CHAPTER II
[1] The culmination came in what is known as the Age of Pericles, who was the master mind at Athens from 459 to 431 B.C. During the fifth century B.C. such names as Themistocles and Pericles in government, Phidias and Myron in art, Herodotus and Thucydides in historical narrative, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in tragic drama, and Aristophanes in comedy, graced Athens.
[2] With the Greeks, morality and the future life never had any connection.
[3] The early Greek philosophers tried to explain the physical world about them by trying to discover what they called the "first principle," from which all else had been derived. Thales (c. 624-548 B.C.), the father of Greek science, had concluded that water was the original source of all matter; Anaximenes (c. 588-524 B.C.), that air was the first principle; Heraclites (c. 525-475 B.C.), fire; and Pythagoras (c. 580-500 B.C.), number.
[4] "There was now demanded ability to discuss all sorts of social, political, economic, and scientific or metaphysical questions; to argue in public in the marketplace or in the law courts; to declaim in a formal manner on almost any topic; to amuse or even instruct the populace upon topics of interest or questions of the day; to take part in the many diplomatic embassies and political missions of the times—the ability, in fact, to shine in a democratic society much like our own and to control the votes and command the approval of an intelligent populace where the function of printing-press, telegraph, railroad, and all modern means of communication were performed through public speech and private discourse, and where the legal, ecclesiastical, and other professional classes of teachers did not exist." (Monroe, Paul, History of Education, pp. 109- 10.)
[5] The importance of a political career in the new Athens will be better understood if we remember that the influence on public opinion to-day exerted by the pulpit, bar, public platform, press, and scholar was then concentrated in the public speaker, and that the careers now open to promising youths in science, industry, commerce, politics, and government were then concentrated in the political career. It must also be remembered that the Greeks had always been a nation of speakers, both the content and the form of the address being important.
[6] Each of these philosophers proposed an ideal educational system designed to remedy the evils of the State. Xenophon (c.410-362 B.C.), in his Cyropaedia, purporting to describe the education of Cyrus of Persia, proposed a Spartan modification of the old Athenian system. Plato (429-348 B.C.), in his Republic, proposed an aristocratic socialism as a means of securing individual virtue and state justice. He first presents the super- civic man, an ideal destined for great usefulness among the Christians later on. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), in his Ethics, and in his Politics, outlined an ideal state and a system of education for it.
[7] "It is beyond all conception what that man espied, saw, beheld, remarked, observed." (Goethe.)
"One of the richest and most comprehensive geniuses that has ever appeared—a man beside whom no age has an equal to place." (Hegel.)
"Aristotle, Nature's private secretary, dipping his pen in intellect."
(Eusebius.)
[8] "As Alexander passed conquering through Asia, he restored to the East, as garnered grain, that Greek civilization whose seeds had long ago been received from the East. Each conqueror in turn, the Macedonian and the Roman bowed before conquered Greece and learnt lessons at her feet." (Butcher, S. H., Some Aspects of the Greek Genius, p. 43.)
[9] Webster, D. H., Ancient History, p. 302.
[10] Previous to this, paper had been made from the papyrus plant, but Egypt, having forbidden its export, necessity again became the mother of invention.
[11] With this exception, never before the Italian Renaissance was there such interest in collecting books. Almost every book written in antiquity was gathered here, and the library at Alexandria became the British Museum or the Bibliothèque Nationale of the ancient world. Every book entering Egypt was required to be brought to this library.
[12] He founded the science of geography. Before his time Greek students had concluded that the world was round, instead of flat, as stated in the Homeric poems. By careful measurements he determined its size, within a few thousand miles of its actual circumference, and predicted that one might sail from Spain to the Indies along the same parallel of latitude.
[13] From the tradition that seventy scholars labored on it.
[14] Henry Sumner Maine.