dion’s wife to a courtier whom she feared. Despite the dictator’s protestations of affection, Plato left Syracuse and joined Dion in Athens. Six years later he returned at the King’s invitation, and pled for Dion’s recall. Dionysius refused, and Plato resigned himself to the Academy.⁴⁸

In 357 Dion, poor in funds but rich in friends, recruited in mainland Greece a force of eight hundred men, and sailed for Syracuse. Landing secretly, he found the people eager to aid him. With one battle—in which, though he was now fifty, his own heroic fighting turned the tide—he so completely defeated the army of Dionysius that the frightened youth fled to Italy. At this juncture, with Greek impulsiveness, the Syracusan Assembly that he had convened removed Dion from command, lest he should make himself dictator. Dion withdrew peaceably to Leontini; but the forces of Dionysius, liking this turn of events, made a sudden attack upon the popular army, and defeated it. The leaders who had deposed him sent appeals to Dion to hurry back and take charge. He came, won another victory, forgave the men who had opposed him, and then announced a temporary dictatorship as necessary to order. Despite the advice of his friends he refused a personal guard, being “quite ready to die,” he said, “rather than live perpetually on the watch against friends and foes alike.”⁴⁹ Instead he maintained, amid surroundings of wealth and power, his accustomed modesty of life. For though, says Plutarch,

all things had now succeeded to his wish, yet he desired not to enjoy any present advantage of his good fortune. . . . He was content with a very frugal and moderate competency, and was indeed the wonder of all men, that when not only Sicily and Carthage but all Greece looked to him as in the height of prosperity, and no man living greater than he, no general more renowned for valor and success, yet in his guard, his attendance, his table, he seemed as if he rather communed with Plato in the Academy than lived among hired captains and paid soldiers, whose solace of their toils and dangers it is to eat and drink their fill, and enjoy themselves plentifully every day.⁵⁰

If we may credit Plato, it was Dion’s aim to establish a constitutional monarchy, to reform Syracusan life and manners on the Spartan model, to rebuild and unify the enslaved or desolate Greek cities of Sicily, and then to expel the Carthaginians from the island. But the Syracusans had set their hearts on democracy, and were no more hungry for virtue than either Dionysius. A friend of Dion murdered him, and chaos broke loose. Dionysius hurried home, recaptured Ortygia and the government, and ruled with the bitter cruelty of a despot deposed and restored.

Undeserved fates come sometimes to individuals, but rarely to nations. The Syracusans appealed for aid to their mother city, Corinth. The call came at a time when a Corinthian of almost legendary nobleness was waiting for a summons to heroism. Timoleon was an aristocrat who so loved liberty that when his brother Timophanes tried to make himself tyrant of Corinth, Timoleon killed him. Cursed by his mother and brooding over his deed, the tyrannicide withdrew to a woodland retreat, shunning all men. Hearing nevertheless of Syracuse’s need, he came out of his retirement, organized a small force of volunteers, sailed to Sicily, and deployed his little band with such strategy that the royal army yielded after a brief taste of his generalship, and without killing any one of his men. Timoleon gave the humbled tyrant money enough to take himself to Corinth, where Dionysius spent the remainder of his life teaching school and sometimes begging his bread.⁵¹ Timoleon re-established democracy, tore down the fortifications that had made Ortygia a buttress of tyranny, repulsed a Carthaginian invasion, restored freedom and democracy in the Greek cities, and made Sicily for a generation so peaceful and prosperous that new settlers were drawn to it from every part of the Hellenic world. Then, refusing public office, he retired to private life; but the island democracies, appreciating his wisdom and integrity, submitted all major matters to his judgment, and freely followed his advice. Two “sycophants” having indicted him on a charge of malfeasance, he insisted, over the protests of a grateful people, on being tried without favor according to the laws, and thanked the gods that freedom of speech and equality before the law had been restored in Sicily. When he died (337) all Greece looked upon him as one of the greatest of her sons.

V. THE ADVANCE OF MACEDONIA

While Timoleon was restoring democracy for its last respite in ancient Sicily, Philip was destroying it on the mainland. Macedonia, despite the cultural hospitality of Archelaus, was still for the most part a barbarous country of hardy but letterless mountaineers when Philip came to the throne (359); indeed, to the end of its career, though it used Greek as its official language, it contributed no author, or artist, or scientist, or philosopher, to the life of Greece.

Having lived for three years with the relatives of Epaminondas in Thebes, Philip had imbibed there a modicum of culture and a wealth of military ideas. He had all the virtues except those of civilization. He was strong in body and will, athletic and handsome, a magnificent animal trying, now and then, to be an Athenian gentleman. Like his famous son he was a man of violent temper and abounding generosity, loving battle as much, and strong drink more. Unlike Alexander he was a jovial laugher, and raised to high office a slave who amused him. He liked boys, but liked women better, and married as many of them as he could. For a time he tried monogamy with Olympias, the wild and beautiful Molossian princess who gave him Alexander; but later his fancy traveled, and Olympias brooded over her revenge. Most of all he liked stalwart men, who could risk their lives all day and gamble and carouse with him half the night. He was literally (before Alexander) the bravest of the brave, and left a part of himself on every battlefield. “What a man!” exclaimed his greatest enemy, Demosthenes. “For the sake of power and dominion he had an eye struck out, a shoulder broken, an arm and a leg paralyzed.”⁵² He had a subtle intelligence, capable of patiently awaiting his chance, and of moving resolutely through difficult means to distant ends. In diplomacy he was affable and treacherous; he broke a promise with a light heart, and was always ready to make another; he recognized no morals for governments, and looked upon lies and bribes as humane substitutes for slaughter. But he was lenient in victory, and usually gave the defeated Greeks better terms than they gave one another. All who met him—except the obstinate Demosthenes—liked him, and ranked him as the strongest and most interesting character of his time.

His government was an aristocratic monarchy in which the king’s powers were limited by the duration of his superior strength of arm or mind, and by the willingness of the nobles to support him. Eight hundred feudal barons made up the “King’s Companions”; they were great landowners who despised the life of cities, crowds, and books; but when, with their consent, the King announced a war, they came out of their estates physically fit and drunkenly brave. In the army they served as cavalry, riding the sturdy horses of Macedonia and Thrace, and trained by Philip to fight in a close formation that could change its tactics at once and as one at the commander’s word. Beside these was an infantry of rugged hunters and peasants, arrayed in “phalanxes”: sixteen rows of men pointing their lances over the heads—or resting them on the shoulders—of the rows ahead of them, making each phalanx an iron wall. The lance, twenty-one feet long, was weighted at the rear, so that when held aloft it projected fifteen feet forward. As each row of soldiers marched three feet before the next, the lances of the first five rows projected beyond the phalanx, and the lances of the first three rows had a greater reach than the six-foot javelin of the nearest Greek hoplite. The Macedonian soldier, after hurling his lance, fought with a short sword, and protected himself with a brass helmet, a coat of mail, greaves, and a lightweight shield. Behind the phalanx came a regiment of old-fashioned archers, who shot their arrows over the heads of the lancers; then came a siege train with catapults and battering rams. Resolutely and patiently—playing Frederick William I to Alexander’s Frederick—Philip drilled this army of ten thousand men into the most powerful fighting instrument that Europe had yet known.

With this force he was determined to unify Greece under his leadership; then, with the help of all Hellas, he proposed to cross the Hellespont and drive the Persians out of Greek Asia. At every step toward this end he found himself running counter to the Hellenic love of freedom; and in trying to overcome this resistance he almost forgot the end in the means. His first move brought him into conflict with Athens, for he sought to win possession of the cities that Athens had acquired on the Macedonian and Thracian coasts; these cities not only blocked his way to Asia, they also controlled rich gold mines and a taxable trade. While Athens was absorbed in the “Social War” that ended her second empire, Philip seized Amphipolis (357), Pydna, and Potidaea (356), and answered the protests of Athens with fine compliments to Athenian literature and art. In 355 he took Methone, losing an eye in the siege; in 347, after a long campaign of chicanery and bravery, he captured Olynthus. He now controlled all the European coast of the north Aegean, had an income of a thousand talents a year from the mines of Thrace,⁵³ and could turn his thoughts to winning the support of Greece.

To finance his campaigns he had sold thousands of captives—many of them Athenians—into slavery, and had lost the good will of Hellenes. It was fortunate for him that during these years the Greek states were exhausting themselves in a second “Sacred War” (356-46) over the spoliation of the Delphic treasury by the Phocians. The Spartans and Athenians fought for the Phocians, the Amphictyonic League—Boeotia, Locris, Doris, Thessaly—fought against them. Losing, the Amphictyonic Council besought the help of Philip. He saw his opportunity, came swiftly down through the open passes, overwhelmed the Phocians (346), was received into the Delphic Amphictyony, was acclaimed as the protector of the shrine, and accepted an invitation to preside over all the Greeks at the Pythian games. He cast his eyes upon the divided states of the Peloponnesus, and felt that he could win all of them except weakened Sparta to accept him as leader in a Greek Confederacy that might free all Greeks in the east and the west. But Athens, listening at last to Demosthenes, saw in Philip not a liberator but an enslaver, and decided to fight for the jealous sovereignty of the city-state, and the preservation of that free democracy which had made her the light of the world.

VI. DEMOSTHENES

The Vatican statue of the great orator is one of the masterpieces of Hellenistic realism. It is a careworn face, as if every advance of Philip had cut another furrow into the brow. The body is thin and wearied; the aspect is that of a man who is about to make a final appeal for a cause that he considers lost; the eyes reveal a restless life, and foresee a bitter death.

His father was a manufacturer of swords and bedframes, who bequeathed to him a business worth some fourteen talents ($84,000). Three executors administered the property for the boy, and squandered it so generously on themselves that when Demosthenes reached the age of twenty (363) he had to sue his guardians to recover the remains of his inheritance. He spent most of this in fitting out a trireme for the Athenian navy, and then settled down to earn his bread by writing speeches for litigants. He could compose better than he could speak, for he was weak in body and defective in articulation. Sometimes, says Plutarch, he prepared pleas for both the opposed parties to a dispute. Meanwhile, to overcome his impediments, he addressed the sea with a mouth full of pebbles, or declaimed as he ran up a hill. He worked hard, and his only distractions were courtesans and boys. “What can one do with Demosthenes?” his secretary complained. “Everything that he has thought of for a whole year is thrown into confusion by one woman in one night.”⁵⁴ After years of effort he became one of the richest lawyers at the Athenian bar, learned in technicalities, convincing in discourse, and flexible in morals. He defended the banker Phormio against precisely such charges as he had brought against his guardians, took substantial fees from private persons for introducing and pressing legislation, and never answered the accusation of his colleague Hypereides that he was receiving money from the Persian King to stir up war against Philip.⁵⁵ At his zenith his fortune was ten times as large as that which his father had left him.

Nevertheless he had the integrity to suffer and die for the views that he was paid to defend. He denounced the dependence of Athens upon mercenary troops, and insisted that the citizens who received money from the theoric fund should earn it by serving in the army; his courage rose to the point of demanding that this fund should be used not to pay citizens to attend religious ceremonies and plays, but to organize a better force for the defense of the state.* He told the Athenians that they were degenerate slackers who had lost the military virtues of their progenitors. He refused to admit that the city-state had stultified itself with faction and war, and that the times called for the unity of Greece; this unity, he warned, was a phrase to conceal the subjugation of Greece to one man. He detected the ambitions of Philip from their first symptoms, and begged the Athenians to fight to retain their allies and colonies in the north.

Against Demosthenes and Hypereides and the party of war stood Aeschines and Phocion and the party of peace. Very likely both sides were bribed, the one by Persia, the other by Philip,⁵⁷ and both were sincerely moved by their own agitation. Phocion was by common consent the most honest statesman of his time—a Stoic before Zeno, a philosophical product of Plato’s Academy, an orator who so despised the Assembly that when it applauded him he asked a friend, “Have I not unconsciously said something bad?”⁵⁸ Forty-five times he was chosen strategos, far surpassing the record of Pericles; he served ably as a general in many wars, but spent most of his life in advocating peace. His associate Aeschines was no stoic, but a man who had risen from bitter poverty to a comfortable income. His youth as a teacher and an actor helped him to become a fluent speaker, the first Greek orator, we are told, to speak extempore with success;⁵⁹ his rivals wrote out their speeches in advance. Having served with Phocion in several engagements, he adopted Phocion’s policy of compromising with Philip instead of making war; and when Philip paid him for his efforts his enthusiasm for peace became an edifying devotion.

Twice Demosthenes indicted Aeschines on the charge of receiving Macedonian gold, and twice failed to convict him. Finally, however, the martial eloquence of Demosthenes, and the southward advance of Philip, persuaded the Athenians to forego for a time the distribution of the theoric fund, and to employ it in war. In 338 an army was hastily organized, and marched north to face the phalanxes of Philip at Boeotian Chaeronea. Sparta refused to help, but Thebes, feeling Philip’s fingers at her throat, sent her Sacred Band to fight beside the Athenians. Every one of its three hundred members died on that battlefield. The Athenians fought almost as bravely, but they had waited too long, and were not equipped to meet so novel an army as the Macedonian. They broke and fled before the sea of lances that moved upon them, and Demosthenes fled with them. Alexander, Philip’s eighteen-year-old son, led the Macedonian cavalry with reckless courage, and won the honors of a bitter day.

Philip was diplomatically generous in victory. He put to death some of the anti-Macedonian leaders in Thebes, and set up his partisans there in oligarchic power. But he freed the two thousand Athenian prisoners that he had taken, and sent the charming Alexander and the judicious Antipater to offer peace on condition that Athens recognize him as the general of all Greece against the common foe. Athens, which had expected harsher terms, not only consented, but passed resolutions showering compliments upon the new Agamemnon. Philip convened at Corinth a synedrion, or assembly, of the Greek states, formed them (except Sparta) into a federation modeled on the Boeotian, and outlined his plans for the liberation of Asia. He was unanimously chosen commander in this enterprise; each state pledged him men and arms, and promised that no Greek anywhere should fight against him. Such sacrifices were a small price to pay for his distance.

The results of Chaeronea were endless. The unity that Greece had failed to create for itself had been achieved, but only at the point of a half-alien sword. The Peloponnesian War had proved Athens incapable of organizing Hellas, the aftermath had shown Sparta incapable, the Theban hegemony in its turn had failed; the wars of the armies and the classes had worn out the city-states, and left them too weak for defense. Under the circumstances they were fortunate to find so reasonable a conqueror, who proposed to withdraw from the scene of his victory, and leave to the conquered a large measure of freedom. Indeed Philip, and Alexander after him, watchfully protected the autonomy of the federated states, lest any one of them, by absorbing others, should grow strong enough to displace Macedon. One great liberty, however, Philip took away—the right of revolution. He was a frank conservative who considered the stability of property an indispensable stimulus to enterprise, and a necessary prop to government. He persuaded the synod at Corinth to insert into the articles of federation a pledge against any change of constitution, any social transformation, any political reprisals. In each state he lent his influence to the side of property, and put an end to confiscatory taxation.

He had laid his plans well, except for Olympias; in the end his fate was determined not by his victories in the field but by his failure with his wife. She frightened him not only by her temper but by participating in the wildest Dionysian rites. One night he found a snake lying beside her in bed, and was not reassured by being told that it was a god. Worse, Olympias informed him that he was not the real father of Alexander; that on the night of their wedding a thunderbolt had fallen upon her and set her afire; it was the great god Zeus-Ammon who had begotten the dashing prince. Discouraged by such varied competition, Philip turned his amours to other women; and Olympias began her revenge by telling Alexander the secret of his divine paternity.⁶⁰ One of Philip’s generals, Attalus, made matters worse by proposing a toast to Philip’s expected child by a second wife, as promising a “legitimate” (i.e., completely Macedonian) heir to the throne. Alexander flung a goblet at his head, crying, “Am I, then, a bastard?” Philip drew his sword against his son, but was so drunk that he could not stand. Alexander laughed at him: “Here,” he said, “is a man preparing to cross from Europe into Asia, who cannot step surely from one couch to another.” A few months later one of Philip’s officers, Pausanias, having asked redress from Philip for an insult from Attalus, and receiving no satisfaction, assassinated the King (336). Alexander, idolized by the army and supported by Olympias,* seized the throne, overcame all opposition, and prepared to conquer the world.

CHAPTER XX

Letters and Arts in the Fourth Century

I. THE ORATORS

THROUGH all this turmoil literature reflected the declining virility of Greece. Lyrical poetry was no longer the passionate expression of creative individuals, but a polite exercise of salon intellectuals, a learned echo of schoolday tasks. Timotheus of Miletus wrote an epic, but it did not accord with an argumentative age, and remained as unpopular as his early music. Dramatic performances continued, but on a more modest scale and in a lower key. The impoverishment of the public treasury and the weakened patriotism of private wealth reduced the splendor and significance of the chorus; more and more the dramatists contented themselves with unrelated musical intermezzi in place of choruses organically united with the play. The name of the choragus disappeared from public notice, then the name of the poet; only the name of the actor remained. The drama became less and less a poem, more and more a histrionic exhibition; it was an era of great actors and small dramatists. Greek tragedy had been built upon religion and mythology, and required some faith and piety in its auditors; it naturally faded away in the twilight of the gods.

Comedy prospered as tragedy decayed, and took over something of the subtlety, refinement, and subject matter of the Euripidean stage. This Middle Comedy (400-323) lost its taste or courage for political satire precisely when politics most needed a “candid friend”; possibly such satire was forbidden or the audience was weary of politics now that Athens was ruled by second-rate men. The general retirement of the fourth-century Greek from public to private life inclined his interest from affairs of state to those of the home and the heart. The comedy of manners appeared; love began to dominate the scene, and not always by its virtue; the ladies of the demimonde mingled on the boards with fishwives, cooks, and bewildered philosophers—though the honor of the protagonists and the dramatist was saved by a marriage at the end. These plays were not coarsened by Aristophanes’ vulgarity and burlesque, but neither were they vitalized by his exuberance and his imagination. We know the names, and have none of the works, of thirty-nine poets of the Middle Comedy; but we may judge from their fragments that they did not write for the ages. Alexis of Thurii wrote 245 plays, Antiphanes 260. They made hay while the sun shone, and died with its setting.

It was a century of orators. The rise of industry and trade turned men’s minds to realism and practicality, and the schools that once had taught the poems of Homer now trained their pupils in rhetoric. Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hypereides, Demades, Deinarchus, Aeschines, Demosthenes were oratorpoliticians, leaders of political factions, masters of what the Germans have called the Advokatenrepublik. Similar men appeared in the democratic interludes of Syracuse; the oligarchic states did not suffer them. The Athenian orators were clear and vigorous in language, averse to ornate eloquence, capable, now and then, of noble patriotic flights, and given to such dishonesty of argument and abusiveness of speech as would not be tolerated even in a modern campaign. The heterogeneous quality of the Athenian Assembly and the popular courts had a debasing as well as a stimulating effect upon Greek oratory, and through it upon Greek literature. The Athenian citizen enjoyed bouts of oratorical invective almost as much as he enjoyed a prize fight; when a duel was expected between such word warriors as Aeschines and Demosthenes, men came from distant villages and foreign states to hear them. Often the appeal was to pride and prejudice; Plato, who hated oratory as the poison that was killing democracy, defined rhetoric as the art of governing men by addressing their feelings and passions.

Even Demosthenes, with all his vigor and nervous intensity, his frequent ascent to passages of patriotic fervor, his withering fire of personal attack, his clever and relieving alternation of narrative and argument, the carefully rhythmic quality of his language, and the overwhelming torrent of his speech—even Demosthenes strikes us as a little less than great. He laid the secret of oratory in acting (hypocrisis), and so believed this that he rehearsed his speeches patiently, and recited them before a mirror. He dug himself a cave and lived in it for months, practicing secretly; in these periods he kept one half of his face shaved to deter himself from leaving his retreat.¹ On the rostrum he contorted his figure, whirled round and round, laid his hand upon his forehead as in reflection, and often raised his voice to a scream.² All this, says Plutarch, “was wonderfully pleasing to the common people, but by well-educated persons, as, for example, by Demetrius of Phalerum, it was looked upon as mean, humiliating, and unmanly.” We are amused by Demosthenes’ histrionics, amazed by his self-esteem, confused by his digressions, and appalled by his ungracious scurrility. There is little wit in him, little philosophy. Only his patriotism redeems him, and the apparent sincerity of his despairing cry for freedom.

The historic climax of Greek oratory came in 330. Six years before, Ctesiphon had carried through the Council a preliminary proposal to award Demosthenes a crown or wreath in appreciation not only of his statesmanship but of his many financial gifts to the state. To keep this honor from his rival, Aeschines indicted Ctesiphon on the ground (technically correct) of having introduced an unconstitutional proposal. The case of Ctesiphon, repeatedly postponed, finally came to trial before a jury of five hundred citizens. It was, of course, a cause célèbre; all who could came, even from afar, to hear it; for in effect the greatest of Athenian orators was fighting for his good name and his political life. Aeschines spent little time attacking Ctesiphon, but turned his assault upon the character and career of Demosthenes, who replied in kind with his famous speech On the Crown. Every line of the two orations still vibrates with excitement, and is hot with the hatred of enemies brought face to face in war. Demosthenes, knowing that offense is better than defense, charged that Philip had chosen the most corruptible of the orators as his mouthpieces in Athens. Then he etched in acid a life portrait of Aeschines:

I must let you know who this man really is who embarks upon vituperation so glibly . . . and what is his parentage. Virtue? You renegade!—what have you or your family to do with virtue? . . . Where did you get your right to talk about education? . . . Shall I relate how your father was a slave who kept an elementary school near the Temple of Theseus, and how he wore shackles on his legs and a timber collar round his neck, or how your mother practiced daylight nuptials in an outhouse? . . . You helped your father in the drudgery of a grammar school, grinding the ink, sponging the benches, sweeping the room, holding the position of a menial. . . . After getting yourself enrolled on the register of your parish—no one knows how you managed it, but let that pass—you chose a most gentlemanly occupation, that of clerk and errand-boy to minor officials. After committing all the offenses with which you reproach other people, you were relieved of that employment. . . . You entered the service of those famous players, Simylus and Socrates, better known as the Growlers. You played small parts to their lead, picking up figs and grapes and olives, and making a better living out of those missiles than by all the battles you fought for dear life. For there was no truce or armistice in the warfare between you and your audience. . . .

Compare, then, Aeschines, your life and mine. You taught reading, I attended school. You danced, I was choragus. . . . You were a public scribe, I a public orator. You were a third-rate actor, I a spectator at the play. You failed in your part, and I hissed you.³

It was a powerful speech; not a model of order and courtesy, but so eloquent with passion that the jury acquitted Ctesiphon by a vote of five to one. In the following year the Assembly voted Demosthenes the disputed crown. Aeschines, unable to pay the fine that was automatically levied upon so unsuccessful a persecution, fled to Rhodes, where he made a precarious living by teaching rhetoric. An old tradition says that Demosthenes sent him money to alleviate his poverty.⁴

II. ISOCRATES

This duel of oratory has been loudly lauded and devoutly studied in every generation. But in truth it represents almost the nadir of Athenian politics; we cannot see nobility in this street-corner contest in vituperation, this mean quarrel for public praise between two secret recipients of foreign gold. Isocrates is a little more attractive, and carries down into the fourth century something of the grandeur of the fifth. Born in 436, he lived till 338, and died with Greek liberty. His father had made a fortune by manufacturing flutes; he gave his son every educational advantage, even sending him to study rhetoric with Gorgias in Thessaly. The Peloponnesian War, and the example of Alcibiades, ruined the flute business, and destroyed the family fortune; Isocrates had to go forth and earn his living by the sweat of his pen. He began by writing speeches for others, and thought of becoming an orator. But he suffered from shyness and a weak voice, and a strong distaste for the crudities of political strife. He abominated the demagogues who had captured the Assembly, and shrank for a time into a quiet pedagogic life.

In 391 he opened the most successful of Athenian schools of rhetoric. Students came to him from all the Greek world; perhaps their variety of origin and outlook helped to form his Panhellenic philosophy. He thought that all other teachers were on the wrong track. In a pamphlet Against the Sophists he denounced both those who professed to turn any numbskull into a pundit for three or four minas, and those who, like Plato, hoped to prepare men for government by training them in science and metaphysics. As for himself, he admitted that he could get results only when the student possessed some natural talent. He would not teach metaphysics or science, for these, he argued, were hopeless inquiries into insoluble mysteries. Nevertheless, he gave the name of philosophy to the instruction provided in his school. The curriculum centered upon the arts of writing and speaking, but these were taught in connection with literature and politics;⁵ Isocrates offered, as we should say, a cultural course as opposed to the mathematical course given in Plato’s Academy. The art of speech was the goal, as being then the chief medium of public advancement; the Athenian state was governed by argument. So Isocrates taught his pupils the use of words: how to arrange them in the clearest order, in rhythmic but not metrical sequence, in polished but not ornate diction, in smooth transitions of sound and thought,* in balanced clauses and cumulative periods; such prose, he believed, would please the refined ear as much as poetry. Out of this school came many leaders of the Demosthenic age: Timotheus the general, Ephorus and Theopompus the historians, Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hypereides, and Aeschines the orators, Speusippus the successor of Plato, and, some say, Aristotle himself.⁶

Isocrates was not content with forming great men; he wished to play some part in the affairs of his time. Unable to be either an orator or a statesman, he became a pamphleteer. He addressed long speeches to the Athenian public, to leaders like Philip, or to the assembled Greeks at the PanheRenic games; instead of delivering these he published them, and thereby unconsciously invented the essay as a literary form. Twenty-nine of his discourses remain, and rank among the most interesting survivals of Greek antiquity. His first great pronouncement, the Panegyricus† struck the theme of all his thought—the theme of his old master Gorgias—a call to Greece to forget its little sovereignties, and become a state. Isocrates was a proud Athenian—“So far has our city distanced the rest of mankind in thought and speech that her pupils have become the teachers of all the world.” But he was a prouder Greek; to him, as to the Hellenistic age, Hellenism meant not membership in a race, but participation in a culture; and that culture, he felt, was the finest that men had yet created anywhere.⁷ But all around this culture were “barbarians”—in Italy, Sicily, Africa, Asia, and what we should now call the Balkans. It saddened him to see the barbarians becoming stronger, and Persia consolidating her control of Ionia, while the Greek states consumed themselves in civil war.

For many as are the ills that are incident to the nature of man, we have ourselves invented more than those that nature lays upon us, by engendering wars and factions among ourselves. . . . Against these ills no one has ever protested; and people are not ashamed to weep over the calamities that have been fabricated by the poets, while they view complacently the real sufferings, the many terrible sufferings, that result from our state of war; and they are so far from feeling pity that they even rejoice more in each other’s sorrows than in their own blessings.⁸

If the Greeks must fight, why not fight a real enemy? Why not drive the Persians back to their plateau? A small detachment of Greeks, he prophesied, would defeat a large army of Persians.⁹ Such a holy war might at last give unity to Greece; and the choice was between Greek unity or triumphant barbarism.

Two years after publishing this appeal (378) Isocrates, turning theory into practice, toured the Aegean with his ex-pupil Timotheus, and helped to formulate the terms of the second Athenian Confederacy. The rise and fall of this new hope of unity formed one more disappointment in his long life. In a brave and vigorous pamphlet On the Peace he condemned Athens for again corrupting an alliance into an empire, and called upon her to sign a peace that would assure every Greek state against Athenian encroachments. “What we call empire is in reality misfortune, for by its very nature it depraves all who have to do with it.”¹⁰ Imperialism, he said, had ruined democracy by teaching Athenians to live on foreign tribute; losing that, they now wished to live on state contributions, and exalted to the highest offices those who promised them most.

Whenever you deliberate on the business of the state you distrust and dislike men of superior intelligence, and cultivate instead the most depraved of the orators who come before you; you prefer . . . those who are drunk to those who are sober, those who are witless to those who are wise, and those who dole out the public money to those who perform public services at their own expense.¹¹

In his next address, the Areopagiticus, he spoke more leniently of democracy. “We sit around in our shops denouncing the present order,” says a timeless passage, “but we perceive that even badly constituted democracies are responsible for fewer disasters than are oligarchies.”¹² Had not Sparta made a worse mistress for Greece than Athens had been?—and, “Have not we all of us, because of the madness of the Thirty, become greater enthusiasts for democracy than those who occupied Phyle?*¹³ But Athens had ruined itself by carrying to excess the principles of liberty and equality, by “training the citizens in such fashion that they looked upon insolence as democracy, lawlessness as liberty, impudence of speech as equality, and license to do what they pleased as happiness.”¹⁴ All men are not equal, and should not be equally free to hold office. The institution of the lot, Isocrates felt, had lowered disastrously the level of Athenian statesmanship. Better than this “mob rule” was the “timocracy” of Solon and Cleisthenes; for then amiable ignorance and eloquent venality had less chance of being raised to leadership; able men rose naturally to the top, and the Areopagus, receiving them after their term of office, became automatically the mature brain of the state.

In 346, when Athens came to terms with Philip, Isocrates, now ninety, addressed an open letter to the Macedonian King. He foresaw that Philip would make himself master of Greece, and begged him to use his power not as a tyrant, but as the unifier of autonomous Greek states in a war for the liberation of Greece from the King’s Peace, and of Ionia from Persian rule. The war party denounced the letter as a surrender to despotism, and for seven years Isocrates held his pen. He spoke once more in 339, addressing his pamphlet to the Greeks who were gathering for the Panathenaic games. The Panathenaicus is a weak and prolix repetition of the Panegyricus; the style trembles in the old man’s hand; but it is an astonishing performance for one who was only three years short of a century. Then in 338 came Chaeronea; Athens was defeated, but Isocrates’ dream of a unified Greece was about to come true. A late Greek tradition says that when the news came he forgot about Philip and unity, and thought only of his native city humiliated, the days of her glory ended; and that, at the age of ninety-eight, having at last lived long enough, he starved himself to death.¹⁵ We do not know if this is true; but Aristotle tells us that within five days after Chaeronea, Isocrates was dead.

III. XENOPHON

The influence of “the old man eloquent”¹⁶ upon the statesmen of his time is open to doubt, but his influence upon letters was immediate and enduring.* It was felt first by the historians. Xenophon and others imitated his sketch of Evagoras,† and biography became a popular form of Greek literature, culminating in the gossipy masterpieces of Plutarch. To one of his pupils, Ephorus of Cyme, Isocrates committed the task of writing a general history of Greece—a record not of any one state, but of Greece as a whole. Ephorus carried out the assignment so well that his contemporaries ranked his Universal History with the books of Herodotus. To another pupil, Theopompus of Chios, Isocrates committed the field of recent events; Theopompus covered it in his Hellenica and Philippica, lively and rhetorical works highly praised by his contemporaries. About 340 Dicaearchus of Messana wrote a history of Greek civilization under the title of Bios Hellados—The Life of Greece; so ancient is our present enterprise, even, by chance, to its name.

The only one of the fourth-century historians who has survived is Xenophon. Diogenes Laertius describes him in his youth:

Xenophon was a man of great modesty, and as handsome as can be imagined. They say that Socrates met him in a narrow lane, and put his stick across it, and prevented him from passing by, asking where all kinds of necessary things were sold. And when Xenophon had answered him, he asked, again, where men were made good and virtuous. And as Xenophon did not know, Socrates said, “Follow me, then, and learn.” And from that time forth Xenophon became a follower of Socrates.¹⁷

He was among the more practical of Socrates’ students. He liked his master’s fascinating sleight-o’-mind, and loved him as a philosophic saint. But he enjoyed action as well as thought, and became a soldier of fortune while some other scholars, as Aristophanes disdainfully put it, were “measuring the air.”¹⁸ About the age of thirty he took service under the younger Cyrus, fought at Cunaxa, and led the Ten Thousand to safety. At Byzantium he joined the Spartans in their war against Persia, captured a wealthy Mede, accepted a rich ransom for him, and lived on it for the rest of his life. He became a friend and admirer of the Spartan King Agesilaus, and made him the subject of a worshipful biography. Returning to Greece with Agesilaus after Athens had declared war upon Sparta, he chose to be loyal to him rather than to his city; whereupon Athens decreed him an exile, and confiscated his property. He fought on the side of the Lacedaemonians at Coronea, and received as a reward an estate at Scillus in Elis, then under Spartan domination. There he spent twenty years as a country gentleman, farming, hunting, writing, and bringing up his sons sternly on the Spartan plan.¹⁹

To his banishment we owe the varied works that lifted him to the front rank among the authors of his time. He wrote as his mood inclined him, about breaking in dogs, managing horses, training a wife, educating princes, fighting with Agesilaus, or raising revenues for Athens. In the Anabasis, with the fresh style of one who had seen or done the things he described, he told the thrilling (but quite uncorroborated) story of the Ten Thousand’s long trek to the sea. In the Hellenica he took up the history of Greece where Thucydides had left off, and brought it down to the battle of Mantinea, in which his own son Gryllus died fighting bravely after slaying Epaminondas. The book is a dreary chronicle, in which history is conceived as an endless chain of battles, a vain logic-chopping alternation of victory and defeat. The style is lively, the character sketches are vivid; but the facts are judiciously chosen to prove the superiority of Spartan ways. Superstition, which disappeared from history in Thucydides, returns with Xenophon, and supernatural agency is invoked to explain the trajectory of events. With like simplicity or duplicity, the Memorabilia transforms Socrates into a monster of perfection, orthodox in religion, in ethics, in genderless love, in everything except that scorn for democracy which particularly endeared him to the banished and Laconizing Xenophon. Still more unreliable is the Banquet, which reports conversations alleged to have occurred when Xenophon was a child.

In the Oeconomicus, however, Xenophon speaks in his own right, and with such frank conservatism that we are charmed despite ourselves. Asked for instruction in agriculture, Socrates modestly confesses his ignorance, but recalls the advice and example of the rich landowner Ischomachus. The latter voices the knightly Xenophon’s disdain for any occupation except husbandry and war. He expounds not only the secrets of successful tillage, but the art of managing one’s property and one’s wife. In pages that for a moment rival the grace of Plato, Ischomachus tells how he taught his bride—only half his age—the business of caring for the home, keeping all things in place, governing her servants with kindness but without familiarity, and building a good name for herself not through artificial beauty but through a faithful performance of her obligations as wife, mother, and friend. In the view of Ischomachus-Xenophon marriage is an economic as well as a physical association, and decays when the silent partner does all the work. Perhaps the readiness with which the young bride accepts all this is merely the devout wish of a general who won no victories on the domestic battlefield; but we should be willing to believe everything in the account except the tale of how Ischomachus, with but a moment’s reasoning, persuaded his wife to abandon powder and rouge.²⁰

Having expounded the art of marriage, Xenophon describes in the Cyropaedia (i.e., The Education of Cyrus) his ideals of schooling and government, as if in answer to Plato’s Republic. Cleverly adapting fictitious biography to the uses of philosophy, he gives an imaginary account of the training, career, and administration of Cyrus the Great. He makes the story dramatically personal, enlivens it with dialogue, and decorates it with the oldest romantic love story in extant literature. He almost ignores cultural education, and concentrates upon making the boy a healthy, able, and honorable man; the youth learns the virile sports, the arts of war, the habit of silent obedience, and finally the capacity for effective and persuasive command over subordinates. The best government, Xenophon thinks, is an enlightened monarchy supported and checked by an aristocracy devoted to agricultural and military pursuits. He admires the laws of Persia for rewarding good as well as punishing evil,²¹ and points out to the individualistic Greeks, from the example of Persia, the possibility of uniting many cities and states in an empire enjoying internal order and peace. Xenophon began, like Philip, with a vision of conquest; he ends, like Alexander, captivated by the people whom he thought to conquer.

He is a masterly storyteller, but a middling philosopher. He is an amateur in everything but war; he considers a hundred subjects, but always from the viewpoint of a general. He exaggerates the virtues of order and has not a word to say for liberty; we may judge from this how far disorder had gone in Athens. If antiquity ranked him with Herodotus and Thucydides it must have been because of his style—the fresh charm of its Attic purity, the harmonious flow of a prose that Cicero called “sweeter than honey,”²² the human touches of personality, the transparent simplicity of language that allows the reader to see through the clear medium the thought or subject in hand. Xenophon and Plato stand to Thucydides and Socrates in the same relation as Apelles and Praxiteles to Polygnotus and Pheidias—the culmination of artistry and grace after an age of creative originality and power.

IV. APELLES

The highest excellence of the fourth century lay not in literature but in philosophy and art. In art, as in politics, the individual liberated himself from the temple, the state, the tradition, and the school. As patriotic devotion yielded to private loyalties, architecture took on a more modest scale, and became increasingly secular; the great choral forms of music and dance made way for private performances by professionals; painting and sculpture continued to adorn public buildings with the representation of gods or noble human types, but at the same time they entered upon that service and portrayal of living individuals which characterized the succeeding age. Where cities could still afford to patronize art on a national scale it was because—like Cnidus, Halicarnassus, or Ephesus—they had not been deeply touched by war, or, like Syracuse, had found in natural resources and governmental order the means of a rapid recovery.

On the mainland architecture marked time. In 338 Lycurgus rebuilt the Theater of Dionysus, the Stadium, and the Lyceum; and under his administration Philon raised an impressive arsenal at the Piraeus. As the tendency to a delicate refinement increased, the Doric order became less fashionable, it? stern simplicity finding no counterpart in the soul; the Ionic style rose in popularity, and served as an architectural analogue to Praxiteles’ elegance and Plato’s charm; while the Corinthian order made modest conquests in the Tower of the Winds and the choragic monument of Lysicrates. At Arcadian Tegea Scopas raised a temple of Athena in all three styles—one colonnade Doric, another Ionic, another Corinthian²³—and beautified it with statuary from his own masculine hand.

Vaster and more famous was the third temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The second temple had burned down on the day of Alexander’s birth in 356, a coincidence which, says the usually kindly Plutarch, Hegesias of Magnesia “made the occasion of a conceit frigid enough to have stopped the conflagration.”²⁴ The new building was begun soon afterward, and was completed by the end of the century. Alexander offered to bear the whole cost of the work if his name as donor were recorded on the edifice; but the proud Greeks of Ephesus refused for the disarming (or possibly satirical) reason that “it was not meet for one god to build a temple to another.”²⁵ Nevertheless, Alexander’s favorite architect, Dinocrates, designed the temple, on a scale that made it the largest in Hellas. Thirty-six of the columns were carved with bas-reliefs by various sculptors, including the ubiquitous Scopas; one sculptured column drum survives in the British Museum, as if to prove by its drapery alone that Greek sculpture was still near the height of its curve. The heads of the figures are not immobile and idealized types, but individualized faces alive with feeling and character—a premonition of Hellenistic realism.

At the opposite extreme of size the fourth century distinguished itself in terra-cotta statuettes. Boeotian Tanagra made its name synonymous with little figures in baked and unglazed clay, cast in generalized types but then molded and painted by hand into a thousand individual shapes quick with the color and variety of common life. As in earlier centuries, painting was called in to aid other arts; but now it acquired an independent status and dignity, and its masters received commissions from all the Greek world. Pamphilus of Amphipolis, who taught Apelles, refused to take any pupil for less than twelve years, and charged $6000 for the course. Mnason, dictator of Locrian Elatea, paid ten minas for each of the hundred figures in a battle scene by Aristides of Thebes, making $100,000 for one painting; and the same enthusiast gave Asclepiodorus $360,000 for a panel of the twelve major Olympians. Lucullus paid $12,000 for a copy of the portrait that Pausias of Sicyon had painted of Menander’s mistress Glycera.²⁶ A picture by Apelles, says Pliny, sold for a sum equal to the treasuries of whole cities.²⁷

“Apelles of Cos,” says the same enthusiastic amateur, “surpassed all the other painters who either preceded or succeeded him. Singlehanded, he contributed more to painting than all the others together.”²⁸ Apelles must have been supreme in his day and art, since he could afford the rare extravagance of praising other painters. Learning that his greatest rival, Protogenes, was living in poverty, Apelles sailed for Rhodes to visit him. Protogenes, unwarned, was not in his studio when Apelles came. An old woman attendant asked Apelles whom she should name as visitor when her master returned. Apelles replied only by taking a brush and tracing upon a panel, with one stroke, an outline of exceeding fineness. When Protogenes came back the old woman regretted that she could not tell him the name of his departed visitor; but Protogenes, seeing the outline and noting its delicacy, exclaimed: “Only Apelles could have drawn that line.” Then he drew a still finer line within that of Apelles, and bade the woman show it if the stranger should return. Apelles came, marveled at the absent; Protogenes’ skill, but drew, between the two lines, a third of such slenderness and grace that when Protogenes saw it he confessed himself surpassed, and rushed to the harbor to detain and welcome Apelles. The panel was transmitted as a masterpiece from generation to generation, until it was bought by Julius Caesar and perished in the fire that destroyed his palace on the Palatine Hill. Anxious to awaken the Greek world to Protogenes’ worth, Apelles asked him what he wanted for some of his paintings; Protogenes mentioned a modest sum, but Apelles offered him, instead, fifty talents ($300,000), and then circulated a report that he intended to sell these works as his own. The Rhodians, aroused to a better appreciation of their artist, paid Protogenes more than the sum Apelles had named, and kept the pictures among the public treasures of the city.²⁹

Apelles meanwhile had captured the plaudits of the Greek world by his painting of Aphrodite Anadyomene—i.e., Aphrodite rising from the sea. Alexander sent for him, and sat for many portraits. The young conqueror was not satisfied with the representation of his horse Bucephalus in one of these pictures, and had the animal brought closer to the panel for comparison. Bucephalus, looking at the picture, whinnied; whereupon Apelles remarked, “Your Majesty’s horse seems to know more about painting than you do.”³⁰ On another occasion, when the King was holding forth about art in Apelles’ studio, Apelles begged him to talk of anything else, lest the boys who were grinding the colors should laugh at him. Alexander took it good-naturedly; and when he engaged the artist to paint his favorite concubine, and Apelles fell in love with her, the King sent her to him as a gift.³¹—Over his finished pictures Apelles painted a thin coat of varnish, which preserved the colors, softened their glare, and yet made them livelier than before. He worked to the last, and death came upon him while he was once more delineating the eternal Aphrodite.

V. PRAXITELES

The sculptural masterpiece of the period was the great mausoleum dedicated to King Mausolus of Halicarnassus. Nominally a satrap of Persia, Mausolus had extended his personal sway over Caria and parts of Ionia and Lycia, and had used his rich revenues to build a fleet and beautify his capital. When he died (353), his devoted sister and wife, Artemisia, held a famous oratorical contest in his honor, and summoned the best artists of Greece to collaborate upon a tomb that should be a fitting memorial to his genius. She was a queen by nature as well as by marriage; when the Rhodians took advantage of the King’s death to invade Caria, she defeated them by clever strategy, captured their fleet and their capital, and soon brought the rich merchants to terms.³² But her grief over the death of Mausolus weakened her, and she died two years after him, before she could see the completed monument that was to give a word to every Western tongue. Slowly Scopas, Leochares, Bryaxis, and Timotheus raised a rectangular tomb of white marble slabs over a base of bricks, covered it with a pyramidal roof, and adorned it with thirty-six columns and a wealth of statuary and reliefs. A statue of Mausolus,* calm and strong, was found among the ruins of Halicarnassus by the English in 1857. Still more finished in workmanship is a frieze* showing again the struggle of Greeks and Amazons. These men, women, and horses are among the chefs-d’oeuvres of the world’s bas-reliefs. The Amazons are not masculine females built for battle; they are women of a voluptuous beauty that should have tempted the Greeks to something gentler than war. The Mausoleum took its place, with the third temple at Ephesus, among the Seven Wonders of the World.

In many respects sculpture now reached its apogee. It lacked the stimulus of religion, and fell short of the majestic power of the Parthenon pediments; but it took a new inspiration from feminine grace, and achieved a loveliness never equaled before or since. The fifth century had modeled nude men and draped women; the fourth preferred to carve nude women and clothed men. The fifth century had idealized its types, and had cast or chiseled the harassed life of man into an emotionless repose; the fourth century tried to realize in stone something of human individuality and feeling. In male statuary the head and face took on more importance, the body less; the study of character replaced the idolatry of muscle; portraits in stone became the fashion for any subject who could pay. The body abandoned its stiff, straight pose, and leaned at ease upon a stick or tree; and the surface was modeled to let in the living play of light and shade. Anxious for realism, Lysistratus of Sicyon, apparently first among the Greeks, fitted a plaster mold upon the subject’s face, and made a preliminary cast.³³

The representation of sensuous beauty and grace came to perfection in Praxiteles. All the world knows that he courted Phryne, and gave a lasting form to her loveliness, but no one knows when he was born or when he died. He was both the son and father of sculptors named Cephisodotus, so that we picture him as the climax of a family tradition of patient artistry. He worked in bronze as well as marble, and won such repute that a dozen cities competed for his services. About 360 Cos commissioned him to carve an Aphrodite; with Phryne’s help he did, but the Coans were scandalized to find the goddess quite nude. Praxiteles mollified them by making another Aphrodite, clothed, while Cnidus bought the first. King Nicomedes of Bithynia offered to pay the heavy public debt of the city in return for the statue, but Cnidus preferred immortality. Tourists came from every nook of the Mediterranean to see the work; critics pronounced it the finest statue yet made in Greece, and gossip said that men had been stirred to amorous frenzy by viewing it.*³⁴

As Cnidus achieved fame through the Aphrodite, so the little town of Thespiae in Boeotia, birthplace of Phryne, attracted travelers because Phryne had dedicated there a marble Eros by Praxiteles. For she had asked of him, as a proof of his love, the most beautiful of the works in his studio. He wished to leave the choice to her; but Phryne, hoping to discover his own estimate, ran to him one day with news that his studio was on fire; whereupon he cried out, “I am lost if my Satyr and my Eros are burned.”³⁵ Phryne chose the Eros, and gave it to her native town.† Eros, once the creator god of Hesiod, became in Praxiteles’ conception a delicate and dreamy youth, symbolizing the power of love to capture the soul; he had not yet become the mischievous and sportive Cupid of Hellenistic and Roman art.

Presumably the Satyr of the Capitoline Museum in Rome, known to us as Hawthorne’s Marble Faun, is a copy of the work that Praxiteles preferred to his Eros. Some have thought that a torso in the Louvre is part of the original itself.³⁶ The satyr is represented as a well-formed and happy lad, whose only animal element is his long and pointed ears. He is resting lazily against a tree trunk, with one foot crossed behind the other. Seldom has marble conveyed so fully the sense of idle ease; all the charming carelessness of boyhood is in the relaxed limbs and trustful face. Perhaps the limbs are too rounded and soft; Praxiteles looked too long at Phryne to be able to model a man. The Apollo Sauroctonus—Apollo the Lizard-Killer—is so feminine that we are half inclined to class him with the hermaphrodites that abound in Hellenistic statuary.

Pausanias remarks with regrettable brevity that among the statues in the Heraeum at Olympia was “a stone Hermes carrying Dionysus as a babe, by Praxiteles.”³⁷ German excavators digging on the site in 1877 crowned their labors by finding this figure, buried under centuries of rubbish and clay. Descriptions, photographs, and casts miss the quality of the work; one must stand before it in the little museum at Olympia, and clandestinely pass the fingers over its surface, to realize the smooth and living texture of this marble flesh. The messenger god has been entrusted with the task of rescuing the infant Dionysus from the jealousy of Hera, and taking him to the nymphs who are to rear him in secret. Hermes pauses on the way, leans against a tree, and holds up a cluster of grapes before the child. The infant is crudely done, as if the inspiration of the artist had been exhausted on the older god. The right arm of the Hermes is gone, and parts of the legs have been restored; the remainder is apparently as it came from the sculptor’s hand. The firm limbs and broad chest show a healthy physical development; the head is in itself a masterpiece, with its aristocratic shapeliness, its chiseled refinement of features, and its curly hair; and the right foot is perfect where perfection in statuary is rare. Antiquity considered this a minor work; we may judge from this the artistic wealth of the age.

Another passage in Pausanias³⁸ describes a marble group set up by Praxiteles in Mantinea. Excavation has found the base alone, bearing the figures of three Muses, carved probably by the pupils rather than by the master. If we put together the references in extant Greek writings to statues by Praxiteles, we find some forty major works;³⁹ and these were doubtless but a part of his abundant production. We miss in the remains the sublimity and strength, the dignity and reverence of Pheidias; the gods have made way for Phryne, and the great issues of national life have been put aside for private love. But no sculptor has ever surpassed the sureness of Praxiteles’ technique, the almost miraculous power to pour into hard stone ease and grace and the tenderest sentiment, sensuous delight and woodland joyousness. Pheidias was Doric, Praxiteles is Ionic; in him again we have a premonition of that cultural conquest of Europe which was to follow Alexander’s victories.

VI. SCOPAS AND LYSIPPUS

Scopas played Byron to Pheidias’ Milton and Praxiteles’ Keats. We know nothing about his life except through his works, which are the real biography of any man; but even of his works we know none with certainty. The stocky and pugnacious heads of the statues that are attributed to him, or of the copies that are ascribed to his originals, stamp him as a man of passionate individuality and force. At Tegea, as we have seen, he served as both architect and sculptor, showing a versatility and power unsurpassed in all the centuries between Pheidias and Michelangelo. Excavations have found only a few fragments of a pediment, chiefly two badly damaged heads marked by a brachycephalic roundness, and a moody distant look, which are typical of Scopas’ work; together with a battered and masculine figure of Atalanta. Strangely like these remains is the Meleager head in the Villa Medici at Rome; here again are the full cheeks, the sensual lips, the brooding eyes, the slightly projecting ridge of the forehead above the nose, and the half-disheveled curly hair; perhaps it is a Roman copy of a Meleager set up by Scopas as part of a group representing the Calydonian hunt. Another head, in the Metropolitan Museum at New York, is almost surely by Scopas, or copied from him; blunt and powerful, and yet handsome and intelligent, it is one of the most characterful remains of ancient statuary.

At Elis, says Pausanias,⁴⁰ Scopas cast “a brazen statue of the Pandemian Aphrodite sitting on a brazen he-goat.” At Sicyon he made a marble Heracles, of which, perhaps, we have a Roman copy in the Lansdowne House at London: the body a relapse into Polycleitan stylized musculature, the head small and round as usual, the face almost as refined as in Praxiteles. He paused long enough at Megara, Argos, Thebes, and Athens to make statues that Pausanias saw there five centuries later; and perhaps he had a hand in rebuilding the sanctuary at Epidaurus. Crossing the Aegean, he made an Athena and a Dionysus for Cnidus, and played a major role in the sculptures of the Mausoleum. Going north, he carved one of the column drums of the third temple at Ephesus. At Pergamum he made a colossal seated Ares; at Chrysa in the Troad he set up an Apollo Smintheus to scare mice from the fields. He contributed to the fame of Samothrace with an Aphrodite; and in far-off Byzantium he carved a Bacchante of which the Dresden Albertinum may have a Roman copy in the Raging Maenad. This marble statuette, though only eighteen inches high, is worthy of a great artist—powerful in figure, magnificent in drapery, unique in pose, alive with anger, and beautiful from every side. Pliny refers to many other statues by Scopas, which in his day stood in the palaces of Rome: an Apollo probably copied in the Apollo Citharoedus of the Vatican; a group of Poseidon, Thetis, Achilles, and Nereids, “an admirable piece of workmanship,” says Pliny, “even if it had taken a whole life to complete it”; and a “naked Aphrodite, sufficient to establish the renown of any city.”⁴¹

All in all, these works, if a judgment may be based upon a few hypothetical survivals, suggest for Scopas a rank very near to Praxiteles. Here is originality without extravagance, strength without brutality, and a dramatic portrayal of impulse, emotion, and mood, without disfigurement by any strained intensity. Praxiteles loved beauty, Scopas was drawn to character; Praxiteles wished to reveal the grace and tenderness of womanhood, the buoyant health and gaiety of youth; Scopas chose to portray the pains and tragedies of life, and ennobled them with artistic representation. Perhaps, if we had more of his works, we should place him second only to Pheidias.

Lysippus of Sicyon began as a humble artisan in brass. He longed to be an artist, but could not afford a teacher; he took courage, however, when he heard Eupompus the painter announce that for his part he would imitate nature herself, not any artist.⁴² Lysippus thereupon turned his face to the study of living beings, and formed a new canon of sculptural proportions to replace the stern rule of Polycleitus; he made the legs longer and the head shorter, extended the limbs into the third dimension, and gave the figure more vitality and ease. His Apoxyomenos is a vagrant son of the Diadumenos; Polycleitus’ athlete bound a fillet above his brow, Lysippus’ scrapes the oil and dust from his arm with a bronze strigil, and achieves a greater slenderness and grace. More attractive and alive, if we judge from the marble copy in the Delphi Museum, was his portrait of Agias, a young Thessalian nobleman. Once free, Lysippus struck out into new fields, abandoning the type for the individual, the conventional for the impressionistic,* and almost creating portrait sculpture among the Greeks. Philip interrupted his wars and amours to sit for Lysippus; Alexander was so pleased with the artist’s busts of him that he made him the official royal sculptor, as he had given the exclusive right to Apelles to paint his likeness, and to Pyrgoteles to engrave it upon gems.

Some of the finest sculptural remains of the fourth century are anonymous: the bronze statue of a youth found in the sea near Marathon, an ancient copy of a fourth-century Hermes of Andros, and a modest, pensive, delicate Hygiaea found at Tegea*—all three in the Athens Museum; and in the Boston Museum, from Chios, a profoundly beautiful Head of a Girl. To this period, so far as we can make out, belong most of the Niobid figures that came to Rome from Asia Minor in the days of Augustus, and are now scattered among the museums of Europe. And perhaps to this age must be assigned the originals of three Aphrodites in the Praxitelean tradition: the hesitant Venus of Capua in the Naples Museum, the Vatican’s Crouching Venus, and the modest Venus of Aries in the Louvre. Greater than these in mature beauty and quiet depth of feeling is the seated Demeter found at Cnidus in 1858, and now among the noblest figures in the British Museum. The subject is uncertain; perhaps it is merely the finest funerary piece that has come down to us from antiquity; perhaps it represents the corn goddess as a mater dolorosa, silently mourning the rape of Persephone. The emotion is conveyed with classic restraint; all the tenderness of motherhood, and its silent resignation, are in the face and eyes. This and the Hermes, and not those ingratiating Aphrodites, are the living sculptural masterpieces of fourth-century Greece.

CHAPTER XXI

The Zenith of Philosophy

I. THE SCIENTISTS

COMPARED with the bold advance of the fifth century, and the revolutionary achievements of the third, science in the fourth marked time, and contented itself, in great part, with recording its accumulations. Xenocrates wrote a history of geometry, Theophrastus a history of natural philosophy, Menon a history of medicine, Eudemus histories of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy.¹ The problems of religion, morals, and politics appearing to be more vital and pressing than the problems of nature, men turned with Socrates from the objective study of the material world to a consideration of the soul and the state.

Plato loved mathematics, dipped his philosophy into it deeply, dedicated the Academy to it, almost, in Syracuse, gave a kingdom for it. But arithmetic was for him a half-mystical theory of number; geometry was not a measuring of the earth, it was a discipline of pure reason, a portal to the mind of God. Plutarch tells of Plato’s “indignation” at Eudoxus and Archytas for carrying on experiments in mechanics, “as the mere corruption and annihilation of the one good of geometry, which was thus shamefully turning its back upon the unembodied objects of pure intelligence to recur to sensation, and to ask help . . . from matter.” In this way, Plutarch continues, “Mechanics came to be separated from geometry, and, repudiated or neglected by philosophers, took its place as a military art.”² Nevertheless, in his own abstract way, Plato served mathematics well. He redefined the point as the beginning of a line,³ formulated a rule for finding square numbers that are the sum of two squares,⁴ and invented or developed mathematical analysis⁵—i.e., the proof or disproof of a proposition by considering the results that follow from assuming it; the reductio ad absurdum is one form of this method. The emphasis on mathematics, in the curriculum of the Academy, helped the science if only by training such creative pupils as Eudoxus of Cnidus and Heracleides of Pontus.

Plato’s friend Archytas, besides being seven times chosen strategos of Taras, and writing several tracts of Pythagorean philosophy, developed the mathematics of music, doubled the cube, and wrote the first known treatise on mechanics. Antiquity credited him with three epochal inventions—the pulley, the screw, and the rattle; the first two laid the foundations of machine industry, the third, says the grave Aristotle, “gave children something to occupy them, and so prevented them from breaking things about the house.”⁶ In this same age Dinostratus “squared the circle” by using the quadratrix curve. His brother Menaechmus, a pupil of Plato, founded the geometry of conic sections,* doubled the cube, formulated the theoretical construction of the five regular solids,† advanced the theory of irrational numbers, and gave the world a famous phrase. “O King,” he said to Alexander, “for traveling over the country there are both royal roads and roads for common citizens; but in geometry there is one road for all.”‡⁸

The great name in fourth-century science is Eudoxus, who helped Praxiteles to give Cnidus a niche in history. Born there about 408, he set out at the age of twenty-three to study medicine with Philistion at Locri, geometry with Archytas at Taras, and philosophy with Plato at Athens. He was poor, and lived cheaply at the Piraeus, whence he walked to the Academy every scholastic day. After a stay in Cnidus he went to Egypt and spent sixteen months studying astronomy with the priests of Heliopolis. We find him next in Propontine Cyzicus, lecturing on mathematics. At the age of forty he moved with his pupils to Athens, opened there a school of science and philosophy, and for a time rivaled Plato. Finally he returned to Cnidus, set up an observatory, and was entrusted with the task of giving the city a new code of laws.⁹

His contributions to geometry were fundamental. He invented the theory of proportion,§ and most of the propositions, transmitted to us in the fifth book of Euclid; and he devised the method of exhaustion which made it possible to calculate the area of the circle and the volume of the sphere, the pyramid, and the cone; without this preliminary work Archimedes would have been impossible. But the absorbing interest of Eudoxus was in astronomy. We catch the spirit of the scientist in his remark that he would gladly be consumed like Phaethon if he might thereby discover the nature, size, and form of the sun.¹⁰ The word astrology was then used to include what we call astronomy, but Eudoxus advised his pupils to ignore the Chaldean theory that a person’s fortune could be told by noting the position of the stars at the time of his birth. He longed to reduce all celestial motions to fixed laws; and in his Phainomena—which antiquity considered its greatest book on astronomy—he laid the foundation for the scientific predicton of the weather.

His most famous theory was a brilliant failure. He suggested that the universe was composed of twenty-seven transparent and therefore invisible spheres, revolving in diverse directions and at various speeds about the center of the earth; and that the heavenly bodies were fixed upon the periphery or shell of these concentric spheres. The system now seems fantastic, but it was one of the first attempts to give a scientific explanation of celestial behavior. In accord with it Eudoxus calculated with considerable accuracy (if we may rashly take our present “knowledge” of these matters as a norm) the synodic and zodiacal periods of the planets.* The theory did more than any other in antiquity to stimulate astronomic research.

Ecphantus of Syracuse wrote, about 390: “The earth moves about its own center in an eastward direction.”¹² Heracleides of Pontus, one of the great polymaths of antiquity—the author of famous works on grammar, music, poetry, rhetoric, history, geometry, logic, and ethics—took up the suggestion, or advanced it independently, arguing that instead of the whole universe revolving about the earth, the relevant phenomena can be explained by supposing that the earth itself rotates daily upon its axis.¹³ Venus and Mercury, said Heracleides, revolve around the sun. For one brilliant moment, perhaps, Heracleides anticipated Aristarchus and Copernicus, for we read in the fragments of Geminus (ca. 70 B.C.): “Heracleides of Pontus said that, even on the assumption that the earth moves in a certain way, while the sun is in a certain way at rest, the apparent irregularity with reference to the sun can be saved.”¹⁴ We shall probably never know just what Heracleides meant.

Meanwhile a modest progress was being made in the sciences. In geography Dicaearchus of Messana, the biographer of Greece, measured the height of mountains, established the circumference of the earth at some thirty thousand miles, and noted the influence of the sun upon the tides. In 325 Nearchus, one of Alexander’s generals, sailed from the mouth of the Indus along the southern coast of Asia to the Euphrates; his log, partly preserved in Arrian’s Indica,¹⁵ was one of the classics of ancient geography. Geodesy—the measurement of land surfaces, elevations, depressions, positions, and volumes—had already been christened (geodaisia) as distinct from geometry.¹⁶ Philistion of Italian Locri, at the beginning of the century, practiced animal dissection, and called the heart the main regulator of life, the seat of the pneuma, or soul. Diocles of Euboean Carystus, about 370, dissected the womb of animals, described human embryos of twenty-seven to forty days, advanced anatomy, embryology, gynecology, and obstetrics, and scotched a favorite Greek error by announcing that both sexes contribute “seed” to form the embryo.¹⁷ A second Aspasia became one of the famous physicians of fourth-century Athens, renowned for her work in women’s diseases, surgery, and other branches of medicine.¹⁸ And lest medical science should lower the death rate too fast for the means of subsistence, Aeneas Tacticus, the Arcadian, published about 360, in time for Philip and Alexander, the first Greek classic on the art of war.

II. THE SOCRATIC SCHOOLS

1. Aristippus

If it was a middling age in science the fourth century was the heyday of philosophy. The early thinkers had propounded vague cosmologies; the Sophists had doubted everything but rhetoric; Socrates had raised a thousand questions and answered none; now all the seeds that had been planted in two hundred years sprouted into great systems of metaphysical, ethical, and political speculation. Athens, too poor to maintain its state medical service, nevertheless opened private universities that made it, as Isocrates said, the “school of Hellas,” the intellectual capital and arbiter of Greece. Having weakened the old religion, the philosophers struggled to find in nature and reason some substitute for it as a prop of morals and a guide to life.

They explored first the paths opened up by Socrates. While the Sophists relapsed for the most part into the teaching of rhetoric, and disappeared as a class, the pupils of Socrates became the storm centers of violently divergent philosophies. Eucleides of Megara, who had often traveled to Athens to hear Socrates, stirred up his native city with “a rage of disputes,” as Timon of Athens phrased it,¹⁹ and developed the dialectic of Zeno and Socrates into an eristic, or art of argument, that questioned every conclusion, and led in the next century to the skepticism of Pyrrho and Carneades. After Eucleides’ death his brilliant disciple Stilpo led the Megarian school more and more towards the Cynic point of view: since every philosophy can be refuted, wisdom lies not in metaphysical speculation but in such simple living as will liberate the individual from dependence upon the external factors in well-being. When, after the sack of Megara, Demetrius Poliorcetes inquired how much Stilpo had lost, the sage replied that he had never possessed anything but knowledge, and no one had taken this away.²⁰ In his later years he numbered among his students the founder of the Stoic philosophy, so that the Megarian school may be said to have begun with one Zeno, and ended with another.

The elegant Aristippus, after Socrates’ death, traveled to various cities, spent some time with Xenophon at Scillus but more with Lais in Corinth,²¹ and then settled down to found a school of philosophy in his native Cyrene, on the coast of Africa. The wealth and luxury of the upper classes in the half-Oriental city had formed his habits, and he agreed most with that part of his master’s doctrine which called happiness the greatest good. Handsome in figure, refined in manners, clever in speech, he made a way for himself everywhere. Shipwrecked and penniless in Rhodes, he went to a gymnasium, discoursed, and so fascinated the men there that they provided him and his companions with all comforts; whereupon he remarked that parents should arm their children with such wealth that even after a shipwreck it should be able to swim to land with its owner.²²

His philosophy was simple and candid. Whatever we do, said Aristippus, is done through hope of pleasure or fear of pain—even when we impoverish ourselves for our friends, or give our lives for our generals. Therefore, by common consent, pleasure is the ultimate good, and everything else, including virtue and philosophy, must be judged according to its capacity to bring us pleasure. Our knowledge of things is uncertain; all that we know directly and surely is our feelings; wisdom, then, lies in the pursuit not of abstract truth but of pleasurable sensations. The keenest pleasures are not intellectual or moral, they are physical or sensual; therefore the wise man will seek physical delights above all. Nor will he sacrifice a present good to a conjectural future good; only the present exists, and the present is probably as good as the future, if not better; the art of life lies in plucking pleasures as they pass, and making the most of what the moment gives.²³ The use of philosophy is that it may guide us not away from pleasures, but to the most pleasant choice and use of them. It is not the ascetic who abstains that is pleasure’s master, but rather the man who enjoys pleasures without being their slave, and can prudently distinguish between those that endanger him and those that do not; hence the wise man will show a discriminating respect for public opinion and the laws, but will seek as far as possible “to be neither the master nor the slave of any man.”²⁴

If it is a credit to a man that he practices what he preaches, Aristippus deserves some honor. He bore poverty and riches with equal grace, but made no pretense to impartiality between them. He insisted on being paid for his instructions, and did not hesitate to flatter tyrants to gain his end. He smiled patiently when Dionysius I spat upon him: “A fisherman,” he said, “must put up with more moisture than this to. catch even a smaller fish.”²⁵ When a friend reproached him for kneeling before Dionysius he answered that it was not his fault if the King “had his ears in his feet”; and when Dionysius asked him why philosophers haunt the doors of the rich, but the rich do not frequent the presence of philosophers, he replied, “Because the first know what they want but the second do not.”²⁶ Nevertheless he despised men who pursued wealth for its own sake. When the rich Phrygian Simus displayed to him an ornate house paved with marble, Aristippus spat in his face; and when Simus protested he excused himself on the ground that he could not find, amid all this marble, “a more suitable place to spit in.”²⁷ Having made money, he spent it lavishly on good food, good clothing, good lodging, and (as they seemed to him) good women. Being reproved for living with a courtesan, he answered that he had no objection to living in a house, or sailing in a ship, that other men had used before him.²⁸ When his mistress said to him, “I am in a family way by you,” he replied, “You can no more tell that it was I, than you could tell, after going through a thicket, which thorn had scratched you.”²⁹

People liked him despite his honest ways, for he was a person of pleasant manner, refined culture (pace Simus), and kindly heart. Doubtless his blunt hedonism was in part due to his delight in scandalizing the respectable sinners of the town. He gave himself away by reverencing Socrates, loving philosophy,* and confessing that the most impressive spectacle in life is the sight of a virtuous man steadily pursuing his course in the midst of vicious people.³¹ Before his death (356) he remarked that the greatest legacy he was leaving to his daughter Arete was that he had taught her “to set a value on nothing that she can do without”³²—a strange surrender to Diogenes. She succeeded him as head of the Cyrenaic school, wrote forty books, had many distinguished pupils, and earned from her city an honorable epitaph—“The Light of Hellas.”³³

2. Diogenes

Antisthenes agreed with the conclusion, but not the arguments, of this philosophy, and drew out of the same Socrates an ascetic theory of life. The founder of the Cynic school was the son of an Athenian citizen and a Thracian slave. He fought bravely at Tanagra in 426. He studied for a time with Gorgias and Prodicus, and then set up his own school; but having heard Socrates discourse, he went over—taking his pupils with him—to learn the wisdom of the older man. Like Eudoxus he lived at the Piraeus, and walked to Athens nearly every day—four or five miles each way. Perhaps he was present when Socrates (or Plato) discussed with a complaisant interlocutor the problem of pleasure.

Socr. Do you think that the philosopher ought to care about the pleasures of . . . eating and drinking?

Simmias. Certainly not.

Socr. And what do you say of the pleasures of love—should he care about them?

Sim. By no means.

Socr. And will he think much of the other ways of indulging the body—for example, the acquisition of costly raiment, or sandals, or other adornments of the body? Instead of caring about these does he not rather despise anything beyond what nature needs?

Sim. I should say that the true philosopher would despise them.³⁴

This is the essence of the Cynic philosophy: to reduce the things of the flesh to bare necessities in order that the soul may be as free as possible. Antisthenes took the doctrine literally, and became a Greek Franciscan without theology. Aristippus’ motto was, “I possess, but am not possessed”; Antisthenes’ was, “I do not possess, in order not to be possessed.” He had no property,³⁵ and dressed in so ragged a cloak that Socrates twitted him: “I can see your vanity, Antisthenes, through the holes of your cloak.”³⁶ Aside from this his only weakness was the writing of books, of which he left ten; one of them was a history of philosophy. After Socrates died Antisthenes resumed his role as teacher. He chose as his lecture center the gymnasium Cynosarges (Dogfish) because it was maintained for people of low, or alien, or illegitimate birth; the name Cynic became attached to the school rather from the place than from the creed.³⁷ Antisthenes dressed like a workman, took no pay for his teaching, and preferred the poor for his pupils; anyone unwilling to practice poverty and hardship was driven away by Antisthenes’ tongue or his club.

He refused at first to take Diogenes as a pupil; Diogenes insisted, bore insult patiently, was received, and made his teacher’s doctrine famous throughout Hellas by living it completely. Antisthenes had been half slave in origin; Diogenes was a bankrupt banker from Sinope. Diogenes had begged from actual want, and was pleased to learn that this was a part of virtue and wisdom. He adopted the beggar’s garb, wallet, and staff, and for a time made his home in a tub or cask in the court of the temple of Cybele at Athens.³⁸ He envied the simple life of animals, and tried to imitate it; he slept on the ground, ate what he could find wherever he found it, and (we are assured) performed the duties of nature and the rites of love in the sight of all.³⁹ Seeing a child drink from its hands, he threw away his cup.⁴⁰ Sometimes he carried a candle or a lantern, saying that he was looking for a man.⁴¹ He injured no one, but refused to recognize laws, and announced himself, long before the Stoics, a kosmopolites, or Citizen of the World. He traveled leisurely, and we hear of him living for a time in Syracuse. On one of his journeys he was captured by pirates, who sold him as a slave to Xeniades of Corinth. When his owner asked him what he could do, he answered, “Govern men.” Xeniades made him tutor of his sons and manager of his household, in which capacities Diogenes did so well that his master called him “a good genius,” and took his advice in many things. Diogenes continued to live his simple life, so consistently that he became, next to Alexander, the most famous man in Greece.

He was something of a poseur, and evidently relished his renown. He had a gift for debate, and his namesake reports that he never lost an argument.⁴² He called freedom of speech the greatest of social goods, and made much use of it, with coarse humor and unfailing wit. He rebuked a woman who knelt with head to the ground before a holy image: “Are you not afraid,” he asked her, “to be in so indecent an attitude, when some god may be behind you, for every place is full of them?”⁴³ When he saw the son of a courtesan throw a stone at a crowd he warned him, “Take care lest you hit your father.”⁴⁴ He disliked women, and despised men who behaved like them; when a richly dressed and perfumed young Corinthian asked him a question he said, “I will not answer you until you tell me whether you are a boy or a girl.”⁴⁵ All the world knows the story of how Alexander, at Corinth, came upon Diogenes lying in the sun. “I am Alexander the Great King,” said the ruler. “I am Diogenes the dog,” said the philosopher. “Ask of me any favor you choose,” said the King. “Stand out of the sun,” answered Diogenes. “If I were not Alexander,” said the young warrior, “I would be Diogenes”;⁴⁶ but we do not hear that the philosopher returned the compliment. The two men died, we are asked to believe, on the same day in 323: Alexander at Babylon in his thirty-third year, Diogenes at Corinth in his nineties.⁴⁷ The Corinthians placed a marble dog over his grave; and Sinope, which had banished him, raised a monument to his memory.

Nothing could be clearer than the Cynic philosophy. It dallied with logic only long enough to dismiss as moonshine that theory of Ideas with which Plato was bewildering the intellectuals of Athens. Metaphysics, too, seemed to the Cynics a vain game; we should study nature not in order to explain the world, which is impossible, but that we may learn the wisdom of nature as a guide to life. The only real philosophy is ethics. The aim of life is happiness; but this is to be found not in the pursuit of pleasure but in a simple and natural life, independent as possible of all external aids. For though pleasure is legitimate if it results from one’s own labor and effort, and is not followed by remorse,⁴⁸ yet it so often eludes us in the chase, or disappoints us when captured, that it may more wisely be called an evil than a good. A modest and virtuous life is the only road to abiding content; wealth destroys peace, and envious desire, like a rust, eats away the soul. Slavery is unjust but unimportant; the sage will find it as easy to be happy in bondage as in freedom; only internal freedom counts. The gods, said Diogenes, gave man an easy existence, but man has complicated it by itching for luxuries. Not that the Cynics put much faith in the gods. When a priest explained to Antisthenes how many good things the virtuous will enjoy after death, he asked, “Why, then, do you not die?”⁴⁹ Diogenes smiled at the Mysteries, and remarked of the offerings set up in Samothrace by those who had survived shipwreck, “The offerings would have been much more numerous if those who were lost had offered them instead of those who were saved.”⁵⁰ Everything in religion but the practice of virtue seemed to the Cynics superstition. Virtue must be accepted as its own reward and should not depend upon the existence or justice of the gods. Virtue consists in eating, possessing, and desiring as little as possible, drinking only water, and injuring no one. Asked how to defend oneself against an adversary, Diogenes answered, “By proving honorable and upright.”⁵¹ Only sexual desire seemed reasonable to the Cynics. They avoided marriage as an external bond, but patronized prostitutes. Diogenes advocated free love and a community of wives,⁵² and Antisthenes, seeking independence in everything, complained that he could not satisfy his hunger as solitarily as he could assuage his lust.⁵³ Having accepted sexual desire as normal and natural, like hunger, the Cynics professed themselves unable to understand why men should be ashamed to satisfy the one appetite, like the other, in public.⁵⁴ Even in death a man should be independent, choosing for it his own place and time; suicide is legitimate. Diogenes, some say, killed himself by holding his breath.⁵⁵

The Cynic philosophy was part of a “back-to-nature” movement which arose in fifth-century Athens as a reaction of maladjustment to an irksomely complex civilization. Men are not civilized by nature, and bear the restraints of ordered life only because they fear punishment or solitude. Diogenes stood to Socrates in somewhat the same relation as Rousseau to Voltaire: he thought that civilization was a mistake, and that Prometheus had deserved his crucifixion for bringing it to mankind.⁵⁶ The Cynics, like the Stoics and Rousseau, idealized “nature peoples”;⁵⁷ Diogenes tried to eat meat raw because cooking was unnatural.⁵⁸ The best society, he thought, would be one without artifices or laws.

The Greeks smiled upon the Cynics, and tolerated them as medieval society tolerated its saints. After Diogenes the Cynics became a religious order without religion; they made a rule of poverty, lived on alms, tempered their celibacy with promiscuity, and opened schools of philosophy. They had no homes, but taught and slept in the street or the temple porticoes. Through Diogenes’ disciples, Stilpo and Crates, the Cynic doctrine passed down into the Hellenistic age, and formed the basis of Stoicism. The school disappeared as an entity about the end of the third century; but its influence remained strong in the Greek tradition, and perhaps reappeared in the Essenes of Judea and the monks of early Christian Egypt. How far all these movements were influenced by, or influenced, similar sects in India, scholarship cannot yet say. The “back-to-nature” devotees of our own day are the intellectual descendants of those men and women of Oriental or Greek antiquity who, tired of unnatural and cramping restraints, thought that they could turn and live with the animals. No full life is without a touch of this urban fantasy.

III. PLATO

1. The Teacher

Even Plato was moved by the Cynic ideal. In the second book of the Republic⁵⁹ he describes with relish and sympathy a communistic and naturalistic Utopia. He rejects it, and goes on to portray a “second-best” state; but when he comes to picture his philosopher-kings we find the Cynic dream—of men without property and without wives, dedicated to plain living and high philosophy—capturing the citadel of the finest imagination in Greek history. Plato’s plan for a communistic aristocracy was the brilliant endeavor of a rich conservative to reconcile his scorn of democracy with the radical idealism of his time.

He came of a family so ancient that on his mother’s side his pedigree went back to Solon, and on his father’s side to the early kings of Athens, even to Poseidon, god of the sea.⁶⁰ His mother was the sister of Charmides and the niece of Critias, so that opposition to democracy was almost in his blood. Named Aristocles—“best and renowned”—the youth distinguished himself in almost every field: he excelled in the study of music, mathematics, rhetoric, and poetry; he charmed the women, and doubtless the men, with his good looks; he wrestled at the Isthmian games, and was nicknamed Platon, or broad, because of his robust frame; he fought in three battles, and won a prize for bravery.⁶¹ He wrote epigrams, amorous verses, and a tragic tetralogy; he was hesitating between poetry and politics as a career when, at the age of twenty, he succumbed to the fascination of Socrates. He must have known him before, since the great gadfly had long been a friend of his uncle Charmides; but now he could understand Socrates’ teaching, and enjoy the sight of the old man tossing ideas, like an acrobat, into the air, and impaling them on the prongs of his questioning. He burned his poems, forgot Euripides, athletics, and women, and followed the master as if under an hypnotic spell. Perhaps he took notes every day, feeling with an artist’s sensitivity the dramatic possibilities of this grotesque and lovable Silenus.

Then, when Plato was twenty-three, came the tory revolution of 404, led by his own relatives; the tense days of the oligarchic terror, and the brave defiance of the Thirty by Socrates; the death of Critias and Charmides, the restoration of the democracy, the trial and death of Socrates: all the world seemed to collapse about the once carefree youth, and he fled from Athens as if it were a haunted city. He found some comfort at Megara in the home of Eucleides, and then at Cyrene, perhaps with Aristippus; thence he appears to have gone to Egypt and studied the mathematical and historical lore of the priests.⁶² About 395 he was back in Athens, and a year later fought for the city at Corinth. About 387 he set forth again, studied the Pythagorean philosophy with Archytas at Taras and with Timaeus at Locri, passed over to Sicily to see Mt. Etna, formed a friendship with Dion of Syracuse, was introduced to Dionysius I, was sold into slavery, and was back safe in Athens in 386. With the three thousand drachmas raised to reimburse his ransomer, and which Anniceris refused, Plato’s friends now bought for him a suburban recreation grove named from its local god Academus;^62a and there Plato founded the university that was destined to be the intellectual center of Greece for nine hundred years.*

The Academy was technically a religious fraternity, or thiasos, dedicated to the worship of the Muses. The students paid no fees, but as they came for the most part from upper-class families their parents could be expected to make substantial donations to the institution; rich men, says Suidas, “from time to time bequeathed in their wills, to the members of the school, the means of living a life of philosophic leisure.”⁶³ Dionysius II was reported to have given Plato eighty talents ($480,000)⁶⁴—which might explain the philosopher’s patience with the King. The comic poets of the time satirized the students as affected in their manners and overnice in their dress—with elegant caps and canes, and a short cloak or academic gown;⁶⁵ so old are the manners of Eton, and the black robes of scholarship. Women were admitted to the student body, for Plato remained to this extent a radical, that he was an ardent feminist. The chief studies were mathematics and philosophy. Over the portal was a warning inscription—medeis ageometretos eisito—“Let no one without geometry enter here”; perhaps a considerable measure of mathematics formed a requirement for admission. Most of the mathematical advances of the fourth century were made by men who had studied in the Academy. The mathematical course included arithmetic (theory of number), advanced geometry, “spheric” (astronomy), “music” (probably including literature and history), law, and philosophy.⁶⁶ Moral and political philosophy came last, if Plato followed the advice which—half justifying Anytus and Meletus—he puts into the mouth of Socrates:

Socr. You know that there are certain principles about justice and good which were taught us in childhood; and under their parental authority we have been brought up, obeying and honoring them.

Glaucon. That is true.

Socr. And there are also opposite maxims and habits of pleasure which flatter and attract our soul, but they do not influence those who have any sense of right, and who continue to honor the maxims of their fathers and obey them.

Gl. True.

Socr. Now, when a man is in this state, and the questioning spirit asks what is fair and honorable, and he answers as the law directs, and then arguments come and refute the word of the legislator, and he is driven into believing that nothing is fair any more than foul, or just and good any more than the opposite, and the same of all his time-honored notions, do you think that he will still honor and obey them?

Gl. That is impossible.

Socr. And when he ceases to think them honorable and natural as heretofore, and he fails to discover the true, can he be expected to pursue any life other than that which flatters his desires?

Gl. He cannot.

Socr. And from being an observer of the law he is converted into a lawless person?

Gl. Unquestionably. . . .

Socr. Therefore every care must be taken in introducing our thirty-year-old citizens to dialectic. . . . They must not be allowed to taste the dear delight too early; that is one thing specially to be avoided; for young men, as you may have observed, when they first get the taste in their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and refuting others in imitation of those who refute them; they are like puppy-dogs, who delight to tear and pull at all who come near them.

Gl. Yes, that is their great delight.

Socr. And when they have made many conquests and received defeats at the hands of many, they violently and speedily get into a way of not believing anything that they believed before, and hence . . . philosophy has a bad name with the rest of the world.

Gl. That is very true.

Socr. But when a man begins to get older, he will no longer be guilty of that sort of insanity; he will follow the example of the reasoner who is seeking for truth, and not of the eristic who is contradicting for the sake of amusement; and the greater consideration of his character will increase and not diminish the honor of the pursuit.⁶⁷

Plato and his aides taught by lecturing, by dialogue, and by setting problems to the students. One problem was to find “the uniform and ordered movements by the assumption of which the apparent motions of the planets can be accounted for”;⁶⁸ possibly Eudoxus and Heracleides derived some stimulus from these tasks. The lectures were technical, and sometimes disappointed those who had hoped for practical gain; but pupils like Aristotle, Demosthenes, Lycurgus, Hypereides, and Xenocrates were deeply influenced by them, and in many cases published the notes they had taken. Antiphanes said humorously that just as, in a far northern city, words froze into ice as they were spoken, and were heard in the summer when they thawed, so the words spoken by Plato to his students in their youth were finally understood by them only in their old age.⁶⁹

2. The Artist

Plato himself professed never to have written any technical treatises,⁷⁰ and Aristotle refers to the teaching in the Academy as Plato’s “unwritten doctrine.”⁷¹ How far this differed from the teaching of the Dialogues we do not know.* Probably these were undertaken originally as a recreation, and in a half-humorous vein.⁷² It is one of the playful ironies of history that the philosophical works most reverenced and studied in European and American universities today were composed in an attempt to make philosophy intelligible to the layman by binding it up with a human personality. It was not the first time that philosophical dialogues had been written; Zeno of Elea and several others had used this method,⁷³ and Simon of Athens, a leather cutter, had published, in dialogue, a report of the Socratic conversations held in his shop.⁷⁴ It was in Plato a literary, not an historical, form; he did not pretend to give accurate accounts of conversations held thirty or fifty years before, nor even to keep his references consistent. Gorgias, as well as Socrates, was astounded to hear the words that the young dramatist-philosopher had put into his mouth.⁷⁵ The Dialogues were written independently of one another, and perhaps at long intervals; we must not be shocked by slips of memory, much less by changes of view. There is no design unifying the whole, except as the continuing search of a visibly developing mind for a truth which it never finds.†

The Dialogues are cleverly and yet poorly constructed. They vivify the drama of ideas, and build up a coherent and affectionate portrait of Socrates; but they seldom achieve unity or continuity, they often wander from subject to subject, and they are frequently cast into a clumsily indirect mood by being presented as narrative reports, by one man, of other men’s conversations. Socrates tells us that he has “a wretched memory,”⁷⁷ and then recites to a friend, verbatim, fifty-four pages of a discussion which he had carried on in his youth with Protagoras. Most of the Dialogues are weakened by the absence of vigorous interlocutors capable of saying to Socrates something other than “yes” or its equivalent. But these faults are lost in the clear brilliance of the language, the humor of situation, expression, and idea, the living world of varied characters humanly realized, and the frequent opening of windows into a profound and noble mind. We may judge the value that the ancients unconsciously put upon these Dialogues when we consider that they are the most complete product that has come down to us from any Greek author. Their form entitles them to as high a place in the annals of literature as their content has given them in the history of thought.

The earlier Dialogues are excellent examples of the youthful “eristic” condemned in the passage quoted a while back, but they are redeemed by the charming pictures they give of Athenian youth. The Symposium is the masterpiece of its genre, and the best introduction to Plato; its dramatic mise en scene (“Imagine,” says Agathon to his servants, “that you are our hosts, and that I and the company are your guests”⁷⁸), its living picture of Aristophanes, “hiccoughing because he had eaten too much,” its lively episode of the drunken and scandalous Alcibiades, above all, its subtle combination of merciless realism in the portrayal of Socrates with the loftiest idealism in his conception of love—these qualities make the Symposium one of the peaks in the history of prose. The Phaedo is more subdued, and more beautiful; here the main argument, however weak, is honest, and gives its opponents a fair chance; the style flows more smoothly over a scene whose noble calm overcomes its tragedy, making the death of Socrates come as quietly as the turn of a river out of sight around a bend. Part of the dialogue of the Phaedrus takes place on the banks of the Ilissus, while Socrates and his pupil are cooling their feet in the stream. Greatest of all dialogues, of course, is the Republic, being the fullest exposition of Plato’s philosophy, and in its earlier parts a dramatic conflict of personalities and ideas. The Parmenides is the worst specimen of empty logic-chopping in all literature, and the bravest example in the history of philosophy of a thinker irrefutably refuting his own most beloved doctrine—the theory of Ideas. Then, in the later Dialogues, the artistry of Plato wanes, Socrates fades from the picture, metaphysics loses its poetry, politics its youthful ideals; until, in the Laws, the weary inheritor of all the culture of many-sided Athens surrenders to the lure of Sparta, and gives up freedom, and poetry, and art, and philosophy itself.

3. The Metaphysician

There is no system in Plato, and if here, for order’s sake, his ideas are summarized under the classic heads of logic, metaphysics, ethics, esthetics, and politics, it should be remembered that Plato himself was too intense a poet to shackle his thought in a frame. Because he is a poet he has most difficulty with logic; he wanders about seeking definitions, and loses his way in perilous analogies; “then we got into a labyrinth, and, when we thought we were at the end, came out again at the beginning, having still to see as much as ever.”⁷⁹ He concludes: “I am not certain whether there is such a science of science” as logic “at all.”⁸⁰ Nevertheless he makes a beginning. He examines the nature of language, and derives it from imitative sound.⁸¹ He discusses analysis and synthesis, analogies and fallacies; he accepts induction, but prefers deduction;⁸² he creates, even in these popular dialogues, technical terms—essence, power, action, passion, generation—which will be useful to later philosophy; he names five of the ten “categories” that will make up part of Aristotle’s fame. He rejects the Sophist view that the senses are the best test of truth, that the individual “man is the measure of all things”; if that were so, he argues, any man’s, any sleeper’s, any madman’s, any baboon’s report of the world would be as good as any other.⁸³

All that the “rabble of the senses” gives us is a Heracleitean flux of change; if we had only sensations, we should never have any knowledge or truth at all. Knowledge is possible through Ideas, through generalized images and forms that mold the chaos of sensation into the order of thought.⁸⁴ If we could be conscious only of individual things thought would be impossible. We learn to think by grouping things into classes according to their likenesses, and expressing the class as a whole by a common noun; man enables us to think of all men, table of all tables, light of every light that ever shone on land or sea. These Ideas (ideai, eida) are not objective to the senses but they are real to thought, for they remain, and are unchanged, even when all the sense objects to which they correspond are destroyed. Men are born and die, but man survives. Every individual triangle is only imperfectly a triangle, sooner or later passes away, and therefore is relatively unreal; but triangle—the form and law of all triangles—is perfect and everlasting.⁸⁵ All mathematical forms are Ideas, eternal and complete;* everything that geometry says of triangles, circles, squares, cubes, spheres would remain true, and therefore “real,” even if there had never been, and never would be, any such figures in the physical world. Abstractions also are real in this sense; individual acts of virtue have a brief existence, but virtue remains as a permanent reality for thought, and an instrument of thought; so with beauty, largeness, likeness, and so forth; these are as real to the mind as beautiful, large, or like things are real to the sense.⁸⁷ Individual acts or things are what they are by partaking of, and more or less realizing, these perfect forms or Ideas. The world of science and philosophy is composed not of individual things, but of Ideas;†⁸⁸ history, as distinct from biography, is the story of man; biology is the science not of specific organisms, but of life; mathematics is the study not of concrete things but of number, relation, and form independently of things and yet as valid for all things. Philosophy is the science of Ideas.

Everything in Plato’s metaphysics turns upon the theory of Ideas. God, the Prime Mover Unmoved, or Soul of the World,⁹¹ moves and orders all things according to the eternal laws and forms, the perfect and changeless Ideas which constitute, as the Neo-Platonists would say, the Logos, or Divine Wisdom or Mind of God. The highest of the Ideas is the Good. Sometimes Plato identifies this with God himself;⁹² more often it is the guiding instrument of creation, the supreme form towards which all things are drawn. To perceive this Good, to vision the molding ideal of the creative process, is the loftiest goal of knowledge.⁹³ Motion and creation are not mechanical; they require in the world, as in ourselves, a soul or principle of life as their originative power.⁹⁴

Only that which has power is real;⁹⁵ therefore matter is not basically real (to me on), but is merely a principle of inertia, a possibility waiting for God or soul to give it specific form and being according to some Idea. The soul is the self-moving force in man, and is part of the self-moving Soul of all things.⁹⁶ It is pure vitality, incorporeal and immortal. It existed before the body, and has brought with it from antecedent incarnations many memories which, when awakened by new life, are mistaken for new knowledge. All mathematical truths, for example, are innate in this way; teaching merely arouses the recollection of things known by the soul many lives ago.⁹⁷ After death the soul or principle of life passes into other organisms, higher or lower according to the deserts it has earned in its previous avatars. Perhaps the soul that has sinned goes to a purgatory or hell, and the virtuous soul goes to the Islands of the Blest.⁹⁸ When through various existences the soul has been purified of all wrongdoing, it is freed from reincarnation, and mounts to a paradise of everlasting happiness.*⁹⁹

4. The Moralist

Plato knows that many of his readers will be skeptics, and for a while he struggles to find a natural ethic that shall stir men’s souls to righteousness without relying on heaven, purgatory, and hell.¹⁰¹ The Dialogues of his middle period turn more and more from metaphysics to morals and politics: “The greatest and fairest sort of wisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of states and families.”¹⁰² The problem of ethics lies in the apparent conflict between individual pleasure and social good. Plato presents the problem fairly, and puts into the mouth of Callias as strong an argument for selfishness as any immoralist has ever given.¹⁰³ He recognizes that many pleasures are good; intelligence is needed to discriminate between good and harmful pleasures; and for fear that intelligence may come too late we must inculcate in the young a habit of temperance, a sense of the golden mean.¹⁰⁴

The soul or principle of life has three levels or parts—desire, will, and thought; each part has its own virtue—moderation, courage, and wisdom; to which should be added piety and justice—the fulfillment of one’s obligations to his parents and his gods. Justice may be defined as the co-operation of the parts in a whole, of the elements in a character, or of the people in a state, each part performing its fittest function properly.¹⁰⁵ The Good is neither reason alone nor pleasure alone, but that mingling of them, in proportion and measure, which produces the Life of Reason.¹⁰⁶ The supreme good lies in pure knowledge of the eternal forms and laws. Morally “the highest good . . . is the power or faculty, if there be such, which the soul has of loving the truth, and of doing all things for the sake of truth.”¹⁰⁷ He who so loves truth will not care to return evil for evil;¹⁰⁸ he will think it better to suffer injustice than to do it; he will “go forth by sea and land to seek after men who are incorruptible, whose acquaintance is beyond price. . . . The true votaries of philosophy abstain from all fleshly lusts; and when philosophy offers them a purification and release from evil, they feel that they ought not to resist her influence; to her they incline, and whither she leads they follow her.”¹⁰⁹

Plato had burned his poems, and lost his religious faith. But he remained a poet and a worshiper; his conception of the Good was suffused with esthetic emotion and ascetic piety; philosophy and religion became one in him, ethic and esthetic were fused. As he grew older he became incapable of seeing any beauty apart from goodness and truth. He would censor, in his ideal state, all art and poetry that might seem to the government to have an immoral or unpatriotic tendency; all rhetoric and all nonreligious drama would be barred; even Homer—seductive painter of an immoral theology—would have to go. The Dorian and Phrygian modes of music might be allowed; but there must be no complicated instruments, no virtuosos making “a beastly noise” with their technical displays,¹¹⁰ and no radical novelties.

The introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state, for styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions. . . . The new style, gradually gaining a lodgment, quietly insinuates itself into manners and customs, and from these it . . . goes on to attack laws and constitutions, displaying the utmost impudence, until it ends by overturning everything.¹¹¹

Beauty, like virtue, lies in fitness, symmetry, and order. A work of art should be a living creature, with head, trunk, and limbs all vitalized and unified by one idea.¹¹² True beauty, thinks our passionate puritan, is intellectual rather than physical; the figures of geometry are “eternally and absolutely beautiful,” and the laws whereby the heavens are made are fairer than the stars.¹¹³ Love is the pursuit of beauty, and has three stages, according as it is love of the body, or of the soul, or of truth. Love of the body, between man and woman, is legitimate as a means to generation, which is a kind of immortality;¹¹⁴ nevertheless this is a rudimentary form of love, unworthy of a philosopher. Physical love between man and man, or woman and woman, is unnatural, and must be suppressed as frustrating reproduction.¹¹⁵ This can be done by sublimating it in the second or spiritual stage of love: here the older man loves the younger because his comeliness is a symbol and reminder of pure and eternal beauty, and the younger loves the older because his wisdom opens a way to understanding and honor. But the highest love is “the love of the everlasting possession of the Good,” that love which seeks the absolute beauty of the perfect and eternal Ideas or forms.¹¹⁶ This, and not fleshless affection between man and woman, is “Platonic love”—the point at which the poet and the philosopher in Plato merge in the passionate desire for understanding, an almost mystic longing for the Beatific Vision of the law and structure and life and goal of the world.

For he, Adeimantus, whose mind is fixed upon true being, has no time to look down upon the affairs of men, or to be filled with jealousy and enmity in the struggle against them; his eye is ever directed towards fixed and immutable principles, which he sees neither injuring nor injured by one another, but all in order moving according to reason; these he imitates, and on these, so far as he can, he will mold his life.¹¹⁷

5. The Utopian

Nevertheless he is interested in the affairs of men. He sees a social vision too, and dreams of a society in which there shall be no corruption, no poverty, no tyranny, and no war. He is appalled at the bitterness of political faction in Athens, “strife and enmity and hatred and suspicion forever recurring.”¹¹⁸ Like a blue blood, he despises the plutocratic oligarchy, “the men of business . . . pretending never so much as to see those whom they have already ruined, inserting their sting—that is, their money—into anybody else who is not on his guard against them, and recovering the principal sum many times over: this is the way in which they make drones and paupers to abound in the state.”¹¹⁹ “And then democracy comes into being, after the poor have conquered their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder they give an equal share of freedom and power.”¹²⁰ The democrats turn out to be as bad as the plutocrats: they use the power of their number to vote doles to the people and offices to themselves; they flatter and pamper the multitudes until liberty becomes anarchy, standards are debased by omnipresent vulgarity, and manners are coarsened by unhindered insolence and abuse. As the mad pursuit of wealth destroys the oligarchy, so the excesses of liberty destroy democracy.

Socr. In such a state the anarchy grows and finds a way into private houses, and ends by getting among the animals and infecting them. . . . The father gets accustomed to descend to the level of his sons . . . and the son to be on a level with his father, having no fear of his parents, and no shame. . . . The master fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their masters and tutors. . . . Young and old are alike, and the young man is on a level with the old, and is ready to compete with him in word or deed; and old men . . . imitate the young. Nor must I forget to tell of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in relation to each other. . . . Truly, the horses and asses come to have a way of marching along with all the rights and dignities of freemen . . . all things are just ready to burst with liberty. . . .

Adeimantus. But what is the next step? . . .

Socr. The excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction. . . . The excess of liberty, whether in states or individuals, seems only to pass into slavery . . . and the most aggravated form of tyranny arises out of the most extreme form of liberty.¹²¹

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near. The rich, afraid that democracy will bleed them, conspire to overthrow it;¹²² or some enterprising individual seizes power, promises everything to the poor, surrounds himself with a personal army, kills first his enemies and then his friends “until he has made a purgation of the state,” and establishes a dictatorship.¹²³ In such a conflict of extremes the philosopher who preaches moderation and mutual understanding is like “a man fallen among wild beasts”; if he is wise he will “retire under the shelter of a wall while the hurrying wind and the storm go by.”¹²⁴

Some students, in such crises, take refuge in the past, and write history; Plato takes refuge in the future, and models a utopia. First, he fancies, we must find a good king who will let us experiment with his people. Then we must send away all the adults except those necessary to maintain order and teach the young, for the ways of their elders would corrupt the young into an image of the past. To all the young, of whatever sex or class, twenty years of education will be given. It will include the teaching of myths—not the immoral myths of the old faith, but new myths that may tame the soul into obedience to parents and the state.* At twenty all are to be given physical, mental, and moral tests. Those that fail will become the economic classes of our state—businessmen, workingmen, farmers; they will have private property, and different degrees of wealth (within limits) according to their ability; but there will be no slaves. The survivors of the first test will receive ten further years of education and training. At thirty they will be tested again. Those that fail will become soldiers; they shall have no private property, and shall not engage in business, but shall live in a military communism. Those that pass the second test will now (and none before) take up for five years the study of “divine philosophy”¹²⁵ in all its branches, from mathematics and logic to politics and law. At thirty-five the survivors, with all their theory on their heads, will be flung into the practical world to earn their living and make themselves a place. At fifty such of them as are still alive shall become, without election, members of the guardian or ruling class.

They shall have all powers, but no possessions. There will be no laws; all cases and issues will be decided by the philosopher-kings according to a wisdom untrammeled by precedent. Lest they abuse these powers, they shall have no property, no money, no families, no permanent individual wives; the people will hold the power of the purse, the soldiers the power of the sword. Communism is not democratic, it is aristocratic; the common soul is incapable of it; only soldiers and philosophers can bear it. As for marriage, it must in all classes be strictly regulated by the guardians as a eugenic sacrament: “The best of either sex should be united with the best as often as possible, and the inferior with the inferior; and they are to rear the offspring of one sort of union, but not of the other; for this is the only way of keeping the flock in prime condition.”¹²⁶ All children are to be brought up by the state, and given equal educational opportunity; classes are not to be hereditary. Girls shall have an equal chance with boys, and no office in the state shall be closed to women because they are women. By this combination of individualism, communism, eugenics, feminism, and aristocracy Plato thinks that a society might be produced in which a philosopher would be glad to live. And he concludes: “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy . . . cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race.”¹²⁷

6. The Lawmaker

He thought that he had found such a prince in Dionysius II. He felt, like Voltaire, that monarchy has this advantage over democracy, that in a monarchy the reformer has only to convince one man.¹²⁸ To make a better state “you would assume a dictator young, temperate, quick at learning, having a good memory, courageous, of a noble nature . . . and fortunate; his good fortune must be that he is the contemporary of a great legislator, and that some happy chance brings them together.”¹²⁹ It was, as we have seen, an unhappy chance.

In his declining years, still longing to be a legislator, Plato offered a thirdbest state. The Laws, besides being the earliest extant classic of European jurisprudence, is an instructive study in the senile aftermath of youthful romanticism. The new city, says Plato, must be placed inland, lest foreign ideas undermine its faith, foreign trade its peace, and foreign luxuries its self-contained simplicity.¹³⁰ The number of free citizens shall be limited to the conveniently divisible number of 5040; in addition to these will be their families and their slaves. The citizens shall elect 360 guardians, divided into groups of thirty, each group administering the state for a month. The 360 shall choose a Nocturnal Council of twenty-six, which shall meet at night and legislate on all vital affairs.¹³¹ These councilors shall allot the land in equal, indivisible, and inalienable parcels among the citizen families. The guardians “shall provide against the rains doing harm instead of good to the land . . . and shall keep them back by works and ditches, and make” irrigation “streams furnish even to the dry places plenty of water.”¹³² To control the growth of economic inequality, trade is to be held to a minimum; no gold or silver is to be kept by the people, and there shall be no lending of money at interest;¹³³ everyone is to be discouraged from living by investment, and is to be encouraged to live as an active farmer on the land. Any man who acquires more than four times the value of one share of land must surrender the surplus to the state; and severe limits are to be placed upon the power of bequest.¹³⁴ Women are to have equal educational and political opportunity with men.¹³⁵ Men must marry between thirty and thirty-five, or pay heavy annual fines;¹³⁶ and they are to beget children for only ten years. Drinking and other public amusements are to be regulated to preserve the morals of the people.¹³⁷

To accomplish all this peaceably there must be complete state control of education, publication, and other means of forming public opinion and personal character. The highest official in the state is to be the minister of education. Authority will replace liberty in education, for the intelligence of children is too undeveloped to excuse us for leaving to them the guidance of their own lives. Literature, science, and the arts are to be under censorship; they will be forbidden to express ideas which the councilors consider hurtful to public morals and piety. Since obedience to parents and the laws can be secured only through supernatural sanctions and aids, the state shall determine what gods are to be worshiped, and how, and when. Any citizen who questions this state religion is to be imprisoned; if he persists he is to be killed.¹³⁸

A long life is not always a blessing; it would have been better for Plato to have died before writing this indictment of Socrates, these prolegomena to all future Inquisitions. His defense would be that he loved justice more than truth; that his aim was to abolish poverty and war; that he could do this only by strict state control of the individual; and that this required either force or religion. The degenerative Ionian looseness of Athenian morals and politics, he thought, would be cured only by the Dorian discipline of the Spartan code. Through all of Plato’s thought runs the fear of the abuses of freedom, and the conception of philosophy as the policeman of the people and the regulator of the arts. The Laws offers the surrender of a dying Athens that had completely lived to a Sparta that, ever since Lycurgus, had been dead. When Athens’ most famous philosopher could find so little to say for freedom Greece was ripe for a king.

Looking back over this body of speculation we are surprised to see how fully Plato anticipated the philosophy, the theology, and the organization of medieval Christianity, and how much of the modern Fascist state. The theory of Ideas became the “realism” of the Scholastics—the objective reality of “universals.” Plato is not only a prä-existent Christlich, as Nietzsche called him, but a pre-Christian Puritan. He distrusts human nature as evil, and thinks of it as an original sin tainting the soul. He breaks up into an evil body and a divine spirit¹³⁹ that unity of body and soul which had been the educated Greek ideal of the sixth and fifth centuries; like a Christian ascetic he calls the body the tomb of the soul. He takes from Pythagoras and Orphism an Oriental faith in transmigration, karma, sin, purification, and “release”; he adopts, in his last works, the other-worldly tone of a converted and repentant Augustine. One would almost say that Plato was not Greek if it were not for his perfect prose.

He remains the most likable of the Greek thinkers because he had the attractive faults of his people. He was so sensitive that like Dante he could see perfect and eternal beauty behind the imperfect and temporal form; he was an ascetic because at every moment he had to rein in a rich and impetuous temperament.¹⁴⁰ He was a poet possessed by imagination, allured by every whimsy of thought, enthralled by the tragedy and comedy of ideas, flushed with the intellectual excitement of the free mental life of Athens. But it was his fate that he was a logician as well as a poet; that he was the most brilliant reasoner of antiquity, subtler than Zeno of Elea or Aristotle; that he loved philosophy more than he loved any woman or any man; and that in the end, like Dostoevski’s Grand Inquisitor, he concluded to a suppression of all free reasoning, a conviction that philosophy must be destroyed in order that man may live. He himself would have been the first victim of his Utopias.

IV. ARISTOTLE

1. Wander-Years

When Plato died Aristotle built an altar to him, and gave him almost divine honors; for he had loved Plato even if he could not like him. He had come to Athens from his native Stageirus, a small Greek settlement in Thrace. His father had been court physician to Philip’s father, Amyntas II, and (if Galen was not mistaken) had taught the boy some anatomy before sending him to Plato.¹⁴¹ The two rival strains in the history of thought—the mystical and the medical—met and warred in the conjunction of the two philosophers. Perhaps Aristotle would have developed a thoroughly scientific mind had he not listened so long to Plato (some say for twenty years); the doctor’s son struggled in him with the Puritan’s pupil, and neither side won; Aristotle never quite made up his mind. He gathered about him scientific observations sufficient for an encyclopedia, and then tried to force them into the Platonic mold in which his scholastic mind had been formed. He refuted Plato at every turn because he borrowed from him on every page.

He was an earnest student, and soon caught the eye of his master. When Plato read at the Academy his treatise on the soul, Aristotle, says Diogenes Laertius, “was the only person who sat it out, while all the rest rose up and went away.”¹⁴² After Plato’s death (347) Aristotle went to the court of Hermeias, who had studied with him at the Academy and had raised himself from slavery to be the dictator of Atarneus and Assus in upper Asia Minor. Aristotle married Hermeias’ daughter Pythias (344), and was about to settle in Assus when Hermeias was assassinated by the Persians, who suspected him of planning to help Philip’s proposed invasion of Asia.¹⁴³ Aristotle fled with Pythias to near-by Lesbos, and spent some time there in studying the natural history of the island.¹⁴⁴ Pythias died after giving him a daughter. Later Aristotle married, or lived with, the hetaira Herpyllis;¹⁴⁵ but he maintained to the end a tender devotion to the memory of Pythias, and at his death asked that his bones be laid beside hers; he was not quite the emotionless bookworm that one might picture from his works. In 343 Philip, who probably had known him as a youth at Amyntas’ court, invited him to undertake the education of Alexander, then a wild lad of thirteen. Aristotle came to Pella and labored at the task for four years. In 340 Philip commissioned him to direct the restoration and repeopling of Stageirus, which had been laid waste in the war with Olynthus, and to draw up a code of laws for it; all of which he accomplished to the satisfaction of the city, which commemorated its re-establishment by him in an annual holiday.¹⁴⁶