of these days was the New Comedy of Menander and his school. Menander’s work was taken over bodily by the Roman poets Plautus and Terence, who did little more than translate his comedies into Latin, and sometimes weave two of them together into one play, a process known by the not inappropriate technical name “contamination.” From the Roman comedians they passed almost direct to the Elizabethan age, so that in the history of the drama Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” begins almost where Menander left off. It must be confessed that the large fragments of Menander recently discovered do not raise our estimate of this dramatist.
If we turn now to philosophy we find the great name of Aristotle overshadowing everything else.[114] If we have a true sense of historical proportion, we shall probably admit that the words of Aristotle have conquered the world in far truer sense than the spears of his great pupil. For Aristotle is the father of the inductive method, the patron saint of all those who observe and verify facts in order to discover the laws that control them. He was born at Stagira, in Thrace, but he came to Athens to be a disciple in the Academy, that pleasant olive-grove where Plato was the master. Twenty years he spent thus in study, and then he was commissioned by Philip to teach Alexander and other noble youths of Macedon. As soon as this task was completed he returned to Athens, and there founded his famous Peripatetic school of philosophy, so called because his lectures were delivered in the shady walks that surrounded the Lyceum. In the morning he would discuss abstruse questions with an inner circle of adepts, and in the cool of the evening deliver polished lectures to a wider circle. The fame of his teaching was spread throughout the world, and all the ablest intellects of Greece gathered to hear him. All his life he received the most generous support from Alexander, who made a point of collecting strange beasts from all quarters to enrich his zoological studies. The attitude of the monarch towards learning was in striking contrast to the behaviour of the Athenian democracy. Some wretched hierophant instituted a prosecution for impiety against Aristotle, just as they had done against Socrates, and forced him to withdraw from Athens for the closing years of his life.
Aristotle took all knowledge as his province and proceeded to map it out for further investigation. It is impossible even to enumerate all his extant writings here, and they are only a small part of what he wrote. For scientific method he wrote on Logic and Dialectic, and here he was the discoverer of the syllogism and distinguished the inductive and deductive methods of reasoning. For literature he dissected Poetry and Rhetoric, laying down principles which all subsequent critics have been compelled to follow. In his Ethics he defines the nature of virtue in a sense that is truly Hellenic. Virtues are the mean between two vices. Thus liberality is the virtue of which prodigality and parsimony are the extremes; courage is the mean between foolhardiness and cowardice. For Natural Science he wrote the first treatise on zoology, enumerating about 500 different species. It was the first time in the history of the world when men had thought it worth while to observe the world around them. Most of this scientific work was beyond the reach of mankind, and remained so for two thousand years. The Romans studied him, but scarcely advanced a step. In the Dark Ages Europe lost even the power to follow him, and much of his teaching was recovered from the wise men of Arabia. The mediæval schoolmen were content with abridged translations for their scientific knowledge. It was not until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that Europe came again to be able to study and understand him. In the seventeenth and eighteenth men like Bacon and Newton began to make some advance. Even now he is our master in Logic, in Criticism, and above all in Politics.
Plato had treated Political Science in three great dialogues, the greatest of which is “The Republic.” The ostensible object of this work is to define the nature of Justice, and in order to do so Socrates and his friends set out to construct an
Plate LXXXVIII. THE VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE
Alinari