The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 04

by Unknown

Under the auspices of these great times Attic tragedy arose as the most perfect expression of the union of Western with Eastern Hellenism, stamped with the features of the great period of its birth; for not until Æschylus, the warrior of Marathon, took the Homeric Heroic legend for the groundwork of the ancient ecstatic Dionysian festivals; not until he substituted the solemn Doric chorus for the satyrs, and reduplicated the Ionian reciter, was the drama discovered which, sublime beyond the scope of mere humanity, and still remaining a part of the worship of the god, yet bore within it the germ of development into a picture of human life, making an appeal more direct and more effective than the narrative of the rhapsodist or the song of the bard. An abundance of talent turned to this new form, which remained Athenian even when the poets came from abroad, and became more and more Athenian, human, and modern. Yet no one ventured to abandon the Homeric subject-matter and go direct to contemporary life for material. And so it continued to be, although with the decay of the Attic empire and its great poets, tragedy (whether as Attic drama or as a part of worship), no longer had any intrinsic claim to the subject-matter of the Heroic legend. Here again the authority of a great achievement condemned posterity to the depths of imitation. The form of drama known at Athens as comedy was regarded as quite another thing; and it had certainly gone far from its source in the same masquerade and the same Dionysian ecstasy by the time it was cast into shape by witty Athenian poets, and promoted to be species of literature. Comedy became drama, and followed the lines of tragedy by centring about a definite action; it was no less wonderful than the latter so long as it served the purpose of the moment and of the necessarily circumscribed circle of Athenian society; but for this very reason it exercised no universal influence, and was destined to fall to pieces with the collapse of the political and social fabric. The last literary achievement of Athens was to transform it, about the time of Alexander, into a refined, purely recitative play which occupied exactly the same relation to contemporary life as later tragedy occupied to the Heroic legends. This new comedy deserved and received the same classic imprimatur as tragedy; but the same slavish subjection to a model ensued; the figures of Menander, so infinitely commonplace and provincial, alas! were doomed to make their appearance on the comic stage, like Medea and Orestes on the tragic, whether the play were written and acted in Rome or Alexandria. In this petrified and haphazard form the theory rather than the poetry of the drama was conveyed to the West. Aristotle, in particular, failed to advance from the chance illustration of actual performances to a formulated statement of the truth, and modern writers have still an unwholesome habit of tossing about the terms “tragedy” and “comedy,” at all events in theory. We have the will to admire and the capacity to understand both what has been achieved by the Athenians and the causes that led inevitably to that achievement: but the foundation of modern dramatic art is Shakespeare—or Plato, who recognised in theory that tragedians and comedians are anything but contradictory terms, and who, like Shakespeare, combined both in himself.

In the Athenian art of the fifth century, as in Æschylean tragedy, the elements of Eastern and Western Greece interpenetrate, and each heightens the effect of the other. The Parthenon is a Doric temple with an Ionic frieze. To Ionic monumental fresco painters is given the task of painting Homeric stories on the broad surfaces of Athenian and Delphic porticoes; the capacity to immortalise the deeds of contemporary life is its own contribution. From the devout spirit that inspires the poet of the Oresteia, Phidias, with all the wealth and all the art at his command, tries to create images of the gods that will satisfy the religious feeling of his time. To the Greeks they were the greatest for all time. Precisely as in the case of tragedy, such a high strain of endeavour lasts but a short time. Then the Ionic element becomes preponderant; the human, subjective aspect thrusts itself into prominence. It is inevitable, and the thing it created is worthy of admiration. But in the pathos and ethos of the divine types created by Praxiteles and Scopas there is nothing but the mythological character of Homer’s gods; they are immortal men, and no more; to Scopas and Praxiteles they were nothing higher than this. And it was right that it should be so; for in the meantime the comprehension of the truly divine had so far progressed that its circumscription in a person was merely symbolical, and implied no idea of physical incarnation.

Ionia’s greatest and most important contribution was that provided by the audacity of the great thinkers and observers of the sixth century, that indeed which, by setting the whole conception of the world on a new basis, was bound to destroy the fair illusion of gods in the form of men which Æschylus and Phidias might still have regarded as a truth. It was only on Ionian soil, on the soil of Homer, that man had courage and strength to fling aside all convention, all tradition, to step into the centre of the universe himself and say “Thou art naught but what I recognise as thee, thou signifiest what I discover in thee.” The idea was not at the outset formulated with this precision, but such is the spirit in which the Ionians early went to work—not the philosophers alone, but the reckless natures who in the world of action took themselves for the standard of conduct—men like Archilochus the poet, whose subjectivism combined with his brutal outspokenness and license aroused the delight and horror of his contemporaries and of posterity. A terrible moral danger lurked in this attitude, and Ionia, which changed nothing but its masters, brought an infection into the mother-country which neither the state nor society availed to overcome. But for strong natures it also provided the remedy, and the world, for its part, owes to this Ionic element the best of what the Greeks have bequeathed to her—science, philosophy, natural science, and history, though it is true that they had first to be ennobled by the Athenians. This is most easily seen in the case of history.

Historia is subjective inquiry; Herodotus, not a man of powerful intellect, gives us, as he himself says, the sum of his own investigations. This includes what he has seen, heard, read, and thought, all in close juxtaposition. The subjective mind determines how and what he can and may narrate. Thucydides, the Athenian, on the other hand, writes the war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians; here it is the object which is the determining factor. The writer renders both himself and the reader account of his subject and of his method, indicates the degree of credibility for his various statements and adds his own interpretations and conclusions for what they are worth; the scientific method has thus been reached. Man has not lost his independence, but he consciously places his whole strength at the service of an idea, in this case the idea of truth; and, clear as it is to him that he cannot reach the point of presenting it pure and complete, he has no doubt that an objective truth exists and is accessible to human knowledge.

Natural science had begun, at a stroke, to explain genesis (das Werden) in general and particular by a bold hypothesis. The investigator made the laws. Natural science, in its turn, came to test its laws by a thousand patient, minute, independent observations of nature, to accumulate the facts from which the rule might be deduced in its turn. Most important for this purpose is the cultivation of that domain in which pure abstraction permits of an unbroken series of proofs, the domain of numbers and geometrical concepts. Here we have a genuine process of learning from which, in time, mathematics takes its name; here the deceptive character of sensuous perceptions is as clear as the existence of knowable laws; here are revealed the necessity and possibility of many to collaborate and continue the work. It was not by means of his religious brotherhood, which, if it had lasted, would have ultimately become a sect, that Pythagoras exercised a beneficent influence, but by the methodical organisation of study, which became scientific in so far as it turned its attention to mathematics. At the same time, in spite of all premature hypotheses, medicine, the branch of observation most closely in touch with actual life, discovered by keen observation and continuous experiment the right way to gain a knowledge of the human body, its nature, its sufferings, how to keep it healthy, or if necessary how to cure it. In astronomy and medicine we have the difference between the East and Hellas most clearly manifest. Thousands of years before, the Babylonians had already observed the heavens; thousands of years before, the Egyptians had compounded prescriptions from all kinds of drugs and simples. But this was sorcery, and even the Greeks had to pay for allowing themselves to be imposed upon by it.

In the sphere of morals the breach with that Nomos of which we have spoken was a great danger: the whole edifice of the Apolline organisation fell to pieces. Democracy fairly challenged man to translate his theory into practice, and the mental attitude of the time was so political that people thought Anaxagoras a crank, because of his own free will he devoted himself to the vita contemplativa and refused to mingle in the political hurly-burly. They declined to believe in his good faith, and political suspicion allied with the principle of established authority, which always naturally opposes a tendency so novel, banished him from Athens. And from the very fact that, in all other fields, this principle was so strong among the Greeks, the age that dared express and pursue every thought that rose in the mind acquires its peculiar significance. The activity, inventiveness, and audacity of the period of the sophists, with its superabundance of talent, sowed seeds without number, many of which, unproductive at the time, have been left for the modern world rightly to appreciate. Thus a science of jurisprudence would have been developed, had not the fall of the empire destroyed the sphere in which alone a uniform system of law could prevail: the practice of the legal profession thus falling into the hands of pettifoggers, while the theory of jurisprudence was left to philosophers, who were honest in their quest of the principle of justice.

Modern speculation has gradually outgrown the tendency to regard the sophists through the eyes of Plato, and to impute to them moral and intellectual indifferentism. One thing, however, is incontestable: the whole movement, coming, as it does, from Ionia, is rationalistic through and through; the intellect will acknowledge nothing on a par with itself. A prophet like Empedocles, who was a doctor, a philosopher, and a poet to boot, besides cherishing the proud conviction of being as good a sophist as any other, could go about extolling his revelation in the Peloponnesus; in Athens he would have found no place. The port of Athens, on the other hand, was laid out by a Milesian diagrammatically in the dreary chess-board style then in vogue for buildings on new sites, although it can only be satisfactory on paper, inasmuch as it neither takes account of the character of the landscape nor consists with the artistic feeling of the Greeks. Rationalistic in his teaching, again, was the only Athenian whose sophist doctrines gave offence to his compatriots, especially because instead of making a fortune like the teachers of wisdom from abroad, he neglected his affairs. We, ourselves, should hardly except Socrates from the category of sophists on account of his merits as a dialectician, had not the reactionary democracy of the restoration executed him as a person dangerous to the common weal. He chose to die rather than do the least thing that ran counter to his consciousness of rectitude, his Logos, the belief in the reality of the Good which he was not able to demonstrate by rationalistic methods; and the moral grandeur of his death has reared for the faith of the human race an image which bears eternal witness that man is free and happy if he can but base his actions on belief in the Good; he needs no future world of punishment and reward. This eccentric Silenus-faced Athenian did not aspire to become a god like Hercules, he would have been more at home in a pedantic than a heroic atmosphere: he merely did nothing which he did not think right. The claim that the will obeys the reason—in most cases such a pitiful brag!—was a truth with him. Socrates was Athenian to the core, and therefore a loyal citizen of the democratic state; but, like Solon, he combines the Ionian and the Doric temperament; and, in common with the law-giver, he is devoid of feeling for mysticism and the whole sphere of the Unknown. His life is only intelligible as an outgrowth of the history of Athens; his death makes him a type of man as he can and should be. So long as the human race survives on our planet it will be a master experience of our moral education to live through the dying hours of this old and ugly plebeian.

That we can so do, that we can have Socrates as our master, we owe wholly and solely to the loyalty and poetic genius of the man (Plato) who set himself in the days of that agony to show that—hard as it may be to define uprightness, courage, piety and what other virtues there may be—the upright and courageous and therefore happy man has demonstrated in his own person the reality of these abstractions. This alone would have sufficed to make Plato a benefactor to mankind; but this is only a small part of his labours. With all that Socrates and the school of sophistry taught him, he combines mathematics and the mysticism of Pythagoras. He founded the school which was destined to serve the purposes of organised scientific work for nearly a thousand years, and which is the prototype of all such organisations. He lays down the fundamental lines of every philosophical science, constructing, and, where he thinks he has found a better way, demolishing the foundations he himself has laid. Many of his intuitions have only been verified after the lapse of centuries and tens of centuries; others still await verification. The force inherent in him is best proved by the energy of those who assure us that he has had his day. He has set Eros as the mediator between heaven and earth; this Eros has no worthier abode than the writings of Plato; through them, even to-day, Psyche is learning the road heavenwards. But Plato is a Greek in every fibre, he can only be understood through his people, and his people through him.

Plato was a poet; and though he fixed his mind wholly on the eternal type, unduly despising the individual phenomenon, and thrusting his own individuality completely into the background, yet this individuality with its poetic genius cast light and shade in bewildering alternation over every field of contemplation, like the full moon as she fleets over the mountains and plains of Attica.