[492] The war brought into fearful exaggeration the salient weakness of Greek morality. The most reprehensible moral faults of the Greeks were the outgrowth of political factions and cabals, of party jealousies and rivalries in the close quarters of city walls. These faults were lifted into the most savage passions by the war. Thucydides in a memorable passage (iii. 82) draws a striking picture of the disastrous moral effects of the prolonged quarrel.
[493] See above, p. 180.
[494] Republic, v. 469–471.
[495] Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 267; see also A. Ræder, L’Arbitrage international chez les Hellenes (1912).
[496] Études sur l’histoire de humanité (1880), t. ii, p. 105. Because of its long exemption from the ravages of war, Elis was more populous and wealthy than any other district of the Peloponnesus (Polyb. iv. 73, 74). The contrast presented by Greece in general constituted an impressive commentary on the fatal consequences for Greek civilization of the war system. Speaking of the depopulation which incessant wars had caused over almost all the world he knew, Plutarch says of Greece, a land once “strong in cities,” that the whole country could raise barely three thousand men, the same number that the single city of Megara sent to Platæa at the time of the Persian war (Philosophical Essays, “On the Cessation of Oracles,” sec. viii).
[497] See above, p. 18.
[498] “Really to see the good and to know it as such, yet not to love and pursue it, is impossible; the vision carries with it its own persuasion and authority.”—Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 74. “Mere school and word knowledge, of course, is powerless, but real knowledge, knowledge that represents real personal conviction, cannot fail to influence life.”—Paulsen, System of Ethics, tr. Thilly (1906), p. 62.
[499] “There are few men whose minds are not more or less in that state of sham knowledge against which Socrates made war; there is no man whose notions have not been first got together by spontaneous, unexamined, unconscious, uncertified association—resting upon forgotten particulars, blending together disparities or inconsistencies, and leaving in his mind old and familiar phrases and oracular propositions, of which he has never rendered to himself account; there is no man, who, if he be destined for vigorous and profitable scientific effort, has not found it a necessary branch of self-education to break up, disentangle, analyse, and reconstruct this ancient mental compound, and who has not been driven to it by his own lame and solitary efforts, since the giant of the colloquial Elenchus no longer stands in the market place to lend him help and stimulus.”—Grote, History of Greece (1888), vol. vii, pp. 168 f.
[500] Quoted by Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), Bd. ii, S. 396.
[501] “His [Socrates’] significancy for moral philosophy lies in his calling attention to rational knowledge as the source of the moral.”—Wuttke, Christian Ethics (1873), vol. i, p. 69.