A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Ancient and Mediæval Philosophy

by Herbert Ernest Cushman

Democritus, 470.

Sophists (many), 450–350.

Socrates, 469.

Antisthenes, 440.

Aristippus, 435.

Plato, 427.

The Persian Wars and the Rise of Athens. The blow that had been impending over Greece during the sixth century had been struck, but had been averted in the Persian Wars of 490 B. C. and 480 B. C. The powerful and splendidly organized “barbaric neighbor,” who had threatened the civilization of the Greek cities of Asia Minor for so many years, had swept over the Hellespont into Greece and had been turned back.It has been pointed out[14] that the Persian Wars were only oneof a series of conflicts between Oriental and Occidental civilizations; and that the strip of Asia Minor along the Mediterranean has always been a disputed borderland between irreconcilable hemispheres. First was the mythical invasion of Troy; then the Persian Wars; then came the arms of Alexander conquering Persia; then the invasion of the Mohammedans to the very walls of Tours; then the Crusades; and to-day we still have the eternal Eastern question with us. While each of these conflicts was momentous for Europe, none was more important in its issues for the world than the Persian Wars. For through those wars did Greece first come to a consciousness of herself. Never before did she realize her united strength,—the greatness of her inherited instincts. The fifth century B. C. was the most clearly conscious moment of Greece, if not of the world. Classic Greece—the Greece whose thought became fundamental to western civilization—was born from the Persian Wars.

The centre of gravity of the Greek world was shifted after the Persian Wars from Miletus to Athens, from the colonies to the motherland. Indeed, the history of classic Greece is almost entirely the history of Athens. Of the large cities of Greece,—Corinth, Ægina, Sparta, and Thebes,—Athens was naturally the locality where Grecian civilization would centre when the commercial and maritime colonies fell. The Ionian race, by whom it had been settled, was a mixed race, and by nature very versatile. Before the Persian Wars it had been under the wise tyranny of Pisistratus, who took the first steps toward the founding of an Athenian empire. In the period between the two wars, Themistocles had built the Athenian fleet and thereby made Athens the great maritimeand naval centre of Greece. There was, indeed, every reason why Athens and not some other Grecian city should become the new centre of classic Greece. The Spartans were oligarchical, stern, unintellectual, and offensive to strangers; the people of Thebes were held under a strict aristocratic government, the people of Thessaly were aristocratic, luxurious, and stagnant; but the Athenians were democratic, social to strangers, literary, liberal, frugal, and alert. After the Persian Wars the power of the Delian confederacy became more and more centralized in the city of Athens. Controlling the fleet of the Confederacy for her own defense and using the rich treasury of the Confederacy for her own municipal improvements, Athens under the brilliant rule of Pericles, who summoned scholars and artists from all Greece, was the only city of Greece where the Renaissance of Greece was possible. Athens had become the eye of Greece, and the following description of the Greek Renaissance is especially significant in regard to her.

The Greek Enlightenment. Following the Persian Wars there arose throughout Greece a great national intellectual movement. The years mark the Greek Renaissance, the Age of Pericles, and the time when the Greek masterpieces in literature and plastic art were produced. Perhaps the greatest Greek production was Athens itself, whose cultural influence was personified in the scholar-politician, Pericles.

1. The Impulse for Learning. In the first place there was a general impulse throughout Greece for education. Everybody seemed to want to know what the schools of Cosmologists had had to say about science. The Greeks now had wealth and therefore leisure; they had come into contact with the Oriental peoples andtherefore they had their curiosity excited. Learning, which had been confined in the Cosmological Period to a few scholars in the schools, now came forth into the market place. Learning in the fifth century B. C. was drawn from the schools into publicity. The objects of interest had greatly widened and the learning of the scholars began to filter into the general consciousness. Whereas in the sixth century philosophy was a matter between learned men, in the fifth century we find Socrates and the Sophists teaching whosoever would listen.