The common Greek conscience never condemned war in itself. There never sprang up in Greece an agitation like the Peace Movement of to-day in Christendom. How deeply ingrained in the Greek mind was the conviction that war is a part of the established order of things is shown by the fact that their treaties ending open hostilities were ordinarily drawn for a limited term of years. They were merely truces, as though peace were only an incident in international relations.
Even the philosophers regarded a state of war as the normal and natural relation of Hellenes and barbarians. Aristotle, as we have seen, taught that barbarians might, without moral scruple, be hunted like wild animals.[493] Plato had no word of condemnation of war by Greek against non-Greek. But the Greeks had an uneasy feeling respecting the rightfulness of war between Greek and Greek; and there came a time when the best-instructed conscience of Greece positively denounced wars of this kind. Plato condemned wars between Hellenes and Hellenes as unnatural.[494] This feeling had a kind of restraining influence upon the Greek cities, and there are many instances of arbitration in Greek history. Sometimes a single person of eminence acted as mediator; but oftener some city or league like the Delphian Amphictyony was chosen as the arbitrator. In the Hellenistic Age the Roman Senate frequently undertook the commission of arbitrating quarrels. The cities concerned were sometimes bound by oath or by a deposit of money to abide by the decision. Oftener, however, the decisions rendered, like those by the Hague Tribunal of to-day, depended for their execution upon the good will and honor of the states concerned. There are instances recorded where one or both of the parties refused to abide by the judgment of the arbitrator.[495]
Various motives, it is true, were at work in these arbitration treaties, but the ethical motive was certainly operative to a greater or less degree. There was not lacking the feeling, vague though it may have been, which was later given explicit expression by Plato, that war between Greek and Greek was wrong and a crime against Hellenic civilization.
But the most interesting and instructive of all the measures taken by the Greeks to limit wars among themselves or to fence them away from a given district was the consecration, by common consent and agreement, of the land of Elis—wherein was situated the sacred Olympia—to perpetual peace and the establishment of a truce of forty days, embracing the festival period of the Olympian games, during which it was sacrilegious for one Greek city to make war upon another. With true vision the philosopher-historian Laurent sees in the little land of Elis, inviolable as a temple, a prophecy of the time when the whole earth shall be consecrated to perpetual peace—an ideal toward which humanity unceasingly advances.[496]
Socrates and his relation to the moral movement
From no other personage in history, aside from the founders of universal religions, has there flowed such a stream of moral influence as issued from the life and teachings of Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus. All the chief ethical systems of the Greco-Roman world were the development of germs found in his doctrines. The Cyrenaic and Eleatic, the Cynic, Stoic, and Epicurean, the Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Aristotelian systems had their sources here. The Stoic and Neoplatonic systems contributed important elements to early Christian ethics, while the Aristotelian system exercised a profound influence upon the scholastic ethics of medieval times. In the contribution which these various systems, especially the Stoic, have made to the world’s common fund of ethical thought and feeling is found in large part the measure of the ethical debt which modern civilization owes to Hellenism.
Socrates’ aim was to replace the artificial conventional conscience of his contemporaries by a natural rational conscience; in other words, to replace customary communal morality by reflective individual morality.[497] His fundamental doctrine was that virtue is dependent upon knowledge; indeed he almost or quite made knowledge and virtue one and the same thing. He maintained that one can no more see the right without doing it than one can see a proposition to be true without believing it. Therefore without knowledge—insight—there can be no true virtue.[498]
But clearness of vision requires the purification of the intellect, the getting rid of all false intellectual and moral notions; hence the aim and purpose of Socrates’ unique method of cross-examination was to show his interlocutor the baseless and mutually contradictory character of his inherited chance-acquired ideas and beliefs, and to bring him to that self-knowledge which is the beginning of real knowledge.[499]
This practical identification by Socrates of knowledge and virtue, this doctrine of his that it is impossible that one should not will to do that which he sees to be good and right, overlooks the saddest and yet most certain fact of human experience, namely, that perversity of the human will which causes man though seeing the good to choose the evil. But it is a theory of human nature which, in the case of such happily constituted souls as Socrates, in whom the authority of conscience is sacrosanct and inviolable, is nearly or quite accordant with fact. With such persons to see an act to be right is to do it. With them dissonance between knowledge and volition is a moral impossibility.
Right here, however, a just criticism may be made of the Socratic philosophy. It is true that without self-knowledge, without the fulfilling of the Delphian requirement, “Know thyself,” one cannot be truly moral. But neither Socrates nor the Greek philosophers in general recognized that this self-knowledge comes through right living rather than through right thinking. As Goethe discerningly observes, man comes to know himself not through reflection but through conduct: “Do your duty and thou wilt know what thou art.”[500]