Other schools of philosophy arose at Athens which from their more vital influence upon the lives and actions of ordinary men are quite as important in the history of human civilisation. Zeno founded in the Stoa Poikile of Athens the Stoic philosophy, and Epicurus taught the doctrines which bore his name, at the same time when Aristotle was lecturing in the Lyceum and the successor of Plato in the Academy. Both were largely concerned with the rules for right conduct in life. The Stoics taught that wisdom and virtue are the true goal of man. Virtue consists in living according to Nature, and it becomes the business of the wise man to discover what is essential and distinguish it from what is merely accidental and ephemeral. Pleasure, praise, even life itself, are among things accidental. At its best Stoicism insisted very sternly upon duty, and the contempt of pain and death. In this way it seized upon all that was noblest in the Roman character and raised up under the Empire a series of martyrs who alone withstood the tyrants because they were not afraid of death. It approaches the sublime in the mouths of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. Filtering through the Asiatic temperament and mingling in its course with the higher teaching of Pharisaism, it did much to form the philosophy of a certain Jew of Tarsus, and through him has vitally influenced Christianity. In another sphere its insistence upon Natural Law bore fruit in Roman jurisprudence and lies at the base of all the legal systems of Europe.
Epicurus, on the other hand, made pleasure the end of life, not the mere bodily pleasure with which his name has been associated, but that which in the sum of its moments goes to form what we call happiness. It was necessary to happiness that men should cast off all the degrading fears born of superstition and know that the gods—if indeed gods exist—are too much occupied themselves in enjoying celestial happiness to condescend to punish and afflict the mortals under their feet. So the Epicureans accepted a material theory, largely due to Democritus, which explained the universe on atomic principles. Death was merely the resolution of body and soul into its primordial atoms. The less noble spirits among them undoubtedly taught the maxim “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” but in such a mind as that of the Roman poet Lucretius Epicureanism is a fine and lofty thing, with its fearless spirit of inquiry and its bitter scorn of superstition.
We should mention also the Cynics, whose chief teacher was Diogenes, for they inculcated a contempt for pleasure and an asceticism which led some of them to live a hermit life, or, like mendicant friars, to carry neither staff nor scrip and to take no thought for their raiment. Needless to say, Cynicism never became a popular doctrine.
It is evident, then, that intellectual life was still in full vigour at Athens in the third century. But there was a weakening already visible. These Greeks could still think clearly, even nobly, but it was not until they made Roman converts that noble thoughts could be translated into noble action. As for the Greeks, their restless tongues and subtle brains carried them away into logic-chopping and childish love of paradox. There was a day when Athens sent on an embassy to Rome the three heads of her chief schools of philosophy. Their brilliant discourses charmed and amazed the simple Romans. Carneades proved that virtue was profitable, and the Romans were delighted. On the next day he proved that it was unprofitable, and the Romans were astonished. Cato, however, the truest Roman of them all, thought that Rome was better without such brilliant visitors. And he was probably right.
VII
EPILOGUE
ἡ πόλις ἡμῶν ... τὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ὄνομα πεποίηκε
μηκέτι τοῦ γένους ἀλλὰ τῆς διανοίας δοκεῖν εἶναι.
Isocrates.
T was, according to Isocrates, the fruit of the activity of Athens that Hellas had ceased to be a geographical expression and had become the definition of an intellectual standpoint. In that very true sense Greek history cannot close. It falls into chapters which are ever to be continued as soon as man begins to think again. Whosoever from the beginning of his action already contemplates its final end and adapts his means thereto in earnest simplicity, whosoever knows that pride and vain ostentation will assuredly bring its own punishment, of whatever land or age he may be, he is a Greek. In that sense we cannot close Greek history. Greece, as Juvenal said in a very hackneyed phrase, vanquished the Roman, her barbarian conqueror, and the Roman took up the mission of extending Hellenism over the West. The history of Roman civilisation only begins in the second century, when Rome was first brought into contact with Greece. Elsewhere I hope we shall see how Greek culture permeated everything at Rome after that, supplied her with art and literature, taught her philosophy, overlaid and almost destroyed her native religion, and even wrote her history. Losing Hellas, Europe sank into ages of darkness: recovering her, the European nations began to think again. Shakespeare we trace through the Latins to Menander, Milton through Vergil to Homer and Theocritus, Bacon to Aristotle, Sir Thomas More to Plato, and so with the others. So that every one who reads books or enjoys art in Europe to-day is indirectly borrowing from Greece.
Moreover, it is fairly obvious that Greece has not ceased to exist as a geographical expression. The more we study modern Greece, the more we are convinced that the Hellenic race is by no means extinct. Greece was, it is true, conquered by the Romans in 146 B.C. They had been forced partly by the aggression of Pyrrhus and partly by the expansion of their own empire to take some action in the Eastern Mediterranean. There they found themselves physically as men among children, intellectually as children among men. Nothing is more striking than the almost reverent spirit in which the Roman soldiers first moved about among the old cities of Greece. But the Greeks were impossible neighbours, and at last, after infinite forbearance, the Romans were compelled by their masculine sense of order to take the responsibility of controlling Greece. Corinth was destroyed for a warning, Macedonia made a province. But cities like Athens and Sparta were left to govern themselves, though, of course, their foreign policy was subject to Roman control. Athens still continued to talk and write and teach. She became a sort of university town to which noble Romans were sent for their studies. Even when Achaia was added to the list of Roman provinces in the days of Augustus it did not mean that Athens ceased to be a free city. In the days of the Empire the more cultured emperors, like Nero and Hadrian, loved to pass their time in Greece, in the attempt to share in her intellectual prestige. So we have Nero performing in the Olympian Games, and Hadrian rebuilding a large part of Athens. It was Hadrian who attempted to complete the gigantic temple of Olympian Zeus begun by Peisistratus. The Athenian schools of philosophy continued to attract strangers from all parts of the world, until Christianity began to see its bitterest foe in the Stoics, who taught many of its doctrines. Julian the Apostate dreamed for a moment of reviving Greek philosophy, so as to overcome Christianity by borrowing many of its doctrines, but at last a decree of Justinian closed the Athenian schools of philosophy in A.D. 529. Meanwhile clouds of barbarian invaders were continually passing over the land. The Goths ravaged Greece under Alaric. The Slavs conquered and peopled a great part of it without, in the long run, materially altering its nationality. Norman invaders conquered it, and not long before our own conquest Harold Hardrada entered Athens in triumph. Then came the Latin crusaders and Venetians. All through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there were Frankish Dukes of Athens. In 1456 the Caliph Omar conquered her, and thenceforth, with a temporary period of Venetian triumph, the Turks ruled Greece with a heavy hand until the glorious War of Independence, in which Lord Byron played a part of prophet and warrior. In 1830 Greece was declared an independent kingdom, and shortly afterwards provided with a youthful European king from Bavaria. The experiment was not a success. The Greeks succeeded in getting rid of one king, and Europe obligingly furnished another from her inexhaustible stock of younger sons. Even yet the bed of a Greek king is not altogether a bed of roses. In 1897 the little kingdom plunged into a war with her big neighbour, Turkey, for which she lacked resources and organisation. Her flanks were turned, her armies miserably routed, and she lost a great deal of the credit she had won in the War of Independence. But her true element is still, as it was in ancient times, the sea.
We have already seen that Greek art still crops out in occasional masterpieces down to imperial times. With literature this is still more the case. Long after the best of Roman literature was over and done with, Greece kept putting forth new products. The Greek novel, for example, in Lucian and Heliodorus is something entirely fresh and of great importance in literary history. The biographies of Plutarch are a new departure; so are the guide-books of such writers as Pausanias.