History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

II. The Ideal

Patriotism the cardinal virtue; civic and military duties

As we have already noticed, it was out of his relations as a citizen that the primary duties of the Greek arose. His supreme duty was patriotism, devotion to his city. “Good citizen” and “good man” were interchangeable terms. And since a state of war rather than of peace was the normal relation of the Greek cities, the military virtues held the highest place in the ideal of excellence. “Their bodies,”—thus Thucydides makes one of his characters speak of the citizen soldiers of a typical Greek city—“their bodies they devote to their country as though they belonged to other men.”[437] Thus the preëminent Greek virtue, courage, was almost synonymous with valor in war. To throw away one’s shield was the last infamy with the Greeks as with the Romans.

This type of character, blending the civic and the military virtues, is presented to us with incomparable charm in Plutarch’s Lives. Here we see the ideal in actual flesh and blood. It is the altruistic element in this type of character which renders it so morally attractive.

The Greek virtue of courage a form of our virtue of self-sacrifice

For we should not fail to note that in the Greek enumeration of the virtues, the virtue of self-sacrifice, which we give the first place in our own moral ideal, is hidden under courage or fortitude.[438] With us this virtue expresses itself in a great variety of forms; with the Greeks, in one form chiefly—self-devotion on the battlefield. This altruism, it is true, was narrow; it did not look beyond one’s own city; but notwithstanding this limitation it was genuine altruism, for facing death in battle, as Aristotle says, is “the greatest and noblest of perils.”[439] This ready self-devotion of the individual to the common interests of his city was the most attractive feature of Greek morality. It formed the basis of Greek civilization. When this virtue was lost the Greek city perished, and with it Greek civilization passed away.

Among all the cities of Greece, Sparta realized most perfectly the military virtues of the Greek ideal. The great place so long held by her in the ancient world she won through the loyalty of her citizens to the soldier’s ideal of obedience, courage, and self-devotion. The conduct of Leonidas and his companions in the pass of Thermopylæ not only had a bracing effect upon Greek character for generations, but has never ceased, through the inspiration of example, to add to the sum total in the world of loyalty to duty.

The virtues of temperance and justice

To the virtue of self-sacrifice, under the guise of fortitude, or the facing of danger or the endurance of pain in a worthy cause, the Greeks added temperance, justice, and wisdom.

The Greek virtue of temperance or moderation was essentially the same as our virtue of self-control or self-denial. It meant measure in all things, the avoidance of the too much and the too little.[440] Everything must be in fair proportion. In building a house one should not go “beyond bounds in size, magnificence, and expense.” In conduct likewise the mean must always be the aim. Restraint must be laid upon one’s appetites and desires. Excessive ambition was a grave fault, as was an undue lack of ambition.

The Greek conception of justice was this: Do no wrong, and suffer no wrong to self or to others—with the emphasis on the latter part of the injunction.[441] Christianity shifted the emphasis to the first part of the commandment.

The virtue of wisdom; mental self-culture a duty

By the term “wisdom” the Greeks covered very nearly what we mean by mental self-culture. Now there has been a wide divergence of opinion among different peoples respecting this matter. Primitive races can of course have no feeling of obligation as to intellectual self-culture; but even a people as advanced in civilization as the Romans may have little or no conscience concerning it. Throughout a great part of the medieval age in Europe mental culture was looked upon with suspicion. Very few regarded it as a duty. But since the Renaissance, that is, since the rebirth in the European world of the Greek spirit, intellectual culture has been coming to be regarded more and more as an urgent and imperious duty. It is to the ancient Greeks, as implied in what we have just said, that we are largely indebted for this ethical feeling. To the truly representative Greek the ethical imperative to seek self-realization called especially for the development of the mind, “his true self.” Mere intellectual curiosity, love of knowledge for its own sake, was, it is true, one of the creative forces of Greek intellectualism; but the ethical motive was ever near. In the Socratic philosophy indeed it is made the dominant motive for the reason that virtuous conduct is by Socrates held to be dependent upon knowledge, the knowledge of things as they really are, things human and divine. With the philosopher the gaining of this knowledge is the aim and end of life.

The development of the body a duty; the ethical element in Greek athleticism

Asceticism, a chief characteristic of which is the conception that there is something meritorious in the illtreatment or neglect of the body, is one of the most striking phenomena in the moral history of mankind. The Oriental peoples especially have ever been easily persuaded, under the influence of religious ideas, that the body should be illtreated in the interest of the spirit.

In passing from Asia to Greece we seem to enter a new ethical atmosphere. We leave behind every trace of asceticism. We are no longer surrounded by unkempt, gaunt, hollow-eyed fakirs, anchorites, and monks. In Greek thought, as we have seen, there was no trace of that Oriental idea of a warring between body and spirit. This happy consciousness of the Greek of harmony in his own being had most important consequences for Greek morality. It made the development of the body, equally with that of the soul, an ethical requirement. The outcome was Greek athleticism, one of the most attractive phases of Hellenic civilization.

We do not mean to say that moral feeling was to the same degree active in calling into existence Greek athleticism that religious-ethical feeling was active in the creation of Oriental asceticism, but simply that the ethical motive held a place among the various motives and sentiments at work. Without this motive the Olympian games and the other sacred festivals into which athletic exercises and competitions entered, would never have won the place they held in Greek life and culture. When in later times these festivals, subjected to commercial and mercenary influences, lost wholly or in part this religious-ethical element, then they lost also their distinctive character, and that morally wholesome and uplifting influence which they had exercised upon the Greek world throughout the best days of Hellas.

Identification of moral goodness with beauty

Just as the cultured Greek brought the intellectual domain of life within the province of morals, so likewise did he with the æsthetic. It was not merely his æsthetic sense which was offended by ugliness in form, but also his moral sense. To the Greek mind, to love beauty, sensuous and spiritual, and to be beautiful was synonymous with being good. “He who is beautiful to look upon,” says Sappho, “is good; and who is good will soon be beautiful.”[442] “The beautiful,” comments Wuttke in speaking of this phase of Greek ethics, “is per se the good; in enjoying and creating the beautiful man is moral.”[443] “The ‘good’ and the ‘beautiful’”—thus G. Lowes Dickinson sums up the Greek view—“were one and the same thing; that is the first and the last word of the Greek ideal.”[444]

This identification by the Greeks of goodness with beauty is one of the most important matters in Greek ethics. For the conception was not with them an inert thing. Greek civilization in all its phases was in a great measure the expression of this conviction. The Greeks filled the world with beautiful things because to create beauty was with them an ethical as well as an æsthetic impulse and necessity. They felt the holiness of beauty.

Live according to nature sums up all moral requirements

All the particular requirements of Greek morality, some of the most important of which we have now briefly commented upon, are summed up in the formula, Live conformably to nature. The idea here embodied of what constitutes man’s full duty springs naturally from the doctrine that man’s nature is essentially good. If that nature be good, then virtuousness will consist in the well-rounded symmetrical development of all the capacities of body and mind. Pindar’s profound injunction, “Be what you are,” embodies the essence of the teachings of the Greek moralists. They taught that man fulfills his destiny by becoming what he is in his innermost being—by complete self-realization.[445]