Part 8

The modern critic, even if he endorses the sharp indictment of Euripides, the poet of the most radical democracy,--that he destroyed the character of Attic tragedy by introducing into it elements from melodrama and the operatic concert, by perverting the grand style of its text and music by vulgar flippancies and incongruous measures, by substituting for artistic development of characters and plot disturbing discussions of the woman question and the latest sensations in philosophy and science, by turning the ancient gods and heroes into burlesque through having them argue and act like contemporary sycophants and sophists,--the modern critic, even Professor Shorey,[50] for example, in his spirited defense of the Sophoclean drama, would abandon Plato, I fancy, when he makes the drama the fundamental cause for the decline of Athenian greatness.

In his _Laws_, Plato is dealing with what, chastened by age and experience, he regarded as correctible things. The lust for private possessions, for land and home, wife and children, he once placed in this category, but he does so no longer; and in other respects he makes wide concessions to human frailties. With greed for wealth, however, he concluded no truce. It is Greeks, mark you, of whom Plato[51] says: "Love of wealth wholly absorbs men, and never for a moment allows them to think of anything but their own private possessions; on this the soul of every citizen hangs suspended, and can attend to nothing but his daily gain. Mankind are ready to learn any branch of knowledge, and to follow any pursuit which tends to this end, and they laugh at every other.... From an insatiate love of gold and silver, every man will stoop to any art or contrivance, seemly or unseemly, in the hope of becoming rich; and will make no objection to performing any action, holy or unholy and utterly base, if only like a beast he have the power of eating and drinking all kinds of things, and procuring for himself in every sort of way the gratifications of his lusts."

Such were the evil conditions of the present when one citizen despoiled his fellow and every city its neighbor. It had been different in the past. Before the introduction of luxurious tastes to stimulate inventions and of coined money to destroy a sense for the natural limits of wealth, men had "worked in summer, commonly, stripped and barefoot,[52] but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They fed on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves; these they served up on a mat of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle. And they and their children feasted, drinking of the wine which they had made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another. They took care that their families did not exceed their means: having an eye to poverty or war." But it was not to an age of such rude simplicity that Plato would recall his contemporaries. He would, indeed, restore the virtues which existed among the early country folk before the rise of modern cities and the establishment of the capitalistic régime; but, while hostile to transmarine commerce, retail trade, industries, banking, interest, and all other accompaniments of interchange between cities, which he regarded as generally undesirable and provocative of wars and conquests, he imagines his ideal people in possession of city culture and the articles of luxury and convenience secured through the capitalistic organization. His citizens are, indeed, farmers, but they are gentlemen farmers, who have their money invested in land and slaves and live on their dividends, free to devote their leisure to athletic, intellectual, and other worthy pursuits. They will be free from greed of wealth because they all possess a competency, which Plato defines as enough to live "temperately," Aristotle as enough to live "with liberality and temperance." Neither philosopher thinks of poverty except as the ordainer of body- and soul-destroying work, work which degrades those who have to perform it, and makes slavery their natural condition. Plato and Aristotle would make all tillers of the soil and workers at the trades and crafts slaves and aliens. They were to exist simply to provide the conditions of "good living" for their masters or superiors; whereupon "we must not conceal from ourselves," says Aristotle,[53] "that a country as large as the Babylonian or some other of boundless extent will be required if it is to support five thousand citizens in idleness." Even in America, where, to use the current formula, ten per cent of the people own ninety per cent of the wealth, the economic situation proposed as ideal by the most enlightened reformers of the fourth century B.C. has hardly been reached. Whether Plato failed to realize that he was condemning nine tenths of people to perpetual bondage and ignorance; or, realizing it, refused to think of anything but the perfection of the few, the conclusion is alike inevitable: he had failed miserably to trace to their historical causes both the cultural barrenness of Sparta and the astounding fertility of his own Athens.

Had Aristotle lived in the commonwealth of Plato's _Laws_, he must have suffered the same fate that Socrates suffered in Athens. For, though far from ungrateful to his teacher, he was not a docile pupil. By birth he was a Stagirite, by experience a citizen of the world. He did not, like Plato, form his youthful impressions in a milieu that was poisoned with bitterness at a demoralized democracy. The Athens to which he came as a lad of seventeen was still a democracy, and a very unhealthy one at that, and for it he had little liking; but his was a more dispassionate nature than was Plato's. He was not a great historian.[54] _That_ the discovery in Egypt in 1890 of one of his many lost historical works has proven clearly; but he was a very learned man, and perhaps came to as close a comprehension of earlier Greek history as was possible for a political philosopher who had nothing to guide him but the unscientific methods then in vogue for investigating the past.

By its very nature science is objective. It is not inhuman, but it is deliberately impersonal. In this respect it contrasts sharply with the arts. The greatest artist may be the man who embodies in his verse or stone or colors moods and thoughts which must be in "widest commonalty spread," but which constitute in the aggregate his own self or soul. History is of course a science, but not one of the common type. Unlike the ordinary scientist, the scientific historian has to practice, not self-suppression, but self-expansion. He must become conscious, so far as that is possible, of the prejudices and special interests of his own age, and, divested of them, he must migrate into a strange land in order to bring back thence a report that is at once an unbiased account of what he has seen and a story that is comprehensible to his fellow-citizens, or, at least, to his fellow-historians. He dare not treat the past as one in spirit with the present, or as resolvable into precisely the same factors. He must be alive to the existence of many different pasts leading to the present in no pre-determinable succession, much less progression. The points must make a line, but the line may be of any conceivable curve. Aristotle was far from arriving at a full appreciation of the difficulties of historical inquiry; but, unlike Plato, he took infinite pains to acquire historical knowledge.

He did not idealize the constitutions of the olden times. Since all men then carried daggers, the presumption, he says, is that they needed them and used them. Since conditions where violence reigned must have continued indefinitely, if political change had been prohibited, he finds it good as well as inevitable that laws be modified from time to time. The permanency of those of Sparta is worthy of high praise; but he traces the corruption and decay of the Spartan state to failure to make needed reforms. In general he strikes a much more just balance between Spartan and Athenian achievement than does Plato.

The first test he applies to institutions, such as the family and the state, is their naturalness--their source in the nature of man as that is revealed in his history. He was well aware that a political science that was based upon _perfected_ human nature was, indeed, suited only for "gods and sons of gods"; that the only principles of government which had real value were those which had approved themselves in practice. "All discoveries," he says,[55] "have been already made, although in some cases they have not been combined, and in others, when made, are not acted upon." "The _Politics_ of Aristotle," says a recent writer, "is the one great book on the science of government because it is the only one which is wholly empirical."

That is too high praise. For the _Politics_ of Aristotle differs from the _Prince_ of Machiavelli in other respects, of course, but noticeably in that the Greek has moral ideals, the Italian none. With Aristotle, as with Plato, the state has an ethical purpose. He requires it to justify not only its acts but its existence. Iniquitous governments might exist,--Aristotle's world was full of them, in fact,--and his mind was too curious of all things political for him to leave them out of his observation: he has, indeed, considered minutely the ways and means for the preservation of all kinds of states, and has shown therein that he had as keen an eye for the realities as had Machiavelli himself. But he would never have permitted, much less advised, his legislator to use foul means to establish a just government or fair means to establish an unjust one.

On the establishment of governments, moreover, he spends very little thought. This, however, is with Machiavelli the main matter, as he himself says near the opening of the second part of his work: "The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed, it follows that when they are well armed they have good laws. I shall leave the laws out of the discussion and shall speak of the arms." Had the Greek heard him he would have scoffed at both the argument and the conclusion. The argument is, of course, sophistical, and the conclusion saved only by the fact that Machiavelli had already considered the political weapons with which rulers should operate. The _Politics_ is a handbook for legislators; the _Prince_ a set of instructions for potentates. For the latter the ways and means of _acquiring_ power was, in Machiavelli's judgment, the all-important thing; whereas the legislator's possession of power is taken for granted by Aristotle, and it is assumed throughout his entire treatment that, if the lawgiver knows the constitution, the laws, and the system of education which are best adapted to the economic, social, and political conditions of his state, he can at once introduce them.

In a measure, therefore, the _Prince_ and the _Politics_ supplement each other, though Aristotle would have been horrified at the idea. For in his thinking, in anything approximating to an ideal world, each city was free to order its internal affairs as it thought best, and, having this liberty, if it was shown what was best, it must, according to the Socratic psychology, immediately adopt it; whereas--to give the devil his due--Machiavelli was actuated, in formulating his precepts for Prince Lorenzo, by the vision of a united Italy, the realization of which by his pupil was to wash away the crimes committed in subjecting to his will the city-states of the peninsula. The conquest of Italy was, accordingly, the goal of the ideal Prince's endeavor; whereas, though Aristotle in one passage of the _Politics_[56] notes that "if the Greeks were united in a single polity they would be capable of universal empire," he regards such a union as highly undesirable. To him a state that was not a city was a rudimentary and very imperfect state. It ceased to be a state at all when it ceased to be free. Hence a city could have subjects, that is to say, slaves, but not dependencies. And since in his thinking it was natural inferiority alone that justified slavery, and this was found especially among the nations of Asia, and not at all in Greece, no Greek city could rightly enslave the inhabitants of any other Greek city: it could wage war and organize slave raids only against barbarians.

The birthmark which we have noted on Plato is an inheritance from unreasoning hatred of democracy. That which mars above all the political thinking of Aristotle comes from the aversion instinctively felt by his age for imperialism. That this, too, is a disfigurement, we may show in a few concluding remarks. "It is necessary," says Aristotle[57] in concluding his plea that a mixed constitution is best for the common run of states, "it is necessary to begin by assuming a principle of general application, viz., that the part of the state which desires the continuance of the polity ought to be stronger than that which does not"; and he proceeds to point out that "strength" consists neither in numbers, nor property, nor military or political ability alone, but in all of them combined, so that regard has to be taken of "freedom, wealth, culture, and nobility, as well as of mere numerical superiority." Nothing could be more cold and objective than the thinking of Aristotle on this important matter. Yet by an extraordinary oversight he lets "strength" exert a decisive influence _within_ the city-states, while he ignores altogether the effect of varying population, wealth, and political and military ability in determining the relations _between_ them.

The whole of the political thinking of Aristotle is dominated by the idea that the world of men is made up of an infinite procession of inferiors and superiors, the desire to forge ahead being one of the most fundamental instincts of human beings. If an omniscient God were to arrange the inhabitants of each city in a line according to their real "strength," he would place few of them abreast. No Greek betrays more naïvely than Aristotle does the national consciousness of the Hellenes that they stood at the head of the honor roll of peoples. It was, therefore, imperative upon them to conquer the Asiatics; for he finds it to be a beneficent command of nature, issued primarily for the advantage of the weaker, that superiors should rule inferiors.

Among moral philosophers Aristotle is characterized by his refusal to let himself be led astray by a visionary ideal of human equality. Nevertheless, while recognizing that Greek cities, even more than individuals, differed in "strength," he refused to let the "strong" use their advantage. He sets apart the sphere of interurban, that is to say, international, relations as one in which the "universal principle," that superior rule inferior, shall not apply. In a visionary world, the "strong" man, on Aristotle's theory, is a "gentle" man; but in the real world, he is a ruler. Had Aristotle not been blinded by the prejudices of his age against imperialism, he must have seen the necessity that in the real world the "strong" state would also be the ruler. It is one of the enigmas of history that Aristotle was the contemporary and subject of Philip II of Macedon, one of its ironies that he was the tutor of Alexander the Great.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Schömann-Lipsius. _Griechische Altertümer_,^4 I (1892), pp. 197 _ff._

2. Bury, J.B. _A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great_ (1900).

3. Meyer, Eduard. _Geschichte des Altertums_, V (1902).

4. Niese, B. _Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte und Landeskunde Lakedämons: Die lakedämonischen Periöken._ In _Nachrichten der Gött. Gesell. d. Wissenschaften_ (1906), pp. 101 _ff._

5. Arnim, Hans von. _Die politischen Theorien des Altertums_ (1910).

6. Gomperz, Th. _Greek Thinkers_, III (1905), IV (1912).

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 34: Schürer, _Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi_, I^3 (1901), pp. 236 _f._ See notes.]

[Footnote 35: 1 Macc. XII, 11.]

[Footnote 36: _Geschichte des Altertums, II^1_ (1893), pp. 562 _f_.]

[Footnote 37: Dickins, _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, XXXII (1912), p. 12.]

[Footnote 38: Schoemann-Lipsius, _Griechische Alterthümer_,^4 1 (1897), pp. 261 _ff_.]

[Footnote 39: See particularly Niese, _op. cit._ in Select Bibliography at end of chapter.]

[Footnote 40: Beloch, _Griechische Geschichte_, I (1893), pp. 439 _ff_.]

[Footnote 41: III, 3, 4 _ff._]

[Footnote 42: The successive tyrannies in Syracuse and the empires of Syracuse over the West Greeks have been omitted of necessity in this book. They have been examined with particular care by Freeman in his _History of Sicily_ and with particular sympathy by Beloch in his _Griechische Geschichte_.]

[Footnote 43: Xenophon, _Hellenica_, IV, 2, 11 _ff._]

[Footnote 44: _Laws_, v, p. 730. (The translation used here and elsewhere in the book is that of Jowett.)]

[Footnote 45: For what is here omitted see the excellent little book by von Arnim, _Die politischen Theorien des Altertums_.]

[Footnote 46: _Laws_, II, p. 664.]

[Footnote 47: _Laws_, II, p. 662.]

[Footnote 48: VII, p. 806.]

[Footnote 49: _Laws_, III, p. 700. The same initial cause of degeneracy is postulated in Plato's _Republic_, VIII, p. 546.]

[Footnote 50: _Greek Literature_ (The Columbia University Press, 1912), p. 11.]

[Footnote 51: _Laws_, VIII, p. 831.]

[Footnote 52: _Republic_, II, p. 372 _b_.]

[Footnote 53: _Politics_, II, 3 (6), 3, p. 1265 _a_. (The translation used here and elsewhere in the book is that of Welldon: the text that of Immisch.)]

[Footnote 54: Bury, J.B., _The Ancient Greek Historians_, pp. 182 _ff._]

[Footnote 55: _Politics_, II, 2 (5), 10, p. 1264 _a_.]

[Footnote 56: VII (IV), 6 (7), 1, p. 1327 _b_.]

[Footnote 57: _Politics_, IV (VI), 10 (12), 1, p. 1296 _b_.]

IV

ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND WORLD MONARCHY

Alexander the Great was born in 356 B.C. His mother, Olympias, was a half-civilized Molossian princess whose fresh beauty, revealed at a wild religious fête on mystic Samothrace, had caught the roving fancy of Philip of Macedon. Their union had the further attraction to Philip that it might bring Epirus under his suzerainty.

Philip wished his wife to be his chief concubine rather than his consort. Olympias, a proud and passionate woman, chafed at her husband's marital infidelities, and had the will and courage to revolt and act for herself when Philip set her aside in 337 B.C. She cannot be acquitted of guilty knowledge of the murder of Philip which occurred a year later at the marriage arranged by him between her daughter and her brother. The act was timed to assure the accession of her son, who was its chief beneficiary.

"My father," Alexander is reported to have said twelve years later to his mutinous Macedonian soldiers,[58] "found you nomadic and poor. Clad in sheepskins, you tended your meagre herds on the mountains, and had to fight grievously for them against the Illyrians, Triballi, and Thracians on your borders. He gave you cloaks to wear in place of hides, he led you down from the hills into the plains, he made you the match in battle of the barbarians who dwelt near you; so that you depended for your safety thenceforth, not on the inaccessibility of your country, but on your own valor. He taught you to live in cities; he appointed good laws and customs for your governance. He made you lords, instead of slaves and subjects of those barbarians by whom you and your possessions had long been harried. The greatest part of Thrace he annexed to Macedon. By seizing the most suitable points on the seacoast, he threw open your country to commerce. He gave you the chance to work your mines in safety. The Thessalians, before whom you had cowered, half dead with fright, he taught you to conquer, and by humbling the Phocians he made your road into Greece, hitherto narrow and difficult, broad and easy. To such a degree did he lower the Athenians and the Thebans, who had ever been ready to fall upon Macedon,--and herein had he my help,--that, instead of your paying tribute to Athens and taking orders from Thebes, it was to us in turn that they went for protection. Into the Peloponnesus he passed and set matters to rights there; and, being appointed commander-in-chief of united Greece in its projected war against Persia, he achieved this high distinction, not so much for himself as for the commonwealth of Macedonia."

The words are not those of the great king himself: they are at the best a paraphrase of the ideas expressed by him on the occasion; at the worst they are the free invention of an historian concerned only with having Alexander say what the situation seemed to him to demand. However that may be, they are a good account of the wonderful work which Alexander, as a boy and young man, saw his father accomplish for Macedon. "What a man we had to fight," said Demosthenes,[59] his great enemy. "For the sake of power and dominion he had an eye put out, his shoulder broken, an arm and a leg injured. Whatever limb fortune demanded, that he gave up, so that the remnant of his body might live in glory and honor." "Taking everything into account," says Theopompus,[60] the far from generous contemporary historian of his achievements, "Europe has never produced the like of Philip, the son of Amyntas."

The court of Philip was rough and boorish. Revels, disgraced by drunkenness and debauchery, interrupted the king's wars and amours. In Pella men behaved like Centaurs and Læstrygonians, sneered the fastidious Athenians; and the frenzy which wine inspired in Philip, religion inspired in Olympias. In wild abandon she let herself be possessed with the spirit of the god, Dionysus, and roamed the hills at night in the company of other women equally intoxicated, brandishing the thyrsus and the "wreathèd snake," shouting with ecstasy. Hers was the religion which William Vaughn Moody, with poetic license, singled out in the splendid _Prelude_ to his _Masque of Judgment_ as characteristic of the world into which Christ was born. It was really abhorrent to the best Greek feeling, and was repressed with stern cruelty by Rome.

Passion, fierce and generous, the main source of heroic action, was bred in the bone of Alexander. His imagination, naturally fervent, was fed by tales of his ancestor Achilles which he heard at his mother's knee, and fired by the vistas opened out to it by the exploits of his father. At thirteen Philip gave him Aristotle as his tutor, and during the formative years of his youth he studied poetry with this great teacher. The poetry was Greek, not Macedonian. In it were found the ideals of the people to which Alexander belonged in spirit and in blood, if not in nationality; thence came the ideas tinged with emotion which fasten themselves like barbed arrows in the memory of the learner--the ideas of right and wrong, of heroism and tenderness, of regard for parents and for duties; as Plato would say, of justice, wisdom, temperance, and courage--which color all subsequent thinking and constitute character. The Greeks have still something to teach us as to the educative power of great poetry.

The commandments of Homer, whom Aristotle never ceases to cite in his philosophical works, went over into the flesh and blood of Alexander, and in him Achilles, the youthful hero of the Iliad, became in a real sense incarnate. Next after Homer, Alexander rated and knew the Attic tragedians, the continuators and improvers of Homer, according to Aristotle, who, therefore, bases his _Poetics_ largely upon tragedy, as being the highest form of dramatic art.