§ 7
While Athens was gaining power and glory and beauty without popular wisdom, the colonial city of Abdera, in Thrace, founded by Ionians, had like others carried on the great impulse of Ionian philosophy, and had produced in the fifth century some of the great thinkers of the race. Concerning the greatest of these, Demokritos, and the next in importance, Protagoras, we have no sure dates;[195] but it is probable that the second, whether older or younger, was influenced by the first, who indeed has influenced all scientific philosophy down to our own day. How much he learned from his master Leukippos cannot now be ascertained.[196] The writings which went under his name appear to have been the productions of the whole Abderite school;[197] and Epicurus declared that Leukippos was an imaginary person.[198] What passes for his teaching was constructive science of cardinal importance; for it is the first clear statement of the atomic theory; the substitution of a real for an abstract foundation of things. Whoever were the originator of the theory, there is no doubt as to the assimilation of the principle by Demokritos, who thus logically continued the non-theistic line of thought, and developed one of the most fruitful of all scientific principles. That this idea again is a direct development from Babylonian science is not impossible; at least there seems to be no doubt that Demokritos had travelled far and wide,[199] whether or not he had been brought up, as the tradition goes, by Persian magi;[200] and that he told how the cosmic views of Anaxagoras, which scandalized the Athenians, were current in the East.[201] But he stands out as one of the most original minds in the whole history of thought. No Greek thinker, not Aristotle himself, has struck so deep as he into fundamental problems; though the absurd label of “the laughing philosopher,” bestowed on him by some peculiarly unphilosophic mind, has delayed the later recognition of his greatness, clear as it was to Bacon.[202] The vital maxim, “Nothing from nothing: nothing into nothing,” derives substantially from him.[203]
His atomic theory, held in conjunction with a conception of “mind-stuff” similar to that of Anaxagoras, may be termed the high-water mark of ancient scientific thought; and it is noteworthy that somewhat earlier in the same age Empedokles of Agrigentum, another product of the freer colonial life, threw out a certain glimmer of the Darwinian conception—perhaps more clearly attained by Anaximandros—that adaptations prevail in nature just because the adaptations fit organisms to survive, and the non-adapted perish.[204] In his teaching, too, the doctrine of the indestructibility of matter is clear and firm;[205] and the denial of anthropomorphic deity is explicit.[206] But Empedokles wrought out no solid system: “half-mystic and half-rationalist, he made no attempt to reconcile the two inconsistent sides of his intellectual character”;[207] and his explicit teaching of metempsychosis[208] and other Pythagoreanisms gave foothold for more delusion than he ever dispelled.[209] On the whole, he is one of the most remarkable personalities of antiquity, moving among men with a pomp and gravity which made them think of him as a God, denouncing their sacrifices, and no less their eating of flesh; and checking his notable self-exaltation by recalling the general littleness of men. But he did little to enlighten them; and Aristotle passed on to the world a fatal misconception of his thought by ascribing to him the notion of automatism where he was asserting a “necessity” in terms of laws which he avowedly could not explain.[210] Against such misconception he should have provided. Demokritos, however, shunned dialectic and discussion, and founded no school;[211] and although his atomism was later adopted by Epicurus, it was no more developed on a basis of investigation and experiment than was the biology of Empedokles. His ethic, though wholly rationalistic, leant rather to quietism and resignation than to reconstruction,[212] and found its application only in the later static message of Epicurus. Greek society failed to set up the conditions needed for progress beyond the point gained by its unguided forces.
Thus when Protagoras ventured to read, at the house of the freethinking Euripides, a treatise of his own, beginning with the avowal that he offered no opinion as to the existence of the Gods, life being too short for the inquiry,[213] the remark got wind, and he had to fly for his life, though Euripides and perhaps most of the guests were very much of the same way of thinking.[214] In the course of his flight, the tradition goes, the philosopher was drowned;[215] and his book was publicly burned, all who possessed copies being ordered by public proclamation to give them up—the earliest known instance of “censorship of the press.”[216] Partisan malice was doubtless at work in his case as in that of Anaxagoras; for the philosophic doctrine of Protagoras became common enough. It is not impossible, though the date is doubtful, that the attack on him was one of the results of the great excitement in Athens in the year 415 B.C. over the sacrilegious mutilation of the figures of Hermes, the familial or boundary-God, in the streets by night. It was about that time that the poet Diagoras of Melos was proscribed for atheism, he having declared that the non-punishment of a certain act of iniquity proved that there were no Gods.[217] It has been surmised, with some reason, that the iniquity in question was the slaughter of the Melians by the Athenians in 416 B.C.,[218] and the Athenian resentment in that case was personal and political rather than religious.[219] For some time after 415 the Athenian courts made strenuous efforts to punish every discoverable case of impiety; and parodies of the Eleusinian mysteries (resembling the mock Masses of Catholic Europe) were alleged against Alkibiades and others.[220] Diagoras, who was further charged with divulging the Eleusinian and other mysteries, and with making firewood of an image of Herakles, telling the God thus to perform his thirteenth labour by cooking turnips,[221] became thenceforth one of the proverbial atheists of the ancient world,[222] and a reward of a silver talent was offered for killing him, and of two talents for his capture alive;[223] despite which he seems to have escaped. But no antidote to the bane of fanaticism was found or sought; and the most famous publicist in Athens was the next victim.
The fatality of the Athenian development is seen not only in the direct hostility of the people to rational thought, but in their loss of their hold even on their public polity. For lack of political judgment, moved always by the passions which their literary culture cherished, they so mishandled their affairs in the long and demoralizing Peloponnesian war that they were at one time cowed by their own aristocracy, on essentially absurd pretexts, into abandoning the democratic constitution. Its restoration was followed at the final crisis by another tyranny, also short-lived, but abnormally bloody and iniquitous; and though the people at its overthrow showed a moderation in remarkable contrast to the cruelty and rapacity of the aristocrats, the effect of such extreme vicissitude was to increase the total disposition towards civic violence and coercion. And while the people menaced freethinking in religion, the aristocracies opposed freethinking in politics. Thus under the Thirty Tyrants all intellectual teaching was forbidden; and Kritias, himself accused of having helped Alkibiades to parody the mysteries, sharply interdicted the political rationalism of Sokrates,[224] who according to tradition had been one of his own instructors.
It was a result of the general movement of mind throughout the rest of the Hellenic world that freethinkers of culture were still numerous. Archelaos of Miletos, the most important disciple of Anaxagoras; according to a late tradition, the master of Sokrates; and the first systematic teacher of Ionic physical science in Athens, taught the infinity of the universe, grasped the explanation of the nature of sound, and set forth on purely rationalistic lines the social origin and basis of morals, thus giving Sokrates his practical lead.[225] Another disciple of Anaxagoras, Metrodoros of Lampsakos (not to be confounded with Metrodoros of Chios, and the other Metrodoros of Lampsakos who was the friend of Epicurus, both also freethinkers), carried out zealously his master’s teaching as to the deities and heroes of Homer, resolving them into mere elemental combinations and physical agencies, and making Zeus stand for mind, and Athenê for art.[226] And in the belles lettres of Athens itself, in the dramas of Euripides [480–406 B.C.], who is said to have been the ardent disciple of Anaxagoras,[227] to have studied Herakleitos,[228] and to have been the friend of Sokrates and Protagoras, there emerge traces enough of a rationalism not to be reconciled with the old belief in the Gods. If Euripides has nowhere ventured on such a terrific paradox as the Prometheus, he has in a score of passages revealed a stress of skepticism which, inasmuch as he too uses all the forms of Hellenic faith,[229] deepens our doubt as to the beliefs of Æschylus. Euripides even gave overt proof of his unbelief, beginning his Melanippe with the line: “Zeus, whoever Zeus be, for I know not, save by report,” an audacity which evoked a great uproar. In a later production the passage was prudently altered;[230] but he never put much check on his native tendency to analyse and criticize on all issues—a tendency fostered, as we have seen,[231] by the constant example of real and poignant dialectic in the Athenian dikastery, and the whole drift of the Athenian stage. In his case the tendency even overbalances the artistic process;[232] but it has the advantage of involving a very bold handling of vital problems. Not satisfied with a merely dramatic presentment of lawless Gods, Euripides makes his characters impeach them as such,[233] or, again, declare that there can be no truth in the “miserable tales of poets” which so represent them.[234] Not content with putting aside as idle such a fable as that of the sun’s swerving from his course in horror at the crime of Atreus,[235] and that of the Judgment of Paris,[236] he attacks with a stringent scorn the whole apparatus of oracles, divination, and soothsaying.[237] And if the Athenian populace cried out at the hardy opening of the Melanippe, he nonetheless gave them again and again his opinion that no man knew anything of the Gods.[238] Of orthodox protests against freethinking inquiry he gives a plainly ironical handling.[239] As regards his constructive opinions, we have from him many expressions of the pantheism which had by his time permeated the thought of perhaps most of the educated Greeks.[240]
Here again, as in the case of Æschylus, there arises the problem of contradiction; for Euripides, too, puts often in the mouths of his characters emphatic expressions of customary piety. The conclusion in the two cases must be broadly the same—that whereas an unbelieving dramatist may well make his characters talk in the ordinary way of deity and of religion, it is unintelligible that a believing one should either go beyond the artistic bounds of his task to make them utter an unbelief which must have struck the average listener as strange and noxious, or construct a drama of which the whole effect is to insist on the odiousness of the action of the Supreme God. And the real drift of Euripides is so plain that one modern and Christian scholar has denounced him as an obnoxious and unbelieving sophist who abused his opportunity as a producer of dramas under religious auspices to “shake the ground-works of religion”[241] and at the same time of morals;[242] while another and a greater scholar, less vehement in his orthodoxy, more restrainedly condemns the dramatist for employing myths in which he did not believe, instead of inventing fresh plots.[243] Christian scholars are thus duly unready to give him credit for his many-sided humanity, nobly illustrated in his pleas for the slave and his sympathy with suffering barbarians.[244] Latterly the recognition of Euripides’s freethinking has led to the description of him as “Euripides the Rationalist,” in a treatise which represents him as a systematic assailant of the religion of his day. Abating somewhat of that thesis, which imputes more of system to the Euripidean drama than it possesses, we may sum up that the last of the great tragedians of Athens, and the most human and lovable of the three, was assuredly a rationalist in matters of religion. It is noteworthy that he used more frequently than any other ancient dramatist the device of a deus ex machina to end a play.[245] It was probably because for him the conception had no serious significance.[246] In the Alkestis its [non-mechanical] use is one of the most striking instances of dramatic irony in all literature. The dead Alkestis, who has died to save the life of her husband, is brought back from the Shades by Herakles, who figures as a brawling bully. Only the thinkers of the time could realize the thought that underlay such a tragi-comedy.
Dr. Verrall’s Euripides the Rationalist, 1897, is fairly summed up by Mr. Haigh (Tragic Drama of the Greeks, pp. 262, 265, notes): “He considers that Euripides was a skeptic of the aggressive type, whose principal object in writing tragedy was to attack the State religion, but who, perceiving that it would be dangerous to pose as an open enemy, endeavoured to accomplish his ends by covert ridicule.... His plays ... contain in reality two separate plots—the ostensible and superficial plot, which was intended to satisfy the orthodox, and the rationalized modification which lay half concealed beneath it, and which the intelligent skeptic would easily detect.” For objections to this thesis see Haigh, as cited; Jevons, Hist. of Greek Lit. p. 222, note; and Dr. Mozley’s article in the Classical Review, Nov. 1895, pp. 407–13. As to the rationalism of Euripides in general see many of the passages cited by Bishop Westcott in his Essays in the Hist. of Relig. Thought in the West, 1891, pp. 102–27. And cp. Dickinson, The Greek View of Life, pp. 46–49; Grote, Hist. i, 346–48; Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 231; Murray, Anc. Greek Lit. pp. 256, 264–66.
Over the latest play of Euripides, the Bacchæ, as over one of the last plays of Æschylus, the Prometheus, there has been special debate. It was probably written in Macedonia (cp. ll., 408, 565), whither the poet had gone on the invitation of King Archelaos, when, according to the ancient sketch of his life, “he had to leave Athens because of the malicious exultation over him of nearly all the city.” The trouble, it is conjectured, “may have been something connected with his prosecution for impiety, the charge on which Socrates was put to death a few years after” (Murray, Euripides translated into English Rhyming Verse, 1902, introd. essay, p. lii). Inasmuch as the play glorifies Dionysos, and the “atheist” Pentheus (l. 995) who resists him is slain by the maddened Bacchantes, led by his own mother, it is seriously argued that the drama “may be regarded as in some sort an apologia and an eirenicon, or as a confession on the part of the poet that he was fully conscious that in some of the simple legends of the popular faith there was an element of sound sense (!) which thoughtful men must treat with forbearance, resolved on using it, if possible, as an instrument for inculcating a truer morality, instead of assailing it with a presumptuous denial” (J. E. Sandys, The Bacchæ of Euripides, 1880, introd. pp. lxxv–vi). Here we have the conformist ethic of the average English academic brought to bear on, and ascribed to, the personality of the Greek dramatist.
An academic of the same order, Prof. Mahaffy, similarly suggests that “among the half-educated Macedonian youth, with whom literature was coming into fashion, the poet may have met with a good deal of that insolent second-hand skepticism which is so offensive to a deep and serious thinker, and he may have wished to show them that he was not, as they doubtless hailed him, the apostle of this random speculative arrogance” (Euripides in Class. Writ. Ser. 1879, p. 85). As against the eminently “random” and “speculative arrogance” of this particular passage—a characteristic product of the obscurantist functions of some British university professors in matters of religion, and one which may fitly be pronounced offensive to honest men—it may be suggested on the other hand that, if Euripides got into trouble in Athens by his skepticism, he would be likely in Macedonia to encounter rather a greater stress of bigotry than a freethinking welcome, and that a non-critical presentment of the savage religious legend was forced on him by his environment.