The exclusion of the domestic sphere
Out of the family relationships arise a large part of the duties making up the moral code of the modern Western world, while in the atmosphere of the domestic circle are nourished many of what we regard as the most sacred and attractive of the virtues. Now these family virtues, which we esteem so highly, found only a very subordinate place in the Greek ideal of character, for the reason that the family, like the clan and the tribe, was almost absorbed by the city. In Sparta the family and family life practically disappeared. In Plato’s ideal republic the family is sacrificed to the state.
The status of the wife in most of the Greek cities was a low one. She was practically one of the slaves. Ethical sentiment, as was true of the sentiment of romantic love, seems to have been almost wholly lacking in the marriage relation.
Infancy, in its earliest stages, was in general never brought beneath the protecting ægis of the moral sentiment.[449] In the practice of the exposure of ill-formed, weak, defective, or unpromising newborn infants the Greeks, like the Romans, never advanced much beyond the standpoint of barbarians. This abandonment or destruction by parents of their offspring did not offend the common conscience. Even the philosophers and moralists saw nothing in the practice to censure. Evidence of how general the custom was, is afforded by various tales and dramas which turn on the rescue of the hero in his infancy after having been cast out to die.[450] The story of King Œdipus is typical.[451]
In this connection a word must be said regarding chastity. We find here one of the most serious defects of Greek morality. The virtue of chastity was given a very low place, hardly any place at all, in the Greek ideal of character. It was the undervaluing of this virtue that without doubt was one of the contributing causes of the decline and early decay of Greek civilization.
Another equally grave defect in the Greek moral character was lack of respect for the aged. Save at Sparta and Athens, age was not reverenced in ancient Greece.[452] In this respect the Greeks stood almost on a level with most primitive races.
The disesteem of industrial virtues
A marked characteristic of Greek ethical feeling was a deep prejudice against manual and commercial occupations as unworthy of freemen. Aristotle taught that there was “no room for moral excellence” in the trades and employments of artisans, traders, and laborers.[453] Even artists like Phidias and Polyclitus were looked upon as “miserable handicraftsmen.”[454] Plato in his Laws says: “He who in any way shares in the illiberality of retail trade may be indicted by any one who likes for dishonoring his race, before those who are judged to be first in virtue; and if he appear to throw dirt upon his father’s house,—by an unworthy occupation,—let him be imprisoned for a year and abstain from that sort of thing.”[455] In some cities the person who engaged in trade was disqualified for citizenship, and in others no mechanic or field laborer could enter the place where the freemen met.
This feeling that labor is degrading came in after the Homeric Age, with the rule of the oligarchs, and was the natural and inevitable outcome of slavery. The effect of slavery is to make work seem ignoble and servile, and to cause the industrial virtues to assume a low place in the moral ideal, or to drop out of it entirely. The high place assigned the industrial virtues in the moral ideals of ancient Persia and Israel was due probably as largely to the subordinate place which slavery held in those countries as to the influence of religious doctrines and physical environment.
Another ground for the feeling was that hard, coarse work destroys the suppleness and mars the beauty and symmetry of the body; and this to the Greek way of thinking was sufficient reason why the freeman—to use Plato’s phrase—“should abstain from that sort of thing.”