Authors of Greece Part 18

"We all recognise the common danger, but we never send emba.s.sies to one another. We are in such a sorry plight, so great a gulf has been fixed between cities by intrigue that we are incapable of doing what is our duty and our interest; we cannot combine; we can make no confederation of mutual friendship and a.s.sistance; we stare at the man as he grows greater; each of us is determined to take advantage of the time during which another is being ruined, never considering or planning the salvation of Greece. Every one knows that Philip is like a recurring plague or a fit of some malevolent disease which attacks even those who seem to be out of his reach. Remember this; all the indignities put on Greece by Sparta or ourselves were at least the work of genuine sons of the land; they may be likened to the wild oats of some heir to a great estate--if they were the excesses of some slave or changeling we all would have considered them monstrous and scandalous. But that is not our att.i.tude to Philip and his diplomacy, though he is not a Greek or a relation; rather he is not born even of decent barbarian parents--he is a cursed wretch from Macedonia which till recently could not supply even a respectable servant."

The bitterness of this is intense in a man who generally refrains from anything undignified in a public speech.

The cause of this disunion is bribery. In former times

"it was impossible to buy from orators or generals knowledge of the critical moment which fortune often gives to the careless against the industrious. But now all our national virtues have been sold out of the market; we have imported in their place the goods which have tainted Greek life to the very death. These are--envy for every bribe-taker, ridicule for any who confesses his guilt, hatred for every one who exposes him. We have far more warships and soldiers and revenue to-day, but they are all useless, unavailing and unprofitable owing to treason."

To punish these seems quite hopeless.

"You have sunk to the very depth of folly or craziness or I know not what. Often I cannot help dreading that some evil angel is persecuting us. For some ribaldry or petty spite or silly jest--in fact, for any reason whatsoever you invite hirelings to address you, and laugh at their scurrilities."

He points to the fate of all the cities whom Philip flattered.

"In all of them the patriots advised increased taxation--the traitors said it was not necessary. They advised war and distrust--the traitors preached peace, till they were caught in the trap. The traitors made speeches to get votes, the others spoke for national existence. In many cases the ma.s.ses listened to the pro-Macedonians not through ignorance, but because their hearts failed them when they thought they were beaten to their knees."

The doom of these cities it was not worth while to describe overmuch.

"As long as the ship is safe, that is the time for every sailor and their captain to be keen on his duties and to take precautions against wilful or thoughtless upsetting of the craft. But once the sea is over the decks, all zeal is vain. We then who are Athenians, while we are safe with our great city, our enormous resources, our splendid reputation--what shall we do?"

The universal appeal of this white-hot speech is its most noteworthy feature. The next year the disgraceful peace was ended, the free theatre-tickets withdrawn. All was vain. In 338 Athens and Thebes were defeated at Chaeroneia; the Ca.s.sandra prophecies of the great patriot came true. In 330 one more triumph was allowed him. He was attacked by the traitor Aeschines and answered him so effectively in his speech _on the Crown_ that his adversary was banished. A cloud settled over the orator's later life; he outlived Alexander by little more than a year, but when Antipater hopelessly defeated the allies at Crannon in 322 he poisoned himself rather than live in slavery.

Of all the orators of the ancient world none is more suitable for modern use than Demosthenes. It is true that he is guilty of gross bad taste in some of his speeches--but rarely in a parliamentary oration. Cicero is too verbose and often insincere. Demosthenes is as a rule short, terse and forcible. It is the undoubted justice of his cause which gives him his lofty and n.o.ble style. He lacks the gentler touch of humour--but a man cannot jest when he sees servitude before the country he loves.

With a few necessary alterations a speech of Demosthenes could easily be delivered to-day, and it would be successful. Even Philip is said to have admitted that he would have voted for him after hearing him, and Aeschines after winning applause for declaiming part of Demosthenes'

speech told his audience that they ought to have heard the beast.

Yet all this splendid eloquence seems to have been wasted. The orator could see much that was dark to his contemporaries, and spoke prophecies true though vain. But the greatest thing of all was concealed from his view. The inevitable day had dawned for the genuinely Greek type of city. It was brilliant but it was a source of eternal divisions in a world which had to be unified to be of any service. Its absurd factions and petty leagues were really a hindrance to political stability.

Further, the essential vices of democracy cried aloud for a stern master, and found him. Treason, bribery, appeals to an unqualified voting cla.s.s, theft of rich men's property under legal forms, free seats in the theatre, belittlement of a great empire, pacifism, love of every state but the right one--these are the open sores of popular control.

For such a society only one choice is possible; it needs discipline either of national service or national extinction. Its crazy cranks will not disappear otherwise. Modern political life is democratic; those who imagine that the voice of the majority is the voice of Heaven should produce reasons for their belief. They will find it difficult to hold such a view if they will patiently consider the hard facts of history and the unceasing warnings of Demosthenes.

No account of Greek literature would be complete without a mention of the influence which has revolutionised human thought. It is a strange coincidence that Aristotle was born and died in the same years as Demosthenes. His native town was Stagira; he trained Alexander the Great, presided over the very famous Peripatetic School at Athens for thirteen years and found time to investigate practically every subject of which an ancient Greek could be expected to have any knowledge.

His method was the slow and very patient observation of individual facts. He is the complement of Plato, who tended to neglect the fact for the "idea" or general law or type behind it and logically prior to it. Deductive reasoning was Plato's method--that of the poet or great artist, who worships not what he sees but the unseen perfect form behind; inductive reasoning was Aristotle's method--that of the ordinary man, who respects what he sees that he may by patience find out what is the unseen cla.s.s to which it belongs. This latter has been the foundation-stone of all modern science; in the main the resemblance between Aristotle's system of procedure and that of the greatest liberators of the human mind, Bacon and Descartes, are more valuable than the differences.

It would be difficult to mention any really great subject on which Aristotle has not left some work which is not to be lightly disregarded.

His works are in the form of disjointed notes, taken down at his lectures by his disciples. As a rule they are dry and precise, though here and there rays of glory appear which prove that the master was capable of poetic expression even in prose. A rather fine hymn has been ascribed to him. As we might expect, he is weakest in scientific research, mainly because he could not command the use of instruments familiar to us. That a human being who possessed no microscope should have left such a detailed account of the most minute marks on the bodies of fish and animals is an absolute marvel; so perfect is his description that it cannot be bettered to-day. Cuvier and Linnaeus are great names in Botany; Darwin said that they were mere schoolboys compared with Aristotle--in other words, botanical research had progressed thewrong way.

Many works have appeared on Ethics and Philosophy; few of them are likely to survive as long as Aristotle's _Ethics_ and _Metaphysics_ Sometimes our modern philosophers seem to forget their obligation to resemble human beings in their writings. We hear so much of mist and transcendentalism, problems, theories, essays, critiques that a book of Aristotle's dry but exact definition seems like the words of soberness after some nightmare. The man is not a.s.saulting the air; his feet are on firm ground. This is how he proceeds. "Virtue is a mean between excess and defect." In fact, his object appears to have been to teach something, not to mystify everybody and to cover the honourable name of philosophy with ridicule.

It is the same story everywhere. Do we want the best book on _Rhetoric_ or _Politics_? Aristotle may supply it, mainly because he took the trouble to cla.s.sify his instances and show the reason why things not only are of such a kind, but must inevitably be so. A course of Aristotelian study might profitably be prescribed to every person who thinks of talking in public; he would at least learn how to respect himself and his audience, however ignorant and powerful it may be; he would tend to use words in an exact sense instead of indulging in the wild vagueness of speech which is so common and so dangerous. This dry-as-dust philosopher who cut up animals and plants and wrote about public speeches and const.i.tutions found time to give the world a book on Poetry. Modern scientists sometimes deny their belief in the existence of such a thing as poetry, or scoff at its value; no poetic treatise has yet appeared from them, for it seems difficult for modern science to keep alive in its devotees the weakest glimmerings of a sense of beauty.

Herein their great founder and father shows himself to be more humane than his so-called progressive children. His _Poetics_ was the foundation of literary criticism and shows no sign of being superseded.

Turning his eyes upwards, he gave the world a series of notes on what he saw there. Not possessing a telescope, he could but do his best with the methods available. Let us not jeer at his results; rather let us remember that this same astronomer found time to observe the heavens in addition to revolutionising thought in the brief compa.s.s of sixty-two years.

For the miracle of miracles is this man's universality of outlook. It makes us ashamed of our own pretentiousness and swollen-headed pride when we reflect what this great architectonic genius has performed. Just as our bodies have decreased in size with the progress of history, so our intelligences seem to have narrowed themselves since Aristotle's day. Great as our modern scientists are, there is not one of them who would be capable of writing an acknowledged masterpiece on Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetry, Metaphysics as well as on his own subject.

Nor have we yet mentioned this stupendous thinker's full claim to absolute predominance in intellectual effort. His works on Medicine were known to and appreciated by the Arabs, who translated them and brought them to Spain and Sicily when they conquered those countries. Averroes commented on them and added notes of his own which contributed not a little to the development of the healing art. More than this, and greatest of all, during the later Middle Ages Aristotle's system alone was recognised as possessing universal value; it was taken as the foundation on which the most famous and important Schoolmen erected their philosophies--Chaucer mentions a clerk who possessed twenty books, a treasure indeed in those days; it provided a European Church with a Theology and the cosmopolitan European Universities with a curriculum.

Greater honour than this no man ever had or ever can have. Thus, although the Greek city-state seemed to perish in mockery with Demosthenes, yet the Greek spirit of free discussion which died in the great orator was set free in another form in that same year; leaving Aristotle's body, it ranged through the world conquering and civilising.

If in our ignorance and bigotry we try to kill Greek literature, we shall find that, like the hero of the _Bacchae_, we are turning our blows against our own selves, to the delight of all who relish exhibitions of perfect folly.

TRANSLATIONS:

Kennedy's edition is the best. It is vigorous and reads almost like an English work.

Butcher's _Demosthenes_ is the standard introduction to the speeches.

Many reminiscences of Demosthenes are to be found in the speeches of Lord Brougham.

ARISTOTLE

_Politics_. Jowett (Oxford). Welldon (Macmillan).

_Poetics_. Butcher (Macmillan). Bywater (Oxford).

Both contain excellent commentaries and notes.

_Ethics_. Welldon.

_Rhetoric_. Welldon. (Contains valuable a.n.a.lysis and notes.)

The article on Greek Science in the _Legacy of Greece_ (Oxford) should not be omitted.