What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?

by J. P. Mahaffy

In relation to Greek politics, which is our subject to-day, this is no idle digression. For it shows us clearly that the higher society of Athens had abandoned this great human interest and so had narrowed and impoverished their spiritual life. It is usual to repeat in our histories that the growth of the Macedonian power, of the Hellenistic kings, of the Roman Republic, killed all possibility of any serious Greek politics, and that in consequence serious men were driven into anti-social philosophy at home, active men into mercenary service abroad. In Menander’s day and long after it, there was still plenty of work for honest and capable men in saving the liberties and the dignities of their native cities. A century later, Polybius shows how the total ruin of Greece and the disastrous conquest by Mummius were mainly produced by the follies and violences of stupid and corrupt demagogues. But these demagogues were invested with official power by the votes of those that still practised politics, when the better classes had retired in disgust. If this disgust dated from Menander’s time, then we can only reflect that those who have abdicated their influence in the day of their country’s prosperity, are not likely to regain it when a crisis comes, and when the masses have found for themselves other leaders.

I have seen a very similar catastrophe in the Ireland of my own time. I have seen the old landed gentry, who had long lived a gay, idle, hospitable life, when their privileges and their properties were attacked by a dangerous agitation, show such want of public spirit, such miserable mistrust in one another, such reckless folly in not spending time, money, and energy in resisting their plunderers, that they lost the sympathy of all their friends, and while they called on English influence to protect them, and railed against all concession and compromise, they have seen their land filched from them by successive legislative inroads upon their rights, and their fortunes ruined even by those on whom they relied to defend them. Many a time did I warn those about me of these inevitable consequences, but there I have seen another instance, and one which came home to me with poignant regret, of the miseries induced by mere incompetence. Quem Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.

VIII
HIGHER THINKING, PHILOSOPHY, SPECULATIVE AND PRACTICAL THEOLOGY

IN my last lecture I spoke of the small effect, or want of effect, which a mere intellectual training in the liberal arts might have upon the average morals of a large society. To-day I propose to take you into a higher atmosphere, and consider what occupied the élite of Greek society in their advanced education, and in their speculations on the nature of things. You must not underrate the enormous advantages the well-born youth then possessed in training his mind, as compared with the youth of to-day. In the first place, a very moderate income would keep a household in comfort, and remove all the grinding care which, in this our modern life with its myriad exigencies, torments so many respectable families. In the next place, the demon of competition had not invaded these states, nor was it possible to do as I and many others have done, to be a slave for some years in order to obtain a competence by passing first in a single examination. In the third place, there was no object in travelling long distances. What was worth seeing, lay within easy reach. In modern life there is only Holland, and perhaps Northern Italy, which offers the same delights within short distances. The huge amount of time spent by Americans in travelling is perhaps one of the most serious obstacles to their intellectual advancement. If North America were compressed into one tenth its size, its inhabitants might gain some leisure for better education.

The obvious thing that will strike any intelligent American, who has only heard of Plato, and wants to make his acquaintance through Jowett’s noble translation, is the amount of time these Dialogues waste in arriving at a conclusion. Nay often they represent a very long conversation which comes to no conclusion at all. Yet that feature is essential to all higher training of the human mind. You may appear to the vulgar to be wasting time, and yet it is not wasting time, but doing the best you can for a great object. The earth moving in its orbit need not delay its regular course because it revolves upon its axis, and causes its whole surface to enjoy the blessed light of the sun. And the next thing you will find in Plato’s Dialogues (the best exponent of higher education I know) is that the objects in view are not those of sense, or of the material needs of life, or of obtaining success in the world. They all, like Saint Paul’s reasonings with Felix, have to do with righteousness and temperance, and judgment to come. But even this field, that of ethical inquiry, is not the highest to which Greek education attained. For their early teachers taught them to think about the universe and its constitution, the nature of mind, the nature of matter, and other high questions of abstract metaphysic.

A notable point about this Greek philosophy is that the priest or the enchanter has nothing to say to it. The sage was a layman, who need fear no pope, no ban of the Church, in using his reason freely upon the problems even of theology. There were indeed isolated cases, where a man who denied the existence of the traditional gods, or was supposed so to do, was pursued by popular indignation. Diagoras of Melos, called the atheist, was driven from the societies which thought such teaching dangerous; Socrates was prosecuted in like manner, because he was suspected of spreading scepticism among the youth, but he was executed only because he behaved in a manner highly contumacious to the established order of the State. Had he defended himself in the ordinary routine, he would at most have been subjected to a fine. These isolated cases are only mentioned lest you should imagine that they were typical. Greek philosophy being secular, was therefore free.

The earliest thinkers, those of the Ionic school, set themselves to solve by speculation the very question which now engrosses our deepest researches in physics. They thought out, or they inferred from their observations, that “things are not as they seem”; they found out, what we have attained by long experiment, that the many qualities our senses perceive are not fundamental or primary, that as Descartes and Locke and Spinoza taught, mechanical composition and varying degrees of motion in minute particles of the same kind may produce wholly diverse impressions. The most obvious and striking of these to the ordinary man is the case of colour. Descartes had anticipated that the pace of the rotation of particles made the differences; we know now that it is not rotation, but vibration of ether, and so with variation in tones. But the differences both of colours and sounds are due to the more or less rapid motion of the vibration. This was what Thales and Anaximenes and Anaximander felt when they said that the world consisted of one element, that moisture, caloric, ether, were the primitive stuff of which the world was composed. And these famous men were not mere metaphysicians, they showed their intellectual greatness in various ways. Thales actually predicted an eclipse, to the astonishment of his contemporaries.[45] He showed them that the lesser bear, ending in the pole star, was a better indication for the sailor to use than the greater. He solved the problem of measuring the height of an inaccessible object by comparing its shadow with that of a small one within reach. He gave valuable advices in politics. So that his metaphysic was both the source and the climax of a wide mental activity. So with Anaximander. He attempted the first map of the known world and made signal advances in astronomy. Anaximenes declared that eclipses were the concealing of one heavenly body by the interposition of another. These were great feats; but they were nothing in comparison to the bold attempts at solving the problem of the origin and nature of the world, wherein their speculations, often erroneous, nevertheless left a residuum of thoughts that were the seeds of all our higher philosophy.

If Thales laid it down that in all the varieties of plant and animal life there was a common element which was their real or original substance, Anaximander thought that caloric (or the igneous principle) was necessary to develop the original material. His book is lost, and his views not clear to us, but we know that his geological observations told him that our world had once been covered with water, from which land had emerged. He was moreover the first to maintain that nothing was eternal except the primeval substance of things.

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

In the largest sense, even applying it to the gods of the Greek Pantheon, did he assert this colossal doctrine. Anaximenes went further, and, assuming that the particles of ether are the most subtle in the universe, he set up the principle of rarification and condensation of matter, asserting that this was the one great cause of the differences in the bodies we perceive. This then was the first expression of the doctrine of the Atomists, which has lasted to the present day.