Westward empire

by Elias Lyman Magoon

The Cyrenaic sect was founded by Aristippus, a disciple of Socrates. It degenerated through the varied succession of Theodorus, Hegesias, and Anniceris, to merge finally in the kindred doctrines on happiness inculcated by Epicurus.

Antisthenes was the first of the Cynics, and was succeeded by the more notorious Diogenes. This school was composed of disciplinarians, rather than doctrinists, whose whole business was the endeavor to arrange the circumstances of life, that they may produce the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of pain. The caustic wit of Diogenes was directed against more refined teachers, especially his great cotemporary, Plato. The latter, in terms which implied respect for the evident talents of a rival whom he had so much reason to despise, called him "a Socrates run mad."

Archelaus succeeded Diogenes, and was called, by way of eminence, "the natural philosopher." Before him, Anaxagoras had taught occasional disciples in Athens; but it is probable that Archelaus was the first to open a regular school there. He transferred the chair of philosophy from Ionia to the metropolis of Minerva 450 years before Christ.

The Megaric sect of Sophists was the last and worst. It was founded by Euclides, and produced Eubulides, Alexinus, Eleensis, Diodorus, and Stilpo. Cotemporary criticism applied to some of these such epithets as the Wrangler, or the Driveler, which, doubtless, were well deserved. Stilpo was the last gleam of philosophic worth in Greece.

Of the religious views of Socrates, we shall treat in the succeeding chapter. Under the present head, it is sufficient to say, that his moral worth illustrated the age in which he lived; and his admiring disciples branched into so many distinguished families or schools, that he is justly called the great patriarch of philosophy. Socrates was the first philosophic thinker who demanded of himself and of all others a reason for their thoughts. He roused the spirit, and rendered it fruitful by rugged husbandry. He insisted that men should understand themselves, and so express their reason as to be understood by him. Thus he produced all he desired, movement, advancement in reflection; and leaving successors to arrange systems, it was enough for him to supervise the birth and growth of living thoughts. As the Pythagoreans were the authors of mathematics and cosmology, Socrates consummated the scientific endeavor, and added psychology. Thus the dignity and importance of human personality stood revealed, the crowning light most needed to complete the age of Pericles. Around this fundamental idea created by psychology was gathered the idea of personal grandeur, in heaven as upon earth, in literature, art, science, philosophy, and religion. As soon as philosophic genius proclaimed the supreme importance of the study of human personality, the higher divinities became personal, and the representations of art no longer fell into exaggerated forms, but were definite, expressive, and refined. Moreover, as this principle prevailed and was acutely felt, legislation became liberal, and the social polity was necessarily democratic.

Plato, the great glory of Athenian philosophy, was born in Ægina, about B.C. 430 years. Descending from Codrus and Solon, his lineage was most distinguished; but his genius was much more illustrious than any ancestral fame. He learned dialectics from Euclides the Megaric; studied the Pythagorean system under Phitolaus and Archytas; and traveled into Egypt to accomplish himself in all that which the geometry and other learning of that country could impart. Returning to Greece, he became the most characteristic and renowned teacher of philosophy in the Periclean age. Demosthenes, Isocrates, and Aristotle were among his disciples, and continuators of his immense mental and moral worth. Plato also visited Italy, where he gathered the noble germs which he grafted on the doctrines of Socrates, and which are not accounted for in Xenophon. On his final return to Athens, he took possession of a modest apartment adjacent to the groves and grounds which had been bequeathed by Academus to the public, wherein he lectured to the public on sublime themes. He divided philosophy into three parts—Morals, Physics, and Dialectics. The first division included politics, and under the second, that science which afterward came to be distinguished by the name of metaphysics. In his Commonwealth, the object of Plato was to project a perfect model to which human institutions might in some remote degree approximate. He seems even at that early day to have had a presentiment of the ennobling republicanism which human progress would necessitate and attain. His writings form a mass of literary and moral wisdom, inculcated with the highest charm of thought and manner, which had ever appeared to exalt the imagination and affect the heart. He was, doubtless, the best prose writer of antiquity; in the form and force of his composition, he stands at the highest point of refinement Attic genius ever attained. He died at Athens, eighty-one years old, and was honored with a monument in the Academy, upon which his famous pupil, Aristotle, inscribed an epitaph in terms of reverence and gratitude.

The philosophy to which Plato gives his name, recalls at once all that is most profound in thought and pleasing in imagination. But no isolated genius can be correctly appreciated. His predecessors, Socrates and Anaxagoras, as well as his successors, the Neoplatonists, must be taken into joint consideration, or the great master in whom philosophic grandeur culminated will not himself be properly understood. Neither is the Sceptic school of Pyrrho, nor the Stoic school of Zeus; Democritus, of Abdera, radiant with smiles, or Heraclitus, of Ephesus, bathed in tears, to be discarded from the view, when we would sum up the aggregated worth of that philosophic age. But the hour has come when the god of philosophy, a son of Metis, or Wisdom, realized the menace put into the mouth of Prometheus by Æschylus, and Zeus with his compeers is driven into the caverns of the West to share the exile of Cronus. Who was the predestined instrument of all this?

Stagirus, the birthplace of Aristotle, was situated on the western side of the Strymonic gulf; a region which, in soil and appearance, resembles much the southern part of the bay of Naples. When seventeen years old, he came to Athens, the centre of all civilization, and the focus of every thing that was brilliant in action or thought. Plato fired his mind, and fortified that wonderful industry in his hardy pupil, which enabled him, first among men, to acquire almost encyclopædic knowledge in collecting, criticizing, and digesting the most comprehensive mass of materials. So extraordinary was the application of Aristotle, that Plato called his residence "the house of the reader."

How wonderful is Providence! While Aristotle was exiled in Mytilene, and when the auspices of human progress were most foreboding, he was invited to undertake the training of one who, in the world of action, was destined to achieve an empire which only that of his master in the world of thought could ever surpass. In the conjunction of two such spirits, according to the predetermined mode and moment, the invaluable accumulation of Periclean wealth was to be distributed westward without the slightest loss. The great transition hero needed to be trained in a way befitting his mission, and this required that he should be imbued with something better than the austerity of Leonidas, or the flattery of Lysimachus, so that his character might command respect, and his judgment preserve it. Through the influence of Aristotle on Alexander, this conservative result was attained. The rude and intemperate barbarian became ameliorated, and soon manifested that love for philosophy and elegant letters, which were the fairest traits of his life. So strong did this elevating passion become, even amid the ignoble pursuits of war, that being at the extremity of Asia, in a letter to Harpalus, he desired the works of Philestris, the historian, the tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the dithyrambs of Telestis and Philoxenus, to be sent to him. Homer was his constant traveling companion; a copy of whom was often in his hands, and deposited by the side of his dagger under his nightly pillow. Thus did the beautiful age of Pericles blend with the martial force about to succeed.

When Aristotle returned to Athens to close the great era of philosophic vigor, being near the temple of Apollo Lyceus, his school was known as the Lyceum, and here every morning and evening he addressed a numerous body of scholars. Among the acute and impressible Greeks nearly all objects, however ideal in their original treatment, subsequently received a practical form. As the imaginative sublimities of their poets became embodied in glorious sculptures, so the theories of their early philosophy were wrought out politically, or gave way to cumulative mathematical demonstration. Plato, in dialogues and dissertations, philosophized with all the fervor of an artist; while the method of Aristotle was strictly scientific in the minute as well as enlarged sense of the word. To the first, philosophy was a speciality which engrossed a protracted life; but the latter treated not only of natural science, and natural history as well, but he also wrote on politics, general history, and criticism, so that it may be said truly that he epitomized the entire knowledge of the Greeks. The age of Plato was an age of ideals; but with Aristotle the realistic age had dawned. Pericles had begun to take part in public affairs one year before the birth of Socrates; Olynthus was taken by Philip of Macedon the very year in which Plato died. This intermediate period of one hundred and twenty years was all occupied with some ideal of beauty, wisdom, or freedom, in the persons of poets, architects, sculptors, painters, statesmen, who were striving to realize it, dreaming of it, or sporting with it to amaze and bewilder their fellow-men. But the name of Aristotle, as that of Philip, is a signal that concentrated organizing power has appeared in the realms of thought and action, and that the coming age requires a philosophical expounder who shall in his own career govern the old and represent the new. It was at Athens that Aristotle collected all the treasures of scientific facts the conquered nations could contribute, and wrote there the great works which were still young in their influence when the Macedonian madman had long since crumbled into dust.