Authors of Greece Part 16

The _Theaetetus_ discusses more fully the theory of knowledge. It opens with a comparison of the Socratic method to midwifery; it delivers the mind of the thoughts with which it is in travail. The first tentative definition of knowledge is that it is sensation. This is in agreement with the Protagorean doctrine that man is the measure of all things. Yet sensation implies change, whereas we cannot help thinking that objects retain their ident.i.ty; if knowledge is sensation a pig has as good a claim to be called the measure of all things as a man. Again, Protagoras has no right to teach others if each man's sensations are a law unto him. Nor is the Heracleitean doctrine much better which taught that all things are in a state of flux. If nothing retains the same quality for two consecutive moments it is impossible to have predication, and knowledge must be hopeless. In fact, sensation is not man's function as a reasoning being, but rather comparison. Neither is knowledge true opinion, for this at once demands the demarcation of false opinion or error; the latter is negative, and will be understood only when positive knowledge is determined. Perhaps knowledge is true opinion plus reason; but it is difficult to decide what is gained by adding "with reason", words which may mean either true opinion or knowledge itself, thus involving either tautology or a begging of the question. The dialogue at least has shown what knowledge is not.

Locke, Berkeley and Hume, the eighteenth century sensation philosophers, were similarly refuted by Kant. The mind by its mere ability to compare two things proves that it can have two concepts at least before it at the same time, and can retain them for a longer period than a mere pa.s.sing sensation implies. Yet the problem of knowledge still remains as difficult as Plato knew it to be.

"Is the Sophist the same as the Statesman and the Philosopher?" Such is the question raised in the _Sophist_. Six definitions are suggested, all unsatisfactory. The fixed characteristic of the Sophist is his seeming to know everything without doing so; this definition leads straight to the concept of false opinion, a thing whose object both is and is not.

"That which is not" provokes an inquiry into what is, Being. Dualism, Monism, Materialism and Idealism are all discussed, the conclusion being that the Sophist is a counterfeit of the Philosopher, a wilful impostor who makes people contradict themselves by quibbling.

The _Politicus_ carries on the discussion. In this dialogue we may see the dying glories of Plato's genius. In his search for the true pastor or king he separates the divine from the human leader; the true king alone has scientific knowledge superior to law and written enactments which men use when they fail to discover the real monarch. This scientific knowledge of fixed and definite principles can come only from Education. A most remarkable myth follows, which is practically the Greek version of the Fall. The state of innocence is described as preceding a decline into barbarism; a restoration can be effected only by a divine interposition and by the growth of a study of art or by the influence of society. The arts themselves are the children of a supernatural revelation.

The _Timaeus_ and the long treatise the _Laws_ criticise the theories of the Republic. The former is full of world-speculations of a most difficult kind, the latter admits the weakness of the Ideal State, making concessions to inevitable human failings.

Though written in an early period, the _Apology_ may form a fitting end to these dialogues. Socrates was condemned on the charge of corrupting the Athenian youth and for impiety. To most Athenians he must have been not only not different from the Sophists he was never weary of exposing, but the greatest Sophist of them all. He was unfortunate in his friends, among whom were Critias the infamous tyrant and Alcibiades who sold the great secret. The older men must have regarded with suspicion his influence over the youth in a city which seemed to be losing all its national virtues; many of them were personally aggrieved by his annoying habit of exposing their ignorance. He was given a chance of escape by acknowledging his fault and consenting to pay a small fine. Instead, he proposed for himself the greatest honour his city could give any of her benefactors, public maintenance in the town-hall.

His defence contains many superb pa.s.sages and is a masterpiece of gentle irony and subtle exposure of error. Its conclusion is masterly.

"At point of death men often prophesy. My prophecy to you, my slayers, is that when I am gone you will have to face a far more serious penalty than mine. You have killed me because you wish to avoid giving an account of your lives. After me will come more accusers of you and more severe. You cannot stop criticism except by reforming yourselves. If death is a sleep, then to me it is gain; if in the next world a man is delivered from unjust judges and there meets with true judges, the journey is worth while.

There will be found all the heroes of old, slain by wicked sentences; them I shall meet and compare my agonies with theirs.

Best of all, I shall be able to carry out my search into true and false knowledge and shall find out the wise and the unwise. No evil can happen to a virtuous man in life or in death. If my sons when they grow up care about riches more than virtue, rebuke them for thinking they are something when they are naught. My time has come; we must separate. I go to death, you to life; which of the two is better only G.o.d knows."

Two lessons of supreme importance are to be learned from Plato. In the first place he insists on credentials from the accepted teachers of a nation. On examination most of them, like Gorgias, would be found incapable of defining the subjects for the teaching of which they receive money. The sole hope of a country is Education, for it alone can deliver from ignorance, a slavery worse than death; the uneducated person is the dupe of his own pa.s.sions or prejudices and is the plaything of the horde of impostors who beg for his vote at elections or stampede him into strikes.

Again, the possibility of knowledge depends upon accurate definition and the scientific comparisons of instances. These involve long and fatiguing thought and very often the reward is scanty enough; no conclusion is possible sometimes except that it is clear what a thing cannot be. The human intelligence has learned a most valuable lesson when it has recognised its own impotence at the outset of an inquiry and its own limitations at the end thereof. Knowledge, Good, Justice, Immortality are conceptions so mighty that our tiny minds have no compa.s.ses to set upon them. Better far a distrust in ourselves than the somewhat impudent and undoubtedly insistent claim to cert.i.tude advanced by the materialistic apostles of modern non-humanitarianism. When questioned about the ultimates all human knowledge must admit that it hangs upon the slender thread of a theory or postulate. The student of philosophy is more honest than others; he has the candour to confess the a.s.sumptions he makes before he tries to think at all.

At times it must be admitted that Plato sounds very unreal. His faults are clear enough. The dialogue form makes it very easy for him to invent questions of such a nature that the answer he wants is the only one possible. Again, his conclusions are often arrived at by methods or arguments which are frankly inadmissible; in the earlier dialogues are some very glaring instances of sheer logical worthlessness. Frequently the whole theme of discussion is such that no modern philosopher could be expected to approve of it. A supposed explanation of a difficulty is sometimes afforded by a myth, splendid and poetical but not logically valid. Inconsistencies can easily be pointed out in the vast compa.s.s of his speculations. It remained for Aristotle to invent a genuine method of sorting out a licit from an illicit type of argument.

These faults are serious. Against them must be placed some positive excellences. Plato was one of the first to point out that there is a problem; a question should be asked and an answer found if possible, for we have no right to take things for granted. More than this, he was everywhere searching for knowledge, ridding himself of prejudice, doing in perfect honesty the most difficult of all things, the duty of thinking clearly. These thoughts he has expressed in the greatest of all types of Greek prose, a blend of poetic beauty with the precision of prose.

But Plato's praise is not that he is a philosopher so much as Philosophy itself in poetic form. His great visions of the Eternal whence we spring, his awe for the real King, the real Virtue, the real State "laid up in Heaven" fill him with an inspired exaltation which lifts his readers to the Heaven whence Platonism has descended. There are two main types of men. One is content with the things of sense; using his powers of observation and performing experiments he will become a Scientist; using his powers of speculation he will become an Aristotelian philosopher; putting his thoughts into simple and logical order, he will write good prose. The other soars to the eternal principles behind this world, the deathless forms or the general concepts which give concrete things their existence. These perfect forms are the main study of the Artist, Poet, Sculptor, whose work it is to give us comfort and pleasure unspeakable. So long as man lives, he must have the perfection of beauty to gladden him, especially if Science is going to test everything by the ruler or balance or crucible. This love of Beauty is exactly Platonism.

It has never died yet. From Athens it spread to Alexandria, there to start up into fresh life in the School of which Plotinus is the chief; its doctrines are described for the English reader in Kingsley's _Hypatia_. It planted its seed of mysticism in Christianity, with which it has most strange affinities. At the Renaissance this mystic element caught the imagination of northern Europe, notably Germany. Pa.s.sing to England, it created at Cambridge a School of Platonists, the issue of whose thought is evident in the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Its last outburst has been the Transcendental teaching of the nineteenth century, so curiously Greek and non-Greek in its essence.

For there is in our nature that undying longing for communion with the Divine which the mere thought of G.o.d stirs within us. Our true home is in the great world where Truth is everything, that Truth which one day we, like Plato, shall see face to face without any quailing.

TRANSLATIONS:

The version in 4 volumes by Jowett (Oxford) is the standard. It contains good introductions.

The _Republic_ has been translated by Davies and Vaughan.

Two volumes in the Loeb Series have appeared.

A new method of translation of Plato is needed. The text should be clearly divided into sections; the steps of the argument should be indicated in a skeleton outline. Until this is done study of Plato is likely to cause much bewilderment.

_Plato and Platonism_, by Pater, is still the best interpretation of the whole system.

DEMOSTHENES

One of the most disquieting facts that history teaches is the inability of the most enlightened and patriotic men to "discern the signs of the times". To us the collapse of the Greek city-states seems natural and inevitable. Their constant bickerings and petty jealousies justly drew down upon them the armed might of the ambitious and capable power which destroyed them. Their fate may fill us with pity and our admiration for those who fought in a losing cause may prejudice us against their enslavers. But just as the Norman Conquest in the long run brought more blessing than misery, so the downfall of the Greek commonwealths was the first step to the conquering progress of the Greek type of civilisation through the whole world. Our Harold, fighting manfully yet vainly against an irresistible tendency, has his counterpart in the last defender of the ancient liberties of Greece.

Demosthenes was born in 384 of a well-to-do business man who died eight years later. The guardians whom he appointed appropriated the estate, leaving Demosthenes and his sister in straitened circ.u.mstances. On coming of age the young man brought a suit against his trustees in 363, of whom Aphobus was the most fraudulent. Though he won the case, much of his property was irretrievably lost. Nor were his first efforts at public speaking prophetic of future greatness. His voice was thin, his demeanour awkward, his speech indistinct; his style was laboured, being an obvious blend of Thucydides with Isaeus, an old and practised pleader. Yet he was ambitious and determined; he longed to copy the career of Pericles, the n.o.blest of Athenian statesmen. The stories of his self-imposed exercises and their happy issue are well known; his days he spent in declaiming on the sea-sh.o.r.e with pebbles in his mouth, his nights in copying and recopying Thucydides; the speeches which have come down to us show clearly the gradual evolution of the great style well worthy of the greatest of all themes, national salvation.

It will be necessary to explain a convention of the Athenian law courts.

A litigant was obliged to plead his own case; if he was unable to compose his own speech, he applied to some professional retailer of orations who would write it for him. The art of these speech-writers was of varying excellence. A first-cla.s.s pract.i.tioner would not only discover the real or the supposed facts of the dispute, he would divine the real character of his client, and write the particular type of speech which would seem most natural on such a person's lips.

Considerable knowledge of human nature was required in such an exciting and delicate profession, although the author did not always succeed in concealing his ident.i.ty. Demosthenes had his share of this experience; he wrote for various customers speeches on various subjects; one concerns a dowry dispute, another a claim for compensation for damage caused by a water-course, another deals with an adoption, another was written for a wealthy banker. a.s.sault and battery, ship-scuttling, undue influence of attractive females on the weaker s.e.x, maritime trickery of all kinds, citizen rights, are all treated in the so-called private speeches, of which some are of considerable value as ill.u.s.trating legal or mercantile or social etiquette.

Public suits were of the same nature; the speeches were composed by one person and delivered by another. Such are the speech against _Androtion_ for illegal practices, against _Timocrates_ for embezzlement and the important speech against _Aristocrates_, in which for the first time Demosthenes seems to have become aware of the real designs of Macedonia. The speech against the law of _Leptines_, delivered in 354 by Demosthenes himself, is of value as displaying the gradual development of his characteristic style; in it we have the voice and the words of the same man, who is talking with a sense of responsibility about a const.i.tutional anomaly.

But for us the real Demosthenes is he who spoke on questions of State policy. This subject alone can call out the best qualities in an orator as distinct from a rhetorician; the tricks and bad arguments which are so often employed to secure condemnation or acquittal in a law court are inapplicable or undignified in a matter of vital national import. But before the great enemy arose to threaten Greek liberty, it happened that Fortune was kind enough to afford Demosthenes excellent practice in a parliamentary discussion of two if not three questions of importance.

In 354 there was much talk of a possible war with Persia. Demosthenes first addresses the sword-rattlers. "To the braggarts and jingoes I say that it is not difficult--not even when we need sound advice--to win a reputation for courage and to appear a clever speaker when danger is very near. The really difficult duty is to show courage in danger and in the council-chamber to give sounder advice than anybody else." His belief was that war was not a certainty, but it would be better to revise the whole naval system. A detailed scheme to a.s.sure the requisite number of ships in fighting-trim follows, so sensible that it commands immediate respect. The speaker estimates the wealth of Attica, maps it out into divisions, each able to bear the expense of the warships a.s.signed to it. To a possible objection that it would be better to raise the money by increased taxation he answers with the grim irony natural to him (he seems to be utterly devoid of humour).

"What you could raise at present is more ridiculous than if you raised nothing at all. A hundred and twenty talents? What are they to the twelve hundred camels which they say carry Persia's revenues?"

He refuses to believe that a Greek mercenary army would fight against its country, while the Thebans, who notoriously sided with Persia in 480, would give much for an opportunity of redeeming this old sin against Greece.

"The rest of the Greeks, as long as they considered the Persian their common enemy, had numerous blessings; but when they began to regard him as their friend they experienced such woes as no man could have invented for them even in his curses. Whom then Providence and Destiny have shown useless as a friend and most advantageous as a foe, shall we fear? Rather let us commit no injustice for our own sakes and save the rest from commotion and strife."

Such is the outline of the speech on the _Navy-boards_. Two years later he displayed qualities of no mean order. Sparta and Thebes were quarrelling for the leadership. Arcadia had revolted from Sparta, the centre of the disaffection being _Megalopolis_; amba.s.sadors from the latter city and from Sparta begged Athenian aid. In the heat of the excitement men's judgments were not to be trusted. "The difficulty of giving sound advice is well known," says the orator.

"If a man tries to take a middle course and you have not the patience to hear, he will win the approval of neither party but will be maligned by both. If such a fate awaits me, I would rather appear to be talking nonsense than allow any party to deceive you into what I know is not your wisest policy."

The question was, should Athens join Thebes or Sparta, both ancient foes?

"I would like to ask those who say they hate either, whether they hate the one for the sake of the other or for your sake. If for the sake of the other party, then you can trust neither, for both are mad; if for your sake, why do they try to strengthen one of these two cities unduly? You can with perfect ease keep Thebes weak without making Sparta strong, as I will prove. You will find that the main cause of woe and ruin is unwillingness to act with simple honesty."

After a rapid calculation of possibilities he suggests the following plan.

"War between Thebes and Sparta is certain. If Thebes is beaten to the ground, as she deserves to be, Sparta will not be unduly powerful, for these Arcadian neighbours will restore the balance; if Thebes recovers and saves herself, she will still be weak if you ally yourselves with Arcadia and protect her. It is expedient then in every way neither to sacrifice Arcadia nor let that country imagine that it survives through its own power or through any other power than yours."

The calm voice of the cool-headed statesman is everywhere audible in this admirable little speech.

The power of discounting personal resentment and thinking soberly is apparent in the speech for the _Freedom of Rhodes_, delivered about this time. Rhodes had offended Athens by revolting in the Social war of 357-5 with the help of the well-known Carian king Mausolus. For a time that monarch had treated Rhodes well; later he overthrew the democracy and placed the power in the hands of the oligarchs. When Queen Artemisia succeeded to the throne of Caria the democrats begged Athens to aid them in recovering their liberty. Deprecating pa.s.sion of any kind, Demosthenes points out the real question at issue. The record of the oligarchs is a bad one; to overthrow the democracy they had won over some of the leading citizens whom they banished when they had attained their object. Their faithless conduct promised no hope of a firm alliance with Athens. The Rhodian question was to be the acid test of her political creed.

"Look at this fact, gentlemen. You have fought many a war against both democracies and oligarchies, as you well know. But the real object of these wars perhaps none of you considers. Against democracies you fight for private grievances which cannot be settled in public, or for territory or boundaries or for domination. Against oligarchies you fight for none of these things, but for your const.i.tution and freedom. I would not hesitate to say that I consider it more to your advantage should become democratic and fight you than turn oligarchic and be your friends. I am certain that it would not be difficult for you to make peace with freeconst.i.tutions; with oligarchies your friendship would not even be secure, for it is impossible that they in their l.u.s.t for power could cherish kindness for a State whose policy is based on freedom of speech."

"Even if we were to say that Rhodes richly deserves her sufferings, this is the wrong time to gloat. Prosperous cities ought always to show that they desire every good for the unfortunate, for the future is dark to us all."

His conclusion is this.

"Any person who abandons the post a.s.signed to him by his commander you disfranchise and exclude from public life. Even so all who desert the political tradition bequeathed you by your ancestors and turn oligarchs you ought to banish from your Council. As it is you trust politicians who you know for certain side with your country's enemies."

These three speeches indicate plainly enough the kind of man who was soon to make himself heard in a more important question. Instead of a frothy and excitable harangue that might have been looked for in a warm-blooded Southern orator we find a dignified and apparently cool-headed type of speech based on sound sense, full of practical proposals, fearless, manly and above all n.o.ble because it relies on righteousness. An intelligence of no mean order has in each case discarded personal feeling and has pointed out the one bed-rock fact which ought to be the foundation of a sound policy. More than this; for the first time an Attic orator has deliberately set to work to create a new type of prose, based on a cadence and rhythm. This new language at times runs away with its inventor; experience was to show him that in this matter as in all others the consummate artist hides the art whereof he is master.

By 352 Greece had become aware that her liberties were to be threatened not from the East, but from Macedonia. Trained in the Greek practice of arms and diplomacy, her king Philip within seven years had created a powerful military system. His first object was to obtain control of a seaboard. In carrying out this policy he had to reduce Amphipolis on the Strymon in Thrace, Olynthus in Chalcidice, and Athenian power centralised in Potidaea, a little south of Olynthus, and on the other side of the Gulf of Therma in Pydna and Methone. Pydna he secured in 357 by trickery; Amphipolis had pa.s.sed under his control through inexcusable Athenian slackness earlier in the same year. Potidaea fell in 356 and Methone, the last Athenian stronghold, in 353. Pagasae succ.u.mbed in 352; with it Philip obtained absolute command of the sea-coast.

In the same year a Macedonian attempt to pa.s.s Thermopylae was met by vigorous Athenian action; a strong force held the defile, preventing a further advance southward. In the next year the Athenian pacifist party was desirous of dropping further resistance. This policy caused the delivery of the _First Philippic_. It is a stirring appeal to the country to shake off its lethargy. Nothing but personal service would enable her to recover the lost strongholds. "In my opinion," it says, "the greatest compelling power that can move men is the disgrace of their condition. Do you desire to stroll about asking one another for news? What newer news do you want than that a Macedonian is warring down Athens? Philip sick or Philip dead makes no difference to you. If he died you would soon raise up for yourselves another Philip if you continue your present policy."