THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Ex tibris [ C. K. OGDEN 1 HARVARD LECTURES ON GREEK SUBJECTS HARVARD LECTURES ON GREEK SUBJECTS LATE PROFESSOR OF GRKF.K !N THE I'NIVLRSITY OF EDINBURGH FORMERLY FELLOW OF 'IRIXITV COLL1-T,!'., CAMSIKIL".;! Eantion MAC MILL AN AND CO., LIMITED NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1904 PREFACE THESE Lectures Public Lectures delivered at Harvard University in April 1904 owe their origin to a generous gift made to the University by Mr. Gardiner Martin Lane, of the Class of i 88 i ; and will remain associated in my memory with the recollection of infinite kindness re- ceived during my visit to Cambridge and Boston. The Lectures, here and there slightly ex- panded, are, in other respects, published almost in the form in which they were delivered. The hearers to whom they were originally addressed comprised not only classical scholars, but also vi HARVARD LECTURES the general public ; and they are now offered to a similarly mixed body of readers. The book may be regarded as forming a kind of companion volume to Some Aspects of the Greek Genius (third edition, Macmillan and Co. 1904). Under various lights I have attempted to bring out something of the originality of Greece. The contrast is at the outset drawn between Greece and two older civilisations : that of Israel, dominated by a great religious idea, and that of Phoenicia, given over to the pursuit of material well- being (I. and II.). In the subsequent lectures two features of the Greek intellect come into special prominence. First, a Love of Know- ledge, which not only seeks out the facts of nature and of man's life, but persistently asks their meaning ; and this belief in the interpreta- tive power of mind, working on and transmuting all raw material of knowledge, is shown to PREFACE vi i extend beyond the domain of philosophy or of science, and to give significance to Greek theories of history and Greek views on educa- tion (HI.). Secondly, a Critical Faculty stand- ing in singularly close relation to the Creative Faculty. Art and inspiration, logic and intui- tion, elsewhere so often disjoined, enter into perfect union in the constructive efforts of the Greek imagination. It is but one eminent example of that balance of contrasted qualities, that reconciliation of opposites, which meets us at every turn in the distinguished personalities of the Hellenic race, and which is too often thought of, in a merely negative way, as the avoidance of excess, rather than as the highest outcome of an intense and many-sided vitality (IV.). But the critical instinct, one of the primary endowments of the Greeks, operates also apart from the constructive power, and (chiefly from the time of Aristotle onwards) HARVARD LECTURES tries to penetrate the secret of the literary art. Here we have no longer the same sureness of insight ; indeed the lack of it is frequently startling. Nevertheless there remains a sufficient body of interesting and even illuminating Criticism, to enable us to see, through Greek eyes, some of those literary principles of en- during value which Greece has bequeathed (V. and VI.). S. H. BUTCHER. October 1904. CONTENTS I. GREECE AND ISRAEL II. GREECE AND PHOENICIA . . 44 III. THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE . . 82 IV. ART AND INSPIRATION IN GREEK POETRY 129 V. GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM . .169 VI. GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM . .219 I GREECE AND ISRAEL Two nations, Greece and Israel, stand out from all others in the history of the world, and form a striking contrast as representing divergent impulses and tendencies of human nature, different ideals of perfection. In this, however, they are alike, that each felt itself to be a peculiar people, marked off from the surrounding races by distinctions more inefface- able than those of blood by the possession of intellectual or religious truths which deter- mined the bent and meaning of its history. That history, as it was gradually unfolded, became to each an unfailing source of inspira- tion. The records and famous deeds of the race were invested with ethical significance. B HARVARD LECTURES In interpreting them each people gained a deeper consciousness of its own ideal vocation. From the heritage of the past they drew fresh stores of spiritual energy. Exclusive indeed they both were, intensely national ; between Greeks and Barbarians, between Israel and the Heathen there could be no intimacy, no union. For many centuries the work of the Hellenes and of Israel went forward at the same time, but in separate spheres, each nation unconscious of the other's existence. Had they crossed one another's path, they would have aroused mutual hatred and suspicion ; the Jews would have been barbarians to the Greeks, the Greeks idolaters to the Jews. Yet this very spirit of exclusiveness was one of the conditions which enabled each to nurture and bring to maturity the life-giving germ which it bore within it. In process of time each people burst the narrow limits of its own nationality, and in dying to itself, lived to mankind. Morientes vivimus is the epitome of each history. The influence by which both Jews and Greeks have acted on all after ages is one which has survived the GREECE AND ISRAEL outward forms of national existence ; it belongs to the mysterious forces of the spirit. Through humiliation and loss of independence they each entered on a career of world-wide empire, till at length the principles of Hellenism became those of civilisation itself, and the religion of Judaea that of civilised humanity. The Jews were from the outset conscious of their separateness, of their peculiar mission. From the family to the tribe, from the tribe to the nation, they felt themselves to be destined for some high purpose, though the idea was deepened and expanded as their history advanced. With the Greeks it was otherwise. In the Homeric age Greeks and Barbarians did not yet stand sharply opposed ; and, though during that period and long afterwards many elements of foreign civilisations were slowly absorbed, yet in the process of absorption they were so transmuted that for the Hellenes the net result was a heightened sense of difference between themselves and the non- Hellenes. The first impulse, however, towards national unity came, as with the Jews, through religion. HARVARD LECTURES The religious life of primitive Greece centred at Dodona in Epirus, the seat of the oracle of Zeus, of whose cult we catch a curious glimpse in the famous invocation of Achilles (//. xvi. 2 3 3). Dodona retained its immemorial sanctity far into historical times ; but it never formed a meeting-point for the scattered families of the Hellenic race. At a very early date the Dodo- naean cult gave place to the worship of Apollo, who made his abode on the Eastern coast of Greece, at Parnassus, with Delphi as his sanc- tuary. Zeus still remained the supreme god, and Apollo, the youngest of the Olympians, became his 'prophet,' his interpreter. The tribal cults are henceforth merged in a higher worship. A league of states representing the common sentiment of the Hellenes is associated with the Delphic shrine. Apollo here presides at the Theoxenia the festival celebrating the friendship of the gods. In reconciling the local deities he stands as the symbol of Hellenic fraternity and union. The nobler energies of the race now obtain a religious consecration. The Delphic religion was in its highest GREECE AND ISRAEL intention an effort after spiritual freedom and enlightenment. In this respect it offers a remarkable counterpart to Hebrew prophecy. It asserts the binding claim of the moral law alike over states and individuals. It deepens the conception both of guilt and purification. As the Hebrew prophets were charged with guarding the spiritual heritage of Israel, so the Pythian Apollo fostered the ideal of Hellenic character in religion, morality, and art. In speaking of Delphic prophecy we must dismiss the vulgar notion of merely predicting future events or revealing secrets. This lower art of soothsaying was, no doubt, in great demand in Greece at all periods of her history. Tablets discovered in Epirus in 1 877 l give examples of the questions addressed by its rude votaries to the oracle of Dodona. A certain Agis asks about some lost property mattresses and pillows whether they may have been stolen by a stranger. 2 Another 1 C. Carapanos, Dodone et ses Ruines. 2 ^Trepwret *A*yt$ At'a Naor [/cat Aiuvav] vjrp rCjv ffTpu/jidruv K[al T&V TrpocrJ/ce^aAcuwc, TO, d.7rw\oA[ei'] (? aTroAwAec), T) TUV HARVARD LECTURES inquires whether the god advises sheep-farming as an investment. 1 Even at Delphi some of the responses recorded are trivial enough. But the influence of Delphi must not be judged by such isolated utterances. The ethical and civilising purpose it served is apparent to every attentive reader of Greek history and literature. Apollo's chief office is not to declare the future ; nor is he concerned with minute ceremonial observances. He bears a personal message to the people ; he is the expounder of the divine will ; it is part of his function to maintain an ethical ideal and to quicken the national con- sciousness. The pious inquirer at his shrine approaches him in the confidence of glad com- panionship, and holds converse with him as with a living personality. The mind of the supreme god is declared not in dark signs through the voices of nature or through perplexing dreams, but by human utterance and in rhythmical speech. Apollo, the 7rpo^>ijrr)<; of Zeus, has human Trpo^rai of his own. But it is in accordance with the religion of Delphi to 1 a? tart. O.VTOL irpofiaTftiovri wvaiov KO.I t\i/j.ov. GREECE AND ISRAEL recognise not only a direct guidance from without, but also an inward revelation, telling of clear-felt duties and pointing to the god in the human breast. Apollo, speaking from the ' just- judging ' ] sanctuary, insists on inward motive, on purity of heart rather than on out- ward cleansing, on the spirit rather than on the letter of religion. He prefers the pious offering to the sumptuous sacrifice ; he maintains the cause of the weak and the oppressed of women, slaves, suppliants ; he inculcates the duty of reverence for oaths. But he was also the familiar friend and counsellor of the nation. He took into his keeping the civic life of Greece. Under Delphic supervision the colonial system was organised, and missionaries of Greek culture were settled in every land. The express sanction of the Delphic oracle was sought for the founding of colonies, such as Byzantium, Syracuse, Cyrene. Apollo, more- over, was invested with all the gracious attributes of knowledge and artistic skill. He was the god of science, of art, of poetry ; he presided 1 Find. Pyth. xi. 9. HARVARD LECTURES at the games and festivals. Under his influence were developed the contrasted ideals that mark the type of Hellene and of Barbarian the Hellene with his self-knowledge and self- control ; his love of ordered freedom ; his belief in reason and in the supremacy of the spirit over the senses : the Barbarian glorying in brute force, with blind impulses carrying him now towards anarchy, now towards slavery, unconscious of moral limitations, overstepping the bounds of law and reverence. I am speaking of the Delphic worship on its ideal side, apart from the inherent unrealities and corruptions in which it was embedded. Yet, even from this point of view, there are strik- ing differences as well as resemblances between Delphic and Jewish prophecy. The Delphic priestess, seized and subdued by an apparently divine possession, lifted out of herself in trans- port, presents a contrast to the Hebrew prophet whose reason and senses remain undisturbed under stress of inspiration. The familiar atti- tude, also, of the Greek towards his god is as unlike as can be to the distant and awful GREECE AND ISRAEL communion which the Hebrew prophet holds with the Almighty. Nor again does the history of the Hebrew prophets afford any parallel to the defection of Delphi from the national cause. Even before the Persian wars Delphi had more than once yielded to the temptations which beset an ambitious priesthood. Now, at the supreme crisis of the nation's history, she could not rise above timid and temporising counsels. She was, it must be owned, forced to make a difficult choice. Her connexions over the barbarian world were widely extended. The gifts of the East flowed in on her. Phrygia and Lydia were among her clients. Her material interests forbade her to pronounce the clear word which would have put her at the head of Greek resistance to the barbarians. And so, the place, which from the eighth century onward she had held as the recognised conscience of Greece, she now forfeited and never wholly regained. In politics, the championship of the Panhellenic cause was assumed by Athens ; and outside the political sphere, it devolved more and more on poets and philosophers to HARVARD LECTURES perpetuate the Delphic tradition by an effort to spiritualise the popular creed and reconcile it with a purer morality. The case of the Hebrew prophets is one of marked contrast. They never ceased to be the guardians of an ideal national sentiment. Not that they merely reflected prevalent opinion. If in a sense they were the spokesmen of the nation, they became so only by combating the will and denouncing the vices of their fellow-countrymen. Between prophets and people there was an unending conflict. We speak of the monotheism of the Jews ; yet they were ever prone to idolatry, being recalled from it only by warning and disasters. We speak of their spiritual faculty ; yet who more carnal than they? lovers of pleasure, lovers of ease, lovers of money. Again and again they were saved from themselves only by their inspired teachers, by the austere voice of prophecy. There were moments when religion stood opposed as one might think to a larger patriotism ; and the prophets had to bear the hard reproach of appearing anti-national. GREECE AND ISRAEL Jeremiah was cast into prison as a traitor. Two conflicting tendencies, as Renan has shown, were at work within Judaism : one, to mix with other nations and learn the ways of the world ; the other, to shun all contact with alien civilisa- tions art, commerce, foreign alliances being regarded as so many dangers which might detach the people from their true allegiance. The first policy that of expansion was the policy of the kings ; the second, the policy of the prophets. The attitude of the prophets towards outside movements and influences was one of extreme circumspection or distrust. But the narrower we might be inclined to say the more illiberal view was, after all, the truly national one. Once we grant that the peculiar mission of Israel was to guard the principle of monotheism, and that any premature attempt at expansion would have meant absorption into heathendom, it follows that the pursuit of secular aims and of a many-sided development would have been for the nation the abandon- ment of her high calling. Delphi in her earlier and better days was HARVARD LECTURES more happily placed in relation to outside currents of thought Vividly conscious though she was of the antithesis between Greeks and Barbarians, no timid fears that Hellenism might be lost in barbarism checked her forward energies. Greece must not be kept out of the general movement of the world. Rather it was dimly felt that the world was one day to be hellenised. The idea that is openly expressed in the fourth century B.C. of a larger Hellenism resting not on racial but on spiritual affinities seems to have floated vaguely before the mind at an earlier date. Delphi was long able to pursue a policy of progress and expansion with- out endangering either patriotism or religion. Here we strike on the fundamental difference between Hebrews and Greeks the Hebrews preoccupied, dominated by a single idea, and that a religious one ; the Greeks moved by the impulse for manifold culture. Two distinct individualities stand out in clear relief. To the Hebrews it was committed to proclaim to man- kind the one and supreme God, to keep alive his pure worship, to assert the inexorable moral GREECE AND ISRAEL 13 law in a corrupt and heathen world. For the Greeks the paramount end was the perfection of the whole nature, the unfolding of every power and capacity, the complete equipment of the man and of the citizen for secular existence. The Hebrews had no achievement to show in the purely secular sphere of thought and con- duct. They had no art, if we except music no science, no philosophy, no organised political life, no civic activity, no public spirit. In regard to plastic representation, they were pure iconoclasts ; for idolatry was a danger near and menacing. The search for causes the inspir- ing principle of the scientific spirit was for them either an idle occupation of which man soon wearies, as in Ecclesiastes, or an encroach- ment on the rights of God. The discovery of a reign of law in nature, which to the lonians of the sixth century B.C. seemed the highest function of the human intellect, was alien to the Hebrew mode of thought. Poetry indeed they had, unique in its kind : the lyrical utterances of the Psalms, outpourings of religious emotion unsurpassed, or rather un- I 4 HARVARD LECTURES \ approached, in depth and range of feeling ; that sublime drama, again, or dramatic lyric, the Book of Job ; the apocalyptic visions of the prophets, revealed in words such as those which Isaiah the son of Amos ' saw.' Yet if we ex- cept the idyll of the Book of Ruth and the Song of Solomon a beautiful and human love-song, which stands in such curious isolation from the other contents of the volume with which it is bound up Hebrew poetry is of a different order from that of our Western civilisation ; it is poetry lifted into another sphere and made one with religion. The epic, and the drama in its strict sense, are wanting. We have not the laughter as well as the tears of humanity ; no airy structures of the fancy ; none of the playful ironies of existence ; no half lights or subtle undertones ; none of the rich variety of poetry in its graceful and intermediate forms. The world which Hebrew poetry reproduces is not a second world recreated out of the elements of the actual, though separate from reality a region into * which we are transported by the power of imagin- ative sympathy. It is the actual world itself. I GREECE AND ISRAEL 15 The two living realities, God and the Soul, are face to face, engaged in everlasting colloquy. We overhear voices of pleading and warning, of pathos and hope, of repentance and forgiveness. And as with the individual so with the nation. All the spiritual experiences of the race, as summed up in an unforgotten past, are ex- pressed in language instinct with poetic emotion. In Hebrew poetry there is a pervading sub- limity which has no precise parallel in any other literature. To the Greek poet, ' Wonders are many and nothing is more wonderful than man ' : yet marvellous as are the achievements of man's art and skill, his daring courage, his civic inventiveness, all fall short of the moral sublimity he attains through suffering, by the endurance of god-sent calamity, and by an un- conquerable will. In Hebrew poetry, lyrical and descriptive, the note of sublimity is of a different kind. It belongs to the domain of heaven. Man is in himself ' a thing of nought,' ' even as a dream when one awaketh ' ; feeble and perish- able ; vicissitude and decay are stamped on his terrestrial life. ' The earth shall reel to and fro 1 6 HARVARD LECTURES \ like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage.' At the sight of the majestic order of the universe, still more in the contemplation of God's everlasting righteousness, his unsearchable greatness, there arises a sense of awe-struck exultation. ' The Lord is King, the earth may be glad thereof : yea the multitude of the isles may be glad thereof. Clouds and darkness are round about him : righteousness and judgment are the habitation of his seat.' 'The Lord sitteth above the water-flood : the Lord remaineth a King for ever.' Essentially sublime, too, are the descriptions which suggest the omnipotence of the divine word. ' And God said, Let there be light : and there was light.' ' For he spake and it was done : he commanded and it stood fast.' ' Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth ? declare, if thou hast understanding. ... Or who laid the corner stone thereof, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy ? Or who shut up the sea with doors . . . and said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further ; and here shall thy proud I GREECE AND ISRAEL 17 waves be stayed ? ' He who ' commandeth the sun and it riseth not, and sealeth up the stars.' Greek poetry in its more serious forms is almost as deeply penetrated with theology as is Hebrew poetry with religion. The Hebrew poets seldom dare to dwell upon those problems touching the moral government of the world which exercised a grave fascination over the imaginative mind of Greece. Yet at times some troubled reflections escape their lips, as in the Psalms, or in shorter outbursts of lyrical emotion. In one book, ho\vevcr, of the Bible the cry of humanity utters itself in tones of reasoned rebellion and with unique audacity. The Book of Job and the PromctJicns of Aeschylus may be placed side by side, as the two protests of the ancient world against divine oppression the one the protest of monotheism, the other of polytheism. Let us glance for a moment at these two poems. They form a luminous comment on the contrasted spirit of the two nations. The character of Zeus in the Prometheus exhibits every line and colour of tyranny as it 18 HARVARD LECTURES \ was understood by the Greeks. Zeus is the ' new lord,' l enforcing his will by relentless ministers, ' ruling by his own laws,' 2 ' keeping justice in his own hands,' 3 ' a harsh monarch and irresponsible,' 4 distrustful of his friends, 5 malevolent towards his subjects, ungrateful to those who had done him service. Even his friends do not question the judgment of his foes. His character is thrown into yet darker shade by the appearance in the play of lo, in whose history is recorded one of the distinctive marks of the tyrant a selfish and heartless love. The two sufferers, lo and Prometheus, meet by chance on the rocks of Scythia, the one the victim of the love of Zeus, the other of his hate ; the one the very emblem of restless movement, the other of a chained captivity. In various details, moreover, the old legend is so modified as to place in strong relief the beneficent effects of Prometheus' revolt. A single point may be 1 Prom. 96 vtos rayfe, cp. 149, 310, 389, 955. 2 Ib. 403 t'Si'otJ v6/j.ois Kparvvuv. 3 Ib. 187 Trap' eavrif TO SiKaiov i-^uv. * Ib. 324 rpa-xjus /J.6vapxos ovd' iiirfvBvvos Kpartl, cp. 35. 8 Ib. 224-225. GREECE AND ISRAEL 19 mentioned. In Hesiod the theft of fire leads indirectly to all the evils that flesh inherits. Till then, under the rule of Cronus men were as gods enjoying all happiness ware 6eol S' %a)ov. In the train of civilisation came all manner of woes and sicknesses. It was as it were the Fall of man. The age of ignorance was the age of gold. In Aeschylus, by the act of Prometheus, the human race so far from forfeiting a state of primitive well-being, rises for the first time out of a feeble, timorous exist- ence ; it subdues to its own use the forces of nature ; ' blind hopes ' are planted in man's heart the pledge of future progress. Nor did Prometheus, as some would have it, by an act of impatient philanthropy forestall the wise purposes of Zeus. The design of Zeus was to sweep away the race. Prometheus, therefore, rescued man not merely from a life of brute stagnation, but from death itself. Many critics have maintained that in ranging ourselves on the side of Prometheus against Zeus we are interpreting the drama in a modern sense and in a manner alien to the thought of HARVARD LECTURES Aeschylus. But the character of the benefactor is drawn in outlines no less firm than that of the oppressor of mankind ; and the words in which Prometheus sums up his own history accord with all the facts of the dramatic presentation : 'In chains ye see me, an ill-fated god, the foe of Zeus, because I loved mortals overmuch ' (Sta rrjv \Lav t\6r'rjTa /Sporty^). 1 Prometheus embodies the Greek type of moral heroism as truly as Zeus does that of tyranny. The hero of Greek poetry, the hero as Athens loved to portray him, is not only eminent for courage or indomitable in his will-power ; he is also generous in sympathy; pitiful to the weak ; moved by a chivalrous, a romantic impulse to redress the wrongs of the world. Prometheus unites the two sides of the heroic character. He is tender as well as magnanimous. ' Out of the strong came forth sweetness.' Towards the Ocean Nymphs he shows a delicate and gentle courtesy. The tormented and confiding lo pours her woe into his ear ; and the sublime sorrow of the god finds room within it for the 1 Prom. 119-122. GREECE AND ISRAEL plaintive outpourings of the mortal. And, as ' love overmuch ' has been his fault, so all creation, animate and inanimate, mourns in sympathy with him in the splendid chorus, lines 397-435- If this, then, is the true reading of the play, it presents the struggle between two wills, each equally unyielding, the one strong in the con- sciousness of physical power, the other in moral greatness and wisdom. That Aeschylus should have placed Zeus in such a light before an Athenian audience, has seemed to many readers an impiety so daring as to be impossible. But let us not lose sight of the far-off period at which the action is imaginatively laid. The Aeschylean heroes are often men in whose veins the blood of gods still runs Koi)7ru> iv t^rnyAov cu/xa Sai[j.6vwv. 1 In this play they are not godlike men but actual gods. We are carried back to an age anterior even to the action of the Iliad. One dynasty of gods has overthrown another, but not without the rough and lawless deeds which 1 Aesch. Fr. 146. HARVARD LECTURES accompany such a change. The sovereignty of Zeus is as yet insecure. The ' new lord ' of Olympus has had a beginning ; he will also have an end unless he mends his ways of governing. The shadow of dispossession hangs over him. He is subject to a mysterious power stronger than himself; between his will and the supreme Fate there is still a discord. His omnipotence is limited by this control. So far is he from being omniscient that he is ignorant of the secret on which the permanence of his throne depends. His reign is stained by caprice and crime. This is surely not the same Zeus that is elsewhere called in Aeschylus, ' king of kings,' ' most blessed of the blest,' ' all-seeing,' ' who rewards all men according to their works,' ' who guides men in the path of wisdom.' Rather, he represents a passing epoch ; he is the ruler of the visible order of things in an era when might and right are not yet reconciled. The play itself looks forward to a future which shall adjust the disorders of the present. We cannot here discuss the difficult question of the sequel ; but once we admit that within the I GREECE AND ISRAEL 23 mythological framework of the Greek religion the supreme god might be exhibited as subject to a law of development, and as growing from lawlessness into righteousness ; that even for Zeus Time could be the great Teacher, in the full significance of Prometheus' words aAA' eKStSacr/cet Trdvd' o y/y/iacr/cojj' xpovos*- then, many of the elements for the future reconciliation are ready to hand. As Aeschylus elsewhere sets the Eumenides against Apollo, the old against the new, so in the Prometheus does he set Zeus against the Titan, the new against the old. In each case the strife must be resolved in a final harmony. In the Prometheus^ the sovereignty of the supreme god becomes assured only when Wisdom and Power shall have entered into indissoluble union. Wisdom without Power is ineffectual : Power without Wisdom, though it may last for a time, cannot be enthroned as immortal. 2 This is probably 1 Prom. 981. 2 This view of the Prometheus, which I have placed before my pupils for more than twenty years, is, I find, supported by the authority of so eminent a scholar as Dissen, in a letter to Welcker printed in Welcker's Trilogie 1824; see an interesting 24 HARVARD LECTURES I the explanation of what at first sight seems the most daring audacity ever enacted on the Greek stage. The mind of Aeschylus loved to move among the dim forms of the elder world. Before his vision gods in their succession came and went. Viewed in the immense perspective of the past the sway of these gods was almost as ephemeral as that of mortals. With them too the higher displaced the lower. Their story, like that of humanity, was one of moral growth. There was a law of evolution, a process of becoming, from which even deity was not exempt. To Aeschylus the dramatist no theme could well have been more congenial than that of the Prometheus, giving scope, as it did, for a conflict of will-power on a scale of such colossal grandeur. But Aeschylus the profoundly religious theologian would surely have shrunk from a dramatic situation so perilous to piety, were it not that the fluid and ever- shifting forms of Greek mythology article in the Classical Review, March 1904, by Janet Case. Also it has been ably and independently put forward by Professor Lewis Campbell in his introduction to the Prometheus Bound (1890). I GREECE AND ISRAEL 25 lent themselves to the utmost freedom of poetic handling. In passing to the Book of Job, we observe some points of detailed resemblance in the setting of the two poems. Just as Prometheus at the outset maintains silence one of those eloquent Aeschylean silences so too Job held his peace ' seven days and seven nights ' ; and then, like Prometheus, reviews his life, proudly proclaiming his own innocence. His friends seek to convince him that he has done wrong. They cannot extort from him the admission. As compared with other men he knows himself to be guiltless. And as the chief actors use similar language about themselves, the language they use about the deity is also in some degree similar. In Prometheus it is an expression of proud defiance towards one whom he regards as a tyrant and an upstart, and whose future overthrow he calmly contemplates. In Job, the voice of accusation seems to touch more nearly on blasphemy, as addressed to a God who was not only supreme, but in the highest sense righteous. It is, however, this very 26 HARVARD LECTURES i perfection of power and goodness which adds a sting to the apparent injustice. The feeling is one of conflict and strange perplexity. Almost in the same breath with passionate remonstrance and complaint there come accents of trust and utter self-surrender. It is the sort of irony which belongs to love. In form an accusation it is in reality an expression of belief in the very attributes that are denied, an appeal to the deity to remove the inconsistencies which seem to darken his character, to explain the flaws in his own work, to reconcile his goodness and his power. Hence the sudden transitions and alternations of mood. Now God is a hard adversary ; for man to plead against him is despair : yet plead he will, though it should be at the cost of his life (ch. ix. 20- 21). 'Thou knowest that I am not wicked' (ch. x. 7) ; 'is it good unto thee that thou shouldest oppress ? ' (ch. x. 3). In his anguish God and his enemies seem ranged on one side (ch. xvi. 7-16). But again by a sudden revulsion of feeling he turns to God, whom he invokes to be judge in his own cause ; he makes him GREECE AND ISRAEL 27 his arbiter even while he is his adversary: ' Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, and he that voucheth for me is on high' (ch. xvi. 19 Rev. Vers.). He complains that God hides from him, that he is not in the East nor in the West. ' Oh that I knew where I might find him ! that I might come even to his seat ! I would order my cause before him.' ' When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold ' (ch. xxiii. i-io). ' Now I have ordered my cause ; I know that I shall be justified ' (ch. xiii. i 8). The sense of ill treatment and despair is heightened in Job's case by a special circumstance. Whereas Prometheus is conscious that he is an immortal and that his victory in the future is assured, Job has no clear belief in immortality. At the most, it stands out dimly as a hope. The old patriarchal theory of life was in need of no hereafter. The good man was always rewarded, the bad man punished. But the theory was giving way ; it was discredited by experience ; and with the blank so created the whole scheme of things fell into confusion. For commonplace minds, such as Job's friends, 28 HARVARD LECTURES \ the old formulas still sufficed. But to those who looked steadily on life the discord between merit and reward was apparent. How account for the divine misrule ? There are moments when Job hints, as it would seem, at a life here- after as the key to these moral problems ; but such rare glimpses are soon lost in deeper darkness. The endings of the two poems are signifi- cantly different. The decisive contrast lies in the characters of the two deities whose justice has been impugned. The God who is the antagonist of Prometheus has power, but he has not goodness : the God who is the antagonist of Job is perfect in goodness as in power. And so Prometheus, strong in conscious right and in foreknowledge of the future, remains unshaken by persuasions and threats. At the close of the drama, from out of elemental ruin earthquake and lightning and tempest he utters his last defiant words : ' Thou seest what unjust things I suffer.' Job, who in all his troubled question- ings has never lost his central trust in the God whom he has upbraided, ends by a retractation : GREECE AND ISRAEL ' I know that thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of thine can be restrained ... I have uttered that which I understood not, things too wonderful for me, which I knew not ' (ch. xlii. 2, 3 Rev. Vers.). The infinite mysteries of creation, as they are flashed before him in a series of sublime descriptions (ch. xxviii.- xli.), have subdued the heart as well as the in- tellect. Love, dormant throughout, is now fully awakened. Yet even for Job the bewildering problem remained unsolved. Jehovah's answer had merely shown him Nature's immensity and the nothingness of Man. While philosophy had for the Jews no mean- ing, history had a deeper significance than it bore to any other people. It was the chief factor in their national unity, the source from which they drew ethical and spiritual enlighten- ment Thither they turned as to living oracles inscribed with the finger of the Almighty. To history they appealed as the supreme tribunal of God's justice. Nor was the history of their past merely a possession of their own ; it was a treasure they held in trust for the human race. 30 HARVARD LECTURES i The story of the Jews was part and parcel of the ' book of the generations of man. 5 Before the eyes of the prophets history as a whole emerged as an orderly plan, conceived in the counsels of the eternal, slowly unfolding itself in the rise and fall of empires, in startling catastrophes, in sharp and swift punishments which smite the innocent with the guilty ; but not less in the normal processes of a nation's life, its growth, its" decay, its obedience, its rebellion, in the seed-time and harvest of the moral world. The great monarchies, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, pass across the scene. Their fortunes cross and interlock with those of the chosen race. Israel is the pivot on which their destiny turns. In their pride they boast of victories not their own. The Assyrian says ' By the strength of my hand I have done it, and by my wisdom ' ; but they are each an instrument, though they know it not, in the hands of the Almighty, by which he chastises his forgetful people or re-admits them to his favour. History, in a word, is the drama in which God himself is the protagonist, vindicating GREECE AND ISRAEL 31 his justice and moral government on the stage of the visible world. Never has any people been so conscious of its own spiritual calling as the Jews ; none has had so profound an intuition of the future. They pondered their long preparation and equipment for their office, its unique design, their repeated lapses, their baffled hopes, the promises postponed. The outward trappings of national existence fell away. All that constitutes history in the eyes of secular nations war and politics, the deeds of kings, heroic struggles for independence these things occu- pied an ever lessening space in their annals ; their only life was the indestructible life of the spirit. They were content to suffer and to wait. They had all the tenacity of hope. Disen- cumbered of material greatness, they enlisted themselves on the side of purely spiritual forces. It was the prerogative of their race to be ' an ensign to the nations,' to bear the banner of the true God. The only Greek historian whose philosophy of history recalls in some chief features that of 32 HARVARD LECTURES \ the Jewish Scriptures is Herodotus. To him the course of the world, its incidents great and small, are under divine governance. The same ' forethought ' l or providence which is at work in maintaining a just balance of forces within the animal kingdom, likewise presides over the destiny of empires. This supreme power reveals its will through various modes of utterance through oracular voices, through signs, through disturbances in the physical order of nature. It humiliates human pride, it lures on insolence to its ruin, it pursues the guilty through genera- tions. And as in Jewish history the fortunes of Israel intermingle with the secular currents of universal history, so in Herodotus Greek history is read in its larger and world-wide relations. The great military monarchies pass before our eyes in a series of apparent digressions ; but the main theme is never forgotten ; the tragic action moves onward through retarding incidents, till at last the divine retribution hastens towards its goal, and all the pride of the East, gathered into one under Persia, flings 1 irpovolr), Herod, iii. 108. GREECE AND ISRAEL itself in preordained ruin on the free land of Hellas. The problems of politics never exercised the mind of Israel. No questions arose about royalty, aristocracy, or democracy, as entitled to put forward their several claims ; there was no thought of tempering the evils of unmixed or extreme constitutions, or of harmonising conflicting ideals, such as at an early period seized upon the reflective spirit of Greece. The Jewish wars of liberation were waged not for political, but for religious freedom. It has been remarked by Renan that the Jews accepted with easy acquiescence any political regime which, like that of Persia, was fairly tolerant of their religious worship. On the other hand, the mind of Israel, ill-fitted indeed to found a secular state, or to adjust the various functions of government, went out in aspiration towards the citizenship of a larger country. The one- ness of God carried with it, as an implicit con- sequence, the oneness of humanity. Even the law, though in the first instance a covenant with a single people, and in spite of its minor D 34 HARVARD LECTURES \ enactments and disciplinary rules, itself became a unifying power. Its moral precepts, flowing from one God as the sole source of law, had a universal and binding force. And if the demands of the law knew no restriction of race, so its privileges were open to all. No ancient constitution accorded to strangers such a position as they enjoyed under the Mosaic code. At Athens resident aliens received a more humane and favoured treatment than in any other state in Greece. Still, even there, they had no legal or civic status ; access to the courts was secured to them only through the service of a patron ; and though this measure of recognition may be put down in part to Attic ^>i\av0p(07rla or kindliness, the direct motive undoubtedly was a commercial one. With the Jews the rights of the alien are placed on a clear religious basis the unity of God involving the brotherhood of man. ' Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger, as for one of your own country : for I am the Lord your God' (Lev. xxiv. 22). The declaration that ' God loveth the stranger ' (Dent. x. 1 8) GREECE AND ISRAEL 35 involved far-reaching consequences which cannot be extracted from the kindly religious sentiment expressed in the Homeric words, ' the stranger and the beggar are from Zeus.' The lessons, moreover, of suffering and the memory of the house of bondage are brought in to reinforce the ethical duty. ' Thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt' (Lev. xix. 34). At the heart of Judaism beneath its hard and often repelling exclusiveness the idea of universal humanity was being matured. With the preaching of the prophets in the eighth century Judaism became essentially a social religion, a religion of humanity. In the last days of the kingdom of Judah the feeling of compassion for the weak, of sympathy for the poor and the oppressed, takes a deeper and tenderer tone. The sense of the inequalities of life strike in upon the mind with a new and piercing force. ' To undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free ' ; ' to open the eyes of the blind ' ; ' to satisfy the afflicted soul ' ; to deliver suffering humanity from the darkness of the prison-house this 36 HARVARD LECTURES i became the absorbing passion of the Hebrew. Such a moral enthusiasm could recognise no restrictions of age or country. In a regenerate society, and under the law of the spiritual king- dom foreshadowed by the prophets, all barriers must be broken down. The families of the earth, already united by a common origin, are henceforth to be united by a common hope. ' For my house shall be called an house of prayer for all people.' Greek thinkers no less than Hebrew prophets figure to their imagination an ideal society. In Plato's Republic justice finds an earthly home. The outward fabric and framework of the city are essentially of the Hellenic type. In its laws and bye-laws, as distinct from the moral principles on which it is based, it is subject to the usual Hellenic limitations with, indeed, one notable exception, that war between Hellenes is forbidden, and that one Hellenic state may not enslave another. But the distinction between Greeks and barbarians is retained ; and within the city sharp lines of demarcation are drawn. There are full citizens, for the sake of I GREECE AND ISRAEL 37 whose complete training in virtue and intellect the state exists ; the governing power resides in their hands ; but beyond these there is a great disinherited class, of traders and artisans who are not true members but only parts of the community, and of slaves who are mere instruments for carrying out their masters' will. So far Plato does not rise above his own age and country. But his real concern is not with the external organisation of the state. The secret he desires to discover is the true method of training intellect and character: how human nature may be moulded into the form of perfect goodness ; how the highest natural endowments, the love of beauty, which reveals the world of art and literature, and the love of truth, which makes man one with himself and one with his fellow -men, may be fostered and combined. Plato is under no illusions as to any facile mode of reforming society. The high hopes of early youth had been shattered. The lesson of Greek history was to him full of despair. Selfishness and corruption, the inordinate assertion of the individual without regard to the welfare of the 38 HARVARD LECTURES \ whole this was what confronted him in civic life. The thinking man who shrinks from engaging in the turmoil of faction may well be tempted to ' hold his peace and do his own business,' ' content if only he can live his own life and be pure from evil or unrighteousness, and depart in peace and good will with bright hopes.' l No merely external changes could restore a society so deeply corrupt. Until wisdom and beneficence, knowledge and power the power of government combined with true philosophic insight were united in the same persons, man- kind could have no release from evil. We are reminded of the union foreshadowed in the Prometheus of power and goodness in the govern- ment of Olympus. Plato is bent on arriving at an intellectual apprehension of the moral forces which underlie all political and social improvement. On the one hand he traces the ascent of the soul, of the nobler philosophic nature, from the darkness to the light, and studies the law of its upward progress ; on the 1 Rep. vi. 496 D-E. GREECE AND ISRAEL 39 other hand he gives a penetrating psychological analysis of the successive stages of moral decline both in states and individuals. The fervour with which he describes the power of philosophy to raise and transform life, to bring thought and action into harmony, has the glow of religious emotion. His words fall little short of Hebrew prophecy in their intensity. But let us not mistake his drift and purpose. He has not the directly operative aim of the social reformer. He is not seeking to ameliorate the outward conditions of existence, or to raise the lot of the poor and struggling. He is well aware that the earthly state, in which he seeks to embody his highest conception of justice or human goodness, is an ideal, and that the pattern of his city is ' laid up in the heavens.' The regeneration of society stands out before him as a far-off hope. He strains his eyes after the heavenly vision, but it is the vision of a philosopher not a prophet, of one who is ' the spectator of all time and all being ' ; for whom the laws of truth and conduct are the great primary reality, towards which the mind must 40 HARVARD LECTURES i strive in far-reaching aspiration, though no era of righteousness is as yet dawning on the world. Yet he insists that the ideal is none the worse for being merely an ideal. His belief never wavers in the sovereignty of reason, in the affinity of the human soul to the divine, and in the vision of the Good as the illuminating power of human life. It is the business of the philosopher to open the eyes and to direct the groping steps of the multitude. ' Could they see the philosopher as he is, they would certainly accept him for their guide.' The vision of the prophets differed from the vision even of the greatest of the philosophers in the ever increasing clearness with which its reality was apprehended. The spirit of hope, so distinctive of the Jewish people, the invincible optimism which survived every disappointment, sustained them to the last. They laid hold of the future as their own possession, with a confi- dence unapproached by any other nation, unless we may find a distant parallel in the exhilaration of tone with which the Roman poets forecast the imperial greatness of Rome. To the Greeks GREECE AND ISRAEL 41 the future is dim and inscrutable; poets and prose writers repeat with many variations the sad refrain, ' uncertain is the future ' ] aSi]\ov TO //.eAAoz/. ' Forecasts of the future,' says Pindar, 'have been doomed to blindness.' 1 The future is the secret belonging to the gods, and it were presumptuous for man to seek to pene- trate it. His duty is to seize the present with its limitless possibilities, and to use it with that rational energy and forethought which are born of an enlightened experience. It is a temper of mind wholly unlike that of the Jew, the loss of whose earthly country seemed to point him forward with a more victorious certitude to ' the city which hath foundations,' to the Heavenly Jerusalem. 'He hath set Eternity in their heart': 2 so might we sum up the spirit of Israel. But the Jewish ideal simplified life by leaving half of it untouched. It remained for Greece to make the earth a home, ordered and well equipped for 1 Find. Ol. viii. ad init. rSiv 8 /xeXXocrwv rerv S-TpaKTa, dv6vrjTa,. GREECE AND PHOENICIA 53 infrequently detached in sentiment. Nor did they show much power of self-government or any aptitude for entering into political union with others. To keep on good terms with the native populations on whose land they had settled, and to turn to profitable use the resources of the neighbouring tribes, was their chief endeavour. Carthage, indeed, the greatest of Phoenician colonies, displayed a magnificent and conquering energy ; but her projects of territorial ambition in Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain were precisely the occasion of her down- fall. The influence of Greater Greece is the determining fact in the history of the Hellenic people. Already in the sixth century B.C. the coasts and islands were studded with Greek towns from the Crimea to North Africa, from the regions of the Caucasus to Lower Italy, to Sicily, and even to Gaul. In the Macedonian period the chain of Greek cities extended to the Indus. Plato might speak of the sea as ' a bitter and brackish neighbour,' l a pleasant thing enough 1 Laws iv. 75 A tt\jUi'p6i' KO.L iriKpbv yeirovrjfj.a. 54 HARVARD LECTURES n to have near you, but dangerous, and likely to bring in other strange products besides foreign merchandise. Nature, however, had marked out a maritime destiny for the Hellenes, and their colonial activity was the highest political achievement of the race. Different motives led the several states to send out colonies. Greece was a poor country Trevirj aei /core avvrpcxfios eVrt: 1 the growth of population outstripped the means of existence, and a foreign market was necessary to supplement the food supply and to furnish the material for native industries. But though actual need was perhaps the most frequent of the impelling causes of emigration, the highest instincts of the race sought other satisfaction in the colonising energy. Each founding of a city was a missionary enterprise. The emigrants carried with them the Apolline worship as the symbol of their spiritual unity ; and, as we expressly read in regard to the found- ing of Naxos (735 B.C.) the earliest of the Greek colonies in Sicily the first act on touching the new shore was to erect an altar to Apollo 1 Herod, vii. 102. GREECE AND PHOENICIA 55 Archegetes. 1 The jealousies which were so rife in the narrow cantons of Greece were softened and sometimes forgotten in absence from home. The sense of Hellenic kinship was deepened and clarified. The Hellenes became aware of themselves as children of one family, however widely dispersed ; guardians of a common herit- age which they were bound to protect against surrounding barbarism ; they listened to one Homer, they were nurtured on the same heroic legends ; on the same days they sacrificed to the same gods as their kinsfolk in the mother cities ; they lived under customs and institutions similar in spirit to the old. Great diversity of aim and method prevailed in the colonising states. Corinth, the Venice of antiquity, pursued a commercial policy, and that policy rested on a colonial basis. Athens, entering much later on the field of colonial expansion, kept larger political and social ends in view. Her colonial empire, growing out of a religious federal union, owed its final and distinc- tive form to the part the city played in repelling 1 Thucyd. vii. 3. I. 56 HARVARD LECTURES \\ the common danger which menaced Greece during the Persian wars. Even into the work of colonisation Athens sought to introduce a large and comprehensive spirit. A salient example occurs in the history of Magna Graecia, the home of so many novel and in- teresting experiments in social organisation. After the destruction of Sybaris, the new city (henceforth named Thurii) was restored under the guidance of Pericles, who desired to make it a Panhellenic community : from the outset it comprised not Athenians only but Arcadians, Eleans, and Boeotians. But widely as the states of Greece differed as colonising agencies, Hellenic colonisation, viewed generally, had one notable characteristic. Fitting in with the spirit of adventure and the disinterested curio- sity of a restless and daring intellect, it carried men into the heart of every science. With the enlargement of the physical horizon new in- tellectual needs sprang up. The art of naviga- tion demanded a closer study of astronomy and mathematics. The opening up of unknown lands, the importation of unfamiliar products, GREECE AND PHOENICIA 57 the acquaintance gained with alien civilisations, whetted the desire for anthropological and his- torical research. We can observe the fascinat- ing influence of geographical discoveries on the imagination of a poet such as Aeschylus. We are reminded of the effect of similar ex- plorations on our own Elizabethan age. Indeed, the versatile colonial intellect of Greece, with its many-sided and, as it might seem, incom- patible activities, produced a type of character which it is not too fanciful to compare with so romantic a personality as that of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was ' poet, historian, chemist, soldier, philosopher, courtier.' The intellectual movement of the Greek world during the sixth century, and down to about the middle of the fifth century, radiates from Greater Greece. The philosophic intellect of Ionia led the way. All the early philosophers are lonians by birth Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, Xeno- phanes, Heraclitus ; and of these the first three belong to one city Miletus. That same Miletus, which from the eighth century onwards sent forth 58 HARVARD LECTURES n intrepid mariners, who penetrated to the remotest corners of the Euxine, planting some eighty settlements along the 'inhospitable' shores, also made fearless excursions into the domain of physical science, and gave to western Europe its first speculative impulse. In philosophy, the colonies of Southern Italy and Sicily followed the Ionian lead. In poetry, the earliest outburst of inspired song after Homer came from the island of Lesbos. Sicily gave birth to comedy, to dramatic dialogue, to rhetoric. The smaller islands contributed their share. Ceos produced the great Simonides ; Samos, Pythagoras ; Cos, Hippocrates, the father of medicine ; a century later Crete gave to the world the Cynic Diogenes ; and Melos, the ' atheist ' Diagoras. Withdraw from Greece the colonies of her own blood, and you rob her of some of her greatest names ; not only those just mentioned, but also Terpander, Archilochus, Mimnermus, Arion, Alcaeus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Anacreon, Ibycus, Bacchylides, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Herod- otus, Hellanicus, Gorgias I need not complete the list. GREECE AND PHOENICIA 59 In the colonies again the most diverse political experiments were tried. The old forms of constitution proved to be too rigid for the new countries. Difficult problems pre- sented themselves and pressed for practical solution. All the adaptive powers of the race, their rich and flexible intelligence, their evrpa- TreXia, were called into play. Rival centres of industry or culture each acquired a distinctive character. The literature, the art, the mode of thought of the several colonies took their own local colouring. The marvel is that at a dis- tance from home, a mere handful of strangers, they were not merged in the prevailing barbar- ism ; that they did not ' forget their language, forget their poets, and their gods.' l As it was, they not only maintained their Hellenism de- spite all diversity of developments, but enriched the common stock by a ceaseless output of ideas. The sacred fire taken from the hearth of the metropolis city, they kept alive, and from it kindled new and illuminating thoughts which they transmitted to the land of their origin. 1 Perrot, Histoire de f Art dans I' Antiquite, vii. 299. 60 HARVARD LECTURES n The history of Greek art l offers multiplied instances of this vital and effective interaction between the colonies and the mother city. A colony, free from the hampering traditions of a school, aided, it might be, by the discovery of a new material as the medium of artistic expression, would strike out some bold experiment which only received its finished form in the old home. Among the causes which acted as a powerful stimulus on artistic production none ranks higher than the agonistic contests of Greece. The desire to win national renown in this field of coveted achievement created a civic rivalry, intense in character and of far-reaching con- sequence. Each state was eager to know and appropriate the best results that had elsewhere been accomplished. Hence there was an un- limited interchange of art products extending even to the outlying regions of Hellenism. Famous artists travelled with their wares. Not only were the great religious and social centres, such as Olympia, Delphi, Delos, Miletus reposi- 1 Here I am much indebted to hints kindly given me by Professor Waldstein. GREECE AND PHOENICIA 61 tories we might almost say museums where works of art could be viewed, but minor locali- ties also took a pride in acquiring masterpieces representing well-known individuals or different schools. This free trade in art had in it an educative and expansive force ; it gave unity no less than variety to artistic culture ; it quickened the sense of Hellenic patriotism ; it had an influence analogous to that exercised by the poetic recitations of the wandering rhap- sodists on the thought, the language, and the sentiment of Greece. Here I can do no more than allude to the topic. For the detail we should recall the history of sculpture from the second half of the seventh century onward, especially in connex- ion with Chios, Crete, Samos, and other islands, whence the hereditary craft of certain families and schools found its way to the Grecian main- land. To Glaucus of Chios is attributed the invention of soldering iron ; to Melas of Chios, the first working of marble an art which he bequeathed to his son Micciades and his direct descendants, Archermus, Bupalus, and Athennis. 62 HARVARD LECTURES n In Samos the art of bronze-casting originated with Rhoecus and his son Theodorus. Crete produced a well-known school of sculpture, the earliest names being those of Dipoenus and Scyllis, who travelled through Greece proper, visiting Sicyon, Argos, Cleonae, and Ambracia, and there introduced their new methods. Later, during the second half of the sixth century and the first half of the fifth, we note the fresh and daring originality displayed in sculpture by Sicily pre-eminently in the earlier metopes from Selinus and also by Magna Graecia. Pythagoras of Rhegium, a rival of Myron of Eleutherae, and famous chiefly as the sculptor of Olympic victors, introduced his principles of ' symmetry and rhythm ' ; he marks the last step in the process of emancipation from archaic and hieratic bonds, which prepared the way for the age of Phidias. Another colonial sculptor of genius was a contemporary of Phidias Paeonius of Mende, near Aenus in the Thracian Chersonese. His Nike, discovered at Olympia in 1875, exhibits an original spirit which un- doubtedly influenced the art of the fifth century. GREECE AND PHOENICIA 63 Again, in painting, Polygnotus of Thasos, under whom were executed the great mural decorations at Athens, appears to have held with Cimon a position similar to that of Phidias with Pericles. In the Periclean age itself one of the most distinctive features of Attic art is its breadth of view, its large hospitality, its power of assimilating every fruitful element of artistic taste and culture which came to it from all other Hellenic centres. Even in the following period, when Argos and Sicyon and Athens took the lead, it is worth remembering that among sculptors Scopas was a Parian ; and in the fourth century, when painting reached its highest point, the masters of the art were Zeuxis from Heraclea, Parrhasius from Ephesus, and Apelles from Colophon. In that enchanted island of Sicily, which for more than a thousand years was the battle- ground of southern Europe, swept by a long succession of conquering races, Greeks and Phoenicians confronted one another for centuries. At certain critical moments of history Phoenicia threatened to engulf our Western civilisation. 64 HARVARD LECTURES n Yet to-day, go where we may through the island, it is Greece that speaks to us, in her theatres and temples, in her ruined columns and along deserted shores. The voice of Greek poets, Greek philosophers and historians, who lived or died there, is still heard in the undying pages of the past. As for Phoenicia, in Sicily as elsewhere, her memorial has perished with her. In her day she did some humble, but real, service to mankind in helping forward, though with a reluctant hand, a more gifted people on the road of material progress. To her they owed their first lessons in shipbuilding and navigation, their knowledge of some of the lesser arts and crafts, and, as it would seem, certain practical applications of arithmetic. But, with all her wealth, she passed away, as was foretold by Ezekiel in his doom of Tyre, and the vestiges of her that remain have an antiquarian, not a human interest. It is just this human quality, lacking in the Phoenicians, which marks so conspicuously the Hellenic temperament. There is in it a natural expansiveness, a desire to enter into kindly ii GREECE AND PHOENICIA 65 human relations with others, to exchange greetings with the stranger on the road, to give utterance to the passing thought or fugitive emotion ; or, if oral utterance is impossible, to make writing serve the turn of speech, and so bind together in friendly intimacy the present and the absent, the living and the dead. Even inanimate objects are drawn into the circle of this genial human intercourse. A bowl fore- stalls your curiosity by telling you something of its personal history. A word or jotting on a piece of pottery sometimes a mere " vrpocr- ayopevw " carries the message of the artist to his friend. Or again, a fragment inscribed with the name of an Athenian youth calls up a tender reminiscence of old friendship when it is found far from Athens in the rock-tombs of Etruria. The "^aipe," again, that is uttered over the departed is repeated on the sepulchral slab ; and not infrequently the farewell word is expanded into a brief dialogue between the dead man and the surviving friend, or even a chance wayfarer. Such sepulchral greetings have a memorial value of a very special kind. 66 HARVARD LECTURES n Unlike more formal monumental inscriptions, they are the direct address of person to person ; they make an immediate appeal to the heart for the very reason that they are so simple, so spontaneous ; as if the unspoken thought had been intercepted before it reached the lips, and had taken external shape while yet upon its way. In all these instances mind is not subjected to things material ; it is the inner world that dominates the outward. This is of a piece with other characteristics already noted. In Plato's ideal commonwealth material well-being does not occupy a commanding place. The true constituent elements of happiness are moral and intellectual. It is only in the Utopias of the comic poets that material enjoy- ments come into the foreground of the picture. In one of the fragments of Pherecrates 1 (a contemporary of Aristophanes), human beings are by the bounty of Plutus equipped with all good things without any effort of their own : ' Of their own accord rivers of black broth, 1 ap. Athen. vi. 97. GREECE .-/AY) PHOENICIA 67 gushing and gurgling, will flow along the high- ways from the springs of 1'lutus. . . . From the roofs rivulets will run of the juice of the grape with cheese-cakes and hot soup and omelets made of lilies and anemones.' Some rabbinical descriptions of the material happiness that will prevail in the visible kingdom of God do not fall far short of this comic paradise. The rivers will flow with wine and honey ; the trees will grow bread and delicacies ; in certain districts springs will break forth which will cure all diseases ; suffering will cease, and men will be very long-lived, if they die at all. Even if we admit that 'a good dose of materialism may be necessary for religion that we may not starve the world,' still Judaism, even in its loftiest moments, is a little too much inclined to hanker after material delights, and to express itself in a form which would have shocked the ideal sentiment of Greece. Take again the enjoyment of a Greek festival. The occasion was not, as with other nations, one for eating and drinking. The people shared the more refined tastes of their gods, who, at the agonistic 68 HARVARD LECTURES n and dramatic festivals, came forth for the day from their sanctuaries, and mingled gladly with the throng of worshippers, demanding from them no costly banquets, but perfected human powers dedicated to the service of religion : physical manhood with all its dis- ciplined skill ; powers too of intellect and imagination, expressing themselves in diverse forms of poetry and music. Similarly in the great national athletic contests, so long as the finer instinct of Greece prevailed over Asiatic ostentation, the reward of the victor had no material value ; the wreath of wild olive, laurel, or parsley, with which he was crowned, was but the symbol of his consecration, nor did he retain it as a personal possession ; it was hung up in the shrine of the local deity. The Greek way of regarding private luxury offers a similar note of idealism. Money lavished on purely personal enjoyment was counted vulgar, oriental, inhuman. It was an offence against good taste, a violation of the law of measure and self-restraint, the glorifica- tion of the individual on his selfish side. It GREECE AND PHOENICIA 69 implied a failure to discern the true ends which make social existence desirable. The famous saying of Pericles, ' We are lovers of the beautiful, but without extravagance ' (CKoK,a- \ovp,ev jap ytier' e^reA-eta?), may be taken as the motto of the private life of the Periclean age. Refinement and simplicity such was the ideal union. Mere economy had no attraction for a Greek, the real question being not the amount you spend, but the occasion of the outlay and the end in view. As for meanness, it was viewed with special disfavour. \Ve ma}- recall the man in Aristotle's Ethics, who, having spent liberally on a fitting object, then spoils the whole effect for the sake of a trifle (ei> fjuicpw TO Ka\bv ttTToXet). 1 But, of all forms of meanness, the worst was that which was combined with display ; of which we have an example in a fragment of a comic poet, where an economical person boasts that he had invited his guests to a wedding breakfast on the express understand- ing that they were each to bring their own food. Large outlay on rare and interesting occasions 1 Eth. Nic. iv. 2. 21. 70 HARVARD LECTURES even in private life meets with approval from Aristotle ; and one of the most characteristically Greek features in his description of such justifi- able outlay is that not only is the outlay on the great scale, it is also in the grand manner. The total effect is impressive ; it depends not on the amount expended, but on a certain harmonious and aesthetic quality that affects the imagination. 1 Great outlay, according to the old ideal of Athens, should be limited to public objects. In the next generation, Demosthenes looks back with regret to the lost simplicity of private life. In earlier Athens, he says, the houses of Miltiades and Themistocles differed in no way from those of the ordinary citizen, while the public buildings and temples were on a scale of grandeur and magnificence that no future ages could surpass. 2 The vast sums spent on the Parthenon and other edifices have, indeed, been criticised by some modern economists as so much wealth locked up in bricks and mortar as unproductive expenditure which contributed 1 Eth. NIC. iv. 2. 10. 2 Dem. Olynth. iii. 25-26. GREECE AND PHOENICIA 71 to the ruin of Athens. From the narrow financial point of view it may be difficult to justify such expenditure. But, if we try to look at it in the Athenian spirit, is there not much to be said in its defence ? Simplicity in the home, splendour in the city that was the principle. To spend largely on our private selves, on our personal satisfaction, was luxury, and culpable luxury. To incur great outlay for worthy objects which transcend self and minister to the enjoyment of the community, was praiseworthy munificence. The individual man and his material surroundings passed away; the city was the enduring reality ; it was in some sense a spiritual fabric, the embodiment of the people's nobler aspirations, of their higher, their collective self. All the efforts of art might worthily be expended in its service ; that wealth was not wasted which added to its beauty and dignity, and inspired in the citizens a passionate and admiring attachment. Here, again, the Athenians look beyond material interest or profit, and estimate the value of a thing in relation to ideal ends, which are above the world of sense. 72 HARVARD LECTURES This conviction that the things of the mind have a worth, an inherent dignity, which cannot be measured in terms of money, is at the root of many Greek ideas on education. If we would pursue knowledge aright, we must love it disinterestedly. Even learning may be followed in the spirit of a shopkeeper ; and the intellectual vulgarity thus fostered is more ignoble than the frank avowal of money-getting as in itself the end. Nothing is so truly de- grading as the intrusion of lower and mercenary motives into the sphere of the higher activities. Plato l distinguishes between the education which aims only at outward and worldly success and the true, the liberal education, which fits men for perfect citizenship. ' We are not now speaking of education in the narrower sense, but of that other education in virtue from youth upwards, which makes a man eagerly pursue the ideal perfection of citizenship, and teaches him how rightly to rule and how to obey. This is the only education which, upon our view, deserves the name ; that other sort of training 1 Laws i. 643 K-644 A. GREECE AND PHOENICIA which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelligence and justice, is mean and illiberal, and is not worthy to be called education at all.' The superior value of leisure in the Hellenic scheme of life as compared with work connects itself with this high ideal of citizenship. Leisure is the Hellenic starting-point, the normal condi- tion of the citizen, the prerogative of freemen. Without leisure there is no freedom. ' We work,' says Aristotle, ' in order that we may have leisure.' 1 At first sight this may bear some resemblance to the schoolboy view of the working term as being of the nature of an interruption, an infelicitous break, in the holi- days. But leisure to the Greek thinker means not the opposite of activity for activity is of the essence of life but a special form of activity ; an activity not evoked by external needs, but free, spontaneous, and delightful ; an ordered energy which stimulates all the vital and mental powers. It is an energy strenuous 1 Nic. Eth. x. 7- 6 d/u e $ a yo-p '" /a crj-vous, nous somuics serieux ! ' 'These,' says Stevenson, 'were the words. They were all employed over the frivolous mercantile concerns of Belgium during the day ; but in the evening they found some hours for the serious concerns of life. I may have a wrong idea of wisdom, but I think that was a very wise remark.' It was only in the decay of civic life, when thought was divorced from action, and cloistered learning had become the fashion of a few, that cr%oX>; or leisure came to denote a busy trifling, and the adjective ' scholastic ' was accepted as equivalent to ' pedantic.' With the ideal view of leisure went a corre- sponding ideal conception of friendship. The 76 HARVARD LECTURES n intellectual employment of leisure consisted mainly in oral discussion on the deeper problems of human life. Only through the strife of con- versation and the kindling contact of mind with mind could truth be elicited. An atmosphere of intimacy was the first condition of dis- interested learning. Friendship and philosophy were linked together in inseparable union, and perfect friendship became in itself a mode of mental illumination. A man's ' wits and understanding,' says Bacon, ' do clarify and break up in the communicating and discoursing with another.' Friendship ' maketh daylight in the understanding out of darkness and confusion of thoughts.' That is a genuine Hellenic sentiment. The friendships of Greece are still proverbial ; and so important a factor did friendship form in social intercourse, especially when the loss of freedom had robbed politics of its chief interest, that the rules to be found in the later Greek writers for the making of friends are as numerous as the modern prescriptions for making happy marriages. Such phrases as ' he who has friends has no GREECE AND PHOENICIA 77 friend ' l point to the high demands implied in perfect friendship. The friendship between good men as sketched by Aristotle ~ glows with an eloquence which surprises us in a writer so studiously quiet in tone, and deserves to stand beside the impassioned chapter describing' the bliss of philosophic speculation. Friendship, he tells us, is realised in that partnership of speech and thought in which the distinctive life of man consists, a life that is social, not merely gregarious ' that is what living together means ; it is not as with cattle herding on the same spot.' To know that you have a good man as your friend quickens the play of vital energy ; it promotes the vivid consciousness of life which is the essence of happiness. Your friend is different from you and yet identified with you ; and in the spectacle of his noble actions and the sympathetic sense of his existence your own sense of personality is ennobled. It is even a friend's privilege to give up wealth, 1 Diog. Lacrt. v. 21 w i'Xos $ TroAAot i\oi. 2 Eth. NIC. ix. ch. 8 and 9. 78 HARVARD LECTURES n station, life itself, for the sake of his friend, and so achieve the true self-love, realising his higher self through self-sacrifice. ' He will prefer,' says Aristotle, ' the intense joy of a brief moment to the feeble satisfaction of an age, one glorious year of life to many years of trivial existence, one great and glorious deed to many insignificant actions.' l Friendship is for Aris- totle the glorified form of human intercourse. I am far from suggesting that these Greek ideals, just as they stand, can be transferred to our own age and country. In many points of detail the Greek way cannot be our way. Some lines of necessary divergence will at once have occurred to you while I have been speak- ing. Under the stress of our industrial life the principles here indicated will need adjust- ment, adaptation, limitation. But the principles themselves, I would submit, are profoundly and permanently true. And, in the task of education, perhaps, as much as in any department of civic 1 Eth. Nic. ch. 9. 9 6\iyov yap xpttvov i)cr6i]i>b5pa fj.d\\ov eXoir' &v 1) TroXiV rip^fia, xai /3iukrcu KaXiDs tviavrbv r) w6XX' Zrr) TVXOVTWS, Kal fiiav irpa^tv KCL\T)V Kai fj.eydXtjv T) TroXXaj KOL GREECE AND PHOENICIA 79 life, we need a reminder that there arc certain ideals of character, certain paramount ends of conduct, which should underlie and determine all our efforts. We are tempted, perhaps, to fix our eyes on the machinery of education, on the subjects of instruction, on the direct mercantile results of our system, on our own immediate ends as the teachers of this or that branch of knowledge. But sometimes we may do well to test and revise our standards ; to ask our- selves what, after all, we arc aiming at, what kind of human being we desire to produce. It was part of the beneficent function of Greece to emphasise this idea. The Greeks, as I have tried to show, introduced a large and humanising conception into the one-sidcdness of an earlier civilisation with which they came in contact. They had a perception of what Isaiah calls ' the things by which men live.' They knew that ' man does not live by bread alone,' that livelihood is not life, that mere wealth is not well-being. The satisfaction of material wants is not the end of human endeavour. The wealth of nations, like the happiness of So HARVARD LECTURES n individuals, has its source deeper than in the accumulation of riches or the expansion of commerce. The true value of the goods of life is determined by the sense of life as a whole, and by their relation to the higher and distinc- tively human ends of existence. All this may be called idealism. I have here omitted all reference to the ideal creations of Greek poetry, to those features of character which lift the men and women of Homer or Sophocles above the trivial and the real, and which, in spite of all moral flaws and imperfections, make us feel that they belong to a humanity nobler and richer than the people of our everyday world that they are real and concrete personalities, and yet ideal types. Nor, again, have I mentioned the heroic figures who stand out at intervals in the pages of Greek history men who responded to great calls of duty and showed a splendid disregard of consequences ; rare and exceptional men such as inspired the biographies of Plutarch. I speak of idealism in a more restricted sense. We have seen how the breath of poetry touches the common affairs of life, disengaging ii GREECE ANH PHOENICIA 81 the things of the mind from the things of sense. It is partly poetry, partly philosophy ; for the Hellenic people felt by a poetic instinct truths which their philosophers arrived at by reflection and analysis. It was these truths that gave meaning and reality to the public and private life of the Greeks their institutions, their ex- ternal surroundings, their recreations to their estimate of human personality and human fellowship, so that the practical world was for them lit up by an imaginative ideal. Ill THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE No one can read Homer without being aware that the spirit of man has here shaken off the torpor of an earlier world and has asserted its freedom. There is no brooding sense of mystery ; none of those oppressive secrets with which the atmosphere of Oriental poetry is charged. A fresh and lucid intelligence looks out upon the universe. There is the desire to see each object as it is, to catch it in some characteristic moment of grace or beauty. And the thing seen is not felt to be truly understood until it has taken shape in words, and the exact impression conveyed to the eye has been trans- mitted to another mind. A single epithet, one revealing word in Homer will often open up to us the very heart of the object ; its inmost and 82 83 permanent character will stand out in clear-cut outline. Nothing is too great, nothing too O O ' O trivial, to be worth describing the sea, the dawn, the nightly heavens, the vineyard, the winter torrent, the piece of armour, the wool -basket, the brooch, the chasing on a bowl. Over each and all of these the poet lingers with manifest enjoyment. There is but a single exception to the rule of minute delinea- tion. In the description of the human person the outward qualities are but lightly touched. Beauty and stature these arc noted in general terms ; the colour of the hair is sometimes added ; not unfrequently, it would seem, as a racial characteristic. But the portraiture of the individual is not drawn with any exactitude. There is no inventory of the features of men or of fair women, as there is in the Greek poets of the decline or in modern novels. Man is some- thing different from a curious bit of workman- ship that delights the eye. He is a ' speaker of words and a doer of deeds,' and his true delineation is in speech and action, in thought and emotion. HARVARD LECTURES Again, though each thing, great and small, has its interest, the great and the small are not of equal importance. There is already a sense of relative values ; the critical spirit is awake. The naivete of Homeric society must not lead us to think of Homer as representing rude and primitive thought. Homer stands out against a vast background of civilisation. The language itself is in the highest degree developed flexible and expressive, with a fine play of particles conveying delicate shades of feeling and suggestion. Homeric men are talkative ; each passing mood seeks some form of utter- ance ; but garrulous they are not. They wish to speak, but they have always something to say. They are bent on making their feelings and actions intelligible. They endeavour to present their case to themselves as it presents itself to the minds of others. They appeal both to living witnesses and to the experience of the past ; they compare and they contrast ; they bring the outer and the inner world into significant connexion ; they enforce their arguments by sayings containing the condensed THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 85 wisdom of life. Homeric discourse, with the marvellous resources of its vocabulary, its structural coherence, its intimate union of reason and passion, has in it all the germs of future Greek oratory. Moreover, the poet aims at being more than entertaining. He sings to an audience who desire to extend their knowledge of the facts of life, to be instructed in its lessons, to enlarge their outlook. Gladly they allow themselves to be carried into the region of the unknown. Common reality does not suffice. They crave for something beyond it. But the world of the imagination is no nebulous abode of fancy ; it is still the real world, though enriched and transfigured, and throbbing with an intenser life. Through known adventures they pass imperceptibly into an undiscovered country- strange and yet familiar in which they still find themselves at home. Poetry is not for them, as it so often is for us, an escape from reality, a refuge from world-weariness. Strabo observes that ' to construct an empty teratology or tale of marvels on no 86 HARVARD LECTURES in basis of truth is not Homeric ' ; l and that ' the Odyssey like the Iliad is a transference of actual events to the domain of poetry.' 2 He insists, in particular, that ' the more Homeric critics' (ol 'O^piKwrepoi) as opposed to Eratosthenes and his school ' following the poems verse by verse ' (rot? CTTCO-IV d/co\o- dovvTes') were aware that the geography of Homer is not invented ; that he is ' the leader of geographical knowledge ' (ap^yertj<; rrjf yewypcKfriJcrjs e/jUTretpia^, 3 and that his stories are accurate, more accurate than those of later ages. 4 Strabo has, of course, an ex- cessive belief in the scientific accuracy of Homer ; still the Odyssey is a truly remarkable geographical document, and recent investiga- tions tend to heighten its value as a record of early travel. The desire indeed to identify Homeric localities and even personages, has 1 Strabo i. 2. 9 K fjLrjdevbs d' d\7)0ovs dvavreiv Kevrjv reparo- \oyiav ovx '0/j.r)pii<6i'. Cp. i. 2. 1J TO d irdvra irXdrrfiv ov irida.vbv, ovd' 'OfirjptKov. 2 Ib. iii. 2. 13 ware Kal TJ}V 'OSviai> "0/A-rjpos. 2 Berard, vol. i. p. 64 ff. THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE expedition. Some hours after sunset Mentor and Telemachus set sail. The time is marked by line 388 : SureTO T ?yeA.ios cr/ctowi'To re Tracrai ayi'iou a formula occurring, in connexion with travel, seven times in the Odyssey, and denoting, apparently, the dead of night. Athene sent them ' a favouring gale, a fresh wind from the North West (aKpaij Zetyvpov} singing over the wine -dark sea.' Next morning at dawn they reach Pylos. Turn now to the official 'Sailing Directions' of to-day. In these Greek waters, we are told, land and sea breezes follow one another alternately. The sea breeze springs up each morning about 10 A.M. During the day, therefore, it keeps the ships locked in the harbour. At sunset it falls. Then for several hours there is a calm. To- wards 1 1 P.M. the land breeze rises. Hence, this ship of Telemachus leaving Ithaca about i i P.M., sails almost before the wind to the Peloponnese. The wind and the pilot do the work. At early dawn the mariners easily make the harbour. Later, it would be more difficult, go HARVARD LECTURES in for see again ' Sailing Directions ' the land breeze then freshens, and does not fall till about 9 A.M. The poet who described this voyage of Telemachus wrote, we cannot doubt, with all the knowledge of a skipper. 1 One more example may be added. J In Book V. 295-296, after Odysseus had quitted the island of Calypso, as he approaches the Phaeacian coast a tempest arises : crvv 8' Ev/ads re Xdro? re OTecTov Zcupos re Svcra^s KOI Bope?;s aiOprfffveTijS /zeya Ku//.a KiAivStoV. ' The South East and South West wind clashed and the stormy North West, and the North East that is born in the bright air, rolling onwards a great wave.' Here we have four winds, Eurus, Notus, Zephyrus, Boreas. Finally Boreas prevails (383-392). It lasts two days and two nights ; then it falls, and a 1 The same custom of embarking at night is found in three other places in the Odyssey : iv. 780 fif., where the sailors go to waylay Telemachus on his return; xiii. 24 ff., describing the convoy of Odysseus from Phaeacia ; xv. 389 ff., Eumaeus' story of the Phoenician merchant-ship quitting the isle of Syria the same formula being there used (xv. 471) as in ii. 388 r rjeXios K.T.\. Berard, vol. i. p. 481 ff. THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 91 ' windless calm ' comes on. This was on the morning of the third day. Again we look at our ' Sailing Directions.' ' It frequently happens,' we read, ' that winds from the N.E., N.W., and S.E. blow at the same time in different parts of the Adriatic. The wind called Bora is most to be feared and demands active and incessant watch. ... Its most furious blasts are announced by the following symptoms a black and compact cloud, surmounted by another cloud more light and fleecy, covers the horizon in the N.K. (cp. aWpr)tXo/m#e9), says Plato, 1 is as marked a characteristic of the Greeks as is the love of money (TO vffis Kpuirrecrdai t\eT. 3 Ib. 7 [18] tav /J.T) HXirrjai, av\inaTov OVK i^evp-ffcffi. 4 Arisl. Met. i. 2. 983 a 12-20. Cp. Plat. Theaet. p. 155 n fjLaXa. yap i\ov TOVTO rb TrdOos, TO ^ai'judfetv ov yap THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 95 diagonal should prove to be commensurate with the side.' The progress of science from the unexpected to the inevitable, as here described by Aristotle, is not unlike his account of the evolution of a dramatic action the most impressive tragic effect being that which arises from the shock of surprise at an unlooked for event followed by the discover}' of necessary sequence : the catastrophe, however startling, could not have been otherwise than it was : the end was already implicit in the beginning. 1 From the outset Greek thinkers looked slightingly on that multifarious learning which holds together a mass of unrelated facts, but never reaches to the central truth of things. As soon as they began to think at all, they directed their energies to the search for causes, the discovery of law throughout the universe. They are tempted at times to be too much elated by their own successes, to accept a hasty generalisation, to be over-confident in the power of a formula ; they cannot decipher ' the long 1 Poet. ix. II 1452 a 2-3 (the union of the irapa ryv So^av with the 5t' (L\\r)\a). 96 HARVARD LECTURES in and difficult language of facts.' l Yet the facts are looked at steadily, the data of experience are interrogated, sifted, collated, by methods indeed still imperfect, but without bias or partiality. We can see the writers at their task, revising and testing each judgment, and reviewing their conclusions. What a refreshing candour, for instance, it is when a physician, in one of the Hippocratic writings (a treatise On Diet in Acute Diseases) introduces a point he had over- looked in the words, ' This argument will be of assistance to my opponent.' Everywhere there is the same invincible desire not to rest in out- ward appearances, but to penetrate to reality, to interpret phenomena, to make the words of nature and of man intelligible. Mere beliefs or opinions the image is that of Plato, 2 though he shares the thought with many of his pre- decessors are, like the statues of Daedalus, runaway things : not until they have been tied down by the chain of causal sequence do they 1 Plat. Polit. 278 D TCIS TUH irpa.yfJ.dTwv /ua/cpas cai /J.T) paSt'ons Xa/Jas. 2 Meno, p. 97 -98 A. 111 THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 97 stand fast and become in the true sense know- ledge. ' Rather,' said Democritus, 1 ' would I discover the cause of one fact than become King of the Persians.' The love of knowledge worked on the Greeks with a potent spell. It came to them as did the Sirens' voice to Odysseus, luring him with the promise that he should know all things the things that have been and those that are t,o be.' 2 They were, ho\vever, partly conscious of the peril. And we find in them that the spirit of inquiry, daring indeed and far-reach- ing, was generally combined with reverence. It is not the timid Oriental fear that man might find out too much and so incur the jealousy of the gods though of this feeling traces may be detected ; chiefly, however, embedded in ancient strata of mythology : it is a feeling rarely hinted at in literature. The reverence I speak of is rather that restraining instinct which reminds man of the limits assigned to human 1 Democr. ap. Eus. Pr. Ev. xiv. 27. 3 A^o/v-ptros yovv aiVos a>s (fiaaiv HXeye f3ov\T0a.i fj.a\\ov fj-lav evpelv airioXoyiai' T) rr\v llepffwv ol (3aai\eiav yevtffOai. - Odyss. xii. 189-191. H 98 HARVARD LECTURES in faculties, and tells him that the utmost scope of his powers cannot avail completely to grasp the eternal order of the universe. Man cannot place himself at the centre and see as far as the circumference. Empedocles strikes this note in memorable verses : J ' Straitened are the powers that are shed through the limbs of men ; many the strange accidents that befal them, and blunt the edge of thought ; brief is the span of that life in death which they behold swift death to which they are doomed ; then are they whirled away, and like a vapour fly aloft, each persuaded only of that on which he has himself chanced to light, driven this way and that. But the whole man boasts that he has found it: all idly; for these things no eye hath seen, nor ear heard, neither may they be grasped by the mind. Thou, then, since thou hast strayed hither, shalt learn no more than human wisdom may discern. But, O ye gods, turn aside from my tongue the mad- ness of these men. Hallow my lips and cause 1 Emped. 36-49. In this passage some of the readings are doubtful. THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 99 to flow from them the stream of holy words. And thee, I beseech, O Muse, much -wooed maiden white-armed, tell me the things that the creatures of a day may hear. From the House of Holiness speed me on my way and guide thy willing car.' As in conduct the pride (y {3 pis') which thrust itself into a sphere not its own, and violated the rights of others- gods or men was condemned ; so too the feeling prevailed, though less frequently asserted, that the intellect should beware of over-stepping its proper limitations. Here too it was right to exercise the quality of temperate self-restraint (crc0pox virep^