For these learned doctors were apt to forget that Plato had reached his conclusions from very different premises than those which were popular in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
For instance, Plato had been anything but a pious man in the Christian sense of the word. The Gods of his ancestors he had always regarded with deep contempt as ill-mannered rustics from distant Macedonia. He had been deeply mortified by their scandalous behavior as related in the chronicles of the Trojan War. But as he grew older and sat and sat and sat in his little olive grove and became more and more exasperated by the foolish quarrels of the little city-states of his native land, and witnessed the utter failure of the old democratic ideal, he grew convinced that some sort of religion was necessary for the average citizen, or his imaginary Republic would at once degenerate into a state of rampant anarchy. He therefore insisted that the legislative body of his model community should establish a definite rule of conduct for all citizens and should force both freemen and slaves to obey these regulations on pain of death or exile or imprisonment. This sounded like an absolute negation of that broad spirit of tolerance and of that liberty of conscience for which Socrates had so valiantly fought only a short time before, and that is exactly what it was meant to be.
The reason for this change in attitude is not hard to find. Whereas Socrates had been a man among men, Plato was afraid of life and escaped from an unpleasant and ugly world into the realm of his own day dreams. He knew of course that there was not the slightest chance of his ideas ever being realized. The day of the little independent city-states, whether imaginary or real, was over. The era of centralization had begun and soon the entire Greek peninsula was to be incorporated into that vast Macedonian Empire which stretched from the shores of the Maritsa to the banks of the Indus River.
But ere the heavy hand of the conqueror descended upon the unruly democracies of the old peninsula, the country had produced the greatest of those many benefactors who have put the rest of the world under eternal obligation to the now defunct race of the Greeks.
I refer of course to Aristotle, the wonder-child from Stagira, the man who in his day and age knew everything that was to be known and added so much to the sum total of human knowledge that his books became an intellectual quarry from which fifty successive generations of Europeans and Asiatics were able to steal to their hearts’ content without exhausting that rich vein of pure learning.
At the age of eighteen, Aristotle had left his native village in Macedonia to go to Athens and follow the lectures in Plato’s university. After his graduation he lectured in a number of places until the year 336 when he returned to Athens and opened a school of his own in a garden near the temple of Apollo Lyceus, which became known as the Lyceum and soon attracted pupils from all over the world.
Strangely enough, the Athenians were not at all in favor of increasing the number of academies within their walls. The town was at last beginning to lose its old commercial importance and all of her more energetic citizens were moving to Alexandria and to Marseilles and other cities of the south and the west. Those who remained behind were either too poor or too indolent to escape. They were the hide-bound remnant of those old, turbulent masses of free citizens, who had been at once the glory and the ruin of the long-suffering Republic. They had regarded the “goings on” in Plato’s orchard with small favor. When a dozen years after his death, his most notorious pupil came back and openly taught still more outrageous doctrines about the beginning of the world and the limited ability of the Gods, the old fogies shook their solemn heads and mumbled dark threats against the man who was making their city a by-word for free thinking and unbelief.
If they had had their own way, they would have forced him to leave their country. But they wisely kept these opinions to themselves. For this short-sighted, stoutish gentleman, famous for his good taste in books and in clothes, was no negligible quantity in the political life of that day, no obscure little professor who could be driven out of town by a couple of hired toughs. He was no one less than the son of a Macedonian court-physician and he had been brought up with the royal princes. And furthermore, as soon as he had finished his studies, he had been appointed tutor to the crown prince and for eight years he had been the daily companion of young Alexander. Hence he enjoyed the friendship and the protection of the most powerful ruler the world had ever seen and the regent who administered the Greek provinces during the monarch’s absence on the Indian front watched carefully lest harm should befall one who had been the boon companion of his imperial master.
No sooner, however, had news of Alexander’s death reached Athens than Aristotle’s life was in peril. He remembered what had happened to Socrates and felt no desire to suffer a similar fate. Like Plato, he had carefully avoided mixing philosophy with practical politics. But his distaste for the democratic form of government and his lack of belief in the sovereign abilities of the common people were known to all. And when the Athenians, in a sudden outburst of fury, expelled the Macedonian garrison, Aristotle moved across the Euboean Sound and went to live in Calchis, where he died a few months before Athens was reconquered by the Macedonians and was duly punished for her disobedience.