Farther, neither Perikles, nor any defender of free speech, would assent to the definition of rhetoric — That it is a branch of the art of flattery, studying the immediately pleasurable, and disregarding the good.[129] This indeed represents Plato’s own sentiment, and was true in the sense which the Platonic Sokrates assigns (in the Gorgias, though not in the Protagoras) to the words good and evil. But it is not true in the sense which the Athenian people and the Athenian public men assigned to those words. Both the one and the other used the words pleasurable and good as familiarly as Plato, and had sentiments corresponding to both of them. The pleasurable and painful referred to present and temporary causes: the Good and Evil to prospective causes and permanent situations, involving security against indefinite future suffering, combined with love of national dignity and repugnance to degradation, as well as with a strong sense of common interests and common obligations to each other. To provide satisfaction for these common patriotic feelings — to sustain the dignity of the city by effective and even imposing public establishments, against foreign enemies — to protect the individual rights of citizens by an equitable administration of justice — counted in the view of the Athenians as objects good and honourable: while the efforts and sacrifices necessary for these permanent ends, were, so far as they went, a renunciation of what they would call the pleasurable. When, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, the Athenians, acting on the advice of Perikles, allowed all Attica to be ravaged, and submitted to the distress of cooping the whole population within the long walls, rather than purchase peace by abnegating their Hellenic dignity, independence, and security — they not only renounced much that was pleasurable, but endured great immediate distress, for the sake of what they regarded as a permanent good.[130] Eighty years afterwards, when Demosthenes pointed out to them the growing power and encroachments of the Macedonian Philip, and exhorted them to the efforts requisite for keeping back that formidable enemy, while there was yet time — they could not be wound up to the pitch requisite for affronting so serious an amount of danger and suffering. They had lost that sense of Hellenic dignity, and that association of self-respect with active personal soldiership and sailorship, which rendered submission to an enemy the most intolerable of all pains, at the time when Perikles had addressed them. They shut their eyes to an impending danger, which ultimately proved their ruin. On both these occasions, we have the pleasurable and the good brought into contrast in the Athenian mind; in both we have the two most eminent orators of Grecian antiquity enforcing the good in opposition to the pleasurable: the first successfully, the last vainly, in opposition to other orators.
[129] The reply composed by the rhetor Aristeides to the Gorgias of Plato is well deserving of perusal, though (like all his compositions) it is very prolix and wordy. See Aristeides, Orationes xlv. and xlvi. — Περεὶ Ῥητορικῆς, and Ὑπὲρ τῶν Τεττάρων. In the last of the two orations he defends the four eminent Athenians (Miltiades, Themistoklês, Periklês, Kimon) whom Plato disparages in the Gorgias.
Aristeides insists forcibly on the partial and narrow view here taken by Plato of persuasion, as a working force both for establishing laws and carrying on government. He remarks truly that there are only two forces between which the choice must be made, intimidation and persuasion: that the substitution of persuasion in place of force is the great improvement which has made public and private life worth having (μόνη βιωτὸν ἡμῖν πεποίηκε τὸν βίον, Orat. xlv. p. 64, Dindorf); that neither laws could be discussed and passed, nor judicial trial held under them, without ῥητορικὴ as the engine of persuasion (pp. 66-67-136); that Plato in attacking Rhetoric had no right to single out despots and violent conspirators as illustrations of it — εἶτ’ ἐλέγχειν μὲν βούλεται τὴν ῥητορικήν, κατηγορεῖ δὲ τῶν τυράννων καὶ δυναστῶν, τὰ ἄμικτα μιγνύς — τίς γὰρ οὐκ οἶδεν, ὅτι ῥητορικὴ καὶ τυραννὶς τοσοῦτον ἀλλήλων κεχωρίσται, ὅσον τὸ πείθειν τοῦ βιάζεσθαι (p. 99). He impugns the distinction which Plato has drawn between ἰατρική, γυμναστική, κυβερνητική, νομοθετική, &c., on the one side, which Plato calls τέχναι, arts or sciences, and affirms to rest on scientific principles — and ῥητορική, μαγειρική, &c., on the other side, which Plato affirms to be only guess work or groping, resting on empirical analogies. Aristeides says that ἰατρικὴ and ῥητορικὴ are in this respect both on a par; that both are partly reducible to rule, but partly also driven by necessity to conjectures and analogies, and the physician not less than the rhetor (pp. 45-48-49); which the Platonic Sokrates himself affirms in another dialogue, Philêbus, p. 56 A.
The most curious part of the argument of Aristeides is where he disputes the prerogative which Plato had claimed for ἰατρική, γυμναστική &c., on the ground of their being arts or reducible to rules. The effects of human art (says Aristeides) are much inferior to those of θεία μοῖρα or divine inspiration. Many patients are cured of disease by human art; but many more are cured by the responses and directions of the Delphian oracle, by the suggestion of dreams, and by other varieties of the divine prompting, delivered through the Pythian priestess, a woman altogether ignorant (p. 11). καίτοι μικρὰ μὲν ἡ πάντας εἰδυῖα λόγους ἰατρικὴ πρὸς τὰς ἐκ Δελφῶν δύναται λύσεις, ὅσαι καὶ ἰδίᾳ καὶ κοινῇ καὶ νόσων καὶ παθημάτων ἁπαντων ἀνθρωπίνων ἐφάνθησαν. Patients who are cured in this way by the Gods without medical art, acquire a natural impulse which leads them to the appropriate remedy — ἐπιθυμία αὐτοὺς ἄγει ἐπὶ τὸ ὄνησον (p. 20). Aristeides says that he can himself depose — from his own personal experience as a sick man seeking cure, and from personal knowledge of many other such — how much more efficacious in healing is aid from the Gods, given in dreams and other ways, than advice from physicians; who might well shudder when they heard the stories which he could tell (pp. 21-22). To undervalue science and art (he says) is the principle from which men start, when they flee to the Gods for help — τοῦ καταφυγεῖν ἐπὶ τοὺς θεοὺς σχεδὸν ἀρχή, τὸ τῆς τέχνης ὑπεριδεῖν ἔστιν.
[130] Nothing can be more at variance with the doctrine which Plato assigns to Kalliklês in the Gorgias, than the three memorable speeches of Perikles in Thucydides, i. 144, ii. 35, ii. 60, seq. All these speeches are penetrated with the deepest sense of that κοινωνία and φιλία which the Platonic Sokrates extols: not one of them countenances πλεονεξίαν, which the Platonic Sokrates forbids (Gorg. 508 E). Τὸ προσταλαιπωρεῖν τῷ δόξαντι καλῷ (to use the expressive phrase of Thucydides, ii. 53) was a remarkable feature in the character of the Athenians of that day: it was subdued for the moment by the overwhelming misery of pestilence and war combined.
Rhetoric was employed at Athens in appealing to all the various established sentiments and opinions. Erroneous inferences raised by the Kalliklês of Plato.
Lastly, it is not merely the political power of the Athenians that Perikles employs his eloquence to uphold. He dwells also with emphasis on the elegance of taste, on the intellectual force and activity, which warranted him in decorating the city with the title of Preceptress of Hellas.[131] All this belongs, not to the pleasurable as distinguished from the good, but to good (whether immediately pleasurable or not) in its most comprehensive sense, embracing the improvement and refinement of the collective mind. If Perikles, in this remarkable funeral harangue, flattered the sentiments of the people — as he doubtless did — he flattered them by kindling their aspirations towards good. And Plato himself does the same (though less nobly and powerfully), adopting the received framework of Athenian sentiment, in his dialogue called Menexenus, which we shall come to in a future [chapter].
[131] Thucyd. ii. 41-42. ξυνελών τε λέγω τήν τε πᾶσαν πόλιν τῆς Ἑλλάδος παίδευσιν εἶναι, &c.
The Platonic Idéal exacts, as good, some order, system, discipline. But order may be directed to bad ends as well as to good. Divergent ideas about virtue.
The issue, therefore, which Plato here takes against Rhetoric, must stand or fall with the Platonic Idéal of Good and Evil. But when he thus denounces both the general public and the most patriotic rhetors, to ensure exclusive worship for his own Idéal of Good — we may at least require that he shall explain, wherein consists that Good — by what mark it is distinguishable — and on what authority pre-eminence is claimed for it. So far, indeed, we advance by the help of Plato’s similes[132] — order, discipline, health and strength of body — that we are called upon to recognise, apart from all particular moments of enjoyment or suffering, of action or quiescence, a certain permanent mental condition and habit — a certain order, regulation, discipline — as an object of high importance to be attained. This (as I have before remarked) is a valuable idea which pervades, in one form or another, all the Hellenic social views, from Sokrates downward, and even before Sokrates; an idea, moreover, which was common to Peripatetics, Stoics, Epikureans. But mental order and discipline is not in itself an end: it may be differently cast, and may subserve many different purposes. The Pythagorean brotherhood was intensely restrictive in its canons. The Spartan system exhibited the strictest order and discipline — an assemblage of principles and habits predetermined by authority and enforced upon all — yet neither Plato nor Aristotle approve of its results. Order and discipline attained full perfection in the armies of Julius Caesar and the French Emperor Napoleon; in the middle ages, also, several of the monastic orders stood high in respect to finished discipline pervading the whole character: and the Jesuits stood higher than any. Each of these systems has included terms equivalent to justice, temperance, virtue, vice, &c., with sentiments associated therewith, yet very different from what Plato would have approved. The question — What is Virtue? — Vir bonus est quis? — will be answered differently in each. The Spartans — when they entrapped (by a delusive pretence of liberation and military decoration) two thousand of their bravest Helot warriors, and took them off by private assassinations,[133] — did not offend against their own idea of virtue, or against the Platonic exigency of Order — Measure — System.