with some fatal exceptions.
Nevertheless among other topics of speculation these men sometimes treated of politics; and when they did condescend to action, it was to carry out trenchant theories, and to act on principle, without regard to the terrible practical consequences of imposing a new order of things on a divided or uneducated public. The Stoic philosophers, in particular, who interfered in the public life of that day, were dangerous firebrands, not hesitating at the murder of an opponent; for were not all fools criminal, and was not he that offended in one point guilty of all? Such men as the Sphærus who advised the coup d'état of the Spartan Cleomenes[172:1], and the Blossius who stimulated the Gracchi into revolution, and the Brutus who mimicked this sort of thing with deplorable results to the world in the murder of Cæsar,—all these were examples of the philosophical politician produced by the Hellenistic age.
Dignity and courage of the philosophers
shown by suicide.
But if there were mischievous exceptions, we must not forget that the main body of the schools kept alive in the Greek mind a serious and exalted
view of human dignity and human responsibility,—above all, they trained their hearers in that noble contempt for death which is perhaps the strongest feature in Hellenistic as compared with modern society; for there can be no doubt that Christian dogmas make cowards of all those who do not live up to their lofty ideal. The Greeks had no eternal punishment to scare them from facing death, and so we find whole cities preferring suicide to the loss of what they claimed as their rightful liberty[173:1]. People who do this may be censured; they cannot be despised.
Rise of despots on principle.
§ 71. Secondly, most philosophers had become so convinced of the necessity of monarchy, if not of the rule of one superior spirit, as better than the vacillations and excitements of a crowd, that many of their pupils considered themselves fit to undertake the duty of improving the masses by absolute control; and so we have a recrudescence, in a very different society, of those tyrants whose merits and defects we have already discussed at an earlier stage in this essay[173:2]. The long series of passages from essays That Monarchy is best, which we may read in the commonplace book of Stobæus[173:3], is indeed followed by a series of passages On the Censure of Tyranny; but the former is chiefly taken from Hellenistic philosophical
tracts, whereas the latter is drawn wholly from older authors, such as Xenophon, who lived in the days of successful republics.
Probably not wholly unpopular.