"As long as the ship is safe, that is the time for every sailor and
their captain to be keen on his duties and to take precautions against
wilful or thoughtless upsetting of the craft. But once the sea is over
the decks, all zeal is vain. We then who are Athenians, while we are
safe with our great city, our enormous resources, our splendid
reputation—what shall we do?"
The universal appeal of this white-hot speech is its most noteworthy feature. The next year the disgraceful peace was ended, the free theatre-tickets withdrawn. All was vain. In 338 Athens and Thebes were defeated at Chaeroneia; the Cassandra prophecies of the great patriot came true. In 330 one more triumph was allowed him. He was attacked by the traitor Aeschines and answered him so effectively in his speech on the Crown that his adversary was banished. A cloud settled over the orator's later life; he outlived Alexander by little more than a year, but when Antipater hopelessly defeated the allies at Crannon in 322 he poisoned himself rather than live in slavery.
Of all the orators of the ancient world none is more suitable for modern use than Demosthenes. It is true that he is guilty of gross bad taste in some of his speeches—but rarely in a parliamentary oration. Cicero is too verbose and often insincere. Demosthenes is as a rule short, terse and forcible. It is the undoubted justice of his cause which gives him his lofty and noble style. He lacks the gentler touch of humour—but a man cannot jest when he sees servitude before the country he loves. With a few necessary alterations a speech of Demosthenes could easily be delivered to-day, and it would be successful. Even Philip is said to have admitted that he would have voted for him after hearing him, and Aeschines after winning applause for declaiming part of Demosthenes' speech told his audience that they ought to have heard the beast.
Yet all this splendid eloquence seems to have been wasted. The orator could see much that was dark to his contemporaries, and spoke prophecies true though vain. But the greatest thing of all was concealed from his view. The inevitable day had dawned for the genuinely Greek type of city. It was brilliant but it was a source of eternal divisions in a world which had to be unified to be of any service. Its absurd factions and petty leagues were really a hindrance to political stability. Further, the essential vices of democracy cried aloud for a stern master, and found him. Treason, bribery, appeals to an unqualified voting class, theft of rich men's property under legal forms, free seats in the theatre, belittlement of a great empire, pacifism, love of every state but the right one—these are the open sores of popular control. For such a society only one choice is possible; it needs discipline either of national service or national extinction. Its crazy cranks will not disappear otherwise. Modern political life is democratic; those who imagine that the voice of the majority is the voice of Heaven should produce reasons for their belief. They will find it difficult to hold such a view if they will patiently consider the hard facts of history and the unceasing warnings of Demosthenes.
No account of Greek literature would be complete without a mention of the influence which has revolutionised human thought. It is a strange coincidence that Aristotle was born and died in the same years as Demosthenes. His native town was Stagira; he trained Alexander the Great, presided over the very famous Peripatetic School at Athens for thirteen years and found time to investigate practically every subject of which an ancient Greek could be expected to have any knowledge.
His method was the slow and very patient observation of individual facts. He is the complement of Plato, who tended to neglect the fact for the "idea" or general law or type behind it and logically prior to it. Deductive reasoning was Plato's method—that of the poet or great artist, who worships not what he sees but the unseen perfect form behind; inductive reasoning was Aristotle's method—that of the ordinary man, who respects what he sees that he may by patience find out what is the unseen class to which it belongs. This latter has been the foundation-stone of all modern science; in the main the resemblance between Aristotle's system of procedure and that of the greatest liberators of the human mind, Bacon and Descartes, are more valuable than the differences.
It would be difficult to mention any really great subject on which Aristotle has not left some work which is not to be lightly disregarded. His works are in the form of disjointed notes, taken down at his lectures by his disciples. As a rule they are dry and precise, though here and there rays of glory appear which prove that the master was capable of poetic expression even in prose. A rather fine hymn has been ascribed to him. As we might expect, he is weakest in scientific research, mainly because he could not command the use of instruments familiar to us. That a human being who possessed no microscope should have left such a detailed account of the most minute marks on the bodies of fish and animals is an absolute marvel; so perfect is his description that it cannot be bettered to-day. Cuvier and Linnaeus are great names in Botany; Darwin said that they were mere schoolboys compared with Aristotle—in other words, botanical research had progressed thewrong way.
Many works have appeared on Ethics and Philosophy; few of them are likely to survive as long as Aristotle's Ethics and Metaphysics Sometimes our modern philosophers seem to forget their obligation to resemble human beings in their writings. We hear so much of mist and transcendentalism, problems, theories, essays, critiques that a book of Aristotle's dry but exact definition seems like the words of soberness after some nightmare. The man is not assaulting the air; his feet are on firm ground. This is how he proceeds. "Virtue is a mean between excess and defect." In fact, his object appears to have been to teach something, not to mystify everybody and to cover the honourable name of philosophy with ridicule.
It is the same story everywhere. Do we want the best book on Rhetoric or Politics? Aristotle may supply it, mainly because he took the trouble to classify his instances and show the reason why things not only are of such a kind, but must inevitably be so. A course of Aristotelian study might profitably be prescribed to every person who thinks of talking in public; he would at least learn how to respect himself and his audience, however ignorant and powerful it may be; he would tend to use words in an exact sense instead of indulging in the wild vagueness of speech which is so common and so dangerous. This dry-as-dust philosopher who cut up animals and plants and wrote about public speeches and constitutions found time to give the world a book on Poetry. Modern scientists sometimes deny their belief in the existence of such a thing as poetry, or scoff at its value; no poetic treatise has yet appeared from them, for it seems difficult for modern science to keep alive in its devotees the weakest glimmerings of a sense of beauty. Herein their great founder and father shows himself to be more humane than his so-called progressive children. His Poetics was the foundation of literary criticism and shows no sign of being superseded.