Science needed the cool judgment and caution of the systematiser. She found it in the person of Aristotle, the master-builder among men (baumeisterlicher Mann), as Goethe calls him. At his hands science first received systematic treatment and method—the tools of her craft. The existence of the man and his work attest for all time the unnatural character of a division of the one and indivisible body of science though it be only into natural and abstract sciences. For even in the collection of material, he laboured for all branches alike. It is idle to inquire which were the greater, his personal achievements or those which owed their birth to his example. For his successors carried on the work in his spirit, even more truly when, often after vehement controversy, they advanced beyond him, than when they rested content with merely working out the plan of the master-builder. Sprung of a family of physicians, and endowed with the Ionian temperament, the natural science of Ionia is the most substantial contribution he made to the legacy bequeathed by Plato. But he had likewise made himself familiar with all the accepted tricks of oratory at Athens, he speaks with authority on logic, rhetoric, and poetry, and he is capable of treating all literary forms with the hand of a master. Yet he did not discover his own peculiar style until he combined the bald simplicity of Ionian scientific phraseology with Attic balance and Attic elegance. Thus he became the father of scientific prose, of the text-book no less than the lecture and the practical investigation. Even in halting translations he afforded nutriment to powerful intellects. His own words will have a modern ring to the end of time.
It is a characteristic distinction between the two philosophers that Plato, the incomparable artist in words, fiercely attacked rhetoric, while Aristotle made it a cardinal item in his programme of education. It was a power and he reckoned with it accordingly, not without yielding more to contemporary taste than we can approve. To the modern mind rhetoric is the least congenial element in the culture and literature of antiquity. We can understand that in the political agitation which pervaded the Attic empire, oratory, which was a daily necessity in parliamentary debate and in the law courts, was bound to develop into an art, and that a literature should have arisen corresponding to that of our daily press. So, too, we can understand that the manifold intellectual activity of the age of the sophists, and the tentative efforts of science, needed an organ which should not only convey practical information but have an eye to effect. That this prose should become Attic, in spite of the fact that the language of Athens had barely passed through its first phase of development in tragedy, was inevitable from the time when Athens took the lead in Greece. In the sphere of language, at all events, the country attained to national unity. But to us there is at first sight something monstrous in the fact that in the age of Pericles a set form of oratory should arise which not only consciously competes with poetry but seeks to supplant it—and which actually succeeded in preventing the development of any new poetic method. The whole classic world, including the Latins, devoted no trifling labour and skill to this art of eloquence, and its art-theory ended by making poetry a mere subdivision of it. We are now coming to recognise more and more how much modern poetry in particular owes to this prose-poetry and its methods: the modern connecting-link of the rhyme was discovered beyond all dispute by that Gorgias whom Plato attacked as the champion of rhetoric; the intermediate links lie before us in an unbroken chain. Our astonishment subsides, if we so far rid ourselves of prejudice as to realise how arbitrary is every line of demarcation between poetry and prose. Not only the poems of Walt Whitman, but a great many of Goethe’s finest poems would be regarded by every Greek art-critic as prose. Prose really implies that the language proceeds on foot; the reverse,—that it soars aloft by means of this device or that,—applies to every conventionalised form of speech; whether it is cast into a regular measure or not is irrelevant in comparison with the fact that it is informed by measure. The Hellenic bias towards style manifests itself here in the creation of a definite form, and we cannot question the fact that the development of the period demanded a new style and one unhampered by the laws of metre. For at such a high point of civilisation the poetic form does not suffice for what the world has to say and wishes to hear. Empty and conventional jingle, relying on tricks of style, undoubtedly attained a bad eminence in Greek and Latin oratory; but a similar spectacle has been afforded by poetry and the arts of chisel and brush. If a man had something to say, like Aristotle, Polybius, and Plutarch, it did him no harm to clothe his thoughts in a form, the effect of which we perceive agreeably even without understanding the art to which it is due. It is the same artistic conventionality which to this day lends to French prose, whether it be that of literature or of polite conversation, the charm which the Teuton does not possess in equal measure. And the French have attained to it by a rhetorical schooling traditionally derived from the method of antiquity. That elegance is not an inborn quality with them is shown by the formlessness of so great a writer as Rabelais. Were we in a position to read the laws of Solon we should perceive that Attic elegance was likewise no gift of heaven. An art which we find still dominant in the sermons and hagiography of the Byzantines is a power not to be despised, even apart from its historical value.
THE ACROPOLIS TO-DAY
Again, it was not to these conventional tricks, in the first instance, that Plato was averse. He was logician enough to appreciate the high educational value of making thought move in regulated periods (a thing that many people overlook nowadays); but the heaven-born poet felt that this intellectual mechanism was antagonistic to the direct unconscious self-revelation of emotional experience. The thing that roused him to passionate protest was the claim laid by rhetoric to the formation of youth. This had to be begun on a fresh system, the old training in music and gymnastics being no longer adequate. The question was between a scientific and philosophical education (Plato was thinking particularly of mathematics, to which we also devote attention) and a conventional and mechanical training of the mind. There is no question that the rhetoricians provided the latter. It is rhetoric that our own schools desire to achieve by the practice of speaking and writing in the mother-tongue, and rhetoric that they formerly aimed at by speaking and writing in Latin. This Plato repudiated because it was no genuine knowledge, while the fact that the rhetorician took upon himself to talk of everything, irrespective of how much he knew of his subject, and never attempted to conceal that he aimed at effect and nothing else, appeared to the disciple of Socrates wantonly immoral. And when Isocrates, the most successful and systematic teacher of rhetoric, called his form of instruction philosophy, it must have sounded like mockery in the ears of the genuine philosopher. In youth, Plato had experienced in his own case that no poetic form was suited to portray what was to him the noblest of all visions—Socrates in converse with his pupils and with the sophists. He felt within himself the capacity to embody this vision directly by the reproductive power of imagination without any other stylistic conventionality than that of his own poetic fire. Thus in the divine madness of the poet, of which he speaks later in his Phædrus, he found the form to suit him. This form he perfected, and created, in the height of his power, works in which we find all the merits of all kinds of poetry and rhetoric, but which are, nevertheless, something utterly apart and unique. In his old age he probably felt that the form was no longer adequate to the substance; but he did not care to abandon it; and he who has glowed with enthusiasm with the youthful Plato, in his elder years willingly gives ear to the style of his old age, because the soul within has not grown old. Great writers like Aristotle and Cicero, having safely stored this characteristic form, which was natural to one period and one person alone, in the pigeon-holes of their æsthetic system, have indeed produced admirable dialogues. They are counterfeits none the less, and it is a wholly anti-Platonic classicism which holds or would hold the dialogue to be the true, or even a particularly good, method of scientific investigation and statement. Plato’s dialogue is a miracle which will edify the world to the end of time, like Athenian tragedy and the comedy of Aristophanes; but it is specifically Athenian. This is why Aristotle at his best abandoned dialogue in favour of a plain statement of ideas. Had the efforts of Aristotle been attended with success, the quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy would have been adjusted, inasmuch as rhetorical training would have received its proper and subordinate place in the philosophical education of youth. But the unforeseen expansion of Hellenic civilisation did not allow of such root-growth, and at a later period the power was wanting. In the dialogue De Oratore, that work which has most of the Platonic character, Marcus Cicero, though himself of the rhetorical school, renews the attempt to subordinate rhetoric to scientific training. In so doing he reproduced the ideas of his contemporaries, the successors of Plato in the Academy. The attempt succeeded neither in Rome nor in Greece. One of the strongest signs of decadence in the time of the empire is the fact that philosophy, except where it holds its own in narrow scholastic circles, has to yield precedence to rhetoric. Where the Latin language prevailed more especially, philosophy becomes no more than a part of general education; while rhetoric, thanks to an adherence to Attic models of style that grows ever closer and more difficult, becomes more and more an empty game of words that only serves to mask the internal decay which it precipitates. And yet the sight of the clinging ivy on the trunk of the dead oak is a fair one.
For centuries the great model of all rhetoricians was Demosthenes. His inimitable greatness is most plainly manifest in their imitations, even though they be those of Cicero. He, too, is intelligible only in connection with his age and his city, the only time and place which could have brought him forth as their natural fruit. The statesmen of the great epoch of Athens had wrought with the living word, prisoned in no written document—thus, Pericles. Gradually the political pamphlet began to make its way, choosing amongst other forms that of the δημηγορία, or parliamentary speech. The leading statesmen, indeed, wrote very seldom; but the literati, whom they made their mouthpiece, in time became a power in the formation of public opinion. Pre-eminent among these was Isocrates; he too made use of the form of the δημηγορία amongst others, his studied arts of speech giving it a character which must have formed a singular contrast to the words dictated by the passion of the moment in the Pnyx. It was a result of existing conditions that the speech in the law courts was sometimes suited to produce its effect as a pamphlet pretty much in the form in which it had been delivered. The popularity of rhetoric also preserved many speeches in the courts which had no particular tendency, and thus, curiously enough, special pleading made its way into literature. But Demosthenes was the first to rise to the position of a leading statesman by the publication of orations to the people or to the courts which he had either actually made or else had reduced to this form. Simultaneously his works took their place among the most distinguished classics of his nation. His only education had been that of an advocate, which included, it must be admitted, all the arts of speech; nothing that may even remotely be called science ever touched him. In our moral judgment of him we should apply no standard but that which he recognised; he took the license which had been taken by patriotic Athenian statesmen even in the days of Themistocles. Possibly this did not tally with the Platonic standard, but then, neither did the state of Athens. The charm of Demosthenes lies in his faith in the democratic imperialistic ideals of the Athens of Pericles. That these had long been past hope, was the key to his fate; he himself was ruined by the fact. That by the power of the spoken word and the faith that alone makes the word powerful, he almost succeeded in inspiring his worn-out and selfish nation with his own patriotism, and, that in spite of everything, Athens once again entered the arena to champion liberty against Philip with the lives of her citizens—therein lies his greatness. The tragic side of this greatness heightens its fascination for one who sees through the illusions of Demosthenes and perceives the better right, historically speaking, on the side of Philip; but the fire of the passion of Demosthenes will carry even such a one away. This is not the charm to which the rhetoricians were susceptible. What held them spell-bound is what at first alienates our sympathies. Hellenic art restrained all wildness and passion, reducing it to the smoothest, most harmonious form. Demosthenes did not speak like this, of that we are sure. As a writer he practises the art of conventionalisation with the soundest judgment and the most cautious intelligence—we discover that this speaker can do whatever he pleases, his power knows no bounds; but he himself defines the narrow limits consistent with the growth of harmonious beauty; beauty, if you will, of the style in which contemporary art adorned its mausoleums; for in the case of Scopas and Leochares, too, vast pathos slumbers beneath the sweep of the beautiful line.
Athenian independence and power and that Greek liberty in opposition to which Philip looked a barbarian and a tyrant in the eyes of Demosthenes, had in truth long been but a phantom. The attempt made by Athenian statesmen, from Aristides to Pericles, to transform into an Athenian empire the confederation of cities which the repulse of the Persians had called into existence, was the greatest act of the Hellenes in the sphere of politics. The concentration of their civilisation into a unit under the hegemony of Athens was achieved. But the issue which the young Thucydides foresaw when, at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war, he determined to write his history, fell out otherwise than he perhaps anticipated or than was in all human probability to be anticipated. Athens had not strength to subdue the Peloponnesus; Sparta subdued Athens and destroyed the empire—but with the help of the Persians, who were the real victors. The result was not only the desolation and brutalisation incident to a long civil war, but a despair of any kind of favourable issue—indeed of any issue at all. The restoration of the Athenian democracy, the catastrophe of Sparta, which after Leuctra has as much as it can do in fighting for its own existence, the ephemeral rise of Thebes, due to the pre-eminence of a single man, all this has no further significance in the history of the nation except to emphasise the fact that none of these little cities could maintain a sovereignty either at home or over their neighbours; that they existed only in virtue of the general weakness. Even the Persian might, which imposes its will on the Greeks so frequently even without the aid of armed force, subsists only because no one attacks it. What this whole world lacks is a dominant will to coerce it to its own advantage. It lacks a master. Many are aware of this, many give voice to it; that state in particular,—founded in violence and yet powerful,—which Dionysius of Syracuse carved out for himself by overcoming the Carthaginians in the hour of their need, widely disseminated this feeling. The fall of his dynasty brought about a reaction, and the spirit of ancient municipal independence owed its power to the fact that the monarchy seemed to place even the personal freedom of the individual in jeopardy. How Philip would have solved the problem put in his hands on the day of Chæronea, it is idle to speculate. Long before that, the aged Isocrates had called upon him to take his place as general of the Hellenic confederacy against the Persians. And now it came to pass that his son was confronted with this same problem. He it was who solved it. He is and was the master of whom the Hellenic nation stood in need.
Demosthenes and all those who were pledged to the old ideals of sovereign cities, whether oligarchies or democracies, were naturally incapable of understanding the great king and his empire, but even Aristotle seems to have thought much as they did, although he had been Alexander’s tutor and saw clearly the need of reform in society and the petty states, and was strongly inclined to translate his political theories into practice. His historical compilations ignore the Macedonian monarchy, and his theories reveal no suspicion of what Alexander designed and executed. This ought not to astonish us, even if we see in Alexander the crowning figure of Hellenic civilisation. For all truly great men in history seem to the reflective eye of posterity like providential agents appearing at the right moment to accomplish what has long ago been augured as a need, prophesied and prepared for. As a matter of fact they accomplish the result in quite another fashion, a fashion of their own, often contrary to all anticipation, filled as they justly are with the sense that they are contributing something new and original. But contemporaries who have no power of reading history backwards from the event (even if their interpretation were likely to be sound), experience the clash of this novel contribution with all the more violence the higher they stand over the common herd, which after all only takes up the catchword, crying, “Hosannah!” on Sunday, and on Friday, “Crucify!” Even now it counts itself singularly sage for taking its catchword from Demosthenes or Aristotle for the condemnation of Alexander.
Alexander went to Asia with the intention of seizing upon the empire of the Persian king. This he accomplished, not in a wild orgy of victory but with the tenacious perseverance which took three years for the conquest and organisation of the Eastern provinces, but did not overleap itself by extravagant ambitions. It is only legend that makes him the conqueror of the world. He was a Macedonian, the hereditary king of a feudal state which the energy of his father had transformed into a military monarchy. He was a Greek in the sense which even the journalists had long since learned to express by saying that it was not race but education that made the Greek. But he was also recognised as the legitimate successor of the Achæmenides, and was himself willing to employ the Persians, side by side with Macedonians and Hellenes, in the service of the empire. His empire was accordingly not to be based on nationality, it was to rear itself over the heads of nations and states. He granted self-government in the widest interpretation of the term to kingdoms, half-civilised tribes, Hellenic and other towns; he not only respected all local peculiarities of manners and religion, he even went so far in this direction as to deliver peoples from a foreign yoke—as for instance in the case of the Egyptians. But his empire was to be more than a confederacy, it was to be an effective entity with the imperial rule supreme over all, with the imperial army a ready instrument of war in the hands of the sovereign, to compel the Universal Peace, as he called his empire, and with the king’s officers able to exercise sufficient authority for the protection, not only of the constituent parts of the empire against one another but also of the individual against the arbitrary action of the individual community. Finally, he realised the civilising mission of the state as fully as any prince has ever realised it; he took in hand the irrigation of Mesopotamia, founded cities, built harbours, and set about the scientific exploration of his newly discovered world in a style to which even the present furnishes few parallels.
The imperial government, like the imperial army, was centred, head and heart, in the king. On his person everything depended. Absolute monarchy was the only possible form for the empire. The founder of this empire, who bore as many wounds on his body as anyone among his veterans, who commanded in all battles in person, who himself, by ceaseless toil, carried on the business of administration, might well regard himself as the true king whose right to rule, even his master, Aristotle, did not dispute, though he questioned the possibility of such a man’s existence. But Alexander in no way regarded himself as a sovereign because he had the power. He regarded himself as a king by the grace of God, not in the sense of a more or less dubious legitimacy, which many great and petty sovereigns are apt to advance as sole proof of their title, but in the sense in which the genuine artist and the prophet may claim to be the depositaries of the divine spirit. It was the reverse of presumption when Alexander set the divine element in himself in the foreground. During his lifetime he exhibited the most scrupulous piety, and it is contemptible to tax him with hypocrisy; he had far more faith in miracles and oracles than we are willing to ascribe to the pupil of Aristotle, though we can readily understand it in the Macedonian and the soldier. To him it was a revelation from heaven when the Libyan god greeted him as his son. Had not his ancestor, Heracles, been the son of Zeus and of Amphitryon? For him personally it was the confirmation of his faith in his own mission, and the divinity of its ruler gave his empire a religious consecration. It was consistent with this idea that the worship of Alexander took its place above the innumerable special cults of tribes and towns, of families and communities, as the religion of the empire as a whole. There are many instances of the worship of the sovereign being assigned a place in the pantheon, side by side with that of the godhead figured under a thousand different names and shapes; for the worship of defunct monarchs, the ancient and hallowed practice of ancestor-worship offers a precedent. The adoration paid to Plato and Epicurus was of a precisely similar character. Thus, the abuses of which weaklings and miscreants on the throne, and flatterers and sycophants among subjects, have been guilty, must not be allowed to neutralise the historical and spiritual authority of the institution of the worship of the sovereign, which is inseparably bound up with the institution of the monarchy of Alexander. This monarchy is the highest phase of political and social organisation attained by antiquity. For the much-lauded Roman Empire is nothing else than this kind of monarchy, imperium et libertas. Cæsar actually grasped at the crown of the Greek king. So far as Italy and the West were concerned, Augustus certainly wished to be the first citizen and no more—the confidential agent of the sovereign people. But to the Greek half of his empire he was from the first both king and god, and he owed his victory not least to his own belief and that of others in the divinity of his adoptive father. From the time of Hadrian the Augustan theory was in the main exploded even in the West.