When we consider how hard it is to keep the moral standard high, even after religion has placed before our view a Divine pattern for man to follow, and how among the Greeks religion, first corrupted itself, had already begun to pour out its own corruption upon morals, we shall not venture to pitch our expectations very high: optimism and pessimism are here alike out of place: we want the clear, dispassionate, and direct discernment of the facts. And when we observe how, down to this day, the epithets which ought to designate virtue only, and in particular the word good, tend irresistibly to attach themselves to other gifts, such as genius, rank, wealth, skill, and power, we must not hastily conclude, from finding a similar use in Homer, that there was no idea or standard of goodness except that belonging to preeminence in the particular kind, according to which a clever thief is a good thief; good, that is, by doing effectually what he professes to do, or good, like the unjust steward of the parable, in respect of the intelligence he displays, though evil in respect of the direction which he gives to it[785].
Homer, in speaking of different classes of society, uses the line[786],
οἷά τε τοῖς ἀγαθοῖσι παραδρώωσι χέρηες.
But after all we can translate this, without much verbal change, or any departure from our own idiom, ‘such services as the lower orders render to good society,’ or ‘to the better classes.’
Mr. Grote[787] says, that ‘the primitive import’ of the words ἀγαθὸς, ἐσθλὸς, and κακὸς relates ‘to power and not to worth;’ and that the ethical meaning of them is a later growth, which ‘hardly appears until the discussions raised by Socrates, and prosecuted by his disciples.’ I ask permission to protest against whatever savours of the idea that any Socrates whatever was the patentee of that sentiment of right and wrong, which is the most precious part of the patrimony of mankind. The movement of Greek morality with the lapse of time was chiefly downward, and not upward. It is admitted, that what we may call the dynamical sense of the epithets has held its ground in later times along with their ethical signification: the important question to be determined is, whether the latter signification was an improvement introduced by civilization into the code of barbarism, or whether it indicates a principle of human nature on its better, which is also its weaker side, and one which we see, all along the course of history, struggling to assert itself against the tyrannous invasion of other propensities and powers.
The word ἐσθλὸς is found in combination with what is absolutely vicious, in the remarkable case of Autolycus:
μητρὸς ἑῆς πατέρ’ ἐσθλὸν, ὃς ἀνθρώπους ἐκέκαστο
κλεπτοσύνῃ θ’ ὅρκῳ τε[788].
But the meaning of ἐσθλὸς appears to be, one who excels; the application of it to Autolycus is not at all unlike the commendation of the unjust steward; and the epithet did not in the later Greek acquire any essentially different force, or any exclusive appropriation to moral excellence. Its use in Homer may be compared with his application of δῖα to Clytemnestra. Yet it leans peculiarly to moral excellence. For the ἀμύμων is opposed to the ἀπηνὴς, who is certainly a moral delinquent; and the highest honour of the ἀμύμων is, that men proclaim him ἐσθλός (Od. xix. 329–34).