[188] Mahaffy.
[189] There is not a single sentence in praise of Alexander, no dedication, no compliments, in all Aristotle. On the other hand, he never mentions Demosthenes nor quotes him in the Rhetoric.—G. M.
[190] Wheeler.
[191] Bauer, in Vom Griechentum zum Christentum, says that Alexander sent a mission of exploration to Abyssinia to enable Aristotle to settle the question of the cause of the Nile inundations (melting of mountain snows), and that he also had tropical flora and other material collected for him—E. B.
[192] Ancient Greek Literature.
[193] Jung in his Psychology of the Unconscious is very good in his chapter I on the differences between ancient (pre-Athenian) thought and modern thought. The former he calls Undirected Thinking, the latter Directed Thinking. The former was a thinking in images, akin to dreaming; the latter a thinking in words. Science is an organization of directed thinking. The Antique spirit (before the Greek thinkers, i.e.) created not science but mythology. The ancient human world was a world of subjective fantasies like the world of children and uneducated young people to-day, and like the world of savages and dreams. Infantile thought and dreams are a re-echo of the prehistoric and savage. Myths are the mass dreams of peoples, and dreams the myths of individuals. The work of hard and disciplined thinking by means of carefully analyzed words and statements which was begun by the Greek thinkers and resumed by the scholastic philosophers of whom we shall tell in the middle ages, was a necessary preliminary to the development of modern science.
[194] “For the proper administration of justice and for the distribution of authority it is necessary that the citizens be acquainted with each other’s characters, so that, where this cannot be, much mischief ensues, both in the use of authority and in the administration of justice; for it is not just to decide arbitrarily, as must be the case with excessive population.” Aristotle’s Politics, quoted by Wheeler, who adds, “Aristotle comes to the conclusion that the natural ‘limit to the size of the state must be found in the capability of being easily taken in at a glance.’” But Murray notes that the word Eusunopton means also “capable of being comprehended as a unity”—a very different and wider idea.
[195] Benjamin Ide Wheeler’s Alexander the Great and G. D. Hogarth’s Philip and Alexander have been very useful here.
[196] To the common Athenians, that is. But to many thoughtful Greeks the rôle of Macedonia in their future was a matter of earnest speculation. Herodotus (viii. 137) tells a long story of a prophecy by which the inheritance of Perdiccas, the ancestor of the Macedonian kings, was to embrace at last the whole round world. This was written a hundred years before Philip and Alexander.
[197] Goldsmith’s History of Greece. The picturesque disposition of the novelist rather than the austere method of the historian, is apparent here.