A Review of the Systems of Ethics Founded on the Theory of Evolution

by Cora May Williams

The same narrow sort of expediency in morals which permitted the exposure of children is exhibited, again, in the lack of regard for the aged shown by the Athenians at all periods of their history;—in Sparta the old men were treated with some considerable respect. Says Mahaffy: "The strongest case against the Periclean Greeks, and one which marks their parentage most clearly from their Homeric ancestors, is the treatment of their old men. For here it is no inferior class, but their equals, nay even those to whom they directly owed their greatness, whom they cast aside with contempt when their days of usefulness had passed by.... The Greek lawgivers were accordingly most explicit in enjoining upon children the nurture and support of aged parents who could otherwise expect little from the younger generation. The Attic law alone added a qualification, that the children were to be without responsibility if their parents had neglected to educate them." Aristophanes describes the treatment of the aged in his "Wasps,"—"where he declares that the only chance of respect or even safety is to retain the power of acting as a juryman, so extorting homage from the accused and supporting himself by his pay without depending on his children. When he comes home with his fee, they are glad to see him, in fact he is able to support a second wife and younger children, as the passage plainly implies, whereas otherwise the father must look towards his son and his son's steward to give him his daily bread, 'uttering imprecations and mutterings lest he knead me a deadly cake,' a dark insinuation which opens to us terrible suspicions."[201]

The women of Greece were comparatively well cared for, as might be expected in a nation and country peculiarly susceptible to the influence of grace and beauty; they were consequently of a comparatively admirable type. However, we are fond, I think, of indulging in this respect, our preference for believing the romantic; so that we usually select carefully the best instances and infer that the standard of all Greece was on this plane. The reasons for this are manifold. We have the habit of imagining, from Greek art, that all Greek women were beautiful; and it is unpleasant to associate moral inferiority with great beauty, or to imagine its being treated with unkindness or disrespect. Again, we are pleased at discovering examples of love and faithfulness even in the far-away ages, and the pleasure of the discovery exalts the few instances with which Greek literature provides us to a disproportionate importance and significance. Disappointed at not finding their perfect ideal in their own age and nation, men have pleased themselves with the imagination of perfection in an object belonging to another age, with regard to which no sordid reality of every-day relation and common, vulgar needs could intervene to check enthusiasm. Furthermore, it is safer to admire those distant from us in time and place, since we are secure from any demand of faithfulness and self-sacrifice from their side. Poets and artists have assisted us in this license of agreeable fancy. So we dwell, with special emphasis, on the beauty of Penelope's character, which is not at all exceptionally faithful as measured by modern standards; we warm over the story of Antigone while we pass by, without special enthusiasm, a thousand instances as admirable in our own day and within our own observation; and we read, with delight, the tale of the Greek who encouraged his ignorant child-wife by gentle treatment until she overcame her timidity, became "tame and docile," and was persuaded to discard cosmetics and high-heeled shoes and devote herself to her household duties; though the most of us would regard the forced marriage of such a child, if it occurred in our own day, as no more than child-barter, and the conduct of the husband (doubtless not worsened by his representation of it) as but a moderate exhibition of common decency. Mahaffy says of the Greeks of the Homeric age: "There is ample evidence that the lower-class women, the slaves and even the free servants, were subjected to the hardest and most distressing sorts of work, the carrying of water, and the grinding of hand-mills; in fact we see them standing to men-servants nearly in the same relation that the North-American squaw stands to her husband—over-taxed, slave-driven, worn out even with field-work, while he is idling, or smoking, or sleeping."[202] The wives of Athens of all periods were little more than a higher class of household servants, with almost no share, by education, in either the science or the art that was the delight of their nation and made its superiority. The position of the hetairai was better in some respects; but the apparently widely spread preference of the Greeks of the cultured classes for what we term unnatural crime argues against any considerable degree of education even in their case. Women were sometimes found in the Greek schools of philosophy, but these were evidently isolated cases. The passage from the Theætetus above quoted shows us the unhappy and subservient position of Athenian women in one respect; and many other passages of Plato throw an unfavorable light upon their lot; though we have, perhaps, to remember that the central figure of the Dialogues had some personal reason for being a woman-hater. "The outcasts from society as we call them were not the immoral and the profligate, but the honorable and virtuous. Accordingly, when we consult the literature of the day, we find women treated either with contemptuous ridicule in comedy, or with still more contemptuous silence in history."[203]

Human sacrifices were not unknown to the earlier Greeks. Of the later days, of Athenian culture, Mahaffy says: "Plutarch tells us that Themistocles was forced by the acclamations of the army to sacrifice three Persian prisoners of distinction brought in just before the battle of Salamis, though he was greatly affected at the terrible nature of the sacrifice, so that it appears to have been then unusual. But Aristophanes, long after, makes allusions to what he calls φαρμακοι, as still remembered at Athens, if not still in use (Ran. 732), and which the scholiasts explain, chiefly from Hipponax, as a sort of human scapegoat, chosen for ugliness or deformity (a very Greek standpoint) and sacrificed for the expiation of the state in days of famine and pestilence, or of other public disaster. I think that Aristophanes alludes to the custom as bygone, though the scholiasts do not think so; but its very familiarity to his audience shows a disregard of human life strange enough in so advanced a legal system as that of democratic Athens."[204]

Mahaffy calls attention to the exceeding cruelty practised by the Greeks in the Peloponnesian war, and adds: "It was not merely among Corcyreans, or among Thracian mercenaries, but among the leaders of Greece that we find this disgusting feature. The Spartans put to death in cold blood 225 prisoners whom they took in Platæa after a long and heroic defence.... But this is a mere trifle when we hear from Plutarch that Lysander, after the battle of Ægospotami, put to death 3000 prisoners (Alcib. c. 37 cp. the details in his Lysander, c. 13),... Athenians, men of education and of culture.... The unfortunate Athenian general, according to Theophrastus (Plut. Lys. 13), submits with dignified resignation to a fate which he confesses would have attended the Lacedemonians had they been vanquished.

"For the Athenians, with their boasted clemency and culture, were very nearly as cruel as their enemies. In the celebrated affair of the Mitylenæans, which Thucydides tells at length in his third book, the first decree of the Athenians was to massacre the whole male population of the captured city. They repented of this decree, because Diodotus proved to them, not that it was inhuman, but that it was inexpedient." Mahaffy argues, in opposition to Grote, that there was no real sentiment of sympathy in the repentance of the Athenians in this affair, for "how could the imagined details of the massacre of 6000 men in Lesbos have been a motive, when the Athenians did, at the same time, have the ringleaders executed at Athens, and they were more than 1000 men (Thuc. III. 30)." These were "executed together, by the hands of Athenians, not with fire-arms but with swords and knives. A few years after, the inhabitants of Melos, many hundreds in number, were put to the sword, when conquered after a brave resistance (Thuc. V. 116), and here, I fear, merely for the purpose of making way for a colony of Athenian citizens, who went out to occupy the houses and lands of their victims."[205]

The practice of torturing witnesses in court was common in Periclean Athens. On this point, Mahaffy writes: "Our best authorities on this question are, of course, the early orators, especially Antiphon, in whose speeches on cases of homicide this feature constantly recurs. It is well known that in such cases the accused might offer his own slaves to be tortured, in order to challenge evidence against himself; and it was thought a weak point in his case if he refused to do so when challenged. It is also well known that the accusers were bound to make good any permanent injury, such as maiming, done to these slaves.

"But there were both restrictions and extensions of this practice as yet but little noticed. It was not the custom to torture slaves who gave evidence to a fact, but only if they denied any knowledge, or appeared to suppress it in the interest of their master (Antiphon, Tetral. A, γ). On the other hand, it was common enough to torture female slaves and also free men....

... "Almost all the orators speak of it as an infallible means of ascertaining the truth. Demosthenes says it has never been known to fail."[206] The restrictions on certain extremities of torture in court diminish in importance when we consider that the poor slave stood, in reality, in all cases, between two alternatives of suffering, that inflicted by the court and that likely to be inflicted by his master in case his evidence displeased the latter. That he was a piece of property of some value was doubtless no more a safeguard to the Greek slave under the hands of his master than it has been in any modern slave-holding country; the Greek was doubtless at least as liable as the man of to-day to forget ultimate loss in the rage of present anger and the malevolent pleasure of revenge.

The condition of slaves among the Greeks furnishes us, indeed, with one of our strongest arguments against their moral code. We do not need to mention the Helots, whose name has become a synonym of degradation and misery. Slaves formed the greater part of the working population of Athens, and were much more numerous than the freemen. Nor were they necessarily even of inferior race or education. Not only did all prisoners taken in war become slaves, with their descendants forever, except as their masters chose to emancipate them (and the possession of such a superfluity sometimes rendered the Athenians generous in this respect), but, until the time of Solon, freemen might be sold into bondage for debt,—and not alone for a large debt, but also for a small one, and not merely until the debt was paid, but for all time. Nor have we reason to suppose that freemen were treated, even in the days of Athens' greatest culture, with great humanity. "At the opening of the Euthryphro there is a story told which is not intended to be anything exceptional, and which shows that the free laborer, or dependent, had not bettered his position since the days when Achilles cited him as the most miserable creature upon earth. 'Now the man who is dead,' says Euthryphro, 'was a poor dependent of mine who worked for us as a [free] field-laborer at Naxos, and one day, in a fit of drunken passion, he got into a quarrel with one of our domestic servants [slaves] and slew him. My father bound him hand and foot and threw him into a ditch, and then sent to Athens to ask of a diviner what he should do with him. Meantime, he had no care or thought of him, deeming him a murderer, and that even if he did die, there would be no great harm. And this was just what happened. For such was the effect of cold and hunger and chains upon him that before the messenger returned from the diviner he was dead. And my father and family are angry with me for taking the part of the murderer and prosecuting my father.'"[207]

We have not much evidence as to the treatment of animals in ancient Greece. Race-horses are likely to have been well cared for,—as long as they were young and swift or beautiful. But it does not appear probable, from what we know of the Greek attitude towards slaves and dependents, women and children, that a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would have flourished in Greece.