The Greek university was the State, and the Greek State was a university—a Cultur-Staat, as the Germans say. That the State is a school of virtue, was a view generally entertained in the ancient world, which, until it began to decay, completely identified the man with the citizen. The influence of this view upon the attitude of the individual to the State, and of the State to the individual, can hardly be overestimated. The State claimed, and the individual accorded to it, a disciplinary right which extended to every sphere and action of life. Thus the sphere of morality coincided exactly with the sphere of legality, or, to put it the other way, the sphere of legality extended to the whole sphere of morality, and this was considered true, whatever form the State or government might assume—monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, etc.
To give a full account of the university education of old Athens would be to write her social and political history up to the time of the Persian Wars. This is, of course, out of the question. All I can do is to point out those elements in the State which enabled it to produce that splendid array of noble men, and accomplish those great deeds and works, which make her brief career seem the brightest spot in the world's history.
The chief of these elements, and the one which included all the rest, was the Greek ideal of harmony. Athens was great as a State and as a school so long as she embodied that ideal, so long as she distributed power and honor in accordance with worth (ἀρετή) intellectual, moral, practical; in a word, so long as the State was governed by the best citizens (ἄριστοι), and the rest acknowledged their right to do so. Notwithstanding the contention of Grote and others, it is strictly true that Athens was great because, and so long as, she was aristocratic (in the ancient sense), and perished when she abandoned her fundamental ideal by becoming democratic. This assertion must not be construed as any slur upon democracy as such, or as denying that Athens in perishing paved the way for a higher ideal than her own. It simply states a fact, which may be easily generalized without losing its truth: An institution perishes when it abandons the principle on which it was founded and built up. Unless we bear this in mind, we shall utterly fail to understand the lesson of Athenian history. If it be maintained that some of Athens' noblest work was done under the democracy, the sufficient answer is, that it was nearly all done by men who retained the spirit of the old aristocracy, and bitterly opposed the democracy. We need name only Æschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes.
Part II
THE "NEW EDUCATION" (b.c. 480-338)
CHAPTER I
INDIVIDUALISM AND PHILOSOPHY