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HELLENICA
[c. 47-]
HELLENICA
& Collection of
ON GREEK POETRY PHILOSOPHY
HISTORY AND RELIGION
EDITED BY
EVELYN ABBOTT, M.A. LL.D.
FELLOW AND TUTOR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD
RIVINGTONS
WATERLOO PLACE, LONDON
Word anfc CambciUjje
MDCCCLXXX
PREFACE.
THOUGH each of the Essays in this volume has
been written independently of the rest, they are all
in a certain sense connected with each other, and I
have endeavoured to indicate the link of connection
by the common title " Hellenica."
We have not done with the Hellenes yet. Jn
spite of all the labour spent, and all the books
written on them and their literature, we have not
yet entered into full possession of the inheritance
bequeathed to us. It has, indeed, been said that we
know nearly as much about the Greeks and Romans
as we shall ever know ; but this can only be true of
the mass of facts, to which, without some new dis-
coveries, we are not likely to add greatly. It is not
in the least true in regard to the significance of
Hellenic history and literature. Beyond and above
the various interpretations placed by different ages
upon the great writers of Greece, lies the meaning
which longer experience and more improved methods
of criticism and the test of time declare to be the true
one. From this point of view much remains and will
long remain to be done, whether we look to the work
vi PREFACE.
of the scholar or to the influence of Hellenic thought
on civilisation. We have not yet found all the
scattered limbs of Truth ; it may be that we are only
commencing the search.
It is not- likely that the great authors of Greece
will ever become, like the Hebrew Scriptures, a text-
book of daily life. The rapt utterance of the prophet
is far mightier " to sway the soul of man " than the
calmer reasoning of the philosopher, who often loses in
intensity what he gains in breadth. But they may
do a great deal more for us than they have hitherto
done, if we will allow them. The Gorgias of Plato
and the Ethics of Aristotle are more valuable than
modern books on the same subjects, for the simple
reason that they are nearer the beginning. They
have a greater freshness, and appeal more directly to
the growing mind. No age can neglect them without
suffering a definite and appreciable loss, least of all
the present age, for the study of the writings and the
contemplation of the lives of men who sought after
knowledge as after hidden treasure, who found, or
seemed to find, the one great Good, which all men,
consciously or unconsciously, were everywhere seeking,
who observed the facts of the world around them with
calm judgment, and built thereon their own lofty
theories of what human life might and ought to be
" Serene creators of immortal things,"
become more and more valuable as the course of
PREFACE. vii
history tends to put things material and practical in
the place of things intellectual.
In many respects modern civilisation contrasts
favourably with ancient ; it is, for instance, a trite
thing to point out the care taken in modern times of
the criminal and the idiot. On the other hand, it is
possible that this gain has not been without some
accompanying loss. While we are anxious to hide or
relieve the degradation to which human nature can
sink, we tend to become less careful of the elevation
to which it can rise ; we put feeling in the place of
thought, and throw away half our birthright. But
if a single generation were able to keep before it an
ideal of culture which should blend all the elements
of human knowledge " into an immortal feature of
perfection," if a whole country could unite in one
effort to appropriate in any real manner the best that
has been thought and written on the great interests
of life, we should indeed make a great stride forward,
but we should also find that the brightest hope of the
future is not far removed from the truest interpreta-
tion of the past.
At present such an effort is impossible, partly
because much of the best literature of the world is in
the exclusive possession of the few. The most direct
method of breaking down this exclusiveness, and bring-
ing the great writers of Greece within the immediate
reach of English readers, is no doubt to translate
viii PREFACE.
them ; but it is hoped that a volume like the present,
while it helps to increase the interest taken in Greek
literature, will also show how that literature may
be of service in the present day.
E. ABBOTT.
BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD,
December 1879.
CONTENTS
PAGE
AESCHYLUS
ERNEST MYERS, M.A., Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford i
THE THEOLOGY AND ETHICS OF SOPHOCLES
EVELYN ABBOTT, M.A., LL.D., Fellow of Balliol College,
Oxford 33
THE THEORY OF EDUCATION IN PLATO'S REPUBLIC
RICHARD LEWIS NETTLESHIP, M.A., Fellow of Balliol
College, Oxford 67
ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION OF THE STATE
ANDREW CECIL BRADLEY, M.A., Fellow of Balliol College,
Oxford 181
EPICURUS
WILLIAM LEONARD COURTNEY, M.A., Fellow of New
College, Oxford 244
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES
RICHARD CLAVERHOUSE JEBB, M.A., LL.D., Professor of
Greek in the University of Glasgow .... 266
XENOPHON
HENRY GRAHAM DAKYNS, M.A., Trinity College, Cam-
bridge 324
POLYBIUS
JAMES LEIGH STRACHAN-DAVIDSON,M.A., Fellow of Balliol
College, Oxford 387
GREEK ORACLES
FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS, M.A., late Fellow of
Trinity College, Cambridge 425
AESCHYLUS.
" voi ch'avete gl' intelletti sani,
Mi rate la clottrina che s'asconcle
Sotto il velame degli versi strani." DANTE.
" High actions and high passions best describing." MILTON.
THE three sons of Euphorion the Athenian, Kynegeirus, Aeschy-
lus, and Ameinias, all earned the gratitude of their country
and of the world, for all fought in the great battles of the
Persian war, and helped to save the brightest hopes of the
human race, which then stood in jeopardy of death. But to
Aeschylus belongs another and a still more conspicuous fame,
for he is the Father of Tragedy ; nor have any of his spiritual
sons, save* perhaps one, been able to claim a right to the boast
of Sthenelus. 1 And since all European drama derives from
the Athenian, it is more than mere idle speculation to say
that without Aeschylus there might possibly have been no
Shakespeare.
Aeschylus was born in the year 525 B.C., and died in 456,
twenty -five years before the Peloponnesian war began, so that
of him, more truly than of Sophocles, it might be said that he
departed ovSev vTropeivas /cafcov, taken away from the evil that
was to come. When the Persian war was over, during the latter
part of his life, he seems, like other poets and artists of the
time, to have visited Sicily and Syracuse, once at least, more
probably twice, or even thrice. We need not regard the gossip
of later times, which attributed his absence from Athens to
jealousy of the rising fame of Sophocles, who had become more
popular than himself in the Athenian theatre. We may feel
sure that the personal relations of Aeschylus and Sophocles find
far truer expression in that passage in the Frogs of Aristo-
phanes, where Aeacus tells how, when the younger poet came
1 Iliad, iv. 405.
A
AESCHYLUS.
down among the dead, he clasped the hand of the elder and
embraced him, and would not suffer that he should yield his
throne. Syracuse was at that time a common resort of men of
art and letters ; and the sympathy of Aeschylus may well have
been aroused, as Pindar's was, for the Hellenic people and
prince who had fought so well against the Carthaginian and
Etruscan in the West, while the Hellenes of the mother country
were beating back the Persian in the East. Whatever were
the cause, there is no doubt that Aeschylus did at least once
exchange the fair curve of hills that stand about the Athenian
plain for Etna's solitary cone, and the rock-fretted ripple of
Ilissus for smooth-sliding Anapus and his reedy banks. In
honour of a new-founded Sicilian city, he wrote a play called Tlie
Women of Aitna, but of this unhappily only four lines remain,
so that we cannot know " how fair a fountain of immortal verse
he made to flow" 1 for his hosts, among whom he came like
Alpheus rising blended in the Arethusan spring,
" bearing bridal gifts,
Fair leaves and flowers and sacred soil of Hellas." 2
In Sicily death overtook him, and his ashes were buried at
Gela with the honours of a public funeral. On his tomb was
engraved a brief epitaph, attributed to himself; and we may
well believe that he wrote it, for it makes no mention of the
triumphs of his art, only of his share in the common duties of
a citizen when he fought in the ranks at Marathon.
His choice of the new and native field of tragic poetry was
symbolised in the legend which told how, when as a boy he
had fallen asleep in his father's vineyard, Dionysus appeared
to him in a vision, and gave command that he should serve
him after this sort at his festival when the vines grew green.
So amply had he fulfilled before his death the charge enjoined
on him by the God, that no less than seventy dramas, of which
only seven have descended to us, were even at the lowest
reckoning ascribed to his hand.
Such external evidence touching the bent and genius of
Aeschylus as has been left to us in the shape of contemporary
1 Ka.1 Ke fj.v6riffa.i0 1 owolav 'A/wceo-tXp
efy>e vayav a^poffLw eirtuv. PlNDAR, Pytli. iv. 298.
J ZSva. <j>tpuv /ca\d <pv\\a KCLI &vdea Kal K&VIV Ipdv. MosCHUS, vi. 3.
AESCHYL US.
or nearly contemporary criticism and comment, is naturally
meagre. The most striking and copious is that found in the
Frogs of Aristophanes. In the Frogs, Aeschylus is intro-
duced to be contrasted with, and to triumph over, Euripides.
The glorious and endearing associations of the elder time find
vindication in the victory of the elder poet. The contest is not
unlike that waged between Honest and Dishonest Pleading in the
Clouds. Simplicity, directness, dignity, heroic magnanimity,
and contempt of the frivolous, the egoistic, the morbidly ingeni-
ous, are arrayed, to the eyes of Aristophanes, against affectation,
meaningless subtlety, inartistic carelessness and triviality, volup-
tuousness, shallow and violent passion. It would be difficult to
find a modern parallel to Euripides, but if, to illustrate the
situation, we imagine some modern English critic, whose indig-
nation had determined him to see nothing but prosaic coldness
in Wordsworth, nothing but bad workmanship and theatrical
declamation in Byron, nothing but voluptuousness in Keats or
Mr. Morris, nothing but pretentious oddity and " a well of Eng-
lish defiled" in Mr. Browning ; a critic who further saw all these
qualities, not dispersed among several poets, but concentrated in
the writings of one, and that one far more popular than any of
these, and with a popularity which the critic believed to be one
of many signs of a fatal degeneracy of the age ; and then if we
imagine this critic matching such a poet against such another
poet of old time as the " God-gifted organ- voice of England,"
employing a wit as unscrupulous as brilliant to expose the
degeneracy of the later-born, we may thus form some idea of
the purpose accomplished by Aristophanes in the Frogs. One-
sided as that play is, it is still a most valuable relic of nearly
contemporary criticism. But the exigencies of comedy, and
possibly even an imperfect appreciation on the part of Aristo-
phanes himself, leave the Frogs very far from satisfactory as a
criticism not only of Euripides, but also of Aeschylus. And
probably the manner in which Aeschylus is there introduced
has done something to incline modern estimates of his genius
toward judgments which a careful study of his works must
pronounce superficial.
Without doubt, of all the tokens whereby we may estimate a
poet, his style is the chief ; but if we go no deeper we shall be
apt to err even in our estimate of his style. And the style of
AESCHYLUS.
Aeschylus, characteristic as it is, has misled some critics by not
being viewed in the light of less obvious elements in his work,
as well as by having undue emphasis laid on its most salient
points ; and the same has been the case in inferences from the
structure, the stories, and the dramatis personae of his extant
plays. Because his diction is always lofty, and sometimes grandi-
ose and excessive in its wealth of pr^ad' iTnroftd/jiova, words on
horseback, 1 because among his characters are Titans and Furies,
he has been accounted one whose delight was pre-eminently in
the colossal and the terrible for their own sake, and whose pre-
vailing passion was for stupendous effects produced by a reck-
lessly gigantesque imagination. In the Frogs, this is made a
chief point of Euripides' attack, and the one defect which
Aristophanes seems to allow to exist in his hero. And since
then the difference in modern taste has been equally ready to
recognise, though less ready to blame, those picturesque extra-
vagances. It is not merely that criticism is always willing
to lighten its task by making the most of the salient
features in its object, but also the standard of comparison
between different kinds of literary and artistic merit is very
commonly other than it was in the time of Aeschylus and
Pheidias, and will sometimes be found wanting in its applica-
tion to that time. The value of vigour and passion, of vivid-
ness of all kinds, was at least as amply recognised in theory and
exemplified in practice by the artistic genius of that age as by
that of any other ; but its larger view never lost sight of the
supremacy of measure and harmony, the powers whose gracious
influence was present in every great effort of the Hellenic mind.
And thus in the drama of Aeschylus, behind all the lurid clouds
of a mysterious destiny, above the mountainous waves of con-
flicting passions, the star of his Athenian soul is never quenched,
nor refuses to eyes that wait for it the pure and grave serenity
of its light.
And probably it is the critics' fancy for striking contrasts,
above referred to, with the effect produced by the Frogs, which
has led also to a somewhat false estimate of the attitude of
Aeschylus toward the political and speculative movements of
his age. In the Frogs he is made generally a laudator temporis
1 Frogs, 821.
AESCHYLUS.
acti, though without commitment to any especial political
opinions. Later authors speak of his having been a conserva-
tive of the school of Aristeides and Kimon, and opposed to
certain innovations made by Pericles and Ephialtes ; it has
been also asserted that the honours paid to the Court of the
Areopagus in the Eumenides were intended as a protest against
the encroachments on its power which the last-named states-
men made. On this point, however the question of the signi-
ficance of the Eumenides as regards the Areopagus, it will
generally be agreed now that the views of K. 0. Miiller,
expressed in his valuable dissertations on the play, must be
accepted with considerable modifications. As Grote has pointed
out, the privilege of the Areopagus on which Aeschylus is
dwelling in the Eumenides, namely the judicial power in cases
of homicide, is the very privilege which Pericles and Ephialtes
left untouched ; it was the senatorial power of the Areopagus
which they took from it, and on this point Aeschylus does not
reveal either satisfaction or dissatisfaction. To some at least
of its readers the play would lose much of its perfection and
impressiveness if it seemed no longer to breathe that spirit of
peace and concord before which party conflicts are forgotten,
and to speak throughout allusively, as well as directly, of those
agencies of renouncement and reconcilement to which Aeschy-
lus looked for a solution of the perplexities of gods and men.
The supposed anti-democratic tendencies of the poet have
been by some critics exaggerated even to absurdity. We find
a widely-read English commentator saying, " His feelings evi-
dently incline to an excessive reverence for kings, . . . and a
degree of grandeur is thrown over their state such as is wholly
incompatible with real dislike or contempt for it." This is in-
deed to pervert evidence of dramatic instinct which Aeschylus
certainly had into evidence of political leanings which he
certainly had not. It would be easy enough to show, from the
Persians especially, but also from other passages where he is
concerned with a comparison of Oriental with Hellenic manners
and customs, 1 that Aeschylus was to the full possessed of the
Hellenic contempt for that barbarian surrender of the rights and
1 Such areAgam. 918-22; Eum. 185-90; Suppl 368-80, 398-401.
AESCHYLUS.
duties of citizens into the hands of a single person chosen by
accident, which brought freemen to the level of slaves.
" Among the Easterns all save one are slaves." *
Indeed, neither the oligarchic nor the democratic party in Hellas,
though we find both, and especially the former, afterwards
tampering with the Persian king, had at that time any of that
natural affinity to despotism which in modern times both the
courtier-noble and the ochlocratic leveller not unfrequently
display. Nor is there any reason to suppose that Aeschylus
attached himself to any extreme party or ideas. Both his own
genius and character, and also his chronological position, furnish
reasons against assigning to him a share in the party spirit
which raged so fiercely in Athens and the other Hellenic States
in the middle and end of the fifth century B.C. In his time the
strife between oligarchy and democracy, while it had somewhat
subsided since the days when it had been embittered by the
greater pressure of poverty on an increasing population, the fear
of demagogic city despots, and other causes, was not yet
exasperated by the alternating revenges for which the Pelopon-
nesian war gave opportunity. Aeschylus was intensely Athenian
and intensely Hellenic. He could not be the first without being
democratic; he could not be the second and adhere to any
principles which would divide the Hellenes in the face of the
barbarian. 2 The battles of Marathon and Salamis and Plataea
formed the central point to which his political ideas referred
themselves. We can readily believe, as tradition tells, that
Aristeides, a hero of the Persian war, the man pre-eminent for
his reverence of that altar of Justice as whose priest Aeschylus
so often appears, would attract the poet's political as well as
personal confidence. But it must be remembered that it was
Aristeides, conservative as he was, who proposed the law by
which the civil offices were thrown open to election from the
1 ra ftappdpuv yap 8ov\a -irdvTa IT\T]V evbs. EURIPIDES, Helen. 276.
2 Among many instances of the Pan-Hellenic feeling of Aeschylus, one less
obvious than others may be referred to. We learn from Plutarch that in the
drama of the Meusinians, (Fragments, 48,) Theseus obtained from Adrastus
the burial of those who had fallen before Thebes by friendly treaty, not
by force of arms, as Euripides afterwards represented in the Suppliants.
Nor is there any passage in all that remains to us of Aeschylus containing
words of hostility or disparagement toward a Hellenic State.
AESCHYLUS. 7
whole people. Very far removed were such men from the
oligarchs who, in the year 411, traded on the agony of their
country. And indeed the later oligarchical movements were
connected with a sophistic and cynically individualistic spirit,
which Aeschylus, and most conservatives of his time, would
have disliked far more than the spirit of innovation encouraged
and directed by Pericles. Even later, it was rather a change of
persons, and sometimes of policy, than a change of constitution,
that the Athenian conservative opposition of the older school
desired : we may see this in the Knights of Aristophanes,
\vhere there is no desire to dethrone Demos, but only to bring
him to his right mind, and to inspire him with distrust and
contempt of the demagogic schemers who enthral him and lead
him into trouble. In Aeschylus, the passage most directly
bearing on Athenian politics is the speech of Pallas in the
Eumenides (681-710), and the central warning of that,
" Bright watersprings with mixture of foul mire
Stain not, or never hope for wholesome draught," l
is one which no democrat, who is not a mere ochlocrat, need
repudiate.
Passing onward, then, and upward from the misconceptions
of litterateurs and commentators, and the travesty of playful
burlesque, let us proceed to the only valid material for a just
estimate of Aeschylus his seven remaining plays, first very
briefly viewing them in relation to their antecedents and sur-
roundings in action, thought, and art. He appeared at a time when
Athens was just entering on her prime, on the years when she
was to justify the oft-cited eulogy of Pericles, when he called
her " the school of Hellas;" when to her sons " the love of beauty
brought no extravagance, the love of knowledge no lack of
manly vigour ;" when no element seemed wanting to train both
heart and head into admirable and harmonious life. The pro-
gress of thought, rapid as it was, had not yet the destructive
aspect which it afterwards assumed. Already the public law-
courts, the increased acquaintance with foreign modes of
thought, the joyful exercise of intellectual powers, were shaping
a taste for dialectical inquiry ; but the multiform spirit, which
fwippoaiffi /3op/36/>y ff Sidup
\OLfjLiTpbv fualvuv otiirof)' fvp-fiffeis iror6v. Eum. 694-95.
AESCHYLUS.
may roughly be called sophistic, was yet undeveloped. The old
religion, thanks to the elasticity of Hellenic theology, and its
identification with the national cause in the Persian war, still
kept a strong hold on the minds even of the most thoughtful.
Pallas had fought for Athens, and the Parthenon was her thank-
offering. Tradition seemed to be reconciled for the time with
reason, as aristocracy with democracy, and artistic with political
energy. Thus from the union of a sense of self-reliance and com-
pleteness with an eager interest in the spectacle and -the action
of life, there arose that state of calm without languor, vivid feel-
ing without distracting passion, which provides the best atmo-
sphere for artistic development. Thus of all the great literary
and artistic epochs of Europe this was the most propitious to
literature and art. In the Hellenic prime there was more of
life and freshness than in the age of Virgil, not to mention
that of Corneille and Moliere, more sanity and serenity than
in medieval Italy in Dante's time, or than in either England
or Italy at the Eenaissance, or during the religious wars of the
Beformatioii ; more also, it need hardly be said, than in any of
the European countries which felt the stimulating shock of the
French Eevolution. Of this age in Hellas the chief artistic
interpreters to us are Pindar, Aeschylus, Pheidias, and Sophocles.
Three of these are Athenians. But it must be remembered that,
splendid as the achievements of Athens were in poetry, she only
appeared late upon that field. The genius to which we owe the
poems of Homer, though Ionian, was assuredly not Attic ; and in
all the famous roll of lyric and gnomic poets who filled the
sixth and the beginning of the fifth century, the only Athenians
are the ancient Tyrtaeus, who dwelt among Dorians and made his
war-songs for the Spartan host, and the lawgiver Solon. Solon,
indeed, was both an Athenian patriot and a true, though not a
great, poet, so far as we can judge from a few fragments. In the
twenty or thirty iambics of Solon's still extant, we can already
detect some prefiguring semblance of the mighty march of the
Aeschylean line. But Solon was primarily a statesman and law-
giver, engrossed in training the first shoots of that law-abiding
freedom which was in the appointed time to bear such rich fruits
of art. That time was come when Aeschylus received his
first mission from Dionysus. Homer had sung for the warrior-
prince, and Hesiod for the toiling husbandman, Sappho for the
AESCHYLUS.
lover, and Pindar for the glory of youth ; but the word of
Aeschylus was for the citizens of an august commonwealth,
whose acts and thoughts were destined
" To cast the kingdoms old
Into another mould."
A new form in poetry was demanded, a form which should be
congenial to those stirring times of action, and this demand
Aeschylus supplied by an unsurpassed effort of original genius.
Thespis, Choerilus, Pratinas, and even Phrynichus, are to us
mere names, but all testimony agrees in regarding Aeschylus
as the virtual creator of the drama. 1 For more than a century
before his birth, Hellas had been alive with lyric song, and the
fragments of that poetry of the sixth century B.C., the loss of
which is one of the heaviest in all literature, show us with
what wide range all the chords of personal feeling were swept
by it in turn. Moving in a parallel stream with these utter-
ances of personal feeling was another kind of lyric poetry of
graver ends and more chastened treatment the Dorian odes
and hymns, the " solemn music " which accompanied triumphal
and religious joy. When toward the beginning of the fifth cen-
tury the common Games and the common worship of the greater
Gods were at the height of their dignity, when the forces of
Hellas were becoming concentrated, and the national life inten-
sified, Pindar appeared, and gave the final lyric expression to
this side of Hellenic life. Aeschylus also was one of the
greatest of lyric poets, but as he grew up he found in the begin-
nings of the Athenian drama a new kind of art arising, which
was to draw aid from all existing kinds, and combine them into
a thing of new beauty and power. When a generation of men
is filled with high emotion and interest, as were those who saw
Salamis or the wreck of the Spanish Armada, it craves some
poetic expression, and has found none happier than the drama,
which shares with music the power of uniting an audience by
sympathy in a common interest and delight. And in the
Hellenic drama music itself was retained in the choric song
alternating with iambic dialogue, the form in which it seems to
1 It is truly astonishing to think that a second actor was only first intro-
duced by Aeschylus. Phrynichus, his most eminent predecessor, seems till
then to have employed in his dramas (if they might so be called) only choric
songs and dialogues of one actor with the chorus.
io AESCHYLUS.
have been combined with acting with less incompatibility than
in any other that has been tried. In such expression the
vague body of emotion which might have wasted itself in
idle or pernicious channels finds relief in the work of a great
artist who interprets souls to themselves, and lifts them into
a larger air. Different kinds of poetry shade into each other ;
one of the greatest of all poems, Dante's Commedia, cannot
be classified it is not a drama, for there is no action, yet
there is a unity which makes it more than a romance. The
lyric is the essence of poetry, its simplest form, and can flourish
under much more precarious conditions of mental soil and
climate than either the epic or the drama. The epic is between
the drama and the romance, and probably the so-called
epics of the Cyclic poets might more properly be classed
as romances. 1 Hellenic drama sprang from the lyric and the
epic both, though primarily from the lyric; while the elegy
and the weighty gnomic line lend their forces blended and
transformed. The flexible iambics which had expressed the
satire of Archilochus or the wisdom of Solon are developed
into the poetic rhetoric of the dialogue, and the lyric odes still
appear in the Doric songs of the chorus, the original nucleus
from which the drama was expanded. Aeschylus, as has been
said, is one of the greatest of lyric poets, but he calls his
dramas " morsels left from the great banquets of Homer." In
the erection of the Athenian theatre there is the same blending
of the new and old, of the venerableness of tradition with the
vigour of revolution, which is the especial glory of the Athenian
people, who, whether as grasshopper-wearing avro^Oove^ or
Eupatrid descendants of gods and heroes, were yet ever the
first to spread sail in quest of new adventure, whether in the
physical or in the intellectual world. The legends of Thebes and
Troy, of the acts and passions of Gods and sons of Gods, were an
ancient treasure of the race ; but in the hands of the dramatist
they yielded new meaning and delight. There is no stiff and
formal allegory ; the figures are scarcely less life-like and real
than they are in Homer, but a deep and serious meaning
breathes through all : they are individuals still, but they are
also more than ever types, and through their separate action is
1 See Aristotle's Poetics, c. 23.
AESCHYLUS.
revealed the action of universal laws. The plot is so implicit
in the situation that we are irresistibly led to compare the
Aeschylean drama to groups of sculpture of the same age, such
as those which filled the pediments of the Parthenon. Not
that poetry has here foregone its privileges among the arts ;
action there assuredly is, and such as potently effects that
" purgation of the terrors and pities of the mind " which
Aristotle conceived to be the drama's aim. Yet through the
whole the sense of some harmonising unity is never absent ;
we never feel that we may be hurried to some inconsequent
disappointment by the mere caprice, as it \vere, of the writer
or of his characters ; all is under the guardianship of those
powers of measure and harmony already spoken of, in the
general conception as in the details and the feeling. Intensity
without extravagance, dignity without coldness, grace without
enervation these qualities are found in Aeschylus, as they are
found everywhere in the best Hellenic art, though in degrees
and proportions varying with the various artists. In the por-
trayal of human passion, the tragedians, like Homer, are strong
and terrible, yet human. Their tragic agonies have neither the
wild and portentous violence which sometimes in the Eliza-
bethan drama kindles the ebullient blood to almost preter-
natural outbiirsts, such as seem to remove the stage from the
dominion of reason altogether, nor yet have they the languor
and the self-consciousness which mix so often with the melan-
choly of poets of the present age,
1 ' ove i lament!
Non suonan come guai, ma son sospiri."
The heroes and heroines of Hellenic story cry aloud in their
pain ; the torrent of their anguish is full and strong, yet we
feel in it an expression of natures not self-conscious, though
sensitive and highly and harmoniously organised, and thus it
has something of health in its very disorder, which seems a
latent antidote to its bitterness. It is what we feel in Achilles'
cry to the vision of his dead friend :
" But ah ! come near, let each with each embracing,
For one short moment feed our fill of woe. " *
dXXti fjiot S.<Tffov arriOc pivvvOa.
oi/s, 6\ooio Tf.Ta.pir&fj.fO'Ga. 76010. Iliad, xxiii. 97-8.
12 AESCHYLUS.
The dramatic achievements of Aeschylus, and the poetic
qualities of imagination, diction, and versification which give
him his high place among poets, have often been dwelt upon ;
and if it might avail to describe what can only be felt, it would
be hard to say enough of the terrible and beautiful things which
he has revealed to us, of the imploring agony of the Danaid or of
the Theban suppliants ; the chivalrous and benignant constancy
of the king Pelasgus ; the war frenzy of the sons of Oedipus and
the seven chieftains in arms before the seven gates ; the baleful
splendours of Clytemnestra ; the piteous soul-solitude of Cas-
sandra ; the indignant woe and solemn vengeance of Agamem-
non's children ; the confusion of the Persian invader ; the psean
of the Hellenic patriot ; the great heart and high bearing of Pro-
metheus on his bed of pain. Although the simple structure and
few persons of the drama in the time of Aeschylus precluded
him, even had he been capable of it, from the " myriad-minded"
craftsmanship in human types which Shakespeare showed, yet in
Aeschylus also we feel that each character, simple as it is, is an
organic whole, a true creation, but the offspring of a brooding
imagination rather than of conscious analysis. This is the
secret of the great effects which he produces with his severely
limited means. Each of his persons, notwithstanding their
similarity of diction, seems almost always to bear about him an
atmosphere which makes his presence unmistakable. We can
readily believe the tradition that on the stage their silence as
well as their speech had its meaning and its eloquence: the
long silences of the Niobe and the Achilles, whom we know not,
sitting beside their dead ; of the Atossa, the Cassandra, the Elec-
tra, the Prometheus, whom we know. Let any one imagine to
himself what the effect must have been when, " at the limit of
the world," the Titan had been thrown upon the rock by the
huge hands of Power and Force, and nailed there by unwilling
Hephaestus, and after listening to their dialogue above his
helpless body in scornful silence, in silence also let them
depart, and so remaining till the place should be, as it were,
purified of the presence of the ministers of injustice, at last broke
the stillness with his despairing yet august appeal :
1 ' holy Heaven, and ye swift-winged winds,
And river-fountains, and the ocean-waves'
Innumerable laughter ; Mother Earth,
AESCHYLUS. 13
And thou all-seeing Sun, I summon you,
Behold me, how these Gods entreat a God.
See in what stress of torment
Ten thousand years of pain
Here must I agonise." 1
If poetry is akin on one side to sculpture and painting, on
another side it is akin to rhetoric ; and when Aeschylus wrote
his plays, that great school of eloquence had been founded in
free-speaking Athens which afterwards produced the oratory
which has served as a model to the world. Homer had found a
place for oratory in his epic, much more might Aeschylus do so
in his dramas. The suppliant Danaiis and Orestes would hardly
have pleaded so persuasively, the dialogue of Prometheus with
Hermes, or of Apollo with the Furies, would hardly have been
so apt and telling, had not Aeschylus been at least a listener to
those pleadings of Athenian law-courts which obtained so wide
a fame for evil and for good, to the eye of Aristophanes a mere
solvent of morality, to the eye of the modern historian an origin
of moral philosophy. But in Aeschylus the poet was always
foremost, the logic- chopping to which the genius of Euripides
descends is alien and remote from him. Even looking to
expression alone, to him belongs a witchery of words far beyond
that of the orator or the rhetorician ; metrical and verbal
harmonies born only in a poet's mind. His imagination is of
that most genuinely poetic kind which is concerned primarily
with the truthful transfiguration of the real and abiding
elements of human life ; but he knows well how to use as
accessories the images on which genius of an inferior order
might be principally and ultimately employed. Although a
child of daylight and the dawn, he has learnt secrets of the
encompassing night. No poet has surpassed him in his power
of thrilling the mind with a sense of mystery and presentient
awe. None has presented more impressively the dim border-
land which lies, as men fancy, between the material and the
1 3) 5?oj aldrjp KO! rax^TfTfpoi irvoa.1,
TroTa/j.&v re irriya.1 Trovriuv re KvpaTOW
KO.I rbv ira.i>6iTTT>)v KVK\OV i)\tov KaXw'
/j.' ola. 7rp6s Oe&v irdcrxw Oe6s.
?>ep'X_QT)ff' oi'au alKiaKnv
8ia.Kvai6fj.fvos rdv fj.vpieTTJ
Xp6voi> ddXevffu. Prometheus Sound, 88-96.
14 AESCHYLUS.
spiritual. With dreams and visions he deals habitually. In the
seven extant plays we find five places where he bodies forth
apparitions of the night. There is the dream of Atossa, in
which she saw her son Xerxes mount his chariot behind the
unequally-yoked pair of woman-steeds, to be hurled to earth by
the fierce and fair sister who cast away his yoke from her neck,
and turned and rent the harness of his car. There is the dream
of Clytemnestra on the eve of her death-day, when she seemed
to herself to have brought forth a serpent that sucked from her
milk and blood, and a great cry rang at midnight through the
palace, where on the morrow her son's sword was to be at her
breast. There is the vision of the Furies, when Clytemnestra's
phantom rises to upbraid them for their slackness in avenging
her blood. There is the vision of Menelaus, born of his yearn-
ing desire, the vision that seemed Helen, but when he stretched
his arms to it was gone, "with wings that follow down the
ways of sleep." Lastly there are the dreams which lo tells,
the very reading of which seems to make a midnight awe and
ghostly stillness in the air :
" For ever to my virgin chambers came
Strange visions and soft voices of the night,
Importunately pleading : Happy maid,
Why tarriest thou so long in maidenhood,
Seeing how high espousals are awaiting
Thy choice ? for lo, the love of highest Zeus
Yearns for thy love, to enfold thee as his own." 1
Aeschylus would seem to have inclined to some such trans-
formed survival of a primitive belief as we find referred to in a
fragment of Pindar, 2 that in sleep the mind is open to influences
1 dei yap &\f/eis eVvt/^ot TrwXetf/tei'cu
^j irapOevwvas roi)j e/toi>s irapr)y6pow
\eloiffifjuj0ois' & fj.ty' ftf5ai/J.ov K6pr),
rl irapOfVfuei dapbv, ^6v ffoi yd/j.ov
Tvxf.lv [jLeyiarov ; Zei)s yap i/xe/>ou /S^Xei
irpbs crov T^daXwrai. Kal waipe<?6at. Kvirptv
0e"Xet. Prometheus, 645-51.
8 Kal ff<2>fj.a /JLV iravruv eVerai Oavdrif TrepurQevei,
<>)bv d' <?TI \eiirerai al&vos etduXov' rb yap ecrri fdtvov
eV TroXXoZs 6velpoi$
Sel/cwcri repirvwv e<f>epiroiffav ^aXetrCiv re Kpicriv. (Frag. 96.)
(And the body indeed is subject to the great power of death, but there
remaineth yet alive a shadow of life ; for this only is from the Gods ; and while
AESCHYLUS. 15
and capable of intuitions which in waking moments are denied.
In one place he says :
" For oft in sleep comes light upon the soul,
But in the day their fate is hid from men ; " *
and in a different but still move memorable passage :
' ' In sleep there doth before man's heart distil
A grievous memory of ill,
And makes the unwise wise against his will.'" 2
These last words may not unnaturally lead us to another
part of the subject, when, descending below the poetic qualities
of the plays, we seek to discover the religious and the moral
ideas which underlie them. These are by no means identical,
or even closely connected ; among the Hellenes morality grew
up separate from religion, and then as it were turned round to
it to demand its aid. Gods had always been stronger and
more beautiful than men ; men now demanded that they should
be also better and greater. In the form Xenophanes had given
to this demand it shook rudely the whole fabric of theological
belief. Now, whatever opinion may be held as to the existence
of the supernatural, it can hardly be denied that when a belief
in it becomes forbidden to art, art loses one of its most precious
means to attaining elevation and impressiveness. To sculp-
ture and painting especially to sculpture the possibility of
dealing with supernatural beings is of immense importance.
No other adequate symbolism has yet been found for expressing
visibly that idealisation of itself which must always be the
object of humanity's highest and deepest reverence. From the
Hellenic Olympus and the Christian Paradise has come all that
is noblest in glyptic and pictorial art. Poetry too, though its
resources are less exhaustible, must feel it a chilling hour when
the ancient shrines have shuddered at the murmured words,
Let us depart hence. No theology, indeed, in its popular shape,
the limbs stir it sleepeth, but unto sleepers in dreams discovereth oftentimes
the judgment that draweth near for sorrow or for joy.)
1 fvSovtra y&p (ppyv 6/j./j.a<riv \afjLir ptiverai,
fv rj^pq. 8t fj.o'tp' d.Trp6ffKoiros /3poTui>. Eum. 104-5.
2 (rrd^fi 8' Zv 0' ijwvtp wp6 Kapdias
fJLVTf]ffLTrri/J.WI> TT&VOS' K0.1 TTOLp' &-
KOVTO.S ?i\0e ffu<ppoveiv. Agam. 179-81.
1 6 AESCHYLUS.
has been pure enough to express unmodified the highest moods
of the highest minds, and it was so especially in that time of
quickened intellectual activity and of increased acquaintance
with new modes of thought. Yet the old religion still kept,
as has been said, a real hold on the minds even of the most
thoughtful. But if Pindar and Aeschylus treated the primi-
tive theogonies with reverence, it was not the reverence of
a primitive theogonist ; although the happy blending of tradi-
tion with advance enabled them, as it were, to build a New
Testament on the foundations of the Old. Pindar's attitude
toward Hellenic mythology is comparatively easy to decide ;
he flatly refuses to believe or report evil of the Gods, and
when tradition conflicts with morality he will not scruple to
alter tradition before he admits it to a place in his pure and
stately song. At the same time, it is obvious that no compli-
cated or reflective scheme of theology is to be gathered from his
poems, and therefore no attempt to gather such has been made.
It is otherwise with Aeschylus. Eight and wrong, sin committed
and curse inherited, the intervention of protecting and punish-
ing supernatural powers, form so- large a part of the matter
with which Aeschylus deals, that he has left materials which
have employed the most earnest and ingenious analytic en-
deavour to discern among them the outlines of a system of
moral theology of which the poet was the prophet and evan-
gelist. In such analysis the most prominent subject for inquiry
must be found in the nature of his conception of the moral
government of the world, and the hands in which it is placed.
The old belief in the infatuation by a supernatural power as
the cause of guilt, which is the primitive expression of the
bewilderment with which the remorseful soul looks back upon
its sin, and the belief in inherited curses and evil destinies
which cling to devoted races these beliefs are treated by
Aeschylus in a way which makes them at once more moral and
more scientific. According to him, man is only blinded and
hastened to destruction when he has voluntarily made an evil
choice.
" When the fool to folly hasteth God shall speed him to his fall" 1
1 dXX' Srav ffTrftdy rh avrbs, X& Oebs ffwd-irrfrai. Persians, 742.
AESCHYLUS. 17
are the words which the phantom of the dead Darius pro-
nounces on the calamities of his son. Thus, while it is only
consistent with the nature of things that wrongs done among
kindred beget wrong, and that tendencies to wild deeds are
inherited, yet each deed stands on its merits for j udgmeut, and
fairly so, because each has its cause in the passions and will of
the doer. The family curse is only one form, though a very
impressive one, of the means which it is the especial office of
tragedy to employ to express the terrific significance and far-
working effect of the human actions and passions with which
it deals. When the developed human spirit begins to reflect
on the terrors and perplexities of its destiny, the "blind
hopes" 1 which Prometheus gave them as his first boon grope
for some solution or consolation, and the prophet or the poet is
moved to reveal it to them in the shape of a moral government
of the world, discerned in the history of the generations of
mankind and in the conscience of the individual man.
In whose hands Aeschylus supposes this government to lie
is harder to decide. We have but a tithe of his works left in
evidence, and even these are not all agreed. If from the seven
plays were excluded the Prometheus, we might perhaps find it
easier to construct from them by conjecture a systematic theo-
logy. In all the other six Zeus occupies a position which is
almost monotheistic, so unlimited are the might, majesty,
wisdom, and goodness assigned to him. He is the All-causing,
All-sufficing, Almighty, All-seeing, All-accomplishing (Travai-
Tto?, Travrap/cris, TrajKpar^, Tra^oTrn/?, TravreXijs) Lord of Lords,
Most Holy of Holies. 2 " In thy hands is the balance ; what
can mortals accomplish without thee V asks one Chorus ;
another, " What without Zeus can befall any man V To Zeus
Apollo refers every oracle that issues from his shrine ; 3 even
Justice is called by Eteokles the child of Zeus. It is Zeus
ev avrois \irt8a.$ /cary/acra.
(Blind hopes I brought to dwell among mankind. ) Prom. 250.
2 Aval; CLVaKTUV, /JLCLKdpUV
fj-aKdprare. Suppliants, 524-25.
8 oi)7TW7ror' elirov fJ-avriKoiffiv ev 6p6vois,
OVK hvSpbs, ov yvvaiKtis, ov ir6Xews irtpi,
d /*7J K\v<rat Zeds 'QXvfjiiriuv irar-ftp.
(Ne'er spake I yet from my oracular throne,
B
1 8 AESCHYLUS.
who "leads mortals to wisdom, in that he ordained that to
suffer is to learn." 1
To the acceptance of this lofty conception of Zeus as the
final and consistently held theological theory of Aeschylus,
there is one obstacle, but that is one of great importance, the
Prometheus Bound. The loss of the Prometheus Fire-bearing,
and still more of the Prometheus Unbound, is a loss of which
we cannot more accurately calculate the magnitude than to be
certain that it is immense. In all literature there is no blank
so cruel to our highest desires. But whatever reconciliation
may have completed the story, nothing could altogether efface
the impression which the poet unmistakably means to convey,
that the Power which stretched on his painful rock and hurled
to Tartarus the giver of good things to men, was in that act
overstepping the limits of wisdom and righteousness, was
guilty, in some measure, of the reckless violence which in other
plays he judges and abhors. Zeus does not indeed appear
himself in the play, but his messenger and representative
Hermes cannot but be taken as expressing the spirit of his
rule, against which the " anima altera e disdegnosa " of Pro-
metheus is exasperated by his own wrongs and the wrongs
of men. This Hermes is not the righteous protector of
Agamemnon's children and of the suppliant Danaids, not
the embodiment of calm and friendly skill and grace, such as
Praxiteles wrought him at Olympia, but the harsh official
taunter of a fallen adversary, alert with a boyish insolence of
new intoxicating success. And his very errand, his threaten-
Of man, of woman, or of commonwealth,
Answer unbidden of the Olympians' sire.) Eum. 616-18.
And compare Fragment 79 :
(rrAXew 6'?rwj ro^iara, ravra yap warijp
Zei)s tyKaOiei Aol-lq. 6f<nrtfffJi.aTa.
(Send with all speed, for thus the Father Zeua
Gave Loxias charge to speak his oracle. )
1 rbv (ppoveiv j3porof>s 68u-
ffavra, rbv TraOrj /uuiOos
Otv-ra. Kvpiwlx etfr - Agamemnon, 175-77.
Accumulation of instances in this sense may be found in Dronke's Religiose
und sittliche Vorstellungen des Aeschylos und Sophokles. The author does not
seem to feel so strongly aa I do the force of the arguments in a different sense
which the Prometheus affords.
AESCHYLUS. 19
ing inquiry of the secret which would save his master from
ruin, confesses the limits of the wisdom and power, no less than
of the goodness, of Zeus.
To bring this drama into consistency with the rest, there
would seem to be two considerations especially to be taken
into account. The first is, that the utterances on the powers
and attributes of Gods are, after all, dramatic, even when
proceeding from the Chorus. For the Chorus is always in
Aeschylus a personage concerned in the drama ; it has ceased
to absorb the whole, as in the dithyrambic songs from which
the drama arose ; but it never stands quite outside the whole
action, as in Euripides, and to some extent in Sophocles.
Thus we must remember that when the Danaid or Theban
suppliants, or even the chorus of Argive elders in the Aga-
memnon, deeply moved as they are for the fate of their king
and city, invoke an all-just and all-ruling Power, this is
primarily and essentially the expression of that longing for a
saviour in the day of trouble which can intensify belief held
lightlier in lighter hours, and can even develop what seem
intuitions of powers and influences unthought of, because
mmeeded, before.
The second consideration is, that there are indications, though
grievously scanty, of the reconciliation which was effected in
the Prometheus Unbound. This much we know, that Prome-
theus was delivered by Herakles, son of Zeus and of the mortal
Alcmene, the seed of the woman To, who had received recom-
pense for her maddened wanderings when she rested by the
banks of Nile. On his release Prometheus tells the fateful
secret, and the danger is turned away for ever from the Olym-
pian throne. In Pindar the revelation is made, not by Pro-
metheus, but by his mother Themis, in that majestic passage of
the seventh Isthmian ode, which may here be cited to fill the
gap in the Aeschylean story, and tell the end of the tale of
divine renunciations in obedience to that Moipa, or Allotment,
which seems a mysterious universal behind the individualities
even of Gods, a personification of the law which constrains all
forces, personal and impersonal, in nature to fulfil the law of
their being by which the cosmic order is sustained :
" Thereof was the Gods' council mindful, what time for the
hand of Thetis there was strife between Zeus and glorious
20 AESCHYLUS.
Poseidon, each having desire that she should be his fair bride,
for love had obtained dominion over them.
" Yet did not the wisdom of the immortal Gods fulfil for them
such marriage when they had heard a certain oracle. For
Themis of wise counsels spake in the midst of them how it
was predestined that the sea-Goddess should bear a royal off-
spring mightier than his father, whose hand should wield a
bolt more terrible than the lightning or the dread trident, if
she came ever into the bed of Zeus, or of brethren of Zeus.
" ' Cease ye herefrom : let her enter a mortal's couch, and see
her son fall in war, who shall be as Ares in the might of his
hands, and as the lightning in the swiftness of his feet. My
counsel is that ye give her to be the heaven-sent prize of
Peleus, son of Aiakos, whom the speech of men showeth to
be their most righteous, an offspring of lolkos' plain. Thus
straightway let the message go forth to Cheiron's cave divine,
neither let the daughter of Nereus put a second time into your
hands the ballot-leaves of strife. So on the evening of the
mid-month moon shall she unbind for the hero the fair girdle
of her virginity.'
" Thus spake the Goddess her word to the sons of Kronos,
and they bowed their everlasting brows. Nor failed her words
of fruit, for they say that to Thetis' bridals came those two
kings even with the rest." 1
Renouncement and reconcilement these are the inseparable
healing agencies to which the mind of Aeschylus turned, when
he contemplated the tumult of passions and ambitions, whether
found in the Assembly of Athens, or in the palace of Mykenae,
or in the Olympian council-hall of Gods. The conception which
would seem most nearly to solve the difficulties of the subject
seems to be one which would certainly also be congenial to the
genius of Aeschylus ; it is that he recognised a certain progress
and education even among Gods, that in the interval between
the binding of Prometheus and his release, Zeus and the new
Gods, while retaining supremacy, had not been without their
share of care and fear, though not of actual misfortune, and
had learnt and unlearnt much of the great teacher, Time. 2
1 Pindar, Isthm. vii. 26-47.
2 d\\' fKStddffKei irdvd' 6 y^pdffKUv xpt> v S-
(All things are taught by the great teacher, Time.) Prom. 981.
AESCHYLUS. 21
Thus, while he dramatised the deliverance of Prometheus, he
seems to have adopted also the tradition which spoke of how
the dethroned Kronos had been released from his bonds, 1 and
had been given, as Pindar tells, an abode in the Islands of the
Blest, not unvisited by his son, and ruling among the spirits of
the good and great. 2
Both the considerations which have been urged on this
subject are expressed by that most striking passage in the
Agamemnon, where the Chorus most emphasise their appeal to
Zeus :
" Zeus, whosoe'er he be, if this name please his ear,
By this name I bid him hear ;
Nought but Zeus my soul may guess,
Seeking far and seeking near,
Seeking who shall stay the stress
Of its fond and formless fear.
For he who long ago was great,
Filled with daring and with might,
Now is silent, lost in night :
And the next who took his state
Met his supplanter too, and fell, and sank from sight." 8
Here, while Zeus is made the object of glorification and earnest
appeal, the mythic account of the divine dynasties is yet
accepted, and the strange vagueness of the opening address
symbolises the poet's half-unconscious sense of the insufficiency
of the mythology to satisfy his aspiration toward an embodi-
ment of the highest good. It is difficult for a modern European,
accustomed to a religion with a body of doctrine formulated
by Greek metaphysic and Roman law, to realise the fluctuating,
though always individual, character of the Hellenic Gods, or how
1 Ewmen. 645. 2 Pindar, 01. ii. 70.
3 Zei)s, Saris TTOT' tffrlv, el r65' av-
T(f <f>l\0t>
Tovrl> vtv
OVK lx
ira.vr'
Tr\r}v Aids, el rb fidrav dirb (ppovrlSot
ovd' 8o-m irdpoiOev fy
Ta/j./j.dxv Opdffei fipijwv,
ovdtv &v X^fat trplv &v.
8s 5' tTTfir' a<j>v, rpiaK-
rrjpos outran TWX&V. Ayam. 160-72.
22 AESCHYLUS.
a belief in them which cannot be called unreal was yet con-
sistent with acquiescence in the saying of Herodotus that
Homer and Hesiod first settled their genealogies and attributes.
A similar but still greater fluctuation seems to have prevailed,
and to prevail still, in India; and even in Catholic Europe
something like it appeared, in spite of the lateness of the time,
when the central controlling force of the Papacy was shaken
and maimed; while another unsettlement of the attitude of
worshippers towards objects of their worship seems to have
occurred among Mahometans when they separated into Sunnis
and Shiahs. The Hellenic Gods, while always regarded as
stronger and more beautiful than men, only acquired that
special claim to allegiance which a moral interference can
support, when specialised, so to speak, in relation to some
human duties placed under their guarding care. The in-
stinctive idea that God will protect the right finds indeed
such utterance as the exclamation of the old Laertes in the
Odyssey, when he hears of the slaying of the wooers :
" Still then ye live, Zeus and Olympian Gods,
If verily vengeance hath the wooers found." 1
But it was only Zet"? Eewo?, 'Epicelos, 'I/cea-ios, the Guardian of
Host and Guest, of the Landmark, of the Suppliant, who, to
the ordinary believer, was reckoned a present God who would
avenge or aid. It was thus that the forces outside humanity,
which the Hellenic imagination conceived as Gods, took shape
and definite relation to human conduct ; a relation in which
both sides had, at least for Aeschylus, their several obligations;
for Apollo himself shrinks from the thought of having the
blood of Orestes on his head :
"For dreadful among Gods and men alike,
The suppliant's curse, if uncompelled I yield him." a
One very striking proof, among others, of what has been said,
occurs also in the Oresteia. 3 It is by the Erinyes, the avengers
1 ZeO vdrep, ?j pa tr' Zffre Oeol Kara (MKpbv "0\v/j,iroi>,
el frebv fjLvriffrijpes a.T&ada\ov vppiv UTiffav. Odyssey, xxiv. 351.
2 dfivi) yhp v f}poToi(ri KO.V 6eois TrAet
17 irpocrrpoTraiov fJ.rjvis, et TrpoSui <r<p' CKUV. Eumen. 233-34.
8 Under this name is generally known the trilogy composed of the Aga-
AESCHYLUS. 23
of blood, that Orestes is pursued for slaying his mother, and
yet it was also by foretelling the wrath of these very Erinyes
that Apollo urged him to the deed. 1 So fluctuating is the
personification, though the idea is clear beneath each shape it
takes. 2 And we feel that the real worship of Aeschylus,
though it may attach itself to this God or to that, to Zeus,
Apollo, or Pan, 3 when he comes to avenge the orphan nestling
or the orphan child, is really independent of the persons, and
belongs to the moral law which they execute and represent.
It is not however for the poet, especially the dramatic poet,
directly to inculcate moral or religious doctrine ; the essentially
important question under this head is, In what region of
ethical feeling does he chiefly move, what ethical qualities and
laws does he present most impressively, and what ethical ideal
do they indicate and indirectly communicate to the spec-
tator or reader of his work ? Here Aeschylus ranks with
Dante and Milton, and in some ways above both. We may
distinguish two ethical qualities especially which he has glori-
fied, and with which he is above all to be identified. One
is the self-control, the sound-mindedness (awc^poo-uvrf), and
respect for the rights and feelings of others which the artistic
memnon, the Choephoroe, and the Eumenides. But when in the Frogs of
Aristophanes Euripides requires Aeschylus to recite the prologue of the
Oresteia, he answers by the first lines of the Choephoroe. The evidence
against the statement (commonly accepted since Welcker wrote) that dramas
were habitually exhibited in trilogies or tetralogies, is succinctly stated in a
paper by Mr. H. Richards in the Journal of Philology, 1878.
1 #XXas 8' t<f>uvfi Trpcxr/SoXas 'Epivvuv. Choephoroe, 283.
2 It must of course be understood too, that even after Homer and Hesiod
an immense body of infinitely various local traditions as to supernatural
persons remained, which the most curious theologian could not expect to
master entirely. Thus for instance we read in Pausanias that the legend of
Glaucus was told (plainly for the first time) to both Pindar and Aeschylus
when they were at Anthedon, the legend's home, that Pindar made some
slight mention of it in his poetry, while Aeschylus took it for the subject of
a play.
8 viraros 8' diow % TIS 'Air6\\ut>,
1) H&v, $ Zfvs, olwv60pooi>
y6oi> 6!-v(36av rCivde fJ-eroiKuv
i>ffTp6iroii>ov
Trowel Trapaficiffiv ''Epivtii'. Agam. 55-59.
The use of the indefinite rts is of still further significance.
24 AESCHYLUS.
instinct of the Hellene helped to make a capital and constant
virtue in his ethical ideal. With this virtue the Pythago-
reanism of Aeschylus, 1 like the Catholicism of Dante and the
Puritanism of Milton, may have mingled something of
asceticism, but with him, as with those other two, it was very
far from the morbid asceticism of the fanatic, who thinks that
by maiming his own humanity he shall gratify a fiend dis-
guised as God ; it was an asceticism based on a recognition of
a supreme and harmonious order, by conforming whereto, and
so only, human nature entered through discipline into the pos-
session of its full privileges and capacities. The other quality is
more peculiarly emphasised in Aeschylus than in other Hellenic
poets, partly owing to his individual character, partly to the time
when he lived, and the mighty acts in which he had borne a
part: this was the virtue of indomitable resistance to unjust
oppression, and of valour in a righteous cause. The issue of
the Persian war seemed to the Hellenes the most signal judg-
ment more signal even than any overthrow of their own city-
despots and oligarchies which had ever descended on that sin
which was the opposite of the virtue of measured self-control,
the sin of vftpis, of insolence, ready to trample in violence over
law and liberty to gratify selfish lust and pride. The feelings of
the religious Hellene who had fought at Salamis and Plataea
were in this like those of the English Puritan who had fought
at Marston Moor and Naseby ; so clearly did a righteous God
seem to have triumphed through their arms. Nowhere could
this feeling be so strong as in Athens, where the ruins of her
temples in the Acropolis, profaned and burnt by the invader,
had looked down a few months after on the Persian wrecks round
Psyttaleia. And when Aeschylus wrote the Persians, Athens
as yet bore her exceeding weight of glory with majesty and self-
control. Perhaps even a more peculiar triumph for her than
1 It is impossible that anything definite should be known of the relation
of Aeschylus either to the Pythagoreanism or to the religious mysticisms of
his day. As to the latter, the results of such interesting and valuable
researches and speculations as those of Kreuzer and Guigniaut, and the like,
seem to point to the conclusion that this period of Hellenic civilisation was
less inclined to mysticism than either the earlier time in which the worship of
"pre-Dorian" divinities was more prominent, or a later time which inclined
to ascetic or sensual rites and mysteries of the East.
AESCHYLUS. 25
Salamis itself was when the allied fleet turned away from the
corrupted Pausanias, affecting with his Persian dress, with his
Egyptian and Median bodyguards, the bearing and habits of a
despot, to Aristeides, simple and open, strong and self -controlled,
the perfection of an Athenian gentleman, a trusted leader
among soldiers, an equal citizen among citizens, dwelling ever
with high thoughts and working for great and patriotic ends, and
chose him with one accord to be their chief. And Aristeides
was the object of Aeschylus' warmest devotion, the man to
whom he did felicitous and noble homage in the lines in which
the Theban messenger describes Amphiaraiis,
" Who bare no blazon on his shield,
Who only cares to be, not seem, the best,
Gathering the harvest of a soul profound,
Wherefrom grow forth his counsels pure and high." 1
But it was the companionship of that other virtue of indo-
mitable valour in a good cause which made so bright the gentle
moderation of Aristeides and of Athens, the spirit in which the
city of Pallas had arisen to face the invader alone, when in the
other states of Hellas " there were great searchings of heart,"
when some of the mightiest quailed, and shrank more from
danger than from the coward's curse the curse pronounced by
the Hebrew Deborah against the men of Meroz, " because they
came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against
the mighty." No Athenian could ever forget the day when a
second storm of invasion threatened his devastated land, and
there came into his Agora the Peloponnesian envoy, who prayed
Athens to forget the desertion of her allies and stand forward
once more as the bulwark of Hellas ; and over against him the
Macedonian prince, who in the name of the Persian king
offered her safety for herself and dominion over her fellow-
Hellenic states, on that one easy-seeming condition, " if thou
wilt fall down and worship me ;" nor how each had his answer
from the Athenian people : how they told the Spartans that they
thanked them for their offer of shelter and supplies, but that
ffij(i.a 5' otiK tirTJv KVK\(f'
ov yap 5oKeii> Hpiaros, d\\' elvai 8^\ei,
v &\oKa dia <(>pfvbs KO.piroviJ.evos,
TO. KeSfii p\affTdvet ftov\fvfj.ara.
The Seven against Thebes, 591-94.
26 AESCHYLUS.
was not what they desired ; let Sparta send men to fight
beside them against the barbarian : how they bade the Mace-
donian go back to those who sent him, and say that so long as
the sun should hold his course in heaven they would be the
irreconcilable enemies of the invaders who had desolated their
homes and burnt with fire the temples of their Gods.
One worthy poetic monument of the great war has been left
to us by Aeschylus in unmistakable form in the drama of the
Persians. It is the counterpart of that colossal statue of
Nemesis which stood eloquent upon the plain of Marathon.
But the spirit of the struggle can be discerned also in the Seven
against Thebes ; that drama, as Aristophanes called it, " full of
the War-God," 1 and more profoundly still, even if less obviously,
in the Prometheus Bound. It may be permitted to dwell briefly on
the consummate art with which, under the simplest and severest
forms, Aeschylus has made the mighty central figure stand out,
how admirably its qualities are relieved and accentuated by the
successive surrounding personages, even in the one play which
is left to us. It would indeed have been of the deepest interest
to have known from his treatment of the story how the
Deliverer's Deliverer, Herakles, was in turn portrayed in the
Prometheus Unbound; how these great souls greeted one another
in the wilderness, when in the year of redemption the process
of the ages had brought them face to face. In the Prometheus
who remains to us, the time-serving good-nature of his would-be
counsellor Oceanus, the sight and foresight of the sufferings
of his fellow-victim lo, the remorse of Hephaestus under
constraint of his hateful office, the taunts and threats of
Hermes, or of the giant Power, all call forth the bitter-
ness of just resentment, and intensify the grim and scornful
endurance which he has summoned to meet his torment.
One softer element there is to relieve the sombre stern-
ness of the whole, the bright and tender personality of the
daughters of Ocean, who come to visit Prometheus in his woe,
and form the chorus of the play. Aeschylus was reproached
by the partisans of Euripides for making small account of
female character in his works, but whether this was due to real
indifference or to a reserve which will bear another interpreta-
AESCHYLUS. 27
tion, may at least be questioned. A Beatrice was impossible
to Hellenic art; this was the one thing lacking to it; but
within Hellenic limits, and they were not narrow, Aeschylus
was less deficient on this point than has been supposed. He
is more careful to preserve the feminine attributes of Electra
under her dire mission of vengeance than is either of the other
great tragedians. His judgment of Helen is sterner than
Homer's, but the vision he evokes of her is not less magi-
cally fair. For pity and beauty nothing in poetry can surpass
his contrast of the hour when Iphigeneia's pleading eyes " as in
a picture " struck her sacrificers to the heart, with the happy
times when her pure voice sang free and joyously in her home,
to gladden the same father whom fate now made her murderer.
But no character is more truly womanly, more winning in its
weakness and in its strength, the weakness of inexperienced
timidity, the strength of self-forgetful devotion, than is the fair
collective personality of these sisters of the sea. Their first
approach is perceived before they are arrived ; Prometheus
breaks off the " large utterance " of the iambics of his first
soliloquy, he feels another presence than he had known of late :
" Ah, ah, but what fragrance
Is wafted anear ?
What murmur comes stealing
Untraced to my ear,
Of God, or man, or blended of the twain I" 1
Tears are in their eyes, and words of compassion on their lips,
while yet at first a half-timid glee at their own daring in
visiting the victim of the wrath of the new king of heaven, an
eager curiosity as to his eventful story, give a touch of child-
like nature to their speech. Their traditional sympathies are
with the old order of things which Zeus has supplanted, but
they cannot see how it can be of profit to resist the supreme
power once established as supreme ; they are little conversant
with ideas, and when Prometheus imfolds the history of his
championship of the human race, and enumerates the benefits
he gave it, they are but slightly moved to sympathy with the
1 a, a, e , ea
ris ax&j r ^ <55yU& irpoatirTO. fj.' d^e-yxrjs,
debffvros, -fj /3/36reios, -f) KeKpa^vrj ; Prom. 114-16.
28 AESCHYLUS.
" creatures of a day," whom they have never known ; they are
still absorbed by the sight and prospect of the Titan's pain,
and press him to end it, even if it must be by submission.
But when Hermes, baffled and scorned by Prometheus, bids
them flee from the wrath to come, which is to hurl the rock
they stand on into hell, then at last their reply makes it plain
that it was from no selfish indifference to the hero's honour,
but only from an over- anxious care for his wellbeing, that they
counselled him before :
' ' Other bidding bear if thou wouldst bend us ;
Tak'st thou us for traitors to our friend ?
Nay, with him, with him, unbowed to baseness,
Be it ours to suffer to the end." 1
On their heads then be the consequences of their folly such
are Hermes' last words : and he is scarcely gone when the
wrath of Zeus descends upon the rock, and Prometheus' last
cry of indignant defiance is heard amid the tempest and the
fire:
" Lo in deed, no more in word, the earthquake !
Hark, the thunder ! lo, the lightnings leap !
Dark with dust and torn with warring whirlwinds
Crash the skies, confounded with the deep.
Zeus himself amid the awful onset
Hurls me hellward to Tartarean gloom :
Earth, my mother ! Heaven, thou light of all things !
Hear ye, see ye, my unrighteous doom I" 3
1 fiXXo TI falivfi Kal impa/jivOov fj.'
6 TI Kal irelaeis' ov yap 77 irov
Tovr6 ye r\i]Tbv iraptcrvpas ZTTOS.
TTWS /J.e K\eveis K
/j.era rovS 1 8 ri x
TOVS irpoS&ras yap fj.iffe?v Z/j.a0ov,
KOVK tffTl v6<TO$
Tiv' awiirTvaa. fj.a\\ov. Prom. 1063-70.
tpyt{> KOVK^Tl /J.v6<{)
la 5' lyxw irapa/jLVKarai
jSpovrrjs, XiKes 5' fK\dfj.irovffi
ffTepoirfjs fdrrupoi,
ffTp&/j.j3oi St Kbvw dXiffffovffi,
aKtprq. 5' avt/j.uv Trvev/j-ara iravrtav
AESCHYLUS. 29
The Prometheus Bound, as is the case with a few of the
highest works of genius, is laden with mighty meanings which
wait on Time to be unrolled. Prometheus himself may be
called a type at once of the Past and of the Future ; he
belongs to the primeval race of deities, but he suffers for having
anticipated the process of the ages, for having helped the new-
born race of man, for having acted on his own vision of things
to come which others could not see. Zeus represents the
Present, with its exigencies, its imperiousness, and its force ;
for the time he forgets the traditions and benefits of the Past,
and ignores and would stifle the Future ; his only concern is to
keep in being the order and administration with which he is
identified, and to which it is not unnatural, it is almost neces-
sary, though it is still unjust, that he should be resolved to
make all claims bow. There have been situations in modern
revolutions which might well remind us of this contrast.
It could hardly be that the august and beautiful conception
of a champion and saviour of men, enduring for their sake the
extremity of agony, yet not suffered to remain in Hell, should fail
to strike the Greek-speaking Christian Fathers as a prefigure-
ment of the great tide of human yearning which found its most
impressive manifestation when the western world swore alle-
giance to the Son of Man crucified on Calvary, foreshadowed
by the Son of Earth crucified on Caucasus, and claiming the
supremacy of Godhead by virtue of his oppressors' taunt, He
saved others, himself he cannot save.
The only work of Aeschylus later than the Prometheus which
we possess is the trilogy in which he tells the fortunes of the
house of Agamemnon. If it is the passion for freedom which
finds pre-eminent expression in such Aeschylean treatment of
the story of Prometheus as remains to us, it is the equally vital
desire for Order and Harmony which is satisfied in the last play
which came from the poet's hand, the Eumenides. From this
j-WTerdpaKTai d' aldrip irbvrtf.
Totd5' fir' /j.ol pnri] Ai6dev
revxovffa <j)b^ov ore/xet tpavepus.
c3 /j,T)Tpbs ^/ii;s (Tafias, w irdvTUv
alOrjp Koivbv <pdos elXicrffuv,
j.' ws /c8ca ird<rx u '> Prom. 1080-93.
30 AESCHYLUS.
we may indeed divine somewhat of how the Prometheus
Unbound must have ended. Here the half-blind worship of
half-blind forces, though arrayed in its full pomp of terror,
yields to a more excellent revelation. In so doing it yields in
fact to what is best in itself. Blood for Uood, the old law had
said : this was enough for it. The new law is awful as the old,
but juster, and will distinguish between degrees of homicide.
Vengeance for Iphigeneia may be the plea of Clytemnestra, as
vengeance for Agamemnon is the plea of Orestes. But the
new tribunal shall discover beneath the plea of Clytemnestra
the selfish motives of lust and guilty fear. The plea of Orestes
shall be allowed to save the slayer, though after an agony such
as must needs follow a deed of so wild justice. For, as has
been said, the old law yields to what was its own best part.
The Eumenides are not deprived of their office, but resume it
in allegiance to the new dispensation. All through the Oresteia
the moral judgment is appealed to by revenges and recrimina-
tions of varying justice. And thus the stories of Orestes and
of Hamlet, while they have much of likeness, have much more
of difference. The interest in Hamlet is primarily in the
persons and in the situation : the interest in the Oresteia is
primarily in the disentangling of the laws which govern the
moral development of the race.
It is significant that the last arbitrament which lays finally
the demon of the house of Tantalus rests not with the Zeus of
either the upper or the under world, 1 but with a council of just
men, as though to show that to the conscience of humanity the
ultimate appeal must lie. It is only when the votes of the
Areopagites are equally divided that Athene adds hers, and
turns the balance for acquittal. Then the whole tumult of
conflicting passions, rights, and duties is resolved in an august
harmony, and passes upward into a stormless air.
If we are thrilled and awed by merely reading this majestic
drama, what must it have been to see and hear as it was pre-
1 See the Suppliants, 230-31 :
Kd/cet ducdfei ra/j.Tr\aK^fj.ad', us \6yos,
Zei)s $\Xoj tv Kafj.ov<riv vcrTdras diKas.
(Among the dead, they say, that other Zeus
Holds a last judgment of the sins of men. )
AESCHYLUS. 31
sented on the Athenian stage ? And when at evening the play
was played out, and its solemn voices still were in his ears,
the Athenian whose path home lay north-westward passed
thither under the very hill of Ares where the momentous
verdict was pronounced, and beside the cave haunted by the
dread powers so hardly appeased ; but his lifted eyes met the
sunlit western front of her shrine who had prevailed for mercy
and right, and could discern the statuary of the pediment, the
monument of the primeval triumph when she won his Athens
to be her own.
This was the last drama written by Aeschylus, and its calm
ending, while it deprives it of none of the solemnity of tragedy,
seems to cast back a mild light over all the terrors which his
spell had called into being before, over the troublous mysteries
of theology and human fate. He leaves us rejoicing in the
triumph of the two brightest and wisest, the "highest and
most human," of all the Hellenic divinities. One is Athene,
queen of light, the most cherished child of Zeus,
" Who only of gods may know that chamber's keys
Where sleeps the sealed thunder of her sire," 1
yet for her people's sake is now most patient, and " will not
tire of speaking gentle words " 2 to the resentful brood of Night.
The other is Apollo, " la lieta delfica Deita," the god invoked
as healer and helper in time of pestilence and war, the Apollo
on whom Herakles called to guide his arrow straight against
the eagle which preyed upon Prometheus, when the hour of
his deliverance drew nigh. 3 And those whom such coinci-
dences affect may remember that to these two deities, among
all the Gods of Hellas, belong, as it happens, the only two cer-
tainly ascribed temples of which more than the merest ruins
are still standing on Hellenic soil. Athene's is on the Acro-
polis of Athens, beneath which a new life struggles feebly, yet
not all ignobly, toward some glimmer of the ancient day.
Apollo's is at the lonely verge of the Arcadian mountain-
1 KO.I K\ySas olda. Sw/j-druv fjrf>vr) Oeuiv
v olj Kepctw6s tanv to'tfipa.yi.o'ij.ti'os. Eum. 827-28.
3 otiroi Ka/jLov/j.a.1 <roi Xtyovaa. ra.ya.6d. Eum. 881.
8 'Aypttis 5' 'AT^XXwp 6p6bv Wvvoi /3Aos.
(Hunter Apollo guide my arrow straight.) Fray. 191.
32 AESCHYLUS.
forest, high above forgotten Phigaleia, and looking south beyond
Eira and Ithome toward his unredeemed Cretan home.
Until Aeschylus was forty-one years old no play of his was
crowned at the Dionysiac competition, and again in his later
years the growing fame of Sophocles seems to have somewhat
overshadowed his. But he had dedicated his works to Time, 1
and the dedication was approved. To his plays the Athenians
assigned the unique privilege that they should be acted after
his death at the public cost, and to Hellenic colonies he
became, in the phrase of M. Victor Hugo, the guardian of their
minority, their preserver from barbaric contamination. 2 In a
quaint but touching simile M. Hugo has compared the function
of the colossal poet among these children of Hellas to that of
the huge and kindly elephants (" ces bontes enormes ") who
watch over infants at play in the jungle round an Indian
homestead. To us at this distance of time and thought his
relation must rather be expressed by some figure of less fami-
liar intercourse. There are a few great poets of past ages
who seem to us, by a not dishonourable illusion, even greater
than themselves, who have become in our eyes as it were
invested with the attributes of the wonderful and beautiful
things of inanimate nature, of ever-flowing rivers and solemn
hills, or of the signs of heaven. And we may liken Aeschylus
to some golden-armoured constellation, whose first rising was
when the sky was thronged with potent fires, yet found there
no radiance of which his own was less than peer. Then the
mists and storm-clouds of barbarism hid him a long time, and
when he again became visible he seemed to have receded far
into the vault ; he reveals a mere fragment of his effulgence,
and of his seventy stars but seven. These at least remain to
us, and shall now be taken away no more. Well is it for the
reasoning soul that has received their influence on her birth,
and can still feel their presence in the firmament, austere and
yet benign. E. M.
1 Athenaeus, viii. 347.
s Le theatre eschylien gtait comme chargg de surveiller le bas age des
colonies. Victor Hugo's "William Shakespeare," p. 216.
THE THEOLOGY AND ETHICS
OF SOPHOCLES. 1
IN his own generation Sophocles was eminent for his piety.
Though he lived at a time when most men were disengaging
themselves from their traditional religion, he remained true to
the old faith ; he believed in the gods of his age and nation.
At the same time we find in his writings some of the noblest
thoughts on religion and ethics recorded in antiquity. Thus
it is that two elements of Greek religion, the mythological and
the ethical, are combined in his dramas, and, incongruous as
these elements often are, there is no attempt to separate them.
Zeus is the upholder of the eternal laws of justice ; he dwells
beyond the reach of time, in a light " which no man may
approach unto." Zeus is also the lover of Semele and Alcmene,
the father of children half-human, half-divine. The incon-
sistency of such a presentation of the divine being would be
fatal if the dramas of Sophocles were a treatise on theology ;
but when we remember that they are pictures of a mind partly
influenced by the contemporary age, and partly in advance of
it, the contradiction is intelligible and true to nature. It is
from this point of view that I have attempted to describe the
attitude adopted by Sophocles towards the deities of his national
religion, and to indicate some of the ethical and religious
thoughts underlying the situations and characters which he
has chosen to depict.
I.
The gods of the old Homeric mythology appear in
Sophocles, but while some are little more than names, others are
represented as having a real influence on human life and action,
1 Dronke, Die religidsen und sittlichen Vorstelluiigen. des Aeschyloa und
Sophocles. Leipzig, 1861.
C
34 THE THEOLOGY AND
and take a prominent part in the development of the dramas.
For this reason we may conveniently speak of these deities of
mythology under three heads. There are, in the first place,
the deities mentioned only in connection with certain places
or isolated facts, local and tutelary gods, present or absent as
the case may be, and having no influence beyond their own
sphere ; then there are the deities which are mere personifica-
tions of human passions, Eros and Cypris deities which
obviously must take a prominent part in any representation of
human life ; and thirdly, distinct from either of the foregoing, is
the great triad of Greek mythology Zeus, Apollo, and Athena.
Without being of any intrinsic value in analysis, this triple
division will enable us to bring out the aspects under which
the gods of mythology appear in Sophocles.
Under the first head come all the gods of the Homeric
Olympus, and even more, with the exception of those set
apart in the other divisions. For the most part these deities
are mentioned in the choruses only. Sophocles adds little or
nothing to their attributes ; he speaks of them in reference to
certain places or facts, as any other Greek of his time might do.
Thus in the final chorus of the Antigone Bacchus is the god
of Thebes. As in the myth, he is the "joy of the Cadrneian
bride," " dwelling beside the seed of the fell serpent," seen by the
gleaming fires on Parnassus, sent forth with loud acclamations
from the vine-clad shores of Nysa. Bacchus is also the
lacchus of the mysteries, and therefore, as we read, the hymn
becomes more mystical in tone : " leader of the fire-breathing
stars, master of the voices of night, son and seed of Zeus, beam
thou upon us with thy Thyiads from Naxus, mystic maidens
who in nightlong dance glorify thee, their lord lacchus."
Bacchus loves to wander near Colonus, which is also the haunt
of the Muses, of Aphrodite, and Poseidon, and has been made
famous by their gifts. In Homer, Ares is, of all the gods who
dwell in Olympus, the most hateful to Zeus. He is " the two-
faced deity to whom strife, war, and battle are ever dear." l In
Sophocles, Ares is the personification of all evil powers. He
/j.ri ri fj,oi, d\\OTrp6ffa\\f,
txOicrTos St fiol ia<n 6e&v ot"Q\v(j.irov ^x ovffiv '
old ydp roi fyts re (f>i\i) iroXepol Tf /taxa* re. II. v. 890.
ETHICS OF SOPHOCLES. 35
is the pestilence which desolates Thebes (0. T. 190) ; he is the
god whom the gods put far from honour (ib. 215). Ares lifts
the cloud of misery from the eyes of the Salaminian mariners
(Aj. 706), i.e. it is Ares who has placed it there. Artemis is
implored to come to the aid of plague-stricken Thebes, in which
city she has a temple (0. T. 160 ff.) ; she is also the goddess
whose torches flash along the Lycian hills, the sister, that is,
of the Lycian god of light, whom the Greeks identified with
their own Apollo. In the Electro,, 1. 563, Artemis is said to
have caused the many winds to blow at Aulis in consequence
of an outrage inadvertently committed in her precincts by
Agamemnon, and thus she brought about the sacrifice of
Iphigeneia. Of Hera, the queen of heaven, there is no men-
tion in the extant plays of Sophocles, except in one passage,
Electra, 1. 8, where she is mentioned incidentally in connection
with her temple at Argos. Demeter and Persephone are
spoken of in reference to the holy mysteries at Eleusis
(0. C. 1049 ff.), "the torch-lit shore, where the queenly
goddesses cherish their rites for men on whose tongue rests the
golden key of the ministrant Eumolpids." Persephone is also
the goddess of the dead, the unseen goddess (0. C. 1556), to
whom Antigone goes down, the last of a sad company. In
Philoctetes, 1. 391, the chorus invoke Cybele, the all-nurturing
mountain-goddess, by whose bounty Pactolus flows with gold,
whose chariot the lions draw. Aidoneus, " the king of the
benighted," is entreated to suffer Oedipus to pass easily into
his realm (0. C. 1557). Hades, the god of night and death, is
of course frequently mentioned; in Ajax, 1. 1035, he is the
cruel workman who wrought the baldrick by which Hector
was torn to death. Prometheus, the fire-god, is one of the
deities of Colonus (0. C. 56). But of none of these can it be
said that they are brought before us in an aspect peculiarly
Sophoclean, or that they enter in any great degree, if at all,
into the action of the drama, and influence the plot. They
hold here the place allotted to them in the ordinary Greek
mind, which connected certain places with tutelary gods, and
looked to particular deities for protection under particular
circumstances.
More important than any of the deities hitherto mentioned
36 THE THEOLOGY AND
are the Eumenides, the deities which occupy so prominent a place
in the theology of Aeschylus. Yet even they, as we find them
in Sophocles, must be brought under this head. They cannot
be said to exercise any influence on the actions of any of the
extant dramas. They are, it is true, the cause of a scene in
the Oedipus at Colonus, but only in so far as they are the local
representatives of higher and more universal powers, Local
customs are needed to propitiate them as local goddesses ; as
universal deities Oedipus claims to be reconciled to them by
his long-suffering and humiliation. Nor is it the Eumenides
who have brought him to ruin, but Apollo (0. T. 1329), and
from Apollo and Zeus comes his restoration. In many cases
where we might expect to find the operation of these goddesses,
we do not find it in Sophocles. In the case of Oedipus and
Polynices it is Zeus and Apollo who undertake the work of
vengeance, and demand expiation. There is no trace of the
Eumenides in the Sophoclean Orestes ; and though Electra
invokes them to come to her aid in avenging her father, the
deed of vengeance is really accomplished under the guidance
of Apollo and the auspices of Zeus.
In any delineation of human life and action there will
necessarily be a place for those deities which are the personi-
fications of human passions. Such are Eros and Aphrodite,
or Cypris, the deities of passionate love. Tradition tells us
that Sophocles knew their power too well. In his poems Eros
is invincible in strife; his power none can escape, whether
mortal or immortal ; and he who is wise will not contend with
him. Eros puts madness in the heart, and leads astray the
soul of the righteous ; he stirs up strife between kindred blood,
and desire sways a sceptre no less powerful than justice.
Without the intervention of Eros the Antigone would have no
denouement. The love of Haemon for Antigone leads to the
altercation of father and son, and to the suicide of the latter on
finding his betrothed dead. The death of Haemon is the direct
cause of the death of his mother Eurydice. Thus it is through
the operation of Eros that the vengeance of the gods overtakes
Creon, and a natural passion becomes the instrument of divine
justice.
In another passage the personification is less complete.
E THICS OF SOPHO CLES. 3 7
The passion is more than the deity. Love, we are told in Frag.
162 (Dindorf), is a pleasant plague, which may be figured thus :
When the air is frosty, and children take the dry ice in their
hands, at first the experience is something strange and sweet ;
but soon the ice is frozen to the hand, and the pleasure passes
into a pain, of which the child would fain be rid, and even
such is the impulse which sways the lover. 1
Here Eros is spoken of in a figure, but not personified.
Indeed, the Greeks, however acutely sensible of the power of
Eros, had not made up their minds whether he was a god or
not. He is at once a human passion and a " great spirit."
Equally important is the action of Aphrodite in the
Trachiniae. Cypris is triumphant ever ; she beguiled the son
of Cronos, Hades, and Poseidon; from her came the famous
strife of Achelous and Heracles for the hand of Dejanira ; and
now she has ensnared Heracles in a new passion for lole. The
fear of a rival in her husband's affections induces Dejanira to
send the fatal robe ; and thus Cypris brings about the death of
Heracles, and takes part in the accomplishment of the will of
heaven. In a beautiful and well-known fragment (678) we
are told that Cypris is not Cypris only, but a goddess named of
many names. Death and Immortality, Frenzy, Passion, and
Grief, these are her titles. Eagerness, gentleness, violence, are
blended and united in her. She enters into all living things
and consumes them : hers are the fish that swim in the sea,
the four-footed kind that tread the earth; her pinion waves
among the birds, in creatures of the field, in men, and heavenly
gods. Even in the heart of Zeus for the truth is blameless,
though we speak it of the gods Cypris is queen; without sword
or spear she cuts down the counsels of men and gods.
In Aphrodite or Cypris the personification is more complete
than in Eros. But personifications of this kind are of course no
invention of Sophocles. What we can perhaps claim for him
is, that he was the first to make them of importance in the
progress of the dramatic action, and to point out the manner in
which they assist in the development of divine purposes. The
motive of love is well known to Homer: it is present in
rods tpuvras avr&s t/iepos
6pai> Kal rb JJ.T] Spav roXXcim irpoffleTat.
38 THE THEOLOGY AND
both the Iliad and Odyssey, but it can hardly be said to
govern the events and assist in the catastrophe of either poem,
though it is true that the love of Helen and Penelope forms the
basis on which the poems are built. "None can blame the
Trojans and Achaeans that their strife for such a woman is
long and sore." " I too know well that Penelope is not beauti-
ful as thou art : she is mortal, and thee nor age nor death can
touch : still, even so, I yearn to visit my home and behold the
day of return." These passages remind us of touching scenes,
in which the charm of beauty is deeply felt, and brought into
contrast with the love of home and country. But Sophocles
has gone much further than Homer. He has distinctly recog-
nised these passions as elements in a dramatic action, binding
individuals together so that wrong cannot be done to one with-
out affecting another, or as forming the weak and assailable
point in some otherwise superhuman character.
Zeus, Apollo, and Athena are deities far more exalted and
sublime than any hitherto mentioned. Yet even they are not
always, or at least the first and greatest of them, Zeus, is not
always represented by Sophocles in the same light. Zeus
is at times the god of the old Olympus, at others the god
of the Athenians of the age of Sophocles, while, in other
passages, the poet seems to be speaking his own thoughts, and
to elevate Zeus, with Apollo and Athena as his ministers, into
a supreme deity of justice and truth. How such various con-
ceptions of one and the same deity which was also the great
national god became possible, the history of Greek religion
will explain. The interval between the earliest conception
and the latest was a long one, but the Greeks did not allow
the mythology which stood to them in the place of doctrine
to restrain them from the endeavour to bring their conception
of the Supreme Being into harmony with their conceptions of
justice and law. Their religious conceptions became ethical at
an early period, and continued to be so to the last, ever grow-
ing higher and higher as the conception of life and duty became
more elevated. To this development and progress Sophocles
contributed his part, without breaking away from what was
traditional in religion or imposed upon him by the limits of
poetry.
ETHICS OF SOPHOCLES. 39
As a god of the old mythology, Zeus is the son of Cronos
(Tr. 127, etc.); Earth is his mother (Phil. 391), Hades his
brother (Tr. 1041), Apollo his son (0. C. 623). By Semele he
is the father of Bacchus (Ant. 1116); by Alcmene, of Heracles
(Tr. 1148, etc.). His daughters are Athena (Aj. 91) and
Artemis (Aj. 172). He is the progenitor of Ajax (Aj. 389);
he slays Capaneus (Ant. 134 if.), descends in a shower of gold
upon Danae (Ant. 950), and punishes Ixion (Phil. 680).
Here we find Zeus mentioned as the lover of Semele,
Alcmene, and Danae. These connections, so far from being
regarded as out of harmony with his nature as a god and the
first of gods, are rather brought into prominence as connecting
certain cities or families more directly with the deity, and mak-
ing them, as it were, his elect. The inconsistency of connect-
ing immoral actions with a moral being is hardly felt. In the
same way, Aeschylus in his Supplices speaks of Zeus as efycnrrop
'lou? i.e. the sensual story is adopted to bring the daughters
of Danaus under his immediate protection, but this does not
prevent the same chorus in the same ode from appealing to
Zeus as the highest and most perfect of the gods. 1 In the
Prometheus Vinctus, on the other hand, the conduct of Zeus
towards lo is spoken of as tyrannical in the extreme.
In other passages of Sophocles Zeus is addressed by
epithets which express the popular contemporary feeling from
a moral or religious point of view. Such are ar/atvux; (Tr. 26),
atetfirop (0. C. 143), apato? (Ph. 1182), e/weetb? (Ant. 487),
e^eoTto? (Aj. 492), t/eeoYo? (Ph. 484), Trarpwos (Tr. 753), rpo-
7raio<? (Ant. 143). These epithets are interesting as showing
how Zeus is brought into relation with various sides of human
life and action. A path is thus prepared by which polytheism
can pass into monotheism, the special spheres of human life
being made special sides, as it were, of the universal pro-
vidence. Zeus is still Zeus, whether invoked as aywz/to? or
ep/celos, but the epithets may not be interchanged, and he who
invokes the god by a wrongly chosen epithet will not, such was
the Greek conception, obtain a hearing.
S.va.1; &VO.KTUV,
fjMKdprarf Kal
Tf\fi6raTov Kpdros, 6\pie ZeO. AESCH. Suppl. 524.
40 THE THEOLOGY AND
In a similar manner, Zeus was popularly connected with cer-
tain localities, as Oeta, Athos, and Lemnos. Other passages (as
0. C. 1464, 1502, 1650 ; Phil. 1198, etc.) represent him as lord of
the thunder and god of the physical world. From a more elevated
and ethical point of view, Zeus is almighty and all-wise Zevs
Travrap^of dewv, nravroTrra^ (0. C. 1086); Tray/cpar^ (Phil.
680) ; iravr avda-acov (0. T. 904) ; jravt)' opwv (Ant. 184). Zeus
and Apollo know the affairs of mortals (0. T. 498). But in all
these passages, and in many more which might be added to
them, the poet is only reproducing the religion of his day, and
using language which any pious Athenian would naturally
use. Those who believed in gods at all, believed in the Power
dwelling in heaven, whose eye beheld and hand guided all
things.
There is yet another point of view r from which is presented
to us, so far as we can tell, the poet's own conception of the
Supreme Being. Zeus is the eternal ruler in heaven, the up-
holder of the highest laws of morality and religion, exalted
beyond the reach of human pride and power. The poet has
attained to the idea of an order of the world which is just and
good, and this order he identifies with the empire of Zeus. In
Zeus the highest laws of the family and the state have their
origin and birth, and though these may clash with the appetites
and ambition of men, and bring " not peace, but a sword," Zeus
is nevertheless a just and righteous ruler. His kingdom is
founded on law, not on caprice. " It was not Zeus," Antigone
declares, when speaking of the edict of Creon, " who made this
proclamation, nor Justice, who abides with the deities of the
under- world; they have established among men the laws which
I obey" (Ant. 450). That is, Zeus and Justice uphold the laws
of family affection and the burial of the dead. The power of
Zeus is also eternal and immutable. "Thy power, Zeus,
what proud advance of men can repress ? that power which
sleep never overtakes, nor the divine unwearying progress of
the months. Through undying time thou dwellest in the
brightness of Olympus ; thy laws are all-pervading ; they have
been and shall be for ever" (Ant. 605-614). Reverence for
Zeus is reverence for the highest law, so that Electra in her
abnegation of self in the cause of her dead father is pious towards
ETHICS OF SOPHOCLES. 41
Zeus. 1 Loftier still is the conception of Zeus in the Oedipus
Tyrannus. Here indeed the name of Zeus seems too narrow for
the poet's thought : " Zeus, if thou art rightly named, let it
not be hidden from thee and thy everlasting rule that men are
disregarding oracles, and that religion is passing away " (0. T.
902). The poet appeals to the highest of divine powers, for
which he has no other name than Zeus, whether that be the
right name or no. 2 In another passage he substitutes Olympus
for Zeus, as though the highest laws were the outcome of the
whole host of heaven : " May it be mine in every act and
word of life to preserve the piety and purity ordained by those
high laws of which Olympus is the only sire, whose birth was
in the sky above, 3 and nothing human gave them being. In
them is a divine power, which grows not old " (0. T. 863).
Of the two deities which remain, Apollo is prominent in the
Oedipus Tyrannus, the Oedipus at Colonus, and the Electra. It
is however necessary to distinguish between two deities called
Apollo. There is Apollo the son of Zeus, who announces
and executes his father's will Apollo Pythius, the Delphian
Apollo, and there is also Apollo Lyceius, the protector of his
worshippers and destroyer of their enemies, whose temple is at
Argos (El. 7), and whose shrines are found beside the palace-
doors (El. 635). To this latter god oracular functions are not
ascribed in Sophocles, nor is he connected with Delphi, or
regarded as the prophet of Zeus. 4 But Apollo, the Pythian god, is
the son of Zeus, and makes known by oracles his father's will.
The oracle of Delphi occupies a very prominent place in the
Sophoclean drama. It influences largely the development of
the action in the two plays concerned with Oedipus. It was
AptffTa T$Zrjv6s evffefidq.. El. 1095.
* Cf. Aesch. Ag. 160 : Zei)j, 6'cms TTOT' tffrlv, ei roS' avrtp (f>[\ov
8 Cf. Bergk, Litteratur-Gesch. p. 330. The idea that the highest laws
have their birth in the " heavenly ether " is perhaps, as Bergk suggests, an
intimation that the highest law is realised in the movements of the heavenly
bodies. Cf. Heraclitus, Fr. 29 : "HXioj OVK lurep/STjcrercu n^rpa- ei 5 /}, 'Epii>ves
Hiv SiKrjs tirlKovpoi tevp-fi<rov<ri, and Wordsworth's Ode to Duty,
11 Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong. "
1 Aeschylus, Ag. 1080, identifies the Apollo "of the street" with the god
whom Cassandra rejected, the Delphian god of prophecy.
42 THE THEOLOGY AND
the oracle which induced Oedipus to fly from Corinth in the
hope of avoiding the doom foretold to him that he should slay
his father and marry his mother. It was the oracle which in-
duced Laius and Jocasta to expose their child to death. It is
the oracle which gives the true reason for the plague which has
visited Thebes, and requires the expulsion or death of the mur-
derer of Laius. It is the oracle which announces to Oedipus that
he shall, after many wanderings, find a place of rest and recon-
ciliation. It is the oracle which induces the Thebans to make the
attempt to recover Oedipus, so that his bones may lie in their land.
In the Electra it is the oracle which supports Orestes in his
attempt to avenge the death of his father, and points out the way
in which vengeance is to be taken. In the Trachiniae also it is
the oracle which "warns Heracles, before his last venture, that
he will either fail, or, if successful, enjoy rest for ever. In
nearly all these cases the oracle points out what will certainly
happen. No place is left, apparently, for the freewill of the
doer. Oedipus is destined to slay his father ; Laius is destined
to fall by his son's hand. Both Oedipus and Laius take measures
to avoid the doom foretold, but in vain. Apollo therefore
would seem, in some cases, to be the prophet of a harsh fatal-
ism which has no regard for guilt or innocence, and which no
one can escape. But the other side of fatalism is human weak-
ness, and the prophetic announcement of destiny is no more
than the complete foreknowledge of what will happen as the
result of such weakness. Laius knows that his child is destined
to slay him, but this does not prevent him from becoming the
father of the child. Oedipus is aware of the doom in store, yet
ov& opwv, QV& la-Topwv he slays a man in his haste, and takes to
wife the queen of Thebes. From thus announcing the suffering
which will fall upon men, Apollo is sometimes regarded as the
author of that suffering. Thus Oedipus (0. T. 1330) declares
that it was Apollo who brought to pass upon him the miseries
which the chorus behold. 1
1 In such passages as these something must be allowed for the supposed
etymology ('Air6\\uv &irb\\vni), a play upon words for which we have distinct
authority in Aesch. Ag. 1080 :
"ATTO\\OI>, '' Airo\\ot>,
ayviar', d.w6\\uv tfj.6s.
d.7rwXe<ras yap ov /j.6\is T& Sftjrtpov.
ETHICS OF SOPHOCLES. 43
Bebellion against the authority of Apollo, and disregard of
his oracles, are regarded by Sophocles as the height of impiety,
inasmuch as Apollo is the servant of Zeus, and directly conveys
his will to man. This rebellion is conspicuous in Jocasta, and
makes that character the darkest in the Sophoclean drama. In
impiety Jocasta far surpasses Clytemnestra ; her language not
only excites a certain impatience in Oedipus, but is denounced in
no measured terms by the chorus, who are at once startled and
shocked by her declarations. We may observe that the feeling
entertained by Sophocles for the great religious institution of
his time, the Delphian oracle, stands in marked contrast to the
attitude of Thucydides.
If the conception of Apollo inspires awe, inasmuch as it shows
how a man's weakness and want of foresight may act as an
inevitable doom, the picture of Athena in the Ajax of Sophocles
is perhaps more terrible still. When Ajax parted from his father
Telamon to join the host for Troy, he received the wise counsels
of age, " My son, strive for victory, but with the help of God ! "
Proud and impious was the answer : " With the help of the
gods, my sire, even a mean man may win the victory ; I,
without them, trust to make this glory mine." And when, at
a later time, Athena offered the hero her aid in battle, he
replied with scorn, bidding her go elsewhere : " Where I stand
the battle shall not break bounds." Such words betrayed a
spirit too proud for a human breast, and brought upon Ajax the
anger of the goddess. She sends madness upon him, so that he
slays the sheep and oxen of the spoil, believing them to be the
Atreidae and Odysseus, and on his recovery he is overwhelmed
by such sovereign shame that he takes his own life.
At first sight there seems to be something inhuman and cruel
in the cold nature of this goddess, who punishes her victim
without the least regard to his nobler qualities, and exhibits
him in his degradation to the eyes of Odysseus, his greatest
enemy. But a goddess is necessarily superhuman ; to speak of
a want of humanity or of cruelty in Athena is as though we
should complain of the cruelty or inhumanity of the laws of
nature. These go on their way without regard to time and cir-
cumstance, and often cause great suffering, but this does not in
44 THE THEOLOGY AND
the least affect their excellence and perfection as laws. In a
similar way Athena is a controlling intellectual force, offences
against which bring their own punishment. Ajax has rejected
her, and spoken scornfully of her help ; he has presumed
" beyond the goal of ordinance," and exalted human power at
the expense of the gods. Hence the wrath of Athena visits
him. Yet the visitation is but for a day, and could Ajax
have been preserved through that day his life was safe
(Aj. 756).
The scene at the beginning of the Ajax exhibits the opera-
tion of this law of vengeance. Just as a natural law may
paralyse the body, so has this divine power paralysed the mind
of Ajax. In this phrenetic state he is exhibited to Odysseus,
not to excite exultation for Odysseus knows the limits of
humanity too well to triumph over a slaughtered enemy, but
to awaken his compassion and deepen his sense of the frailty
of human nature, and the dependence of all men in all things
on the gods. It is thus that Odysseus is brought to insist on
the burial of Ajax. He alone, with Calchas, knows the reason
of this frenzy, and he shrinks from depriving an enemy when
dead of the funeral rites which are fitly his.
Athena then is the spirit of o-co^poa-vvrj she is the divine
power who keeps watch over the impulses of men, and punishes
them when they would pass beyond the appointed limit.
Those who most acknowledge their dependence on the divine
power she is most willing to aid, but she punishes with all the
resistless and relentless persistence of a natural law all who
rebel against her. In her we see that intellectual conception
of life which makes men responsible for their mistakes as well
as their crimes, and punishes with equal severity the presump-
tion and the baseness of men.
II
From this examination of the conception of Athena in her
relation to Ajax we may pass on to the wider question : " In
what way does Sophocles conceive the relation of man and
God ? " Often, instead of naming any special deity, the poet
ETHICS OF SOPHOCLES. 45
speaks vaguely of Oeos, 6 #eo?, Oeoc, Satfj-wv words which seem
to be used, without much difference of meaning, for the divine
power ; but which have the effect of emancipating us entirely
from the old mythology, and enabling us to put the question
just mentioned in its widest form.
We cannot read much of Sophocles, or of any Greek
tragedian, without arriving at the conclusion that the relation
of man to his God is conceived under two different and almost
contradictory aspects. On the one hand, God is beneficent, the
author of good to his creatures ; just and holy ; the upholder
of right, the avenger of wrong. On the other hand, God is the
author of evil, and men are even divinely deceived in order to
bring them the more certainly to their ruin.
In support of the first or optimist view, we may refer to
the passage already quoted from the Oedipus Tyrannus (1. 871),
in which the high laws are divinely sustained : " There is a
mighty divine power in them, which grows not old." In the
Antigone the gods are the guardians of justice (1. 369); and
justice is said to have her home with the deities of the under-
world (1. 450). In the Ajanc (1. 1343) the gods require the
burial of the dead. To the gods also Philoctetes looks for
vengeance of the wrong that has been committed against him :
" Ye will perish for the wrong that ye have done to me, if the
gods have regard for justice ; and that they have I know :
never would ye have made this voyage hitherward for a help-
less man had not some heaven-sent yearning for me impelled
you." l In like manner Electra trusts to the gods for venge-
ance of her wrongs. 2 The justice of God may however in
appearance be at variance with the justice of man : " "With
God to lead him, a man may wander from the way of justice,
for where God is guide reproach follows not." 3 The gods are
holy as they are just ; Oedipus in his horror of the crime
which he fears that he may have committed appeals to the " pure
1 el ^77 TI Ktvrpov Gflov Tjj' V/J.8.S t/j.ov. Phil. 1039.
2 o?s 0e6s 6 fJ.tyas '0\vfJ.irio$
irolvifj.a irdOea. iraOeiv iropoi. El. 209.
8 d\\' ts 6fovs bpGivTO., K&V w S/K^S
Xupew KeXeijy, /ceur' odonropeiv xpf^'
V ovdtv &v v<p-riyovvra.i. Ofol. Frag. 234.
46 THE THEOLOGY AND
holiness" of the gods. 1 They are also beyond the reach of
human pollution. 2
As a natural result of their justice and holiness the gods
punish the wicked. In Electra, 1. 1383, Apollo is entreated by
Electra to show to the world what are the wages of impiety.
This divine vengeance may linger, 3 or it may come quickly, 4 or
the sins of the father may even be visited on the children. 5
But whether the vengeance is swift or slow, that it will come,
that all morality and religion depend on its coming, is the faith
of Sophocles. 6 As the gods disregard and punish the evil, so
they love and honour the good. 7 They are helpful to men, and
from them comes the wisdom of the wise. It was by divine
aid that Oedipus was enabled to save Thebes from the Sphinx. 8
No one is truly wise whose wisdom is not from above. 9 The
utterances of the gods are indeed dark at times, but the
wise will understand them, and those who will not will never-
theless find them true. 10 In understanding the mysteries of
life a righteous and loving soul sees further than cunning or
1 & OeZv ayv&v fftfias.O. T. 830.
2 e5 yap o75' #ri
0eoi)j fjualveiv otiris dv6puir<ai> aOtvei Ant. 1043.
3 6eol yap e5 ptv, 6\l/ d' dcrop&ff' , Srav
ra 6eV dfais TIS 4s rt> jaaivecrflcu rpairfj. 0. C. 1536.
ffvvr^fjo'ovffi yap
Oe&v TroSw/ceis rovs KaK6<ppovas ^3Xd/3cu. Ant. 1103.
6eots yap Ijv oi/rw <f>l\ov t
rax' &" TI fjii)vlovffu> els ytvos ird\ai. 0. G. 964.
6 0. T. 883 ff.
' TOI)J 8 ffd>(f>povas
0eol <j>i\ovffi Kol ffrvyovffi rovs Kaicovs. Aj. 132, and Ant. 288.
a\\a Trpoffd^K-rj deov
\yei vofdfret 6' i)fd.v bpOGxrai fiiov. 0. T. 38.
On this point the relations of Athena and Odysseus as described in the open-
ing scene of the Ajax are abundant evidence.
' ffo<pos yap ovdels ir\j)v 6c av TI/J,$ 6e6s. FTag. 234.
10 Kal TOV Ofbv TOIOUTOV ^eirlffTa/juu,
<ro<pois jj.v alviKrrjpa dfetpdruv del,
ffKatois 8 <j>av\ov K&V fipaxft StSda/caXoc. Ibid. 707.
ETHICS OF SOPHOCLES. 47
cleverness, 1 and even the capacity for sound judgment is
derived from the gods. 2 Lastly, the gods have power to
remove misery. 3
Such is what may be called the optimist relation of man to
God : we find in it that which is the " central light of all re-
ligion," the justice and truth of God ; but we miss from it many
ideas with which Christianity has made us so familiar that
they seem to us a part of the necessary relation of the human
and the divine. There is little trace of the paternal relation
so prominent in modern conceptions of the same subject. No
doubt, in Greek religion Zeus is the father of men and gods,
but not much is meant by the title. There is nothing said of
the love of God for his creatures, or of their love for him.
The picture is severe, even in this the most favourable light.
What then is the darker side of this relation of man and
God ? The poet does not hesitate to speak of the gods as
heartless. 4 They are the fathers of human children, whom
they leave to perish miserably, even as Heracles was consumed
by fire. They are also jealous of the power of man. In the
Ajax the divinely-inspired bard Calchas says of Ajax, and
those like him " Men over mighty in stature are plunged by
the gods into dire misfortune." 5 They also injure men, so
that the evil may outstrip the good, such at least is the utter-
ance of Ajax in his despair. 6 It is the gods who, for purposes
1 i/vXT) yap ffivovs /col <f>povov<ra rofivSiKov
Kpdffcruv ffo<t>urrov iravrds karw evperis. Frag. 88.
a Ant. 603.
3 vvv yip Oeol <r' 6p0ov<ri, irpbffOe 5' &\\vva.v. 0. C. 383; 394.
fldbrts Hpyuv -rCiv Trpaffffo/J.^vwv,
Ol <f>6ffaVTS KO.I K\ri'6/J.tVOl
irartpes roiaur' <pop>cri irdOrj.Tr. 1266 ff.
6 TO. yap irepiffffa Kav6vr)ra crd/j
jriiTTfiv /Sapet'cus irpbs 0fu>v dvffTrpa%tais
tfatffx' 6 in6.vri.s, 6'<ms avdpdnrov 0i/<rw
P\a.ffTwv Ijretra /xrj /car' &v8puirov <f>povy. Aj. 758 ff.
et 54 rtj 0ftav
/SXdirrot, (jtvyoi r&v x Ka/cds rbv Kpeiffffova. Aj. 455.
48 THE THEOLOGY AND
of their own, have sent on Philoctetes his pain and loneliness, 1
while the chorus in their dismay at the frenzy of Ajax can
only say, " I fear that some heaven-sent evil may have over-
taken him." 2 When God so determines, the change from evil
to good is easily brought about, and no one can escape the
" stroke of God." 3 Not only are the gods the authors of
misery, but they even lead men into calamity, and deceive
them to their ruin. " It was wisely uttered of old," so we are
told in the Antigone, " that evil often seems good to the man
whom God is leading to his ruin" (Ant. 623). In a fragment,
Phaedra excuses her fault by saying that no one can escape
the evils sent by Zeus. 4 It is the gods who have placed strife
between the two sons of Oedipus the gods assisted by an evil
mind. 5
Thus the religious feeling which runs through the plays of
Sophocles does not scruple to attribute to the gods the evil
which falls upon men. And the power of the gods is supreme ;
man is absolutely helpless before them. The gods are indeed
just and holy, and regard the good before the evil : but this
justice is consistent with the suffering even of the good.
Hence we cannot expect to find in Sophocles a cheerful view
of life, or a high value placed upon existence. And in truth, if
there is one point on which the poet insists more than another,
it is the " Nichtigkeit " of human life. However light-hearted
and happy we may picture the inhabitant of Athens to have
1 $e?ct yap, el Kal Kayib TI ippovu,
Kal ra ira.6-fifj.a.TO. Keiva 7rp6s avrbv
rrjs w/dxppovos X/JI/CTTJS eirefl-ri. Phil. 192 ff.
8 Aj. 278.
3 tv yap Ppaxe? KaOfi\e
jrd/j.ir\ovTov 8\j3ov dalftovos KUK
Srav fjLerdffTji Kal Oeois doKy rd5e. Frag. 572.
Geov Se ir\TjyT)i> o&x virepirrjdi} fiporfa. Frag. 656.
4 atcrxn f^ v > & yvvalices, o$8' av eh <pijyot
ppor&v irod', $ Kal Tievs <(>opiJi-f)ari /ca/cd,
vbaovs d' avayicr) ras 6(rj\dTovs <pe"peit>. frag. 611.
5 vvv 8' IK Oedjv rov Ka dXeiTtjpov <f>pevbs
elafjXOe roiv rpiffadXioiv />is /ca/c^. 0. C. 371.
ETHICS OF SOPHOCLES. 49
been, his reflections on life were melancholy and sombre.
Life is an evil : it were better not to be born at all ; and next
best to die in infancy. Life is only good so long as youth
continues, and the joys of youth are idle follies (Kov$ai atypo-
crvvat, 0. C. 1225 ff.). Mortals in the prime of life are but as
nothing. ISTo one gains more than a mere phantom of happi-
ness, and even this he loses in the gaining (0. T. 1186 ff.). We
are as shadows, and wander to and fro, a superfluous burden on
the earth (Fr. 682). " I know," says Theseus in his glory to
the outcast Oedipus, " that I too am a man, and that in the
morrow I have no greater share than thou hast" (0. C. 567).
Odysseus, gazing on the ruin of his enemy, is saddened with
the thought that " all of us who live are no more than
phantoms, than fleeting shadows" (Aj. 125, 6). The misery
of age is intolerable ; age is the home of every evil ; the hand
of the aged is feeble, his mind fails, his thoughts are nothing
worth. 1 Even when life is most prosperous a change may
quickly come, and no man's happiness can be estimated till
the day of his death. 2
Against this melancholy picture we have little to set on
the other side. There is a chorus of the Antigone in which
the inventive genius of man is celebrated. By the help of his
art he has made himself master of sea and land, of beast and
bird and fish. By this he has found out the secret of language
and reason and civic life ; the comforts of house and home and
remedies from disease. Yet these victories only remain to him
so long as he cherishes a righteous and pious mind; they
are lost to the daring and the impious. In the Trachiniae, the
women of Trachis comfort their mistress with the thought that
" heaviness endureth for a night, but joy cometh in the morn-
1 0. C. 1235 ff.
TT&VT t/J.wt<pVKe T(J) /J.ClKp({) "fflpq. KO.K<i,
vovs (ppoudos, l/ry' dxpe'a, <ppovrl5es Keval. Frag. 684.
* oil xpti TOT' eD irpaffffovTOS 6\[3iffa.i rv
dv5/xSs, irplv atiTif iravreXias tfSr) pios
5ifKwfp6.vdri Kal reXevrTjcrri /3t'<w. (?). Ibid. 572.
The sentiment is repeated in other words at the end of the Oedipus Tyrannus
and the Antigone.
D
ing." l But even in these words of comfort, joy and sorrow are
closely united, and the issue of the play shows how "ironically"
they are spoken, for in another sense, and with a deeper mean-
ing, there comes on Dejanira ^alpeiv re KCU o-repeaOai.
But the sadness of life is a theme as old as the lyric poets,
and equally old are the sorrows of age. Mimnermus has told
us what existence is worth when the joy of youth is gone ; the
sentiment that judgment cannot be passed on life till its close
is attributed to Solon ; it is the central thought in his famous
dialogue with Croesus, a dialogue which, if genuine, would have
to be placed about a century before the literary activity of
Sophocles. Moreover, to most of the sentiments about the
sadness of life here illustrated from Sophocles parallels could
be found in the History of Herodotus. They are the strongly
expressed maxims of the moral philosophy of that period. In
truth, the melancholy view here taken of human life is no
fancy of a poet sighing after an impossible happiness, or of a
diseased mind which finds the world out of joint. The Greek
was no doubt free from much that distresses and almost
paralyses the modern world. In him there was not that
struggle of inward and outward, of flesh and spirit, which
plays so large a part in modern ethical reflection. Yet in other
respects life pressed upon him far more heavily. Few were
the years in which the Greek was not at war for interests
more or less vital ; few the households in which there was not
one slain in battle. And even in peaceful times the race of
life was severe. The battle went to the strong. Here and
there we find passages which betray a certain tenderness to-
wards suffering and weakness, but these are exceptions to
the general rule. The Greek at his best was a fierce
partisan, who rejoiced in the calamities of his enemies.
At his worst he did not scruple to rob the weak and help-
less, the orphan and the widow, while relentless vengeance
on an enemy in an unguarded moment was exalted into a
moral duty. And when a man turned his eyes away from
himself, there was little to comfort him. The gods might
yu^i/ei yap otir' ai6\a
vv!; jSpOTOiffiv ovTe Kijpfs oCre irXoOros,
dXX' &<pap j3^3a.K. rtf 5' twtpxeTai, 'xo.Lpei.v re KO.I ffr^peadai. Tr. 131 ff.
ETHICS OF SOPHOCLES. 51
indeed be good and just; it was dangerous to speak evil of
them; but they were certainly jealous and exacting. Their
wrath was easily kindled, and no one could tell how their
anger would be shown. For there remained the inexplicable
mystery that evil overtook the good as well as the wicked, a
Nicias as well as an Alcibiades. Poets spoke of a future world
beyond the grave ; but did it really exist ? Or was it more
than a place of punishment? Even if all that Pindar said
were true, how could a life beyond the grave compensate for
misery in this life ? Thoughts such as these must have passed
through the minds of many Greeks in the time of the Pelopon-
nesian war ; so that Sophocles is true to nature in his picture
of the evils of human existence, and if we find him attempting
to explain them, he is explaining a fact and not a fiction.
The deepest note is touched in the passage already quoted
from the Antigone: "With wisdom was it declared of old,
that good often appears evil to one whose mind God is leading
to ruin." The passage occurs in the ode in which the chorus
dwell on the woes of the house of the Labdacids ; and nothing
can represent life under a more hopeless aspect than that
picture of a house stricken with a curse which penetrates from
generation to generation, till every member of the family is
Hestroyed. This hopeless ruin, though induced immediately
by frenzy and infatuation (\o<yoi; T avoia real (frpevwv 'Epivv<i),
is nevertheless part of the ordinance of Zeus " whom neither
age nor sleep can touch, who sits supreme throughout never-
ending time in the splendour of Olympus." Even the hopes
of mankind are but deceptions, leading them unawares to
destruction ; the heart of the doomed is blinded, so that good
is evil, and evil good, and few are the days that are not days
of sorrow (Trpda-crei 8' o\.lyt<TTOV xpovov e^ro? ara?).
This chorus is, no doubt, in designed contrast to that which
immediately precedes it in the play, and which tells us of the
power and inventiveness of man (cf. supra, p. 49). It raises
the question, "Is this unhappy condition of man whose
wisdom is so great -this angry temper of the gods, due to the
wickedness of man, or is it mere caprice on the part of
potentates desiring to keep within due bounds a rebellious
race, or is it a severe inexplicable destiny? The presence
52 THE THEOLOGY AND
of misery in the world is shown by abundant testimony. What
explanation can we give of it ? "
In part the misery of life is due to the foolishness and
pride of men. Pindar had spoken of arrj as the child of
vfipts, and Sophocles is penetrated with this feeling. A
rebellious spirit breaking the bounds imposed on humanity
(dvYjTos ov OvrjTa typovcov) will not go without punishment. It
is this which brings upon Ajax the punishment of Athena
(cf. supra, p. 44), and the goddess herself declares that this is
the lesson to be drawn from the picture of Ajax sitting among
the dead sheep and oxen. 1 In such a punishment the justice
of the gods is apparent. Ajax has sinned, and he suffers. But
even here the punishment, in its worst form, is not inevi-
table. For one day only will the wrath of Athena pursue
him. If for this day he can be saved, he will hereafter be
free. The frenzy will pass away, and with it the sense of
humiliation. Ajax will return to a better mind.
But the instances in which this close connection between
the fault and the punishment is apparent are few in Sophocles.
We may trace it, of course, in Clytemnestra, and, though the
case is widely different, in the Creon of the Antigone. But of
Antigone herself what can we say ? Is she to be placed beside
Ajax, or beside Creon? Is her death the punishment of a
rebellious spirit, or is she a martyr in the cause of sisterly
affection and the rights of the dead ? We must not answer
this question according to our own views and feelings ; we
must ask, What was the view and the meaning of Sophocles ?
As A. Bockh has seen, a strong case may be made out against
Antigone. She defies the civic authority ; she goes beyond the
limits imposed upon a woman. Her own sister Ismene
regards the deed which she contemplates as rash and un-
womanly. It is in fact impossible, and the mere attempt is
foolishness. 2 The chorus also, aged chiefs of the State, speak
with strong reprobation of Antigone's conduct. Her act is the
1 roiavTo. roivvv elffopCiv virtpKoirov
H-rjd^f TTOT' eiwrjs avrbs fis Oeoi/s TTOS. Aj. 127.
a.Tr&ppT)TOv 7r6Xet, 1. 44; v6/J.ov /3tg, 1. 59; fliq. iroXiruv, 1. 79; dfj.rjxd.viin>
s, 1. 90 ; foovs, 1. 99.
ETHICS OF SOPHOCLES. 53
rash deed of youth, prompted by folly and infatuation. 1 It is
an offence against justice; the work of defiant passion. 2
Bockh is also of opinion that unless it be assumed that
Antigone, no less than Creon, is guilty of rashness and re-
bellion, the play is deficient in unity. This view has been
examined elsewhere. It is enough to say here that the words
of Ismene and the chorus cannot be taken to be the judgment
of the poet, and that an action which involves a double cata-
strophe is not necessarily wanting in unity ; it may be the
manifestation of a single central idea. The leading idea of the
Antigone, is not merely that rebellion is a crime ; rebellion against
injustice, and such is Antigone's rebellion, can never be placed on
the same footing as the outrage of natural rights consecrated by
religion, in which lies the guilt of Creon. It is rather that the
laws of nature are not to be overridden by the law of the
State. That the assertion of this law involves both Antigone
and Creon in destruction does not in the least destroy the
unity of the drama.
But we may perhaps, from another point of view, ask : If
Antigone is in no way guilty, is not her death, in the language
of Aristotle, fiiapov, or shocking ? Does not the play decline
in this respect from the standard of the Poetics, 3 where we
learn that a character, to be tragic, must be good, but not
perfect ?
The explanation is, that men fall by their good qualities as
well as by their bad qualities ; and it is possible to be daring
and incautious in the cause of right no less than in the cause
of wrong. The afiapTia rt9, which Aristotle regards as a neces-
sary part of the tragic character, is not to be limited to moral
imperfection. It implies any flaw, however slight, of temper
or prudence. Such a flaw we may allow in Antigone without
detracting from her heroic character. She is hasty with her
1 ev d0po<riV>7 /ca0eX6i>res, 1. 383 ; \6yov T' &.VOLO. KOJ. <f>pfvwv 'Epicfa, 1. 603.
z Trpoj33.ff' fir' Hffxarov Opdffovs
v\f/vi\bv ^s At'/cas ftdOpov
Trpoffe'irtcres, & TKVOV, iro\v.
<rt 5' auT&yi'UTOs &\e<r' dpyd. Ant. 853 ff. 875.
8 Poetics, c. 13, 2.
54 THE THEOLOGY AND
sister, abrupt and resolute in her own determination, and con-
temptuous towards Creon. Her nature is by no means concilia-
tory ; on the contrary, it is made up of extremes, a passionate
tenderness and love alternating with no less passionate resolu-
tion. This intensity of nature is not to be put on a level with
moral guilt. Antigone is righteous in her transgression (ocrto.
Travovp^rja-aaa). Ismene and the chorus may stand apart
from her they have neither her vision for right nor her will
to do it, but the gods justify her actions, as does also the
popular voice of Thebes. In defending her conduct she speaks
the law of nature and God, though she breaks the ordinance of
a man who identifies the law of the State with his own will.
Her suicide is her own act ; it is a rash deed, and for it we
may gently blame her, pleading in her defence that she takes a
life already doomed, and hastens from a lingering death to be
at rest with those whom she loves.
In Antigone then we must admit that we have a case in
which the lower nature (Creon) and the lower law is allowed
to triumph over the higher one. The triumph is short-lived, it
is true, and the scale is quickly turned. But the victory of her
cause cannot restore Antigone to life ; she is beyond the reach
of earthly comfort ; she suffers, so far as we can see, without
offence and without compensation. The evil has prevailed
against the good, and this, if false to any supposed canons of
art, is true to human nature.
Let us turn now to the two dramas which deal with the fate
of Oedipus. Here again we ask : Is it not piapov that a character
so noble and exalted as Oedipus should be involved in unmerited
destruction ? For who can say that his sufferings are deserved ?
Throughout he defends himself as an unconscious actor in the
crimes which have brought him into the abyss of ruin. "I
was the victim in wickedness, the victim, be God my witness,
for nothing in it was my own deliberate act." 1 When in the
Oedipus at Colonus, the chorus would speak of his deeds, he cries :
" Deeds they were not; I did nothing; I accepted a gift, which
eyKov KO.KOTO.T . . .
eyKOf eKiliv /J.v, 6fbs tffru,
VTW 5' avdaiperov ovdtv, 0. C. 521.
ETHICS OF SOPHOCLES. 55
I would that I had never taken." 1 And again, in reference to
his incestuous connection with Jocasta, he declares, " She was
my mother, and we knew it not, and to her shame my mother
bore me children." 2 Indeed, the plea that the evil was uncon-
scious cannot be denied. There is nothing in the character of
Oedipus that can be brought forward as any sufficient reason
for his calamities. Headstrong, rash, and over-confident in
some respects he is, but once more we must not confuse weak-
ness of this kind with moral guilt. How different, for instance,
is Oedipus from Jocasta !
There still remain the instances of Philoctetes and Dejanira.
The question whether the years of agony endured by Philoctetes
in Lemnos are brought upon him in retribution of some crime
of his own, or whether he is to be regarded as wholly guilt-
less, has been much discussed. Hasselbach and others contend
at great length for the guilt of Philoctetes ; Hermann and
Schneidewin are in favour of his innocence. There can hardly
be any doubt that the latter are right. The passages most to
the point are these : In 1. 192 ff., when making reply to the
chorus, who express their sympathy with the loneliness and
misery of Philoctetes, Neoptolemus says : " By heaven's will,
if there be wisdom in ine, these sufferings came upon him from
the ruthless Chryse." 3 And he adds the reason for the suffer-
ing : Troy was not to be destroyed before the appointed time,
and the affliction of Philoctetes was the divinely-appointed
means for delaying the destruction. Again, in 1. 1326 ff., Neo-
ptolemus tells Philoctetes: "This affliction is sent upon thee
by a divinely-ordered chance, in that thou didst approach the
guardian of Chryse, the hidden serpent, who keeps watch and
d&pov, 5 /XTJTTOT' eyil) raXawipSios
a. -rroXeos ^eX^ffdai. 0. C. 539.
8 triKTf ydp /j.' triKTfv, &fiot fj.oi KCLK&V,
OVK et'56r' OVK fl5vla, KO.1 reKovffd fJ.e
avrrjs 6vei5os vaidas e^<pvffe poi. Ibid. 982 ff.
3 6fca yap, eiirep Kdytii ri eppovu,
KCU TO. TT a.6 '77 yuara neiva ?r/)6j avrbv
rijs v[j.6<f>poi'os Xpvff-rjs iirtprj. Phil. 192 ff.
56 THE THEOLOGY AND
ward in the open shrine." 1 These passages are as much
evidence as can be reasonably required to prove that there was
no intentional violation of the sanctuary of Chryse, whoever she
may have been, by Philoctetes. For the righteousness of his
dealings with his fellow-men w r e have evidence in a passage
where the chorus speak of him as one " who did no wrong to
any, nor defrauded him, a just man among the just." 2 Other
passages may no doubt be quoted, as, e.g. 1. 446 ff., in which
Philoctetes displays a certain vehemence against the gods ; but
this vehemence is induced by an experience of life in which the
evil has outstripped the good. If Philoctetes wonders that such
things as the triumph of Odysseus and the Atridae can happen
in a world governed by just gods, he is not alone in his wonder.
And with him such impatient thoughts are only on the surface.
He is not at heart sceptical of the justice of the gods ; he even
recognises it in his own case. 3
The misery which descends on Philoctetes is therefore due
to a dela rvxn- It serves a definite purpose in the economy of
the world, inasmuch as it delays the vengeance of the Greeks
upon Troy till the time appointed. 4 Dramatically, it serves
to bring out the character of Philoctetes in its strongest and
most sublime lines. It is therefore a fit object for a dramatic
poet to delineate, and Sophocles, as a rule, does not inquire into
the motive of a legend which he finds serviceable for dramatic
purposes. It is the more remarkable that in this instance he
has chosen to raise very clearly the further question of the
guilt or innocence of the sufferer.
Lastly, in the case of Dejanira there can be hardly any
question of guilt. Her action, perfectly innocent in itself,
except in so far as it may be called an experiment, is done
without the least suspicion of the results which flow from it,
1 ffi> yap voveis r6S' (LXyos tic Gfias TI/X*?*,
Xpijcrrjs irtXaffOds <f>v\a.Kos, 6s TOC a.Ka\v<f>T)
ffTjKov <f>v\dff<rfi Kpixpios oiKovpuv 6(pis. Phil. 1326 ff.
8 8s ofir' ?/)aj Tiv 1 oCrf vo<r<f>iffas,
dXX' foot ?i> -y' tcrois a.vT]p,
&\\v6' &6' ava^ius.Ibid. 684 ff.
Ibid. 1306. 4 Cf. Aesch. Ag. 365, 736.
ETHICS OF SOPHOCLES. 57
and for a motive which cannot be condemned. She sees the
beauty of lole, she knows the weakness of Heracles, and seeks
to keep for herself the first place in the affection of her husband.
We may accuse her of aftovKla want of prudence, but of
nothing more. Even Heracles, at first so furious and eager for
vengeance upon the wife that has destroyed him, and Hyllus
admit, in the end, her complete innocence. 1 The miserable end
of Heracles is one divinely appointed for him ; and Dejanira
was but the agent in carrying out the divine purpose. 2
In all these cases, from Antigone onwards, the calamity
which overtakes the actor in the Sophoclean drama is not to be
attributed to moral guilt. Rashness and want of circumspec-
tion there may be, but the punishment is out of proportion to
such weakness. It is hopeless to attempt to find in Sophocles
a poetical justice measuring out sorrow and joy to every one
according to his deeds ; and such " poetical " justice would be
unworthy of so great a poet, because it is out of harmony with
the facts of human life.
Yet the gods are just, of this Sophocles has not a doubt.
And so once more the question presents itself, How are we
to account for the calamities which overtake the noble and
high-hearted among men ? What is the meaning of the suffer-
ing inflicted upon them ?
Can we fall back on the idea of an inherited curse ? In
Aeschylus this conception runs through a large part of his
theology, and is brought forward very strongly in the Seven
against Thebes and the Agamemnon. The Erinyes will not
leave the accursed house of the Atreidae, but remain there from
generation to generation till the last blow of divine vengeance
is struck. But in Sophocles this conception plays a far less
important part, though there are clear traces of it. In the
chorus already quoted more than once from the Antigone we
find it stated that when "a house is shaken from heaven,
1 K&V ffov ffrpa<f>fli] 0v/j.6s, el rb TTO.V /adflois . . .
jflfjiapre xpTjord. fj.w/j.^vij. Tr. 1134 ff.
1 ffj-ol yap J]v irp6<pavTov (K Trarpbt TrdXeu,
Trpis rCiv irvebvruv fj.-rjSfvbs Oaveiv Giro,
d\\' &mj"At5ov tydipevos oiKrfrup ire'Xoi. Ibid. 1159 ff.
58 THE THEOLOGY AND
calamity never leaves it ; it advances upon the whole race ;
and one generation frees not another : a god dashes them
to earth and there is no release," x In the Electro, we find the
evils of the house of the Pelopidae traced back to the murder
of Myrtilus by Pelops. 2 Oedipus, in looking back on the misery
of his life, can only account for it by saying, " Such was the
will of the gods ; perhaps they cherished some anger of old
against my race." 3
Of these passages those taken from the Antigone and the
Electro, occur in the songs of the chorus, where the poet is
perhaps expressing the popular view of such miseries as those
of the Labdacids and Pelopids. The language of Oedipus
hardly amounts to more than a conjecture : " It may have been
some guilt of my father's which caused my woe; it was certainly
not any guilt of my own." In the case of Philoctetes and
Dejanira there is not the slightest allusion to anything of the
kind. They do not suffer for their own sins nor for the sins
of their fathers. Nor again is there in the play of Oedipus
Tyrannus an allusion to anything of the kind. In truth the
notion of an inherited curse, if held in its naked strength, is
calculated to limit the freedom of the individual so much as
to make a drama of character nearly impossible. But the
drama of Sophocles is a drama of character.
The mystery of suffering has not been cleared up yet, and
Sophocles may well have found it an almost insuperable
difficulty. His conception, so far as we can gather it from the
fate of Oedipus, Antigone, Philoctetes, and Dejanira, would seem
to be that suffering is part of the appointed order of the world,
alternating, at the best, with happiness, as night with day. But
to him suffering is not altogether an evil. It may further the
purposes of divine wisdom, as in Philoctetes ; it may develop,
1 aits yap av ffeurGy 6e6dev 56/x.os, &TTJS
ov5v ^XXetTret yeveas enl Tr\fj6os 'eptrov . . .
ovd' aTra\\d<Tffii yeveav yevos, dXX' tpetirct
Oe&v rts, ovd' %x ei ^vffu'- Ant. 584 ff.
2 Si n^XoTros a irpocrdev
ird\inrovos iTrireta,
wx fyioXes alavj) rq.5e yq., K.T.\. El. 504 ff.
0eo?s yap rjv ourw (f>i\ov,
rdx' & v TI fj.rjviovinv ej -y&oj TrdXat. 0. C. 964.
ETHICS OF SOPHOCLES. 59
deepen, and enlarge a character, as in Philoctetes or Oedipus ; it
may establish a higher law, as in Antigone. This is the end of
suffering in its highest aspect ; but Sophocles does not exclude
the fact that there are accidents in life such as that which
caused the supposed death of Orestes, though even these
accidents, as we see from the case of Philoctetes, who suffers
ere 6eia$ TV^TJ^, are often divinely sent and of high importance
in life. There are, besides, the rash acts of men in moments
of excitement, the sins of vfipis, and the suffering caused by
deliberate wickedness extends to those who are in no way
guilty. But the truth which underlies these facts of human
nature is that the moral order of the world does not of necessity
mean the happiness of all men. From some it may demand
endurance and sacrifice, and he that loses his life shall find it.
Yet two questions still remain :
1. Is there no compensation for the suffering which falls
upon the guiltless, as part of the divine government of the
world ?
2. Do the gods intentionally bring calamity upon men in
order to accomplish certain ends ? or, to put the question more
plainly, Do the gods deceive men to their ruin ?
In the Philoctetes a definite recompense is made to the
wounded hero. Troy cannot be taken without him. Heracles,
the type of triumphant endurance, is sent to announce to him
the divine will. Heracles has won immortality by labour and
endurance, and Philoctetes has a similar lot. 1 Philoctetes will
be deemed the foremost warrior at Troy (1. 1425). He will slay
Paris, the arch-enemy, sack Troy, and return home to the
plain of Oeta with the prize of valour. Aesculapius will
be sent to cure his wound. He is not left without his reward ;
it comes to him in full measure, and it comes to him before his
death.
Oedipus again is greater in his death than in his life. His
position as king of Thebes is only apparently majestic ; the
true majesty is seen when the Eumenides permit him to enter
their holy place, when Theseus gives him welcome, when Thebes
strives in vain to recover possession of his body, when Poly-
1 /cat crol, ffd(f>' ladi, TOUT' 6(f>fi\eTai iraBelv,
IK TUIV KaKuv -rCivS 1 evK\ea 6{<rdai {Hov. Phil. 1421.
60 THE THEOLOGY AND
nices prays for his help in the attempt to regain his throne,
and, above all, when the divine voice summons him to his last
resting-place ; and he is allowed to pass away from life in a
mysterious manner, taken, as it were, to his rest without the
trial of death. His tomb becomes a holy place, bringing pro-
sperity to those who possess it. The life of suffering has its
reward in the final triumph of him who endured nobly.
Moreover, as has been pointed out by Dronke, calamity when
undeserved is represented by Sophocles as having no power
against the inward conviction of rectitude. " Thou wilt keep
him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee." These
words of the greatest of Hebrew prophets, uttered at a time
when ruin was impending on his nation, denote the peace
which Israel may yet gain by trusting in Jehovah. No Greek
could have uttered them, for no Greek was ever so deeply
penetrated with the love of the Deity for the nation. But
what Isaiah extends to the nation Sophocles can say of the
individual. The peace of the spirit which rests on the highest
and holiest deities is not easily disturbed. Secure in that
repose, it can rise above the distress of unconscious errors and
involuntary crimes. If Creon accuses Oedipus, the accusations
only serve to reveal his own baseness. He is not worthy to
tread the soil of Attica, but Oedipus may recline in the hallowed
shrine of the Eumenides.
But Antigone : In her case there is no final triumph. The
consolation offered by the chorus, that her death is glorious,
exempt from disease and bloodshed, is rightly rejected by her
as no equivalent for the brightness and hope of life. There is
no compensation for Antigone in this life, and what does
Sophocles tell us of the next ?
Even when she is brought face to face with death, and the
" pity of it " becomes more deeply felt, Antigone speaks with
cheerful hope of that other world in which she will join her
friends : " When I come there, such is the hope I cherish, I
shall find love with my father, love with my mother, and love
with thee, my brother." l The life which will be hers then will
v TJ^ftV TTCLTp,
fj.Tjrep, (f>l\r) 5 crol, KaffiyvyTov Kapa. Ant. 897
ETHICS OF SOPHOCLES. 6r
be far longer than the life of this world. 1 And in that future
life there will be no misapprehensions and mistakes. " Justice
has her home with the gods below." ''
Hence for the righteous there is a good hope in death, and
the life to come is a real existence in which the broken ties of
this world will be united, never to be severed again. Heracles
is now an immortal being abiding in heaven. 3 Electra speaks
of her father's spirit as alive (El. 459), and Clytenmestra will
live in the under-world (El. 437). By thus conveying the
mind to another life, Sophocles in some measure softens the
weight of injustice and misery in this. Antigone, in the con-
sciousness that her act is accepted before the higher powers
" in those pure eyes and perfect witness of all-judging Jove,"
is content to undergo the sentence which man pronounces
upon her. And her death achieves the victory which her life
could not have achieved. Not only is her brother buried, but
the ordinance of burial is established by higher and holier laws.
We see then that in a certain sense compensation comes to
those who suffer innocently such compensation as a noble
spirit would seek to gain. But there are passages which seem
to intimate that God leads a man to ruin. And if this be so,
how can we any longer speak of the justice and truth of God ?
In Antigone, 1. 623, the passage so often quoted, we are plainly
told " that evil seems good to a man whom God is leading to
ruin " (p. 48). This is the reflection of the chorus on the house
of Labdacus, and it probably reproduces with accuracy the
ordinary Greek conception. Many a man looking back on
actions done in moments of passion or excitement can hardly
give any other account of them than that he was not himself
when he did them. So Helen excuses her weakness arrj fie
Traprjjaye, and in a religion where dualism was unknown, this
deception or bewitchment is naturally referred to the gods.
But if the chorus mean this sentiment to apply to Antigone in
the sense that she has confounded good and evil in her act of
self-devotion, neither Sophocles nor we can agree. In the life
tirel ir\eiuv -xpbvos
&v Set /j.' aptaKeiv TOLS Karw r(av ev6A8f. Ant. 74.
* r) fftivoiKO'i rCiv K&TU deuv ALKIJ. Ibid. 451.
3 aOdvarov a-perty lffx ov t us irdpecrd' opav. Phil. 1420.
62 THE THEOLOGY AND
of Oedipus we have indeed evil seeming good. His success at
Thebes in destroying the Sphinx and gaining the hand of
Jocasta is an instance of the way in which evil may seem good ;
but it is the shortsightedness of man rather than the decep-
tion of God which brings him to ruin. Oedipus, who has been
forewarned of his destiny, acts ov& opwv ovd' icn-opwv in the death
of Laius and the marriage of Jocasta. In the case of Dejanira
we may also observe a similar want of caution. The suffering
in either case is not a thing apart from the aj3ov\ia of the
sufferer. The deception of God is not to be charged with that
which is due to the blindness of man. If man were all-wise,
and could in every act proceed with perfect knowledge, he
would be saved from much, if not all, the suffering which comes
upon him ; being imperfect, he must accept the suffering which
comes from ignorance as well as that which comes from crime
and its punishment.
Still it is possible to ask Is this divine order of the world,
which entails suffering on men, more than mere destiny ? Can
we deny, in spite of the lofty tone of many passages, that in
Sophocles man is the slave of a relentless destiny whose will
he is powerless to resist or escape ?
It is often assumed that the tragedy of the Greeks, especially
in the hands of Aeschylus and Sophocles, is no more than a
tragedy of destiny. That is, it exhibits man not as suffering in
consequence of his own misdeeds, or as the slave of his own
passions, but as the sport of destiny doomed at birth to a
certain pre-ordained fate, which he strives in vain to resist.
Every man has his fwlpa, and the interest of the tragic situa-
tion lies in showing how this ftolpa is fulfilled. Often this
fjbolpa is announced in an oracle, often it is not known till the
end of life, but, known or unknown, it is inevitable and uncon-
trollable by the will of man. Even those who do not find this
" destiny " in the work of Sophocles regard it as the ground-
work of the tragedy of Aeschylus.
If destiny, as something apart from and superior to the will
of the gods, plays such an important part in Greek tragedy, it
is remarkable that Aristotle should have no allusion to it in his
Poetics. It is more than remarkable, it is impossible that if
he entertained such a view of destiny he should have written
ETHICS Of SOPHOCLES. 63
the description of the " tragic " character in the thirteenth
chapter of that work. For with Aristotle the truly tragic
character is not, as we might expect, a good man struggling
with an evil destiny, but a good man failing St' afj.aprlav
rivd. The tragic character is not tcrcs ct rotundus, a perfect
sphere on whose smooth surface no speck can be found,
but a character with faults, and yet suffering beyond the
desert of the faults. Such a character implies freedom of
will, which on the hypothesis of an overruling destiny is
annihilated. And therefore in any severe system of fatalism
tragedy becomes impossible. There must be room for the
individual choice, for the individual development of character,
or the " tragic " element becomes " shocking " (p,iapov). There
is no relation between a man's moral guilt and his actions,
without which a drama is impossible. Hence Aeschylus, in
whom, if anywhere, we may look for the idea of destiny, is
nevertheless at pains to show that the actions of men are free.
It is open to Eteocles to go forth to meet his brother Polynices,
or to remain. He declares that he must go, that it is the
curse of his father which is driving him along a fatal path.
But the chorus plead against his resolution, though they plead
in vain. In the same way it is open to Agamemnon, if he will,
to return home from Aulis, and save his daughter from sacrifice.
But he will not return TTCO? \i7rovavs yevcopat, ; and thus both
Eteocles and Agamemnon place themselves within the reach
of the curse of their house. In Sophocles, Antigone urges
Polynices not to pursue his march to Thebes, but to save him-
self from the curse of Oedipus by returning to Argos. But
Polynices, like Agamemnon in Aeschylus, cannot be false to
his army. He goes on his way, though he is going to certain
destruction. The principle which urges these heroes to their
doom is not unlike that false sense of honour which has pre-
vailed in modern times. It is not destiny.
Again: Such an idea of destiny as that described is impossible
when the gods have been recognised as omnipotent and just.
So long as there is a question about the justice of the reign of
Zeus, the " triple Moerae and mindful Erinyes " may have power
against him, but this power is gone when Zeus is himself the
centre and source of justice. An unjust destiny is at variance
64 THE THEOLOGY AND
with the will of the Almighty ; a just destiny is merely the ex-
pression of his will : in no case is there room for destiny outside
and above the deity. There is therefore no destiny apart from
the will of God. By obedience to that will man may escape
from evil, by opposing it he may bring evil on himself and
on his descendants. Labdacus consciously opposed the will of
heaven ; Oedipus, when informed of the evil in store, does the
very actions which he should most have avoided. In the case of
Antigone there is no question of destiny at all. She acts of her
own will, in defiance of an authority which has the power to
punish by death. Dejanira dies by her own hand, in consequence
of her own act. Her conduct may have been a part of an order
of things which the gods foreknew, but there was no irresistible
destiny compelling her to act as she did. She acts from
human motives ; she takes human counsel, and her act is a
mistake. Philoctetes suffers eic Oeias TV^T)?, by an accident, as
it were, which serves the purposes of heaven. Whether he could
have escaped his accident or not it is useless to inquire, for
the drama of Sophocles is founded on the fact that he did not
escape it. He has his reward, and his suffering is not due to
a blind destiny, but to the conscious purpose of the gods.
Aeschylus and Sophocles are not religious teachers as the
Hebrew prophets and St. Paul are religious teachers. They are
not conscious of a divine mission, or carried out of themselves in
an ecstasy of faith and love. They are poets, desiring to give to
a nation the pleasure which poetry can give. But the greatness
of the themes on which they wrote, and of the times in which
they lived, brought them into close contact with the truths
and difficulties underlying all faith and morality. These
they did not pass over, or treat in any merely formal manner. To
them, therefore, and to Plato, we must look for the best that the
Western world can tell us on the nature of God, on the relation
of the divine and the human. In the popular Hellenic view, all
the calamities of men were either the result of crime in the
individual, or some ancestor of the individual, or they were the
work of a capricious power known as " destiny." This popular
conception Aeschylus strove to elevate and refine. He elimi-
nated the caprice of destiny as irreconcilable with the justice
of the divine nature, and sought, in every case, to connect the
ETHICS OF SOPHOCLES. 65
calamity of the sufferer with some deliberate act of wrong-
doing : " Sin and sorrow, the old, old story." l In this severe
conception the justice of God is, if we may use the expression,
saved at the expense of facts. The popular view is right in
maintaining that the guiltless do suffer : yet how can destiny
be anything but the will of God ? and how can the will of God be
anything but just ? Here Sophocles takes up the problem. He
accepts the mysterious fact that the guiltless do suffer, but seeks
to explain it by taking a higher view of the nature of such
suffering. For him the calamities of the guiltless are part of
human life as a whole, not punishments dealt out to indi-
viduals. They are often necessary to the development of char-
acter ; without them we should know nothing of the strength
and majesty of Oedipus or Philoctetes. They assist in the
general purposes of humanity ; and thus at times, as in the case
of Antigone, suffering comes near to the modern conception of
self-sacrifice. They help to bring before us the true nature
of life, and separate the accidental from the real. It is not
prosperity and success, it is often failure and endurance, which
become the most effective and truly real factors in the advance-
ment of mankind. Hence it is only a superficial judgment that
can ascribe to the injustice of the gods or the caprice of destiny
the evil which overtakes the good. In part, no doubt, that evil
is the result of some want of foresight, which, though not
morally culpable, is yet sufficient to bring calamity upon a man,
or even on a race. In part it arises from the imperfection of a
world in which justice and power are not always in the same
hands. It may also arise from the wise purposes of the gods,
" whom no weak pity moves " to regard the happiness of one
man more than the elevation of all, more than the illustration
of some great moral truth. In any case, it must not be taken
alone ; it must always be considered in reference to the whole,
just as in human life isolation is impossible. Calamity, again,
is a wholesome check on the conceit of knowledge and power.
To the Greek prosperity was a snare ; it tended to raise him
above the appointed limit, and kindle ambitions which brought
about their own overthrow. Even in the ordinary course of life
dpd.aa.vTi vaOelv rpiytpwv fj.v8os rdSe
66 THE THEOLOGY AND ETHICS OF SOPHOCLES.
it was difficult to know the bounds of human nature and " think
human thoughts." To live entirely free from danger in this
respect would require perfect wisdom, the knowledge what to do
and what to leave undone in every circumstance, every moment
of life. Such knowledge is not attainable by men ; it is divine ;
and only by submission to the divine power may we hope to
gain something of it. For the gods are accessible by oracles,
and declare their will to men, darkly indeed, but yet in tones
which a simple heart may understand. Finally, when calamity
has been thus separated from guilt so Sophocles seems to
teach us, and the lesson is the more striking in a nation so
excessive in its regard for prosperity and its dread of misfor-
tune as the Greeks it loses half its terrors. It has still an
outward power in so far as it may bring poverty and distress ;
it may mar the body and make life heavy to be borne, but
it has no inward power against the mind. Vain is the
remembrance of his past agony, vain the prospect of help-
less distress to subdue the mighty heart of Philoctetes in his
lonely island ; vain are all promises of glory and dominion to
move the spirit of the outcast Oedipus. Each is the guiltless
victim of a grievous calamity, and the inward consciousness
of innocence makes the outward suffering of less moment. In
the end the reward of patience, endurance, and submission
comes, either in this world or the next. The lowly is exalted,
the rejected is victorious. The undertone of divine vengeance
running through the dramas of Aeschylus seems in Sophocles
to pass away into an echo of divine compassion, and we move
from the gloom of " sin and sorrow " towards the dawning of a
brighter day in which strength is made perfect in weakness.
E. A.
THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO.
SOME apology may seem to be due for printing an Essay
upon a subject so well worn as the Platonic conception of
Education, the more so as I have no new discoveries to detail
and no new theories to advance. But it seems true that
Greek thought is in a sense ever young ; that while its lessons
are always being learnt, they are always being forgotten and
misunderstood ; and that though much has been done for its
interpretation, and the study of it has established itself in the
curriculum of our schools and Universities, we are still in many
respects only at the threshold, and often see it through a veil of
conventional platitudes, pretentious antiquarianism, or senti-
mental finery. All that I have here attempted is to draw
renewed attention to some of the salient and familiar points in
a subject which concerns us all, and to suggest reflection upon
our own corresponding theory and practice.
The subject of Education is treated by Plato in the
Republic as an integral and vital part of the wider subject
of the wellbeing of human society, and it is scarcely possible
to give an intelligent account of his treatment without first
indicating the scope and plan of the work as a whole. The
Republic opens by asking the question, What is the nature of
justice ? and the first four books of it pursue the answer to this
question without any serious deviation. The real bearing of
the question is but poorly represented to us in its English
dress ; it would be better expressed, if (following the sugges-
tion of Plato himself 1 ) we substituted for it the question, How
1 1. 344 e ; 352 d.
68 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
are men to order their lives so as to live best ? which naturally
involves the further question, What is to live well ? Various
representative answers to these questions are first propounded
and examined ; the personal experience of the good old man of
the good old time, the half-understood maxims of the educated
man of the world, the sounding formulas of the unscrupulous
and cynical rhetorician, all these are passed in review, and
found to be inadequate, ill-considered, or self-destructive. Then
the voice of society or its leaders is listened to ; current theories
of the origin of law and morality, which resolve the one into
arbitrary convention and the other into a calculation of rewards
and punishments, or a system of indulgences, are exhibited in
their most naked form ; until at last we seem to be left with
the whole of popular opinion and experience arrayed upon the
side of what is called injustice, and upon the other side nothing
but a bare conviction, to which the moral sense of man still
clings, though unable to justify itself for doing so.
Such a justification Socrates is now called upon to give.
We Jiave had enough of verbal discussions x in which every-
thing seems to depend upon the sense in which the particular
disputant takes the particular word in dispute; nor can we
rest satisfied with theories which reduce morality to its material
consequences, whether in this world or the next. If justice
and injustice, right and wrong, are not merely the same thing
viewed from different sides, but express real and radical dis-
tinctions, they must admit of being exhibited " as they are in
themselves," that is, not in their current equivalents of wealth,
success, popularity, and the reverse, but as forces working for
good or ill in the very soul of man. 2 With the demand for
such an exhibition, the inquiry passes from the domain of
verbal definition and popular opinion to that of psychology, and
the question, How are we to order our lives for the best ?
becomes the question, What is the nature of the living prin-
ciple 3 within us which Plato calls the soul ? Though, however,
this is the real import of the transition now made in the
dialogue, it is made in a form which would be little expected
1 '2. 367 b, /J.r] ot'v ijfjuv JMVOV evdei^r) TU \&yy, K.T.\.
3 2. 360 e ; 367 b and d ; 358 b.
3 Cf. 4. 445 a, O.VTOV TOUTOV < fu>/j,fi>.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 69
by a modern student of moral psychology. Instead of meet-
ing the new requirement by analysing the human soul, Plato
proceeds to analyse human society. The reason for this is
to be found in his conviction that in society (to interpret his
own familiar simile x ) we see man " writ large ; " in other
words, that in the broad outlines of the state, with its classes,
its trade and industry, its military and political institutions,
the secret and subtle elements of human nature come to the
surface, take visible shape, and are unmistakably legible to the
observer. If then we would study human life successfully, we
must begin from the outside and work inwards ; we must take
the obvious facts and principles without which society would
not go on, and ask, what they mean, of what inner facts and
principles are they the exponents ? And in order to do this,
we must have a method. It will not do to take society at any
chance point on its surface and probe it there ; we must begin
at the beginning, we must look at it "in its growth." 2 Not,
however, in its historical, but in its logical and psychological
"growth;" for this seems to be the explanation of the picture
which Plato gives of " the genesis of the State." He has begun
with what he considered the lowest stratum of life, at the point
where it is most nearly the mere keeping life alive, the mere
satisfaction of necessary wants ; to this rudimentary basis he
has gradually added the higher factors of human nature, with
their accompanying needs ; and throughout the structure, alike
in its lower and its higher ranges, he has shown us the same
principle of efficiency and well-being, a principle writ large on
the face of society, 3 but to be ultimately traced back to its
analogue in the constitution of the human soul itself. That
principle, to which he gives the name of justice, may be briefly
1 2. 368 d. 2 2. 369 a, yiyvo^vijv iro\iv.
8 Cf. 4. 443 b-c, where it is stated that the principle of the division of
labour in trade and industry was a sort of "initial outline " (apx-riv Te Ka ^
Tijirov riva) of justice, the first suggestion and rudimentary form of it, and
further, that this principle was really only " an image " (ttSu\6v rt) of justice,
the truth being that justice is not merely concerned with ' ' the external doing
one's own work," but with " the inward doing of what is in very truth one's
own ; " so the harmonious working of the soul within itself is the really
essential condition of which external organisation is merely the " image " or
outward expression.
7 o THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TWN
explained as follows : Every man has wants, of which he can-
not get rid, but which he cannot himself satisfy. 1 They are as
various as the want of food and clothes, the want of protection
from external violence, the want of assistance against his own
lower nature; but whatever their character, they make him
individually insufficient for himself. On the other hand, while
all men need others, all men are, or may be, needed by others ;
the same limitation which forces the individual into society
also makes him a useful member of it; for the diversity of
individual character is not a mere diversity of atoms, but has
in it the capability of organisation, or, in other words, of form-
ing a whole. These primary facts suggest, as the true principle
of human life, that each social element should do that which it
is most fitted to do, thus contributing to the common stock the
best that it has to give, and receiving from each other element
that of which it is itself most in need. The more society is so
ordered that this twofold principle of division and association
of work is carried out, the more nearly will it approach its
most natural and most perfect form. The main part of the first
section of the Republic, from the middle of the second to the
end of the fourth book, is occupied with the sketch of a society
as it might be conceived to be if this principle of harmonious
co-operation were realised, and it is as an element in its reali-
sation that what may be called the first system of education is
developed.
Before considering that system in its details, it will be well
to see what was Plato's conception of education in general, for
by it his whole treatment of the subject is in a great measure
determined. We know in our own time what a difference it
may make in the spirit and working of an educational method,
whether the idea with which it starts is that of culture, or of
training, or of useful accomplishment. Plato's idea of the
essence of education is most simply and comprehensively
1 The " insufficiency " of the individual is first illustrated from the most
obvious sphere, that of the necessary wants (2. 369 c ff.); but it holds
good in higher spheres too ; cf. 9. 590 d-e (the divine reason which it is
good for a man to be governed by, if he has not got it in himself, is supplied to
him from outside). Similarly the industrial principle of association is applied
to the relation of the philosophers to the society of which they are members
(7. 519 e 520 a).
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 71
expressed in the word "nurture." 1 To him the human soul
is emphatically and before all else something living, something
which in the strict sense we can neither create nor destroy,
but which we can feed or starve, nourish or poison. As in
the case of other living things, of plants and animals, 2 the
stronger and better the nature of the soul, the more important
is it what nourishment it gets, and a gifted soul in a corrupt
society is like a good seed sown in a strange soil; it grows
crooked and unlike itself, loses its proper virtue, and sinks at
last to the level of its surroundings. And in another famous
passage, 3 to which we shall have to refer more than once, the
young citizen who is being educated is compared to an animal
at pasture ; from the things which he sees and hears about him
he assimilates, little by little, the good or the evil which they
embody, till " many a little makes a mickle," which becomes
part and parcel of himself. It is this feeling of the assimilative
power of the soul which leads Plato to attach such immense
importance to the circumstances and environment of life, and
makes him on the whole more disposed to attribute moral evil
to bad nurture than to inherent vice. Amongst the various
elements which make up the complex creature man, he con-
ceives that there are few which are not open to good influence.
Of what are usually called the lower desires there are indeed
some that are radically " wild," 4 and with these there is only
one course possible, to stop their growth ; but the others admit
of being " tamed," and made to take service under the higher
self. And thus it is with a sort of compassion that Plato 5
looks upon some of the great criminals of the world, who in
his eyes had the capability of being its greatest benefactors,
and owe their failure to its corruption or neglect. Against the
all-powerful influence of society, 6 he thinks that no private
teaching can hold its ground. It is not the so-called en-
lightened leaders of public opinion, the sophists of the day,
who really teach and demoralise the youth ; 7 the real educator
1 Cf., for the use of rpo<J>ri or cognate terms, 3. 401 b, e ; 402 a ; 403 c ;
412 b ; 4. 424 a ; 6. 491 d-e ; and Phaedrus, 247 e ff., where the metaphor
is enlarged upon.
3 6. 497 b ; 491 d 492 a. s 3. 401 c-d. 4 9. 589 b ; 591 b.
5 6. 491 e. 6 6. 492 c-e. 7 6. 492 a-b.
7 2 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
and the real sophist is public opinion itself, whose voice,
resounding in the assembly and the law-courts, in the theatre
and the camp, is practically irresistible by the isolated efforts
of individuals. Such a power for evil can only be counter-
acted by creating a power for good as penetrating, as uncon-
scious, and as universal, and to do this is the true function of
a public system of education. On the other hand, while the
inherent vitality of the soul makes the question of its nourish-
ment all-important, it also precludes a merely mechanical treat-
ment of it. We can place it in a healthy atmosphere, but we
cannot compel it to assimilate only the healthy elements.
The " eye of the soul " l is not, as some " professors of education"
seem to think, a blind eye into which knowledge can be put ;
its power of vision can neither be originally produced by edu-
cation, nor entirely destroyed by the want of it ; it can only be
" turned to the light," for which it has an intrinsic capacity.
And the same holds good of the lower extremity of human
nature ; as in the " wild " and unteachable element there is a
power of growth which can only be dealt with by being re-
pressed, so among men there are found moral "incurables,"
for whom society has no course but to put them out of the
way. 2
The very simplicity of these ideas, as in the case of some
others of Plato, is apt to conceal their importance. Everybody
admits in theory that the human self is a living being, requir-
ing a certain environment in order to grow properly, and
capable of growing improperly in an immense variety of ways.
But it is mainly in dealing with the material circumstances of
life that the truth of the principle is practically realised, because
there the consequences of its neglect are palpable : when we
have to do with the mental atmosphere we are liable to forget
it. Then again, the greater specialisation of modern life makes
it difficult for us to keep our hold on universal elementary
truths, which to the Greeks seemed neither old nor simple.
Modern education inevitably divides itself under many heads
it is primary or higher, technical or liberal, scientific or reli-
gious ; the distinctions are real and cannot be ignored ; but in
1 7. 518 b-c. 2 3. 410 a ; cf. 10. 613 e.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 73
the controversies to which they sometimes give rise it is well,
just because it is hard, to remember, that the ultimate subject
of all education is a living organism, whose vital power, though
divisible in thought, is really one and undivided ; that its
vital wants are equally such, whether they be for fresh air, for
useful knowledge, or for religious truth ; and that it will starve
or degenerate in mind if its natural mental nourishment be
denied it, as surely as it will in body if its bodily wants be
neglected.
Such being Plato's general conception of the nature of
education, we may expect that any system of education which
he propounds will be a system for providing proper nurture to
the growing soul, or for adjusting its surroundings to its higher
needs. It is also clear that the particular character of the
system for attaining these ends must be determined by the
conception of the human nature which has to be fed, and the
needs to which its circumstances have to be adjusted. And
thus, in order to understand Plato's theory of education, we
must understand his psychology.
In giving some account of the psychology of the Republic,
we shall have to notice that, while the ground-plan of the
account of the soul remains on the whole the same, the position
assigned to its various elements changes considerably in different
parts of the work ; and these changes are necessarily accompanied
by changes in the view taken of education. We will begin with
the psychology of the first section of the work, only combining
that of later sections where it seems to be in substantial agree-
ment. From this we gather that Plato regarded the human
soul as a complex whole, consisting of three " forms," " kinds,"
or "parts," 1 as he variously calls them. The first of these,
beginning at the lower end in the scale of worth, is vrnQvpla
or " appetite." Plato 2 was aware that in what he called the
"appetitive " form of the soul he was dealing with something
too various to be easily described by a single name. He seems
to have chosen the name in question because the bodily appe-
tites, to which it was most commonly appropriated, are, from
1 elSos, 4. 435 c ; 439 e, etc. ; ytvos, 4. 441 c ; 443. d ; jutyoj, 4. 442 b.
2 9. 5SO d-e.
74 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
their intensity, the most obvious and conspicuous instances of
their class. He has, however, another name, suggested, not by
the degree of intensity of the activity, but by what seemed to
him its most typical object; 1 " because wealth is the principal
instrument by which the bodily appetites are satisfied, we call
this element of the soul the wealth -loving or gain-loving ele-
ment." This close association of things sometimes supposed to
be so far apart as sensuality and avarice, 2 is very characteristic
of Plato ; and we shall see later on by what facts he illustrates
it. For the present it is enough to observe that, though Plato
by no means confines the word translated " appetite " to the
above-mentioned instances, 3 yet when he speaks of the " appe-
titive " as a specific form or part of the soul, he intends primarily
those desires of which bodily satisfaction and wealth are the
typical objects. Of such appetites he distinguishes in a later
book two kinds, " necessary " and " unnecessary." 4 Necessary
appetites are those which we cannot get rid of, or those of which
the satisfaction does us good ; unnecessary are those which are
superfluous or harmful. In these latter, 5 again, there is a sub-
division into those which, though in themselves unproductive
and wasteful to the organism, are yet capable of regulation, and
those which are incurably " wild," " bestial," " lawless," which
make themselves felt, even in the best men, when reason is in
abeyance, but which, unless repressed or reduced to a minimum,
bring ruin into life. These distinctions are graphically repro-
duced in a somewhat generalised form in one of the allegorical
figures under which Plato represents his conception of human
nature. He asks us to imagine a being having the outward
semblance of a man, 6 but combining within three creatures, a
man, a lion, and " a beast with many heads, heads of beasts tame
and wild, and able to breed and change them at its will." Of
the first two there will be more to say presently ; in the third
we readily recognise the psychological element of appetite in
the sense just described. The hydra-like creature has in it an
inherent capacity of growth and reproduction ; some of its off-
1 9. 580 e 581 a. 2 3. 390 b 391 c ; 4. 442 a ; 8. 548 a-b.
8 Cf. e.g. 5. 475 b; 9. 5SO d. 4 8. 558 d ff.
6 9. 571 b ff. 9. 588 b ff.
AV THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 75
spring can be "tamed " and " domesticated," 1 and made service-
able to life ; others are radicably untameable, the inorganic,
inhuman, " unnecessary," and possibly destructive, appendage
of our nature, which, while it can never entirely divest itself of
its humanity, touches God at one extremity and the beast at
the other.
Though Plato represents appetite as the element which
occupies the largest space in the soul, 2 and though the men who
live for appetite more than for any other part of themselves
are, in his view, the majority of mankind, we shall not expect
it to occupy the chief share of attention in his system of educa-
tion. The degree of education of which the appetites are
capable is expressed by his own word "taming," 3 and by this
he seems to mean such a regulation of them as shall prevent
them from interfering with the higher psychical activities, and
train them to contribute to the good of the whole soul that
basis of healthy physical life which is the necessary ground-
work of those activities.
The second element in the Platonic analysis of the soul
is not quite so easily described or understood. The Greek
words Ovfjio^ rb dv/jioei&es, by which it is designated, are com-
monly translated " spirit," and though this term covers only a
part of their meaning in the Republic, it will serve as well as
any other in the absence of a real equivalent. " Spirit " is
first introduced as being the indispensable foundation of cour-
age, 4 that element of hardihood and intrepidity which is common
to men with dogs and horses, and which makes them " never
say die ; " at the same time it is represented as the source of
pugnacity and aggressiveness, with their possible developments
into ferocity and cruelty. It is only another form of the same
view, when " spirit " is said to be that part of the soul which
is peculiarly fostered and stimulated by athletic exercises ; 5 it is
the " hard" element in human nature, which, if rightly nurtured,
becomes true bravery, but if exclusively encouraged degenerates
into blind brutality, surliness, quarrelsomeness, or self-will. In
1 9. 589 b, necuretuv. 2 4. 442 a ; 9. 588 d ; 4. 431 c.
8 Cf. 4. 442 a ; 8. 559 a-b ; 9. 591 c d. 4 2. 375 a-b.
2 3. 410 c-d ; 411 c-e ; 9. 590 a-b.
76 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
all this we at once recognise the " lion " of the allegorical figure
of man mentioned above.
So far the account of the "spirited" element is simple enough.
It has two other senses which are not quite so obvious ; the one
attaching to the sense of anger which $17^69 so commonly has,
the other to that of pugnacity. From the former point of view
" spirit " appears as what we may call righteous indignation. It
is that which makes a man's blood boil at the consciousness of
suffering unjustly, 1 while it is characteristically absent when the
suffering is felt to be deserved. It is that, again, 2 which makes
a man angry with himself when he feels that he has let his
appetites get the better of his reason, whereas no one ever feels
this anger when he has let his better judgment prevail over his
appetite. These observations lead Plato to represent " spirit "
as the natural ally or servant of the rational or better self; 3 not
that it is never irrational, or may not be perverted by bad edu-
cation, 4 but that it never seems to act with the lower appetites
against the reason ; or, to use more modern phraseology, if we
are once convinced that in refusing to satisfy an appetite we
are acting reasonably, we may feel dissatisfaction, but we do
not feel indignation. In its third and last distinctive use, 5
" spirit " is the root of ambition or the competitive instinct. In
this sense it is, as was said, a modification of the fighting
spirit, for the essence both of ambition and of pugnacity is the
desire to do better than somebody else. And as in the other
two senses, so here " spirit " may have a good or a bad develop-
ment, into honourable rivalry on the one hand, on the other
into mere contentiousness.
It is not difficult to see how these various representations
of " spirit " may be connected. In all of them there is an ele-
ment of w r hat we may call self-assertion and self-consciousness.
It is this, in the form of not choosing to be " put upon," which
makes us resist what we think injustice ; it is this, in the form
of honourable pride, which makes us face danger without flinch-
ing, and prompts us to measure ourselves against others ; it
is the consciousness of a self which deserves respect that
makes us angry when we have disgraced ourselves ; and it is
1 4. 440 c-d. 5 4. 440 a-b. 3 4. !40 b. 4 4. 441 a. 5 9. 531 a-b.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 77
the feeling that there is no such self to fall back upon which
weakens us when we know that we are in the wrong ; ami
lastly, it is often an exaggerated sense of our own importance
or power which breaks out into aggressiveness, hardens into
self-will, or is nursed into bad temper.
It now remains to consider the third, and in Plato's mind
the highest, element in the constitution of the human soul, that
which he calls " the philosophic." And here much more than in
the case of the other two we shall have to notice considerable
modifications in his account in different parts of the RcpvMic.
Bernnnino 1 with what we have called the first main section of
o o
the work, we find the " philosophic " element at first charac-
terised in a way very far removed from what the English word
would lead us to expect. It is introduced 1 as a necessary
psychological complement to the element of " spirit." Unmiti-
gated or unbalanced, the latter element would be a source of
mere indiscriminate pugnacity, and would result in a destruc-
tive war of all against all. Clearly if human nature is to be
adapted to the higher functions of civic society, it must contain
some counterbalancing factor, some quality of gentleness to
soften ferocity, some tendency to union to counteract the feeling
of mutual antagonism. The germs of such an element Plato
finds in some of the lower animals : the well-bred dog, who had
been already chosen to typify the quality of " spirit," is found
to exhibit, along with the greatest fierceness towards strangers,
the greatest gentleness towards those whom he knows ; and
this suggests, what is found to be the fact when we come to
look at human nature, that this combination of qualities so
opposite is not only possible but natural. But the question
arises, Why call this softening, unifying element " philosophic " ?
Here again, half-playfully perhaps, yet not without a deeper
meaning, Plato helps himself with the analogy of the dog. The
dog judges of friends and enemies by the test of knowledge ;
1 2. 375 b 376 c. In this passage a selection of men is being made who
are to be " guardians " of the ideal state which is being constructed. But it
is clear (cf. 9 581 a-c ; 4. 435 e 436 a) that while here appearing to pick
out certain qualities for a certain purpose, Plato is really enumerating the
qualities which he conceived to be present in different proportions in all
human beings.
7 8 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
those whom he knows he treats as friends, those whom he does
not know as enemies ; with him, in a word, to know is to be
fond ; and as it is the feeling of knowing those whom he knows
which excites his fondness, he may be said in a sense to be
fond of knowing, much as a person who likes the society of his
inferiors might be said to be fond of superiority. In so far
then as the quality of gentleness attaches to the consciousness
of knowledge and the pleasure which that consciousness excites,
it may be said to arise from fondness of knowledge, and this is
almost equivalent to " philosophy " in its literal sense of " love
of knowledge " or " wisdom."
The first and simplest application of this somewhat curious
train of thought is obvious enough. Every one has felt in one
form or another the power of knowledge or familiarity to breed
a sort of liking. It is an instinctive feeling, which often does
not rise to the height of affection, but remains a sense of quiet
pleasure or comfort ; it attaches to things, to places, to persons ;
much of the love of home and of country, and even of humanity,
is traceable to its presence ; much of the antipathy to foreigners
or to novelties, to its absence. In such a rudimentary feeling
of attachment for what belongs to us Plato saw the first germ
of that which seemed to him highest in human nature. We
shall see shortly how the germ developed under his hands.
Our next introduction 1 to the "philosophic" element of the
soul is in a somewhat different context. It is still, indeed, the
" gentle " or " tame " part in contradistinction to the " wildness "
and " hardness " of the " spirited " part, and it is still intimately
associated with knowledge ; but the gentleness of which it is
now said to be the source is the result of culture instead of
dog-like attachment, and the knowledge in which it takes
delight is the sense of something understood rather than of
something familiar. It now includes susceptibility to the
influences of language, of music, of painting, of beauty in the
widest sense of the word; it includes also the quickness of
perception which makes learning pleasant and welcomes every
fresh form of truth. It has also a more purely moral aspect ;
it is that which produces love of order and quietness, the
1 3. 410 b-412 a.
AY THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 79
impulse to obey rather than to resist, and to use persuasion
rather than force. Like " spirit," it is capable of exaggeration
and perversion; under the exclusive or excessive influence of
culture and refinement it develops softness and effeminacy, or
nervous sensibility and unstableness.
When we again 1 meet with the highest form of the soul it is
no longer under the name of " philosophic ; " the intellectual
character in it now predominates over the emotional ; it is the
calculative, deliberative, reasoning element in the soul, that in
virtue of which it guides and rules, that which when fully
developed becomes, not love of wisdom, but wisdom. Its rela-
tion to the " spirited " element is also changed ; from being a
merely complementary factor to it, it has come to be its natural
master, from whom issue the dogmas and principles which in
the well-trained soul " appetite " cheerfully obeys and " spirit "
fearlessly carries out.
Such is the account of the " philosophic " part in the first
section of the Republic ; in its most primitive character it is
the impulse of attraction to what is familiar because it is
familiar ; then the substratum of gentleness and of culture ;
lastly, reason in its regulative and ruling capacity.
To sum up then briefly the results thus far arrived at, the
human soul, in Plato's view, is a triple being. It has for its
largest constituent appetite, the simple craving for present
satisfaction, capable of indefinite expansion, mostly amenable,
but also partially unamenable, to reason. Secondly, it implies
an element of self-assertiveness and pugnacity, which gives rise
to qualities as various as courage and brutality, ambition and
contentiousness, just indignation and unreasoning bad temper.
Lastly, there is in it a capacity of attraction and receptivity,
which if not perverted into weakness of character, develops, on
the one side, into gentleness, sociableness, love ; on the other,
into refinement, culture, and wisdom.
Proceeding now to the later modifications of this psychology,
we find, as has been already observed, that they are modifica-
tions not so much in the general constitution of the soul as in
1 4. 439 d ; 441 e ; 442 c. In the fourth book the word <f>i\6<ro<t>ov is dropped,
and the highest element in the soul is generally called XoyumKbv or (436 a ;
cf. 9. 580 d) $ na.v6avotJ.ev.
8o THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
the relationship of its constituent elements. They consist
mainly in the widening and deepening of the conception of the
''philosophic" element, and in the assignment to it of a much
more predominant position in the formation of human character
and the regulation of human conduct. It is scarcely possible
to make this clear without again referring shortly to the general
structure of the Republic. The first four books of it, as we
saw, contain the discovery and exhibition of a principle of
human life, social and individual, such as, if carried out, would
realise the greatest wellbeing of which man is capable. That
principle is most simply described as the harmonious co-opera-
tion of various elements, whether those of the individual soul
or those of the state ; and the ultimate hypothesis upon which
the principle rests is that these various elements have the
capacity of forming a whole, and that, therefore, in performing
each their separate function in the best way, they are also in
the best way working for the good of the whole. According to
this view, in a normally constituted society each class would
consist of those individuals in whom a certain psychological
quality predominated, and who were therefore best fitted for a
certain k'ind of work ; and the chief interest and duty of the
society would be to secure, firstly, that each of its members
should have his proper place in the organisation of work ; and,
secondly, that having found his proper place, he should be
fitted by education or other means to do the particular work of
his life as well as possible. Of the work necessary to the well-
being of a state, Plato thought that there were three principal
kinds, the work of producing the material commodities essen-
tial to life, the work of protecting the state against external
enemies and of preserving order within it, and the work of
legislation and government. For the class of citizens engaged
in the first kind of work he apparently did not think that any
public system of education was necessary, a fact which, however
much at variance with modern ideas, will not startle any one
who is familiar with the position of the industrial classes in
Greek society, and with the opinions entertained of them both
by the public and by philosophers. It was then for the classes
who are engaged in military and political functions, that is, in
what a Greek would consider the functions of a citizen proper,
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. Si
that the education sketched in the earlier part of the Republic
is exclusively intended. That education is a method for pro-
viding the natural and proper nurture for the souls of the
persons in question. Its character (to anticipate for a moment
what must be said later) is emphatically non-technical; it
teaches no knowledge or mental accomplishment having a
direct bearing upon the functions eventually to be exercised by
those who receive it ; it comes to an end at about twenty, when
those functions have not yet begun, and its main object is to
predispose the soul, intellectually and morally, to the perception
and execution of ideas and principles of which it does not as
yet understand the full bearing, but upon which it will after-
wards find that the welfare of itself and society depends.
We may now return to the point at which it was necessary
to make this digression. It seems to have been in Plato's mind, 1
even at the time when he was writing the first part of the
Republic, that the system of education contained in it was
imperfect and inadequate. Whether it was from design that
he deferred the expression of this feeling, or whether it was
forced from him by subsequent criticism, this is not the place
to discuss ; it is at any rate certain that in what may be called
the second section of the work, comprising the fifth, sixth, and
seventh books, the education described in the preceding books
is referred to and criticised as insufficient for the purpose of
preparing citizens for the exercise of the most important public
functions. This attitude of criticism adopted in the later
towards the earlier section is however by no means the only
symptom of change on the part of the writer. The question under
discussion, the tone in which it is discussed, and the answer
which is given to it, are very different in the two parts. In
the first the question is, What is the true principle which
should regulate human life, and what would be the form of a
society in which it was carried out ? In the second it is, How
could such an ideal society, with all the consequences which it
seems logically to entail, be actually realised, and what is the root
1 Indications of this feeling are found 3. 414 a and 416 b, compared with
6. 503 a-b, e. The want of "exactness" or completeness in the account of
education in the early books is parallel to that in the psychology (cf. 4. 435 d
with 6. 504 a-e.
82 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
of the existing evils of mankind which hinder its realisation ?
In the first part, again, the tone is that of a man who certainly
sees much to criticise in existing institutions, but who is never-
theless disposed to make the best of them, and does not despair
of doing so. In the second it is that of one oppressed by the
sense of the evil in the world, hoping for salvation only from
remedies which are themselves almost hopeless, diffident and
yet defiant, daringly paradoxical and yet terribly in earnest.
And lastly, the two answers are different. To the earlier
question the answer is : Allow, and if necessary compel, human
nature to develop normally, and provide it with the nurture
which its development demands; the rest will manage itself.
To the later it is : The cause of the ills of mankind is ignorance
of their true good and neglect of their noblest natures ; train
those natures rightly and they will see what is the true good of
mankind ; give them unlimited power and they will carry out
what the good requires. Such is the significance of the start-
ling demand made in the fifth book of the Republic, that
philosophers should be kings. We are here concerned with it,
not in its political, but in its psychological and educational,
aspect ; in other words, we have to see how Plato's conception
of what we have already learnt to know as the " philosophic
part " in the soul has expanded to the point at which we now
find it, giving its name to the whole man, embodying all gifts
and excellencies, and claiming to rule the world.
Between the account of the " philosophic " element which we
have gathered from the first four books of the Republic, and
that of the " philosophic nature " which we are about to gather
from the following three, the references made to the same
subject in the ninth book seem to occupy an intermediate
place, 1 and to form a kind of transition. In the ninth book,
taking his departure from the triple division of the soul with
which we are now familiar, Plato divides mankind into three
"primary kinds," 2 according as one or other of the three
psychical elements predominates in the character. To those in
1 I do not mean to imply that the ninth book was necessarily composed
before the sixth, though there is some ground for the supposition.
2 9. 580 d ff.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 83
whom " appetite" predominates, the chief object in life is the
wealth by which appetite is satisfied ; to the " spirited " class it
is the honour which rewards successful competition ; while to
those in whom the " philosophic " side is the strongest, it is
truth. And accordingly they are called respectively lovers of
gain or wealth, lovers of contention or honour, lovers of learn-
ing or wisdom, that is, " philosophers," and of these the last are
said to enjoy the fullest experience and to live the highest life.
Here then we find the love of knowing, which has all along
underlain in different senses the " philosophic " form of soul,
interpreted as the love of " knowing the nature of the truth," *
or, to use an equivalent Platonic phrase, " the nature of what
is," and further, when present in sufficient force, giving its
name to a definite type of character, and that the highest.
The allegorical figure of man in the same book, to which refer-
ence has already been made, supplies some more additions to
the conception. In the triple creature which we are there asked
to imagine, the " man," or, as he is called to distinguish him
from the external human semblance, the " inward man," clearly
represents the " philosophic " element ; and from this we see
that in Plato's view it is this element which constitutes the
real humanity, and therefore the real personality, in our com-
plex nature. But this is not all. The " inward man " is dis-
tinctly asserted to be that which is " divine " or " the most
divine " in man. 2 To Plato there is a revelation of God in the
human soul, as there is in the physical world ; his " celestial
city " 3 is not only a visionary type, it is also, like the " kingdom
of heaven," within us, and he who will may enter in and dwell
there. And once more, as it is this divine humanity which is
in the truest sense the self, the other parts of human nature
are conceived by Plato to find their highest activity and their
most real satisfaction in following and serving it as far as they
are able ; to become as human as possible, to live for humanity
in this sense, is the highest end of the half-animal nature which
forms the larger part of man.
Turning now from the ninth to the three central books of
1 581 b, e ; 582 b, c.
8 9. 589 d, e ; 590 d ; cf. too, 6. 497 c, and 10. 611 e. * 9. 592 a-b.
THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
the Republic, we find the attributes with which the "philo-
sophic" nature is invested in the former confirmed and developed
in the latter. The point of departure is the same : the " philo-
sopher " is described, in accordance with his name, 1 as one who
loves knowledge or wisdom, and " philosophy " is the instinctive
and indiscriminate craving to learn. The man endowed with
this passion is like a man with a great appetite and a strong
digestion ; everything that will stay the hunger of his soul is
welcome food. Or again, he is like a man who is in love, not
once or twice, but always and everywhere ; as the lover finds
nothing that is not beautiful in the face of his beloved, so to the
man born to be a " philosopher " there is nothing in the face of
truth which is not loveable. This is the germ, the elementary
condition, of philosophy ; it does not of itself make a full-grown
philosopher, any more than the possession of " spirit" necessarily
makes a brave man ; but no true philosopher can be without
it, any more than a spiritless man can have real courage. But
(and here Plato takes his next great step) 2 these elementary
qualities are not only the germ of the true philosophic character,
but of all human excellence as well ; or rather, the philosophic
spirit cannot exist in its fulness and integrity without involv-
ing all that is called good and noble in human character.
Plato explains this somewhat startling idea by showing how
the whole company of virtues flows naturally and necessarily
from the single passion for truth. In one whose desires " set
strongly" towards one all-absorbing object, the channels of the
bodily appetites must run dry ; and the " vision of all time and
all existence" which he enjoys will make human life seem but
a little thing, and death nothing to be feared. In a mind
which "reaches out after all that is human and divine" there
is no room for meanness or pettiness, nor can such a mind be
harsh or unfair in dealings with other men, for the motives
which make others so avarice, conceit, or fear do not touch it.
Add to these ethical qualities the intellectual gifts without
which love of knowledge is impossible, quickness to learn and
slowness to forget, with that mental grace or proportion which
1 5. 474 c^75 c ; 6. 485 b.
8 6. 485 b 487 a ; 489 e-^90 c.
AV THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 85
predisposes the soul to receive truth, and we have a fully-endowed
nature, such as " the god of blame himself could find no fault in."
We have here reached the culminating point in the develop-
ment of Plato's conception of " philosophy" in the Republic.
Beginning with the instinctive attraction to what is familiar,
passing on into the ready receptivity for all that is admirable
in nature and art, with the unconscious grace and refinement
which accompanies it, it has now become the consuming pas-
sion for what is true and real, at once the most human and the
most divine attribute of the soul, the crowning gift and com-
plete embodiment of perfect manhood.
Neither the later uses of the word "philosophy," nor its
literal interpretation as " love of wisdom," will much help the
modern reader to enter here into the spirit of Plato. Philo-
sophy to most of us is too much wrapt up in the associations
of books and systems, of technicalities and jargon, to let us feel
the living spirit which it still is when it is anything more than
a set of phrases. And the love of truth, in spite of the boasts
of modern science, is still but rarely found to dominate the
character and mould the life as Plato conceived that it might
do. The difficulty of understanding him is further increased
by the dispersion and differentiation which his idea has under-
gone. When he spoke of " the truth," or of " what is," we see
that there entered into his feeling not only the enthusiasm of
the scientific discoverer, but also the passion of the poet for
beauty and the devotion of the saint to the object of his wor-
ship. It would be beyond our present scope to dwell at length
upon this point ; a reference to two passages in the Republic
will sufficiently illustrate it. One is that in which he describes
the philosophic spirit as the desire for union of the mind with
reality i 1 "It is in the nature of the real lover of learning to be
ever struggling up to being, and not to abide amongst the
manifold and limited objects of opinion ; he will go on his way,
and the edge of his love will not grow dull nor its force abate,
until he has got hold of the nature of being with that part of
his soul to which it belongs so to do, and that is the part which
is akin to being; with this he will draw near, and mingle
1 6. 490 a-b.
86 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
being with being, and beget intelligence and truth, and find
knowledge and true life and nourishment, and then, and not
till then, he will cease from his travail." The imagery of this
passage shows us that to Plato the process of knowledge was
very far from being the mechanical and external operation as
which we are apt to regard it. To him the world of reality or
fact, that which really is in spite of what appears or what we
fancy, is something of kindred nature with what is highest in
the human mind ; the impulse to know is the impulse to become
one with that which is " bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh,"
and truth is the birth which allays the " travail of the soul."
In another passage l the effect of the same spirit upon the
formation of character is brought out in a way equally remote
from ordinary modes of thought. "The man whose mind is
really set upon the things that are, has not leisure to look down
at the concerns of men, and to fight with them, and fill him-
self with envy and bitterness ; that which he sees and gazes
upon is set fast and ever the same, it neither does nor suffers
wrong, but is all reasonable and in order. This he imitates,
and, as far as is possible, becomes like it, for it surely cannot
be that a man can live in fellowship with what he admires
without imitating it. So then the philosopher, living in fellow-
ship with what is divine and orderly, grows himself orderly
and divine as far as man is able." Such is Plato's conception
of what in modern phrase we should call the genuine study of
the laws of nature and the world. In the unchangeable order and
beauty of the universe he sees the image on a vaster scale of the
same reason which is imperfectly reflected in human life, and he
might have said to Justice what Wordsworth has said to Duty :
"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong."
We have now passed in review the main elements of that
human nature for which, as Plato conceived, it was the function
of education to provide nurture. It may seem, perhaps, that
a disproportionate space has been given to what belongs not to
education but to psychology. But it is just the inseparableness
of the two that is so characteristic of Plato's treatment, and,
1 6. 500 b-c.
AV THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 87
whatever we may think of his analysis of the soul in its de-
tails, we shall hardly escape the conclusion that some such
analysis is an indispensable condition of a really rational
theory of education ; in other words, that neither a state nor
an individual can undertake to educate in a systematic way
unless they start with some idea, not only of what they wish
to teach, nor only of the type of character which they wish to
produce, but also of the living being to which the matter to
be taught is relative, and upon which the given character is to
be impressed. The " practical " man, who believes in " results,"
will be disposed to regard such psychological considerations as
fanciful or far-fetched. And yet the most fatally unpractical
thing in the world is to go on testing methods by results which
take every factor into account except the one upon which the
whole result ultimately depends. That factor in man is the
human mind, in Englishmen the English mind, in different
classes of Englishmen the minds of those classes ; and to dis-
cuss what kinds of education are in themselves the best,
without considering mental organisation, is as idle as to discuss
what is the best kind of food in the abstract without regard to
the stomach which has to digest it.
Before passing on to our main subject, the methods by
which Plato proposed to meet the educational needs of the
soul, one preliminary observation must be made. It appears
from what has been already said that there is a certain want
of continuity in his psychology. Instead of following the soul
in an unbroken series from its earliest to its most advanced
phase of development, he has first given a picture of its educa-
tion up to a certain point, which is apparently meant to be
final, and has then made a fresh start, and represented the
previous course as a merely preliminary stage in a larger and
more elaborate system; and this fresh start coincides with a
fresh point of departure in the account of the highest or " philo-
sophic" element in the soul. The questions suggested by
these facts as to the composition of the Republic do not con-
cern us now ; whatever they may be, and however they may
be answered, it may be assumed here that Plato, at some time
in his life, intended the sections of the Republic, as we now
have it, to form parts of one work. On this assumption,
THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
the accounts which it contains both of the soul and of educa-
tion have been considered in this Essay as forming a logical if
not a literary whole, and as supplying a fairly complete and
coherent representation of what Plato conceived human nature
in its fulness to be and to require. It must, however, be
remembered once for all that the Eepullic gives us, not a de-
tailed treatise on education, but certain leading principles
which admit of being applied under various circumstances and
in various ways. Our present object is not primarily to dis-
cover the modifications which these principles admit or
require, but to exhibit the principles themselves in their
clearest light and fullest bearings.
The education of the average Greek gentleman, like that of
the average English gentleman, comprised a certain amount of
mental cultivation and a certain amount of athletic exercise.
The former, besides reading, writing, and some elementary
mathematics, consisted mainly in the reciting and learning by
heart of poetry, along with the elements of music, and some-
times of drawing. Perhaps because so much of the poetry
was originally sung or accompanied, the word "music" was
sometimes applied to the education in literature as well as in
music proper, and it is in this wider sense that Plato habitu-
ally uses it. Under the term " gymnastic " was understood the
whole system of diet and exercise which, varying with the
customs of different states, had for its common object the pro-
duction of bodily health and strength, and the preparation for
military service. In this twofold method of education, which
the wisdom of the past had handed down, Plato sees an un-
conscious recognition of the psychological requirements of
human nature on its two most important sides. 1 At first sight
it would seem that " music " and " gymnastic " were related to
one another as mental to bodily training, and this was no doubt
the ordinary way of distinguishing them ; but Plato, while him-
self adopting the popular phraseology at first, afterwards corrects
it by asserting that the soul, and not the body, is the primary
object of "gymnastic" as well as of "music," 2 and appeals
1 2. 376 e, 1) \a\eirbv evpeiv /SeXrta TTJS vvit rov iroXXoC xp6vov evprifdvT}s ; cf.
3. 411 e, 6ebv 170*7' to, x.r.X. * 3. 410 b-c.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO.
to the fact that exclusive devotion to physical exercises affects
the character no less markedly than exclusive devotion to
literary and aesthetic culture. The truth is, that " music"
educates, 1 not the soul merely, but specifically the "philo-
sophic " part of the soul, through the medium of the eye and
ear, while " gymnastic," through bodily exercises, not only pro-
duces bodily health and strength, but disciplines the psycho-
logical element of " spirit." It is through the gentle, responsive,
loving element that the soul is open to the influences of litera-
ture and art; it is this which makes it quick to assimilate,
ready to obey and to imitate, open-eyed and open-eared to
catch the sights and sounds of the living world. To satisfy
its cravings with the right food, to offer true nobility to its
admiration and true beauty to its love, to keep its perceptions
wakeful and clear, to refine and balance its emotions, these are,
in Plato's opinion, the functions of " musical " education. But
it will not be truly " musical," truly " harmonious," unless it be
counterbalanced by something different. 2 If the " philosophic "
side of the soul be exclusively fostered, its gentleness will turn
into effeminacy, its sensitiveness into irritability, its simple
love into feverish desire. 3 It is not enough (though this is
important) that the material presented in "music" should
itself be such as to brace the softer qualities in the soul ; it
must be supplemented by nurture of an altogether different
kind acting upon altogether different qualities. This is the
office of " gymnastic," which, by bodily exercises, develops and
educates the element of " spirit." For " spirit," though it has an
instinctive tendency to ally itself with reason, requires training
if the tendency is to become a habit. Proper " gymnastic" will
discipline the wild impulses of violence and pugnacity, de-
veloping the intelligent courage of the citizen-soldier, instead
of the blind ferocity of the barbarian or the wild beast, 4 while
it will counteract the yielding, voluptuous, or nervous tenden-
cies by encouraging competition, endurance, and presence of
mind. On the other hand, excessive attention to it brings
with it evils as great as its undue neglect. The body then
1 3. 410 e 412 a. 2 3. 412 a ; cf. 9. 591 d.
Cf. 3. 403 a ; 404 d-e ; 410 a. 4 4. 430 b-c.
9 o THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
gradually swallows up the mind ; the whole man swells with
the pride of conscious strength ; by degrees his courage sinks
into brutality, and his high spirit into insolence; his senses,
the windows of the mind, are clogged and darkened, and his
intelligence, neglected and starved, grows "weak, deaf, and
blind." The problem then of education is to adjust these two
complementary but conflicting elements in human nature. 1
The soul is like a stringed instrument, and education has to
time it, tightening here and slackening there, that it may
become one instead of many, and its life a harmony instead of
a discord. The man who can thus educate himself or others,
who can " combine music and gymnastic, and apply them in due
proportion to the soul," deserves, far more than any musician,
to be called a " musical " man.
Of the two branches of education, "music," in its widest
sense, 2 will clearly begin before " gymnastic," for we tell stories
to children before they can take athletic exercise. The means
employed by "music" in the Platonic system are literature,
music proper, and the other fine arts. Each of these, in its
different way, is capable of expressing certain ethical charac-
teristics, and by each these characteristics are conveyed, through
the eye or ear, to the soul. 3 Of the various means, literature,
in the shape of stories and poetry, naturally comes first, 4 and
the questions which Plato 5 raises regarding the educational
use of literature are two, firstly, what should it express ? and
secondly, how should it express it ? The first question explains
itself; the second concerns literary form or style, and, as the
ethical influence of form depends mainly, in Plato's view, on
the degree to which it is dramatic, this question to him comes to
be, How far is the dramatic element in literature good or bad for
education ? Such a problem would not arise until a compara-
tively late stage, for in young children the susceptibility to
literary influence is as yet too embryonic to admit such distinc-
tions as dramatic or undramatic, personal or impersonal, and
the like. The first question then is not as to the form but as to
the substance of literature, regarded as an educational agent.
1 3. 412 a ; cf. 4, 443 d-e. 2 2. 376 e. 3 3. 400 c 401 a.
4 2. 376 e ; 377 a. " 3. 392 c ; 398 b.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 91
" In all work the beginning is of the greatest importance,
especially when we have to do with a young and tender creature,
for then, more than at any other time, it receives the particular
fashion and stamp which we wish to impress upon it," 1 and so,
"what the child hears when it is young generally becomes
fixed fast and indelibly in its mind." 2 This is Plato's reason for
giving so much consideration to the beginnings of education.
The young soul, like the young body, is plastic and malleable,
and mothers and nurses, who take such care that their chil-
dren's limbs shall grow straight, should remember how much
more care is needed in the handling and shaping of their minds. 3
What then are the ideas which should be impressed most
deeply on the minds of children ? Speaking generally, they
will be such as we should wish them to retain when they are
grown up. 4 The education of childhood should lay a foundation
of character which will not have to be cut away as years go on,
but will invite and sustain the superstructure of manhood.
Such a foundation Plato would see laid in certain religious or
semi-religious ideas ; he would, in other words, have the funda-
mental elements of character developed in the first instance by
habitually putting before the minds of the young the true nature
of God and of what is most godlike in man. In this sense,
then, that he would represent the primary moral ideas to chil-
dren as embodied in divine or superhuman beings, Plato may
be truly said to invest those ideas with a religious sanction,
and to give his system of education a religious basis. The
child is to be bred up in the belief that beings greater and
better than himself have behaved in a certain way, and his
natural impulse to imitate is thus to be utilised in forming
his own character. 5 It would, however, be an inversion of the
real order of Plato's thought, to say that he conceives the ideas
in question to owe their validity to their superhuman embodi-
ment. On the contrary, it is clear that with him the moral is
1 2. 377 a-b. 2 2. 378 d-e. 3 2. 377 c.
4 2. 377 b, ttreiSav TeXfuOdxriv ; cf. 383 c, el /j.t\\ov(ru>, K.T.\.
6 This impulse is mostly insisted on by Plato in connection with what is
bad (2. 378 b; 3. 391 e), but it is implied in all that he says of early
education. Cf. 6. 500 c, T) ote: TU>& fjLT)xa.v7]v eli>ai, STI? TIS 6/iuXet a.yAfiei'os, pi)
exelvo;
9 2 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
the criterion of the supernatural, not the supernatural of the
moral ; and that if, and so far as, a religious sanction means a
sanction derived from a story of miraculous events, he considers
that sanction to belong to a rudimentary stage of education and
intelligence. This will appear more plainly if we examine the
form in which what we may call religious truth is supposed by
him to be imparted. Education, Plato says, 1 must begin with
literature, and " literature is of two kinds, true and false ; it is
with the latter kind that education must begin, for the literature
which we read to children consists of myths, and myths, speak-
ing generally, are false, though they contain elements of truth
as well." The whole circle of Greek religious ideas, so far as
they found expression in language at all, did so mainly in the
form of myths. Instead of an authorised collection of more or
less historical books, with a mass of authorised doctrine more
or less directly depending upon it, the Greeks had a number of
floating mythical stories, local and national, some of which,
receiving glorified shape from the genius of poets or artists,
exercised a special ascendency over the popular imagination.
The bulk of these stories Plato unhesitatingly pronounces
" false," and what he means by " false " appears from a passage 2
where he is enumerating the cases in which " falsehood in
speech " may be useful and admissible. One of these cases is
" the falsehood of the poet ;" for " in mythology, owing to our
ignorance of the actual truth of what happened long ago, we
make the falsehood as like the truth as we possibly can, and so
render it useful." The old myths, then, are untrue, not because
they necessarily misrepresent facts, but because the lapse of
time prevents us from knowing whether any facts underlie
them, and what those facts are. They are like pictures of
which we are no longer able to test the accuracy. And yet, in
the same sentence which tells us that myths are false because we
do not know the truth of what they say, we are told that we can
" make them like the truth." The explanation of this apparent
contradiction is found in an important distinction in the sense
of falsehood. In the sense that they can at best be only an
uncertain approximation to the truth, all myths and mythic
1 2. 376 e 377 a. a 2. 382 d.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLA TO. 93
poetry are necessarily untrue. They may, however, be untrue
in another, and, to Plato, more serious sense; they may not
only veil our want of historical knowledge, they may also con-
tradict our fundamental ideas about the subjects of which they
treat ; they may be not only unhistorical, but morally or meta-
physically inconsistent and illogical. 1 Their subject-matter is
the divine nature, gods and demigods ; of this nature we must
have a more or less definite conception, and wherever a myth
contradicts that conception, we must pronounce it false. It is in
this sense that Plato speaks of the poet " telling his falsehood
badly," 2 " when he makes a bad likeness in language of the
characters of gods and heroes, like a painter who paints a
picture not at all like what he means to copy." And he gives
numerous illustrations of his meaning ; the dismal accounts of
Hades are "not, true;" 3 the stories of the changes of Proteus
and Thetis, of the robberies of Theseus and Peirithous, are
" calumnies ;" 4 and it is a sort of "blasphemy" against Achilles
to say or to believe that he was so avaricious as to accept
Agamemnon's presents, and not to give up the body of Hector
without a price. 5 In one sense, then, (to recapitulate) all myths
must be false, in so far as we cannot know whether they re-
present what actually happened ; in another sense they may be
true or false, according as they do or do not conform to the
logical laws of their subject-matter. And as Plato seems to
consider myths to be the appropriate form for speaking of the
divine nature, when it has to be spoken of as a person or
persons, he would seem to conceive of specifically religious
truth, so far as it implies such a personal representation, as
belonging to a rudimentary stage of mental development. On
the other hand, he clearly sees no objection to employing this
admittedly inadequate form of expression as an agent in educa-
tion, nor to telling children religious stories which cannot pre-
tend to be historical.
This entire subordination of historical to moral truth in
religious education, strange as it may seem to us, was natural
to Plato. The mythology which occupied the Greek mind
1 2. 380 c, oflre &fjL<f>uva aira avro'is. 2 2. 377 d-e ; cf. 3. 388 c.
3 3. 386 b-c. 4 2. 381 d ; 3. 391 c-d. 6 3. 391 a ; cf. 2. 381 e.
94 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
was its own creation, the offspring of its early contact with
nature, developed by subsequent reflection ; and the mind from
which it sprang felt itself competent to judge it. The element
of dogmatic fixity in their religion attached much more to its
ritual than to its ideas ; these latter were a plastic material,
growing in accordance with the secret laws of psychology and
language, or the conscious design of poets. In applying to
them canons of criticism resting on no authority but that of
his own moral consciousness, Plato might expect to offend
many popular beliefs and prejudices, but they would not be the
beliefs or prejudices of a priesthood or a church. It seems to
be incident to religious movements and ideas, that they rapidly
gather round them an accretion of mythical events and con-
ceptions, and neither the Jewish nor the Christian religion is an
exception to the general rule. But there is this great difference
between them and the Greek religion, that the literature to
which the former attach themselves, large as is its infusion of
poetry and mythology, still purports in its most important parts
to be historical, and that with its historical character its
religious significance has come to be almost inseparably
associated. And thus, in religious education, we are not only
met by the question which Plato asked, Whether the whole of
this literature is consistent with our ideas of the divine nature ?
but we have also to settle the question, which did not present
itself to Plato, Whether it is consistent with our canons of
historical evidence ? Had Plato been writing now, he would
have found the second a more prominent question than the
first, and we cannot say with certainty what his advice would
have been to those who find themselves in the dilemma of
teaching, or seeing others teach, their children religious stories
which they themselves do not believe to be true. We may,
however, conjecture that he would have made the moral worth
of those stories the final test, and that if they had seemed to
him to embody ideas really vital to human life and character,
he would have retained them, trusting to the child's mind to
assimilate what was valuable, and to later education to preserve
or to rectify its sense of historical truth.
The increased appreciation of the distinction between truth
of fact and truth of idea, is often and rightly represented as a
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 95
characteristic acquisition of modern, as compared with ancient,
thought. Yet, in its ultimate analysis, the distinction is seen
to exist only in abstraction. Neither " mere " facts nor " mere "
ideas form any part of our knowledge, but facts which are
interpreted into our mental experience, and ideas which are
referred to something independent of that experience. The
importance of a historical fact must depend, in the last resort,
upon its moral or ideal significance, or, in other words, upon
what it tells us of our own nature ; and our conception of the
use and value of evidence is in advance of that of the Greeks,
not because we have discovered a new sort of truth which was
unknown to them, but because our whole mental horizon has
enormously expanded, and we are far more vividly conscious
of the possible bearings of one part of our experience upon
another. Our truth of fact is more pregnant with thought than
theirs, and our truth of idea goes back into a deeper reality.
We have seen in what sense Plato bases education on reli-
gion, and how he conceives that the mythical form in which
religious ideas are presented may be, in different ways, both
true and untrue. The next question is, What is that religious
truth which mythical literature may approximately express,
and by its conformity to which its educational value is to be
determined ? Clearly it can be no other than the most perfect
and consistent conception which can be formed of the divine
nature. Plato accordingly begins by laying down certain
" outlines of theology, which the makers of stories must not
be allowed to transgress," for " God must always be repre-
sented as he really is, whether in epic or in tragedy." 1 The
doctrines of Plato's state-religion are only two, but they go to
the root of the matter ; the first is, that God is good and the
cause of good only; 2 the second is, that God is unchangeable
and true. 3 Thus simply stated, they are the common property
of all higher religious thought, but Plato's application of them
is to some extent peculiar. The primitive conception of the
deity as the simple embodiment of power, readily leads in one
direction to the belief that he sends good and evil upon man
2. 379 a. 2 2. 379 a 380 c. 8 2. 380 d 383 b.
96 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
according to his caprice, and in another to the idea that he is
jealous of human success. To these deep-rooted tenets of the
Greek popular religion Plato opposes the simple logical posi-
tion, that what is in its essence good cannot produce what is
not good. As to the difficulty of accounting for the undoubted
preponderance of evil in the world, 1 " either we must say that
it is not the work of God ; or that, if the work of God, its in-
fliction is just and good, and those who suffer it are the better
for being chastised. ... To say that bad men are miserable
because they need chastisement is allowable, but not to say
that God is the cause of their misery.", 2 In the emphasis with
which Plato insists on this truth, we see not only the resolu-
tion of the philosopher to uphold his logical conception of the
divine nature, but also the anxiety of the legislator and teacher
to press home human responsibility. To encourage the natural
tendency to lay to the door of an irresponsible being the evil
which we ourselves have caused or deserved, is what no state
will do " if it is to be well governed." 3 In the oracular words
of the daughter of Necessity to the souls about to enter on their
earthly life, "Virtue owns no master; as a man honours or
dishonours her he will have more or less of her. The guilt is
with him who chooses. God is guiltless." 4
The application of the other great religious principle is
still more strongly coloured by Greek or Platonic ideas. The
liability to change by external influences, whether in organic
bodies, or in products of art, or in the human soul itself,
seems to Plato a universal symptom of inferiority or weak-
ness ; least of all in the divine being, the absolutely best,
can he admit any variableness. 5 Nor again in another and
more obvious sense can he conceive of God as liable to
change. 6 The metamorphoses which play so large a part
in the stories about the Greek divinities are impossible to
a being who is already perfect ; for no one, God or man, will
voluntarily change for the worse. It is not the representation
of the deity as having shape or similitude which offends Plato,
1 iroXi) y&p \di~rti> T&ya6a, TWV KaKuv i)fj,iv, 2. 379 c. 2 2. 380 a-b.
* 2. 380 b ; and cf. 10. 619 c, o yap eavrbv aiTia<r6ai TWV KO.K&V, K.T.\.
4 la. 617 e. 6 2. 380 e 381 b. 6 2. 381 b-e,
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 97
us it did the great Jewish teachers, but the indignity offered
to the divine essence by supposing it capable of wantonly
taking lower forms. Lastly, it is inconceivable that God
should be otherwise than true, 1 whether in the peculiarly
Platonic sense of untruth, 2 in which it means want of con-
formity in the mind to fact, ignorance of that which it is vital
to know, the " delusion " which makes us " believe a lie," or in
the ordinary sense of deceiving others by word or deed. 3 In
the first sense no man, much less God, could choose to be
untrue ; in the latter, there are some circumstances under
which men think lying admissible, but none of these circum-
stances can apply to God.
Such is Plato's conception of the divine nature ; and as such,
in its essence and its operation, he would have it presented by
poets to the imagination of his future citizens, " if they are to
be men who reverence God and are like God as far as it is
possible for man to be so." 4 These general religious ideas,
however, are not the only ideas which he would see embodied
in poetry, and by which he would judge of its right to a place
in the education of a people. It should be its function also to
exhibit the moral ideal in all its various manifestations ; and
we have next to ask how Plato conceived of that ideal, and
what are the specific qualities and principles which he con-
sidered to be at once the true elements of moral greatness, and
the legitimate material of poetical art. Plato's " whole duty of
man " is comprised in the following list : honour to parents,
love of fellow-citizens, courage, truthfulness, self-control. Each
of these deserves a few words of notice. The honour due to
father and mother is set by Plato next to the honour due to
the gods, 5 and he denounces the stories of the treatment of
Cronos by his son Zeus as " the greatest of lies about the
greatest of things." The mixed sentiment of awe, admiration,
and modesty, which the Greeks associated with the untrans-
latable word at&9, and which they regarded as the germ of all
youthful virtue, has its earliest and simplest expression in the
feeling of children for their parents ; and to diffuse this feel-
1 2. 381 e 383 b. 2 382 a-b. * 382 c-e.
4 2. 383 c. 8 3. 386 a ; 2. 377 e ; 378 b.
G
THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
ing through society, knitting old and young together by an
instinctive bond, and superseding the law of the state by the
finer law of family affection, was one of the fairest though most
impossible dreams of Plato's life. 1 Equally important in his
eyes was the sense of fellowship amongst citizens. 2 The false
tales of the battles of the gods with one another are not to be
told to children, who should see in the Olympian community
the glorified image of their own. Kather they are to be taught
that it is " very disgraceful lightly to quarrel amongst them-
selves," " that citizen never falls out with citizen, and that it is
wicked to do it." Thus the earliest lessons of education are
to appeal to that element in the soul which, as we have seen,
Plato regarded as the highest and most distinctively human in
man, the element in virtue of which he is not a mere isolated
atom and centre of resistance, but capable of attraction both to
what is higher than himself and to what is like himself. 3
From the common groundwork of citizenlike feeling we pass
to the specific virtues of public life, and the first of these is
courage, 4 or, as we might more literally and more instructively
translate the Greek word dvSpeia, " manliness." Plato's treat-
ment of this quality is characteristically Greek. The child who
is to be one day a soldier and to fight for his country must
learn before all things not to be afraid of death. Death, as
the inevitable end of youth and strength and beauty, as the
entrance to a joyless and ineffectual phantom world, seemed to
the Greek imagination of all terrible things the most terrible,
and the man who could face it without flinching the most
worthy to be called a man. Plato, as usual, has both a specu-
lative and a practical interest in banishing from poetry the
ghastly pictures of Hades ; they " are not true," 5 and they " do
no good." " Not true," for to Plato it is clear that a good
man can have no reason for being afraid of death ; 6 and " they
do no good," 7 for whatever scope they may give to descriptive
power, and however pleasant it may be to feel the pulse quicken
and the skin creep at reading them, they only unnerve the
1 5. 463 d ; 465 b. 2 3. 386 a ; 2. 378 b-c.
8 Cf . 2. 375 c-d, and 376 b-c, with 378 c. 3. 386 a 388.
5 3. 386 c. 387 d. 7 387 b-c.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 99
character, and are bad for children who are to learn " to be
freemen, fearing slavery worse than death." 1 But if a man
need not be afraid' to die himself, neither need lie be afraid
for his friend to die, 2 and the expenditure of tears and lamenta-
tions over the departed is both uncalled for and unmanly, for a
man ought to learn as far as possible to lean upon himself, not
upon others. And if it is weak to give way to excess of grief,
it is no less so to give way to the opposite emotion ; laughter,
like tears, is not to be allowed to get the better of us, for the
violent expression of one feeling tends to produce an equally
violent reaction. 3
These precepts, to which Plato is led by his conception of
moral truth, remind us of those which Lessing arrived at by
thinking out the laws of artistic propriety. Perhaps few Eng-
lishmen will feel themselves or their children to be much in
need of such precepts. Many of us would be only too glad
sometimes if our sense of the pathetic or the ludicrous could
find more relief in expression. To the Greek of Plato's time,
as to some southern peoples now, the tendency to sudden and
violent revulsions of feeling was a real cause and symptom of
weakness of character. To us, taught as we are from early
years by example and temperament to be neutral and moderate
in our language and gesture, an analogous danger may perhaps
be found in the tendency to nurse suppressed emotion until
it becomes a drain upon the mental forces or breaks out in
extravagant action.
In his treatment of truthfulness, 4 the virtue which comes
next upon his list, Plato is short and simple. Elsewhere, 5 in
passages where truth is identified with " what is," we find
him basing the obligation to truthfulness upon the desire to be
in harmony with fact ; here, where he is concerned primarily
with early education, he connects it naturally with obedience.
He would have the young citizens continually conscious that
they are living under authority, and that " to say the thing that
is not" 6 to their elders is as " deadly and destructive to the
community " as it would be for the sailor to lie to his officer or
1 387 b. 2 387 d-e. 3 388 e.
4 3. 389 b-d. 5 E.g. 6. 485 c ; 486 d. 3. 389 c.
i oo THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
the patient to his doctor. Obedience too is the basis of the
remaining virtue of crw^pocrvvrj, 1 which in its literal sense
describes the man who remains " sound in mind," or, as we
might say, " keeps his head," under the stress of appetite and
passion. " To obey those who are in authority and to have
authority over one's-self " 2 is the fully-developed virtue of which
the sentiment of at'Soj? is the instinctive germ. It is this law-
loving spirit, whether the law be the external law of the state
or the voice of reason within us, which is the enemy alike of
forwardness and insolence, of gluttony, drunkenness, and lust,
of meanness and avarice. The principle of balance and con-
trol, which so pervades the Greek life and philosophy, comes
out nowhere so prominently as in the conception of this virtue.
It is a principle which no longer appeals strongly to the modern
mind, to which it tends to suggest rather the complacencies and
prettinesses of morality than its inward victories or struggles.
But to a people like the Greeks, combining such an extra-
ordinary sense of proportion with such an extraordinary capa-
city for excess, a perfect self-mastery might well seem as high
an ideal as the humility and purity which take its place in the
Christian code.
The elements of moral greatness just enumerated form the
second main category in the legitimate material of poetry in a
well-ordered state. To trace them out in the lives and actions
of national heroes and great men, and to give them fitting
expression, is the true function of the masters of language.
The divine and the heroic, however, are not the only subjects
which Plato would allow to poets. There remains the whole
sphere of human life and nature, to discover some principle
in which was the original problem of the EepuUic? How
then are poets to deal with this vast material ? What canons
can be laid down to which their imagination should con-
form in drawing human nature, corresponding to the canons of
religious and moral truth which they are not to transgress in
drawing the divine ? Is the world really what it is popularly
represented, a scene of confusion and caprice, in which the
1 3. 389 d 391 d. a 389 d-e.
3 3. 392 a, irepl avOpuirwv ri> \onrbv &v etrj.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO.
unjust are happy and the just miserable ? J The answer to these
questions is the Rcpiiblic itself. If, as Plato would have us
believe, justice is the health, and injustice the disease, of human
life, individual and social; 2 if the triumph of what is most
divine in the world is also the triumph of what is most human, 3
and man can only realise himself by living at his highest; 4 if
the life of the just man is in the hand of God, who orders
all things for good whatever the appearances may be, 5 and if,
when we come to look at the facts, even in the judgment of
the world justice more often prospers than not ; 6 if this is the
truth, then children must be taught it, and poets must sing
it, and the contrary representations of popular literature
are as great calumnies upon man as they are upon gods and
heroes.
Many reflections must be suggested to a modern reader of
the part of the Republic to which we have been referring, partly
as regards the nature and method of early education, and partly
also as regards the position and functions of poetry and litera-
ture. One of the first points which must strike him, accustomed
as he is to hear the methods of imparting knowledge, and the
kind of knowledge to be imparted, made the main subjects of
discussion, is the almost exclusive attention given by Plato to
the method of developing character, and the kind of character
to be developed. We are not indeed to suppose that Plato
intended children to be brought up in ignorance of reading,
writing, and arithmetic ; besides this elementary knowledge, he
evidently contemplated some teaching of the rudiments of such
science as then existed. 7 But he does not dwell upon this early
scientific education, except to say that it will be comparatively
unsystematic, 8 and that it should be made as little compulsory
as possible, " for the acquisition of knowledge ought not to be
made a slavery to any free man." 9 Thus it remains true on the
whole that Plato regarded the formation of character in child-
hood and early youth as a much more important part of educa-
tion than useful instruction or the training of the intellect. It
1 3. 392 b. 2 4. 444 d e. 3 9. 589 c 590 a.
4 9. 586 d-e. . 10. 612 e 613 b. 10. 613 b-e.
7 7. 536 d ; 537 c ; cf. 6. 498 b.
etj/, 536 d : x^v, 537 c. 7. 536 e.
i o 2 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
would, however, be a mistake to suppose that because this
branch of education finds a comparatively small place in modern
theoretical discussions, it is therefore neglected in modern
practice; on the contrary, it is probably just because it receives
so much attention at home and at school, that it is thought
capable of taking care of itself. The successes of our public
school system have lain, much more than in any particular
stimulus that they have given to literary or scientific activity,
in the production of certain types of character and the prepara-
tion for the art of life, and in these points we naturally feel less
need for method or even for consistency. And yet perhaps
our very feeling of security should make us diffident. The
names of " Christian," " scholar," and " gentleman," are as much
in our mouths as those of the cardinal virtues were in the
mouths of the Greeks ; but the ideas of religion, culture, and
manhood, which we attach to them, are not less confused, and
often not less untrue, than some of those which Plato found in
the current literature and opinion of his day.
Our neglect of the theory of ethical education as compared
with Plato has also another explanation. In a small Greek
State, with the whole or greater part of its effective citizens
taking part in the conduct of affairs, the influence of per-
sonal character upon society and politics was more direct and
unmistakable than it can be in the vast organisation of a
modern nation, where the members at the circumference may
be almost unconscious of their connection with the centre.
Ultimately, no doubt, it is as true now as it was in the times
of Plato and Aristotle that the character of a people is respon-
sible for its social and political life, and that education is mainly
important because it produces or modifies that character and
thus affects the public interests. But the steps by which ethi-
cal and psychological agencies come to the surface in politics
are much more numerous now and much more difficult to trace,
and it is proportionately more easy to isolate particular aspects
of the national life and to treat them as if they had no connec-
tion with each other or the whole. And thus, while it has
become a commonplace that many of the evils of modern
society can only be cured by education, few people probably can
see the connection between the evil and the remedy as clearly,
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 103
and express it as simply, as Plato did when he said that the
encouragement of ghostly fears and superstitions tends to make
bad soldiers, or that changes of fashion in popular music are
symptoms of political revolution.
But the difference between ourselves and Plato in the rela-
tive importance attached to the education of character is not
greater than the difference in the means employed for that
education. In the first place, we have no really national
mythology which takes, or could be made to take, such a posi-
tion in education as did that of the Greek people. The Arthur
legend has indeed been recently made to yield the picture of
an " ideal knight," and the still more recent treatment of the
Scandinavian Sagas has shown that the ideas which stirred
our forefathers are still alive in ourselves. But the position of
Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Morris in this respect is very different
from that of the Greek dramatists. The myths with which the
latter worked had been handed down by a continuous tradition,
both literary and popular; and however freely a poet might
transform or modernise them, he was still sure of appealing to
the popular imagination, of which his material had come to
form an integral part. The characters of Celtic and Scandi-
navian mythology are no longer domesticated amongst us ; we
no longer regard them with either familiarity or reverence ; the
ties which bound them to us have been shattered beyond repair,
and it is only here and there that we dimly catch sight of them
behind the crowd of classical and Christian figures which has
pressed in between us and them.
The place thus left vacant in education by our want of a
national mythology has been partially filled by other forms of
literature, of which the books of the Old and New Testaments
are the most conspicuous, while alongside of them there has
grown up the miscellaneous mass of stories, romances, allegories,
and fairy-tales, comprised under the head of " literature for the
young." It is from these two sources that our early concep-
tions of the divine and the heroic are mainly derived. What
would Plato have thought of them ? He would no doubt have
been surprised at the hard and fast line which it is usual to
draw between sacred and profane literature, which robs the
former of much of its legitimate literary effect, and the latter
THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
of much of its educational power. There may seem to be a
certain incongruity in applying high canons of criticism to
the story-books of children ; and indeed their miscellaneous
character and rapid multiplication makes such an application
almost impossible. Yet it would be a fruitful work for a com-
petent person to make such a collection from the religious
books, mythologies, and popular tales of different peoples and
ages, as should appeal to and stimulate the best elements in a
child's imagination, without either spoiling its simplicity, over-
exciting its sensibility, or nursing its conceit. In such a
collection the most appropriate stories from the Bible would
find their natural place. The circumstances which have led to
the Biblical writings being treated as a single book, while
investing them all with the same promiscuous sanctity, have
greatly increased the difficulty of using them as a text-book of
religion and morality. There is much in the Old Testament
which Plato's canons would exclude from the education of the
young, and some of the worst expressions of Jewish fanaticism
have served as the watchwords of modern cruelty or cant. On
the other hand, the direct influence of example is much less in
the case of the Old Testament than it was in that of the Greek
poets. The heroes of Jewish history do not live in the English
mind as types to be imitated in the same way that the Greek
heroes lived in the mind of their own nation. It is to the
words with which their names are associated, rather than to
the deeds, that the influence of the former is due, and this
makes it all the more important that their words should be
purged from the baser matter which adheres to them, and fitted
to be in truth what they are now only in name, a revelation
of the divine nature to the English people. With the New
Testament the case is different. Here it is the story of a life
and a character to which, more than to anything else, the power
of the book has been due ; and Plato, if he might have warned
us gently against that literal imitation which is really no imita-
tion, would have found there all and more than all the ideal of
heroic manhood which he sought for in vain in the figures of
his native mythology. And yet we must see that the very
exaltation of that character and life makes it difficult to pre-
sent it to children without falsifying it, and that we are not
AV THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 105
teaching them to be like Jesus, either on the one hand by
making him so familiar to them that they can " play at being
him," or on the other by introducing him to them in a buckram
of ecclesiastical dogma. To us, as to Plato, the problem of
early religious education is, How to express the highest truth in
the most appropriate and the least inadequate forms. But in
the interval of more than two thousand years which separates
us from him, the spiritual inheritance of Europe has been both
enormously enriched and enormously encumbered ; enriched
by the advent and expansion of new and potent religious ideas,
which have carried the human mind to heights scarcely dreamt
of by him, but encumbered also by an undergrowth of theologi-
cal tangle which makes it harder for us to keep in view the
grander outlines of the truth and the light towards which they
tend.
The demand of Plato that poets should be teachers, and
their subject-matter limited accordingly, will generally be
received with disgust or derision in the republic of letters.
This is due partly to the extreme simplicity and even crudity
of Plato's language, and the difficulty of translating it to suit
the complex conditions of our modern civilisation, partly to
a narrow conception of the scope of education on the one hand
and the responsibilities of literature on the other. Plato in
the Republic,} as he tells us himself, " is not making poetry, but
founding a commonwealth, and the founder should know the
outlines within which the invention of poets should be exer-
cised ; but it is not his business to invent himself." Hence to
any one who thinks of the exuberant variety of the poetic
activity, these " outlines " are apt to seem a Procrustes-bed, and
Plato's poet is pictured as a literary tailor who cuts his wares
to order. And this feeling is intensified by the fact that Plato
is much more concerned to criticise the current literature of his
time than to suggest fresh lines for writers to work on, thus
leaving the impression of an entirely hostile attitude to poetry
in general. Moreover, in reading proposals like his, we are
naturally more apt to seize upon the difficulties or mistakes in
them than on the essential truth which they may contain. We
1 2. 378 e-379 a.
106 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
are all agreed that a public censorship of poetry would be im-
possible and self-destructive ; we also see that as a matter of
fact the greatest poets have not often been educators of their
people. We forget that this idea of a censorship is an accident
of Plato's mind and circumstances, and that the truest ideas are
often those which are most slowly realised in history. For
what is the requirement here made, if we look at it on its posi-
tive, not merely its negative, side ? It is that the poet should
take his place in the commonwealth, not as an ornamental
luxury, a caterer for the pleasure of intellectual epicures, 1 but as
an integral part of it, with a work of his own, imprinting 2 the
first indelible ideas upon the souls of the young, revealing 3 the
inscrutable nature of God in forms of imaginative truth, nerving 4
the heart and chastening the emotions by the power of heroic
examples, interpreting 5 to the fancy the language of facts, and
surrounding 6 the mind with an atmosphere of health and beauty.
This is not a position of which any poet need be ashamed.
Few, if any, have ever risen to it ; but not a few, and those not
the least, have claimed it. The abilities of the poet, says
Milton, " wheresoever they be found, are the inspired gift of
God, rarely bestowed, but yet to some though most abuse in
every nation : and are of power, besides the office of a pulpit, to
inbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and
public civility ; to allay the perturbations of the mind, and set
the affections in right tune ; to celebrate in glorious and lofty
hymns the throne and equipage of God's almightiness, and what
he suffers to be wrought with high providence in his church ;
to sing victorious agonies of martyrs and saints, the deeds and
triumphs of just and pious nations, doing valiantly through
faith against the enemies of Christ; to deplore the general
relapses of kingdoms and states from justice and God's true
worship. Lastly, whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, in
virtue amiable or grave, whatsoever hath passion or admira-
1 2. 373 b, where poets and artists are included in the list of "unnecessary"
luxuries in the rpvty&cra. 7r6\is.
* 2. 377 c. 3 2. 382 d. 4 3. 387 c ; 389 e.
6 3. 401 C, TOI>S tinpvws Svvafj^vovs Ixvevfiv rrjv TOV KO\OV re Kal evffx^ " ^ <j><bffiv,
andcf. 402 c, where the "images of the letters, " which "music "has got to teach
us to read, seem to be works of art. 6 3. 401 c.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 107
tiou in all the changes of that which is called fortune from
without, or the wily subtleties and refluxes of man's thoughts
from within ; all these things, with a solid and treatable smooth-
ness, to point out and describe."
High words like these will perhaps provoke a smile or a
sigh in those who remember the bathos of unsuccessful attempts
to carry them into effect ; and when to this is added the thought
of the pressure of modern life, so feverish and yet so mechanical,
so interesting and yet so unlovely, the poet himself will some-
times lose heart, and become,instead of "the trumpetwhich sings
to battle," " the idle singer of an empty day." Yet those who
fancy that the lamp of imagination is waning before the dawn
of industry and science might reflect that our scientific insight
into nature is scarcely more in advance of the crude fancies of
the Greeks than our imaginative interpretation of it is in
advance of their naive mythology. And if others are inclined
to retire to a " shadowy isle of bliss," and to leave education to
school boards and ministers, they should remember that the
"immortal garland" of poetry must be " run for, not without dust
and heat." They might consider too (to adapt Milton's words
once more), " What nation it is whereof they are, and whereof"
(if they knew it) " they are the governors ; a nation not slow and
dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit ; acute to
invent, subtile and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach
of any point that human capacity can soar to." Such a nation
is worthy to be educated by men who have the genius to do it.
We have heard Plato's answer to the first of the two ques-
tions which he raised about poets the question, What ought
they to say? and may now pass on to the second, How ought
they to say it ? What is the manner or form of poetry best
fitted to the functions which have been assigned to it in edu-
cation ? By the form of poetry Plato understands merely the
mode in which the poet represents the personages in his poem,
that is, whether he speaks in his own person and simply
describes what they say and do, or whether he puts himself in
their place and makes them speak and act for themselves. 1 The
first of these manners he calls " narrative," 2 the second " imita-
1 3. 392 c ff. * 3. 394 c.
1 08 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
live ;" the two may of course be employed separately, or com-
bined in various proportions in the same work. The type of
the " imitative " manner is the drama, that of the " narrative "
certain kinds of choric hymns, while the epic introduces them
both. We shall, however, understand Plato better if we banish
from our minds this triple division of poetry, with its modern
associations, and fix them upon the real question which occu-
pied him. That question is, Whether " imitation," or, as we
might better say, impersonation, should be the ruling principle
in poetry, or whether some other principle should rule ; or, in
other words, Is the poet to put himself into as many and as
various interesting personalities and situations as he possibly
can, and is the greatest poet he who can do this to the greatest
extent, or is he to observe some principle of selection other
than that of the merely interesting, and is there some other
criterion of poetic excellence than the degree of " imita-
tive " power ? That this is the real issue in Plato's mind
appears from the following passage : " The well-regulated man,
when he comes in his narrative to a speech or a deed of a good
man, will, it seems to me, want to give it in the very person of
that man, and of such imitation he will not be ashamed ; he
will imitate the good man most of all, when he acts without
stumbling or folly ; to a less extent and degree when he has
been upset by disease, or love, or drunkenness, or any other
calamity. But when he comes upon a person unworthy of
himself, he will not like seriously to assimilate himself to his
inferior, unless it be on the few occasions when he does some-
thing good ; partly he is unpractised in imitating such people,
and partly, too, it goes against the grain to put himself into
the mould of natures worse than his own ; his mind scorns
to do such a thing, unless it be in fun." l On the other hand,
" the lower the nature of the poet, the less will he discrimi-
nate in what he says, or think anything unworthy of him,
so that he will try to imitate anything and everything, in
sober earnest and before a large audience, such things even as
thunder and wind and hail, the noises of \vheels and pulleys, the
tones of trumpets, flutes, pipes, and all kinds of instruments,
1 396 c-e.
AY THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 109
and the voices of dogs, sheep, and birds." 1 We see that Plato is
here grouping together forms of imitation which would be dis-
tinguished by a modern writer. 'As art and literature advance,
the primitive delight of mere mimicry gives way to that of
subtler kinds of reproduction, and tends to confine ifself to the
less educated classes of society. But though the dramatic poet
stands on a different level from the actor, still more from the
pantomimist, they all agree in one point, that they are endowed
with more than ordinary capacity of losing their own person-
ality in that of others. It is in this common capacity that
Plato sees a danger, a danger both to the artist who possesses
it, and, in various degrees, to the audience which is able to fol-
low him in the exercise of it. His whole conception of the true
form of human society is based, as we saw, on the principle that
each member in it should have his work to do, and should do
it. 2 He is convinced of the impossibility of one man's excelling
in many trades or professions ; the same natural law which
makes every man the possible helpmate of others imposes on
him the necessity of accepting help from them. And if one
man cannot do many things well, neither can he imitate many
things ; and Plato (at least when he wrote the Republic) did
not think it possible for the same poet, or even for the same
actor, to excel both in tragedy and comedy. This law of the
limitation of human nature, which he found to hold good in
arts and professions, he would see observed in the greatest of
all arts and professions, the life of the citizen who is engaged in
the public service of the state. To men for whom the good of
the commonwealth is to be the paramount rule of conduct,
whose " craft " 3 is to be to maintain the liberty of their country,
what need is there of doing or being anything except what bears
upon their work ? and if not of doing and being, why of imi-
tating ? For imitation, bodily or mental, cannot remain mere
imitation ; if it begin early and continue long, it results in a
second nature. 4 If, then, the young are to put themselves into
other characters at all, let it be such characters as we wish them
ultimately to be, but no others, " lest from the imitation they
1 397 a. 2 3. 394 e 395 c ; cf. 2. 370 a-c.
z dtifjuovpyofc t\evdeplas TTJS iriXews irdvv aKpiftets, 3. 395 c. 4 3. 395 c-d.
THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
catch something of the reality." And thus the only poets who
will have work to do in a well-ordered State, will be those who
will "imitate what is right, and that only ;" 1 who will express
in their works the true type of character, and thereby help to
produce it. As for the great pantomimic genius, " the man
with the skill to turn himself into all kinds of people, and to
imitate everything," 2 he may be allowed to be " divine and
miraculous and delightful ;" but he will find no audience in a
society where " twofold and manifold men do not exist, but
everybody does one thing."
The mitigated attack made upon the drama in the third
book of the Republic, is renewed by Plato in the tenth with
greater vehemence and a more elaborate array of argument.
We need not here enter into the general theory of the nature of
artistic production which he there advances in order to refute
the extravagant claims of omniscience made for the poets by their
admirers ; but his account of the psychological effects of dra-
matic poetry may be noticed, as it develops and illustrates that
given in the earlier book. Plato charges dramatic writers,
firstly, 3 with depending mainly upon illusion for their success ;
and secondly, 4 with weakening character by over-stimulating
the emotions. The meaning of the first charge is best seen from
the analogy of painting by which it is illustrated. 5 Painting
and kindred arts produce their effects by taking advantage of
certain optical illusions ; the perception of the actual propor-
tions of objects is kept in abeyance by the mere appearance,
until corrected by scientific measurement. Similarly the poet
takes advantage of illusions of feeling ; 6 the aspects of charac-
ter which he likes to represent are not those where it is simple,
quiet, consistent, and rational, but rather its emotional aspects,
with their shifting lights and shadows, where the contrasts are
strong and the transitions rapid ; and the element in his audi-
ence to which he appeals, and upon which he reckons for his
success, is not the sober judgment which sees life in its true pro-
portions, but the illusory feelings of the moment which care only
for their immediate satisfaction. So that, judged by the worth
1 3. 397 d. 2 397 e 398 b. 3 10. 602 c 605 c.
4 605 c 606 d ; 605 b. 6 602 c-e. 6 604 d 605 e.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. in
both of what it represents and of what it appeals to, dramatic
poetry seems to condemn itself to inferiority. The second
charge against it is an expansion of that made in the third
book. Few people reflect that in putting themselves in the
positions of others, they catch something which becomes their
own. 1 Yet this is the case when, in seeing tragedy and comedy,
we give unrestrained way to emotions which we should be
ashamed to indulge in real life. We think it does not matter,
because we stand outside the circumstances which call them
forth ; but when similar circumstances arise in our own experi-
ence we find that our will has been weakened and our self-
respect undermined.
Two dominant ideas underlie all the objections urged by
Plato against the dramatic element in literature : the duty of
being true to ourselves, and the duty of being true to facts.
The two were in his mind closely related. As the burden of
his philosophy of knowledge was that we should learn to see
things as they are, not as they appear to us to be, so the burden
of his philosophy of conduct is that we should learn to be
what we really are, and not what our fancy makes us. And as
the belief in an objective world of reality, an order of existence
which we do not create, but which we find and must recognise,
pervades his logical speculation, so it is the corresponding con-
viction that the rational self in man is his most real self, and
that life in accordance with the rational order of the world is
his truest life, which gives nerve and consistency to his theories
of morality. We have already seen expressions of this convic-
tion in the denial of the possibility of change in the divine
nature, and in the condemnation of excessive indulgence of
emotion. Order and immutability seemed to Plato the attributes
of what is best and highest both in the physical and in the
moral world, and it is just these attributes which he missed in
the capricious current of feeling. The lower he went in human
nature or in human society, the more did he seem to find men
the creatures of their sentiment, and the less purpose or law
did he discern in their lives. 2 And art, especially dramatic art,
seemed to him to pander to this natural fickleness. It had
1 606 b. a 4. 431 c ; 3. 397 d ; 10. 604 e ; 608 a.
1 1 2 THE THE OR Y OF ED VGA TION
no principle of selection, no law of better and worse ; l wherever
it could raise a laugh, or draw a sigh, or tickle an appetite,
there it was ready with its phantasmagoria of life. It had a
direct interest in "watering and nourishing" 2 the lower and
more trivial impulses which reason calls upon us " to dry up,"
and it stimulated the already too great tendency in us to do
everybody's business except our own, to be actors instead of
citizens, to play at life instead of living it. The words of Bacon,
in which he gives the reason why poetry " was ever thought to
have some participation of divineness," might have been used
by Plato in another sense to express why it is so far from being
divine ; " poetry doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting
the shows of things to the desires of the mind, whereas reason
doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things."
The very emphasis and fulness of Plato's polemic against
dramatic literature must make us feel that he was writing in a
different atmosphere from our own. Few modern writers on
education in England would reckon the stage amongst the most
powerful agents, whether for good or bad ; few too would regard
a tendency to theatricality and effusiveness as one of the most
serious dangers to the English character. Not the most extra-
vagant admirer of our dramatists would claim for them what
Plato heard men claim for Homer, that they have " educated
their country, and deserve to be read over and over again as
authorities on human conduct and education, and as models on
which men may order the whole of their lives." 3 Nor is the
average Englishman likely to be too " imitative " in the sense
which alarmed Plato. The suppleness of nature which made
it hard for the Athenian to be " one man and not many," is
generally replaced in us by a sturdiness and concentration,
of which consistency and self-respect, self-consciousness and
selfishness, are respectively the good and the bad developments.
Yet it must be admitted that these qualities are not incom-
patible with illusions and extravagances of feeling, none the
less dangerous because outwardly repressed ; and though we are
not, on the whole, a nation of theatre-goers, we are undoubtedly
a nation of novel-readers, and may find there the dramatic
1 605 a-c. 2 10. 606 d. s 10. 606 e.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 113
stimulants against which Plato protested. It must be borne in
mind, in comparing any ethical influence of literature in ancient
and modern times, that what in Greece was mainly a public of
spectators and listeners is now mainly a public of readers. It
is true that in the pulpit we have a medium of oral communi-
cation which they had not, but, speaking generally, it is not now
in the open places of the theatre, the camp, the law-courts, and
the marketplace, that the uttered word most circulates and
works ; it is rather in silence or in solitude, through the news-
paper on the family table, the periodical at the club, the poem
or novel in the bedroom, that the modern writer speaks to his
fellow-men. And the difference in the medium goes along with
a difference in the effect. Instead of the noisy publicity in
which contagious feeling grows as it spreads from man to man,
till the individual is " borne helplessly along the stream," l and
loses himself in an indiscriminate froth of exaggerated feeling,
we brood over books in the heated cells of our own imagination,
build castles of the fumes of our own emotions, and come forth
to measure the world by the mock-heroic standard of our own
littleness. But the craving for change and excitement, the
desire to escape from our own true selves with the responsi-
bilities which they entail, are not the less strong in us because
we are not born actors or mimics ; the mind can make its own
stage and act upon it, while the body remains immobile and
unexpressive. Nor does the modern demand exceed the modern
supply. The novel, which absorbs so much of our dramatic
talent, lends itself with fatal ease to the promiscuous photo-
graphy of situations and feelings. The increased sense of the
importance of human life and of the inexhaustibleness of its
problems supplies a ready argument to those who find anything
and everything "interesting;" and there are still writers of
whom we might say metaphorically what Plato intended
literally, " that there is nothing which they will not imitate,
thunder and wind, trumpets and whistles, dogs and sheep." 2
The same principles which guided Plato in his conception of
the educational function of literature guided him also in his
treatment of the other constituents of " musical" education, and
1 6. 492 c. * 3. 397 a.
1 1 4 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
led him to conclusions still more at variance with modern
practice and theory. That poetry and literature, which express
definite ideas, should be made to serve the interests of society,
is an intelligible if surprising proposal ; but that music, paint-
ing, and sculpture should be pressed into the same service, will
seem to many a vague fancy, impracticable in education, and
destructive of art. Let us then see what Plato's idea of the use
of the arts in education precisely was. " Music," he says, 1
" involves three elements, words, harmony, rhythm," or, as we
may say, to bring his meaning nearer home, without pretending
to give it an exact modern equivalent, words, key, and time.
As to the words, they must conform to the same canons as the
words of other poetry, and the character of the two remaining
elements must be determined by that of the words. Those
"harmonies" and "rhythms" then must be employed in musical
composition which will express the qualities which we wish to
develop in the soul. What these are we already know. They
are the qualities which result from the right nurture of the two
higher psychological elements in human nature, the " spirited"
and the " philosophic." We must therefore have a music of
corresponding character, a music of war and a music of peace, 2
a " harmony " of violence and effort, and a " harmony " of con-
ciliation and calm, a "harmony" to represent the daring of the
soldier and the endurance of the martyr, and a " harmony" to
express the accents of entreaty or persuasion, of submission or
acquiescence. Other kinds than these, and other instruments
than these require, are superfluous luxuries which must be
" purged away" 3 in a healthy state, whose object is not to stimu-
late every feverish craving of its citizens, but to weave strongly
those vital strains of character which sustain the fabric of
society. The same principle will apply to the " rhythms" 4 and
measures of music and dance, as to the " harmonies" in which
they are composed ; they must not develop in lawless indepen-
dence, but must be such as will express " the orderly and brave
life."
There is then, according to Plato, a right and a wrong in the
musical relations of pitch and time, and this right and wrong
1 3. 398 d. 2 3. 399 a-c. 3 399 e. 4 399 e 400 c.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 115
is in some sense akin to the right and wrong in human
nature and conduct. Goodness and badness of form, he says,
follow goodness and badness of rhythm, and goodness and bad-
ness of rhythm follow goodness and badness of language, and
these again depend upon goodness and badness of character. 1
Nor is it only in the movements of dance and song that there
is this correspondence ; in all sensuous material there is a similar
capability of expression ; 2 it is present in the forms of painting
and sculpture, of weaving and embroidery, of building and
manufacture, of animal and vegetable life ; " in all of these
there is shapeliness or unshapeliness, and unshapeliness and un-
rhythmicalness and inharmoniousness are the kindred of badness
of language and badness of character, while the opposites are
kindred and imitations of the opposite character, the chastened
and the good." The poets then are not the only artists over
whom the state should exercise control; 3 attention must be
given to the whole body of craftsmen, and they must be pre-
vented from expressing what is vicious and unchastened, mean
and unshapely, whether in the figures of living things or in
buildings or in any other work of art. The artists who should
be encouraged by the state must be " those who have the
genius to track out the nature of what is fair and shapely " 4 and
to embody it anew in their works. For the young citizens must
not be allowed to grow up amongst images of evil, lest their
souls by daily contact gradually and unconsciously assimilate
the ugliness of their surroundings. 5 Eather they should be
like men living in a beautiful and healthy place; 'from every-
thing that they see and hear, loveliness, like a breeze, should
pass into their souls, and teach them without their knowing
it the truth of which it is a manifestation. In such an
atmosphere they will not only acquire a natural grace and
proportion of bearing and character, but an instinctive sense of
what is fair and what is foul in nature and in art ; and this
instinctive sense is a kind of anticipation of a rational under-
standing of the nature of good and evil; for the reason which
is now presented to them in forms of sense, and calls forth
sensuous delight, is the same reason which they will afterwards
1 3. 400 c-d. "- 401 a. 3 401 b. 4 401 c. & 401 c-d.
ii 6 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
learn to know in its own form as an intelligible principle, and
which they will then recognise as an old friend with a new face. 1
Such is the nature and such are the limits of the education
of " music." It has a more intellectual and a more emotional
aspect. From the former point of view, it is completed when
we have " learned to read " 2 the world of sights and sounds
which is about us. That world is like a language which we
have got to master ; the sensible forms of good and evil pass
and repass before us in an infinite variety of combinations, like
the letters of an alphabet which combine into an infinity of
words, great and small. No form can be disregarded ; acts and
speeches which seem trivial, like the little words in a book, may
contain a world of meaning and be the key to a character. And
the true function of the artist is to help us to learn this lan-
guage of life ; he is the man who knows the shapes of the letters
and the laws of their combinations. In the " mirror " which
he holds up we may see reflected the images of courage, tem-
perance, generosity, and their opposites, and thus learn to know
the realities when we see them. Thus art should find its
fulfilment in life; and he may most truly be said to be
" musically " educated, whose eye and ear are trained to detect
what is right and wrong, not only in the creations of art, but
also, so far as it can be apprehended by the senses, in the actual
world of which art is the reflection.
If, on the other hand, we regard the emotional effects of
" musical " education, they may be summed up in two, that it
infuses a spirit of order, 3 and that it develops the " true love "
of beauty, 4 the former being the more passive condition of which
the latter is the more active expression. To Plato, most of the
evils of sensual passion fall under one of two heads, unregulated
variety or unregulated intensity. He considered passion to be
essentially " many-headed," and capable of indefinite multipli-
cation and expansion ; and one of his chief charges against the
art of his time was that it fostered and satisfied the indiscrimi-
nate craving for emotional excitement. In contrast with it,
1 3. 402 a. 2 402 a-c.
3 3. 404 e, fftoHppoffiJvqv ; 4. 424 e, fwo^ur^pov iraidias ; 425 a, evvo^iav : cf.
413 e. 4 3.402 d 403 c.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 117
he demanded an art which should not merely stimulate, but
should also discipline, the feelings ; which should not follow but
lead them ; which should chasten their disorder and brace their
indolence by making them move in the delicate lines of pro-
portion and beauty, and respond to the quiet emphasis of
harmony and rhythm. For the balance and symmetry which
are essential to good artistic work are also, he conceived,
essential to true artistic feeling. Love is the typical feeling
awakened by sensuous beauty, and the genuine love of genuine
beauty is incompatible with ungoverned emotion. The mere
" mad" 1 intensity of animal appetite has nothing to do with such
love, which is not for the body except so far as it is the expres-
sion of soul. " Where beauty of inward character meets with
beauty of outward form, each corresponding and harmonising
with the other, and cast in a common mould, there is the fairest
sight to a man who has the eyes to see it. And what is most
fair is also most loveable." 2 It is this perfect accord of the
inward and the outward which the truly " musical " man seeks
and delights in ; but if it cannot be realised, if one or the other
element must be imperfect, he will surrender the outward, and
while no perfection of form will atone to him for defect of
soul, he " will not refuse to take pleasure in " a fair soul even
though it appear in an " inharmonious " body. 3
Before considering the general view here given of the func-
tions of art in education, a word must be said about the relative
position which Plato assigns to the various specific arts. We are
at once struck by the great prominence given to music as com-
pared with painting, sculpture, and architecture ; and this may
seem the more surprising when we remember the excellence
attained by the Greeks in the last two and the rudimentary
character of their achievements in the first. It may be that
Plato did not see in the sculptors and architects of his time the
signs of degeneracy which drew his attention to the poets and
musicians ; but more probably he estimated the practical
influence of the former upon the national character as less
important than that of the latter. The frame of mind in which
pictures and statues, and still more buildings, are most appre-
1 3. 403 a. * 402 d. 402 d.
1 1 8 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
ciated and enjoyed, is rather one of open and undisturbed
receptivity than of active emotion, and to most temperaments
the burning word and the stirring melody have far more effect
upon action than brilliancy of colouring or majesty of form.
But whatever may be the cause, it is a fact worthy of attention
that a philosophical iconoclast like Plato, in attacking the idols
of sensationalism both in knowledge and morality, should have
almost ignored the painters and sculptors, and confined his
assaults to the musicians and still more to the poets. Another
noticeable point is the simplicity and uniformity of the criteria
which Plato applies to the several arts. Proportion, in one
form or another, is the single source to which he refers all
artistic excellence, in the musical relations of time and tone no
less than in those of space in the arts of form and construction.
And this leads us lastly to remark how extremely rudimentary
must have been the music of which he was speaking. He
assumes throughout that music always implies words, and the
whole subject of harmony, in its modern sense, is absent from
his consideration. The truth seems to be, paradoxical as it
may sound, that it was the very simplicity of Greek music
which led Greek writers to assign to it such a direct and
important educational influence. As in the early days of
sculpture or painting, the crudeness and symbolism makes the
meaning of the artist more clear, when compared with the
subtle design and colouring of great masters, so when music
was chiefly limited to an accompaniment giving emphasis or
precision to a recitation or a dance, its effect would be more
strongly recognised in proportion as it was more simple. Even
now there are dancing and inarching melodies which exercise a
direct and almost physical influence on a susceptible hearer,
just because there is nothing but the simple act of dancing or
marching which they suggest ; and if music generally were
intimately associated with a few elementary acts and feelings,
its power, being more easily expressible, would be also more
reducible to rule and to practice, than when it has developed
into a vast and independent growth, speaking in its own
language and obeying its own laws, of which it is itself the
sole interpreter.
This difference, however, great as it is, and much as it in-
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLA TO. 119
creases the difficulty of applying Plato's ideas to modern music,
does not except it from the general scope of his theory concern-
ing the educational use of art, the main features of which we
may now proceed to consider. Of these the central and most
characteristic one is undoubtedly the idea that art may have,
and ought to have, a definite function in the development of
character ; and we have to ask how Plato conceived this function
to be exercised. " Education in music," he says, " is so telling,
because rhythm and harmony sink so deeply into the inward
part of the soul, and take hold of it so strongly, and make it
graceful with the grace which they bring with them." 1 And
again, " Gracefulness and ungracefulness go along with rhyth-
micalness and unrhythmicaluess, and rhythmicalness and
unrhythmicalness follow and resemble goodness of language,
or the reverse ; the style of language, again, follows the char-
acter of soul, and thus goodness of language, of harmony, of
form, and of rhythm go along with goodness of character." 2
" Are the gestures and accents of a brave soul in trouble the
same as those of a cowardly one ?" he asks in a closely analogous
passage of the Laws ; " surely not ; the very colours of the two
men are different." 3 From these few passages, which could easily
be multiplied, so much is clear, that Plato was in earnest with
the idea that there is some real connection between character
and artistic form, and that the common element in both is
found in the Tightness of proportion which is essential alike to
beauty in art and to goodness in conduct. We shall perhaps
understand him better if we reflect (what the passages above
will suggest) that in the early stages of civilisation the whole
of life tends to be more symbolical, and the connection
between mental states and their physical expression more
immediate. In such stages speech has something of the crudity
of a language of signs, while gesture and sound approach the
delicacy and articulateness of words. With the progress of
civilisation the symbolism of sense does not, as is sometimes
supposed, disappear, but it gets infinitely more complex and
subtle ; colours and lines, tones and measures, instead of being
like letters of an alphabet with fixed and uniform values, be-
1 3. 401 cl. 2 3. 400 c-e. 3 Laws, 2. 654 e.
1 2 o THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
come fitful centres of multitudinous associations, so various to
different sensibilities, and so remote from their primitive signi-
ficance, that men are tempted to deny their validity or to relegate
them to the sphere of individual caprice. It is curious to see
the human mind thus refusing to recognise, or to be recognised
by, its own offspring as they grow up. In the infancy of art,
nobody doubts but that it has a meaning, that mind speaks to
mind in it. Only when it has ceased to lisp and to point, when
the simple singer has grown into a " mighty-mouthed inventor
of harmonies," and the sculptor's one poor thought has made
way for
"The thousand sounds and sights that broke
In on him at the chisel's stroke,"
only then do men begin to question whether what they have
created is really their own, and to explain it away by chance,
by convention, by mechanics, by anything but mind. Yet this
is not really to be wondered at ; for as soon as we try to account
for any but the simplest effects of art, they escape us, the truth
being that " accounting for " them merely means translating one
medium of expression into another and less perfect one. Lan-
guage and music and painting are all significant, but the sig-
nificance of one is not convertible with that of another. We
cannot listen to the meaning of colour and form, we must see
it ; we cannot make music speak in words without its ceasing
to be music, any more than we can resolve a poem into sound
and rhythm without its poetry evaporating. And if the relation-
ship of the arts to one another is so difficult to express, much
more so is the relationship of art in general to other modes of
human activity. Few people, indeed, can seriously doubt that the
character of an imaginative man is ultimately affected by what
he habitually sees and hears ; or, again, that what one person ap-
prehends as right or expedient, another person may apprehend
as beautiful; or, once more, that devotion, similar in effect
to that of the saint for the being whom he worships, may be felt
by the man of science for the truth which he pursues. But
when we have made a few general statements such as these, we
are brought to a standstill by the intricacy of the subject and
the limitations of our analysis. The fact remains irrefragable
that to the vast majority of mankind art and conduct, religion
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLA TO. 121
and science, are very different things, with little or nothing in
common ; and that the attempt to fuse them generally results
in sermonising pictures, rose-water morality, and unctuous
sciolism. And as, at most times and for most purposes, it is of
more practical importance to realise proximate differences than
fundamental unities, the world at large instinctively looks with
suspicion upon those who, in trying to see through the ordinary
distinctions of life, appear to be removing its ordinary land-
marks. No one has insisted more strongly than Plato himself
upon the dangers of passing too hastily " from the many to the
one ; " but for that very reason we need not be afraid to follow
him, when, with the courage of his conviction that reason is
one in its essence, he leads us now and again to " a high rock "
from which we may see that it is one also in its manifestations.
To Plato the laws of proportion, which are the condition of
beauty in art, seemed to betoken the presence of the same mind
as is revealed in the immutable order of the universe, and more
imperfectly in the moral order of human life. 1 He was very
far from identifying or confusing artistic beauty with moral
goodness; but, believing, as he did, that the whole physical
world is " the image of its maker, God manifest to sense," 2 he
could not but believe that in all things sensible, and therefore
in the relations of figure, time, and tone, there is a right and a
wrong, a good and a bad, according as they do or do not express
and obey intelligence. And since bodily movement and sight
and hearing are among the most prominent and important of
our vital activities, especially in early life, he drew the natural
conclusion that it must make a difference to the growth of the
human soul and character, how, and upon what occasions, those
activities are exercised, and that it is the function of the arts to
provide for their exercise in the best way and upon the best
objects. It is, in fact, rather the real simplicity than the sup-
posed vagueness of Plato's ideas which makes them embarrass-
ing. The luxuriant development of the arts in modern times,
in independence both of one another and of the other elements
of human life, makes it difficult to apply to them conceptions
formed at a time when they were modest and business-like
1 Timaeus, 47 b-d. * Timaeus, 92 b.
1 2 2 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
appendages of religion, war, or public amusement ; almost as
difficult as it -would be to transfer the lessons learnt on a school
drilling-ground to the evolutions of a modern army on the
battle-field.
Plato would have his young citizens, who are one day to
govern and protect the state, nerved and inspirited, soothed
and softened, by warlike and peaceful songs ; he would have
them disciplined to order by the precision of time and tune, of
movement and voice ; he would remind them of their duties by
the sculpturesque embodiments of undying types of true man-
hood ; he would make grace and dignity as natural to them as
the air which they breathe, and lead them to bear themselves
unconsciously as if they were in the presence of others. In all
this there is nothing strange. But from the austere beauty of
the conception of the Greek philosopher to the confused jargon
of modern aesthetic culture, is a bewildering and unwelcome step.
Our masterpieces of art are mostly foreign, and speak a lan-
guage unintelligible to the ordinary English mind. Even if it
were otherwise, they are meaninglessly arranged in galleries, cut
adrift from the surroundings for which they were made, but
which they can never recover. Our greatest artists are going
back to an unreal or unnational past, or "are making the
public their master more than necessity requires." 1 Where are
we to look for the " breeze of beauty and health," for the crafts-
men who " can track out the nature of loveliness and grace " ?
We may collect engravings, and photographs, and china, and
make ourselves learned in the history of art ; we may found
museums and institutes, and spread casts of Venus and Apollo
through the land ; we may give thousands of pounds for pieces
of clever vulgarity ; but we shall not make English life much
more beautiful or more joyous, unless we can produce art
which will educate the nation to see with its eyes and to hear
with its ears the country in which it dwells and the history
which it inherits. It is in music perhaps that the outlook is
the least discouraging. Here there is a possibility of acting
upon large masses with some effect ; here social distinctions are
less felt ; here too the English nature seems to show more apti-
tude and susceptibility. We can hardly hope to make our great
1 6. 493. d.
AV THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 123
towns beautiful, but it is not chimerical to look forward to a
time when they may each have their orchestra and chorus, and
adequate provision for hearing them. There is no need to
quarrel about the precise educational effect which modern music
has or may have. That it has some such effect will not be denied
except by those who wish to keep it to themselves, or by those
who are irritated at the stupidity of its would-be advocates.
The apparent vagueness of its influence, arising from the diffi-
culty of formulating it, is neither a proof of its unreality nor an
argument against utilising it. Everybody who is at all suscep-
tible to music knows that he is better for having it, and worse
for being without it ; he also probably know-s that the composers
whom the world has agreed to call great are, some, or all of
them, those to whose music he most likes to listen ; more than
this he need not be able to say, for a fact is not made more of
a fact by being talked or written about. If it be once fully
recognised that music has a great emotional power over a con-
siderable proportion of English people, the proper application
of the power becomes a public duty, and it is only a question of
time to discover the best ways of doing it.
We have thus far considered Plato's conception of the
education in " music," mainly in its ethical and psychological
aspect, but we should represent him very imperfectly if we
omitted to mention the importance which he attaches to it on
social and political grounds. The often-quoted text, that " the
fashions of music are never changed without changes in the most
important laws of the commonwealth," 1 may serve here as a point
of departure. It is difficult for us to understand the concern with
which Plato urges the importance of permanence and continuity
in the system of " musical " education. " It is in music," he
says, 2 " that the guardians of our state must build their guard-
house ; for it is here that lawlessness easily creeps in unper-
ceived. People think that it is only play, and does no harm.
And what harm does it do ? Little by little it gets a footing,
and spreads gently and silently into the habits and arrange-
ments of life ; from these it passes, gathering force as it goes,
into the transactions of business, and from business it gets to
1 4. 424 c. "Music " is here used in its modern sense. 2 424 d-e.
1 2 4 THE THE ORY OF ED UCA TION
the laws and the constitution, with licence full-grown in its
train, until it ends by ruining everything, both public and
private." On the other hand, " when the play of children is
good from the first, and they take in a spirit of law through
their music, then it has just the opposite effect, attending them
at every step in life, making it grow, and building it up where
it had fallen down." l And as in the other case the spirit of
lawlessness, beginning at the trifles of education, ends by over-
throwing law itself, so the law-loving temper, fostered from
childhood, is the pregnant germ of the full insight of the legisla-
tor and statesman. 2 If it only be started well, it will assimilate
nourishment and grow by its own inherent vitality. To people
who have thus lived in an atmosphere of order, the details of
legislation will offer no difficulty; with an instinctive and
inherited tact they will regulate their life wisely and well,
whether it be in the lesser matters of social behaviour and
usage, or in the greater ones of business, commerce, and trade.
We have had occasion before to remark on the difference
between the small and simple civic communities of Greece and
the complex masses of modern nations, in regard to the
directness and rapidity of the transmission of social and
political changes. The passage just quoted brings that differ-
ence again vividly before us. To Plato, with the restlessness
and instability of Greek political life before his eyes, the one
thing needful seemed to be to establish in society a permanent
" ethos," a traditional character, which should be able to resist
the shocks of party-spirit and individual caprice. And if this
could only be done by a system of education, which should
receive each citizen at birth and retain its hold upon him
through life, it was no mere fancy to watch with a jealous eye
the first symptoms of innovation in the system, even in matters
so apparently trivial as popular songs. To us, with our national
gift for forming and carrying on traditional modes of life and
thought, it will often seem that in education we need more
exhortation to adopt new ideas than to remain faithful to old
ones. Our great schools and universities are typical instances
of the way in which prejudice and tradition may uphold
1 4. 425 a. 8 424 a ; 425 a-e.
AY THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 125
methods of teaching and social habits which have ceased
to have a reason for existence. As regards the other part of
Plato's opinion, that for men who are going to serve their
country in government and legislation the early formation of a
" constitutional " character is of much more importance than a
study of written systems or codes, we are more nearly at one
with him. If the Duke of Wellington could say that the
battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields at Eton, we
need not be surprised at Plato when he speaks of children
" receiving the spirit of law through their music," l or when he
says that " one of the greatest tests of a man's character is the
show which he makes in his gymnastics." 2 The distrust in
" technical " education for the higher spheres of public life, and
the belief in the efficacy of a " liberal culture," which glories in
having nothing directly to do with a profession, are both strong,
sometimes perhaps too strong, in the English mind. Even if
the theory itself were in no danger of being overdriven, the
poverty of the culture which we provide on the strength of it
might give us some qualms. The principle of our system, put
at its best, is that by taking the mind through the greatest
works of classical literature, we both train it to habits of
exactitude and observation, and cultivate the taste, imagination,
and judgment with the finest and wisest thought of antiquity.
We inherit the system from an age when the language and
literature of modern Europe had only just begun to exist, and
when great thoughts adequately expressed could only be found
in classical writers. The value of the intellectual discipline
gained in the curriculum cannot seriously be disputed; but
whether, as it is at present worked, even when supplemented by
the teaching of parts of the Bible, it supplies the best and most
natural food to the " philosophic " element in the English mind,
is extremely doubtful. It is not indeed upon this ground, of
inadequacy for its professed purpose, that the system is gene-
rally attacked ; its assailants are more often persons who are
crying out for " practical" education, and who, if they had their
way, would eliminate from the culture of the human mind the
study of its own greatest works. But it is just this which
1 4. 425 a. 7. 537 b.
1 2 6 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
makes the question a serious one. For if the position of the
higher education is assailed from without by misguided or
mercenary ignorance, while its natural defenders are beginning
to doubt whether they have anything to defend, we may well
fear for its future. In the confusion and din which surrounds
the subject, nothing seems so important as to come to a clear
understanding of the point at issue. It should be seen that
convenient catch-words like " supply" and " demand," or well-
sounding oppositions like " words " and " things," tell us
absolutely nothing unless we realise first by what the "de-
mand" is made, and what "things" are. It should be under-
stood that the primary question is, not whether to refine the
taste, or to produce a gentleman, or to teach useful knowledge,
is the end of education ; but, before all, how the whole man is
to be made the best of ; and that whether it be nature and her
works, or man and his works which are studied (and neither
can rightly be neglected), it is ultimately mind in some form
or another which we have to educate, and mind in some form
or another through which alone it can be educated. The
representatives of religion, literature, and science might then join
hands over their common subject-matter, instead of snatching at
it by turns, and trying each to undo the work of his supposed
rival. In the meantime, until we are nearer to such a result,
two lesser and more practicable things may be done by the
teachers of language ; they may try to make classical education
less a matter of mere grammatical discipline or of imitative
ingenuity, and more a study of human thought and character ;
and they may try to rescue our own English literature from its
present neglect, to treat it in the spirit of the great men who
have created scholarship, not on methods combining the worst
features of the traditional classical curriculum, and, by making
it speak to the youth of the nation, give it a systematic place in
the development of the national character.
We may conclude Plato's representation of the political and
social importance of " musical " education by looking with him
for a moment at some of the consequences of its neglect. In
the eighth and ninth books of the Republic, Plato has given us
in a series of pictures an ideal history of the fall of the human
soul, both in the individual and in society. He had previously
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 127
shown us what he conceived that the life of man might be if it
were allowed to follow the highest law of its development ; he
now shows us to what lowest depths it might be supposed to
sink if the logical principle of degeneration were allowed to
work unchecked. He had followed man up to the point at
which he is nearest to God ; he now traces his descent to the
point when he is on the verge of passing into a beast. In this
picture of the progress of evil a strikingly prominent place is
assigned to the gradually increasing neglect of "music;" and
nowhere does Plato express more clearly his sense of the vital
importance, social and political, of a thing apparently so far
removed from society and politics as the early culture of the
higher side of human nature. The ideally best condition of life,
individual and social, had been represented by him as resulting
from the harmonious and normal development and operation of
certain psychical forces. In accordance with this view, the
gradual declension from such a condition is represented as a
continually increasing discord in the vital faculties, beginning
with the failure of the highest to perform their proper functions,
and the usurpation of their place by lower ones, and ending
with the complete inversion of the true psychological relations,
and the absolute dominion of those activities which have no
right even to exist in the organism. And as the ideally best
conditions were conceived by Plato to depend upon a right
system of education, maintaining and transmitting a certain
character, so the typical forms of evil or imperfection in the
world are pictured by him as resulting from the abandonment
or perversion of such a system, the soul being thereby deprived
of its proper nourishment, and left a victim to the bad influ-
ences of its environment and its own lower nature.
The first effect of the neglect of " music" is a certain loss
of elevation in the general aim of life. 1 The "philosophic"
faculties, deprived of their true object, find exercise in calculat-
ing means to lower ends, and in this unnatural service lose
that simplicity and directness which are alone compatible with
the pursuit of truth in the interests of society. The element
of " spirit" rises into the place thus left vacant, and makes the
1 Cf. 8. 546 e ; 548 b-c ; 549 b ; 547 d-e.
1 2 8 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
desire for distinction the ruling principle of life. But the
falseness of its position reacts upon it ; deprived of the higher
inspiration which its nature requires, it sinks itself into mere
personal ambition, while the meaner desires, which it should
have joined with reason to regulate or repress, begin to lift up
their heads. Such is Plato's psychological diagnosis of certain
well-known social phenomena. When the best intellects in
the community begin to be suspected of being " too clever," and
are kept out of high places in favour of " honest and down-
right" men; when self-respect tends to degenerate into self-
will, and the desire for personal distinction becomes a passion ;
when moral rectitude is upheld more by fear of disgrace than
by inward conviction, and a chivalrous bearing in public is
compatible with the pursuit of money and pleasure "in the
dark;" 1 then we may suspect that "the Muses are beginning
to be neglected," 2 and that "reason tempered with music,
which is the only guardian-angel of virtue," 3 is being driven
from its natural home in the souls of men.
The continued neglect of education brings with it more
aggravated results. 4 As the eye of the mind grows more and
more unaccustomed to the vision of beauty and truth, its sight
gets more and more narrowed to the objects nearest to it, and
the " blind god " of wealth becomes the leader of the " blind "
soul. And the fresh downward step of the higher self is accom-
panied by a fresh rise in the lower ; the animal appetites, which
ambition had affected to despise and repress, now no longer
" tamed " by reason or swayed by high purpose, become noisy
and importunate ; and though respectability and self-interest
may still keep them down, " want of education " leaves them
free to engender a brood of " drone-like " passions, unproduc-
tive and inorganic, the paupers and criminals of the soul. The
same " want of education," operating over a wider area, pro-
duces analogous conditions in a state, where the neglected and
unnurtured children of the upper classes first sink into unpro-
ductive spendthrifts, and then swell the useless and dangerous
elements of the society which, in its blind devotion to money,
had helped to impoverish them.
1 Cf. 8. 547 d-e ; 549 a ; 548 a-b. 2 8. 546 d.
8 8. 549 b. 4 554, b-d ; 552 e.
AV THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 129
It is a further stage in decline \vhen the comparative
respectability and consistency of the pursuit of wealth gives
way to the mere restlessness of indiscriminate impulse, and the
satisfaction of the passing moment is erected into a principle
of life. Here, again, it is the " uneducated " l soul which falls a
victim. A father, who believes in nothing that does not pay,
gives his son a cheap education. 2 The son gets into fast society ;
its flashiness dazzles his eyes, which have never learnt to look
at anything but the ground ; after a struggle perhaps he
temporarily recovers his hereditary steadiness, but his soul is
still empty and barren, and weeds, both native and exotic, have
full liberty to grow there. The " words of truth and beauty,
which are the best garrison of souls whom God loves," 3 have never
been allowed to hold their rightful citadel, and their vacant
place is gradually occupied by the "false and swaggering" 4
theories, which promise " initiation " into the " mysterious "
knowiedge of the world. 5 Their key to the mystery is simple,
and consists in "calling insolence good breeding, anarchy
freedom, prodigality magnificence, and shamelessness man-
hood." 6 For a soul so circumstanced, the best chance is that it
may stop in its career of licence before it has become the victim
of any one dominant passion, and arrive at a sort of equilibrium
in its desires, satisfying them each in turn, and living that life
of so-called " freedom " which consists in being the creature of
the moment. 7 But if circumstances are not so favourable to
it, 8 the trembling balance of discordant appetites is sure to be
overset, the irresistible impulse of passion to absorb everything
unless it be itself absorbed will assert itself, and the easy-going
"liberty and equality" of many-coloured caprice will settle
down into the cruel and sombre " tyranny " of lust.
These meagre fragments, from what forms perhaps the most
powerfully written section of the Republic, will suffice to illus-
trate Plato's conception of the consequences of neglecting the
education of the reason through the imagination and the emo-
tions. They will show how strongly he felt the truth which we
are sometimes in danger of forgetting, that the evil in human life
1 8. 559 d. 2 559 d 560 a. * 560 b. 4 560 c.
5 560 e. 6 560 e. 7 561 a-e. * 9. 572 e 573 c.
130 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
is quite as much due to negative as to positive conditions ; that
it is the absence of healthy and bright surroundings, the want of
healthy and interesting employments, the abeyance of healthy
and inspiring emotions, which drag so many men down. We
cannot help seeing this in the case of the lower strata of
society, where the pressure of circumstances is so gross and
palpable ; but if we agree with Plato, we shall feel that the
more richly endowed and the more delicately organised human
nature is, the more important and also the more difficult it is to
educate it well, and the more fatal are the consequences, both
to itself and to society, of educating it badly or not at all. And
what is true of different natures compared with one another, is
true also of the different elements in the same nature. Good,
like evil, begins at the top and radiates downwards. If we can
secure that the highest faculties, intellectual and emotional, are
at their highest activity, the lower ones will not probably be
seriously disorganised ; but no amount of decent regularity in
the working of the lower will guarantee the vitality of the
higher. " When the whole soul follows the philosophic element,
and there is no faction in it, the justice of each separate part is
secured, and each does its own work and reaps its own pleasures
too, the best pleasures, and also up to its measure the truest.
But when any of the other elements dominates, it not only fails
to find its own pleasure itself, but it compels the other elements
to pursue a pleasure which is not their own nor true." 1
The evils arising from the neglect of " music" are not the
only evils which Plato describes in connection with it ; we have
already seen what he considered to be the psychological effects
of its excessive or exclusive study. To obviate these effects is,
as we also saw, the proper function of gymnastic ; and we have
now to complete our account of Plato's conception of that
branch of education. Of this, as of music, he only lays down
certain general " outlines" or principles, leaving the details to be
filled in by those who have to apply them. The most important
of these principles, which we have already had occasion to notice,
is that gymnastic, though concerned primarily with the body, 2
is to be considered as ultimately affecting the soul and the
1 9. 586 e. 3 3. 410 c.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 131
character, and owes to this fact its educational importance.
This principle at once determines the general aim of bodily
exercises ; they should aim " not so much at producing mere
strength, as at awakening the spirited element in human
nature." 1 It is the fault of the professional trainers that they
ignore the educational side of their business, and attend only to
developing the muscles. And their system not only fails in an
ethical point of view, but even where it might be expected to
succeed, it does not really do so. " The athletic habit of body
is a sleepy sort of habit, and is liable to upset the health. We
see how the professional athletes doze away their life, and how,
if they deviate a little from their prescribed diet, they get
serious and violent diseases." 2 A " finer kind of training " is
wanted for a man who is to serve his country as a soldier ; 3 he
must have his wits wide awake, be quick of sight and hearing,
and able to endure changes of food and weather without break-
ing down. Of the two elements in such a training, diet and
exercise, Plato, in the Republic, devotes much more considera-
tion to the former. The most characteristic point in what he
says of the latter is, that for a certain period physical exercise
should be pursued alone, to the exclusion of all serious mental
work. 4 This period would apparently be from two to three
years, 5 between the ages of seventeen and twenty. Two reasons
are given for this view : that " hard work and sleep are enemies
to study," and that " the figure which a man makes in his
gymnastic is one of the greatest tests of his character." 6 Every
one who knows anything of English school-Life will be ready to
indorse both these statements ; but he will not probably con-
sider the truth of them a reason for making two years and a
half of exclusive athletic exercises a necessary part of educa-
tion. We must remember, however, that Plato was thinking of
something more analogous to an incipient military service than
to the games of our schools. The exercises upon which so long
a time was to be spent would aim principally at disciplining
the body for the work of a soldier, and would include, if practi-
cable, some actual " taste of blood " on the battle-field. 7 Still,
1 3. 410 b. s 3. 404 a. * 404 a-b.
4 7. 537 b. s Cf. 7. 537 b ; 539 e. 7. 537 b.
7 5. 466 e-^67 e ; cf. 7. 537 a ; 3. 404 a-b.
1 3 2 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
even with this explanation, it is curious that his belief in
the importance of " specialising " work should have so far over-
ruled his consciousness of the dangers of one-sided develop-
ment.
Plato has more to say on the other branch of gymnastic, the
system of diet and general management of the body ; for he is
here brought into contact with the medical practice of his day,
and about this he held some strong opinions. Impressed with
the want of principle and purpose, of simplicity and concentra-
tion, in all departments of Greek life, he saw in the recent
growth of luxury, with its attendant crop of new diseases, and
its new methods of medical treatment, an analogous phenomenon
to that which he observed in the sphere of art. While the
artists seemed to him to be mainly engaged in catering for a
morbid appetite for emotional stimulants, 1 helping to enervate
morality and to fill the law-courts with litigants, instead of to
make men a law to themselves, the doctors, he thought, were
pampering a luxurious valetudinarianism, and flattering the
whims of rich voluptuaries whose disorders were the result of
their own mismanagement. 2 The simplicity for which he had
cried aloud in art, he now demanded in living, and upon the
same grounds. In a well-ordered society, every man ought to
have his work to do ; and if he has work to do, he must make
himself fit to do it. 3 The spiced luxuries of a feverish civilisa-
tion, with its "sauces from Sicily," its " grisettes from Corinth,"
its " Athenian confectionery," have no more place in his life
than they would have if he were training for a race. 4 Most of
the long names which recent medicine has given to diseases
are, in Plato's opinion, the polite inventions of doctors who will
not offend their rich patients by telling them the truth, that
they have worked too little and eaten too much. 5 A man who
is always wanting to see a physician, except in case of accidents
or epidemics, ought to be as much ashamed of himself as a man
who is always going into court to get justice, because he has
none of his own. 6 We might learn a lesson here from the de-
spised artisan. 7 He cannot afford to be long in bed ; his work
1 3. 404 e 405 a. 2 3. 405 c 408 b. 3 3. 406 c.
4 404 d ; cf. 2. 373 a, where erdlpat are similarly inserted between 6^/a and
. 6 3. 405 d. 6 3. 405 ad. ' 7 406 c d.
AV THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 133
will not wait for him ; and if he cannot be cured soon, he dies.
But the rich man is supposed to have no work to do, abstention
from which would make life not worth living. 1 He is to be
allowed to give up his duties as a householder or a citizen, or
to let his brain lie fallow as long as he likes, whenever he
fancies that he has a sick headache.
Modern life would have supplied Plato with close analogies
to the evils which he saw in the gymnastics and dietetics of his
own day. Our public schools and universities have no lack of
the sleepy and brutalised athlete, who has not an idea of doing
anything except by force, whose perceptions are cloyed and
dull, whose "life moves without grace or rhythm," 2 and who
yet probably could not serve on a campaign or a geographical
expedition. Nor is the well-to-do valetudinarian an unfamiliar
creature amongst us, the man who " suffers torments if he
depart at all from his accustomed diet," and "is always in
labour about his body." 3 Both phenomena may be said to
represent the bad sides of something which is intrinsically good ;
the exaggerated interest taken in athletic exercises, while
it partly defeats its own aim by artificialising school life, and
making games into professions, is nevertheless the outcome of a
genuine desire to broaden the basis of education, and to lose no
chance of developing character out of strong national tendencies.
So, too, the attention given to diet and the less serious forms of
ailment, though it may sometimes result in making a man
"profitable neither to himself or society," 4 is a symptom of the
higher and more intelligent value which is set upon human life.
Every real advance in civilisation, along with the higher re-
sponsibilities and the more delicate public conscience which it
brings with it, entails also fresh forms of abuse and greater
necessity for taking trouble ; but the best modern minds will
not agree with Plato that it is the duty of society to let anybody
die who can be kept alive. If, however, we have advanced
upon his ideas in this point, we are still far from having
realised them in others. We have not yet found the best way
" to blend music with gymnastic and apply them proportionately
to the soul " of the average schoolboy ; and we have scarcely
1 3. 407 a-c. 2 3. 411 e. 3 3. 406 b and 407 c. 4 407 e.
1 3 4 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
begun to entertain the idea that a man is as much bound to
manage his health properly as he is to manage his morals, much
less to diffuse the knowledge which would enable him to do it.
Let us now gather up briefly the main threads in Plato's
account of " musical " education, which, in its wider sense, as
implying the harmonious development of the whole nature,
includes " gymnastic " as well as " music." Its function is to
provide nurture for the soul from childhood to youth. Upon
the lower or " appetitive " element its action is more indirect
than direct ; it tames, regulates, or represses its various mani-
festations, by encouraging interests and emotions by which they
are absorbed, or with which they are incompatible, as the case
may require. Upon the " spirited " and " philosophic " elements
it acts directly, by compelling and encouraging their normal
activity through the bodily limbs and senses. The means
which it employs for the former are diet and exercise, for the
latter they are poetry and the arts. These last are the appro-
priate nurture of the " philosophic " nature, not in its entirety,
but in that phase of its growth in which it is mainly imagina-
tive and emotional, not logical and reflective. By presenting to
the soul the true principles of human life in the sensuous mate-
rial which it is able to assimilate, they prepare it unconsciously
for assimilating them when presented at a later stage in a more
rational form. They teach it how to live by telling how divine
beings and great men live and have lived ; they teach it what
to love by surrounding it with what is really loveable ; they
foster its acquisitive instincts by encouraging the quick and
accurate use of the senses ; they develop its tendency to order
and law by accustoming it to recognise severe symmetries of
sound and form; and, finally, they introduce it to manhood
endowed with an instinctive capacity of doing and saying the
right thing at the right time, and with an instinctive perception
of what is right and wrong in the deeds and words of others.
In calling the capacity and perception thus acquired " instinc-
tive," it is not intended that Plato conceived them to be received
at birth or got by natural selection. No doubt Plato did attach
immense importance to natural endowment; no doubt also he
believed that there was some natural tendency in human nature
towards what was good for it ; but we have abundantly seen
7.V THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 135
that this belief was more than counterbalanced by a conviction
that mere natural endowment may be simply destructive, and
that a mere tendency to what is good may ultimately tend to
what is bad. 1 By " instinctive " then is meant that the sub-
stance of the education of " music " is appropriated and held by
the soul without real reflection ; that, in Greek phraseology, it
feels neither the need nor the capacity to " give an account of "
it ; that it is conscious of it only as part and parcel of itself,
not as an object which it can hold apart, look at, and criticise.
Such a condition of mind is not of course unreflective in the
sense of implying any capriciousness or instability ; on the
contrary, the imperceptible degrees by which it has been formed
guarantee its depth and fixity. And, accordingly, when Plato
wishes to describe finally the effects of " music " upon the
character, he can find no better metaphor than one taken from
the process of dyeing. The dyers, he says, 2 when they want to
dye wool a fine purple, first select white wool from amongst the
various colours ; then they prepare it very carefully to receive
the bloom, and then at last they dye it ; a dye put in in this
way is fast for ever, whereas if otherwise treated it washes out in
a ridiculous manner. " This then was what we were trying to
do when we selected our citizen-soldiers, and educated them by
music and gymnastic ; our whole object was that by obedience
they should take in the laws like a dye, so that their belief
about danger and all other things might become fast, through
their having both the proper nature and the proper nurture,
and thus the influences of pleasure, pain, fear, and appetite,
which are more potent than all the soaps and solvents in the
world, might never be able to wash it out."
The question now arises, Is education so conceived complete ?
Is the soul, when nurtured up to this point, full-grown as far as
education can make it? At one time Plato seems to have
thought that it was; 3 that at about twenty a man must cease
learning in the narrower sense of the word, and get the rest of
his knowledge in the practical life of a citizen, and that it
rested with those in authority to watch his development and
regulate his career accordingly. But we have also seen that
1 C. 491 b. z 4. 429 c 430 b. 3 3. 413 e 414 a.
1 3 6 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
in the second section of the Republic, he clearly expresses his
feeling of the imperfection of the education of " music," and
assigns to it a subordinate and preparatory function in a more
elaborate system. 1 There are two main points in which Plato
finds it imperfect : subjectively, from the side of the soul, it
leaves important capacities undeveloped ; objectively, regarding
the matter which it imparts and the form in which it imparts
it, it stops short of the requirements of knowledge. On the
one hand, it teaches the " philosophic " nature to love what is
beautiful, but not to understand what is true ; 2 it makes it
quick to recognise the forms of goodness presented to sense or
imagination, but not to see with the mind's eye the essential
principles which those forms imperfectly express ; 3 it infuses
into it indelible beliefs and convictions, attaching to the parti-
cular characters and actions which have come before it in the
course of education, but it does not satisfy the desire to know
the laws to which those beliefs can be referred.* On the other
hand, if we regard the matter which it teaches, this consists
mainly of ideas embodied in sensible forms; the characters
and deeds of individual men are described in poetry or sug-
gested in music or pictured in painting and sculpture, with the
view of stimulating imitation and educating the sense for the
corresponding realities in life. The ideas thus imparted carry
conviction to the soul, not through their logical consistency and
irrefragability, but through their familiarity; they are appre-
hended, not in the systematic form of science in which each
part is seen to be connected with every other, but as a multi-
tude of isolated instances, each complete in itself, and contain-
ing its own justification. 5 A person in this mental condition
does not satisfy the requirements of what Plato understands by
knowledge; and here few thoughtful people would disagree
with him ; where he differs from most of the world is in think-
ing that the further mental progress, instead of being left to the
circumstances and choice of the individual, should be systemati-
cally provided for by a continued education. He seems to have
been led to this idea by reflecting upon the consequences which
1 7. 522 a ; 6. 503 e ff. 2 Cf. 3. 402 d and 403 c, with 5. 475 d-e.
8 Cf. 3. 402 b-c with 5. 476 a-d. 4 Cf. 3. 412 d^!4 a with 6. 503 a-e.
5 See the account of 56$a and its objects, 4. 477 a 480 a.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 137
seemed to him to follow from the neglect of it. He was per-
suaded that the evils of human life had their root in ignorance,
and that if men could once realise what their true interests
required them to do, they would do it. He did not expect that
mankind at large should ever have such a keen and profound
perception of the truth, but it seemed to him not impossible
that a few exceptional persons might arrive at it, and that
society might allow itself to be governed by them ; at any rate
he was convinced that this sovereignty of true knowledge was
the ideal to be aimed at, convinced that there is an intelligible
principle pervading and connecting not only the life of men but
the life of the whole universe, convinced that to discern this
principle and to conform to it is the highest achievement of
knowledge and of conduct, and that to " rise by stepping-stones"
towards this height is the true education both of the individual
and of the human race. Of such a principle the education of
"music" had nothing to tell ; l it showed examples and types of
courage, temperance, justice, but it did not show "wherein they
are good," 2 what is the end to which they all converge, and
which gives unity and meaning to their variety ; and without
some such perception how can we be said to " know " justice, or
even to possess it ? We may know it in one form, but we might
mistake it in another ; we may think we have got hold of it at
one moment, in one place, under one set of circumstances, but
it may escape us when we have changed our point of view.
This is why the results of the first education are " sketchy "
and " inexact," and require " filling up " and completing by a
further education. 3
But there was another consideration which led Plato to the
same conclusion. It has already been shown how the concep-
tion of what he called the " philosophic " nature grows under
his hands in the Republic, and how from being a complemen-
tary psychological element it comes ultimately to be represented
as the germ of complete manhood. Though, however, it has
in it this inherent capability, like other germs it depends for
its development upon its environment, and Plato is the first
1 7. 522 a. 2 6. 506 a.
1 6. 504 b, d/cpt/3eias t\\iirrj ; ib. d, inroypaQ-qv . . . airepya<ria.v, K.T.\.
1 3 8 THE THE ORY OF ED UCA TION
to admit, and even to insist upon, the fact, that this richly-
endowed " philosophic " nature, which might be the cause of
the greatest good to mankind, is generally the cause of the
greatest evils. 1 The reason of this strange phenomenon is
found, partly in the very gifts of the nature itself, partly in the
external advantages, so called, which it usually commands. 2
Driven by the native force of genius, it cannot rest in the
narrow conventionalities of common opinion. 3 But its un-
quenchable thirst for what is real, its far-reaching vision, its
magnificent aspirations, find no true satisfaction or guidance.
The atmosphere in which it lives is public opinion, speaking
through its hired mouth-pieces, who think themselves its
leaders ; loud, exaggerated, irresistible, intolerant of principles,
and confident in facts, which are really nothing but the dictates
of its own caprice. 4 What can save a great nature in such an
atmosphere, especially if his force of mind be supplemented by
beauty and strength, wealth and connections ? His power is
flattered by venal servility,his ambition spoiled by easy triumphs;
he feels the world within his grasp. And if some wiser man
whisper in his ear the hard truth that he is living the life
of a fool, how should he listen ? Or if his better genius chance
to make him listen, how should he escape the clutches of the
parasites, who had looked forward to living upon his success ?
So it is that the philosophic nature is corrupted, and sinks to a
life unworthy of itself, while philosophy, deserted by her true
kinsmen, falls a victim to any jackanapes who can afford to de-
spise his own profession, and bears in this enforced and unnatural
union the wretched bastards who go about the world bearing
her name, and bringing shame upon their mother. 5 Only here
and there, by some exceptional circumstance, ill-health perhaps,
or banishment, or pride, or possibly an inward and inexplicable
monition, a man of the true stuff is kept back from public life
and saved for philosophy ; and those poor few can do nothing
better than stand aside out of the storm of the world, happy if
they can live without sin and die in hope. 6 Such is Plato's
1 6. 487 e. 2 6. 491 b-c.
3 6. 490 a, OVK eiri^vot, iirl TO?S Sofafo/tt^ots elvai TroXXots ^/cdaTots.
4 C. 491 d 495 c. 6 6. 495 c 496 a. 6 6. 496 a 497 a.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 139
indictment against the society in which he was living. " No
one of the forms of constitution now existing is worthy of
the philosophic nature. Therefore it is changed and distorted,
and as a seed sown in a strange soil will lose its virtue and
become a victim to the influences amongst which it lives, so
in the present state of things this kind of soul does not keep its
force, but falls away to a nature not its own. But if it can
find a form of society good enough for it, then men will see that
it was always really divine, and that all else in their nature
and ways of life is human only." 1
It is then in the interests of society, whether we regard
them as endangered by want of real knowledge, or by the
neglect and corruption of its noblest natures, that Plato finds
a further education to be necessary ; and the question is,
firstly, How did he conceive of the higher kind of appre-
hension which he called knowledge and the higher form of
object which he called truth, and by what means did he think
that the mind might be educated to the knowledge of such
truth ? and secondly, How did he hope to avoid the dangers
attendant on the philosophic nature, and to make it an instru-
ment of salvation instead of destruction to society? These two
questions were to Plato really one ; for in his view the dominant
impulse of the philosophic nature is the impulse to know the
truth, and to know the truth of things is to know the reason of
them, and to know their reason completely would be to see
them as convergent parts in a whole governed by a single end,
or, in Platonic language, a single " good ;" so that ultimately to
know the truth of the world would be to know " the good" of
the world, or the " reason why " of its existence, and to under-
stand human life thoroughly would be to see the end or pur-
pose which governs it in the light of that larger end or purpose
which makes the whole universe luminous and intelligible.
Thus the true interests of society coincide with those of its
highest natures ; for the study of what the good of man is and
requires, is the best way of satisfying the best impulse of those
natures, and the same process which develops the philosophic
mind to its highest pitch, and makes a man a true philosopher,
1 6. 497 b-c.
140 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
will bring it also to the knowledge of the principles which
should guide human conduct, and will make a man a true
statesman. Thus the question with Plato comes to be, What
is the education by which the human mind may be brought
nearer to that truth which is at once the keystone of know-
ledge and the pole-star of conduct ? And this question is most
instructively treated under three heads, firstly, What is the
nature of intellectual progress ? the answer to which will give
us a scale of knowledge and truth up which education should
lead the mind ; secondly, What is the nature and cause of
human ignorance, which keeps the mind from thus advancing ?
and thirdly, What are the specific means by which this
ignorance may be removed, and the inherent capacity of the
mind developed and regulated ? The last only of these ques-
tions concerns education directly ; but just as in the case of the
earlier education of character it was impossible to understand
Plato without considering the constituent elements out of
which the character had to be formed, so in order to make
intelligible his account of the later education of reason, it is
indispensable to consider in a general way how he conceived
the activity and sphere of reason, in other words, knowledge
arid truth. And further, as Plato's manner of developing a
view by antagonism to an existing state of things is nowhere
more forcibly illustrated than in his treatment of this part of
his subject, we should be throwing away the half of our infor-
mation if, in examining the ideal of knowledge at which he
aimed, we neglected his picture of the ignorance from which he
wished to escape.
At the end of the sixth book of the Republic 1 Plato gives
us, under the figure of a line divided into four parts, a series of
the objects of mental apprehension, and of the mental operations
which correspond to them, arranged in an ascending order of
clearness and truth. At the bottom of the scale of objects he
places what he calls " images," and at the bottom of the scale
of mental activities the " perception of images." By " images "
he understands primarily shadows and reflections, but he seems
also to include under the term any perceivable object which
'6. 509 d 511 e.
IN THE RE TUB LIC OE PLATO. 141
reproduces or suggests another in the same kind of way that
shadows and reflections suggest and reproduce the things which
occasion them. Thus all works of art may be called, more or
less appropriately, " images," for it is common to them all to
represent how things appear, or what they suggest to sense or
imagination, by means of words, sounds, colour, or form, which,
however directly related to the things, cannot be identified
with them. 1 This is of course far from being a full account of
what the arts do ; but they all do at least this, and Plato, for
reasons which we shall presently see, chose to emphasise this
characteristic of artistic representation, and to class together
indiscriminately all objects of perception to which it is common.
Judged then by the standard of clearness and truth, the lowest
kind of perception is that which perceives merely shadows,
reflections, or analogous images, of things, whatever the
medium through which the image is conveyed. The Greek
substantive (el/cacrla) used by Plato to describe this " perception
of images," means literally the act of making one thing like
another. The corresponding verb, besides the corresponding
sense of copying or imitating, is commonly used in the sense of
"conjecturing," apparently because one of the most obvious
forms of conjecture is an inference drawn from comparing, that
is, mentally " making like," one thing to another. No doubt
this double association of the verb recommended the substan-
tive to Plato's use; for it enabled him conveniently to
characterise the lowest stage of perception, not merely as a
perception of "images," but also as having only a "conjectural"
certitude. 2 It is obvious that if we compare the knowledge
about an object or an event derived from a picture or a descrip-
tion, with the knowledge of a person who has seen the object
or been present at the event, the former is not only more
indirect and superficial than the latter, but the certainty which
we are justified in feeling about it is also less.
It would seem to be in relation to the last-mentioned sense
1 Cf. 10. 599 a ; 605 c ; 3. 402 b-c ; 7. 517 d, where the "shadows of
images " would be, e.g., the representation or misrepresentation of the existing
laws (themselves only " images " of justice) by a rhetorician or pleader.
2 See 7. 516 c-d, for an application of elKaala in the sense of " conjecture."
1 4 2 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
of eltcaa-id that Plato calls the next stage in the scale of know-
ledge 7T/crTi9, " belief " or " conviction." Here, as in the former
case, when the word has so many associations, it is important
to seize the particular one which Plato apparently intended to
convey. The objects of " belief," he says, are the things of
which the images of the first stage are resemblances, in other
words, what are ordinarily understood by " real things." The
differences in the mental state of a man whose knowledge con-
sists in " images " and that of one whose knowledge is derived
from personal contact are many, but the one which is
emphasised by Plato for his present purpose is that the latter,
besides being more clear and true, is also more certain. 1
The two kinds of mental objects and operations just described,
while they differ from one another in important respects, have
certain other important points in common when both compared
with a higher stage of knowledge ; and they are accordingly
comprised by Plato under the single generic name of Soa, or,
as it is usually translated, " opinion." 2 Neither the Greek word
nor its English equivalent, in their ordinary usage, gives any
indication of the special meaning which Plato here intended
to express. The characteristic marks of what he chooses to
call " opinion " are the following : subjectively, it is a state of
mind which carries with it no guarantee either of truth or per-
manence; it may be either true or false 3 (whereas what we
understand by " knowledge " must be true), and it is liable to
be changed or lost 4 (whereas when we really know a truth once
we know it always) ; objectively, it relates to a matter which is
given in forms of sense, and which is manifold, particular, and
relative. 5 An illustration will best explain Plato's meaning.
A man has " opinion " about justice or beauty or weight or
size; that is, he "thinks" that certain things are just or beauti-
ful, heavy or large. His thought may be more or less positive
according to his nature and circumstances, but however posi-
tive he may feel, he cannot use " thinking " as equivalent to
"knowing." If asked, What is justice? What is heaviness?
he will probably answer by pointing to this or that instance of
1 Cf . 10. 601 e 602 b. 2 7. 534 a. 3 5. 477 e ; cf. Theaetetus, 187 b.
* 3. 412 e ; cf. 6. 508 d ; and Meno, 97 e 98 a. 5 5. 476 a 480 a.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 143
what he means ; justice perhaps will be to him bound up with
certain particular laws, actions, or persons, heaviness with
certain particular materials. The respective aggregates of these
particular instances will make up his conceptions ; justice is to
him this aggregate, and nothing more. But now, suppose the
actions or institutions in which his conception of justice was
embodied to be done under different circumstances or worked
under different conditions, they may very likely appear to be
unjust instead of just. And similarly the materials with which
alone he associated heaviness will seem light and not heavy
when put alongside of materials which are heavier. The matter
of " opinion," then, whether it be moral or aesthetic, mathemati-
cal or physical (for in this respect there is no difference), is,
firstly, " manifold," consisting of a number of sensible or
imaginable objects ; and secondly, it is " particular " and
" relative," for each of its constituents depends for its character
upon its own particular position, and changes its character as
its relative position changes. And it is clear that these charac-
teristics belong equally to the matter in question, whether it be
apprehended directly in actual sensible experience, or indirectly
through an artistic or other medium. The condition of mind
thus characterised is that of the majority of people on most
subjects, and of all people on many subjects. 1 What we com-
monly call our knowledge, except where we may have made a
special study in a special direction, is either derived from the
representation of other men, or from our own casual and limited
observation of the particular objects with which we happen to
have come in contact. On the other hand, though the mind
is for the most part content to remain in this condition, there
are occasions on which it is conscious of its unsatisfactoriness.
This must be the case, for instance, as soon as it begins to see
that the sensible qualities of things, which it supposed to be
fixed and absolute, are after all variable and relative, and that
the same thing seems to have opposite attributes according
as its position is changed. This relativity, which is inherent
in the matter of sensation, whether in the physical or moral
world, is one of the first difficulties which stimulates thought or
1 5. 479 d, rd. ruv iro\\wv TroAXd, v6/M(M.. ]
144 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
reflection. 1 The same thing seems to be both light and heavy,
both just and unjust ; how can this be ? Are then light-
ness and heaviness, justice and injustice, one and the same ?
To suppose this is to give the lie to one's own consciousness.
The dilemma forces the mind to advance and to analyse further
this perplexing matter of sensation, which, instead of the clear and
permanent thing which it seemed to be, has become a " confused"
centre of contradictory and fluctuating attributes. 2 To detect
distinctions in this confusion, to ask, What then really is weight ?
What then really is justice? and to distinguish finally the
object of sense, with its capacity of developing contradictions
and of " playing double," 3 from the object of thought which can
be fixed and defined, these are the further steps which reflection
takes, and with these we have left the domain of " opinion" and
entered upon that of science. And this brings us to the next
stage in the Platonic scale of mental objects and activities.
When we reflect upon the meaning of "knowledge" or
" science " (for the Greek word is the same for both), it seems
incongruous to apply it to a state of mind which is liable to
error, or to an object-matter which is liable to change. We
cannot say that we "know" what justice is, if the embodiments
of our conception may become unjust by a change of relations,
any more than we could say that we " knew " what a triangle
was, supposing that we found that the properties of triangles as
such varied with the size, colour, or position of the particular
figures of which we demonstrated them. This, however, is just
what we do not find ; we conceive that a triangle is always and
everywhere a triangle, that once known it is always known :
and in this belief we speak of geometrical science or knowledge,
which we distinguish from our ordinary state of mind on ordinary
subjects. What we only "think" or "believe" is scattered
about in a number of separate objects ; what we " know " is one,
and only one, however many may be the instances in which we
perceive its truth. What we only " think," depends for its
character or validity upon its particular form or environment,
and changes with them ; what we " know " is independent of
its particular presentation, and remains true under all apparent
1 7. 523 a 524 d. 2 ffvyKfxv^vov n, 524 c. 8 fira^orepl^eiv, 5. 479 c.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 145
changes. The state of mind thus distinguished from " opinion"
is what is commonly understood by " scientific/' and as the
only sciences which could be said to exist in Plato's time were
mathematical, he took mathematics as the type of the third
stage in his scale of knowledge, though his characterisation of
them would equally apply to all sciences ordinarily so called.
The geometrician, Plato says, 1 uses sensible figures in his reason-
ing, but does not really think of them. What he really has in
his thought is not the particular triangle which he draws on
paper, but the " triangle itself," which the one on paper " is like"
or " is an image of." Similarly we might say of the botanist
or political economist, that in proportion as their subject-matter
has reached a scientific stage, they ignore the particular modifi-
cations under which it is presented to them, and see through
these to the essential forms or laws of which they are symbols.
In doing this they have no more doubt than has the geometri-
cian, that they are nearer to the truth than if they allowed
themselves to attend to nothing but the particular circum-
stances of the place or the moment. Whatever popular pre-
judices may be violated by the scientific mode of thought, and
whatever metaphysical difficulties may be raised by the assump-
tion of degrees of reality, the best minds are practically, if
not theoretically, convinced that there is a difference between
" thinking " and " knowing," and that in the latter they are
more in conformity with what is real than in the former.
The word ^avoia, which Plato 2 appropriated to the form of
mental activity just described, had no more fixed connotation
in ordinary Greek usage than such English words as " thought,"
" intellect," " understanding." We have seen what was the par-
ticular meaning which he wished to convey by it, namely, that
the next step in the scale of clearness and truth above the mere
certainty of opinion, is that in which the mind, while employing
sensible objects, is really occupied with something of which
they are only symbols or images. It is necessary to dwell at a
little more length upon Plato's conception of the distinction
here involved, which plays such a vital part in his theory of
education and knowledge. The opposition between sense and
1 6. 510 cl-e. 2 6. 511 d ; 7. 534 a.
146 THE THEOR Y OF ED UCA TION
thought in various forms had attracted the attention of Greek
thinkers from the earliest times. The apparent arbitrariness
and fluctuation, both of our physical sensations and of our moral
ideas, were continually contrasting themselves with the fixity
and substantiality which the simplest conception of knowledge
and the most rudimentary moral distinctions alike seem to
presuppose. The necessity for immutable principles, if the
world of -nature and human life is to be explained, impressed
itself upon Plato with all the greater force that he seems to
have realised with peculiar vividness the mutability of much
which ordinary experience pronounces permanent. To the
element of reality which his mind discovered or surmised
everywhere behind the appearance and change which sensation
shows us, he gave the name of " form." It is a curious instance
of the changes of fortune in the life of language, that the Greek
word " idea," which Plato chose to express what is most pro-
foundly real, and least dependent on the human mind for its
reality, should have come to be used for a mere mental creation
or fiction, and that its English equivalent " form " is now mainly
suggestive of what is superficial and unsubstantial. The his-
tory of the word in Greek speculation before its employment
by Plato is very slight ; we can only conjecture that to a Greek,
peculiarly organised for the perception of shape, and accus-
tomed to find significant and typical lines in all that he saw, it
was a natural transition from what is outwardly and visibly
characteristic to what is inwardly and theoretically essential.
Every people, like every individual thinker, has its favourite
metaphors for expressing ultimate philosophical conceptions.
In the phraseology of Greek philosophy there is no pheno-
menon of which we are more constantly reminded than that
of vision, and the use of the word " form " by Plato is only the
most pregnant and far-reaching instance of a metaphor which,
in the way of analogy, simile, or suggestion, pervades his
speculation. We have here only to indicate in the briefest and
most general way the meaning of the Platonic conception of
" form," so far as it enters into the theory of knowledge and
education. It may be said to combine elements of all the
modern conceptions of essence, law, and ideal. Those qualities
or characteristics in a thing which most make it what it is, and
AV THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 147
which contrast with others that are casual and separable, are
the " form " which characterises and individualises the thing.
That principle which gives consistency and continuity to
changing manifestations of activity, is the " form " which works
itself out in a plastic material. And once more : the aim or
mark to which the various steps in a process converge is the
" form " to which the agent in the process looks, and which he-
strives to attain. So that alike in art, in science, in morality,
it is the " form " which is essential and important, the " form "
which the imagination discerns through the chaos of sense-
impressions, the " form " which the reason separates from the
accidental conditions of time and place, and the " form " in
which the moral consciousness finds rest and guidance amidst
the distractions and contradictions of experience.
Plato has various ways of expressing the mode in which the
" form " exists, and is apprehended. It is that which really
" is," as opposed to that which " seems ; " that which is " one,"
as opposed to that which is " many ; " that which is self-
identical and permanent, as opposed to that which is always
becoming something else. Or, again, the sensible world is only
the " appearance " of the intelligible ; the things which we see
and hear are " images," that only " resemble " and suggest some-
thing which we cannot see or hear ; and each of these images
or resemblances only " participates in," but does not adequately
embody, the reality which is grasped in and over it. The vivid
and sometimes crude manner in which Plato represents the
relationship between what is and what is not "form," has
given rise to much misunderstanding of him as well as to many
real difficulties, and has left a doubt whether he had himself
clearly apprehended what he was endeavouring to express.
The truth seems to be that no great genius, "stung by
the splendour of a sudden thought," can ever work out or even
conceive his idea with the coolness and completeness which are
necessary to make it consistently intelligible and to guard it
from misinterpretation. But we are here concerned, not with
the exaggerations and confusions, real or supposed, to which
Plato fell a victim, but with the central truth which he saw
clearly, and to which he held tenaciously.
Returning now to the scale of knowledge, we see that
148 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
whether we regard the sense of unsatisfactoriness which impels
the mind to advance upon sensible opinion, or the intellectual
condition in which that impulse results, it is what Plato
understands by " forms," for which the mind is looking, and in
which it rests. The mathematical sciences, which spring from,
and are the answer to, questions raised by the mathematical pro-
perties of sensible objects, take account, not of the particular
figures to which they refer, but of the "objects themselves,"
of which those figures are only the "images;" these "objects
themselves" are clearly what we have learnt to know as "forms."
Though, however, it is about the " form " of the triangle or of
unity that the geometrician and arithmetician really reason, not
about the figures on the paper, they cannot dispense with those
figures. They exercise intelligence, but intelligence which still
has an appendage of sense, and is not therefore perfectly
intelligent. And along with this imperfection in the know-
ledge of which mathematics are a type, goes another one which
Plato expresses by saying that such knowledge is "assump-
tive " or " hypothetical." " Geometricians, arithmeticians, and
the like, assume the odd, the even, the figures, the three kinds
of angle, and other similar things, according to the particular
branch of the science with which they are dealing ; these they
assume themselves to know, and make them hypotheses, and
do not think themselves bound to give any further account of
them either to themselves or others ; they suppose every one to
see the truth of them. From these hypotheses they start, and
when they have got this start they go on through the remain-
ing steps, and arrive conclusively at the result which was the
original object of their inquiry." l Such a procedure does not
satisfy the full conception of knowledge or science ; for " when
the starting-point of the argument is something assumed and
not known, and the end and intermediate steps depend for
their connection upon this unknown starting-point, how can
such a conclusion possibly constitute knowledge ? " 2 By
"hypotheses," then, Plato understands, not assumptions tem-
porarily made for certain definite purposes, but truths which,
while really depending for their validity upon their connection
1 6. 510 c-d; 511 d. a 7. 533 c.
IN THE RE 'PUBLIC OF PLATO. 149
with higher truths, are treated as if they were independent of
that connection, and self-proven. In this sense, each one of
the " forms " of existence with which the special sciences are
concerned, number, figure, motion, etc., is a "hypothesis;"
the special sciences are scientific so far as they follow logically
from these " hypotheses " which form their principles, but so
far as those principles themselves are not, strictly speaking,
" known," they do not satisfy the ideal requirements of science.
For science to Plato means explanation and intelligibility ; we
"know" a truth when we can "give account of" it, and the
way in which we give account of it is by showing its necessary
connection with wider and more independent truths. Progress
in science is progress from isolated to connected thought ; and
if we try to imagine such a progress consummated, we are led
to the conception of a universal science, in which every part is
seen in its relation to every other part, and of which the whole
forms a perfect orb of truth, beginning and ending in itself.
Of such a science, as it might be if the speculative impulse of the
human mind were fully satisfied, Plato has given us a picture, 1
though he is conscious that it is only a picture, and that to
realise what he is imagining is " a flight above " 2 both himself
and his readers. The whole matter of knowledge is imaged as
a perfectly graduated scale of the essential " forms " of exist-
ence ; each " form " is seen to be, not an ultimate truth, but a
" hypothesis," depending for its truth upon one above it ; the
mind mounts from " form " to " form," using each as a " point
of departure " to the next, until it reaches the topmost " un-
hypothetical principle," upon which the whole chain hangs, and
from which it can descend again securely down the ladder of
intelligible reality. In such a perfect system of knowledge, as
there would be nothing " hypothetical " or unproven, so there
would be no element of sense or unintelligibility. The
symbolism of sensible appearances, which suggest imperfectly
something which they are not, and blur the intellectual vision
with an unexplained residuum, would melt into the perfect
transparency of reason, when mind met mind face to face.
We have thus reached the highest stage in the Platonic
1 6. 511 b-c. 2 6. 506 e ; cf. 7. 532 e 533 a.
1 5 o THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
scale of mental development, that stage to which he applies
emphatically the name of '' knowledge," and the object-matter
of which is the essential " forms " of existence without
admixture of hypothesis or sense. Like the preceding stage,
it represents an inherent impulse in the mind ; but, unlike it,
it leaves the impulse in the main unfulfilled. The different
specific sciences owe their existence to the dissatisfaction occa-
sioned to the mind by reflection upon its sensible experience.
This dissatisfaction they remove by revealing permanent and
consistent " forms " in what before seemed a fluctuating chaos ;
but it still survives in the sense of incompleteness and limita-
tion which the mind feels, when it finds that each science rests
upon an unproven basis and points beyond itself for the
ultimate establishment of its conclusions. The force or
faculty in virtue of which the mind is perpetually trying to
rid itself of this dissatisfaction, to get out of the region of
" hypotheses," and to see truth as a whole of parts, is called
by Plato the " dialectical " faculty, 1 and the ideal science which
the completed exercise of that faculty might be conceived to
create, is the " science of dialectic," the only form of science
or knowledge which seemed to him strictly to deserve the
name. 2 The term " dialectic," which plays almost as con-
spicuous a part in the Platonic philosophy as " form," means
originally nothing more than the process of oral discussion by
question and answer. Naturally a prominent and familiar
word among a people where ideas were communicated so
much more by talking than by reading, and specially con-
secrated to Plato by the example of his master Socrates, it was
adopted by him to describe the process by which the mind
endeavours to arrive at true conceptions, whether by actual
verbal discussion or by inward " dialogue with itself." And as
Plato conceived that the truth exists in a certain form or order,
and that the human mind in learning and apprehending it
must conform to that order, he naturally used " dialectic " for
that particular mode of manipulating language and thought
which seemed to him most consonant with truth, and most
fitted to lead to its discovery. What that mode must be we
1 7. 533 a ; cf. ib. c, and 532 a. 2 7. 533 c-e.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 151
have already had some indication. If the only conception of
reality which satisfied Plato was that of a cosmos which is
neither a vacant unity nor a crowded chaos, but a reasonable
system of interrelated elements, the only true logic or method of
knowledge must seem to him to be that which obeys the two-
fold requirement arising from such a conception, a method which
unifies without confounding, which specifies without separating,
a method which does not " break the limbs " of truth, 1 but
follows and reveals the natural articulations of its subject-
matter till it has reached the perception of its organic unity.
Such a method is the true " dialectic," the only true method of
learning, teaching, and investigating, because the only method
which is in agreement with the inherent constitution of the
real world. And if the method be supposed to have been
carried through to the utmost verge of truth, the moving
process passes into a completed result, and dialectic, instead of a
logic of discovery and definition, becomes the living expression
of the truth itself, the embodied logic of reality. Plato has
nowhere filled up the outline of his conception of " dialectic ; "
but the greater part of his dialogues are practical illustrations
of the principle, and the suggestions of a theory which are
scattered up and down them are often more instructive as well
as more stimulating than the finished systems of other men.
We have now seen how Plato conceived the natural order
in the ascent of the mind towards truth. It begins by seeing
things " darkly," through the uncertain " glass " of fancy ; it
goes on to the certainty of direct sensible experience ; from the
objects of sense and opinion, with their local and temporal
limitations, it advances to the perception of essential " forms "
and principles, which those objects symbolise or suggest ; and
from the understanding of isolated principles and their conse-
quences it passes to the apprehension of them as steps in a
connected scale of existence. We have next to ask, How far
does the human mind actually obey this principle of progress ?
What is the actual state and opinion of mankind as regards its
" education," in the fuller sense in which we have now come to
use the word ? Plato has expressed his views upon this sub-
1 Pkaedrus, 265 e.
152 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
ject in the famous allegory of the cave, with which the seventh
book of the Republic opens. The allegory to be understood
and appreciated must be studied in its entirety. A few only
of its main features need be dwelt upon here. Mankind in
general, Plato gives us to understand, so far from advancing up
the road which leads to truth and light, remain for the most
part during their whole life in the state of mind which is only
fit for children. They are like men sitting bound at the bottom
of a cave, lit by a fire to which their backs are turned, able
only to look straight before them at the wall of their prison.
The living world of nature and man lies behind them, and all
that they know of it are its shadows and echoes, the hazy,
unsubstantial, artificial reproductions of the minds of other
men. At this moving world of phantasms they stare, and
in its reality they believe, with all the fixity and fervour of
men who have done a thing from their childhood. They watch
its vain shows as they pass and repass, observe the order of
their succession, and formulate a conjectural science which is
to enable them to predict the future. From this condition
there is for most men no escape, for they do not know, and
therefore cannot desire, any other sort of existence. Only now
and then, by some force of nature or circumstances, a prisoner
is set free from his chains, made to stand on his feet and look
round, to see with his own eyes, and hear with his own ears,
and step by step, perhaps, to make his way to the upper air
and the sunlight of knowledge. But each stage in the process
is grievous to him ; the first experience of actual life confuses
him, and makes him wish for his old world of fancy again, and
the sudden revelation of scientific truth dazzles his mind,
which is only used to empirical certitude. Only by slow
degrees he gets an insight into the principles which really
govern the world, and the supreme principle upon which they
all depend ; and if in compassion for the ignorance of man-
kind he tries to teach them his new knowledge, he is received
with ridicule and opposition, which in the end may cost him
his life.
Philosophy, like religion, has often begun by calling upon
men to get rid of their prejudices and illusions. It is custo-
mary, indeed, to look upon the two as antagonistic, and to con-
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 153
trast the humility required by the Gospel with the supposed
arrogance and self-sufficiency of the philosophic spirit. Yet
if we take men so different, and so representative in their
differences, as Plato, Bacon, and Spinoza, we find them all
agreeing, not in a glorification of the human mind, but in the
imperative demand that it should shake off its " chains " and
turn to receive the light, that it should surrender its " idols "
and " become as a little child," that it should look at things
" under the form of eternity," not through the vague confusion
of its own imagination. To all alike, however different their
phraseology and their motive, the conviction is common, that
there is an order of existence or of nature which man does not
make but finds, which he must wait upon and not forestall, if
he would attain to the wellbeiug, the power, or the freedom,
of which he is capable.
Passing from these common features to the details of Plato's
conception of human ignorance, we do not find him, like Bacon,
giving any classification of the false " shadows and images," but
we can gather many hints as to their nature. Primarily they
are the dim, exaggerated, and shallow representations of things
through the medium of art, literature, and rhetoric. 1 In ex-
plaining Plato's antipathy to dramatic representation, we have
already had occasion to notice some of his attacks upon art in
general. Those attacks seem to be valid if, and so far as,
artistic representation produces actual illusion, and substitutes
appearance for reality. To a mind which is really fitted by
nature and education to receive art in the spirit of art, illusion, so
far from being a necessary element in aesthetic enjoyment, is a
distinct bar to it. A person who looks at a play exactly as if
it were real life may be vehemently moved for a moment, but
will eventually find the spectacle either so exciting or so
wearisome that he will wish to interrupt it or to go away. It
is essential to the perfect reception of artistic effect that the
impulse to action should be in abeyance, and the theoretic
faculties at their fullest activity. The after-effect may issue in
acts, but at the moment of seeing, or hearing, or reading, the
work of art, considered as such, demands that " wise passive-
1 Cf. 7. 517 d-e ; 10. 600 e 602 b ; 605 c.
1 5 4 THE THE OR Y OF ED I 'CA 7 ION
ness " which is only the other side of theoretic energy. But
there are comparatively few imaginative persons in whom the
double power of self-control and self-surrender, of entering in
and yet of standing outside, is so strong that they " cannot
choose but " hear or see. To most of us the message of art
awakens a cross echo in our own selves, and we go away with
the flattering feeling that the vapours or the rhetoric of egoism
are the universal types or tones of genius and truth. Then it is
that the artist, often without knowing it, and against his will,
becomes "a mimic and a juggler" to the public; 1 the spirit
distilled in the crucible of imagination gets cloyed with the
lees of prejudice or sentiment ; and the " impassioned expres-
sion, which is in the countenance of all science," stiffens into a
masquerade which can " deceive children and fools." 2
The " shadows and echoes " amongst which Plato's prisoners
live are not, however, only the illusions, intentional or un-
intentional, produced by art and literature ; they are also the
illusions of our own passions. It would be a great mistake to
regard the darkness of the cave as a mere darkness of intellec-
tual ignorance, or the escape from it as a mere intellectual
enlightenment. In the mind of Plato, reason is never for long
dissociated from emotion, or knowledge from purpose; the
highest impulse to him is the impulse towards truth, and the
highest knowledge is knowledge of the end of action. Thus
the great reason why the spark of "divine" 3 intelligence is so
nearly smothered in man is not primarily the difficulty of
learning or the mysteriousness of nature ; the fetters which
bind the men in the cave are those " leaden weights which the
pleasures of gluttony and the like gather round them, and
which turn the eye of the soul to the earth." 4 The " impulse "
which, if it had sway, 5 would carry the soul out of the " sea "
of earthly life, to union with " the divine, immortal, and
eternal " to which it is " akin," is checked and thwarted by no
irresistible necessity or power of evil, but by the " shells and
stones and tangle" with which the "delights of the table"
gradually incrust it. The " painted images of true pleasure," 6
1 10. 598 d. 2 10. 598 c. 3 7. 518 e.
4 7. 519 b. 10. 611 c 612 a. 6 9. 586 a c.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 155
with which men choose to dwell, are the offspring of their own
nature, which leads them about " like cattle, with their heads
down and eyes fixed upon their dinners, feeding and breeding,
and kicking and butting one another because they cannot get
enough." It is not the thought of " this unsubstantial pageant "
which leads Plato like Shakespeare to call human life a
' dream ;" l rather it is the same feeling as that of Lucretius
when he cries to man,
" Qui somno partera majorem conteris aevi,
Et vigilans stertis nee somnia cernere cessas."
It is because men will not rouse themselves to the reality
which is there if they had the eyes to see it, because they
mistake the passing shows of sense for the eternal essence of
which they are the mere outside, because they " fight about
shadows " of power and clutch after " phantoms of good," that
" before they are well awake in this world they find themselves
in the other, sleeping the heavy sleep of death." 2
" How then " (and this is the third and last part of our
question) " are men to be led up to the light, as some are said
to have gone up from Hades to dwell with the gods in heaven ?" 3
Or, as we may also put it (for it is upon progress in knowledge
that the good of mankind depends), " what kind of studies and
practice will produce the men who are to save society ? " * Or,
once more (for the interest of society is ultimately identical
with that of its noblest natures), " how is the commonwealth
to handle philosophy so as not to be destroyed by it ?" 5 Clearly
it is important that society should look to it ; that her greatest
sons, instead of being criminals or outcasts, who owe their
mother nothing for their bringing up, should be bound to her
by ties of mutual obligation. 6 The principle of justice which
regulates other spheres of life ought to hold good here too ;
the man who has the philosophic faculty should not be allowed
to do what he likes with it ; 7 he should be induced to contribute
his share to the common good, and to help in " binding the
commonwealth together," while his fellows should do for him
1 7. 520 c ; 5. 476 c-tl ; cf. Timaeus, 52 b-c.
2 7. 534 c-d. 3 7. 521 c. 4 6. 502 d.
6 6. 497 d. 6 7. 520 b. ' 7. 519 e 520 a.
1 5 6 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
what he cannot do for himself, provide him with the neces-
sary material of life and supply his soul with the nurture which
it demands. The general character, then, of the duty of society
is clear : it has to find a way for doing methodically and with
the greatest possible ease what now takes place exceptionally
by the force of circumstances and under almost insuperable
obstacles. Arid the general character of the education which
shall do this is also clear : it must be an education which will
help the soul to " see " the truth, to penetrate the darkness
which fancy and appetite spread between it and facts, to follow
its own " divine impulse," and to shake off the fetters of its
own forging. Some " professors of education," l indeed, talk as
if the soul were like a blind eye and teaching were " putting
sight into it." But the truth is that the " eye of the soul," the
" organ with which it learns and understands," is not like the
eye of the body. The latter is more or less independent of the
rest of the organism, and can be moved without it ; but the
former can only be " turned to the light " if the whole soul be
turned with it. The soul is not in pieces, but continuous;
knowledge in the highest sense is not an independent act of a
part of the self, but that union of the whole witfrtruth, in which
the lower parts are taken up into the higher according to their
capacities. 2 It is not possible to be habitually living the life of
the lower elements, and to keep the higher at their greatest
efficiency. Evil is the " disease " of the soul, 3 and to be or do
evil and still expect to exercise the highest psychical activity is
as reasonable as it would be, if body cured body by contact, to
expect the most diseased body to be the best healer. It is
from this point of view that Plato denies the possibility of
getting to know the real nature of evil by personally experienc-
ing it ; the very experience which is to be the object of know-
ledge spoils the instrument by which it is to be known. The
"whole" soul then must be turned to the light, for the " eye of
the soul " is the highest element in it, and carries with it the
other elements.
In another respect also the mental is unlike the bodily
vision. The bodily eye may lose its power of sight and have it
1 7. 518 b-c. 2 9. 586 e. 3 4. 444 e 445 b ; 3. 409 a-e.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 157
restored to it again, but the analogous faculty in the mind can
neither be created nor destroyed ; " the other virtues of the
soul, as they are called, seem to be nearly akin to those of the
body, for they are not originally in existence, but are an after
product of habit and practice ; but the virtue of intelligence
seems to belong to something altogether more divine, something
which never loses its force, but is made serviceable or unser-
viceable, helpful or harmful, according as it is turned to the
light or not." l The power of mental insight still remains active
in the warped soul of the clever scoundrel ; it is the divine and
immortal part in the soul, that which makes it "capable of
bearing all good things," 2 but capable also of bearing " all evil
things ;" it may be " buried in the mud" of ignorance or over-
grown with the " incrustations " of passion, but it is never so
lost that it cannot be lifted up, purged, and re-illumined, or so
negative that anything else can be substituted for it.
The general principle, then, of the higher education is ex-
pressed in the term " conversion." 3 How is this to be effected ?
Clearly the educational process must follow the true and natural
order of mental development. If the scale of knowledge and
truth is what it has been represented to be, education must be a
method for leading the soul from the lowest stage, where it ap-
prehends nothing but " images," through that of direct sensible
experience, to the region of essential " forms " of existence, and
so finally to that perception of the systematic unity of truth
which is the ideal of science. The first two steps are provided .
for if the education in "music" be successfully carried through.
Its function was precisely to obviate the possible perversion of
the imagination and emotions, by training them rightly ; to pre-
vent people from being still children when they ought to be
men, by making childhood the real precursor of manhood ; to
train the imagination so that it should not lead to an idolatry
of sensible forms which the mind can only leave with pain and
difficulty, but that " when reason comes" she may be " welcome"
to the soul which has already learnt to know her unconsciously ;
to form habits which may not be mere habits, but the basis
for fresh acquisitions of character, and convictions which shall
1 7. 518 d 519 a. 2 10. 621 c. 3 7. 518 d ; 521 c.
1 5 8 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
not be merely fixed, but shall offer a ready material for receiv-
ing the form of principles. In a soul thus trained, with its
imagination filled with fair sights and sounds, its emotions
instinctively responsive to what is really loveable, its beliefs
" dyed fast " with truth, the new structure of knowledge has to
be reared. The steadfastness of opinion has to be translated
into logical consistency ; the quickness and exactness of per-
ception and fancy into the power of abstraction and reasoning ;
the love of things and persons into the devotion to principles
and ideas. What the first step in the new " conversion " will
be we already know by anticipation. The mathematical
sciences, which are at once the product and the type of the
third stage in the scale of mental activity, are clearly marked
out to be the instruments for stimulating and training that
activity. Those sciences, as we saw, owe their existence to the
difficulties which the soul experiences when it reflects upon
the matter of sensuous opinion. It is in meeting those diffi-
culties, in obedience to an inherent speculative impulse, that
the soul passes from the supposed clearness and consistency
of local and temporal truth to the more transparent clearness
and the more rigorous consistency of a truth which is not
sensible but intelligible. If, then, we could make the soul per-
form methodically and under guidance the process which it is
its nature to perform imperfectly and at random, if the sciences
could be utilised for training its scientific faculties as the arts
were utilised for training its artistic faculties, we should be
helping in the most effective, because the most natural, way
to " make the work of conversion easy."
Plato complains 1 that the true educational function of the
sciences has been ignored or neglected. Arithmetic has been
studied so far as is useful for trade and commerce, geometry
for the purposes of measurement, astronomy for its value in
navigation, harmonics in the interest of the professional musi-
cian ; but it is hard to make people believe the truth that each
of these sciences may be made a means for "purging and
rekindling an organ of the soul which would otherwise be
spoiled and blinded, an organ more worth saving than ten
1 7. 525 c ; 527 a-b, d-e ; 531 a.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 159
thousand eyes, for by it alone the truth is seen." He does not
of course deny the importance of such practical applications in
their proper sphere ; on the contrary, he himself emphasises
the practical utility of arithmetic and geometry to a man who
is to be a soldier and tactician. 1 But he points out that for
such practical purposes a very slight amount of science is
necessary, and that the methods of study which serve for such
purposes are not the methods which serve for education. 2 The
mere empirical observation of objects, which is all that is
necessary for immediate utility, does not "lead the soul to
look upwards," 3 whereas the study of the same objects in the
scientific spirit is just what is wanted to make " the natural
intelligence useful instead of useless." 4 For, as we have already
been told, the really scientific man, though he employs sensible
objects in his reasoning, does not " think of them." The num-
bers of the arithmetician are such as " can only be manipulated
by thought;" 5 and if we point out to him that the visible or
tangible object which represents his unit is not " one " at all,
but is divisible into infinite multiplicity, he will only laugh at
our simplicity, and will adhere to his assertion that one is one,
and never anything else, invariable and indivisible. Geometry,
too, so far as it is scientifically treated, relates to "what is
invisible and eternal," 6 and not to the sensible figures which are
" becoming " something else at the very moment that we speak
of them. Nor will Plato admit that the case is really different
when we come to astronomy. Here indeed the splendour and
beauty of the visible objects with which the science is con-
cerned, easily deceive us into thinking that this merely sensible
nature is in itself important and interesting. But gazing up
at the stars in open-mouthed wonderment will no more give us
knowledge than gazing at a very excellently constructed dia-
gram. 7 The whole celestial universe, so far as it " has body and
is visible," is subject to the same conditions as other material
things. It does not " admit of knowledge " in the strict sense ;
it is a symbol, but not the truth symbolised. The material
heavenly bodies, as such, do not realise the relations of figure
1 7. 522 e ; 526 d. 2 7. 526 d. 8 7. 529 a-b. 4 7. 530 c.
6 7. 526 a. 6 7. 527 b. 7 529 c-e.
1 60 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
and motion which they suggest; 1 those relations "cannot be
apprehended by sight, but by thought only;" and it is as figures
and diagrams for the discovery and analysis of these intelligible
relations that the visible bodies ought to be used, if we are
really to study astronomy and thereby to educate the human
intelligence. The methods adopted in harmonics, or the science
of sound, admit of a similar reform ; it too may be made to
help in the work of "conversion" by revealing the abstract
numerical conditions upon which musical harmony depends.
But this is not understood either by the professional musicians
who fight over the " smallest audible interval " and " set their
ears before their minds," 2 or even by the Pythagorean philo-
sophers who, 3 though they appreciate the true interest of the
subject, confine their investigations to what they can hear, and
do not go on to ask what relations of number produce harmony
and what do not, and what is the cause of each.
Plato's conception, then, of the educational function of the
sciences is, primarily, that they may be used to teach men to
think. This they do by presenting to the mind sensible objects,
and at the same time compelling it to ignore or abstract from the
particularity and limitation incident to sense-presentation, to fix
its attention solely upon the essential and universal " forms "
which are confusedly " imaged " to sense, and to deduce con-
sistently the consequences which follow from them. The diffi-
culties or misunderstandings to which he has given occasion in
expressing this conception, seem mainly due to the embarrass-
ing combination of an extremely limited and simple scientific
experience with an almost prophetic power of advancing upon
it, or divining its possibilities. In the childlike confidence
inspired by the still fresh perception of the nature of arith-
metical and geometrical truth, he leaps the barrier which
modern thought has erected between deductive and experi-
mental science, and boldly surmises a state of human know-
ledge in which the whole web of cosmic conditions should be
as rigorously intelligible as the simplest relations of number
and figure. He sees how the senses confuse the reason in its
early reflections upon units and triangles, and how the reason
1 530 a-c. 2 531 a-b. 3 531 c.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 161
sets the senses at defiance and goes on its own way securely, and
at a stroke he pictures to himself the whole phenomenal world
seen as the symbol of an intelligible order. He knows by
experience how the study of mathematics quickens the mind
and compels the practice of abstract thinking, and there seems
to him to be no reason why the whole of human science should
not be pressed into the same high service, the education of the
human race.
We have however mentioned only one, and the lesser one,
of the motives which led Plato to advocate the study of the
sciences. The ten years between twenty and thirty, over
which he would continue that study, would be a very long
time to spend in the mere practice of logical thinking. But
the study has to him a real as well as a formal significance.
It serves not only as a mental gymnastic, helping the soul to
reach the place where the truth is to be found, 1 but also as an
actual introduction to the truth for which it is looking. That
this is Plato's conception appears both from his enumeration
of the sciences themselves, and, still more, from the principle
upon which he directs that they should be studied. In his
series of sciences, arithmetic, geometry, stereometry, astronomy,
and harmonics, he is clearly following an order of progression
in their respective subject-matters, 2 number, planes, cubes,
motion of cubes, motion of audible bodies. We need not
suppose the series to be intended to be complete, even in the
then condition of knowledge ; we are expressly told that there
are many other forms of motion which might be mentioned ; 3
still it would seem that Plato meant to co-ordinate, in outline at
least, those portions of the knowledge of his time which could
pretend to the name of science. This appears more clearly
from the passage in which he indicates the method upon
which they should be studied. "If the pursuit of all these
subjects which we have enumerated be carried on to the point
where they communicate with and are related to one another,
and their natural affinities be inferred, I think it is of some
use for our present purpose, and not labour spent in vain, as it
otherwise is." 4 And again, 5 when the age of twenty is reached,
1 7. 526 e. * See, e.g. 1. 528 b.
3 530 c-d. 4 531 c-d. 6 537 c.
L
1 6 2 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA T10N
the branches of knowledge which have been placed before the
student in boyhood " promiscuously," to be picked up without
system or constraint, " are to be brought together, so that he
may have a comprehensive view of their relationship to one
another, and to the nature of being." From these passages we
see that Plato regarded the sciences which he had enumerated,
not as arbitrary and isolated pieces of knowledge, still less as
merely formal constructions, but as directly related to the sum
of being or reality, of which each one of them expresses a
particular aspect, and in which they all find a common meet-
ing-point. Number, extension, motion, are primary " forms "
of being ; the first especially 1 is involved in the simplest acts of
thought, and underlies the processes of all the arts and sciences.
In learning to deal with them we are not only preparing our-
selves for dealing with more important subjects, but we are
actually setting our foot upon that " ladder " of existence, the
ascent of which would be the summit of scientific attainment.
And here we are reminded of the language in which Plato
explains what he considers to be the imperfection or inadequacy
of the knowledge of which mathematics are a type. That
knowledge, we were told, is "hypothetical," that is, it rests
upon principles which are unproven, because they have not
yet been apprehended in all their relations to other principles.
In requiring, then, that the study of the sciences should be
constantly directed to the perception of their mutual relation-
ships, Plato is clearly intending to remedy this characteristic
defect by pointing the way from the region of the "hypo-
thetical " to that of a self-demonstrated system of knowledge.
To such a system Plato, as we saw, gave the name of " dialectic,"
and the impulse which leads, and the rules which guide, the
mind in the endeavour to realise it, are the " dialectical " faculty
and method. Accordingly we find, as we might expect, that
in the power of perceiving the mutual relationships of the
particular sciences, Plato finds " the greatest test of the pre-
sence or absence of a dialectical nature," for "the man who
can see things together is a dialectician, and he who cannot is
not." 2 And as to " see things together," or in their natural and
* 7. 522 c. * 537 c.
JN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 163
necessary connection, is the same thing as to understand, ex-
plain, or account for them, the " dialectician " is also naturally
described as the man who " can give account both to himself
and others of the essential nature of any given thing." l
The sciences, then, "ordinarily so called," 2 are the " prelude " 3
or the "propaedeutic" 4 to "dialectical" science. The study of
them, as usually conducted, is far from making a man a
" dialectician," for it generally leaves him incapable of " giving
any account of" his knowledge, 5 and knowledge thus un-
accounted for is neither an intelligent nor a permanent acqui-
sition. But if studied on the principles above suggested, they
not only " purge and rekindle " 6 the mental vision, they are
not only " fellow-labourers in the work of conversion," 7 but they
also directly prepare the way for a higher study, partly by
discovering and developing the requisite faculty for it, partly
by introducing the mind to the elementary basis in that struc-
ture of knowledge of which " dialectic " is " the coping-stone." 8
The study of the sciences during the ten years between
twenty and thirty is not, in Plato's plan, to claim the whole
time and energy of the citizen who is admitted to it. He is
to be at the same time serving his apprenticeship in military
service, and testing the courage of his moral convictions under
the various trials of pleasure and pain, fear and persuasion,
which meet him in the course of his public duties. 9 The study
of " dialectic," on the other hand, which is to go on from thirty
to about thirty-five, is to concentrate the entire faculties of
the student while it lasts. 10 Of the form and substance of this
" dialectical " science we can only collect hints from Plato. And,
firstly, as to its form. If we conceive " dialectic " as a body of
scientific truth, it would be nothing less than a system of
universal knowledge, in which not only the "hypothetical"
principles of the mathematical and physical sciences, but those
of all other branches of human inquiry, found their place and
justification, and were seen to depend upon a single " unhypo-
thetical principle." Plato was as conscious as we are that no
1 7. 533 b ; 534 b. * 533 d. 531 d. 4 536 d.
531 e. 527 d. 7 533 d. 534 e.
* Cf. 6. 503 e ; 3. 412 e 413 e ; 7. 537 d ; 535 c. M 539 d.
THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
such universal science was in existence, but perhaps he felt
more strongly than we do the importance of insisting upon its
theoretical necessity, and of keeping the outlines of it before
the mind. If, on the other hand, we think of the study of
" dialectic " as an educational study of the true method or logic
of thinking, the simplest account of it is that it is " that educa-
tion which will enable the student to question and answer in
the most scientific way." 1 This may seem to be a great fall
from the height to which we are carried by the conception of
a universal science, but this is mainly because we use oral
discussion so comparatively little as a means for arriving at
truth, and because our ideas of science and speculation are
associated with printed books and systems, rather than with
the living processes of thought which produce them. If we
substitute for " the man who can question and answer in the
most scientific way," "the man who can elicit, whether from
his own mind or that of others, the truest thought on every
subject which comes before him," we shall have a more adequate
notion of what Plato meant. For if, as he conceived, truth is
a system in which no part can be fully known until its con-
nection with all other parts has been apprehended, it follows
that in proportion as a man can " give and take account of "
any subject, or part of a subject, he must have the system
before his mind. We can therefore understand how Plato can
say that "no other procedure can undertake to give a com-
plete and methodical grasp of the essential nature of any given
thing." 2 For what is the case in what is commonly called dis-
cussion ? Generally we go no further with it than to produce
a certain comfortable persuasion in our own minds or that of
others; we appeal to no higher standard than the current
opinions and desires of the public which we address ; 3 we are
satisfied when we have turned a smart phrase or won a verbal
victory. 4 Even reasoning which aspires to be " philosophical "
is often only an artificial arrangement of skilfully adjusted
words, which seem to have admirable coherence, but bear no
relation to facts. 5 But let us suppose a mind to which debate,
1 7. 534 e. 2 533 b. 3 533 b.
4 6. 499 a. 5 6. 498 e.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 165
whether outward or inward, has no other object than the
attainment of truth ; l a mind bent upon arriving at and im-
parting conviction, and feeling that a lifetime is but a frag-
ment in the eternity which such a work demands; 2 suppose it
filled with an insatiate desire for reality, 3 which no fragment is
so insignificant as to escape, 4 no objections so formidable as to
deter, 5 no complexity so great as to confuse, 6 no hypothesis so
ultimate as to satisfy ; 7 suppose too that such a mind had been
trained by many years' practice in the power of abstracting
itself from the immediate presentations of time and place, so
that it was able to " let go eyes and other senses, and make
its way to the real truth;" 8 and suppose that there is present
in it, not only the general desire for truth and the belief in the
possibility of arriving at it, but also a conception, in outline
only, but not therefore the less firm or definite, of the form in
which the truth exists and in which it must be apprehended
by the inind, a conception leading us to look everywhere for
unity in multiplicity and differentiation in unity, so that
while no piece of truth can be confounded with any other, no
piece can be isolated from any other ; and suppose, lastly, that
this conception of the constitution of truth had borne fruit in
an approximate systematisation of the existing sum of know-
ledge, a logic of truth as complete as the state of the human
mind at the time admits, and that this logic had been studied
and practised unremittingly for years : then we shall perhaps
have some idea of what Plato intended by the true " dialec-
tical " nature and the true " dialectical " education.
"We shall probably feel that such an education must depend
for its success more upon the spirit in which it is imparted and
received than upon its particular form and matter. And cer-
tainly no one can be further than Plato from the idea that
" dialectic" is a ready-made system of formulas to be swallowed
whole by the mind. He is never tired of insisting upon the
importance of choosing the right natures for the study of the
1 6. 499 a. * 498 d. 8 5. 475 b-c. * 6. 485 b.
6 tiffirep tv (J-dxy 3ti irdvruv, K.T.\., 7. 534 c.
6 d-7r6 TWV AXXdif TrdvTuv a<pe\uv, K.T.\, 534 b. 7 7. 533 C.
8 7. 537 d.
1 6 6 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
sciences, and still more for that of " dialectic." They must
be, not " bastards," but " genuine " children of philosophy ; l
" sound in limb and sound in mind," well grown and developed,
not one-sided "cripples." 2 They must not only be quick to
learn, but must have also the qualities of intellectual retentive-
ness and endurance and love of work, " for hard study makes
a craven of the soul much more than gymnastic ; the work
comes more home to it, for the soul has it all to itself, and does
not share it with the body." 3 Above all, they should be of the
proper age, and should have been " dyed " indelibly with the
spirit of law and order, so that they may combine, what it is
hard to find in combination, constancy and steadiness of char-
acter with speculative activity and aspiration. 4 Otherwise the
study of dialectic will continue to bring upon philosophy the
charge which is so often made against it, that it unsettles the
mind and undermines morality. 5 For, as we have already
heard, 6 philosophy is a double-edged instrument ; the specula-
tive spirit which demands to have its beliefs justified and its
experience accounted for, may by a turn of the hand become
the spirit of revolution, denying the validity of all beliefs and
the reasonableness of any experience; and the same logical
method which, when rightly handled, guides us through the
maze of opinion and reveals the essential forms of truth, may
be applied by the intellectual gladiator to show that one thing
is no more true than another, and to confound real distinctions
in a mist of words. The danger lies in the transition from
the atmosphere of " opinion " to that of " knowledge." In the
former we seem to be surrounded by a world of solid and per-
manent objects, each with a definite position and character
of its own, with which our ideas are inseparably bound up.
Our principles are materialised in particular persons and things,
and these in their turn are invested with the sanctity of prin-
ciples. Of the possible incongruity between an idea and its
local and temporal embodiment we are as yet unconscious.
But the mind has an inherent and a justifiable impulse to
advance upon this state ; for, as a matter of fact, truth is not
1 7. 535 c-d. * 536 b. * 535 b.
4 6. 503 c-e ; cf. 7. 535 a ; 539 d. 7. 537 e 539 d. 6. 497 d.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 167
merely local or temporal, and however necessary it may be that
our experience of it should be so, it will be continually, so to
say, giving the lie to that experience and breaking the limita-
tions imposed upon it. And in this capacity which the mind
possesses of rising above itself, 1 asking itself questions, feeling-
dissatisfaction with its own results, lies the real condition and
source of progress, intellectual and moral. But the difficulty
is to regulate the capacity rightly, to aw r aken it at the right
moment, and to exercise it in the right method. The power of
logical manipulation in clever people is often far in advance of
the strength of their character. The first sense of command
over logical formulas, not unlike that of command over literary
expression, is apt to upset the balance of the mind, which feels
as if it had the world at its command, because it can set it up
and knock it dow r n again in syllogisms. Many of us must
have observed, as Plato had done, " that schoolboys, w r hen they
get their first taste of logic, make free with it as if it were a
game ; they are for ever using it to contradict people, and in
imitation of those who confute them they go and confute others,
as pleased as puppies to worry and tear every one who comes
in their way." 2 But there is a more serious danger than that
arising from the mere delight in the exercise of a new accom-
plishment. The " flattering " 3 voice of pleasure is always
encouraging the intellect to find a flaw in the beliefs and insti-
tutions in which we have been brought up. The " question-
ing spirit" 4 comes to us and asks " What is honour?" "What
is justice ? " We answer by pointing to this and that belief,
this and that course of action, according to what we have been
taught. But logic has no difficulty in confuting us, in showing
that this particular belief or action is in itself " no more right
than wrong ; " 5 for the particularity of the belief or the act is
just what is unessential to their moral quality, as the particular
colour or size is unessential to the mathematical quality of a
triangle. It is only as " partaking in " or " imaging " some-
thing which cannot be apprehended in the limits of sensible
experience, that the particular phenomenon has a moral value.
1 7. 524 a-b. a 7. 539 b. 7. 538 d.
< 538 d. 6 538 e ; cf. 5. 479 a-b ; 7. 524 a.
1 6 8 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TJON
But if the mind has not yet realised this, 1 if it has only
realised the relativity of the particular form of presentation, it
will probably identify the unessential and phenomenal con-
ditions with this essential reality, and in ceasing to believe in
them will cease to believe in anything at all. Against such a
tragic result, which brings discredit on philosophy and turns
into enemies of society men capable of being its saviours,
Plato would guard by putting off real philosophical study till
thirty, restricting it as far as possible to those characters which
combine the requisite moral constancy with the requisite specu-
lative interest and ability, and preparing for it by a long and
severe discipline both in intellectual and practical work. In
other words, he would not have " the question " asked until the
mind is already on the way to answer it, or the " reason why "
given until it merely means the throwing of a stronger light
upon truth already seen. " Dialectic " should " destroy hypo-
theses," 2 but only " in order to establish them ;" it should lead
the mind to see through empirical facts, but not into a dark-
ness or vacuum, only into a wider vista of clearer truth. 3
A systematic study of philosophy, in the spirit and under
the conditions suggested by Plato, is as remote from the modern
theory and practice of education as a systematic employment
of the arts. His account of what actually took place in his
time might be applied with slight modifications to our own :
" those who study philosophy at all, do it in this way : when
they are just emerged from boyhood, in the intervals of business
and money-making, they go into the most difficult part of the
subject, I mean logic, and then they leave it ; I am speaking of
those who become the greatest proficients ; and in after years,
if they ever accept an invitation to listen to 'a philosophical
discussion, they are quite proud of themselves, for they look
upon it as a mere pastime ; and as they draw towards old age,
their light goes out, all but that of a very few, and is never
kindled again." 4 Philosophy in modern England has not even
the advantage, a dubious advantage perhaps, of that conven-
tional glory which attached to the word in the society of Plato's
day, when a " philosopher " seems to have combined in himself
1 rd re dXi?^ (J.T) evpiffK-rj, 7. 539 a. 2 7. 533 c.
8 Of. 7. 520 c, and 532 a. " 6. 497 e 498 a.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 169
the lofty associations of the " savant " with the social prestige of
the " man of culture." It would hardly now be said of philosophy
that it is "a place full of fair names and shows/' 1 into which
the " escaped convicts " of other professions " are glad to take a
leap." In the popular estimation, it is a cold and comfortless
region, haunted mainly by the fancies of dreamers, the sneers
of sceptics, and the formulas of pedants. Not, indeed, that it
is looked upon with less suspicion on that account. The cry is
as loud now as it was in Plato's time, that speculation unsettles
and corrupts the mind of the young. And if we may retort with
him that the so-called theories upon which society is so hard
are often nothing but its own opinions articulately expressed, 2
and though we may not attach so much importance as he did
to the love of speculative truth and the dangers of its perversion,
we cannot deny that the forcible or adroit expression of what
many men are dumbly feeling has in itself an incalculable
power, and that not only are many honest minds needlessly
perplexed by speculative writing and discussion, but that much
real force of intellect and character is spoiled or frittered away
by the want of method and management in the higher branches
of our education. But though we may still feel the reality and
presence of Plato's difficulties, we are as far as he could be from
any prospect of applying his remedies. If the idea of concen-
trating the efforts of literary and artistic genius upon education
seemed chimerical, what are we to think of the proposal that
our best and ablest men should combine a severe course of
scientific study with the first ten years of active life, and
then give exclusive attention to logic and metaphysics for
five years more ? Or, even if the proposal itself were more
likely to find favour or attention, where is that co-ordination
of the sciences, and, still more, where is that science of logic,
which could, with any confidence, be set before an aspiring
mind ? In the case of this, as of others of the most valuable
ideas in the Republic, we are reduced to content ourselves with
the crumbs which fall from the " feast of reason." In the way
of its literal execution we can do hardly anything ; but we
might do a little towards carrying out some of its spirit. We
1 6. 495 c d. * 6. 493 a.
1 7 o THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
might introduce more continuity into the curriculum of our
schools and universities, trying to give the mind its natural
food at the right times, and not letting it be still sprawling on
the ground when it ought to be able to walk, nor asking it to
climb a mountain before it can rind its way about the house.
The writers and supporters of our periodical literature might
have more sense of the responsibility of their calling, and
realise more fully that they spread truth or falsehood, as well as
provide excitement or relaxation. Above all, we might con-
vince ourselves that speculation, when it deserves the name,
does not mean spinning cobwebs or playing with fireworks, but
the finding of clews in the chaos of fact, and the letting in the
daylight through the mist of prejudice ; and that the specula-
tive spirit, though it may have many counterfeits, is a real
element in human nature, and an element to which it owes both
its most splendid achievements and its most disastrous failures.
To discuss the details of any educational system, actual or
possible, would be far beyond the scope of an essay, and would
be especially fruitless when the position of the natural sciences
in education and their relation to philosophy is still a subject
of so much dispute. As long as the advocates of scientific
education suppose themselves, or are supposed, to be in essen-
tial antagonism to those of a literary education, and as long as
metaphysics is understood to mean a mass of exploded fancies,
there can be no common ground between ourselves and Plato.
His whole theory hangs upon the principle that the study of
the sciences should be complementary to a previous training
through literature and art, and should itself be supplemented
in turn by a study of those universal logical principles to which
it points, and in which its problems find solution. Amongst
ourselves the educational use of science, apart from its teaching
for practical application, can only be said to have just begun,
and is still mostly confined to the popularisation of certain
elementary truths with a view of stimulating early habits of
observation and an interest in external nature. The idea of a sys-
tematic exhibition of the leading principles of the sciences, such
as should not only train the inind to think, but should awaken
its perception of the real nature of the world in which it lives,
and " draw it gently out of the outlandish slough " in which it
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 171
is half buried, is still only an idea. Nor can the existing teach-
ing of philosophy be said to satisfy Plato's requirements any
better than that of science. A not very profound knowledge of
small portions of Plato and Aristotle, a smattering of the history
of philosophy mainly derived from second-rate handbooks, or a
familiarity with some generalised theory of evolution, represent
the chief part of what we can point to as the results in this
branch of education. Meantime the air teems with speculation
and discussion ; questions are raised and answered in newspapers
and periodicals which could hardly have been printed twenty
years ago without raising an uproar; and there is no lack of
those " young men of talent, able to skim the surface of every-
thing that is said, and to draw inferences from it as to the best
way of leading their lives," 1 of whom Plato anxiously asked,
" What are we to suppose that they will do ?" In the dearth
of really original contemporary speculation, we seem to be
driven back upon a work only less difficult than that of crea-
tion, the work of interpreting the past. The task of editing
philosophical books for educational purposes requires, as much
as any task, real editorial genius, and as yet it has scarcely
been attempted ; nor have we any adequate collection of the
most valuable parts of great philosophical waitings, such as can
be put into the hands of students. Perhaps, if the present
interest in elementary education is ever followed by an equal
interest in its higher grades, the expenditure of industry and
ability upon primers and handbooks will be paralleled by an
effort to make accessible to the more advanced minds of the
community some of the original works which are now being
made meat for the babes. We cannot expect to revive the
days when truth was communicated by question and answer,
though we may adopt some of their method on a humble scale ;
but it is all the more important that the few men in each
generation who might once have discussed philosophy in the
streets of Athens or the gardens of the Academy should make
the works of the great thinkers of the world not a dead letter,
but a living voice, by entering into their spirit, interpreting
their speech, and carrying on their thought.
1 2. 365 a.
1 7 2 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
We have been thus far considering the Platonic education in
science and "dialectic" mainly in its formal aspect, and we have
found in it a method for leading the soul from the stage in which
its knowledge is held in the form of opinion and imagination to
that in which it is held in the form of an intelligible system.
But we have heard scarcely anything of the matter or substance
of the education : much about the way in which it is to teach
the mind to think, little of what it is to teach. And the ques-
tion which now remains to be asked, and the answer to which
puts the coping-stone to Plato's theory of education, is, What
is the ultimate lesson which the human mind has got to learn,
and for the sake of which all this elaborate apparatus has been
put together ? In the language of Plato's allegory, Where is the
upper air to which the prisoners have to ascend, and what is
the sun to which their eyes have to be turned ? Or, in his
technical phraseology, What is that unhypothetical first prin-
ciple upon which the whole structure of truth depends, and to
grasp which is the crowning act of knowledge? We have
already seen (p. 137) briefly and by anticipation what is Plato's
answer to these questions. It is " the form of the good " which
is "the greatest of all studies;" 1 it is this which "comes last
in the world of knowledge;" 2 it is this which is the end of the
" dialectical " process, 3 the ultimate principle to which all the
" hypotheses " of knowledge are to be referred.
The word " good " has so many meanings and associations
in English, that it is important to be clear as to the particular
sense in which its Greek equivalent was used by Plato. That
sense is perhaps most simply and most clearly illustrated in the
familiar expressions, "What is the good of a thing?" and
" What is a thing good for ?" The answers to both these ques-
tions will give us the use, purpose, or end, which the thing in
question serves, and when we say a given thing is " good " in
this sense, we can generally paraphrase the expression into " it
does its work, or serves its purpose, well." From this sense is
to be distinguished what would commonly be called the more
" moral " sense of " good." It is indeed difficult to say how far
the two uses have modified one another ; but in the minds of
1 6. 505 a. 2 7. 517 b. 3 Of. 6. 511 b-c, and 7. 532 a-b.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 173
most people there is a tolerably marked distinction "between the
sense in which they speak of " a good man " and that in which
they speak of " a good horse " or " a good plough." In the
former case they think primarily of a certain state of mind or
character, secondarily of the end which it fulfils, or the work in
which it is manifested ; in the latter, the work which the horse
or plough does is the first consideration, the conditions of their
doing it come second. We shall understand, not only Plato,
but the whole of Greek moral philosophy, better, if we bear the
second use of " good " in mind ; if we accustom ourselves to
think of man as having a specific work to do, of morality as his
doing that work well, of virtue or " goodness " as the quality
which makes him do it well, and of " the good " as that which
the work serves or realises, and in serving and realising which
it is itself " good." Unfortunately the modern associations with
the word " good " in this sense are somewhat narrow and mis-
leading. When we ask, What is the " good " of a thing ? we are
apt to think of the " good " in question as a purpose or end out-
side the thing itself, to which it is made or supposed (perhaps
only by ourselves) to contribute ; and it is to this perversion of a
true idea that the doctrine of final causes owes much of its de-
served disrepute. To conceive of a thing as good for something,
or having some good, is, in the truest sense of the words, nothing
more than to conceive of it as having a meaning or being intel-
ligible ; for, strictly speaking, a thing of which the elements
exist side by side in no connection or order whatever, or a thing
which itself exists by the side of other things without standing
in any expressible relation to them, is to our intelligence an
inconceivable nonentity. And the moment that we mentally
interpret a thing, or, in other words, understand it, we give it a
reason for existing, whether that reason be a form which it
assumes, a purpose which it serves, a function which it per-
forms, or a substance which it is. We may protest as vigorously
as we can against the utilitarian or pietistic applications of such
a conception ; we may warn students of science against the
dangerous tendency to anticipate nature, and to translate facts
into the formulas of their own wish or fancy ; but such protests
and warnings touch only the abuse, not the essence, of the
conception, that the world is not an unmeaning chaos, but a
1 7 4 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
something of which, however slowly and with however many
mistakes, we are discovering, and not merely inventing, the
significance.
It seemed necessary to make these few preliminary remarks
in order to get a point of departure for considering Plato's
account of " the good " in the Republic. That account may be
treated conveniently under three heads, according as "the good"
is regarded from an ethical, a logical, or a metaphysical and
religious point of view. And firstly, " the good " is " that which
every soul pursues, and for the sake of which it does all that it
does j" 1 it is the object in life which all men more or less feel
themselves to have, but which very few clearly conceive or
could clearly express ; it is that which makes everything which
we do seem worth doing, and everything which we possess
worth possessing ; 2 that about which no one would willingly
deceive himself, but of which every one says or thinks, " this at
least is something real, and this is what I really live for." 3
Theories of life apparently the most opposite imply the exist-
ence of this conception ; the man who lives for pleasure does
not really live for pleasure pure and simple ; 4 he admits the dis-
tinction of " good " and " bad " pleasures, and he chooses the
good ones, in other words, those which fall in with his general
scheme of life, however fragmentary or dim that scheme may
be. So, too, with those who live for knowledge ; 5 it is not
mere intellectual insight which is their aim, but insight into
something " good," something which they think worth knowing
or having ; for what is all knowledge worth unless it have some
relation to our life, unless it show us what is the good in our
life, and in the world where it is lived? And yet, though
every one has, more or less consciously, some such ultimate
object, something about which he would wish to be sure, some-
thing which makes things worth doing and having, it is here
more than in any other point that the ignorance of mankind is
most conspicuous. Most people " have no one mark in life at
which to aim in all that they do," 6 and are more sure about any-
thing almost than about the real object of their desire. The
1 6. 505 e. 2 505 b. 3 505 d.
4 505 c. 505 b. s 7. 519 c.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PL A TO. 175
immediate steps which they take, the present means which they
employ, seem to them much more clear than the ultimate goal
to which they aspire. And this uncertainty of aim reacts upon
the rest of their life ; the proximate advantages which they
grasp at elude them and turn out profitless, just because they
have no connection, no pervading purpose, no whole in which
they find a place. 1 It is the same want of unity and consist-
ency which makes most of our moral ideas and character so
vague and insecure. We talk of our principles of justice and
honour, but how can we be said to understand, or even to
possess, a principle or a virtue, unless we see " wherein they are
good," 2 unless we know what it is which gives them their value,
unless they are not isolated fragments in a vague " sketch " 3 of
life, but connected parts in a fully wrought design ? How can
a man order his own life or that of others, if he has " no clear
pattern in his soul" 4 to the ideal truth of which he can look for
guidance ? How can he maintain existing laws or institutions,
or reform them when they need it, if his acquaintance with
them is the merely empirical familiarity which a blind man
might have with things which he had often touched, or with a
road along which he had learnt to walk straight ? 5 Such a man
is only half awake ; 6 the good things which he supposes him-
self to secure are only images and shadows of the truth ; his
mental grasp of them is conventional and unintelligent, 7 and
is liable to be loosened by every logical objection. He can
"give no account" of them to himself or others, can see no
single " form " underlying their variety, but confuses what is
essential in them with what is unessential, the fragment with
the whole, the resemblance with the reality.
It is the perception of " the good," then, which is required to
complete morality, to do away with the vagueness, the aimless-
ness, the blindness, the fragmentariness, of life, and to give it
unity, completeness, and decision. But Plato sees in it the
condition, not only of conduct, but of knowledge also. What
the sun is in the world of visible objects, that he conceived " the
1 6. 505 e ; cf. 7. 534 c, otfre <*XXo dyaObv ovdtv.
2 6. 506 a. 8 6. 504 d, inroypa^v . . . TeXewrdr^v direpyacrtav.
4 6. 484 c. * 6. 484 c-d ; 506 c ; cf. 493 b, x/x
6 5. 476 c-d. 7 7. 534 c.
1 7 6 THE THE ORY OF ED UCA TION
good " to be in the sphere of intelligence. 1 To the complete
fact of sight there are, in Plato's view, four factors necessary,
an eye capable of seeing, an object capable of being seen, light
in the eye and the object, and the sun of which the light is an
" effluence." The fact of knowledge may be analogously ana-
lysed : there must be a subject capable of knowing and an ob-
ject capable of being known, there must be intelligence present
in both making the one intelligent and the other intelligible, and
there must be a source of intelligence from which it is diffused
through the twin world of subject and object, soul and being.
Such a source is " the good," which " supplies truth to the
object of knowledge, and gives to the subject the power of
knowing." 2 Nor is this all : as the sun is the condition not only
of vision and visibility, but also of birth, growth, and nurture
to visible things, so the objects of knowledge owe to " the
good," not only their truth, but also their very being and
essence. 3 And lastly, like the sun in the allegory of the cave,
" the good " is the crowning vision in the upward progress of
the soul from darkness to light ; or, speaking without metaphor,
if the soul, in the strength of the dialectical impulse, penetrates
right through the imagery of sense, and traverses the whole
chain of intelligible relations, the " end of the intelligible " 4 at
which it arrives, the " unhypothetical first principle," upon
which it sees the whole structure of knowledge to depend, is
again "the good." In Plato's mind then, the conception of
knowledge and truth, the conception of objective reality or
essence, and the conception of a systematic order or cosmos,
alike implied the conception of a " good," which cannot be
identified with any of them, but is the condition or logical
prius of them all. 5 Things are known and understood so far as
they are seen as elements in a rational order ; knowledge is the
perception of them as such, and things so perceived are truly
perceived. Again, a thing is what it is in virtue of its position
in such an order. As in the physical organism the character
of each organ depends upon its relation to the whole, and has
no existence apart from that relation ; 6 as in the larger whole
1 6. 507 b 509 b. 2 508 e. 3 509 b. 4 7. 532 a-b.
* irpeajSetq. Kcd 8w<i/xet i'7re/>^x oj ' TOJ > 6. 509 b. 6 4. 420 d.
AY THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 177
of the state each member only preserves his true individuality
so long as he takes his proper place in the organisation of
labour, and loses it when he ceases to do so ; l so in the universal
order of existence, each constituent not only is understood, but
subsists, only so far as it remains true to its place in the order,
and as that place is determined by the ruling principle, end, or
" good," of the order, it is to this ultimately that it owes what
it is. Lastly, as a life without purpose is blind, as qualities
without unity and connection are sketchy and incomplete, so
a system of truth without an unconditioned principle to depend
on is baseless and " dreamy ;" and such an unconditioned prin-
ciple Plato could only conceive in the form of an absolute end,
which casts a light backward through the whole system of
existence, but is itself above and beyond it. It thus becomes
intelligible how he could speak of sciences so abstract as the
mathematical as leading up to " the good," 2 of geometry as
" making us see the form of the good more easily," 3 and of the
study of harmony as "useful for the investigation of the
beautiful and the good." 4 For, if each science deals with a par-
ticular " form " of universal being, and each " form " points to
and connects with the "form" above it, and ultimately the
highest " form," then even in the simple relations of number,
figure, and sound, we may expect to hear the faint "prelude" 5
to the far-off " strain " of that fuller intelligence " whose voice
is the harmony of the world."
From this conception of a logically implied condition or
postulate of the world of knowledge, it was to Plato an easy
step to the conception of a creative cause of the universe,
both material and intelligible, and we are not surprised to hear
the sun spoken of, not only as the "analogue," but as the
" begotten child," 6 of the good. Plato seems here to have com-
bined the metaphysical conception which he expresses in the
Phaedo with the more mythological ideas of the Timaeus. In
the former dialogue, 7 the " choice of the good and the best" is
represented as the essential characteristic of intelligence, and
1 4. 420 e^21 a ; cf. 3. 417 b ; 5. 466 b. * 7. 532 b-c.
3 7. 526 e. 4 7. 531 c. * 7. 531 d.
6 6. 508 c ; 7. 517 c. 7 Phaedo, 99 a-c.
M
1 7 8 THE THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION
any one who holds that the universe is really the work of
intelligence is bound to show that "it is the good and right
which binds and holds it together;" for it is folly to think that
we shall ever find " an Atlas " to support it " more mighty and
more immortal and more sustaining" than this. In the
Timaeus?- " the maker and father of the universe," whom " it is
hard to find out and impossible to declare to every one," being
himself good, and therefore incapable of envy, creates the sen-
sible world in all things as good, that is as like himself, as the
conditions of sensible existence allow. The whole material
universe is thus the " image " 2 or expression to sense of an
intelligible system, and though this intelligible system is some-
times spoken of as the "pattern" 3 upon which the Creator
made the world, it seems to be practically absorbed in the
Creator himself when, at the end of the work, 4 the visible
cosmos is said to be " the image of its maker, God manifest to
sense." In the light of these passages we may interpret the
account of the good in the Republic. It is the final cause of
the world ; not that
" far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves,"
but the immanent reason in things, in virtue of which each,
realises its own end in realising that of the whole. It is also
the eternally creative power which sustains existence ; which
imagination represents in 5 " picture-language " as a person
making all things good, and which reason apprehends as the
" unhypothetical principle" which all truth and goodness lead up
to and imply. Art, morality, and science have each something to
tell of it, for it is " in a manner the cause of all that we know," 6
whether in a more or a less perfect form. It is foreshadowed
in the child's story of the God who is perfectly good and
unchangeable, 7 in the poem which presents the 8 " image of the
good character " in its simplicity and integrity, in the beauty
of line and melody which speak of " that beauty in which all
things work and move." 9 Or again, it is the divine beneficence
1 Timaeus, 28 c 29 c. 2 Ib. 30 c-d. 3 Ib. 28 c 29 a.
* Ib. 92 b. 5 Ib. 29 b-d, e^raj \6yovs. G 7. 516 c.
7 2. 380 b 383 a. 8 3. 397 d ; 401 b. 9 Timaeus, 47 b-d.
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. 179
which does no evil, the moral perfection in which our frag-
mentary virtues find their "filling up," 1 the spirit of a world
where injustice is neither done nor suffered, 2 and which we may
look at until w T e become like it. Or, once more, 3 the sciences
put us on the ascent which leads to it, and surrender their
hypotheses to receive them from it again connected and estab-
lished ; philosophy teaches us to find the outlines and articula-
tions of its presence under the motley confusion of appearances; 4
and the working life of mature and educated manhood supplies
the rough material in which those who have mastered their
lesson in theory may learn to understand and work it out in
practice. For we must not forget that the fifteen years of
training in sciences and dialectic are to be followed, in Plato's
scheme, by fifteen more years of public service, " in order that
the citizen may not be behind the rest in experience;" 5 and
during all this time he is to be tested in the strength of his
mind and character, " whether he will stand being pulled about
this way and that, or will blench at all." Not till he has
" passed through this trial and shown himself foremost both in
action and in knowledge," is he to be made " to turn the eye
of his soul upward and look at the very good itself, which is
the universal source of light." 6 Then at last the world will lie
open before his mind, ordered and intelligible, connected and
pervaded by a single principle which he can trace in many
forms and combinations, 7 but can distinguish from them all.
Then the shadows and images of everyday life will acquire
their true meaning, for he will see through and over them to
the realities which they reflect. 8 The isolated and self-con-
tradictory maxims of popular morality will interpret themselves
into fragments of a single perfection, which human life suggests
though it does not realise it. 9 The separate sciences will cease
to talk " in dreams," 10 and will point beyond themselves to the
waking vision of an absolute being. Philosophy will be, not a
cunning device of words or an occupation for a listless hour,
1 G. 504 d. 2 6. 500 c. 3 7. 533 c-d ; 517 b.
4 7. 534 b-c. 5 7. 539 e. 7. 540 a.
7 7. 534 c.; cf. 5. 476 a. "7. 520 c.
9 6. 501 b. 7. 533 c.
1 80 THE OR Y OF ED UCA TION.
but the articulate language of truth which a lifetime is too
short for learning. Only eternity can interpret that language
fully, 1 but to understand it is the nearest approach to heaven
upon earth, and to study it is true education. 2
II. L. X.
1 6. 498 c-d.
2 7. 519 c, TOI)J fv Traideiy eu/j.^i>ovs oia.Tpipfii> . . . fjyov/j.ei'OL ev JJ.O.KO.JMV
ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION OF
THE STATE.
ARISTOTLE'S work on Politics has a twofold interest historical
and theoretical. If it does not add very materially to our
knowledge of facts and events, it throws more light than any
other writing, ancient or modern, on the constitutional forms
and struggles of the Greek States. It is the result of the politi-
cal experience of a people, reflected in the mind of one of its
wisest men and reduced to theory. Aristotle wrote of a life
that was going on around him, and the freshness of personal
knowledge enlivens his coldest analysis. Thus, in spite of the
scientific character of his theory, it is national. He does not
write as though Greek civilisation were in his eyes something
transitory, or a single stage in history. Though he had been tutor
to Alexander, he seems unaware that the day of autonomous
republics was passing, and that in the Macedonian monarchy a
kind of government was arising hitherto unknown in the develop-
ment of his race. On the other hand, the very fact that he stood
on the confines of change gives him a peculiar advantage. His
position is not midway in a political development, where the
character of institutions and the meaning of movements is
obscure. The strength and weakness of Greek society and of
Greek civic virtue, the political structure which had protected
that virtue and been upheld by it, the gradual decline of
public spirit, the corruption of military aristocracy into an
oligarchy of wealth at Sparta, of active free government into
impotent ochlocracy at Athens, the war of classes which sprang
from a social question and became a political one, all this lay
behind him. The prime of Greek life was nearly past when he
wrote. What we miss in his work, what would have been of such
great interest now, a description of military monarchy and of
federal government, would not have touched the life which rises
1 82 ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
before our minds when we hear of Greek history. And what
he does describe is fully developed, and therefore capable of
adequate analysis.
But it is not merely our desire to understand the past which
is satisfied by a treatise like the Politics. That which is true
of the art and literature of the Greeks is only less true of their
political creations. Their most intensely national products are
at the same time " purely human." To apply to modern affairs
conclusions drawn from Greek history is indeed hazardous, and
such reasonings are often as futile theoretically as the imita-
tions of Roman virtue in the French Eevolution were practically
hollow. The fate of Athenian democracy will not disclose to us
the future of the American Republic, for the circumstances are
radically different. But in spite of change there are permanent
characteristics of social forces and of forms of government, of
commerce and agriculture, wealth and poverty, true and false
aristocracy, oligarchy and democracy. Not only this : among the
subjects of which the Politics treats there is something even more
permanent and universal, and that is the simple fact of political
society. Let a State be the organisation of a nation or a city, it is
still a State ; and what is true of its nature and objects in one
case will, up to a certain point, be true of them in another and
in every case. It is in the discovery of these truths and the
investigation of such ideas as those of justice and right, that the
primary business of philosophy in its application to politics
consists ; and Aristotle is before all things a philosopher. These
facts and ideas are so familiar to us that we take little account
of them ; they seem to us self-evident, and we prefer to deal with
more concrete difficulties. But to philosophers the self-evident
ceases to be so, and their effort is to know what everybody seemed
to know before. Thus Aristotle makes these preliminary
problems the basis of all further discussion. It would have
seemed absurd to him to attempt the settlement of complex
problems, when the elementary conceptions on which they
depend have been subjected to no analysis ; to blame the State
perhaps for overstepping its limits, when we do not know what
the State is, and therefore cannot possibly tell what its limits
are ; or to assert a right to share in government when we can
attach no intelligible meaning to the word " right." The fault
OF THE STATE. 183
of reasoning on insufficient data has never been charged on
Aristotle's Politics ; every one knows that he founded his theory
on researches into more than a hundred and fifty Greek consti-
tutions, and that he even made a collection of the social and poli-
tical usages of foreign tribes. But he is equally free from other
defects more easily forgiven : he does not use criteria the value of
which he has never questioned, nor try to account for one set of
human phenomena in total isolation from the theory of all the
rest. To him political science is founded on ethics, and ethics
on psychology ; and all these rest upon metaphysic and its
application to nature.
In the following pages I propose to give a sketch of the views
which Aristotle held on a few of these preliminary questions.
In the nature of things, these questions are less affected than
any others by historical changes ; and an attempt to show their
vital meaning through the forms of Greek thought may have an
interest, although it can offer nothing to professed students of
antiquity. But the differences which exist between Greek poli-
tical conditions and those of our own time, and between the ideas
associated with each, are so marked that they appear even in
the most abstract discussions ; and there are some of such
importance that, unless they are constantly kept in sight, it is
impossible rightly to appreciate Aristotle's views, or to separate
what is essential in them from what is merely temporary. In
spite of their familiarity, therefore, it will be as well to begin
by recalling some of these points of difference to mind, and
examining Aristotle's position in regard to them.
First of all, the Greek State was a city, not a nation. If we
think of an English county with a single city and its surround-
ing territory, and imagine it to be independent and sovereign,
we shall have more idea of one of the largest Greek States than
if we compare it with a modern nation. Political life was con-
centrated in the capital to such an extent that the same word
stands for city and State. In such a community public affairs
were as much matters of every day as the municipal politics of
an English town, and yet they had all the dignity of national
decisions. The citizen, in a State like Athens, took part in
politics personally, not through a representative ; not once in
four or five years, but habitually. His convictions or his catch-
1 84 ARISTOTLE S CONCEPTION
words were won not through the dull medium of the press, but
from the mouths of practised orators. The statesmen of his time
were familiar figures in his daily life. The opposite party to
his own was not a vague collective name to him, but he rubbed
shoulders with it in the streets. Thus political life was his occu-
pation and acquired the intensity of a personal interest. The
country and its welfare had a vivid meaning to him ; he felt
himself responsible for its action and directly involved in its
good or evil fortune. Under these conditions, the rise and fall
of a State visibly depended on the character of its citizens ; its
greatness was nothing but the outward sign of their energy and
devotion ; the failure of virtue in them acted immediately on it.
Thus the bonds of reciprocal influence, which we can only
believe in now, were palpable facts then ; and the more direct
danger of foreign attack or of civil war was seldom far distant.
Hence the vital interest taken by the State in the character of
its members and their education. Hence also an amount of
governmental inspection and control of private affairs which,
even if it suited modern ideas, would be scarcely possible in a
nation. Such "interference with liberty" was then not felt to be
an interference. In the best days of Greece, to participate in this
rapid and ennobling public life was enough for the Greek citizen.
If his country was independent and himself an active member of
it, this community satisfied him too completely for him to think
of " using his private house as a state" 1 or a castle. " To live as
one likes," this is the idea of liberty which Aristotle connects
first with the most primitive barbarism (Eth. 10. 9. 13), and then
with that degraded ochlocracy which marked the decay of the
free governments of Greece (179. 20 ; 185. 9 ; 216. 16).
The effects of this one difference on a political theory are
incalculable. And Aristotle not only adopts the Greek idea of
the State, and consequently thinks of it as a city, but he has
expressly raised the question of its proper size. The discussion
of this point in the account of the ideal State (101. 14 ff.) con-
tains one or two chance remarks which throw a strong light on
the Greek idea and its results. Aristotle mentions an opinion
1 73. 16. Here and throughout this Essay, where mere figures are given,
they indicate the pages and lines of Bekker's small edition of the Politics
(Berlin, 1855).
OF THE STATE. 185
that the State or city should be large ; and, while he admits
that largeness is an advantage so long as it involves no
diminution of that real energy of the State which makes it
great and not simply big, he insists that this proviso sets
definite limits to the increase of size or population. It is
essential that the State should be " easily overseen " (evavvoTr-
TO?, 103. 11). Just as a boat can no more be two furlongs
long than a span long, so a State can no more have 100,000
citizens than ten (Eth. 9. 10. 3). Such a number is possible
for a mere tribe (e6vo<$), but not for a political community.
And why not ? The answer is in the highest degree charac-
teristic. The State implies government ; and the function of
the governor is to issue orders and to judge. " But if just
legal decisions are to be given, and if office is to be apportioned
to men according to merit, it is necessary for the citizens to
have a knowledge of each other's characters, since, where this
is not the case, things must needs go wrong with the appointment
of officials and the administration of the law; but it is not right to
act off-hand in either of these matters, and that is plainly w r hat
happens where the population is over-large." In such a case,
again, it is impossible to prevent strangers from quietly obtain-
ing the rights of citizens. And finally, who could be the one
general of such a multitude, and who, unless he had the voice
of Stentor, their one herald ? l
A second fundamental distinction is to be found in the
social organisation of the Greek State. The political life of
Sparta or Athens rested on the basis of Slavery. The citizen-
body might trace its descent to a conquering race which had
reduced the original possessors of the country to a position of
more or less complete subjection, and lived upon their agricul-
tural labour, as in the one case; or the slaves might be
procured through war and a slave-trade, as in the other. But
in both instances the bulk of the necessary work was per-
formed by an unfree population, far outnumbering the select
aristocracy of free citizens. This institution and the contempt
even for free labour are the most striking proofs that the
1 102. 15 ff. In 62. 10 the size of Babylon is said to fit it for an
rather thau a irbXis ; of. 33. 30.
1 86 ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
Hellenic solution of social problems was inadequate ; modern
writers find in them the " dark side " of Greek life, or even the
" blot upon their civilisation." But the latter expression at
least is misleading, since it implies that such defects had no
organic connection with the strength and beauty of this
civilisation ; whereas, in fact, the life of " leisure," devoted to
politics and culture or to war, would have been impossible
without them, and general conclusions drawn from Greek
history which do not take them into account are inevitably
vitiated.
On this point Aristotle shares the view common to his
countrymen. He recommends that slaves should be kindly
treated, and that good conduct on their part should be rewarded
by their liberation. He does not admit that the slavery of men
born to be free is justifiable, since, in his view, it is a viola-
tion of nature. But he definitely holds that there are men
(apparently as a rule " barbarians ") whose right and natural
destination is servitude ; and he adopts the institution in his
ideal state. Into his analysis of slavery and his partial
justification of it it is unnecessary to enter. Its chief interest
is that he attempts to put the question on a moral ground, and
therefore in his attempt to defend a bad cause falls into con-
tradictions. He does not base slavery on political utility, nor
fortunately has he Biblical arguments at hand which he can
call religious. Its morality and that to him was the deciding
question depends on the fact that some men are destitute of
reason in the highest sense of the word ; " those men who
differ from others as widely as the body does from the soul,
or a beast from a man (and men stand in such a relation
when the use of their bodies is their function and the best
thing that can be got out of them), are by nature slaves" (7. 15);
and for them servitude is not merely a painful necessity, but
their good. The problem is, then, to find men whose nature is
of this kind, and who at the same time are capable of obeying
and even anticipating orders (5. 21), of receiving rational in-
struction (22. 9), and of standing in the relation of friendship
to their masters (Etli. 8. 10. 6). And this is a contradiction
which cannot exist. The weakness of the position is brought
out in the words which Aristotle adds to his assertion that
OF THE STATE. 187
friendship is possible between master and slave "not as a
slave, but as a man." In other words, to treat a man as a
slave is to treat him as though he were not a man.
Another distinction which calls for some remark concerns
religion. It would be superfluous to compare the doctrine
and spirit of Christianity and Greek religion: superfluous, and
perhaps misleading. For the vital differences which really
exist between them are liable to be exaggerated by a statement
of opposing principles, especially when it is assumed that the
"ideal" morality which we describe as Christian is that by
which modern Christians, for the most part, really live. But
though the actual religious motives and practice of Greeks and
Englishmen may be nearer to one another than we are apt to
suppose, in the position of religion in the community there is
a striking dissimilarity. Greek religion knew no recognised
orthodox doctrine and no recognised expositor of that doctrine.
A Greek had no church. Consequently one of the most fruit-
ful sources of conflict in modern nations had no existence in
Hellas. There is nothing in Greek history even analogous to
the struggles of Church and Empire and Church and State, to
the religious wars of Germany and France, or even to the semi-
theological Great Rebellion, and in Aristotle's list of the causes
of <rracT49 or civil discord religion is hardly mentioned. A
second consequence is this, that the Greek knew little, either
for good or evil, of the modern idea that the State is " profane."
His religious feelings attached themselves to it. It was not
merely the guardian of his property, but the source of right
and goodness to him, the director of his worship and guarded
by the gods he worshipped. He might not insult its gods,
although within certain limits he was left to think and speak
of them as he thought right. In the absence of a powerful
priesthood, the natural development of the religious ideas of
the people was unhampered and could pass easily into corre-
sponding action ; a vote of the Legislature might adopt a new
deity into the number of those already recognised. Thus, but
for the occasional influence of the Delphic oracle, we may say
that to the Greek citizen his State was the moral and religious
law in one.
It is easy for us to realise the defects of such a relation
1 88 ARISTOTLE S CONCEPTION
and the want of truth in the religious ideas connected with
it. But it had also a greatness of its own ; and this we do not
feel so readily. It fostered the social and political virtue of the
citizen ; and in his devotion to his State, his perception of its
greatness and dignity, and the fusion of his reverence for it
with that which he felt for his gods, he possessed a spiritual
good which the modern world has known only in the scantiest
measure, and that only since the Eeformation. It is this spirit
. which breathes throughout the Politics, the spirit which is
x willing to be guided by the highest authority it knows; which
emphasises its duties to the community, and has not even a
word to signify its "rights" against it; which describes the
possession of property and the begetting of children not as the
^private affair of individuals but as services to the State ; l and
which finds in the law, not a restraint but the supremacy of
the divine element in human nature, " reason without desire."
For the rest, there is nothing specially noticeable in Aristotle's
remarks on the religious services of his ideal city. He seems
to place this social function first in importance (108. 4). It
is provided for from the proceeds of the state-lands (111. 28),
and performed by the oldest citizens, who are freed from the
duties of war and public life (109. 28). It cannot be said
that Aristotle attributes to religion anything like the import-
ance it has for us. It is characteristic of him that though
he certainly did not believe the popular mythology, uses the
plainest language respecting it, and even thought that some of
it had been deliberately invented by rulers for political ends, 2
he proposes no kind of change in the public worship, and
contents himself with trying to guard against the moral
dangers connected with the celebrations of some deities (128.
29). What he would have thought of the use of this
mythology in education we can do DO more than guess, for
the book which treats of that subject breaks off long before it
can be supposed to be complete. But that his attitude was
not due to moral indifference is quite certain. He probabty
considered the common people incapable of any such exalted
1 \etTovpyeIv TT? w6\fi, 126. 21, and 152. 10. So also of government, 152. 11.
2 Met. 1074 a 38.
OF THE STATE. 189
monotheism as his own, and thought that their own creed had
the sanctity for them that in all cases belongs to the highest
form in which the truth is attainable.
It will be already apparent, lastly, that if Aristotle's views
represent Greek opinion, we must not expect to find in him our
own ideas of the individual. Eoman law, with its presumption
that every one is a person and capable of being the subject of
rights ; Christianity, which asserts an identification of the
human and divine spirit capable of becoming actual in
the soul of the believer, and giving his existence an absolute
value ; the more popular caricature of this doctrine, which
places the end of this individual soul in the attainment of
perpetual private pleasure ; the romantic preference of personal
honour and loyalty to public spirit, and of purity and humility
to the social virtues ; the principles of the French Eevolution
and of English liberalism, all this lies between us and
Aristotle. It is natural to us to base our political theories on
individual liberty and rights. We look upon man as having a
nature of his own and objects of his own, independently of
society. We look upon the State as a contrivance for securing
to him the enjoyment of his liberty and the opportunity of
pursuing his ends, a contrivance which involves some limitation
of his rights and ought to involve as little as possible. Even
when reflection has shown us that there is something theoreti-
cally wrong with these ideas, we remain convinced that a
happiness or a morality which is imposed on us from without
loses half its value, and that there are spheres of our life and parts
of our inward experience into which no one ought to intrude.
And if we feel strongly our unity with others, and are willing
to admit that social and political institutions have a positive
object and not the merely negative one of protection, we
emphasise the fact that the character or happiness they are to
promote are those of individuals, and are often in danger of
falsifying our position by regarding the community and its
institutions as something separable from this individual welfare,
and a mere means to it. When we read Plato or Aristotle every-
thing seems to be changed. The State is regarded not as a con-
trivance for making possible the objects of individuals, but as
a sun on which the lesser bodies of its system are absolutely
i 9 o ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
dependent, or rather as this system itself. It does not limit
private existence; private existence derives its being, its welfare,
and its rights from it. The community and even its institu-
tions seem to be regarded as an end in which personal happiness
has no necessary place, and to which the existence of any num-
ber of individuals is a mere means. We soon discover that the
Greek philosophers held no such absurdity as this, that they
regarded personal welfare in the highest sense as the sole object
of the State, and that they were in far less danger than ourselves
of seeking it in conquest or in wealth. But after this has been
taken into account, and after we have realised that the modern
citizen's patriotism and reverence for law seem to answer more
to Greek ideas than to our own theories, there remains a decided
difference both in fact and in feeling, a difference which appears
again and again in political questions.
For a century or more before the Politics was written, the
traditional Greek view had been called in question, and ideas
had been opposed to it which strike us at once by their modern
air. What is the State ? Is it something inevitably produced
in the development of human nature, or an invention ? Is it a
whole, the source of all freedom and morality to its members,
or a contrivance of individuals, deriving its authority simply
from their agreement and from enactment ? Is its object
something common and equivalent to the end of human life, or
is it a mere means to the attainment of the private objects of
the individuals who combined to form it ? In some such way
we may make explicit the questions which decide the character
of Aristotle's theory. And they may be summed up in the
single inquiry, started by the Sophists, Is the State natural
or conventional ? a If, with some of them, we hold that it is
the latter, that it rests upon custom and enactment, the result
seems at first sight to be that the reverence and devotion which
it claims from the citizen are misplaced, and that its identifica-
1 fpfoei or v6fj.y. It is impossible to render i/6/xos by a single word, as it
means both enactment and custom. The Gorgias and the first two books of
the Republic contain full illustrations of the Sophistic views referred to.
OF THE STATE. 191
tion with the moral law is absurd. Yet it is clearly dependent
on man's will and intelligence, and neither fixed nor natural
as the stars are. If then it is still to be regarded as an absolute
moral power, and not the product of fear or force, we must find
some way of reconciling this absoluteness with a recognition of
the action of man's will in low or custom. Thus we shall find
that Aristotle's position towards the question practically
amounts to a denial of the antithesis between vcn<$ and vofjios,
and an assertion that the State is at once due to man's will and
the necessary or " natural " expression of his progress. This
result Aristotle reaches not by a refutation of opposing theories,
but by his own analysis and interpretation of facts. And the
first question, on which all others depend, is : What does the
fact of political community mean ? What is the State ? l
" Since all communities or associations are formed for the
sake of some good, this must be especially true of that com-
munity which is the highest and includes all the rest, and it
1 We use the word State in at least two different senses, and to prevent
misapprehension it may be as well to define shortly the meaning attached to
it in these pages. By State we seem to mean (1) such a community as pos-
sesses not only a social but also a political organisation, or, in the widest
sense, a government. As a State the body politic is not merely a collection
of individuals or classes, but is itself an individual or person ; as is especially
evident in its relations with other States, and in the existence of a monarch
or president. In the case of modern States, most of which are already
founded upon nationality, the word "nation" expresses this idea; and
language which may seem overstrained when applied to the State sounds more
natural if we substitute "nation." That word, however, is inappropriate
to Greek politics ; and even if it were not it does not express clearly the fact
that society has a political organisation : it is sometimes true to say "the
nation does or wills " this or that, when it would not be true to say this of
the State. It is in this first sense that I commonly use the expression
State. But (2) as this expression lays stress on the organisation of the com-
munity in government, we come to use it as equivalent to government. Thus
a single function of the State gets the name of the whole, and acquires a false
isolation. Accordingly when language used of the State is understood to apply
to the government, it becomes absurd, unless indeed the government is regarded
as representing the State and, for the time being, equivalent to it. In such
discussions as those on the end of the State, then, it is important to bear in
mind that the State is distinct, on the one hand, from government, since it
is the unity of which government is a single function, and that it is distinct,
on the other hand, from society, because it is this unity as it expresses itself
in political organisation and, through the fact of this organisation, acts as a
person.
1 92 ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
will clearly have for its object the highest and most command-
ing good. This community is the State." With some such
words the treatise opens. Their simplicity conceals the extent
to which they define Aristotle's position, yet when they are
admitted some of the most vexed questions are settled before-
hand. In accordance with his fundamental idea that every-
thing is defined by the end it is destined to attain, they lay it
down that there is a definite object for which the State exists ;
that this object is not something accidental, suggested by the
chance desires of individuals ; and that it is not the merely
relative end of making possible the attainment of other ends ;
but that the State is the highest of human associations,
and, instead of being one among others, includes in itself all
other associations ; and that, as the good at which it aims in-
cludes the subordinate objects of desire arrived at by the sub-
ordinate communities, this good is nothing short of the final
object of human life, the end which alone gives value to all
lesser ends and has no end beyond it.
Whatever this chief good which makes life worth living
may be, it is the end of man and not of an abstraction such as
the State is sometimes thought to be. In other words, it is the
end of the citizens who compose the community; for the good
of the State and that of the individual are, according to
Aristotle, precisely the same, although, when we regard this
good in the first way, it has a greater perfection and grandeur
(Eth. 1. 2. 8 ; cf. 93-96). But many men pursue a false end ;
they give their lives to objects unworthy of a man, such as
mere pleasure, or to objects like wealth, which, though they are
really desirable, are so only as means to a good beyond them.
In the same way there are States which pursue unworthy aims,
and Aristotle finds opinions prevalent which either tacitly or
openly assign to the State ends which are really beneath it.
His opposition to these views brings out his own more dis-
tinctly.
There are, for example, certain oligarchic and democratic
arguments which assume that the possession of wealth and free
birth, respectively, forms such a contribution to the purposes of
the State as ought in justice to be rewarded by political privi-
leges. But these arguments, as Aristotle points out, really pre-
OF THE STATE. 193
suppose that the end of the State is wealth or free birth, positions
which lie cannot for a moment admit. Not that these elements
of life are without importance for the political community ; they
may even be means necessary to its welfare, but they do not on
that account constitute its essence or end. The same is true
of other necessary conditions. The State is not a defensive
alliance, concluded by individuals who wish to pursue their
various objects in security from hostile attacks. Nor is it a
device they have adopted for facilitating trade with one another,
and insuring themselves against force or fraud. If it were, its
object would be (to borrow modern language) merely the pro-
tection of person and property ; " the law," in Aristotle's own
language, " would be a contract and, as Lycophron the Sophist
says, a pledge of lawful dealing between man and man ; " and
two different nations which had formed a defensive alliance,
and whose citizens, when their trading led to disputes, could
sue and be sued in the courts of either State alike, would only
be considered separate States because their territories happened
to be distinct. But even if this difficulty were overcome, and
to communion in all these points were added the right of legal
intermarriage and the existence of societies for holding common
festivals and joining in common amusements, the resulting
association would still fall short of being " political." " All this
must be there, if there is to be a State ; but even if all this is
there, there is not yet a State." For the members of the society
would not only lack the single government which is essential
to a State, but they would not necessarily have any share in
that which alone gives a value to these subordinate bonds of
union, the final end of human life (72. 4 74. 7).
What, then, is this final end or chief good, the pursuit of
which and a common share in which is the essence of the State?
What additional bond would make this imaginary society poli-
tical ? Aristotle has answered this question in the concrete in
the passage before us. This society is a community in mere
" living ;" and a State is a community in " good living." These
associates do not trouble themselves about each other's moral
character or wellbeing; and the State aims at nothing short
of that. The law to them is a mere contract, protecting their
persons and property ; but the real law, the law of the State,
N
i 9 4 ARISTOTLE 'S CONCEPTION
aims at making the citizens good and just men. " Good living"
(3. 9; 72. 14), " noble actions" (74. 1), a " perfect and self-sufficing
life," 1 " well-being " or happiness, these are all various names
for the chief good of man. The full discussion of it is the
subject of the Ethics ; and we have to do with it here only so far
as is necessary to bring out the positive character of the end at.
which the State is said to aim. It is the full and harmonious
development of human nature in the citizen, or, in other words,
the unimpeded activity of his moral and intellectual " excel-
lence" or virtue. In the freedom of this activity from
hindrances is implied a certain amount of "prosperity" or of
" external goods." But the goods of fortune are not goods at
all except to the man who can use them aright, and therefore
the essence of his wellbeing lies in the activity itself, or in his
character, not in what he has, but in what he is. The virtues
or excellences in which his true nature is developed are naturally
manifold ; but in Aristotle's view they fall into two main
groups. The soul feels and desires ; it thinks and it rules its
emotions. In so far as its desires are moulded by reason into
harmonious and controlled activities, the soul attains the
" moral" virtues in the narrower sense of the word ; in the
employment of reason itself it reaches \vhat Aristotle calls the
intellectual virtues. In both it feels that pleasure which
accompanies the free exercise of a function. That all these
functions are equally ends in themselves, Aristotle, of course,
no more believes than any one else : there is a higher and lower
in them, and a greater and less desirability in men's lives,
according as they develop one kind of excellence or another.
It is when the care and the necessary incompleteness of the
active citizen life are laid aside, and a man attains to speculative
1 73. 25 S. fto7?s reXe/as cat avrdpicovs. One idea connected with the latter
word is that of completeness. The chief good must lie in a life which leaves no
want of man unsatisfied, whether these wants be external or spiritual, a life in
which man's self (avrbs) is fully realised, and which therefore attains his final
end (rAos). " Self-sufficience " has already a meaning of its own in English,
and in many ways "freedom" seems to answer best to avrapKeia : freedom
not in a merely negative sense, but in that in which it is said that the truth
makes men free ; or, as by Carlyle, that the object of all religion is to make
man free ; or, as by Hegel, that the idea of mind and the end of history is
freedom.
OF THE STATE. 195
insight into the reason of the world, that the divine element in
him approaches nearest to its source, and he touches that
highest blessedness which all great philosophers, as well as
religious men, have found in union with God. That a whole
life of such activity and joy is more than human, and that it can
be known only in moments, is no reason for falling back on
Philistinism. " We ought not to listen to those who tell us that,
since we are men, our thoughts should be those of men, and
since we are mortal they should be mortal ; but, so far as in us
lies, we ought to rid ourselves of our mortality and do all we
can to live in accord with that which is noblest in us ; for
though in bulk it be a little thing, in power and preciousness
it far surpasses all things" (Etli. 10. 7. 8). A life of such happy
moral excellence and active " contemplation " is what Aristotle
calls " good living." To attain and further this is the end of
the State. This itself, community in this, is the State.
An inseparable connection of this kind between political
society and man's chief good leaves only one possible answer to
the question, Is the State natural or conventional ? It is man's
destination, that in which and through which his end is
realised. It is therefore "natural" in Aristotle's use of the
word, at least in so far as man is concerned ; and if man's end
is also an end in the system of the world, the State will be
natural in a still further sense. The meaning of these ideas will
be clearer if we first consider the steps by which man reaches
the stage of political society, and thereby advances towards the
goal of his progress. Aristotle's account of the origin of the
State (2. 1 3. 9) sounds very meagre at the present time; but,
besides its historical interest, it contains a further refutation of
the view that the relations which connect men with each other
are accidental bonds of their own contriving. It destroys before-
hand the various theories which found society on an explicit or
implicit agreement.
The beginnings of the State, the final community, are to be
sought in the most primitive forms of association. These are
the unions, Aristotle tells us, of those " who cannot exist with-
out one another;" man and woman, master and slave. Man
and woman come together not from any rational resolve, but
because in them, as in the other animals and in plants, there is
196 ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
a natural desire to reproduce themselves. Master and slave are
united by the desire for security ; the master being one whose
superior intelligence enables him to foresee the future and fits
him for rule, whereas the slave is naturally adapted for simple
obedience, because he is only capable of carrying out the orders
given him. Thus, we may say, he is a body of which his
master is the soul ; and owing to this natural division of func-
tions the relation of slavery is for the interest of both parties. 1
It is of these two associations that the household or family con-
sists ; and Hesiod's verse, " first of all a house and a wife and
an ox to plough " is true, since to the poor man the ox stands in
stead of a servant. Thus the origin of the State is to be looked
for in the Family. But there is an intermediate step between
them the. stage of the milage. The village consists of several
families. Whether it is formed by the aggregation of indepen-
dent households or by the expansion of a single one, Aristotle
does not tell us ; but the latter view seems to be favoured by
the words, " it seems most naturally to be an offshoot or colony
(d7roiKia) of the family (oifcia), and its members, being the sons
and sons' sons [of the family], are called men of the same milk
(6fjioyd\aKTef)." In these first beginnings Aristotle finds the
explanation of two interesting facts. They show us why the
earliest form of political government, like the government of
tribes not yet political, is monarchical; for the village from
which the State springs is governed by its oldest member.
And this explains why the same form of government is attri-
buted to the gods ; " for men imagine in their own likeness not
only the shapes, but also the mode of life of the gods." Beyond
this scanty notice, we have hardly any reference to the village
in Aristotle's work. We do not know whether he connected it
as a stage in the growth of society with the formation of the
761/09 or clan, though the passage quoted above seems to make
this probable ; and there is a further one in which he speaks of
the State first as a " a community of families and clans," and
immediately afterwards as a " community of clans and villages "
(73. 24 ff.). However this may be, and in whatever way he
1 Later on (68. 20), though it is reiterated that " in reality the interests of
the natural master and slave are identical, " we are told that the master seeks
properly his own good, and only accidentally that of the slave.
OF THE STATE. 197
may have imagined the transition from village to city, he men-
tions no further stage between them. With the union of
several villages we have the State.
Thus the individuals who became citizens of a State had
already been members in two previous forms of community,
each of which involved a definite organisation, and, what is more,
a relation of government. And in the same way the son of a
citizen has his individuality circumscribed or developed by his
position not only in the city, but also in these subordinate
spheres, which both preceded the State and continue to exist
in it. 1 But this is not all. If we look closer, we shall see a
deeper connection between the various stages. Each is a pre-
paration for the next ; each is produced by the effort of human
nature to realise itself ; it is because of the failure of each to
satisfy this desire fully that a new form is created. And this
process cannot cease until that kind of association is reached
which gives man the attainment of his true end. Thus the two
relations which compose the family are due to the necessity of
mere existence ; they are formed by those who simply cannot
do without each other ; and it is obvious that neither propaga-
tion nor mere preservation, which are their ends, is any complete
realisation of human nature. Again, the end for which the
family exists is defined as the satisfaction of daily wants. With
the village a further advance is made ; the needs which it aims
at providing for are more than those of the day. But it is only in
the State that the " limit of perfect self-sufficiency" is attained. 2
And if in this passage the imperfection of the lower stages is
placed mainly in their failure to reach avrapiceia, and we are
inclined to regard this avrapicela as equivalent merely to a com-
plete satisfaction of merely external wants, Aristotle makes his
1 It should be noticed, accordingly, that what is said of the family, as a
community preceding the State, is not intended to be a satisfactory account
of it as a part of the State. When the State has come into being, its
nature and object must affect its constituent elements ; and therefore Aristotle
postpones the full discussion of the family until he has examined the political
whole with reference to which its relations and education must be arranged
(22, 12. ff.).
2 In Eth. 8. 9. 5 the State is distinguished from other communities by its
aiming at good " for the whole of life," which makes the series of the Politics
complete.
198 ARISTOTLE S CONCEPTION
meaning clear by at once adding " and though the State comes
into existence for the sake of mere life, it exists for the sake of
good life." For man's end is not reached until his " wellbeing"
or "good life" is reached; and it is this which drives him on
from stage to stage, and is both the aim and the cause of the
whole process of his development.
This process, therefore, and most of all its completion, the
State, is natural. To say that the State secures or is the end
of man is with Aristotle not a proof that it is natural : it is
simply equivalent to describing it as his nature. For the
realisation of the nature of anything is its end : that which a
thing is when its process of growth is complete, is its nature
(3. 11). It is this that defines a thing, or is its formal cause or
essence. It is this also that causes its existence, developing it
from a merely potential* condition to its full actuality. Thus
if Aristotle's is a doctrine of final causes, it is not so in the
ordinary sense. The final cause is not one imposed on the
object from without, an end to which the object is a mere
means ; it consists in the completed nature of the object itself.
In so far as the given tiling is " actual," it is equivalent to its
final cause; in so far as it is only partially realised, its final cause
or end is immanent in it and moves it to its perfection. Thus
the final cause of man is realised when his "nature," in the sense
of his mere potentiality, is developed into his " nature," in the
sense of his end or good. His final cause is to be himself. As
a child he is only potentially what he should be or is destined to
be ; and therefore he grows. And so, as a master, a husband, a
father, a member of a village, his possibilities are still in various
degrees latent, only partially brought into life. It is only in
the State that they come into full play, and therefore the State
is " natural " to him.
And this, which is the law of man's being, is the law of the
whole world. Throughout the universe this process of the
realisation of ends is going on ; and, what is more, these ends
or " natures " are not all of equal value, but form a series of
grades of excellence. Thus a lower stage of existence is not
merely " for its own sake," but it is also a step to the next
highest ; and in this sense it is " for the sake of " another, and
a means to it. Thus, we may say, to Aristotle all nature is a
OF THE STATE. 199
striving towards its highest form, and what we have seen in the
development of man is true on this wider field. One principle,
in its impulse to realise itself, produces those lower forms
which are the necessary foundation for the higher, and passes
beyond them to a less inadequate development, approaching
more and more nearly to the divine actuality in which no im-
perfection remains. That man attains only for moments to
some likeness of this divine perfection we have already seen ;
but that he does so even for moments, and for a longer time
can produce those activities of the moral life which are the
victory of the divine element in him over his lower nature, is
enough to place him at the head of earthly things. In him
not as a vegetable nor as an animal, but in so far as his true
nature, his better self, is active the highest existence of
which the earth is capable is brought into being. In this sense
the whole inorganic, vegetable, and animal kingdoms may be
said to exist for his sake. And in this final and highest sense
the State is natural, and man by nature a " political animal."
Such, in the barest outline, is Aristotle's answer to the
Sophistic question. In substance it might almost be expressed
by that startling formula of a modern philosopher, that the
object of history is the State. This is not the place to criticise
it; but, in common with most other metaphysical theories of
politics, it is easily misapprehended. Such theories are often
accused of annihilating man's will before a spiritual fatality.
It is true that Aristotle's ideas lose all their meaning if we
suppose that human action is perfectly capricious, or that it is
destitute of an " end," or that this end stands in no relation to
the order of things. But they are not inconsistent with any
sober notion of freedom. When Aristotle said that the State
was by nature, he was not denying that it is due to human
thoughts and resolutions, any more than Mr. Carlyle, when he
speaks of an improvement in human affairs as an approach to
obeying Nature, means that man would be perfect if he were
law-abiding like a stone. To hold that there is within certain
limits of deviation a fixed development of human nature and
is not so 'much as this implied in our calling one change a
development or progress, and another the opposite ? is not to
hold that this development takes place in as involuntary a
ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
manner as does a flower's. And it is those very actions which
most further this definite progress that are most free ; since that
which acts in them is in the fullest sense ourself, and not a
distorted fraction of it. But just because they are not asser-
tions of our separate existence, we are apt to speak of such actions
as least our own. The same apparent contradiction meets us
elsewhere. In the creations of art, or in the experience of
religion, that which is the most perfect realisation of man's
higher self abolishes this separate feeling ; and so it is with
moral action and its concrete products. Thus when we wish
to express the freedom of such creations or experiences from
our lower selves, or to contrast their absoluteness with the
results of our shifting desires, we are apt to use language
which takes no notice of the share our will has had in them.
It is not the poet who creates, but an inspiration of which he
is the mere vehicle; it is not I who act but Christ that
dwelleth in me ; and the State or justice are due to nature and
not to enactment. When language of this kind is used, there
is a temptation to fall under its influence, and to separate
what we know to be really identical. It is such a separation
that is expressed in the antithesis of </>ucrt9 and I/O/AO?, or in the
modern opposition of moral necessity to free-will. But the
Greek rose superior to that antithesis ; though he might be
puzzled when it was put clearly before Mm, he felt no incom-
patibility between the origin of the law of his State in the
human will and its absolute validity. And Aristotle is only
giving a theoretical justification of the position which he could
not justify for himself. 1
It is perhaps hardly necessary to notice another possible
misconception. If Aristotle is not abolishing man's will
before the moral order of the world, still less does he mean by
the " nature " which produces the State what we mean when
we contrast the natural and the spiritual. It is true that he
not unfrequently uses " nature " in this lower sense, as in the
Ethics, where he is showing that virtue does not come by
nature but through a discipline of the will (Efk. 2. 1). In this
1 On the conception of Law compare K. F. Hermann, Ueber Ge.se.tz Gesetz-
ijebung und gesetzgeben.de Gewalt im yriechischen Alterthume.
OF THE STATE. 201
sense those elements of man's being which he shares Avith the
other animals are more natural than his reason and rational
desires. In this sense, again, man is by nature " rather a pair-
ing animal than a political one" (Etli. 8. 12. 7). And the double
use of the word may be charged with some of Aristotle's pre-
judices in questions of political economy. But in the doctrine
before us nature has exactly the opposite meaning, and that
which is most natural in the lower sense is furthest removed
from that nature which is man's end. On the other hand,
there is an essential connection between the two ; and that
connection is teleological. To Aristotle the higher is not so
much the result of the lower, as the lower is a preparation and
material for the higher. It would be misleading, on his view,
to say that man produced the State because he wished to satisfy
certain primary needs ; those primary needs and instincts are
the stirring in him of that immanent end or idea which is ex-
pressed in the State. " The impulse to political society exists by
nature in all men" (4. 10); but the Aristotelian view is not
that man invents the State to satisfy the impulse ; he has the
impulse because his destination is the State. Thus when it is
said that Aristotle's is the first " scientific " view of politics,
this assertion may be either true or false. If it means that he
considered the laws and productions of human nature to be
identical with those of physical nature, it possesses no founda-
tion. It was not in that sense he asserted the unity of the
world, for he never held the strange belief that we are to form
* o
an idea of nature in abstraction from her highest product, and
then to expect no difference between that highest stage and
this truncated " nature." If those who propose to treat the
State exactly like the objects of physical science are to find an
ally in Aristotle, they must adopt the unity of nature in his
sense ; they must admit not merely that man and his works are
the result of her lower stages, but that the lower stages are (not
in a metaphor, but really) the " potency " of man, and that the
evolution is determined by its end. When this is admitted, it
will be found that Aristotle is by no means averse to recognis-
ing the forms or laws common to man and the lower stages of
existence, and that he has little sympathy with that idea of a
total breach between the two, in the maintenance of which
202 ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
our spiritual interests have often been supposed to be in-
volved.
Putting metaphysical questions aside, we have now to ask,
What is Aristotle's ground for regarding the State as man's
destination and good ? " Man is by nature a political animal,"
he tells us ; " and he who, owing to his nature and not to ill
fortune, has no State, is either morally bad or something more
than a man " (3. 16). And again : " He who cannot form one of
a community, or who does not need to do so because he is already
sufficient to himself, is no part of a State, and is therefore either
a brute beast or a god" (4. 8). Here we have two characteristics
of the State noticed, both of which we have met before ; it alone
can supply avrapiceta, and in it alone is morality possible. The
reason why it is necessary for morality lies in the imperfection
of man, and in the fact that the State has might. " As man in
his perfection is the best of animals, so when he is separated
from law and justice he is the worst of all," the " unholiest, the
most savage, and the most abandoned to gluttony and lust.
And justice belongs to political society " (4. 12). At the end
of the Ethics, again, Aristotle has explained how the State is
directly involved in the attainment of morality. There are
three ways, he tells us, in which men attain virtue. One of
these, our natural endowment, is out of our power. Another,
intellectual teaching, has little or no effect except on young
men of a generous temper, or those who have been schooled in
experience. For those who live by their feelings, obeying the
dictates of pleasure and pain, it is useless. It is only by the
third means, by habituation, that the impulses which lead
away from virtue can be trained, and that men can by degrees
acquire that love of the good and hatred of the bad without
which mere instruction avails little. For the purpose of this
habituation, especially if, as is necessary, it is to be exercised
throughout the whole of life, we need an authority which
must unite two requisites. It must itself be an expression
of reason; and it must have the fullest powers to compel
and punish. And this union of right and might Aristotle
finds only in the State. But it is not only by its direct action,
by its compulsory education and its moral guardianship, that
the State contributes to " good living." If we examine those
OF THE STATE. 203
virtues in the exercise of which this good living consists, we
shall find that they all imply social relations or life in com-
munity, and one of the most important, that practical wisdom
the possession of which implies the presence of the rest (Etli.
6. 13. G), has its sphere not only in private life, but also in the
ordering of State-affairs : and the Politics adds that the virtue
of the best man, the perfect virtue, is equivalent to the virtue
of the ruler (119. 22). Thus we find that the individual who
realises his chief good or happiness is necessarily a citizen.
And the strongest expression which Aristotle has given to this
view is to be found in his statement that the individual is
posterior to the State, and a part of it.
To say that the State is prior to the individual means
primarily no more than that his end is realised in it. By
" prior" Aristotle often means not anterior in time, but prior
in idea or, as he sometimes says, in nature. Thus in idea or
in nature the end is prior to the means, and the actuality to
the potentiality. But in the order of time, or again relatively
to our knowledge, the means may, and often do, precede the
end, and the potential existence is prior to the actual. In one
sense of the word, then, the family may be said to be earlier
than the State, and in another sense the opposite is true ; and
in this latter meaning Aristotle might say that the individual
is " later" than political society. In the present case, however,
this dictum has a further meaning. The State is said to precede
the individual not merely as the actual precedes the potential,
but as a whole precedes its parts. The part is itself only in
relation to the whole, has no existence outside it, and is
intelligible only in reference to it. It is therefore said to be
posterior to it ; for, to take the instance of a living body, " if
the whole is destroyed, there will no longer be a foot or a hand,
except in name, and as one may call a stone foot a foot ; for
everything is defined by its function " (4. 1), and with the
dissolution of the body the functions of its members have
disappeared. Such is the relation of the individual to the
State.
Language like this at once recalls the current phrase, " the
body politic," and the theories which have attempted to make
it more than a phrase. Aristotle has nowhere called the State
204 ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
an organism, and doubtless he did not explicitly connect that
idea with it. But, apart from the present passage, there is a
close connection between this idea and his view that political
society is natural, and he not unfrequently employs in his
consideration of it criteria gained from the study of living
beings. The use of such criteria no doubt requires caution,
and we are sometimes told that the conception of an organism
belongs only to the physical world and becomes a mere meta-
phor when applied to human society. But most of the ideas
we use in describing spiritual things are derived from the
world outside us, and it is not clear that the categories " thing,"
" collection," " mechanism," and the like, are any less meta-
phorically used of a State than the category of life. On
the other hand, reasons are not wanting for the view that the
latter idea is at least less inadequate than the others ; and, if
this is the case, what w^e have to do is only to distinguish
in what respects the conception of an organism must differ
when it is applied to the animal body and to the political
body. It may be interesting, considering the present promi-
nence of this conception in English philosophy, to notice some
passages in which Aristotle seems implicitly to regard the
State as an organism, and then to ask whether his doctrine
recognises those characteristics in which it differs from living
things.
That the State, in the sense of the political community, is a
totality or composition (avvOea-ts:), admits of no question. Its
unity is formed of a multiplicity of parts ; it is a number of
citizens (58. 31). But there is more than one kind of compo-
sition. For example, a heap of cannon-balls is a whole made
up of parts. But here the whole is made up by the mere
addition of unit to unit : it is a collection. In such a totality
the part does not get its existence or character from its rela-
tion to the other parts and to the whole ; it is the same thing
in the pile that it was out of it, and has merely had a relation
added to it. If the State were a collection of individuals of
this kind it would be absurd to say of it that it was prior to
its parts ; it would be absurd to compare one of these parts
with the hand or foot, which have no existence or function
apart from the body to which they belong. A composite body
OF THE STATE. 205
of which this can be said is not formed by the addition of
units, and not even the category of whole and parts is in strict-
ness applicable to it. Its " parts " are members ; it is a unity
which expresses itself in diverse members, functions and
organs, and the connection between these members is not
mechanical but organic. Apart from the decisive language
already quoted, Aristotle insists in more than one place on the
diversity of the parts of the State. He is especially emphatic
on this head, because he considers that Plato had neglected it
and, in his desire to attain a complete unity of the whole body,
had disregarded the necessary " differentiation " of its parts.
He had wished to see the principle of the whole clearly realised
in every member, and, in Aristotle's view, had failed to per-
ceive that this result cannot be obtained by making all the
members alike. " The State does not consist simply of a
number of men, but of men specifically different from one
another ;" these are Aristotle's words, 1 and he at once illus-
trates his meaning by referring to the distinction between a
State and an alliance. 2 In the latter the mere addition of a
quantity of men of the same sort is a direct good ; but in the
State, a community in the functions of good life, the unity to
be attained must issue from diversity. It is not true, he in-
sists, that mere unity is its object : if it were, the State would
not exist. For the family is, in this sense, more one than the
State, and the individual than the family.
In other passages the dissimilar parts of the State are re-
garded as classes of society, not as mere individuals. These
classes are formed of groups of men performing separate " func-
tions," or " works," in the whole. In the description of the ideal
constitution these works are enumerated as the agricultural food-
providing function, the technical or mechanical, the military,
the religious, the function of property, and that of government
in its two main branches, according as the decisions arrived at
1 24. 4. The same law which prevents a commercial KOIVUVICL between two
men of the same trade (Eth. 5. 5. 9) is active in the political Koivuvia.
a It will be remembered that Aristotle, in discussing the end of the State,
distinguished it from an alliance on the ground that an alliance has no com-
mon end, and its law is a mere contract. In other words, an alliance is a
collection of homogeneous units, not a unity in diversity.
206 ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
concern the common interest or the administration of justice
(107 and 108). In another passage (150-152) the list is
repeated with some enlargements, and it is pointed out that
the reason why different species and sub-species of constitution
arise is that, though all these functions or social elements are
necessary to a State, the particular forms which each of them
takes may vary, and, further, the varieties of each may be com-
bined with those of the rest in different ways. To illustrate
his meaning Aristotle refers to the manner in which the various
kinds of animals are distinguished. There too we find certain
functions which are necessary to animal life, such as those of
sense, nutrition and motion ; and there are special organs ap-
propriated to them. These appear in various forms, and the
varieties of one may be found 'in combination with those of
another. There are different shapes of the mouth, for example,
and various developments of the organs of motion ; and not
only these varieties, but the different combinations in which
they are found to coexist, may be made the ground for dis-
tinguishing species and sub-species of animals.
From this differentiation of functions it immediately follows
that inequality among the parts of the State is regarded not as
an imperfection, still less as an injustice, but as natural and
necessary. And not merely inequality, but a relation of
government ; " for wherever a single common whole is formed
out of a number of elements, a ruler and a ruled is to be found,
whether these elements are continuous," as in a physical
organism, " or discrete," as in the relation of master to slave, or
in a political organism ; and an analogue to this relation may
be found even in "compositions" not organic (6. 21). But
there is a still closer correspondence between the living body
and the State in this point. We soon find in reading the
Politics that all the " parts " or members of the State are not of
equal importance ; that some of them, as for example the agri-
cultural and industrial functions, are mere means or necessary
conditions to others ; and that only those which are ends are
properly called " parts " at all. Such are obviously those which
really share in the life of the whole, or realise its end ; in other
words, those which are organs of " good living." Accordingly
the real parts of the State are, to Aristotle, the citizens alone,
OF THE STATE. 207
who exercise the functions of government and religion, defend
the State and possess its landed property. The rest of the
population are mere means, or sine qv.ilus non. If we turn
to the account of the animal body, we come upon a precisely
similar distinction. There too the whole body and each of its
organs exists for the sake of a certain function or "action"
(Trpdfys), but only certain parts of the body are regarded as
ends. These are distinguished as the specially " organic "
parts, and among them are counted the hand and foot, to
which at the beginning of the Politics Aristotle compares the
citizen of the State. To these organic or heterogeneous parts
the rest, which are homogeneous, such as the blood, flesh,
fat, bones, and sinews merely serve as constituents or means.
" The living body is composed of both, but the homogeneous
are for the sake of the heterogeneous." 1 And so the State is
composed both of citizens and of a labouring population ; but
the one is for the sake of the other.
In Aristotle's treatment of the State as something which
has laws of its growth and health, not reversible by man's will
except within certain limits, w r e may trace a further likeness
to the conception of an organism. This point of view is
especially evident in his remarks, already referred to, on the
magnitude of the city. It does not depend simply on the
arrangements which the citizens choose to make, how large
their State is to be. As a natural existence the State has a
definite function, and this function can only be exercised if a
certain limit of size is preserved. It is as much subject
to this law as other things, animals, plants, or lifeless in-
struments (102. 13). A departure from the ideal standard in
either direction weakens its power to perform its function,
and therefore lessens its] existence. 2 A still further departure
destroys its nature altogether, so that it ceases to be a State. If
it has too small a population, it ceases to be "self-sufficing;"
and if it has too large a one, it no longer admits of order.
But self-sufficience (avrapfceia) is its essence ; and order (ra|^<?)
is implied in its very existence as a work of nature.
1 Part. an. ii. 1 ; cf., in particular, 646 b 10.
2 Hence, to Aristotle, a great State does not mean a large one, but one
which vigorously exercises its function.
2o8 ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
The same point of view is apparent where Aristotle is
treating of the necessary equilibrium of the various elements of
society. It is only within certain bounds that this equilibrium
will bear disturbance. The disproportionate development of
one social function is hostile to the wellbeing of the whole,
and may destroy the constitution (212. 1 ff . ; 201. 2). The
illustration is again taken from the living body. " A body is
composed of parts, and they ought to grow proportionally, that
its symmetry may be preserved; otherwise it perishes;" as it
certainly would, if " the foot were six feet long and the rest of
the body only two spans." So it is with the State. And as
again a certain kind of disproportionate growth may result in
one animal form actually passing into another, so one consti-
tution may from the same cause pass into another, and the
whole nature of the State be therefore changed (197. 30).
The same idea lies at the root of Aristotle's advice to those
who wish to preserve either of the two principal " perverted "
forms of government, oligarchy or democracy. It is the
essence of these constitutions that they represent the pre-
ponderance of one social element in the State, whether it be
that of the few rich or the many poor, and that this class rules
not for the common good but in its own interest. Even so
perverted a State has a vital principle of its own. But this
principle will not bear straining too far ; and Aristotle points
out that the worst friends of such constitutions are those who
wish to develop their characteristics to the uttermost. " Many
of those things that are counted democratic destroy demo-
cracies ;" and the same is true of oligarchies. The governing
class cannot really get on without the opposite element which
it strives to suppress, and therefore the pursuance of its main
principle beyond a certain point ends in its self-annihilation.
"A nose," as Aristotle drily tells us, "may depart from the
ideal straightness and tend to be either aquiline or snub, and
yet it may still be beautiful and have a charm for the eyes ;
but if an artist were to push the deviation to excess, first of all
the feature would lose its due measure of size, and at last it
would not look like a nose at all" (214. 26). The principle of
measure or the mean (TO peaov) rules the State, as it does the
moral character of the individual.
OF THE STATE. 209
~\Ve may thus reach an important conclusion. That end of
the State which is described as good living or happiness is also
described as the common interest or good (TO Koivfi crv^epov,
68. 9), that noble living (/caXw? ffiv) in which each shares
according to his ability. In any whole that is " prior " to its
parts, in any organism, there is an identity between the general
welfare and the particular welfare of each part. It is in the
healthy and harmonious development of its organs or functions
that the health of the whole body lies, and the interest of the
State is nothing but that of its citizens. And conversely, there
is no part which really has a separate interest ; for its essence
and good lie in its function, and this is a function of the
whole body. Thus if it appears to have a private interest
which is thwarted by its membership in a system and sacri-
ficed to that system, this appearance must be considered a
delusion. The disproportionate growth of a single organ, for
example, is its real misfortune ; for its true nature is not
developed, and it injures the whole on which its own health
depends. And in the same way we may say that the depend-
ence of one member on the rest is not a sign of bondage but
its real liberty, if liberty means " self-sufficiency ;" and the
growing independence of the parts is equivalent to the loosen-
ing of that bond which is the life of the organism and only
disappears in its decay.
Such are some of the points in which Aristotle seems to
find the characteristics of animal life in the body politic. It
is clear that they would not justify us in calling his conception
of it organic; but perhaps they amount to something more
than analogies, and they give a fuller meaning to his descrip-
tion of the State as a natural existence with laws of its own.
If, however, we are to retain this idea at all, it is essential to
realise how vitally a political organism differs from a merely
physical one ; and a few words will suffice to show that
Aristotle's view does not obscure the distinction between the
two. 1
1 In Mot. an. 703 a 29 there is an interesting comparison of the animal
body to a State, and the fact that the "order" of the latter is due to the
human will is pointed out. But it is doubtful whether this treatise is
genuine.
210 ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
" That man is a political animal in a higher sense than the
bee or any other gregarious creature, is clear. For nature, as
we say, makes nothing in vain ; and man is the only living
thing that possesses rational speech (\6yos). A mere voice
(<$>u>vri) serves to signify pleasure and pain, and therefore it is
possessed by the other animals as well as by man ; for their
nature goes so far that they feel pain and pleasure, and signify
these feelings to each other. But language has for its office to
express what is helpful and hurtful, and therefore also what is
right and wrong (TO Bi/caiov teal TO aSt/cov). For this is peculiar
to man, as compared with the other animals, that he alone has a
perception of good and evil and of right and wrong. And it is
community in good and right that constitutes a family and a
State" (3. 20). Thus, in modern language, the State is more
than an organism ; it is a moral organism. The soul of man is
not a mere principle of growth and nutrition, like that of
plants. Its activity is not confined to sense and the desires
which depend on sense, like that of the lower animals. It is
intelligence and rational will. And therefore man not only
has a law of his life, but is capable of knowing the law of his
life : lie not only knows it, but is capable of living by it. In
him therefore appears the separation of what is and what
might be, of good and evil, of right and wrong; in a word,
morality. And this morality is not something which belongs
to each man's private life. It is community in it which con-
stitutes the State or political organism. But the consciousness
of this organism, and therefore its morality, can exist nowhere
but in its members. The principle of the whole is present
in the parts. Its reason and morality are theirs ; its end is
theirs ; it is in them that it feels, suffers and enjoys. And if
the converse is not true, if the end of any particular member
seems to be something else than the end of the whole, it is
because this single function attempts to deny the relation in
which it stands, and must stand, to the whole.
From what has been already said, it will be evident that
Aristotle is in no danger of obliterating these distinctions.
The citizen is related to the State as the hand is to the whole
body. But the end of the State is happiness or noble action ;
the State itself is community in this good life, or in the right
OF THE STATE. 211
which language only can express. If the whole then is
rational and moral, its highest functions must be rational and
moral. But these highest functions are those of its mem-
bers ; and for that very reason those of its parts which fulfil
no such function are not, properly speaking, members of it,
but merely necessary conditions of its life. For the same
reason, however, its true " parts " necessarily attain their
own ends in attaining the end of the whole. " Happiness is
not a conception like that of evenness in number. That may
be predicated of the whole number" (say 10) "without being
predicated of its component parts " (say 3 and 7) ; " but this
is impossible with happiness" (32. 27). On the other hand,
the welfare of the citizen is not merely bound up with that
of the whole, but he is capable of realising this, and of either
devoting himself to the State or making his supposed private
advantage his end. His relation to the State is not, like that of
the hand to the body, one simply of fact, but also one of duty.
" No citizen ought to think that he is his own, but all that
they are the State's" (130. 15). And Aristotle does not sup-
pose that, left to himself, a man is likely to identify his good
with that of the whole organism in the manner of a healthy
animal organ. It is just because he is a
' ' fool whose sense
No more can feel but his own wringing,"
that the education of the State and the arm of the law are
required, to convert him from a life " according to passion " to
one of true citizenship and participation in happiness.
The functions of the body politic, then, are moral functions ;
and the members which exercise these functions are conse-
quently moral agents. It must be remembered, lastly, that the
virtue or happiness which is the end of State and citizen alike,
is not something distinct from the direct duties of citizenship,
but that these duties themselves play a large part in it. A
man is not a good citizen in order that he may gain something
by it. Happiness is the exercise of "virtue." In being brave
and self-controlled and liberal a man is attaining happiness,
and at the same time showing the virtues of citizenship. But
there are excellencies of a more commanding kind than these.
212 ARISTOTLE 'S CONCEPTION
As we have already seen, the crowning talent of moral wisdom,
with the possession of which all the virtues are given, has its
sphere no less in affairs of State than in a man's own house-
hold. It is the virtue of government, the possession of which
makes a " good citizen " and a " good man " equivalent terms,
while the citizen-virtues of obedience would by themselves not
amount to perfect goodness. The citizen must be free
from the mere wants of life that he may have time for
politics no less than for philosophy ; for those are the two
main forms of happiness. So far then from the growth or
action of the political organism being merely natural, they
are to be consciously guided by the most developed char-
acter and wisdom. It is as though a plant should be
aware of the conditions on which its perfect growth depends,
and, making this perfect growth its object, should consciously
attempt to realise those conditions. Whether this conscious
guidance is a characteristic of the State which renders the con-
ception of an organism radically inapplicable to it, we need not
stop to dispute. It certainly is at first sight more in accord-
ance with our common view of government as a mechanism ;
and to Aristotle it suggests the metaphor of the "ship of State"
rather than that of the " body politic." He compares the
citizens to sailors (63. 9), and (by implication) the citizen as
ruler to the steersman (68. 31). And there is a psychological
fitness in the comparison. For reason, which acts in govern-
ment, is not in his view connected with the human organism
in the same way as the inferior " faculties ;" and in the case of
this psychical " part," he would have answered in the affirmative
the question raised in de Anima (2. 1. 11), whether the soul is
related to the body as " a sailor to his boat."
In any great political theory the comprehension of one
main idea makes the rest comparatively obvious. The remain-
ing conclusions on which our space allows us to touch, follow
naturally from the general ideas already sketched, and will
serve to give them a more substantial shape. With this
purpose we may rapidly review Aristotle's teaching on the
subjects of citizenship, State- education, the various forms of
OF THE STATE. 213
government, the meaning of political justice and political
rights.
Aristotle's view of the nature of citizenship has been
already indicated ; but it can hardly fail to be misunderstood
unless we take into account his judgment as to the political
position of the labouring classes. From the conception of the
State two main results directly follow : first, that citizenship can
mean nothing less than the right or duty of exercising political
functions ; and, secondly, that this exercise is, in the true
State, the activity of those higher virtues which make the good
citizen identical with the good man. For practical purposes it
may be, though it is not always, true to say that a citizen is
one whose father and mother were both citizens. But this is a
mere external mark, and does not tell us in what citizenship
consists. In what does it consist ? JSTot in the mere posses-
sion of civil rights. Just as the State is not merely a com-
munity in territory or in the legal protection of person and
property, so a citizen does not mean one who resides in a
certain city and can be sued in its law-courts. These are not
functions of the State, and do not involve participation in its
end. If the citizen is to be really a part of the State, he must
live its life ; and that in the concrete means that he must
govern. Thus citizenship may be defined as " ruling and being
ruled," and a citizen as one who shares, or has the right to
share, in government, deliberative, executive and judicial. In
so doing he uses not only the virtues of obedience, not only
the common moral virtues, but also the excellencies of moral
wisdom and command. His life is pre-eminently one of
apery.
But the brain cannot think unless the heart beats ; and
society cannot exert its highest powers when its lowest needs
are unsatisfied. The whole must exist before it can exist well ;
and it cannot exist well if the organs whose office is to think
have to attend to mere living. A life of culture and political
aperr) implies freedom in him who lives it from the necessity of
looking after these lower wants (66. 22). It implies what Aris-
totle calls "leisure," and this leisure must be supported on
some one's labour. The life of labour is a mere means to the
higher life. It is not a participation in the State-life, but a con-
214 ARISTOTLE S CONCEPTION
dition of it, a sine qua non. It does not do what is noble, but
provides what is necessary. It might produce a joint-stock
company, but not a State. It creates mere material prosperity,
and " no class has a share in the State which is not a producer
of virtue" (100. 21).
The result of this hard and fast distinction is obvious. So
far as aperrj is concerned, it makes no great difference whether
the labourer is a slave or a free man. " Those who provide
necessaries for an individual are slaves, and those who provide
them for society are handicraftsmen and day-labourers" (66. 24 ;
cf. 21. 32). And the labouring class includes not only peasants,
but all fidvavaoi, a designation w T hich covers artisans, professional
singers and artists, and no doubt all persons engaged in trade.
It is against fiavava-ia that the reproach of ignobleness is
especially directed ; and the word, like our " mechanical," has
an ethical significance. " That," says Aristotle, " must be con-
sidered a mechanical practice or art or subject of study, which
makes the body or the soul or the intellect of free men useless
for the activities of virtue" (131. 7). Bavava-la deforms the
body (18. 8), and renders it unfit for military and political duties
(140. 15). It accustoms a man's mind to low ideas, and absorbs
him in the pursuit of the mere means of life. The (3dvavcros
seeks the satisfaction of other people's wishes, and not the im-
provement of his own character; and this is the mark of slavery.
It is for this reason that the occupation of the professional
musician is considered unworthy of a man (136. 18). He treats
his art " technically " or professionally, practises " amazing and
brilliant pieces" (140. 19), has to gratify an audience often of
vulgar tastes, and therefore practises a kind of day-labour
(141. 25). 1 If citizenship then means essentially the practice of
x lt will be remembered that in Greece not only professional performers
but even original artists were considered ' ' mechanical. " It is inconceivable
that Aristotle, with his high view of art, should have considered his account
of fiavavaia. applicable to Phidias ; but probably the following typically antique
passage would not have sounded so strange to him as it does to modern ears :
"If a man applies himself to servile or mechanical employments, his industry
in those things is a proof of his inattention to nobler studies. No young man
of noble birth or liberal sentiments, from seeing the Jupiter at Pisa, would
desire to be Phidias, or, from the sight of the Juno at Argos, to be Poly-
cletus ; orAnacreon, or Philemon, or Archilochus, though delighted with their
poems." Plutarch's Life of Pericles (Langhorne's translation).
OF THE STATE. 215
dperi], there can be no question for Aristotle as to the admission
of the ftdvava-oi to political rights. In such perverted constitu-
tions as " democracy " they might find a place, as they actually
did; for the principle of that constitution is not the true principle
of the State. And in an oligarchy, the " perversion " which sub-
stitutes wealth for political virtue, though a day-labourer could
hardly attain the property- qualification necessary for citizen-
ship, a ftdvavaos might (07. 2). Accordingly at Thebes, we are
told, a law was in force that a man could not take part in
government until ten years after his retirement from the market.
But in any true State, in any constitution in which " the honours
of office go by excellence or merit," it is impossible that the
ftdvavcros should be a citizen. For his life is " ignoble and
opposed to dperij" (66. 31 ; 108. 32).
Aristotle's view is only the reproduction of current Greek
ideas. At first sight it is so repulsive to us that we are tempted
to condemn it wholesale. But it should be observed that it is
due not only to a contempt of labour connected with the institu-
tion of slavery, but also to the height of the ideal with which
the labouring life is compared. In this point it contrasts
favourably with the modern upper-class sentiment which it
seems at first to resemble. And it is worth while to ask where
its falsity lies.
If we grant Aristotle's premises, no fault can be found with
his exclusion of the labouring classes from political rights : their
admission would have been a mere inconsistency. It is simply
true that, as a body, they could not have possessed the qualities
he demands in the citizen, even if they had found the leisure
for military, political, and judicial duties. We have given up
the idea of professedly apportioning shares in government
according to merit, virtue, or culture (words which Aristotle
uses interchangeably in this connection) ; all that we hope for is
that, through a political machinery which assigns no superior
rights to these qualities, they may yet find their way to the
helm. But if we did accept Aristotle's principle in the matter,
we should certainly arrive at his conclusion, and should wish to
exclude from the suffrage the great majority of those who possess
it. Nor again is the idea that this culture depends upon lower
labour false. It is a fact which, however painful, cannot be too
216 ARISTOTLE 'S CONCEPTION
clearly recognised, that the existence of those excellencies in
which Aristotle finds the end of life and the virtues of the
citizen, rests upon a mass of mere work as its necessary con-
dition. And is there any modern society which can plume
itself on the advances it has made in uniting these two elements,
the end and the means, in the same persons or classes ? If no.t,
we must admit that, so far, Aristotle's view is not open to
reproach. Nor, lastly, will any honest observer deny that there
is a moral ftavava-ta which besets some of the occupations
included under that term.
What is disputable in Aristotle's view is the too exalted
idea of citizenship, an idea which, with the increase in the size
of States, has ceased to be even plausible. What is psychologi-
cally untrue is the pre-eminence given to intellect in the con-
ception of man's end, and the hard and fast line drawn between
the virtues of government and those of obedience. What is
morally repulsive is the consequent identification of the end
and means of life with two separate portions of the community,
and the feeling that moral lowness has anything to do with
labour, as such, or with a professional occupation. Modern
civilisation, in its best aspects, tends to unite what is here
separated. The intellectual excellencies themselves have be-
come the basis of professions. Payment for performing the
duties of government, in Greek democracy the symptom of
decay, is the recognised rule of modern States, so far as adminis-
tration is concerned. Clergymen, artists, poets, authors, philo-
sophers receive, or may receive, wages for their work, and it is
not supposed that they necessarily work with a view to their
wages. We anxiously avoid even the semblance of contempt
for the labouring classes ; not only out of deference to their
political power, but from a conviction that there is no shame in
labour. It is felt that work, be it what it will, may be done in
such a spirit that moral character may be developed by it ; and
that in this character, in family affection, and in religion a
happiness is attainable which contradicts the idea that in the
mechanical life there can be no production of " virtue," and
therefore nothing to make life worth having. Some of our
language would even imply that mere labour was the end of life,
and not a means to something beyond itself; but this piece of
OF THE STATE. 217
cant is implicitly contradicted by efforts to educate the classes
engaged in manual work, and to put suitable " occupations of
leisure " within their power.
But it is easy to make too much of these differences, and to
imagine a correspondence between the facts of modern society
and its best tendencies which does not really exist. Prejudices,
resting on old custom and containing half a truth, repose com-
fortably in our minds side by side with ideas which, if we were
thoroughly awake, would destroy them. Aristotle himself has
laid down with the greatest clearness that even the most menial
services need not be ignoble, and that the slavishness of a pur-
suit lies not in the things that are done, but in the spirit in
which they are done, and in their object. And for this reason
he would have some of such services performed by the youthful
citizens (119. 17; 131. 16). And yet he seems hardly to ask
himself whether work which is rewarded in money may not be
done for its own sake ; and, with ideas of art hardly less exalted
than Plato's, he utters no word of protest against the identifica-
tion of the artist with the fidvavaos. Nor, again, can it be said
that these old prejudices are wanting in vitality at the present
day. If a good many " yomig men of liberal sentiments" would
so far differ from Plutarch that they would desire rather to be
Shakespeare than Pericles, most of their relations, and perhaps
all their mothers, would take quite another view ; and they
themselves might not all persist in an ambition which would
involve their ceasing to be " gentlemen " and becoming common
actors. One of the wisest of Englishmen, when he heard a
compliment to the Queen, which Garrick had introduced into a
play, characterised as " mean and gross flattery," asked " (rising
into warmth) : How is it mean in a player a showman, a
fellow who exhibits himself for a shilling, to flatter his Queen ? " l
Yet Garrick was the greatest actor of the day, and Johnson's per-
sonal friend. Again, what does the respectable father of a family
think of the boy who turns painter or musician ? What does the
respectable man of learning think of him ? If we do not know
from experience how " society " looks upon artists, Thackeray
will tell us ; what it thinks of " persons in trade," not to speak
1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. ii. p. 215 (edition of 1824 in 4 vols.).
218 ARISTOTLE S CONCEPTION
of the "lower orders," no one can help knowing. But there
is a difference between this sentiment and Aristotle's. If he
shares our prejudice, he does not share our ideal. The leisure
which he thought indispensable for a citizen was not leisure to
be stupid, idle, or busy only in amusement. The notion that
that was the end to which a thousand lives of toil were a mere
means would have seemed an astounding one to him. The
strenuous exercise of the highest powers of body and mind in
defending and governing the State, and in striving to quicken
the divine reason in the soul, this is the kind of " high life "
with which fiavava-ia is contrasted, and the citizenship of which
it is declared incapable.
If this life is man's personal ideal, there can be little ques-
tion of the mode in which it is to be approached. Without
the gifts of nature not much can be done, and Aristotle hardly
seems to find the happy mixture of spirit and intelligence in any
race except the Greek (105. 25). But, given the good material,
the rest is the work of Education. And Aristotle uses this
word in its strict sense. The natural effects of climate, air,
water, and the like, are important (112. 23 ff.). The unconscious
influence of a moral atmosphere can do much. The direct
action of the Legislature in arranging institutions has its effect.
But it is not communism which will cure the moral diseases
of society, but education (30. 30 ; 38. 6) : and when he is
describing the ideal city Aristotle's interest in outward arrange-
ments soon flags. He turns abruptly to the question, How
shall we make our citizens good men ? and answers, By
education.
From the very beginning the child must be definitely
trained and guided ; and this training has to follow its natural
development. Care can be taken of the body before the mind
is active, and the desires are in full energy long before the intel-
lect. It is in this early time that the habituation, on which
Aristotle lays so much stress, is possible. Pleasure and pain
rule the first years of the soul, and the problem of education is
to attach these feelings to the right objects; not to teach the
reasons of good and evil, but to nurture a love of the one and a
hatred of the other. If this has not been done, the cultivation
OF THE STATE. 219
of the intellect will have little moral result ; and, if it lias been
done, reason will afterwards appeal not to a chaos of passions,
but to emotions which have taken her own order and colour,
and to habits which form a body pliant to her will. A nature
which has gone through such a training has a chance of reach-
ing that energy of the soul which is the main constituent of
happiness.
To Aristotle then the fundamental problem of politics is one
of education. And to him the practical conclusions are in-
evitable. Education must ~be public and compulsory. Aristotle
is riot blind to the advantages of private instruction, the system
followed in most of the Greek States (129. 26). It has the
same advantages which government by a person possesses over
government by a fixed law ; it can adapt itself to individual
differences. But he cannot admit that the State should give
up the training of its citizens. That it attended to it, in how-
ever narrow a spirit, at Sparta and Crete, was one of the chief
claims of those communities to honour. Not only does the
State possess a conception of the end which training is to
attain, but it, and it alone, has power to enforce this training
on unwilling subjects ; and, owing to its impersonal character
the compulsion it exercises is comparatively inoffensive (Eth. 10.
9. 12). Nor, even if it were possible, would it be right for the
State to leave this duty to that private enterprise which means
private opinion. It has an end and a moral character exactly
as an individual has, and its responsibility is like his (130. 19).
If the object it sets before it is not realised in the persons of
its citizens, it is not realised at all. And this object is not
something indefinite, but a fixed type of character, or ^#09.
The failure to produce it is the failure of the State, and may be
its danger ; for the rjdos is that living spirit which keeps the
political body healthy and united. " The greatest of all securi-
ties for the permanence of constitutions is what all men now
neglect, an education in accordance with trie constitution,"
and the best laws in the world are of no avail if men are
not educated in the spirit of the State (215. 27; cf. 78. 7;
146.17).
And this is not all. The same reasoning leads Aristotle to
the further conclusion that education must be uniform and
220 ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
universal. The end of the whole State is one (130. 10), and
its spirit must be one. Some of the imperfect constitutions
might, and naturally would, depart from this rule ; for in them
the rulers and the ruled form two distinct classes, and would
consequently require a different training. But in the true
State every citizen at some period of his life takes part in
government, and a common culture is the ideal to be sought.
Whatever departure from this uniformity might be admitted
would be due to that insistance on the absolute universality of
education which is one of the most striking features of Aristotle's
doctrine. The State is not to content itself with the training
of its active citizens. That of its women is hardly less im-
portant. It was a fatal error in the Spartan constitution that
it educated its men and left its women uncared for, a negli-
gence which bitterly avenged itself in the effect they produced
on the moral character of the whole State (45. 11). For the
women "form half the free population" (22. 23), and where
their condition is not what it should be, " half the State
must be considered uucared for by the law." Doubtless,
if Aristotle's promise to deal with this subject were fulfilled in
the book, as we possess it, we should find that he gave very
different regulations for the training of the two sexes ; but
the same law of conformity to the constitution is insisted on
for both.
Nor can the State afford to relax its care with the manhood
of its pupil. Its education, in the wider sense of the word,
ought to last through life (Eth. 10. 9. 9; cf. 115. 11 ff. ; 128.
22). For the mass of men, at least in ordinary States, can
hardly be expected to live by the light of their own reason.
Under the inferior forms of government it is of so great im-
portance that men should live in accordance with the estab-
lished constitution, that special officials ought to watch and
control the lives of disaffected persons (212. 10) ; and the best
of existing governments, we are told, have functionaries to
guard the conduct of women (174. 21). If we turn from the
adult years of the citizen to his very birth, we find the same
point of view. If the contribution of nature to man's good
lies in part beyond our power, it is only in part that it does so.
And with a view to the production of the best material for
OF THE STATE.
education the whole arrangements of marriage are placed under
the absolute control of government. It is at such points as
these that we feel farthest removed from Greek ideas, and are
surest of our progress. But there is at least nothing unworthy
in the spirit which dictates such interferences with private life.
We feel all the moral intensity as well as all the harshness of
the ideal statesman (Etli. 1. 13. 2) in the rebuke with which
Aristotle meets those who wish to live " after their own heart's
desire." " But this is base : for one ought not to think it
slavery to live in the spirit of the constitution" (216. 18) ; and,
" No man ought to think that he is his own, but all that they
are the State's" (130. 15).
Of the education which seemed to Aristotle ideal we have
only a fragmentary sketch. Its spirit may be conjectured from
the end at which it aims, but any account of it would lead us
beyond our immediate subject. If we turn now to the perfect
city for which this education is intended, a glance at the very
scanty account of its political organisation will enable us to
understand the imperfections of the other forms of govern-
ment.
All the citizens of the ideal State have received the same
education ; they are " free and equal." Their education was
designed to fit them not only for obedience, but also for govern-
ment, and for the second by means of the first. Of the virtue
implied in this function there is one indispensable condition,
freedom from the necessity of providing the means of life.
Accordingly the property of the community is in the hands of
the citizens ; and though they ought to some extent to permit
a common use of it, they hold it as their own, and not in
common. 1 Under these conditions what distribution of public
rights or duties does justice demand ? In virtue of the
equality of the citizens, it demands that all shall share in
civic rights. Of these functions there are two main classes,
1 One is tempted to suppose that by "property" is meant landed pro-
perty ; since the fidvawoi, who are not citizens, might possess wealth of
another kind. But it is possible that Aristotle, who dislikes trade and
manufactures, may have intended his State to be almost entirely agricultural.
And the agricultural labourers would not be free men (112. 13).
ARISTOTLE S CONCEPTION
military and political; and accordingly every one has to take
part in each. But the equality of the citizens is not identity ;
they are unlike as well as like ; and in the necessary distinc-
tion which nature makes between them Aristotle finds the
ground for a difference in rights or duties. Various functions
demand various capacities, and these capacities belong roughly
to separate periods of man's life. Energy or force (SzW/u?) is
the gift of youth, and wisdom (<f)p6vna-is) of riper years. In
the ideal State, then, the citizen in his earlier manhood will
perform the military duties, and will only take part in govern-
ment when they are completed. The remaining function of
citizenship, the care of religious worship, is assigned to those
advanced years which relieve men from more active services.
We shall see that, as in this distribution of work, so in other
respects the ideal State is the image of that perfect justice
which in Aristotle goes by a name afterwards applied to a very
different conception natural right.
That every constitution existing in Aristotle's time answered
to his idea of the State no one could suppose. Not one fully
corresponded to it, and the majority fell far short of it. In
this, as in every other work of nature, there are variations and
defects. Nature, as Aristotle mythologically says, aims at the
best, but she cannot always attain it (cf. 7. 27 ; 9. 18). Her
creation is arrested at some point, or it develops itself awry.
Thus men do not always reach the stage of political society,
and when they do they often form imperfect or even " perverted "
States. They mistake the true end, or else they do not take the
right means to reach it (116. 8). Yet the mere beginnings, or
the deformed growths, are better than nothing. " Man is by
nature so political an animal that, even when men need no
assistance from each other, they none the less desire to live
together ;" and though the common good of a noble life is in
the highest degree their end, yet " they come together for the
sake of mere life, and form political communities even for it
alone. For perhaps it has something of the noble iait " (68. 7).
Thus subordinate ends which fall short of man's true develop-
ment are raised into ultimate ones, and form the bases or
fundamental principles (vTrotfecret?) of imperfect constitutions.
On the "hypothesis" of we"alth arises what Aristotle calls
OF THE STATE. 223
oligarchy, on that of mere freedom what he calls democracy.
As we have seen, neither wealth nor freedom is the end for
which the State exists ; but both are necessary to that end.
Hence at once the existence and the weakness of such forms of
government. They are States, and so far good ; and of neither
of them does Aristotle use the language he applies to tyranny,
which takes the pleasure of the tyrant for its object. On the
other hand, in common with tyranny, they are perversions of
the true idea, and therefore contrary to nature (92. 1). Each
of them, if it pursues its " hypothesis " to the legitimate conclu-
sion, destroys itself, whereas the true end cannot be pursued to
excess. With every step in its development the chance of
permanence for the constitution decreases ; the extreme forms
live a hazardous life, and, like diseased organisms, perish of
trifling ailments (187. 25). The reason is that they diverge
from the idea of the State so far, they realise it so little,
as hardly to be States at all. And we shall find that this is
equivalent to saying that they pursue a false end, that they
pervert justice, and that their government is selfish arid not
public.
When Aristotle thus distinguishes between an ideal State
and various perversions of it, he is far from supposing that the
existence of bad forms of government is avoidable. He does
not dream of framing an ideal scheme of government, the
adoption of which would turn a misshapen State into the image
of his idea. To him the constitution (troXtreia, a word which
has a wider sense than its English equivalent) is inseparable
from the nature of the people who live under it as inseparable
as any organisation is from the matter organised in it. It is the
" order " of the citizens (rat9, 58. 28). It is the " form " of the
State, and constitutes its identity (62. 22 ff.) : and it is often
spoken of as the State itself. But it is possible, and even
necessary for our purpose, to draw a distinction between the
two. To ask why an imperfect State exists is to enter at once
on a metaphysical question, and comes at last to the problem
of the existence of evil. But there is a more obvious meaning
in the inquiry why an imperfect constitution exists, although
this inquiry must ultimately merge in the other. It exists
because it is the natural outcome of a given social condition.
224 ARISTOTLES CONCEPTION
Given a certain material, a population of a certain kind and in
a definite degree of civilisation, and there is a form or order
naturally fitted for it ; and no other order, however superior
it would be in better circumstances, is better for it. This
fact Aristotle clearly recognises. There are populations, he tells
us, naturally adapted to monarchy, aristocracy, and a constitu-
tional republic (91. 31 ff.) ; and though he adds that all the
perversions are unnatural, he does not mean by this that they
do not naturally arise under the appropriate social conditions :
on the contrary, this is true not only of oligarchy or democracy,
but of the various sub-species of those forms (166. 14 ff. ; 178.
22 ff.). Accordingly, when he is describing his own ideal State,
Aristotle does not confine himself to the arrangements of
government. He realises that, if his sketch is to have any
verisimilitude, he must imagine also the population for which
the constitution is intended, and even the physical conditions
under which it lives. In other words, he describes an ideal
State, and not merely an ideal constitution. In the same way
he recognises that the approaches which can be made to the
constitution of this ideal are very various in degree, and that it
is essential for a political theorist to consider all of them.
False simplicity he regards as the besetting sin of such theorists.
Some of them investigate nothing but the one best constitution,
in which things we wish for, and cannot insure, play so large a
part ; others eulogise a single existing form, like the Spartan,
and sweep all the rest out of sight. But it is necessary,
Aristotle points out, not only to know what we wish for and to
take care not to want impossibilities (34. 1), but also to find out
what constitution suits any given population ; what is the best
constitution that can be framed on a given " hypothesis ; " what
form is the highest attainable by an average State ; and, instead
of supposing that there is one oligarchy and one democracy, to
study all the varieties of each (145 and 146). On the other
hand, from the fact that for any given people that constitution
is best which is fit for it, Aristotle does not draw the hasty
inference that all constitutions stand on a level. If we consider
that people which is fitted for free institutions more civilised
than that which is fitted for despotism, we implicitly assert that
one form of government is also superior to the other. This is
OF THE STATE. 225
the language which Aristotle commonly adopts : nor is there
any objection to it, so long as we bear in mind, as he invariably
does, that the constitution is the form of the State, and, con-
sidered apart from the State, is an abstraction.
Aristotle's main division of the forms of government is into
six (69. 19 ff.). Of these three are good or right, and of each
of the three there is a perverted form (vrape/c/iJacri?). The first
set consists of Kingdom, Aristocracy, and Republic (iro\i,Teia) ;
the second of Tyranny, Oligarchy, and Democracy. And, accord-
ing to some passages, the first three are placed in a descending
order of goodness, and the second three in a descending order
of badness, so that the corruption of the best (kingdom) is
the worst (tyranny). But this division, probably suggested by
Plato's Statesman, undergoes serious modifications in the course
of the work. The historical forms of kingdom and aristocracy
receive slight attention, mainly because in Aristotle's time they
were of little importance. On the other hand, an ideal State,
not identical with any of these historical forms, but regarded
indifferently as either a kingdom or an aristocracy, though
commonly as the latter, becomes a main subject of discussion.
In accordance with this point of view, the main division into
good and bad States loses its sharpness. The Republic or
Politeia 1 is always regarded as markedly inferior to its two
companions (cf. 70. 7; 92. 16; 158. 20), and is once roundly
called a Trape/cftac-is (149. 15). And there is another important
change. The three constitutions in each set are at first distin-
guished according to the number of the government, which may
consist of one man, a few or many. But Aristotle has no sooner
adopted this principle than he points out that the distinction is
in some cases illusory. The number of the governing body is
a mere accident of oligarchy or democracy, which are really
distinguished by the wealth or poverty of the ruling class
(71. 8) ; and though in the later books Aristotle again modifies
his new principle, he never deserts it. In the same way in
1 This form of government is, as the reader will see, called simply Consti-
tution. In English we have nothing that is even an apparent equivalent. So
far as any Greek State can be called a republic, the Politeia may be called
a republic of the middle classes. But there is no single case in all the six in
which the use of the designations given to modern States is not misleading.
P
226 ARISTOTLE 'S CONCEPTION
various passages various causes are assigned for the existence
of different forms of government ; and the truth is that there is
no one principle of division in the Politics. This wavering
procedure seems to be due in part to the recurrence, at various
times, of two distinct points of view, and an indifference to their
relation to each other. After what has been said, it will be
obvious what these points of view are. At one time Aristotle's
endeavour is to fix clearly in what the goodness or badness of
a State consists ; to discover the fundamental principle of each
main form of government, and, by a comparison of it with the
standard of the ideal State, to determine its value. At other
times the fact that every actual constitution is the expression of
a certain social order becomes prominent ; and it is found that,
though the previous distinction may determine the general
goodness or badness of such a constitution, it does not really
explain its concrete character. It will be best, without enter-
ing into any critical discussion, to separate these methods from
each other, and to ask, first, what is the main external
difference of constitutions, and afterwards to analyse those
characteristics which distinguish any good government from
any bad one.
The question what social condition is appropriate to each
constitution lies beyond the scope of this Essay. Still less can
we reproduce Aristotle's sketch of the order in which the main
forms of government appeared (88. 8 ff.), or his explanation of
the fact that some of them had ceased to answer to the needs
of the time. 1 The doctrine which we have to notice is that the
constitution is not merely in general the result of social con-
ditions, but that it expresses the relative power of the different
elements or sections of society. Every political community
contains a variety of parts, elements, or functions. Translating
this into the concrete, we may say that every society is divided
into classes, although it does not necessarily happen, and,
according to Aristotle, had better not happen, that every func-
tion is allotted to a single class. Each of these elements or
1 See, for example, on the disappearance of the kingly form of monarchy,
223. 3 ff. ; and on the connection of democracy with the increased size of
States, 88. 25 ; 188. 3 ; 186. 4.
OF THE STATE.
classes which are variously enumerated in different passages
contributes something to the State, and so has a certain claim to
share in its life, or constitution, 1 or political rights. And, apart
from the justice of these claims, as a matter of fact the relative
strength of these elements determines the question where the
supreme power or sovereignty lies in the community, and there-
fore settles what the constitution of the State shall be (e.g. 80.
20 ff.). Thus Aristotle tells us more than once that the variety
of constitutions is due to the various vTrepo-^al, or preponderances
of the social parts (148. 7 ; 149. 1 ; 152. 29) ; and this must be
regarded as his settled view of the existing States, although he
does not admit the complete justice of the claim of any class to
exclusive power (e.g. 81. 12). Thus again the true difference
between oligarchy and democracy, the commonest actual forms
of government, consists in this, that in the one the element of
wealth, which naturally falls into a few hands, is supreme
(fcvpiov} among the social elements, whereas in democracy the
poor multitude has got the mastery. And in the same way the
superiority of the Politeia to these two constitutions is that in
it neither of these extremes has overpowered the other, but the
middle class possesses a social force which results in political
supremacy.
These distinctions of fact, however, are only the signs of a
difference in moral value. The transition from one point of
view to the other is facilitated by the haphazard way in which
Aristotle uses abstract and concrete expressions. He speaks of
a social element indifferently as wealth or the wealthy, freedom
or the free, virtue or the good. Accordingly, instead of saying
that one of the classes of society, say the wealthy, predominates
in a State, he defines the constitution of that State as one which
takes a single social element, wealth, for its standard (0/909).
Thus, he tells us, of the qualifications which can claim to
be such a standard there are on the whole three free birth,
wealth, and virtue (since a fourth, nobility, means ancestral
wealth and virtue); and these are the standards respectively of
democracy, oligarchy, and aristocracy (159. 15). From the
notion of a standard to that of an end the step, especially in
1 rj yap iroXireia /3t'os ris i<m 7r6Xews. 163. 3.
228 ARISTOTLE S CONCEPTION
Greek, is a short one. Accordingly, we are not surprised to find
Aristotle distinguishing constitutions by the ends they pursue.
And again, since the end or standard determines the rights
which are thought to belong in justice to the citizen, we are
told that the existence of certain constitutions is due to the
fact that men have not a right idea of justice (193. 28 ft'.). But
when we come to divide States according to the ends they
pursue and the justice they realise, we have left the ground of
a mere analysis of social forces, and have entered the region of
moral judgment. If we add to these criteria the question what
kind of rule is exercised in a given State, we shall have found
the three tests by which the goodness or badness of a con-
stitution may be tried.
The first of these criteria is obvious. The very definition
of the State places its whole nature in its end. To pursue a
false end is to be a bad State, or even (so far) to fail of being a
State at all. The true end, as we know, is that noble life which
is identical with happiness or the exercise of complete virtue.
But there are various subordinate constituents or various
necessary conditions of this end, which may be mistaken for
it. And just as a man may take as the object of his life
not real happiness, but wealth or pleasure, so may a State.
Thus the end of the good State is, as we may suppose, the true
end. That of the ideal State is this end in its perfection, so that,
in the aristocratic form of it which is really Aristotle's ideal,
the virtue of the good citizen is, as such, identical with the
virtue of the good man. In the same way the fact that the
Politeia is counted among the good States, must mean that its
end is virtue ; but the virtue at which it aims is that imper-
fect aperrj of which a large number of men is capable, the
virtue of the citizen-soldier (70. 15). 1 On the other hand, the
1 In this instance we have an example of the way in which the real con-
ditions of a society are connected with the moral qualities of the constitution.
The possibility of attaining the true end depends on a limitation of the
number of the body which governs ; even in the ideal States only some of the
citizens actually rule. If a large number are to govern, the end must be
lowered, and with it the standard for political rights. Thus the qualification
in the Politeia is the possession of arms, or (what comes to the same thing in
a Greek State) such a property-qualification as admits only the upper and
middle classes to power.
OF THE STATE. 229
ends which define the perverted forms are not merely imperfect
degrees of apery, but something subordinate to it. Thus
we shall expect to find the object of oligarchy in wealth, and
this is implicitly asserted by Aristotle (e.g. 218. 9). That of
democracy must be freedom, since the other characteristics of
that form, poverty, numbers, and low birth, are obviously in-
capable of being ends (159. 15; 179. 7; 180. 17). That of
tyranny again is not the noble life on which pleasure necessarily
follows, but pleasure itself and, with a view to pleasure, wealth
(218. 4).
In the perversions, then, the government does not seek the
good. But, secondly, it does not seek the common good (TO
Koivfj a-v^epov, 68. 5). It pursues the end for itself, and not
for the whole State. Its rule therefore is not political but
despotic ; that is, a kind of rule applicable to the relation of
master and slave, but not to the relation of citizens to each
other. The welfare of the ruled is, like the slave's, only
accidentally involved in that of the ruler, in the sense
(apparently) that more than a certain amount of ill-treatment
destroys the living material or instruments by which the master
or tyrant obtains his own objects. Thus the subject, like the
slave, is the means to another man's end; whereas it is the
essence of political society to be a community of free men. In
this sense democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny are alike despotic
(69. 1 7). In other words, they are so far not States at all ; they
are insecure ; their vital principle is self-destructive ; and their
safety lies in suppressing the full development of this principle,
or in adopting for a bad end measures which, as a matter of
fact, tend to the common good.
Each of these two moral characteristics is indispensable. To
seek an end which is common to all the citizens will not make
a government correct, if the end is false ; and to seek the true
end will not do so either, if this end is not sought for all. And
Aristotle combines the two characteristics when he defines the
common good as the share of noble life which falls to each
citizen (68. 10). But beyond this mere assertion of their
union he does not go ; he does not attempt to prove that
the pursuit of the true end is necessarily unselfish, whereas
that of a false one is not. We may gather such a result
2 3 o ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
from his denial that a mere society of traders would con-
stitute a State. The ground of this denial is, that such a
society has not a really " political " end ; it seeks nothing more
than protection for the endeavour of each man to attain his
private end of wealth, an endeavour in which the welfare, and
even the wealth, of his fellows is involved, if at all, only
accidentally. And to this is opposed the interest of the citizen
in the moral character of others, that is, in the attainment of
the end of the State by others as well as himself. Or again, we
may infer that the true end of the State is necessarily a common
good, from the account of justice in Ethics v. 1. In that pas-
sage justice is identified with virtue, when virtue is regarded
in its relation to other men ; and the virtue of the citizen is,
as we know, the end of the State. But to seek this justice must
be to seek the good of all the citizens ; for, owing to its rela-
tion to others, it may be defined, Aristotle says, as the " good
of others" (a\\oTpiov aryaOov), and not merely of the just man
himself. But we have to find such indications for ourselves.
The antithesis of selfishness and disinterested action, which
suggests the difficulty, had no such prominence in Greek Ethics
as it possesses for good and evil now. Aristotle never ex-
plicitly raises the question, so obvious to us, in what relation
a man's happiness stands to the realisation of the same end in
others, and whether it is possible for one to be attained with-
out the other, and, therefore, to be preferred or sacrificed to
the other. And in the same way here, there is no attempt to
show that the pursuit of the real end is in its nature public-
spirited, and that of wealth or mere freedom or pleasure neces-
sarily the subordination of the public good to a private or class
interest.
We have to ask, thirdly, in what way is the State a realisa-
tion of justice or right. 1 It is so, first of all, in this general
sense, that it produces in its citizens that virtue for which,
as we have seen, justice is another name. But there is also
a more special principle of right in political society. This is
1 On this subject H. A. Fechner's tract, Ueber den Gerechtigkeitsbegriff des
Aristoteles may be compared. The corresponding passages in the Politics and
Ethics are fully pointed out in the notes to Mr. H. Jackson's edition of the
fifth book of the Ethics.
OF THE STATE. 231
what Aristotle calls distributive justice ; and its law is that
public honours, advantages, or rights, are distributed among
the citizens, not arbitrarily, but in proportion to their contribu-
tion to the end of the State, or, in other words, according to
their worth (a%ia). Thus this justice maybe defined in modern
language as the correspondence of rights and duties. A right
given, which does not answer, and answer proportionately, to
a duty done, is a violation of justice. A duty done, a contribu-
tion to the State, which does not meet with its proportionate
return in the shape of a right, is equally a violation of justice.
Or, again, this justice may be represented as a geometrical pro-
portion. If A and B are two citizens whose worths differ, the
rights , which go to A, ought to differ in amount from the
rights &, which go to B, proportionately to the difference in
worth between A and B ; or, A : B : : A-f a : B + &. In the same
way Aristotle calls political justice a principle of equality. And
by this he means not absolute equality, but equality of ratios.
Thus if A gets the amount of rights which answer to his
worth, and B does the same, they are treated justly ; and,
although they receive unequal rights, they are treated equally.
To give equal rights to unequal worths, or unequal rights
to equal worths, is to violate equality. In so far then as a
State applies this law of proportion, it realises distributive
justice. On the other hand, although it fairly distributes
rights according to worth, it may in reality violate justice by
using a false or one-sided standard of worth. Instead of rating
the citizen by his capacity of exercising true citizen functions,
it may adopt a criterion answering to its own false end. In
this case, among others, the justice of the State will, in a
higher sense, be unjust. And it is only when this positive
justice corresponds to, or expresses, natural justice, that the
State can be said to be a full realisation of right.
This is not the case with the perverted States. Plainly,
none of them is likely to produce justice in its citizens. None
of them, again, fully satisfies distributive justice. Though all
except, we may suppose, the tyrant admit that justice
means proportionate equality (193. 29; 195. 14), in no State
except the ideal is political right wholly coincident with
natural (Eth. 5. 7. 5). The departure from natural justice in
2 3 2 ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
oligarchy and democracy is represented by Aristotle in two
different ways. A partial equality or inequality is taken as
absolute, and a false standard of worth is adopted. Thus in
the oligarchy an inequality in one respect is considered a just
ground for the exclusive possession of power ; and political
rights are restricted to those who are superior to their fellow-
citizens in one particular, viz., wealth. Here is already an in-
justice ; but it is heightened by the fact that the measure of
worth is itself a false one. "What is a man worth?" means
in an oligarchy not " What is his merit, his contribution to the
true end of the State ?" but " How much money is he worth ? "
The injustice of democracy, though it leads to very different
outward results, is in principle the same. Grasping the fact
that in one point, freedom, all its citizens are on a level, it
takes this partial equality for an absolute one, and gives equal
rights to everybody. In other words, it gives equals to un-
equals, and thereby violates justice. And again, though
according to the standard of worth it has adopted it may
apportion fairly, this standard is not merit but the imperfect
one of free birth. Hence Aristotle can at one time insist that
equality is justice, and at another condemn democracy on
account of its passion for equality, since the equality it realises
is not proportionate but absolute or numerical. 1 So it comes
about that there is an " oligarchical right " and a " democratic
right." They are not, in the highest sense, right at all. But
to a certain extent they are so ; partly because the agio, which
they take as the qualification for political power, although not
the true one, still has a subordinate importance for the State ;
and partly because, on the basis of this standard, they do dis-
tribute public advantages and honours according to a fixed law.
Thus, though Aristotle does not trace the gradual decline of
justice in the various stages of these Trape/cfidaeis, it is not an
accident that those extreme forms of oligarchy and democracy,
which are furthest removed from right and almost on a level
with tyranny, are characterised in his view by contempt of the
1 Hence also Aristotle sometimes says (e.fj. 188. 4) that democracy is opposed
to "justice according to worth (<ita)." Its standard of worth is mere free-
dom, and, therefore, scarcely a standard at all.
OF THE STATE. 233
law, and the substitution for it of the mere will of " dynastic "
plutocrats (157. 16) and the momentary decrees of the despot
mob (154. 15).
Aristotle's application of these ideas to the various grounds
on which political power may be claimed is, in the main, very
simple. The nearest approach to our modern notion of a " right"
is to be found in his discussion of this subject ; and, like him,
we seem to use this word, as well as "justice," in a double sense.
Let us take, as an example of political rights, the suffrage. The
poor man, then, claims this privilege as his right ; and he bases
his claim on the ground that he is equal to, or as good as, those
who possess it. The rich man claims a greater or unequal
share of power, on the ground that he is superior or unequal
to his poorer fellow-citizens. The idea underlying each
argument is that of distributive justice, and it is a sound one.
If the poor man is equal to the rich, he has a right to equal
powers ; and if not, not. But the real question is, What does
the equality or inequality of men mean in this connection ?
In what are they equal or unequal? (78. 19 ff.) It is evident
that equality or inequality in any quality whatever which we
choose to take will not give a right to equal or unequal
political power. If it did, a man might claim the suffrage
because he was the same colour or the same size as those who
possess it. An illustration from, another field will guide us to
the true conclusion. Suppose we had certain flutes to distribute.
We should scarcely give the best of them to those players who
happened to be of the highest birth ; " for they will not play
better than other people on that account." And even if the
superiority of one man to another in wealth or birth far
exceeded his inferiority to him in flute-playing, we should still
give the best flute to the poor and low-born proficient. " For
it is to the function or work in question that the superiority
in birth or wealth ought to contribute ; and it contributes
nothing." The same principle will apply to politics ; and it
will not justify either of the claims in question. It is not un-
just that a real inequality, a superior contribution to the end
of the State, should be rewarded by a superior share in the
function. But against the favour shown to irrelevant in-
equalities the democrat rightly protests. On the other hand,
234 ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
the point in which he is equal to every other citizen is
not that which ought to settle his political u^ta. The
end of the State is no more free birth than wealth ; and
absolute justice belongs in reality only to claims based on the
equal or superior possession of intelligence and moral character.
Suppose, however, that a given State pursues a false end, and
accordingly adopts a false standard of worth. In this case,
whatever the standard may be, he who contributes to it equally
with other men may truly be said to have an equal right to
political power with other men, although his right would in an
ideal State be none. So, again, in an oligarchy a wealthy man
has a right to greater privileges than others ; and his superior in
aperr), or the real capacity for government, might be legally
treated as inferior to him. In such a case, in one sense the
poor man of ability would have no right to the power refused
to him, and yet, in another sense, he might be said to have an
absolute right to it. Obvious as these distinctions appear, any
controversy on the suffrage will show how easily they may
still be confused, and that the twofold idea of " rights " is
still current. When we say that a man has a right to the
franchise, what do we mean ? We may mean that according
to the constitution, the English political BUaiov, he can claim
it, because he satisfies the conditions laid down by the law as
necessary to the possession of it. But when the franchise is
claimed as a right by those who do not satisfy these conditions,
this cannot be the meaning. They really affirm that the
actual law, the English SUaiov, is not properly or absolutely
just, and does not express " natural right ; " that, according to
real justice, they ought to have the suffrage, and that, if they had
it, the State would be less of a Trape/cySao-t? and nearer to the
ideal. And if the further question were asked, why true justice
demands the change, would not the answer (unless it were a
piece of mere clap-trap) involve the notion that equal rights
ought in justice to follow equal duties to the State, and the
assertion that those who claim the suffrage contribute equally
to the State with those who already possess it ?
The result of these principles for Aristotle would seem to
be clear ; and to a certain extent it is so. That the only true
standard of worth for distributive justice is merit, or virtue, or
OF THE STATE. 235
education (TraiSeia, " culture "), is obvious. But in the imme-
diate application of this doctrine uncertainties arise. First of
all, there is one limitation on all governments, a limitation
which has, fortunately for us, become almost too obvious to be
worth mentioning. The rule of those who possess any
superiority, even that of virtue, is to be considered inferior to
the rule of law. It is only because the law is too general to
meet all the particular cases that arise, that a government is
necessary to supplement as well as execute it ; and therefore,
with one exception to be noticed later, the rule that all govern-
ments ought to be subject to it is absolute (e.g. 77. 30).
Secondly, an element of doubt is introduced by the true per-
ception that, though wealth or free birth are not direct contri-
butions to the end of the State, they yet constitute elements
necessary to its existence (79. 22). There is consequently a
certain amount of justice in the demand that the possession of
them should be followed by some share in public rights. But
what share this should be, and in what rights it should be a
share, are questions which Aristotle does not discuss. Lastly,
his view of the claims of individuals to political power receive
an important modification in the account of the imperfect
States. Aristotle tells us (166. 6 ff.) that we have to consider
not only quality, but quantity; that is, not only the element or
quality on which a claim to rule is based, but also the number
of those who possess it. It is the comparative power of these
factors which settles the constitution of a State. Thus
oligarchy means the preponderance of the quality of wealth
over the superior quantity of the poor, and democracy 1 the
opposite. It is the tendency of either government to push its
principle to an extreme. Oligarchy heightens the amount of
the "quality" of wealth necessary for political rights, and
thereby increases the numbers opposed to it. Democracy
1 Obviously, according to Aristotle, democracy is absolute government of
a quality, viz. free birth, and the oligarchs make up a quantity of men.
But then free birth is common to rich and poor, the noble by* nature and the
noble by birth alike. Accordingly he sometimes speaks as if the essence of
democracy were mere number, i.e. mere quantity, or this united with
poverty and low birth, i.e. the absence of certain qualities. In the same
way, as we saw, he speaks as though democracy recognised no dta, because
its cl|ia is so slight a one.
2*6 ARISTOTLE 'S CONCEPTION
extends the franchise more and more, and with its increase of
quantity loses more and more all distinctive quality. The
further this development goes, and the further these factors
are separated, the worse the State becomes, and the nearer it
approaches to an internecine struggle between them. Accord-
ingly, it is the characteristic of the Politeia, which is dis-
tinguished for its stability, that it combines these elements ;
and it is in this connection that Aristotle's celebrated eulogium
on the middle classes occurs. But it is clear that the applica-
tion of this idea to the question of political rights will make
our previous results uncertain. For those results are based
simply on an inquiry into the quality which any individual
can allege as a claim to power : this doctrine, on the contrary,
touches the rights not of an individual, as such, but of a
number, or possibly a class, and it expressly admits that their
quantity must be considered.
A consideration not quite identical with this, but closely
allied to it, is applied even to the good States ; and it has a
special interest, because it leads Aristotle to discuss the rights
of the mass or people (TTA/^O?, the whole body of citizens).
Let us assume, so we may state his results (75. 6 77. 30),
that wealth is the standard by which rights are apportioned.
Still, it will not follow that " the rich " should rule. The mass
might justly dispute their claim; for although the wealth of any
rich man might far exceed that of any poor one, yet the col-
lective wealth of the people might exceed that of the wealthy
class. Again, even if we admit that the true standard of
justice is apery, it is not certain that the best and ablest man
in the State, nor the few best and ablest men, have a right to
hold the reins of government. It is possible that the
aggregate aperr) of the people might outweigh that of this
individual or class ; and then the very arguments on which the
latter claim to govern might be turned against them. The
man of distinguished aperrj, we might say, is like the ideal
portrait. In it are united the various beauties which in life
are distributed among different men, and it is therefore more
beautiful than the average man. Yet if we take a crowd, we
may find in it here a mouth, and there eyes, and there again
another feature, still more beautiful than are the features of the
OF THE STATE. 237
portrait. And so, although each individual of the 7rA,?}#o<? may
be far inferior in political merit to the aristocrat, yet if we
take the whole mass, it may contain an aggregate of merit
exceeding his. Each member of it brings a contribution to the
one vast man, who has many feet and hands and senses. In
the same way we find that the judgment of the mass on poetry
and music is better than that of a single critic ; for one man
appreciates one excellence, and another another, whereas the
taste of an individual is necessarily one-sided. And again, as
a large quantity of water is less easily defiled than a small, so
it is harder to corrupt a whole people than an individual ; and
" it is not easy for them all to be enraged or mistaken at once."
For these reasons it may be just to give such powers as those
of election and the scrutiny of official actions to the whole
people. And if the objection be raised that, if they are not
fit to hold office themselves, they cannot be fit to choose
officials and judge their conduct, the answer is that in many
cases it is not necessary to know how a thing is made in order to
judge of it. The head of a household, who could not have built
the house, is a better judge of the product than the builder, the
man who eats a dinner than the cook who prepared it.
This is Aristotle's version of "the sovereignty of the
people;" and his arguments, whether wholly sound or not,
have a permanent value. But it is important to recognise
clearly on what basis they rest, and to what conclusion they
are supposed to lead. We have to remember, first, that the
" people," here as everywhere, is not equivalent to the whole
male population, and does not include the enormous body of
slaves and aliens. Nor does Aristotle suppose that his
arguments will apply to any and every mass ; for, " by heaven,
in some cases this is clearly impossible." And, further, the
sovereignty of the people to whom they do apply is doubly
limited. It is subject to the ultimate supremacy of the law ;
and even under the law it is not complete. The very reasons
which establish it restrict it to those cases in which the people
can act en masse, and not individually. In other words, the
functions of government in which the 7r\fj6o<; can claim a share
are the general ones of deliberation and decision, which con-
stitute the definition of citizenship, and not the highest
238 ARISTOTLE $ CONCEPTION
executive offices, for which special ability is required. Lastly,
it will be observed that the ground on which these claims are
based by Aristotle is not that of simple quantity as opposed
to quality. It is a claim based on the superior quantity of a
quality. It is not because "all government rests on the
consent of the governed," nor because one man is as good as
another, nor because the people is a majority, that it has a
right to rule; but because, in the case of a high level of
civilisation, its rule is more likely to realise the government
of intelligence and character than any other arrangement.
Number stands on no higher level, or even on a lower level,
than money or birth. Whatever rights belong to it, belong to
it as the sign of something beyond itself.
Partly on account of this discussion, partly through the mis-
interpretation of various passages in the Politics, some readers
of the work have identified the Politeia with Aristotle's ideal
State. But it is quite impossible to maintain this view. It is
true that in both the suffrage is widely extended. But the
Politeia is only the practical ideal. It is the constitution
adapted to an average good State. It is a government of aperr),
but of imperfect aperrj. The whole people does not rule ; there
is a strict qualification for political rights, and, with a view to
obtaining a rule of fair aperr), the qualification fixed is one of
moderate wealth. The ideal State, on the other hand, is the
true aristocracy ; a government of complete dperr), a government
of the best men (apta-Toi) for the best end (apia-Tois), (70. 1).
In the form which Aristotle has given to it the whole body
of citizens bears rule. But then he is constructing a State
according to his wishes ; he supposes all the citizens to be men
of high excellence ; and even then he does not give the actual
functions of government to them until they have reached a
certain age. If his "wish" should not be fulfilled, justice
would demand a different constitution. A population, in which
a small band of men were distinguished to such a degree that
their aperr; surpassed that of the remaining TrXrjQos, w r ould, on
Aristotle's principle, be governed by that select few. And a
still stranger case is not inconceivable to him. It might
happen that a man appeared in the State, gifted with a great-
ness of soul which raised him far above all his fellows. In
OF THE STATE. 239
such an event no love of his own ideal will deter Aristotle
from the consistent result of his principles. If the great man
really has a spirit so exalted in energy and virtue that these
gifts exceed in quantity those of the whole body of his fellow-
countrymen, justice demands that he should be held for what
he is, "a god among men" (82. G). The conditions of common
political life cease to be applicable. He is not an equal among
equals, to be bound by equal rules. In this single case even
the supremacy of law must be abandoned. He is to be recog-
nised as of right an absolute king, governing for the common
good. That Aristotle considered such an occurrence extremely
improbable is obvious. But that it was conceivable is the
reason why he describes the ideal State as either monarchy
or aristocracy (147. 1). And as in the Ethics (8. 10. 2), so in
the Politics he has even given the first place to the former
(147. 10). 1
The true State may take various forms ; but, whatever form
it takes, these two requirements are absolute : it must strive
to realise perfect justice by giving power to the natural
sovereignty of intelligence and virtue, and it must seek the
common good. The Greek constitutions have no more than a
historical interest for us now. Our monarchy, our feudal
aristocracy, our representative government, were things unknown
to them, and the most democratic of their democracies we
should call an oligarchy. But these principles remain. The
first of them modern States attempt to carry out in various
ways. From the very force of circumstances we are even less
tempted than the Greeks to translate the truth that reason
alone has a " divine right " to rule, into the dictum that philo-
sophers should be kings ; but it is still possible to forget that
wealth and numbers have no political value except as symbols,
and that political machinery is very far from being an end in
1 The absolute kingship described above is of course the exact opposite of
tyranny. It has been supposed that, in speaking of it, Aristotle was thinking
of Alexander, and the enthusiasm of his language is certainly striking. But
it is almost incredible that such an opinion of the new military monarchy
should have left so little trace on the structure of his whole political theory.
And it should be observed that the comparison of the rule of law and of
an absolute king has throughout a reference to Plato's Statesman, and that
Aristotle makes use even of Plato's illustrations.
240 ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
itself. The second of these principles may be thought, fortu-
nately for us, to have lost the pressing importance it had to
Aristotle. For him the ruin of the Greek States was the
witness of its violation. 1 The organisation of the State, in-
stead of representing the common good and standing above
the strife of social parties, had become in many cases the prize
for which they fought, and a means which the victorious party
used for its own exclusive advantage. Cities were divided
into two hostile camps of the rich and poor. In this immediate
dependence of the State on society we have one of the most
marked characteristics of Greek politics. In modern nations
the struggle of classes for political power does not, as a rule, rise
prominently to the surface; and, though a change in social
conditions such as the decay of a landed aristocracy, or the
rise of the commercial or the labouring classes, inevitably
expresses itself in politics, it commonly does so slowly and, so to
speak, unintentionally. The State has a fixity and power such
as the Greeks in spite of the far greater part played by govern-
ment in their lives never knew ; and, where the opposition of
classes begins to pass from the social sphere and to take an
openly political form, we recognise a peril to the national
welfare and morality which to the Greek, instead of being a
rarity, was ever at the doors. But it is impossible to say how
far this supremacy of the State is connected with the modern
institution of monarchy, and to what extent more popular
forms of government, by whatever name they go, may be able
to preserve it. That it needs no preservation, that great
nations can do without it, and can subsist on nothing but the
natural competition of interests modified by public opinion, is
a hope which underlies some forms of the democratic faith, and
seems to be implicitly adopted by many who have no theoretic
convictions on the subject. Yet it seems too probable that, in
more than one European country, the irruption of an exaspe-
rated social strife into the political arena would follow any
weakening of the central power ; and it would be a poor change
which freed men from the burden of that power only to bring
1 Cf. L. v. Stein in the Zeilschrift fur die gesammte Staatswissenschaft for
1853, pp. 115-182.
OF THE STATE. 241
it back in its least beneficent and progressive form, that of
military force. Nor is it possible to confine these doubts to
the great continental States. In more than one of the English
colonies, unless they are maligned, the interest of a class is
predominant in politics, and is susceptible of scarcely any
check from above. And if representative institutions are not
in other cases to be misused for the same " despotic " purposes,
if they are not to produce, instead of the public good and the
rule of dperrj, class-government and the supremacy of the dema-
gogue and the wire-puller, it may be that the sluggish action
of public opinion will need to be reinforced by some strengthen-
ing of the State and some counterpoise to those tendencies
which characterised the extreme democracy described by Aris-
totle, the gradual weakening of the executive and the grasping
of all the powers of government by the popular assembly
(154. 26; 170. 12; 174. 16; 179. 25180. 11).
There is no fear that modern civilisation will abandon the
ideas which mark its progress. Unless some gigantic calamity
were to overtake it, men who have once conceived of God as
identical with the inmost spirit of humanity and bound by no
limits of race or nation, who have realised that the breath of
morality is freedom, and that voluntary association may be
almost as powerful a force as the State, are never likely to find
their ideal in the Greek city. The dangers are still on the
other side. The process through which those ideas gained
strength involved serious losses, and the false antitheses to
which it gave rise have not yet ceased to rule our thoughts.
To them the spirit of Aristotle's conception may still serve as
a corrective. With every step in the moralising of politics and
the socialising of morals, something of Greek excellence is won
back. That goodness is not abstinence but action ; that egoism,
to however future a life it postpones its satisfaction, is still
nothing but selfishness ; that a man does not belong to himself,
but to the State and to mankind ; that to be free is not merely
to do what one likes, but to like what one ought ; and that
blindness to the glory of " the world," and irreverence towards
its spiritual forces, are the worst of passports to any " church "
worthy of the name, every new conviction of such truths is an
advance towards filling up the gulf between religion and reality,
2 42 ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION
and restoring, in a higher shape, that unity of life which the
Greeks knew.
So far as opinions have weight, there are not many which
more retard this advance than the idea that the State is a mere
organ of "secular" force. That it is so seems to be the theoretical,
though not the practical, belief of most Englishmen ; and
Aristotle's fundamental position, that its object is nothing short
of " noble living," seems to separate his view decisively from
ours. The partial truths that the law takes no account of moral
character, and that Government ought not to enforce morality
or interfere with private life, seem to be the main expressions
of this apparent separation. But, to say nothing of the fact
that legal punishments do in some cases habitually consider a
man's moral guilt as well as his illegal act, it is forgotten that
the reason why this is not the rule is itself a moral reason, and
that if, by making it the rule, the good life of the community
were likely to be furthered, it would be made the rule. And
in the same way the reason why the State does not to any
large extent aim at a directly moral result, is not that morality
is something indifferent to it, but that it believes it will
help morality most by not trying to enforce it. If we hold to
Aristotle's definition, it does not follow that we are to pass
sumptuary laws and force men to say their prayers. Every
argument that is brought against the action of Government may
(so far as it does not rest on a supposed right of the individual)
be applied, with whatever truth it possesses, under that defini-
tion ; and if, in the pursuit of its final object, the State, with a
view to that final object, refrains from directly seeking that
final object, that does not show that the immediate ends which
it pursues are its ultimate and only end. But, apart from this,
it is not true that in our own day the State has ceased actively
to aim at a positive good, and has restricted itself to the duty
of protecting men's lives and property. If the theory that its
duty should be so restricted were carried out, it would lead to
strange results and would abolish public laws and acts which
few would be willing to surrender. We need go for a proof no
further than our own country, where the action of Government
is certainly not overvalued. A State which, in however slight
a degree, supports science, art, learning, and religion ; which
OF THE STATE. 243
enforces education, and compels the well-to-do to maintain the
helpless ; which, for the good of the poor and weak, interferes
with the " natural " relations of employer and employed, and
regulates, only too laxly, a traffic which joins gigantic evil to
its somewhat scanty good ; a State which forbids or punishes
suicide, self-maiming, the voluntary dissolution of marriage,
cruelty to animals, offences against decency, and sexual crimes
which, if any act could be so, are the private affair of the
persons who commit them, a State which does all this and
much more of the same kind, cannot, without an unnatural
straining of language, be denied to exercise, in the broad sense,
a moral function. It still seeks not merely " life," but " good
life." It is still, within the sphere appropriate to force, a
spiritual power, not only the guardian of the peace and a
security for the free pursuit of private ends, but the armed
conscience of the community.
A. C. B.
EPICURUS.
IN the year 1752, certain workmen, who were excavating
the soil of the modern Portici, which covers the ancient
Herculaneum, struck upon a small chamber or cell belonging
apparently to a country house which in former times looked
over the sea. Eound the walls of this little chamber were
arranged, on a pavement of mosaic, chests and cupboards of
marqueterie, and standing on one of these, in the middle of
the room, were seen busts of Demosthenes, Epicurus, Zeno,
and Hermarchus. It was almost the first discovery of real
importance which had rewarded the patience of the explorers. 1
Some ancient statues had indeed been unearthed in 1713,
during the excavations carried on by the Prince d'Elbosuf,
and again in 1737 under the orders of Charles in.: but the
discovery of Pompeii in 1748, and the superior facility with
which excavations could be carried on in the "passamonte"
(light cinders) which covered the ruins of the sister town, had
diverted attention for a while from Herculaneum. Yet the
soil beneath Portici and Resina offered relics of far greater
value. On the shelves of the cupboards found in the room of
the buried villa lay little rolls, about two or three inches in
diameter and a palm in length, the appearance of which gave
1 Perhaps the Emperor Titus was anxious to restore the city, which had
been ruined in A.D. 79 ; cf. Suetonius, Tit. 8 : "Bona oppressorum in Vesevo,
quorum heredes non exstabant, restitution! afflictarum civitatum attribuit. "
Winckelmann is supposed to be wrong in saying ( Werke, ii. p. 23), on the
strength of an inscription containing the words ' ' signa translata ex abditis
locis," that the Romans carried on excavations.
EPICURUS. 245
the workmen the notion that they were in the shop of a
charcoal or coal merchant. An accidental fall revealed the
tact that they were covered with decipherable letters, that in
reality the charcoal-rolls were nothing but rolls of papyrus,
charred with the action of fire. 1
So startling a discovery was not long in engaging the atten-
tion of savants. A certain Camillo Paderni, who was superin-
tending the excavations in 1752, was the first to make an
attempt to open the volumes. Despairing of success in other
ways, he adopted the barbarous plan of cutting the volume
in half longitudinally, and was quite satisfied, if the result of
his labours revealed the language in which the manuscripts
were written. By this means, no less than 337 Greek volumes
and eighteen Latin were destroyed in a few months. Fortunately
his successors in inquiry were neither so impatient nor so
unfortunate, and something was done to repair his ravages as
well as to carry on his original object. A series of investigators
since 1752 have worked with admirable devotion to recover
the manuscripts, amongst whom the important names are those
of Piaggio in 1754, Mazocchi, Lapira in 1786, Hayter at the
commencement of the nineteenth century, Sickler in 1814, and
Davy in 1819 and 1820. Every kind of plan has been tried,
fumigation, exposure under glass to the sun, and different
modes of chemical treatment; but it has had in the long-run
to be confessed that the plan which Piaggio invented is on the
whole the most successful. It is an infinitely slow and laborious
1 What this villa was, and to whom it belonged, forms an interesting matter
for speculation. According to Prof. Comparetti, whose name is honourably
known in connection with explorations at Herculaneum, the villa belonged to
Calpurnius Piso, the colleague of Gabinius in the consulship (58 B.C.) The
majority of the charred scrolls found there are the works of Philodemus, a
late Epicurean, of no particular merits as a philosopher. Philodemus was
unlikely to have a villa of such pretensions belonging to himself ; and he
might have been a sort of superior secretary and philosophical instructor to
Piso. Comparetti further supposes that two bronze busts, which have been
sometimes called Seneca and Berenice, represent in reality Piso and Gabinius,
the latter of whom Cicero calls effeminate. See the essay furnished by Com-
paretti to the volume of articles published on the occasion of the eighteen-
hundredth anniversary of the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
("La inlla del Pisoni in Ercolano e la sua Biblioteca," published in " Pompei e
la fiec/ione sotterata dal Vesuvio nelV anno LXXIX." Napoli ; Giannini,1879.
246 EPICURUS.
process. The first task is to discover the margin of the paper,
which is by no means always easy. Then the roll is hung on
two ribbons and rests on wool, spread on a piece of card. This
card is held on leather supports, which can be raised or lowered
by a screw. After all this preliminary work, the real process
begins. Small portions of goldbeaters' skin are glued to the
paper by means of isinglass, and, when the back of the paper
is thus strengthened, threads of silk are attached to it, fas-
tened to a cylinder. The cylinder is slowly turned, while
other workmen open out the leaf with the point of a needle ;
and in this manner, in the course of four or five hours,
a single inch is unrolled. The portions thus opened are laid
on linen, copied and engraved, and the engravings form
the collection now known as the "Volurnina Herculanen-
sia," brought out under the authority of the Academia Erco-
lanese. 1
Such is a brief history of the discovery which will in time
give us, in all probability, a fuller acquaintance with the Epicu-
rean philosophy. For of the unearthed fragments, the great
majority belong either to Epicurus himself, or to Philodemus,
an Epicurean contemporary of Cicero. Hitherto we have learnt
much of Epicureanism from the mouths of its adversaries :
from the professed sceptic, Sextus Empiricus from Plutarch,
who wrote against an influential Epicurean named Colotes
from Seneca, who was a Stoic from Cicero, above all, in most
cases a most unfriendly and even contemptuous critic of Epicu-
reanism. Of the positive tenets of Epicurus we learn most
from the tenth book of Diogenes Laertius, to whose recital we
must, of course, add the testimony of the eloquent Epicurean
poet Lucretius. Of all the 300 rolls of Epicurus's own writ-
ings, the scant remains we possess are his will, a few epistles
and letters, and a philosophical epitome, entitled icvpiai So|at,
preserved by Diogenes: some individual expressions which
we find in Seneca, Plutarch, and others : and fragments of
Books ii. and xi., and portions of a few other books of his large
1 See the account given by Dr. J. C. G. Boot in his Notice sur les manu-
scrits trouves a Herculanum (Amsterdam, 1841), and also the report of Mr.
Hayter, who was sent by the Prince Regent to Naples.
EPICURUS. 247
work " on Nature," which form part of the Volumina Hercu-
lanensia. 1
To recast for ourselves, however, the society of Epicurus
in its main features is no difficult task. There is hardly any
other ancient philosopher whose personality comes before us
with such strikingly clear and definite traits. His was essen-
tially a simple character, with none of the profundity of the
student, or the exclusiveness which marks the expounder of a
singular and isolated system. It was indeed the adaptability
of his doctrines to general life to the ordinary pursuits of
ordinary people which gave them such an unique charm in
the eyes of his contemporaries, and made his school flourish'
from the third century before Christ to the third or fourth
century after. 2 Nor were the characteristics essentially changed
in this long life of 700 years, for there was no school which
was more careful to preserve the actual words of the founder.
Epicurus had not the obtrusive idiosyncrasy of the Cynic, nor
the severe and strict austerity of the Stoic. Philosophy with
him did not mean speculation, nor yet an isolated seclusion :
neither was its effect to be seen in the outward clothing, or
want of clothing, of a Diogenes. Philosophy was " a daily
business of speech and thought, to secure a happy life," evepyeia
1 The following, according to Professor Gomperz, is a table of fragments
belonging to Epicurus from Herculaneum :
n [ ire pi <pv<rews . Bk. ii.
3. ) Bk. xi.
4.1 Bk. xi.
5. Bk. xiv.
6. Bk. xv.
7. Bk. xxviii. On Causes of Error.
8. ) ? ( Fragments on the Freedom of
9. J ? j the Will.
10. ? On Error.
11. ? On Life after Death.
12. ?
The treatise was originally in thirty-seven books. Facsimiles of 1 and 3-10 are
preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. In 2 occurs a curious word,
tl;WffTiK6s. Is this the right reading of the word in Diog. L. x. 143, which
usually stands ^opicrriK-fj (al. ^epurriKfj, ta.iptTiKrj) ?
2 Epicurus was born in the year 342 or 341 B.C. Came to Athens in 306
B.C. (Diog. x. 2). Died 270 B.C. (Diog. x. 15). That the school lasted to at
least the third century after Christ is proved by what Diogenes says ( 9),
writing in the first half of the third century, according to Zeller.
248 EPICURUS.
KOI Slavery tcrfAois rov ev8ai/j,ova ftiov TrepiTroiovaa. It was
not necessary to have read deeply or thought profoundly :
indeed, literature and education were often more of a hindrance
than otherwise. " My good sirs, leave all culture alone" (irai^eiav
Traaav, fiafcdpioi, favyeTe) writes Epicurus in his letter to
Pythocles. 1 It need not trouble any one, says Metrodorus, his
pupil, if he had never read a line of Homer, and did not
know whether Hector was a Trojan or a Greek. And Cicero -
adds his testimony, " nihil opus esse eum, philosoplms qui
futurus sit, scire literas." One study, however, for a philosopher
was absolutely necessary, the study of nature, and that for
the reason that a man cannot be happy unless he discard
superstition. "A man cannot be released from his fear on
matters of highest import, unless he knows the nature of the
universe and discards mythical superstition, so that without
physical science our very pleasures are tainted " (coo-re OVK rjv
avev <f)vcrio\,oylas dxepaia$ ra<$ rjSovas d7ro\an/3dveiv). s For the
rest, a simple life without ostentation, without meanness, not
pharisaically temperate, nor yet too liberally self-indulgent,
was the ideal of Epicurus. " For myself, I can be pleased
with bread and water," he says, " yet send me a little cheese,
in order that when I want to be extravagant, I may be." 4
This was the man, Diogenes pithily adds, whose doctrine was
that pleasure was the end of life.
Not less clearly stand out the personal kindliness, the sym-
pathy, the generosity, the sweetness of Epicurus's character.
In the little circle which surrounded the philosopher in his
famous gardens were Polyaenus, Hermarchus his future suc-
cessor, Colotes, possibly Leonteus and his wife Themista,
Leontion, and a beloved disciple, Metrodorus. Metrodorus,
who from the time of his first acquaintance with Epicurus
only left his side for six months, died before his master,
leaving two children. For these Epicurus seems to have
had an especial tenderness, leaving many injunctions about
them in his will. " Let my heirs watch over the daughter of
Metrodorus," he writes, " and when she grows up, let them
1 Diog. x. 6 ; cf . 121 : "The wise man lives poems, and does not make
them" iroirifj.a.T<i re tvepye'iv, OVK &v iroirjffai. Also 87.
2 Cic. de Fin. ii. 4. 12. s Diog. x. 143. 4 Ibid, 11.
EPICURUS. 249
give her in marriage to whomsoever Hermarchus shall choose,
if she be modest and obedient." Among the Herculanean
remains there is a letter of Epicurus to a little child, who may
possibly be this daughter of Metrodorus. The letter runs
thus : " We came to Lampsacus, Pythocles, Hermarchus,
Ctesippus and myself, and we are quite well. We found there
Themista and our other friends, and they are quite well. I
hope you are well too, and your mamma, and that you obey her
and papa and Matron in everything, as you used to do. For
you know quite well, my pet, that I and all the others love
you very much, because you are obedient to them in every-
thing." 1 The use of the very w r ords of childhood (" papa " and
" mamma "), the tender little expression, vairia (though why
Doric in form it is hard to say), the travelling with a sort of
retinue, all seem to mark this letter as genuine. But if so,
what an admirable comment it forms on the encomiums in the
9th and 10th sections of Diogenes's history ! on the man who
could keep about him, " held prisoners by the siren-charms of
his teaching" (rals So^/xart/cai? avrov cretprjcri TrpoKaracr^eOevre^),
such a host of followers " that whole cities could not contain
them," who counted in his school men and women alike, and
could enlist in the number of his disciples even his slaves, one
of whom, named Mus, attained some celebrity as a philosopher !
And in this context we may perhaps read his dying words to
1 Of. Gomperz's " Em brief Epikurs an ein kind " in Hermes, vol. v. (1871)
pp. 386-395.
According to the arrangement of Gomperz the fragment is as follows :
d<f>elyfjL0a et's Aauif/aKov v-
yiaivovres, ^yu> Kal Hv6o-
K\ijs Kal "Epuapxos Kal KTT}-
ertTTTros, Kal e/ce? KaTei\rj<f>a-
fjifv vyiaivovras 0e/u/<r-
TO.V Kal TOVS \Oi7TOi)s $('\Ol/S.
e3 Sf Troieis Kal el cri> vyi-
alvfis, Kal T] fj.dfj.fj.7i, (cai^T?; (?)
Kal irdira Kal Mdr/jwyt TTO.V-
ra TrfiOfi, ucnrfp Kal Z/j.-
irpoffBev' eD yap i<T0i, vairla,
Sri Kal tytj} Kal ol XoiTroi
Trdvres ae jj.lya QiXovfiev
Sri TOVTOIS ireiBif)(i) irdfTa.
250 EPICURUS.
Idomeneus, 1 wliich though they contain possibly a note of
exaggerated rhetoric, yet bear a last testimony to the quiet
happy life among friends, which his philosophy recommended.
" On this last, yet blessed, day of my life, I write to you. Pains
and tortures of body I have to the full, but there is set over
against these the joy of my heart at the memory of our happy
conversations in the past. Do you, if you would be worthy of
your devotion to me and philosophy, take care of the children
of Metrodorus." ' ETn^eXov rwv -TralSwv Mrjrpo&copov were the
last words he wrote.
If this is not the ordinary notion which is held about
Epicurus, the reason is that his philosophy is more studied
than his life, and there are many points of view from which his
philosophy seems to invite criticism and disparagement. AVith
some critics, the fundamental idea of Epicurus the value of
human happiness is not one which enlists their sympathies ;
by others an unconscious comparison is drawn between Epicu-
reanism and the magnificent systems which preceded it very
much of course to the detriment of the former ; by others, again,
that notorious dislike of culture, which the founder of the
school not only felt but was proud of, is considered fatal to his
philosophic fame. And in these ways Epicureanism is un-
doubtedly open to blame ; to which must also be added a
certain logical weakness and inconsistency of thought which is
not surprising in one who thought so lightly of logic as a study.
The poverty of the theory of knowledge and truth, the incon-
sistency between a systematic incuriousness about astronomy, 2
and the acknowledgment of the necessity of physics, the flat
contradiction between the reign of Law in Nature and the
Freedom of Will in Man, the difficulty of understanding how a
purely selfish theory of life could not only extol disinterested
friendship, but even worship gods from whom nothing could
be obtained, all these points, and many others beside, must
tend to lower our admiration for Epicurus as a philosopher,
1 Diog. x. 22. The power and influence of Epicurus over his disciples is
acknowledged by Lucian : Alex. Pseud, caps. 17, 25, and 61 (Jacobitz).
2 Of. the astonishing assertions in Diog. x. 91, 92 ff., Epicurus thought that
the sun was about the same size as it appears to be, etc. etc.
EPICURUS. 251
however attractive a character may belong to Epicurus as
a man.
But the historical circumstances of the time, which perhaps
promoted individual virtues, were fatal to the elaboration of a
systematic philosophy. It was a time of weariness and exhaus-
tion a weariness of metaphysical abstraction, a weariness of
sophistical ingenuity and rhetoric, a weariness of political
activity. At the time when Epicurus was living at Athens, at
the close of the fourth century B.C., the Grecian world had seen
the downfall of Thebes, the exile of Demosthenes, the ship-
wreck of the Hellenic state-system. The death of Alexander
at Babylon had led to the fruitless struggle for independence
in the Lamian war ; the conquest of Antipater had crushed out
the last efforts of Greek spirit. Aristotle, accused of atheism,
had left the city of Socrates and Plato, and had died at
Chalcis. In the misery and repression of the time, men did
not want far-reaching theory or elaborate system, but some-
thing definite, precise, concrete : some ideal of existence which
would suit those who had given up politics and had become
isolated and self-centred, a theory of individual life, not a com-
pendium of cosmical knowledge. The philosophy of Epicurus
was the most effectual answer to the needs of the age. While
Stoicism preached heroic fortitude, and had to be transformed
in a century and a half, Epicureanism in the fourth century
after Christ remained essentially the same system which had
been promulgated by the son of Neocles.
" The aim and end of all action," says Epicurus, " is that we
may neither suffer nor fear," rovrov jap xdptv aTravra irpar-
roftev OTTOJ? fiijre dA/yeo/iez/ //.^re rapySco/iey * " when once
this end is realised, all the tempest of the soul subsides, for
animal nature has then no need to satisfy, nothing is wanting
to the full completion of good, whether of body or soul. For
we want pleasure when we feel pain at its absence ; when we
feel no pain, we want no pleasure. It is for this reason that
we say that pleasure is the beginning and end of a happy life."
Here at least there is a concrete and definite answer to men's
demands. " Who will show us any good ? " was the pressing
1 Diog. x. 128.
2 5 2 EPICURUS.
question asked amid the ruins of Hellenism. The good
is pleasure, and pleasure is the good, is the ans\\ 7 er of Epi-
curus. Xor will he have any mistake as to his meaning.
" I can conceive of no good remaining," he says, " if you
take from me the pleasures of taste, the pleasures of love,
and the pleasures of ear and eye." 1 And Metrodorus, the
disciple, exaggerating, as is the -wont of disciples, the teaching
of his master, says boldly : " It is in the belly that the natural
reason of man finds the chief object of his care." 2 The brother
of Metrodorus, a certain Timocrates, who was a renegade from
Epicurus's school, found in this and other texts plenty of matter
for scandal. He had had hard work, he said, to get away from
his nightly revels and all his mystic confraternity. As to
Epicurus 819 rrjs rjfiepas ep,eiv VTTO rpv<>rjs' crvvelvai re amm re
fcal MrjTpoSwpa) eraipas Kal aXXa?' Map/j,dpiov Kal 'HSeiav /ecu
'Epcortov Kal Ni/clSiov? "Notum inter accolas odium," and
Epicurus's name was the subject of many attributes, of which
Ktvai$o\o<y6<> was by no means the worst.
But Epicurus was not such a tiro in pleasures as to sup-
pose that a life of sensual enjoyment was a life of happiness.
A man of fierce, sensual nature like Aristippus, with the hot
blood of Africa in his veins, might indeed think so, and make
moments of pleasurable emotion (^ovo'xpovo^ rj^ovrj) the motto
of his school. But a man who lived no tempestuous life like
the Cyrenaic, but taught in his garden at Athens, who expressly
recommended his pupils to live in the country, 4 was not likely
to be a libertine and a voluptuary. Does pleasure only consist
in motion and restlessness ? Can indiscriminate indulgence in
pleasures secure happiness, not only for the present, but for
life ? Do pleasures differ only in quantity and not in kind ?
and is not the pleasure of the mind higher than the pleasure of
the body ? Does not man, as rational, look before and after,
and is not therefore the future and the past, as well as the
present, matter of concern for him ? Such were the questions
which naturally presented themselves to Epicurus, and mate-
1 Diog. x. 6.
* Ap. Athen. vii. ii. , irepl yaffr^pa 6 Kara (frvtnv padlfav \6yos TTJV awaffav ^x fl
ffirovd7]v. Cf. Eur. Cyclops, 335 (Paley), Kal rfj ^cyta-Ty yacrrpi ryde dai/j.6vuv.
s Diog. x. 6, 7. * [rbv a(><t>ov} cf>t\ayprifffiv.Ibid. 120.
EPICURUS. 253
rially qualified his views on pleasure. "We do not choose
every pleasure : there are times when we relinquish many
pleasures, when the consequent inconveniences are greater,
and we hold many pains to be more choiceworthy than
pleasures, when, after much endurance of pain, we are re-
warded by a higher pleasure. Every pleasure is in its essential
nature a good, but not every pleasure is choiceworthy, just as
every pain is an evil, but is not therefore always to be avoided." 1
And again, very explicitly : " When we say that pleasure is
the end, we do not mean the pleasures of the libertine and
the pleasures of mere enjoyment, as some critics, either igno-
rant, or antagonistic, or unfriendly, suppose ; but the absence
of pain in the body and trouble in the mind." 2 Hence the
necessity of prudence and self-control in the direction of life
a prudence which is only to be taught by philosophy. " For
it is not drinkings and revellings, nor the pleasures of love,
nor tables loaded with dainties, which beget the happy life,
but sober reasoning (yr)$wv Xoyto-yLio?), to discover what must
be sought or avoided, and why, and to banish the fancies which
have most power to distract men's souls. Philosophy has no
more priceless element than prudence, from which all the
other virtues flow, teaching us that it is not possible to live
pleasantly without also living sensibly, honourably, and justly :
nor yet to live sensibly, honourably, and justly without living
pleasantly." 3 Therefore says Epicurus, " Let not the young man
delay to learn philosophy, neither let the old man weary ot
philosophy : for no one is either under age or over age to secure
his soul's health." 4 In point of fact, the end of a wise man's
life is not pleasure in the ordinary sense, but health, ease,
serenity (ir/leia, airovia, aTapa^la). 5
To the realisation of this serenity many things appear as
obstacles. Nature seems against a man, fate crushes him in
its grasp, the gods are not always his friends, death comes at
the last to end all his hopes and energies. Epicurus saw
1 Diog. 129. 2 Ibid. x. 131. 3 Ibid. 132. 4 Ibid. 122.
5 Cf. Lucian, Bis accusatus, cap. 22. Parasitus, ch. 11. The former
passage is a dialogue between the 2ro<f and Epicurus himself ; the latter is
concerned with the Epicurean idea of felicity.
EPICURUS.
clearly enough that these impediments must be removed out of
the path of men's happiness, although, unfortunately, in nearly
each case, the removal is effected at the expense of his logic.
The whole of the superstructure which he builds on the founda-
tions of Hedonism and Sensationalism is an interesting attempt
to go beyond his ground-plan, to find room for the complexity
and the many-sidedness of life on the narrow platform of what
is called Individualism. Most of the miseries of life are caused
by superstition, and the first effort of the wise man must con-
sequently be to oppose science to religion, a knowledge of
nature to an imaginative mythology. Science, says Epicurus,
is freedom; mental serenity means enfranchisement from all
mythical opinions, and the constant memory of the main facts
of nature. " For if we study those events whence arise our
anxiety and fear, we shall find their true causes and be free." 1
Here is the first breach made in that theory of unintellectual-
ism with which Epicurus started. It is all very w r ell to tell
men to eschew culture and be happy ; but it is impossible at
the same time to tell them to be sages. However much it may
be true in some given point that ignorance is bliss, it is not a
good maxim for a life which aims at being continuously happy.
The theory breaks down at the outset, directly it is discovered
that happiness means at least freedom from fear, and that fear-
lessness is not attainable without knowledge. Some of the
elements of culture may indeed be abandoned ; a man need
not know literature, he may "act poems and not make them ;" a
Polyaenus may, on his entrance to the Epicurean ranks, abjure
the higher mathematics which made him famous ; and Epicurus
himself might declare the knowledge of celestial phenomena to
be either useless or unattainable a few years before Archimedes
and Hipparchus measured the volume of the earth and the
approximate distance of the moon; 2 but yet a certain amount
of science is indispensable, so as to make head against foolish
superstition. Almost the chief endowment of the Epicurean
sage must be a knowledge of nature, for "without physical
1 Diog. x. 82.
z Cf. M. Guyau's La Morale (PEpicure, p. 185. He there compares
Epicurus's incuriousness with that of Auguste Comte. Cf. too Cic. Acad. ii.
33. 106 ; Fin. i. 6. 20.
EPICURUS.
255
knowledge our very pleasures are tainted." Religion lias been,
as Lucretius afterwards said, the chief cause of the greatest
evils ; and it is only possible to checkmate religion by science.
What then is to be our view of natural operations ? what
is the character of this saving and enfranchising physics ?
Epicurus's scheme is a strictly materialistic one, for the details
of which he is mainly indebted to Democritus. All life is
material, some form of body being at the base of all existence.
The ultimate elements of nature are not the so-called elements
which Empedocles made his o-roi-^eta. Fire, earth, air, and
water are, in fact, not simple bodies at all, but complex aggre-
gates, which can be divided into something more primordial
and original. At the base of things scientific analvsis reveals
o /
two elements, atoms and void, both of which are infinite ; and
the beginnings of creation are due to the infinite atoms fallino-
O t
through infinite space, collecting and aggregating themselves
here and there and forming worlds, life meaning the collection
of atoms, death their dispersion. 1 Even the soul is really
material, formed out of atoms which are indeed finer and rarer
than those which go to the creation of other substances, but
still essentially material in their structure. 2 Atoms have only
primary qualities, shape, size, and weight ; other qualities of
taste or colour are only subjective and secondary. 3
But before we get so far as this, the question naturally occurs
as to the capacities of the human mind for ascertaining the
truth about nature. What is the criterion of truth ? Sensation,
aiadrja-ts, is the answer of Epicurus. In that part of his
philosophy which answers to Logic, and which in his termino-
logy is TO /cavoviKov, he is very explicit on this matter. " The
criteria of Truth are sensations : There is nothing which can
convict sensations of error; neither a similar sensation, for
similar sensations have an equal value ; nor yet different
sensations, for they refer to different objects ; nor yet reason,
for reason itself is constructed out of, depends upon, sense (mi?
<yap Xo7o<? OTTO TWV alcrQrfcrecav ijpTrjTai)." 4 How then does
error arise, for it is obvious that hallucinations, for instance,
and dreams, are real ? It arises, not in the sensation itself, but
1 Diog. x. 39, 40, 41. 2 Ibid. 63. 3 Ibid. 44. * Ibid. 31, 32.
256 EPICURUS.
in our inference from the sensation. The actual sensation of a
ghost which a nervous man sees is real and indubitable ; the
mistake arises when he draws the inference that what he sees
has a real existence outside him. Yet go beyond mere sensa-
tion we must ; for how else are we even to attempt to interpret
for ourselves the constitution of nature ? Epicurus feels the
necessity, but is not very scientific in his theory of the pro-
cesses founded on sensation. There are 7rpo\rf\lret,<>, he says,
which are notions founded on repeated sensations, and 6at,
which are opinions, and \6yos, which is ratiocination. The
whole process seems to go on naturally, without any idea of
the activity of mental construction. Every body throws out
ei^wXa, images of itself, and these images may come differently
to different men not that the thing itself changes, but that
the images, which men see of it, are different. Hence, as
Protagoras said, what seems to a man to be true is true for him,
and yet there is a real objective truth, as well as subjective
opinions. But how in any given case are we to know that we
have got hold of the true image ? Here Epicurus fails us ;
whether he falls back upon the Democritean dogma that there
is a true knowledge of the intelligence, as well as a false know-
ledge of mere sense-impression, or whether he cuts the knot by
the assertion that the images of the wise man are always true.
In each case the solution is more than unsatisfactory ; and in
this failure, the whole theory of nature, so far transcending the
mere impressions of sense, is involved in uncertainty and
doubt.
But this is after all a logical or metaphysical difficulty,
antecedent to the study of nature. There is, however, another
of a more practical nature which the Epicurean system of
physics has to meet. If everything in nature goes by fixed
and unalterable laws, is not man too bound in the links of an
iron fate ? For man is, according to the materialistic position,
part of nature, his body formed of the grosser atoms and his
soul of the finer. And if so, what becomes of human happiness
before the rigid laws of Necessity ? For Fate, too, as well as
superstition, is a stern schoolmaster, driving us in ways which
do not make for our peace. How can man's freedom, on
which his happiness seems to depend, be secured side by side
EPICURUS. 257
with that regularity of natural law which is to banish super-
stition ? Here Epicurus's theory, judged by a modern standard,
becomes almost puerile. The atoms, according to him, have a
certain wilful spontaneity of their own ; they do not descend
in parallel lines : they swerve aside, self-moved, and in this
power of the atoms to deviate from the perpendicular, Epicurus
finds the origin of human free-will. 1 This is the celebrated
doctrine of the " clinamen," which Lucretius expounds at
length, and which Cicero covers with ridicule. 2 It may be,
of course, that we have not as yet got the theory in its true
outlines. Recent fragments from Herculaneum throw, accord-
ing to Professor Gomperz of Vienna, clearer light upon this
much-vexed question. " From these fragments there arises a
series of deductions which, it seems to me, are indubitable.
Epicurus was not, as has been hitherto supposed, an Indeter-
minist : he was an opponent of Fatalism, not of Determinism :
he did not believe in the causelessness of human acts of will ;
for, like Voltaire and others, he believed that man to be morally
free whose actions were determined by his own opinions : he
avoided, like the best thinkers of our day (like Mill, Grote, or
Bain), the use of the word Necessity in the processes of the
will, as a misleading expression. Like these philosophers, he
held that it was unsuitable to denote the efficacy of irresistible
causes, and the efficacy of all causes generally by one and the
same expression. Finally, his theory of the will was coloured
by that doctrine of knowledge which was peculiar to him and
to Democritus. The problem evidently culminates with him
in the question How can an act of will through an image
(el8a)\.ov) from without (the antecedent of every perception
and mental representation) be excited and determined by the
collection of our convictions, i.e. (in his sense) our whole
personality." 3 Whatever may be the exact opinions of Epicurus
on this matter, two things are clear First, that he declared (as
against the Stoics) that such a thing as Fate did not exist (7-771;
1 Plutarch, de Solert. Anim. 7, STTWS rb ^<' -qfjuv /UTJ air6\riTcu.
2 M. Guyau, in his La Morale. (V Epicure, defends the doctrine. See pp.
71-103.
3 Nuiie Bruchstiicke Epikur's insbesondere uber die Willenxfragc, von Th.
Gomperz (Wien, 1876), pp. 9-11. The fragments in question are those marked
K
258 EPICURUS.
VTTO TWU>V Bea'TroTii' elcrayo^evrjv TTCIVTWV fj,rj
secondly, that freewill in man was necessary to insure the
validity of moral distinctions (TO Be Trap JHJ.WV d&eo-Trorov &> KCU
TO fiefiTTTOv Kal TO evcLVTiov 7rapaKO\ov6elv 7re<pvfcev). 1
Eyen though a man should disbelieye in Fate, he yet may
belieye in the influence of the Divinity upon human affairs, and
the Divine influence may chance to be malevolent. In the
thoughts of many of the Greeks, the godhead was not free from
envy ; and human happiness, if prolonged for many years, was
sure to bring down the gods' displeasure. Even though sucli
definite maleficent purpose were wanting, yet in the action of
the godhead there was something at once irresponsible and
incalculable, which would make the Epicurean " serenity "
difficult to realise. What then does Epicurus bid his followers
think about the gods ? " In the first place," he says in the
letter to Menoeceus, " you must think the god to be a being
incorruptible and blessed, according to ordinary notions on the
subject : attribute to him nothing which is inconsistent with
his incorruptibility, or inappropriate to his blessedness, but
think about him everything which is true to that union of
happiness and immortality which he enjoys. For gods there
veritably are, because our idea of them is clear. But they
are not what most people think them to be ; and the atheist
is not he who destroys the gods of the people, but he who
attributes the fancies of the people to gods." 2 And again :
8 and 9 in the list given above. [Pap. 1056 ; Coll. prior x. 697 ; Coll. alt.
vi. 55 seq.] Here is a fragment tolerably easy to follow, as restored
by Professor Gomperz :
ov (d d7r)oXeforet TO. irdOr] rov ylv(e'cr0at) vov0e(r)\ elv
re a\\rj\ovs Kal (/J,)dx(fff)9ai. Kal /jxTapvB/jLi^eiv (sic)
(!K %x oVTa 'S K l *" ea(v)Tdis rrjv al(r)La.v KCU oi>xl
Iv rfj e dpxys f^vov ffvffrdfffi KCU Iv rfj rov
7re/3(^%ovros Kal eireurt6vTos Kara TO afn-6narov
dvdyKi)(i). el yap ns Kal Tip vovdeTeiv Kal T^J
vovOere'icrOai TTJV /caret Tb av(r6) fJ.a(T)ov dvdyK-r)v
irp(ocr}v(t l j.oi'). Pap. 1056, 21, and Pap. 697, D, 1.
Cf. too Die Ueberreste eines Buches von Epikur irepi <f>v<rews (Gomperz, Wien,
1879), which adds to the foregoing. Also Fr. Bahnsch (Philolog. Anzeiger
1878, Nr. 5, Art. 73.)
1 Diog. x. 133.
2 Ibid. 123, dcre/Srjs 8t, oi/x 6 TOUS TWV TTO\\UV Oeovs dvaipuv, dXX' 6 rds r&v
Oeols
EPICURUS. 259
" The blessed and immortal deity neither feels trouble nor
causes trouble : he feels no anger, nor is he moved by flattery :
for all such feelings indicate weakness " (ev do-Oevel jap irav TO
Toiovrov). 1 On the one hand, then, if the gods are really
happy, they can have nothing to do with the troubles of the
world; on the other hand, if they have nothing to do with
human affairs, men need not be afraid of their interference.
Thus the very condition of happiness in the gods secures the
inviolability of human happiness. The gods, infinite in num-
ber, live in happy ease in the intervals which separate the
infinite worlds. 2 They are in stature like men, composed of
very fine atoms ; they eat food, and thus repair the ravages of
time ; they are male and female ; and Philodemus, according to
a Herculanean fragment, has the hardihood to assert that they
speak something like the Greek language.
It is at the least doubtful how far Epicurus himself would
assent to all these predications about the godhead which were
certainly rife in his school. It would savour too much of that
" attributing of the fancies of the people to gods," which, in his
own fine phrase, constituted the character of the real atheist.
But, whatever may be the mental reservations or nuances of
thought involved, Epicurus undoubtedly asserted that the gods
exist, for the notions we have of them (based on sensations) are
clear, and clearness is to him, as well as to Descartes, the test
of truth. Perhaps the images of them which are found in
men's minds are due, as Deinocritus thought, to the fact that
while all objects, distant as well as near, send off eiBco\a of
themselves, the intervening medium of air distorts and magnifies
the images received by the senses. Perhaps they were mere ideals
of human life and happiness, for Epicurus in one passage declares
that they were only to be apprehended by reason \6ym Oewpr)-
Tot/9 elvai? Perhaps Epicurus was after all, in this respect,
somewhat of a hypocrite, according to the judgment of Posi-
donius. This much at least is certain, that, whatever the gods
were, they were not to be allowed to interfere either with the
reign of law in the natural world, or with the happiness of the
1 Diog. x. 139. 3 TO. /j.eraK&cr/jua, intermundia.
3 Diog. x. 139. Lucian makes Epicurus an atheist ; cf. the Jila accusatits,
Z< a* Tra/joedus, 22, and Jcaromenippus, 32.
260 EPICURUS.
Epicurean wise man. The Epicureans might worship at the
temples, and a Diocles might feel the grandeur of Zeus himself
increased by the sight of an Epicurus on his knees ; l but Zeus
was no longer to be the cloud-compeller, the lord of heaven and
earth : he might retain his majesty, but he must lose his
terrors.
Yet, even so, the possibility of worshipping such gods
demands greater self-forgetfuluess in the wise man than Epi-
curus allows him. It is a remark of Seneca, that although
Epicurus banished disinterestedness from morality, he yet
allowed it a place in the worship of the gods. 2 What reason
could induce a man who was persuaded that his own pleasure
was his only object in life, to worship gods who had nothing to
do with the course of the world? What good could he get
from them ? what evil could he avert by his bended knees ?
And if nothing could be gained from such an act, what induce-
ment was there for a man to perform it ? The same difficulty
occurs in the Epicurean theory of friendship. Friendship, like
every other external relation, must in such a system be ulti-
mately based on its advantages. 'H (j)i\ia Sia T<Z<? %peia<?, says
Epicurus, although he adds that a great part of the resulting
advantage is the sense of community in enjoyment. Yet, how-
ever selfish in origin, friendship appears eventually to figure as
a highly disinterested virtue Epicurus in this view of the
subject resembling the ordinary modern Utilitarian. Hardly
any friendships, moreover, were more celebrated than the Epi-
curean, as Cicero remarks ; and hardly any words were too
strong to recommend it. "Of all the things which wisdom
provides for the happiness of a lifetime by far the greatest is
friendship." 3 And so high a view has Epicurus of the society
of friends, that he expressly discountenances the Pythagorean
formula of friendly communism. A professed communism
argues distrust, and distrust is the ruin of friendship. 4 When
1 Ace. to M. Guyau, La Morale d 1 Epicure, p. 178.
2 Senec. de Benef. iv. xix.
3 Cic. Fin. i. 20, 65 ; ibid. ii. 25, 80.
4 T(>V re ''EjriKovpov /J.TJ a^iovv efc rb KOIVOV KarariOeffOai TO.S ovcrias, Ka.0a.wep rbv
Tlvdayopav, KOIVO, TCI. rQ>v tfiiXuv \yoi>TO. - airicrTovvTuv yap flvai rb TOIOVTOV' el d'
airiaTUv, ovdt <pi\ui>. Diog. x. 11 ; cf. ibid. 148.
EPICURUS. 261
we consider the selfish origin of friendship, it is not surprising
to learn that the later Epicureans were much exercised with
regard to the proper interpretation of the phenomenon.
One more obstacle to happiness remains, the most difficult
yet the most necessary to remove. The awful shadow of death
lies across men's lives, quenching not only enthusiasm but
serenity in the fear of impending pain and perfect annihilation.
How is a man to bear up against so inevitable a future ? How
is the delicate plant of human happiness to thrive in such an
undermined soil ? Some of Epicurus's best sayings have refer-
ence to death. " Accustom yourself," he tells Menoeceus, " to
think that death has nothing to do with us, since every good
and every evil depends on sensation, and death is the absence
of sensation. Whence it comes that the true knowledge that
death has nothing to do with us makes what is mortal in life
really enjoyable, not because it adds to life immortality, but
because it takes away our longing for immortality. For there
is nothing which can terrify a man in life, when he is assured
that there is nothing terrible in the absence of life. So that he
is a fool who tells us to fear death, not because its presence
will torment us, but that its anticipation torments us. For
that which troubles us not when it is come, has but vain
terrors when it is looked forward to. Death, then, the most
awful of ills, is nothing in our eyes ; for when we are, death is
not, and when death is, we are not." 1 But fear is not to be
exorcised by sophisms, and the question still presses for an
answer, Are not our pleasures ruined by the prospect of death ?
No, answers Epicurus, for pleasure is not made pleasure by
continuance, it is whole and entire in every pleasurable
moment. Pleasure is still pleasure, happiness is yet happiness,
even though it be doomed to an inevitable death. "Time,
whether limited or unlimited, involves an equal amount of
pleasure, if a man measures it by reason." 2 Can this con-
sideration, then, help the Epicurean, that pleasure is pleasure,
whether it is fleeting or permanent, whether it comes once or
lasts a lifetime ? Yet, when we remember that it was only by
means of the idea of continuance that Epicurus overcame the
1 Diog. x. 124. * Ibid. 145.
262 EPICURUS.
^ovrj of the Cyrenaics, that the pleasure he recom-
mended was precisely not the pleasure of any given moment,
but that pleasure which could last and become a permanent
possession, even this consolation breaks down. Here once
more, in the case of death, as in the case of fate, freewill, and
the gods, the higher philosophy of Epicurus is found too wide
for his foundation, and mental serenity, the Epicurean ideal of
life, can only be gained at the expense of Epicurean logic.
After all, one has to turn away from the system, in order to
reconstitute one's notion of the man. We think rather of the
kindly and genial teacher, realising the " rus in urbe " in his
Athenian garden, and surrounded by his friends, the faithful
Metrodorus, Polyaenus the converted mathematician, Hermar-
chus the future successor, above all, the little Epicurus and his
sister, Metrodorus's children. There are no asperities about
Epicurus, no angular points of chagrin or disappointment or
baffled hopes. He is as much above his professed opinions as
the ordinary man is below them. His system may require a
selfish account of friendship, yet he can say, " It is more blessed
to give than to receive." 1 His theoretic view of death forces
him to deny it any terrors ; yet he knows the full value of life,
and can administer a stern rebuke to the pessimist (perhaps
Hegesias, 6 TreicnOdvaTos) of his own day. " He who admonishes
a youth to live well, and an old man to die well, is a fool ; but
far worse is the man who says, ' It is well not to have been
born, and, when born, it is best to die.' For if he means what
he says, why not die at once ? It is quite open to him to do
so. But if he is jesting at us, he is frivolous on subjects which
do not admit of jest." 2 Epicurus might despise superstition,
yet he felt that fatalism was more morally ruinous. " It were
better to follow the myths about the gods than be a slave to the
fate of the physicists." 3 Seneca, who felt all the attractions of
the Epicurean system, has preserved for us another saying of
1 rb eZ iroielv ijSiov ecrrt TOV ir6.<rx f <- v - Plut. N on posse suav. viv. 15. 4.
2 Diog. x. 126, 127 ; cf. Soph. (Ed. Col. 1225.
3 Ibid. 134. So again a man's happiness is not to be imperilled by a belief in
luck and chance. ' ' Little indeed is the power which fortune has over a wise
man, for the main interests of life have been, are, and will be ordered by
Reason" (c. 144). And again : " Chance does not give us good and ill, but
only the beginnings whence good or ill may come" (c. 134).
EPICURUS. 263
Epicurus, which has quite a modern sound : " Initium salutis
est notitia peccati "-the knowledge of sin is the first step in
reform. 1 Indeed, there is much modern quality in Epicurus.
Besides that doctrine of Utilitarianism, which fathers so much
modern philosophical thought, there is his belief in progress and
the slow results of Time. " We must admit," he says, " that the
nature of man is in many respects forced and schooled (StSa^-
Ofjvai, re teal avafyKacrdrjvai) by circumstances. Reasoning after-
wards perfects nature's lessons, and adds thereto new discoveries,
sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes in long periods
of time, practically infinite." 2 It is difficult to find in any
other Greek writer so explicit a statement as this of the effects
of Time on human development. Or again, there is his theory
of justice, which anticipates Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau :
" Justice is nothing in itself, apart from human societies :
Justice is the token of a common interest, a contract not to
wrong or to be wronged." 3 Or, once more, there is the natural
origin attributed to Language (by no means the ordinary Greek
idea), which is said to be neither a divine creation nor an
artificial product, but which both Epicurus and Lucretius
explain as due to the natural emission of sounds expressive of
sensations and ideas. 4
But Epicurus's chief merit is undoubtedly found in the
simple, practical, and unaffected morality which he inculcated
both by precept and example. As a summary of the philo-
sophy of life the following maxims are not unworthy to be
reckoned with the thoughts of greater men than the Gargettian
sage : " The injuries which come to men either through hatred
or envy or pride, the wise man will conquer by reason. He
will acknowledge the power of feelings and passions, but will
not thereby be hindered in his wisdom. Even though he be
tortured, he is yet happy, albeit that at times in his torture he
will moan and groan. 6 It is the wise man only who can feel
1 Senec. Ep. 28, 9.
2 Diog. x. 75 ; cf. Lucret. v. 1452 :
Usus et impigrae simul experientia mentis
Paulatim docuit pedetemtim progredientes.
3 Diog. x. 150. 4 Diog. x. 75 ; Lucret. v. 1027.
6 As against the Stoical endurance of pain.
264 EPICURUS.
affection for his friends, whether present or absent. He will
not punish his servants, but will be compassionate, and pardon
those who are worthy. Xo wise man will fall in love, nor
believe that Eros is heaven-sent. Xor will he be a good
orator. At times a sage will marry and beget children ; at
times, if circumstances be adverse, he will not marry, and will
try to dissuade others. He will neither cherish wrath in drunk-
enness, nor will he engage in politics, nor become a tyrant, nor
yet flatter. Neither will he beg. Even though bereft of eyes,
the wise man will still have a hold on life. He will feel grief :
he will think about property, he will provide for the future.
He will be fond of a country life, and bear a stout front against
fortune. Only so far will he think of repute amongst men,
that he be not contemned. More than others he will feel
delight at the theatre. It is only the wise man who will have
a right opinion on music and poetry ; yet the sage lives poems,
and does not make them. Money he will make, yet only in
wisdom, if he be in w r ant. He will court a monarch at the
proper moment; he will humour a man, in order to correct
him. He will found a school, but not to gain crowds of
scholars. He will give his opinion freely, and never be at a
loss; in his dreams he will be true to himself. And some-
times he will die for his friend." 1
Epicurus has had many resurrections ; his spirit has' lived
again in Gassendi, in La Eochefoucauld, in Saint-Evremond, in
Helvetius, and in Jeremy Bentham. Perhaps this fragment
from Saint-Evremoud may be most fitly compared with the
summary of virtue just quoted from Epicurus :
" He is a philosopher who keeps aloof alike from superstition
and from impiety ; an Epicurean, whose distaste for debauchery
is as strong as his appetite for pleasure ; a man who has never
known want, but at the same time has never enjoyed affluence.
He lives in a manner which is despised by those who have
everything, envied by those who have nothing, appreciated by
those who make their happiness and their reason agree. In his
youth he hated waste, being persuaded that property was
necessary to make a long life comfortable. In his age he cares
1 Diog. x. 117-121.
EPICURUS. 265
not for economy, feeling that want is little to be feared, when
one has but a little time left to want in. He is grateful for
the gifts of nature, and finds no fault with those of fortune ;
he hates crime, endures error, and pities misfortune. He does
not try to find out the bad points of men in order to decry
them, but he looks for their foibles in order to give himself
amusement ; is secretly rejoiced at the knowledge of these
foibles, and would be still more pleased to make them known
to others, did not his discretion forbid. Life is to his mind too
short to read all sorts of books, and to load one's memory with
all sorts of things at the risk of one's judgment. He devotes
himself not to the most learned writings, so as to acquire
knowledge, but to the most sensible, so as to strengthen his
understanding. At one time he seeks the most elegant to
refine his taste, at another the most amusing to refresh his
spirits. As for friendship, he has more constancy than might
be expected from a philosopher, and more heartiness than could
be looked for even in a younger and less experienced man. As
for religion, he thinks justice, charity, and trust in the good-
ness of God of more importance than sorrow for past offences." 1
Such too was the Epicurean sage ; not a hero, not a statesman,
not even a philosopher, but a quiet, humane, and prudent man,
"a hero," as Seneca says, "disguised as a woman." Epi-
cureanism was undoubtedly not a speculative success, but as a
practical code of life it suited the world far more than its rival,
Stoicism, and lasted longer. It could not produce martyrs, 2 or
satisfy the highest aspirations of mankind, but it made men
fall back on themselves, and find contentment and serenity in
a life at once natural and controlled. AaOe fiiooa-as, Live in
secret, was the Epicurean watchword. " Keep my words," said
Epicurus, " and meditate on them day and night, by yourself
or with your friend, and you shall live as a god amongst men.
For there is nothing mortal about a man who lives in the
midst of immortal good." W. L. C.
1 Quoted in George Saintsbury's article on Saint-Evremond, Fortnightly
Review, July 1879.
* M. Guyau, however, says that Vanini, who had his tongue cut out, and
was burnt at Toulouse in 1619, was a martyr for the sake of Epicureanism.
La Morale d' 'Epicure, p. 192. He is usually called a Peripatetic.
THE SPEECHES OF
THUCYDIDES. 1
1. THE famous phrase in which Thucydides claims a
lasting value for his work has had the fate of many striking
expressions : it is often quoted apart from the words which
explain it. " A possession for ever," not " the rhetorical
triumph of an hour:" taken by itself this has a ring of exul-
tation, noble perhaps, yet personal, as if the grave self-mastery
of the historian had permitted this one utterance in the tone of
the Eoman poet's confident retrospect or the English poet's
loftier hope, speaking of a monument more enduring than brass,
of things so written that men should not willingly let them die.
It is the context that reduces the meaning to a passionless pre-
cision. " The absence of fable in the History," he says, " will
perhaps make it less attractive to hearers ; but it will be enough
if it is found profitable by those who desire an exact knowledge
of the past as a key to the future, which in all human probability
will repeat or resemble the past. The work is meant to be a
possession for ever, not the rhetorical triumph of an hour." 2
That the intention of Thucydides has been fulfilled in his own
sense is due largely to the speeches which form between a
fourth and fifth of the whole work. It is chiefly by these that
the facts of the Peloponnesian war are transformed into typical
examples of universal laws and illuminated with a practical
significance for the students of politics in every age and country.
1 A table of the Speeches will be found at page 322.
2 i. 22. The re after KTij/ua. in the original marks the connection of the
thought: "and so. " Cp. i. 4, Mlvus . . . (Kpdrriffe . . . r6 re \yffTiKbv,
tl)s ek6s, Kadypfi : so 5, TO re ffid'rjpo^opfiffdai : 6, ^yv/j.vudrjffdv re : 9, 'A7<x-
re.
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES. 267
The scope of the speeches is seen best if we consider what the
History would be without them. The narrative would remain,
with a few brief comments on great characters or events, and
those two passages in which Thucydides describes the moral
effects of pestilence and of party-strife. But there would be little
or no light on the inner workings of the Greek political mind,
on the courses of reasoning which determined the action, on
the whole play of feeling and opinion which lay behind the
facts.
2. The introduction of speeches became a regular part
of ancient historiography, and came in again at the revival of
literature, not quite going out, in Italy and France at least, till
the end of the last century. But the followers of Thucydides
were obeying an established tradition ; he was the writer who
had done most to establish it ; indeed, he might properly be
called its founder. The place of the speeches in his design was
due to special influences of the age as well as to the peculiar
bent of his mind ; we have to consider what had been done
before him, and the plan on which he went to work.
At the beginning of the Peloponnesian war a Greek prose
literature scarcely yet existed. The Ionian prose-writers before
Herodotus, or contemporary with him, are known to us only
from scanty fragments. But the Augustan age possessed all,
or nearly all, their writings ; and Dionysius of Halicarnassus
has described their general characteristics, comparing them
collectively with Herodotus and Thucydides. 1 These Ionian
writers, he says, treat the annals of cities and people sepa-
rately, 2 not combining them into a large picture, as Hero-
dotus does. Their common object was to diffuse a knowledge
1 Dionys. de Thuc. c. 5. Dionysius concedes the more dignified name of
ffvyypafais to the Ionian logographers. He names, (1 ) as anterior to the age of
Thucydides, Eugaeon of Samos, Deiochos of Proconnesos, Eudemos of Paros,
Democles of Phigaleia, Hecat'aeus of Miletus, Acusilaus of Argos, Charon of
Lampsacus, Amelesagoras of Chalcedon ; (2) as elder contemporaries of
Thucydides, Hellanicus of Lesbos, Damastes of Sigeion, Xenomedes of Chios,
Xanthos of Lydia. His words imply that these, " and many more " (dXXoi
ffvxvoi), were then extant.
lh. ov ffwaTTTOvres dXX^Xaiy (ras i<rropias), d\Xd /car' HOvri Kal Kara. TnSXets
ditupovvTfs : whereas Herodotus is said TroXXdj Kal 5ia<p6povs 7r/>dets ^s /j.iav
Trepiypa<j>T]i> IT pay pare Las ayaytlv.
268 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
of the legends which lived in oral tradition (oaai
fAvr]jj,ai), and of the written records (ypa^ai) preserved in
temples or state- archives ; and to publish these " such as
they received them," without adding anything, and on the
other hand without omitting " myths " and ' theatrical epi-
sodes" which appear childish to a more critical age. 1 As
to style, it is much the same for all of them, plain,
concise, " strictly to the point," 2 without artificial display ;
but with a certain freshness, he adds, and some degree of
charm, which has been the secret of their survival. The
meagre fragments which remain, such as those of Xanthus
and Charon, Hecataeus and Hellanicus, consist chiefly of short,
jerky sentences, strung together in the baldest possible fashion. 3
If these Ionian writers introduced dialogues or speeches as
the example of the epic poets might have led them to do it may
be conjectured that these were of the simplest kind. There is
one, indeed, who has left proof that he could write dialogue
with the ease and grace of Herodotus himself. 4 But Ion
of Chios was a poet as well as a chronicler; he knew the
1 Dionys. de Thuc. c. 5, ev otj /cal /j.i)0oL rives evijffav virb TOV iro\\ov
ireiria'Tfii/j.evoi j(j>l)vov (cp. Thuc. i. 21, of the stories told by the logographers,
virb xpoi/ou . . . eirl TO /jivdwdes eKveviKTjKora) /ecu OearpiKai rives irepnreTfiai,
iroXi) rb rf\L0Lov ?x fiv T0 ^ s v ^ v SoKovffai.
s Ib. TOLS Trpay/Aaai Trpoff<pvrj. In Herodotus (i. 27, etc. ) irpoutpvews \eyeiv
is simply ' ' to speak pertinently. " But the phrase of Dionysius seems to
mean, not merely "adapted to the subject," but closely adhering to the
facts of the story (whether mythical or not), without attempt at verbal
embellishment. It is illustrated by the dry and absolutely matter-of-fact
style of the extant fragments.
3 Muller, Fraym. Histor. Graec. i. 1-68. The longest fragment of Heca-
taeus may serve as a specimen : " Orestheus, son of Deucalion, arrived in
Aetolia in search of a kingdom ; and a dog produced him a green plant ;
and he ordered the dog to be buried in the earth ; and from it sprang a
vine fertile in grapes. Wherefore he called his son Phytius. Now the
son of Phytius was Oeneus, so named after the vine-plant ; for the ancient
Greeks called the vine Oena : and the son of Oeneus was Aetolus. " (Frag.
341, p. 26.)
4 The story of the poet Sophocles defending the phrase M irop<j>vpeoM
Trapyaiv against the criticisms of a learned guest at a supper-party in
Chios. (Muller, Fraym. Hist. vol. ii. p. 46. ) The 'Eiridr]/j.tai, in which it
occurred, seem to have been Ion's account of his own "visits" to Athens
and other cities. (Ibid. p. 45.)
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES. 269
Athens of Pericles ; and his memoirs, with their sprightly
gossip, must have been very unlike the normal type of Ionian
chronicle.
Herodotus is distinguished from his predecessors, first of
all, by an epic unity of plan. It is hard to say exactly how
far he was superior to them in his method of verifying facts
his diligence and his honesty are both unquestionable, and we
know that he attempted not very scientifically, perhaps to
decide between conflicting versions of the same story. But in
the dramatic element of his narrative he shows the true free-
dom of an epic poet. In his History, as in the Iliad and the
Odyssey, the author seldom speaks when there is a fair pretext
for making the characters speak. The habitual use of " direct
speech," or easy dialogue, is evidently a different thing from
the insertion of set speeches : there is nothing necessarily
rhetorical about it. It is merely the vivid way of describing
thought and motive, the way natural to a simple age ; and in
the case of a work meant to be heard rather than to be read,
like the early Greek prose works, it has the obvious recom-
mendation of helping to keep the attention alive. Even the
longer speeches in Herodotus have usually the conversational
tone rather than the rhetorical. 1 On the other hand, there are
a few which may be considered as properly rhetorical, that is,
as efforts by Herodotus to work up a vague tradition in the
most effective form. The debate in the Persian cabinet on the
invasion of Greece 2 is a case in point. The speeches of
1 E.g. the speech in which Aristagoras of Miletus appeals for aid to
Cleomenes, king of Sparta (Herod, v. 49), and that of Sosicles at Sparta
(v. 92), which is simply a plain sketch of the Corinthian tyrannies, put
into the mouth of a Corinthian speaker.
a Her. vii. 8-11. The council is called fftiXXoyos ^TT/K-XIJTOS Hepafav ru>v
dptffruv : as in viii. 101 Xerxes tfiovXevfro &/j.a Ilfpfftwv roicrt. tiriKXrfroiffi : i.e.
with his "privy-councillors." Later writers went at least as far as Hero-
dotus in reporting speeches made on occasions which presuppose privacy ;
as when Dionysius, Livy, and Plutarch give the expostulations of Veturia
(or Volumnia) with Coriolanus, when Sallust is present in imagination
at a debate of Catiline's conspirators, or when Livy transcribes the
brilliant, but domestic, remonstrances of Pacuvius Calavius with his son
Perolla, offered with a view of dissuading the young man from murdering
Hannibal at Capua. Thucydides never violates dramatic probability in
this particular way.
270 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
Xerxes, Mardonius, and Artabanus have been carefully elabor-
ated, and have the elementary dramatic merit of expressing
views which Persian speakers could conceivably have taken.
Another example is the debate of the Persian conspirators
after the death of the false Smerdis. Otanes argues for
democracy, Megabyzus for oligarchy, Darius for monarchy ;
but here the points of view seem purely Hellenic. 1 Herodotus
prefaces his report of the discussion by saying, " Speeches
were made which some of the Greeks refuse to credit ; but
made they were :" 2 and elsewhere 3 he remarks with triumph
that " those Greeks who do not believe " in Otanes having
advocated democracy will be surprised to hear that Mardonius
established democracies in the Ionian cities. The ground of
this dramatic episode, then, was a story current among the
Greeks of Ionia, but rejected by some of them, as manifestly
inconsistent with Persian ideas. The spirit of rhetorical
dialectic may be traced again very clearly in the conver-
sation between Solon and Croesus, where Solon refines on
the distinction between wealth, good fortune, and happi-
ness. 4 Still, it cannot be said that Herodotus had much
love for set rhetorical display : his taste was for conversa-
tion lively, ingenious, argumentative it might be, but still
mainly in the colloquial key. 5 A good instance of the
1 Her. iii. 80-82. Similarly in Her. iii. 36 the Lydian Croesus utters
Hellenic thoughts.
2 Her. iii. 80, e\'xfl'n ffa - v ^0701 S.TTICTTOI /JLV tvioicri 'EXX^rwc, ^\^6-rj(rav ft 1 Siv.
3 Her. vi. 43, tvdavra. ^yicrrov 6uv/j.a tptu roiffi /J.TJ a.Tro5eKo/j.tvoicn 'EXX^wy
Hepcrtwv Toiffi fTTTCL 'Ordvfo. yvwfj.riv dirod^aaOai, ws xpe&v eii) drj/uLOKpar^effOai
Tltpffas : where yurj d7ro5e/co / it&'oi<rt implies more than //TJ iriffTevovvt would have
implied, viz. that the statement was offered for acceptance, not simply
by Herodotus himself, but by a widely-spread rumour.
4 Her. i. 32. The question of Croesus to Solon had been rlva rfdrj irdvruv
elSes oXjSiciro.Toi' ; Solon answers, in effect, that irXoOroj is certainly an
element of 6X/3os, but that complete 8\pos requires evrvxia also, and that
a man's life cannot be called curias unreservedly until we have seen it
to the end. Dean Blakesley observes (on Her. i. 32), that this "might
have proceeded from the mouth of Protagoras, or Hippias, or any other
of the fjLepifivrjral \6ywv alluded to by Euripides" (in. Medea 1225 f.). If it
has not the matured subtlety of the rhetorical dialectic, it may certainly
be said to anticipate its spirit.
5 Dionysius says most truly of Herodotus that he has almost all the
excellences of style except the eva.-yuvi.oi dperai the combative excellences,
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES. 271
way in which he passes by an opportunity for oratory is his
brief notice of the speech made by Themistocles just before the
battle of Salamis : l "His theme was the contrast between all
that is worthy and all that is base. He exhorted them to
choose the better part in all that men's nature and condition
permit ; and then, having wound up his discourse, he ordered
them to embark." The true rhetorician would have developed
the topic which Herodotus barely indicates. 2 It may be
noticed, too, that the ornament of the speeches in Herodotus is
sometimes distinctly Homeric illustrating his nearer affinity
to epos than to rhetoric. Thus the Corinthian Sosicles, in
the debate at Sparta, begins with truly epic force : " Verily
now the sky shall be under the earth, and the earth shall
hang above the sky, men shall have their pastures in the
sea, and fish upon land," if Spartans become the friends of
tyranny. 3
3. Thucydides has stated the general principles on which
he composed the speeches in his History. The precise interpreta-
tion of that statement depends, however, partly on the question
How far is it probable that Thucydides is there instituting
a tacit comparison between his own method and that of Hero-
dotus ? So far as we know, the work of Herodotus was the
only prose work in which Thucydides could have found a pre-
such as were afterwards developed by strenuous controversy, political or
forensic. ovd yap drj/jnjyoptais iroXXdis 6 dvijp ov5' evayuviois KexP 7 l Tal \6yois, ovS'
fv T iraOaiveiv Kal deivoiroielv rd Trpdyfiara TTJV d\KT]v % (de Thuc. c. 23).
1 Her. viii. 83, TO. d Hirea Ijv irdv-ra Kpeaau TOICTI eayoffi avririOefieva. Sera
8 tv dvdp&irov <t>vo~i Kal KaraaTacri eyyiverai, wapatveffas 5?j TOVTUV rd Kpeaau
alptevOai Kal /cara7rX^as TTJV pTJcnv eafiaiveiv eK.e\eve es ras vrjas.
? Cp. Plato, Hippias Major, p. 286, where the sophist Hippias tells
Socrates that he has composed "an admirable discourse" on the theme of a
question supposed to be put by Neoptolemus to Nestor after the taking of
Troy What are /caXd 1-jrir'rjde^/jLara ? The phrase of Herodotus, /carairX^^ay
TTJV prjcriv, reminds us of the tone in which the speakers of Thucydides some-
times decline to develop commonplaces.
3 Her. v. 92, ^ di] & re ovpavbs tcrrai ZvepBe rrjs yrjs Kal ij yrj fj-ertupos virtp rov
otipavov Kal ol avBpuvoi vofJibv ev Oa\dffffr] efcovffi Kal o't /%#yes rbv irporepov avGpwiroi,
Sre ye vpets, & AaKedaiu6viOi, IfroKparias Kara\vovTes rvpavvidas s rds 7r6Xty Kard-
yeiv wapa(TKevde(r9e. Compare the epic phrase which closes the spirited
oration of Dareius in the debate of the conspirators ov yap afj.ei.vov (Her. iii.
83 ; Iliad xxiv. 52, ov /J.TJV ol TO ye KO\\IOV ovde r 1 &/j.fivov, etc.).
272 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
cedent for dramatic treatment applied to history. If Thucy-
dides knew that work, it would naturally be present to his
mind at the moment when he was stating the rules of his own
practice. It can be shown almost certainly that a period of at
least twenty years must have elapsed between the time at
which Herodotus ceased to write and the time at which
the History of Thucydides received the form in which it has
come down to us. 1 It was possible, then, for Thucydides
1 Herodotus alludes to no event later than 425 B.C., the latest mark of
time being a doubtful reference to the death of Artaxerxes in 425 (vi. 98).
And there are instances in which his silence affords presumptive proof that
later events were unknown to him. (1) In 437 B.C. Athenian colonists
founded a city on the spot formerly called Ennea Hodoi, and their leader
Hagnon named it Amphipolis, because the Strymon flowed on both sides of it.
Herodotus mentions Ennea Hodoi (vii. 114), but nowhere speaks of Amphi-
polis. Had he been writing after the new colony had become important, he
would naturally have mentioned it in this connection ; he could scarcely
have failed to do so after the battle of Amphipolis in 422 B.C. had made the
place famous. (2) Demaratus tells Xerxes that Spartans never yield : it is
their fixed law to conquer or die (Her. vii. 104 ; cf. 209). This passage would
have been singularly infelicitous if it had been written after the surrender of
the Lacedaemonians at Pylos in 425 B.C., when 120 Spartan prisoners were
brought to Athens ; an event which, as Thucydides expressly says (iv. 40),
astounded the Greeks, precisely because their belief had been that which
Herodotus expresses. (3) Demaratus advises Xerxes to detach 200 ships
from his fleet, for the purpose of occupying the island of Cythera, and quotes
the saying of Cheilon, that it would be well for Sparta if Cythera were sunk
in the sea (Her. vii. 235), Xerxes neglected the advice. But in 424 B.C.
the Athenians actually occupied Cythera, and the damage thence inflicted on
Laconia was one of the causes which disposed the Spartans to conclude
peace. Herodotus would not have omitted, if he had known, so forcible an
illustration of Cheilon's saying. And there are indications that Herodotus
did not live to give the last touches to his work : thus a promise made in
vii. 213 is left unfulfilled. [The revolt of the Medes "from Dareius " (Her.
i. 130), which Dahlmann identified with the revolt of 408 B.C. (Xen. H. i. 2.
19), has been shown by the Behistun inscription to belong to the reign of
Dareius Hystaspes.]
F. W. Ullrich (Beitraqe zur Erklcirung des Thukydides ; Hamburg, 1846)
has ingeniously argued that Thucydides composed his first three Books, and
Book iv. as far as ch. 48, in exile (about 421-413 B.C.) ; and the rest of the
work, as a continuation, after the final close of the war. This view rests
mainly on the alleged existence of passages in Books i. iv. 48 which imply
ignorance of later events. Classen has examined these passages in detail
(Einleitung, xxxii. liv.), and has, I think, shown that they are insufficient to
support the theory built upon them. My opinion has not been altered by read-
ing a learned essay in favour of Ullrich's hypothesis, which has appeared
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES. 273
to know the work of Herodotus ; that he actually knew it, and
that he pointedly alludes to it in several places, cannot be
doubted by any one who weighs the whole evidence. 1
In the view of Thucydides there had hitherto been two
classes of writers concerned with the recording of events.
First, there were the poets, especially the epic poets, of whom
Homer is the type, whose characteristic tendency, in the eyes
of Thucydides, is to exaggerate the greatness or splendour of
since Classen's Introduction was published (Ueber die successive Entstehung
des Thucydideischen Geschichtswerkes, by Julius Helmbold ; Colmar, 1876).
But for the present purpose it is enough to assume, what even the supporters
of Ullrich's view would allow, viz. that the whole work was at least revised
by Thucydides after the end of the war. (See Thuc. i. 13. IS ; ii. 65.) The
probable influence of Herodotus is here being estimated in relation to those
parts of the work of Thucydides which would have been the last to receive
his finishing touches the speeches.
1 That Thucydides knew the work of Herodotus is assumed by Lucian (de
cons. hist. 42), Marcellinus (vit. Thuc. 54), Suidas (s.v. opydv), Photius
(cod. 60), and the Scholiast on Thuc. i. 22, etc. In modern times it has been
denied or questioned by F. C. Dahlmann (Herodot. p. 214), K. 0. Miiller
(Hist. Gk. Lit. c. xxxiv. 2, and Dorians, ii. 98, 2), by J. C. F. Bahr (in
his edition of Herodotus), and in an essay De plurlmis Thuc. Herodotique locis,
by H. Fiitterer (Heiligenstadt, 1843). The proofs that Thucydides knew the
works of Herodotus have been brought together by Mure (Hist. Gk. Lit. Bk.
iv. ch. 8), and more recently by H. Lemcke, in an essay entitled Hat Thuc.
das Werk des Herod, gekannt 'f (Stettin, 1873.) The crucial texts are (1.)
Thuc. i. 20, on the common errors regarding the vote of the Spartan kings
and the Pitanate company, compared with Her. vi. 57 and ix. 53 ; (2.) Thuc.
ii. 97, on the Thracians and Scythians tacitly correcting what Herodotus
says of the Thracians (v. 3) and of the Scythians (iv. 46) ; (3.) Thuc. i. 126,
on Cylon's conspiracy, compared with Her. v. 71 ; Thuc. vi. 4 on Zankle
(Messene) compared with Her. vi. 23 ; Thuc. ii. 8, on the earthquake at Delos
(cf. i. 23) compared with Her. vi. 98. In view of all these passages, it seems
impossible to doubt that in i. 97 Thucydides includes or specially designates
Herodotus among those who ^ ret irpb T&V 'M.ijdiKwv 'E\\rjviK& ^werldeaav i)
avra TO. Mr?5t/cd.
I must add a word on the vexed interpretation of Her. vi. 57, TOI)S fj.d\iffrd
ff<j>i TUV jfpbvTwv TrpoffT/iKovras <=~)(eiv TO. rCiv /3a<ri\ewv ytpea, dtio ^0ous ride^vovs,
rplr-qv 8 TT\V ewvr&v. The question is, Does Herodotus mean riOe^vovs dtio
ij/ri<povs (Kdrepov, TpiTtjv 8t TTJV ewvrov ? Shilleto (Thuc. i. 20) thinks that this is
not certain, suggesting that roi)s irpoff-fiKovras might mean rbv dei Trpoff-fiKovra, and
comparing Her. iv. 62, T0icr5e = ry ev e/cdory dpx^'V, but ne sees the difficulty
of supposing the same person to be nearest of kin to both kings. Failing this
resource, we must surely allow that Herodotus means 5tfo ^TJC^OVS fKartpov, for
Isu how could he possibly have written Tpiri^v 8 rty euvruiv ? Would he
not have written dtVT^pas St rds fwvrwv ?
S
274 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYD1DES.
things past. 1 Secondly, there were the prose writers whom he
calls chroniclers (\oyoypd(j)oi) ; and these he characterises by
saying that they " compiled " 2 their works with a view to
attracting audiences at a recitation, rather than to truth ; deal-
ing largely, as they did, with traditions which could no longer be
verified, but had passed into the region of myth. Now with
such chroniclers Herodotus was undoubtedly classed by Thucy-
dides. The traits common to Herodotus and the other chro-
niclers, as Thucydides viewed them, were (1) the omission of
really accurate research the tendency to take what lay ready
to the writer's hand (TO, erolfjua, i. 20) ; (2) the mixture of a
fabulous element with history ; (3) the pursuit of effect in the
first place, and of truth only in the second. Probably Thucy-
dides would have said that Herodotus was more critically
painstaking and less indiscriminately tolerant of fable than
most of the other chroniclers, but that his study of effect was
more systematic and more ambitious. The imaginary dialogues
and speeches in Herodotus would be the most conspicuous
illustrations of this desire for effect. If they were not absolute
novelties in the chronicler's art, at least we may be sure that
they had never before been used in such large measure, or
with such success.
The first aim of Thucydides in his introduction is to show
that the Peloponnesian war is more important than any event
of which the Greeks have record. He then states the principles
on which his History of the War has been composed. " As to
the various speeches made on the eve of the war, or in its
course, I have found it difficult to retain a memory of the
precise words which I had heard spoken ; and so it was with
those who brought me reports. But I have made the persons
say what it seemed to me most opportune for them to say in
view of each situation ; at the same time, I have adhered as
closely as possible to the general sense of what was actually
said. As to the deeds done in the war, I have not thought
myself at liberty to record them on hearsay from the first in-
1 Thuc. i. 10, et'/cis eirl rb /J,eiov [itv Troii)Tj]v 6vra Ko<rfj.fj<ra.i : 21, ws TroiTjral
VfU^lictUTU> tirl TO p,ei^ov Ko<r/j.ovvTes.
3 Thuc. i. 21, ^vvtBeaav, as again 97, ^vverLOfaav, implying a process more
external and mechanical than ^v
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES. 275
formant, or on arbitrary conjecture. My account rests either
on personal knowledge, or on the closest possible scrutiny of
each statement made by others. The process of research was
laborious, because conflicting accounts were given by those who
had witnessed the several events, as partiality swayed or
memory served them." 1
The phenomena of the war, then, as materials for history
are classed by Thucydides under two heads \6yoi,, things said,
and epya, things done. These are the two elements of human
agency. 2 As regards the epya, the deeds, he is evidently con-
trasting his ow r n practice with that of the chroniclers generally.
He has not taken his facts, as they did, without careful sifting
he had formed a higher conception of his task
In regard to the words, the \6yot, he is tacitly con-
trasting his own practice with that of Herodotus, the only
conspicuous example in this department. If his statement
were developed in this light, it might be paraphrased thus :
Thucydides says : (1) I have not introduced a speech except
when I had reason to know that a speech was actually made :
unlike Herodotus, when he reports the conversation between
Croesus and Solon, the debate of the Persian conspirators, the
discussion in the cabinet of Xerxes. (2) I do not pretend to
give the exact form of the speeches made : as a writer implies
that he does when, without warning the reader, he introduces
a speech with the formula, " He said these things " (e'Aeye
raSe), 3 instead of "He spoke to this effect" (eXeye roidSe).
1 Thuc. i. 22.
* Shilleto remarks (on i. 21 2) : "TCI 5' Zpya T&V irpaxOfrruv is a somewhat
bold expression for TO. 5' tpya. TO. irpaxd^ra." It may be added that the
phrase has the special effect of bringing out the antithesis between facts of
speech &nd. facts of action.
3 Cp. Her. iii. 80, where the speeches of Otanes, Megabyzus and Dareius
are introduced by \tywv raSe . . . \tywv rode . . . ZXege raSe : so v. 91, tXeyov
raSe . . . clirov ravra : 92, Xee rode (Sosicles) : vii. 8, ?Xefe H^/>i?s rdde : and
so usually. Thucydides nearly always has Ae^cw or ZXeyov roiade, with roiairra
(orToo-oOra)attheend. Ini. 85 (of Sthenelaidas), IXe^ev tD5e ("in this manner,"
not = ra5e). In iv. 58 the speech of Hermocrates is introduced by roiotirovs
Sr; \ayovs direv, where 5^ appears to mean "as we may presume ;" i.e. he
spoke " to this general effect " the phrase intimating somewhat more plainly
than the usual TOLj.de that Thucydides had only a very general notion of the
276 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
(3) On the other hand, I have faithfully reproduced the
speaker's general line of argument, the purport and substance
of his speech, so far as it could be ascertained. Herodotus
disregards this principle when he makes Otanes, Megabyzus
and Dareius support democracy, oligarchy and monarchy by
arguments which no Persian could have used. And in filling
up such outlines, my aim has been to make the speaker say
what, under the circumstances, seemed most opportune (ra
Beovra yu,aXt<TT<z).
The last phrase is noticeable as marking a limit of dramatic
purpose. According to the regular usage of the words 1 (TO,
Seovra) in Thucydides, it can mean only "what the occasion
required" not necessarily what was most suitable to the
character of the speaker. The latter idea would have been
expressed by a different phrase (TO, TrpocnjKovTa). That is, in
filling up the framework supplied by the reported "general
sense " of a speech, Thucydides has freely exercised his own
judgment on the situation. Suppose a report to have reached
him in this shape : " Hermocrates spoke in the congress at
Gela, urging the Sicilian cities to lay aside their feuds and
unite against Athens." In composing on this theme, the first
thought of Thucydides would be, "What were the best arguments
available?" rather than, "What arguments would Hermocrates
have used?" This general rule would, of course, be liable to
various degrees of modification in cases where the speaker was
well known to the historian as having marked traits of
character, opinion or style.
4. " Set speeches," says Voltaire, " are a sort of oratorical
lie, which the historian used to allow himself in old times. He
used to make his heroes say what they might have said. . . .
At the present day these fictions are no longer tolerated. If
one put into the mouth of a prince a speech which he had
never made, the historian would be regarded as a rhetorician." 2
How did it happen that Thucydides allowed himself this
" oratorical lie," Thucydides, whose strongest characteristic is
1 Thuc. i. 70, TO TO. B^OVTO. Trpa^ai : 138, avToa-xfSid^fLv TO. dtovra : ii. 43,
iyvuffKOvrfs ra d^ovra : ii. 60, yvuvai re TO. dfovra KO.I ep/jLTjvevffai ravra.
* Preface to the Hist, of Russia, 7.
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDWES. 277
devotion to the truth, impatience of every inroad which fiction
makes into the province of history, laborious persistence in the
task of separating fact from fable : Thucydides, who was not
constrained, like later writers of the old world, by an established
literary tradition ; who had no Greek predecessors in the field
of history, except those chroniclers whom he despised precisely
because they sacrificed truth to effect ? Thucydides might
rather have been expected to express himself on this wise :
" The chroniclers have sometimes pleased their hearers by
reporting the very words spoken. But, as I could not give
the words, I have been content to give the substance, when I
could learn it."
In order to find the point of view at which Thucydides
stood, we must remember, first of all, the power which epic
poetry had then for centuries exercised over the Greek mind.
The same love of the concrete and comprehensible which
moved the early Greeks to clothe abstract conceptions of a
superhuman power in the forms of men and women, " strangers
to death and old age for ever," led them also to represent the
energy of the human spirit as much as possible in the form of
speech. The Homeric ideal of excellence is the man of brave
deeds and wise words. The Homeric debates are not merely
brilliant, but also thoroughly dramatic in their way of charac-
terising the speakers. 1 The Iliad and Odyssey accustomed the
Greeks to expect two elements in every vivid presentation of
an action first, the proofs of bodily prowess, the account of
what men did; and then, as the image of their minds, a
report of what they said. Political causes strengthened this
feeling. Public speech played a much larger part in the
affairs of States than it now does. Envoys spoke before an
assembly or a council on business which would now be
transacted by the written correspondence of statesmen or
diplomatists. Every adult citizen of a Greek democracy
had his vote in the assembly which finally decided great issues.
1 Sir G. C. Lewis, in illustrating this point, instances the embassies from
Corcyra and Corinth to Athens (Thuc. i. 68), from Mitylene to Olympia (iii. 9),
and from the Athenians and Syracusans to Camarina (vi. 76). (Methods of
Observation and Reasoning in Politics, vol. i. p. 232. )
278 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
To such a citizen the written history of political events would
appear strangely insipid if it did not give at least some image
of those debates which imparted the chief zest to civic life and
by which political events were chiefly controlled. He was one
who (in modern phrase) had held a safe seat in Parliament
from the time when he came of age ; who had lived in the
atmosphere of political debate until it had become to him an
almost indispensable excitement ; and who would feel compara-
tively little interest in hearing the result of a Parliamentary
division unless he was enabled to form some idea of the process
by which the result had been reached. Such a man would
not have been satisfied with the meagre information that
the Athenian Ecclesia had discussed the fate of Mitylene,
that Cleon had advocated a massacre, that Diodotus had
opposed it, and that the view of Diodotus had prevailed by a
narrow majority. His imagination would at once transport
him to the scene of the parliamentary combat. He would
listen in fancy, as he had so often listened in reality, to the
eloquence of antagonistic orators, he would balance the possible
arguments for severity or clemency, he would conceive himself
present at the moment when one uplifted hand might incline
the scale of life or death, and he would feel the thrill of relief
with which those who supported Diodotus found that Athens
was saved at the eleventh hour saved, if the bearers of the
respite, rowing night and day, could reach Lesbos in time
from the infamy of devoting a population to the sword.
When Thucydides gave in full the speeches made by Cleon
and Diodotus, he was helping his reader, the average citizen
of a Greek republic, to do on more accurate lines that which
the reader would otherwise have tried to do for himself.
Thucydides was writing for men who knew Greek politics from
within, and he knew that, if they were to follow him with
satisfied attention, he must place them at their accustomed
point of view. The literary influences of the age set in the
same direction. At the beginning of the war the Attic drama
had been in vigour for more than forty years. The fame of
Aeschylus was a youthful memory to men who had passed
middle life ; Sophocles was sixty- four, Euripides was forty-nine.
Each had given great works to Athens, and was yet to give
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES. 279
inure. An age of vivid energy had found the poetry most
congenial to it in the noblest type of tragedy, and this, in turn,
fed the Greek desire to know character through deed and word.
In the hands of Euripides tragedy further became the vehicle
of dialectical subtleties and the dramatic mirror of public
debate. At the same time Attic oratory was being prepared
by two currents of influence which converged on Athens the
practical culture of Ionia, represented by the Sophists, and the
Sicilian art of rhetoric. 1
5. If the speeches in Thucydides were brought under a
technical classification, the Funeral Oration would be the only
example of the " panegyrical" or epideictic class ; the pleading
of the Plataeans and Thebans before the Spartan Commissioners
might possibly be called " forensic ;" and all the other speeches
would be in some sense " deliberative." 2 But such a classifica-
tion, besides being rather forced, does not correspond to any
real differences of structure or form. If the speeches are to be
viewed in their literary relation to the History, it is enough to
observe that the addresses of leaders to their troops may be
regarded as practically forming a class apart. 3
The right of an adult citizen to attend the debates of the
Ecclesia must have been acquired by Thucydides many years 4
before the war began. From its very commencement, as he
says, he had formed the purpose of writing its history. There
is every probability that he had heard most or all of the
important discussions which took place in the Ecclesia be-
tween 433 and 424 B.C. It was in 423 B.C., or at the end of
the year before, that his exile of twenty years from Athens
began. Thence we can name some at least of the speeches
to which he probably refers as heard by himself (auro?
1 The early history of Greek oratory, and the various influences which con-
tributed to mould it during the fifth century B.C., have been traced by the
writer in the Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos, vol. i. Introduction,
pp. xciii-cxxxvii.
2 /. e. in the largest sense of ffVfj.pov\evriKoi, under which the addresses of
leaders to troops would be included as irpoTpeimKoi the speeches in poli-
tical debate being dr)fj.T)yopla.i in the proper sense.
3 See the table at the end ; and below 7.
4 Probably from 451 B.C., if his birth may be placed in 471 B.C. Cp. K. F,
Hermann, Antiq. i. 121 ; Xen. Mem. Socr. iii. 0. 1.
280 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
iJKovcra), and not merely reported to him. Such would be the
addresses of the Corcyrean and Corinthian envoys, when they
were rival suitors for the Athenian alliance in 433 B.C. ; the
speeches of Pericles; the debate on Mitylene in 427 B.C.; and the
speech of the Lacedaemonian envoys in 425 B.C., making over-
tures of peace to Athens. If he was not present on all these
occasions, still, as a resident citizen, he would have exceptional
facilities for obtaining a full and accurate account. Taking this
group of speeches first, then, we may consider how far they are
apparently historical in substance, or show traces of artificial
treatment.
After giving the addresses of the envoys from Corcyra and
Corinth in 433 B.C., Thucydides notices the course of the debate
in the Ecclesia. Two sittings were held. At the first, he says,
the Athenians inclined to the arguments of the Corcyreans, and
were disposed to conclude an alliance both offensive and
defensive ; at the second they repented of this, but decided to
conclude a defensive alliance. The considerations which pre-
vailed with them were, that war was unavoidable in any case ;
that the Corcyrean navy must not be allowed to pass into the
hands of the Corinthians; and that Corcyra was a useful
station for coasting voyages. 1 These three arguments are just
those on which the Corcyrean speech, as given by Thucydides,
chiefly turns. 2 The circumstantial account of the debate in the
Ecclesia cannot be treated as fictitious. Either, then, Thucy-
dides has given the substance of the arguments really used by
the Corcyreans, or he has ascribed to them arguments used on
their side by Athenian speakers in the Ecclesia. Now the
speech of the Corinthian envoys has at least one mark of
substantial authenticity : the references to benefits conferred
on Athens by Corinth in the matters of Samos and Aegina 3
would certainly have occurred to a Corinthian envoy more
readily than to an Athenian writer. In both the Corcyrean
and the Corinthian speech it seems probable that Thucydides
has given the substance of what was really said, though he may
have added touches from his recollections of the subsequent
debate in the assembly. Similar is the case of the speech
1 Thuc. i. 44. - i. 32-3J. 3 i. 42.
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES. 281
made by the Lacedaemonian envoys at Athens in 425 B.C. 1 The
historian's comment on it is as follows : " The Lacedaemonians
spoke at such length' 2 [i.e. for Spartans], in the belief that the
Athenians had previously desired a truce, and had been
hindered only by Spartan opposition ; so that, when peace was
offered, they would gladly accept it, and restore the men."
This clearly implies that the speech ascribed to the envoys
which Thucydides may well have heard is historical in
substance.
The Thucydidean speeches of Pericles raise three distinct
questions : How far do they preserve the form and style of
the statesman's oratory ? how far do they express the ruling
ideas of his policy ? and how far do they severally represent
what he said on the several occasions ?
As Thucydides must have repeatedly heard Pericles 3
whom he describes as the first of Athenians, most powerful
in action and in speech, 4 it would be strange if he had not
endeavoured to give at least some traits of the eloquence
which so uniquely impressed contemporaries. Pericles is said
to have left nothing written : 5 but Aristotle and Plutarch have
preserved a few of the bold images or striking phrases which
tradition attributed to him. 6 Several examples of such bold
imagery occur in the Thucydidean speeches of Pericles, 7 and it
1 Time. iv. 17-20.
2 By roffavra in such a context Thucydides usually means "only thus much, "
as ii. 72, roffavra elirbvTwv HXaraiSiv. But in iv. 21, roffavra flirov refers back
to iv. 17 2, robs d \6yovs /j-aKportpovs ov Trapd TO eiuObs ^.rjKvvovfjiev.
3 See e.g. ii. 13, Z\eye 6t Kal d\\a oldirep el&Oei HepiKXfy.
4 i. 139.
5 Plutarch, Pericl. c. 8 : <*yypa<fx>v p.tv ovdtv dvoX^Xonre tr\7]v TU>V \l/ri<pi(rfji.a.T<i>v ,
diro/j.i'rjfj.oi'eveTai dt 6Xiya iravrdiraffiv.
6 Arist. Rhet. iii. 10 7 : &<rvep HepiK\fjs <pTj rr\v vebrifra. rrjv airo\o^vriv ev
T(j)iro\{/J.i{} OUTWJ f)<f>avicr6a.i K TTJS 7r6Xeojs, uffirep et ns rb Hap IK rov tviavrov ^e\oi:
ib. TJ]V "Aiyivav dfaXew ^/cAewe ryv XTJ/UTJI/ TOV Heipattws. Plut. Per. 8 5
quotes his saying, rbv 7r6Xe^oc ijdi] Kadopav airb HeXoirovvriffov Trpoff<t>tp6fievoi> :
and of those who fell at Samos, tyKu/j.idfav eirl rov @rnj.a.Tos aOavarovs ?\eye
yeyovtvai KaOairep rovs Oeovs' 01) yap ticelvovs avrovs 6pwfj.ev, dXXa TCUS TI/JLCUS As
txovffi Ka.1 rots ayaffois & ira.p^'xovffi.v ddafdrov^ elvai TfK/j.atpt>fie6a.
7 E.g. ii. 43, rbv dyripuv eiraivov KaXXiffrov Upavov irpoi'ttJ.tvoi . . . : 41,
fj.vrjjjif'ia. KdKwi' Ka.ya.duv didia ^vyKaroiKlffavres . . . : 43, avdpCiv firi<pavwv ird<ra
yi) ra^os . . . , and others passim in the ^rird^cos : in ii. 62, Kyirlov Kal
282 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
can hardly be doubted that they are phrases which have lived
in the historian's memory. But the echo is not heard in single
phrases only. Every reader of the Funeral Oration must be
aware of a majesty in the rhythm of the whole, a certain
union of impetuous movement with lofty grandeur, which
Thucydides has given to Pericles alone. There is a large
alloy, doubtless, of rhetorical ornament in the new manner
of overstrained antithesis : 1 but the voice of the Olympian ' 1
Pericles is not wholly lost in it. There can be no question,
again, that the speeches of Pericles in the Ecclesia accurately
represent the characteristic features of his policy at the
time. 3 But how far do they severally represent what Pericles
said on the several occasions? Thucydides makes Pericles
use different topics of encouragement at three successive
stages.
In 432 B.C. Pericles emboldens the Athenians to reject
the Peloponnesian demands by a general comparison of the
resources and prospects on either side. 4 In 431 B.C., when
Archidamus is about to invade Attica, Pericles repeats his
former exhortations, but supplements them by a detailed
exposition of Athenian resources, financial and military. 5 In
e-y/caXXciTTto-^a TrXoirrou, and many more. Bold imagery of this kind was
characteristic of the elder school of oratory, and generally of what Dionysius
calls the avffr-ripa. ap/j.ovia : cp. Attic Orators, vol. i. p. 27.
1 The most glaring example is the reiterated contrast of "word" and
"deed," which occurs some eighteen times in the Funeral Oration, and is
parodied (as Mr. H. M. Wilkins observes, Introduction to the Speeches, p.
xxv) in the Platonic Menexenus [Menex. p. 236 D/Epyy /*&> rj/uv o'iSe x owt
TO, irpoffriKovra crfplffiv avrois, Giv TV%6vTes iropetiovTai TTJV ifj.ap/J,vr]v iropflav,
TrpoirefjupOevTes KOivjj /J.tv virb rrjs ir6Xews, Idig. 5e inrb r&v oiKeiwv' X6y<f> 5 STJ,
K.r.X. And immediately afterwards, Zpyuv eS irpaxOevrwv . . . \6yy KO\UIS
2 Ilept/cX^s ov\ij/j.irios, Ar. Acharn. 530. Eupolis notices the rapidity, the
charm, and the sting of his eloquence (A^ot, Frag. Com. i. 162) ; cp. Attic
Orators, i. p. cxxx.
8 Viz., to make no derogatory concessions, but to accept the war; to wage
it, however, mainly on the defensive, allowing the enemy to ravage their
lands, but guarding their possession of the city and the sea ; to rely chiefly
on their navy, and to retain a firm hold upon the allies, whose tribute gave
the financial superiority to Athens.
4 i. 140-144. 5 ii. 13.
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDWES. 283
430 B.C., after the second invasion of Attica, when the land had
been devastated and while the plague was raoino- Pericles
X O O O*
convened a special meeting of the Ecclesia, 1 with the twofold
purpose of reassuring his countrymen and of allaying their
resentment against himself. " As to the prospects of the war,
you may rest satisfied," he says, " with the arguments by which
I have proved to you on many other occasions that you have no
cause of uneasiness. But I must notice a special advantage
which the scale of your empire confers, one, I think, which
has never occurred to you, which I have not mentioned in
addressing you before, and which I should not have noticed now
as the claim implied might seem too arrogant did I not see
you unreasonably dejected. You think that you rule your allies
alone. I tell you that of the two fields open to human action,
land and sea, the latter is under your absolute dominion, not
merely to the extent of -your actual empire, but as much
further as you please. While you hold the sea in your present
naval strength, you cannot be resisted by the Persian king, or
by any nation on earth." 2 Thus, as the pressure on the
Athenian spirit becomes more and more severe, the exhorta-
tions of Pericles go on from strength to strength, until, at the
darkest hour of all, they culminate in a triumphant avowal
that the naval empire of Athens is not relative but absolute, is
not an empire over a limited confederacy but a boundless
supremacy on the sea. If this ascending scale, so fitly gradu-
ated, was due to the invention or arrangement of Thucydides,
it was a dramatic conception. But it seems more probable
that the topics really used by Pericles on these three occasions
were substantially those given by the historian. It is difficult
otherwise to justify the emphatic clearness with which the
special theme of the second speech is distinguished from that
of the first, and that of the third, again, from both. 3 On the
1 ii. 59, v\\oyov irotTJtray, i.e. t->jyK\t}Tov tKK\T]<rtai>, which Pericles could con-
vene as one of the Ten Generals (In 5' ta-Tparriyei).
2 ii. 62 2.
3 Compare ii. 13 2, Trapyvei 5 ical irepl TWV Trap&vruv airep ical irpbrepov (re-
ferring to i. 140-144) . . . dapo-ew re ^/cAei/e, K.T.\. (introducing the fipecial
subject of the second speech), with ii. 62 1, introducing the special subject
of the third.
284 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
other hand, the first speech of Pericles betrays some remark-
able traces of manipulation by the writer. Earlier in the
same year the Corinthian envoy at the Peloponnesian congress
had given several reasons for believing that the Peloponnesians
were likely to prevail in the war. With help from the sacred
treasuries of Delphi and Olympia, he had said, they might lure
away the foreign seamen of Athens by offering higher pay.
They could acquire naval skill by practice. And among the
possibilities of the war he suggests the occupation of a fortress
in the enemy's country. 1 The speech of Pericles answers these
arguments point by point. But the correspondence is not
merely in the topics. The very phrases of the Corinthian
speech are repeated by Pericles in his reply. 2 Similar paral-
lelisms may be traced between the Corinthian speech and
that delivered by the Spartan Archidamus on the occasion
of the former congress : one with which the Corinthians cannot
be supposed to be acquainted in detail, since it was made to
the Spartans only, after strangers had withdrawn. 3 The fact
is that the eight 4 speeches recorded by Thucydides as delivered
at Athens or Sparta before the commencement of the war form,
for his purpose, a group by themselves. In these he has
worked up the chief arguments and calculations which were
current on either side. Collectively, they are his dramatic
presentation of the motives at work, the grievances on each
side, the hopes and fears, based on a comparison of resources,
with which the combatants entered on the struggle. At the
end of his first speech Pericles says : " I have many other
reasons to give for hoping that we shall prevail; but these
shall be given hereafter as the events arise (a/^a rot? epyot?) "
thus foreshadowing the speech of which an abstract is given
1 i. 121 3-4 ; 122 1.
2 Compare (1) Pericles, i. 143 1, et re ical Kivr/ffavTes TUI> 'OXv/tnKwv T)
AeA$>o?s 'xpi]}t,o.rwv fuaOip fjLei^ovi , . . virokafieiv TOI)S evovs T&V vavruv, with
the Corinthian speech, i. 121 3, curb T&V ev AeA<o?s /cat 'OXu/wr/p xpw*-
TUV . . . vTroXafietv fj.iffOy p.eiovL TOVS evovs avruiv vavparas : (2) Pericles, i.
142 6, with Corinthian, i. 121 4 ; (3) Pericles, i. 142 2, with Corinthian,
i. 122 1.
3 Compare i. 120-4 with i. 80-85.
4 See the Table at page 322 ; cp. i. 21, o<ra tiirov
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES. 285
on a subsequent occasion. 1 In this particular case, as we have
seen, the disposition of topics may well be authentic in the
main. But the composer's phrase is significant. It suggests
the habit of selecting from a certain stock of available material
and disposing the extracts with something of a dramatist's
freedom.
In the Funeral Oration there is nothing, apart from the
diction, which distinctly shows the invention of Thucydides.
At first sight there is some plausibility in the view that such
an oration would probably have contained allusions to the
heroic legends of Attica, and that the mind of Thucydides is to be
traced in their suppression. 2 But the argument may be turned
the other way. The very absence of mythical embellishment,
it might be urged, is rather a proof of the fidelity with which
Thucydides has reported a speaker who, regardless of the
vulgar taste, was resolved to treat a w T ell-wom theme in a new
and higher strain. One or two passages, indeed, have been
supposed to hint at the moral deterioration of the Athenian
democracy in the years which followed the death of Pericles ; 3
but the supposition seems gratuitous.
It remains to notice the debate in the Ecclesia on the
punishment of Mitylene. Cleon urges a massacre, Diodotus
opposes it. " These views," says Thucydides, " having been
stated with nearly balanced effect, the assembly came after all
to a division ; and on a show of hands the parties proved nearly
equal, but the view of Diodotus prevailed." The words can
only mean that, in the speeches of Cleon and Diodotus, Thucy-
dides has given the real substance of the arguments which were
1 i. 144 2, dXX' IKC'IVO. (j.v icai fv fiXXy \6y(f> a/M rots tpyois Srj\uB^ffeTat. The
promise is fulfilled by the speech of which an abstract is given in ii. 13, and
by that reported in the direct form in ii. 60-64.
2 The suggestion of F. C. Dahlmann (Hist. Forschungen, i. 23), to which
Grote justly opposes the fj.aKprjyope'ii' tv eid6criv ov /3ov\6/j.evos tdvu (Thuc. ii. 36).
The analogy of similar extant pieces (the Menexenus, the tirirdfaoi falsely
ascribed to Lysias and Demosthenes, the Panathenaicus of Isocrates, etc.)
justifies Dahlmann's major premiss, but does not support his conclusion.
3 Viz. (1) ii. 37 3, the reference to a restraining 5<?<w, and to those laws,
6(7oi &ypa(f>oi Svres ala'x.vvTjv ofj.oXoyovfj.tvrji' tpfpovo'i : (2) 40 1, 0iXoKaXoi;/ue' per
( irreXeias /ecu <f>i\o(ro<t>ov/j.ev S.i>ev //aXa/a'as. I cannot assume the allusions which
Classen finds here to a subsequent and opposite state of society.
286 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
found to be so " nearly balanced," and which led to so close a
division. Cleon's speech has one striking characteristic. In
several places it echoes phrases which occur in the speeches of
Pericles. 1 But, with these verbal parallelisms, there is a
pointed contrast of spirit. As Pericles describes the good
side of the intellectual Athenian nature, Cleon brings out its
weak side. As Pericles insists on the Athenian combination
of intelligence with courage, Cleon declares that this intelli-
gence leads men to despise the laws, and prefers ignorance
combined with moderation. 2 Pericles is gone: Cleon echoes
the words of the statesman as whose successor he poses, at the
very moment when he is contradicting his principles. It may
be observed that when Thucydides reports the speech of the
Syracusan demagogue Athenagoras, he marks his manner by a
certain violence of expression. 3 Cleon, whom Thucydides calls
"most violent," has no violence of expression. Probably
this abstention from vehemence of the demagogic type, this
superficial imitation of Pericles, are traits in which the Cleon
of Thucydides is historical.
This closes the series of those seven speeches, delivered at
Athens, for which Thucydides probably derived the " general
1 Compare (1) Cleon, iii. 37 2, rvpawLSa %x ere T V "PX 1 ?"* 'with Pericles, ii.
63 2, us TvpaitviSa yap tfSr) <?x eTe T V ^PX^I" ' (2) Cleon, iii. 40 4, tic rov
dKivdiJvov dvSpayadi^fffdai, with Pericles, ii. 63 2, ef TIS Kal r6de ev rcj) Trap6vri
SeSi&s dirpay/jLOffi''vri dvSpayaOi^erai : (3) Cleon, iii. 38 1, tyw p/lv oZv 6 cn/r6s
el/u TTJ yvd}/j.fi, with Pericles, ii. 61 2, Kal tyu /J.ev 6 atiros elui Kal oik ^ia-rafMi.
Compare also Cleon's notice (iii. 37 2) of rb KaO' yptpav dSe^s in Athenian
life, with what Pericles says of TO. KaB' yfiepav e'7riT??5ei//iaTa, ii. 37 2.
2 Cleon, iii. 37 3, dfjiadla re fiera ffw<f>poffvv^ w<^eXiyu.wrepov ?} Sejfto-njs fiera
aKo\a<rlas, K.T.\., contrasted with Pericles, ii. 40 2, ov TOI>S \6yovs rots Zpyois
ijyovfievoi, K.T.\., and ii. 62 5, rr^v r6\fj.av . . . i) iW(rts . . .
8 E.g. vi. 40, dXV ?rt Kal vvv, S> iravrajv d^vveTwraroi, el /J.TJ aavOdvere /caeca
T) dfiaG^ffrarol tare Siv lyu olda 'EXX^vw^, ^ dSiKtirraroi, el el56rfs
In a M6moire sur Thucj/dide, by M. Meierotto (in the Memoirs of the Berlin
Academy for 1790-91, p. 530), the writer observes, with reference to the dis-
crimination of character in the speeches: "Cleon et Athenagore parlent
ordinairement d'un ton dur, offensant et grossier, dont pourtant ils s'ecartent
quelquefois. " We have only one speech of Cleon and one of Athenagoras;
so far as these go, however, the striking thing, it seems to me, is not the
resemblance, but the contrast.
THE SPEECPIES OF THUCYDIDES. 287
sense " either from his own recollection or from the sources
accessible to a resident citizen. The only one of these which
exhibits distinct traces of artificial dealing with subject-matter
is the first speech of Pericles. And in this the only traces
are, first, a certain adjustment of the language to that of
the Corinthian speech made earlier in the same year; 1 and,
secondly, a phrase by which the composer prepares the reader
for a subsequent speech of Pericles.
6. We now come to the speeches made elsewhere than at
Athens from 432 B.C. onwards, or made at Athens later than
424 B.C. In regard to all or most of these, Thucydides must
have relied on reports of the " general sense " brought to him
by others (rot? a\Xo9ev iroOev e/jiol aTrayyeXXovcriv^)? The first
general characteristic which claims notice is the occurrence of
passages certainly, or almost certainly, written Avith a con-
sciousness of later events. These passages may be cast into
three groups, according as they relate to (I.) the affairs of
1 As the Corinthian speech contains a prophecy (after the event) of the
occupation of Deceleia (eiriTfixt<r/j.6s, i. 122 1), so the corresponding passage
of Pericles contains what may be a reference to the Athenian occupation of
Pylos and of Cythera (i. 140 3, einTfixi^iv . . . TrXewrcu'Tas ^s TTJV tKelvwv).
* Thuc. v. 26 : "It befell me to live in exile for twenty years [423-403 B.C., or
nearly so] after my command at Amphipolis. I thus became conversant with
both parties indeed, as an exile, I saw most of the Peloponnesians and was
enabled to study the events more at my leisure." The phrase here KO.I yevo-
ptvip trap' afjL<t>or{pois rots irpdyiMcri certainly implies more than that Thucydides
was in the countries which were the theatre of the war. It implies that he
was in intercourse with the actors. The words Ka.9' yvvxiav denote the " ease "
or "leisure" of one who had no official status, political or military. Hitherto
Thucydides had been himself an actor in the war (in the Ecclesia or as ffTpaTrj-
76s) ; now he was only a thoughtful spectator. During his exile Thucydides
certainly spent some time in Italy and Sicily. Marcellinus quotes ( 25) the
statement ws <f>vyu>v ipKT}fffv tv 'IraXt'g, and there was even a tradition of his
burial there ( 33). There are traces, I think, of Thucydides' personal know-
ledge of Sicily in the speech of Alcibiades (vi. 17 3). Niebuhr conjectured, and
E. Wolfflin has shown (Antiochus v. Syrakus u. Coelius Antipater, Winterthur,
1872), that Thucydides (vi. 2 ff.)used the St/teXtwrts <rvyypa<f>ri which Antiochus
of Syracuse brought down to 424 B.C. These are the chief data for con-
jecturing the general nature of the materials which Thucydides may have
had for the speeches subsequent to 425 B.C. In many cases, probably, he
had good sources of information, though it is hardly likely that the words
S>v avrbs iJKova'a can include any speeches except those made at Athens before
his exile.
288 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
Sicily, (II.) the Deceleian war, (III.) the final defeat of
Athens. 1
(I.) 1. Speaking in the congress at Gela in 424 B.C., Her-
mocrates warns his hearers against the designs of Athens. The
Athenians, he says, are now on our coast with a few ships; but
some day they will come with a larger fleet, and endeavour to
reduce the W 7 hole island. 2 The Athenian fleet on the Sicilian
coast at this time must have numbered some fifty or sixty
triremes. 3 Hermocrates, speaking in 424 B.C., certainly would
not have spoken of these as " a few ships," least of all when it
was his object to show that Athens was formidable. 4 But
Thucydides, when he composed the speech, had in view the
vast fleet at least thrice as numerous 5 sent to Sicily in
415 B.C.
2. Nicias, in his second speech dissuading the Athenians
from the expedition to Sicily, says that the only Sicilian cities
likely to join the invaders are Naxos and Catana. 6 Both ISTaxos
and Catana did, in fact, join the Athenians. But the Athenians,
when they opened the campaign in Sicily, had hopes of other
cities also. The alliance of Messene 7 was solicited by Alci-
biades, though without success. Both Athenian and Syracusan
envoys were sent to Camarina, and it was not without much
hesitation that Camariua resolved to remain neutral. 8 The
1 In the list of nine passages noticed here, I have not included any in which
the suggestion of acquaintance with subsequent events did not seem to me
tolerably strong and clear. Thus I have purposely omitted the passage in
which Archidamus says (432 B.C.) of the war, dtdoiica 8t /j.3.\\ov ^ KO! rots
Trcucriv avrov viroXiiru/j.ei' (i. 81 6), in which some find a knowledge of its
actual duration ; a passage in vi. 11 (in the speech of Nicias), which might
possibly be regarded as foreshadowing the aid actually lent by Sicily to Sparta
at a later time (viii. 26) ; and a reference by Hermocrates to future feuds and
reconciliations between the Sicilian cities (iv. 64).
Five of these passages have been noticed by previous writers, viz. Nos.
1, 5, 6, 7, 9 ; the others Nos. 2, 3, 4, 8 have not, to my knowledge, been
considered in this light before.
2 iv. 60, 6\iyais vaval Trap6vres , . . TrXtovi Trore crroXy eXOovras.
3 Twenty triremes had been sent in 427 B.C. under Laches (iii. 88), whom
Pythodorus had superseded ; forty more were afterwards sent under Euryme-
don (iii. 115), and these had now joined the first detachment (iv. 48).
4 As Grote remarks, vii. 189, n.
* Thuc. vi. 31. 6 vi. 20. 7 vi. 50. 8 vi. 88.
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDWES. 289
precision of the forecast made by Nicias betrays knowledge of
the event.
3. Again, when the Athenian attack on Sicily is imminent,
Hermocrates, in his speech at Syracuse, gives reasons for think-
ing that it will fail. Numerous as the Athenians are, he says,
they cannot outnumber the united forces of Sicily. " And if
they should fail from want of supplies in a foreign country,
they will still leave glory to those against whom their design
was laid, even though they should be ruined mainly by their
own errors." 1 Thucydides elsewhere expresses his own view of
the Sicilian disaster. The primary cause of the failure was
not, he thinks, a miscalculation of forces, but rather the
neglect of the Athenians at home distracted as they were by
faction to support the army in Sicily, a neglect which blunted
the zeal of those engaged in the campaign. 2 The words
ascribed to Hermocrates were written by Thucydides in retro-
spective view of the Athenian errors which had led to the
Athenian defeat.
4. The speech of Euphemus, the Athenian envoy at Cama-
rina, offers another example. Urging the people of Camarina
to join the Athenians rather than the Syracusans, he reminds
them that they will not often have an opportunity of securing
such powerful auxiliaries. And if, he says, you dismiss them
now, " one day yet you will long to see even the least part of
them, when their succour can no more avail you." 3 A few
years later (405 B.C.), the Carthaginians, already victorious over
Selinus, Himera, and Agrigentum, advanced against Gela and
Camarina. Dionysius, who had become tyrant of Syracuse,
failed to relieve Gela. The inhabitants of Camarina, like those
of Gela, were forced to abandon their city; and when the
conclusion of peace between Dionysius and the invaders
allowed them to return, they returned as tributaries of Car-
thage. 4 The protection of Syracuse, in which Camarina had
1 vi. 33. 2 ii. 65.
3 vi. 86, ty el rep virbiTTtp 7) AwpaKrov edffere aire\9fiv T) /ecu cr^aXeurcw, tri
fiovXyaeffde /ecu iroXXoarbv fj.6pt.oi> avrTjs ISeiv, Sre ov5v ZTI irtpavel irapayevbfjifvov
vtuv. (For en thus used in menace or presage, cf. Soph. El. 471. In Aesch.
Earn. 812, Shilleto conjectured v/j,fis 5' tr' [for es] &\\6<f>v\ov eXOovcrai \P6va. \ yi,s
d' fpaff6rifffff0f.) * Diod. xiii. 108-114; Xen. ffellen. ii. 3.
T
290 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
trusted, proved a broken reed. Thucydides must have been at
work on his History for some years after the end of the Pelo-
ponnesian war, perhaps as late as 396 B.C. 1 When he put that
emphatic menace into the mouth of Euphemus, the fate which
actually overtook Camarina soon afterwards was surely present
to his mind.
(II.) 5. The Corinthian speaker at Sparta in 432 B.C. alludes
to the establishment of a fort in Attica as one of the possibili-
ties of the war; 2 and Pericles, in the parallel passage of his
first speech, admits that the construction of a hostile fort might
do harm by facilitating raids and by tempting slaves to desert. 3
6. Alcibiades, speaking at Sparta in 415 B.C., urges the
occupation of Deceleia. " It will benefit you," he says, " and
will embarrass the enemy in many ways. I will briefly notice
the chief of these. Most of the property in the country will
become yours by capture or surrender. The Athenians will
forthwith lose their revenues from the silver mines of Laurium,
and all their present gains from the land and the law-courts.
Above all, they will suffer by the irregular transmission of
tribute from their allies, who, when satisfied that you are
making war in earnest, will slight their demands." 4 These
predictions accurately correspond with the effects of the occu-
pation as afterwards described in the historian's own words. 6
The temporary presence of the invading enemy had not hitherto
hindered the Athenians from reaping the fruits of the soil ; but
now " they were deprived of their whole land " including, of
course, the mines at Laurium. " More than twenty thousand
slaves had deserted to the enemy." All their sheep and oxen
1 Thucydides mentions an eruption of Aetna in 426 B. c. as the third on record
(iii. 116) implying ignorance of that in 396 B.C., noticed by Diodorus, xiv. 59.
On the probability that Thucydides was at work on his History for at least
some years after 403, cp. Classen, Eiril. xxx. I cannot, however, accept Ullrich's
ingenious suggestion that the reference to Antiphon dpicrra T&V fj-fxpi ffJ-ov
6a.va.Tov diKrjv a.Tro\oyr)<ra.nevos (viii. 68) points to a tacit comparison with the
defence of Socrates (399 B.C.).
2 Thuc. i. 122 1. 3 i. 142 2.
4 vi. 91 7. In the sentence, ols . . . TJ %uy>a KaTeffKevaarai, TO. TroXXa 7rp6s v/j,8.s
TO. fi.tv \7]<t>6tt>Ta, ra d' avr^fj-a-TO. ^et, the word avr6fjLara, as commentators have
seen, refers to the desertion of slaves, included in the KaraffKevat as household
chattels or "live stock."
6 vii. 27-28. On the avTo/j.o\iai of slaves, cf. viii. 40.
THE SPEECHES OF TIIUCYDIDES. 291
were lost. The whole number of adult male citizens was
required for military duty on the walls or in the field, a neces-
sity which would suspend the sitting of the law-courts and, as
Alcibiades foretold, close that source of profit. 1 The expenses
of the State were heavily increased, its revenues were perishing.
Alcibiades might easily have foreseen the importance of occu-
pying Deceleia. But the minute correspondence between the
special results which he is made to predict and those which
Thucydides relates in his own person indicates that the pro-
phecy followed the event.
(III.) 7. The Athenian speaker at Sparta in 432 B.C. says to
the Spartans : " If you were to overthrow our empire and estab-
lish your own, you would soon alienate the good- will which you
have gained because we are feared, if you are to continue the
policy of which you gave a specimen during your brief leader-
ship of Greece against Persia. The usages of your community
preclude intercourse with others, and moreover a Spartan
citizen on foreign service observes these usages as little as those
of Hellas at large." 2 There is a manifest reference here to the
period after the close of the war, when the Spartan promises of
" liberating Greece " were falsified. And the reference to the
misconduct of tha Spartan citizen abroad was certainly not
suggested by the case of Pausanias alone. The war had fur-
nished two signal instances. Gylippus had been convicted by
the Ephors of appropriating part of the treasure taken after the
capture of Athens. 3 Lysander the first Greek who received
divine honours from Greeks had surpassed the arrogance of
Pausanias. 4
1 The reference of Alcibiades in the words 8<ra . . . fab TWV
vw u<pf\ovi>Tcu is to the income which the State derived from court-fees of
various kinds, especially the deposits (irpvravfia) made by parties to a law-suit,
as well as from pecuniary fines, confiscations, etc. Bockh (Publ. Econ. i.
461) understands the passage thus, following the scholiast. Meineke (Hermes
iii. 359) and Madvig (Adv. i. 328) conjecture deKarfvrrjpiuv, "places where
public tithes and taxes were taken" objecting, as against the vulgate, that
it does not appear why even a virtual state of siege should suspend the sitting
of the law-courts. Thucydides, vii. 28 2, gives the plain answer all the
citizens were required for military duty.
1 Thuc. i. 77 6.
* Plut. Lys. 16-17, Nic. 28, cf. Diod. xiii. 106.
4 With Plut. Lys. 18 cf. Paus. vi. 3 14-15, Athen. xv. 696.
292 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
8. The striking speech of Brasidas to the Acanthians (424
B.C.) deserves to be considered in this connection. It is
throughout an emphatic assertion that the cause in which
Sparta fights is the cause of Greek liberty. " I have not come,"
he says, "to support a party. I do not consider that I
should be bringing you freedom in any real sense if I should
disregard your constitution, and enslave the many to the few,
or the few to the many. Such freedom would be harder than
a foreign yoke : and we, the Lacedaemonians, should reap no
thanks for our pains, but rather blame instead of honour and
renown." 1 Now. what Brasidas protests that Sparta will not
do, is precisely what Sparta actually did at the end of the war,
with the result which he anticipates. Oligarchies of the
narrowest type boards of ten were established by Lysander
in most of the cities, with a Spartan governor and garrison in
each to repress the popular party. 2 The many were literally
enslaved to the few, and they found the freedom which Sparta
had given them harder indeed than any foreign rule. It can
scarcely be doubted that this speech of Brasidas composed by
Thucydides after the close of the war was inserted by him
here, just at the moment when Sparta was making the first
advances to the democratic cities of Northern Greece, for the
purpose of bringing out the glaring contrast between Spartan
promise and Spartan performance.
9. In the conference between the Athenian and Melian
negotiators, the Athenians remark that, in the event of Athens
being vanquished, they would have less to fear from the
vengeance of Sparta than from the vindictiveness of smaller
States. 3 The reference here is unmistakable. After the sur-
render of Athens in 404 B.C., a congress was held at Sparta
1 Thuc. iv. 86 3. In 4 there is no doubt to my mind that ovd' &v
[for oi>5 affa<j>ri\ is the right reading, &v eirifapeiv being the oblique of
2 See Isocr. Panegyricus, 110-114, where he denounces the partisans of
the narrow Lacedaemonian oligarchies in the several States ol ruv deKapxiuv
KOLvuvriffavres and speaks of the miseries which they inflicted on their own
cities by "choosing to be enslaved to a Helot" (i.e. to the /j.66a Lysander :
Tjpovvro 5 TU>V EiXi^rwv evi dov\veiv). The passage is a striking commentary
on the Acanthian speech of Brasidas.
3 Thuc. v. 91.
THE SPEECHES OF TIIUCYDIDES. 293
in which the destruction of the defeated city was advocated,
according to Xenophon, " by the Corinthians and Thebans
chiefly, but by many other Greeks too." It was by the Spartan
vote that Athens was saved. 1
The effect of such touches as these suggested by a know-
OO v
ledge of occurrences subsequent to the dramatic date may be
compared with that produced in a Greek tragedy when one of
the persons unconsciously utters a word or phrase which fore-
shadows the catastrophe. The spectator who knows the destined
end of the drama is affected in the same manner as the reader
who knows the sequel of the history. In using such touches,
however, Thucydides was probably thinking more of logical
than of artistic effect. His mind, with its strong concentration,
grasped the whole series of arguments or illustrations which
the experience of the war could yield ; and he brought the
most forcible of these to bear on his point without caring
whether the facts which suggested them were earlier or later
than the supposed date.
7. It has already been remarked that the addresses of
leaders to their troops may be considered as forming a class
apart from the rest. These military harangues, of which there
are twelve in all, are usually short. The object is always the
same to bring out vividly the essential points of a strategical
situation ; and the historian has been less uniformly attentive
here to the details of dramatic probability. 2 A modern writer
1 Xen. Helkn. ii. 2, 19-20.
2 Thus (1) the harangue is sometimes ascribed to several leaders collec-
tively ; e.g. vii. 65, TrapeKe\e6<ravro eKeivois ol re ffrparyyol Kal Fv\nnros Kal
e\eav roidde. So ii. 86, 6 Kvrj/j.os Kal 6 Bpavldas Kal oi a\\oi. r&v Hf\OTroi>vT]fflwv
ffrparrjyoi . . irapeKe\ev<ravro Kal eXfi-av roidde. In the case of the political
speeches, the only similar instance is when a single speech is given as made
by the two spokesmen of the Plataeans (irpord^avres ff<j>uv avrwv 'Acrrvfj.axoi'
re . . Kal AdKuva). It is obviously a different case when a speech is assigned
to envoys collectively (i. 32, ol KepKvpaTot. t\eav roidde, etc.), when one would
speak for the rest. (2) The military harangue is sometimes introduced in
words which imply that it was made several times over ; thus iv. 91
(Pagondas), irpoaKa\(av e/cCurrouj Kara \6xovs, SITUS pi) aOpboi eK\irroie rd 6ir\a,
t-n-eiGe . . \eywv roidde. Cf. vi. 68 (Nicias), Kara re eOvr) irnrapiui>> Ka<rra Kal
$v/jura<n roidSe irapeKe\evero. (Cf. eiwrapiwv ro ffrparoireSov TrapeKfXevero, iv. 94. )
In vii. 76 Nicias eiriirapiuv iQdpawe re Kal irapefj.v6elro, /So?? re Xf&iur* eri.
e/cclo-Tots /ca0' ot)s ylyvot.ro, Kal /foi/X^eros w eirl wXeiffrov yeyuviffKuv
THE SPEECHES OF TIIUCYDIDES.
would have attained the object by comments prefixed or added
to his narrative of the operations. Thus Archidamus, address-
ing the Peloponnesian officers before the first invasion of Attica,
dwells on the certainty of the Athenians being stung into
giving battle when they see their lands ravaged. 1 This serves
to heighten the reader's sense of the provocation offered, and
of the difficulty which Pericles must have had in restraining hi?
fellow-citizens. 2 Sometimes the speech of the general on one
side is as distinctly a reply to the general on the other as if it
had been delivered in debate. The Peloponnesian captains,
exhorting their men before the action in the Corinthian Gulf,
tell them that, though naval skill is much, it cannot avail
against courage. 3 Phormio, exhorting the Athenian crews,
tells t lie in, as if in retort, that though courage is invaluable,
their decisive advantage is in their naval skill. 4 Pagondas,
before the battle of Delium, tells the Boeotians that they must
fight, even beyond their own border, for the safety of Boeotia,
and reminds them that their fathers secured it for a time by
defeating the Athenians at Coroneia. 5 Demosthenes tells the
Athenians that they must fight, even on Boeotian ground, to
protect Attica, and reminds them of the Athenian victory over
the Boeotians at Oenophyta. 6 The speech of Brasidas to his men
on his Illyrian expedition is intended to bring out the contrast
between Hellenic and barbarian warfare; 7 his speech at
Amphipolis serves to explain his tactics. 8 The harangue of
Nicias before the last sea-fight at Syracuse marks the peculiar
character of the action as " a land-battle on board ship "
(jre^ofMa^a. airb z/eaw), and at the same time sums up for the
reader the whole meaning of that supreme crisis, when, as
Mcias reminds the men about to embark, the fleet is all that
remains of Athens and her great name. 9 This, and the cor-
responding speech of Gylippus on the Syracusan side, 10 are in a
high degree powerful and pathetic ; so, above all, is the last
1 Thuc. ii. 11. 2 ii. 59 f. 3 ii. 87.
4 ii. 89. 6 iv. 92. 6 iv. 95.
7 iv. 126. 8 TJ)V eirlvoia.v typdurai, v. 9.
9 vii. 61-64, }] i/rroXoiTTOS iroXts /ecu rb /j.tya 8vo/J.a. TUV 'A^Tjj'wj'.
10 vii. 65.
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES. 295
speech of Nicias before the retreat. 1 Nowhere else, perhaps,
has Tlmcydides given so free a scope to his own rhetorical
power ; yet even here it is strictly subordinated to his primary
purpose that of faithfully presenting the cardinal facts of the
situation as he conceived them.
8. The expression of character in the Thucydidean
speeches has the same kind of limitation which was generally
observed in Attic tragedy. It is rather typical than individual.
Tlmcydides seizes the broad and essential characteristics of the
speaker, and is content with marking these. We are some-
times reminded of the direct simplicity with which the epic or
tragic heroes introduce themselves : " I am Odysseus, the
marvel of men for all wiles, and my fame goes up to heaven."
" I am pious Aeneas, renowned above the stars." 2 "You voted
for war," says Pericles, " and now you are angry with me, a
man who deems himself second to none in discerning and
expounding the right course, a man devoted to his country and
proof against corruption." 3 These were salient points in the
public character of Pericles as conceived by the historian, 4 and
accordingly Pericles is made to say so. The fate of Nicias
seemed to Thucydides a signal example of unmerited misfor-
tune, since Nicias had been remarkable throughout life for the
practice of orthodox virtue. 5 And so, in his speech before the
retreat from Syracuse, Mcias says, " The tenor of my life has
been loyal to the gods, just and without offence among men." 6
1 vii. 76. The two last military speeches of Nicias take something of the
political character from the fact that, as he says in both, the army is now the
city : avdpes yap TnSXts a striking illustration of Sophocles, Oed. Tyr. 56.
2 Od. ix. 19 ; Aen. i. 379 ; cf. Soph. Oed. Tyr. 8, avrbs &5' t\ri\v6a, \ 6 ira<n
K\eivbs OlSiwovs KaXoti/J-fvos.
8 Thuc. ii. 60. 4 ii. 65.
6 vii. 86, iJKtcrra Si) 4ios 8>v ru>v ye fir' t/j.ov 'EXXi^wi/ & rovro dvffrvxtas
d<f>iK^ffdai, Sia ryv irdffav is dperyv vevofjuffpevriv ^TrirySevcnv : i.e. lit., his
whole course of life, regulated by law and tradition (vevop-itr^vy) in the
direction of virtue. The apery of Nicias was that which consists in fidelity
to the established observances of religion and to received notions of duty
as distinguished from the apery, less in conformity with popular concep-
tions, which Thucydides can still recognise in such a man as Antiphon
(viii. 68).
6 Thuc. vii. 77, iro\\a fdv es Oeovs v6fj.tfj.a SeSirirr)/mi, iro\\a Se es avOpuwovs
Siicaia Kal aveirtydova. As to the Letter of Nicias (vii. 11-15), its substantial
296 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
In the debate at Athens on the Sicilian expedition Alcibiades
is introduced by a prefatory sketch of his position and character.
Thucydides notices his ambition, his magnificence, especially
in the matter of horses and chariots, the licence of his private
life, his insolence, his public efficiency, his personal unpopu-
larity. 1 Then Alcibiades speaks, and begins by saying in so
many words that he has a better right than others to high
command ; he boasts of having entered seven chariots at
Olympia ; he avows that he does not regard his fellow-citizens
as his equals ; he asks whether his personal unpopularity inter-
feres with his administrative capacity. 2 The speech is merely
the sketch developed. It is the character of Alcibiades, as
Thucydides saw its salient points, condensed in a dramatic
form ; but it is not such a speech as Alcibiades could conceiv-
ably have made on this occasion, or indeed on any. Thucy-
dides has given us distinct portraits of the chief actors in the
Peloponnesian war, but these portraits are to be found in the
clearly narrated actions of the men; the words ascribed to
them rarely do more than mark the stronger lines of character ;
they seldom reveal new traits of a subtler kind. The tendency
of Thucydides was less to analyse individual character than to
study human nature in its general or typical phenomena. His
observation was directed, first, towards motives and passions
which may be considered, in regard to practical politics, as
universal influences : 3 next, towards the collective attributes
which distinguish whole communities from each other. Thus
the normal Spartan character is exhibited in its merits and its
defects. 4 The political character of the Athenians is arraigned
and defended ; 5 their intellectual character is illustrated in its
strength and its weakness. 6 And Thucydides shows a desire
to comprehend these conceptions of national character in for-
mulas, which he gives as epigrams to his speakers. The
genuineness might perhaps be argued from the fact that, while it dwells on
the wear and tear of the armament, there is no attempt to excuse his own
delay and his failure to prepare for the coming of Gylippus ; but the manner
of its introduction (drjXovffav roidde) seems to indicate the composition of
Thucydides.
1 vi. 15. 2 vi. 16.
3 iii. 82 2, yiyvb/j.ei>a /J.tv Kcd del e<r6fj.fva. e'ws &v ij avrij <pvcris TUV avQpwiruv y.
4 i. 68-72. 80-85. 5 i. 68-72, 73-78. 6 ii. 37 f. : iii. 37-40. '
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES. 297
Spartan disposition, says an Athenian, might be described as
one which regards everything that is pleasant as honourable,
and everything that is expedient as just. 1 The Athenians, says
a Corinthian, are, in brief, men who will neither rest nor allow
others to rest. 2 Athens, says Pericles, might be described as
the school of Greece, and the Athenian nature as the most
gracefully versatile in the world. 3
9. Those cases in which Thucydides gives merely a brief
summary 4 of a speech or debate suggest how slight the mate-
rials may often have been which he worked up in the oratorical
form. The political or ethical reflections with which the
meagre outlines were filled up were doubtless supplied in
large measure by Thucydides himself. The speeches, taken
altogether, are pervaded by certain general conceptions, ex-
pressed in formulas more or less constant, which indicate
unity of authorship. But it cannot be said, in the same
sense, that they bear the stamp of one mind. They do,
indeed, suggest certain intellectual habits, but it is seldom
possible to distinguish between opinions or modes of thought
which were in the air, and such as may have been proper
to Thucydides. Nor would much be gained if we could.
The real interest of the speeches in this aspect is something
more than biographical ; it is their interest as a contribution to
the intellectual history of a transitional period in an age of
singular mental energy. The age of faith was passing by, and a
rational basis for ethics which were then included in politics
was only in process of being sought. Thucydides is here the
representative of a time which, for the most part, could no
longer believe with Herodotus, but which had not yet learned
1 v. 105. 2 i. 70.
3 ii. 41. I regard the Melian dialogue as neither less nor more historical
than those speeches in which Thucydides had to rely on a slight knowledge
of the &fj.Tra.ffa yvw/j.-r). I cannot suppose, with Classen, that Thucydides had
any written documents to go upon. The frankness of the Athenians, which
Grote finds startling, is Thucydidean : his wish to portray ruling motives is
stronger than his regard for dramatic nicety.
4 E.g. i. 72 (where the general lines of the discourse in 73-78 are indi-
cated) ; iv. 21 (the general sense of Cleon's answer to the Spartan envoys) ;
iv. 58 and vi. 32 (debates at Gela and Syracuse) ; viii. 53 (debate at Athens
in 411 B.C.), etc.
298 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
to bring a Socratic method to bear on generalisations. He
appears so far as he is revealed at all as a thinker of intense
earnestness, with a firrn and subtle apprehension of his chosen
subject, alike in its widest bearings and in its minutest details ;
and of profound sensibility in regard to the larger practical
aspects, that is the political aspects, of human destiny. He has
neither a dogmatic religion nor a system of ethics. He cleaves
to positive fact ; his generalisations rarely involve a speculative
element, but are usually confined to registering the aggregate
results of observation upon human conduct in given circum-
stances. In the spirit of a sceptical age he makes his speakers
debate questions of political or personal morality to which no
definite answer is offered. In Plato's Gorgias Callicles distin-
guishes between "natural" and "conventional" justice, contend-
ing that " natural justice " entitles the strong to oppress the
weak, and that " conventional justice " is merely a device of the
weak for their own protection. 1 In the Republic Thrasymachus
defends a similar doctrine, namely, that "justice is another's
good and the interest of the stronger, and that injustice is a
man's own profit and interest, though injurious to the weaker." -
The sophist Hippias, in Xenophon's Memorabilia, argues in a
like strain that justice and law are merely arbitrary and con-
ventional. 3 This, no doubt, was one of the commonplaces of
sophistical dialectic in the time of Thucydides. The Athenian
speakers in his History defend the aggressive policy of Athens
by arguments which rest on substantially the same basis as
those of the Platonic Callicles and Thrasymachus. 4 But the
historian is content to state their case from their own point of
view ; he does not challenge the doctrine as the Platonic
Socrates does by comments of his own. The victims of
aggression, indeed, the Plataeans or Melians, appeal to a higher
justice than the right of might, and Thucydides hints that his
sympathies are with them ; 5 but that is all. The abstention is
characteristic. On the whole, it may be said that he evinces a
1 Plato, Gorgias, p. 482, c. 38. 2 Rep. p. 367 c.
8 Xen. Mem. iv. 4. 14. * Thuc. v. 105 ; vi. 82-87.
5 Not expressly, but by the naked repulsiveness in which he exhibits the
' ' right of might. "
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES. 299
personal liking for moral nobleness, 1 but refrains from deliver-
ing moral judgments, 2 as if these would imply laws which he
was not prepared to affirm or deny. But he insists on dis-
covering a rational basis for action. If a man or a State pursues
a certain line of policy, there must be some intelligible reasons,
he feels, which can be urged for it. This desire to enter into
the mind of the actors to find the motive behind the deed,
and to state it with all possible logical force is the mainspring
of the oratory in Thucydides, in so far as this is his own
creation. It is an element of dramatic vividness ; sometimes
also of dramatic untruth, when the reasonings supplied by the
historian to his actors are subtler than would probably have
occurred to the speakers or commended themselves to the
hearers. Thucydides is a philosophical historian, in the sense
that he wishes to record the exact truth, in a form which
may be serviceable for the political instruction of mankind.
But he has not, in the sense of Plato or Aristotle, a theory of
ethics or politics. Thucydides groups the observed facts of
practical politics, but without attempting to analyse their
ultimate laws. It might be possible to piece together Thucy-
didean texts and, by filling up a few gaps, to form a tolerably
coherent system of doctrine ; but the process would be artificial
and delusive. Possibly a Shakespeare might re-create Thucy-
dides from the fragments of his personal thought, but the breath
of life would be the poet's gift; the broken lights are all
that really remain. The paradoxes of one age are said to
be the truisms of the next, but the violent contrast sug-
gested by the epigram is hardly the important point to seize
if we desire to trace the growth of opinion. There was a
moment when the so-called paradoxes were neither paradoxes
nor as yet truisms, but only rather new and intelligent opinions,
seen to be such against the foil of notions which were de-
1 As Professor Sellar says (" Characteristics of Thucydides," Oxford Essays,
1857): "His own feeling shines out in such expressions as this, 'Simple-
mindedness, which is mostly an ingredient in noble natures ' (iii. 83). The
speeches attributed to Pericles are especially expressive of generous ideas of
man."
2 It is enough to instance the manner in which he relates without comment
the treachery of Paches to Hippias (iii. 54), and the assassination of two
thousand Helots by the Spartans (iv. 80).
300 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
caying, but had not quite gone out. For instance, when
Tlmcydides makes his speakers say, as he so often does, that
the future is uncertain, 1 we do more justice to the originality
of the remark if we remember that in the time of Thucydides
there were those who thought that the future was very fre-
quently indicated, at great moments, by signs from the gods.
Herodotus, for example, would have disputed the statement
that the future is uncertain, if it had been placed before him as
an unlimited proposition covering such crises as the Pelopon-
nesian war. 2 The same consideration applies to many of the
political or moral aphorisms, which may be regarded as those
of Thucydides himself. They are in silent controversy with
some unexpressed dissidence of contemporaries. The principle
of tacit contrast pervades the whole History, as in the Funeral
Oration the picture of Athens requires to be supplemented by
a mental picture of the Sparta to which it is opposed. 3 This
was of the inmost nature of Thucydides : the reluctance " to
speak at superfluous length" 4 was deep in him. His general
views must be measured both by the credulity and by the
higher scepticism of a naive age; so gauged, they are never
commonplaces, but, at the least, hints for a part of the history
which he has not told in words, because he did not distinctly
conceive that it could ever need to be told. "Fortune,"
Tvxy, is the name by which he usually designates the in-
calculable element in human life ; but this " fortune " is no
blind chance; it is, as he once explains it, "the fortune given
by heaven " (rj rv^n e '* TOV Oelov), the inscrutable dispensation
of a divine Providence. 5 The course of this fortune not only
baffles prediction, but is sometimes directly opposed to the
reasonable beliefs of men concerning the source which dispenses
it. Thrice only in the long tragedy of the war, as Thucydides
unfolds it, do men appeal expressly to the gods, invoking the
1 E.g. iv. 62, rb aaraQ^-rfrov rov fj.tX\oi>Tos ws firl TrXeiarov Kparei : vi. 9, wepi
T&V d<f>avuv /cat fj,f\\6vTuv KivSvvtveiv : ii. 42, TO dfiaves TOV Karo/>0u>yuaTos : ii. 87,
voft.iffa.1 TCUS TIJXO.IS evS^xecr&u ff<pd\\firdai rous dvdpuwovs, etc.
2 See e.g. Her. i. 45, 6eu>i> rty yu.ot . . . Trpoeffrifiaive ra yaeXXovra ZcreffOai : vi.
37, <f>i\tfi 54 KWS Trpoa-nfjialveiv 6 0e6s, K.T.\. On the omens, prodigies, dreams,
etc., in Herodotus, see Mure, Bk. iv. ch. 6, 3, and Rawlinson, i. 71 f.
3 Esp. ii. 37 and 39.
4 fj.aKpijyope'iv : i. 68, ii. 36, iv. 59. 5 v. 104.
THE SPEECHES OF 7HUCYDWES.
name of religion, in their agony, against tyrannous strength ;
thrice the power behind the veil is deaf, thrice the hand of the
avenger is withheld, and the miserable suppliant is struck
down by the secure malignity of man. The Plataeans appeal to
the altars which had witnessed the consecration of Greek
liberty, 1 and the Spartans kill them in cold blood. The
Melians are confident against the Athenians as the righteous
against the unjust ; 2 their city is sacked, their men are slain,
their women and children enslaved. Nicias, after the great
defeat at Syracuse, believes that the jealousy of the gods must
now be exhausted, and has a firm hope, based on a good life,
for himself and his followers ; 3 but the wretched remnant of
his defeated army are in great part butchered as they slake
their thirst with the bloody water of the Assinarus ; he himself
is put to death lest he should tell tales under torture, and the
survivors pass into a horrible slavery. Thucydides feels that
the ways of Heaven are hard to understand, but he does not
complain of them ; they are matters not for reasoning but for
resignation. 4 He regards the fear of the gods as a potent check
on the bad impulses of men, and notices the loss of this fear 5
as a grave symptom of moral anarchy. As to omens, oracles,
and similar modes of seeking miraculous light or aid, he no-
where denies the possibility of such light or aid being occasion-
ally given, though his contempt is excited by the frequency of
imposture; 6 this, however, he would affirm that such re-
sources are not to be tried until all resources within human
control have been tried in vain. 7 There is one way only,
Thucydides holds, by which man can certainly influence his
own destiny, and that is by bringing an intelligent judgment
(7i/ft)//,77) to bear on facts. Some have traced the influence of
Anaxagoras in the prominence which Thucydides gives to the
intellectual principle ; but no such prompting was needed
by a strong understanding of sceptical bent, and it may
1 iii. 59 2. 2 v. 104, Scrioi irpfc ov
8 vii. 77 4, iced rifJ-Ss Vos vvv rd re dirb TOV 0eov tXirlfeiv fjiriurepa. e
otKTOv yap air' avrwv ditarepoi ijSr) eff/J^v 1) <f>66vov.
4 ii. 64, cptpfiv re XP^I Ta T ai/j.6via dvayicalus rd re dtrb rCiv jroXf/j.i
dvSpdus. s ii. 53 ; iii. 82.
6 E.g. ii. 21 ; v. 26, 103 ; vii. 50 (of Nicias), ty KOJ. ayav tfetcw/tty re /cat
.evos. 7 v. 103.
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
be observed that Thucydides has at least not adopted the
language of Anaxagoras. 1 It is the peculiar merit of the
Athenian character, as portrayed in Thucydides, to recog-
nise intelligence as the true basis of action and the true root
of courage, 2 instead of regarding mental culture as adverse
to civic loyalty and warlike spirit. 3 If soothsayers cannot give
us prescience, reason well used can enable such a man as
Themistocles at least to conjecture the future. 4 In a trial of
human forces the chances baffle prediction, but superiority in
ideas (Sidvoiat) is a sure ground of confidence. 5 Yet the man
of sound judgment will not presume on this confidence, for he
will remember that the other element, " fortune," is beyond his
control. 6 Justice, rightly understood, is the "common good," 7
and is identical with true self-interest. 8 As the remorseless
exaction of an extreme penalty, "justice" may be opposed to
" equity ;" 9 or as a moral standard, it may be opposed to " self-
interest" in the lower sense. 10 And self-interest, when thus
opposed to justice, can appeal to "the immemorial usage," 11
believed to obtain among the gods, and so certainly established
among men that it may plausibly be called a sort of natural
necessity, 12 that the stronger shall rule the weaker. No
speaker in Thucydides goes quite so far as Callicles in the
Gorgias, or proclaims this to be " natural " as distinguished
from "conventional" justice. It is not said to be just, but
only natural and not unreasonable. 13 The argument against
capital punishment, which is put into the mouth of Diodotus,
rests on the observation that no restraints have yet been
devised which can be trusted to keep human passions in check.
1 vous, in Thucydides, occurs only in the phrases ev v$ ?x iv (* intend), rbv
vow Hx eiV "7>os TI, or Trpoo^xeti', and Kara, vow, "to one's mind." The general
term for the power of the intellect is yvw^rj, with which didvoia and ffwe<ris
are sometimes nearly synonymous.
2 ii. 40 2 ; 62, 5.
3 As Archidamus does (i. 84), and Cleon (iii. 37).
4 i. 138, TWV fj,e\\6vT(av eiri TrXeiffTov rov yevqaof^lvov &PL&TOS et/cacrr^y.
5 i. 843; vi. 11 6. 6 iv. 64.
7 TO Kowbv ayaebv, v. 90. 8 i. 41. 9 iii. 40; iv. 19.
10 i. 76, 79 ; iii. 56 ; v. 90 ; iv. 61. n i. 76, rb del Ka0e<rr6s.
12 v. 105, i]yovfj,e0a yap TO re Oelov SJ^TJ TO u.i'0puwei.6v re cracpuis dia iravrbs
virb <pvfffus dvayKaias, 06 av KpaTy, apxeiv. Cf. iv. 61, vi. 87.
13 vi. 85, ovStv &\oyov OTI. Kal
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES. 303
Legislators have gone through the whole list of possible penal-
ties, and even the prospect of death is found insufficient to
deter those who are goaded by want or ambition, and tempted
by opportunity. 1 The friendship of men and of communities
must be founded in the first place 011 a persuasion of mutual
benevolence, and on some congeniality of character; 2 but in
the long-run the only sure bond between States is identity of
interests. 3 The Peloponnesian league is loose just because the
interests diverge. 4 In default of a common interest, the only
guarantee for an alliance is balanced fear. 5 Similarly, in the
relation of the citizen to the State, patriotism is enforced by
the dependence of private on public welfare. 6 Pericles even
says that no fair or just legislation can be expected from
citizens who have not such a stake in the country as is repre-
sented by the lives of children. 7 The distinctive merits of an
oligarchy always provided that it is constitutional, and not of
the narrow type which Thucydides calls a "dynasty" 8 are
fairly recognised in the History. Archidamus and Brasidas
claim stability, moderation and disciplined loyalty for the
Spartan State. 9 A true democracy is pictured as one in which
three elements work together for the common good : the rich
are the guardians of property, the able men offer counsel,
and the mass of the citizens decide on the opinions laid before
them. 10 Democracy was the form of government under which
Athens had been greatest and most free r 11 and the best phase of
the Athenian democracy in his recollection, Thucydides says,
was just after the Revolution of the Four Hundred, since then
the oligarchic and popular elements were judiciously tempered. 12
Destiny may alter the part which a State is called upon to
perform, and its institutions may require to be modified
accordingly. Thus the Corinthians say to the Spartans, " Your
I iii. 45 3. 2 iii. 10. 8 i. 124. 4 i. 141.
8 rb avriiraXov 5<?oj, iii. 11 ; cf. iv. 92. 6 ii. 60. 7 ii. 44.
8 The Swaurreia (01) perk i>6(j.uv, unconstitutional) of Thebes in the Persian-
wars is opposed to the later 6\iyapxia iV<W/xoj, iii. 62.
9 i. 84 ; iv. 126 4.
10 vi. 39 (Hermocrates) ; cf. ii. 37 (Pericles). It is only Alcibiades (at
Sparta) who uses d-rj/jLOKparia in a narrow and bad sense, as a synonym for
a.Ko\acria ir\ri9ovs (vi. 89).
II vi. 89 6. ls viii. 97.
3 o 4 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
system is out of date if you are to cope with Athens. In
politics, as in art, improvements must prevail. Fixed institu-
tions are best for a city at peace. But the call to manifold
enterprise imposes the need of manifold development. Hence
owing to their varied experience the Athenians have been
' greater ' innovators than you." 1 The analogy suggested here
between politics and a progressive art 2 is the more significant
when it is remembered what the historian's age had seen
accomplished in sculpture, architecture and drama. It is also
worthy of remark that the only unqualified censures of demo-
cracy which occur in Thucydides, and the only protests against
change as such, are ascribed to the " violent " Cleon and the
" licentious " Alcibiades. 3
10. The choice of moments for the introduction of
speeches is not, with Thucydides, a matter of rhetorical caprice,
but has an intelligible relation to the general plan of his
work. A speech or debate reported in the direct form
always signalises a noteworthy point in the inner or mental
history of the war, as distinguished from the narrative of its
external facts : it announces thoughts and arguments which
exercised an important influence, and which therefore require
to be apprehended with the utmost possible distinctness. The
event which furnishes the occasion for inserting a speech need
not be of first-rate importance in itself, if only it is typical of
its kind, and therefore suitable for the dramatic exhibition of
reasonings which applied to several similar cases. The destruc-
tion of Plataea by Sparta was an impressive event; but its
effect on the general course of the war would scarcely have
warranted the amount of space devoted to the Plataean and
Theban pleadings, 4 if the occasion had not been a typical
illustration of Spartan and Theban policy. Such, again, is the
case of Mitylene, viewed as exemplifying the relation between
1 i. 71.
2 "Among early inquirers into the nature of human action the arts helped
to fill up the void of speculation." (Prof. Jowett, Introduction to Plato's
Republic. )
3 iii. 37 3 ; vi. 18 7. Thucydides speaks of the 01) drj/j-oriKy irapavo/j-ta of
Alcibiades in vi. 28 ; cf. vi. 15, where the same term is applied to him as in
i. 132 to Pausanias.
4 iii. 53-59, 61-67.
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES. 305
Athens and her subject allies ; and the dramatic form is given
accordingly, not merely to the Athenian debate on Mitylene,
but also to the appeal of the Mityleneans at Olympia. 1 The
speech of Brasidas at Acanthus is given in the direct form as
a specimen of his persuasive diplomacy in dealing with the
cities of the Chalcidic peninsula. 2 The rival overtures of
Athens and Syracuse to Camarina have a similarly represen-
tative character in relation to the wavering neutrality of the
Sicilian cities, and accordingly the direct form is given to the
arguments of Euphemus and of Hermocrates. 3 The absence of
speeches in the Eighth Book has been reckoned among the
proofs that this book had not received the author's last
touches. There can be no doubt that Thucydides was pre-
vented by death from completing or revising the Eighth
Book : 4 but if his general practice is considered, the argument
from the absence of speeches will appear questionable.
Much of the Eighth Book is occupied with negotiations, either
clandestine or indecisive, or both ; and in a period of similar
character which fills the greater part of the Eifth Book
Thucydides nowhere employs the dramatic form. 5 It cannot
surprise us that Thucydides has not given a dramatic emphasis
to the mere misrepresentations by which Alcibiades and Chal-
cideus prevailed on the Chians to revolt. 6 The Eevolution
1 iii. 9-14. 2 iv. 85-87. 3 v. 76-80 ; 82-86.
4 Classen examines the evidence in his Vorbemerkungen to Book viii. , with
these results : (1) Book viii. was left unrevised, owing to the author's death
while he was engaged upon it, and hence several inaccuracies of expression or
statement remain [cf. e.g. cc. 8 3-4 : the notice of the |3/>axa vav/j.axia in
c. 80, compared with c. 102 : c. 89 2 (T&V irdvv ffTparriywv, K.T.\.) : c. 90,
1, where ff<f>uv recurs four times in a few lines : c. 101 3, where the
geographical details are obscure]. (2) Such defects of the text were early
recognised, but for a long time no attempt was made to remedy them. (3) In
the Alexandrian or Roman age a recension of the whole History was made, of
which codex Vaticanus 126 is the representative. For Books i. vi. the cases
in which the codex Vaticanus alone has the true reading are not numerous :
in vii. they are more so : in viii. they are so frequent that here the Vati-
canus, as compared with all the other MSS., assumes the character of a
revised text.
8 Thuc. v. 14-83 (422-416 B.C.). In Book v. the direct form of speech
occurs only in the harangue of Brasidas (v. 9) and the Melian dialogue
(85-116).
6 viii. 14.
U
;o6 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
of the Four Hundred certainly afforded opportunities for
the insertion of speeches made in debate. But that Revolution
was primarily concerned with the form of the Athenian con-
stitution ; its special importance for the history of the war lay
in the use which Alcibiades was making of it to procure his
own recall. This is perhaps the only point in the extant part
of the Eighth Book at which the usual practice of Thucydides
would lead us to expect the dramatic emphasis ; and just here
it is found. Peisander brings his opponents to admit that the
case of Athens is desperate without the help of Persia. " This,
then," he says, "we cannot get, unless we adopt a more
temperate policy, and concentrate the administration in fewer
hands, so as to secure the confidence of the king, . . . and
recall Alcibiades, the only man living who can gain our end." *
In a revision of the book Thucydides would possibly have
worked up the speech of Peisander at greater length. 2
11. As regards the language of the speeches, Thucydides
plainly avows that it is chiefly or wholly his own. 3 The
dramatic truth, so far as it goes, is in the matter, not in the
form. He may sometimes indicate such broad characteristics
as the curt bluntness of the ephor Sthenelaidas 4 or the insolent
vehemence of Alcibiades. 5 But, as a rule, there is little dis-
crimination of style. In all that concerns expression, the
speeches are essentially the oratorical essays of the historian
himself. At the end of the war, when he composed or revised
them, the art of Ehetoric was thoroughly established at Athens.
The popular dialectic of the Sophists had been combined with
1 viii. 53.
a The absence of military harangues, too, in Book viii. is sufficiently
explained by the absence of any good occasion for them. The sea-fights at
Euboea (95) and Cyzicus were hardly such : and the narrative breaks off
before the more decisive actions of Cynossema and Aegospotami. The
question has been discussed lately in an essay, De Thucydidel Operis Libr!
viii. indole ac natura, by Paul Hell wig (Halle, 1876).
3 i. 22, where the d/c/n'/Jeia avrrj rCiv \'xfl^vruv is opposed to the v/j.Traffa
-yvdfjLT).
4 i. 86, TOI)S fiev X670i's TOI)S iroXXoik ruv ' A0Tjva.iii}i> oti yiyvdiffKU, K.T.\.
8 vi. 18 3, Ta/j.ieve<rOai es 8<rov /3oiA6/u,e6>a </>x e ' : 4, ffropeffw/j-evrb
(pobv-qua, etc. , where the scholiast remarks that this is the harshest (aK\r>p6TaToi')
or the metaphors in Thucydides, dXXd Kara 'A.\Kifii.<idr]v.
THE SPEECHES OF TIIUCYDIDES. 307
lessons in the minute proprieties of language. Protagoras
taught correctness in grammatical forms, 1 Proclicus in the use
of synonyms. 2 The Sicilian Rhetoric had familiarised Athenian
speakers with principles of division and arrangement. 3 Gorgias,
with his brilliant gift of expression, 4 had for a while set the
fashion of strained antithesis and tawdry splendour. It might
have been expected from the character of his mind that Thucy-
dides would be keenly alive to what was hollow and false in
the new rhetoric. Several touches in the History show that
he was so. Citizens in grave debate are contrasted with men
who play audience to the empty displays of sophists. 5 A con-
tempt for rhetorical commonplace is frequently indicated. Thus
Pericles declines to dilate on the legendary glories of Athens 6
or on the advantages of patriotic fortitude, 7 and Hermocrates
begs to be excused from enlarging on the hardships of war 8 or
the blessings of peace. 9 On the technical side, however, Thucy-
dides shows the influence of the new art. This often appears in
his method of marshalling topics and in his organisation of the
more elaborate speeches. 10 It is seen still more clearly if his
style is compared with that of the orator Antiphon. The
extant work of Antiphou as a writer of speeches for the law-
fireia, Plat. Phaedr. 267 c.
2 6pd6rT]s 6vo/j.dTuv, Plat. Euthyd. p. 277 E.
3 The two things which the early Sicilian Rhetoric most sought to teach
were skill in marshalling facts and skill in arguing probabilities : cp. Attic
Orators, vol. i. p. cxviii f.
4 Cp. ib. i. cxxiii. Gorgias was not properly either a student of technical
rhetoric or a sophist.
5 Thuc. iii. 38 7. ffotptffrwv [the word only here in Thuc.] dearais {ombres
KaB-ri/n^vocs yU.SXXoj' $) irepi 7r6\ews j3ov\evo/j^vois. Of. 5, pera Kaiv6Ti)ros \6yov
airaraffdai dpiaroi. Thucydides thrice uses e7ri5eits, but only once in reference to
oratory, and then in a general, not in a technical sense (iii. 42). The regular
speakers in the Ecclesia are thrice spoken of as pijropes, and always in a more
or less unfavourable tone (iii. 40 ; vi. 29 ; viii. 1).
6 ii. 36. 7 ii. 43. 8 iv. 59.
9 iv. 62. Compare what Alcibiades says at Sparta in declining to dwell on
the evils of democracy dXXd wepl 6/jLd\oyovfji.tvr)s dvoias ov5v &v Kaivdv \tyoiro.
10 As in the Plataean and Theban speeches to the Spartan judges (iii. 53-59,
61-67), in the speeches of Hermocrates and Athenagoras to the Syracusan
assembly (vi. 33-34, 36-40), and in the Funeral Oration. We can recognise a
conscious partition, more or less complete, into wpooi/Mov, irp60e<rts (or irpoKara-
a-Kevrj), dirtyr)cris, irlffreis, tirl\oyos. Cp. Attic Orators, vol. i. pp. 36, 181 ; ii. 4^2.
308 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
courts falls in the years 421-411 B.C. 1 The warmth of the
terms in which Thucydides describes him as " a master of device
and of expression," 5 a phrase identical with that which is
ascribed, as a definition of statesman-like ability, to Pericles
testifies at least to an intellectual sympathy. There is, how-
ever, no evidence for the ancient tradition that the historian
was the pupil of the orator. 3 Thucydides and Antiphon belong
to the same rhetorical school, and represent the same early stage
in the development of Attic prose. Both writers admit words
of an antique or a decidedly poetical cast. 4 Both delight in
verbal contrasts, pointed by insisting on the precise difference
between terms of similar import. 5 Both use metaphors rather
bolder than Greek prose easily tolerated in its riper age. 6 On
the other hand, there are three respects in which the composition
of Thucydides may be contrasted with that of Antiphon. First,
Thucydides has a pregnant brevity which would not have been
possible in such measure for a practical orator, since no ordinary
1 Of his extant works, Or. v., irepi rov'HpdiSov <povov, may be referred to about
417 B.C., and Or. vi., irepi rov xopevrov, to about 412 B.C. Cp. Attic Orators,
i. 34, 58, 63.
2 viii. 68, Kpdriffros kvQv^Qrfl'a.i . . . Kai a yvoirj elirelv. Cf. ii. 60, 6s ov5f>>bs
oto/juii rjfffftav elvat yv&val re TO. deovra Kal epfjMjvevffai ravra.
3 Caecilius of Calacte, in the Augustan age, conjectured that Thucydides had
been the pupil of Antiphon (Vitt. x. Oratt. ); Hermogenes (wepl IS. ii. 497)
notices the belief as current, but rejects it. It seems to have been a mere
guess, resting on resemblance of style. See Attic Orators, i. p. 4.
4 E.g. Antiphon : aArri^pios iroivf) irpoffrpbTraios evOvfiLos dffiraipti} (ii. 5. 5)
avOp&trivov <f>v\ov (iv. a. 2) ev8[a (ii. /J. 1) xwpo^tXeZi' (v. 78) <f>i\oOi>T7]s (ii.
/3. 12). Thucydides : irepiu-n-fj (=ffK<nrta, iv. 86) axOyduv (ii. 37) vavfidrr)?
(i. 121 ; cf. Pollux i. 95, rb vav^dras 6vo/j.dfi.v (rota VO.VTO.S) rpayiKwrepov tffO-f]-
(MTO. (iii. 58) effffa.fj.evuv (=idpvffafjLva}v, ib.) KfK/j.t]ures (iii. 59) Trepippvros
(iv. 64) <j>v\oicpiveiv (vi. 18) eirr}\vyd^fff&ai (vi. 36), and many more.
5 E.g. Antiphon: yvupiffrai SiKaffrai Sofaffral Kpiral (v. 94): the Trpd/cropes
TUIV aKovviuv distinguished from the atnoi TWV Tra.dTifji.dTwi> (ii. ft. 6) : ra Trap^.x't-
utva ffi]/j.eiois iriffTWffai,Td Se /uAAopTa TeKfj.ijplois (ap. Ammon. 127). Thucydides :
alrla Karriyopla (i. 68) : <f>p6vrifia Ka.Ta(f>p&i>ri/j.a ai?x 7 7A ta KaTa(f>p6vr]ffis (ii. 62) :
eTravdffT7]cra.v anreffrriffav (iii. 39) otf/c d^vverwrepov, KaLKO^iverwrepov 5e (vi. 76) :
KaroiKiffcu e^oiKiffai (ib.} Trapalveffts d^ltiiffis (i. 41) doKoiva <paivofj.^vr) (i. 32)
TrpofTri^ov\veiv avTeTTifioiiXfiieiv (i. 33) : SiKaffral . . . ffufipoviffrai (vi. 87).
6 E.g. Antiphon: TO. tx v V T ^ s biro^'ias eh rovrov (f^povra (ii. y. 10): larpovs rfjs
drux/as (ii. /3. 13); cf. i. y. 1 andii. /3. 10. Thucydides: ij eiriffT-f)^ eyyrjpdffeTat
(vi. 18) t'arpos rrjs 7r6\fwj (vi. 14) Soi'Aotrd (f>p6i>r]fj.a rb al<f>vLSiov (ii. 61) 7r6Xe/iios
Si'atos 8i5daKa\os (iii. 82) iriK\acr9ijvai (iii. 59), etc.
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES. 309
hearer could have followed his meaning with full comprehen-
sion. 1 Secondly, Tlmcydides often departs not only from the
natural but from the rhetorical order of words, in order to throw
a stronger emphasis on the word which is the key-note to the
thought ; and in this again he is seen to be writing for readers,
not for hearers. 2 Thirdly, the strings of clauses, forming periods
of a somewhat loose and inartistic kind, are longer with Thu-
cydides than with Antiphon, and this because Thucydides is
striving to express ideas of a more complex nature. 3 The
originality and the striking interest of the historian's style con-
sists, in fact, in this, that we see a vigorous mind in the very
act of struggling to mould a language of magnificent but im-
mature capabilities. Sometimes the direction of the thought
changes in the moment that it is being uttered. 4 Then arise
obscurities which have their source in the intense effort of
Thucydides to be clear at each successive moment to say
exactly what he means at that moment. The strong conscious-
ness of logical coherence then makes him heedless of formal
coherence. The student of Thucydides has one consolation
which is not always present to the student of a difficult \vriter.
He knows that he is not engaged in the hopeless or thankless
1 This brevity appears (1) in such constructions as ywaiicelas operas, Seat. . .
ZaovTat. (ii. 45), or rCiv fj.kv dpxew T&V & Siavoelffdat. (sc. fipxew, i. 124) ; (2) in
the suppression of a clause which can be supplied mentally, as often before a
sentence introduced by ydp (cf. i. 120 ad init.) : (3) in the pregnant use of
words, as vi. 11, Strep r/yuas eicfapovffi (=eK<j>opovvTes \tyovat). Cic. de Oral. ii. 22,
sententiis magis abundat quam verbis . . . ; 13, ita verbis aptus et pressus
est, etc. Quint, x. 1, densus et brevis et semper sibi instans. Dionys., p. 792,
says that it belongs to Thucydides TTfipStirOai Si ^\axiffruv 6vo/j.drui> TrXelcrra
crrifj.aivfiv, and Marcellinus, 50, speaks of his davfj-aaral ppaxvmjres-
2 E.g. iii. 39, /J.erd rCiv 7roXe/ua>rdVw' tyuas ffrdvres 8ia<f>0eipa.t. : i. 33, yevfaerai 8t
. . KaXr; T) ZwTVxia, Kara TroXXot rrjs ^er^paj xp f l a * ' vi- 82, oOs Zvyyevels <pa.ffiv
6vras rjfj.as 2ii/Da/c6crioi 5e5ov\&ff6ai : v. 91, irl (rurrjpiq. vvv roi)s X6*youj tpov/j-ev rfjs
8 E.y. Such a sentence as that in Antiphon v. 21, r\ ^v 7rp6<f>a<ris fKartpy
diroOavdv ainbv rbv 'Hpwdyv, may be compared in general structure with Thuc.
vi. 82, i}/j.fis yap ' luwes 6i>res . . . 2upa/c6criot SedovX&ffOai, but the latter has
a much longer series of clauses. In Thucydides the transition from a simple
string of clauses to a period properly so called is commonly made by the inser-
tion of explanatory parentheses introduced with ydp.
4 E.g. vii. 42, rots 2vpaKov<rlou . . . /cordrX^fts lytvero . . . bpwvres, K.T.\.
Cp. iii. 36, vi. 24, iv. 108, etc.
3 io THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
task of unravelling a mere rhetorical tangle. Every new light
on the thought is sure to be a new light on the words. 1
O O
12. The practice of introducing speeches was continued
through the whole series of Greek and Roman historians, and,
owing to its classical prestige, even maintained itself for a time
in modern literature. But it is curious to trace the process by
which it was gradually estranged from the spirit and signifi-
cance of its origin. For Xenophon, the idea of portraying
character in deed and in word was as natural as for Thucydides.
Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, with all their differ-
ences, alike belong to an age in which the historian draws
from life and for life, setting forth what has been done and
said, but rarely theorising or commenting. In the political life
which Thucydides and Xenophon represent, public speech
wielded the decisive force ; but while the main purpose of
Thucydides is political, that of Xenophon is rather ethical.
Xenophon. introduces direct speech or dialogue chiefly to
enforce the moral lessons of individual character. The collo-
quial tone prevails even in political debate, 2 and there is rarely
any attempt at condensed reasoning of the Thucydidean type.
In the course of the fourth century B.C. the school of Isocrates
developed a normal literary prose, and such writers as Ephorus
and Theopompus applied a rhetoric more florid than their
master's to the misplaced embellishment of history. 3 At the
same time the political life of Greece was decaying, and with it
1 Jelf (following Runner) rightly classes Thucydides with those writers
who, " engrossed with the subject, were overpowered by their now of thought,
and endeavouring to concentrate these notions in all their fulness in as few
words as possible, passed from thought to thought, without taking much
care that the several parts of the whole sentence should be connected
together with a strict grammatical accuracy." The constructions of Thucy-
dides, he adds, "in spite of, or perhaps because of, their grammatical inac-
curacy, have a power and depth of expression which perhaps no other prose
writer ever attained." (Greek Grammar, ii. 593.) Thucydides wishes his
thought to be what Aristotle requires in the period (Rhet. iii. 9) evatvoirrov.
Cp. Attic Orators, i. 35.
2 See e.g. the speeches of Critias and Theramenes in Xen. Hdlen. ii. 3.
This colloquial tone is one element of the quality in Xenophon which Quin-
tilian (x. 1) calls "iucunditas inaffectata. "
3 On the rhetorical historians of the Isocratic school, see Attic Orators
ii. 48 and 427.
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDWES. 311
the instinct which in earlier days would have been offended by
the obtrusion of false ornament on a narrative of civic action.
Then came the age of the Alexandrian erudition, and history
was made a province of learned research. Polybius is a
learned historian with a theory, but he is also a practical
statesman and soldier. He is utterly opposed to the rhetorical
treatment of historical subjects. He expressly condemns the
sensational writers who confound the scope of history with
that of tragedy. Tragedy, he says, may stir the emotions by
any fiction which is not too improbable : the part of history is
to teach lessons of permanent worth " by means of real deeds
and words." l At the same time, he is keenly alive to the power
of oratory. He observes how a single weighty speaker may
turn the tide at a crisis, 2 and he apparently feels bound to
make some attempt at representing oratorical effect. When he
makes his persons speak, he does so much in the spirit of
Thucydides, though less elaborately: that is, he has some
definite points or arguments which he wishes to present in the
most vivid form at a critical moment. Like Thucydides, he
sometimes balances the harangues of generals on opposite
sides. 3 Sometimes he begins to give merely the purport of
what was said, and then passes from the oblique to direct
speech, 4 as Thucydides occasionally does. And it may be con-
cluded that, like Thucydides, he gave the " general sense "
faithfully whenever it could be ascertained. 5 But Polybius
stands alone in this respect among the historical writers after
Xenophon. In the period between Alexander and Augustus
the rhetorical school of history prevailed. Diodorus Siculus
1 Polyb. ii. 56 : ^ccei /j,ev yip (i.e. in Tragedy) Set dia r&v tn.9a.vwr6.ruiv
\6yii)v Kir\rjl;ou Kal \f/vxayuyf)(rai Kara rb irapbv rovs aKovovras, evOdSe 5e (in
History) 5ta rwv d\r}6u>u>v Hpyuv Kal \6yuv els rbv wdvra xp^ov SiSd^ai Kal irelffai
robs <t>i\ofj.adovvras.
2 Polyb. xi. 10 : oOrws els \6yos, evKalpus pyQels vir' dvdpbs d&oirlffrov,
ov fwvov airorpeirei r&v xeipl<rruv aXXa Kal irapop/jiq irpbs ra Kd\\icrra TOI/J
3 E.g. of Hannibal and Scipio, Polyb. iii. 108-111.
4 Polyb. xi. 28; xxii. 14.
6 See Polyb. xxx. 4 : fy 5' 6 vovs TTJS diroKplffeus roiovros, the ^fiiraffa yvdfjL-ri
of Thuc. i. 22.
3 i2 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
and Dionysius of Halicarnassus 1 are both rhetoricians, the
rhetoric of Diodorus being combined with a quasi-philosophical
bent, and that of Dionysius with aesthetic criticism. Diodorus,
indeed, has some quaintly judicious remarks on the introduction
of long speeches into history. They interrupt the story, he
says, and distract the reader : writers who wish to show their
eloquence should do so somewhere else. A history should be
an organic whole; a speech which is inserted amiss cannot
have vital grace. 2 Still, speeches are sometimes desirable,
Diodorus adds, for the sake of variety (TTOIKIXIO). When
circumstances require that an envoy or senator should speak,
the historian must gallantly accompany his personages into
the arena of debate. 3 Diodorus appears to recognise, as he
certainly used, the free licence of invention. 4 His view is sub-
stantially that of Plutarch 5 and Lucian. 6 They demand that the
speech shall be appropriate to the speaker and to the occasion,
but the same conditions are equally binding on an epic poet.
Among the Eoman historians of the first rank, Livy is the one
who has made the largest use of this freedom. He once says,
in reference to a speech of Cato's, that, as the real text is ex-
tant in Cato's Origines, he will not give the reader a pale copy
1 I have purposely abstained from examining the criticisms of Dionysius on
the speeches in Thucydides, since he regards them exclusively from the point
of view of contemporary rhetoric, not at all from the historian's. His
criticisms on Thucydides are, for this very reason, immeasurably inferior to
those in his excellent essays on the orators. The lengthy speech of Veturia
to Coriolanus (Dionys. Ant. Bom. viii. 46-53) is a fair specimen of his own
practice in the rhetorical embellishment of history.
2 tffTtprjTai TTJS \j/vx<-Kijs x<fy" ros > Diod. xx. 2.
3 Diod. xx. 2, 6 yu.rj redappTiKbrus (nryKaTa^alvuv irpos TOI)S v rots \6-yois ayuvas
KCU avros VTrairios SLV etrj.
* Thus he says, ib., fj.eyd\uv Kal \afj.wpuv rQiv vTrod^aewv ovaCiv, ov irepio-
pa.rtov eXdrrova -rCiv tpywv cpavrjvai. rbv \6yov.
8 Plut., praecept. ger. Reipubl. 6, where he objects to long speeches before
battles as out of place. The speeches, often happily dramatic, in his own
biographies are the best comment on his remark (de glor. Athen. p. 346), rCiv
IffTopiKuv Kpdriffros 6 TTJC 5i.rfyi)cn.v uffirep ypa.<j>T)v irddeai Kal irpoffwirois ei'dwXo-
jroiijcras.
6 Lucian, de conscrib. hist. 58, ty St wore . . . Seiv6rr]Ta : "And if it should
ever be necessary to introduce a person speaking, first of all let the speech be
suitable to the person and the matter ; next let it be as clear as possible :
then, however, you are at liberty to declaim (prjTopevffai) and to show your
oratorical power."
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
of that rich eloquence. 1 It might have been inferred that Livy
was careful in his speeches to represent individual character
and manner. 2 But the inference is scarcely supported by the
extant portion of his work, though it is possible that his
portraits may have become more accurate in this respect as he
came to later times and ampler materials. The speeches are
sometimes of great power and beauty, but the rhetorical colour
is uniform, and there is sometimes an absolute disregard of
dramatic probability. 3 Sallust has higher merit in this de-
partment. The war of Jugurtha and the conspiracy of Catiline
were, w r hen Sallust wrote, events of recent memory, and each
had been illustrated by striking contrasts of character. Ac-
cording to Plutarch, the employment of shorthand writers 4 to
report debates in the Roman Senate began in G3 B.C. ; it was
certainly well established in the closing years of the Republic.
Sallust had some advantages for the presentation of character
in a manner at once dramatic and historical, and he seems to
have used them well. There is no reason to doubt that Caesar's
speech in the debate on the punishment of the conspirators
was substantially such as Sallust reports ; 5 and his way of
introducing a discourse of Memmius in the Jugurthine War
implies that it is true not only to the substance but to the
manner. 6 Tacitus uses the dramatic form more variously than
1 "Simulacrum viri copiosi," Liv. xlv. 25.
* As Quintilian says of Livy, "ita dicuntur omnia, cum rebus turn per-
sonis accommodata," x. 1.
* E.g. Liv. ii. 40 ; xxiii. 8, 9. Livy seems sometimes to have taken hints
from Polybius or Thucydides ; cp. xxx. 30 with Polyb. xv. 6, and vii. 30 with
Thuc. i. 32.
4 Plut. (Cat. min. 23) says that the speech of Cato in the debate on the con-
spiracy of Catiline is believed to be the only one of his preserved Cicero
having taught some of the most rapid writers the use of a shorthand (fftj^ela
trpodi5d!;avTos tv fUKpois Kal ppax^fft- TVTTOIS iro\\Cn> ypa.fj.fj.aTuv exovTa 5vvaiJ.iv), and
having distributed these writers through the Senate-house. For the Romans,
Plutarch adds, did not yet possess TOVS Ka\ov(j.tvovs a"r)fj.ei(rYpd<f>ovs : this was
the beginning of it. Suetonius mentions a speech of Julius Caesar which,
Augustus thought, must have been imperfectly taken down by the actuarii
(Caes. 55). The usual Roman word was notarius. Martial has an epigram on
a shorthand writer, xiv. 208.
8 Sallust, Catil. 51, 52.
6 Bellum Jugurth. 31 a striking illustration of the Roman feeling that
oratory, for its own sake, deserved a place in history.
3i4 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
Sallust, but with a stricter historical conscience than Livy.
He resembles Tlmcydides and Polybius in never introducing a
speech merely for oratorical effect, but always for the purpose
of illustrating a political situation or character. 1 There is a
well-known instance the only one in ancient literature in
which the discourse given by the historian can be compared
with an official record of the discourse really delivered. In the
Eleventh Book of the Annals the Emperor Claudius addresses
the Senate in support of a proposal for imparting the Roman
franchise to the provincials of Gallia Comata. 2 The bronze
tablets found at Lyons in the sixteenth century, and now in the
Museum there, give what purports to be the real speech of
Claudius on this occasion. Tacitus and the tablets disagree
hopelessly in language and in nearly all the detail, but agree
in the general line of argument. 3 Knowing the antiquarian
turn of Claudius, Tacitus might easily have concluded that
the Emperor's speech would dwell largely on historical
precedents; but it seems more likely that he knew, from
oral or written report, the substance of what Claudius had
said, and worked up this in his own way. Here, then,
is a rough gauge of the approximation which might be
made to the truth by a historian who composed a speech
based on " the general sense of what was really said."
Thucydides and Polybius, Sallust and Tacitus, are widely
removed from writers who introduce harangues merely as
opportunities of display. 4 The latter tendency prevailed in
1 Ulrici, indeed (Charakteristik der antiken Historiographie, p. 148) regards
some of the speeches in Tacitus as inserted merely for dramatic ornament ;
e.g. Ann. i. 17, 22, 42, 43, 58, 59 ; ii. 14, 45, 46 ; iii. 16, 61 ; iv. 34, 35 ; xii.
10. But in all such cases, I think, it will be found that a more serious motive
is also present.
2 Tac. Ann. xi. 24.
3 The text of the two bronze tablets, found in 1524, has been edited by A.
de Boissieu in his Inscriptions antiques de Lyons. It is printed in Orelli's
edition of Tacitus at the end of Book xi. of the Annals, p. 342.
4 As they are introduced, for example, by Quintus Curtius, who gives
the speech of the Scythian ambassadors to Alexander (vii. 8), and an im-
possible harangue of Dareius to his army before the battle of Arbela
(iv. 14).
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
what Gibbon calls " the elaborate and often empty speeches
of the Byzantine historians." 1 The Latin chroniclers of the
middle ages rarely ventured on such ambitious efforts. But at
the revival of letters the classical practice of inserting speeches
was revived by historical writers, whether they wrote in Latin 2
or in their vernacular. 3 M. Daunou 4 quotes some curious
examples from the French literature of the three centuries
before our own. Thus Vertot, in his Revolutions romaincs,
entered into competition with Dionysius, Livy and Plutarch,
by inventing a fourth version of the appeal made to Coriolanus
by his mother in the Volscian camp. Mezerai could make
Joan of Arc address her executioners in a harangue full of
violent invective and sinister prediction; and this when the
contemporary record of her trial existed, with its notice of the
rare and broken utterances which belonged to her last hours. 5
By degrees a controversy arose on the question whether a
historian is entitled to invent speeches for his persons, and the
literary world was long divided upon it. Isaac Voss 6 and
Mably 7 were among the more distinguished champions of the
oratorical licence ; among its opponents were Voltaire whose
opinion has been quoted already and D'Alembert. The latter
declared, in 1761, that a historian who filled his work with
1 Decline and Fall, ch. 43. It is difficult to believe, with Gibbon, that the
speech of Attila to his soldiers before the battle of Chalons as given in Cas-
siodorus can rest on any basis of fact (ch. 35) ; however it may be with the
letter of Belisarius to Justinian given by Procopius, which Gibbon thinks
"genuine and original" (ch. 43).
2 E.g. Paulus Aemilius, Strada Mariana, Buchanan, Grotius, De Thou.
3 E.g. Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Mezerai.
4 Cours d'titudes Historiques, vol. vii. p. 466 ff.
5 As M. Daunou gravely observes : "La plus simple reflexion suffit pour
concevoir que les Anglais, tenant en leur pouvoir la malheureuse Jeanne, ne
lui auraient pas permis, a sa derniere heure, de debiter publiquement toutes
ces sottises " (p. 476). The authentic records of her trial and execution are
contained, he adds, in vol. iii. of the Notices et Extraits des Manuscrits de la
Bibliotheque du Roi. It is an extraordinary example of the rhetorical taste
of the age that Mezerai should have preferred to declaim, when he might have
told a true story of the deepest pathos.
6 Ars Historica, 20.
7 De la maniere d'ecrire THistoire, Works, vol. xii. 452-461.
316 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
speeches would be sent back to college. 1 But the practice
lingered on a little longer, being commonly defended by the
plea that it was enlivening, and that it could not be really
deceptive. 2 The spirit of scientific criticism has now banished
it for ever from history, and has relegated it to its proper
sphere in the province of historical romance.
13. Thucydides set the first great example of making
historical persons say what they might have said. The basis
of his conception was common to the whole ancient world : it
was the sovereign importance of speech in political and civic
life. But in Thucydides the use of the licence is dramatic
that is, conducive to the truthful and vivid presentment of
action. In most of the later Greek and Eoman historians it is
either rhetorical that is, subservient to the display of the
writer's style or partly dramatic and partly rhetorical. The
art of rhetoric passed through two sta.ges of educational signifi-
cance in the ancient world. In the first stage, with which
Thucydides was contemporary, rhetoric meant a training for
real debate in the assembly or the law-courts. Then, as Greek
political life died down, rhetoric came to mean the art of
writing or declaiming. 3 The speeches in Thucydides have the
dramatic spirit, and not the rhetorical, because, although the
art of rhetoric has helped to make them, they are in direct
relation with real action and real life. The rhetorical historians
of the ancient world represent the second stage of rhetoric :
1 "Tranchons le mot, aujourd'hui Ton renverrait aux amplifications de
college un historien qui remplirait son ouvrage de harangues : " quoted by
Daunou (vii. 472) from a paper on the art of writing history, read by D'Alem-
bert to the French Academy (Ib. p. 115).
2 Thus Gaillard, in his History of Francis I., published in 1766, answers the
charge of a "petite infidelite" by saying : " Je reponds que je ne puis voir
une infidelite reelle ou d'un cdte personne ne veut tromper, et ou d'un autre
cote personne ne peut-etre trompe " (Daunou, p. 458). This is much the same
as the apology for Livy's speeches made by Crevier in the preface to his
edition : " Quasi vero cuiquam innocens ille dolus imponat." Botta's History
of Italy from 1780 to 1814 contains one of the latest examples, perhaps, of the
licence, when he gives (Book iii. ) the speeches of Pesaro and Vallaresso in the
debate of the Venetian Senate on the French invasion of Italy (1793), and
(Book v.) a debate in the Piedmontese Council. The practice was thoroughly
suited to the Italian genius, and maintained itself longest in Italy.
3 The process of this change has been sketched in the Attic Oratory, vol. ii.
ch. xxi\ .
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDWES. 317
their speeches are only more or less possible declamations.
The modern writers who attempted to revive the practice were
in a lower deep still, since for them rhetoric was not even a
living element of culture. 1 But it may be well to consider a
little more closely how far and in what sense Thucydides can
be called dramatic. The epithet " dramatic " is sometimes
applied to narrative when no more is apparently meant than
that it is vivid or graphic. In the proper sense, however, a
narrative is dramatic only when it elicits the inherent eloquence
of facts. Thucydides is dramatic, for instance, when he places the
Melian dialogue 2 immediately before the Sicilian expedition. The
simple juxtaposition of insolence and ruin is more effective than
comment. The bare recital, thus ordered, makes the same kind
of impression which the actions themselves would have made if
one had immediately succeeded the other before our eyes. It
might not be difficult, with a little adroitness, to represent
Thucydides as a conscious dramatic artist throughout his
work ; and an ingenious writer has actually shown how his
History may be conceived as a tragedy cast into five acts. 3
1 The Roman historical writers of the Empire were under the influence of
the recitations (cp. Mayor on Juvenal iii. ; and Heitland and Raven, in the
Introduction to their extracts from Quintus Curtius, in the Pitt Press Series,
p. 12). Prejudicial to history as this influence was, it yet gave a special
interest to the speeches, regarded as exercises in a familiar art.
2 In the remarkable speech of the Athenian envoy Euphemus at Camarina
(vi. 82-86, 415 B.C.), the dramatic purpose of the Melian dialogue is continued
and completed. The plain avowal of Athenian motives is reiterated, and
their bearing on the Sicilian expedition is explicitly stated. See vi. 83,
ri]v re yap <?/cet d/>xV (in Greece) dp-qKa.fj.ev dia 5^os ?x eiv > Kal TO. evddde (in
Sicily) Sia rb avro ijiceiv /j-era rCiv (j}i\uv a.ff<pa\us Ka.Ta,aT~r](T6[j.evoi. 85, wcrre
Kal Tou>6d8e dK&s irpbs r \vaire\ovv ical, d \tyofj.ft>, & 2vpa.Ko<r[ov$ 5tos
8 Ulrici, Charakteristik der antiken Historiographie, p. 313. Book i. is a
prologue, he says, which acquaints the reader with the immediate ante-
cedents of the drama and the relative positions of the chief actors. The
First Act comprises the plague at Athens, the supreme efforts of Pericles and
his death, the destruction of Plataea by Sparta, the overthrow of Mitylene by
Athens (ii. 1 iii. 68). The Second Act presents the typical party-strife at
Corcyra ; fortune wavers ; the Athenians are defeated by the Aetolians, but
blockade the Spartans in Sphacteria (iii. 69 iv. 36). The Third Act opens
with the surrender of the Spartans ; the Athenians occupy Cythera ; both
sides are weary of the struggle, and at length a peace is concluded. But
there are signs that it cannot last, and now Alcibiades comes forward to
,18 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
But it would perhaps be truer to say that the war itself pre-
sented striking contrasts, analogous to those which a dramatic
poet contrives : the dullest writer could not have wholly
missed these contrasts ; and if Diodorus had been the historian,
his work, too, might have revealed the five acts ; but Thucy-
dides was peculiarly well fitted to bring out these contrasts
with the most complete effect. He was so, because he felt
the whole moment and pathos of the events themselves ;
because he saw them with the distinctness of intense concen-
tration ; and because, partly under the influence of language, 1
he had even more than the ordinary Greek love of antithesis.
It is obvious that the Peloponnesian war, as a subject for
history, may be said to have dramatic unity in the sense that
it is a single great action : as, by an analogous metaphor, the
subject of Herodotus may be said to have epic unity, because
the various parts, though they cannot be brought within the
compass of one action, 2 can be brought within the compass of
one narrative. And, apart from this rudimentary dramatic
unity, the Peloponnesian war has a further analogy to a drama
in presenting a definite moment at which the cardinal situation
is decisively reversed as it is reversed in the Oedipus
Tyrannus, for instance, when the king discovers that he is an
incestuous parricide. That moment is the Sicilian expedition.
The supreme test of " dramatic " quality in a history of the
Peloponnesian war must be the power with which the historian
advocate the Sicilian expedition (iv. 37 vi. 23). The Fourth Act is the
crisis the Sicilian expedition, ending in the Athenian defeat (vi. 24 vii.). In
the Fifth Act the catastrophe is delayed for a moment by the recall of
Alcibiades. He brings back a gleam of prosperity with him. But he is
again dismissed ; and then comes the final ruin of Athens (viii.).
1 The Greek instinct for symmetry and just measure sharpened the percep-
tion of contrast, and the desire of vividly expressing contrast helped to mould
the language. Thus when it is said of Antigone, wavuv ywaiKwv <lis dva^iu-
T&Tt\ | KdKiar' air' gpywv eikXeeo-rdrwj' (f>0ivei (694), it is the keenly felt opposition
of things that is striving to utter itself in the forcible opposition of words.
Then Rhetoric arose, with its opposition of words even where there was
no commensurate opposition of things. Thucydides was partly under
this influence of Rhetoric : witness his Zpyov and X67os, etc. ; but, by a
reversal of the natural process, the very habit of verbal antithesis tended to
quicken the observation of opportunities for its effective employment.
8 /.e> no drama on the Persian wars could have included (e.g.) the Egyptian
and Scythian episodes of Herodotus.
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYD1DES. 319
lias marked the significance of the Sicilian expedition as the
tragic "revolution" (peripeteia), the climax of pity and terror,
the decisive reversal. Tlmcydides has devoted the whole of
his Sixth and Seventh Books to the events of those two years,
thus at once marking the significance of the expedition as the
turning-point of the war. And every reader knows with what
tremendous effect he has traced its course, from the moment when
the whole population of Athens was gathered at the Peiraeus
in the early midsummer morning to see the splendid fleet sail
for Sicily, and the trumpet commanded silence while the whole
multitude joined in prayer, and wine was poured from vessels
of silver and gold as the paean 1 arose, down to that overthrow of
which he writes that they were destroyed with utter destruction,
arid that few out of many came home. 2 Here, at the point in
his story which supplies the crucial test, Tlmcydides shows
that he possesses true dramatic power. By the direct present-
ment of the facts, not by reflections upon them, he makes us
feel all that is tragic in the Sicilian disaster itself, and also all
that it means in relation to the larger tragedy of the war. The
same power is seen in many particular episodes of the History :
for example, in the self-restrained majesty of Pericles, the great
protagonist of the opening war, whose courage, amidst havoc
and pestilence, ever rises as the Athenian courage declines ; or
in the first appearance of Alcibiades on the scene, with his
brilliant versatility and his profound lack of loyalty, with his
unmeasured possibilities for good or evil, just when the Sicilian
project is trembling in the balance. Without pressing the
parallel between the History and a work of dramatic art to
any fanciful length, it may be said with a definite meaning
that Thucydides has not merely the inspiration of action, but
often also the spirit of the noblest tragic drama.
It is natural to regret his silence in regard to the social and
intellectual life of his age. 3 The simplest explanation of it is
1 vi. 30. s vii. 87.
8 The names of Aeschylus, Sophocles (the poet), Euripides (the poet),
Aristophanes, Pheidias, Ictinus, Anaxagoras, Socrates, are among those which
Thucydides nowhere mentions. In addition to Helen (i. 9) and Procne
(ii. 29), only four women are named in the whole History, and not one of
them has the slightest human interest in reference to the war Chrysis and
Phaeinis, successively priestesses of the Argive Hera (ii. 1, iv. 133) ; Strato-
320 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
that he did not conceive such details as requisite for the illus-
tration of his purely political subject. The art and poetry of
the day, the philosophy and the society, were perhaps in his
view merely the decorations of the theatre in which the great
tragedy of the war was being played. Though he wrote for all
time, he did not conceive of an audience who would have to
reconstruct this theatre before they could fully comprehend
his drama, 1 No writer has ever been at once so anxiously
careful and so haughtily improvident of the future. His
characteristic dislike of superfluous detail seems to have been
allied with a certain hardness of temperament, such as is
indicated by the tone of his reference to the poets. 2 His
banishment may also have infused something of bitterness 3
nice, the sister of Perdiccas (ii. 101) ; and Archedice, the daughter of Hippias
(vi. 59). The Parthenon is alluded to as a treasury ; and the Propylaea are
noticed as a work which had reduced the balance in it (ii. 13, 3, where ev
1 Thucydides can, indeed, imagine a time when Sparta shall be desolate,
and only the ruins of Athens shall remain ; i. 10 2, AaKeSai/movluv yap
tl i} 7r6Xts pi) fj.ii} 6 fir] . , . ' AOyvaiuv d TO avrb TOVTO iraObvTUv, K.T.\. But
he has no conception of a time when the Hellenic civilisation that he knew
should have passed away. Thus Pericles says that Athens (unlike Troy or
Mycenae, he means) needs no Homer to persuade posterity of her greatness :
she has established on every shore imperishable monuments of her power for
evil or good, where the aidia fj-v-rj^la. are the Athenian settlements on con-
quered or on friendly soil. Cf. ii. 64, r)v iced vvv virevdw^v irore . . . fj.vfjfj.fj
Ka.Ta\f\el\l/eTcu, K.T.\, where the /W^/M? assumes a purely Hellenic standard.
2 He cites them simply as authorities for facts, whose statements often
require to be modified : i. 21 1. Thus he makes a sort of apology for
quoting so equivocal an authority as Homer respecting the power of Agamem-
non (i. 9 4), and the size of the Greek fleet (10 3). His extracts from
the fine passage in the Hymn to the Delian Apollo are the briefest which
could establish his two points that there was an Ionian festival at Delos, and
that it included a musical contest (iii. 104).
3 There is a singular suggestiveness in the speech which the exile Thucydides
attributes to the exile Alcibiades (at Sparta in 415 B.C., vi. 92). It is the
historian's way of showing how the pain which he himself had known might
work in a disloyal character. "My patriotism," says Alcibiades, " is not for
a country that wrongs me ; it was given to a country that protected my rights.
The true patriot is not he who abstains from moving against the country
from which he has been unjustly banished, but he who, in his passionate love
for her, strives by all means to regain her."
May not these words KC 0X6?roXtj oOros 6p0cDs, o$x 5s &" TTJV eavrov adl/cus
dTToX^tras /J.T-, eirlri have a reference to Thrasybulus and the patriotic exiles
who marched from Phyle upon Athens ? Just after the restoration of the
democracy the point would have been peculiarly effective.
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES. 3 21
into his recollections of the Athenian life, with all its gracious
surroundings, with all its social and intellectual delights, from
which he was suddenly cut off, so that he should know them
no more until he came back in his old age and found them
changed. Ko one can tell now r how the memories of early
sympathies may have grouped themselves in his mind as he
looked out in later years from his home in Thrace on the sea
over which he had sailed on the long-past day when he failed to
save Ainphipolis ; but at least there is a twofold siiggestiveness
in those passages 1 which touch on the glories of Athens.
There is the feeling of the man who has never lost his love and
admiration for the Athenian ideal ; and there is also a certain
reluctance to translate this ideal into concrete images, 2 as if,
in the words of Oedipus after his ruin, it were sweet for thought
to dwell beyond the sphere of griefs. 3 Perhaps in this very
reticence the modern world may find a gain when it views his
work from the artistic side. Thucydides must always hold his
fame by a double right ; not only as a thinker who, in an age
of transitional scepticism, clearly apprehended the value of
disciplined intelligence as a permanent force in practical politics,
but also as a writer who knew how to make great events tell
their own story greatly ; and the dramatic power of the im-
mortal History is heightened by its dramatic reserve.
E. C. J.
1 Most striking of all these, perhaps, is one in the speech of Nicias to the
army before the retreat from Syracuse (vii. 63, 3), where, addressing the
Hem-Athenians, he reminds them of the pleasure (ijBovri) which they have
derived from passing for Athenians through their knowledge of the Attic
dialect, and their imitation of Attic manners and so being admired through-
out Greece : J A8t]va1oi vofj-ifo/jLevoi ical /JLTJ H>vres . . . TTJS re (fxnii'TJs ^iriarrnj.^ KO.I rCiv
Tpbiruv rfj /u/iTjtm tdavfid^fffOe KO.TCI T^V 'EXXciSa. Among Peloponnesians,
Italians or Siceliots, the Athenian exile had ever carried about with him the
consciousness of belonging to that city which was the Tratdfv<ns 'EXXdSos.
2 Even in the Funeral Oration that splendid monument of his grave
enthusiasm for Athens Thucydides has been restrained, whether by
fidelity to the original or by his own feeling, from exceeding the limit of such
abstract expressions as T& Ka.6' r)(dpav iwiTt]Sevfj.a.Ta., irdvuv avawavXai, aywvfs,
iat, <pi\OKa\f?v, <f>i\o<ro<f>e'tv.
rb y&p | TT)v (ppovriS' w TUI> KaxCov oiKdv yXvKv, Oed. Tyr. 1390.
322 THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDIDES.
TABLE OF THE SPEECHES.
[Asterisks mark those delivered at Athens before the exile of Thucydides.]
Book. Date B.C.
I. 32-36 433 Corcyrean )
(> ^ . ~ . ,,. i Envoys to the Athenian Lcclesia.*
,, 37-43 ,, Corinthian J
,. 68-72 432 Corinthian \
__ __ . ,, f Envoys in the nrst Congress at Sparta.
73- / 8 Athenian )
80-85 King Archidamus ~)
mi -n i Oil. i -j r to the Spartan Assembly.
86 The Ephor Sthenelaidas J
120-24 ,, Corinthian Envoys in the second Congress at Sparta.
,, 140-44 Pericles to the Athenian Ecclesia.*
II. 35-46 431 Funeral Oration of Pericles.*
,, 60-64 430 Pericles to the Athenian Ecclesia.*
III. 9-14 428 Mitylenean Envoys to the Peloponnesians at Olympia.
37-40 427 Cleon
42-48 Diodotus to the Ath eman Ecclesia *
53-59 Plataeans)
61-67 Thebans } to the Spartan Judges.
IV. 17-20 425 Lacedaemonian Envoys to the Athenian Ecclesia.*
59-64 424 Hermocrates in the Sicilian Congress at Gela.
85-87 Brasidas to the Acanthians.
V. 85-116 416 Conference between Athenian and Melian negotiators.
VI. 9-14 415 Nicias ^
16-18 Alcibiades > to the Athenian Ecclesia.
20-23 Nicias J
,, 33-34 Hermocrates "\
,, 36-40 ,, Athenagoras > to the Syracusan Assembly.
41 A Syracusan General J
,, 76-80 Hermocrates as Envoy of Syracuse \ . /-,
_ .. f at Oaniarina.
82-86 Euphemus as Envoy of Athens J
89-92 Alcibiades at Sparta.
Militavy Harangues.
II. 11 431 Archidamus to the Peloponnesian Officers before invad-
ing Attica.
87 429 Peloponuesian Commanders to their
in the Corinthiau
before an action
crews
89 ,, Phonnio to the men of the Athenian ,,.
Fleet Gulf "
IV. 10 425 Demosthenes to his troops at Pylos.
92 424 Pagondas to the Boeotian troops \ before the
,,95 ,, Hippocrates to the Athenian troops / of Deliuni.
THE SPEECHES OF THUCYDWES. 323
Book. Date B. c.
IV. 126 423 Brasidas to his troops on the campaign against Arrhi-
baeus.
V. 9 422 Brasidas to bis troops before the battle at Amphipolis.
VI. 68 415 Nicias to his troops before the first battle at Syracuse.
VII. 61-64 413 Nicias to the Athenian troops "1 before the last sea-
,, 66-68 ,, Gylippus to the Syracusan troops / fight.
,, 77 ,, Nicias to his troops before the retreat from Syracuse.
The short speech of the Elean Teutiaplus to Alcidas and the Pelopon-
nesian leaders at Embaton (iii. 30, 427 B.C.) is virtually of this class.
From the set speeches are to be distinguished a few shorter utterances
in the direct form, but of a more colloquial character, viz. the dialogue
between Archidamus and the Plataeans (ii. 71-74, 429 B.C.) ; the conversation
with the Ambracian herald and an Athenian (iii. 113, 426 B.C.) ; and the
words of Peisander in the Athenian Ecclesia (viii. 53, 411 B.C.) The letter
of Nicias (vii. 11-15, 414 B.C.) would be classed by some with the speeches
composed by Thucydides, by others as an authentic document. Cp. p. 98,
note 6.
XENOPHON.
" The sage and heroic Xenophon. " GIBBON.
IF the learning of Gibbon had chanced or chosen to add
another epithet to the two in which he has justly commemo-
rated the virtues of Xenophon, perhaps with the cro</>o? and
of Plutarch and Longinus he would have coupled the
of Polybius ; for the companion of Cyrus, who
tramped or galloped over the sandy plains of Mesopotamia
seven centuries and a half before the fatal march of Julian, in
the end proved himself no less an adept in the art of words
than of warfare, and lived to display to after-time, as the out-
come of multiform gifts, a triad of interblending qualities as a
man, philosopher, and stylist.
It is under this threefold embodiment that an attempt is
here made, in some sort briefly, to estimate the genius of
Xenophon. But intentionally, the scope of this Essay is con-
fined to an appreciation of the more salient characteristics of
the writer. What was the main drift of his talents 1 How
was he placed with regard to the times at which he lived ?
In what relation does he stand to our own ? The answer, or
some answer, to these questions may well present itself as a
quite sufficient object without plunging into polemic, even
where the views maintained run counter to those of higher
authority. On the same principle, it seems right to avoid all de-
tailed discussion of the various ' vexed questions ' and perplexi-
ties familiar to the student of the life and literature before us.
Some of these have the abstract interest of problems proper,
in which the balance of argument in favour of this con-
clusion or the other is so evenly poised, that a tremor of the
investigator's hand will turn the scale, and the work will
need to be recommenced; as, for instance, the time-honoured
inquiry, "de simultate Platonis cum Xenophonte," or the
question whether he fought at Delium and was carried off
XENOPHON. 325
the field on the shoulders of Socrates ; or, again, in what
year he was born. Of these, some, it is felt, are compara-
tively otiose, others lure the searcher on, in hopes of a
discovery, where perhaps discovery is impossible. Thus we
may ask, What light does 'the Anabasis' throw upon the
question of Xenophon's age at the date of the matters there
recorded (B.C. 401) ? Let us suppose, for the moment, that the
book itself is simply a splendid work of imagination, of the
Robinson Crusoe type, based upon the verisimilitude of thrill-
ing incidents such as might have occurred during the actual
advance and retreat, and in which a ' well-girt ' Athenian
volunteer might have played a conspicuous part, but which
were really the clever invention of some Hellenic Defoe : x
would such a work fix with certainty the age of this ideal
Xenophon, as under thirty-five rather than over forty ? Or,
OD the counter supposition that the tale itself is a vera nar-
ratio, not more coloured than would be the contributions of
a fairly accurate military correspondent to a modern news-
paper, w r ho should find himself actively employed in command
of a Russian column in Central Asia : in this case, do any
expressions used ovSev irpo^aai^o^ai rrjv rjXtfciav, "my age shall
not stand between me and your orders," etc., settle the question ? 2
Another class of difficulties has this special attractiveness,
that being involved with more vital points of interest which
lie still in a haze of uncertainty with the elucidation of the
one will come, perhaps, an inpouring of light upon the others.
What, for instance, was the date of Xenophon's banishment
from Athens ? What was the cause of it ? Supposing him to
have been sentenced eVt Aa/cavia^a), 3 " on the ground of
' Laconism' " in what way were these objectionable or culp-
able proclivities exhibited? Was it through attachment to
1 To this inventive personage, possibly named Themistogenes, but more
probably Xenophon himself, Xenophon is an ideal being. The stone of
stumbling, perhaps intentionally placed, is the passage in Hellen. iii. 1. 2.
w fJ.v o$v KOpos ffrpdrevfui re o"(WXee Kal rovr 1 'x< av df^i] ^""i r & v ade\<t>6v, Kal
wj i] fJ.dx~n tytvero, Kal us a.irt0a.ve, Kal us K TOVTOV a.Trffu6r]ffai> ol "EXX^cej tiri
OaXarrav, QepiffToytvei r<p 'SivpaKocritj) ytypairrai. Vide infra, p. 352, for
further problems connected with the person of Themistogenes.
* Xen. Anab, iii. 1. 14 and 25; compare Thirlwall, Xenophon, Niebuhr,
and Delbrueck, Philol. Mus. vol. i. p. 510.
8 Diog. Laert. ii. 7. 15.
326 XENOPHON.
Cyrus ? or coquettings with Spartan Harmosts, the admirals
and governors-general of Byzantium? or were these at worst
forgotten bygones ? Was it his new friendship with Agesi-
laus, or his presence at Coroneia, or something altogether
different, which brought about the sentence ? Again, was
Xenophon present at Coroneia ? If present, was he there in a
private capacity, as a mere spectator conceivably ? or was he,
necessarily, personally engaged ? Or, given that he was present
on the field, does it remain important whether he fought or
not ? Again, assuming that he was not only there, but fought
beside Agesilaus, can his conduct be explained or justified on
general grounds ? or by application of any ethical standard
suited to the peculiar political situation ? This standard may
either be normal, 1 that is to say, in accordance with the more
or less fixed Hellenic ' interpolitical ' morality ; or abnormal, 2
the outcome of a temporary confusion of ideas. It is clear
that such confusion was inevitable, in the struggle between
incipient Panhellenism, and a belief in the ' natural ' claims
of Sparta to hegemony, which is Laconism, coupled possibly
with anti-Theban jealousy ? It is no less clear that these
currents and cross-currents must set more or less in a direction
contrary to the old customary and sacred separate-State
doctrine, which would usually, and more properly, be distin-
guished by the name of ' patriotism.' Nor is it to be denied that
a right answer to these and other similar questions would lead
directly to the better understanding either of Hellenic history
as a whole, or of the Socratic and Sophistic era in particular ;
of the times or personality of Xenophon ; of his political stand-
point or his military and literary genius. Hence their fascina-
tion here to be resisted.
A third class of difficulties, however, intermediate between
these latter and the problem proper, may not be so easily
1 Normal. It must be borne in mind that ' the opposition ' were in all
Greek states (even tolerant Athens) liable to find themselves outside the walls
of their 7r6\ts, and then civic duties became hazy and ambiguous. Cf.
Alcibiades.
2 Abnormal. The opinions of Isocrates, only a stage later than Xenophon,
throw much light on this matter. Vide Jebb, Orators, vol. ii. ch. xii. for his
Philippising Panhellenism. Panhellenism in itself is the prototype of modern
cosmopolitan morality.
XENOPHON. 327
avoided, for they run up into the substance of any general ap-
preciation ; yet, even so, they can be only dealt with indirectly in
this essay. They cluster chiefly round the Memorabilia, or else
round the Hdlcniea. Of the first, these are samples : What is
Xenophon's estimate of Socrates worth ? Is he unworthy the
name of a philosopher, if only as being unintelligent of his great
associate ? Of the second, these : Why is his History so one-
sided ? Why these astonishing gaps ? Why no mention of
Pelopidas in the recapture of the Cadmeia, nor of Epaminondas
at Leuctra ? Xot a word of the re-establishment of Messene
on Mount Ithome, or of the founding of Panarcadian Megalopolis.
What, on the other hand, is the meaning of the encomium passed
upon the historian by Lucian, 1 for honesty and impartiality ?
It cannot be alleged of these questions, as of others possibly,
that they are either insoluble or of no deep biographical interest;
yet, to rivet attention, in a sketch, to the difficulties rather than
the patent characteristics of a period in the life of a people or
an individual ; to arrange the materials before us so as to con-
stitute a series of diverting or discouraging riddles, may be the
worst mode of distorting the truth ; and, in a rapid survey, it
would seem better to allow the lights and shadows to arrange
themselves, than microscopically to examine the obscurer por-
tions. The former at any rate is the method adopted here.
But there is yet another class of questions, which, although
individually included in one or other of the above divisions, might
better be treated separately. I refer to the whole topic of the
canon. Which of the works attributed to Xenophon are genuine ?
and, amongst those regarded as genuine, which, if any, are sus-
pected portions ? However formidable this group ofdiroplcu, its
discussion is inadmissible here ; and in lieu of which, it may
be deemed sufficient to append a list of works accepted
as, for the most part, genuine. Nor does this solution seem
objectionable, if, in so doing, we conscientiously refrain from
colouring our judgment on any essential point by data drawn
from those works, or portions of a work, the genuineness of
which we more than half suspect. The list itself, appropriated
bodily from Sauppe's stereotyped edition in five volumes,
1 Lucian, TTWS e? laroplav (rvyypd<peiv ; 39.
328 XENOPHON.
will serve to draw attention to a point of some importance,
not unfrequently forgotten wldle we are thinking of Xeno-
phon's talents as pre-eminently embodied in this or the other
of his larger works ; as the author of the Anabasis, or the
Cyropacdia, of the Hellenica, or the Memorabilia. The point
referred to is the versatility and productiveness, and, as a closer
consideration reveals, the inventiveness of this writer's genius;
while the titles themselves, and still more the subject-matter,
show that these qualities are not literary simply, but part of
the underlying capacity of the man.
Lastly, and as might a priori have been expected in the
case of so 'vocal' an actor, the writer, it will be admitted,
has not failed to reveal either himself, or the stage on which
he moved, and this to a quite unprecedented degree. These
works l (with their approximate dates) are rich with the best
autobiographic matter, and burn brightly with the spirit of the
times. But w r hat is meant by biographic, or autobiographic,
matter ? I would fain use the words in only the higher
sense, and exclude a particular kind of ' inferential ' biography
of a type with which the so-called lives of certain saints
or sinners have made us in our childhood familiar. We
are content to know that Proxenus was a time-honoured
friend, and can gather food for reflection from the descrip-
tion of the after-supper walk in the camp, in front of the
place d'armes, where the two friends paced together a few
days before the youthful Boeotian general was murdered. 2 We
1 [The Polity of Athens, probably not by Xenophon, written about B.C. 426]
ffiero, written after ,, 394
Memorabilia (or Recollections) , . . . written about ,, 390
Treatise on Hunting, ..... written after , , 389
Hellenica, Part L, written before ,, 387
The Symposium, ...... written before , , 385
The Economist, . . . . . . written not before ,, 383
The Anabasis (or the Advance on Susa and
the Retreat), . . . . written after ,, 380
The Polity of the Lacedaemonians, . . written about , , 369
A Cavalry General's Manual, . . . written about ,, 363
A Treatise on Horsemanship, . . . written about , , 362
The Cyropaedia (or the Education of Cyrus), not finished before , , 361
Agesilaus (a panegyric on), .... written about ,, 360
Hellenica, Part II., ..... written about ,, 357
A Pamphlet on Revenues, .... written about ,, 356
2 A nab. ii. iv. 15.
XRNOFHON. 329
can almost overhear the words they said together. So again
the delineation of his friend's character, in juxtaposition with
those of Clearchus and Menon, is speakingly suggestive. But
we do not care to make this biographic incident a ground for
concluding that the early years of Xenophon were spent in
captivity at Thebes ; where, with Proxenus, who learnt wisdom
as we know from Gorgias, he may have listened to Prodicus
expounding the choice of Heracles ; where also he doubtless
contracted that general antipathy to Thebans, of which his
exceptional affection for Proxenus gives a kind of proof. So
again the picture of his life at Skillus, drawn by himself, suffices.
Here we see him offering daily sacrifice to his patron goddess
Artemis, 1 or worshipping in the miniature model of the temple
of the great goddess of the Ephesians at Ephesus by the banks
of the miniature Selinus, or hunting antelopes and boars
with his sons and friends on the slopes of Pholoe. Nor is
any strong desire aroused in us to ascertain what really
happened eventually ; whether or not the Eleians restored the
recaptured farm, or whether the wanderer was driven to retire
to Corinth, where he ended his days. In truth, a question of
deeper interest does arise : whether the irepl irpoao^wv was, as
we incline to believe, a work of his old age, and, not improbably,
written in requital to Eubulus for the kindly service of his
restoration ; but whether he actually ended his days at Athens
or Corinth, or elsewhere, is not in itself a fact which we ought
to jump at inferentially ; or need unduly lament as still rele-
gated to the region of open surmise.
It is, however, not to be denied that within the biography of
inference lurk also the germs of better things ; ceasing to deal
with trivialities and the more mundane materials, it rises at
once in validity and in dignity : so that, instead of a tissue
of external ' facts ' whose objectivity is questionable,' we get,
in some sort of matter-of-fact setting, a group of rational infer-
ences, drawn from the cognition of real and truly apprehended
qualities. In such or such way must this man, being of this
sort, have behaved in these circumstances. The qualities of
the individual and the circumstances being given, the inference
of any sympathetic and intelligent biographer will probably
1 Anal. v. 3. 5-12.
330 XENOPHON.
be worth recording ; or, in the case of a tradition, the subjective
summing up of a whole cluster of unconscious biographers
to wit, the age which records it may have the further charm
of contributing to the autobiography of humanity itself. This
high order of conjectural biography, doubtless, deserves to be
called 'ideal' rather than inferential. Such is its true nature,
and it is generally interesting as throwing light on the mind
of others quite as much as on his who is the subject of the nar-
rative. Hence the charm and interest of Plutarch's Lives, which
may be spoken of as chapters from the autobiography of Greece
and Koine. In them there is still a contribution from the
actual life, it may be of a Pompey or an Alcibiades, the rest
being the offerings of contemporaries, or posterity constructing
inferentially, and only half-consciously, the two lives as they
should, nay must, have shaped themselves. In other words,
they were sentences of activity or inaction, spoken by twin
guardian divinities, to be graven by the fingers of a mortal upon
the hearts of men. A stage further, and a whole people writes
its own " phase of faith " in the life of its greatest religious
teacher, the facts being of the flimsiest historic validity, but the
idea stamped as genuine gold with the impress of eternity.
When this happens to humanity as a whole, there is only one
title to be given to these self-delineations. They are the ever-
lasting portraitures of man, the express image of the offspring
of divinity. Apart from this, it would seem better to be repre-
sented by no biography of the mundane sort, or next to none
as is the case with Shakespeare, but to live by works in the
faithful hearts of posterity.
In more self-conscious times, however, the impulse to con-
scious self-revelation has produced another type, and, with the
growth of science and regard for " objective " truth, perhaps in
this direction may be expected the happiest results : when the
writer is content to set forth his life simply as it lies spread
out before the all-seeing, neither despising the physical and
material side of his nature, nor taking part for or against his
spiritual self; pending which, we are grateful to those who
have written, whether consciously or unconsciously, the history
of their religious opinions or their intellectual growth.
In the particular case before us the inferior inferential bio-
XENOPHON. 331
graphics are chiefly of modern manufacture ; but the ancients
themselves are not altogether guiltless : and, not to speak of mere
gossips, the statement of Plutarch, that Xenophon was actually
present at Coroneia, has commonly been accepted as of equal
authenticity with the remark of Xenophon 1 upon which it
doubtless was based. Strabo also, Athenaeus, Diodorus, and
Diogenes Laertius, have all more or less interpreted the Xeno-
phontine tradition inferentially, but the last named has, at the
beginning and end of his life of Xenophon, incorporated two
stories which, on ideal grounds, bear the stamp of validity,
being not only beautiful in themselves, but as striking the key-
note to what we are to discover about him from himself.
The one illustrates the hero, the other anticipates the sage, or,
more correctly, it has a whisper of the religious nature within,
which was the soul's soul. For our purposes let us invert
them, and let us first listen to the tale of his old age. His
son Gryllus, serving in the Athenian cavalry at Mantinea,
fought with might and main, and met his end ; but at that
instant fell also Epaminondas, so that afterwards he was said
to have fallen by the hand of Gryllus, the son of Xenophon
the Athenian. Meanwhile, as the story goes, the father was
engaged in offering sacrifice ; the chaplet was upon his brow,
when they brought him news saying, "Thy son has fallen,"
whereupon he removed the chaplet; but as the messengers
added ' nobly ' he replaced it on his head, shedding, as others
have mentioned, no tear, but only uttering the words, y&eiv
dvrjrbv ryeyevvrjKcos, "I knew my child was mortal." The
other tale has fully as clear a ring of spiritual truth, though
the particular circumstances need never have taken place. It
is a tale of boyhood, but its note is a rhythm of the melody
of the man. " Xenophon was the son of Gryllus : he was
an Athenian, of the deme Erchia; modest of demeanour
was he, fair also to look upon beyond description. Tradition
tells how Socrates met him in a narrow way, and, stretching
his staff athwart him, so as to bar his passage, plied him with
inquiries as to where this or that commodity was to be pur-
chased, to all which the boy answered fluently: when the
1 Anab. v. 3. 6 ; Plutarch's Lives, Clough, vol. iv. p. 21 : Agesilaus.
332 XENOPHON.
sage at length put to him a final question, ' And where are the
fair and noble to be found?' The boy shook his head in
perplexity; then, said he, 'Follow me, and be taught.' So he
followed him, and thereafter became his ' hearer.' " The date of
Diogenes is scarcely ascertained, but we may suppose that the
above anecdote represents a tradition of perhaps six hundred
years ; and, skipping twice that period of time to the date of
Kaphael and " The School of Athens" (1510 A.D.), 1 we shall find it
still fresh : fresh, doubtless, in the mind of Fabio Calvi, who sup-
plied the youthful painter with the hint of information which he
needed. The rest was supplied by the spirit of the time, speak-
ing through the prophetic soul of the artist. Among the six or
seven figures which compose the Socratic group (Socrates
himself being so truly depicted as to form a companion to the
portrait drawn by Alcibiades in Plato), none are more truth-
ful to the imagination than those of Alcibiades and Xenophon.
The helmeted, mail-clad warrior facing the philosopher with
exquisite proud poise, indicative of a graceful self-confidence on
the very verge of vfipis, is unmistakable ; but beside the talker,
with back-turned face, hanging on his lips, is a youth with rosy
cheeks, auburn-haired, leaning on one arm, in a brooding
attitude of deep, earnest, religious gaze: that is Xenophon,
the future apologist of the life of Socrates, treasuring one of the
recollections of the Memorabilia.
Pre-eminently among the old writers has Xenophon written
a sort of apologia pro vita sua, a many-sided life indeed, as an
artist, a citizen, Emigre', philosopher, householder, public man
or private friend ; and that not only in the most admissibly
autobiographic of his works, the Anabasis, but unconsciously
throughout. This also he has done with so naive a trans-
parency that he cannot escape the good or the evil of such self-
delineation. Only, it should be borne in mind that at one time
it is his artistic self that speaks, at another it is to the political
man that we are listening ; now we catch the undertone of self-
defensive diurnal combativeness, and again predominates the
clear voice of single-sighted Hellenic objectivity. The only
guide and clew to a fair interpretation is the reader's sympa-
1 Vide Symonds, The Fine Arts, p. 335, for the notes on Greek philosophy
which Fabio Calvi may have supplied to the painter.
XENOPHON. 333
thetic intelligence ; nought else will avail to arouse and
attune our modern minds or feelings to a wakeful harmony,
in response with the pulses of old days : the world of Hellas
at a crisis of spiritual turmoil ; the apx>l w&ivcov of thought
in the person of Socrates, whose issues are eternal ; the
quickening of a politico-ethnic consummation, ere long to spring
to life in the person of Alexander, with consequences by nature
temporal, but on a scale colossal. Portions, indeed, of this self-
revelation of the man or of his times a later age may, through
its own defects, or even merits, fail duly to appreciate ; or
again, in other cases, we may withhold our moral while accord-
ing our intellectual sympathy, and this from some moral pro-
gress or regress of to-day in which we share. But in the main,
to the scientifically trained mind it will seem sufficient to
understand the time, neither praising nor blaming over greatly ;
and Xenophon is qualified to help us to this scientific, or, if we
please to call it so, this optimistic apprehension.
To science and to the God of natural laws, as to the God of
Paradise, everything is ' wie am ersten Tag,' very good. How
can we, therefore, trained in this school, and considering the
progressive tendency of human nature, which is our faith, and
which gives an optimistic colour to our dTrofjivrjf^ovevf^ara, how
can we, as a whole, do other than sympathise with the past,
out of which that which is ideal in us has grown, and in which
it is rooted ? This or that thing we may turn our backs upon
in scorn or disgust, but, calmly considering, the whole sub-
stratum of ourselves seems excellent, it has played its part
well enough. What seems less good and more doubtful is
ourselves, as the substratum of the future. Here our verdict
swings round self-accusingly, but not of necessity unscienti-
fically, unless indeed the principle of progress 'I count not myself
to have apprehended ' is psychologically false. Here, at the
same time, let us guard against a misconception. However high
and optimistic our appreciation of Xenophon, to intercede as
his apologist would be impertinent. Inevitably, in the case
of so transparent a human being, tenets and points of view
revealed in naked simplicity present themselves, with which it
is hard if one man in a thousand will feel more than the
scantiest sympathy. His views about the democracy, about
334 XENOPHON.
the political problems of the day, about war or the chase, are
not as our views ; if we had lived then, we trust we should
have been differently disposed. But is not all this, in the
language of Xenophon or Socrates, to stamp ourselves as " busy-
bodies and vain fellows "? Why not take Xenophon as we find
him, and make the best of him ? We shall not find him so very
bad ; nor his times. Even where we dissent, as children of a
democratic age, perhaps, from his prejudices in favour of oi
/3e\Ti(TTOi, "the better classes;" as befrienders of animals from
his inveterate love of hunting ; or, again, as British sportsmen,
from his methods of snaring hares ; or, on general grounds, from
this, that, or the other limitation of his horizon, we may still to
ourselves seem to see how this partial view and these arrifrtf
tenets were natural and appropriate to him.
Neither impelled by any prejudice as ag'ainst any past phase
of humanity, nor furnished with any critical apparatus of art, or
philosophy, or religion, by which to bind or loose the men of
old, we may take an acquiescent joy in contemplating the great
art products of a world which is past, but, like the scenes of our
childhood, still abides closer to us, in a sense, than our present
surroundings. Not indeed that such criteria of art, religion, and
philosophy as will square with science are wanting. Hegel's, 1
for instance, in the well-known passage where he bids us take,
as a key to the understanding of Greece, " an insight into the
ideal forms of sculpture," instructing us that " the images of
statesmen and philosophers, as well as epic and dramatic
heroes, must be regarded from the point of view of plastic
art, for that is the character of all, actors, poets, thinkers,
alike; great and free they have grown up on the soil of
their own individuality, creating themselves out of them-
selves, and moulding themselves to what they were and willed
to be. The age of Perikles is specially rich in them. Perikles
himself, Phidias, Plato, above all Sophocles : Thucydides also,
Xenophon and Socrates, each in his own department : none
greater or less than another : ideal artists of themselves ; cast
in flawless mould : works of art which stand before us as an
immortal presentment of the gods." Such is the sentence of
1 Hegel, JEsthetik, 3. 2. 3, translated in Pater's Studies in the History of the
Renaissance, pp. 192, 193, Winckelmann.
XENOPHON.
art, a sentence of salvation and security against the finger of
corruption and temporal decay, wherewith the verdict also of
Religion and Philosophy accords. " But the souls of the right-
eous are in the hand of God. There shall no torment touch
them. But they are in peace."
" Then all this earthly grossness quit,
Attired with stars, we shall for ever sit,
Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee, Time."
To the profound antique philosophy the modern deep makes
answer, "Notre nature a besoin d'etre epuree par la mort, pour quo
ses meilleurs attributs puissent assez ressortir en surmontant les
grossieres necessites qui d'abord les dominent. C'est uniquenient
ainsi que pent s'accomplir la sublime inversion oii tend 1'anima-
lite ;" while to narrow-souled censure of ever-shifting Sittlicli-
Jceiten the old rebuke suffices: &io dva7ro\6jrjTo^ el, w avOpwrre 7ra<?
6 Kpivwv. Let Xenophon and the rest be judged by their own
a-vvelBtjcr^, not by another, alien to ourselves and everything
except the particular historical instant, or temporary moral need,
from which it was abstracted for illegitimate and unseasonable
application elsewhere. Let us not do this ; which is to do
violence to the historic sense, and in so far to dull the best
and most precious gift of progressive humanity. 1 Lastly, the
attitude here pleaded for is not more in agreement with the
spirit of art and religion than consonant with the scientific
movement of the day. If in one sense the GraBCO-Rornan world
seems less important to us than to the humanists of the Renais-
sance ; " if the first enthusiasm for antiquity shall never be
restored, nor trie classics yield that vital nourishment they
offered in the spring-time of the modern era," 2 still there is a
charm in the lengthening shadows ; or, more truly, we seem to
be cresting to-day the last high-tidal waves of a rediscovery,
which confronts us face to face with the very soul of past
humanity, and scientifically we are nearer than when we en-
thusiastically believed. To trie half-appeased hunger of a
passionate curiosity it is as if their secret would soon be out,
and we should know them ' even as we are known.'
1 An intelligent respect for the Sittlichkeiten of the moment, past and
present, seems essential for the preservation of the spiritual continuity no
less than the solidarity of our race.
8 Symonds, Revival of Learniny, p. 539.
336 XENOPHON.
But, for the present, the question of the a-vveiSrjais of the
Socratic age of Greece claims our attention : What was the re-
lation of Xenophon to his era ? It does not concern us whether
his birth falls about the date of the thirty years' truce (445 B.C.),
or only somewhere near the commencement of the Pelopon-
nesian war (in 431 B.C.) ; nor again is the actual date of his death,
between 359 1 and 355, or 354 B.C. in all probability, of any serious
importance. In any case we shall be right in regarding the
adult Xenophon as a representative pre-eminently of the period
from 411 (at which point he takes up the History of Thucydides)
to 359, the first year of Philip of Macedon. Thanks to the
genius and " good fortune " of the Athenian people, it was not
possible or conceivable that this century of time should pass
unchronicled. Hence it is that Thucydides appears as the his-
torian of the great war; and when his voice is hushed, a most vocal
witness and participator of the subsequent events presents him-
self in the person of Xenophon. It is thus that we also assist
at the uncoiling, as it were, of two mighty lengths of Hellenic
history : the thread of the first being the conflict between
Athens and Sparta, fully unwound at the ^king of Athens by
Lysander (in 404) ; the second representing the struggle for hege-
mony between Sparta and the rival powers, with the momentary
supremacy of Thebes and the apotheosis of Epaminondas at
Mantinea, which form the last links of a chain of closely
connected incident.
Of this later period Xenophon is at once the mouth-
piece and a product. In him we have a witness whose
combined qualities as a thinker, writer, and man of action
make him, even where he is defective or incomplete in his
character and views of existence, pre-eminently representative.
Briefly stated, what we find is that certain features of an inter-
esting time are in this individual written large, so that he
who runs may read ; though others doubtless are less apparent
or altogether absent. What then are these characteristic
features, " the signs of the times " ?
1 The assassination of Alexander of Pherae, mentioned by Xenophon, Hellen.
vi. 4. 35-37, took place between 359 B.C. and 357 B.C. The date of the irepl
Trpoffbdwv, or cle Seditibus (if correctly ascribed to Xenophon), extends the
life of its author four or five years longer than the earlier of these two dates.
XENOPHON. 337
In the spiritual world they are the emergence of " sub-
jectivity," of self-examination and self-expression of all sorts,
the awakening of self-consciousness, the earnest application
to one's-self and others of the Delphic injunction TvwOi,
creavrov with a view to self-culture, which is an epitome
of the Socratic method, the spiritually -minded sophistry.
Parallel with this is the development of dialectic, the art
of words and of conduct, the sharpening of the instrument
of mind, and the working up of the raw material of subtle
thought as a power in itself, to be wielded irrespectively of the
moral guidance of the lVo/09, and the limited requirements of the
public weal, but so as to suit the taste and exigencies of the
thought-emancipated individual with a view to personal success,
which is an epitome of the carnally -minded sophistry. " The pre-
Socratic thinkers," it has been said, 1 " from Thales downwards,
were all primarily devoted to ontological research, but by the
middle of the fifth century B.C. the clash and conflict of their
dogmatic 2 systems had led some of the keenest minds to doubt the
possibility of penetrating the secret of the universe. This doubt
found expression in the reasoned scepticism of Gorgias, and pro-
duced the famous doctrine of Protagoras, that the human appre-
hension is the only standard of what is and what is not. A
similar view of the natural limits of the human intellect repelled
the philosophic ardour of Socrates from physico-metaphysical
inquiries." Again the same writer says, " This emergence of an
art of conduct with professional teachers cannot thoroughly be
understood, unless it is viewed as a crowning result of a general
tendency at this stage of Greek civilisation to substitute
technical skill for traditional procedure and empirically de-
veloped faculty. In the age of the Sophists we find, wherever
we turn, the same eager pursuit of knowledge and the same
eager effort to apply it directly to practice. The method of
earth-measurement was rapidly becoming a science ; the astro-
1 Ethics, Encyc. Metrop. pp. 576-7, but I think the writer of the article him-
self would state the matter differently. The antithesis might be put thus : In
one aspect, an age of Doubt, of emancipation of the questioning subject from
Tradition and Custom. In another, an age of Faith, of belief in the largest
possibilities of Art, Science, Method. This last is Mr. Sidgwick's point.
2 Cf. Xen. Mem. I 1. 14.
Y
538 XENOPHOX.
nomy of Meton was introducing precision into the computation
of time ; Hippodamus was revolutionising architecture by
building towns with straight broad streets ; old-fashioned
soldiers were grumbling at the new pedantries of tactics
and ' hoplitics ; ' the art of music had recently received a
great technical development ; and a still greater change had
been effected in that training of the body which constituted
the other half of ordinary Greek education. If bodily vigour
was no longer to be left to nature and spontaneous exercise, but
was to be attained by the systematic observance of rules laid
down by professional trainers, it was natural to think that the
same might be the case with mental excellences." Briefly, this
was an age stamped, as we might say, ' internationally,' with the
conflict or contrast of rival vopoi, of ' creeds ' and national
political theories ; in private life, with the escape from VO/AOS
of the individual, with ' atheism,' as it was called, in the wake
of physics. 1
In the world of politics, the ' signs of the times ' are the red
and lowering clouds which betoken a new and turbulent
day. These are, the accentuated antithesis of stable (or rela-
tively stable) rule, and the liberty of anarchic minorities or
majorities. At Athens are to be seen the confronting idols
of Laconism and the Demos ; at Thebes, of autonomy and pan-
Bceotarchy ; in Peloponnese there are symptoms of anti-
Spartan Argolism ; 2 north of the isthmus, of embryo empires
in Thessaly or Thrace. Everywhere miso-Persian Hellenism is
confronted with the incompatible desire for hegemony, only to
be obtained at the price of Persian assistance ; everywhere, also,
the hand of the ISuorrj^ is against the hand of the TroXi'r^, or that
1 Physics = a sort of physico-metaphysical philosophy, running inevitably
counter to theology, or possibly theoseby, "theology and even religious feeling. "
[Cf. Aristoph. Clouds, 380. Not God, but Vortex reigns, according to Anaxa-
goras.] It is true, physical science, in the stricter sense, was silently working
in the direction of real discovery, and, as the Comtists say, encyclopaedic
knowledge. Not to speak of numerical and geometrical conceptions carried
up to the point of their application to astronomy, to Thales and Democritus
are already due the sphericity of the earth and the " atomic " theory. Hip-
pocrates also should be coupled with Meton and Hippodamus.
4 Hellen. iv. 8. 34, ttrei y&p ol'Apyewi TI\V K6piJ>Oov"Apyo^ tTreirolijvTo, K.T.\. ;
cf. ibid. v. 2. 6.
of the State against society ; : everywhere there is a bourgeoning
of ranhellenic vitality at the expense of (state) patriotism.
Of some of these propensities, the evidence of a disjointed
world, Xeuophon is either the victim or the scarcely unwilling
tool, of others he is the censor and the antagonist, and in all cases
(consciously or unconsciously) the exponent and interpreter;
while (which is only tantamount to realising the completeness of
his assimilation) through good report and evil report his voice is
not only a witness to the present but a prediction of the future.
To quite a startling extent, perhaps only in a chance word or a
cherished aspiration, we discover in him an earnest of things
which are yet to lie. For if the political world was out of joint,
he that was destined to set it for a season right was nigh at hand ;
if, in a deeper sense also, the age itself was travailing and heavy-
laden, the times of refreshing were not far distant ; nor was their
labour destined to be in vain, but rather rich with the fruitage
of intellectual achievement ; of the consummation and world-
wide diffusion of the gifts of Hellenism. The era of Aristotle and
of Alexander was speedily approaching. Under this head Xeno-
phon is wonderfully typical. As a man of action, and personally
mixed up with the incidents of the day, and tossed on a sea of
political troubles, he is individually and conjointly with others
of a kindred spirit (as Alcibiades perhaps, certainly Agesilaus 2
and Jason of Pherae 3 ), anticipative of Alexander the Great. As
a thinker he is symptomatic of the approach of Aristotle. 4 As
a stylist and part-inventor of the KOivrj Stake/cros, he is one of
the fountain-heads of the great common literature of the Eastern
empire, the lineal ancestor of the Septuagint, of Lucian, and
perhaps of the best style of modern Greek to-day.
1 Not unfrequently. Of. the two famous occasions on which Socrates found
himself in isolated opposition to the government of the day, Mem. i. 1. 18 ;
iv. 4. 3 ; Hellen. ii. 3. 39, and, generally speaking, many an emigre doubtless
was the victim of State oppression. Cf. Hellen. v. 4. 2.
- Hellen. iv. 2. 3. 3 Ibid. vi. 1. 12.
4 Xenophon, the crowds or <ro(pi<TT7)s, seems to some extent to have anticipated,
from a common-sense point of view, the Ethics of Aristotle ; while, as a
prirwp, and author of such treatises as the Polity of the Lacedaemonians, he
foreshadows the Politics. This view might be pushed further in reference
to the more technical treatises on Hunting, Horsemanship, etc. But in the
pamphlet on Revenues, or the panegyric of Agesilaus, the reader's thought is
carried forward no further than Isocrates. In other ways also he is an dppafiuv
T7JS K\1)pOVO/J.ia.S.
340 XENOPHON.
Nor, if we now turn to the second question raised
above, and ask ourselves, What is the closest bond of intimacy
between us ? what is there common to our mental and
spiritual horizon and that of Xenophon ? shall we find him
barren or devoid of interest. Indeed, that we have one such
link of connection of a firm sort will appear obvious to him
who recognises that the underlying personal quality of the man,
the primitive substratum of his character, is nothing more nor
less than his piety and devotion (TO eucreySe? and 6eoa-e8ei.a).
His motto, many times repeated, and oftener implied, is not to
be mistaken : 2vv rofr eols iravro^ apxeatfcu epyov (Ask the
blessing of Heaven upon all thy purposes) is the daily and
hourly watchword of his soul. 1 It is true that this Seto-iSat-
fjiovia? is a quality not peculiar to Xenophon, but one which he
holds largely in common with his fellow-countrymen ; which
endears the Hellenic world to us, and the existence of which
it would be foolish in us to ignore. Possibly, in the case
of Xenophon, his natural piety was refined and even crystal-
lised in what we must call his second nature, as a loyal
" listener " to Socrates. But if the " theoseby " of the
natural man brings him close to us on grounds of common
humanity and common needs, so also is Xenophon ' after the
(Socratic) spirit' welcome as a personal friend, on grounds
of transmitted inherited philosophy. Without here entering
into the question of supposed metaphysical or philosophic
deficiencies, it is clear that the disciple was largely appre-
ciative of the master's ethical stand-point ; neither blind to
his originality as " the inventor of morals," nor throughout a
long life forgetful of the painstaking self-command and improve-
ment which was the practical side of the teaching which he
reverenced. But (1) Evo-efieia is a quality suited to all times,
and not less interwoven with the texture of humanity to-day
than with the life of ancient Hellas ; in spite of many external
and some intrinsic differences in the attempt to deal with that
most real world beyond, which, with all reverence, we formulate
as GOD. Also, (2) at the basis of our own popular or quasi-
1 Cf. Agesilaus, i. 27.
2 Acts xvii. 22, and Mr. Kuskin's comment on the mistranslation in his pre-
face to The Economist of Xenophon in the B ibl. Pastorum, vol. i. p. xxv.
XENOPHON. 341
philosophic moral theology lies the "teleology" of Socrates. 1
To this twofold extent Xenophon appears as the clear-toned
e&jyrjTris of his times and not of his times only, but in some
sense also of Hellas as a whole.
Of this general thesis we may find ample illustration, either
in the main characteristics of his writings, however rapidly sur-
veyed, or by direct handling of the matter in answer to the ques-
tion, What are the various personal or professional, philosophical
or literary, qualities of the author ? Let us then, in pursuance
of such an object, review these various qualities. Those which
we call personal would seem to depend chiefly on a certain
healthiness of body and brain (eve%ia) ; original probably, and
emphasised by the regular gymnastic of the city, which we
are aware was indorsed by Socrates. 2 Tradition tells us that
Xenophon was Ka\os and eve^ecrraro^, and conjecture adds that
he must have possessed great bodily strength and endurance.
Indeed, with the exception of his piety and affectionate remem-
brance of Socrates, nothing is more pronounced in him than his
devotion to jv^vacrrLKt] : field-sports and field-work, being a sort
of duty to one's-self and to the State, so <that the bodily frame
may be inured " by toils and sweat " to the more serious busi-
ness of life and war. " Agriculture, devotion to the tillage of
the soil, has this high praise, that it implies a training of the
limbs till they are capable of performing everything that a free-
man should. Though earth gives of her abundance, yet her
blessings are not showered on the lap of laziness ; but in hus-
bandry she inures her servitors to suffer gladly summer's heat
and winter's cold. Those that labour with their very hands,
the actual delvers of the soil, she trains in a wrestling ground
of her own, giving them strength for strength ; while those
others whose devotion is confined to the overseeing eye and to
studious thought she makes more manly, rousing them with
1 The distinctive teaching of our Lord, taken in the deepest modern sense,
as the gospel of human fraternity and love, being either ignored or non-
assimilated (cf. the unchristian acceptance of much needless war) ; and re-
garded practically as a quite separate inner and independent principle of
action, or else added as the graceful coping-stone and crown of the pagan
morality of Greece and Rome.
2 Cf. Mem. iii. xii. ; also Socrates' humorous defence of dancing, Symp.
ii. 15-18.
342 XENOPHOX.
the crowing of the cock, and compelling them to be up and
doing betimes in many a long day's march." 1 In these and
similar passages the scent of the morning air is so keen and in-
vigorating, and the play of the limbs so joyous and godlike,
that we catch the hunter's or the husbandman's enthusiasm ;
riding with Ischomachus cross country over his estates, or
running a novel ' lampadephoria ' with the soldiers after wild
asses in the desert of Arabia; or coursing hares and shouting to
the dogs with the old Athenian Emigre and his sons and friends
on the farm at Skillus ; or now with Astyages, smiling a proud
smile at sight of his grandson, about fifteen years old, and
allowed, after much supplication, to hunt large game for the
first time. "The heart of the old man was overjoyed to see his
grandson, unable to keep silence in the excess of his delight,
but ' baying ' with excitement like a well-bred whelp whenever
he came to close quarters with a beast, and shouting to his
fellows by name." But the fullest gospel of 'Ty/em, or Eue^'a
is to be found in the treatise on hunting, in the prefatory chapter,
and again later near the siispected attack on the Sophists : " My
word of exhortation to the young is : do not despise hunting or
the other training of your boyhood, if you desire to grow r up to
be good men good not only in war, but in all else of which
the issue is perfection in thought, word, and deed." " Those
that make this their passionate pursuit will reap their reward
in the health which will accrue to their bodily frames the
quickening of the eye and the ear the postponement of old
age ; not to speak of the warlike training w r hich is given, so
that long marches under arms will seem mere child's play."
This bodily training is, in fact, the keystone to Xenophon's
theory of education. He seems to have said to himself : " Here
is the one great pleasure which is harmless in itself ; whereas
all the other rival pleasures, either in themselves or incidentally,
may become ruinous to health of body and soul ; but this is
innocuous, and in its consequences most useful, as a training in
virtue and good habit." These warning voices to the young
have a genial cheery ring in them, like the voice of the Aiicalos
^6709 in Aristophanes, 2 expounding to us the old theory of
1 Oecon. v. 4.
2 Arist. Clouds, 961, etc., and cf. Symonds, Greek Poets, vol. i. p. 280.
XENOPHON. 343
education in that blissful time " when he flourished, and
modesty and temperance were practised : " " If you do what I
tell you, and apply your mind moreover, you will have big
brawny shoulders and a polished chest, with the fair white
complexion of health." Indeed, taken in cxtcnso, the Xeno- ;
phontine passage reads much like a prose version of the Aristo-
phanic moral. If we are also curiously reminded of educational
doctrines in vogue in our own particular polity of modern
Europe, that is only another instance of what may be called a
modern element in our author, which seems to make us, even in
education, more akin to the ancients than we might suppose. 1
Even while we confine our attention to this matter of health
and educational training, two other traits silently obtrude
themselves, and may conveniently be dealt with at this point.
In the first place, there is the amiable air of didactic teaching,
which we should now-a-days call " moralising" a touch of the
doctrinaire, short of pedantry certainly, and dulness, but still
noticeable and truly Xenophontine. The minor works on
hunting and horsemanship are full of this, as also is the Cavalry
General's Manual (a work which the inferential biographer
shall be allowed to consider as addressed by the old philosopher
soldier in his declining years to his son Gryllus, the same who
fought in the Athenian squadron at Mantinea, and fell face to
face with Epaminondas). In these it was natural perhaps to
fall into a didactic vein, and to speak as one of ' those who
know.' But the opening paragraphs of the Cyropaedia, and
other passages interspersed in the larger and probably more
youthful compositions, testify to the same propensity. We
seem at times to be listening to a sweet- tongued talker, a wise
man and a good, whose style reminds us of the Vicar of Wake-
field. In spite of his sage talk he presents to us the appearance
1 It is interesting to compare the elaborate Spartan education, with its proud
motto, rtf raireivoi elvai neyaXtivovrai (Lac Pol. viii. 2): " The Spartans mani-
fest a lordly pride in submissiveness : " vide M tiller's Dorians, vol. ii. p. 309.
" During the progress from the condition of an ephebus to manhood, the
young Spartans were called Sphaereis, probably because their chief exercise was
football, which game was carried on with great emulation, and indeed
resembled a battle rather than a diversion. In their nineteenth year they
were sent out on the crypteia, " etc. To such training, as tradition tells us,
were the sons of Xenophon submitted.
XENOPHON.
of a practical man who has seen men and manners, and tasted
wisdom at the fountain-head. Nothing is pleasanter than to
sit by and listen to his reflections somewhat loosely and yet
pretentiously delivered.
The other something referred to is easier to feel than to define
in words, yet it is absolutely Xenophontine ; being neither
more nor less than the consciousness of the man himself his
personalism or individualism, or by whatever name we are to
name it, which probably owes its origin to the general subjec-
tivity of the age, in the spirit of which he so largely shares ; to
the Socratic training and the lessons in self-knowledge which that
implied when faithfully carried out. It is a self-consciousness,
enhanced conceivably in this case by the isolation of exile, and
the sharp differentiation of the personal against the impersonal
element within ; as if the ISuoTrjs rose in judgment against the
TroXtTT??, and the TroTu'r^ against the tSwiyny?, and the one self
accused or else excused the other, with the result at last of a
novel and, for a Greek, curiously modern egoism. 1 Hence these
phrases : e^ol pev Boicel " I should say," or " if you ask my
opinion," or " my observation tells me;" and these first personal
beginnings, iJKovaa &e TTOTG ol8a [Jiev, on, 7roAA,a/a? edavftaaa ;
or the personal pronouns anticipative of the pleonastic usage of
a later day, which again give a modern feeling to this subjective
artist. Connected with this is a higher personal quality, or, in
other words, the same quality when brought into grander rela-
tions with the world beyond man's control and knowledge
" the region of obscurity, the home of things about which we
cannot say whether they will turn out thus or otherwise ; which
really includes the most important elements even of things
that lie within the circumscribed region of our own knowledge
and activity; where we are bound to reflect and exert our-
selves without superstitiously turning for querulous help to
heaven." 2
1 The naivete of the egoism of Herodotus is childlike, suggestive of wonder-
ment at once and a desire to speak the truth : that of Xenophon has a
touching parental gravity.
2 Mem. i. 8. Doubtless the &dr)\a STTWS d.7ro/3i7<rercu here are things mundane
and practical ; but Xenophou would almost have applied the term to the
larger issues of life, and the general government of the world.
XEXOPHOX.
This, which the hearer has shown us to have been his
teacher's creed, was certainly his own also ; and no heart can
fail to be touched by the utterance of so genuine a faith, as
profound as it is simple, in which he lias chronicled their com-
mon conduct as a self-annihilating trust in the goodness of
God. " He prayed to the gods simply to give him what was
good for him ; for they know best what good things are."
" To pray for gold and silver or a despotism is no better than
to make a particular throw at dice or a battle the subject of
prayer, when no man can prophesy what the consequences of one
or other will be." 1 Here indeed we have reached the most central
and vital thing in all Xenophon, his devoutness or holiness ; it
cannot help bringing him close to us, and otherwise doubtless
has a direct bearing upon ourselves. But as it would be a
mistake to exaggerate the matter in his favour, as if he only
and Socrates, 2 and a few other exceptional specimens of that
people, were capable of pure and lofty religious feelings, so also
we ought not to overlook something which is original and
idiosyncratic in the 'religiosity' of this particular follower of
the unique teacher. It is, to begin with, to some extent an
accident that we hear so much of piety ; that devotion is so
prominent a virtue on his lips devotion especially as shown
in prayer and pavTitcrj. Why, for instance, is no light thrown
on that other large department of Greek religious feeling which
found satisfaction in the Mysteries ? The explanation of this
outspokenness in particular directions, this insistance on the
necessity of prayer, etc., seems to be that the moment required
it. We gather our views largely from The Recollections of
Socrates, a work written under certain self-imposed limitations
in a truthful, loving, but ' apologetic ' strain, and for a
distinct object, viz., to set his ' master's ' reputation right in
the eyes of the Athenian people. Now an indictment against
his friend was, that he refused to acknowledge and believe in
1 Mem. i. 3. 2.
2 The commentators compare the poet's prayer in Plato, Alcib. ii. 143 A :
ZeO f$affi\eu, ret (j.tv teffXa Kal evxpfttvois Kal dcev/crotj
" Afifu Sldov, ra 8 dfiva Kal evxo/J.tvois airaX^eiv.
' ' King Zeus, grant to us all blessings, whether we pray for them or not,
and deliver us from evil, even to the denial of our prayers. "
346 XENOPHOX.
the gods of the state, preferring to introduce new divinities of
his own. These charges were contrary to the patent everyday
witness of the philosopher's life, who came not to destroy but
to fulfil, and was particularly punctual and conservative in all
acts of worship in prayer and sacrifice in what may with
reverence be called the machinery of daily worship ; while as
to the introduction of new divinities, if by these ^aiyuovia was
meant the divine whisper, which checked or propelled his
' master's ' action, was not that simply a form of /jiavnKr] like
any other admonition howsoever vouchsafed to man from
heaven, whether by flight of birds, or a voice heard, or a sound
uttered, or something crossing the path ?
But with regard to the Mysteries, whatever w r e are to think
of them in our present imperfect knowledge, we must hold that
they were not " generally necessary to salvation : " we may
indeed speculate as to whether they were the relics of some
primitive worship " ancient foreign rudiments containing no
greater wisdom than already existed in the consciousness of
the Greeks " which is Hegel's view, 1 and introduces his re-
mark that " all Athenians were initiated in the Mysteries
Socrates excepted, who refused initiation, because he knew
well that science and art are not the product of mysteries ;
that wisdom never lies among arcana." Or, our opinion may
incline us to believe with others that, even so, there was
a deep underlying meaning in the scenic representation of
old Chthonian creeds, calculated to work powerfully upon
the spiritual emotions of the beholder : some steeping in the
blackest gloom of a night of sorrow and bereavement sud-
denly, in the twinkling of an eye, relieved by an inrush of
light and joy and rejuvenescence; the renewing, with the
passion of early spring, of wintry weeds outworn. In any
case, this side of the religious life of their times is not divulged
to us by either Plato or Xenophon. So far as the age of Peri-
cles goes, the least faint echo of what it betokened is to be
got from the parody of Aristophanes in the Frogs ; while the
deep implication of religious feeling in the name is sufficiently
1 Hegel's PJiil. of Hist., Engl. transl. p. 248, also 257, 258 ; compare
Hausrath, Neutest. Zeityesch., Die Mysterien, p. 68, etc.
XENOPHON. 347
attested by the description in Thucydides of the mutilation of
the Hermae. 1
It also appears that apart from 'apologetically' explaining
the tenets of Socrates, Xenophon a man of culture as well
as of action was satisfied to follow that leading ; holding
o / O
the hand of his guide with confidence, and following in
O O
his path, hand passibus acquis. In illustration of which
there is the famous story of his going against the wise
elder friend's advice to his cost in the matter of accepting
Proxenus's invitation to join Cyrus. 2 The sage has an instinct
(possibly the voice of the Sat^oviov] that no good will come
of this, but he advises his associate to ask the will of God at
Delphi. From whatever cause, Xenophon asks, not " Shall I
go?" but " To which god should I sacrifice on this journey?"
The answer is given accordingly : but the rebuke of Socrates is
too late now : and there is nothing for it but to do as the
oracle has said and go. In the Recollections Xenophon 3 tells
us "that so strong a faith had Socrates in the intimations
vouchsafed to him by heaven, that without a moment's appre-
hension of writing himself down ' fool or impostor,' he would
freely, and on the authority of the divine voice alone, tender
advice to his friends to do this, or to abstain from doing that ;
and so with those who followed his injunctions it went well,
while those who lent a deaf ear lived to repent of their obsti-
nacy." Thus it requires all the childlike religious trust, recon-
ciling contraries, on the part of Xenophon, to discover how in
the end after the pains and perplexities of the advance and
retreat the w r ays of God were finally justified, and the
promised help of Zeus, whose name is kindness, literally
fulfilled. This touch of superstition in him has Xenophon by
comparison with the pure faith of Socrates. But <rvv Oeols
TrpaTTeiv, trust in heaven, has become to him so emphatically
a part of his theory of life and practice, that in one of the works,
probably of his old age, the Hipparchicos, he touchingly apolo-
gises for the reiteration of the phrase in such a context ; not as
though he used it as a mere phrase, but as an English colonel
1 Thuc. vi. 28. 1, KO.I T& fj.vffT-ripia Upa. u.-s Trotetrai tv oMcur Ifi Cftpfi.
2 A nab. iii. 1. 4-8. 3 Mem. i. 1.
348 XENOPHOX.
might apologise, so to speak, for some custom in his regiment of
prayer-meetings or reading of the Bible : " If the repetition of
the phrase throughout this treatise, ' act \vith God,' surprises
any one, he may take my word for it, that with the daily or
hourly recurrence of perils which must betide him, his wonder-
ment will diminish ; as also with the clearer recognition of the
fact that, in a time of war, the antagonists are full of designs
against each other; but the precise issue of these plots and
counterplots is rarely known : to what counsellor then can a
man apply for advice in his extremity save only to the gods,
who know all things, and forewarn whomsoever they list by
victims, or by omens, by voice or vision ? And is it not rational
to suppose that they will prefer to help in their need, not those
who merely seek them in time of momentary stress and trouble,
but who in the halcyon days of their prosperity make a practice of
rendering to heaven the service of heart and soul?" 1 The senti-
ment, it may be retorted, is the sentiment of Christian times,
but the means are the measure of a creed that is past : which
is so far true that the lepa and r\nai, the olwvol and ovelpara,
take us out of ourselves into a pre-scientific world ; but to insist
further is neither fair nor rational. The question of the relative
value of creeds must be discussed with less prominence given
to a machinery commdn to the whole ancient world, Jewish and
Gentile alike, and more in reference to the spirit which animates
the worshipper ; when the gain will not all be on the side of later
times or ' purer ' beliefs.
To test this matter fairly then, to escape purblindness
so as to see clearly into the Xenophontine heart at any
rate, we must, without laying sacrilegious hands on our own
sacred things, " not to speak it profanely," mentally remove
the religious machinery of to-day, our sacramental feasts,
our prayer and thanksgivings, our devotional musings ;
replacing these by the secret rites of Demeter and lacchos,
by all that is comprehended under [Aavritcr), from the roll of
thunder, or the dream or chance word of good or evil import,
down to the still small voice, not refused to Socrates, which was
the oracle of " private judgment," by the public oracles, by
1 Hipparch. ix. 8, 9.
XENOPHON. 349
prayer for prayer, by faces veiled in sorrow and beaten breasts
in lieu of bent knees and contrite hearts, by lifted Lands and
chanted pagans of the Adorante in lieu of jubilates and choral
hallelujahs. Some of these cover the same ground, however
different in outward appearance or construction ; others point
to real chasms between the ancient Hellenic spirit and that
which is the breath of our life to-day. But just as in the
origin of species, the very progress in and through the
continuity may, if we neglect the true links, seem to imply
a gap which does not really exist, so here; and what is of
equal importance, we may fail to notice the solidarity of the
advanced peoples of ancient times as regards the machinery of
their worship, however divergent their creeds. It seems the
in&anique celeste of the soul of man is the same for long
ages together ; and thus in the Acts of the Apostles, 1 when St.
Peter is quoting the prophet Joel, the opdcreis, evinrvia, repara,
o-rjfjLela all occur in a perfectly rational and natural way, as
judged by the common mind of the time. " ^?;/z^ a voice
from heaven," " Bath Kol," one calls it ; " An angel spake to
him," says another ; " it thundered," to a third ; but thunder in
a clear sky that is a word of warning. These strange coinci-
dences between the world beyond myself and what is thrill-
ing me must be ' symbolic ' of the divine will.
It is not easy for the scientifically trained mind to go out of
itself, reverting to the every-day surroundings, the scenery of a
religion that is past. The demarking barrier between then and
now (or there and here, this very day) is hard to cross ; yet it
is science at least the supreme science which bids this to
be done. Nor, even for sympathetic natures, is it easy to revive
and realise the diffused condition of religion in a world, or
among peoples, in which sanctity is conterminous with existence,
and the godhead peers through every cranny of nature : the
days when baptisms were not so much a type of the spirit, as
literally spiritual ; when every fountain was sacred, and the
huntsman is enjoined not to interfere with springs and streams,
ra vd/jiara Kal ra peWpa edv, for to meddle with these is ugly
and base TO jap airTea-dai TOVTWV ala-'xpov Kal KUKOV : not
1 Actsii. 16-22.
350 XENOPHON.
to speak of the bad example of lawlessness set to the be-
holder Kal Iva p,r) TW vofJiw evavrioi MCTLV ol t'Soz^re?. 1 Some
dim intelligence of these things we may get from the remini-
scences of childhood and the natural sacraments of inventive
innocence ; when our nurse blessed us if we sneezed ; and we
held in secret silence commemorative feasts. Such is the
simple-minded, extended religiousness of early days, not subtle
indeed nor intense, but more thoroughly permeating every
hour and movement of existence religion interbleiit with life.
As to Xenophon personally, only a Hellene among Hellenes,
a specimen of a particular race, the product of a period interest-
ing but transient, we can see that he was doubly conditioned
by these circumstances, in the direction of superstition
" naturally," in the direction of monotheism through Socratic
training, 2 or something infectious in the great searcher's faith.
On the other hand, oracles and omens, prayers and fj,avTi/crj
generally, are his essentials (for he is at one with the
kindly race of man), and his theology revealed to him in the
' cities and tribes of men ' a region of rational common-sense
religion, God-fearing in the appointed ways ; but at either limit
of this religious world he beheld two " maniacal " extremes
here the worshippers of stocks and stones, 3 or again of animals
and there those who contrived to pass through life without
God or gods at all. Probably he had as little intellectual
sympathy with a fetichist or animal- worshipper, a mad Mossy n-
oecian 4 turning all customs upside down, as with a civilised
non-barbarian atheist like Aristodemus the little, who figures in
the memorable conversation with Socrates on the omnipresence
of God. But if (and it is an open question only, an inference,
in fact) Xenophon was so far narrow in his sympathies, or, as
we may say, unscientifically disposed, we must do him the
justice to admit that he is also in advance of his times in his
theologic views. It is to him we owe the clear appreciation of
1 Cyn. v. 34.
2 Cf. Cicero's very interesting criticism, de Nat. Deorum, ii. v. 18. An
argument is drawn from the mind in man to establish a directing principle
in the universe, rb i]yefj.oviK6v, taken from Plato and the Xenophontine
Socrates.
8 Cf. Mem. i. 1. 14, and i. 4. 19. 4 Vide infra, p. 365.
XENOPHOX. 351
some of the most important of his master's tenets : his natural
theology, his ' teleologic ' proofs of a beneficent Providence,
his speculations on immortality. These are not only conveyed in
reported conversations of the teacher, but they interpenetrate the
writings of the disciple. Once and again we listen to them in the
conversations, and they fall in most clear accents from the lips
of the dying Cyrus. 1 Xor, once propounded, have they been
allowed to die away. We do not compare them with the
argument of a later lover of mankind in 1 Corinthians xv.,
but handed on from age to age through the Stoics, through
Plutarch, through Cicero (through the Fathers surely and the
schools), we hear a ring of them in the Evidences and sermons
of to-day : and of these Socratic " mysteries " the hierophant
is Xenophon.
Let us, however, abandoning " the things concerning the
gods," turn and consider the bent of our author's mind towards
his fellow-men. His (f)i\av0pa)7rta and his appreciation of human-
heartedness in others are remarkable. Here again the words
which he applies to Socrates, " that he was perpetually trying
to be of service to those with whom he was brought in contact,"
may with certain restrictions be applied to himself ; for in the
main, and in spite of strong political bias, and the prejudices of
"a beautiful and good" but still circumscribed nature, he is full
of loving-kindness, and of a friendly disposition to his fellow-
men, Hellenes and barbarians alike. He bears no spite or
grudge against humanity, being devoid, as far as we can dis-
cover, of any deep-seated selfishness or arribre pensfo. Of
Socrates he says : 2 "If his friends were ever in difficulties,
where ignorance was the cause, he tried to heal the trouble by
a dose of wisdom ; or where want and poverty were to blame,
by lessoning them that they should assist one another as far as
in them lay." And of Cyrus, whom he selects to represent the
ideal ruler, he says : " In legend and song he is still com-
memorated by the Eastern world as of bodily shape most fair to
look upon, but in soul so replete with the threefold love of
man, of knowledge, and of honour, that there was no toil he
would not suffer, or danger incur, to win the praise and admira-
1 Cyropaed. viii. 7. 17-19. 2 Mem. vii. 7.
352 XENOPHON.
tioiiof mankind." "\Vith the " philanthropic" type of character,
and for true friendship with its duties, the writer has evidently
the deepest sympathy and concern ; but his personal possession
of the quality is proved rather by the manifest warmth of
his affection for many personal friends, etc. It is an admira-
tion reaching the point of ' hero-worship ' in the case of
Socrates, and perhaps Agesilaus ; but not less genuinely
exhibited, after humble human fashion, in the tender panegy-
rics or criticisms of Proxenus, his " ancient friend," or of
the younger Cyrus. " Among those who were brought into
communion with Socrates, and recognised his greatness, all
true lovers of virtue still to this day cease not to lament his
incomparable loss with the bitterest regret, as for him who,
as none else could, helped them in the pursuit of perfection.
For iny part, when I think of his qualities . . ." l Part of the
brightness of the Anabasis and Hellenica is due to his warm-
hearted sympathy with this or that human being ; sometimes
a friend and companion, like Teleutias the Spartan admiral,
brother of Agesilaus ; 2 sometimes a stranger associate, like
Seuthes ; 3 or only some distant hero whose splendidly shining life
has caught the historian's attention, and still gleams upon his
page, like Pasimachus. 4 But their name is legion. Others are
nameless heroes, like the two whose /ca\oKaya6ia and needless
sacrifice during the Ptetreat have touched his heart, and whose
epitaph he writes : " See, they have died thus, these ' galant-
uomini,' and we were not able to remove their bodies or bury
them." 5
It would be safe to conjecture that this generosity of disposi-
tion must find vent for itself in all natural and orderly ways ;
that the broad-souled philanthropist and staunch friend would
also prove, under the right circumstances, a passionate lover
husband father ; but for proof we are not left to surmise or
even inferential biography or tradition. To the old grammarian
Tzetzes, indeed, Themistogenes appears as Shakespeare's Mr.
W. H. ; and he regards him as in a special sense " the only
1 Mem. iv. 8. 11, TUV 5e Zwscpdr^i' yiyvuffK6vT<av ofos fy, K.T.\.
2 Hellen. iv. 4. 19. s Anab. vii. 6. 43.
4 Hellen. iv. 10. 5 Anal. iv. 1. 19.
XENOPHON,
begetter" of the Analxisis. " As Phidias made statues for the
Eleian Pantarces inscribing the name so did Xenophon
with regard to his ' Advance of Cyrus' setting a certain name
to the work to please him whom he loved." Who can contra-
dict this ? A similar tale in Diogenes Laertius 1 contradicts itself.
That writer first tells us that Aristippus relates in Book iv. of
his treatise irepl 7ra\aia$ rpvffis that Xenophon loved Cleinias,
whom he apostrophises thus, vvv <yap ejco KXeiviav r/Siov fj,ev
Oewfjiai ?} ToX\a Trdvra ra ev dvOputTrois /ca\d, quoting totidem
verbis from a speech of Critobulus, one of the interlocutors in the
Symposium, a work which later on he justly assigns to Xeno-
phon. To Critobulus (the real lover of Cleinias) the time has
come, according to the rules of the after-supper entertainment,
to defend as his thesis " that on which I pride myself most is
my beauty." This he does in the broadly humorous but still
delicately ironic style suited to the occasion and the author,
who at will infuses a touch of bombast. " ' It is now my turn,
I think, to state to you the grounds on which I pride myself
on beauty.' A chorus of voices rejoined, ' Say on.' ' To
begin with, if I am not beautiful, as methinks I be, you will
bring on your own heads the 'penalty of perjury one and all :
for, without waiting to have the oath administered to you,
you are always taking the gods to witness that you find me
beautiful : and I must needs believe you are you not all
honourable men ? If then I be so beautiful, and affect you
even as I also am affected by him whose fair face here attracts
me, I swear by all the company of heaven, I would not choose
the Great King's empire in exchange for what I am, the
beauty of the world, the paragon of animals; and at this
instant I feast my eyes on Cleinias gladlier than on all other
sights which men deem fair. Joyfully will I welcome blind-
ness to all else, if but these eyes may still behold him, and
him only. With sleep and night I am sore vexed, which rob
me of his sight, but to daylight and the sun I owe eternal
thanks, for they restore him to me, my heart's joy, Cleinias.' "
Unauthentic, as that of Tzetzes was apocryphal, this tale
proves nothing which we did not perceive already. Xeno-
1 Diog. Laert. Xenophon.
2
354 XENOPHON.
phon, like Socrates, understood the influence of the masculine
epaxt. This to him is the highest type of passionate affec-
tion. 1 Nor need we further witness than his own words to put
us at the right point of view with regard to him : " The men
of old, Achilles, Heracles, and the rest, learnt at the feet of
the Centaur Cheiron many a noble art, and they began with
the chase. From these they attained to great virtue, and
became men of renown, and are admired even to this day for
their goodness, goodness, who numbers all men as her lovers,
as is very plain ; only, because of the pains they must take to
win her many fall away, for the achievement of her is hid
in obscurity, but the pains that cleave to her are manifest.
Perchance, if only she were endowed with a visible bodily
frame, men would less have neglected her, knowing that even as
she is visible to them, so they also are not hid from her eyes.
For is it not so, that when a man moves in the presence of him
whom he dearly loves, he rises to a height above himself,
being incapable of aught base or foul, in word or deed, in sight
of him ? but, fondly dreaming that the eye of virtue is closed
to them, they are guilty of many a base thing and foul before
her very face, who is hidden from their eyes. Yet she is pre-
sent everywhere, being dowered with immortality ; and those
who are perfect in goodness she honours, but the wicked
she thrusts aside from honour. If only men could know that
she regards them, how eagerly would they rush to the embrace
of toilful training and tribulation, by which alone she is hardly
taken; and so should they gain the mastery over her, and she
should be laid captive at their feet."
More striking perhaps, as being possibly more exceptional, is
his guardedness. He is so fully aware of the danger which
lurks in the things of 'A<j>po8lrrj and epcos that his mature creed
is almost puritanic. Unconscious carelessness, followed by
a storm of personal struggles to end in eventual calm, may pos-
sibly be pointed at in the biographic passage of the Recollections,
apropos of the same Critobulus and Cleinias : 2 " A touch of the
lips " in certain temperaments may be " the poisonous bite of
the tarantula ; nay, this creature is less deadly, for it must cling
1 Cyn. xii. 18-21. 2 Mem. i. 3. 8-14.
XENOPHON. 355
to its victim in order to inject its poison ; but do you not know
that this wild beast which men call beauty is so much more
terrible than the tarantula, that, by a mere glance, it will
inject something into you yards away which will drive you
mad ? . . . My advice to you, Xenophon, is, ' Whenever you set
eyes on any fair face or form, to run helter-skelter without
casting a glance behind you ;' and to you, Critobulus, my
advice is, ' Go abroad for a year; so long will it take you to be
healed of this wound.' " " Such," adds the biographer, " in the
affairs of Aphrodite, should be the attitude of those who do not
stand firm as a rock." But perhaps Xenophon was not more
distinguished from other Hellenes of this date in this than in
the kindred subject of intersexual or domestic relations, and the
state of marriage. The dignity of the wife, the education of
women, the humane treatment of slaves, are matters in which
he is for some reason (perhaps the Socratic self-discipline of
a naturally philanthropic disposition) in advance of his com-
peers ; or, if that seems too partial a statement, to his art of
words, at any rate, we owe the revelation of the most pleasing
pictures of inner life and manage in contrast with that of the
reigning beauty of the day ; and to the same gift we owe a series
of portraits of great women, which, for truth of delineation and
inventiveness of design, would alone mark this writer as a great
artist of a noble school of realism.
In reference to tenderness and the topic now before us, it is
sufficient to record an interview of Socrates with Theodote 1 in
the Recollections, and to compare it with the conversation be-
tween Ischomachus, an Athenian country gentleman, and his
young wife, in the Economist. Theodote is probably painted
from life, and nothing certainly could be more life-like, while
round all objects, and the persons present with the two that are
speaking, and the words and manner of their speech, plays a
delicate air of Hellenic grace, and the irony of Socrates stings
innocuously; so that he also who, to-day, has surreptitiously
listened, departs wiser and more tender-hearted than when he
entered. Perhaps it is base to unveil a portion of so charm-
ing a scene. The lady says, at last : " ' Oh ! why, Socrates,
1 Mem. iii. 11. 1.
356 XENOPHON.
why are you not at my side (like the huntsman's assistant) to
help me snare my friends and lovers ?' ' That will I be/ he
answered, ' if only you can woo and win me.' ' How shall I woo
and win you?' she asked. ' Seek and you will find means, if
you truly need me.' ' Then come and visit me often/ she said.
And Socrates, poking sly fun at his own lack of business occu-
pation, answered, ' Nay, Theodote, leisure is not a commodity in
which I largely deal. I have a hundred affairs of my own to
attend to ; and then there are my lady-loves my dear friends
who will not suffer me day or night to leave them, for ever
studying to learn love-charms and incantations at my lips.'
' Why ! are you really versed in those things, Socrates ?' 'Of
course, or else how is it, do you suppose, that Apollodorus here
and Antisthenes never leave me, and why have Cebes and
Simmias come all the way from Thebes to stay with me ? Be
assured, these things cannot happen without divine love-charms
and incantations and magic wheels.' 1 ' I wish you would lend
me your magic wheel then/ she said, ' and I will set it spinning
for you first/ ' Ah, but/ he answered, ' I do not wish to be
drawn to you. I wish you to come to me/ ' Then I will come/
she answered, ' only will you be " at home " to me ?' ' Yes/ he
answered, ' unless I am already engaged/ "
Let us turn to a scene in domestic life : ^Socrates is inter-
rogating the "husband who had received into his arms his
young wife of fifteen, absolutely ignorant of the world and its
ways," as Mr. Lecky tells us. 2 " ' Then all else/ said I, ' you
taught your wife yourself, Ischomachus, until you had made her
proficient in careful attention to her appointed duties ?' ' That
did I not/ replied he, ' until I had first offered sacrifice and
prayed, that I might teach and she might learn all that could
conduce to the happiness of us twain/ ' And did your wife
join in sacrifice and prayer to that effect ?' ' Most certainly,
with many a vow registered to heaven to become all she ought
to be ; giving plain proof that, if the teaching failed, it should
not be from want of due attention on her part/ ' Pray nar-
rate to me what you first essayed to teach her ; to hear that
1 Cf. Theocr. ii. 17.
2 History of European Morals, vol. ii. 305 ; Xenophon, Oecon. vii.
XENOPHON. 357
story would please me more than any description of the most
splendid gymnic contest or horse-race you could give me.' "
As soon as the fluttering fawn-like little creature had become
accustomed to her husband's hand, and was now sufficiently
trained to bear the effort of discussion, he commenced by ask-
ing : " Did it ever strike you to consider what led me to choose
you as my wife among all women, or your parents to intrust
you to me of all men?" Gently and gradually, drop by drop,
with infinite tact and delicacy, the questions and answers come,
until the girlish wife is led to realise her position clearly ; and
the raison d'etre, practical and spiritual alike, of matrimony,
with its providentially devised scheme of manifold co-operation,
is revealed. She is to be the Queen-bee in her hive ; and the
works and duties, for which her woman's nature is so well
adapted, will not be of trifling importance. For God, perceiv-
ing that a fearful spirit would be no detriment to guardianship,
has endowed her with a larger measure of timidity than he
bestowed on man. She must receive and register the products
of their joint estate, apportioning part for daily and current
use, and making provision to garner and guard the rest, so that
the outgoings destined for a year may not be expended within
a month. " ' There is just one of the occupations which
devolve upon you,' says the husband, ' that you may find not
altogether pleasing : when any member of our household falls
sick, it will be your care to see and tend them to the recovery
of their health.' ' Nay,' replies the wife, ' that will be my
pleasantest of tasks, if careful nursing may touch the springs
of gratitude and leave them friendlier than heretofore.' " We
are reminded of the Euripidean Alkestis parting with her
slaves :
" All of the household servants wept as well,
Moved to compassion for their mistress ; she
Extended her right hand to all and each,
And there was no one of such low degree
She spoke not to, nor had an answer from. " '
"With a very tender and delicate care to avoid everything
resembling a reproach, the husband persuades his wife to
give up the habits of wearing high-heeled boots in order
1 Browning, Balaustion's Adventure, p. 38.
358 XENOPHON.
to appear tall, and of colouring her face with vermilion and
white-lead. He promises her that if she faithfully performs
her duties he will himself be the first and most devoted of her
slaves. He assured Socrates that when any domestic dispute
arose, he could extricate himself admirably if he was in the right,
but that whenever he was in the wrong he found it impossible to
convince his wife that it was otherwise." l Let us once more
overhear the last few words of this dialogue. Ischomachus
is speaking and says : " ' Things have indeed now got so
far, that it has happened to me to be taken apart and to
have judgment passed upon me, what penalty I must pay
or what requital I must make.' 'And at whose bar,' I asked,
' is the sentence given ? I cannot guess.' ' Whose but my own
wife's? 'he answered. 'And pray how do you conduct your
own case ? ' ' Not so badly when truth and interest are on
one and the same side ; but when these are opposed indeed,
Socrates, I have no skill to make the worse appear the better
argument.' To which I : ' No, in truth, Ischomachus, black
cannot be made to look white.' " 2
But, for the light which it throws on this matter, let us
turn to another discourse quoted by Cicero from the Socratic
Aeschines, as a specimen of the "inductive" method. 3 The
interlocutors are Aspasia, Xenophon's wife, and Xenophon
himself. Aspasia asks, " ' Tell me, wife of Xenophon, if your
neighbour possesses better jewellery than you, would you
rather have hers or yours ? ' ' Hers.' ' If her dresses, etc., are
better and costlier, would you rather have your own or hers ? '
' Hers, I suppose.' ' Well ! well ! and if she has a better husband
than yours, which would you rather have, hers or your own ? '
A blush suffused the lady's cheeks ; and Aspasia turned to
Xenophon : ' Tell me, Xenophon, if your neighbour rides a
better horse than yours, would you rather have his or yours ?'
' His.' ' Well, if he owns a better farm than yours, would
you rather have his farm or yours?' 'The better one, of
course.' ' Well ! but if he has a better wife than yours, which
would you choose ? ' Silence sealed his lips. Then Aspasia :
1 Lecky, ibid. I.e.
2 Oecon. xi. 25. 3 De Invent. 1. xxxi. 51 et seq.
XENOPHON. 359
' Very well ! since you will neither of you tell me the only thing
I wished to hear, let me interpret to you your thoughts. You,
lady, wish to have the best of husbands, and you, Xenophon,
the queen of wives ; but if you fall short of a perfection that
lies in your own hands, you will feel an aching void which
nought else can supply since you both covet earnestly this
best possession.' They assented." This tale, which has a
dramatic truth about it, is not, of course, to be used for
purposes of biography, and we need not speculate whether
the lady's name was Soteira or Philesia ; but for the uses
of ideal biography we shall, with a good conscience, let it
throw w T hat light it can upon the matrimonial happiness of
our author ; and if we feel inclined we shall say that Philesia
or Soteira or some other real woman, " better than any portrait
by Zeuxis," was the prototype, in some sort, of the wife of
Ischomachus, the Portia at whose judgment-seat we have lately
sat ; or of Panthea that fairest lady in all the land, and most
loyal of wives the wife of Abradatas ; or of the wife of
Tigranes ; x and the other Xenophontine women, worthy to
rank, not with Antigone perhaps, but with many of the women
of Euripides.
As to Panthea, for her at least have our hearts melted ' with
the droppings of warm tears ;' like Araspas we have been made
unawares captive in love, and at the hands of the wicked
sophist "Epax; have been taught wisdom ; to know that we have
two souls, and that when the good and lovely soul prevails, all
lovely and good things are wrought, but the villain soul lays to
her hand to work things base and ugly. 2 But this whole story,
" perhaps the most pathetic recital embodied in the works of
Hellenic antiquity," 3 is too good and sacred to spoil by breaking
up into fragments. For the present let us only recognise that it is
a tale of conjugal love, which we keep among the eternal /crr/para
owing to the inventive genius of Xenophon. Less tragical,
but much to the point, is the narrative of Tigranes, the son of
the king of Armenia, and the Armenian princess his wife, in
Book iii. of the Cyropaedia, of whom Heywoode writes : " The
1 Heywoode has put these two deservedly into his Jfwcu/cetoj' (1624), pp.
126, 245.
2 Cyr. vi. 1. 41. ' Grote, Plato, chap, xxxix. vol. iii., Xenopkon.
360 XENOPHON.
wife of Tygranes having been with her husband at a sumptuous
banquet made by King Cyrus in his Pallace Boy all, when every
one extold the majestie and applauded the goodlinesse of the
King's person ; at length Tygranes askt his queen what her
opinion was of his magnitude and person. She answered : ' I
can say nothing, sir, for all the time of the feaste mine eyes were
stedfastle fixed upon you, my deare husband ; for what other
mens beauties are it becomes not a married wife to inquire.' "
That is graceful, but the original is more graceful arid simpler
than the Elizabethan reflection. The father of Tigranes, also
called Tigranes, beleaguered in a fastness with his wives and
daughters and all that he had, has been forced to come down
and submit to be tried by the conqueror Cyrus. At that
crisis the eldest son of the Armenian monarch Tigranes, an
old hunting companion of Cyrus, was returning home after a
long journey, and when he heard what was done he presented
himself to Cyrus even as he was ; but when he saw his father
and his mother, his brethren, yea, and his own wife also, that
were made prisoners, he could not refrain himself from tears.
Constrained by Cyrus, he assists at the trial of his father.
There is just that tinge of Oriental feeling which gives the
Cyropaedia part of its charm ; as of the meeting of Hellenism
and the Eastern world. Is this the court of Solomon ? or are we
in a sort of philosophic dicasterion of the Elect, such as might be
found in Plato's ideal state ? It is hard to say ; we seem to be
in two places at once, yet there is no confusion, so great is the
potency of the poetry of this master: behind the Socratic dialogue
and the Spartan character of the Buler and true Prince we are
made aware of the parabolic wisdom of Nathan, and the king of
kings. 1 The Armenian monarch is forced to pass a sentence of
death upon himself ; but the son pleads for the father, and the
conqueror, who is as clement as he is politic and princely, yields.
" But when they were gotten home they talked of Cyrus one
praising his wisdom, another his endurance, and a third the
gentleness of his nature, and a fourth his beauty and magni-
ficent stature. Then Tigranes turned to his wife and asked :
' Did Cyrus seem beautiful in thine eyes also ? ' To whom
1 Of . Sidney's An Apologie for Poetrie, 1595: "So right a prince as
Xenophon's Cyrus," p. 25.
XENOPHON.
he answered : ' Xay, my lord, for I set not mine eyes upon
him.' ' But on whom then ? ' asked Tigranes. ' On him
who, to free me from slavery, offered his own life.' For that
proposal had the husband made. . . ." The next day it is a
question whether the son or father shall command the Ar-
menian contingent. The father says : " He of us twain upon
whom thou slialt lay this injunction." But the son says :
" Nay, Cyrus, if I must even follow as one of your baggage-
bearers, I will never leave you." Then with an arch smile
Cyrus asked : " And what will you take that your wife should
learn of you that you are become a baggage-bearer ? " " She
will not need to learn the fact from others, for I shall take her
with me, and she can see for herself with her own eyes all that
I do." " It is time then you two got your ' kit ' together." So
the wife followed her husband on the campaign ; and when the
empire of Cyrus was established, and the rewards of valour
were to be distributed at Hey woode's " sumptuous banquet," he
brought out and gave to Tigranes a woman's attire and adorn-
ment, bidding him bestow it on his wife ort avftpeiws
<Tvve<n pareveTo rq> avSpi " for that she manfully followed
her own man to war."
Side by side with these pictures of fair women and good
wives ought to be placed, not only on artistic grounds, but as
throwing a clear light on a leading portion of our author's
human-heartedness, the boyhood of Cyrus ; and if Philesia may
have been the model for the wife of Tigraues, so certainly may
the childhood of Cyrus have been studied from one or other
of Xenophon's sons. Xenophon is a true artist, and, with-
out possessing the chief distinguishing Euripidean qualities,
curiously witnesses to the realism of his time, coming to much
the same point as the great poet analyst, by opposite means.
He sees the character or object or personage he wishes to
describe, en bloc, but with the clear-sighted precision of a photo-
grapher's lens; and his hand hardly falters in the delinea-
tion ; his ' negatives ' are generally good ; in the case of this
young boy, perhaps, exceptionally perfect; but what purges
the artist's vision here is the philanthropy of the father and
the man. Throughout a long sustained account, extending over
several quarto pages, the relations of the boy to his mother ;
362 XENOPHON.
his school-fellows, his grandfather, his uncle, his admirers, the
chief butler, etc., are all exquisitely and inimitably drawn, and
preserved without perhaps one false note. We have seen
Cyrus hunting to the admiration of his grandfather ; and if
space permitted, we might see him slay his stag and boar, even
as his great historic compeer, the ideal monarch of a neigh-
bouring people, slew a lion and a bear. We might represent
scene upon scene some of proverbial notoriety : the judgment
of the coat, and the whipping consequent ; the exclamation at
sight of his grandly-attired Median grandfather, 009 KO\.OS poi
6 TraTTTTo? ; his overflow of animal spirits ; the stirrings of his
soul by affection ; the light-as-air whispers of the divine epeo<?
in his ear ; the heavy-hearted contritions and short, sharp pangs
of boyish remorse, etc. etc., and we should at no moment doubt
but that the delineator had a true and loving conception of
boyish nature, as being the " programme of all good."
But this topic has detained us long enough ; only, in kindred
connection, and before we turn to consider qualifying points,
let us in a series of pictures appreciate that most untranslat-
able of all qualities the humour and geniality, without which
a man is scarcely a man, and to which the healthy irony of the
Greeks gives so rare and intellectual a beauty. We will let
our minds revert freely to the Anabasis, though the special
quality in question is not confined to that buoyant work, but is
everywhere, and is made the staple of the broader fun of the
Symposium, which holds its sides and ' guffaws,' like a Brob-
dingnagian expansion of the gossamer wit of Lilliputia.
Bacon has recounted to us in vivid style the humorous
interview, after Cunaxa, between the generals and Phalinus,
the agent of the Great King, himself a Greek and a sort
of professor of strategics at the Persian court. Bacon was
not troubled by any manuscript reading Theopompus for
Xenophon, nor disturbed by doubts as to the absolute authen-
ticity of so graphic a history. 1 Therefore the passage which is
here quoted, for the humour of the situation, is also an epitaph
engraven with the high encomium of "the young scholar or philo-
1 Advancement of Learning, i. vii. 30. Lord Bacon's Works, vol. iii. p. 313.
(Spedding and Ellis.)
XENOPHON.
sopher :" " The message imported that they should deliver up
their arms, and submit themselves to the king's mercy. To
which message, before answer was made, divers of the army con-
ferred familiarly with Falinus, and amongst the rest Xenophon
happened to say, ' "NVhy, Falinus, we have now but these two
things left, our arms and our virtue ; and if we yield up our
arms, how shall we make use of our virtue ? ' Whereto Falinus,
smiling on him, said, ' If I be not deceived, young gentleman,
you are an Athenian, and I believe you study philosophy, and
it is pretty that you say ; but you are much abused if you think
your virtue can withstand the king's power.' Here was the
scorn ; the wonder followed : which was that this young scholar
or philosopher, after all the captains were murdered in parley
by treason, conducted those ten thousand foot through the heart
of all the king's high countries, from Babylon to Grecia, in safety,
in despite of all the king's forces, to the astonishment of the
world, and the encouragement of the Grecians in times suc-
ceeding to make invasion upon the kings of Persia ; as was
afterwards proposed by Jason the Thessalian, attempted
by Agesilaus the Spartan, and achieved by Alexander the
Macedonian, all upon the ground of the act of that young
scholar." But while considering his heroism, let us not forget
the humour of Xenophon. 2 On the night after the murder of
the generals we are fairly resolved on the march ; our wagons
and tents are burnt ; we have shared with each other what we
need from our superfluities, and thrown the rest into our watch-
fires ; and with a good conscience we betake ourselves to break-
fast. Just then up rides Mithridates with about thirty horsemen.
Summoning the generals to within earshot, he makes us a fine
long speech : ' Men of Hellas, I was faithful to Cyrus, and
I am well-disposed to you, and now I am here living in great
dread. What are you going to do ? If it seems rational, I am
disposed to join you with my retainers/ etc. etc. This sounds
promising, but after various consultations out it comes. In the
style of a preacher the excellent Asiatic tries to persuade us
1 Grote is still at Bacon's point of view ; and seems hardly sufficiently to
recognise the colouring element of Xenophon's strong subjectivity.
2 Altai, iii. 3.
364 XENOPHON.
that without the good graces of the Great King our salvation is
hopeless. We part friends. After the mid-day meal we cross
the great Zab, and are jogging along in regular inarching
order. But before we have got very far, lo and behold, eVt-
(fraivercu Trakiv 6 MidptSdrrj^, 1 there he is again. Yes, surely,
that's he Mithridates with a couple of hundred horse at his
back this time, and twice as many bowmen and slingers ; and
in another five minutes we are in the thick of a pelt of arrows
and stones. The cavalry of this false friend, whose appear-
ance we shall never forget, dog us all day. The scene changes :
We are on the edge of a river with beetling Carduchian
crags hemming us in. We sound the depth of the river. We
can't bottom it with our long spears. In the midst of our per-
plexities a lihodian comes up with a proposal : 2 ' I am ready,
sirs, to carry you across 4000 heavy infantry at a time, if you
will furnish me with what I need, and give me a talent for my
services.' ' What will you need ? ' ' Only 2000 wineskins.
I see there are multitudes of sheep and goats and asses.
They have only to be flayed and their skins inflated, and they
will readily give us a passage. I shall want also the straps you
use for the baggage-animals. With these I shall couple the
skins to one another, and then I shall moor each skin, by
attaching stones and letting them down like anchors into the
water. Then I shall carry them across, and when I have fas-
tened the links at both ends, I shall place layers of wood on
them and a coating of earth on the top of that. You will see
in a minute that there is no danger of your drowning, for every
skin will be able to support a couple of men without sinking ;
and the wood and earth will prevent your slipping off.' This
seems a pretty invention enough ; but the generals think it
not altogether practicable in the face of cavalry on the other
side, etc. Every now and again the march is enlivened
by 'chaff' and repartee between the quick-witted Athenian
and the respectable Laconian Cheirisophus. Views of educa-
tion are compared. 3 The Athenian suggests, a propos of steal-
ing a march upon the enemy, that the Spartan training will
1 Anab. iii. 3. 6. 2 Ibid. iii. 5.
3 Ibid. iv. 6. 14-16.
XENOPIION. 365
now be of use. The Spartan mutters something in the nature
of a tu q_uoq_uc, about those who are taught to filch the public
moneys in a democratic state, of which he has heard. On
the slopes above Trebizond there is a great sacrifice and games. 1
The master of the ceremonies, a Spartan, Dracontius by name, is
asked to conduct them to the course. He merely waved his hand,
pointing to where they were standing, and said : ' There, this
ridge is just the place for running anywhere, everywhere.'
' But how will they manage to wrestle on the hard scrubby
ground ?' ' Oh ! worse knocks for those who are thrown.'
There was horse-racing also. The riders had to gallop down
a steep incline to the sea, and then turn and come up
again to the altar ; and on the descent more than half rolled
head over heels, and then back they came toiling up the
tremendous steep, scarcely out of a walking pace. Loud were
the shouts, the laughter, and the cheers. The quaint cus-
toms of semi-barbaric tribes in matters of eating and drink-
ing are a constant source of mirth, as we sit imbibing beer
through long reeds ; 2 or, in Thrace, Seuthes throws us junks of
meat ; or the wine-cup is handed, and we must get up and
make speeches and promise gifts. 3 Again, 110 one who ever
visited the Mossynoecians, i.e. the wooden-tower dwellers,
will ever forget them. Transported suddenly into the world
of Sir John Mandeville, he feels as if pavia were only next
door; but there is a comical method in this madness. The
customs of these people were the customs of civilised folk
turned inside out. They do in a crowd what nous autres do
in private, and vice versa* There they go, talking and laugh-
ing to themselves, standing and capering about, as if their
sole business were to show off to the rest of the world. They
are very white-skinned, the men as well as the women. One
of their entertainments consists of an exhibition of fatted
children belonging to the wealthy classes, fed up on boiled
chestnuts until they are as white as white can be, and very
nearly as broad as they are long." But these humorous situa-
tions are endless.
1 Anab. iv. 8. 26. 2 Ibid. iv. 5. 26.
3 Ibid. vii. 3. 22, 26 et seq. 4 Ibid. v. 4. 32-34.
3 66 XENOPHON.
Xenophon then is, without exception, a type of the
dpwTTos, but of course it is a ^>L\av6pa)7rta conditioned by his
age and " political " circumstances, neither of which does he
transcend to any miraculous extent. His world is peopled,
somewhat unduly to our democratic minds, with ol fieXria-Tot
and ol KaXol rcdr/adoi. The better classes and the people of
culture limit or confine the horizon of his sympathies ; even as
now-a-days, when caste prejudices are clearly decadent, the garb
or general appearance of a man may impose on the imagination
of a Christian, or as the philosophy of some thinkers seems to
be warped by contact with coloured races and less advanced
civilisations. The eye of Xenophon may similarly have looked
askance at some one whose political or social setting was not
to his taste ; but this Trpoa-wn-oXrj-^la does not render him less
graphic, nor, in any deep sense, poison the springs of his phil-
anthropy. Indeed his sympathy is so akin to clear-sightedness,
and in keeping with the bright keen atmosphere and sunny
Heiterkeit of his native olive-clad hills and vales, that nothing,
not even anti-Theban political partisanship, can dull its trans-
parency ; and so, whatever he may have thought of the two
heroes who slipped through the fingers of Agesilaus from the
closely-watched citadel of Phlius, his description of them
lives in our memory, through the vividness of his style. 1
" Agesilaus granted a truce for the embassy, but at the same
time he was so angry at their setting his personal authority
aside that he sent to his friends at home, and arranged that the
fate of the little township should be left to his discretion, and
meanwhile proceeded to tighten the cordon of investment, so
as to render it impossible that a single soul should escape." In
spite of which he was not clever enough for Delphion. " This
brilliant organiser of the defence, with a single comrade (crrvy-
fjuartas Tt<?), a branded dare-devil, who had already shown great
dexterity in relieving the besieging parties of their arms,
escaped in the night."
In close connection with the healthy humanity of our author
(which in reference to others is faXla, to one's-self eve^la,
and negatively implies an absence of Tr\eove%ia and //3pt<?),
1 Hellen. v. 3. 22-24.
XENOPHON. 367
are to l>e ranged his favourite virtues : the special ' rule of
life/ to which his nature was doubtless prone; but with the
emphasising of which ' the great companion ' must surely be
largely credited, though to what extent we can only dimly con-
jecture. For undoubtedly on many important moral questions
or (to speak correctly) ethical theories, the disciple differed largely
from his master, and was, so far, nearer to the average mind of
even later ages. 1 Thus, according to Xenophon, who is inter-
preting the Socratic mind to ' the Athenians,' i.e. to a general
audience, and in a somewhat apologetic style, in keeping
with the mental vernacular, to Xenophon virtue is a branch
of /jidOrjaii; (learning) indeed, and so far a thing to be taught ;
but then aaKTjo-is, discipline (including objective discipline of
the individual and subjective self-discipline), is a means of
teaching. Again, ema-T^i], the highest type of intellectual
knowledge (science), readily transforms itself into cro^la, the
highest sort of wisdom. Possibly the transformation, so far
as Xenophon himself is concerned, takes place through some
such train of thought as the following, taken from a con-
versation between Socrates and Euthydemus : 2
Question. And what shall we say of wisdom ? Tell me : do
the wise seem to you to be wise in things they know, or are
there, who are wise in what they know not ?
Answer. Clearly in what they know ; for how should a man
have wisdom in what he know^s not ?
Quest. The wise, in fact, are wise in knowledge ?
Ans. Why, in what else could a man be wise, save only in
knowledge ?
Quest. And wisdom ! is it aught else, think you, than that
wherein men are wise ?
Ans. Certainly not.
Quest. It seems, knowledge is wisdom ?
Ans. I think so.
1 I do not mean, contrariwise, to imply that the true Socrates is to be found
in Plato rather than in Xenophon (vide note ' next page, and note x page 369),
but rather, that the Aristotelian theory of virtue was latent in the common-
sense views of the moralist. What the profound identification of <ro<pla. with
tiri(TTJiij.T) was in the mind of Socrates, lies beyond the present discussion.
2 Mem. iv. 6. 7.
;68 XENOPHON.
Quest. Do you think that a man is capable of knowing all
the things that are ?
Ans. I should say he cannot know even the millionth part
of them.
Quest. It seems a human being cannot be all-wise ?
Ans. Certainly not.
Quest. The conclusion is, the wisdom of each man is limited
to that which he knows.
This is by no means tantamount to saying that <jo$ia =
eTnaTrj/^rj : but one sees that wisdom and knowledge might
easily come to be convertible, in inexact thought or expres-
sion ; and the practical loss (or gain) is the same. 1 On the
other hand, aofaa is apt to fade away, and to transform
itself into o-co^poavvrj (an untranslatable "mixed mode"-
temperance, modesty, sobriety, and rhythmical self-completion
and adjustment). 2 " Now wisdom and awp^ocrvvr] he did not
distinguish, his verdict being that the one thing needful was
that a man should make himself acquainted with ' the beautiful
and the good,' and practise them ; or, again, he should learn to
know the ugly and base, and avoid it. Such a man was o-o^o?
and <r<t)(f)p(i)v, wise and well-regulated. For justice (or upright-
ness) and all things that are wrought with virtue are beautiful
and good." 3 And, again, "justice and all the rest of virtue are
wisdom."
Whether, then, in these kaleidoscopic views Xenophon is
only expressing his own reading of the philosopher's mind, or
whether he has also the mind of the philosopher, which,
thirdly, he may be translating into language to be understood of
the mass of men, is a most serious investigation, raising as it does
1 It may be urged that, as far as this passage goes, the disciple is truly,
if perhaps crudely, intelligent of his master ; for, admittedly, the identification
of knowledge, wisdom, and virtue is the most characteristic of Socratic
doctrines ; while the scope and intention of the Recollections exclude severe
philosophising. But, even so, the impression left upon the mind is that
Xenophon himself took merely a common-sense view of the subtleties of the
spirit, in which the teacher dealt ; and, except as a moralist and sympathiser,
failed to fathom the distinctive doctrine. Nor does it appear that Plato,
from another side, was more successful.
3 Cf. J. S. Mill, Dissertations and Discussions, vol. iii. 326, 327.
8 Mem. iii. 9. 4, 5.
XENOPHON. 369
the whole question of the philosophic value of the Recollections.
But its pursuit would lead us too far afield, and it seems suffi-
cient to get an insight into the mind of the Hearer rather than
of the Inspirer ; for if we find it next to impossible to separate
the chaff of Xenophon 1 from the wheat of Socrates, we have no
similar difficulty in detecting the idiosyncratic virtues of this
particular Hellene. AVe have only to carve them out of the
whole assemblage of moral qualities which make up the dperrj
of man ; and the " virtues," which constitute the sum of ethical
principle, whether of the unwritten code, the aypa^oi vo^o^
(with which Socrates confutes the scepticism of Hippias), or
that wherein the law of the State is embodied, are for the
main easily enumerated. Often hard, or even impossible, to
represent by any one equivalent or string of half-equivalents in
English, they are not hard to realise with tolerable definiteness.
The names of several occur in Mem. iv. 6, and are so current
indeed in all Greek literature that if Plato and Xenophon and
Aristotle were destroyed we still should possess or re-discover
them. The four ' cardinal ' virtues are 3 (1) o-cxfria; (2) SIKCIIO-
avvTf)\ (3) dvSpela; (4) crax^poa-vvr] (1) wisdom; (2) justice or
social uprightness (in New Testament " righteousness ") ; (3)
courage; (4) temperance. 4 Akin to a-w^poo-vvr] is eyKparela
(self-control), and in the same breath with crotyla must be
mentioned (f>p6vr](ri<; (prudence or practical wisdom) and eVt-
1 Again, by this expression I do not wish to suggest that the Socrates of
Xenophon is more (or less) real or true than that of Plato. Personally, I
regard these portraitures as both true, both defective. They are single-sided
and opposite ideals ; and, pro tanto, caricatures in part of the actual being,
whose real self was not truly depicted by any mortal. Whose has been ?
The Xenophontine Socrates (of the Recollections) is drawn to suit the every-
day spectator, and possesses a certain precious, if limited, "historic"' truth.
The limitations of the Platonic draught are of a different kind. The theorist
and philosopher needs the high-aiming, unselfish eristic inspirer and searcher,
as the most important of his dramatis personce. Plato also is a poet ; and
will ' poetise ' the real man to the same extent that the historian ' historicises '
him askew. Yet both are good and noble portraits.
2 Mem. v. 4. 19.
3 Ibid. iv. 6 : 2-4, Piety (eforejSefo) ; 5-6, Justice (8iKaio<rtvi)) ; 7, Wisdom
(ffO(f>la.) ; 8-9, le Beau (rt> ica\6t>) ; 10-11, Courage (&i>5pela).
* '" Temperance, ' while corresponding to a part of the word, is ridiculously
inadequate to the whole." J. S. Mill, on "Mixed Modes," different from
or corresponding to our use. Dies, and Disc. vol. iii. 328.
2 A
370 XENOPHON.
These, with others, constitute the full perfection of
man : they are virtue. But roaming among these the soul of
Xenophon was chiefly enamoured of evaefteia, of dv&peta, and
of aaxfrpoavvri in its kinship to ey/cparela rather than croc/ua ; i.e.
on the moral and emotional rather than the intellectual side ; but
as a follower of Socrates it is sufficient for him to put consciously
into the foreground growth in Ka\o/cdya6ia, as the chief aim
and rule of life. For the religious, temperate, self-controlled,
rhythmically attuned, just, righteous, prudent, scientific, wise,
and good man is he who has absorbed into himself the KaXa
Kay add, the whole list of beautiful and noble things ; or, in the
language of Lycurgean training, ra rca\d simply, the chivalrous
" code of honour " at Sparta. In a less formal way, but with
a still more penetrative persistence, as of a man who knows
that he has no better gospel of salvation to give, he insists on
a still unmentioned virtue which must be regarded as highly
idiosyncratic: to M'it, eTripeXeia, painstaking care. Possibly
there is the slightest aristocratic tinge to this excellence ;
perhaps a touch of superiority in its possessor is implied
as of the overseer's care ; but however incompatible with
things low and sordid (ra Pavava-i/cd), the doctrine is the
same : ov$ev avev TTOVOV /cal eTrtyiieXeia? <yv/j,va<TTeov trvv TTOVOIS
Kai IBpwri, which Cicero would turn "nihil sine sudore et
studio," nothing without painstaking care, and trouble ; x and
this it is which, with (evae/Betd) his piety, endears Xenophon
to the heart of Mr. Euskin, and most deservedly, for when it
enters in and dwells with a man, out of his heart perishes
all d\a%ovLa and fMiTaior^, all moral thinness and quackery ;
and it is therefore quite comprehensible how, to a practical
temperament, such as Xenophon's, the problem, Can virtue be
taught ? resolves itself for the most part into an affair of
training (aa-K^ais).
With regard to "King IVo//,o<?," his bias is strongly Athenian,
or else Laconian. " The laws " of Thebans or Eleians shock or
revolt him, or are beyond even his stricture as something alien
much as a good English Protestant not so long ago might have
been scandalised by the beliefs and customs of the Parisians or
1 Mem. ii. 1. 28.
XENOPHON. 371
Catholics, and as for the political or religious views of Turks
or Russians, would not reckon them as within the pale of his
observation. This analogue, if not pressed too far, throws some
faint light on Xenophon's limitations, which are ' national,'
nothing more. 1
Orderliness, not to speak of piety, economy, self-cultiva-
tion these lead to success in life, but also to the highest per-
fection of the Hellenic soul. By comparison with these, even
(f)i\oTi/j,ia, that first and last infirmity of noble-minded citizens,
ambition and the love of honour, ranks nowhere ; and it is easy
to see how closely connected with this somewhat Spartan (or
Socratic ?) self-supervision is what we venture to call the Puri-
tanism, or even Calvinism, of his soul. Over and over again we
seem to hear a prophecy of language which we think appro-
priate enough on the lips of St. Paul, but which startles
us some four hundred odd years before those birth-throes of our
spirit. " The majority of pleasures are bad," says Xenophon, 2
and hence an argument in favour of the healthy excitement and
the joyous discipline of the chase ; for, of course, the pains and
pleasures of animals are ignored then as now. If he has said,
or rather has introduced Simonides as saying to Hieron, " All
the troubles which you 'tyrants' endure are well repaid,
since in the end you receive more abundant honour than
the rest of mankind ; and no pleasure which men can
enjoy approaches nearer to the divine than the delight in
being honoured ;" he has also written this apostolic passage: 3
"Where, then, is the difficulty of supposing that a man
may be virtuous and temperate to-day, and to-morrow the
reverse ; or that he who once has had it in his power to do what
is right, may not quite lose that power? No ; if I may venture
to express an opinion of my own, I would say that all beautiful
and noble things are a matter of constant practice and training ;
and this applies pre-eminently to the virtue of temperance,
1 Socrates, in his famous speech in the Symposium, viii. 34, argues against
Pausanias's theory of the invincibility of a sacred band of lovers, and as to
the customs of Elis and Thebes adduced in support of his view, " that," says
Socrates, " is a one-legged proof at best, for what they accept as highly
proper we regard as simply scandalous." The point to bear in mind is that
NOMOI correspond to our CREEDS pretty much.
2 Cyn. xii. 12. * Mem. i. 2. 23.
372 XENOPHON.
seeing that in one and the same bodily frame pleasures are
planted and spring up side by side with the soul, ever whisper-
ing in her ear, ' have done with self-restraint, make haste to
gratify us and the body (our common lord).'"
In these last considerations we seem to have been exploring
a mind partly 'Socratic,' partly independent of Socrates; and at
length when we come to the writer's philosophic self, the o-oc/uo--
T?;?, or 0-0009, or (^tXocro^o?, as we may term it, within him, this
ambiguity is intensified. We find ourselves fully launched in-
deed into ' Socratic ' influence, with all the external apparatus
of method, the elenchos, the dialectic process, the cut and parry
and thrust of eristic argumentation, the epaktic or inductive
reasoning, the arrangement of what we talk about by " families,"
i.e. " generalisation ; " but while caught into this wise man's
debating ground, we seem to be in it, and not of it. To say
that our feelings resemble those of the poor old Athenian country
gentleman in the Thinkery, (jjpovrtcrrrjpiov, would be libellous,
because the ^aO^rr]^, Xenophon, is at anyrate quite at home.
Possibly he is hardly aware of the gap which separates him
from the philosophy of him at whose feet he sat ; even as Aris-
tippus, Antisthenes, Euclides, and the rest, may have regarded
their own fragments over fondly as the keystone of the palace
of thought. Here the distinction seems not difficult to grasp.
Between the world of the wise man and that region which is
inhabited by the ol TroXXot, the children of everyday life, there is
a gulf fixed, but there is no want of intercommunication ; there
is what may be termed the Xenophontine bridge, and on this,
which is neutral ground for the philosopher and the mass of
men to meet, there are no hostile catchwords ; " the stock argu-
ment and the ready-to-hand reproaches " are in abeyance. On
the far side is the most original of men seeking as an abso-
lutely lofty and philanthropic object to awaken self-conscious-
ness in his fellows or in himself; this is the noble, nay
sublime, Hellenic effort for " the salvation of souls." 1 As Mr.
Sidgwick in the treatise already quoted says : z " The radical
and most impressive article of his creed was constituted by his
1 " Socrates, the Jesus Christ of Greece." SHELLEY.
2 Ethics, Ency. Metrop. p. 576.
XENOPHON. 373
exalted estimate of this knowledge that was so hard to find, his
conviction that ignorance of the good and evil in human life
was the source of all practical error." " Take heed," he was
always saying in his own language, " take heed, therefore, that
the light which is in thee be not darkness." This enlighten-
ment is at once knowledge and goodness and moral attainment.
When shall we attain to Socratic wisdom ? when, in Xenophou-
tine hunting metaphor, shall virtue be laid captive at our feet ?
These are the questions \ve ask, as we take our stand on the hither
side with the ordinary Hellene, bent upon self-culture. 1 From.
this point of view we persuade ourselves that Socrates did really
care less for his method, his elenchos, his induction, his novel
class or clan system of arrangement (TO Kara yevr) BiaXeyew) ,
than for benefiting, by hook or by crook, the interlocutor (or
possibly some other at his expense), but with infinite "philan-
thropy " in all cases. As performing a solemn and charitable duty,
he sought to awaken self-consciousness, to throw a stream of
light into a dark place, and to convict of ignorance, confusion
and obscurity of thought and behaviour, for the sake of clearer
intelligence and a firmer moral foothold. The machinery was
the whole " maieutic " apparatus of the new method : so im-
portant indeed in the history of philosophy, that Aristotle can
sum up his great discovery thus : " he sought the abstract
(TO Ka06\ov), 2 and was the first who thought of giving
definitions." But to himself neither the method nor any
part of the machinery was of vital necessity, only these
were the natural handiest instruments for his purposes. (If
' anaesthetics ' would have served, he would have applied
them.) The important point was, not the intellectual or meta-
physical training, or the philosophising even by a better
method though " to make his associates more dialectic," to
sharpen and keep bright their lancets, was in its due place
part of his daily business, 3 but better philosophising as a
step forward in the direction of manly virtue and human
completeness, which is happiness.
In some such light we may imagine that Socrates revealed
vrj irepl roi)j 9eoys, irepl r-qv diiccuoffiji'T)v a rhythmical self -completion
and adjustment towards God and the righteousness of man (social uprightness).
2 Arist. Metaph. xiii. 4. 3 Mem. iv. 6. 1.
374 XENOPHON.
himself to the concrete mind of Xenophon. Some of his
doctrines may have been absorbed at once ; others, really put
forward tentatively for the awakening of another soul, Xenophon
may have assimilated in the half-ripe condition; hence the
rounded teleology and the views about immortality (in the
Memorabilia and Cyropaedia). In other cases, he gives rein to
his own philosophic propensities, and in the satisfaction of his
own highest nature, attempts to answer various questions,
which he had often heard raised for the twofold purpose of
getting a clear concept, and of creating a thorough moral
awakening. The result of this fashion of his own is some of
the most beautiful pieces of Greek literature : the Economist,
the Hieron, the Cyropaedia. He asks, Who is the economic
man ? Who is the despot ? Who is the kingly personage
with the gift of ruling? and with some semblance of the
Socratic "induction," his own thoughts the while working
along the " epaktic " grooves, he comes to a conclusion which
is, if you like, a generalisation, but is nevertheless embodied
in a concrete shape ; he has, in fact, drawn upon his canvas, as
an answer to the philosophic inquiry, with which we started, a
Cyrus or a Hiero, or an Ischomachus. That which might have
ended in metaphysics turns out to be an exquisite work of art,
carefully elaborated line for line, but at the same time not
devoid of ethic and allegoric import.
Here, however, we will be quit of the o-ofaarris and turn to
interrogate the prfrcop, the political reformer, and professor of
strategics, the author ; not indeed of the earliest political bro-
chure, for we are agreed to exclude from our canon that " oldest
extant specimen of literary Attic prose," and otherwise remark-
able work, the essay On the Athenian Polity; 1 but of the
Laconian Polity, the Hipparchicos, the pamphlet on Revenues.
We will confront the artist, who has skilfully worked into the
texture of his larger works much that belongs to the statist and
the tactician ; and this to so great an extent that in the eyes of
the modern military historian " tactics " seem to form the main
thread of the Cyropaedia, and the chief point of interest of the
Anabasis (or Hellenica). 2
1 420 B.C., Jebb, Greek Literature Primer, and vide supra, p. 328, note.
2 Vide Rustowand Kochly passim, also the former's HilitarischeBiographieen.
XENOPHON. 375
To speak of these "political" and professional gifts in a breath
is not easy, though there is a marked ' solidarity ' between
the diverse selves of the man whom we are cross-questioning ;
and the native rhythm of even so many-sided and Odyssean a
character predominates. Under favourable circumstances it is
quite likely that Xenophon might have appeared in history
as another Iphicrates, 1 a /^op/jLoo and bugbear 2 to Spartan allies or
Boeotians, or as a second Chabrias or Charidemus, a higher type
of military reformer or captain of mercenaries than the Ccera-
tidases and Phalinuses whose features he has so indelibly
imprinted on our minds. 3 His interest at any rate in military
matters is obvious ; 4 and, if sentiment is to weigh, the Hip-
parchicos, addressed to a commandant of cavalry for the
benefit possibly of his own son, and as a seal of reconciliation
to his fatherland, has a special interest for us : a remark
applicable also to the latest work of his old age, written as
tradition infers for Eubulus, the finance minister of Athens,
who had been instrumental in rescinding the vote of banish-
ment, and in that case doubly, for the sake of peace. As prac-
tical works the value of these political tracts would probably
be as great in the eyes of the modern reader as the companion
treatises on Hunting and Horses, if only the species of things
with which they deal were of a type as fixed as horses and
grooms, dogs and hares. Dealing with the more shifting
or evanescent topics of cavalry tactics, and of Athenian
finance, they may easily be misjudged. For instance, as far
as the military manual goes, we ought not to allow mere
change in numbers or equipment to affect our judgment, if,
as regards evolutional and other efficiency, the precepts appear
to possess a more permanent value. A fairer difficulty, the
insertion of pompous regulations which would have no par-
allel in a similar modern treatise, is to be explained by the
close connection in a Greek city community between the
citizen soldier's service as a defender of his country in war.
1 Xenophon's Seuthes' experiences present a strong family likeness to those
of Iphicrates and Cotys.
2 Hell. iv. 4. 17. 8 Anab. vii. 1. 21-25 ; ibid. ii. 1. 6-15.
4 Plutarch says Xenophon taught Agesilaus. Cicero tells us Scipio Afri-
canus carried a copy of the C'yropaedia about in his breast pocket.
XENOPHON.
and his employment in religious processions during peace. 1
Her Majesty's household troops throw little light on this side
of the matter, which, however, in Xenophon's time could hardly
have been omitted. So, again, our more advanced views of
political economy our intelligent appreciation of the applica-
tion of " the, law of diminishing returns " to mineral products,
ought not to lead us to laugh at the fundamental hypothesis of
the de Reditibus that the silver mines of Laurium were inex-
haustible. Better economised labour, and more of it, would
probably have rendered them more lucrative. Besides which,
they were as inexhaustible for the Athenians, at any rate, as
the coal-fields of Great Britain are for the people of England ;
nor is there anything in the rest of the scheme to stamp its
author as an unpractical politician.
Of course it is not pretended that these treatises have, or
ever had, any claim to rank highly among the 7roA.m/oH Xoyoi,
the production of which, in the eyes of Isocrates, guarantees to
the author the title of philosopher refused to the verbose or
disputatious professor of wisdom; moreover, we have hardly
the means of gauging the value attached by his contempor-
aries to any of these minor works. The fact that they were
written by Xenophon would have preserved them ; and what is
more profitable here is to discover in the mature treatise the
floating schemes and enthusiastic aspirations of youth or middle
age. In the nonagenarian Nestor, of the Revenues, devising
means to counteract pauperism and turn exceptional wealth to
account, while adding honour to the state, we hear the voice of
the youthful and athletic captain of the Eetreat, brimming
with an Odyssean joy in experience and irrepressible good-
humour. Our minds revert to the fatal night of the murder of
the generals ; the dream and the resolution are past, the first
hurried meetings have taken place, the new generals have been
appointed. The council is held as day breaks; the speeches
follow : Cheirisophus' laconic, as it ought to be ; Cleanor's
of Orchomenus artistically suited; then Xenophon rose he
was arrayed for war in all his finery. 2 If the gods grant us
victory, thought he, the finest attire will accord with the event;
1 Hipparch. iii. 2 Anab. iii. 2. 7.
XENOPHON. 377
or, if death is our doom, then for him who has claimed the
finest it is as well there should be some correspondence between
the expectation and the end. 1 ..." But perhaps," he urged,
" it is well we did not stop, for I fear that if we once learn to
live in idleness and luxuriously to batten, in intercourse with
these tall and handsome Median and Persian women and
maidens, we shall be like the lotos-eaters, and forget the road
home altogether. It seems to me it is only rational and right,
in the first instance, to make an effort to return to Hellas and
to revisit our hearths and homes, if only to prove to our
countrymen that it is their own fault that they are poor and
needy, seeing it is in their power to give to those now living
a pauper life at home a free passage hither, and to convert
them into well-to-do burghers at once." Here seems to be
the germ of the colonisation scheme, of which we hear again
and again, whether in the shape of a project of forming a
settlement at Cotyora, 2 or of sailing off for a similar purpose to
the mouth of the Phasis, or of establishing a new "politeuma"
on the auspicious promontory of Calpe. The scheme of the de
Eeditibus half a century later is more elaborate, but is marked
by the same philanthropic savoir faire?
The special evils of a still later date have been described as,
" 1. The accumulation of wealth in the hands of the rich, and
the corresponding growth of rapacity on the part of the poor.
2. The growth of egotism and unprincipled ambition since the
rupture between society and the state. 3. The swarms of men
without cities, paupers, political exiles, malefactors, for ever
moving over the face of Greece, ready for mercenary service, and
ripe for mischief." 4 Of all these things we are aware from the
pages of Xenophon, who lived, indeed, down to the days of Philip,
but is representative of a generation earlier. Still stronger light
is thrown on the underlying causes of this " political decom-
position " and increasing chaos, by a great modem thinker. 5
The philosopher has done speaking of the " diversion of Greek
1 Anab. iii. 2. 25. * Ibid. v. 6. 15.
3 De Redit. i. , td 5 rty rov ir\-f)0ovs ireviav dvayKa^effdai Hfiaffav adiKtbrepoi
flvai Trepl rds 7r6Xeis ; also vi., /coi 6 /j.i> STJ/J.OS rpo<prjs eviropi?icrfi, ol d
K.T.\. 4 Jebb, Orators, Isocrates, ch. xii. p. 15.
5 Comte, vol. iii. of Pos. Polit. p. 245, Engl. transl. (Beesly.)
378 XENOPHON.
intellect from politics," and is concerned with the spectacle of
independent states united by common sentiments and beliefs.
" The political decomposition served as a new impelling force,
for it kept before men's eyes the continual spectacle of an
intellectual and moral association between states independent
of each other. That spontaneous church, even then as much a
reality as the cities composing it, could by no territorial restric-
tion be hindered from arousing in those whose qualities of
heart and mind inclined them towards social generalisations,
an unmistakable desire for a universal communion." l In other
words, the reign of the NO/AO? dynasty in the different states
was tottering to its fall, and out of the void (no real vacuum,
but the abiding-place of the aypafoi v6fj,oi), was fast shaping
itself the new law, whose best name in history is " the scientific
conscience," the heirloom of Hellenic intellect. To this chaos
and decomposition Xenophon, amongst others, has borne testi-
mony ; for better or for worse he is a veritable " enfant du
siecle," and that is his high praise ; but we ought not to restrict
our regard for him to that view. By a kind of accident, owing
to the preservation of the diverse products of his fertility, and
because his genius is that of the universally representative
rather than exceptionally original artist in some one depart-
ment of things the child of Thalia or Calliope or Melpomene ;
for these reasons, and for others which go deeper, to wit his
humanity, his moral earnestness, his appreciation of Socrates,
he has always, even when his fame suffered declension, been
honoured as the foreordained depositary of precious in-
formation about the ancient Greeks, which, but for him, would
certainly have perished. This, then, is a high prestige, but it
is one which a man has to share with the Moabitish Stone,
the obelisks, or the ruins of Nineveh. Not " half-sunk," indeed,
or " shattered is the visage " of this ancient Hellene, but rather
he is a "pyramid built up by renewed might of all Time's
1 To understand ' ' Laconism, " we ought to go to a somewhat analogous period
the Italy of the Republics, where Venice with her relative stability and
oligarchical government = Sparta ; Florence with her intellectual turmoil and
political self -consciousness = Athens. The comparison would be worth work-
ing out in detail. Vide Symonds, Age of Despots, chap. iii. passim, and ch. iv.
p. 236 ; also Freeman, Historical Essays, 2d series, p. 32.
XENOPHOX. 379
artificers," by Plutarch, by Cicero, by Alberti, Sidney, Bacon,
down to the warm-hearted and broad- souled exponent of
the great Athenian Demos, of whom we have all been
' hearers.' 1
But for Xenophon one may claim a more than monumental
title. He is also essentially a stylist, the forerunner of the
masters of belle Icttcre. Like Herodotus, like Pindar, like his
other literary compeers, he has, if in a less degree, some claim
to the additional meed of absolute originality, not only as
the inventor of a style of literature, but of many of its minor
subdivisions. " For Xenophon, who did imitate so excel-
lently, as to give us cffiyiem justi imperil, the portraiture of a
just empire under the name of Cyrus (as Cicero saith of him)
made therein an absolute heroicall poem." 2 And there are
poems within the poem. How novel must have appeared this
Eastern version of King Arthur, this premonition of the Table
Round, written in the choicest " euphuism " of that day ; in
which, round 3 the blameless king, are grouped a dozen lesser
characters, whose action harmoniously adjusts itself to the main
thesis, enlivening and assisting its development. While there
is room, in a natural way, also, for disquisitions on military
matters, for moral delineations and the growth of character, for
pathetic tales and skilfully interwoven episodes, like that of
Gobryas and Gadatas, or of Panthea and Abradatas "the
earliest prose love-story in European literature ;" where a place,
too, is found for comic supper-parties and interludes, in which
the fun is of a robust, broad type, contrasting with the delicately
ironic humour which ripples through the Anabasis, but helping,
and helped by, our appreciation of the Aristophanic vein of
the Symposium ; in both, the breadth? of the jocularity being
redeemed, as in Shakespeare, by truth to nature and grace of
style. Scarcely behind the Cyropaedia in inventiveness, and
its superior in a certain quality of opaline beauty, ranks the
Economist. It is full of the Xenophontine limpidity, the little
bells of alliteration, the graceful antithetic balance; the sweet
1 Grote, Hist. vol. viii. passim, compared with his Plato, vol. iii. ch. xxxix.
4 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologiefor Poetrie, p. 28.
a Compare the \fsvxpfo |3a<nXei>s with Tennyson's King Arthur, Araspas with
Lancelot or Sir Bedivere, etc.
380 XENOPHON.
sounds helping out the health} 7 sense, as of a fragrant air
breathed upon us from fresh and well-worked fields, where we
cherish content in winter by a blazing fire, or in summer lulled
by a trio of babbling streams, soft airs, and tender shades. 1
This is a work the careful thoroughness of which, and its
praise of Masserizia, found great favour with the Italians of the
Renaissance, so that Alberti, or some other, speaks of imitating 2
" quel Greco dolcissimo e soavissimo scrittore Seriophonte."
This Cicero indeed had done before, 3 whose remarks upon
the style of Xenophon are worth remembering. 4 " The Muses
they say spoke by the lips of Xenophon." " I have come across
students of forensic oratory who wished to take Xenophon as
their model, cujus sermo est ille quidem melle dulcior, sed a
forensi strepitu remotissimus ; " 5 and in praise of his portrait of
Agesilaus, " Xenophon's one little book, as a panegyric, is
better than all the pictures and statues put together," " in
eo rege laudando facile omnes imagines omnium statuasque
superavit ;" 6 or again, in an interesting discussion of the
qualities requisite for writing history, in which we get a
comparison of Roman and Greek standards with criticisms of
different historians, Xenophon and Callisthenes, two "philo-
sophic" historians, emanating respectively from Socrates and
Aristotle, are contrasted. The Aristotelian wrote "rhetorico
paene more ;" the Socratic " leniore quidem sono est usus, et qui
ilium impetum oratoris non habeat, vehemens fortasse minus,
sed aliquanto tamen est, ut mihi quidem. videtur, dulcior." 7
Reference has already been made to Cicero's translations of
Xenophon, and the rendering by this great monotheistic Latin
of Cyrus's dying speech on immortality was nothing less than a
handing on of the torch to after times, a torch not yet quite anti-
quated in pattern. 8 His estimate of the work itself is nearly
1 Oecon. v. 7. The ' horizontal ' structure of the Xenophontine sentence is
conspicuous in this work ; the members balancing with a tender minuet-like
movement. 2 Opere volgari cli Leon-Battista Alberti.
3 Fragments of Cicero's translation of the Economist remain.
4 Cic. Or. xix. 62.
* Ibid. ix. 32, and on this point cf. Jebb, ii. ch. xxiv. p. 449.
4 Cic. Ep. ad Div. v. 12. 7. 7 Cic. de Oral. ii. xiv. 58.
8 Cicero's monotheism is felt to be more consistent and denned than Plato's
or Xenophon's ; de Nat. Deoiitm, i. xii. 31.
XENOPHON. 381
that of Sir Philip Sidney, as above recorded. The letter to his
brother Quintus, 1 in which he recommends him to follow
the example of Africanus, and make its chapters his constant
companions, as containing " the whole duty of government,"
" nullum est enim praeterniissum in his officium diligentis et
moderati imperii," shows the practical value attached to so
poetical a work. And later criticism, while ready to assign
greater historical importance, 2 retains the idea of a philosophic
and poetic treatise on the ideal monarchy, as of a work written
(caeteris paribus) with an object similar to that of Tacitus's
Germania.
The Anabasis is so well-known a book, and has been so
universally appreciated, that to add even a few words seems an
impertinence ; as if to whole generations of schoolboys tied
down to fragments of the classics for many years, in this book
at any rate had not come an " apocalypse " of Greek life ;
or as if its more essential, epic and Homeric, qualities had not
been fully and affectionately enough insisted on in the pages
of Grote (and his followers) ; yet the topic of its literary merits
is by no means exhausted. Like the Hellenica, it seems to
hinge on a kind of unconscious "peripety;" also, like the
Hellenica, read as a whole work, it contains what we may call
a double (Euripidean) plot. In the Anabasis the battle is the
crisis, and Trebizond the solution of the first plot; then comes
the really tragic, swinging round of Fate, the true " peripeteia."
Just when the situation becomes so dramatic that the joyous
cry from the hill-top, " The sea ! the sea !" has become a proverb,
and their final escape is accomplished out of the jaws of death
into the bosom of that friendly sea which girds their islanded
home ; then as a matter of fact, and perhaps in the mind of
the narrator, the too cruel reversal of good fortune. Persians
and savage tribes, and the inclemencies of Armenian snows,
or the intricacies of Kurdistan defiles, are nothing which
stout hearts cannot without too great strain surmount; but
at the instant at which the ingenuous grumbler, with Homer
on his lips, sighs to give up all this forced marching and
1 Ep. ad Qu. Fratr. 1.1. viii. 23.
8 Xenophon clearly was working upon legendary accounts ; vide Duncker,
Breitenbach, etc.
382 XENOPHON.
picket duty, preferring to tumble into a hammock and sail
away home like Odysseus, 1 the real troubles of the heroic
little band are about to commence troubles chiefly of their
own countrymen. Cheirisophus goes to fetch ships from his
friend the Spartan admiral, but his absence is interminable ;
when after various vicissitudes they eventually reach Europe,
they are regarded, as what indeed they partly are, a wolfish
rabble, barely to be trusted if not tearing barbaric sheep or
turning their teeth against one another. The Spartan governor-
general in Byzantium by a ruse succeeds in kidnapping and
knocking down to the hammer as slaves about 600 of the band.
The semi-barbarian Thraciaii Seuthes is no better than the civi-
lised Greek. Dissension too has broken up their ranks, and it
requires all the piety of Xenophon to sustain him until the
finger of Zeus Meilichios is plainly visible at Pergamus, 2 when
" the Lacedaemonians, the captains and the rest of the generals,
and the soldiers generally, united to give him the pick of horses
and cattle and other spoil, so that now he could do a friend a
good turn ; and meanwhile Thimbron arrived, and he received
the Cyreiaus, whom he incorporated with the rest of his
Hellenic forces, and proceeded to prosecute a war against Tissa-
phernes and Pharnabazus."
In the Hellenica there is a similar twofold climax corre-
sponding to the well-known division of the work : the first
attained in the reconciliation of the Demos and the Eleusiniaii
supporters of the Thirty is the finale of the work of Thucydides. 3
The second and larger volume has been described as The Epic
of Agesilaus, who is certainly to some extent the protagonist ;
but the pivot of the piece, the peripety, is the turn of the tide
of Laconian prosperity, consequent, in the eyes of Xenophon,
upon the lawless seizure of the Theban citadel by the Spartan
general Phaebidas. " I do not think it would be necessary to
ransack either Hellenic or foreign history in proof of the pro-
position that the divine powers are extreme to mark what is
1 Odyssey, xiii. : " Then they alighted from the benched ship upon the land,
and first they lifted Odysseus from out the hollow ship, all as he was in the
sheet of linen and the bright rug, and laid him yet heavy with slumber 011
the land." BUTCHER and LANG.
2 Anab. vii. 8. 3 Hellen. ii. 4. 43.
XENOPHON. 383
done amiss, winking not either at impiety or the commission of
unhallowed acts ; but at present it is my duty to confine myself
to the facts before me." 1 When the end draws nigh not too
soon indeed, but with a certain dimly realised dramatic effect,
owing to the long-sustained silence in praise and blame alike,
the fire of the old soldier burns ; and the historian's tongue is
loosed in a panegyric of the strategy of Epaminondas, and the
pall descends upon the great Theban, but upon Sparta herself
the penumbra of total eclipse. Nor is there wanting a touch of
pathos in the half-baffled realisation of the beginning of the end.
As to Guicciardini, reviewing the posture of affairs after the
peace of Cambray, 2 things seem pretty much unaltered ; so to
Xenophon after Mantinea the old balance is renewed, or rather,
in the language of the Greek, "Where it was expected that
one or other of these fell combatants would rule an empire,
there set in once more confusion worse confounded (not an
dpxn, but worse anarchy)." In the one case really the knell of
Venice was sounded ; in the other the prestige of humbled
Sparta fled with the triumphant spirit of her mighty rival.
The other questions connected with the Hellcnica do not fall
within the scope of this Essay, nor is any attempt to harmonise
the antique acceptance and the modern mistrust of the historian
here offered. Only it is well to bear in mind that the title of a
Sl/cato? a-wyypafavs a just historian 3 has been accorded to
Xenophon ; and, apart from the omissions extraordinary to a
modern reader, it is plain that the quality of transparency
which belongs to all his writings holds here even in the moral
import of the word ; so that his demerits, if demerits they be,
amount to nothing worse than a species of colour-blindness.
We know and he does not attempt to conceal, the point of
view from which he writes; moreover, as a philosopher, he-
has a right to his philosophy, however defective it may render
him as a philosophic historian, and he makes no secret of
his sympathy with the ideal of Sparta and Lycurgus (his
Laconism), or for the "aristocratic" sections of society. But
the quality which, like the vigour and the humour and the
1 Hellen. v. 4. 2 Symonds, Aye of Despots, iv. p. 232.
3 Lucian, vide supra, p. 327.
384 XENOPHON.
healthy, joyous youthfulness of the Anabasis, permeates this
sadder and more sober production, is a certain vividness
and brightness of delineation suited to the clear skies of
Hellas and Asia Minor, and the sparkling waves of the Aegean
and the Straits. What M. Eenan has said of the Acts of the
Apostles may be almost verbatim applied to this work :
" Une brise matiuale, une odeur de mer, si j'ose le dire, in-
spirant quelque chose d'allegre et de fort, penetre tout le livre et
en fait un excellent compagnon de voyage ; le bre" viaire exquis
de celui qui poursuit des traces antiques sur les mers du midi." 1
The Hellenica is not a dull book, and the period with which it
is concerned however sad in part and disheartening is never
tedious. With it in our hands we bound over the glancing
waves in rhythmical obedience to our beloved Keleustes, 2 or scale
the heights of besieged citadels, or for the moment are friends
with the living personalities of a tumultuous time. We have
been Spartans and tramped along by forced marches in the
night, after the destruction of a whole army corps, on its road
to Amyclae : 3 thus we proudly sneaked, for fear, not so much of
the jeers of lukewarm friends or half foes, as of ourselves and
the evil that might come of it. We have crossed the heights at
Creusis between Attica and Boeotia, and our shields have been
snatched by a violent tornado from us and whirled into the
abyss. 4 We have watched the deadlock at Coroneia, and seen the
slain with their shields battered, their swords snapt off at the
hilt, their daggers still clutched between their fingers, etc.; 5 and
all these things, page after page, has Xenophon by his photo-
graphic art arid his Euripidean or Zeuxis-like skill, 6 wrought for
us ; so that the feeling left on our minds is one of exhilaration
and content. Of course, if we had had the making of those
days and persons, we should have provided that the hero friend
of Xenophon should be Epaminondas not Agesilaus ; but the
gods, it seems, willed it otherwise, and so this matter has
issued thus.
1 Eenan, St. Paul, pp. 12, 13. 2 Cf. Oecon. xxi. 3. 4.
8 Hetten. iv. 5. 4 Ibid. v. 4. 17. 6 Ibid. iv. 3. 19 ; Agesil. ii. 14.
6 Three instances, at least, of what may be called Euripidean art, may be
mentioned, how (Anab, ii. 5. 33) after the generals were seized and the
army waited in expectation, suddenly sight was caught of a man galloping
XENOPHON. 385
Before we part with our author, let us briefly summarise
certain things in which, ceasing to be merely representative of
his days, he seems to utter things to come. His pregnancy in a
variety of departments is remarkable, and to be traced probably
to the underlying subjectivity of his disposition, which takes
him as it were out of the ordinary objective setting of his
fellows. Hence his colonisation schemes and higher specula-
tions on the conquest of the east already mentioned, the pro-
phecy here pointing through Agesilaus and the rest to the
times of Alexander, but as yet there are many years to run,
and Xenophon will not live to see that day. Again, in his
quasi-philosophical and political pamphlets he may be said to
be pointing through Isocrates and his school to Aristotle. In
his high standard of moral self-culture, in the rcaprepia of his
women, he is anticipative of stoicism. In just that faint
touch of orientalism, the unnameable somewhat reminding us
of Mithra worship in the east ; possibly also in his admiration
of the same Cyrus who restored the Jews, he is anticipative
of the interblending of two worlds of Semitic monotheism
and Greek science. In his purity and mistrust of pleasures
which seduce the soul, and in his religiousness generally, he
makes us realise how the earth prepared herself for the seed
of Pauline Christianity; nay, in a certain sense we seem to
be aware of something which we held to be peculiar to Pro-
testantism. Is this a Hellenic Havelock ? But not least of
all this pregnancy belongs to his style, the antithesis and grace
of which have a ring of Italian or Elizabethan " euphuism." l
The love-story of Panthea, and the whole court and courtesy
wildly the Arcadian Nicarchus who had escaped with a wound in the belly
he rode into camp holding his entrails in to tell the news ; or, again, how
(Cyr. vi. 4. 9) Panthea bade sad but stout-hearted farewell to her husband
whom she was not to see alive again, and ran to give a last kiss unperceived
to the chariot which held him. Abradatas turned and looked upon her and
said, "Be strong and of a good courage, Panthea, and hie thee home." And
how (Cyr. vii. 3. 9) the same lady tenderly kissed and replaced the poor
dismembered right hand of her dead lord, which Cyrus, unwitting of what
was done, had grasped in friendly sorrow. With Cyrus we also weep for some
time in sorrow.
1 The ancients fully appreciated the yorjrela or witchery of his style ; a
quality not to be discerned in translations offered only as reminiscences of the
writer's thought.
2 B
386 XENOPHON.
of the prince, are as near the romance of chivalry as aught
Hellenic can be ; while last of all, in the mere lucidity and
" plainness " of his Attic, not excluding foreign and poetic words,
he is the author of what must always from the first Imve been,
and in modern Hellas is probably destined in a still higher
degree to become, the model of expression, a transcendental
Is the fame of Xenophon decreasing ? That is scarcely cred-
ible. At various periods he has stood high in the appreciation
of mankind, and for various reasons ; nor is it likely that any
partial obscuration of his brightness will last long. The modern
historic sense will assuredly remove the scales from our eyes.
Nor though it has chanced to Xenophon, because he wrote
history, to be weighed in the balances against Thucydides, and
condemned ; though it has also befallen him, on the ground of
his delineation of Socrates, to be compared with Plato and
voted no philosopher ; though it has been his paradoxical fate
to have stood somewhat in his own light, and, as the author of
the Anabasis, partly to have effaced his own reputation as the
author of less appreciated works, none of these mishaps are
real misfortunes. The " chef-d'ceuvre," Victor Hugo has said,
" is on a par with the chef-d'ceuvre," or, as a more ancient
prophet words it, " One star differeth from another star in glory."
The glory of philosophic history is one ; the glory of Pla-
tonic philosophy is another ; and there is a third glory of the
" fair and gentle " " beautiful and brave " Hellenic culture,
which is Xenophon. If pallid, the light of this genius has a
lustre of its own, once discerned, not soon to be lost sight of,
a potency of tender, transparent brightness, which invites the
gaze, undimmed by the fiercer rays, or more mystic brilliancy,
of larger luminaries blazing in envious proximity. But to the
scientific student the spectrum yielded by this planet is of even
weightier importance.
H. G. D.
POLYBIUS.
No ancient writer of equal interest and importance finds fewer
readers than Polybius. It is probable that for a hundred
Englishmen familiar with Herodotus and Thucydides not more
than three or four would be found who had made the acquaint-
ance of the third great Greek historian. The struggle between
Eome and Carthage for the foremost place in the world, and
its result in the establishment of Eoman domination over the
whole circle of the Mediterranean States, present a topic un-
surpassed in history; and in knowledge, in industry, and in
candour, Poly b his is not unworthy of his subject. His own life
and fortunes are intimately involved in the great events which
he records. The Eoman conquest bore away the Achaean
statesman, brought up at the feet of Philopcemen, to be a
prisoner in Italy, a man of literary leisure, and a cosmopolitan
student of politics ; it sent him back to his native land as the
mouthpiece of the conquering power ; above all, it bound him
in ties of the closest intimacy to a Eoman friend. His life
seems framed as of set purpose to mould the historian who was
to bridge over for us the interval between the Greek and the
Eoman world. With all his excellences, it is not probable that
Polybius will ever be widely read. He cannot command the
tones to sway or impress the mind. His book remains a store-
house from which the historian and the antiquary may draw,
rather than a possession to enrich the mind of the ordinary
reader. The neglect which he has experienced leaves a wide
choice of comparatively fresh and unknown material, and may
justify the endeavour to give a short account of Polybius and
his work, with some attempts at criticism, and some elements
of a judgment on his qualifications as a writer of history.
Polybius was by birth a citizen of Megalopolis in Arcadia,
the most vigorous and uncompromising member of the Achaean
388 POLYBIUS.
League. He tells us with pride how Megalopolis and Stym-
phalus were the only cities in which Cleomenes of Sparta
could not find a partisan or a traitor. 1 Cleomenes, with the
aid of some Messenians, to whom Megalopolis had given hos-
pitable shelter, finally succeeded in surprising and capturing
the town (223 B.C.) The inhabitants for the most part escaped
and retired into Messenia. There a message reached them
from the Spartan king, -with offers to restore their town and
territory uninjured, if only they would separate themselves
from the Achaean Federation. The refugees refused to hear
the letter to the end. "They chose," says their countryman, 2
" to be deprived of their lands, their graves, their country, and
their goods, of everything, in a word, that men hold dearest,
rather than flinch from their good faith to their allies." The
full wrath of Cleomenes now fell on the town itself : " he laid
it waste so savagely and vindictively, that no one supposed it
could ever be made habitable again." 3
The victory of Antigonus and the Macedonians, and the
extinction of the power of Sparta after its brief flicker of
renewed life under Cleomenes, restored the people of Megalo-
polis to their ruined home. What followed is known to us by
Polybius's account of a commission granted by the Achaean
League to their President, Aratus, four years later, to settle
the discords of Megalopolis ; the passage may be worth quoting
as an illustration of the sort of difficulties which beset the
internal politics of a Greek State :
" Their spirit was unbroken, but they were crippled by want
of means, public or private. And, as usual, when means are
deficient, controversies and jealousies and quarrels were rife
amongst them. The first subject of dispute was about the
fortifications ; some thought they ought to contract them to a
size which would enable them to make an end of the business
of building at once, and also to man them in any sudden
emergency ; and they attributed their present disaster to the
extent of the works and the difficulty of guarding the whole
line. Besides, it was held by some that the landowners ought
to contribute a third of their possessions, so as to fill up the
1 ii. 55. 8 ii. 61.
POLYBIUS. 3 8 9
ranks by addition of fresh citizens. The other party would
neither submit to make the city smaller, nor consent to con-
tribute a third of their land. But the chief cause of contention
was the constitution drawn up by Prytanis. He was one of
the leaders of the Peripatetic sect, and had been nominated to
legislate for them by Antigonus." l
The Achaean arbitrator seems to have been more successful
than the Aristotelian philosopher. The difficulties were at
length settled, and the city took its old place in the League.
Aratus himself was a native of Sikyou. But the other great
men whose policy gave dignity to the last years of Greek
freedom, Philopcemen, Lycortas, and Polybius, all sprang from
Megalopolis :
" The League," after years of modest obscurity, " at last
found leaders worthy to represent it, and then it quickly mani-
fested its power by accomplishing the noblest of tasks, the
concord of Peloponnesus. The credit of being the originator
and pioneer of this policy must be assigned to Aratus of Sikyon;
Philopcemen of Megalopolis was its champion, and consum-
mated it in action ; and its consolidation and subsistence, up to
the present time, is due to Lycortas and those who followed
his lead." 2
Philopcemen served as a young man under Antigonus in the
decisive battle with Cleomenes (221 B.C.), and on the death of
Aratus, in 213 B.C.,' succeeded to the position of foremost man
of the League. Lycortas first appears in the narrative in 186
B.C., 3 and must have been many years junior to Philopcemen.
Polybius was the son of Lycortas.
Our historian was thus brought up in the midst of the circle
of Greek statesmen who staked their hopes upon the Achaean
League, and who, while anxious above all things to avoid
collision with the overpowering strength of Kome, and willing
to appear as her ally in all her contests in the East, never-
theless strove to maintain an attitude of independence, and to
manage the affairs of Greece without Roman intervention.
Their policy is summed up in the rebuke which Philopoemen
administered to Aristsenus, the leader of the Roman party:
1 v. 93. ii. 40. xxiii. 1.
390 POL YSIUS.
" Man, why are you in such haste to behold the fate that waits
for Greece ?"
Polybius was selected as the youth who was to bear the urn
containing the ashes of Philopcemen to the tomb (183 B.C.).
The first reference in his History 1 to his own personal recol-
lection is the record of a political conversation held by
Philopcemen two years before his death, in the presence of
Polybius, in which the young man silently disapproved the
conclusions of the President. Polybius afterwards wrote a
biography of Philopcemen, which has not been preserved. In
his History, while freely criticising some of Philopcemen's
actions, he always shows a loyal respect and affection for the
memory of his leader.
We next find Polybius, three years later (180 B.C.), selected
as one of the ambassadors who were to renew the alliance of
the Achseans with Ptolemy Epiphanes, king of Egypt. He
tells us 2 that at this time he was too young to be legally
qualified for the post, but was nevertheless chosen on account
of the friendly relations existing between his father, Lycortas,
and the Egyptian Court. The death of Ptolemy rendered this
mission abortive.
We now pass on to the year 169 B.C. The great struggle
between Perseus and the Romans was at its height. Lycortas,
Polybius, and Archon had succeeded Philopcemen as leaders of
the moderate party among the Achseans, which had to steer a
difficult and dangerous course between the servile tools of
Rome on the one hand, and the reckless partisans of Macedon
on the other. Their attitude of neutrality had caused offence
at Rome, and the Roman commissioners sent by Mancinus, the
consul of the previous year, are said to have intended to
denounce them all as secret supporters of Macedon, but to have
been deterred by the utter lack of evidence against them. 3
Polybius, convinced that action was necessary, now
separated from the policy of his father, who still counselled
neutrality, and declared, along with Archon, for an alliance
with Rome. Archon was thereupon elected President for the
year, with Polybius for Master of the Horse. 4
1 xxiii. 10 a. 2 xxv. 7.
s xxviii. 3. 4 xxviii. 6.
POLYS I US. 30 1
It was now formally resolved to raise a general levy of the
Achaean forces, to assist the Romans against Macedon; and
while his chief was collecting the troops, Polybius was
despatched into Thessaly to inform the consul, Marcius
Philippus, of their approach. Marcius, while thanking the
Achteans, declined the proffered assistance. The levy was
countermanded, but Polybius remained in the Roman camp,
and_took part in the campaign. Afterwards, by direction of
the consul, he returned home to relieve the Achoeans from
the burden of a requisition of 5000 troops which had been
made on them by a subordinate Roman officer who had the
command in Epirus. 1
It was probably about this time that Polybius introduced a
system of telegraphy for use in war. Preconcerted fire-signals
had long been used. We hear of " hostile " and " friendly "
signals, i.e. "danger," and "all's well;" 2 and this principle
had been elaborated by ingenious contrivances which enabled
a longer or shorter display of the light to indicate this or that
message; 3 but its use was necessarily limited to the con-
veyance of information that was expected, and for which the
signals could be arranged beforehand. The new system was to
telegraph single letters instead of sentences. The idea was
due, says Polybius, 4 to Cleoxenus and Democleitus ; but he
himself was the first to work it out in practice. The alphabet
was written out on five tablets, each containing five letters.
The signal-station consisted of two beacon-towers. The
number of lamps displayed on the left-hand beacon showed
the tablet to be referred to ; that on the right showed the
number of the letter signalled in its own tablet. Thus, one
lamp to the left and three to the right indicates the third letter
in the first tablet, 7. Two lamps displayed to the left and one
to the right means the first letter on the second tablet, In
this way letter after letter might be telegraphed, until a com-
plete message was conveyed.
Next year we find Polybius nominated as lieutenant to his
1 xxviii. 11. * xii. 12 a.
3 In the system described in x. 44, this was managed by a sort of water-
clock set running at each station so long as the light was displayed.
4 x. 45-47.
392 POLYBIUS.
father, who was to lead a small Achaean contingent to Egypt
at the request of the sons of the late king, to aid in protecting
them against the Syrians. It may seem strange that those who
aspired to the position of the leading statesmen of Peloponnesus
should have been content to become the captains of a body of
twelve hundred men who were to serve as mercenaries in a
foreign country. But such an adventure was quite in character
with the habits of the Greek statesmen of the day. Even
Philopcemen more than once employed an interval of leisure
from Peloponnesian politics, by serving as a soldier of fortune
in the constant wars between the petty townships of Crete.
In the present case, Lycortas and his son doubtless felt that
their game was played out in Greece. The fate of the Mace-
donian monarchy could no longer be doubtful to such keen
observers ; and with the complete victory of Borne would come
the domination in Greece of the party which had thrown away
all regard for right and patriotism, and resolved to know no
rule of conduct except the rule of subserviency to every whim
of a Eoman commissioner. Thus the prospect of an honourable
exile, with some chance of glory and booty, was not unaccept-
able to the Achaean chiefs. Their rival Callicrates urged that
there was no occasion for an armed contingent, and that it
would be enough to send an embassy to mediate between the
belligerents. The matter was on the point of being decided in
favour of Lycortas, when a letter was brought into the assembly
from Marcius Philippus, requesting that the Achseans would
support a mission of mediation which the Romans were sending
to Egypt. The request was taken as a command, and the pro-
posal for an armed expedition was withdrawn. 1
These instances of compliance did not serve to avert the
impending danger. Perseus was defeated and made prisoner,
and ten commissioners were sent by the Senate to arrange, in
concert with the victorious general, ^Emilius Paullus, the
affairs of the peninsula (167-165 B.C.). This was the oppor-
tunity of Callicrates and the so-called " Eoman party." They
denounced all their opponents as enemies of Eome, and the
commissioners were only too ready to lend an ear to their
calumnies. JEmilius Paullus himself disapproved the action
1 xxix. 8-10.
POLYBIUS. 393
of the commission. 1 The papers of Perseus were ransacked in
vain for proofs of complicity. But the judges had made up
their minds beforehand. We are not informed of the fate of
Lycortas ; but Polybius was one of a thousand of the leading
men of the Achseaiis who were deported to Italy, nominally to
await a trial before the Senate on the charges brought against
them. No trial ever took place : the suspected persons were
detained year after year in Italy, and the Senate put aside
every petition either for the investigation of their guilt or for
leave to return to their country. In Greece the popular
indignation against the sycophants who had procured their
ruin was intense. The children as they came from school used
the privilege of infancy to shout " traitor " after them in the
street. If one of them gained a prize in the public games, the
announcement of his name was greeted with storms of hissing.
If one of them used the public baths, no one else would enter
until the bath-man had let out all the water and put in fresh ;
" for every one thought he would be polluted by washing in
the water which Callicrates or Aiidronidas had touched." 2
At length, after seventeen years, when death had thinned
the ranks of the exiles, and it became evident that, as Cato
said, " the only question that remained was whether the under-
takers of Italy or of Greece were to have the burying of them,"
the remnant, to the number of three hundred, were released.
Meanwhile their native land, stripped of its best citizens, had
been torn by factions. Servility had been followed by reaction.
In their despair men plunged into wild schemes of resistance
to Rome, and of savage vengeance on their domestic enemies.
Rome was in no temper to pardon ; her sentences were harsh
and humiliating ; the party of revolt got the upper hand, and
a hopeless war followed (146 B.C.).
" Fortune," Polybius says, 3 " strove to save Greece ; but the
folly of the rulers trampled all her gifts underfoot. At last, as
the only means of salvation, she granted a complete and speedy
defeat, before the Romans had time to be exasperated by resist-
ance, or the revolutionists to be encouraged to fresh excesses
by a momentary triumph."
His exile in Italy was the turning-point of the life of
1 xxx. 10. 2 xxx. 20. 8 xl. 5 (abridged).
POL YBIUS.
Polybius. It removed him from political conflicts ; it gave
him at once leisure for his great work, and rare opportunities
for observing events and collecting information. He became
the friend of the most eminent Eomans of the day. We find
him accompanying Scipio in Africa, and Mummius in Greece.
His influence at Rome is illustrated by the fact that he had
interest enough to procure for the Locrians of Italy a much-
coveted exemption from service in the Spanish and Dalmatian
wars. 1
Apart from his labours as a historian, the interest of
Polybius's life henceforth centres round two points : first, his
position as mediator between his countrymen and the con-
querors ; and secondly, the romantic friendship which united
him to the younger Scipio.
Polybius returned to Greece to see the political ideal of his
youth rudely shattered. Corinth, the capital of the Acheeans,
was destroyed under his eyes, and he records how he saw the
choicest pictures of Greece lying on the ground, and the Roman
soldiers using them as boards to play dice on. 2 Polybius had
the satisfaction of pleading with success for the preservation of
the statues of Aratus and Philopoemen, which some of the
more brutal of the Romans wished to destroy. 3 But the
Achaean League, their true monument, was swept away beyond
all hope of restitution. In the bitterness of his heart Polybius
exclaims that it would be better to be even as Carthage :
" Though the fate of Carthage might seem to be the greatest
of all possible calamities, yet one may well regard that which
then befel Greece as not less, or even in some respects greater.
For the former, their end is their plea with posterity, 4 but the
latter have left not so much as a plausible excuse for those
who would fain plead their cause. The Carthaginians, at the
moment of their fall, perished from off the face of the earth,
and were thenceforth insensible of their misfortunes : but the
Greeks look on at their own calamities, and hand down their
losses as an inheritance to their children's children ; so that just
as we count those who live on under torture more wretched
1 xii. 5. 2 xl. 7. 3 xl. 8.
4 T!6Trov !:crx aTOV o.Tro\oyias ye ?rp6s TOUS tiriyiyvofjitvovs irepl a<f>>v
Compare Shakespeare's "If not, the end of life cancels all bonds."
POLYS I US. 395
than those who expire under their torments, so we should
esteem the fate of the Greeks yet more pitiable than that which
befel the Carthaginians." 1
Worse than all, Folybius felt that his countrymen had
brought their fate on themselves, and that it was his duty as a
historian to expose their faults, and to give his verdict against
them. There is something pathetic in the contrast between
his feelings as a Greek and the sternness of his historical
judgment :
" Some perhaps will blame me and think that I write in a
hostile spirit, I who ought of all men to palliate the errors of
the Greeks. But I hold that men of sense will never esteem
him a true friend who shrinks through fear from downright
speaking, nor him a good citizen who deserts the truth because
of any offence it may give at the moment. It is unpardonable
for the historian to set anything whatever above the truth. A
record handed down 'to posterity extends to more persons and
to a further time than words uttered for a present purpose ;
and bearing this in mind, the writer ought to make truth his
first object, and his hearers to welcome this disposition. At
the time of these disasters it was my part, as a Greek for the
Greeks, to give them my aid in all ways, defending them,
palliating their faults, deprecating the anger of the conquerors ;
and this I did then and there with all sincerity. But I here
record for posterity the memory of the events, untinged with
any animosity, not seeking to please for the moment the ears
of my readers, but to edify their minds and save them from
committing the same faults again. And so I leave this
subject." 2
It is characteristic of Polybius that he threw himself with
all his might into the task of making the best of the disastrous
circumstances, and of alleviating as far as possible the subjec-
tion of his countrymen. He had thoroughly won the confidence
of the Eomans, and was now selected by them as the repre-
sentative of the Imperial power in Greece during the period of
transition. Polybius's own opinions were democratic, and his
party had always rested on popular support ; but now he was
1 xxxviii. la. a xxxviii. 1 d.
396 POLYS I US.
constrained to arrange the affairs of each state in accordance
with the oligarchical models which their Roman masters
preferred. We subjoin his own account of this painful but
necessary and honourable task :
" The ten commissioners having completed these arrange-
ments sailed for Italy early in the spring, leaving behind in
view of all Greece an honourable specimen of Roman policy.
At their departure they instructed Polybius to make a progress
through the various states, and to clear up any points about
which people were in uncertainty, until they should get accus-
tomed to the constitution and the laws. And this charge he
fulfilled in process of time, so that men acquiesced in the con-
stitution which had been given them, and no obscurity remained
about any point of law, public or private." l
Polybius regarded this labour as the most useful and
important of his life. His countrymen recognised his services
with gratitude, and set up his statue where he would be best
pleased to have it, side by side with those of Aratus and
Philopcemen. 2
We turn with relief from the melancholy spectacle of the
enslavement of Greece to the story of the friendship of Polybius
and Scipio ^Emilianus.
Scipio was by birth the son of ^Emilius Paulrus, but was
adopted when a child by the son of Scipio Africanus the elder,
the conqueror of Hannibal. The early death of his adoptive
father left young Scipio the possessor of a great fortune, and the
inheritor of the first name in Rome. He was hardly more than
a boy when he accompanied Paullus in the war against Perseus.
After the victory his lather gave him the free run of the royal
forests of Macedon. These had been jealously preserved for
years ; the sport they afforded was the finest then to be found
in the world, and young Scipio was happy as a king 3 in his
magnificent playground. When he returned to Italy he shunned
the morning calls and the practice in the law-courts, which
occupied the time of other young nobles. They strove, says
Polybius, to keep themselves before the eye of the world by
1 xl. 10. a xl. 8.
3 I'Ofj.'.aas olov el pa
POLYS I US. 397
being constantly in the Forum. Scipio found in his friend 1
Polybius a passionate lover of sport, and the two spent their
days together in the chase. Scipio's daring exploits in the
hunting-field passed from mouth to mouth. " Before long he
outstripped all his contemporaries, and gained an unprecedented
reputation, though the way he took to acquire it ran counter to
all the habits and customs of the Eomans." 2
The beginning of their intimacy must be told in Polybius's
words. 3
" As the process of our story and the period of events bring
us to this family, I wish now to fulfil, for the benefit of the curious,
the promise I held out in the last book. I undertook to relate
why and how the reputation of Scipio in Eome rose to such a
height and burst forth into such unexpected lustre ; and further,
how the affection and the intimacy between him and Polybius
became so strong, that not only did the fame of it reach through-
out Italy and Greece, but even distant nations heard the story of
their friendship and association. I have already stated that
their first relations arose out of reading books together and
literary conversation. As their intimacy advanced, Fabius and
Scipio, the sons of Paullus, begged of the praetor to have Poly-
bius remain at Rome, when the other Achseans who were under
detention were interned in the country towns of Italy. After
this they were constantly in one another's society. One day
the three walked together out of the house of Fabius, and Fabius
took the turn towards the Forum, while Polybius and Scipio
went in the other direction. As they walked, Scipio, blushing
scarlet, and in subdued and gentle tones spoke thus : ' How is
it, Polybius, we have been dining, two brothers together, and
yet you always talk to Fabius, and put your questions and
address your remarks to him and set me aside ? It is clear that
you share the opinion which I hear my fellow-citizens have of
me : they think me tame and dull, unlike a Roman in character
and action because I do not choose to speak in the courts ; and
they say that I am not the stuff for the head of such a house as
I am sprung from ; and this grieves me to the heart.' Polybius
rbf TOV IIoXi//3foi/ Trpis roOro rb /a^pos ti>0ovffiaff/j.6v.
2 xxxii. 15, * xxxii. 9.
398 POLYBIUS.
was astounded to hear the lad (for he was not more than eighteen
years old at the time) begin the conversation in this strain, and
he replied, ' For heaven's sake, Scipio, do not speak so, or let
such notions enter your head. I am not despising you or set-
ting you aside ; far from it, but as your brother is the elder,
when w r e are in company I begin with him, and refer my
remarks and plans to his decision, and lean on his judgment,
assuming that you share his views. But you astonish me when
you say that you are too gentle for the son of such a house ;
this reserve is the best evidence of force of character. For my
part I would gladly devote myself as your fellow-worker to
make you in speech and action worthy of your ancestors. For
in the studies, into which you now throw your interests and
your efforts, neither you nor your brother will have any lack of
ready helpers ; for I see that a throng of such persons is pouring
over from Greece. But in the matters which now distress you,
as you say, I think you will not find any fitter companion and
fellow-worker than myself.' Before Polybius had done speak-
ing, Scipio seized his hand with both his own, and pressing it
fervently, exclaimed ' Would that I might see the day when
you will make me your first interest and be my comrade. From
that day forth I shall feel that I am not unworthy of my house
and my ancestors.' Polybius was charmed with the fervour and
open-heartedness of the lad, but was not without misgiving as
he thought of the greatness of his house and the wealth and
station of its members. But from the time of this compact
young Scipio would never part from Polybius, and preferred his
society to everything else. And as time went on, and the
friends found each other faithful through the course of an un-
broken intimacy, they conceived for one another an affection
and devotion as of kindred or brethren."
Apart from its interest as an account of this notable friend-
ship, the passage is instructive as showing that Scipio, like
most great orators, was a man of nervous and sensitive tempera-
ment. In later years, when he had overcome his reserve and
shyness, he was a master of impassioned outbursts of invective.
When the Roman mob, swollen with a motley throng of en-
franchised slaves, tried to shout him down whilst speaking, he
exclaimed, " Silence, you to whom Italy is not mother but step-
POL YBIUS. 399
mother ; " and as the clamour rose again, " Do you think I will
fear those let loose, whom I brought in chains to the slave-
market ? "
Another anecdote of Polybius's life in Rome shows the
historian in a somewhat unexpected light, as a man with a
love for an adventure, and ready to run a considerable risk
from a good-natured wish to help an acquaintance in difficulty.
Demetrius, a grandson of Antiochus the Great, had been shame-
fully treated by the Roman senate. He had been sent to Rome
when a child, as a hostage on behalf of his father, Seleucus,
who was then king of Syria. Seleucus died, and was succeeded
by his brother, Antiochus Epiphanes. Demetrius now claimed
release ; for he was no sort of hostage for the behaviour of his
uncle, who would have been glad enough to see him out of the
way. The Senate refused his petition. In process of time
Antiochus died, and Demetrius, as the eldest member of the
family, was the lawful heir to the throne. The Senate, how-
ever, preferred to acknowledge the young son of Antiochus,
and sent commissioners, nominally to act as guardians to the
infant prince. These commissioners, acting on instructions
from Rome, proceeded to burn the ships of their ward, to ham-
string his elephants, and to weaken the kingdom by every
means in their power. The ministers whom they set up were
notorious for misgovernment, and were hated by the people ;
and there was no doubt that if Demetrius could once set foot
in Syria he would be received with acclamation. The preten-
der was jealously detained in Italy, where he consoled himself
with wine and hunting. This last amusement brought him
into contact with Polybius : he confided his troubles to him,
and Polybius resolved to plan his escape. He persuaded a
Greek friend, who was at Rome on a mission from Ptolemy, to
charter a vessel as if for his own return to Egypt. At the last
moment the Alexandrine envoy sent word to the captain of the
vessel that business detained him in Rome, and that he would
send in his stead some friends with important letters for home.
Demetrius, to avoid suspicion, sent out his servants with dogs
and nets, instructing them to meet him at Circeii for a hunting
party. He then went to dinner at the house of a friend.
Polybius was at the time confined to his bed by illness, and
400 POLYBIUS.
was uneasy for fear that Demetrius should spoil everything by
getting drunk at his dinner-party. He therefore sent one of
his slaves with a sealed packet which was to be silently placed
in Demetrius's hand at the dinner-table. The letter when
opened contained no signature, but only a string of wise say-
ings extracted from the poets about the virtues of sobriety,
resolution, and prompt action. Demetrius took the hint and
retired from table. He left Eome, as if to join the hunters at
Circeii, and hurried on board the ship which was moored at
Ostia. The captain had not the least suspicion who was his
passenger, and set sail immediately. It was not till the fourth
day that Demetrius's retinue, uneasy at his breaking his appoint-
ment at Circeii, returned to Eome and gave the alarm ; and by
the time the matter came to the ears of the government,
Demetrius was beyond the Straits of Messina. He recovered
his kingdom without much difficulty ; but the maxims on
sobriety, which Polybius had been so careful to copy out for
him, failed to impress him permanently, and hard drinking
soon put an end to his life. The plans of his Greek friends
were so well laid, that no suspicion seems to have been aroused
as to their part in the escape, till Polybius himself told the
story years after in the course of his narrative. 1
The great business of Polybius's life was the collection of
materials for his History. He had the advantage of living at
the capital, in the very centre of political events, yet with the
leisure and impartiality of a spectator. He was the most un-
wearied and conscientious collector of information. He knew
that his work would be read by Roman critics, and he specially
appeals to them to confirm the accuracy of his account of
Roman institutions. He has the true instinct of a great
historian in dealing with original documents. He does not
load his pages with references to petty inscriptions, and he
laughs good-humouredly at Timpeus, 2 a sort of Dryasdust, who
would pounce with delight on an error of three months in the
synchronism of Athenian archons and Argive priestesses, and
" who pried into what was written on the columns in the back
premises of temples and the compacts of hospitality on the
xxxi. 19-23. *xii. 11.
POLYBIUS. 401
door-posts." But where inscriptions will throw light on any
questions that lie along the main lines of the history, he spares
no trouble to avail himself of them. Finding contradictory
accounts of the various treaties between Rome and Carthage,
he studied and translated the originals, some of them written
in language so archaic as to be almost unintelligible to the
Romans of his day. 1 If he gives the numbers of Hannibal's
army at different dates, it is always on the authority of an
inscription set up by Hannibal himself at the Lacinian pro-
montory before he left Italy. 2 For events before his time, or
out of the reach of his personal knowledge, Polybius hunted
up the evidence of eye-witnesses. He still found men alive
who remembered the passage of Hannibal over the Alps. 3 He
checked the Roman accounts of the Punic Wars by cross-
questioning Carthaginians, and he refers especially to the infor-
mation given him by Massinissa, the veteran king of Numidia,
who had fought under the first Scipio, and who lived to see the
beginning of the Third Punic War. 4 In his account of the
obscure negotiations of Perseus and Eumenes (a matter in
regard to which modern historians have been inclined to throw
doubt on the veracity of Polybius), we find that he gathered his
information from the Macedonian courtiers who were privy to
the transaction. 5
Polybius travelled far and wide to see with his own eyes
the scenes of the events he describes. He points out most
fairly the disadvantages under which previous writers had lain
in their geographical descriptions. Eye-witnesses of distant
countries were rare ; and even these were hampered by the
difficulties of language and the dangers of savage lands, and had
every temptation to eke out their scanty information by the
invention of mere travellers' stories. So far, then, from blaming
his predecessors for their mistakes, he would rather give them
all credit for any advance in knowledge which they effected.
" But in our day Asia, by the conquests of Alexander, and
the rest of the world, by the supremacy of the Romans, have
become almost everywhere accessible by sea and by land ; and
the same events, by withdrawing from men of energy all objects
1 iii. 22 seq. 2 iii. 33. 3 iii. 48.
4 ix. 25. 5 xxix. 1 e.
2 C
402 POL YBIUS.
of ambition in war and politics, have given occasion to great
interest and curiosity about those other subjects ; and thus
it is incumbent on us to acquire better and more accurate
knowledge of what was before obscure. This it shall be my
endeavour to set forth in its place, and this was my chief in-
centive to undergo the dangers and hardships of journeys in
Libya, Spain, and Gaul, and on the sea that forms the further
boundary of these countries." 1
He is thus able to speak from personal measurements of the
plan of the city of Carthagena ; 2 and he followed the footsteps
of Hannibal across the Alps that he might be the better
qualified to write the history of his passage. 3 Unfortunately,
Polybius's power of graphic delineation of localities is not
equal to his industry, and his account of Hannibal's route falls
far short of the clear and exact description which he is careful
to promise his readers.
Polybius makes use of his notes of travel to enrich his book
with much curious information about the countries through
which he passed. The fertility of Spain, for instance, is illus-
trated by elaborate statistics of the price of commodities,
evidently gained from personal experience. 4 The natural
history of the island of Corsica gives him an opportunity of
correcting his rival Timseus, on whose blunders he always
comments with satisfaction.
" His assertions about the island of Corsica are on a level
with his random talk about Libya. He states, in his account
of Corsica, in the second book, that it contains numbers of
wild goats, sheep, and oxen ; and likewise deer, hares, wolves,
and other game ; and that the inhabitants employ themselves
in hunting these, and make the chase the business of their
lives. Now, in that island, far from there being wild goats or
oxen, there is not so much as a hare, a wolf, or a stag, nor any
other animals of the sort, excepting only foxes, rabbits, and
wild sheep. The rabbit at a distance looks like a small hare ;
but when you come to handle it, it is quite distinct both in
form and in the taste of its flesh, and it generally lives under
ground. The fact is, that the animals of the country have the
2 x. 11. 3 iii. 48.
POL YB1US. 403
appearance of being wild, for the following reason. The herds-
men are not able to follow their beasts about on the pastures,
owing to the wooded, steep, and rocky nature of the ground.
But when they wish to collect them, they post themselves at
convenient stations, and sound a call with the trumpet to their
animals, who come running together without fail, each to its
own trumpet-call. The consequence is, that when persons
coasting along the island see goats and oxen pasturing un-
tended, and wish to catch them, the animals will not suffer
the strangers to approach them, but run away ; and when the
herdsman sees them making off, he blows his trumpet, and
immediately they hurry headlong in a drove, congregating
towards the call. This gives them the appearance of wildness ;
and thus Timasus is led into his random statement by careless
and insufficient inquiry. As for their obedience to the
trumpet, there is nothing to wonder at in that ; for in Italy,
likewise, the owners adopt the same plan in pasturing swine.
The swineherds do not follow at the heels of their beasts, as
among the Greeks, but walk in front, blowing the horn at
intervals, and the beasts follow behind, and run together
towards the note ; and the familiarity which each shows with
his proper horn is so remarkable, that those who hear of it for
the first time are astonished and inclined to be sceptical." 1
Another extract from Polybius's travelling note-book gives
us a glimpse of the cost of board and lodging in Cisalpine Gaul,
a land which must have been in those days a very Paradise for
an economically-minded tourist.
" As to the details of the produce of wine, and of the plenty
of the means of subsistence, we may best form a notion of
them from the following fact. When persons travelling
through the country put up at an inn, they do not bargain with
the landlord as to the price of each article, but ask how much
he charges to receive a guest ; and the innkeeper as a general
rule admits his lodgers, undertaking to provide them with all
they want, at the rate of half an as (that is a quarter of an obol)
for each day ; and this charge is rarely exceeded." 2
The as, when Polybius wrote, was equal in value to the
1 xii. 3. 8 ii. 15.
404 POLY J3 1 US.
sixteenth part of the denarius, and a denarius contains silver to
the amount of about eightpence-halfpenny : it follows that a
man could live en pension in the valley of the Po for a fraction
over one farthing per diem. Two hundred years later, wine
was still so cheap in this district, that the jest ran that pure
water was a more costly liquor to drink; and Martial could
complain that he was cheated by the tavern-keeper, who, when
he called for wine and water, served him the wine neat. 1
The plan of Polybius's History was altered and extended
during the course of its composition. His original scheme is
explained in the first book, and recapitulated at the beginning
of the third. After two preliminary books in which are nar-
rated the events of the First Punic War, the revolt of the
Carthaginian mercenaries, the war between Eome and the Cis-
alpine Gauls, and the affairs of Greece in the age of Cleornenes
and Aratus, all as preliminary to the main subject the body
of the work commences with the third book, and is to comprise
the period of fifty-three years, from the commencement of the
Second Punic War down to the destruction of the kingdom of
Macedon after the war with Perseus. Within it fall the wars
with Philip of Macedon and with Antiochus, king of Syria. It
is the history of the steps by which Eome attained the position
of the dominant power in the world.
" This is the conclusion of our fifty-three years' period, and
within this the growth and advancement of the Eoman domina-
tion was accomplished; and further, it seemed agreed and
forced on the conviction of all men, that all that remains to
the world is to submit to the Eomans, and to perform whatever
they shall enjoin." 2
But as early as the time when Polybius published his third
book he had come to feel that this was insufficient. He must
also show how the Eomans used their supremacy, what view
they took of their rights and duties as the rulers of the world,
what was the political and social condition of the subjects, and
what was their state of feeling towards their masters.
1 Book iii. Ep. 56 and 57.
2 iii. 4. The fifty-three years are counted (inclusively) from 219 B.C., the
year of Hannibal's attack on Saguntum, to 167 B.C., the year of the settle-
ment of Macdonia after Paullus's victory.
POL YBIUS. 405
" For it is obvious that it is by considering these points that
we must instruct our contemporaries whether the supremacy of
the Romans is a thing to be abhorred or to be accepted, and
form the judgment of future generations whether they are to
praise and imitate the Eomans, or to condemn them." 1
He will therefore make a fresh start, and relate the events
which succeeded the establishment of the Roman dominion,
down to the time when fresh wars led to the revelation of the
full results of the new system in the overthrow of Carthage
and of Greece. This adds another period of twenty-one years
(167-146 B.C.) to the subject-matter of his History. He is
urged, he says, " partly by the greatness of the events, partly by
the astounding nature of their consequences, but most of all
because he was himself so largely not only a spectator but an
actor in them." 2
With reference to this last point it may be noticed that
Polybius adopted the very strictest views as to the limits
of historical credibility. In the two preliminary books he
does not claim to be an original historian, but founds on the
works of his predecessors, Aratus, Philinus, and Fabius. But
for the main body of his work he chooses a period within the
reach of his own personal inquiries.
" The period which follows this date (219 B.C.), and forms the
subject of our History, corresponds partly with our own days
and partly with those of our fathers ; and from this it results
that some of the events happened before our eyes, and of the
rest we heard from those who had seen. For to stretch into
earlier times so as to write down a report of a report appeared
to us to give no security either for conclusions or assertions." 3
The traces of a change in the point of view of the writer
are left here and there on his work. Take, for instance, the
following account of the Achaean League in the second book. 4
" Concerning the Achaean nation and concerning the house
of Macedon, it will not be out of the way to indulge in a short
retrospect, seeing that our generation has witnessed the com-
plete annihilation of the one and the marvellous growth and
unity of the other. Many have attempted in past times to
1 iii. 4. 2 iii. 4. iv. 2.
406 POL YBIUS.
lead the Peloponnesians to an appreciation of their common
interests, and none have succeeded, because they were anxious
rather for their own supremacy than for a liberty in which all
should share. But in our time this undertaking has attained
such a success and consummation, that not only is there an
association for political purposes as of friends and allies, but
they all have the same laws, the same weights, measures, and
coins, the same magistrates, senators, and judges; and, in a
word, the whole of Peloponnesus differs in construction from a
single state only in this, that the inhabitants do not live within
the same walls."
It is obvious that these words were written after the war
with Perseus, and before the destruction of the Achrean League
(i.e. between 167 B.C. and 146 B.C.). The writer either did not
foresee, or with a natural and patriotic optimism refused to
recognise, the ruin that was coming on his country.
The explanation no doubt is, that the two preliminary
books were published before the final catastrophe had taken
place. It was one effect of the transmission of books by
manuscript copies, that it was impossible to correct what had
once got abroad. The Littera scripta manet was strictly
true. The author had none of the opportunities of the
" new and revised edition " of modern times. We find this
amusingly illustrated in the case of a Ehodian historian
named Zeno, who had shocked Polybius by describing a
Spartan expedition as passing through Sellasia on its way to
Thalamse and Pharse ; whereas Sellasia lay to the north-east of
Sparta, and the other places to the south-west. 1 Polybius
wrote off in hot haste to Zeno, but the book was already
published, and correction was impossible. " Zeno was as
vexed as could be, but the thing was beyond remedy :
however, he acknowledged my efforts in the most friendly
terms." 2
Only the first five books of Polybius's History are pre-
served to us entire. The third book carries the history of the
Second Punic War down to the battle of Cannre, while the
1 xvi. 16. Modern maps represent Sellasia as due north, and Thalamae and
Pharse as south, or a point to the south-east of Sparta.
2 xvi. 20.
POLYBIUS. 407
fourth and fifth books deal with the contemporary history of
Greece and Asia. The remaining thirty-five books are known
to us by fragments. By far the longest is the account of the
Roman constitution and military system, from the sixth book.
This comprises fifty-eight chapters, probably about half the
original book. The lost portion doubtless described the civil
administration and financial system of Eome. " One may with
justice reproach Fortune " (to borrow a phrase of our historian)
for having preserved in the fourth and fifth books so much
that is petty and off the main lines of the history, while with-
holding from us the light which would have been shed on
some of the most difficult and interesting questions of ancient
politics, if the sixth book had come to us unmutilated. 1
Besides the usual sources of fragments in the quotations
and allusions of other ancient writers, we have in the case of
Polybius the help of volumes of compiled extracts which have
survived the destruction of the complete works from which
they were drawn.
A volume of Epitomes (so the MS. calls them) was known
as early as the year 1549. These are really not epitomes
in our sense of the word, but extracts tolerably copious from
Books 1. xvin. The earlier editors amused themselves with
the fancy that they had in their hands the work on which, as
Plutarch tells us, 2 Brutus was engaged on the eve of the battle
of Pharsalia. Schweighauser points out 3 that a much later
date is determined for these extracts by comparing those of
them which are taken from the first five books with the con-
tinuous manuscripts of these books. All our copies of the
extracts conform, he says; exclusively to the readings of that
family of manuscripts of which the Vatican is the chief, ignor-
ing those of the other group on which the earlier editors
framed the textus receptus. This seems to prove that the com-
pilation was effected after the divergence of the two types
which are respectively followed by these two classes of manu-
scripts. It is probably safest to attribute this collection to
Byzantine compilers of a comparatively recent date.
1 See Marquardt, Romische Staats- Verwaltung, vol. ii. p. 76.
3 Zypaijie ffwrdrruv ^irirofj.Tjv IIoXu/3(ov. Plutarch, Brutus, 4.
8 Preface, p. civ.
POL YfilUS.
Of a second, and scarcely less important, compilation we
have fuller information. 1 Constantino Porphyrogenitus, a
Byzantine Emperor of the tenth century, ordered the forma-
tion of a sort of Digest of Historical writers for the use of
persons who found the complete works too long and wearisome
to study. Extracts from them were selected and arranged
under different headings according to their subjects. He
claimed to have included everything which was important
in the Greek historians within the limits of his fifty-three
volumes. Two of the fifty-three survive nearly complete, the
one entitled Embassies (irepl Ilpea-Peiwv), the other Virtue and
Vice (irepl 'Aperf)? /cal Ka/a'a?). Both draw largely from
Polybius; they were first printed in 1582 and 1584 respec-
tively, and Casaubon included the extracts from both in his
great edition of Polybius. In the present century fragments
of another volume, Maxims (irepl TVWJJLWV}, have been dis-
covered in the Vatican Library by Cardinal Mai, and later
editors have incorporated in the text many fresh extracts from
Polybius drawn from this source.
The extracts and fragments preserved are longer by
nearly a half than the five complete books, and they are also,
taking them as a whole, far more interesting and valuable.
The most striking passages were naturally selected for the
compilations ; and though we have to look elsewhere for the
continuous history, and though we feel that the silence on
particular points of interest is vexatious, yet in what remains
we have evidently the pith of the work, and can find the
picture of the age and its great events as the historian wished
to portray them.
The task which Polybius proposed to himself was to write
the history of the world during the period he had chosen for
his subject. Such a universal history was demanded, so he
thought, by the appearance of a universal Empire.
" Now in the times preceding this period, the events of the
world's history may be said to have happened in a state of
isolation, because each action, both in its inception and in
its development, was disconnected with all others by time or
1 See Schweighauser's Preface, p. cxxxix.
POL YBIUS. 409
place. But from this period we find that the history has
become an organic whole, and the affairs of Italy and Libya
are bound up with those of Asia and Greece, and the general
current of events sets to one fixed point." l
" The distinctive feature of our work corresponds with the
marvellous characteristic of our times ; for as Fortune has
swayed almost all the affairs of the world to one centre, and
compelled every force to set in one and the same direction, so
we would by means of our History bring under a common view,
for the benefit of our readers, the operations which Fortune has
employed for the completion of a combined system of the
world. Indeed it was this above everything that incited and
urged us to attempt the writing of history, and an additional
incentive was the consideration that none of our contemporaries
have attempted to construct a universal history ; otherwise for
my own part I should have been much less eager to occupy
this ground. But now, seeing that many writers employ
themselves on individual wars, and on some of the actions
associated with them, but that the universal and connected dis-
position of events, when and from what causes they took their
rise, and how they reached their full development, are questions
which no one of them, so far as I know, even attempts to
analyse, I conceived that it was absolutely necessary not to
omit nor let pass without recognition this which is at once the
noblest and most instructive of all the operations of Fortune.
For while she is for ever working revolutions, and for ever busy-
ing herself over the lives of men, she never yet accomplished
such a task, nor fought through such a struggle as has been
exhibited in our day. But of this it is impossible to gain a clear
conception from those who write history in isolated segments.
" It is by gaining a view of the connection and relationship
of all events to each other, and of their resemblances and
differences, that alone we can reach the goal, and be enabled to
get both profit and pleasure out of history." 2
Polybius is thoroughly impressed with the majesty of his
subject. In this conception of a systematic whole, and in the
recognition that he must search for the hidden threads of reason
1 i. 3. * i. 4.
410 POLYBIUS.
which bind events together, he finds an informing principle
for his work. He gains from it the support of a duty clearly
apprehended and loyally adhered to, and it supplies a certain
elevation and dignity which would otherwise be wanting both
to his thought and writing. It sets him in a sphere removed
above the temptations of the rhetorician and the pamphleteer,
and makes him the most trustworthy of historians. Polybius
is an enthusiast for the truth wherever he finds it. He shows
throughout a calm determination to probe to the bottom the
conditions of the time with which men had to deal : what is
inevitable he will accept without murmuring : he will state for
his contemporaries the facts, whether agreeable or not, to which
their conduct must be suited. Neither fear nor favour, he
contends, must tempt the historian to waver for a moment in
his allegiance to the truth. In this spirit he criticises the rival
histories of Fabius and Philinus for their partisan accounts of
the First Punic War.
" Now in most affairs of life, perhaps, a man would do ill
to divest himself of such a fellow-feeling. For a good man
should be attached to his friend and to his country, and out of
sympathy for these should hate their enemies and love their
friends. But when a man assumes the attitude of mind that is
proper to history, he is bound to leave out of sight all such
considerations, and he must often speak well of his enemies and
adorn them with the highest praises when the facts demand
this ; and again he must often blame his nearest friends, and
bring their faults home to them whenever their conduct
requires it. For just as, if the eyes of a living animal are put
out, the whole creature becomes maimed and helpless, so, if you
take away the truth out of history, what is left is merely an
unprofitable tale." 1
Polybius's own practice shows that this homage to the
truth is not merely a lip-service. We have seen how all his
political hopes and aspirations were bound up with the Achaean
League. Of all men of his age, Aratus, the founder of Achaean
greatness, might seem to claim from him indulgent treatment,
while Cleomenes, whose whole life was a struggle against the
1 i. 14.
POLYBIUS.
Achneans, and who had dealt a deadly blow at Megalopolis,
Polybius's native town, might seem a natural mark for enmity
and detraction. Yet he is careful to point out the great defects
of Aratus, his want of skill and energy in the field of battle,
and the numerous disasters which his incapacity inflicted on
his countrymen. " All Peloponnesus was full," he says, " of
the trophies which had been erected for victories over Aratus."
On the other hand, when he comes to describe the death of
Cleomenes, though it does not fall within his province to give
the picturesque details which we learn from Plutarch, he fully
recognises the dignity and heroism of his end. When all their
efforts had failed, he and his companions " killed themselves
bravely and as became Spartans : and this was the end of
Cleomenes, a man of winning manners towards his fellow r s, and
of ability in the affairs of State, and, in a word, framed by
nature to be a leader and a king." 1
To pass to the next generation: his character of the last
Philip of Macedon leaves nothing to be desired in discrimina-
tion and soundness of moral judgment. He does equal justice
to the courage, prudence, and self-restraint of his youth; to
the reckless vice and tyranny of his middle life ; and to the
splendid resolution with which the old man, braced and sobered
by misfortune, bent himself to the tremendous task of retriev-
ing his shattered fortune, and reviving his country after the
shock of its first great calamity.
Or again, let us consider Polybius's picture of Rome. Rome
is the triumphant hero of his story. The object of his book is
to show that the success of the Romans was not an accident,
but the natural result of their character and their institutions.
He accepts the supremacy of Rome as the voice of fate, and
urges submission on the world. Yet he is never tempted by
the desire for a false consistency to slur over the unjust, cruel,
or mean actions of the Romans. Their conduct to Demetrius
and to the kingdom of Syria is only a specimen of many dis-
creditable deeds recorded by their historian : he tells of each
occurrence in its place calmly and judicially, without fear or
favour.
1 v. 39.
412 POLYBIUS.
With this absorbing passion for truth, Polybius has the
" defects of his qualities " in a certain unfortunate contempt
for the artistic presentation of the truth. The following is his
criticism on his Rhodian friend :
" What shall we say, then, is the defect of Zeno ? That he
is anxious, not so much about inquiring into his facts and
dealing with his subject, as about perfecting his style ; and it
is clear from many passages that this is what he prides himself
on, as is the case with many other distinguished historians.
Now I hold that a man should by all means take pains and
exert himself about the fitting presentation of what he has to
say, for it is manifest that this contributes greatly to the effect
of the narrative; but men of sound sense should not set up
this as their first and leading object. Far from it ; there are
other nobler elements of history on which a statesmanlike
historian would rather pride himself." l
The doctrine, as it stands, is of course indisputable; but
Polybius in practice allowed his scrupulous performance of the
first duty of a historian to serve him as an excuse for wholly
neglecting the second. His style must, indeed, be acquitted of
the very worst faults, those which spring from conceited
pedantry and laborious folly. It is not vicious, nor forced, nor
inflated, nor false. You listen to a man of sense telling his
story in a way that is natural to him. Thus, whenever the
events he is describing are in themselves sufficiently exciting
to fix the attention of the reader by their intrinsic interest, he
does not throw away the advantage, nor spoil the narrative by
tinsel ornament. Some of the battle-scenes, for instance, in
which Polybius's own bent towards military pursuits furnished
a stimulus to his mind, are really well described. Perhaps the
passages where one feels least the defects of the writer are the
description of the revolt of the Carthaginian mercenaries in
the first book, and that of the capture and death of Achseus in
a fragment of the eighth.
Carthage had collected into her mercenary army a throng
of Libyans, Celts, bastard Greeks, runaway slaves, and deserters
from all parts of the world. These burst into mutiny after
1 xvi. 17.
POLYBIUS. 413
their return to Africa at the end of the First Punic War (2-41
B.C.). The long-suppressed hatred of the African population
towards their Carthaginian tyrants assisted them in their
revolt, and stimulated them to wild orgies of cruelty and
destructiveness. They had no common language, and the only
word they all understood was the Greek /3a\Xe, "pelt him."
The leaders of the mutineers had only to raise this cry against
any one who opposed them, and it was taken up from mouth
to mouth, and the designated victim was stoned to death as a
supposed spy or traitor. A reign of terror ensued, founded on
mutual suspicion ; no one was trusted unless he had given
security for his fidelity by unpardonable crimes. The whole
nature of these men became brutalised and poisoned with
malignant passions ; they tortured or mutilated every prisoner :
Gesco, their favourite general, was seized when he came at their
own request to treat with them in the camp, and put to death
with horrible torments. Driven to bay, they resorted to canni-
balism in their despair, and were at length either exterminated
on the field, or else crucified or trodden under the feet of
elephants by their conquerors. 1 It has been said by one who
first read this description at the time when news was being
brought by every mail of the events of the Indian Mutiny, that
it was the story told by Polybius which best enabled him to
enter into the spirit of what was passing in the East, and which
brought most vividly before his mind the horrors of the armed
rebellion of a savage race.
Not less striking is the story of the unfortunate pretender
Achseus, besieged in the fortress of Sardis by King Antiochus. 2
He was enticed out by night by a traitorous Cretan named
Bolis, who, having received a great sum of money to effect his
escape, sold him to Antiochus. Acheeus, who had doubts of
the fidelity of his guide, had disguised himself, and instructed
the leader of his party to tell the Cretan that Achseus had
remained behind, and would content himself with sending three
or four friends as messengers to his partisans outside. Bolis,
now utterly puzzled, accompanied them through the darkness ;
but he soon noticed that there was one of the party to whom
i. 66-88. 2 viii. 17-23.
4H POLYBIUS.
the others seemed to show deference, taking care of him and
helping him over rough and dangerous places. This, he rightly
concluded, must be the prince ; he suddenly flung his arms
round him, the attendants were cut down by armed men who
w r ere lying in wait, and the Cretan, marching in the dead of
night into the tent where Antiochus sat anxiously awaiting
the issue of the plot, flung down the rebel, bound hand and
foot, before the king.
In such passages as these, we feel that it is the thrilling
character of the events described which gives pow r er and
interest to the description. Where Polybius lacks the stimulus
of such a topic, and has to depend on his own skill for the
artistic presentation of his subject, he fails from sheer care-
lessness and slovenliness. His sentences trail along without
beginning, middle, or end. His remarks fall out pell-mell,
without any regard to their suiting the tone or spirit of the
context. As long as he can say what he wants to say, the
manner has to take care of itself. He writes, indeed, not so
much in a bad style, as with no style at all. The result is
that, although hardly any writer has said more interesting
things than Polybius, he is tedious and uninteresting as a
whole. It is characteristic of the man that the fragments
should be the most valuable part of his work. The extant
portions of his writings occupy altogether nearly 1200 octavo
pages of Bekker's edition. We may almost apply to him what
Macaulay says of Spenser that if the whole forty books,
printed on some 4000 octavo pages, had remained to us, " we
doubt if any heart less stout than that of a commentator would
have held out to the end."
The Nemesis of his contempt for the form and style of his
writing has come on Polybius in the neglect which he has
experienced at the hands of the modern world. He can hardly
have a place in the regular educational curriculum, for there
could not be a worse book from which to teach boys Greek.
His language lacks all the subtlety and depth of classical
Greek, and has the indescribable flavour of a modern language,
such as we find about the Dog-Latin of the Middle Ages. It
is a cosmopolitan language, without character and without
idiom, fitted only to serve as a medium of communication for
POLYBIUS. 415
the dead and colourless civilisation which remained to the
Hellenised East under the crushing power of Rome.
In arrangement and choice of materials, we find in Polybius
the same want of artistic sense. His proper subject is so vast,
and embraces such a multiplicity of details, that, with all his
anxious care for truth, he despairs of attaining absolute
accuracy ; l but, not content with this, he can never resist the
temptation of talking and arguing about other matters. He
cannot let his History speak for itself, but is always trying to
justify his method, or his style, or his arrangement ; if he
introduces a new subject, he wastes time over an apology, and
an attempt to show that the discussion is to the point ; if he
decides to omit something, still he cannot be silent about it,
but must explain, generally at very unnecessary length, why it
is not convenient to enter on this or that subject at present.
He will not say a thing once and have done with it, but keeps
harping on the same topics. It was useful and proper that he
should point out the difference between his subject-matter and
that of the writers of " special histories ;" but, from mere want
of literary skill and critical sense, he insists on the theme till
the reader is weary of it.
It is interesting to notice in this connection the different
effects of the conditions of composition among the ancients on
the form of their writings. The footnote, the reference, the
appendix, the magazine criticism, are all modern inventions,
and by their means the modern writer may purge his text.
Whatever the ancient historian wished to say, he must intro-
duce into the body of his work. Polybius sets no limits to this
licence of forcing in extraneous matter. Side by side with the
record of great events we find in him elaborate criticisms of
rival historians the fragments of that on Timasus alone occupy
forty octavo pages apologies, answers to objections, and even
a sort of publisher's advertisement, which explains that the
public are not to be alarmed at the size and price of his w T ork,
for that his forty books are really cheaper to buy and easier to
read, in comparison of the ground they cover, than the works
of the " special historians." 2 By such indiscriminate loquacity
1 xxix. 6 a. a iii. 32.
416 POLYBIUS.
the dignity and beauty of the History is seriously impaired ;
and the fault appears the greater, if we contrast the effect of
the same conditions of writing upon the great masters of his-
torical style. The responsibility of choice seems to strengthen
and brace them; their taste and judgment are polished till they
attain an almost unerring instinct of w T hen to speak and when
to keep silence. Polybius claims a place in the highest rank
of ancient historians, and such a claim challenges a comparison
with the greatest names with the severe and stately thought
and diction of Thucydides ; with Tacitus, who carries the art
of writing to its highest pitch, in whom no expression, no turn
of a sentence, no hint, no digression, fails to heighten the effect
of the whole ; with Herodotus, who, whether by the simplicity
of genius, or by art so consummate that the observer cannot
distinguish it from nature, delights generation after generation
of readers with a tale that leaves nothing to be desired in finish
and beauty. Would it be well for ordinary classical students
to give up any one of these to spend the time over Polybius ? It
must be confessed that Polybius as a writer cannot stand for a
moment in the light of such a comparison. If " the style is
the man," Polybius has no place in the first rank. He has not
the genius, and will not take the trouble to acquire the trained
sensitiveness of art which might have supplied its place ; and
thus his writing has no distinction and no charm, and we miss
in reading him what gives half their value to great writers
the consciousness that we are in the hands of a master.
It is more difficult to come to a correct judgment as to the
moral side of Polybius's writings. Mommsen, in his generally
judicious criticism, lays down that " his treatment of all ques-
tions in which right, honour, religion are involved, is not only
shallow but radically false." 1 This seems a harsh and unfair
sentence. To judge Polybius rightly, we must take account of
the experiences which formed his character. The life which
he had led, and the events which he had witnessed, were not
calculated to develop in a man the highest moral capabilities
self-sacrifice, devotion to a great cause, faith in an ideal,
sympathy with great currents of human feeling. High hopes
1 Hist, of Rome, vol. iii. p. 467 (English translation).
POLYBIUS. 41
and sentiments, however delusive, are a necessary element in
the lives of the deepest human interest, and such hopes and
sentiments the triumph of Borne had crushed out except in the
narrow circle of her own republican liberty. The spectacle of
a heroic life like that of Hannibal, struggling against this
terrible nation, is a tragedy for all time. But for those who
saw the drama played out, the obvious moral was that such a
life was an anachronism and a failure. Polybius has a hearty
admiration for Hannibal ; but he must have felt that his fate
and the fate of his country decided once for all the question
whether the struggle was worth continuing
' ' si Pergama dextra
Defend! possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent."
Polybius could not but be a " disillusionised man;" religion
was dead to all reasonable men in his day, and patriotism, as it
had been hitherto understood in the world, hopelessly wrecked.
We have no right to blame Polybius for being a sceptic, and it
should be put to his credit that he was not a cynic, that he
kept his moral judgment of men and things clear, that he still
believed in justice and right, and had the courage to speak his
mind in praise or censure with a single eye to truth. What
was an honest Greek to do in such a time ? Mommsen sneers
alike at Philopcemen, who hoped against hope for liberty and
independence, and at Polybius, who, when this last chance was
obviously and completely lost, resolved to accept what was in-
evitable, and to accommodate both his conduct and his counsels
to that which history had decreed. It seems more rational to
esteem both of them as men who with true wisdom and
sincerity of purpose strove to do their best for their country
and for the world under most difficult or even desperate circum-
stances. One article of faith remained to Polybius, and to
this he clung with unswerving loyalty.
" I believe," he says, 1 " that nature has given to man Truth
as the greatest deity, and has endued her with strength above
everything. Sometimes when every one unites to beat her
down, and when every plausibility is ranged on the side of
falsehood, yet one way or other, by virtue of her own nature,
1 xiii. 5.
2 D
4i 8 POLYBIUS.
she penetrates into the souls of men, sometimes revealing her
might at once, sometimes after long eclipse, winning her way
at last and fighting down falsehood."
He saw that it was his duty to look every fact in the face,
to clear away every illusion, to conceal nothing and extenuate
nothing; and he believed that the truth thus studied cannot
but have its practical lessons, and that reality once fairly
grasped and accepted must contain the germs of a policy which
can secure a tolerable, if not a desirable, solution of the pro-
blems of the time.
Polybius's attitude towards religion deserves a more special
notice. We see in it the strong effort of the man towards fair-
ness and candour. Obviously an unbeliever himself, he is
eager to recognise the good moral effect of the continuance of '
religious belief among the Romans.
" The most salutary feature of the Eoman constitution is the
belief it inculcates ill the gods. And I think that the Eoman
state is held together by a quality which is a reproach among
other men I mean by superstition. For this motive is
heightened in effect and enters into the life of the people and
into public affairs to an almost incredible extent. This may
seem astonishing to some, but I think that the Romans have
acted thus out of regard to the multitude. For if it were
possible to collect a nation of wise men, such a practice would
perhaps be unnecessary. But since every multitude is fickle
and full of lawless desires, of unreasonable anger, and of violent
passions, it only remains to curb them with invisible terrors
and such -like machinery. For this reason I think that the
notions about the gods, and the belief in a future world, were
not introduced by our fathers carelessly or at random, but
that the recklessness and folly is rather on the side of this
generation who reject them. And so amongst public officers in
Greece, if a single talent be intrusted to their care, they have
ten indorsers and as many seals and two witnesses to each
signature, and with all this they cheat ; while the Romans, as
commissioners, pass great sums of money through their hands
and never transgress, by virtue of the mere sanctity of their
oath." 1
1 vi. 56.
POLYBIUS.
To maintain this wholesome spirit he is willing to make
some allowance for the introduction of myths and legends into
/ o
history, though it is a liberty which he will grant to others but
not use himself. Only the stories must be such as tend to keep
up the reverence of the people for the gods, and must confine
themselves within the limits of the possible, if not of the pro-
bable. This requisition leads him to reject peremptorily a
fragment of primitive folk-lore, which lingered in his native
Arcadia. We know from Plato 1 that the belief in were-wolves
was localised in the temple of the Arcadian Zeus, and here we
tind another superstition which we are accustomed to think of
as purely medieval, that of the "man without a shadow,"
attaching to the same spot.
" To say that some bodies when placed in the light cast no
shadow, marks a mind beyond the influence of sense; and
this is what Theopompus does when he says that those who
enter into the forbidden precinct of Zeus in Arcadia lose their
shadows." 2
Polybius, however tolerant of religion in its proper place,
is indignant when the credit which statesmen and generals
deserve for wisdom or courage is taken from them by ascrib-
ing their success to providence or inspiration. The elder
Scipio claimed to be a special object of the favour of the gods,
and allowed his most successful enterprises to be attributed to
divine admonition. It is amusing to see Polybius's anxiety to
clear his hero from the suspicion of having sincerely believed
any such nonsense. Scipio did not rely on dreams or
mysterious voices for the measures by which he founded the
greatness of his country; but he, like Lycurgus, perceived
" that the masses will not accept any policy which is strange
to them, nor meet danger with courage unless they hope for
some assistance from heaven," and therefore " he inculcated the
belief that his plans were suggested by inspiration, and thus
put his men in good heart against danger. But that each of
his actions was really done by calculation and foresight, and
that his success was the legitimate issue of his plans, will be
clear from the subsequent narrative." 3 The best example
1 Rep. viii. 16. Also frequently in Polybius. - xvi. 12. 3 x. 2.
420 POLYBIUS.
perhaps is the siege of Carthagena. Scipio, after a careful
study of the habits of the tidal water in the harbour, timed his
assault to coincide with an unusually low tide, and informed
his troops that Neptune had promised him notable assistance
at the crisis of the battle. 1 When the soldiers saw the water
fall so as to permit of a party fording the harbour and attack-
ing the fortress in flank, their enthusiasm at the divine inter-
position made their onset irresistible.
In another passage 2 Polybius attempts to establish a
modus vivendi between religion and reason, by dividing the
field of human life between them.
" Whenever it is difficult or impossible for human power to
apprehend causes, we may fairly in our uncertainty refer such
things to God or to Fortune ; as, for instance, a continuance of
storms and violent rainfall, or of droughts and frosts, and the
loss of crops resulting from these, and in the same way, un-
healthy states of atmosphere, and other things of the same kind,
whose causes are not easy to discover. Therefore, in our un-
certainty about such cases, we naturally conform to the
opinions of the multitude, and propitiate heaven by supplica-
tions and offerings, and send to inquire of the gods what we
are to do or say to obtain a blessing and a relief from the ills
that beset us. But where it is possible to discover the origin-
ating and efficient cause of what has occurred, in such cases I
think it wrong to refer it to the will of heaven. To take
an instance : In our time all Greece has been smitten with
childlessness and deficient population, by which the cities are
desolated, and sterility reigns, although no long wars nor un-
healthy seasons have occurred. Supposing, then, that any one
should advise us to send and inquire of the gods what we are
to say and do to become more numerous and replenish our
cities, would not this be manifestly silly, when the cause is
evident and the correction lies in our own hands ? For men
have fallen into habits of ostentation and greed and indolence,
and they will neither marry nor bring up the children who are
born to them out of wedlock, or else they rear one or two at
the most, in order to leave these rich and luxurious, and the
1 x. 11. 2 xxxvii. 4.
POLYS I US, 421
mischief, though not much noticed, has grown rapidly. For it'
this only child, or one of the two, is carried off by war or
disease, it is manifest that houses must needs be left desolate,
and before long the cities too become weak from lack of men,
like a hive without bees. 1 And in all this there is not the
least occasion to ask the gods how we may be released from
such a calamity ; for any man of ordinary intelligence will tell
us that we can apply the remedy ourselves by reforming the
objects of our ambition, or if this be impossible, then by
making laws to provide for the rearing of all children born."
The reader can hardly fail to notice a peculiar modern tone
in Polybius's manner of dealing with such questions ; and this
modern tone is the prevalent one throughout his work. The
great difficulty in understanding classical writers is that they
seem, almost all of them, to move and work in a different plane
of thought from ourselves. It is probably this newness and
freshness of the world they open, out to us that constitutes the
chief value of the classics in education. But it is not to be
wondered at if, until the mind is thoroughly imbued with
classical culture, a sense of bewilderment and impatience is
produced. The schoolboy generally believes in his heart that
there is no nonsense so enormous that it may not be a probable
translation of a passage of Greek. Sometimes this strangeness
in the tone of thought of ancient books to that of the every-day
world leads men to desire to reject the first altogether, and to
prefer the political wisdom of the Times to that of Thucy-
dides. If there are any who seriously feel this often-quoted
preference, they should be sent to make their peace with the
ancients by reading Polybius. No effort is required to get at
his point of view. Whatever question he starts, his attitude
of mind towards it is such as to appeal to the sympathy, if not
to the conviction, of the average modern reader. His remarks
are always full of an obvious good sense, always enlightened,
candid, and judicious, and, it must be added, rather common-
place.
Polybius is never so happy as when he is correcting a
1 KaOd-irep iirl TU>V peXiTT&v T& ff^vrj. The sentence is obviously imperfect,
and the text is faulty throughout the fragment.
422 POLYB1US.
popular error, or explaining and analysing what may appear at
first sight a paradox. A few characteristic specimens may
serve to complete the picture of our author. The first is a
curious instance of accurate observation conveyed in a some-
what pedagogic tone :
"Most men suppose that cities which contain hills and
sloping-ground will hold more houses than those of the same
circumference built on a plain. But this -is entirely wrong,
because the houses must be built perpendicular, not to the
slopes, but to the level below, on which the hills themselves
are planted. One may prove this from w r hat is manifest to any
child, as the saying is. For if we conceive the houses on the
slopes built up until they are all the same height, it is clear
that the roofs of the houses will form a single plane, and that
this plane will of necessity be parallel and equal to the plane
on which the foundations of the walls and the hills themselves
rest." 1
Mention has been already made of Polybius's discriminat-
ing account of Aratus. He lays down clearly the merits and
defects of the man, an excellent organiser, and unsurpassed
in careful preparation and wise laying of plans, but destitute
of energy, courage, and resource, at the moment of action. The
spectacle of these discordant qualities in the same person leads
Polybius to generalise on the different grooves in which courage
and capacity run with different men.
" This is no paradox, but a familiar phenomenon, accepted
by judicious observers. Sometimes you have men courageous
in hunting, who will face wild beasts with boldness, and yet
these same men will be cowards when set in arms against the
enemy ; or again, some who are skilful and successful in single
combat, but useless when drawn up in line of battle. Then
there is the Thessalian cavalry, whose shock is irresistible when
they charge by troop or squadron, but they are slow and of no
avail for risking themselves in hand-to-hand conflict as place
and occasion serve, while just the contrary is true of the
^Etolians. The Cretans, both by land and. sea, are invincible
1 ix. 21. Modern land-surveyors apply Polybius's principle to vegetable
growths as well as to buildings, and estimate the acreage of hilly ground for
agricultural purposes in accordance with it.
POL YB I US. 423
in ambushes and marauding expeditions, and in kidnapping
enemies, and in night attacks, and in all such individual ser-
vices where cunning is required ; but when the phalanx charges
face to face on fair ground they turn cowardly and unsteady.
The Acha-ans and Macedonians exhibit just the opposite
temper." 1
Another interesting passage in the same tone is where he
defends the Greeks from the charge of fickleness and ingrati-
tude in giving some sympathy to Perseus in his struggle against
Rome.
" I think that the disposition of their minds is to be
accounted for in this way. The phenomenon is the same as
that which one often sees in athletic contests. For when a
distinguished and seemingly invincible champion is opposed
by an obscure and inferior antagonist, the multitude at once
gives its good-will to the weaker man, and cheers him on and
sympathises with his efforts ; and if he touch his adversary's
face and leave some mark of the blow, the spectators feel as if
they had a share in the struggle, and sometimes they begin to
clamour against his opponent not that they dislike him or
wish for his disgrace, but because they are carried away by
sympathy, and so favour the weaker side. But if any one
administers a timely rebuke, they soon repent and check their
indiscretion."
After illustrating this by the case of a notable athlete,
Clitomachus, who had thus recalled the sympathies of the
spectators to an old and tried favourite, he proceeds :
" The popular feeling towards Perseus is a parallel case.
For if any one had withstood them, and asked them frankly if
they desired to see such a supremacy fall into the hands of a
single man, and to feel the weight of a monarchical power
absolutely irresponsible, I conceive that they would soon have
recanted and gone over to the other side ; and still more if the
speaker had briefly reminded them of all the injuries which the
Greeks had experienced at the hands of the house of Macedon,
and of all the benefits which they had received from the
supremacy of Rome, I think that the revolution in their senti-
iv. 8.
POLYBIUS.
merits would have been complete and immediate. But under
the irresistible influence of the first wave of opinion, the multi-
tude betrayed its satisfaction at the news, being flattered by
the unexpected appearance of a champion able to stand face to
face with Borne. And so I close this discussion, the object of
which has been to show that it is only a thoughtless judgment,
and one ignorant of human nature, which will cast the reproach
of ingratitude on the temper which the Greeks showed on this
occasion." 1
In the selection of these and the other pieces quoted in
this paper the object has been to give passages illustrative of
Polybius as a man and a writer, rather than those which are
of intrinsic historical importance. The latter class of extracts
would find their place in a picture of the Greek and Eoman
world in Polybius's time, which is a task too long to be
attempted within the limits of this essay. For the present it
must suffice to have placed before the reader materials for a
judgment on the merits and the limitations of the Historian of
the Eoman Conquest.
It will be difficult, perhaps, to arrive at a more judicious
verdict than that in which Mommsen sums up his criticism :
" Polybius is not an attractive author ; but as truth and
truthfulness are of more value than all ornament and elegance,
no other author of antiquity, perhaps, can be named to whom
we are indebted for so much real instruction. His books are
like the sun in Koman history ; at the point where they begin,
the mist which still envelopes the Samnite and Pyrrhic wars
is raised; and at the point where they end, a new and, if
possible, still more vexatious twilight begins." 2
J. L. S. D.
1 xxvii. 7 a. 2 Hist, of Home, vol. iii. p. 468 (English translation).
GREEK ORACLES.
PREFATORY NOTE.
AMONG the sources to which I have been indebted in the composition of
the following Essay, my first acknowledgments are due to the works of
Mr. Tylor, Sir John Lubbock, and other ethnologists, whose labours in the
comparative study of primitive beliefs and customs are perhaps even more
important for the history of religion than were the great philological genera-
lisations which immediately preceded them. On Greek religion, and Greek
oracles in particular, I have consulted, among others, the following authors :
-Becker and Marquardt, Botticher, Bouche-Leclercq, 1 Bowen, Cox, Creuzer
and Guigniaut, Curtius, Decharme, Fontenelle, Gb'tte, Hendess, Hermann,
Hoffmann, Hiilbnann, Klausen, Lloyd, Lobeck, Maury, August Mommsen,
Nagelsbach, Preller, Rodiger, St. Hilaire, Tzschirner, Vacherot, Van Dale,
Wachsmuth, Welcker, F. A. Wolf, G. Wolff, Zander ; and the important
monographs of Carapanos on Dodona, Foucart on Delphi, and Lebegue and
Homolle on Delos. I owe special obligations to Maury's Religions de la Grece,
which contains an excellent collection of references to ancient authors, and
to G. Wolff's two tracts Porphyrii de Philosophia ex Oraculis haurienda
Reliquiae, and De Novissima Oraculorum Aetate, from which many of my
later references are derived. In a subject which has been so often discussed
it is no longer possible to lay claim to originality of citation, though much
significance remains to be educed from the texts already known. And in
fact, as will be seen by persons familiar with the literature of the subject,
my treatment of the history of Greek oracles in some places differs widely
from that adopted by my predecessors. While suggesting my own views
with much diffidence, and venturing on very few definite conclusions, I
cannot but feel that the difficulties of this manifold subject have hardly
received adequate attention from scholars, and are as yet to a great extent
unsolved. It would be tedious to specify the ancient writers consulted.
Herodotus and Eusebius are the most important, but there is scarcely a
Greek author, from Homer to Zosimus, from whom some illustration may not
be drawn, and the range of such illustrations has been limited in the following
Essay by the defect, not of applicable material, but of erudition, of space,
and of tune.
1 Only the first volume of M. Bouche-Leelercq's Histoire de la Divination dans I'AntiquiU
has as yet appeared (July 1879). The third volume is to treat of Delphi and other Greek
oracles, and is likely to form one of the most important works on the subject. Unfortunately,
however, the lessons and methods of comparative ethnology are expressly excluded from
M. Bouche-Leclercq's plan (Preface, p. 2).
Ou /JL^V 7TWS VVV i!ff7lV CLTTb SpV&S Oi}5' ttTTO
TO; dapL^e/jievai, a re TrapOevos rjWeos re,
Trapdfvos TjWe&s T' oapi^erov a.\\rj\ouv.
I.
IT is not only in the domain of physical inquiry that the
advance of knowledge is self-accelerated at every step, and the
very excellence of any. given work insures its own speedier
supersession. All those studies which bear upon the past of
mankind are every year more fully satisfying this test of the
genuinely scientific character of the plan on which they are
pursued. The old conception of the world's history as a collec-
tion of stories, each admitting of a complete and definitive recital,
is giving way to a conception which would compare it rather
with a series of imperfectly-read inscriptions, the sense of each
of which is modified by the interpretations which we gradually
find for its predecessors.
And of no department is this truer than of the comparative
history of religion. The very idea of such a study is of recent
growth, and no sooner is the attempt made to colligate by
general laws the enormous mass of the religious phenomena of
the world than we find that the growing science is in danger
of being choked by its own luxuriance that each conflicting
hypothesis in turn seems to draw superabundant proof from the
myriad beliefs and practices of men. We may, indeed, smile
at the extravagances of one-sided upholders of each successive
system. We need not believe with Bishop Huet 1 that Moses
was the archetype both of Adonis and of Priapus. Nor, on the
other hand, need we suppose with Pierson 2 that Abraham
1 Demonatr. Evang. iii. 3, viii. 5. 2 Ap. Kuenen, Religion of Israel, i. 390.
GREEK ORACLES. 427
himself was originally a stone god. We may leave Dozy 1 to
pi;rsue his own conjecture, and deduce the strange story of the
Hebrew race from their worship of the planet Saturn. Nor
need the authority of Anonymus dc Rebus Incrcdibilibus 2 con-
strain us to accept his view that Paris was a young man who
wrote essays on goddesses, and Phaethon an unsuccessful
astronomer.
But it is far from easy to determine the relative validity of
the theories of which these are exaggerated expressions, to
decide (for instance) what place is to be given to the direct
transference of beliefs from nation to nation, to fetish- worship,
to the worship of the heavenly bodies, to the deification of dead
men. In an essay like the present, dealing only with a frag-
ment of this great inquiry, it will be safest to take the most
general view, and to say that man's fear and wonder invest
every object, real or imaginary, which strongly impresses him,
beasts or stones, or souls and spirits, or fire and the sun in
heaven, with an intelligence and a power darkly resembling
his own ; and, moreover, that certain phenomena, real or sup-
posed, dreams and epilepsy, eclipse and thunder, sorceries and
the uprising of the dead, recur from time to time to supply
him with apparent proof of the validity of his beliefs, and to
modify those beliefs according to the nature of his country and
his daily life. Equally natural is it that, as his social instincts
develop and his power of generalisation begins, he will form
such conceptions as those of a moral government of the world,
of a retributory hereafter, of a single Power from which all
others emanate, or into which they disappear.
Avoiding, therefore, any attempt to take a side among con-
flicting theories, I will draw from the considerations which
follow no further moral than one which is wellnigh a truism,
though too often forgotten in the heat of debate, namely, that
we are assuredly not as yet in a position to pass a final judg-
ment on the forms which religion has assumed in the past ; we
have traversed too small a part of the curve of human progress
to determine its true character; even yet, in fact, "we are
ancients of the earth, and in the morning of the times." The
1 Ap. Kuenen, i. 262. * Opuscula Mytfiologica (Amst. 1688).
428 GREEK ORACLES.
difficulty of bearing this clearly in mind, great in every age,
becomes greater as each age advances more rapidly in know-
ledge and critical power. In this respect the eighteenth cen--
tury teaches us an obvious lesson. That century witnessed a
marked rise in the standard of historical evidence, a marked
enlightenment in dealing with the falsities and superstitions of
the past. The consequence was that all things seemed expli-
cable; that whatever could not be reduced to ordinary rules
seemed only worthy of being brushed aside. Since that day
the standard of evidence in history has not declined, it has
become stricter still ; but at the same time the need of sym-
pathy and insight, if we would comprehend the past, has become
strongly felt, and has modified or suspended countless judg-
ments which the philosophers of the last century delivered
without misgiving. The difference between the two great
critics and philosophers of France, at that day and in our own,
shows at a glance the whole gulf between the two points of
view. How little could the readers of Voltaire have antici-
pated Eenan! How little could they have imagined that
their master's trenchant arguments would so soon have fallen
to the level of half-educated classes and half-civilised nations,
would have been formidable only in sixpenny editions, or
when translated into Hindostani for the confutation of mis-
sionary zeal !
What philosophical enlightenment was in the last century,
science, physical or historical, is in our own. Science is the
power to which we make our first and undoubting appeal, and
we run a corresponding risk of assuming that she can already
solve problems wholly, which as yet she can solve only in part,
of adopting under her supposed guidance explanations which
may hereafter be seen to have the crudity and one-sidedness of
Voltaire's treatment of Biblical history.
The old school of theologians were apt to assume that
because all men or all men whom they chose to count had
held a certain belief, that belief must be true. Our danger lies
rather in being too ready to take for granted that when we
have explained how a belief arose we have done with it
altogether; that because a tenet is of savage parentage it
hardly needs formal disproof. In this view the wide diffusion
GREEK ORACLES. 429
of a belief serves only to stamp its connection with uncivilised
thought, and "quod semper, quod ubiqiie, quod ab omnibus"
has become to many minds rather the badge of superstition
than the test of catholic truth. That any one but ourselves
should have held a creed seems to lower the average intelli-
gence of its adherents.
Yet, on behalf of savages, and our ancestors in general, there
may be room for some apology. If we reflect how large a part
of human knowledge consists of human emotion, we may even
say that they possessed some forms of knowledge which we
have since lost. The mind of man (it has been well said), like
the earth on which he w r alks, undergoes perpetual processes of
denudation as well as of deposit. We ourselves, as children,
did in a sense know much which we know no more ; our
picture of the universe, incomplete and erroneous as it was,
wore some true colours which we cannot now recall. The
child's vivid sensibility, reflected in his vivifying imagination,
is as veritably an inlet of truth as if it were an added clearness
of physical vision ; and though the child himself has not judg-
ment enough to use his sensibilities aright, yet if the man is to
discern the poetic truth about Nature, he will need to recall to
memory his impressions as a child.
Now, in this way too, the savage is a kind of child ; his
beliefs are not always to be summarily referred to his ignorance ;
there may be something in them which we must realise in imagi-
nation before we venture to explain it away. Ethnologists have
recognised the need of this difficult self-identification with the
remote past, and have sometimes remarked, with a kind of
envy, how much nearer the poet is than the philosopher to the
savage habit of mind.
There is, however, one ancient people in whose case much
of this difficulty disappears, whose religion may be traced
backwards through many phases into primitive forms, while
yet it is easy to study its records with a fellow-feeling which
grows with our knowledge till it may approach almost to an
identity of spirit. Such is the ascendency which the great
works of the Greek imagination have established over the
mind of man, that it is no paradox to say that the student's
danger lies often in excess rather than in defect of sympathy.
430 GREEK ORACLES.
He is tempted to ignore the real superiority of our own
religion, morality, civilisation, and to re-shape in fancy an
adult world on an adolescent ideal. But the remedy for over-
estimates, as well as for under-estimates, lies in an increased
definiteness of knowledge, an ever-clearer perception of the
exact place in the chain of development which Greek thought
and worship hold. The whole story of Greek mythology must
ere long be retold in a form as deeply modified by comparative
ethnology as our existing treatises have been modified by com-
parative philology. Such a task would be beyond my powers ;
but while awaiting some more comprehensive treatment of the
subject by a better-qualified hand, I have in this Essay
endeavoured to trace, by suggestion rather than in detail, but
with constant reference to the results of recent science, the
development and career in Greece of one remarkable class of
religious phenomena which admits to some extent of separate
treatment.
Greek oracles reflect for a thousand years 1 the spiritual
needs of a great people. They draw their origin from an
Animism 2 which almost all races share, and in their early
and inarticulate forms they contain a record of most of the
main currents in which primitive beliefs are wont to run. After-
wards closely connected both with the idea of supernatural
possession and with the name of the sun-god Apollo they
exhibit a singular fusion of nature-worship with Shahmanism
or sorcery. Then, as the non-moral and naturalistic concep-
tion of the deity yields to the. moral conception of him as
an idealised man, the oracles reflect the change, and the
Delphian god becomes in a certain sense the conscience of
Greece.
A period of decline follows ; due, as it would seem, partly
to the depopulation and political ruin of Greece, but partly
1 Roughly speaking, from 700 B.C. to 300 A.D., but the earliest oracles
probably date much further back.
2 It is hardly necessary to say that by Animism is meant a belief in the
existence around us of souls or spirits, whether disembodied, as ghosts, or
embodied in fetishes, animals, etc. Shahmanism is a word derived from
the title of the Siberian wizards, who procure by agitated trance some
manifestation from their gods.
GREEK ORACLES. 431
also to the indifference or scepticism of her dominant schools
of philosophy. But this decline is followed by a revival which
forms one of the most singular of those apparent checks which
complicate the onward movement of thought by ever new
modifications of the beliefs of the remote past. So far as this
complex movement can be at present understood, it seems to
have been connected among the mass of the people with the
widespread religious upheaval of the first Christian centuries,
and to have been at last put an end to by Christian baptism or
sword. Among the higher minds it seems to have rested
partly on a perplexed admission of certain phenomena, partly
on the strongly-felt need of a permanent and elevated revela-
tion, which yet should draw its origin from the Hellenic rather
than the Hebrew past. And the story reaches a typical con-
clusion in the ultimate disengagement of the highest natures
of declining Greece from mythology and ceremonial, and the
absorption of definite dogma into an overwhelming ecstasy.
II.
The attempt to define the word " oracle " confronts us at
once with the difficulties of the subject. The Latin term,
indeed, which we are forced to employ, points specially to cases
where the voice of God or spirit was actually heard, whether
directly or through some human intermediary. But the corre-
sponding Greek term (jtavreiov) merely signifies a seat of sooth-
saying, a place where divinations are obtained by whatever
means. And we must not regard the oracles of Greece as rare
and majestic phenomena, shrines founded by a full-grown
mythology for the direct habitation of a god. Eather they
are the products of a long process of evolution, the modified
survivals from among countless holy places of a primitive race.
Greek literature has preserved to us abundant traces of the
various causes which led to the ascription of sanctity to some
particular locality. Oftenest it is some chasm or cleft in the
ground, filled, perhaps, with mephitic vapours, or with the
mist of a subterranean stream, or merely opening in its dark
obscurity an inlet into the mysteries of the underworld. Such
432 GREEK ORACLES.
was the chasm of the Clarian, 1 the Delian, 2 the Delphian
Apollo ; and such the oracle of the prophesying nymphs on
Cithaeron. 3 Such was Trophonius' cave, 4 and his own name
perhaps is only a synonym for the Mother Earth, " in many
names the one identity," who nourishes at once and reveals. 5
Sometimes as for instance at Megara, 6 Sicyon, Orcho-
menus, Laodicea the sanctity gathers around some {3airv\os
or fetish- stone, fashioned, it may be, into a column or pyramid,
and probably in most cases identified at first with the god
himself, though, after the invention of statuary, its significance
might be obscured or forgotten. Such stones outlast all
religions, and remain for us in their rude shapelessness the
oldest memorial of the aspirations or the fears of man.
Sometimes the sacred place was merely some favourite post
of observation of the flight of birds, or of lightning, like
Teiresias' " ancient seat of augury," 7 or the hearth 8 from
which, before the sacred embassy might start for Delphi, the
Pythaists watched above the crest of Parnes for the summons
of the heavenly flame.
Or it might be merely some spot where the divination from
burnt- offerings seemed unusually true and plain, at Olympia,
for instance, where, as Pindar tells us, "soothsayers divining from
sacrifice make trial of Zeus who lightens clear." It is needless
to speak at length of groves and streams and mountain-summits,
which in every region of the world have seemed to bring the un-
seen close to man by waving mystery, or by rushing murmur, or
1 Iambi, de Myst. p. 74.
- Lebegue, Recherches sur Ddlos, p. 89.
3 Pans. ix. 3. See also Paus. v. 14 for a legend of an oracle of Earth herself
at Olympia.
4 Paus. ix. 39.
5 Tpo<f>i!}vios from rptcpw. The visitor, who lay a long time, 01) /j.d\a ffvp,<f>povC>v
eva/xyws etr' eyp-rjyopev eiV diveipoTr6\ei (Plut. de Genio Socratis, 22), had doubt-
less been partially asphyxiated. St. Patrick's Purgatory was perhaps con-
ducted on the same plan.
6 Paus. i. 43, and for further references on baetyls see Lebegue, p. 85. See
also Lubbock, Origin of Civilisation, p. 225.
7 Soph. Ant. 1001 ; Paus. ix. 16 ; and cf. Eur. Phoen. 841.
8 Strabo, ix. p. 619. They watched a,irb rfjs tvx&P -* r v dcrTpa.Tra.lov
Ai6s. Even a place where lots were customarily drawn might become a seat
of oracle. Paus. vii. 25.
GREEK ORACLES. 433
by nearness to the height of heaven. 1 It is enough, to under-
v U O
stand that in Greece, as in other countries over which successive
waves of immigration have passed, the sacred places were for
the most part selected for primitive reasons, and in primitive
times ; then as more civilised races succeeded and Apollo
came, whence or in what guise cannot here be discussed, the
old shrines were dedicated to new divinities, the old symbols
were metamorphosed or disappeared. The fetish-stones were
crowned by statues, or replaced by statues and buried in the
earth. 2 The Sibyls symbol of the divinations that issue
from chasms died in the temples, and the sun-god's island
holds the sepulchre of the moon-maidens of the northern
sky. 3
It is impossible to arrange in quite logical order phenomena
which touch each other at so many points, but in making our
transition from these impersonal or hardly personal oracles of
divination to the " voice-oracles " 4 of classical times, we may
first mention the well-known Voice or Eumour which as
early as Homer runs heaven-sent through the multitude of
men, or sometimes prompts to revolution by " the word of
Zeus." 5
To this w r e may add the belief that words spoken at some
critical and culminant, or even at some arbitrarily-chosen
moment, have a divine significance. We find some trace of
1 There is little trace in Greece of " weather-oracles," such as the Blocks-
berg, hills deriving a prophetic reputation from the indications of coming
rain, etc., drawn from clouds on their summits. The sanctity of Olympus, as
is well known, is connected with a supposed elevation above all elemental
disturbances.
2 Find. 01. viii. 3, and for further references see Hermann, GriecJi. Ant. ii.
247. Maury (ii. 447) seems to deny this localisation on insufficient grounds.
3 The Hyperborese, see Reff. ap. Lebegue, p. 69. See also Klausen, Aeneas
und die Penaten, p. 207 foil., on the connection of Sibyls and xd<rfJ.a.Ta. Hero-
phile had herself prophesied from the Delphian baetyl, but in her epitaph
she thanks Apollo and complains of nobody but Fate. The bones of the
oracular Demo also were interred in a water-pot in the temple of Apollo at
Cumae. Paus. x. 12.
4 ~KpT)<r/j.ol (f>6ey/j.a.TiKol.
5 6ff<TCL, <f>-fifJ.t), KXTtS^v, 6fj.<jrri II. ii. 93 ; Herod, ix. 100 ; Od. iii. 215, etc.
These words are probably used sometimes for regular oracular communica-
tions.
2 E
434 GREEK ORACLES.
this in the oracle of Teiresias, 1 and it appears in a strange form
in an old oracle said to have been given to Homer, which tells
him to beware of the moment when some young children shall
ask him a riddle which he is unable to answer. 2 Cases of
omens given by a chance word in classical times are too familiar
to need further reference. 3 What we have to notice here is
that this casual method of learning the will of heaven was
systematise*! into a practice at certain oracular temples, where
the applicant made his sacrifice, stopped his ears, went into the
market-place, and accepted the first words he happened to hear
as a divine intimation. We hear of oracles on this pattern at
Memphis, 4 and at Pharae in Achaea. 5
From these voices, which, though clearly audible, are, as it
were, unowned and impersonal, we may pass to voices which
have a distinct personality, but are heard only by the sleeping
ear. Dreams of departed friends are likely to be the first
phenomenon which inspires mankind with the idea that they
can hold converse with a spiritual world. We find dreams at
the very threshold of the theology of almost all nations, and
accordingly it does not surprise us to find Homer asserting
that dreams come from Zeus, 6 or painting, with a pathos which
later literature has never surpassed, the strange vividness
and agonising insufficiency of these fugitive visions of the
night. 7
And throughout Greek literature presaging dreams which
form, as Plutarch says, " an unfixed and wandering oracle
1 Od. xi. 126.
2 dXXa vtuv Traldwi> afcfy/ia <t>v\a%ai. Paus. x. 24 ; Anth. Pal. xiv. 66. This
conundrum, when it was at length put to Homer, was of so vulgar a
character that no discredit is reflected on the Father of Poetry by his per-
plexity as to its solution. (Homeri et Hesiodi certamen, ad fin.)
3 Herodotus ix. 90 may be selected as an example of a happy chance in
forcing an omen.
4 Dio Chrys. ad Alex. 32. 13, voides &irayy4\\ov(ri Traifovrfs rb SOKOVV rip 0e<p.
5 Paus. vii. 22.
6 n. i. 63. Or from Hermes, or earth, or the gods below.
7 n. xxiii. 97. If we accept the theory of an older Achilleid we find the
importance of augury proper decreasing, of dreams increasing, in the Homeric
poems themselves. Geddes, Horn. Probl. p. 186 ; cf. Mure, Hist. Gr. Lit. i.
492. Similarly Apollo's darts grow more gentle, and his visitations more
benign. Geddes, p. 140.
GREEK ORACLES. 435
of Night and Moon. 1 " are abundant in every form, from the
high behest laid on Bellerophon "when in the dark of night stood
by him the shadowy-shielded maid, and from a dream, suddenly,
a waking vision she became," 2 down to the dreams in the temples
of Serapis or of Aesculapius which Aristides the Rhetorician
has embalmed for us in his Sacred Orations, the dream which
" seemed to indicate a bath, yet not without a certain am-
biguity," or the dream which left him in distressing uncertainty
whether he were to take an emetic or no. 3
And just as we have seen that the custom of observing
birds, or of noting the omens of casual speech, tended to fix
itself permanently in certain shrines, so also dream-oracles, or
temples where the inquirer slept in the hope of obtaining an
answer from the god seen in vision, or from some other vision
sent by him, were one of the oldest forms of oracular seats.
Brizo, a dream-prophetess, preceded Apollo at Delos. 4 A
similar legend contrasts " the divination of darkness " at Delphi
with Apollo's clear prophetic song. 5 Night herself was be-
lieved to send visions at Megara, 6 and coins of Commodus still
show us her erect and shrouded figure, the torches that glimmer
in her shade. Amphiaraus, 7 Amphilochus, 8 Charon, 9 Pasiphae, 10
Herakles, 11 Dionysus, 12 and above all Aesculapius, 13 gave
answers after this fashion, mainly, but not entirely, in cases of
sickness. The prevalence of heroes, rather than gods, as the
Plut. Ser. Num. Vind. 22. 2 Piiid. 01. xiii. 100.
Ar. Rhet. vol. i. p. 275 (Dind.), ?X" P^ v Tiva ^vvoiav Xotirpov, ov n^vroi
virovolas, and i. 285.
4 Athen. viii. 2, and see Lebegue, p. 218 ; comp. Aesch. Ag. 275.
5 Eur. Iph. Taur. 1234 foil. 6 Paus. i. 40.
7 Paus. i. 34. 8 Dio Cass. Ixxii. 7.
9 Eustath. Schol. ad Dionys. Perieg. 1153.
10 Cic. de Div. i. 43 ; Plut. Agis. 9, and cf. Maury, ii. 453.
11 Paus. ix. 24, comp. inscr. ap. G. Wolff, de Noviss. p. 29, and see Plut. de
Malign. Herod. 31 for the dream of Leonidas in Herakles' temple.
12 Paus. x. 33.
13 Ar. Rhet. passim, ; Iambi. Myst. 3. 3, etc. See also Val. Max. i. 7 ;
Diod. Sic. v. 62; Ar. Rhet. Sacr. Serm. iii. 311, for dreams sent by
Athene, the Soteres, Hemithea. Further references will be found in
Maury, iii. 456, and for the relation of Apollo to dreams see Bouche-Leclercq,
Hist, de la Divination, i. 204.
436 GREEK ORACLES.
givers of oracles in dreams seems still further to indicate the
immediate derivation of this form of revelation from the
accustomed appearance of departed friends in sleep.
The next step takes us to the most celebrated class of oracles,
those in which the prophetess, or more rarely the prophet,
gives vent in agitated trance to the words which she is inspired
to utter. We encounter here the phenomena of possession, so
familiar to us in the Bible, and of which theology still main-
tains the genuineness, while science would explain them by
delirium, hysteria, or epilepsy. It was this phenomenon, con-
nected first, as Pausanias tells us, 1 with the Apolline oracles,
which gave a wholly new impressiveness to oracular replies.
No longer confined to simple affirmation and negation, or to
the subjective and ill-remembered utterances of a dream, they
were now capable of embracing all topics, and of being pre-
served in writing as a revelation of general applicability.
These oracles of inspiration, taken in connection with the
oracles uttered by visible phantoms, which become prominent
at a later era, may be considered as marking the highest point
of development to which Greek oracles attained. It will be
convenient to defer our consideration of some of these pheno-
mena till we come to the great controversy between Porphyry
and Eusebius, in which they were for the first time fully dis-
cussed. But there is one early oracle of the dead, different in
some respects from any that succeeded it, 2 which presents so
many points for notice that a few reflections on the state of
1 Paus. i. 34.
2 The distinction drawn by Nagelsbach between this and other " Todten-
orakeln " (Nachhom. Theologie, p. 189) is surely exaggerated. See Klausen,
Aeneas und die Penaten, p. 129 foil., for other legends connecting Odysseus
with early necromancy, and on this general subject see Herod, v. 92 ; Eur.
Ale. 1131 ; Plat. Leg. x. 909 ; Plut. dm. 6, de Ser. Num. Vind. 17 ;
Tylor, Prim. Cult. ii. 41. The fact, on which Nagelsbach dwells, that
Odysseus, after consulting Teiresias, satisfied his affection and his curiosity by
interviews with other ghosts in no way alters the original injunction laid on
him, the purport of his journey faxy -xp^abp-evov Q-rj^alov Tetpecrtao. Nagels-
bach's other argument, that in later times we hear only of a dream-oracle,
not an apparition-oracle, of Teiresias seems to me equally weak. Readers
of Pausanias must surely feel what a chance it is which has determined the
oracles of which we have heard.
GREEK ORACLES. 437
belief which it indicates will assist us in comprehending the
nature of the elevation of Greek faith which was afterwards
effected under the influence of Delphi.
For this, the first oracle of which we have a full account,
the descent of Odysseus to the underworld, " to consult the
soul of the Theban Teiresias," shows in a way which it would
be hard to parallel elsewhere the possible co-existence in the
same mind of the creed and practices of the lowest races with
a majesty, a pathos, a power, which human genius has never
yet overpassed. The eleventh book of the Odyssey is steeped
in the Animism of barbarous peoples. The Cimmerian entrance
to the world of souls is the close parallel (to take an instance
among many) of the extreme western cape of Vanua Levi, a
calm and solemn place of cliff and forest, where the souls of
the Fijian dead embark for the judgment-seat of Ndengei, and
whither the living come on pilgrimage, thinking to see ghosts
and gods. 1 Homer's ghosts cheep and twitter precisely as the
shadow-souls of the Algonquin Indians chirp like crickets, and
Polynesian spirits speak in squeaking tones, and the accent of
the ancestral Zulu, when he reappears on earth, has earned
for him the name of Whistler. 2 The expedition of Odysseus
is itself paralleled by the exploit of Ojibwa, the eponymous
hero of the Ojibbeways, of the Finnish hero Wainamoinen, and
of many another savage chief. The revival of the ghosts with
blood, itself closely paralleled in old Teutonic mythologies, 3
speaks of the time when the soul is conceived as feeding on the
fumes and shadows of earthly food, as when the Chinese beat
the drum which summons ancestral souls to supper, and pro-
vide a pail of gruel and a spoon for the greater convenience
of any ancestor who may unfortunately have been deprived
of his head. 4
Nay, even the inhabitants of that underworld are only the
semblances of once living men. " They themselves," in the
terrible words of the opening sentence of the Iliad, " have been
left a prey to dogs and every bird." Human thought has not
1 Prim. Cull. i. 408. 2 Ibid. ii. 42.
3 Ibul. ii. 346. 4 Ibid. ii. 30.
438 GREEK ORACLES.
yet reached a point at which spirit could be conceived of as
more than the shadow of matter.
And if further evidence were needed, the oracle of Teiresias
himself opening like a chasm into Hades through the sunlit
soil of Greece reveals unwittingly all the sadness which
underlies that freshness and power, the misgiving which so
often unites the savage and the philosopher, the man who
conies before religions and the man who comes after them,
in the gloom of the same despair. Himself alone in his wisdom
among the ineffectual shades, Teiresias offers to Odysseus, in the
face of all his unjust afflictions, no prevention and no cure ;
" of honey-sweet return thou askest, but by God's will bitter
shall it be ; " for life's struggle he has no remedy but to
struggle to the end, and for the wandering hero he has no
deeper promise than the serenity of a gentle death.
And yet Homer " made the theogony of the Greeks." 1
And Homer, through the great ages which followed him, not
only retained, but deepened his hold on the Hellenic spirit.
It was no mere tradition, it was the ascendency of that essen-
tial truth and greatness in Homer, which we still so strongly
feel, which was the reason why he was clung to and invoked
and explained and allegorised by the loftiest minds of Greece
in each successive age ; why he was transformed by Polygnotus,
transformed by Plato, transformed by Porphyry. Kay, even
in our own day, and this is not the least significant fact in
religious history, we have seen one of the most dominant,
one of the most religious intellects of our century, falling
under the same spell, and extracting from Homer's almost
savage animism the full-grown mysteries of the Christian
faith.
So dangerous would it be to assume such a congruence
throughout the whole mass of the thought of any epoch, how-
ever barbarous, that the baseness or falsity of some of its tenets
should be enough to condemn the rest unheard. So ancient,
so innate in man is the power of apprehending by emotion
and imagination aspects of reality for which a deliberate
1 Herod, ii. 53, oi/roi 5^ (Homer and Hesiod) eicri ol Troirjcrai'Tes
GREEK ORACLES. 439
culture might often look in vain. To the dictum, so true
though apparently so paradoxical, which asserts " that the
mental condition of the lower races is the key to poetry," we
may reply with another apparent paradox, that poetry is the
only thing which every age is certain to recognise as truth.
Having thus briefly considered the nature of each of the
main classes of oracular response, it is natural to go on to some
inquiry into the history of the leading shrines where these
responses were given. The scope of this Essay does not admit
of a detailed notice of each of the very numerous oracular seats
of which some record has reached us. 1 But before passing
on to Delphi, I must dwell on two cases of special interest,
where recent explorations have brought us nearer than else-
where to what may be called the private business of an oracle,
or to the actual structure of an Apolline sanctuary.
The oracle of Zeus at Dodona takes the highest place
among all the oracles which answered by signs rather than
by inspired speech. 2 It claimed to be the eldest of all, and
we need not therefore wonder that its phenomena present an
unusual confluence of streams of primitive belief. The first
mention of Dodona, 3 in that great invocation of Achilles
which is one of the glimpses which Homer gives us of a world
far earlier than his own, seems to indicate that it was then
a seat of dream- oracles, where the rude Selloi perhaps drew
from the earth on which they slept such visions as she sends
among men. But in the Odyssey 4 and in Hesiod 5 the oracle
is spoken of as having its seat among the leaves, or in the
hollow or base of an oak, and this is the idea which prevailed
in classical times. 6 The doves, 7 if doves there were, and not
merely priestesses, whose name, Peleiades, may be derived from
1 The number of Greek oracular seats, with the Barbarian seats known to
the Greeks, has been estimated at 260, or an even larger number ; but of very
many of these we know no more than the name.
2 Strab. viii. Fragm. txP' r l 'l J -<p5ei 5' ofi 5ia \6ywv dXXoi did nvuv
tiffirep rb ev AL^VTJ 'A/u/awvta/civ. So Suid. in voc, Audwvrj, etc.
3 II. xvi. 233.
4 Od. xiv. 327, xix. 296.
* Hes. Fr. 39. 7, valbv T' Iv irv6^vi. tfirjyov. See Plat. Phaedr. 275.
6 Aesch. Prom. 832 ; Soph. Track. 172 and 1167.
~ See Herod, ii. 54, and comp. Od. xii. 63.
440 GREEK ORACLES.
some other root, 1 introduce another element of complexity.
Oracles were also given at Dodona by means of lots/ 2 and by
the falling of water. 3 Moreover, German industry has estab-
lished the fact, that at Dodona it thunders on more days
than anywhere else in Europe, and that no peals are louder
anywhere than those which echo among the Acroceraunian
mountains. It is tempting to derive the word Dodona from
the sound of a thunderclap, and to associate this old Pelasgic
sanctuary with the propitiation of elemental deities in their
angered hour. 4 But the notices of the oracle in later days are
perplexingly at variance with all these views. They speak
mainly of oracles given by the sound of caldrons, struck,
according to Strabo, 5 by knucklebones attached to a wand held
by a statue. The temple is even said to have been made, of
caldrons, 6 or at least they were so arranged, as a certain Demon
tells us, 7 that " all in turn, when one was smitten, the caldrons
of Dodona rang." The perpetual sound thus caused is alluded
to in a triumphant tone by other writers, 8 but it is the more
1 On the Priestesses, see references in Herm. Griech. Antiq. ii. 250.
2 Cic. de Div. ii. 32.
3 Serv. ad Aen. iii. 466.
4 I do not think that we can get beyond some such vague conjecture as
this, and A. Mommsen and Schmidt's elaborate calculations as to months of
maximum frequency of thunderclaps and centres of maximum frequency of
earthquakes, as determining the time of festivals or the situation of oracu-
lar temples, seem to me to be quite out of place. If a savage possessed
the methodical patience of a German observer, he would be a savage no
more. Savants must be content to leave Aristotle's rvx~n xal rb avr6fj.aTov,
chance and spontaneity, as causes of a large part of the action of primitive
men.
The dictum of Gotte (Delphische Orakel, p. 13) seems to me equally un-
proveable : "Dodona, wohin die schwarzen aegyptischen Tauben geflogen
kamen, ist wohl unbestreitbar eine aegyptische Cultstatte, die Schwester-
anstalt von Ammonium, beide Thebens Tochter. " The geographical position
of Dodona is much against this view, the doves are very problematical, and
the possible existence of a primitive priesthood in the Selloi is no proof of an
Egyptian influence.
5 Strab. lib. vii. Fragm. ap. Hermann, Griech. Ant. ii. 251, where see
further citations.
c Steph. Byz. s. voc. AuSurt), quoted by Carapanos, in whose monograph on
Dodona citations on all these points will be found.
7 Miiller, Fragm. Hist. Gr. iii. 125.
8 Callim. Hymn, in Del. 286 ; Philostr. Imag. ii. 33 (a slightly different
account).
GREEK ORACLES. 441
difficult to determine in what precise way the will of Zeus was
understood.
Among such a mass of traditions, it is of course easy to
find analogies. The doves may be compared to the hissing
ducks of the Abipones, which were connected with the souls of
the dead, 1 or with the doves in Popayan, which are spared
as inspired by departed souls. The tree-worship opens up
lines of thought too well known for repetition. We may
liken the Dodonaean " voiceful oak" to the tamarisks of Beer-
sheba, and the oak of Shechem, its whisper to the " sound of
a going in the tops of the mulberry-trees," which prompted
Israel to war, 2 and so on down the long train of memories to
Joan of Arc hanging with garlands the fairies' beech beside
her father's door at Domremy, and telling her persecutors that
if they would set her in a wood once more she would hear the
heavenly voices plain. 3 Or we may prefer, with another
school, to trace this tree also back to the legendary Ygdrassil,
" the celestial tree of the Aryan family," with its spreading
branches of the stratified clouds of heaven. One legend at
least points to the former interpretation as the more natural.
1 Prim. Cult. ii. 6. The traces of animal-worship in Greece are many and
interesting, but are not closely enough connected with our present subject to
be discussed at length. Apollo's possible characters, as the Wolf, the
Locust, or the Fieldmouse (or the Slayer of wolves, of locusts, or of field-
mice), have not perceptibly affected his oracles. Still less need we be
detained by the fish-tailed Eurynome, or the horse-faced Demeter (Paus. viii.
41, 42). And although from the time when the boy-prophet lamus lay
among the wallflowers, and "the two bright-eyed serpents fed him with the
harmless poison of the bee" (Find. 01. vi. 28), snakes appear frequently in
connection with prophetic power, their worship falls under the head of
divination rather than of oracles. The same remark may be made of ants,
cats, and cows. The bull Apis occupies a more definite position, but though
he was visited by Greeks, his worship was not a product of Greek thought.
The nearest Greek approach, perhaps, to an animal-oracle was at the fount of
Myrse in Cilicia (Plin. H.N. xxxii. 2), where fish swam up to eat or reject
the food thrown to them. " Diripere eos carnes objectas laetum est con-
sultan tibus, " says Pliny, "caudis abigere dirum." And it appears that live
snakes were kept in the cave of Trophonius (Philostr. Vit. Apoll. viii. 19), in
order to inspire terror in visitors, who were instructed to appease them with
cakes (Suid. a. v. /xeXiroCrro).
2 2 Sam. v. 24.
8 " Dixit quod si esset in uno nemore bene audiret voces venientes ad earn."
On Tree-worship see Lubbock, Origin of Civilieation, p. 206 foil.
442 GREEK ORACLES.
For just as a part of the ship Argo, keel or prow, was made of
the Dodonaeau oak, and Argo's crew heard with astonishment
the ship herself prophesy to them on the sea :
' ' But Jason and the builder, Argus, knew
Whereby the prow foretold things strange and new ;
Nor wondered aught, but thanked the gods therefore,
As far astern they left the Mysian shore," J
so do we find a close parallel to this among the Siamese, 2
who believe that the inhabiting nymphs of trees pass into the
guardian spirits of boats built with their wood, to which they
continue to sacrifice.
Passing on to the answers which were given at this shrine,
we find that at Dodona, 3 as well as at Delphi, 4 human sacrifice
is to be discerned in the background. But in the form in
which the legend reaches us, its horror has been sublimed into
pathos. Coresus, priest of Bacchus at Calydon, loved the
maiden Callirhoe in vain. Bacchus, indignant at his ser-
vant's repulse, sent madness and death on Calydon. The
oracle of Dodona announced that Coresus must sacrifice
Callirhoe, or some one who would die for her. No one was
willing to die for her, and she stood up beside the altar to be
slain. But when Coresus looked on her his love overcame
his anger, and he slew himself in her stead. Then her heart
turned to him, and beside the fountain to which her name
was given she died by her own hand, and followed him to the
underworld.
There is another legend of Dodona 5 to which the student
of oracles may turn with a certain grim satisfaction at the
thought that the ambiguity of style which has so often
baffled him did once at least carry its own penalty with it.
Certain Boeotian envoys, so the story runs, were told by
Myrtile, the priestess of Dodona, " that it would be best for
them to do the most impious thing possible." The Boeotians
1 Morris's Life and Death of Jason, Book iv. ad fin.
1 Prim. Cult. iL 198. 8 Paus. vii. 21.
* Eus. Pr. Ev. v. 27, irapOtvov AtTrvrldav K\ijpos /caXet, etc. See also the
romantic story of Melanippus and Comoetho, Paus. vii. 19.
5 Ephor. ad Strab. ix. 2 ; Heracl. Pont. Fragm. Hist. Gr. ii. 198 ; Proclus,
Chrest. ii. 248, and see Carapanos.
GREEK ORACLES. 443
immediately threw the priestess into a caldron of boiling
water, remarking that they could not think of anything much
more impious than that.
The ordinary business of Dodona, however, was of a less
exciting character. M. Carapanos has discovered many tablets
on which the inquiries of visitors to the oracle were inscribed,
and these give a picture, sometimes grotesque, but oftener
pathetic, of the simple faith of the rude Epirots who dwelt
round about the shrine. The statuette of an acrobat hanging
to a rope shows that the " Dodonaean Pelasgian Zeus " did not
disdain to lend his protection to the least dignified forms of
jeopardy to life and limb. A certain Agis asks " whether he
has lost his blankets and pillows himself, or some one outside
has stolen them." An unknown \voman asks simply how she
may be healed of her disease. Lysanias asks if he is indeed
the father of the child which his wife Nyla is soon to bear.
Evaudrus and his wife, in broken dialect, seek to know " by
what prayer or worship they may fare best now and for ever."
And there is something strangely pathetic in finding on a
broken plate of lead the imploring inquiry of the fierce and
factious Corcyreans, made, alas ! in vain, " to what god or
hero offering prayer and sacrifice they might live together in
unity?" 1 "For the men of that time," says Plato, 2 '-'since
they were not wise as ye are nowadays, it was enough in their
simplicity to listen to oak or rock, if only these told them true."
To those rude tribes, indeed, their voiceful trees were the one
influence which lifted them above barbarism and into contact
with the surrounding world. Again and again Dodona was
ravaged, 3 but so long as the oak was standing the temple rose
anew. When at last an Illyrian bandit cut down the oak 4 the
presence of Zeus was gone, and the desolate Thesprotian valley
has known since then no other sanctity, and has found no
other voice.
I proceed to another oracular seat, of great mythical
celebrity, though seldom alluded to in classical times, to which
1 TVw KO. Oeuv % i]pww> Otiovres /ecu Ax&Ufvoi b^ovoolev tirl TayaObv.
* Phaedr. 275. Recherches sur Delos, par J. A. Lebgue, 1876.
Strab. vii. 6 ; Polyb. ix. 67, and cf. Wolff, de Novis*. p. 13.
4 Serv. ad Afn. iii. 466.
444 GREEK ORACLES.
a recent exploration has given a striking interest, bringing us,
as it were, into direct connection across so many ages with
the birth and advent of a god.
On the slope of Cynthus, near the mid-point of the Isle of
Delos, ten gigantic blocks of granite, covered with loose stones
and the debris of ages, form a rude vault, half hidden in the
hill. The islanders call it the " dragon's cave ; " travellers had
taken it for the remains of a fortress or of a reservoir. It was
reserved for two French savants to show how much knowledge
the most familiar texts have yet to yield when they are
meditated on by minds prepared to compare and to compre-
hend. A familiar passage in Homer, 1 illustrated by much
ancient learning and many calculations of his own, suggested
to M. Burnouf, Director of the French School of Archaeology at
Athens, that near this point had been a primitive post of
observation of the heavens ; nay, that prehistoric men had
perhaps measured their seasons by the aid of some rude instru-
ment in this very cave. An equally familiar line of Virgil, 2
supported by some expressions in a Homeric hymn, led M.
Lebegue to the converging conjecture that at this spot the
Delian oracle had its seat ; that here it was that Leto's long
wanderings ended, and Apollo and Artemis were born. Every
schoolboy has learnt by heart the sounding lines which tell
how Aeneas " venerated the temple built of ancient stone," and
how at the god's unseen coming " threshold and laurel trembled,
and all the mountain round about was moved." But M.
Lebegue was the first to argue hence with confidence that the
oracle must have been upon the mountain and not on the
coast, and that those ancient stones, like the Cyclopean treasure-
house of Mycenae, might be found and venerated still. So far
as a reader can judge without personal survey, these expecta-
tions have been amply fulfilled. 3 At each step M. Lebegue's
1 Od. xv. 403. Em. Burnouf, Revue Archtologiqiie, Aug. 8, 1873.
2 Aen. iii. 84 ; Horn. Hymn., Del. 15-18, and 79-81.
3 M. Homolle (Fouilles de Delos, 1879) gives no direct opinion on the matter,
but his researches indirectly confirm M. Lebegue's view, in so far as that
among the numerous inscriptions, etc. , which he has found among the ruins
of the temple of Apollo on the coast, there seems to be no trace of oracular
response or inquiry.
GREEK ORACLES. 445
researches revealed some characteristic of an oracular shrine.
In a walled external space were the remains of a marble base
on which a three-legged instrument had been fixed by metal
claws. Then came a transverse wall, shutting off the temple
within, which looks westward, so that the worshipper, as he
approaches, may face the east. The floor of this temple is reft
by a chasm, the continuation of a ravine which runs down
the hill, and across which the sanctuary has been intentionally
built. And in the inner recess is a rough block of granite,
smoothed on the top, where a statue has stood. The statue
has probably been knocked into the chasm by a rock falling
through the partly-open roof. Its few fragments show that it
represented a young god. The stone itself is probably a fetish,
surviving, with the Cyclopean stones which make the vault
above it, from a date perhaps many centuries before the
Apolline religion came. This is all, but this is enough. For
we have here in narrow compass all the elements of an oracular
shrine ; the westward aspect, the sacred enclosure, the tripod,
the sanctuary, the chasm, the fetish-stone, the statue of a
youthful god. And when the situation is taken into account,
the correspondence with the words both of Virgil and of the
Homerid becomes so close as to be practically convincing. It
is true that the smallness of scale, the sanctuary measures
some twenty feet by ten, and the remote archaism of the
structure, from which all that was beautiful, almost all that
was Hellenic, has long since disappeared, cause at first a shock
of disappointment like that inspired by the size of the citadel,
and the character of the remains, at Hissarlik. Yet, on reflec-
tion, this seeming incongruity is an additional element of
proof. There is something impressive in the thought that
amidst all the marble splendour which made Delos like a
jewel in the sea, it was this cavernous and prehistoric sanc-
tuary, as mysterious to Greek eyes as to our own, which
their imagination identified with that earliest temple which
Leto promised, in her hour of trial, that Apollo's hands should
build. This, the one remaining seat of oracle out of the
hundreds which Greece contained, was the one sanctuary
which the Far-darter himself had wrought ; no wonder that
his mighty workmanship has outlasted the designs of men !
446 GREEK ORACLES.
All else is gone. The temples, the amphitheatres, the colon-
nades, which glittered on every crest and coign of the holy
island, have sunk into decay. But he who sails among the
isles of Greece may still note around sea-girt Delos " the dark
wave welling shoreward beneath the shrill and breezy air ; " l
he may still note at sunrise, as on that sunrise when the god
was born, "the whole island abloom with shafts of gold, as
a hill's crested summit blooms with woodland flowers." ~
" And thou thyself, lord of the silver bow," he may exclaim
with the Homerid in that burst of exultation in which the
uniting Ionian race seems to leap to the consciousness of all
its glory in an hour, " thou walkedst here in very presence,
on Cynthus' leafy crown ! "
" Ah, many a forest, many a peak is thine,
On many a promontory stands thy shrine,
But best and first thy love, thy home, is here ;
Of all thine isles thy Delian isle most dear ;
There the long-robed lonians, man and maid,
Press to thy feast in all their pomp arrayed,
To thee, to Artemis, to Leto pay
The heartfelt honour on thy natal day ;
Immortal would he deem them, ever young,
Who then should walk the Ionian folk among,
Should those tall men, those stately wives behold,
Swift ships seafaring and long-garnered gold :
But chiefliest far his eyes and ears would meet
Of sights, of sounds most marvellously sweet,
The Delian girls amid the thronging stir,
The loved hand-maidens of the Far-darter ;
The Delian girls, whose chorus, long and long,
Chants to the god his strange, his ancient song,
Till whoso hears it deems his own voice sent
Thro' the azure air that music softly blent,
So close it comes to each man's heart, and so
His own soul feels it and his glad tears flow. "
Such was the legend of the indigenous, the Hellenic Apollo.
But the sun does not rise over one horizon alone, and the
glory of Delos was not left un contested or unshared. Another
hymn, of inferior poetical beauty, but of equal, if not greater,
authority among the G-reeks, relates how Apollo descended
from the Thessalian Olympus, and sought a place where he
1 Hymn. Del. 27. * Ibid. 138-164.
GREEK ORACLES. 447
might found his temple : how he was refused by Tilphussa, and
selected Delphi ; and how, in the guise of a dolphin, he led
thither a crew of Cretans to be the servants of his shrine.
With this hymn, so full of meaning for the comparative
mythologist, we are here only concerned as introducing us
to Apollo in the aspect in which we know him best, " giving
his answers from the laurel-wood, beneath the hollows of Par-
nassus' hill." l
At Delphi, as at Dodona, we seem to trace the relics of
many a form of worship and divination which we cannot now
distinctly recall. From that deep cleft "in rocky Pytho,"
Earth, the first prophetess, gave her earliest oracle, 2 in days
which w r ere already a forgotten antiquity to the heroic age of
Greece. The maddening vapour, which was supposed to rise
from the chasm, 3 belongs to nymph-inspiration rather than to
the inspiration of Apollo. At Delphi too was the most famous
of all fetish-stones, believed in later times to be the centre of
the earth. 4 At Delphi divination from the sacrifice of goats
reached an immemorial antiquity. 5 Delphi too was an ancient
centre of divination by fire, a tradition which survived in the
name of Pyrcon, 6 given to Hephaestus's minister, while Heph-
aestus shared with Earth the possession of the shrine, and in
the mystic title of the Elame-kindlers, 7 assigned in oracular
utterances to the Delphian folk. At Delphi too, in ancient
days, the self-moved lots sprang in the goblet in obedience to
Apollo's will. 8 The waving of the Delphic laurel, 9 which in
later times seemed no more than a token of the wind and
1 Hymn. Pyih. 214.
2 Aesch. Eum. 2 ; Paus. x. 5 ; cf. Eur. Iph. Taur. 1225 sqq.
3 Strabo, ix. p. 419, etc. In a paper read before the British Archseological
Association, March 5, 1879, Dr. Phene has given an interesting account of
subterranean chambers at Delphi, which seem to indicate that gases from the
subterranean Castalia were received in a chamber where the Pythia may have
sat. But in the absence of direct experiment this whole question is physio-
logically very obscure.
4 Paus. x. 16, etc.
5 Diod. Sic. xvi. 26. Pliny (Hist. Nat. vii. 56) ascribes the invention of this
mode of divination to Delphos, a son of Apollo.
6 Paus. x. 5. 7 Plut. Pytli. 24.
8 Suidas, iii. p. 237 ; cf. Callim. Hymn, in Apoll. 45, etc.
9 Ar. Plut. 213 ; Callim. Hymn, in Apoll. 1, etc.
448 GREEK ORACLES.
spiritual stirring which announced the advent of the god, was
probably the relic of an ancient tree-worship, like that of
Dodona, 1 and Daphne, priestess of Delphi's primeval Earth-
oracle, 2 is but one more of the old symbolical figures that have
melted back again into impersonal nature at the appearing of
the God of Day. Lastly, at Delphi is laid the scene of the
sharpest conflict between the old gods and the new. What-
ever may have been the meaning of the Python, whether he
were a survival of snake-worship, or a winding stream which
the sun's rays dry into rotting marsh, or only an emblem of
the cloud which trails across the sunlit heaven, his slaughter
by Apollo was an integral part of the early legend, and at the
Delphian festivals the changes of the " Pythian strain " com-
memorated for many a year that perilous encounter, the god's
descent into the battle-field, his shout of summons, his cry of
conflict, his paean of victory, and then the gnashing of the
dragon's teeth in his fury, the hiss of his despair. 3 And the
mythology of a later age has connected with this struggle the
first ideas of moral conflict and expiation which the new
religion had to teach ; has told us that the victor needed
purification after his victory ; that he endured and was for-
given ; and that the god himself first wore his laurel- wreath
as a token of supplication, and not of song. 4
With a similar ethical purpose the simple narrative of the
Homerid has been transformed into a legend 5 of a type which
meets us often in the middle ages, but which wears a deeper
pathos when it occurs in the midst of Hellenic gladness and
youth, the legend of Trophonius and Agamedes, the arti-
1 1 cannot, however, follow M. Maury (ii. 442) in supposing (as he does in
the case of the Delian laurel, A en. iii. 73) that such tree-movements need
indicate an ancient habit of divining from their sound. The idea of a wind
accompanying divine manifestations seems more widely diffused in Greece
than the Dodonaean idea of vocal trees. Cf. (for instance) Plut. DeDef. orac.
of the Delphian adytum, evudias a.vairlfj.w\arai Kal Tn^/xaros.
2 Paus. x. 5.
3 A/jLTreipa, Ka.Ta,Ke\fv<T[j.6s, crdXiriy!;, Sa/cruXot, oSovricr/ios, vtipiyyes. See August
Mommsen's Delphilca on this topic.
4 Botticher, Baumcultus, p. 353 ; and see reff. ap. Herm. Griech. Ant. ii.
127. Cf. Eur. Ion, 114 sqq.
5 Cic. Tusc. i. 47 ; cf. Plut. De Consol. ad Apollon. 14.
GREEK ORACLES. 449
ficcrs who built the god's home after his heart's desire, and
whom lie rewarded with the guerdon that is above all recom-
pense, a speedy and a gentle death.
In the new temple at any rate, as rebuilt in historic times,
the moral significance of the Apolline religion was expressed
in unmistakable imagery. Even as " four great zones of
sculpture" girded the hall of Camelot, the centre of the
faith which was civilising Britain, " with many a mystic
symbol" of the victory of man, so over the portico of the
Delphian god were painted or sculptured such scenes as told
of the triumph of an ideal humanity over the monstrous
deities which are the offspring of savage fear. 1
There was " the light from the eyes of the twin faces " of
Leto's children ; there was Herakles with golden sickle, lolaus
with burning brand, withering the heads of the dying Hydra,
" the story," says the girl in the Ion who looks thereon, "which
is sung beside my loom ; " there was the rider of the winged
steed slaying the fire-breathing Chimaera ; there was the tumult
of the giants' war ; Pallas lifting the aegis against Enceladus ;
Zeus crushing Mimas with the great bolt fringed with flame,
and Bacchus " with his unwarlike ivy-wand laying another of
Earth's children low."
It is important thus to dwell on some of the indications,
and there are many of them, which point to the conviction
entertained in Greece as to the ethical and civilising influence
of Delphi, inasmuch as the responses which have actually
been preserved to us, though sufficient, when attentively con-
sidered, to support this view, are hardly such as would at once
have suggested it. The set collections of oracles, which no
doubt contained those of most ethical importance, have
perished ; of all the " dark-written tablets, groaning with many
an utterance of Loxias," 2 none remain to us except such frag-
1 The passage in the Ion, 190-218, no doubt describes either the portico
which the Athenians dedicated at Delphi about 426 B.C. (Paus. x. 11), or (as
the words of the play, if taken strictly, would indicate) the facade of the
temple itself.
2 Eur. Fr. 625. Collections of oracles continued to be referred to till the
Turks took Constantinople, i.e. for about 2000 years. See reff. ap. Wolff,
de Noviss. p. 48.
2F
450 GREEK ORACLES.
ruents of Porphyry's treatise as Eusebius has embodied in his
refutation. And many of the oracles which we do possess owe
their preservation to the most trivial causes, to their connec-
tion with some striking anecdote, or to something quaint in
their phraseology which has helped to make them proverbial.
The reader, therefore, who passes from the majestic descriptions
of the Ion or the Eumenides to the actual study of the existing
oracles will at first run much risk of disappointment. Both
style and subject will often seem unworthy of these lofty
claims. He will come, for instance, on such oracles as that
which orders Temenus to seek as guide of the army a man
with three eyes, who turns out (according to different legends)
to be either a one-eyed man on a two-eyed horse, or a two-
eyed man on a one-eyed mule. 1 This oracle is composed
precisely on the model of the primitive riddles of the Aztec
and the Zulu, and is almost repeated in Scandinavian legend,
where Odin's single eye gives point to the enigma. 2 Again, the
student's ear will often be offended by roughnesses of rhythm
which seem unworthy of the divine inventor of the hexameter. 3
And the constantly recurring prophecies are, for the most part,
uninteresting and valueless, as the date of their composition
cannot be proved, nor their genuineness in any way tested.
As an illustration of the kind of difficulties which we here
encounter, we may select one remarkable oracle,* of immense
celebrity in antiquity, which certainly suggests more ques-
tions than we can readily answer. The outline of the familiar
story is as follows : Croesus wished to make war on Cyrus,
but was afraid to do so without express sanction from heaven.
It was therefore all-important to him to test the veracity of the
oracles, and his character, as the most religious man of his time,
enabled him to do so systematically without risk of incurring
the charge of impiety. He sent messages to the six best-known
1 Apollod. ii. 8 ; Paus. v. 3. 2 Prim. Cult. i. 85.
3 Bald though the god's style may often be, he possesses at any rate a
sounder notion of metre than some of his German critics. Lobeck (Aglao-
phamus, p. 852), attempting to restore a lost response, suggests the line
ffTevvypTjv 5'evoevv evpvycurTopa ov Kara ycuaf,
He apologises for the quantity of the first syllable of fvpvyaffropa, but seems to
think that no further remark is needed.
* Herod, i. 47.
GREEK ORACLES. 451
oracles then existing, to Delphi, to Dodona, to Branchidae, to
the oracles of Zeus Ammon, of Trophonius, of Arnphiaraus.
On the hundredth day from leaving Sardis, his envoys were to
ask what Croesus was at that moment doing. Four oracles
failed; Amphiaraus was nearly right; Apollo at Delphi
entirely succeeded. For the Pythia answered, with exact
truth, that Croesus was engaged in boiling a lamb and a
tortoise together in a copper vessel with a copper lid. The
messengers, who had not themselves known what Croesus was
going to do, returned to Sardis and reported, and were then
once more despatched to Delphi, with gifts so splendid that in
the days of Herodotus they were still the glory of the sanc-
tuary. They now asked the practically important question
as to going to war, and received a quibbling answer which, in
effect, lured on Croesus to his destruction.
Now here the two things certain are that Croesus did
send these gifts to Delphi, and did go to war with Cyrus.
Beyond these facts there is no sure footing. Short and pithy
fragments of poetry, like the oracles on which the story hangs,
are generally among the earliest and most enduring fragments
of genuine history. On the other hand, they are just the
utterances which later story-tellers are most eager to invent.
Nor must we argue from their characteristic diction, for the
pseudo-oracular is a style which has in all ages been cultivated
with success. The fact which it is hardest to dispose of is the
existence of the prodigious, the unrivalled offerings of Croesus
at Delphi. Why were they sent there, unless for some such
reason as Herodotus gives ? Or are they sufficiently explained
by a mere reference to that almost superstitious deference with
which the Mermnadae seem to have regarded the whole re-
ligion and civilisation of Greece ? With our imperfect data,
we can perhaps hardly go with safety beyond the remark that,
granting the genuineness of the oracle about the tortoise, and
the substantial truth of Herodotus's account, there will still
be no reason to suppose that the god had any foreknowledge
as to the result of Croesus's war. The story itself, in fact,
contains almost a proof to the contrary. We cannot suppose
that the god, in saying, " Croesus, if he cross the Halys, shall
undo a mighty realm," was intentionally inciting his favoured
452 GREEK ORACLES.
servant to his ruin. It is obvious that he was sheltering his
ignorance behind a calculated ambiguity. And the only in-
telligence to which he or his priestess could, on any hypothesis,
fairly lay claim, would be of the kind commonly described as
" second-sight," a problem with which ethnologists have
already to deal all over the world, from the Hebrides to the
Coppermine Eiver.
It is obvious that the documents before us are far from
enabling us to prove even this hypothesis. And we are
further still from any evidence for actual prophecy which can
stand a critical investigation. Hundreds of such cases are
indeed reported to us, and it was on a conviction that Apollo
did indeed foretell the future that the authority of Delphi
mainly depended. But when we have said this, we have said
all ; no case is so reported as to enable us altogether to exclude
the possibility of coincidence, or of the fabrication of the
prophecy after the event. But, on the other hand, and this
is a more surprising circumstance, it is equally difficult to
get together any satisfactory evidence for the conjecture which
the parallel between Delphi and the Papacy so readily
suggests, that the power of the oracle was due to the
machinations of a priestly aristocracy, with widely-scattered
agents, who insinuated themselves into the confidence, and
traded on the credulity, of mankind. We cannot but suppose
that, to some extent at least, this must have been the case,
that when " the Pythia philippised," she reflected the fears of a
knot of Delphian proprietors ; that the unerring counsel given
to private persons, on which Plutarch insists, must have rested,
in part at least, on a secret acquaintance with their affairs,
possibly acquired in some cases under the seal of confession.
In the paucity, however, of direct evidence to this effect, our
estimate of the amount of pressure exercised by a deliberate
human agency in determining the policy of Delphi must rest
mainly on our antecedent view of what is likely to have been
the case, where the interests involved were of such wide
importance. 1
1 For this view of the subject, see Hiillmann, Wwrdigung des Delphischen
Orakels ; Gotte, Das Delphische Orakel, and Mr. Justice Bowen's Essay on
" Delphi." August Mommsen (Delphika) takes a somewhat similar view, and
GREEK ORACLES. 453
For indeed the political influence of the Delphian oracle,
however inspired or guided, the value to Hellas of this one
unquestioned centre of national counsel and national unity,
has always formed one of the most impressive topics with
which the historian of Greece has had to deal. And I shall
pass this part of my subject rapidly by, as already familiar to
most readers, and shall not repeat at length the well-known
stories, the god's persistent command to expel the Peisistratids
from Athens, his partiality for Sparta, as shown both in en-
couragement and warning, 1 or the attempts, successful 2 and
unsuccessful, 3 to bribe his priestess. Nor shall I do more than
allude to the encouragement of colonisation, counsel of great
wisdom, which the god lost no opportunity of enforcing both
on the Dorian and Ionian stocks. He sent the Cretans to
Sicily, 4 and Alcmaeon to the Echinades ; 5 he ordered the foun-
dation of Byzantium 6 " over against the city of the blind ; " he
sent Archias to Ortygia to found Syracuse, 7 the Boeotians to
Heraclea at Pratos, 8 and the Spartans to Heraclea in Thessaly. 9
And in the story which Herodotus 10 and Pindar n alike have
made renowned, he singled out Battus, anxious merely to
learn a cure for his stammer, but type of the man with a
destiny higher than he knows, to found at Gyrene " a
charioteering city upon the silvern bosom of the hill." And,
as has often been remarked, this function of colonisation had
a religious as well as a political import. The colonists, before
whose adventurous armaments Apollo, graven on many a gem,
still hovers over the sea, carried with them the civilising
calls the Pythia a " blosse Figurantin," but his erudition has added little to
the scanty store of texts on which Hiillmann, etc. , depend. I may mention
here that Hendess has collected most of the existing oracles (except those
quoted by Eusebius) in a tract, Oracula quae supersunt, etc., which is con-
venient for reference.
1 Herod, vi. 52 ; Thuc. i. 118, 123 ; ii. 54. Warnings, ap. Paus. iii. 8 ; ix.
32 ; Diod. Sic. xi. 50 ; xv. 54. Plut. Lys. 22 ; Agesil. 3.
2 Cleisthenes, Herod, v. 63, 66 ; Pleistoanax, Thuc. v. 16.
3 Cleomenes (Cobon and Perialla) Herod, vi. 66 ; Lysander ; Plut. Lys. 26 ;
Ephor. Fr. 127 ; Nep. Lys. 3.
4 Herod, vii. 170. 5 Thuc. ii. 102.
6 Strab. vii. 320 ; Tac. Ann. xii. 63 ; but see Herod, iv. 144.
7 Paus. v. 7. 8 Justin, xvi. 3. 9 Thuc. iii. 29.
10 Herod, iv. 155. u Pyth. iv.
454 GREEK ORACLES.
maxims of the "just-judging" 1 sanctuary as well as the brand
kindled on the world's central altar-stone from that pine-fed 2
and eternal fire. Yet more distinctly can we trace the response
of the god to each successive stage of ethical progress to which
the evolution of Greek thought attains.
The moralising Hesiod is honoured at Delphi in preference
to Homer himself. The Seven Wise Men, the next examples
of a deliberate effort after ethical rules, are connected closely
with the Pythian shrine. Above the portal is inscribed that
first condition of all moral progress, " Know Thyself; " nor does
the god refuse to encourage the sages whose inferior ethical
elevation suggests to them only such maxims as, " Most men
are bad, " or " Never go bail." 3
Solon and Lycurgus, the spiritual ancestors of the Athenian
and the Spartan types of virtue, receive the emphatic approval
of Delphi, and the " Theban eagle," the first great exponent of
the developed faith of Greece, already siding with the spirit
against the letter, and refusing to ascribe to a divinity any
immoral act, already preaching the rewards and punishments
of a future state in strains of impassioned revelation, this
great poet is dear above all men to Apollo during his life, and
is honoured for centuries after his death by the priest's nightly
summons, " Let Pindar the poet come in to the supper of the
god." * It is from Delphi that reverence for oaths, respect for
the life of slaves, of women, of suppliants, derive in great
measure their sanction and strength. 5 I need only allude to
the well-known story of Glaucus, who consulted the god to
know whether he should deny having received the gold in
deposit from his friend, and who was warned in lines which
sounded from end to end of Greece of the nameless Avenger
of the broken oath, whose wish was punished like a deed,
and whose family was blotted out. The numerous responses
1 Pyth. xi. 9.
2 Plut. de El apud Delphos. Cf. Aesch. Eum. 40 ; Choeph. 1036.
8 I say nothing, de El apud Delphos, about the mystic word which five
of the wise men, or perhaps all seven together, put up in wooden letters at
Delphi, for their wisdom has in this instance wholly transcended our inter-
pretation.
4 Paus. ix. 23. 5 Herod, ii. 134 ; vi. 139, etc.
GREEK ORACLES. 455
of M'hich this is the type brought home to men's minds the
notion of right and wrong, of reward and punishment, with a
force and impressiveness which was still new to the Grecian
world.
More surprising, perhaps, at so early a stage of moral
thought, is the catholicity of the Delphian god, his indulgence
towards ceremonial differences or ceremonial offences, his
reference of casuistical problems to the test of the inward
lightness of the heart. 1 It was the Pythian Apollo who
replied to the inquiry, "How best are we to worship the gods?"
by the philosophic answer, " After the custom of your country," 2
and who, if those customs varied, would only bid men choose
" the best." It was Apollo who rebuked the pompous sacrifice
of the rich Magnesian by declaring his preference for the cake
and frankincense which the pious Achaean offered in humble-
ness of heart. 3 It was Apollo who warned the Greeks not to
make superstition an excuse for cruelty, who testified, by his
commanding interference, his compassion for human infirmi-
ties, for the irresistible heaviness of sleep, 4 for the thoughtless-
ness of childhood, 5 for the bewilderment of the whirling brain. 6
Yet the impression which the Delphian oracles make on
the modern reader will depend less on isolated anecdotes like
these than on something of the style and temper which appears
especially in those responses which Herodotus has preserved,
something of that delightful mingling of navvettwitla greatness,
1 See, for instance, the story of the young man and the brigands, Ael. Hint.
Var. iii. 4. 3.
2 Xen. Mem. iv. 3. ij re yap TLvOia. v6/j,cf TroXews avaipet TTOIOWTO.S evffejS&s &y
TTOutv. The Pythia often urged the maintenance or renewal of ancestral rites.
Paus. viii. 24, etc.
3 Theopomp. Fr. 283 ; cf. Sopater, Prolegg. in Aristid. Panath. p. 740,
eCaSt /not x0i#s Mfiavos, K.T.\. (Wolff, de Noviss. p. 5 ; Lob. Agl. 1006), and
compare the story of Poseidon (Pint, de Prof, in Virt. 12), who first re-
proached Stilpon in a dream for the cheapness of his offerings, but on learning
that he could afford nothing better, smiled, and promised to send abundant
anchovies. For the Delphian god's respect for honest poverty, see Plin.
H. N. vii. 47. 4 Evenius. Herod, ix. 93.
5 Paus viii. 23. This is the case of the Arcadian children who hung the
goddess in play.
6 Paus. vi. 9 ; Plut. Romul. 28 (Cleomedes). For further instances of the
inculcation of mercy, see Thuc. ii. 102 ; Athen. xi. p. 504.
456 GREEK ORACLES.
which was the world's irrecoverable bloom. What scholar has
not smiled over the god's answer 1 to the colonists who had
gone to a barren island in mistake for Libya, and came back
complaining that Libya was unfit to live in ? He told them
that " if they who had never visited the sheep-bearing Libya
knew it better than he who had, he greatly admired their
cleverness." Who has not felt the majesty of the lines which
usher in the test-oracle of Croesus with the lofty assertion of
the omniscience of heaven ? 2 lines which deeply impressed the
Greek mind, and whose graven record, two thousand years
afterwards, was among the last relics which were found among
the ruins of Delphi. 3
It is Herodotus, if any one, who has caught for us the
expression on the living face of Hellas. It is Herodotus whose
pencil has perpetuated that flying moment of young uncon-
sciousness when evil itself seemed as if it could leave no stain
on her expanding soul, when all her faults were reparable, and
all her wounds benign, when we can still feel that in her
upward progress all these and more might be forgiven and
pass harmless away
for the time
Was May-time, and as yet no sin was dreamed.
And through all this vivid and golden scene the Pythian
Apollo " the god," as he is termed with a sort of familar affec-
tion is the never-failing counsellor and friend. His provi-
dence is all the divinity which the growing nation needs. His
wisdom is not inscrutable and absolute, but it is near and kind ;
it is like the counsel of a young father to his eager boy. To
strip the oracles from Herodotus's history would be to deprive
it of its deepest unity and its most characteristic charm.
1 Herod, iv. 157. There seems some analogy between this story and the Norse
legend of second-sight, which narrates how " Mgimund shut up three Finns
in a hut for three nights that they might visit Iceland and inform him of the
lie of the country where he was to settle. Their bodies became rigid, they
sent their souls on the errand, and awakening after three days, they gave a
description of the Vatnsdael." Prim. Cult. i. 396.
2 Herod, i. 47.
2 Cyriac of Ancona, in the sixteenth century, found a slab of marble with
the couplet olda. T' iyJi, etc., inscribed on it. See Foucart, p. 139.
GREEK ORACLES. 457
And in that culminating struggle with the barbarians, when
the young nation rose, as it were, to knightly manhood through
one great ordeal, how moving I had almost said how human
was the attitude of the god ! We may wish, indeed, that he
had taken a firmer tone, that he had not trembled before the
oncoming host, nor needed men's utmost supplications before
he would give a word of hope. But this is a later view ; it is
the view of Oenomaus and Eusebius, rather than of Aeschylus
or Herodotus. 1 To the contemporary Greeks it seemed no
shame nor wonder that the national protector, benignant but
not omnipotent, should tremble with the fortunes of the
nation, that all his strength should scarcely suffice for a conflict
in which every fibre of the forces of Hellas was strained, " as
though men fought upon the earth and gods in upper air."
And seldom indeed has history shown a scene so strangely
dramatic, never has poetry entered so deeply into human fates,
as in that council at Athens 2 when the question of absolute
surrender or desperate resistance turned on the interpretation
which was to be given to the dark utterance of the god. It was
an epithet which saved civilisation ; it was the one word which
blessed the famous islet instead of cursing it altogether, which
gave courage for that most fateful battle which the world has
known
"Thou, holy Salamis, sons of men shalt slay,
Or on earth's scattering or ingathering day."
After the great crisis of the Persian war Apollo is at rest. 3
In the tragedians he has risen high above the attitude of a
struggling tribal god. Worshippers surround him, as in the
Ion, in the spirit of glad self -dedication and holy service ; his
priestess speaks as in the opening of the Eumenides, where
the settled majesty of godhead breathes through the awful
calm. And now, more magnificent though more transitory than
the poet's song, a famous symbolical picture embodies for the
1 Herod, vii. 139 seems hardly meant to blame the god, though it praises
the Athenians for hoping against hope.
8 Herod, vii. 143.
8 It is noticeable that the god three times defended his own shrine,
against Xerxes (Herod, viii. 36), Jason of Pherae (Xen. Hell. vi. 4), Brennus
(Paus. x. 23).
458 GREEK ORACLES.
remaining generations of Greeks the culminant conception of
the religion of Apollo's shrine.
" ISTot all the treasures," as Homer has it, " which the stone
threshold of the Far-darter holds safe within" would now be so
precious to us as the power of looking for one hour on the
greatest work of the greatest painter of antiquity, the picture
by Polygnotus in the Hall of the Cnidians at Delphi, of the
descent of Odysseus among the dead. 1 For as it was with the
oracle of Teiresias that the roll of responses began, so it is the
picture of that same scene which shows us, even through the
meagre description of Pausanias, how great a space had been
traversed between the horizon and the zenith of the Hellenic
faith. " The ethical painter," as Aristotle calls him, 2 the
man on whose works it ennobled a city to gaze, the painter
whose figures were superior to nature as the characters of
Homer were greater than the greatness of men, had spent on this
altar-piece, if I may so term it, of. the Hellenic race his truest
devotion and his utmost skill. The world to which he intro-
duces us is Homer's shadow-world, but it reminds us also of a
very different scene. It recalls the visions of that Sacred Field
on whose walls an unknown painter has set down with so start-
ling a reality the faith of medieval Christendom as to death
and the hereafter.
In place of Death with her vampire aspect and wiry wings,
we have the fiend Eurynomus, " painted of the blue-black
colour of flesh-flies," and battening on the corpses of the slain.
In place of the kings and ladies, who tell us in the rude Pisan
epigraph how
Ischermo di savere e di richezza
Di nobiltate ancora e di prodezza
Vale niente ai colpi de costei,
it is Theseus and Sisyphus and Eriphyle who teach us that
1 For this picture see Paus. x. 28-31 ; also Welcker (Klelne Schriften),
and W. W. Lloyd in the Classical Museum, who both give Riepenhausen's
restoration. While differing from much in Welcker's view of the picture, I have
followed him in supposing that a vase figured in his AUe Denkmaler, vol. iii.
plate 29, represents at any rate the figure and expression of Polygnotus's
Odysseus. The rest of my description can, I think, be justified from Pausanias.
2 Ar. Pol. viii. 8 ; Poet. ii. 2.
GREEK ORACLES. 459
might and wealth and wisdom "against those blows are of no
avail." And Tityus. whose scarce imaginable outrage in the
i/ ' O O
Pythian valley upon the mother of Apollo herself carries back
his crime and his penalty into an immeasurable past, Tityus
lay huge and prone upon the pictured field, but the image of
him (and whether this were by chance or art Pausanias could
not sav) seemed melting into cloud and nothingness through
v f o O o
the infinity of his woe. But there also were heroes and heroines
of a loftier fate, Memnon and Sarpedon, Tyro and Penthesilea,
in attitudes that told of " calm pleasures and majestic pains ; "
Achilles, with Patroclus at his right hand, and near
Achilles Protesilaus, fit mate in valour and in constancy
for that type of generous friendship and passionate woe.
And there was Odysseus, still a breathing man, but with
no trace of terror in his earnest and solemn gaze, demand-
ing from Teiresias, as Dante from Virgil, all that that strange
world could show; while near him a woman's figure stood,
his mother Anticleia, waiting to call to him in those
words which in Homer's song seem to strike at once to the
very innermost of all love and all regret. And where the
medieval painter had set hermits praying as the type of souls
made safe through their piety and their knowledge of the divine,
the Greek had told the same parable after another fashion. For
in Polygnotus' picture it was Tellis and Cleoboia, a young man
and a maid, who were crossing Acheron together with hearts at
peace ; and amid all those legendary heroes these figures alone
were real and true, and of a youth and a maiden who not long
since had passed away, and they were at peace because they
had themselves been initiated, and Cleoboia had taught the
mysteries of Demeter to her people and her father's house.
And was there, we may ask, in that great company, any heathen
form which we may liken, however distantly, to the Figure
who, throned among the clouds on the glowing Pisan wall
marshals the blessed to their home in light ? Almost in the
centre, as it would seem, of Polygnotus' picture was introduced
a mysterious personality who found no place in Homer's poem,
a name round which had grown a web of hopes and emotions
which no hand can disentangle now, "The minstrel sire of
song, Orpheus the well-beloved, was there."
460 GREEK ORACLES.
It may be that the myth of Orpheus was at first nothing more
than another version of the world-old story of the Sun ; that his
descent and resurrection were but the symbols of the night and
the day ; that Eurydice was but an emblem of the lovely rose-
clouds which sink back from his touch into the darkness of
evening only to enfold him brightlier in the dawn. But be this
as it may, the name of Orpheus 1 had become the centre of the
most aspiring and the deepest thoughts of Greece ; the lyre
which he held, the willow-tree on which in the picture his
hand was laid, were symbols of mystic meaning, and he himself
was the type of the man "who has descended and ascended "-
who walks the earth with a heart that turns continually towards
his treasure in a world unseen.
When this great picture was painted, the sanctuary and the
religion of Delphi might well seem indestructible and eternal.
But the name of Orpheus, introduced here perhaps for the
first time into the centre of the Apolline faith, brings with it
a hint of that spirit of mysticism which has acted as a solvent,
sometimes more powerful even than criticism, as the sun in
the fable of Aesop was more powerful than the wind, upon the
dogmas of every religion in turn. And it suggests a forward
glance to an oracle given at Delphi on a later day, 2 and cited by
Porphyry to illustrate the necessary evanescence and imperfec-
tion of whatsoever image of spiritual things can be made visible
on earth. A time shall come when even Delphi's mission shall
have been fulfilled ; and the god himself has predicted without
despair the destruction of his holiest shrine
" Ay, if ye bear it, if ye endure to know
That Delphi's self with all things gone must go,
Hear with strong heart the unfaltering song divine
Peal from the laurelled porch and shadowy shrine.
High in Jove's home the battling winds are torn,
From battling winds the bolts of Jove are born ;
These as he will on trees and towers he flings,
And quells the heart of lions or of kings ;
1 See, for instance, Maury, Religions de la Gr&ce, chap, xviii. Aelius Lam-
pridius (Alex. Sev. Vita, 29) says "In Larario et Apollonium et Christum,
Abraham et Orpheum, et hujusmodi deos habebat."
2 Eus. Pr. Ev. vi. 3.
GREEK ORACLES. 46 r
A thousand crags those flying flames confound,
A thousand navies in the deep are drowned,
And ocean's roaring billows, cloven apart,
Bear the bright death to Amphitrite's heart.
And thus, even thus, on some long-destined day,
Shall Delphi's beauty shrivel and burn away,
Shall Delphi's fame and fane from earth expire
At that bright bidding of celestial fire."
The ruin lias been accomplished. All is gone, save such cyclopean
walls as date from days before Apollo, such ineffaceable memo-
ries as Nature herself has kept of the vanished shrine. 1 Only
the Corycian cave still shows, with its gleaming stalagmites, as
though the nymphs to whom it was hallowed were sleeping
there yet in stone ; the Phaedriades or Shining Crags still flash
the sunlight from their streams that scatter into air; and
dwellers at Castri still swear that they have heard the rushing
Thyiades keep their rout upon Parnassus' brow.
III.
Even while Polygnotus was painting the Lesche of the
Cnidians at Delphi a man was talking in the Athenian market-
place, from whose powerful individuality, the most impressive
which Greece had ever known, were destined to flow streams
of influence which should transform every department of belief
and thought. In tracing the history of oracles we shall feel
the influence of Socrates mainly in two directions; in his
assertion of a personal and spiritual relation between man and the
unseen world, an oracle not without us but within ; and in his
origination of the idea of science, of a habit of mind which should
refuse to accept any explanation of phenomena which failed to
confer the power of predicting those phenomena or producing
them anew. We shall find that, instead of the old acceptance of
the responses as heaven-sent mysteries, and the old demands for
prophetic knowledge or for guidance in the affairs of life, men are
1 See Mr. Aubrey de Vere's Picturesque Sketches in Greece, and Turkey for a
striking description of Delphian scenery. Other details will be found in
Foucart, pp. 113, 114; and cf. Paus. x. 33.
462 GREEK ORACLES.
more and more concerned with the questions : How can oracles be
practically produced ? and what relation between God and man
do they imply ? But first of all, the oracle which concerned
Socrates himself, which declared him to be the wisest of man-
kind, is certainly one of the most noticeable ever uttered at
Delphi. The fact that the man on whom the god had bestowed
this extreme laudation, a laudation paralleled only by the
mythical w^ords addressed to Lycurgus, should a few years
afterwards have been put to death for impiety, is surely one of
a deeper significance than has been often observed. It forms
an overt and impressive instance of that divergence between
the law and the prophets, between the letter and the spirit,
which is sure to occur in the history of all religions, and on the
manner of whose settlement the destiny of each religion in turn
depends. In this case the conditions of the conflict are striking
and unusual. 1 Socrates is accused of failing to honour the
gods of the State, and of introducing new gods under the name
of demons, or spirits, as we must translate the word, since the
title of demon has acquired in the mouths of the Fathers a bad
signification. He replies that he does honour the gods of the
State, as he understands them, and that the spirit who speaks
with him is an agency which he cannot disavow.
The first count of the indictment brings into prominence an
obvious defect in the Greek religion, the absence of any
inspired text to which the orthodox could refer. Homer and
Hesiod, men like ourselves, were the acknowledged authors
of the theology of Greece; and when Homer and Hesiod
were respectfully received, but interpreted with rationalising
freedom, it was hard to know by what canons to judge the
interpreter. The second count opens questions which go
deeper still. It was indeed true, though how far Anytus and
Meletus perceived it we cannot now know, that the demon of
Socrates indicated a recurrence to a wholly different conception
of the unseen world, a conception before which Zeus and
Apollo, heaven-god and sun-god, were one day to disappear.
But who, except Apollo himself, was to pronounce on such
1 On the trial of Socrates and kindred points see, besides Plato (Apol.,
Phaed., Euthyphr.) and Xenophon (Mem., ApoL), Diog. Laert. ii. 40, Diod.
Sic. xiv. 37, Plut. de genio Socratis.
GREEK ORACLES. 463
a question ? It was lie who was for the Hellenic race the
source of continuous revelation; his utterances were a sanc-
tion or a condemnation from which there was no appeal. And
in this debate his verdict for the defendant had been already
given. We have heard of Christian theologians who are " more
orthodox than the Evangelists." In this case the Athenian
jurymen showed themselves more jealous for the gods' honour
than were the gods themselves.
To us, indeed, Socrates stands as the example of the truest
religious conservatism, of the temper of mind which is able
to cast its own original convictions in an ancestral mould,
and to find the last outcome of speculation in the humility of a
trustful faith. No man, as is well known, ever professed a more
childlike confidence in the Delphian god than he, and many a
reader through many a century has been moved to a smile
which was not far from tears at his account of his own mixture
of conscientious belief and blank bewilderment when the infal-
lible deity pronounced that Socrates was the wisest of mankind.
A spirit balanced like that of Socrates could hardly recur,
and the impulse given to philosophical inquiry was certain to
lead to many questionings as to the true authority of the
Delphic precepts. But before we enter upon such contro-
versies, let us trace through some further phases the influence
of the oracles on public and private life.
For it does not appear that Delphi ceased to give utter-
ances on the public affairs of Greece so long as Greece had
public affairs worthy the notice of a god. Oracles occur,
with a less natural look than when we met them in Herodotus,
inserted as a kind of unearthly evidence in the speeches
of Aeschines and Demosthenes. 1 Hyperides confidently re-
commends his audience to check the account which a mes-
senger had brought of an oracle of Amphiaraus by despatching
another messenger with the same question to Delphi. 2 Oracles,
as we are informed, foretold the battle of Leuctra, 3 the battle
of Chaeronea, 4 the destruction of Thebes by Alexander. 5 Alex-
ander himself consulted Zeus Ammon not only on his own
1 e.g. Dem. Meid. 53 : r$ 5-/j/xy rGav ' &.Qt]voJitAv 6 TOV Aids arj/j.aLi'ei, etc.
- Hyper. Euxen. p. 8. 3 Paus. ix. 14.
4 Plut. Dem. 19. 5 Diod. xvii. 10.
464 GREEK ORACLES.
parentage but as to the sources of the Nile, and an ingenuous
author regrets that, instead of seeking information on this
purely geographical problem, which divided with Homer's
birthplace the curiosity of antiquity, Alexander did not
employ his prestige and his opportunities to get the question
of the origin of evil set at rest for ever. 1 We hear of oracles
given to Epaminondas, 2 to the orator Callistratus, 3 and to
Philip of Maceclon. 4 To Cicero the god gave advice which
that sensitive statesman would have done well to follow, to
take his own character and not the opinion of the multitude
as his guide in life. 5
Nero, too, consulted the Delphian oracle, which pleased
him by telling him to "beware of seventy-three," 6 for he
supposed that he was to reign till he reached that year. The
god, however, alluded to the age of his successor Galba. After-
wards Nero, grown to an overweening presumption which
could brook no rival worship, and become, as we may say,
Antapollo as well as Antichrist, murdered certain men and
cast them into the cleft of Delphi, thus extinguishing for a
time the oracular power. 7 Plutarch, who was a contemporary
of Nero's, describes in several essays this lowest point of
oracular fortunes. Not Delphi alone, but the great majority
of Greek oracles, were at that time hushed, a silence which
Plutarch ascribes partly to the tranquillity and depopulation
of Greece, partly to a casual deficiency of Demons, the im-
manent spirits who gave inspiration to the shrines, but who
are themselves liable to change of circumstances, or even to
death. 8
Whatever may have been the cause of this oracular eclipse,
it was of no long duration. The oracle of Delphi seems to
have been restored in the reign of Trajan, and in Hadrian's
1 Max. Tyr. Diss. 25. 2 Paus. viii. 11. 8 Lycurg. Leocr. 160.
s Diod. xvi. 91. 5 Plut. Cic. 5. Suet. Nero, 38.
7 Dio Cass. Ixiii. 14. Suetonius and Dio Cassius do not know why Nero
destroyed Delphi ; but some such view as that given in the text seems the
only conceivable one.
8 Plut. de Defect, orac. 11. We may compare the way in which Heliogabalus
put an end to the oracle of the celestial goddess of the Carthaginians, by
insisting on marrying her statue, on the ground that she was the Moon and
he was the Sun. Herodian, v. 6.
GREEK ORACLES, 465
days a characteristic story shows that it had again become a
centre of distant inquirers. The main preoccupation of that
imperial scholar was the determination of Homer's birthplace,
and he put the question in person to the Pythian priestess.
The question had naturally been asked before, and an old
reply, purporting to have been given to Homer himself, had
already been engraved on Homer's statue in the sacred pre-
cinct. But on the inquiry of the sumptuous emperor the
priestess changed her tone, described Homer as " an immortal
siren/' and very handsomely made him out to be the grandson
both of Nestor and of Odysseus. 1 It was Hadrian, too, who
dropped a laurel-leaf at Antioch into Daphne's stream, and
when he drew it out there was writ thereon a promise of his
imperial power. He choked up the fountain, that no man
might draw from its prophecy such a hope again. 2 But
Hadrian's strangest achievement was to found an oracle him-
self. The worshippers of Antinous at Antinoe were taught to
expect answers from the deified boy : " They imagine," says the
scornful Origen, " that there breathes from Antinous a breath
divine." 3
For some time after Hadrian we hear little of Delphi.
But, on the other hand, stories of oracles of varied character
come to us from all parts of the Roman world. The bull Apis,
" trampling the unshowered grass with lowings loud," refused
food from the hand of Germanicus, and thus predicted his
approaching death. 4 Germanicus, too, drew the same dark
presage from the oracle at Colophon of the Clarian Apollo. 5
And few oracular answers have been more impressively re-
counted than that which was given to Vespasian by the god
Carmel, upon Carmel, while the Eoman's dreams of empire
were still hidden in his heart. " Whatsoever it be, Vespasian,
that thou preparest now, whether to build a house or to
enlarge thy fields, or to get thee servants for thy need, there is
1 Anth. Pal. xiv. 102 : (Lyvwcrrov //.' fp^ets yeveijs xal Trarpidos afys
anfipoffiov Setp^voj, etc.
2 Sozomen, Hist. Ecd. v. 19.
3 Orig. ad. Cels. ap. Wolff, de Novlss. p. 43, where see other citations.
4 Plin. viii. 46.
6 Tac. Ann. ii. 54.
2G
466 GREEK ORACLES.
given unto tliee a mighty home, and far-reaching borders, and a
multitude of men." l
The same strange mingling of classic and Hebrew memories,
which the name of Carmel in this connection suggests, meets
us when we find the god Bel at Apamea, that same Baal " by
whom the prophets prophesied and walked after things that
do not profit " in Jeremiah's day, answering a Eoman emperor
in words drawn from Homer's song. For it was thus that the
struggling Macrinus received the signal of his last and irre-
trievable defeat : 2
" Ah, king outworn ! young warriors press thee sore,
And age is on thee, and thou thyself no more. "
In the private oracles, too, of these post-classical times there is
sometimes a touch of romance which reminds us how much
human emotion there has been in generations which we pass
rapidly by ; how earnest and great a thing many a man's mission
has seemed to him, which to us is merged in the dulness
and littleness of a declining age. There is something of this
pathos in the Pythia's message to the wandering preacher, 3
" Do as thou now doest, until thou reach the end of the world,"
and in the dream which came to the weary statesman in Apollo
Grannus' shrine, 4 and bade him write at the end of his life's
long labour Homer's words
" But Hector Zeus took forth and bare him far
From dust, and dying, and the storm of war. "
And in the records of these last centuries of paganism we
notice that the established oracles, the orthodox forms of inquiry,
are no longer enough to satisfy the eagerness of men. In that
upheaval of the human spirit which bore to the surface so much
of falsehood and so much of truth, the religion of Mithra,
1 Tac. Hist. ii. 78. Suetonius, Vesp. 5, speaks of Carmel's oracle, though it
seems that the answer was given after a simple extispicium.
2 Dio Cass. Ixxviii. 40 ; Horn. II. viii. 103. Capitolinus, in his life of
Macrinus (c. 3), shows incidentally that under the Antonines it was customary
for the Roman proconsul of Africa to consult the oracle of the Dea Caelestis
Carthaginiensium.
3 Dio Chrysostom, vepl (j>vyTJs, p. 255.
4 Dio Cassius, ad fin.; Horn. II. xi. 163.
GREEK ORACLES. 467
the religion of Serapis, the religion of Christ, questions are
asked from whatever source, glimpses are sought through
whatsoever in nature has been deemed transparent to the
influences of an encompassing Power. It was in this age 1
that at Hierapolis the "clear round stone of the onyx kind,"
which Damascius describes, showed in its mirroring depths
letters which changed and came, or sometimes emitted that
"thin and thrilling sound," 2 which was interpreted into the
message of a slowly-uttering Power. It was in this age that
Chosroes drew his divinations from the nickering of an eternal
tire. 3 It was in this age that the luminous meteor would fall
from the temple of Urauian Venus upon Lebanon into her
sacred lake beneath, and declare her presence and promise her
consenting grace. 4 It was in this age that sealed letters con-
taining numbered questions were sent to the temple of the sun
at Hierapolis, and answers were returned in order, while the
seals remained still intact. 5 It was in this age that the famous
oracle which predicted the death of Valens was obtained by
certain men who sat round a table and noted letters of the
alphabet which were spelt out for them by some automatic
agency after a fashion which from the description of Ammianus
we cannot precisely determine. 6 This oracle, construed into a
menace against a Christian Emperor, gave rise to a persecution
of paganism of so severe a character that, inasmuch as philoso-
phers were believed especially to affect the forbidden practice,
the very repute or aspect of a philosopher, as Sozomen tells us, 7
1 The following examples of later oracles are not precisely synchronous.
They illustrate the character of a long period, and the date at which we
happen to hear of each has depended largely on accident.
2 Damasc. ap. Phot. 348, (f>uvriv XeTrroO ffvpiff/j-aTos. See also Paus. vii. 21.
3 Procop. Bell. Pers. ii. 24. The practice of divining from sacrificial flame
or smoke was of course an old one, though rarely connected with any regular
seat of oracle. Cf. Herod, viii. 134. The irvpe'iov in the x u pl v ' Adiappiydvuv
which Chosroes consulted was a fire worshipped in itself, and sought for
oracular purposes.
4 Zcsimus, Ann. i. 57.
5 Macrob. Sat. i. 23. Fontenelle's criticism (ffistoire des Oracles) on the
answer given to Trajan is worth reading along with the passage of Macrobius
as an example of Voltairian mockery, equally convincing and unjust. Cf.
Amm. Marcell. xiv. 7 for a variety of this form of response.
6 Amm. Marcell. xxix. 2, and xxxi. 1.
7 Sozomen. vi. 35.
468 GREEK ORACLES.
was enough to bring a man under the notice of the police. This
theological rancour will the less surprise us, if we believe with
some modern criticism that St. Paul himself, under the
pseudonym of Simon Magus, had not escaped the charge, at
the hands of a polemical Father, of causing the furniture of his
house to move without contact, in obedience to his unholy
will. 1
Finally, to conclude this strange list with an example which
may by many minds be considered as typical of the rest, it
was in this age that, at the Nymphaeum at Apollonia in Epirus,
an Ignis Fatuus 2 gave by its waving approach and recession
the responses which a credulous people sought, except that
this Will-o'-the-Wisp, with unexpected diffidence, refused to
answer questions which had to do with marriage or with death.
Further examples are not needed to prove what the express
statement of Tertullian and others testifies, 3 that the world was
still " crowded with oracles " in the first centuries of our era.
We must now retrace our steps and inquire with what eyes the
post-Socratic philosophers regarded a phenomenon so opposed
to ordinary notions of enlightenment or progress.
Plato's theory of inspiration is too vast and far-reaching for
discussion here. It must be enough to say that, although oracles
seemed to him to constitute but a small part of the revelation
offered by God to man, he yet maintained to the full their
utility, and appeared to assume their truth. In his ideal polity
the oracles of the Delphian god were to possess as high an
authority, and to be as frequently consulted, as in conservative
Lacedaemon, and the express decision of heaven was to be
1 Pseudo-Clemens, Homil. ii. 32. 638, TO. ev oldg. CKe^-rj u>s avrofj-ara <f>fpo-
pfva. 7r/>6s virijpfffLav [3\tireff6ai vote?. Cf. Renan, Les Ap6tres, p. 153, note,
etc.
2 There can, I think, be little doubt that such was the true character of the
flame which Dio Cassius (xli. 45) describes : irpbs d rds eirixvcreis r&v 6fj.j3pui>
^7ren/ Kal ts Vifsos i^alperai, etc. Maury's explanation (ii. 446) is slightly
different. The fluctuations of the flame on Etna (Paus. iii. 23) were an
instance of a common volcanic phenomenon.
8 Tertullian, de Anima, 46 : Nam et oraculis hoc genus stipatus est orbis, etc.
Cf . Plin. Hist. Nat. viii. 29 : Nee non et hodie multifariam ab oraculis medicina
petitur. Pliny's oracular remedy for hydrophobia (viii. 42) is not now phar-
macopoaal.
GREEK ORACLES. 469
invoked in matters of practical 1 as well as of ceremonial 2
import.
Aristotle, who possessed, and no man had a better right to
it, a religion all his own, and to which he never converted
anybody, delivered himself on the subject of oracular dreams
with all his sagacious ambiguity. " It is neither easy," he said,
"to despise such things, nor yet to believe them." 3
The schools of philosophy which were dominant in Greece
after the death of Aristotle occupied themselves only in a
secondary way with the question of oracles. The Stoics and
Academics were disposed to uphold their validity on conserva-
tive principles, utilising them as the most moral part of the
old creed, the point from which its junction with philosophy
was most easily made. Cicero's treatise on divination contains
a summary of the conservative view, and it is to be remarked
that Cratippus and other Peripatetics disavowed the grosser
forms of divination, and believed only in dreams and in the
utterances of inspired frenzy. 4
Epicureans and Cynics, on the other hand, felt no such need
of maintaining connection with the ancient orthodoxy, and
allowed free play to their wit in dealing with the oracular
tradition, or even considered it as a duty to disembarrass man-
kind of this among other superstitions. The sceptic Lucian is
perhaps of too purely mocking a temper to allow us to ascribe
to him much earnestness of purpose in the amusing burlesques 5
in which he depicts the difficulty which Apollo feels in com-
posing his official hexameters, or his annoyance at being obliged
to hurry to his post of inspiration whenever the priestess
chooses "to chew the bay-leaf and drink of the sacred spring." 6
1 Leges, vi. 914. 2 Leges, v. 428 ; Epinomis, 362.
8 Ar. Div. per Som. i 1 . He goes on to suggest that dreams, though not
BeoirefiiTTa, may be 5at/j.uvia.
4 See Cic. de Div. i. 3.
5 Jupiter Tragoedus; Bis Accusalus, etc. I need not remind the reader that
such scoffing treatment of oracles does not now appear for the first time. The
parodies in Aristophanes hit off the pompous oracular obscurity as happily as
Lucian's. A recent German writer, on the other hand (Hoffmann, Orakelwesen),
maintains, by precept and example, that no style can be more appropriate to
serious topics.
6 Bis Accusatus, 2. I may remark that although narcotics are often used
to produce abnormal utterance (Lane's Egyptians, ii. 33 ; Maury, ii. 479),
470 GREEK ORACLES.
The indignation of Oenomaus, a cynic of Hadrian's age,
is of a more genuine character, and there is much sarcastic
humour in his account of his own visit to the oracle of Apollo
at Colophon ; how the first response which he obtained might
have been taken at random from a book of elegant extracts,
and had also, to his great disgust, been delivered in the self-
same words to a commercial traveller immediately before him ;
how, to his second question, " Who will teach me wisdom ? "
the god returned an answer of almost meaningless imbecility ;
and how, when he finally asked, " Where shall I go now ? " the
god told him, "to draw a long bow and knock over untold
green-feeding ganders." l " And who in the world," exclaims
the indignant philosopher, "will tell me what these untold
ganders may mean ? "
Anecdotes like this may seem to warn us that our subject
is drawing to a close. And to students of these declining schools
of Greek philosophy, it may well appear that the Greek spirit
had burnt itself out ; that all creeds and all speculations were
being enfeebled into an eclecticism or a scepticism, both of them
equally shallow and unreal. But this was not to be. It was
destined that every seed which the great age of Greece had
planted should germinate and grow ; and a school was now to
arise which should take hold, as it were, of the universe by a
forgotten clew, and should give fuller meaning and wider
acceptance to some of the most remarkable, though hitherto
least noticed, utterances of earlier men. We must go back as
far as Hesiod to understand the Neoplatonists.
For it is in Hesiod's celebrated story of the Ages of the
World 2 that we find the first Greek conception, obscure
though its details be, of a hierarchy of spiritual beings who fill
this mastication of a laurel-leaf or bay-leaf cannot be considered as more than
a symbolical survival of such a practice. The drinking of water (Iambi. Myst.
Aeg. 72 ; Anacreon xiii.), or even of blood (Paus. ii. 24), would be equally in-
operative for this purpose ; and though Pliny says that the water in Apollo's
cave at Colophon shortened the drinker's life (Hist. Nat. ii. 106), it is difficult
to imagine what natural salt could produce hallucination.
1 Eus. Pr. Ev. v. 23
eK T(U'\jcrTpo(f>oio \aas fffavdovrjs ids avjjp
X^cas evapl^eiv /SoAcucrw, affirerovs, Trony/Jopovs.
3 Hes. Opp. 109 sqq.
GREEK OR A CLES. 471
the unseen world, and can discern and influence our own. The
souls of heroes, he says, become happy spirits who dwell aloof
from our sorrow ; the souls of men of the golden age become
f O O
good and guardian spirits, who flit over the earth and watch
the just and unjust deeds of men; and the souls of men of
the silver age become an inferior class of spirits, themselves
mortal, yet deserving honour from mankind. 1 The same strain
of thought appears in Thales, who defines demons as spiritual
existences, heroes, as the souls of men separated from the body. 2
Pythagoras held much the same view, and, as we shall see
below, believed that in a certain sense these spirits were
occasionally to be seen or felt. 3 Heraclitus held "that all
things were full of souls and spirits," 4 and Empedocles has
described in lines of startling power 5 the wanderings through
the universe of a lost and homeless soul. Lastly, Plato, in the
Epinomis 6 brings these theories into direct connection with
our subject by asserting that some of these spirits can read the
minds of living men, and are still liable to be grieved by our
wrong-doing, 7 while many of them appear to us in sleep by
visions, and are made known by voices and oracles, in our health
or sickness, and are about us at our dying hour. Some are even
visible occasionally in waking reality, and then again disappear,
and cause perplexity by their obscure self-manifestation. 8
Opinions like these, existing in a corner of the vast
1 It is uncertain where Hesiod places the abode of this class of spirits ; the
MSS. read ewi-xBovioi, Gaisford (with Tzetzes) and Wolff, de Daemonibus,
VTTOX&OVIOI.
* Athenag. legal, pro Christo, 21 ; cf. Plut. de Plac. Phil. i. 8.
s Porph. vit. Pyth. 384 ; reff. ap. Wolff. For obsession, see Pseudo-
Zaleucus, ap. Stob. Flor. xliv. 20.
* Diog. Laert. ix. 6. 5 Plut. de Iside, 26.
6 I believe, with Grote, etc., that the Epinomis is Plato's ; at any rate it was
generally accepted as such in antiquity, which is enough for the present purpose.
7 Epinomis, 361. fj.ere-x.ovra. ^ <ppovfi<rews 6avfj.a<rrijs, are ytvovs 6vra
evfutOovs re Koi fjU>rnM>i>os, yiyvdiffKeiv ^ev %vfj.iraffav r-r\v Tj/J-ertpav avrd diavoiav
\tyw/j.ev, Kal rov re Ka\t>v TJ/JLUV Kal dyaObv a^a 6av/J.affrus dffirafraOai Kal rbv
ff<f>65pa Kanbv fuffflv, are XiyTnjs pere-xovra ijd-ij, K.r.\.
8 Kal TOVT' elvai r6re fj.ev 6pufj.evov &\\ore Se airoKpv<j>6ev &Sij\ov yiyvop.evov,
Oavfw. tear' d/j.vSpav 6\f/iv irapexo/jifvov. The precise meaning of dfivdpa fl^w is
not clear without further knowledge of the phenomena which Plato had in
his mind. Comp. the d\a/j,irfj Kal d/j.vSpdv fuyv, wffirep a.va6\>iu.a<Tiv, which is all
that reincarnated demons can look for (Plut. de Defect. 10).
472 GREEK ORACLES.
structure of Platonic thought, passed, as it seems, for centuries
with little notice. Almost as unnoticed was the gradual
development of the creed known as Orphic, which seems to
have begun with making itself master of the ancient myste-
ries, and only slowly spread through the profane world its
doctrine that this life is a purgation, that this body is a
sepulchre, 1 and that the Divinity, who surrounds us like an
ocean, is the hope and home of the soul. But a time came
when, under the impulse of a great religious movement, these
currents of belief, which had so long run underground, broke
into sight again in an unlooked-for direction. These tenets,
and many more, were dwelt upon and expanded with new
conviction by that remarkable series of men who furnish to
the history of Greek thought so singular a concluding chapter.
And no part, perhaps, of the Neoplatonic system shows more
clearly than their treatment of oracles how profound a change
the Greek religion has undergone beneath all its apparent con-
tinuity. It so happens that the Neoplatonic philosopher who
has written most on our present subject, was also a man whose
spiritual history affords a striking, perhaps an unique, epitome
of the several stages through which the faith of Greece had up
to that time passed. A Syrian of noble descent, 2 powerful
intelligence, and upright character, Porphyry brought to the
study of the Greek religion little that was distinctively
Semitic, unless we so term the ardour of his religious impulses,
and his profound conviction that the one thing needful for
man lay in the truest knowledge attainable as to his relation
to the divine. Educated by Longinus, the last representative
of expiring classicism, the Syrian youth absorbed all, and pro-
bably more than all, his master's faith. Homer became to
him what the Bible was to Luther ; and he spent some years
in producing the most perfect edition of the Iliad and
1 See, for instance, Plato, Crat. 264. doKovcn fdvToi /ML naXiara. 6<r6ai ol
d.fi.<pl ' Qp<pta TOUTO rb 6vofia (<rw/j.a quasi ffijfj.a) us 5'iK-qv Sidoucrys TTJS ^VXTJS &v drj
2 G. Wolff, Porph. de Phil, etc., has collected a mass of authorities on
Porphyry's life, and has ably discussed the sequence of his writings. But
beyond this tract I have found hardly anything written on this part of my
subject, on which I have dwelt the more fully, inasmuch as it seems
hitherto to have attracted so little attention from scholars.
GREEK ORACLES. 473
Odyssey which had yet appeared, in order that no fragment
of the inspired text might fail to render its full meaning.
But, as it seems, in the performance of this task, his
faith received the same shock which had been fatal to
the early piety of Greece. The behaviour of the gods in
Homer was too bad to be condoned. He discerned, what is
probably the truth, that there must be some explanation of these
enormities which is not visible on the surface, and that nothing
short of some profound mistake could claim acceptance for
such legends as those of Zeus and Kronos, of Kronos and
Uranus, amid so much else that is majestic and pure. 1 Many
philologists would answer now that the mistake, the disease
of language, lay in the expression in terms of human appetite
and passion of the impersonal sequences of the great phenomena
of Nature ; that the most monstrous tales of mythology mean
nothing worse or more surprising than that day follows night,
and night again succeeds to day. To Porphyry such explana-
tions were of course impossible. In default of Sanskrit he
betook himself to allegory. The truth which must be some-
where in Homer, but which plainly was not in the natural
sense of the words, must therefore be discoverable in a non-
natural sense. The cave of the nymphs, for instance, which
Homer describes as in Ithaca, is not in Ithaca. Homer must,
therefore, have meant by the cave something quite other than
a cave ; must have meant, in fact, to signify by its inside the
temporary, by its outside the eternal world. But this stage in
Porphyry's development was not of long duration. As Ms
conscience had revolted from Homer taken literally, so his
intelligence revolted from such a fashion of interpretation as
this. But yet he was not prepared to abandon the Greek
religion. That religion, he thought, must possess some autho-
rity, some sacred book, some standard of faith, capable of being
brought into harmony with the philosophy which, equally with
the religion itself, was the tradition and inheritance of the race.
And such a rule of faith, if to be found anywhere, must be
found in the direct communications of the gods to men. Scat-
1 The impossibility of extracting a spiritual religion from Homer is charac-
teristically expressed by Proclus (ad. Tim. 20), who calls Homer dirdtieiav re
voepav Kal faty ij>i\6<TO({>oi> oi>x oI6$ re irapadovvai.
474 GREEK ORACLES.
tered and fragmentary though these were, it must be possible
to extract from them a consistent system. 1 This is what he
endeavoured to do in his work, " On the Philosophy to be drawn
from Oracles," a book of which large fragments remain to us
imbedded in Eusebius's treatise "On the Preparation for the
Gospel."
Perhaps the best guarantee of the good faith in which
Porphyry undertook this task lies in the fact that he afterwards
recognised that he had been unsuccessful. He acknowledged,
in terms on which his antagonist Eusebius has gladly seized,
that the mystery as to the authors of the responses was too
profound, the responses themselves were too unsatisfactory, to
admit of the construction from them of a definite and lofty
faith. Yet there is one point on which, though his inferences
undergo much modification, his testimony remains practically
the same. 2 This testimony, based, as he implies and his
biographers assert, on personal experience, 3 is mainly concerned
with the phenomena of possession or inspiration by an unseen
power. These phenomena, so deeply involved in the conception
of oracles, and which we must now discuss, are familiar to the
ethnologist in almost every region of the globe. The savage,
readily investing any unusual or striking object in nature with
a spirit of its own, is likely to suppose further that a spirit's
temporary presence may be the cause of any unusual act or
condition of a human being. Even so slight an abnormality as
the act of sneezing has generally been held to indicate the
operation or the invasion of a god. And when we come to
graver departures from ordinary wellbeing nightmare, con-
sumption, epilepsy, or madness the notion that a disease-spirit
has entered the sufferer becomes more and more obvious.
Ravings which possess no applicability to surrounding facts
are naturally held to be the utterances of some remote intelli-
1 ws &i> K fiovov fiffiatov rets t\iridas TOV (ruOfji'ai dpvo/j.evos (Eus. Pr. Ev. iv. 6)
is the strong expression which Porphyry gives to his sense of the importance of
this inquiry.
2 There is one sentence in the epistle to Anebo which would suggest a con-
trary view, but the later De Abstinentia, etc., seem to me to justify the
statement in the text.
3 See, for instance, Eus. Pr. Ev. iv. 6 : /udXiora yap <piKo<r6<jx>}v oCros T&V K.a.0'
i)/j.3.s doKei /cat dai/MJi Kal oh (prjcri Oeols
GREEK ORACLES. 475
gence. Such ravings, when they have once become an object
of reverence, may be artificially reproduced by drugs or other
stimuli, and we may thus arrive at the belief in inspiration by
an easy road. 1
There are traces in Greece of something of this reverence
for disease, but they are faint and few ; and the Greek ideal of
soundness in mind and body, the Greek reverence for beauty
and strength, seem to have characterised the race from a very
early period. It is possible indeed that the first tradition of
" Blind Thamyris and blind Mseonides,
And Teiresias and Phineus, prophets old,"
may have represented a primitive idea that the " celestial light
shone inward" when the orbs of vision were darkened. But the
legends which have reached us scarcely connect Homer's blind-
ness with his song, and ascribe the three prophets' loss of sight to
their own vanity or imprudence. In nymph-possession, which,
in spite of Pausanias's statement, is perhaps an older pheno-
menon than ApoUine possession, we find delirium honoured,
but it is a delirium proceeding rather from the inhalation of
noxious vapours than from actual disease. 2 And in the choice
of the Pythian priestess while we find that care is taken that
no complication shall be introduced into the process of oracular
inquiry by her youth or good looks, 3 there is little evidence
to show that any preference was given to epileptics. 4 Still less
1 On this subject see Prim. Cult. chap. xiv. ; Lubbock, Origin of Civilisa-
tion, pp. 252-5, etc. The Homeric phrase (rrvyepbs 5t oi Hxp a 8a.lfj.wv (Od. v.
396) seems to be the Greek expression which comes nearest to the doctrine of
disease-spirits.
2 See Maury, ii. 475. Nymph-oracles were especially common in Boeotia,
where there were many caves and springs. Paus. ix. 2, etc. The passage
from Hippocrates, De Morbo Sacro, cited by Maury, ii. 470, is interesting from
its precise parallelism with savage beliefs, but cannot be pressed as an autho-
rity for primitive tradition.
8 Diod. Sic. xvi. 27.
4 Maury (ii. 514) cites Plut. de Defect, orac. 46, and Schol. Ar. Pint. 39, in de-
fence of the view that a hysterical subject was chosen as Pythia. But Plutarch
expressly says (de Defect. 50) that it was necessary that the Pythia should be
free from perturbation when called on to prophesy, and the Scholion on Aristo-
phanes is equally indecent and unphysiological. Moreover, Plutarch speaks
of the custom of pouring cold water over the priestess in order to ascertain by
her healthy way of shuddering that she was sound in body and mind. This
476 GREEK ORACLES.
can we trace any such reason of choice in other oracular
sanctuaries. We find here, in fact, the same uncertainty which
hangs over the principle of selection of the god's mouthpiece
in other shahmauistic countries, where the medicine-man
or angekok is sometimes described as haggard and nervous,
sometimes as in no way distinguishable from his less gifted
neighbours.
Nor, on the other hand, do we find in Greece much trace of
that other kind of possession of which the Hebrew prophets
are our great example, where a peculiar loftiness of mind and
character seem to point the prophet out as a fitting exponent
of the will of heaven, and a sudden impulse gives vent in words,
almost unconscious, to thoughts which seem no less than divine.
The majestic picture of Amphiaraus in the Seven against
Thebes, the tragic personality of Cassandra in the Agamemnon,
are the nearest parallels which Greece offers to an Elijah or
a Jeremiah. These, however, are mythical characters ; and so
little was the gift of prophecy associated with moral greatness
in later days, that while Plato attributes it to the action of the
divinity, Aristotle feels at liberty to refer it to bile. 1
It were much to be wished that some systematic discus-
sion of the subject had reached us from classical times. But
none seems to have been composed, at any rate none has come
down to us, till Plutarch's inquiry as to the causes of the
general cessation of oracles in his age. 2 Plutarch's temper is
conservative and orthodox, but we find, nevertheless, that he
has begun to doubt whether Apollo is in every case the inspir-
ing spirit. On the contrary, he thinks that sometimes this is
plainly not the case, as in one instance where the Pythia,
forced to prophesy while under the possession of a dumb and
evil spirit, went into convulsions and soon afterwards died.
same test was applied to goats, etc., when about to be sacrificed. There is no
doubt evidence (cf. Maury, ii. 461) that the faculty of divination was sup-
posed to be hereditary in certain families (perhaps even in certain localities,
Herod, i. 78), but I cannot find that members of such families were sought for
as priests in oracular seats.
1 Plat. Ion. 5. Ar. Probl. xxx. I cannot dwell here on Plat. Phaedr. 153,
and similar passages, which suggest a theory of inspiration which would carry
us far beyond the present topic.
2 Plut. de Defect, orac.; de Pyth. ; de El apud Delphos.
GREEK ORACLES. 477
And he recurs to a doctrine, rendered orthodox, as we have
already seen, by its appearance in Hesiod, but little dwelt on
in classical times, a doctrine which peoples the invisible world
with a hierarchy of spirits of differing character and power.
These spirits, he believes, give oracles, whose character therefore
varies with the character and condition of the inspiring spirit ;
and of this it is hard to judge except iuferentially, since spirits
are apt to assume the names of gods on whom they in some
way depend, though they may by no means resemble them in
character or power. Xay, spirits are not necessarily immortal,
and the death of a resident spirit may have the effect of closing
an oracular shrine. The death of Pan himself was announced
by a flying voice to Thamus, a sailor, " about the isles
Echinades ; " he was told to tell it at Palodes, and when the
ship reached Palodes there was a dead calm. He cried out
that Pan was dead, and there was a wailing in all the air. 1
In Plutarch, too, we perceive a growing disposition to dwell
on a class of manifestations of which we have heard little since
Homer's time, evocations of the visible spirits of the dead. 2
Certain places, it seems, were consecrated by immemorial
belief to this solemn ceremony. At Cumae, 3 at Phigalea, 4 at
Heraclea, 5 on the river Acheron, by the lake Avernus, 6 men
strove to recall for a moment the souls who had passed away,
sometimes, as Periander sought Melissa, 7 in need of the
accustomed wifely counsel; sometimes, as Pausanias sought
Cleonice, 8 goaded by passionate remorse ; or sometimes with
no care to question, with no need to confess or to be forgiven,
but as, in one form of the legend, Orpheus sought Eurydice, 9
1 This quasi-human character of Pan (Herod, ii. 146 ; Find. Fr. 68 ; Hyg.
Fab. 224), coupled with the indefinite majesty which his name suggested,
seems to have been very impressive to the later Greeks. An oracle quoted
by Porphyry (ap. Eus. Pr. Ev. ) etfxo/twu pporbs yeyds Ilavl crtV^vros 6e$, K.T.\., is
curiously parallel to some Christian hymns in its triumphant sense of human
kinship with the divinity.
3 Quaest. Horn. ; de Defect. Orac. ; de Ser. Num. Vind.
8 Diod. Sic. iv. 22 ; Ephor. ap. Strab. v. 244. 4 Paus. iii. 17.
* Plut. Cim. 6.
6 Liv. xxiv. 12, etc. The origin of this veKvo/j-avre'tov was probably Greek.
See reff. ap. Maury, ii. 467.
7 Diod. iv. 22 ; Herod, v. 92 gives a rather different story.
8 Plut. dm. 6. Paus. iii. 17. Paus. ix. 30.
GREEK ORACLES.
travelling to the Thesprotian Aornus, in the hope that her
spirit would rise and look on him once again, and waiting for
one who came not, and dying in a vain appeal.
But on such stories as these Plutarch will not dogmatically
judge ; he remarks only, and the remark was more novel then
than now, that we know as yet no limit to the communications
of soul with soul.
This transitional position of Plutarch may prepare us for
the still wider divergence from ancient orthodoxy which we
find in Porphyry. Porphyry is indeed anxious to claim for
oracular utterances as high an authority as possible ; and he
continues to ascribe many of them to Apollo himself. But he
no longer restricts the phenomena of possession and inspira-
tion within the traditional limits as regards either their time,
their place, or their author. He maintains that these pheno-
mena may be reproduced according to certain rules at almost
any place and time, and that the spirits who cause them are of
very multifarious character. I shall give his view at some
length, as it forms by far the most careful inquiry into the
nature of Greek oracles which has come down to us from
an age in which they existed still ; and it happens also that
while the grace of Plutarch's style has made his essays on
the same subject familiar to all, the post-classical date and
style of Porphyry and Eusebius have prevented their more
serious treatises from attracting much attention from English
scholars.
According to Porphyry, then, the oracular or communica-
ting demon or spirit, we must adopt spirit as the word of
wider meaning, manifests himself in several ways. Sometimes
he speaks through the mouth of the entranced " recipient," l
sometimes he shows himself in an immaterial, or even in a
material form, apparently according to his own rank in the
i is the word generally used for the human intermediary
between the god or spirit and the inquirers. See Lob. Agl. p. 108, on the
corresponding word Kara/3oAiK<5s for the spirit who is thus received for a
time into a human being's organism. Cf. also Firmicus Maternus de errore
prof, relig. 13: " Serapis vocatus et intra corpus hominis conlatus talia
respondit ; " and the phrase ^7/caro%^tras r SapdiriSi (Inscr. Smyrn. 3163,
ap. Wolff, deNov.)
GREEK ORACLES. 4 79
invisible world. 1 The recipient falls into a state of trance,
mixed sometimes with exhausting agitation or struggle, 2 as in
the case of the Pythia. And the importance attached to a
right choice of time and circumstances for the induction of this
trance reminds us of Plutarch's story, already mentioned, of the
death of a Pythian priestess compelled to prophesy when pos-
sessed by an evil spirit. Another inconvenience in choosing
a wrong time seems to have been that false answers were then
given by the spirit, who, however, would warn the auditors
that he could not give information, 3 or even that he would
certainly tell falsehoods, 4 on that particular occasion. Porphyry
attributes this occasional falsity to some defect in the surround-
ing conditions, 5 which confuses the spirit, and prevents him
from speaking truly. For on descending into our atmosphere
the spirits become subject to the laws and influences which
rule mankind, and are not therefore entirely free agents. 6
When a confusion of this kind occurs, the prudent inquirer
should defer his researches, a rule with which inexperienced
investigators fail to comply. 7
Let us suppose, however, that a favourable day has been
secured, and also, not less important, a 8 " guileless inter-
1 Porphyry calls these inferior spirits Sai^via. v\iKa, and Proclus (ad
Tim. 142) defines the distinction thus : T&V Saipbvuv ol u-ev ev rrj ffvardcrei
TT\OV rb Trvpiov i=x ovTfS bparol 6vres ovotv i%ov<nv dvTiTvirus, ol 5t Kal yijs
fj.eTfi\r)<j)6Tes vTroiriirTov<n T% a<f>ri. It is only the spirits who partake of earthly
nature who are capable of being touched. These spirits may be of a rank
inferior to mankind ; Proclus, ad Tim. 24, calls them ^u%as dTroTvxovffas p.ev
TOV dvOpuTriKOv vov, 7r/)6s 5 TO, $Qo, c^ovcro.? 8id6e<nv.
2 ov fopei fj.e TOV doxyos i) rdXaiva Kapdia (Procl. in Rempublicam, 380) is
the exclamation of a spirit whose recipient can no longer sustain his presence.
3 Eus. Pr. Ev. vi. 5, ffri/j.epov oik eirtouce \tyeiv frffrpuv bSbv Ipriv.
4 Ibid. K\ele ftirfv Kdpros re \6yuv \f/evdriyopa X^w : "Try no longer to enchain
me with your words ; I shall tell you falsehoods."
8 i) K<na<rraau TOV irepitx ovr< >s- Eus. Pr. Ev. vi. 5, KOI TO irepitx v dvayKafrv
^/{vdrj ylvfffdai TO. navTela, ov TOVS Trapoiras eKovTas irpoaTidtvai. TO i/'eOSos. . . .
irt(j>T]vev dpa, adds Porphyry with satisfaction, irodev iro\\a.Kis TO
' Porph. ap. Philoponum, de Mundi Great, iv. 20, with the comments of
Philoponus, whose main objection to these theories lies in their interference
with the freedom of the will.
7 Pr. Ev. vi. 5, oi 5k ^vovfft Kal \tyeiv dvayKdfrovtn did TT^V dfiaOlav.
8 Ibid. v. 8, Kcanrfvev d/j.(f>l Kdpijvov d/j,u/j.Tf]Toio
480 GREEK ORACLES.
mediary." Some confined space would then be selected for
the expected manifestations, " so that the influence should not
be too widely diffused." l This place seems sometimes to have
been made dark,- a circumstance which has not escaped the
satire of the Christian controversialist, 2 whose derision is still
further excited by the " barbarous yells and singing " 3 with
which the unseen visitant was allured, a characteristic, it
may be noticed in passing, of shahmanistic practices, where-
ever they have been found to prevail. During these proceed-
ings the human agent appears to have fallen into an abnormal
slumber, which extinguished for the time his own identity,
and allowed the spirit to speak through his lips, " to contrive
a voice for himself through a mortal instrument." 4 In such
speeches, of which several are preserved to us, the informing
spirit alludes to the human being through whom he is speaking
in the third person, as " the mortal " or " the recipient ; " of
himself he speaks in the first person, or occasionally in the
third person, as " the god " or " the king." 5
The controlling spirits do not, however, always content
themselves with this vicarious utterance. They appear some-
times, as already indicated, in visible and tangible form. Of
this phase of the proceedings, however, Eusebius has preserved
to us but scanty notices. His mind is preoccupied with the
presumption and bizarrerie of the spirits, who sometimes
profess themselves to be (for instance) the sun and moon ;
sometimes insist on being called by barbarous names, and
talking a barbarous jargon. 6 The precise nature of such
appearances had been, it seems, in dispute since the days of
Pythagoras, who conjectured that the apparition was an
1 *cal dfjia &iro<TTT)plfoi>Tes afrrb fvravda ?v nvi ffTept
SiaxelffOai, Iamb, de Myst. iii. 14. The maxims of lamblichus in these
matters are in complete conformity with those of Porphyry.
2 Eus. Pr. Ev. iv. 1, Kal rb OKOTOS d ov fj-itcpa ffvvepyeiv rrj Ka.8' eavrovs
8 Ibid. v. 12, &<r^fwa re Kal fiapfiapois -fix 01 * Te Ka ' <t>^"ais KijKovjjifroi,.
4 Ibid. v. 8, auXoO 5' e*c fSpoT^oio <pi\t]v ereKvuffaro <f>ti)vf>v.
5 <f>u>s, j3porbs, doxtfc. Pr. Ev. v. 9, Xtfere \onrov &.VO.KTO., pporbs Oebv OVK^TI
Xwpei.
8 Pr. Ev. v. 10 (quoting Porph. ad Aneb. ), ri d Kal TO, &<rr)fjia. ftov\erai ovofjura
K<d T&V dffrifj.uv ra J3dpj3a.pa irpb ruv mur<f oiKeiuv, etc.
GREEK OR A CLES.
emanation from the spirit, but not, strictly speaking, the spirit
itself. 1
In the Neoplatonic view, these spirits entered by a process
of " introduction " - into a material body temporarily prepared
for them ; or sometimes it was said that " the pure name was
compressed into a sacred Form." 3 Those spirits who have
already been accustomed to appear were best instructed as to
how to appear again ; but some of them were inclined to
mischief, especially if the persons present showed a careless
temper. 4
After a time the spirit becomes anxious to depart ; but is
not always able to quit the intermediary as promptly as it
desires. We possess several oracles uttered under these cir-
1 Pythag. ap. Aen. ; Gaz. ap. Theophr. p. 61, Boisson. irbrepov Oeol r) Sat/j-oves
7} TotjTUv a.irbppoi.a.1, Kal Trorepov SCU/XWP efs aXXos tlvai 5oKwv T) TroXXo: /ecu atpuv
avrwv Bi.a<f>epovTes, oi /Afv TJ/mepoi, oi 5' dypioi, Kal ol n^v eviore TaXrjOTJ \eyovres ol
6' 6Xws Kifi$ri\oi .... reXos irpo'lerai dai/u.ovos diroppoiav elvaL TO cpdafj.a.
2 fia-Kptiris. See Lob. Arjl. p. 730.
3 Pr. Ev. v. 8: iepdici TVTTOLS
ffwOXifiofJ-frov Trvpos dyvov.
I may just notice here the connection between this idea of the entrance of a
spirit into a quasi-human form built up for the occasion, and that recrud-
escence of idol-worship which marks one phase of Neoplatonism. In an age
when such primitive practices as ' ' carrying the dried corpse of a parent round
the fields that he might see the state of the crops" (Spencer's Sociology, 154),
were no longer possible, this new method of giving temporary materiality to
disembodied intelligences suggested afresh that it might be practicable so to
prepare an image as that a spirit would be content to live there permanently.
An oracle in Pausanias (ix. 38) curiously illustrates this view of statues. The
land of the Orchomenians was infested by a spirit which sat on a stone. The
Pythia ordered them to make a brazen image of the spectre and fasten it with
iron to the stone. The spirit would still be there, but he would now be per-
manently fixed down, and, being enclosed in a statue, he would no longer
form an obnoxious spectacle.
4 Pr. Ev. v. 8, #os iron)ffa.p.evoi rrjs eavrCiv irapovfftas evfiaOtcrrepov <j>oiTu<rai
Kal /MoXiffra eav Kal <f>6<rei dyadol Tvyx<ivuffiv, ol 5, K&V H6os ?x ufft r v "fapa-
ylveffBai, fiXd/Byi' TIV& TrpoOv/JLovvrai iroielv, Kal fJ-d\iffTa tav dfJ.e\t(rrep6v rts doKy
dvaffrptfaffOai ev rots irpdy/Mffi. This notion of a congruity between the in-
quirer and the responding spirit is curiously illustrated by a story of
Caracalla (Dio Cass. Ixxvii.), who tyvxayuyrjffe fttv fiXXos rt TWOS Kal rty rou
irarpbs rov re Ko/u./j.6dov tyvxfyv elire 5' oZv ovdels avrif ovdtv, TrXrjv TOV Ko/j.jjASov.
"E077 yap ravra' (3a2ve SiKrjs affffov, 6eol ty alrouffi Seftripy. No ghost would
address Caracalla except the ghost of Commodus, who spoke to denounce to
him his doom.
2 H
482 GREEK ORACLES.
cumstances, and giving directions which we can but imperfectly
understand. It appears that the recipient, for what reason we
are left to conjecture, was in some way bound with withes and
enveloped in fine linen, which had to be cut and unwrapped at
the end of the ceremony. 1 The human agent had then to be
set on his feet and taken from the corner where he had been
outstretched, and a singular collaboration seems to have taken
place, the spirit giving his orders to the bystanders by a voice
issuing from the recipient's still senseless form. 2 At last the
spirit departs, and the recipient is set free.
Eusebius, in a passage marked by strong common sense, 3 has
pointed out some obvious objections to oracles obtained in this
fashion. Some of these so-called " recipients," it appears, had been
put to the torture and had made damaging confessions. Further
penalties had induced them to explain how their fraud was
carried out. The darkness and secrecy of the proceedings were
in any case suspicious ; and the futility of the answers obtained,
or their evident adaptation to the wishes of the inquirers,
pointed too plainly to their human origin. The actual
method of producing certain phenomena has exercised the
ingenuity of other Fathers. Thus figures could be show r n in a
bowl of water by using a moveable bottom, or lights could be
made to fly about in a dark room by releasing a vulture with
flaming tow tied to its claws. 4
But in spite of these contemptuous criticisms the Christian
Fathers, as is well known, were disposed to believe in the
genuineness of these communications, and showed much anxiety
to induce the oracles, which often admitted the greatness and
wisdom, to acknowledge also the divinity, of Christ. 5
1 Pr. Ev. v. 8 : Tratieo di) ireptypuv ddpuv, avcarave d
Ba/j-vwv K\tiuv TroXibv rtiirov, -fjd' aifb yvtwv
NeiXanji* 666vr)v xepcrlf <m|3a/>ws diraeipas.
And again, when the bystanders delay the release, the spirit exclaims
crlvdovos afjurtraffov vecpfXi^v, \vff6v re 5o%^o.
2 Pr. Ev. v. 8 : v\f/lwpupov alpe rapffbv, fox ftv&v ^ K M U X < ^' / - And again,
&pare (pwra yalr)det> avaffTriffavres ercupoi, etc.
3 Pr. Ev. iv. 2.
4 Pseudo-Origen, Philosophumena, p. 73.
8 Pr. Ev. iv. iii. 7. Aug. de Civit. Dei, xix. 23. Lact. Instil, iv. 13.*
GREEK ORACLES. 483
Eusebius himself, in another work, 1 adduces a letter of
Constantino's describing an oracle said to have been uttered
direct!} 7 by Apollo " from a certain dark hole," in which
the god asserted that he could no longer speak the truth on
account of the number of saints who were now on the earth.
But this has so little the air of an Apolline manifestation that
it is suspected that a Christian man had crept into a cave and
delivered this unauthorised response with a polemical object. 2
Into so obscure, so undignified a region of mingled fraud
and mystery does it seem that, by the admission of friends and
foes alike, the oracles of Greece had by this time fallen. Com-
pared with what had been stripped away, that which was left
may seem to us like the narrow vault of the Delian sanctuary
compared with the ruined glories of that temple-covered isle.
There was not, indeed, in Porphyry's view anything incon-
sistent with the occasional presence and counsel of a lofty and
a guardian spirit. There was nothing which need make him
doubt that the Greeks had been led upwards through their long
history by some providential power. Nay, he himself cites, as
we shall see, recent oracles higher in tone than any which have
preceded them. Yet as compared with the early ardour of that
imaginative belief which peopled heaven with gods and earth
with heroes, we feel that we are now sent back to " beggarly
elements ; " that the task of sifting truth from falsehood amid
so much deception and incompetence on the part both of visible
and invisible agencies, 3 of erecting a consistent creed on such
mean and shifting foundations, might well rebut even the patient
ardour of this most untiring of " seekers after God." And
when we see him recognising all this with painful clearness,
giving vent, in that letter to Anebo which is so striking an
example of absolute candour in an unscrupulous and polemic
1 Vit. Const, ii. 50 ; cf. Wolff, de Noviss. p. 4.
2 The well-known story, Tpriy6pt.os T$ 2a.Ta.vg. EiVeXtfe Greg. Nyss. 548
(and to be found in all lives of Gregory Thaumatiirgus), illustrates this Chris-
tian rivalry with pagan oracles or apparitions.
3 The disappointing falsity of the manifesting spirits who pretended to be
the souls of departed friends, etc., is often alluded to ; e.g. in the ad Aneb-
onem : ol 5 elvai [jv ^u6fi> rlffevrat rt> vwf)Koov ytvos dira.Tir)\rjs <f>\jfffus, iravrb-
/Jiop<}>6v re /cat iro\frrpowov, viroKpit>6fj.fvov Kcd 6eoi>s ical dai/j.ovas Ka
TfOvr)K6rtai>, etc.
484 GREEK ORACLES. '
age, to his despair at the obscurity which seems to deepen as
he proceeds, we cannot but wonder that we do not see him
turn to take refuge in the new religion with its offers of certainty
and peace.
Why, we shall often ask, should men so much in earnest as
the Neoplatonists have taken, with the gospel before them, the
side they took ? Why should they have preferred to infuse
another allegory into the old myths which had endured so
much ? to force the Pythian Apollo, so simple-hearted through
all his official ambiguity, to strain his hexameters into the
ineffable yearnings of a theosophic age ? For we seem to see the
issues so clearly ! when we take up Augustine instead of Pro-
clus we feel so instantly that we have changed to the winning
side! But to Greek minds and the glory of the Syrian
Porphyry was that, of all barbarians, he became the most
intensely Greek the struggle presented itself in a very
different fashion. They were fighting not for an effete mytho-
logy, but for the whole Past of Greece ; nay, as it seemed in
a certain sense, for the civilisation of the world. The repulse
of Xerxes had stirred in the Greeks the consciousness of their
uniqueness as compared with the barbarism on every side.
And now, when Hellenism was visibly dying away, there awoke
in the remaining Greeks a still more momentous conception,
the conception of the uniqueness and preciousness of Greek life
not only in space but in duration, as compared not only with
its barbarian compeers, but with the probable future of the
world. It was no longer against the Great King, but against
Time itself, that the unequal battle must be waged. And while
Time's impersonal touch was slowly laid upon all the glory
which had been, a more personal foe was seen advancing from
the same East from whose onset Greece already had escaped,
" but so as by fire." Christ, like Xerxes, came against the
Greek spirit ^vpiryyeve^ appa BtcoKcov, driving a Syrian car ;
the tide of conquest was rolling back again, and the East was
claiming an empire such as the West had never won.
We, indeed, knowing all the flower of European Christianity
in Dante's age, all its ripening fruit in our own, may see that this
time from the East light came ; we may trust and claim that we
are living now among the scattered forerunners of such types of
GREEK ORACLES. 485
beauty and of goodness as Athens never knew. But if so much
even of our own ideal is in the future still, how must it have
been to those whose longest outlook could not "overpass the
dreary centuries of barbarism and decay ? So vast a spiritual
revolution must needs bring to souls of differing temper very
different fates. Happy were they who, like Augustine and
Origen, could frankly desert the old things and rejoice that all
things were become new. Happy too were those few saintly
souls an Antoninus or a 1'lotinus whose lofty calm no
spiritual revolution seemed able to reach or mar. But the
pathetic destiny was that of men like Julian or Porphyry,
men who were disqualified from leading the race onward into a
noble future merely because they so well knew and loved an
only less noble past.
And yet it is not for long that we can take Porphyry as an
example of a man wandering in the twilight between " dying
lights and dawning," between an outworn and an untried faith.
The last chapter in the history of oracles is strangely connected
with the last stage of the spiritual history of this upward-
striving man.
For it was now that Porphyry was to encounter an influence,
a doctrine, an aim, more enchanting than Homer's mythology,
profouncler than Apollo's oracles, more Christian, I had almost
written, than Christianity itself. More Christian at least than
such Christianity as had chiefly met Porphyry's eyes ; more
Christian than the violence of bishops, the wrangles of heretics,
the fanaticism of slaves, was that single-hearted and endless
effort after the union of the soul with God which filled every
moment of the life of Plotinus, and which gave to his living
example a potency and a charm which his writings never can
renew. 1 " Without father, without mother, without descent,"
a figure appearing solitary as Melchisedek on the scene of
history, charged with a single blessing and lost in the un-
known, we may yet see in this chief of mystics the heir of
1 Eunapius (vit. Porph. ) manages to touch the heart, in spite of his affecta-
tions, when he describes the friendship between Porphyry and Plotinus. Of
Porphyry's first visit to Rome he says : -rty fjLeylffrrjv "Pufnji> t'SejV
. . . fireiSi] ra-x^TO- s avryv d0t'/cero Ka.1 T
6/J.i\icu>, irdvTuv tireXdOero TWV &\\uv, K.T.\.
GREEK ORACLES.
Plato, and affirm that it is he who has completed the cycle of
Greek civilisation by adding to that long gallery of types
of artist and warrior, philosopher and poet, the stainless image
of the saint.
It may be that the holiness which he aimed at is not for
man. It may be that ecstasy comes best unsought, and that
the still small voice is heard seldomer in the silence of the
wilderness than through the thunder of human toil and amid
human passion's fire.
But those were days of untried capacities, of unbounded
hopes. In the Neoplatonist lecture-room, as at the Christian
love-feast, it seemed that religion had no need to compromise,
that all this complex human spirit could be absorbed and
transfigured in one desire.
Counsels of perfection are the aliment of strenuous souls,
and henceforth, in each successive book of Porphyry's, we see
him rising higher, resting more confidently in those joys and
aspirations which are the heritage of all high religions, and the
substance of the communion of saints.
And gradually, as he dwells more habitually in the thought
of the supreme and ineffable Deity, the idea of a visible or
tangible communion with any Being less august becomes
repugnant to his mind. For what purpose should he draw to
him those unknown intelligences from the ocean of environing
souls ? " For on those things which he desires to know there is
no prophet nor diviner who can declare to him the truth, but
himself only, by communion with God, who is enshrined indeed
in his heart." 1 " By a sacred silence we do Him honour, and by
pure thoughts of what he is." 2 " Holding Him fast, and being
made like unto Him, let us present ourselves, a holy sacrifice,
for our offering unto God." 3
And in his letter to the well-loved wife of his old age,
than which we find no higher expression of the true Platonic
love (so often degraded and misnamed) no nobler charge and
1 De Abstln. ii. 54.
2 Ibid. ii. 34, Sia S ffiyris Ka.6a.pas icai TWV irepl avrov Ka.6a.pSjv evvoi&v 6prf-
3 Ibid. ii. 34, Sel &pa ffvva<f>0vTas KOA. 6/JWiudfrTa.s O.UT<$ TT?C avruv a
dvffiav Ifpav Trpoaa.ya.yeiv r<p Off.
GREEK ORACLES. 487
counsel of man to woman in all the stores which antiquity has
bequeathed, in this last utterance we find him risen above
all doubt and controversy, and rapt in the contemplation of
that Being whom "no prayers can move and no sacrifice
honour, nor the abundance of offerings find favour in his sight ;
only the inspired thought fixed firmly on Him has cognisance
of God indeed." 1 It may seem that as we enter on this region
we have left oracles behind. But it is not so. The two last
oracles which I shall cite, and which are among the most
remarkable of all, are closely connected with this last period of
Porphyry's life. The first of them is found, by no chance
we may be sure, on a leaf of the manuscript which contains
his letter to Marcella. It is introduced to us by an unknown
writer as "an oracle concerning the Eternal God.'" 2
God ineffable, etenial Sire,
Throned on the whirling spheres, the astral fire,
Hid in whose heart thy whole creation lies,
The whole world's wonder mirrored in thine eyes,
List thou thy children's voice, who draw anear,
Thou hast begotten us, thou too must hear !
Each life thy life her Fount, her Ocean knows,
Fed while it fosters, filling as it flows ;
Wrapt in thy light the star-set cycles roll,
And worlds within thee stir into a soul ;
But stars and souls shall keep their watch and way,
Nor change the going of thy lonely day.
Some sons of thine, our Father, King of kings,
Rest in the sheen and shelter of thy wings,
Some to strange hearts the unspoken message bear,
Sped on thy strength through the haunts and homes of air,
Some where thine honour dwelleth hope and wait,
Sigh for thy courts and gather at thy gate ;
These from afar to thee their praises bring,
Of thee, albeit they have not seen thee, sing ;
1 rb &6fov <f>p6vr)(j.a /caXws ijdpafffj.frot' ffwdTrrerai T<j5 6c$. See the Ad Mar-
cellam passim.
2 This oracle was very probably actually delivered in a shrine, as the utter-
ances of this period were often tinged with Neoplatonism. I have followed
Wolff's emendations, and must refer the reader to his Porph. Fragm. p. 144,
and especially TaisAddit. IV. de Daemonibus, p. 225, in support of the substantial
accuracy of my rendering. It is impossible to reproduce all the theology
which this hymn contains ; I have tried to bring out the force of the most
central and weighty expressions, such as decdois dxeroiai ri6i]vCiv vow araXavrov.
The oracle will also be found in Steuchus, de Perenni Philosophies,, iii. 14 ;
Orelli, Opusc. (jr. vett. sentent. i. 319 ; and Mai's edition of the Ad Marcellam.
4 88 GREEK ORACLES.
Of thee the Father wise, the Mother mild,
Thee in all children the eternal Child,
Thee the first Number and harmonious Whole,
Form in all forms, and of all souls the Soul.
The second oracle above alluded to, the last which I shall
quote, was given, as Porphyry tells us, at Delphi to his friend
Amelius, who inquired, " Where was now Plotinus's soul?" 1
Whatever be the source of this poem, it stands out to us as
one of the most earnest utterances of antiquity, though it has
little of classical perfection of form. Nowhere, indeed, is the
contest more apparent between the intensity of the emotions
which are struggling for utterance and the narrow limits of
human speech, which was composed to deal with the things
that are known and visible, and not with those that are incon-
ceivable and unseen.
Little, indeed, it is which the author of this oracle could
express, less which the translator can render; but there is
enough to show once more the potency of an elect soul, what a
train of light she may leave behind her as she departs on her
unknown way ; when for those who have lived in her presence,
but can scarcely mourn her translation, the rapture of love
fades into the rapture of worship. Plotinus was " the eagle
soaring above the tomb of Plato;" no wonder that the eyes
which followed his flight must soon be blinded with the sun.
Pure spirit once a man pure spirits now
Greet thee rejoicing, and of these art thou ;
Not vainly was thy whole soul alway bent
With one same battle and one the same intent
Through eddying cloud and earth's bewildering roar
To win her bright way to that stainless shore.
Ay, 'mid the salt spume of this troublous sea,
This death in life, this sick perplexity,
Oft on thy struggle through the obscure unrest
A revelation opened from the Blest
1 Porph. vit. Plot. 22. It is seldom that the genuineness of an oracle can be
established on grounds which would satisfy the critical historian. But this
oracle has better external evidence than most others. Of Porphyry's own
good faith there is no question, and though we know less of the character
of his fellow-philosopher Amelius, it seems unlikely that he would have
wished to deceive Porphyry on an occasion so solemn as the death of their
beloved master, or even that he could have deceived him as to so considerable
an undertaking as a journey to Delphi.
GREEK ORACLES. 489
Showed close at hand the goal thy hope would win,
Heaven's kingdom round thee and thy God within. 1
So sure a help the eternal Guardians gave,
From life's confusion so were strong to save,
Upheld thy wandering steps that sought the day
And set them stedfast 011 the heavenly way.
Xor quite even here on thy broad brows was shed
The sleep which shrouds the living, who are dead ;
Once by God's grace was from thine eyes unfurled
This veil that screens the immense and whirling world,
Once, while the spheres around thee in music ran,
Was very Beauty manifest to man ;
Ah, once to have seen her, once to have known her there,
For speech too sweet, for earth too heavenly fair !
But now the tomb where long thy soul had lain
Bursts, and thy tabernacle is rent in twain ;
Now from about thee, in thy new home above,
Has perished all but life, and all but love,
And on all lives and on all loves outpoured
Free grace and full, a spirit from the Lord,
High in that heaven whose windless vaults enfold
Just men made perfect, and an age all gold.
Thine own Pythagoras is with thee there,
And sacred Plato in that sacred air,
And whoso followed, and all high hearts that knew
In death's despite what deathless Love can do.
To God's right hand they have scaled the starry way
Pure spirits these, thy spirit pure as they.
Ah, saint ! how many and many an anguish past,
To how fair haven art thou come at last !
On thy meek head what Powers their blessing pour,
Filled full with life, and rich for evermore !
This, so far as we know, was the last utterance of the
Pythian priestess. Once more, indeed, a century afterwards,
a voice was heard at Delphi. But that voice seems rather
to have been, in Plutarch's phrase, "a cry floating of itself over
solitary places," than the deliverance of any recognised priestess,
or from any abiding shrine. For no shrine was standing more.
The words which answered the Emperor Julian's search were
but the whisper of desolation, the last and loveliest expression
of a sanctity that had passed away. A strange coincidence !
that from that Delphian valley, whence, as the legend ran, had
1 {(/HIVI) yovv rtf ID^urLvif CTKOTTOS eyyvOi valuv' r^Xoj yap avry Ka.1
fy rb evudrjvai /ecu TreXdcrat Tip ^TT! iraai 6e<j>. 'En>xe 8t Terpam iroi>, frre a\
CLVT$, TOV ffKoirov TOVTov tvfpyeia df>prfr({> (cat ov 5wafJ.ei. (Porph. vit. Plot.)
2 I
490 GREEK ORACLES.
sounded the first of all hexameters, 1 the call, as in the child-
hood of the world, to " birds to bring their feathers and bees
their wax " to build by Castaly the nest-like habitation of the
young new-entering god, from that same ruined place where
" to earth had fallen the glorious dwelling," from the dry
channel where " the water-springs that spake were quenched
and dead," should issue in unknown fashion the last frag-
ment of Greek poetry which has moved the hearts of men,
the last Greek hexameters which retain the ancient cadence,
the majestic, melancholy flow ! 2
Stranger still, and of deeper meaning, is the fate which has
ordained that Delphi, born with the birth of Greece, symbolis-
ing in her teaching such light and truth as the ancient world
might know, silenced once only in her long career, and silenced
not by Christ, but by Antichrist, should have proclaimed in
her last triumphant oracle the canonisation of the last of the.
Greeks, should have responded with her last sigh and echo to
the appeal of the last of the Romans.
And here I shall leave the story of Greek oracles. It may
be, indeed, that some strange and solitary divinities the god
Jaribolus at Palmyra, 3 the god Marnas at Gaza, 4 the god Besa at
Abydos 5 still uttered from time to time some perishing pro-
phecy, some despairing protest against the new victorious faith.
But that such oracles there still were is proved rather from Chris-
tian legislation than from heathen records. On these laws I will
not dwell, nor recount how far the Christian emperors fell from
their divine ideal when they punished by pillage, 6 by torture, 7
epa. r' olwvol Kripov re /uAtTTcu. Plut. de Pyth. xvii.; and reff.
ap. Hendess, Orac. Graec. p. 36.
2 eitrare r<JJ ftacriXiji, xanal irt<re daida\os afi\a'
oi>K4n 3>or/3oj i-Xft KaXv^av, 01) /JMVTida 8a.<t>vr]v,
ov irayav \a\tovcraf airier jSero KO.I \d\ov vdup.
Ge. Cedren. Hist. Comp. i. 304 ; and see Mr Swinburne's poem, "The Last
Oracle." The Pleistos is now called Xero-Potamo.
* Inscr. Gr. 4483 ap. Wolff, de Noviss. p. 27. There is, however, no proof
of Jaribolian utterance later than A. D. 242.
4 Marc. Diac. vlt. Porph. Episc. ap. Acta Sanctoriim, and Wolff, de JVo
p. 26. Circ. A.D. 400.
5 Amm. Marc. xix. 12 (A.D. 359).
6 Cod. Theod. xvi. 10 (Theodosius i.)
7 Amm. Marc. xxi. 12 (Constantius).
GREEK ORACLES. 49 1
and by death 1 the poor unlearned " villagers," whose only crime
it was that they still found in the faith of their fathers the
substance of things hoped for, and an evidence of things not
seen. Such stains will mar the noblest revolutions, but must
not blind us to the fact that a spiritual revolution follows only
on a spiritual need. The end of the oracles was determined
not from without, but from within. They had passed through
all their stages. Fetishism, Shahmanism, Nature-worship,
Polytheism, even Monotheism and Mysticism, had found in
turn a home in their immemorial shrines. Their utterances
had reflected every method in which man has sought com-
munion with the Unseen, from systematic experiment to
intuitive ecstasy. They had completed the cycle of their
scripture from its Theogony to its Apocalypse ; it was time
that a stronger wave of revelation should roll over the world,
and that what was best and truest in the old religion should
be absorbed into and identified with the new.
And if there be some who feel that the youth, the naivettf,
the unquestioning conviction, must perish not from one religion
only, but from all ; that the more truly we conceive of God, the
more unimaginable He becomes to us, and the more infinite, and
the more withdrawn ; that we can no longer " commune with
Him from oak or rock as a young man communes with a
maid;" to such men the story of the many pathways by
which mankind has striven to become cognisant of the Un-
seen may have an aspect of hope as well as of despondency.
For before we despair of a question as unanswerable we
must know that it has been rightly asked. And there are
problems which can become clearly defined to us only by the
aid of premature and imperfect solutions. There are many
things which we should never have known had not inquiring
men before us so often deemed vainly that they knew.
Suspense of judgment, indeed, in matters of such moment,
is so irksome an attitude of mind, that we need not wonder if
1 Cod. Justin, ix. 18 (Constantius) ; Theod. leg. Novell, iii. (Theodosivts n.).
These laws identify paganism as far as possible with magic, and, by a singular
inversion, Augustine quotes Virgil's authority (Aen. iv. 492) in defence of the
persecution of his own faith. See Maury, Magie, etc., p. 127. The last struggle
of expiring paganism was in defence of the oracular temple of Serapis at
Alexandria, A.D. 389.
492 GREEK ORACLES.
confidence of view on the one side is met by a corresponding
confidence on the other; if the trust felt by the mass of man-
kind in the adequacy of one or other of the answers to these
problems which have been already obtained is rebutted by the
decisive assertion that all these answers have been proved futile
and that it is idle to look for more.
Yet such was not the temper of those among the Greeks
who felt, as profoundly perhaps as we, the darkness and the
mystery of human fates. To them it seemed no useless or
unworthy thing to ponder on these chief concerns of man with
that patient earnestness which has unlocked so many problems
whose solution once seemed destined to be for ever unknown.
" For thus will God," as Sophocles says in one of those passages
(Fr. 707) whose high serenity seems to answer our perplexities
as well as his own
" Thus then will God to wise men riddling show
Such hidden lore as not the wise can know ;
Fools in a moment deem his meaning plain,
His lessons lightly learn, and learn in vain."
And even now, in the face of philosophies of materialism
and of negation so far more powerful than any which Sophocles
had to meet, there are yet some minds into which, after all, a
doubt may steal, whether we have indeed so fully explained
away the beliefs of the world's past, whether we can indeed
so assuredly define the beliefs of its future, or whether it may
not still befit us to track with fresh feet the ancient mazes, to
renew the world-old desire, and to set no despairing limit to
the knowledge or the hopes of man.
F. W. H. M.
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