Pythagoras, the cotemporary of Anaxagoras, greatly improved every branch of science. He is said to have been taken prisoner by Cambyses, and thus to have become acquainted with all the mysteries of the Persian Magi. He settled at Crotona, in Italy, and founded the Italian sect. The physical sciences, particularly natural history, and the science of medicine, were created by the Greeks. The writings of Hippocrates and Galen instructed the age of Pericles in the science of anatomy, which, with geometry and numbers, enabled the greatest of the artists to determine his drawing, proportions, and motion. It was genius guided by science that enabled the master to endow his work with life, action, and sentiment.
Science in Greece, like life itself, was thoroughly republican and expansive, so long as vital growth was permitted. Their navigation extended even to the Baltic, as the voyage of Pytheas is a proof; they rather surpassed than yielded to the Phœnicians in the activity of their trade, and the wealth as well as extent of their colonies. It was in their superiority of scientific attainments that the Grecian colonists mainly excelled. Carthage, for instance, was at the same time powerful in conquest and commerce, but despite all her intellectual culture, she was inferior to smaller cities planted on the opposite coasts.
In the time of Homer, all Italy was "an unknown country." Phocean navigators discovered the Tyrrhenian sea, west of Sicily, and yet more daring adventurers from Tartessus sailed to the Pillars of Hercules. In due time, Colæus of Samos, clearing for Egypt, was driven by easterly winds (Herodotus adds significantly, "not without divine intervention,") through the straits into the ocean. Thus was the remotest border of the known world unwillingly passed, and a nearer approach made to the divinely attested Hesperides of the West.
In contemplating the sublime and immortal rank which Greece held in the designs of Providence, the relation of her commerce to science should not be overlooked. The fable respecting the flight of Dædalus from Crete, is supposed to signify that he escaped by means of a vessel with sails, the first use of which, in that primitive age, might well be regarded as a description of wings. Inland and maritime navigation, were made to contribute much to that prolific race. Ivory, ebony, indigo, the purple dye mentioned by Ctesias, and gum-resins were imported from Arabia and Africa, together with pearls and cotton from the Persian Gulf. Caravans of camels richly ladened crossed Arabia to Egypt, and the great rivers Euphrates and Tigris conveyed vast stores of raw material to western Asia and Greece. Not only were the shrines of many a deity enriched with vessels and decorations wrought out of "barbaric gold," but every department of productive art and science was kept active through the demands of a wide and untrammeled commerce. The great intelligences of the age struggled with laudable intent, to embody the conceptions, and diffuse the effulgence they possessed. As in that national game so significant of the master-passion and glorious mission of the Greeks, they threw onward the blazing torch from one to the other, until light kindled in every eye, and the flying symbol exhilarated every breast. No man then professed to teach, and was paid for teaching, who yet had nothing to communicate.
For ten centuries the Greeks marched at the head of humanity, while Athens remained the centre to which the winds and the waves bore germs of civilization from the East, and whence, by the same instrumentalities, the seeds of yet richer harvests were scattered toward a more distant West. Hesiod, in his Works and Days, gave many practical lessons on agriculture, and more prosaic, but not less useful proficients arose on every hand to impart the most valuable instruction to each aspirant. The last effort of Grecian science was to mingle and combine in one system, all that the nations of the earth up to that era had produced. Diversified ideas of every shape and degree of worth were gathered around the torch of intense national enthusiasm, were made to comprehend and modify one another, and, in their sublimated union, gave birth to the first cultivated world. Plato was nearly cotemporary with Phidias, and, considering the great influence of his philosophic theory concerning the power of the soul to mold the outward person into its own pattern of virtue or vice, we can little doubt that the artist in his studio was greatly influenced by the sage of the Academy, both as to the choice of subjects and mode of treating them. But when the age of consummate art had passed, the Greeks perfected another great legacy to their successors, by making the last generation of her national industry the successful devotees of science.
When every other department of literature and art in Athens were at their greatest splendor, the mathematics also flourished most; the former soon began to decline, but the sciences continued in power long after beauty in art had been eclipsed. Aristotle wrote nine books on animals. He may be fixed upon as representing the highest stage of knowledge and system the Greeks ever attained. Athenæus states, that Alexander gave him large sums of money, and several thousands of men, to hunt, fish, and otherwise aid in furnishing a vast collection in natural history, under the supervision of the philosopher. He was not only the first, but the only one of the ancients, who treated of separate species in the animal kingdom. But, although his system of physics accumulated numerous facts, Aristotle deduced not one general law to explain them. He knew the property of the lever as well, and many other correlative truths, but there was no correct theory of mechanical powers in the world, before Archimedes struck upon a generic principle of science. Before him, no one had arranged the facts of space, body, and motion, under the idea of mechanical cause, which is force.
The civilization of Greece is borne to us, not upon the shields of her warriors, though they were such as Epaminondas, Miltiades, or Theseus. But in her inventive skill and artistic taste, in her ships and argosies, in her industrial prowess and the freedom consequent thereupon, were the power and wealth which made her the Panopticon of the nations. Freedom of production, and freedom of barter, were the guiding commercial principles under which science and fame grew together and matured the greatest strength. Athens was indebted to the enterprise of her citizens, and not to martial conquest, for her glory. The ships that crowded the gulf of Salamis, were built of wood, purchased from Thrace and Macedonia, and choice material for the furniture of their halls and palaces, from Byzantium. Phrygia supplied them with wool, and imports from Miletus were woven in their looms. The choicest products of Pontus, Cyprus, and the Peloponnesus, did the Athenians obtain; while, for them, from Britain, overland through Gaul, the Carthagenians exported tin, and exchanged with them diversified commodities. Spain yielded them its iron, and the quarries of Hymettus and Pentelicus furnished marble for the adornment of their own lands, and for copious export. As is shown in McCullagh's "Industrial History of Free Nations," they never had an idea that population could outstrip production, or production over supply the population. "If a man were in debt, they did not confine him between stone-walls, useless to himself and his creditors: they provided that he should labor until he had paid back the amount of the debt. It was upon the seas of commercial treaty they learned their lessons of freedom; and thence, too, did those gems of art, which have since been the wonder and the worship of the world, increase and delight. The beauty of their heavens shed an influence over their soul; the tenderness of their scenes, we know, enwove themselves into even the tables, chairs, couches, and drinking vessels. The Grecian moved amid a perpetual retinue of beauties; the painting, the statue, the vase, the temple, all assumed novel forms of elegance. In all this it is not the splendor of Athens which attracts us most, it is that indefatigable genius of enterprise and industry which, from the caves of the Morea, plucked the laurel, and made the wild waves of the Ægean tributary to her wants and her valor." So prevalent was this spirit of free trade and personal enterprise, that ordinary mechanics often gained great power in the republic; as in the person of Cleon, the tanner, who became a worthy successor of Pericles. The port of the great artistic, manufacturing, and commercial emporium, was so thronged with ships from every clime, as to justify the saying of Xenophon, that the dominion of the sea secured to the Athenians the sweets of the world. Nor were their own craft insignificant in size, or any way unworthy of the great people they served. Demosthenes refers to one ship which carried three hundred men, a full cargo, numerous slaves, and the ordinary crew.
It is granted that art was the parent of science; the genial and comely mother of a daughter possessing a yet loftier and serener beauty than herself. It is equally true that Doric columns, and decorated entablatures, were perfected like the integral parts of the Attic drama, before professional critics vouchsafed to apply rules for the three unities, or canons of monumental forms. What creative spirit in their age actually did, scientific judges afterward patronized with frigid nomenclatures, and learnedly demonstrated that it might by certain rules be done.
Under the Ptolemies, neither poets nor artists were produced; but the mathematical school of Alexandria exhibited an extraordinary succession of remarkable men. Within the secluded halls and ample libraries of that central college, the exact sciences were assiduously cultivated, and for more than a thousand years immense resources of learning were stored, in due time to be dispersed over the prepared West. The works of Euclid, Apollonius, and Archimedes, contain a valuable treasure of the mathematical knowledge of antiquity; but at the early period when they lived, science was so immature, and the amount of observations so limited, they could only lay the foundation of that excellence to which posterity has since arrived. At the conclusion of the Aristotelian treatises the exploration of this realm subsided, and the human mind remained, in appearance, stationary for nearly two thousand years.