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 SAN DIEGO 
 
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 GREEK IDEALS
 
 "L'homme est ni si mediocre qu'il n'est bon que 
 quand il reve." RENAN.
 
 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 A STUDY OF SOCIAL LIFE 
 
 BY 
 
 C. DEL1SLE BURNS 
 
 Author of 
 "Political Ideals," " The Morality of Nations," etc. 
 
 G. BELL & SONS; *LTD. 
 1917
 
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 mm LONDON AND NORWICH PRESS LIMITED, LONDON AND NORWICH, ENGLAND
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THIS book contains no reference which will be new 
 to scholars and no subversively new conclusions 
 drawn from the old evidence. It is an attempt 
 at nothing more than an analysis of some of the 
 ideals which are usually called Greek. And, as 
 will be easily seen, Greek in this sense means Athen- 
 ian. A short explanation then is needed, both of 
 what is here meant by an ideal and of the limitations 
 here imposed on the word Greek. The life of every 
 people, in so far as it is not simply formed by cir- 
 cumstances, is governed by their ideals. An ideal 
 is less violent and less unconsidered than a desire 
 or an expectation, and thus it may have less place 
 than passion in moving men to action. But the 
 action to which it moves is progressive, whereas the 
 violence of passion or the inconsiderateness of 
 expectation, may destroy almost as often as it 
 urges men forward. 1 An ideal is an emotionally 
 coloured conception of a state of things which would 
 be better than the present. It is, in a sense, intel- 
 lectual because it is due to a perception of present 
 evils and future possibilities ; but it is not a com- 
 plete programme for action, for a man influenced by 
 an ideal may often stumble over obstacles to its 
 realisation because he has not any definite method 
 
 1 Thucy elides III. 45. " Hope and passion are everywhere, hope 
 leading, passion following, hope devising, desire making us believe 
 good fortune inexhaustible. They work much evil, and though 
 invisible overcome dangers actually seen."
 
 VI 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 of attaining what he desires. On the other hand, 
 an ideal must be emotionally appreciated. It is 
 not the kind of reality which can be understood by 
 mere calculation or intellectual analysis. It moves 
 because it is desired. 1 But although ideals of every 
 kind originate in the clear thought or deep emotion 
 of individuals, they are powerful only when many 
 are moved by them. The common experience seems 
 in them to produce a common vision. 
 
 The ideals of which we speak here are predomin- 
 antly moral in the widest sense of that too narrow 
 word. We should, perhaps, apologise for saying little 
 of the position of Art in Greek life : but in the first 
 place our subject must be limited and, secondly, it is 
 most untrue to the Greek spirit to be rhetorical 
 about Art. The Art of the Greeks coloured all their 
 moral ideals ; and yet it was part of their moral 
 ideal not to talk about Art but to produce it. Even 
 of their literature and their philosophy we shall speak 
 only in so far as these provide evidence of moral 
 ideals which are typically Greek. 
 
 And now with regard to the word Greek : we shall 
 refer chiefly to Athens in the fifth century ; not 
 only because the evidence for that is most complete, 
 but also because what is most typical of the race 
 or culture is to be found there and then. For by 
 typical we do not mean what was most common, 
 but (a) what was most characteristic and (b) what 
 was intended half-consciously by many who could 
 not have defined their ideal. In discussing the 
 ideal the real Athenians must be taken as a starting- 
 point. But we shall suppose in what follows that 
 the everyday life of Athens is known, at least, in 
 its chief features. It was like ours in some ways ; 
 
 1 Aristotle, Met. 10726. 3. Of the activity of the first cause.
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 but in more important ways very unlike. We shall 
 have to suppose the existence of many different 
 social worlds even in the Athens of the fifth century. 
 There was the Athens of the country-folk, to whom 
 the city was a market or a place of meeting at festi- 
 vals ; the Athens of the traders and merchants, 
 whose point of view is derived from the continual 
 coming and going of the Peiraeus : the Athens of 
 the wealthy few, at whose banquets anybody^and 
 everybody might be present : the Athens of industry, 
 whose labour was directed by " captains of industry " 
 and dependent upon an always increasing slave- 
 caste : the Athens of the poorer craftsman, who 
 looked with anger at the increase of large businesses : 
 the Athens of free women, who, in theory " en- 
 closed," yet contrived to enjoy wine and good 
 fellowship : the Athens of boys in the gymnasia 
 and girls in the precincts of temples : the Athens of 
 the amateur politician, the public speaker, the 
 military imperialist and the for-God's-sake-leave- 
 me-in-peace good citizen : the Athens of poor jury- 
 men, trying cases with no knowledge of law ; and of 
 sycophants, earning an income by patriotic denun- 
 ciations. All these are implied in the conceptions 
 of life and character which we call Greek. It must 
 not be imagined, however, that the Athens of which 
 we shall speak was in any sense isolated. We 
 distinguish its culture from that of other cities, 
 but it was much more a meeting-place of different 
 peoples and standards of life than any other city of 
 that time. 
 
 Again it will be seen that .Greek social life, espe- 
 cially on its religious side, is treated in this book 
 as being much more like mediaeval life than like 
 either the life of savages or the life of modern men.
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 And, finally, the versatility of the Greeks is more 
 emphasised than any single idea such as " harmony " 
 or " beauty," to express the Greek ideal. But in 
 all their ideals what is most prominent appears to 
 be sociability. 
 
 The argument of the book may be summarised 
 thus : (a) The Greeks desired chiefly a life in 
 society and a character completely social. And 
 society was conceived primarily as a religious union, 
 which was organised in its festivals so as to keep 
 touch with the dead, to relieve the tedium of the 
 living and to free the individual from fear, (b) In 
 so far as society was organised politically, Greek 
 social life shows a desire for flexibility in law and 
 free local development, with the beginnings of 
 individual freedom, (c) Later developments of 
 the ideals of Greece show themselves in literature. 
 Homer and Hesiod had set certain standards for 
 character. The admiration for bodily beauty 
 appears in Pindar, as it does also in the vase paint- 
 ings. And the Hramatists indicate the Greek admira- 
 tion for intelligence, clear speech and a life of public 
 activities, (d) A contrast, however, appeared 
 between those who admired the older fashions and 
 those who looked forward. The " old School " 
 stood for what was traditional ; and, on the other 
 side, the clearest sighted and most humane of all was 
 Socrates. He was the most splendid achievement of 
 Athens, although her severest critic, (e) In depend- 
 ence upon popular tradition and current discussions, 
 the philosophers made Greek ideals more consistent 
 and more exalted. Plato is the most striking moral 
 enthusiast whose works have come down to us. He 
 undervalues the individuality of the average man 
 indeed, but he exalts the finest elements of emotional
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 and intellectual life. He expresses the desire for a 
 perfect society, in which every man capable of a 
 high development shall have an opportunity of 
 doing what he is best fitted to do. (/) In the decline 
 of Greek thought some traditional ideas appeared 
 more clearly than heretofore, as, for example, the 
 naturalness of the good life and the dignity of the 
 common man. 
 
 In a field so large, even though severely limited, 
 it is almost impossible to satisfy either the require- 
 ments of scholars or the expectations of the ordinary 
 reader. Indulgence must, therefore, be asked for 
 the many omissions and exaggerations which will 
 appear. That they are not greater is due to the 
 most valuable criticisms and suggestions of my 
 friend, Mr. G. P. Moriarty; and I have also to 
 thank Miss Melian Stawell for some important 
 corrections. 
 
 C. DELISLE BURNS. 
 January, 1917.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. ATHENIAN RELIGION ... I 
 
 II. THE ANTHESTERIA ... 12 
 
 III THE PANATHENAIA ... 20 
 
 IV. THE DIONYSIA 35 
 
 V. THE ELEUSINIA .... 46 
 
 VI. POLITICS 64 
 
 VII. THE EPIC TRADITION ... 87 
 
 VIII. THE FIFTH CENTURY . . . IO2 
 
 IX. THE OLD SCHOOL .... 117 
 
 X. SOCRATES 143 
 
 XI. THE PHILOSOPHERS . . . 170 
 
 XII. PLATO ON RIGHT ACTION . . 177 
 
 XIII. PLATO ON THE IDEAL MAN . . 189 
 
 XIV. PLATO OX EDUCATION . . . 204 
 XV. PLATO ON THE IDEAL SOCIETY . 214 
 
 xvi. ARISTOTLE'S IDEALS . . . 237 
 
 XVII. THE AFTERGLOW 260
 
 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 ATHENIAN RELIGION 
 
 THE history of a people may be interpreted by 
 reference to the kind of life which they held most 
 desirable and the kind of character they most admired. 
 The Greeks, and especially the Athenians, made 
 themselves what they were by their ideals, and they 
 have left us nothing more valuable than those ideals. 
 These are our subject. We may begin with the 
 statement that the life desired by the Athenian was 
 one thoroughly social, and the character most 
 admired was that of the man who was completely 
 social. Lack of companionship they dreaded most, 
 and they suspected most the man who needed no 
 companions. On the other hand the individual 
 had a larger place in the imagination of the Athen- 
 ians than in that of any contemporary group of men. 
 The supremacy of the social' elements in life is not 
 by any means so characteristic as the presence and 
 power of individuality, if we compare Athens 
 not with modern cities but with Thebes or Sparta or 
 contemporary Egypt and the East. Individuality 
 was valued, and the life in society was judged best 
 in which the individual could have free play.
 
 2 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 But what we must first explain should be con- 
 sidered to be rather an emotional attitude than a 
 conscious theory or even a consistent moral practice. 
 The attitude is one which gives great place to what 
 we have called the social elements in life and yet 
 allows to each individual, at least of a fairly large 
 group if not of a whole society, a certain share in 
 spontaneous activity. And if we are to find a Greek 
 word for society, in this sense, it is polis. The life 
 of the polis is the ideal life : the character admired 
 is that of the polites. 
 
 So much is easily said. But the interpretation 
 of the attitude depends upon the value we give to 
 the word polis. Our first task then must be to 
 give some sort of concrete meaning to the term, or 
 to explain what was meant to the Athenian mind 
 by the life of the polis ; and this not by archaeological 
 detail as to what happened in Athens but by 
 interpretation of the feeling for society and the 
 individual as reflected in custom and language. 
 We must discover what the Greek felt to be best 
 in the life of the polis ; and for this reason we 
 must begin with contrasts. What must obviously 
 be ruled out is what we now call politics. First, 
 there is no distinction to the Athenian mind between 
 the institutions for law and government and those 
 for the worship of the gods or for public entertain- 
 ment. Secondly, in his actions the average Athenian 
 would not easily have distinguished what we call 
 the sacred and the secular. The justification of 
 these statements will be attempted later. For the 
 present we simply deny the possibility of discussing 
 the life of the social man as though he were primarily 
 what we call a citizen. Our word is too narrow and 
 colourless. The leading characteristics of the social
 
 ATHENIAN RELIGION 3 
 
 life of Athens were rather what we may call religious ; 
 for it was concerned chiefly with the relations of the 
 group to certain non-human or super-human realities 
 within or behind the world of sense. This is the 
 original influence which forms the Athenian ideals 
 of life and character, and in this religious sphere 
 the highest embodiment of social life was always 
 found. The polis of fact was in the main a religious 
 union, and the ideal polis was also in the main 
 religious. It had elements which were strictly, in 
 our sense, political ; but these were less fundamental 
 and, in the social ideal, rather means than ends. 
 Of these we shall speak later. 
 
 The Athenians prided themselves on giving much 
 time to the service of the gods. 1 But the service of 
 the gods was an enjoyment for themselves. Peri- 
 cles is made by Thucydides to say, " We Athenians 
 have rest from labour in the service of the gods by 
 contests and sacrifices : " 2 and Plato, reflecting on 
 the character of Athens, says, " The gods pitying the 
 toils which our race is born to undergo have 
 appointed festivals in which men alternate rest with 
 labour ; and have given them the Muses and Apollo, 
 leader of the Muses, and Dionysus, as partners in 
 their revels, that they might improve what education 
 they have at the festivals of the gods and by their 
 aid." 3 At a much later date both Pausanias and 
 Plutarch agree that the prominence of religion 
 gave Athens its peculiar character. But the chief 
 feature of this religion was its social character. It 
 
 1 IIoX. A6. III. 8. Twice as many festivals in Athens as else- 
 where, cf. Lycurgus adv. Leocrat. 149. " You differ most 
 from other men in piety towards the gods, reverence for your 
 ancestors and devotion to your country." There were seventy 
 festival days in the Athenian year. 
 
 * Thucydides II. 38. s Laws, 653. Jowett's trans.
 
 4 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 was not dogmatic : and no creed was preached or even 
 clearly held. For religion meant action of a certain 
 kind, including the lowest form of magic and the 
 highest symbolism. The most important point, 
 however, for us now is that it was the unifying bond 
 of all members of the polis. This was so in every 
 Greek city, but more consciously so in Athens. 
 
 In order to emphasise the importance of this 
 conception of society for the appreciation of moral 
 ideals, it may be necessary to point out (i) that one 
 institution included traditionally all the social 
 interests of men, and that (2) in Greece generally 
 but in Athens especially religion never implied 
 ecclesiasticism. 
 
 The first point is simply a re-statement of the 
 fundamental fact that the polis was not what we call 
 a state : the word meant society in general, organised 
 indeed but organised rather religiously than, in our 
 sense of the word, politically. The political history 
 of Athens is no doubt important in the understanding 
 of the Athenian ideal ; but the deeper feeling, even 
 in comparatively late times, was always excited by 
 such religious events as the mutilation of the Hermae. 
 And, as we shall see, the grievance against Socrates 
 was not political, and yet it was not theological : 
 it was of a kind which can only be appreciated if the 
 polis is regarded as an institution with a spirit and 
 a form unlike any of our present institutions, but 
 having very close likeness to a democratic church. 
 It included also the functions of the modern state 
 in law and administration ; but of that strictly 
 political element we shall speak separately, and 
 even of that we may say that the political is saturated 
 with religious feeling. 
 
 The connection between the different aspects of
 
 ATHENIAN RELIGION 5 
 
 society may be seen in the passage of Demosthenes' 
 speech against Midias where he summarises his 
 grievance. The complaint is of assault while 
 Demosthenes was preparing the exhibition of a 
 chorus for the Dionysia. " In none of this have I 
 alone been wronged : but by the offences touching 
 the chorus of my tribe, a tenth part of you has been 
 wronged as well as I ; by his outrages to my person 
 and by his machinations against me the laws are 
 wronged to which every one of you is indebted for 
 security ; and by all these things the god, whose 
 choirmaster I was, is wronged and the essence of 
 holiness whatever it be, the venerable and the 
 divine." 1 Or again, in what we should call more 
 obviously secular cases, Pericles and Protagoras 
 spent a day discussing whether the javelin which 
 accidentally had killed a certain man bore the guilt 
 of murder ; 2 and Antiphon urges that the presence of 
 a murderer pollutes the air, bringing plagues and 
 ill fortune, while his punishment " brings purity 
 back to Athens." 3 Thus it is quite impossible to 
 separate religious feeling from any part of the life 
 of the polls. 
 
 Secondly, it is fundamental that the religious 
 activity of the Athenians was shared by all. There 
 was no segregated caste of priests and, although 
 certain families had special religious functions, the 
 most characteristic feature of Athenian festivals 
 was that every member of the society had some 
 function to perform. As the clergy do not exist in 
 Greek religion neither do the congregation, if we 
 
 1 Dem. c. Mid. (tr. Kennedy, p. 108). The last phrase is 
 interesting. The Greek conception of the divine was always 
 so flexible as to be easily referred to a quite impersonal 
 " essence of things." 
 
 * Plutarch, Pericles, 36. * Tetral, I.A., par. 10.
 
 6 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 understand that word as indicating the passive laity. 1 
 All Athenians act in the Anthesteria, Panathenaia 
 and the rest. All Athenians administer what we 
 should call their sacraments. This has a double 
 importance for the understanding of Athenian ideals. 
 It is seen in religious ceremony that Athens is demo- 
 cratic more fundamentally than in the merely 
 political sense. For all Greek cities had " popular " 
 religion ; but in Athens more than in any other the 
 popular processions reached magnificence. And 
 on the other hand, the individual Athenian felt 
 himself to be " somebody," whereas the more 
 primitive forms of group-religion swamp or obscure 
 the feeling of individuality. Here, then, in the 
 religion of the polis during its most elaborate and, 
 as some would say, " formal " development, we find 
 the sense of that relation of individual to society 
 which we regard as peculiarly Greek. Society is a 
 real whole. The Athenian sees it and feels it more 
 even in the Panathenaic procession than in the 
 Ecclesia. And yet individuality has scope. Every 
 member of society has a special function to perform, 
 and a special place which no one else could fill. 
 
 The general features of this social religion may be 
 conveniently described under two headings, for its 
 ceremonies are either sacramental or liturgical. It 
 is the purpose of early ceremonies to assist at the 
 crises of life : and these " rites de passage " are due 
 to the feeling of special danger when man is passing 
 through any exceptional stage in his growth. Evil 
 
 1 Preaching was absolutely unknown. Religion was dramatic 
 not dogmatic. The temple had no space for a congregation. 
 In fact the temple was in no sense a church. " Le veritable 
 temple c'est a dire qui repond a 1'Eglise moderne, c'est le temenos, 
 lepgribole . . . c'etaitle victeur, le curieux, le devot quientraient 
 dans la cella, sous le conduite de 1'exegete."
 
 ATHENIAN RELIGION 7 
 
 powers are then most to be feared. Therefore special 
 precautions are taken. 1 This is the origin of sacra- 
 ments which are connected with the beginning of 
 life (Baptism), the change from childhood to youth 
 (Confirmation), from youth to manhood or woman- 
 hood (Marriage as sacrament, and Orders), and the 
 final passage out of life (Extreme Unction). And as 
 civilisation develops, what has begun as magic for 
 avoiding danger becomes a sort of register taken 
 by society of the appearance and growth of new 
 members. Such crises or stages of individual life 
 were marked in civilised Athens by ceremonies which 
 we may call sacramental. 
 
 Of the introduction to society, the ceremony at 
 the Apaturia is an example. 2 The first day was 
 kept by a meeting of members of the clans at a supper 
 given by a wealthy member. Sausages were the 
 ideal fare. 3 On the second day sacrifice was made 
 to Zeus of the tribe and to Athena ; and on the third 
 day fathers entered on a register the children born 
 that year, who were then introduced to the tribe. 
 Objection might be made to the admission of the 
 child, the form being to remove the sheep or goat 
 which the father offered at the altar. Cases were 
 judged by the tribe. Adopted children were intro- 
 duced in this way, 4 and a new citizen had to go 
 through this form of naturalisation. The sacri- 
 ficial victims provided the food for the feast with 
 which the ceremonies ended. 5 Here if anywhere 
 
 1 The most widespread and the most striking of such rites are 
 those connected with menstruation, cf. Frazer, Golden Bough : 
 "Balder the Beautiful," Vol. I. ch. 3. 
 
 1 Herodotus I. 147. 3 Aristophanes, Acharn. 145. 
 
 4 Adopted sons might be entered on the register at the Thargelia, 
 Isaeus de App. H. 20. 
 
 * Isaeus de Ciron. 71. Demosthenes c. Eubul, 1315. c. Macart. 
 1054.
 
 8 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 is a social sacrament, and such a sacrament gives 
 definite colour to one's feeling for society. 
 
 There were also initiation ceremonies, by which the 
 passing of childhood was marked. As an example 
 we may cite the Brauronia. At Brauron, on the 
 eastern coast of Attica, every fifth year, girls between 
 five and ten years old used to be consecrated to 
 Artemis. They were dressed in yellow and crept 
 on their hands and knees like bears. 1 No Athenian 
 maiden could be betrothed before being thus con- 
 secrated. And the life of the Athenian woman 
 was thus saturated with religious feeling for the 
 polls ; as we may understand from Aristophanes' 
 song of a girl's career : 
 
 " I bore at seven the mystic casket, 
 Was, at ten our lady's miller, 
 
 Then the yellow Brauron bear : 
 Next (a maiden tall and stately 
 
 With a string of figs to wear) 
 Bore in pomp the holy basket. 
 Well may such a gracious city all my filial 
 duty claim."* 
 
 Again, every boy on reaching manhood as an 
 Ephebos, took an oath at the temple of Aglauros 3 
 to defend the country, to obey the laws and to respect 
 the institutions of the polis. His birth and parent- 
 age had first been examined and, his name having 
 been put down in the register of citizens, he was 
 then presented with a shield and lance. This is 
 sacramental ; and one would think very differently 
 
 1 Pausanias I. 23, 33. Euripides, Iph. Tauris, 1449. 
 1 Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 641. (Rogers' trans.) 
 Legend said that Aglauros, daughter of Cecrops, had thrown 
 herself from the Acropolis to avert a war from Attica. The 
 patron of youthful patriotism in Athens died to preserve the 
 peace. She is the patron-saint of women. (Aristophanes 
 Lysistrata, 439. Thesm. 533.)
 
 ATHENIAN RELIGION 9 
 
 of society if one had been through such a ritual ; 
 for in all these ceremonies the society recognises 
 the changes in the life of the individual. 
 
 By liturgical festivals or ceremonies we mean those 
 which mark the crises or stages in the world-life or 
 the rhythms of nature. Such crises also are danger- 
 ous ; and we may speak of them under three heads. 
 They are, first, those of the change from winter to 
 summer or summer to winter ; and since the world- 
 life is always changing, there is a tendency to 
 increase the number of the festivals of nature. 
 Secondly, those crises are marked which are repre- 
 sented by the beginnings or ends of human labour, 
 especially of an agricultural kind. From these 
 come festivals of civilisation : and these also refer 
 to the gods, since nearly all civilisation was put 
 down to the aid of gods. Thirdly, there are festivals 
 which mark the achievements of human history, 
 themselves all crises, and they thus become com- 
 memorative. 
 
 Of the first kind we find an example in the Adonia. 
 At the end of April, at about the date of our Good 
 Friday, the women of Athens mourned for the death 
 of Adonis. Their cries were such as were used at 
 funerals : and the ill-omened sound is said to have 
 been heard when the Sicilian expedition sailed from 
 Athens. 1 After the mourning, on the second day 
 there was rejoicing because Adonis had risen from 
 the dead. As the name indicates, this is a foreign 
 or " eastern " ceremony introduced into Athenian 
 life, but not less effective on that account. 
 
 The festivals of civilisation are chiefly those 
 greater days of the Dionysia and Eleusinia of which 
 we shall speak in detail later. And these are closely 
 
 1 Plutarch, Alcib., 18.
 
 io GREEK IDEALS 
 
 connected with such festivals as the Synoikia, which 
 marked the political supremacy of Athens in Attica. 
 
 As festivals marking human achievement we 
 may count saints' days. An example is the feast of 
 Theseus. We are told that Cimon, in 476, found the 
 body of Theseus in Scyros, a giant coffin, a spear- 
 head and a sword. The relics were translated to 
 Athens with great rejoicing, 1 and the temple of Thes- 
 eus became an asylum for the poor and the oppressed. 
 On his feast-day bread and soup were given to the 
 poor. 2 Boys had a special feast-day, the Hermaia, 
 on which there were games and amusements in the 
 gymnasia, no adults being present. 3 Married women 
 had theirs, the Thesmophoria. 4 And in such cases 
 we can feel the importance of the idea of special 
 patronage for special members of society. Thus 
 throughout the life of the polis there was an elaborate 
 religious structure which influenced very profoundly 
 the moral ideal, 
 
 Further, apart from ceremonies, many of the 
 chief officials of the polis were " religious." The 
 Archon Eponymus concerned himself with family 
 morals. The Archon Basileus fulfilled the priestly 
 office for Athens as a whole and presided at the 
 Lenaea, the Eleusinia and the Lampadephoria. 
 General charges of impiety came under his cog- 
 nisance : and his wife, the Queen, had a special import- 
 ance at the Anthesteria. Add to all this the sacred 
 character of those who provided the chorus for a 
 public festival and of the Gymnasiarch who looked 
 after the schools and supplied wrestlers and pyrrhic 
 dancers. The sacred embassies of Athens sent to 
 
 1 The finding of Saint Gervasius by St. Ambrose is a parallel ; 
 see the Roman Breviary and the Bollandists for June 19. 
 1 Aristophanes, Plutus, 627. 3 Aeschines c. Tim., 2. 
 
 4 c/. Aristophanes, Thesmophoriasousai.
 
 ATHENIAN RELIGION n 
 
 Delphi, Delos or Olympia must not be forgotten nor 
 the prominence in social life of the sacred ships. 
 From these and many other like facts it is evident 
 that the atmosphere in which Athenian ideals appear, 
 perhaps even the influence that formed them, was 
 religious. The life of the social whole was most 
 prominently to be seen in the festivals, and the chief 
 social activities of every Athenian were rituals.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE ANTHESTERIA 
 
 THE traditional conception in Athens of the 
 nature and tendencies of group life may be under- 
 stood by reference to four great festivals : the 
 Anthesteria, the Panathenaia, the Dionysia, and 
 the Eleusinia. Our purpose here is not to give the 
 full details of the ritual, nor to discuss the many 
 points of historical interest which are still far from 
 clear. We must depend chiefly upon the broad 
 effects of the ceremonies used and endeavour to 
 show, first, how they express what the Greek meant 
 by society, and, secondly, how they influence the 
 moral and intellectual standards of the ordinary 
 Athenian and through him of the philosopher. In 
 these two points the reference to Athenian religion 
 is necessary for interpreting Athenian ideals. The 
 polis, in all the force of its original growth, appears 
 in the four great festivals : the conceptions of 
 individuality, and the admiration for beauty, har- 
 mony or intelligence, arise under the influence of 
 these periodical gatherings of all members of the 
 community. Even the philosopher does not make 
 his theory of individual and society, or of the ideal 
 state and the ideal man, except by reference to the 
 actual life of Athens in which he shared. 
 
 In the Anthesteria we have a very ancient group- 
 ritual of the liturgical or year-crisis type. In it the 
 
 12
 
 THE ANTHESTERIA 13 
 
 social life appears both as a good fellowship and as 
 an uncanny touching of hands with the dead. We 
 have our home here in the company of those who 
 share our food ; and before we living were born, our 
 life was in those who stand about us now unseen, the 
 dead. The festival which marks the sense of such 
 facts and keeps alive in a more elaborate civilisation 
 this first grasp of human community had no small 
 influence upon the formation of Athenian ideals. 
 The roots of society and individual life are in the 
 past : for the greater number of the members of any 
 society are the dead, and perhaps it is among the 
 dead that we should find the characters most 
 admired. Such is the general feeling that would 
 influence every Athenian. 
 
 The Anthesteria 1 was a festival of early spring, 
 corresponding in many ways to the Carnival on 
 Shrove Tuesday and the beginning of Lent on Ash 
 Wednesday ; although we should find perhaps 
 another parallel in the feast of All Saints followed, 
 the second of November, by that of All Souls. It 
 was one of the oldest and most sacred of all Athenian 
 festivals. On the first day, named from the cere- 
 mony " Cups," there was an opening of the jars 
 containing the new wine. This began the rejoicing, 
 which was expressed first in a carnival procession 
 to the city of those who had new wine to sell. The 
 country folk came in carts, and the road was 
 the scene of a contest of ribaldry which may 
 
 1 No adequate explanation of the name exists. It was cer- 
 tainly in the main a festival of the dead and not of flowers 
 (v6o!r). cf. Jane Harrison, Prol., p. 32-74. 
 
 The feast is called Dionysia, sometimes (feast of) " Cups," 
 and only in comparatively late times Anthesteria, although it 
 had in very early times given its name to the month Anthesterion. 
 (Ridgeway, Proceedings Camb. Phil. Soc. 1907.)
 
 I 4 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 have developed into a masquerade. " At Athens," 
 we read, " on the feast of Cups the revellers on the 
 carts jest with and revile those who look on." 1 
 And after the procession the specially shaped pots 
 for the celebration which was to follow were sold 
 in the market with the new wine. 
 
 But the chief feature of the whole celebration was 
 the family banquet. In this connection slaves 
 received special presents, greater freedom was 
 allowed to them and they were thus in fact recog- 
 nised as a constituent part of the household. It 
 was in general an occasion for giving presents, the 
 polis itself sometimes distributing money to citi- 
 zens. There was also a public banquet, given by the 
 priest of Dionysus, to which the invited brought 
 their own provisions and each a special cup of the 
 kind from which the festival took its name. These 
 cups were filled with wine, 2 and at a signal all present 
 drank in silence. He who finished first was given 
 as prize a cake and a measure of wine. 3 What 
 was left of the wine at the banquet was offered as a 
 libation to Dionysus ; and, as at all festivals, there 
 followed dances and songs. The banquet seems to 
 have ended at the setting of the sun. 
 
 Then began the less secular practice in the wor- 
 ship, at the temple of Dionysus " in Limnae." The 
 wife of the King-Archon entered this temple and 
 performed a secret sacrifice to Dionysus in the name 
 of the whole city. The marriage of the Queen with 
 Dionysus followed. The statue of the god was 
 carried in procession to the house of the King-Archon 
 
 1 Suidas s.v. x^ e< S- ' Aristophanes, Ach. 1000, 1087. 
 
 * It is specially noted that this was the civilised mixture of 
 water and wine which Dionysus himself had made, as opposed 
 to the raw wine of barbarism. Demosthenes Mid. 53.
 
 THE ANTHESTERIA 15 
 
 called the Boukolion, and was probably left there all 
 night, during which time the consummation of the 
 marriage was supposed to take place : and next day 
 the statue was restored to its temple, which was then 
 shut for another year. 
 
 Already one might begin to feel that some 
 uncanny power was being recognised ; but a further 
 touch to the character of the festival was added by 
 the ceremony of Pots. 1 On the day of Pots, sacrifice 
 was made to Hermes of the Underworld and to 
 Dionysus ; a mixture was made and cooked of all 
 sorts of seeds, which was enclosed in a pot and 
 offered by each family to Dionysus and Hermes, 
 in behalf of the dead. This part of the festival is, 
 perhaps, the oldest ; and indeed the Anthesteria 
 may have been a feast of All Souls before Dionysus 
 was conceived. It preserved its ancient ceremonies 
 of warding off ancestral ghosts long after the wine- 
 god had established his suzerainty, and it gave a 
 touch of uncanny grandeur to the new divinity of 
 rejoicing. 
 
 In the festival as a whole Dionysus appeared as 
 the patron of conviviality and family reunions. 
 A certain feeling of a distinct character does in fact 
 arise at such reunions : it is not by mere magic 
 that such meetings influence those who are 
 present, since even to-day a common dinner is the 
 usual expression of sympathy. But if we notice the 
 still greater effect of a banquet among those of 
 common blood, we shall perhaps understand why 
 the Athenians valued the Anthesteria. The Christ- 
 
 (feminine) is the name for ordinary pots, and the 
 masculine (x<JTpoi) indicates " pot-holes," in the earth : another 
 indication of the interest of the dead in this feast, cf. J. Harri- 
 son. Prol. p. 36.
 
 16 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 mas dinner survives the Mass which once celebrated 
 the birth of Christ ; and we can well imagine that 
 the philosopher who laughed Dionysus out of 
 existence might seem to be striking at the very 
 root of family life. 
 
 The effects produced by the new wine and the 
 common meal and by those more intangible causes 
 which we crudely call the " crowd-mind " or the 
 " social soul " these would not unreasonably be 
 put down to the agency of one person. He is 
 Dionysus, the source of enthusiasm and common 
 life. It is he who establishes the basis of all such 
 life by the sacredness of marriage. The statue of 
 the god, that is the god himself present in the sym- 
 bol, is conducted to the Boukolion to be married 
 to the Queen, and there he stays all the night follow- 
 ing the evening banquet. Not simply as a god 
 of vegetation, whose marriage is a source of the new 
 life in the spring, but as a god of civilised life, 
 Dionysus is married according to the official forms ; 
 and therefore Aristotle speaks both of the official 
 form and of the consummation of marriage. We 
 have here something more than sympathetic magic. 
 
 Again, Dionysus becomes a mystery-god by his 
 connection with the dead. The last ceremony 
 of the Anthesteria is that of putting all sorts of 
 edibles (TravaTrepfjda) in the jars, and this was done 
 for the dead of the family, in honour of Dionysus 
 and Hermes of the Underworld. The emphasis, 
 it seems, should still be laid upon the family as the 
 unit, although the mention of the dead naturally 
 brings in the figure of Hermes as guide of souls. 
 The connection of Dionysus with the dead has 
 puzzled many scholars : but perhaps it is because 
 he presides over a union of the family, and because
 
 THE ANTHESTERIA 17 
 
 at such a time it is natural to think of those members 
 of the family who are no longer living, that he 
 becomes also a patron of the dead who are to share 
 in the family banquet. Thus the Pots for the dead 
 are placed in the care of Dionysus just as the banquet 
 and Cups x for the living are his. 
 
 Dionysus enters first as a name for the influence 
 we feel in such a festival. That the influence in 
 social unions should be called by the name of the 
 god of wine or of artistic enthusiasm need not sur- 
 prise us. But the figure of the god is in any case not 
 very prominent in the festival ; and therefore the 
 Anthesteria still remained in the fifth century typical 
 of the earliest form of group-feeling. 
 
 The festival, from our present point of view, is 
 interesting chiefly because in it we may find some 
 of the meaning given to the life in society. It is 
 from such experiences as in the Anthesteria that the 
 later philosophers derive their conception of the 
 merging of the individual in the group, and not from 
 an abstract view of psychological fact. Athenian 
 philosophy is the daughter of Athenian religion. 
 In the first place the Greek feeling for good-fellow- 
 ship as the basis for society is to be seen in the 
 Anthesteria. Not " contract " nor " fear " nor even 
 " common purpose " so much as good fellowship 
 makes social groups. This is the Aristotelian 
 " friendship " of which we read at the end of the 
 Ethics, and its importance for us now is in the 
 " naturalness " which it gives to the conception of 
 social life. The philosophical significance will be 
 discussed later : here it is only necessary to say 
 that no Athenian, with the experience of the yearly 
 
 1 It may be that even the " cups " (X^s?) were originally 
 libations (X 03 ") for the dead, 
 c
 
 i8 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 Anthesteria, could possibly have believed that social 
 life was a mere convention. He could not have 
 imagined an individual completely isolated from the 
 past, as felt in the influence of the dead, 1 or cut off 
 from his fellows in the ordinary needs of life. In 
 this oldest and simplest embodiment, then, we find 
 one of the meanings given to " society " by the 
 Athenian mind. The devout or patriotic Athenian 
 would have no theory to explain his feeling ; but 
 the life he most desired would most certainly be 
 indicated for him in the ritual of the dead and the 
 family banquet. 
 
 Secondly, it is to be noticed that even Plato, the 
 ascetic, in his ideal state allows for drunkenness, 
 not as a practice 2 but on the festivals of the god 
 who gave us wine. 3 For wine, he says, may be at 
 banquets the test of a man's character ; and it was 
 given to man " as a balm in order to implant modesty 
 in the soul and health and strength in the body." 4 
 He further appoints " the chorus of Dionysus, old 
 men softened by wine " 5 to be a committee for 
 judging the dances of the polis at festivals. 6 
 
 Without the influence of Athenian tradition such 
 sentences of a philosopher would mean either too 
 much or too little to us nowadays, according as we 
 understood by good-fellowship only boon-companion- 
 ship or feared the least approach to festivity. But 
 in the Anthesteria we see the influence at work which 
 made the Greeks eager for society, and rendered 
 
 1 This is regarded as characteristic of Athens : cf. Demosthenes 
 c. Sept. " You are the only people who have state funerals for the 
 dead and funeral orations in which you glorify the actions of 
 brave men." The great funeral orations are as it were the 
 results in conscious life of the dumb feeling of the Anthesteria. 
 
 1 Laws, 637 and of course certain occupations preclude any 
 drunkenness. Pilots must not drink. 
 
 Laws, 775. 'Laws. 672. 'Laws, 671. Laws, 819.
 
 THE ANTHESTERIA 19 
 
 unnecessary the modern tendency to regard social 
 bonds as an obligation and not as a pleasure. In 
 this oldest festival the individual hardly appears ; 
 he is, as it were, absorbed in the life of society 
 through its many generations. But even here every 
 Athenian is active in his own sphere. The ritual 
 bond, so to speak, is not put on to the Athenians by 
 any external and priestly authority. Every man 
 is his own priest : and every man who has any part 
 at all in society has his place in the festival^
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE PANATHENAIA 
 
 THE life of the city in its highest form was expressed 
 by the Athenians in the Panathenaia. And that 
 festival again reacted to modify or develop their 
 conception of social life ; so that the Athenian ideal 
 may be found both expressed in and modified by 
 the same ceremonies. The point of importance 
 for us here is that the Panathenaia was the expres- 
 sion of Athens, and in it only Athenians had a place. 
 The feast was viewed traditionally as a com- 
 memoration of the victory of Athena over the giants. 
 But probably the procession and sacred dance 
 existed long before there was any conception of 
 Athena. It was a summer festival, at the end of 
 July, at the beginning of the Athenian year. It 
 may have been a harvest thanksgiving, and the 
 olive branches carried in procession may have been 
 signs of gratitude. The vase of oil offered as a prize 
 indicates the store of good so far acquired. But 
 it may have been also, as so many processions have 
 been, a magic ritual for bringing the rain, which is 
 needed in Attica in July. The same idea lies behind 
 the procession on the Rogation Days according to 
 the present Roman ritual. 1 
 
 1 Duchesne, Christian Worship (English trans., p. 287). " The 
 people march in procession to the cultivated lands." The pro- 
 cession in Christian Rome took the same route as that followed 
 on the old festival of the Robigalia on the same date. 
 
 20
 
 THE PANATHENAIA 21 
 
 The Panathenaia occurred every year, and with 
 special magnificence every fourth year (Great Pana- 
 thenaia). It lasted for four days. The chief ele- 
 ment in the festival was the procession, our most 
 effective record of which is the frieze of the Parthe- 
 non. The evening before there was a torch-race 
 and much feasting. In the morning at sunrise 
 the whole people was marshalled by officers, the 
 men being in white. 1 The procession went from the 
 Ceramicus to Eleusis and back to the temple of 
 Athena Polias on the Acropolis. On the Parthenon 
 frieze we see the order of the procession and its 
 culminating point. Beginning from the western 
 door of the temple the frieze covered the walls of 
 the cella to the eastern end, and thus recorded in 
 stone the ritual in which every Athenian had his 
 place. First, at the far end of the procession are 
 the cavalry of Athens. Some are mounting their 
 steeds, others, already mounted, are riding in 
 massed order. 2 Then come the musicians, and 
 maidens bearing utensils for the sacrifice, as the 
 choir and the acolytes with thuribles would come 
 in a mediaeval procession. For if we allow for the 
 exclusion of women from direct religious service 
 after the introduction of Christianity, the parallel 
 would be complete with a mediaeval procession on 
 
 1 Paus. i, 2, 4 : "At the entrance to the city we come to a 
 building for the getting ready of the processions which are 
 conducted at yearly and other intervals." cf. Lucian, Nigrinus, 
 c. 14 : " A citizen had been arrested for making his appearance 
 in coloured clothes. The onlookers felt for him and took his 
 part : and when the herald declared that he had violated the 
 law by attending the festival in that attire, they all exclaimed 
 with one voice that he must be pardoned for wearing those clothes 
 as he had no others." 
 
 1 The great impression made by this show of horsemanship 
 may be judged from the suggestions as to cavalry evolutions on 
 days of procession made by Xenophon in the " Hipparch."
 
 22 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 the day of the city's patron. Finally it may be that 
 on the Parthenon frieze the folded cloth represents 
 the peplos being received. On this great robe the 
 record of Athena's triumph was embroidered ; and 
 on it also the figures of the greatest servants of the 
 community might be added. 1 In the procession 
 the robe floated like a sail over a car which, when 
 Athens was a sea-power, was shaped like a ship. 
 
 The whole ceremony culminated in the shrine 
 of Athena Polias, where the ancient statue was to be 
 robed in the new peplos. What might be seen there 
 we learn from Pausanias. " The object which was 
 universally deemed the holy of holies many years 
 before the union of the townships, is an image of 
 Athena in what is now called the Acropolis, but 
 what was then called the city. The legend is that 
 the image fell from heaven, but whether that was 
 so or not I shall not inquire. Callimachus made a 
 golden lamp for the goddess. They fill the lamp 
 with oil, and wait till the same day next year ; and 
 the oil suffices for the lamp during all the intervening 
 time, though it is burning day and night. The wick 
 is made of Carpasian flax, which is the only kind of 
 flax that does not take fire. A bronze palm-tree 
 placed over the lamp and reaching to the roof draws 
 off the smoke. ... In the temple of the Polias is 
 a wooden Hermes, said to be an offering of Cecrops, 
 but hidden under myrtle boughs. Amongst the 
 ancient offerings which are worthy of mention is a 
 folding chair, made by Daedalus, and spoils taken 
 from the Medes, including the corselet of Masistius, 
 who commanded the cavalry at Plataea, and a 
 sword said to be that of Mardonius. Masistius, I 
 know, was killed by the Athenian cavalry ; but as 
 
 1 Aristophanes, Knights, 565.
 
 THE PANATHENAIA 23 
 
 Mardonius fought against the Lacedaemonians, and 
 fell by the hand of a Spartan, the Athenians could 
 not have got the sword originally, nor is it likely 
 that the Lacedaemonians would have allowed them 
 to carry it off. About the olive they have nothing 
 to say except that it was produced by the goddess 
 as evidence in the dispute about the country. 
 They say, too, that the olive was burned down when 
 the Medes fired Athens, but that after being burned 
 down it sprouted the same day to a height of two 
 cubits. Contiguous to the temple of Athena is a 
 temple of Pandrosos, who alone of the sisters was 
 blameless in regard to the trust committed to them. 
 What surprised me very much, but is not generally 
 known, I will describe as it takes place. Two 
 maidens dwell not far from the temple of the Polias ; 
 the Athenians call them Arrephoroi. These are 
 lodged for a time with the goddess ; but when the 
 festival comes round they perform the following 
 ceremony by night. They put on their heads the 
 things which the priestess of Athena gives them to 
 carry, but what it is she gives is known neither to 
 her who gives nor to them who carry. Now there is 
 in the city an enclosure not far from the sanctuary 
 of Aphrodite called Aphrodite in the Gardens, and 
 there is a natural underground descent through it. 
 Down this way the maidens go. Below they leave 
 their burdens, and getting something else, which is 
 wrapt up, they bring it back. These maidens are 
 then discharged and others are brought to the Acro- 
 polis in their stead." 1 Such was the shrine and its 
 other special ceremonies. 
 
 But to return to the Panathenaia the central 
 ceremony of the festival was indeed the procession ; 
 
 1 Pausanias I. 26, 6 to 27, 3. Frazer's trans.
 
 24 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 but the whole four days, or eight at the Great 
 Panathenaia, were typical of all that concentration of 
 varied interests which gave the polis its meaning. 
 There was the Pyrrhic dance or dance in full armour 
 obviously a primitive war-dance. War is one of 
 the fundamentally unifying occasions for a group 
 in an earlier world ; and the purpose of the war- 
 dance is magical. Men dance thus in order to be 
 successful in war, and the spirit which comes into 
 them is their god. Later on, the dance is supposed 
 to be merely commemorative, and its effect is merely 
 a preparation, not directly practical. " Our virgin 
 lady," says Plato, " delighting in the sports of the 
 dance, thought it not meet to dance with empty 
 hands ; she must be clothed in full armour and in 
 this attire go through the dance. And youths and 
 maidens should in every respect imitate her example, 
 honouring the goddess, both with a view to the 
 actual necessities of war and to the festivals." 1 
 
 With the dance we may connect the contest of 
 heavy-armed soldiers who leapt from chariots 
 (Apobatai), and the athletic contests (races, etc., 
 and also a boat-race at Piraeus), the record of which 
 is preserved for us in the prize amphorae. 2 All this 
 makes social life ; but there was more, and that 
 specially Greek or even Athenian. There were 
 recitations of Homer and other literary exhibitions. 3 
 Herodotus is said to have read his histories at the 
 Panathenaia, after having read them at the Olympic 
 
 1 Laws, 796. The title of Athena is interesting : TJ 8& <xi5 TCOU 
 Trap* Yj[xlv x6pyj xai Ao7roiva. 
 
 1 Among the vases of the British Museum may be seen some 
 of these. They are interesting not only as pictures of the con- 
 tests, but as indicating by their rigid types, especially in the 
 figure of Athena, the weight of an old tradition. 
 
 c/. Plato: Ion.
 
 THE PANATHENAIA 25 
 
 festival. And there were chorus-singing and instru- 
 mental contests, said by Plutarch to have been 
 introduced by Pericles. 1 There can be hardly any 
 doubt that the Panathenaia expressed to the 
 Athenians the spirit of Athens. It was for them- 
 selves, as civilised and living embodiments of that 
 spirit, neither a memory of the past as the Anthes- 
 teria, nor a connecting link with the wider Greek 
 world as were the Dionysia and the Eleusinia. 
 Here the polis alone was sacramentally or liturgically 
 present. And out of the festival came the Athena 
 of the fifth century, the war-goddess transformed 
 into the political strategist, the cunning of Homer's 
 Athena transformed into intelligence and grace. 
 This Athena was Athens. 2 
 
 The highest development of the worship of Athena 
 is marked by the Parthenon. When this was built 
 some men were already doubting whether there 
 was any such person as Athena ; but we may well 
 imagine that the vast majority in Athens did not 
 doubt tradition. The Parthenon was definitely a 
 monument to Imperial Athens : 3 and Athena herself 
 is transformed from the old Promachos, champion 
 of a fortress, or Polias, organiser of a city, into a 
 Mistress (Despoina). " Pheidias added something 
 to the gods," as Quintilljian says ; but what he 
 added was in part at least given him to add by the 
 new experience of his contemporaries. His image 
 of Athena, however, was the final embodiment of 
 
 1 Plutarch, Per. 13. 
 
 * This is not merely a modern metaphor. In the illustrations 
 to Farnell's Cults of the Greek States may be seen a figure of 
 Athena, as the people of Athens, giving thanks to certain citi- 
 tens. 
 
 It was built with money which really belonged to the supposed 
 Allies who had then become Tributaries of Athens.
 
 26 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 the ancient deity. " The image itself is made of 
 ivory and gold. Its helmet is surmounted in the 
 middle by a figure of a sphinx . . . and on either 
 side of the helmet are griffins wrought in relief. . . . 
 The image of Athena stands upright, clad in a gar- 
 ment that reaches to her feet ; on her breast is the 
 head of Medusa wrought in ivory. She holds a 
 Victory about four cubits high, and in the other hand 
 a spear. At her feet lies a shield, and near the 
 shield a serpent, which may be Ericthonius." 1 
 So Pausanias wrote ; but the image is long since 
 gone and the temple is ruined. And yet, more per- 
 manent than the ivory and gold, the ideal which 
 built the city, which gathered men in the Panathen- 
 aia, which also gave birth to the magnificent dream 
 of Athena this ideal remains still intelligible. 
 
 Athena or shall we say Athens ? is born of the 
 soil. 2 She arises in the dance and the procession, 
 in the recurring ritual which makes a centre for 
 itself by creating her. 3 But she is not the character 
 played by a leader in ritual, as we may suppose 
 Pan and Dionysus to have been. She is a form of 
 the eternal Maiden, the representative and thus the 
 cause of prosperity. 
 
 1 Pausanias I. 24, 5. Frazer's trans. 
 
 1 The early form of her name (Athenaia) is adjectival : but 
 I do not see why that should imply that the name of the god 
 comes from the name of the place. The adjective may refer to a 
 quality. Thus the " Athenian Maid " would be the maid of a 
 certain kind. This is in opposition to Jane Harrison, Prol. 
 p. 301. Farnell argues that Athena gave her name to the city, 
 and the city gave it back to her as an adjective. 
 
 * I do not mean the Panathenaic procession or ritual, but that 
 which was its primitive source, and further we must allow for 
 the cumulative effect of all the festivals connected with Athena. 
 At the Plynteria a string of figs was carried, at the Oscophoria 
 there was a race of youths bearing grapes on the spray, at the 
 Procharisteria " the magistrates sacrificed when the ears of 
 corn were beginning to show." (Suidas of. Farnell, I., p. 291.)
 
 THE PANATHENAIA 27 
 
 Now the prosperity sought for in the service of 
 Athena is not pastoral, but in part agricultural and 
 in the main civic. She is that to which the first 
 agriculturists attend, which is in Athens the olive. 1 
 The magic olive tree on the Acropolis which was 
 burnt down by the Medes and sprouted up again 
 miraculously was " the luck of Athens," and, in a 
 vague sense, Athena herself. But in this case we 
 seem to see the effort of the worshipper's mind to 
 separate the external sensuous fact from the inner 
 cause. Athena is not the olive, but that which makes 
 the olive grow. To us, we may suppose, the olive 
 itself is that which makes the olive grow ; if, at 
 least, we are not too idealistic in our philosophy. 
 The force that makes the olive grow is an hypothesis 
 to explain the distinction between what we can see 
 or feel and " the life" or "the spirit" of the tree. 
 This life of all olives would be Athena. And as she 
 is that which makes the olive grow so she is that 
 which makes the city grow. Thus she is conceived 
 as the teacher of the industrial arts. She is the 
 instructor in the war-dance, the protectress of the 
 city ; and as such takes a special interest in rational- 
 ising the arbitrary rigour of primitive law, as it is 
 shown in the Eumenides of Aeschylus. She is also 
 concerned with the arts of music and of poetry at 
 her festival, although she was never considered as 
 the source of artistic inspiration. And in all her 
 worship she is the embodiment of Reason, not of 
 that dull analysis which we moderns tend to mis- 
 take for reasoning, but of that creative imagination 
 which is the source of all real science. 
 
 The impossible derivation of " Athene " given in 
 
 1 cf. Lysias : On the sacred olive. Certain trees scattered 
 over Attica were held by the polis.
 
 28 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 the Cratylus, is nevertheless an indication of the 
 character of the goddess as popularly conceived. 
 Socrates there says that the interpreters of Homer 
 " assert that he meant by Athene ' mind ' and 
 intelligence ; and indeed (Homer) calls her by a still 
 higher title, ' divine intelligence/ as though he would 
 say : This is she who has the mind of God." 1 And 
 so to the thinking Athenian his chief Goddess 
 becomes the Reasoning which built up and main- 
 tained Athens. For, since no one can reason when 
 he likes, but the process seems to occur in us at the 
 touch of some power not ourselves, it would be 
 natural to conclude that this power was a person, 
 and indeed the very person whom your forefathers 
 worshipped blindly. 
 
 It seems hardly necessary to ask what influence 
 the worship of Athena and the conception of the 
 divine therein developed can have had on moral 
 ideals. There was no special difficulty, no barbaric 
 crudity in the worship, to be opposed, and hardly 
 any " irreverence " in the myth. A philosopher 
 might be tempted to say that Athena was a celestial 
 body such as the moon, 2 and a sceptic might ridicule 
 the splitting headache Zeus must have had before 
 he brought forth the armed maiden. 3 But most 
 of the great thinkers were Athenian in spirit if not 
 in birth, and to be too particular about Athena and 
 her worship might savour of disloyalty. 4 It is 
 indeed difficult to imagine that even the philosophers 
 
 1 Plato, Crat. 407. 
 
 * Aristotle is said to have said this. Arnobius, adv. Genres, 
 3-3i- 
 
 Lucian, Dialogues of the Gods, viii. 
 
 Euripides is not too critical of her ; but he expressed some 
 feeling against Apollo (in the Ion) and Aphrodite (in the Hippo- 
 lytus). Aristophanes can laugh at Dionysus, but not at Athena.
 
 THE PANATHENAIA 29 
 
 actually doubted her existence. They would have 
 said perhaps that what people referred to as Athena 
 was not of such a character as the poets had imag- 
 ined ; but they would hardly have said that no such 
 being existed. However that may be, the nature of 
 the goddess worshipped in Athens made an immense 
 difference to the development of Athenian ideals. 
 
 The effect on thought may perhaps be called 
 indirect, but it is omnipresent. For without the 
 worship of Athena Athenian philosophy would 
 never have arisen ; although perhaps it may be 
 truer to say that the same spirit produced both. 
 The interest in all that makes civilised city life, and 
 the consciousness of what it was that so made it 
 industrial art, common discussion and rational 
 method this is what produced the worship of 
 Athena, as, later on, it produced Athenian philoso- 
 phy. Sophists went to other cities besides Athens ; 
 but in none did such brilliant consequences follow. 
 Ionia had indeed laboured at philosophy long before 
 Athens ; but it was superseded when Athens began 
 to think. We need not recite the well-known facts 
 concerning the subjects of the first Greek specula- 
 tion in Ionia. We may take it for granted that 
 Greek philosophy when it came to Athens was 
 chiefly concerned with the constitution of matter, 
 perhaps a little with mind at large, but generally 
 with the Universe external to man. The sophists 
 and scientists came to Athens, and Athens trans- 
 formed their attitude. She made Ethics and Poli- 
 tics the most pressing problems ; and it was the 
 Athenian in Socrates who " brought philosophy 
 down to earth." Naturally the contrast was not 
 abrupt. The sophists of other cities had begun to 
 discuss morality before Athens became a philosophical
 
 30 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 centre ; they may even be held to have human- 
 ised philosophy ; and it is to Protagoras of Abdera 
 that Mr. Schiller now looks as his predecessor in 
 the reform he proposes. The sophists may have 
 been Pragmatists or Humanists. They had cer- 
 tainly made the practical effect of their teaching 
 the criterion of its value. But even if we allow 
 that a transformation took place under the 
 sophists since the earlier and " physical " stage of 
 Greek thought, we must further admit another 
 transformation when philosophy became Athenian. 
 After Socrates' death Greek philosophy became 
 definitely Athenian philosophy for some centuries, 
 and during that time we may mark the effect of the 
 worship of Athena perhaps upon the course of 
 speculation and certainly upon the conceptions of 
 the ideal life and the ideal character. 
 
 First, the nature of the state religion made the 
 admission of new thought comparatively easy. 
 The Athenians, like others after them, did not 
 want to go too far ; but although in the end they 
 killed Socrates, we must not forget that they had 
 allowed him many more years to annoy them 
 than he would have been allowed in any other Greek 
 city of that date. They did not want to reason too 
 much ; but they had no fundamental prejudice 
 against reasoning as such, and this was due to the 
 nature of their religion and their conception of a 
 deity who was worthy of worship. In any case 
 it is clear that the character of the god reflects the 
 character of the people ; and if the god's character 
 is generally admitted, the conception reacts upon the 
 attitude of the worshippers towards life in general. 
 It was no small gain to the philosophers to find 
 Athena established as worthy of worship.
 
 THE PANATHENAIA 31 
 
 If comparison is not impertinent, we may cite the 
 contrast with Greek thought to be found in the 
 development of the Hebrews. Their conception of 
 deity subordinates entirely the intellectual quali- 
 ties ; for Jahwe, fine moralist though he may have 
 been, never reasoned about the evidence for morality, 
 and in his sacred books we find command and cor- 
 rection but never reasoning. His people are told 
 what to do, never why they should do it. Again he 
 has no interest in politics, regarded as the science 
 of the adjustment of relations between man and 
 man. Democracy could not flourish in his land, 
 for he never was a comrade of his people : at most 
 he communicated with the few. And so his worship 
 constituted a prejudice against free speculation 
 among equals. Or again, we may compare the 
 attitude of Roman gods towards intellectual inter- 
 ests. They were suspicious of the advent of the 
 first philosophers : and they saw in reasoning the sub- 
 version of order. They were the embodiment of 
 fixity. Indeed the Roman word for man's attitude 
 towards them, " religio," whatever its derivation, 
 indicates the rigidity of an established ritual rather 
 than the good-fellowship of the Athenian worship. 
 Any such abrupt contrasts must undoubtedly be 
 unfair to the many excellent elements in the Hebrew 
 and the Roman religion : but even allowing for 
 these, we may assert that only in Athenian religion 
 could one find such openness of mind as made it pos- 
 sible for philosophy to flourish and develop so 
 rapidly. The majority in Athens were not indeed 
 any less foolish than are the majority in London. 
 It is a question of atmosphere. Even a fool may 
 help philosophers if he is not proud of his folly : 
 but the intellectual pride of the wise man is as
 
 32 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 nothing if compared with the blind complacency of 
 the fool who will have no argument because he 
 cannot argue correctly. In Athens every one argued 
 so much indeed that it became a taunt against 
 the whole city. In Athens men wanted to know 
 why they should do this or that : they desired 
 reasons not commands. Thus they imagined the 
 force which made their city to have some uncanny 
 connection with reasoning. And this again reacted 
 on the conception of what they held valuable and 
 made it possible for the Athenian Socrates to 
 value all scientific investigations so highly. For 
 Athena's character shows a definite bias towards 
 reasoning and intellectual discussion among equals. 
 Such was the atmosphere which resulted from the 
 worship of Athena. But we may understand its 
 value still more fully by noticing that, in the last 
 stage of Athenian religion, Athena was undoubtedly 
 conceived as the soul of Athens itself. We have 
 contemporary examples of the same process of 
 thought ; for not only primitive savages make 
 mythology, but we too are, in our self-conscious 
 way, mythologists. The figure of Britannia on the 
 English penny is what is called a symbol of Eng- 
 land ; but it refers to the same kind of reality as that 
 of which the fifth century Athenian thought when 
 he looked at an Athenian coin and saw the head of 
 Athena. There is something, certainly, which 
 makes all Englishmen keep together and distin- 
 guishes them from all Frenchmen. To say that 
 this something is not a person does not imply that 
 it is nothing at all ; and in spite of the philosophical 
 mistake which would be involved in supposing that 
 a person called Britannia exists, we can see an 
 advantage even for philosophy, in making " the soul
 
 THE PANATHENATA 
 
 33 
 
 of a nation " personal. But we shall leave this 
 general issue to a later chapter, and consider the 
 immediate effect of such a method. Britannia, for 
 example, is given a definite character and interest. 
 She bears a shield, and, as a sea power, holds a 
 trident. Her character is fixed in political cartoons 
 and popular song. And as Athena is sometimes 
 changed to the owl, so Britannia is transfigured 
 into a lion. 1 The connection is probably no closer 
 in one case than in the other ; and there seems 
 to be no reason for saying that Athena was origin- 
 ally an owl or that we have traces here of totemism. 
 
 Further, we should notice that Britannia sym- 
 bolises not only the power of England but her 
 aspirations and ideals. She is what England 
 " stands for," whether that be law and order, or 
 constitutional government, or the protection of 
 weak nations, or any other such admirable purpose. 
 So also Athena is a symbol of the aspirations and 
 ideals of Athens ; and there is a certain piquancy 
 in the contrast between the intelligence and the 
 artistic interests of Athena as compared with the 
 more primitive concerns of Britannia. For no one 
 ever suspected Britannia of being intellectual. 
 Can we avoid supposing that here we have a reflec- 
 tion of the things which are thought valuable in 
 the two nations ? Athena is at once the soul of 
 the actual city of Athens and a world-power called 
 reasoning or that which makes men reason. 
 
 The same process which produces in our day the 
 symbols of national character and national aspira- 
 tions was at work in the modifying of the primitive 
 
 1 As the comic figure we have John Bull in England and Demos 
 in Athens. The mythology is the same in kind. Of course in 
 modern mythology, La France, Germania, etc., are everywhere 
 on monuments and coins. 
 
 D 

 
 34 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 Athena. It is unfair to say that the Olympians 
 were unchangeable or that Athena did not develop 
 in character since the Heroic Age which probably 
 created her. The low cunning of Homer's Athena l 
 is not to be found either in the Polias of the Acro- 
 polis or in the Lady Queen of the Parthenon. And 
 it must not be imagined that we can put aside this 
 process of symbolic personification as worthless 
 because we can treat Britannia, for example, as a 
 poetic fiction, and satisfy ourselves by remark- 
 ing that a nation is not a person. It is myth- 
 ology to speak of the life or the character of a 
 nation ; but it is legitimate, if we know what we 
 are doing ; and it is undoubtedly effective. So 
 even for a modern thinker it is impossible lightly 
 to pass over the magnificent hypothesis which is 
 Athena. No dream so splendid which has beguiled 
 men so long, no dream to which even the waking 
 life of philosophy owes so much, is altogether worth- 
 less. For in the figure of Athena we have the finest 
 embodiment of what the Athenians meant by the 
 polis. 
 
 1 e.g. in the trick by which she killed Hector or in her inspira- 
 tion of^the wily Odysseus.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE DIONYSIA 
 
 WHEN we turn to the Dionysia and Eleusinia, society 
 seems to be giving a more prominent place to the 
 individual. In the Dionysia the development took 
 place of the great expression of individual genius 
 tragedy and comedy, and during the festival 
 it was the custom that individual merit should be 
 recognised officially by the state. In the Eleusinia 
 the individual is initiated, and the greatest moment 
 of the festival was an expression of an attitude 
 towards death as a crisis which the individual must 
 face alone. These two festivals, then, stand apart 
 in the meaning they give to the life of the polis, for 
 in them the general spirit of the group is only an 
 opportunity for the individual to review life and 
 death for himself. There is not, indeed, any definite 
 line to be drawn between these and the festivals 
 we have already discussed ; for religion in the 
 Dionysia and Eleusinia is as completely social as 
 in the Anthesteria and the Panathenaia ; but 
 neither Dionysus nor Demeter are deities of the 
 civic group, for their servants are those in every 
 group who are specially inspired or initiate. A 
 man does not in the truest sense worship them as 
 an Athenian but as one to whom the god has come ; 
 and although here, as in more formal festivals, many 
 would see only the outer ceremony, the few who 
 
 35
 
 36 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 saw more would be able to distinguish the external- 
 ism of the Panathenaia from the " inner light " of 
 Dionysus and Demeter, since these two come to 
 their worshippers and live in them. This is not 
 the mere imagination of a later age. The Athenians 
 themselves class Dionysus and Demeter together as 
 mystery deities ; they are worshipped together 
 at the Eleusinia ; and Socrates and Plato refer to 
 them and not to Zeus, Athena and Apollo, when 
 they wish to explain their most intense experience. 
 For the worship of Dipnysus there were many 
 festivals ; l but chiefly in Athens, if we exclude the 
 Anthesteria, two, the Lenaea and that called 
 generally the Dionysia. The Lenaea, which was 
 officially called " Dionysia," and distinguished 
 from other feasts of Dionysus, when necessary, as 
 " that in the Lenaion," was celebrated in the month 
 of Gamelion, that is to say about the middle of Janu- 
 ary. It began with a procession, under the direc- 
 ts the Eleusinia is only one among many mysteries so the 
 Dionysia is only one among many festivals of ecstasy or wild 
 enthusiasm. With the civic festivals of the god of wine we may 
 connect the many unofficial cults of special religious societies 
 which gave a colour and a setting to the more stately ceremonies 
 of the polis. For religion was not altogether official even in 
 Athens. The private revivalisms are indicated in the attack 
 by Demosthenes on Aeschines : " After you were grown up you 
 attended your mother's initiations, reading her books and 
 helping in all the ceremonies ; at night putting the fawn-skin 
 on the novices, swilling, purifying and scouring them with clay 
 and bran, raising them after the lustration and bidding them 
 say ' I have escaped evil. I have found what is better ' 
 priding yourself that no one ever howled so lustily. ... In 
 the daytime you led your noble orgiasts, crowned with fennel 
 and poplar, through the streets, squeezing the big-cheeked 
 serpents and lifting them over your head, and shouting ' Evoe 
 Saboe ' and capering to the words ' Hues Attis, Attis Hues ' 
 saluted by the old women as Leader, Conductor, Chestbearer, 
 Fan-bearer and the like, getting your reward of tarts and biscuits 
 and rolls."
 
 THE DIONYSIA 37 
 
 tion of the King-Archon, which ended at the Lenaeon. 
 This precinct, which gave its name to the feast, was 
 almost certainly named from the wine-press (Xiqvoc,) 
 a sacred model of which was probably kept in the 
 temple. " In the contests at the Lenaea of Dionysus 
 the torch-bearer passing on lights cries : ' Call the 
 God ! ' And the listeners shout, ' lacchus, son of 
 Semele, giver of riches ! " l A chance gloss on 
 Aristophanes gives us this hint of religious action, 
 and we can feel the god arising from that prayer. 
 Then followed dramatic performances, which were 
 probably played not in the great theatre on the 
 slope of the Acropolis but in the precinct called the 
 Lenaeon, where a wooden structure served to seat 
 the audience. This structure would naturally 
 disappear after the building of the greater theatre of 
 stone, the remains of which are known to every one : 
 and in general we may reserve our consideration of 
 drama for our discussion of the " Great Dionysia." 
 It is to be noted, however, that at the Lenaea the 
 audience would be exclusively Athenian, as foreigners 
 would not be visiting Athens so early in the year as 
 January. Hence the comedies would be more 
 pointedly in reference to local figures and the poet 
 could treat his hearers as members of a family. 
 
 As for the festival called by the Athenians the 
 " Great Dionysia " or the " Dionysia in the City," 2 
 the first point of importance is that it is not a festival 
 of native origin. The cult epithet of the god in this 
 festival is " Eleutherios," which indicates that he is 
 a Boeotian god brought to Athens from the village 
 of Eleutherae. It is generally supposed that the 
 god was introduced into Athens in the sixth century, 
 
 1 Scholiast, on Aristophanes' Frogs, 479. 
 1 Aiovuoia ta fxeYaXa, Iv
 
 3 8 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 and from that time on he grows more and more in 
 importance as the city rises in power and wealth, 
 until at last an Athenian saying " Dionysus " would 
 probably think more of the Greater Dionysia than 
 of his ancestral " Anthesteria." This comparatively 
 new festival gathers to itself all the enthusiasm of a 
 city, consciously growing ; and in the end the city 
 of Athena becomes to the world the temple of drama, 
 that is to say, of Dionysus. In the same way the 
 ancient festival of Maundy Thursday was gradually 
 eclipsed during the Middle Ages by the magnificence 
 of Corpus Christi, although both celebrated the 
 same gift to man and the same central figure. The 
 Easter plays of earlier times tended to be transferred 
 to Corpus Christi and, as is well known, at York and 
 other towns the dramatic festival of .the year was 
 " The Pageants of Corpus Christi." In the same 
 way the Greater Dionysia absorbed the dramatic 
 interests of the Lenaea. Secondly, the date of the 
 Dionysia (April) made it an occasion on which many 
 foreigners could be present in Athens. The seas 
 were again navigable. Business or pleasure would 
 bring to the central city of Hellas travellers from 
 east and west ; and they would take back to their 
 homes from Athens their enjoyment of the Dionysia. 
 Hence the admiration for the tragedians outside 
 Athens in the whole Greek world, and hence also 
 the tendency of later ages to think of Athens chiefly 
 as the source of drama. 
 
 But it is not simply as an opportunity for drama 
 that we must consider the Greater Dionysia. What 
 Corpus Christi was for the mediaeval man could not 
 be explained by a study of the Mystery plays, 
 since the great procession was part of the festival : 
 and so we must first concentrate our attention upon
 
 THE DIONYSIA 39 
 
 the effect of the Dionysia not due to drama. That 
 festival opened with a procession which began at 
 sunrise, conveying the god from the temple on the 
 slope of the Acropolis to a temple in the Academy. 1 
 A great concourse was marshalled by the members 
 of the family who had this right ; magistrates, 
 soldiers, artists, and simple citizens were there, 
 with strangers and visitors to Athens. At the 
 temple in the Academy youths sang a hymn to 
 Dionysus and danced ; there was apparently only 
 one such chorus and hymn. Sacrifice was then 
 offered, combined as usual with a banquet, and the 
 god was conducted back to the temple near the 
 theatre. But in this return, which was called a car- 
 nival or revel (XW[AO<;), all restraint was given up. 
 Those in the procession had now had their fill of 
 wine ; and they were dressed in fantastic garbs. 
 The wildest rejoicing was now in place ; for the god 
 had come to his worshippers. Athena, Apollo and 
 Zeus might be served with studied ceremony, but 
 Dionysus demanded that his servants should " let 
 themselves go." This does not, indeed, involve the 
 later " revivalism " of Greek religion when the wilder 
 Dionysus of the hills gave the chief elements to the 
 character of the worship ; but even as a city god, 
 Dionysus is the god of enthusiasm, the simplest 
 type of which is intoxication. 
 
 The character of the city god is, however, made 
 orderly by his connection with tragedy. The 
 contests between the tragedians are known to all. 
 
 1 Pausanias I. 29. 2 : " Outside the city, in the townships and 
 on the roads the Athenians have sanctuaries of the gods and 
 graves of heroes and men. Close to the city is the Academy. . . . 
 On the way to it is an enclosure sacred to Artemis. . . . There 
 is also a temple of no great size to which they bring the image 
 of the Eleutherian Dionysus every year on appointed days."
 
 4 o GREEK IDEALS 
 
 It is said that Peisistratus, who had been already 
 expelled twice, instituted the prize for tragedy 
 (in 535 B.C.) at the Great Dionysia, at the begin- 
 ning of his third reign. 1 And from about that 
 time drama, and especially tragedy, developed 
 rapidly. It was always essentially religious. The 
 theatre was a sacred place enclosing the altar round 
 which the chorus danced, and the subjects were 
 sacred legends, not contemporary crises. The 
 plots retained their ancient ritual form, based upon 
 death and resurrection. But besides being religious, 
 tragedy was also Hellenic and not local in its bearing. 
 It was part of the religion of the polis, but in it the 
 polis meant less a locality than a certain type of 
 culture ; for Athens set forth in her art what she 
 opposed in her politics, the common bonds of civi- 
 lised humanity. 
 
 Before the play in the fifth century there was a 
 formal " presentation " to Athens, made in the 
 theatre by the envoys of allied cities. It was partly 
 an expression of Athenian imperialism and partly 
 a sign of the bonds between Athens and the rest of 
 the Greek world. Then also public proclamations 
 might be made ; and the priest of Dionysus, who 
 presided over the play, would make his prayer. 
 The tragedy would then begin ; and between its 
 different parts the audience would have time for the 
 refreshments of the day. The mingling of what we 
 should call sacred and secular was complete. 
 
 This is not the place to review the play itself. 
 A tragedy must be seen in surroundings other than 
 a modern theatre in order to be felt as the Greeks felt 
 it. For it was altogether and, to our minds, rigidly 
 formal or ritualistic, and yet closer to the simple 
 
 1 Plutarch, Solon 29.
 
 THE DIONYSIA 41 
 
 and essential forces of nature than we can well 
 imagine it. Modern barbarism and formlessness is 
 really more conventional than the masks and the 
 buskins under an Athenian sky. There one might 
 see Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Orestes torn 
 by the great evil of blood for blood, and the gradual 
 emergence of that alternative which was Athens. 
 One might pity the blind Oedipus and fear the over- 
 mastering past from which no good man is safe. 
 One might discover with surprise the heights and 
 depths in a Phaedra or a Medea ; and hear one's 
 dreadful doubt cried to the sky in the accusation of 
 the gods themselves. And indeed we cannot tell 
 how much more the Greeks had, for only the barest 
 fragments are left of that magnificent tragedy which 
 was perhaps the highest achievement in their pur- 
 suit of the ideal. Aristotle, in this as in his Ethics 
 expressing the common judgment, tells us that by 
 tragedy men are purified from all those " humours " 
 which rise within the soul of man, and confuse and 
 destroy or degrade those who cannot find an outlet 
 for them. Such outlets for emotion have been 
 provided by every form of religion, in hymn-singing, 
 in the ceremony of the Mass, as well as in the furious 
 self -mutilation of primitive cults. And it is as a 
 religious method that Aristotle discusses tragedy, 
 not simply as an artistic effort at producing enjoy- 
 ment. In this we see the high achievement of the 
 Greeks and the nature of the ideal which guided 
 them. For the effect of tragedy, upon those who 
 are developed enough to understand it, compares 
 favourably with the effect of religious self-mutila- 
 tion or the screams and noises with which other 
 religions have sought purification of spirit. And 
 perhaps it is not simply a prejudice which sees in
 
 42 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 pity and fear, excited by tragedy according to the 
 Greeks, the true purification of which all others are 
 childish or primitive forecasts. Athens discovered 
 something permanently human in her development 
 of tragedy. And thus while the temple of every 
 other Athenian deity is deserted or ruined, Dionysus 
 alone, although unacknowledged, reigns in all the 
 theatres of the civilised world. The actor, whether 
 of comedy or tragedy, is still inspired by the god ; 
 and whenever an audience at the most modern of 
 plays laughs or shudders, without knowing it they 
 feel the presence of the god. 
 
 The emergence of tragedy was a sign of the 
 Athenian ideal, and it reacted upon the current 
 conceptions of life. First, as a sign, tragedy was in 
 existence before Athens was great and perhaps even 
 before Dionysus was connected with it. But the 
 Athenians gave to the primitive magic-dance and 
 song its elevation and its power. That alone shows 
 the spirit of the people. What can they have thought 
 most admirable if they assisted at such a new revela- 
 tion ? It is difficult for us now to imagine what the 
 world would be without the stage, and even those 
 who least understand drama owe a debt to tragedians 
 of whom, perhaps, they have never heard. 
 
 The Athenians, and not only the tragedians, felt 
 that the life most worth living was one of deep and 
 even destroying emotion. Their religion had a 
 place for such feeling as well as for staid and normal 
 behaviour ; and social life to them meant a sharing 
 in all that drama could do as well as a common 
 delight in the orderliness and good-fellowship which 
 is the basis of the polis. When, therefore, we con- 
 sider why the Athenian valued the polis and what 
 they meant by it, we must remember the Dionysia
 
 THE DIONYSIA 43 
 
 as well as the meetings in the streets or the solemn 
 procession of the Panathenaia. For this makes 
 the polls very much more than what we call a state ; 
 and it prevents us from supposing that Athenians 
 were conceited and self-conscious villagers. Tragedy 
 introduces us to the company of those who have 
 lived or died greatly. It cannot fail to affect those 
 who are habitually watching it, not simply as an 
 entertainment but as a religious exercise and yet 
 critically. For at this point, before we consider 
 the influence of literature, we may speak of the 
 Greek conception of the function of the poet in 
 society. The Dionysia gave the poets their oppor- 
 tunity, and in that festival appears most clearly 
 the tradition which made their work possible. 
 
 The poets are expected to be teachers. The old 
 school and the new, Aristophanes and Plato, agree 
 upon that ; although they probably put different 
 meanings upon the same words. The Greeks, 
 therefore, cannot conceive the poetic art without 
 reference to a criterion which is, in the strictest 
 sense of the word, moral. At the Dionysia tragedy 
 was expected to raise the thought and illumine the 
 life of Athens ; and there can hardly be any doubt 
 that such was its effect. The only correction that 
 we should have to make if any one said that tragedy 
 must be didactic is due to our modern confusion 
 between teaching and preaching. Preaching was, 
 happily, unknown in Athens. When Greeks spoke 
 of teaching they generally meant an incitement to 
 creative and spontaneous thought, not an inculca- 
 tion of precepts or a repeating of information ; but 
 preaching as distinct from teaching is generally a 
 rhetorical obfuscation of already obsolete issues 
 by a person secure from immediate criticism or ques-
 
 44 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 tioning. So great is the confusion of modern terms 
 that those who desire a serious drama seem to 
 imagine that the stage should be used as a pulpit. 
 It may be so ; although it seems unfair that those 
 who have escaped from being preached to death by 
 a mad curate should find themselves in a theatre 
 the victims of a tub-thumper. In any case there is 
 nothing Greek about that kind of didactic drama. 
 The whole festival of Dionysus is a repudiation of 
 such dry-as-dust moralising. For when the Greeks 
 looked to the poets for teaching, they expected to be 
 roused to thought and induced to criticise not only 
 their teachers but the gods themselves. 
 
 As to the effect of tragedy upon the Greek ideals 
 of life and character, we must notice first its human- 
 ising effect. In drama the artist is less than in 
 any other art aloof from society. A painter deals 
 with things not human, and he cares little for the 
 looker-on. Even a musician does not play upon 
 a human instrument. But the dramatist's material 
 is human character, and his method makes him 
 depend both upon actors and upon audiences. 
 Again, society no longer remains merely a company 
 of neighbours when drama affects it ; for then we 
 see human life as something not local or ephemeral 
 but universal in its sufferings and its triumphs. 
 
 In the Dionysia the Athenian expressed his 
 admiration for the heights and depths of human 
 life. The life worth living was not only the careful 
 and orderly fellowship of Anthesteria or Pana- 
 thenaia it is spoken with no depreciation of those 
 festivals ; for in the Dionysia we discover the greater 
 life of the emotions. Thus Nietzsche makes the 
 Dionysiac element in Greek religion the repudiation 
 of the Apolline, as the impulse to spontaneous
 
 THE DIONYSIA 45 
 
 change and individual enthusiasm is the repudia- 
 tion of a staid sobriety. And finally, the Dionysia 
 affected Athenian ideals so much that in later years, 
 when her political power had passed, the city of 
 Pallas Athena became, for all practical purposes, 
 the city of Dionysus. Athenians were known as 
 countrymen of Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides ; 
 and to this day we live in the finest Athens rather 
 by the appreciation of tragedy than by fingering the 
 dead record of futile warfare and political jealousies, 
 which is usually called Greek history.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE ELEUSINIA 
 
 IN all Athenian religion there is nothing that we 
 should more easily recognise as religious than the 
 Mysteries. That is so, no doubt, because of the 
 great effect the Mysteries have had on our own 
 religious tradition ; for not even Protestantism, 
 with all its fear of ritual, has been able to escape 
 the ideas and the emotions which were developed 
 at Eleusis, since the literature of Christianity, 
 especially in its early documents, is filled with the 
 language and conceptions of Mysteries. The devel- 
 opment of which all such Mysteries were proved 
 capable is one of the reasons for their immense effect 
 on the progress of thought. The first Athenian 
 philosophers owed not only some of their terms, 
 but even some of the experience on which they 
 relied, to Mysteries ; and the whole of Athenian life 
 was coloured by the meaning given to it at the 
 Eleusinia. Hence in the study of ideals it is neces- 
 sary to allow for this influence ; and if possible 
 to explain the moral standard which initiation 
 established at first in Athens and then in the whole 
 Greek world. 
 
 It is well known that the Eleusinian Mysteries 
 were only the most striking of many secret rites ; 
 and, therefore, although the cult of Demeter and 
 Persephone is chiefly in question here, we may 
 
 46
 
 THE ELEUSINIA 47 
 
 suppose that the same sort of effect was found to 
 come from the other types of Mystery. Orphism 
 especially may be regarded as having given some- 
 thing of importance to the life of Greece ; and, 
 doubtless, if we knew more of the many private 
 religious societies in Athens, we should be able to 
 trace more of the language of Plato and Aristotle 
 to a source in secret rites. 
 
 First, then, the Mysteries of Eleusis must be 
 described in their effects as a religious experience ; 
 and for this purpose the ritual and belief must be 
 considered as one whole, since it was as the expres- 
 sion of one complete view of life that they had most 
 effect on the moral atmosphere and on the religions 
 which were to succeed them. 
 
 Even apart from the direct effect of the Mysteries 
 on Christianity, they seem familiar to us because 
 our religious sentiment tends so naturally to the 
 contemplation of death, and to death also the 
 Mysteries seemed to refer. The immortality prom- 
 ised to the initiated is not very different from that 
 expected by the Christian. Further, there was a 
 special emphasis in the Mysteries on purification. 
 This was naturally a ritual purification at first, but 
 it had already in the fifth century developed into a 
 spiritual or moral purification such as is often 
 implied in Christianity. There is no need to argue 
 as to origins ; Christianity may have borrowed 
 much from the Mysteries, but its ritual and belief 
 on the points we have mentioned may be simply 
 the result of the same human mind expressing the 
 same needs. 
 
 These needs were at first material. The Mys- 
 teries concerned simply the growth of corn ; but 
 they soon became a source of thought about the
 
 48 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 death which seemed to be the last act of life and yet 
 the promise of new life ; and it was this element in 
 them which had the greatest influence upon the 
 philosophers. For life may be various, beautiful 
 and under the patronage of many gods in its differ- 
 ent episodes ; but life itself to the civilised man as 
 well as to the savage, seems at certain moments 
 to be dwarfed by the near presence of death. That 
 great power stands somehow above all others ; 
 and in any consideration as to the nature of the 
 world or of man, death must be dealt with as an over- 
 whelming fact. 
 
 Thou art more than the gods who number the days of our 
 
 temporal breath; 
 For these give labour and slumber ; but thou, Proserpina, 
 
 death. 
 Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I 
 
 know 
 I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep : even 
 
 so. 
 For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a 
 
 span ; 
 
 A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man. 
 So long I endure, no longer : and laugh not again, neither 
 
 weep. 
 For there is no god found stronger than death ; and death 
 
 is a sleep. 
 
 The poet does well to unite the Maiden of the Mys- 
 teries with that fine phrase of late religious philoso- 
 phy : " Thou art a little soul bearing a corpse." 
 The words are those of Epictetus ; and the spirit 
 in which they were uttered may not unfairly be 
 identified with that of the Mysteries in their highest 
 development, when such men as Socrates, Plato and 
 Aristotle knew them. 
 
 If we are to ask, then, what experience is chiefly 
 referred to in the Mysteries, the reply must be that it
 
 THE ELEUSTNIA 49 
 
 is the contemplation of death. Seeing what happens 
 when the corn is cut, when the seed is planted, and 
 when the new corn comes up ; seeing also that we 
 too die down like the corn, men in all ages have 
 reacted to such visions. In view of such crises they 
 have performed their rituals, and as an expression 
 of such issues they have conceived Demeter and 
 Persephone. If their action to us seems futile and 
 their creed false, we should not, therefore, suppose 
 that either ritual or belief was without some ground 
 in experience. 
 
 It may be as well to begin with an account of 
 what was done in the Eleusinian Mysteries, although 
 the details of the ceremony must be left as described 
 in the usual authorities. 1 Our purpose is to discover 
 the characteristic effect of the Mysteries upon Greek 
 conceptions of life. By this means we shall empha- 
 sise one at least of the influences which give to 
 discussions of personal immortality their peculiar 
 importance in Plato. We shall understand why 
 philosophers who rejected deities, spoke with respect 
 of the Mysteries, and why even the early Christian 
 Fathers condescended to an unusual politeness in 
 their controversial violence when they referred to 
 Eleusis. 
 
 The great feast was prepared for, during the fifth 
 century, by the lesser Mysteries, held in the month 
 Anthesterion. This was referred to as a " first 
 purification," and it seems to have originated only 
 when the Eleusinian Mysteries had already become 
 very elaborate. In July ambassadors (cnrov&y^opoi) 
 went out to proclaim a sacred truce, as they did 
 
 1 Farnell, Culls; Foucart, Les Mysteres, etc.; J. Harrison, 
 Prolegomena ; Frazer, Golden Bough. Spirits of the Corn and 
 the Wild. 
 
 B
 
 50 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 b. fore the Olympic games. The principle was the 
 same and the effect probably as uncertain as that 
 of the Trettga Dei during the Middle Ages. It is 
 of importance, however, that in civilised times the 
 Mysteries of Eleusis were recognised as specially 
 sacred by the whole Greek world. 
 
 The actual festival was held after the harvest 
 and probably at the time when rain was wanted for 
 the sowing of the new corn. 1 It was an official 
 glorification of what had once been a simple harvest 
 festival such as is described by Theocritus. 2 The 
 corn had been reaped, and men began to think of 
 burying the seed for next year's corn, for even when 
 in the fifth century the old basis of life in agriculture 
 had been obscured by an elaborate civilisation, the 
 many offerings of corn which came to Eleusis at 
 this season must have turned the attention of the 
 worshippers to the same sort of fact as that from 
 which their forefathers had made the figure of the 
 Corn-Mother. The festival began with a procession 
 from Eleusis to Athens, in which certain sacred 
 objects were conveyed to the Eleusinion under the 
 Acropolis. This procession was met by the people 
 of Athens ; and it seems to be symbolic of the 
 taking over by the city of Athens of the local 
 Eleusinian harvest festival. 3 On the following day 
 (the fifteenth of Boedromion) the King Archon 
 spoke to the people gathered together in the Stoa 
 
 1 Frazer, G. B. Spirits of the Corn, etc., p. 51, sea. 
 
 Idyll VII. 
 
 3 "Peace was made on these terms: the Eleusinians were to 
 perform the mysteries by themselves but were in all other 
 respects to be subject to the Athenians." Pausanias I. 38, 3. 
 Eleusis was one of the twelve independent cities of Attica united 
 by Theseus into a single state. The Eleusinion was specially 
 sacred (Thucydides II. 17).
 
 THE ELEUSINIA 51 
 
 Poikile. He pronounced the sacred formula, to 
 separate the unclean from those who might attend 
 the Mysteries : " Whoever has not pure hands, 
 whoever has not an intelligible tongue, 1 must not 
 assist at the initiation." The day after was called 
 " To the sea, Mystics," because of the procession, 
 called a " driving out," from Athens to the sea. 
 Each mystic took, or perhaps drove, a pig, and 
 purified the pig and himself in the sea. 2 This 
 purification was of immense importance, and 
 the connected idea of " pollution " ((xiicro?) may 
 actually have given the name to the Mysteries. 3 
 The pig was afterwards sacrificed ; and the primitive 
 element had of course become slightly ludicrous 
 even to the devout, so that Aristophanes 4 can make 
 his slave say : 
 
 " O Virgin of Demeter, most blessed ! 
 
 What an entrancing smell of roasted pig ! " 
 
 while the mystics march by singing. 
 
 On the two following days (lyth and i8th) there 
 was a festival of Asklepios, called the Epidauria, 
 which was probably introduced about 421 B.C. 
 and has no connection with the Mysteries. It is, 
 however, of interest as thus placed, because it shows 
 the flexibility of Athenian religious festivals and 
 their power of development. So in the Octave of 
 Christmas (between the Birth and the Circumcision 
 of Christ) the Roman Church celebrates the festival 
 of the Innocents, St. Thomas and St. Stephen. On 
 the night of the nineteenth the great procession 
 
 aauvsToc cf. ]. Harrison, Prolegomena, 151. 
 1 The pig is used on Eleusinian coinage. 
 * cf. ]. Harrison, Prolegomena, 154, as opposed to the old idea 
 of the derivation from 
 1 Frogs, 339.
 
 52 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 of the purified went with the image of lacchos from 
 Athens to Eleusis! 1 Some went in carriages, but the 
 more religious would walk ; and they were to reach 
 Eleusis at about midnight. All bore torches and 
 the initiated wore wreaths of myrtle : and as they 
 went they sang to Dionysus " lacchos " and to the 
 Maiden-Mother. " The sound you hear," says the 
 speaker in Herodotus, " is the cry ' lacchos ' which 
 they raise at this feast." 2 
 
 We have a record of their hymns in Aristophanes ; 
 for the cry of the chorus in the Frogs is a ritual 
 prayer ; and in the same passage there is an address 
 to Demeter and the Maiden. 
 
 Ch. lacchos ! lacchos ! Ho. 
 
 X. There, Master, there they are, the Initiated ; 
 
 All sporting about as he told us we should find 'em. 
 
 They're singing in praise of Bacchus. . . . 
 
 Ch. Now let us raise in a different strain 
 
 The praise of the goddess the giver of grain, 
 Imploring her favour, with other behaviour 
 In manner more sober, submissive and graver. 
 
 Dionysus was a new-comer to the Eleusinian 
 Mysteries, but as a god of enthusiasm he would be 
 easily -made to sympathise with the elements of 
 religious revivalism which were always present in 
 the service of the Mother-Maid of the Corn. 3 
 
 The sacred road 4 which the procession followed is 
 about twelve miles long. It was lined with tombs, 
 and in the plain on either side were olive woods. 
 
 1 They went first from the Eleusinion to the lacchion and there 
 put lacchos on his car. 
 
 *cf. Herodotus, VIII.. 65. 
 
 * cf. J. Harrison, Prolegomena, loc. cit. 
 
 * A book was written by Polemo, the antiquary, about this 
 road.
 
 THE ELEUSINIA 53 
 
 Then the road rises up Mount Aegaleus and runs 
 through a pass which is narrow, from the top of 
 which one may look back over Athens, where the Par- 
 thenon stands out in the late evening " against a 
 background of purple mountains." 1 The road then 
 descends and we pass a shrine of Apollo on the left, 
 after which the scene opens out and one may look 
 through the hills to the sea. It is dark now, and on 
 either side are tombs or little shrines at which 
 sacrifice is made as the procession passes. On the 
 right, a mile after the shrine of Apollo, is a sanctuary 
 of Aphrodite. 2 Then one comes to the open plain 
 by the shore ; along which the road runs, with the 
 hill-slopes on its right ; and when the hills give space 
 farther on one passes a group of salt-springs and a 
 pool. 3 Here are tombs of heroes, and the place of 
 famous battles of old time. The road, passing a 
 last hill on the right, comes into the Thriasian plain, 
 in which are fertile corn-lands, where "in spring 
 and early summer the plain is gaily carpeted 
 with anemones, red, purple and blue." All is now 
 dark except where the streams shine under the 
 autumn stars, and on our left is the wide gulf of 
 Salamis with the island far off. In the plain the 
 mystics were adorned by the Croconidae, an Eleusinian 
 family, with saffron bands on the right arm and left 
 leg ; and when Eleusis was reached the initiated and 
 those about to be initiated wandered in the dark- 
 ness with their torches, which was popularly 
 
 1 Frazer, Note on Pausanias I. 36, 3. Other quotations below 
 are from the same source. 
 
 * The ruins are extant, many inscriptions and some votive 
 offerings. There was no large temple but only a small shrine 
 in a rock-cut precinct, cf. Frazer on Pausanias I. 37, 7. 
 
 * The fishing in this was preserved by the priests of Eleusis.
 
 54 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 supposed to be a commemoration of Demeter's 
 search for Persephone. 1 
 
 The day after the great procession at midnight, 
 preparations were made for the initiation. There 
 seems to have been some attempt at oral instruction 
 either at the Lesser Mysteries or on the day preced- 
 ing that of full initiation. In any case there was 
 much said and done concerning purification, one 
 of the most efficacious rites for which is fasting. On 
 the 2ist and 22nd the sacred drama was played in 
 the hall of Initiation. Those who had been pre- 
 pared * at the lesser Mysteries were admitted to 
 the hall of Initiation. They passed, as Pausanias 
 tells us, " a temple of Triptolemus, another of Artemis 
 of the Portal and of Father Poseidon, and a well 
 called Callichorum, where the Eleusinian women 
 first danced and sang in honour of the goddess. 
 They say that the Riarian plain was the first to be 
 sown and the first to bear crops, and, therefore, 
 it is their custom to take the sacrificial barley and 
 to make the cakes for the sacrifices out of its produce. 
 Here is shown what is called the threshing-floor of 
 Triptolemus and the altar. But my dream forbade 
 me to describe what is within the wall of the sanc- 
 tuary ; and surely it is clear that the uninitiated 
 may not lawfully hear of that from the sight of which 
 they are debarred." 3 But we know something at 
 least of the secret which Pausanias thought it wrong 
 to reveal. We may go on with the procession into the 
 
 1 The torch may have originated in magic, as a sort of imitation 
 sunshine, for the purpose of making the corn grow. cf. Frazer, 
 G. B., Spirits of Corn, etc. 
 
 1 The preparation is called (XUKJOK;, involving again the idea 
 of purification. Those prepared are then called HUOTOCI, until 
 they become tordrrrai at the Great Mysteries. 
 
 * Pausanias I. 38, 6, Frazer's Trans.
 
 THE ELEUSINIA 55 
 
 very precinct of the goddesses. Let us suppose we 
 have passed the walls and, under the acropolis of the 
 little town, come to the sanctuary. The building 
 had been restored during the time of Pericles. 1 
 The rock is cut away, and a terrace formed on which 
 are the shrines and the hall of the sanctuary. On the 
 left of the great portal is the well mentioned above ; 
 and some fifty feet from this is a smaller portal, 
 at the end of a passage between two walls. 2 There 
 are signs that the original entrance was guarded by 
 a strong tower. We pass a small temple of Pluto 
 and a grotto " where are the gates of hell," 3 and 
 near it many shrines and votive statues. The 
 initiated would be led by the mystagogue through 
 the darkness among the various shrines of the outer 
 sanctuary until they came to the hall of Initiation, a 
 chamber about lyoft. square. The roof was 
 " supported by six rows of columns, seven columns 
 in each row," and round the hall were the steps 
 " on which the initiated sat watching the perform- 
 ance of the mysteries which took place in the body 
 of the hall. It is calculated that about 3,000 people 
 could find room on them." 4 
 
 The sacred place where only the priests might go 
 was probably the centre of the hall, " which may 
 have been screened by curtains from the spectators 
 sitting in darkness on the tiers of seats that ran 
 round it, till suddenly the curtains rose and revealed 
 
 1 The old precinct had been ruined by the Persians in 480 B.C. 
 
 2 33 feet wide and 50 long. 
 
 3 This, of course, is another traditional spot where Perse- 
 phone was taken down. There were many such. Beside the 
 Cephisus, a swift stream near Eleusis, is " a place called Erineus. 
 They say that Pluto when he carried off the Maid, descended 
 here." Pausanias I. 38, 5. 
 
 4 Frazer, note on Pausanias I. 38, 6.
 
 56 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 the vast hall brilliantly illumined, 1 with the gor- 
 geously attired actors in the sacred drama moving 
 mazily in solemn procession or giddy dance out and 
 in among the forest of columns that rose from the 
 floor of the hall, while the strains of grave or volup- 
 tuous music filled the air. Then, when all was over, 
 the curtain would as suddenly descend, leaving the 
 spectators in darkness and silence with nothing 
 but the memory of the splendid pageant that had 
 burst upon them and vanished like a dream." 2 
 
 As for the drama, it involved two chief persons, 
 Demeter and Persephone, and a third, Hades or 
 Pluto, who was of subordinate importance. We 
 do not know what was actually done ; but the 
 probability is that some form of sacred marriage was 
 gone through. The characters were played by a 
 priest and two priestesses of a sacred family ; and 
 they were assisted by heralds, torch-bearers and 
 servants. After the marriage the announcement 
 was made of the birth of a divine child. 3 The 
 priest in the course of the ceremonies showed certain 
 objects generally regarded as symbolic, among 
 which was certainly a full ear of corn ; and there was 
 a communion, following the fast, by all the initiated, 
 in which the kukeon 4 was drunk in commemoration 
 of Demeter's having drunk it. Sacred objects were 
 moved and perhaps tasted : and the initiated ended 
 by pronouncing the formula " I am free." 
 
 On the 23rd two vessels (plenochoai) were emptied, 
 one to the east, another to the west, while certain 
 magic words were said ; and " looking up to the 
 
 1 The whole process was called " a leading into light." 
 1 Frazer, loc. cit., p. 510. 
 
 * cf. Lucian's parody in Alex. 38 and J. Harrison, Prol., 551. 
 4 A sort of thick drink.
 
 THE ELEUSINIA 57 
 
 sky they cried ' Rain ! ' and looking down upon the 
 earth they cried ' Be fruitful ! ' " l On the 24th the 
 return to Athens took place. Especially on the 
 bridge over the Cephisus there was a ritual cursing, 
 and ribald jokes were made, the purpose of which, 
 as of all ritual cursing, was, of course, the turning 
 away of evil. 
 
 From such ceremonies, with all their crudities 
 and all their beauties, arose the great figures of 
 Demeter and her daughter. The ritual and perhaps 
 even the drama in the lighted hall had existed 
 before there was any myth of the loss of Persephone, 
 the search of Demeter or the giving of corn. It 
 was a harvest festival, and its purpose must clearly 
 have been the promotion of fertility. The old corn 
 gives the seed, and in the late summer, when the seed 
 is dead and buried, men move about in procession, 
 or dance and play, in order that the rain may come 
 and the seed may grow. For this reason also they 
 bear the torches in their wandering about the fields - 
 
 From this harvest festival came the contemplation 
 of recurring birth and death ; and from this con- 
 templation an aloofness which gave the initiated 
 security as to his own fate. " Demeter who came 
 to our country," says Isocrates, 3 " bestowed on us 
 two priceless gifts : the cultivation of the fruits of 
 the earth, which compelled us to leave the savage 
 state, and the ceremony which brings to the initiated 
 the sweetest consolation at death and the hope 
 of eternity." And so in Aristophanes the immortal 
 dead sing : 
 
 1 Proclus on Plato. Timaeus, 293. 
 
 * The candles in the Roman Church for the Purification and the 
 Rogation Day processions are used like the torches of Demeter. 
 3 Panegyricus ch. 28.
 
 58 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 " Let us hasten let us fly 
 
 Where the lovely meadows lie ; 
 
 Where the living waters flow ; 
 
 Where the roses bloom and blow, 
 Heirs of Immortality, 
 Segregated, safe and pure 
 Easy, sorrowless, secure ; 
 Since our earthly race is run 
 We behold a brighter sun. 
 Holy tunes a holy vow 
 Such rewards await them now." 1 
 
 " The hope of eternity " became in minds of 
 grosser make a mere guide-book knowledge of the 
 underworld, which would preserve them from the 
 dangers of the journey after death. And especially 
 in the decadence of Athenian religion and in the 
 revivalism connected with the name of Orpheus, 
 the world of after-death was described in a sort of 
 poetical physical geography. Immortality then 
 depended on a mere dodging of demons or avoidance 
 of obstacles and the sacred knowledge (yvcbcri^) was 
 a mere memory of formulas. 2 
 
 But to poets the truth was not less cogent because 
 it was less exactly stated. " Happy is he," says 
 Pindar, " who has seen these things before leaving 
 the world ; he realises the end and the beginning of 
 life as ordained by Zeus." 3 And Sophocles declares 
 that " Those are thrice-blessed who have seen these 
 rites before their descent into Hades : for they 
 only will have a future life the rest will find nothing 
 but pain." 4 Thus to those who were not mere 
 bearers of the symbol but really possessed of the 
 
 1 Frogs, 568 sq. 
 
 * The Orphic tablets given in J. Harrison's Prolegomena are 
 proof enough of crude thought. 
 
 3 Pindar, Frag. 137. Clement of Alexandria says (Str. III. 
 578) that this refers to the iileusinui. 
 
 4 Soph. Fragm. No. 753 (Nauck).
 
 THE ELEUSINIA 59 
 
 god, the old Corn-Mother or the Maiden-shoot of 
 early corn have given place to the majesty of the 
 mourning Demeter and the Queen of the Under- 
 world. 
 
 The process of thought is clear : Demeter and 
 Persephone are both the life-force of the corn. 1 
 The Mother is the full ear, the daughter is the seed 
 which is committed to earth as are the dead. 2 
 And with the yellow corn the poppies grow : with 
 the support of life appears the gift of sleep, which 
 is twin-brother of death. 3 The goddesses are at 
 once the corn itself and the powers outside the 
 corn which give life, the dead and buried seed 
 and from it life again. For the corn gives us our 
 life ; and indeed all life seems to run in an unending 
 cycle from birth to death and death to birth. 
 So the goddess Seed-of-the-Corn who dwells in 
 darkness becomes she who waits for us all and gives 
 the sleep which is death. 
 
 " The Greeks of an earlier age," says Pausanias, 
 " esteemed the Eleusinian mysteries as much superior 
 to all other religious exercises as they esteemed 
 gods superior to heroes." 4 And we can see some 
 reason in the judgment, even though it expresses 
 in part the prejudices of Pausanias himself. There 
 
 1 The corn was chiefly barley. Ceres (Demeter) is the soul 
 of Cereals, cf. Ovid. F. IV. 673. 
 
 Officium commune Ceres et Terra tuentur ; 
 Haec praebet causam frugibus, ilia locum. 
 
 1 In reaping " the sturdy swains cleave Demeter limb from 
 limb " ; quoted in Plut. Isis., 66. Unripe corn is called " Green 
 Demeter." 
 
 3 Thus Demeter- Persephone holds in her hand sheaves of 
 barley and poppies ; cf. the excellent passage on corn and poppies 
 in Frazer, Spirits o\ the corn and the wild. 
 
 Paus. X. 31, 80. In a passage about a picture representing 
 " those who held the Eleusinian Mysteries of no account."
 
 60 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 was experience enough in the ritual and beauty 
 enough in the legend to transform the conception 
 of life itself. 
 
 Coming therefore to its effect on ideals of life 
 and character, we should say that this part of 
 Athenian religion chiefly influenced the conceptions 
 (i) of moral purity and (2) of the nature of the soul 
 or mind. We have allowed for the existence of 
 literalists and crude intelligences in Athens, but 
 after all it was not these who made and developed 
 the Athenian ideals of life and character. The 
 finer few, as Aristotle says, were changed for the 
 rest of their lives by what they saw at Eleusis, and 
 these few made Athens. Their standard of values 
 would be exalted by a magnificent social experience : 
 for, first, even here we must notice the social quality 
 of Greek Religion. Even in the Eleusinia the 
 polls is active : and from the Eleusinia one derives 
 one's experience of what the polis can do. But, 
 secondly, in this part of Athenian religion the indi- 
 vidual appears as a unit of experience. He is not 
 merely a celebrant in the ritual : he has by initiation 
 become the very subject of the whole process in 
 the sense that he might feel in the Eleusinia, more 
 than in any other of the ceremonies of the polis, 
 that the myth was really about him. Death in the 
 Eleusinia is not the death of others, which is so 
 often the source of primitive and formless deities. 
 It is the death of ourselves. The primitive man, 
 seeing the departure of something from the body 
 of dying friend or enemy, at first makes no applica- 
 tion to himself of what he believes to occur to others. 
 He does not realise his own fate in the vision of 
 death. He fears the ghost of the dead man, but 
 hardly perceives that he is himself a ghost. When,
 
 THE ELEUSINIA 61 
 
 however, men see as a fact the inevitability of 
 their own death, they react to that vision in a 
 transformation of the old ritual of the corn. They 
 " whisper to themselves as it were " of the 
 nature of the powers which govern them in these 
 issues ; and the result is Demeter- Persephone. They 
 are free. For they perceive that they are something 
 other than their bodies, and the ritual purifications 
 have become " temperance and justice and courage 
 and wisdom itself " in the true philosophy " And 
 I fancy that the men who established our mysteries," 
 as Socrates says, 1 " had a very real meaning : in 
 truth they have been telling us in parables all the 
 time that whoever comes to death uninitiated and 
 profane, will be in the mire ; while he that has 
 been purified and initiated shall dwell with the 
 gods. ' For the thyrsus-bearers are many ' as 
 they say in the mysteries, ' but the inspired few.' 
 And by these last are meant, I believe, only the true 
 philosophers." It was not, therefore, by argument 
 but by Athenian experience that the Socratic idea 
 of life was formed. 
 
 In the continual interaction of Death and Life, 
 of things decaying and things growing, the 
 ocvoSoc, and xdcOoSo^, the anabolism and catabolism 
 of modern science, there is a source for all 
 kinds of speculation and the occasion for all kinds 
 of action. In this seeming contest between two 
 forces, the shadow of death sometimes falls upon 
 the whole of life, giving birth to religions of gloom 
 and pessimistic philosophy ; and sometimes the 
 light of life takes from death itself all darkness, 
 producing a religion of joy and an optimistic philo- 
 sophy. The religious temperament of the race 
 1 Phaedo, 69.
 
 62 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 influences the thought of its great men, when 
 philosophy begins ; and either death or life is 
 the object of chief attention. 
 
 It would be false to call Athenian religion either 
 gloomy or joyous : for all religions preserve the 
 characteristics of the race which produced them, 
 and the Athenians were not continuously either joyful 
 or gloomy. The different moods of the individual or' 
 of a race appear in their natural temperaments ; 
 and if moods are unchanged, the result is madness. 
 But the Athenians least of all would have permitted 
 their changing moods to have become fixed ; and 
 perhaps they may truly be said to have been sane 
 enough to preserve both gladness and sorrow. 
 They had accesses of terrible fear, and moments of 
 unrestrained joy, and so in their religion one may 
 find traces of both moods, depths of gloom and 
 transports of joy, vivid reactions to the changing 
 drama of life. On the whole, however, we may 
 assert that in the Mysteries the genius of the 
 Athenians made the light of life overcome the gloom 
 of death. The burying of the seed was always to 
 them a hope of resurrection. The circumstance 
 which gives darkness to life, the disappearance of 
 what we hold valuable, was thus transformed by 
 the religious imagination which saw in all death 
 the promise of a new life. For the buried seed 
 lives again. The analogy may be futile, since the 
 individual which dies is clearly not the individual 
 which rises again ; but the general tendency was 
 m the direction of lifting the gloom from death. 
 And morally this was of value. We may use the fact 
 of death as evidence as to the nature of life, and 
 Plato at least never neglects such evidence. Indeed 
 he makes Socrates say that the whole of life is but
 
 THE ELEUSINIA 63 
 
 a preparation for death. 1 But we do not know 
 either what life is or what death is : and it is just 
 as reasonable to use the fact of life as evidence as 
 to the nature of death. This, perhaps, is the 
 dominant tendency in Athenian thought. This is 
 the meaning of the interest in what is called im- 
 mortality, and this gives force to the saying of 
 Spinoza, " Liber homo de nulla re minus cogitat 
 quam de morte." Those who are interested chiefly 
 in life with all its intricacy and variety, tend, when 
 death is forced upon their notice, to explain it 
 to themselves in the terms of life : and on the other 
 hand those who are abnormally sensitive to death 
 and spend much time in thinking of its causes and 
 consequences, tend, when they are forced to consider 
 any crisis in life, to explain it by reference to death. 
 The Athenian tradition in the Eleusinia, then, 
 colours the Athenian conception of moral greatness 
 and of the worth of life. It does not blind the 
 Athenians to the near presence of death to every 
 man, nor does it make any man less lonely in that 
 part of his fate in which no man can have assistance 
 from any other. But it prepares a moral atmosphere 
 in which the calm and serenity of Socrates could 
 find a place as well as the more restricted moral 
 ready-reckoning of Aristotle. Both are Athenian 
 and the source of a great part of the thought of both 
 is to be found in the religious tradition of Athens. 
 
 1 Phaedo. 67 : "In life he has been preparing himself to live 
 as nearly in a state of death as possible."
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 POLITICS 
 
 IN our sense of the word, politics is confined to 
 the interest in law and government, and it excludes 
 any reference to religion, to various spheres of 
 morality, and to all those aesthetic interests in drama, 
 architecture, music and sculpture all of which 
 were in the Greek sense of the word, political. 
 There was no clear distinction to the Athenian mind 
 between the service of the polls in its festivals and 
 in its law-courts. The purely religious, in our sense, 
 was connected with the purely political, again in our 
 sense, by the fact that many public offices combined 
 duties of both kinds, that festivals were often diplo- 
 matic occasions, and that even legal business was 
 never wholly dissociated from a reference to divine 
 powers. 1 Architecture and drama were of political 
 importance, and the general progress of intelligence 
 could not be clearly separated from the methods 
 of suppressing crime or organising trade. Hence 
 Plato makes the statesman, as we unwisely trans- 
 late his word, deal with details of education, and 
 Aristotle can even go so far as to give him a veto 
 on playing the flute. 
 
 But the restricted meaning of the word political 
 
 was not unknown to the Greeks, especially after the 
 
 fifth century. Aristotle distinguishes the priest- 
 
 1 c[. Lysias, on the Sacred Olive. 
 
 64
 
 POLITICS 65 
 
 hood from political offices : 1 Plato means by the 
 politicos chiefly the administrator in law and govern- 
 ment. 2 And even in the historians one can see 
 indications of the severance which was beginning 
 to be recognised between what we should call the 
 religious and the secular. For the polis was a living 
 and therefore changing institution ; and it was 
 moving, as all such institutions do, from a primitive 
 and complex function towards a state of things in 
 which each interest of human life is represented 
 by a distinct method of organisation or action. 
 The social life we have so far studied, as giving its 
 character to the polis was, in the fifth century, 
 already an ancient tradition. It was beginning 
 to be obvious that for law and administration a 
 special attention and special organisations were 
 needed. And there were already some who thought 
 that the most important affairs of the polis were not 
 those which had reference to the gods. Even art 
 was claiming a special attention from connoisseurs 
 which could no longer be given equally by all the 
 members of the polis. Voluntary societies (Otaaoi) 
 appeared : and drama, still in the service of the 
 Athenian polis, was in fact international. 
 
 Law and administration were, on the other hand, 
 a special department of life ; and the polis was, 
 therefore, in one of its meanings political in our 
 sense of the word. That is to say, it was the name 
 given to society when organised and administered 
 according to law. For our purpose here, then, we 
 contrast such a meaning with that in which the word 
 polis is used to refer to a society with special rela- 
 tions to divine powers ; and we must now discuss 
 
 1 Politics 12990. 
 
 a Theatetus, 178 : Even in the Republic the interest is predom- 
 inantly administrative.
 
 66 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 only that side of the Greek ideal which is, in our 
 sense of the word, political. 
 
 But we should not fully understand the Greek 
 conception of politics if we did not allow that the 
 polis was once a fortress and the polites a soldier. 
 In fact, law and administration, as in all primitive 
 society, still bore traces of their origin in military 
 organisation. To some historians this seems the 
 fundamental fact ; and they have subordinated 
 the religious union in festivals to the union for 
 defence. In this they seem to follow the judgment 
 of Aristotle, where he says that the polis comes 
 into existence for the protection of life. But in 
 the matter of origins it is difficult to say that any 
 social bond was felt before the religious. The life 
 for which Aristotle says the polis first existed was 
 endangered much more by lack of food and by natural 
 conditions than by human enemies ; and religion 
 is the earliest method of contending with or control- 
 ling nature. Therefore, even according to Aristotle, 
 we might explain the polis as primarily religious. 
 And secondly, whatever the origin of the sense of the 
 polis, in the fifth century (except for Sparta) Greek 
 social life was not predominantly military. The 
 Greek was indeed a soldier ; but even that word 
 is misleading. For he was not a professional 
 specialist. In the convulsive activities of war he was 
 an energetic amateur ; and hopelessly so, because 
 in many instances he was also a man of affairs, 
 a literary and dramatic critic and a mill-owner or 
 a landlord. We shall therefore suppose that the 
 defensive organisation on which the administration 
 of the polis was based was to the Greek mind second- 
 ary. But this does not mean that it was unimportant. 
 The state was always imagined as a ship in the midst
 
 POLITICS 67 
 
 of surrounding waves of barbarism : and the danger 
 to the whole of civilisation gave a great importance to 
 military measures. By a natural exaggeration of this, 
 every little Greek city thought, as every state does 
 still, that if its peculiar form of law and administra- 
 tion disappeared, civilisation itself would be ruined. 
 Our subject must now be denned by reference 
 to Athens in the fifth century, because the most 
 characteristic or most influential political life was 
 developed there. But it would be unfair to Greek 
 political thought and activity if other parts of Hellas 
 were not at least referred to in passing. For Athens 
 did not develop hi a political vacuum, and, in fact, 
 one of the most important facts about Greek political 
 experience is its immense variety. No other race 
 can show in so short a period so many types of 
 administration and legislation. There was every- 
 thing from extreme autocracy to mob-rule. And, 
 more than this, the various kinds of autocracy or 
 of any other form of administration seem all to have 
 been tested : monarchy, " tyranny " constitutional 
 or personal and capricious, can be found ; and so 
 can limited and unlimited rule of " the many." 
 The governing political tendencies, however, appear 
 in Greek history most clearly through the opposition 
 of Sparta and Athens. Both are Greek in emphasising 
 the religious basis of society and in the conception 
 of law as flexible and personal. But there is a broad 
 distinction which appeared supremely important 
 to the contemporary Greek world. The speech of 
 the Corinthians in Thucydides gives the approved 
 view, as fairly stated as we can expect in a report 
 of an attack on Athens written by an Athenian of 
 the old political school. 1 The contrast runs thus : 
 
 1 Thuc. I. 68 sq.
 
 68 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 Athenians are quick, changeable, adventurous, 
 never disheartened, reckless of lives in public ser- 
 vice and insatiably energetic. The Lacedaemonians 
 are careful, over conservative, home-staying, not 
 easily stirred to far-reaching schemes and too much 
 enamoured of a quiet time. Even in institutions 
 this contrast of character shows itself ; for Athens 
 is always being organised on a new model and 
 Sparta remains the same. 
 
 Of Sparta we cannot fairly speak here : since 
 an analysis of its political good and evil is beyond 
 our present purview. 1 But Sparta was an influence 
 in the formation of some political ideals : and the 
 admiration for her ruthless organisation was wide- 
 spread. It has come down to us in Plato and 
 Xenophon. Not even this, however, makes Sparta 
 typically Greek. Its organisation was directed 
 to military domination by the only means such 
 domination can use, force and fraud : and its 
 political primitiveness is in part a cause of the 
 entire absence of any Spartan art or science. So 
 barren a life as this perfect organisation attained 
 can hardly be treated as anything but a violation 
 of all that was most ideally Greek : and therefore 
 we turn to Athens. 
 
 We shall speak now only of the conceptions of 
 law and liberty as far as they can be discovered in 
 the common actions of Athenian life, omitting for 
 the present the enthusiasms of fifth century litera- 
 ture and the more studied suggestions of the philo- 
 sophers. For, in the very structure of Athenian 
 law and administration we may discover aims and 
 ambitions. It is true that the ideals implied would 
 not be clear to the average man, even if he were 
 
 1 cf. Pollock.. Introd, to Pol. Science, p. n, note.
 
 POLITICS 69 
 
 assiduous in his attendance at the Assembly or 
 the law-courts. He might answer to the appeal of 
 dramatists or historians or even philosophers. He 
 might say that their sentiment had been his all the 
 time. And although he would not be able to express 
 for himself any clear conception of democracy, of 
 established government, or of personal liberty, he 
 may be truly said to have been moved by ideals. 
 
 The leading political ideal of Athens was liberty. 
 In the first place this meant autonomy for the group ; 
 and in this meaning it was an ideal which was 
 universal in Greece. It corresponds in its good, 
 as well as its evil effects, with our conception of 
 state-sovereignty. It is based upon the fact that 
 in early times no relation of two groups is possible 
 which is not the subordination of one to the other. 
 This relation, which is based simply upon compara- 
 tive force is, in that far, not moral ; and therefore 
 the first political enthusiasm is a revolt against the 
 dominance of mere force. In this sense liberty is 
 the first cry of a new world the world of administra- 
 tive organisation, which we now call political. 
 But in the appeal against predominant force, other 
 force is used ; and the original conception of justice 
 is forgotten. So far as the ideal of autonomy 
 involves a policy of the group with respect to other 
 groups it is simply exclusive or in the more polite 
 term " defensive," originating in exclusiveness and 
 causing an isolation which was, in the end, the curse 
 of Greek political life. But in its beginning autonomy 
 is a noble ambition. It expresses the desire of a 
 group to carry to their full development the char- 
 acter and intelligence which is common among them 
 and distinct from that of their neighbours. 
 
 We need not quote the well-known references in
 
 70 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 Herodotus to the position of Athens, both as gaining 
 for herself liberty against Persia and as being the 
 " Saviour of Greece." l No group of men has ever 
 undervalued their own autonomy so long as they 
 had it ; but many groups have parted with autonomy 
 easily, and most have not understood its meaning 
 so clearly as the Greeks did. In this sense the ideal 
 is Greek that it is conscious. And further, not 
 only did each city fight for its own independence 
 but the hypothesis of inter-state policy in Greece 
 was the mutual independence of the cities. The value 
 of local autonomy may even be said to have been 
 exaggerated by the Greeks. And even when local 
 independence obviously did not exist, it was possible 
 for Greeks to pretend that it did. 2 
 
 There is no doubt of the genuineness of the belief 
 in Athens that the domination of Athens over two 
 hundred and fifty other cities was all for liberty. 
 The cities of the " alliance " were devoutly imagined 
 to be at least willing if not enthusiastic. They were 
 presumed by the dominant partner to see the im- 
 mense advantage, for their own "true liberty," of sub- 
 ordination in fact to Athens. And the phenomenon 
 is not without parallel in modern times. The affection 
 of a dominant group for liberty, or of an imperial 
 organisation for national differences, has indeed 
 provoked the laughter of cynics, and it is perhaps 
 laughable. But it is not generally hypocritical. 
 The majority of men think that although no other 
 group would provide good governors for their own 
 countrymen, yet their countrymen are admirably 
 fitted to govern other groups. 
 
 Thus, even in the actual practice of a despotic 
 
 1 Herodotus VII. 139. 
 
 *cf. Zimmern, G.C., ch. VII., p. 175 sq.
 
 POLITICS 71 
 
 form of " imperialism," the people of Athens still 
 held to the idea of autonomy. They paid at least 
 lip-service to the common desire of all Greeks, and 
 confessed even in their blindness to facts that the 
 liberty of every group to develop the character of 
 its own members was the foundation of political 
 life. 
 
 There was no lack of " real politik " in Athens. 
 Thrasymachus in the Republic, Callicles in the 
 Gorgias and Cleon in Thucydides and Aristophanes, 
 all stand for the idea that in actual fact men are 
 governed by fear and force, and that this actual 
 fact is what ought to be supported and developed. 
 The Greeks, and especially the Athenians, saw 
 clearly enough that because force was used to repel 
 force it might be argued that the only relation of 
 groups was that of comparative force. But another 
 principle in inter-state relations was not without 
 expression. Indeed, we have in Thucydides a 
 definite statement of an attitude in political theory 
 which has hardly been improved upon. Diodotus, 
 replying to Cleon on the question of using fear to 
 control the allies, particularly with reference to 
 the conquered people of Mitylene, urges that fear 
 caused by the use of overwhelming force is not the 
 best basis for stable relations between groups. Prud- 
 ence and a sane perception of facts, even without 
 any reference to justice, go to show that " forgive- 
 ness is in the public interest." * But this positive 
 and constructive policy was never grasped either 
 by the weaker or the stronger cities. 
 
 And as a matter of fact, the ideal of local autonomy, 
 in spite of the action of every Greek city which 
 became powerful enough to oppose it, remained 
 
 1 Thucydides III. 36, 41.
 
 72 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 embodied in the separatism of Greek politics. No 
 other part of the world can show so many independent 
 and fully developed units of government in so re- 
 stricted a space as Greece. For it was the ideal of 
 these people that every group of about one hundred 
 thousand free men inhabiting, with their dependants, 
 about the area of an English county, should be 
 organised independently and absolutely. They 
 more nearly achieved, at least for a short time, 
 this ideal than any other : and the very achievement 
 proved the limitations of the conception, even for 
 a primitive period of economic and intellectual 
 development. Attempts were, indeed, made to 
 prevent the isolation of states which naturally 
 followed from the ideal of local autonomy. There was, 
 in the first place, the ancient tradition of Hellenic 
 unity imagined in Homer and embodied in the games. 
 The Greek cities never quite forgot their common 
 interest ; even though no positive policy was based 
 upon it. For here, as in the spirit of the separate 
 polls, religious festivals pointed a way. In the 
 Homeric hymn to the Delian Apollo we have the 
 record of a gathering in early times of many different 
 " civic " units. The lonians are represented as 
 the sharers of a common interest. And in historical 
 Greece all those we now call Greeks had a share in 
 four festivals, which embodied and expressed a 
 sentiment of union more inclusive than the polls. 
 The Olympian, the Pythian, the Isthmian and the 
 Nemean games were opportunities for a new politics : 
 and they may have been actually developed with 
 a political intention. 1 At Olympia, for example, 
 
 1 The dates of supposed or actual establishment of these games 
 are : Olympian, 776 ; Pythian, 586 ; Isthmian, 582 ; Nemean, 
 573 B-C.
 
 POLITICS 73 
 
 every fourth year representatives and private 
 pilgrims met, from all the Greek cities. Heralds, 
 sent out from Elis, proclaimed the sacred truce 
 which for a moment stilled the evil bickerings of 
 the Greek cities. Embassies were sent to Olympia : 
 and there, besides athletic contests and literary 
 recitations, sacrifices and intercourse kept at least 
 a vague conception of Greek unity alive. 
 
 Secondly, there was always a number of citizens 
 in different states who suggested a policy of federa- 
 tion, or at least, of close Hellenic alliance. Aristo- 
 phanes, in his peace dramas, cannot have spoken 
 for himself alone when he suggested that Greeks 
 should not continue to destroy one another. The 
 Homeric literature was used as an argument for 
 common action by all Greeks. Sophists, like Gorgias, 
 Lysias and Isocrates, at the great festivals, con- 
 tinually urged the political union of Greek cities : 
 and from time to time when the obvious inade- 
 quacy of the ideal of local autonomy was proved by 
 the destruction of city after city, even the average 
 man seems to have felt a vague desire for some other 
 ideal to correct it. Tradition and religious sentiment 
 pointed the way, but the Greeks were unable to 
 follow it by political action. The Hegelian idea 
 that what did occur must have occurred is misleading. 
 For there \vas at one time the possibility of a union 
 between Greek cities which would not have destroyed 
 local autonomy. The sentiment was there but 
 practical ability was lacking ; and the best of good 
 intentions is useless in politics unless accompanied 
 by a clear perception of fact and a capacity for 
 imagining practical programmes. 
 
 There was, besides the ideal of local autonomy, the 
 ideal of co-ordination of equals. But as the whole
 
 74 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 world knows, these two ideals, which might have 
 been complementary, were never reconciled. The 
 ideal of local autonomy divided Greece so effectively 
 that hardly, even in face of a common enemy, could 
 Greek cities be united ; and on the other hand 
 when at last Greece was united by force, it was 
 only by the suppression of all local autonomy which 
 did not confine itself to supervision of the parish 
 pump. We need not carry the history of events 
 into detail ; but we may compare the bold utter- 
 ance of Demosthenes with the submissiveness of 
 Plutarch when local autonomy was altogether lost. 
 " Pericles," he says, " reminded himself that he 
 governed freemen. Now the Roman shoe is on 
 our heads : " and he goes on complacently to record 
 his embassy to a kindly proconsul. 1 But this 
 miserable conclusion was not due to moral weakness 
 or to the decay of civic patriotism, upon which the 
 commentators, who are persuaded by Demosthenes, 
 have delighted to enlarge. 2 Ideals do not always 
 fail because men are ignoble or decadent, but 
 sometimes because the ideals themselves are mis- 
 taken or at least exaggerated. Local autonomy 
 in the Greek sense involved the denial of facts to 
 which the Greeks were somewhat blind the inter- 
 dependence of the cities in trade, in industry and 
 in general culture. But on the other hand the 
 political ideal of a Hellenic unity, which should 
 have embodied these facts, was altogether too 
 sentimental and indefinite. The result was that 
 
 1 Political Precepts, 1 7, 20. 
 
 It may be that Greece at some date was morally decadent. 
 Even that may have been an effect rather than a cause of political 
 misconceptions. The point is that the sudden disappearance of 
 Greek independence was due to mistaken intellectual judgment 
 of facts and not to vice.
 
 POLITICS 75 
 
 the effective, but more limited, ideal destroyed the 
 Greek world. 1 
 
 The Greek ideal of liberty, however, meant not 
 only autonomy, but also a certain possibility of 
 action for individuals : and this was regarded as 
 peculiarly Greek. Their tradition said that Artabanus 
 remarked to Themistocles " Some think one thing 
 valuable, some another. With you it is said to be 
 liberty and equality. We regard it as essential 
 to adore in the king, the image of deity." 2 Hero- 
 dotus says that the Athenians became powerful 
 when they rid themselves of tyrants : Aeschylus 
 represents the Persians as astonished that Athenians 
 serve no master : Thucydides declares that in 
 Athens " we are not angry with a neighbour for 
 following the bent of his own humour ; and in 
 private life we converse without diffidence." 3 
 Aristotle distinguishes Hellenes from barbarians 
 by saying that Hellenes understand personal free- 
 dom ; 4 and he distinguishes democracies from other 
 forms of government, as Herodotus had done 
 before him, 5 by saying that chiefly in democracies 
 individual liberty and equality are to be found. 6 
 And, in this sense, democracy is evidently conceived 
 to be peculiar to Greeks. 
 
 Further quotation, however, is unnecessary, 
 since it is generally recognised that some sort of 
 personal liberty was valued in Greece, although 
 some have supposed the Greeks not to have meant 
 
 1 cf: below p. 256 on the idea of Hellenic unity hinted at in Plato 
 (Rep. 469) and Aristotle (Pol. 13276). 
 * Plutarch, Themistocles. 
 
 3 Thuc. II. 42. 
 
 4 Pol. i255a. " Hellenes do not like to be called slaves but 
 confine the name to barbarians." 
 
 Herodotus III. 80. 
 ' Pol. 12916.
 
 76 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 what we mean when we use the words. It is essen- 
 tial, therefore, that we should be clear as to the 
 likeness and the distinction between ancient and 
 modern ideas of individual liberty. 
 
 The Greek conception of individual liberty must 
 be denned by reference to two complementary 
 conceptions. First, it is aristocratic, and there- 
 fore an ideal of a few only : and, secondly, it 
 is opposed by an ideal of civic patriotism. As for 
 the first point, few Greeks reached the conception 
 of a fundamental likeness between all human 
 beings, including women, slaves and barbarians 
 at large, upon which could be based equal political 
 rights. 1 There were vague beginnings of a new 
 ideal in Athens, but even in Athens personal 
 liberty, such as is now connected with the word 
 democracy, was confined to a very small percentage 
 of the population. And this was not only a fact ; 
 it was a situation accepted as desirable, and there- 
 fore, an ideal. For the Greeks felt that few were 
 capable of attaining that full development which 
 they expected of man. In this we may perceive 
 the strange realism with which the Greeks conceived 
 their ideals. We are often satisfied to admire 
 the unattainable : but they were much impressed 
 by the conditions within which alone any ideal 
 could be realised. It was perfectly clear to them 
 that for the higher development of human faculty, 
 much drudgery or mechanical work was necessary. 
 Society cannot consist of artists and critics, for food 
 and clothing must be supplied. It seemed essential, 
 then, that liberty and equality should only be the 
 
 1 Some Sophists preached the equality of all men. Socrates 
 and Plato understood it. Euripides felt it. But Aristotle 
 is the mouthpiece of the average man in his defence of 
 " natural " slavery and the " natural " incompetence of women.
 
 POLITICS 77 
 
 right of a few males. Women had to work at child- 
 bearing ; and this went well with house-keeping. 
 Slaves and working-men had no time and no deve- 
 loped capacity for the " good life." Except for 
 some revolutionaries, therefore, the Greeks (slaves 
 and women, as well as the few who benefited) 
 accepted an aristocratic conception of liberty. 
 
 Modern idealists wax eloquent upon this grave 
 deficiency in the Greek ideal, and it was indeed due to 
 inexcusable lack of imagination. But the modern 
 lack of imagination is even greater ; for it seems to 
 involve an incurable blindness to fact. The political 
 theorist talks of personal liberty as an ideal for all, 
 while the majority are still enslaved, and while the 
 very conditions which make it possible for him to 
 theorise are degrading women into animals and 
 working populations into machines. At least the 
 Greeks had imagination enough to see what other 
 people were doing ; and a touch of realism is no bad 
 thing in a vision of the ideal. We cannot condemn 
 the Greek ideal without accusing ourselves ; until 
 we have been able to devise some method by which 
 the many shall not be sacrificed to the development 
 of the few. And if we allow for the limitations of 
 their ideal, we must also allow for the positive 
 purpose of the Greeks. It was supposed by them that 
 the few individuals who could be, ought to be free 
 not merely to follow their own bent but to develop 
 the highest excellencies of body and spirit. True 
 liberty as a means to a great life was first understood 
 by contrast with slavery. 1 
 
 As for the second part of our delimitation of 
 
 1 cf. Ritchie, Natural Rights, p. 248 : " It was in contrast 
 with the subject and the slave that men first felt themselves 
 equal and free."
 
 78 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 liberty, the polls was undoubtedly always before 
 the eyes of the Greek. The greatest lover of 
 individual independence felt the whole life of 
 society as a reality which he could not but admire 
 and develop. Therefore " civic patriotism " or 
 devotion to the polis is often held to have been a 
 much more characteristically Greek ideal than that 
 of individual liberty. If we suppose this to be true, 
 it is still liberty for which the Greeks stood in politics : 
 but liberty would then mean only autonomy or 
 liberty of the group, which subordinated individual 
 independence to itself. The comparative import- 
 ance to Greeks, however, of the two conceptions 
 must be interpreted differently by those who read 
 the evidence differently. And here we shall suppose 
 that individual independence was just as much a 
 Greek ideal as local autonomy. This would imply, 
 first, that Sparta was not typically Greek. Even 
 if the majority of Greek cities were organised on a 
 plan of which Sparta was only an exaggeration, yet 
 the domination of a small group over the majority 
 was not what distinguishes Greece from other 
 countries. And again, the intention of the Spartan 
 organisation was certainly not to produce that high 
 emotional and intellectual activity which we are 
 generally agreed to view as a Greek ideal. But, 
 secondly, our view would imply that the continual 
 revolutions of Greek city-politics were due to the 
 pursuit of an ideal, and were not merely fallings 
 from grace. The literature of Greece is the mind of 
 the anti-revolutionaries ; the history of Greece is 
 the record of crTacret? ; and there is no reason why 
 we should accept that view of the Greeks which 
 is most prominently expressed by their literary 
 men.
 
 POLITICS 79 
 
 The history of Greece is not so much a history of 
 contending states as a history of contending political 
 parties, representing opposed economic interests 
 to which the frontiers of the state made little differ- 
 ence. And the aim of every party was the full and 
 free activity of its individual members. Thus, in 
 the history of Greece the conception of individual 
 independence was so powerful as to be destructive ; 
 and even the social sense of the polis was unable 
 to resist the desire of the few for a full and free 
 development. There is still a persistent supersti- 
 tion among literary men that the opposite to what is 
 fantastically called " civic patriotism " is egoistic 
 selfishness ; but there are, in fact, many other possi- 
 bilities ; for a man may be devoted to a quite 
 healthy ideal of personal development, or of general 
 human service, or of economic common interest. 
 And these are not mere fallings from grace, but other 
 ways to the " good life." 
 
 On the whole, however, the Greeks never reached 
 a very clear conception of the relation of the individ- 
 ual to political institutions. They had behind them, 
 in the not very distant past, the complete sub- 
 mergence of the personality in the group, which is 
 characteristic of primitive society. They were also 
 aware that every man thinks his own customs the 
 best. " If any one should propose to all men to 
 select the best institutions of all that exist, each, 
 after considering them all, would chose their own, 
 so certain is it that each thinks his own institutions 
 by far the best. That all men are of this mind 
 respecting their own institutions may be inferred 
 from many and varied proofs and among them 
 from the following. Darius, having summoned 
 some Greeks under his sway, who were present,
 
 8o GREEK IDEALS 
 
 asked them for what sum they would feed upon the 
 dead bodies of their parents. They answered that 
 they would not do it for any sum. Darius after- 
 wards having summoned some of the Indians called 
 Callatians, who are accustomed to eat their parents, 
 asked them in the presence of the Greeks, who were 
 informed of what was said by an interpreter, for what 
 sum they would consent to burn their fathers when 
 they die. But they loudly besought him not to 
 mention such things. Such is the effect of custom. 
 And Pindar seems to me to have said rightly that 
 custom is the king of all men." 1 The Greeks took 
 their established institutions perhaps with a greater 
 docility than is usual among the more educated 
 of us moderns ; but they never were oppressed by 
 that civic patriotism, which in the fantastic solemnity 
 of recent historians and commentators appears as 
 a Moloch devouring all individuality. 
 
 For the further understanding, however, of Greek 
 political liberty the Greek conception of law must 
 be discussed. Even in Greece law was conceived 
 as a limitation of liberty. " Though free," says 
 Herodotus, " they are not absolutely free ; for they 
 have a master over them, the law." 2 And the 
 devotion of the critical Socrates to the laws of 
 Athens has become notorious. But we should be 
 mistaken if we imagined that to the Greeks civil 
 law seemed to be anything like our civil law ; and 
 we should be still more mistaken if we thought the 
 Greek devotion to law was in contradiction to their 
 ideal of liberty. 
 
 It has often been remarked as characteristic of 
 Greek morality in general and of Greek politics in 
 particular, that there is an absence of legal codes. 
 1 Herodotus III. 38. * id. VII. 104.
 
 POLITICS 81 
 
 No moral law was ever formulated in the Greek 
 tradition ; for the essence of morality to them was 
 life and life could not be codified. Therefore, 
 even in that part of morality which is called politics, 
 the necessity for certainty and precision in principles 
 never compelled the Greeks to think of law as we 
 do. So far as facts go, written constitutions were 
 few in Greece. The laws which were cited, in the 
 courts of Athens, for example, were dealt with quite 
 freely according to their spirit and not legally inter- 
 preted as we expect of modern law. Hence law 
 meant rather a spirit than a formula ; and not even 
 the traditional view among us of the British 
 Constitution implies quite such vital law. 
 
 Secondly, the Greek attitude towards law is 
 quite different from ours or from the Roman ; 
 for law was to them a living and changing thing, and 
 almost a human being. The language of Socrates 
 in the Crito or of Demosthenes in his private orations 
 is not metaphorical ; for to the Athenians " the 
 laws " were, as we may put it, plastically conceived. 
 They were Athens, and Athens was Athena. As we 
 find it difficult to feel the reality of Demeter so we 
 find it difficult to envisage that " Doom " which is 
 as real and has as definite a character as any living 
 person. Thirdly, the explanations given of the 
 nature of law show how impossible it is to suppose 
 that there was any real contrast in the Greek mind 
 between law and liberty. " Law," says Aristotle, 
 " is reason without passion ; "* it has, that is to say, 
 all that is valuable in personality without the 
 caprice against which " liberty " was a protest. 
 It is, in the absence of passion, not a hindrance 
 but a security for liberty; since what obstructs, 
 
 1 Pol. I286.
 
 82 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 according to the Greek mind, is not reason, but 
 emotion. 
 
 And the historical theory of law which was gener- 
 ally held in Greece points to the same fact. The 
 law-giver was believed to be the most important 
 person in the making of the polls. The highest law, 
 that is to say, had a quite personal and individual 
 source and bore on it the marks of his character 
 and mind. But the law-giver is spoken of as giving 
 evidence, collecting traditions and foreign ideas, and 
 then making general conclusions. The Greeks 
 never conceived him as an authority different in 
 kind from themselves. He gave not commands 
 but conclusions. 
 
 " The law," says Aristotle, stating the experience 
 of the past, " has a compulsory power ; but whereas 
 we take offence at individuals who oppose our 
 inclinations, even though their opposition is right, 
 we do not feel aggrieved when the law bids us to do 
 right." Control there must be in society, or, indeed, 
 even in individual life, if there is to be any order, 
 but there is something, obviously, in the Greek 
 conception of law which prevents any such concep- 
 tion as that of Mill where he says that we are 
 " hindered " by it. Not because the Greeks were 
 less individualistic, but because their social system 
 was more plastic, therefore they never felt law as 
 oppressive. The conclusion is obvious. The legal 
 and administrative system called the polis was 
 fundamentally different from any modern state 
 and even from the so-called city-state of the Romans. 
 To confound the Athenian and the Roman attitude 
 towards the state or even to confuse the Athenian 
 with the Roman state-system, is much worse than 
 calling Zeus, Jupiter, or Athena, Minerva. And as
 
 POLITICS 83 
 
 for our modern state, both in spirit and in adminis- 
 tration or organisation (even in the strictly political 
 sense), the polis bears little resemblance to it. There 
 is a likeness between the Athenian conception of law 
 and the English idea of the British Constitution ; 
 but not even the British Constitution has that flexible 
 personality which was quite definitely imagined by 
 the Athenians to belong to their polis. In the ideal 
 of political experience, in rigidity of law in the 
 British Empire and in that peculiar phenomenon 
 called " red tape," we are far indeed from the com- 
 parative formlessness of the Athenian system. It 
 would be utterly absurd, then, to suppose that we 
 can model our attitude towards the modern state 
 upon the Athenian practice or theory of the polis. 
 
 But if all the political effort of Athens was for the 
 maintenance of law and liberty, what means did 
 they choose ? They set themselves to form institu- 
 tions which would secure them against the caprice 
 of individuals. That is the solution of the apparent 
 contradiction between the desire for personal liberty 
 and the complete subordination of the individual 
 to the polis. Both are Greek ; and both are due 
 to the same ideal, which is liberty. But some his- 
 torians, having in view quite modern circumstances, 
 cannot imagine why the Greeks should have sub- 
 mitted themselves almost with religious enthusiasm 
 to the " laws " and yet believed themselves to be 
 free. These historians have either underrated the 
 Greek reverence for law ; or they have supposed 
 that the Greeks did not love liberty as we do. It 
 is a mistake. The fact is that the danger to liberty 
 in the Greek world, as in all quasi-primitive worlds, 
 was personal. It was the dominance of definite 
 men which was the chief menace to individual
 
 84 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 freedom. " When freed from tyrants," says Herodo- 
 tus, " the Athenians became by far the first," 1 
 and we notice that Plato and Aristotle never dream 
 of any hindrance to one person's liberty which is not 
 the will of some other person. The danger of 
 institutionalism was then unknown. 
 
 So also, in the Middle Ages the " freedom of the 
 city " meant the security from the caprice of a 
 local lord. What men wanted was law, because the 
 alternative was personal passion or at least personal 
 opinion : and so liberty was identified with " the 
 rule of law." Now, the political situation is almost 
 completely reversed, except in the corners of the 
 world. 2 Institutions have become so powerful that 
 some cry out against them for a return to personal 
 rule. The vast business organisations and the 
 complex officialism of the state are to us the chief 
 obstacles to personal and independent or spontaneous 
 life. Society, we say, has been dehumanised ; and 
 revolutionaries such as Proudhon look to the " de- 
 fatalisation " of life. The very institutions which we 
 have built up to secure us against violent personali- 
 ties have now begun to subdue to their own exist- 
 ence the spontaneous life for which alone they were 
 called into being. The state suppresses the individ- 
 ual's choice ; the. church kills enthusiasm ; the art 
 academy destroys art. 
 
 Hence come the great differences between the 
 ancient and modern ideals of liberty, (a) To them 
 liberty meant the possibility of a direct individual 
 share in public activities ; to us it more usually 
 
 1 Herodotus V. 78. Thucydides I. 17. 
 
 1 Exactly the same situation as the Greek may be observed 
 in some Western cities of the United States, where " law " is 
 the aim of liberty as against the capricious rule of a political 
 " boss."
 
 POLITICS 85 
 
 means the possibility of avoiding the political 
 absorption of the individual, (b) To them liberty 
 seemed to be obstructed by an ancient group-tradi- 
 tion ; to us its obstacle is a new and increasing 
 regulation, (c) To them liberty is conceived only 
 in one form a complex of political, religious, 
 intellectual and economic life. To us, liberty has 
 many different meanings in the different social rela- 
 tions of men. And finally, as we have shown (d) 
 in ancient times liberty is opposed to personal 
 dominance ; in modern times it is opposed to 
 institutionalism. Against different evils the same 
 fundamental ideal is found to be active ; and in spite 
 of all its ephemeral features, we may still conceive 
 the Athenian ideal of liberty to imply essentially 
 the same desire as ours. The very distinctions 
 prove the identity of the two ideals in their 
 apparently opposed forms. To them the more 
 polis the better, to us the less state the better. 
 What has changed, however, is not the conception of 
 liberty but the sphere of politics, or the meaning 
 we give to what the Athenians called the polis and 
 we call the state. Liberty still means, as it meant 
 in fifth century Athens, the full development of 
 capacities. But in Athens all the interests of life, 
 drama, music, sculpture, philosophy and religion, 
 were to be found in the use of one institution, the 
 polis. In our time, if we gave to what we call the 
 state what the Athenian gave to his polis, we should 
 lack all other interests but what we call the political. 
 No Panathenaia, no Dionysia should we share ; and 
 if we were satisfied with only what we could get 
 from the modern state we should indeed lack liberty. 
 We therefore seek, in restricting the state, the 
 fulness of life which the Athenians sought in extend-
 
 S6 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 ing the dominance of the polis. Or, to put it the 
 other way, the Athenians (if we allow for the natural 
 indefiniteness of the feeling for individuality in an 
 earlier time) were individualists in the same sense 
 that all sane men are, having as their ideal not 
 ease of government, but the fullest development of 
 the individual's life. And this could only be had 
 by institutionalising a society as yet too unorgan- 
 ised ; but the end was the promotion of that 
 spontaneity by which alone society lives, of which 
 the source is in the individual. 
 
 Thus the Athenian ideal for a political society is 
 autonomy so far as its external contacts are con- 
 cerned, and individual liberty at least for a few, 
 within an administrative system which is regarded 
 not as a mechanism but as a living organism.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE EPIC TRADITION 
 
 HAVING reviewed Greek social life and the ideals 
 implied in it so far as concerns religious and political 
 practice, we must now turn to the more conscious 
 idealism of literature and philosophy. 
 
 By universal acknowledgment of all Greeks their 
 ideals were expressed and influenced by " the 
 poets ' ' ; and chiefly by Homer and Hesiod. We 
 can hardly imagine a Greek conception of life and 
 character which has not been already coloured by 
 literature. It is true that life and therefore a moral 
 atmosphere came first and literature afterwards. 
 The moral standards of a vanished age are undoubt- 
 edly embodied in Homer and Hesiod ; for the poets 
 did not create the moral atmosphere which is felt 
 in reading the works called by those names, even 
 though they may have profoundly influenced what 
 men admired in the very effort to express it. But 
 of that earlier age, when literature as yet had not 
 become " canonical," we shall not speak here. 
 When Greece was first the Greece of Athenian cere- 
 monies and temples and drama, the canonical 
 poets were already an accepted influence, as much 
 a revelation from outside the common experience 
 of men as are all traditional books. The Greeks, 
 however, escaped the evil influence of " sacred" books 
 as they avoided the danger of a priestly caste or 
 
 87
 
 88 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 an established church ; their tradition was never 
 allowed to be secure from criticism. 1 And yet 
 Homer and Hesiod spoke for a world outside that 
 of fifth century Athens and with the authority of 
 " our ancestors." 
 
 We shall speak, therefore, of the Epic tradition 
 as an already established fact, and we shall discuss 
 it only from the point of view of the fifth and fourth 
 centuries in Athens. For this purpose, with all 
 due apologies to scholars, we may class together, 
 as expressions of the same tradition, Homer and 
 Hesiod ; and we shall speak of them as individuals, 
 in the manner of those who read them at Athens 
 and derived from them illumination or encourage- 
 ment. 
 
 There is no doubt of the importance of Homer 
 to the Greek ideals. His influence is acknowledged 
 both by those who approved of it and by those who 
 opposed it. In Xenophon's Symposium Nikeratus 
 says that his father wishing to make him a virtuous 
 man, made him learn the whole of Homer. " And 
 so it happens," he says, " that I can repeat by 
 heart the Iliad and the Odyssey." The objection 
 is naturally urged that every rhapsodist can do the 
 same and yet they are not virtuous. To this the 
 simple-minded Xenophon makes his Socrates reply, 
 "That is only because they do not understand the 
 sense of what they recite." Homer rightly under- 
 stood, therefore, is moral teaching. 2 So also in 
 the fragments of Aristophanes' Banqueters the bad 
 
 1 It is false to say that Homer was " the Greek Bible " ; for 
 that implies a misunderstanding of the Greek attitude. No 
 one was compelled to " believe in " Homer in spite of his immense 
 influence, cf. Livingstone, Greek Genius, p. 54. Farnell. 
 Higher Aspects of Greek Religion, 
 
 * Symp. III., 5.
 
 THE EPIC TRADITION 89 
 
 young man is discovered to be bad because he is 
 ignorant of Homer. 1 
 
 On the other hand the attack upon the influence 
 of Homer in the Republic of Plato is well known. 2 
 Probably Plato exaggerated the influence of the 
 example of Homeric gods upon the lives of his con- 
 temporaries, as modern magistrates exaggerate the 
 influence on boys of stories of adventure or crime. 
 The majority learn neither their vices nor their 
 virtues from literature. But the moral atmosphere 
 in an accepted and approved author does affect 
 the general tone of society ; and in that sense Plato 
 was right. In much later days when Homer had 
 survived all criticism of his morals, an attempt was 
 made to moralise him, on the assumption that he 
 wrote with an allegorical meaning. 3 Both parties, 
 however, those who accept and those who criticise 
 Homer, acknowledge his immense importance to 
 Greek ideals of life and character. 
 
 Almost as much may be said of Hesiod. There 
 is a line, said to be by Pindar, which runs : " Hail, 
 Hesiod ! who boldest the measure of wisdom for 
 men." Aeschines uses him as a guide to politics. 
 Aphorisms from him are scattered throughout the 
 conversations recorded by Plato and Xenophon. 
 And as with Homer so with Hesiod, the very 
 antiquity of the sentiments expressed tended to 
 make men suppose that they were correct. 
 
 We may attempt then to state what the ordinary 
 
 1 Frag, 222, 223. 
 
 1 Republic 377 sq. It is indicative of the " canonical " books 
 that other poets are united with Homer in these lines. This 
 carries on the old quarrel of philosophy with the poets which 
 Xenophanes is said to have begun. 
 
 8 cf. Stewart, Myths of Plato, for a treatment of Allegory, 
 p. 230 sq.
 
 90 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 Greek found in Homer and Hesiod ; and first of 
 Homer. Gods and heroes are the models of char- 
 acter, and conceptions of worthy life are dependent 
 upon the actions of these. As for the gods, we must 
 put aside modern explanation of the brutalities and 
 immoralities of the divine beings in the Iliad. 
 Obviously many apparently immoral actions were 
 simply explanations of primitive ritual ; but it 
 must be allowed that what troubles us now probably 
 made very little impression upon Greeks who had 
 been brought up on Homer. It is extraordinary 
 how little critical thought is excited by a book to 
 which every one is accustomed. And in any case 
 no one in Greece was induced to eat his children 
 because a god had done it. There is always a large 
 allowance, even in early times, for what our grand- 
 fathers could do and we can not ; and a still larger 
 licence is given to deities. 
 
 Not by their peculiar habits but by their passions 
 and general attitude the gods of Homer influenced 
 fifth century Greece. Enough has been said against 
 them. Let us therefore see if, from the point of 
 view of an age as yet experimenting in a new morality, 
 anything can be said in favour of the gods. The 
 first feature of the Olympians which should impress 
 us reinforces our argument as to the ideal of Greece 
 being social. Even the gods live in company. 
 It may be that the society is crude and the common 
 feeling of its members even less binding than that 
 of the aristocratic feudal class, whose splendour 
 first made Olympus. But it is a society ; and as 
 such we should contrast it with conceptions of the 
 divine which, while as personal as Greek Olympian- 
 ism, imply an isolation and aloofness in divinity. 
 Such a conception, however high the moral standard
 
 THE EPIC TRADITION 91 
 
 it may give to the god, robs him of that highest 
 morality which depends upon converse with equals. 
 In Homer on the contrary, even in the sky the life 
 is social. The gods banquet joyously together : 1 
 they are all interested in Aphrodite's wound : 2 
 and a thousand other examples could be cited to 
 show the influence Homer must have had in making 
 " the good life " seem to be in the main " good 
 company." 
 
 Secondly, in Homer and in all Greek thought 
 there is no devil : there is no one source of the evil 
 we suffer or the evil which is in us : and such evil 
 as there is, moral or physical, is found to have the 
 same source as the good. We need not quote at 
 length to show how evil is to be found in the char- 
 acter of the gods in such a way that every Greek 
 must have known it to be evil. Zeus sends a deceit- 
 ful dream to Agammemnon : 3 Athena uses a vile 
 trick against Hector : 4 Hera plays the wanton with 
 Zeus. 5 There is weakness too, for Aphrodite 
 is wounded by a mortal and runs off to her mother. 6 
 The evil which might have gone to the make of a 
 devil is divided and apportioned to all superhuman 
 beings. And we may understand the Greek moral 
 ideal as affected by such a conception, if we contrast 
 with it the belief which distinguishes absolutely 
 the sources and embodiment of good and evil. The 
 most consistent and powerful form of this belief is 
 Manicheanism ; and an element of Manichean dual- 
 ism remains in orthodox Christianity. It is perhaps 
 to be found even in the New Testament ; but it 
 was given the emphasis which it still has by the 
 
 1 Iliad I. in fine. 2 id. V., 415 sq. 
 
 8 id. II. init. *id. XXII., 225 sq. 
 
 id. XIV., 160 sq. id. V., 340.
 
 92 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 never wholly converted Manichean, St. Augustine. 
 The same hard distinction between good and evil 
 is to be found in earlier Persian creeds, in Gnostic 
 theories and in the heresy of the Cathari during the 
 Middle Ages. 
 
 All such beliefs involve practical consequences 
 of great importance. They generally lead to 
 condemnation of matter and the body ; for what is 
 material or sensuous is given over as entirely evil. 
 The body is treated as despicable : it is either scourged 
 and destroyed or it is indulged. For, strangely, the 
 same beliefs lead to the opposite extremes of action ; 
 and some who despise matter argue that we should 
 restrain impulses and convert the joys of the body 
 into sorrow ; but others, quite logically, say that 
 the best way to destroy the body is to indulge all 
 appetite excessively, or they say that what happens 
 to the vile body makes no difference to the pure 
 soul. The conception of the devil removes the 
 ultimate issue out of the obvious matter of the 
 world we know, but it represents the same concrete 
 division of good and evil ; and it has had, in Cal- 
 vinism for example, almost the same practical 
 effects in casting a slur upon everything sensuous 
 and beautiful. 
 
 The Olympians may be in many ways deficient 
 and their character may have obscured too much the 
 fact that nothing evil is worthy of reverence ; 
 but with them the human body ascended into heaven 
 in all its grace and beauty. No one brought up 
 upon Homer could ever fall into the evil heresy 
 that there is anything wrong with " matter." 
 Indeed it is remarkable that Plato, the opponent 
 of Homer, makes precisely the mistake in condemning 
 the sensuous from which a more sympathetic under-
 
 THE EPIC TRADITION 93 
 
 standing of Homer might have protected him. His 
 Greek love of beauty saved him from abnormalities ; 
 but he was too adverse to the Homeric sanity. And 
 now once again in our own day the Olympians 
 are attacked as less religious than earlier and less 
 bodily gods. The controversy will never be decided. 
 For there will always be some who prefer the ser- 
 pents and mist of early magic and late mysticism 
 to the shining faces of the gods and the sunlight of 
 Homer. These gods are indeed material, but none 
 the worse for that ; and they share among them 
 the attributes of the devil, but are not necessarily 
 therefore more dangerous to the moral life than the 
 theories which divide absolutely the sources of good 
 and evil. 
 
 After all, however, not the gods but the heroes 
 gave to the ordinary Greek his conception of ideal 
 character. Nikeratus, in Xenophon, says that 
 because he knows Homer " whoever desires to be 
 like Achilles or Ajax, Nestor or Odysseus " should 
 come to him. 1 We may turn then from Olympus to 
 the plains of Troy. To our eyes there are great 
 moral deficiencies in the heroes. But men have an 
 infinite capacity for not seeing the obvious, and it 
 is quite possible to admire a certain person for 
 qualities which he possesses, without being even 
 aware of his great lack of other qualities. The 
 average Frenchman does not notice the blood- 
 thirsty vainglory of Napoleon ; and the average 
 Englishman is blind to the barbarisms of Drake. 
 Not only do group-beliefs whitewash " heroes " ; 
 but excellent qualities are admired under the name 
 Napoleon or Drake, without any consciousness of 
 the deficiencies of the actual characters. So, one 
 1 Symposium IV. 6.
 
 94 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 imagines, the average Athenian thought of Achilles 
 and Odysseus without any consciousness of the 
 blood-lust of the one or the dishonesty of the other. 
 And it would be unfair to condemn the Greeks for 
 admiring such heroes, as though our heroes were 
 spotless or even our saints perfect. If, however, 
 we give to others the credit we claim for ourselves, 
 we shall see that what was called Achilles was 
 friendship, bravery and prowess embodied, and what 
 was called Odysseus was skill in facing intricate 
 difficulties. 
 
 From this point of view Greek ideals are magni- 
 ficently expressed and immensely influenced by the 
 heroes. First, the Iliad and the Odyssey give one 
 a sense of the greatness of man which can hardly 
 be paralleled in the traditional literature of any 
 other race. In the Iliad the gods are everywhere : 
 but they look on, for most of the time, while men do 
 the great deeds : these deeds are the Iliad. Sorrow 
 and inevitable death come upon the greatest ; and 
 in the endurance of these man is shown supremely. 
 Achilles bethinks him of his dead and weeps. 1 
 He knows he is to die in the fray and grandly faces 
 what no gods can. 2 Here indeed are mighty men 
 whom not even the combined terrors of the world 
 and the gods could daunt. Joy in their strength 
 gives colour to their deeds : 3 and they know them- 
 selves to be great even when they fail and die. Over 
 them all is a shining glory so great that it has misled 
 more than one after-generation searching for an 
 ideal. 
 
 1 Iliad XXIV., 508. 
 
 * Id. XVIII. 97. This is what Socrates quotes to persuade his 
 judges that death cannot daunt a man. Apol. 28. cf. Ajax' 
 prayer in Iliad XVII., 647. 
 
 1 cf. the games in Iliad XXII.
 
 THE EPIC TRADITION 95 
 
 Among Greek ideals, as among those of many 
 other races, is the ideal of courage and manliness 
 in war leading on to glory. The conception of 
 glory it is impossible to express shortly ; but its 
 importance for us here is that it was the origin of the 
 unfortunate mistake that courage and manliness 
 are to be found chiefly in the deeds to be done in 
 war. That the great book of their boyhood was a 
 book of war made so much difference to the Greeks 
 that perhaps it is one reason for the continual bicker- 
 ings of their political history. The criticism which 
 Plato directed against the primitive standards of 
 moral excellence in Homer are really criticisms 
 of an ideal from which Plato himself never wholly 
 escaped ; and the ideal is that of warriors. For 
 the Greeks often went to war, not because it was 
 inevitable or forced upon them, but because they 
 liked it ; and they liked it because about it was 
 woven the tissue of golden lies which is called glory. 
 But the Epic tradition contained some corrections 
 of the sentimentalism with which such primitive 
 minds as Xenophon and Alexander the Great 
 regarded warfare ; for, magnificent over the fields 
 of glory, come the Homeric lines. " Even as are 
 the generation of leaves such are those likewise of 
 men ; the leaves that be the wind scattereth on the 
 earth, and the forest buddeth and putteth forth 
 more again, when the season of spring is at hand ; 
 so of the generations of men one putteth forth and 
 another ceaseth." 1 And by such thought we are 
 saved from the futility and bestiality of which Greek 
 history is so full. 
 
 The judgment of scholars has perhaps been not 
 quite fair to the influence of the Odyssey. There 
 1 Iliad VI., 146. c/. XVI. init., XXIV. 507 sq.
 
 96 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 is no doubt that it is less virile, more smooth and 
 finished, than the Iliad ; but its literary qualities 
 do not concern us here. It had an immense influ- 
 ence on the Greek mind. As it was the Iliad which 
 formed " the men of Marathon," and at the close of 
 Greek history armed Alexander against the East, 
 so it was the Odyssey which planted Greek colonies 
 adventurously in the far West. We have forgotten 
 that the Greeks were daring sailors and restless 
 explorers. We do not sufficiently notice the ships 
 even in the Iliad ; but we certainly undervalue 
 the sea-yarns of the Odyssey. The Greeks were made 
 by them into colonists, and even in later days the 
 Greek was the adventurer par excellence to the staid 
 and slowly moving Roman. But the moral quality 
 which is implied in an admiration for the wild is not 
 sufficiently allowed for in the Greeks. The desire 
 for the open spaces of the world caused the English 
 admiration for buccaneers who, but for their adven- 
 tures, are sordid and un-ideal. And Odysseus influ- 
 enced Greek conceptions of character in the same way : 
 since, because of his adventures, the average Greek 
 would probably not consider his propensity to lying. 
 But it is less in its hero than in its atmosphere 
 that the Odyssey is great. The atmosphere of the 
 Odyssey is clear and the air is free ; for through it all 
 come the sounds and the scent of open sea. No 
 statement of Greek ideals can omit reference to this. 
 For Hellas itself was the sea and its shores ; and the 
 sea was not a barrier but a bond. It was also a 
 defence, but in every aspect it gave Hellas its 
 character and influenced the ideals of life there 
 developed. 
 
 The shipwreck of Odysseus is altogether a triumph 
 of sea verse ; the shrouding clouds, the jostling wind,
 
 THE EPIC TRADITION 97 
 
 the rush of the mighty wave sweeping the raft along 
 as the thistledown on the plain, the sea-gull on the 
 wing, and then the calm and the sight of land, 
 where the swell crashes on reefs all is immortal. 1 
 But apart from finished scenes, the Odyssey all 
 through smells of the sea. And from the Odyssey 
 comes the Greek literary tradition of the sea, of 
 which it will not be inappropriate to speak here. 
 Thucydides is probably right in making the history 
 of the Greeks begin on the sea. Aeschylus wrote 
 of a sea battle in his Persians, and he has expressed 
 an Athenian affection for the sea in the appeal of 
 Prometheus to " the countless laughter of the ocean 
 waves." Sophocles counts as one of the chief 
 glories of man his sailing under the crest of waves. 
 And what the sea was for Greeks is recorded unfor- 
 gettably in that passage of the Anabasis which 
 tells of the first sight of the sea after the long 
 march. Finally, at the close of the great period of 
 Athenian literature we find that epigram of Plato's 
 concerning those who were carried away as prisoners 
 by Darius into the regions of Persia far removed 
 from the sea. 2 
 
 These are but a few of the instances of sea litera- 
 ture in the Greek tradition which begins with the 
 Odyssey ; and they indicate that element in the 
 Greek ideal which we should call the love of adven- 
 ture. The hero of adventure is, therefore, by no 
 means unknown to the Greeks, and they have 
 quite as genuine an admiration for him as any race 
 could have. 
 
 1 Odyssey V., 290 sq. 
 
 * " Here we lie who left long ago the sounding waves of the 
 Aegean, now in the midmost plain of Ecbatana. Greeting, O 
 fatherland, renewed Eretria ; greeting, O Athens, neighbour 
 to our Euboea ; and greeting, beloved Sea ! " 
 
 H
 
 8 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 Of Hesiod we must speak shortly. The works 
 called by that name were used popularly for a sort 
 of theological instruction as to the history of gods. 
 But theology weighed lightly upon the Greek mind ; 
 and indeed it is unfair to call their stories 
 " theology," because no one argued about them. In 
 any case their moral influence would be small, since 
 Hesiod was more valued for his practical precepts. 
 Thus Aristophanes makes him an instructor in 
 " the tillage of land, the seasons of fruits and 
 ploughing." 1 He bears the message of hard toil and 
 the grinding work of men upon the meagre resources 
 of Hellas. There is a sternness about his view of 
 life ; and he loves no glory of kings and warriors, 
 for he knows the bitter reality, the injustice to poor 
 men and the narrow selfishness of the upper classes 
 which lies under the golden tissue of glory. It 
 was good for the Greek youth to hear that. But 
 apart from this general view of life, Hesiod is moral 
 teaching of the copybook type. He inculcates 
 prudence and he is full of the dangers of this dreadful 
 life. He causes in one sometimes deep melancholy 
 and sometimes, without intending it, uncontrollable 
 laughter. Perhaps the Greeks too felt at times that 
 things were not so bad after all, when they remem- 
 bered Hesiod. He is thus a moral influence, but 
 slight as compared with Homer and, being a less 
 skilful poet, he does not master the changing moods 
 of those who read him ; for, sometimes he seems a 
 wise old man and sometimes a dismal old fool. 
 That is the fate of all writers of gnomic poetry and 
 copybook morality ; but he is the best of the 
 tribe. 
 
 When we pass from ideals of character to concep- 
 
 1 Frogs, 1032.
 
 THE EPIC TRADITION 99 
 
 tions of social life, it is almost astonishing to find 
 that lessons of patriotism and service of the polis 
 were " drawn from" Homer: but there is nothing 
 that men cannot derive from a text which they have 
 learnt as children. The Homeric heroes have no 
 conception of loyalty except to a warlike band or to 
 personal friends, and although they have a vague 
 feeling of community in so far as all are at war 
 with Troy, there is hardly a hint of civic organisation 
 or devotion to the varied and changeful life of the polis, 
 except in occasional precepts and in the attitude of 
 Hector. Hesiod also knows of no polis. 1 The city for 
 him is a nuisance. His ideal is a company of good 
 neighbours in a secluded agricultural village ; for 
 city men were to his mind, as the old school in Athens 
 tried to believe, very subtle and dishonest. 
 
 But this was no obstacle to the wildest appeals 
 to the authority of Homer and Hesiod ; and in the use 
 of both there is the same absence of historical sense 
 which is to be observed in the use of other famous 
 books. The scholars of the Middle Ages used to 
 define the position of a mediaeval king by reference 
 to the biblical accounts of David and Solomon and 
 their successors. So the Athenians looked to Homer 
 and Hesiod for guidance, in respect to facts on which 
 neither had any real bearing. Nothing is more 
 indicative of the Athenian attitude than this of 
 Aeschines, when he is attacking Demosthenes. 
 " The poet Hesiod," he says, " well interprets such 
 a case. There is a passage, meant to educate 
 democracies (!) and to counsel cities generally, 
 in which he warns us not to accept dishonest leaders. 
 I will recite the lines myself the reason, I think, for 
 
 1 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 89, sq. The Muses of 
 Hesiod " have never heard of the City State."
 
 ioo CREEK IDEALS 
 
 our learning the maxims of the poets in boyhood is 
 that we may use them as men. 
 
 ' Oft hath the bad man been the city's bane, 
 And scourged his sinless brethren for his sin ; 
 Oft hath the all-seeing Father vexed their towns 
 With dearth and death, and brought the people low, 
 Slain then" strong host, cast down the fenced wall, 
 Broken their ships upon the stormy sea.' 
 
 Strip these lines of their poetical garb, look at them 
 closely and I think you will say that these are no 
 mere verses of Hesiod's ; they are a prophesy of 
 Demosthenes' administration, for by that administra- 
 tion's agency, our ships, our armies, our cities, have 
 been swept from the world." x What is interesting 
 here is not the application of a platitude to a par- 
 ticular situation that is a common device of orators 
 but the thorough acquaintance with Hesiod 
 which is implied and the general acceptance of him 
 as an authority on political issues. We have, then, 
 in the consideration of Greek ideals to allow for the 
 immense influence of Homer and Hesiod, read as 
 uncritically by some of the Greeks as any Bible has 
 ever been. We have to allow both for the influence 
 of these books and for the freedom from their 
 influence which a completely uncritical reading 
 sometimes gives. And we have also to admit 
 that even the average Greek of the fifth century 
 cannot have been altogether untouched by the 
 adverse criticism passed upon the Epic tradition by 
 contemporary or ancient philosophers. Hesiod 
 escaped the great condemnation because of his less 
 effective influence ; and Homer has been unmerci- 
 fully handled by every moralist. We do not defend 
 him. He needs no defence : for there remains an 
 
 1 Aeschines de Corona, 134, Jebb.
 
 THE EPIC TRADITION 101 
 
 abiding glow in the Homeric tradition. The splen- 
 did form of the gods, their majesty and their 
 strength, their kindliness and their moments of real 
 feeling for us, things of a day these are great. 
 And of the heroes, we still find Achilles faithful to 
 friends, fearless of death and softened by memory of 
 his old home. Hector we still pity and love ; and 
 although Odysseus is too modern a man of business 
 to be altogether admired by us, yet we have a soft 
 place in our hearts for his wiles. After all he was 
 hard put to it, with angry gods and over-amorous 
 goddesses ; and it is indeed worthy of admiration 
 that he should come at last home.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE FIFTH CENTURY 
 
 IF we class together the great writers of the fifth 
 century it is from no desire to obscure the fact of 
 disagreements between Sophocles and Euripides 
 or Herodotus and Thucydides. Sophocles is devout 
 and Euripides critical, but Sophocles could think 
 and Euripides could be reverent. They are both 
 divided from the sentimental Virgil. Thucydides 
 was not kind to Herodotus, but he would have been 
 quite unparliamentary if he had read Livy. In this 
 large sense we can speak of the ideals of the fifth 
 century in Athens, as shown in literature. 
 
 Individuality had now appeared, and very differ- 
 ent characters were admired, very different kinds of 
 life were valued by different men in Athens. Schools 
 of thought disagreed violently. There was a move- 
 ment towards entirely new and as yet indefinite 
 standards of value. But there was still some common 
 ideal, as there was a common experience upon which 
 all in Athens could depend. We shall endeavour, 
 then, only to indicate the kind of life generally 
 held best, and the kind of character generally 
 admired. The first social bond, the religious union 
 of the polls, with its place in ritual for every member 
 of the group, had now become somewhat obscured. 
 The second social bond, the political administration 
 of the polis, with its autonomy and individual liberty 
 
 102
 
 THE FIFTH CENTURY 103 
 
 partially realised, had become familiar. And men 
 were seeking for something in life and character, the 
 hints of which are to be found in the magnificent 
 literature and plastic art of Athens. As we may 
 well imagine, it was not something simple or easily 
 stated. It was indeed something never quite 
 realised ; for Athens never contrived to achieve 
 the full splendour of which her dawn gave so much 
 promise, before the sudden end of her too shortened 
 day. We, looking back, think of Athenian litera- 
 ture and sculpture as so much achievement. But 
 perhaps we should see both more truly if we thought 
 of them as the records of an attempt to reach an 
 ideal which was never attained. For the best minds, 
 even in the fifth century, looked forward, and it is 
 their desire, their longing for better things, which 
 has inspired the work they have left. In that sense 
 there is an ideal in the literature of the fifth century. 
 So far as expression goes, the poets and historians 
 stood between the thought of average men and that 
 of the philosophers. They were more critical than 
 the average man and less able to accept what was 
 done without passing any moral judgment upon it. 
 But, on the other hand, they were "less systematic 
 than Plato and Aristotle, and did not seek to find 
 either the basis of their criticism of tradition or the 
 ultimate conclusions to which what they accepted 
 would lead them. That is to say, they were in the 
 position with regard to ideals of life and character 
 which is always that of poets and literary historians. 
 The inexactness, however, and inconclusiveness of 
 their ideas are quite forgotten in the brilliance of 
 their intellectual activities, the depth of their 
 sympathies and their unsurpassed insight into the 
 facts of life or the promise of better things. For if
 
 104 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 ethical philosophers have an advantage over 
 unphilosophic poets, they have also this disadvan- 
 tage ; they are more removed from the flow of life 
 and less able to express the heights and depths of 
 experience. They are also less able so to affect the 
 ordinary man as to give him vision or enthusiasm. 
 When, therefore, we refer to the great poets and his- 
 torians we intend to discover from them not merely 
 the insight of genius but the admirations which the 
 average man must have felt for as much as he 
 could understand of their visions. 
 
 The most excellent evidence for the fifth century 
 ideals of life in Athens is in the speech of Pericles 
 in Thucydides. But this has been quoted so 
 often and expounded so fully that we shall presume 
 here to refer to it rather by implication than by 
 direct exposition. We shall add to its central 
 thoughts the words of poets and less considered 
 indications of the Athenian ideal. 
 
 We may distinguish for our present purpose the 
 social from the purely political ideals, allowing, 
 as we have indicated, that the distinction would 
 not be as clear to a Greek as it is to us. Ceremonies 
 and processions, dinners and philosophical converse, 
 are not in our sense of the word political, although 
 to the Greek they were all integral parts of one life. 
 The social ideals of the fifth century are those of men 
 who live much in public. Everybody who was 
 anybody did, in fact, know everybody else in Athens ; 
 and the life desired was one in which this close 
 acquaintance could be developed. This is so obvious 
 in the whole literature that it needs no special 
 quotations to indicate its meaning. The citizen 
 of a modern city-region obviously desires a life of 
 isolation or of company in a small clique of his own,
 
 THE FIFTH CENTURY 105 
 
 which would be unendurable to the fifth century 
 Athenian. No one in London knows the inhabitants 
 of his own street ; and no one selects his acquaint- 
 ance from among his immediate neighbours. The 
 contrast, however, need not imply that one ideal is 
 any better than the other. The point is that fifth 
 century Athens, and much more the smaller Greek 
 cities, had what we should call village-scandal and 
 village neighbourliness without the narrowness of 
 interests which is usually found in a village. Vil- 
 lagers and country gentry generally talk of one 
 another because they do not know of any other 
 subject ; in Athens they knew one another well 
 enough to gossip, but they were aware of a sufficient 
 number of other interests for conversation. 
 
 We have already seen that the ideal social life 
 had in it religious ceremonies and political activities. 
 We need only add for the fifth century that such life 
 must be one among equals. This is, no doubt, 
 implied in Athenian religion and politics, but the 
 full meaning is developed in the fifth century con- 
 ception of tyranny as something horrible, not only 
 to the subjects but to the tyrant himself. In 
 Sophocles' Antigone Creon is the tyrant of popular 
 imagination. He is not necessarily wicked ; but 
 he is violent, absolute and, above all, he stands alone, 
 independent of the likes and dislikes of other men. 
 Antigone taunts him with the fact that all men 
 would be against him if they were not afraid ; 1 
 and the Chorus at the end meditates upon the down- 
 fall of him who stood alone. The tyrant becomes a 
 type of the unsocial man. So in Herodotus 2 it is 
 urged that he is reckless of all other men, and almost 
 a Homeric Cyclops. And at the end of Athenian 
 
 1 Antigone 505. 8 Herodotus III., 80.
 
 io6 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 civilisation, in the dialogue called the Hiero, 
 Xenophon reviews the tyrant's life from this point 
 of view. The chief unhappiness of such a life is the 
 lack of companionship among equals. 
 
 Again, the old tradition of friendship continued 
 and developed as an ideal. Achilles and Patroclus 
 were already enshrined ; but in the historians we 
 have the development of the legend of Harmodius 
 and Aristogeiton ; and in the tragedians we have 
 Orestes and Pylades, and many more. It is easy to 
 see that the ideal was a friendship of equals wth 
 great purposes in common, a friendship altogether 
 human, based upon physical beauty, and yet too 
 active in the world of affairs to become sentimental. 
 
 This social life must be one not only of public 
 interests but of public action. In this sense the 
 social ideal may be called political : for in fifth 
 century Athens anyone who did not take a sufficient 
 part in the administration of the polis was looked 
 at with suspicion. Neither private business nor 
 abstract or aesthetic interests would be held to 
 excuse an Athenian freeman from active participa- 
 tion in what must sometimes, even to them, have 
 been tiresome details of law or of public finance. 
 But although public activity was admired and culti- 
 vated, a quiet life was also allowed to be ideal, 
 if it did not involve isolation. For a man should 
 not be too busy about everything public. Indeed 
 too concentrated an attention given to public affairs 
 or the entry upon them when one was still youthful, 
 was looked at askance. The average Athenian 
 must have held that these matters must be taken 
 seriously without private ends to serve, and that 
 they demanded some maturity of experience. Thus 
 a young man is made by Lysias to say : " I have
 
 THE FIFTH CENTURY 107 
 
 understood, senators, that some people are annoyed 
 with me for this too that I presumed, though 
 rather young, to speak in the Assembly. It was 
 about my own affairs that I was first compelled 
 to speak in public : after that, however, I do suspect 
 myself of having been more ambitiously inclined 
 than I need have been partly through thinking 
 of my family, who have never ceased to be statesmen 
 partly because I saw that you (to tell the truth) 
 respect none but such men : so that, seeing this to 
 be your opinion, who would not be invited to act 
 and speak in behalf of the state ? " x This gives 
 at once the ideal of public activity and the limits 
 set by popular taste to the manner in which it was 
 exercised. And of all methods of social action, speech 
 or skill in reasoning was popularly regarded as most 
 excellent. So Antiphon is drawn by Thucydides 
 as " a man second to no Athenian of his day in 
 excellence : a proved master of device and of 
 expression." 2 Of course he was suspected, and 
 justly, by the democracy, but they could not with- 
 hold admiration. 
 
 Certainly of all the arts the Athenians loved, the 
 art of public speaking was valued most highly. 
 The audience would applaud a good antithesis. 3 
 Plato reports how Lysias would finish off his 
 speeches with the care of a good sculptor. 4 Euri- 
 pides was valued for the very facility for making 
 speeches which is abhorrent to some moderns : 
 and in later times Quintillian actually sug, 
 Euripides as a model for public speakers. 5 This 
 
 1 Lysias : pro Mantith, par. 20. Jebb's trans, in his Attic 
 Orators, 
 
 * Thucydides VIII. 68. Isocrates, Panath, par. 2. 
 
 * Phaedrus. cf. the stories given by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. 
 
 * Quint., Instit. Orat. X. i, quoted in Grote ch. Ixvii.
 
 io8 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 alone explains the delight in Athens at the coming of 
 Sophists and the immense wealth which some of 
 them are said to have acquired by training young 
 men for public speaking. 1 Indeed we should not 
 take it so much for granted as we tend to do that 
 Greek literature contains the speeches in Thucydides 
 and the works of orators from Antiphon to Demos- 
 thenes. Nothing but a sincere and enlightened 
 admiration for the power of the spoken word could 
 have produced so much. And that admiration 
 is dependent upon the conception of public speaking 
 as a fine art with exact rules, for which practice and 
 special genius were necessary. 
 
 We have, then, in fifth century Athens an ideal 
 of life which implies good-fellowship of neighbours, 
 intense personal affection and common service of 
 the city. In its basis this ideal is more natural and 
 kindly if less exalted than that for example of 
 monasticism : and in the service of the polis the 
 Athenians found all that variety of experience 
 which we have already seen to be embodied in their 
 religion, along with literature, the dance, music, 
 sculpture and architecture, which already began to 
 be recognised in their own right and not as mere 
 servitors of religion. 
 
 It goes without saying that this ideal was limited, 
 and even in its limitations never realised. But 
 criticism we need not give in great detail since any 
 modern reader with imagination can see the limita- 
 tions of Athens. No one now believes that there 
 was ever such a little town as Keats saw on the vase. 
 
 1 It has been noticed that Xenophon's army in the Anabasis 
 is more like a peripatetic parliament than a body of soldiers. 
 And, as a different example of the Greek love of speeches, Gorgias 
 is made by Plato to say that he went round with the doctor 
 to argue with the patient !
 
 THE FIFTH CENTURY 109 
 
 And in fact certain deficiencies in the ideal are 
 common to Athens and to many modern cities. 
 Society was conceived only in terms of one sex and 
 of a small social caste : even friendship was not 
 idealised except for those few male slave-owners. 
 The Athenians, except for a few Sophists and 
 Euripides, were blind to the most obvious social 
 'evils. Their very polis, exalted by being idealised 
 as an object for service, was degraded by 
 becoming an end in itself : and, again with a few 
 exceptions, the Athenians were ignorant of the 
 excellence of other cities and blindly satisfied with 
 any Athens that looked well and was materially 
 successful. 
 
 We may now turn to the more personal concep- 
 tions of the ideal during the fifth century. And in 
 this we shall consider not anything more definite 
 than the general tendency of Athenian thought in 
 so far as it pointed to improvement. What sort of 
 character was admired ? Or, rather, what govern- 
 ing moral ideas moved the Athenian in his everyday 
 life ? Or again, what did he most desire to become, 
 in so far as he desired anything definite ? 
 
 First, a full bodily development was felt to be 
 admirable. The delight in gracefulness and bodily 
 vigour was not an empty sentiment in Athens ; 
 for all citizens felt moved to make themselves 
 physically fit and agile. Such vigour was essential 
 perhaps to the military needs of the period ; but 
 the Athenians went much beyond the mere exercise 
 for possible campaigns. They valued gymnastics 
 chiefly for grace. And this must be distinguished 
 from the Roman sentiment " Mens sana in corpora 
 sano " ; for the Athenian would never have used a 
 word corresponding to " sanus." Health, indeed, is
 
 no GREEK IDEALS 
 
 not a conscious purpose for action except in a deca- 
 dent age ; and the Athenian would have looked 
 with smiling astonishment at so meagre an ideal. 
 Bodily beauty, to be found in proportion of parts, 
 suppleness and vigour, that is the beginning of 
 the fifth century ideal for the individual. And this 
 beginning is fundamentally moral, according to the 
 Athenian conception. The philosophers were to 
 explain body and spirit ; but even the average 
 Athenian knew the body to be altogether excellent 
 and all its activities to be fundamentally good and 
 in no wise vile. 
 
 The evidence is in the vase-paintings as much 
 as in the literature ; and vase-paintings are much 
 more typical of Greek feeling than is the public 
 sculpture. The fair forms and the frequent inscrip- 
 tion " beautiful " show us a feeling which is almost 
 unknown to-day, and is somewhat more unconscious 
 than is usually implied by imitators of the Greek. 
 On the vases are the supple, moving bodies, in the 
 dance, in the gathering of friends, in gymnastics 
 or at the hunt. And such pictures of his ideals 
 the Greek found in every house and street. The 
 very popularity of such vases as we now possess of 
 the fifth century shows much more than the formal 
 sculpture how genuine and how universal was the 
 Greek admiration for beauty, and of all beauty 
 for that of the human body. Sophocles was chosen 
 when he was sixteen for his personal beauty to lead 
 the choir of victory after Salamis. Akibiades was 
 quite frankly forgiven much because of his fair 
 form. And from the human body and its record 
 upon the vases we may go to the forms of the vases 
 themselves and to many other quite unofficial 
 indications that the basis of all Greek moral ideals
 
 THE FIFTH CENTURY in 
 
 of character was this saturation with what is beauti- 
 ful. We are so far removed from the naturalness 
 of tliis conception that to us it seems an aesthetic 
 convention : and we can hardly give its true value 
 to the saying of Hypereides that " one cannot live 
 beautifully unless one knows the beautiful things 
 which there are in life." 
 
 Secondly, the man most admired was to be 
 intelligent, but not an intellectualist. " The Greeks," 
 says Herodotus, " have from of old been distin- 
 guished from the barbarians as being more acute 
 and free from all foolish simplicity, and the Athenians 
 are esteemed the wisest of the Greeks." 1 And if 
 any one characteristic may be selected as being 
 most typical of the fifth century Athenian ideal it 
 is this, a man must be quick and ready in wit. 
 The evidence for this is to be found in the intellec- 
 tual quality of all fifth century literature. There is 
 an intellectual atmosphere about Greek tragedy and 
 particularly about the chief characters in it which 
 is hardly to be found in the Shakesperian tragedy. 
 It is not that Ajax talks better philosophy than 
 Hamlet : nor that the view of the world in Macbeth 
 is less exalted than in the Hippolytus. The point 
 is that a quicker wit is necessary for following the 
 verbal interchange in Sophocles and Euripides. 
 There is more contact between characters who are 
 intellectual equals : 2 and the audience must have 
 valued points of dialectic which to us appear to 
 interfere with the dramatic action. 
 
 But without admiring a fool and certainly without 
 any prejudices in favour of the " strong, silent man," 
 
 1 Herodotus I. 60. 
 
 1 e.g. Hamlet stands alone. In the play called by his name 
 he has no intellectual equal.
 
 ii2 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 the average Athenian was suspicious of the clever 
 fellow or the professed" intellectual." Quite apart 
 from the prejudices of the old school, the intelli- 
 gence admired in Athens was by no means that of 
 the specialist, still less that of the man who by his 
 intellectual interests is cut off from his fellows. In 
 this matter Plato and Aristotle do not represent 
 average Greek opinion or even Athenian opinion. 
 They stand for a new age, when new associations 
 were taking the place of the old polis in men's 
 affections or in men's minds. But in the fifth cen- 
 tury even the man of intellect was believed to be at 
 his best when in contact with the ordinary fool, 
 and even the fool accepted the idea that intelligence 
 was admirable ; for society was as yet too simple 
 for distinctions of ability to carry men far apart. 
 
 Next, the character admired is that of a man 
 who is free and yet not unrestrained. He must be 
 free, above all, from trivial cares ; but this did not 
 mean that he should be careless of the graces or 
 fineness of life. There was a largeness of spirit in the 
 Thucydidean Pericles. 1 But the " don't care " of 
 Hippoclides was absurd ; for he " stood on his head 
 on a table and gesticulated with his legs " which 
 was a freedom too un- Athenian. 2 Dignity, then, 
 gives to the ideal man what we should call an 
 aristocratic air. It must be remembered that, 
 although the Athenian citizen might object to doing 
 manual labour, he had no objection to living by the 
 manual labour of his slaves or the women of his 
 household, for he felt himself to be superior to 
 them ; and on this rests the possibility of a slave- 
 system. The system, obviously, exists first and 
 
 1 Thuc. II., 65. xccTielxev TO 
 Herodotus VI., 127.
 
 THE FIFTH CENTURY 113 
 
 produces the sense of superiority, and then the 
 system is secured and developed by this very 
 sense. 
 
 Finally, there is the conception of reserve or of 
 control, which Aristotle attempted to develop into 
 the doctrine of " the mean." The best man, it 
 was felt, was one who, while active in many interests, 
 kept a due control upon his impulses. 1 He is not the 
 philosophical ascetic of Plato, still less the strong 
 silent man of popular English fiction. For the fifth 
 century Athenians never forgot active public life 
 and bodily grace and intelligence in speech. Their 
 ideal of control in character may, perhaps, be most 
 clearly understood by reference to the contrast 
 which was probably in the Greek mind. To Greeks 
 the quintessence of barbarism was excess. They 
 saw round them the violent ecstasies of oriental 
 religion, the monstrosities of unhellenic art, the self- 
 indulgence of barbarous princes and the excessive 
 docility of peoples. They felt all these as dangers, 
 since already in the fifth century ecstasy-religion 
 and the extreme self-indulgence which results from 
 large incomes had appeared in Athens. Therefore, 
 the ideal dignity of the Greeks is reinforced and made 
 conscious in the admiration for the man who could 
 control his impulses. 
 
 To suppose that this ideal implies coldness or 
 apathy or the rigidity of a statue is to misunder- 
 stand the whole point. Sophocles, who is the most 
 perfect of all the tragedians in the reserve of his art, 
 is never cold or statuesque ; and an Athenian 
 audience could give way to tears at the fate of 
 
 1 The ideal of harmony is developed from this : but as we find 
 it in Plato, it is Orphic and Pythagorean, and therefore somewhat 
 different from the fifth-century " self-control." 
 
 I
 
 H4 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 Oedipus, as the Athenian army rrmkl weep when 
 they thought of what war was. Indeed, even in 
 Greek sculpture there is no lack of feeling, except 
 to the eyes of an observer already jaded by the violent 
 striving of moderns to attain the appearance of 
 originality. Indeed, the element of feeling in Greek 
 self-control makes the English words " temperance " 
 or " sobriety " or " prudence " or " wisdom " 
 unsuitable for rendering the Greek conception of the 
 control of impulses. Such impulses must be 
 supposed to exist: they must not simply be absent. 
 The conception may be supposed to be symbolised 
 by Greek statuary, as the conception of the natural- 
 ness of the love of beauty may be supposed to be 
 symbolised in the vase-paintings. But even in the 
 Greek ideal control of self, the emphasis is not upon 
 mere inaction but upon the action for which all 
 discipline exists. And action is dependent upon 
 the survival, in control, of impulses or feelings. 
 Indeed it was, in part, because the Greeks had violent 
 feelings that they made an ideal of reserve and 
 control. People not given to violent fits of joy or 
 grief do not trouble to urge themselves to be moder- 
 ate ; although they may indeed suppose their own 
 absence of any emotion to be a virtuous moderation. 
 But when the best voices of a great race urge men 
 to moderation we may be almost certain that the 
 race is not eminently statuesque. And indeed if 
 we look closely into the fifth century we perceive 
 that it is a tangle of intellectual and emotional 
 currents. The Greeks, and especially the Athen- 
 ians, were easily excited, and they could be moved 
 to extremes of action. For that very reason their 
 ideal man was one who kept his head and, in whatever 
 height of fortune, retained his hold upon his ambi-
 
 THE FIFTH CENTURY 115 
 
 tions, in whatever depth of despair remembered his 
 his manhood. 
 
 A word of criticism is necessary, because of the 
 limitations of this ideal of character. What was 
 in it was excellent and effective, in so far as Athen- 
 ians did really acknowledge the place of beauty in 
 its own right, the necessity for intelligence in good- 
 fellowship and the due attention to restraint. The 
 Athenian ideal of character compares favourably 
 in this sense with other apparently more exalted 
 ideals ; it was a power in the improvement of ordin- 
 ary men, for it was based upon a correct perception 
 of facts. By contrast, the lofty ideals of the Middle 
 Ages \vere given lip-service, but were singularly 
 ineffective ; and that largely because they often 
 implied a fantastic misrepresentation of human 
 nature. An ideal of character must be estimated 
 chiefly by reference to its effectiveness in producing 
 the finest quality of men. 
 
 The Athenian ideal, however, was limited in many 
 ways. In the reference to intelligence it seems to 
 have implied attention rather to manner than to 
 matter. Skill was more admired than wide know- 
 ledge the power of persuasion more than the ability 
 to prove. It is, indeed, difficult to judge the Athen- 
 ian atmosphere very exactly ; but the later pre- 
 judices against physical science seem to depend upon 
 the limitations of the fifth century view of intelli- 
 gence. The general attitude was not unlike that of 
 those who in our own day admire a culture which is 
 quite innocent of exact acquaintance with physical 
 or historical facts. Again, there was a grievous 
 limitation in the restriction of the ideal of character / 
 to a small number of the male sex. A few among 
 the Sophists, and Euripides among the tragedians
 
 n6 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 perceived that women had souls ; but the average 
 Athenian, and still more the average Greek, ignored 
 the subject or was contemptuously indifferent to it. 
 So also the average Athenian complacently supposed 
 that the ideal could not be attained by a slave ; or, 
 to put it in another way, he so conceived his ideal 
 that in fact it was unattainable by slaves. Such 
 were the limitations of the Athenian ideal in the fifth 
 century. 
 
 It has been well said, however, that the Athenians 
 were not peculiar in their slave-holding and in their 
 subjection of women. Indeed, they are character- 
 ised rather by their attempt to correct these evil 
 traditions. And even though the ideals of the 
 fifth century had serious limitations, their positive 
 excellencies are so great that we cannot afford to 
 neglect them. Some of what the fifth century con- 
 ceived as admirable we have preserved, if not in fact 
 at least in our desires. We still vaguely admire 
 beauty and intelligence and self-control. But 
 some of it has been forgotten or submerged in the 
 confusion of ideals which has followed during the 
 two thousand years of Christianity ; and we are 
 only now beginning to free ourselves both from the 
 disdain of these ancient pagans and from the equally 
 futile attempt to excuse barbaric self-indulgence as 
 Athenian.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL 
 
 THE half-conscious moral ideals embodied in and 
 developed by Athenian religion combined with the 
 newer feeling of the literary age and resulted in 
 bringing to prominence certain conceptions and 
 practices which would otherwise have been less 
 noticed because more uncritically accepted. Such 
 conceptions and practices we shall call those of the 
 old school. They imply in the first place a positive 
 moral attitude, and secondly a defensive propaganda 
 against new-fangled notions. The two are parts 
 of the same moral ideal. But for our purpose here 
 we shall distinguish the positive standards main- 
 tained from the objections against new ideals. Our 
 first task, then, must be to state and to estimate the 
 traditional moral attitude in its non-controversial 
 form. 
 
 Every moral tradition seems to create among 
 some of those whom it influences an admiration 
 for the good old times. They contrast the many 
 evils of their own experience with a time, long ago, 
 when all men were happy and contented. That was 
 the life which we must bring back again. That is 
 the ideal. So Isocrates writes that in the old days 
 " the city was not distracted with law suits and 
 grievances and taxes and penury and wars ; people 
 lived on good terms with their neighbours and peace- 
 
 117
 
 n8 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 ably with all men. Athenians . . . lived in such 
 security that the houses and establishments in the 
 country were handsomer and richer than those 
 within the wall, many citizens never coming to 
 town even for the festivals, but preferring their own 
 snug homes to a share in the bounty of the state. 
 The public spectacles, for which they might have 
 come, were managed sensibly and not with an 
 insolent profusion. People did not measure happi- 
 ness by shows, or by rivalries in the equipment of a 
 chorus, or by the like forms of pretentiousness, but 
 by soberness of life, by everyday comfort, by the 
 absence of destitution among citizens." 1 
 
 This is the belief of the old school of every age 
 there once was a " good " time ; and it matters not 
 at all in the study of moral ideals that no such time 
 can be shown to have existed. The men of the 
 fourth century say that it was in the fifth ; those of 
 the fifth say it was in the sixth : and so on infinitely. 
 The same ideal was at work when William Morris 
 looked to the thirteenth century, forgetting that 
 Dante looked to a still earlier period ; and both for- 
 got that the men of that earlier period said the 
 same " Not now, indeed, but before us men were 
 happy." So simpler men incline to say that their 
 grandfathers were fine fellows but " the old college 
 is going to the dogs," or " the House of Commons 
 is not what it was once," for reverence and faith 
 and manliness once ruled the world. The old school 
 lives upon an ignorance of history ; it is genuinely 
 moved by a simple moral ideal of life and character 
 which its own imagination has created. And when 
 evil becomes obvious, it is the new-fangled notions 
 that are to blame. " Trying new dodges" has brought 
 1 Isocrates, Areop. par. 51 sq. Jebb's trans.
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL 119 
 
 Athens down in the world, as Aristophanes, in 
 393 B.C., makes his protagonist say : 
 
 " And would it not have saved the Athenian state 
 If she kept to what was good and did not try 
 Always some new plan ? MI 
 
 As for the moral standard, the old school knows 
 that these things were to be found in the good old 
 days the country life, frugal simplicity, the manly 
 man and the womanly woman. 
 
 There is, first, the admiration for the country life. 
 The literature of Athens is city literature ; but 
 Athens was more like a small agricultural town 
 than like a modern city-region. The air of the 
 country blew into its streets everywhere ; and an 
 ideal of life could not fail to reflect this nearness to 
 hills and fields. " Even in the winter season," 
 says Aristophanes, " you can buy crowns of violets 
 in Athens." 2 And men were not Greek, still less 
 Athenian, who could forget the water-springs and 
 the violets and the olives and the figs. In such an 
 air life would be indeed ideal, but not, to the minds 
 of the old school, in the confusion and noise of city 
 streets. They therefore dreamed of the country 
 life as the only happy one. This not liberty nor 
 the drama nor anything else, made life worth living. 
 But this ideal is that of an old school because, in the 
 period of Athenian greatness, the agricultural and 
 pastoral life had already faded somewhat into the 
 background. Athens had become a shipping, trad- 
 ing and manufacturing centre. And yet the founda- 
 tion of Athenian, as of all Greek city life, had been 
 laid in the close dependence of the city upon the 
 agricultural region in which it was built. The city 
 men might despise the country folk, but the old 
 
 1 Ecclesiazousai 218. * Seasons. Quoted by Athenaeus, IX. 14.
 
 120 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 school ^ knew, the country as the place for more 
 honesty and less talk, for peace and the good fellow- 
 ship of neighbours. So Demos, who is the old 
 Athens, in Aristophanes' Knights, when he reforms 
 the state and purifies morals, sends the young men 
 back to the land to dig and to hunt. 1 
 
 There is no doubt that Socrates' likings are being 
 contrasted with this older feeling when Plato makes 
 him say that he does not go into the country because 
 the company is bad. 2 He liked well enough the 
 plane-tree shade and the running water, but that is 
 the pleasure of a city man. He hated ploughed 
 fields and vacant hours of watching with no one 
 to talk to ; but that is precisely what the old school 
 loved. The grievance of the farmer class, when 
 they had to move into Athens because war had 
 devastated their fields, is expressed by Aristo- 
 phanes. 3 To them the quiet of the country-side 
 must have seemed the old and worthy way of life 
 by contrast with the bustle and crowding of the 
 city ; and their feelings would have a counterpart 
 among the older men even in the city. But the old 
 life was gradually disappearing ; and what the 
 early fifth century had accepted as the nature of 
 things the end of the century remembered as a past 
 golden age, so that men transformed a fading memory 
 into a moral ideal. 
 
 The country life is described with genuine affection 
 by Aristophanes in the Peace. " What we yearn for 
 are those fig-cakes and figs and myrtles and violets 
 by the well and olives." 4 And again " There's 
 
 1 Knights 1670. 2 Phaedrus 230 d. 
 
 3 Acharnians3os$'. of. Thucydides II. 14 : " The change was 
 very painful, for the greater part of the Athenians had been 
 accustomed for generations to live in the country." 
 
 Peace, 574 sq.
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL 121 
 
 nothing sweeter than when the sowing is over and 
 God sends the rain, to hear our neighbour say 
 ' What'll we do ? Let's have a drink, now God is 
 kind. Mother ! bring out the beans and barley 
 and figs. . . . Syra, call Manes in from the fields 
 . . . let's have some hare three plates for us and 
 one for father call Charinades in for a drink as you 
 pass, for God guards the harvest. When the cicala 
 sings his sweet song, I love to watch the Lemnian 
 grapes and see if they are full for that kind ripens 
 early. And the fig I wait till it be soft to pluck and 
 eat. And I bless the kindly seasons, and I grate 
 and mix the thyme ; so I grow fat and fatter, while 
 the summer lasts." 1 
 
 These must stand for many like passages in 
 which there is evidence of the old love of country 
 joys and country scenes. And this love was more 
 genuine in fifth century Athens than in the Alex- 
 andria of the days of Theocritus or in the London of 
 the days when pastoral plays were written. For 
 the life of the countryside was known in Athens to 
 be more full-blooded than pastoral poetry implies. 
 There were no china shepherdesses in the minds of 
 the old school : and even the sentimentalism of 
 bucolic poetry had not yet appeared. This ideal 
 life stands, then, not for a revolt against accepted 
 usages so much as for the pull of an actual experience 
 which was passing away. To define it more would 
 perhaps involve reading too much into the minds of 
 the old school. It was the life of the good men of 
 old, and that sufficed. It was the life not only 
 
 1 Peace 1140 sq. It is interesting to contrast the agricultural 
 ideal of the country life in Athens with "the forest" as the 
 free and noble life in Mediaeval England, cf. Shakespeare's 
 " As you like it."
 
 122 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 of the simple farmer, but of what we should call the 
 country gentleman ; and in that latter form it 
 would naturally be established as the ideal. For 
 there was this social distinction in the Athenian 
 mind : but the old school stood for the country 
 life in all its forms. Indeed the good fellowship of 
 country-lovers makes social distinctions unimport- 
 ant, so the old school would like to believe. 
 
 With the love of the country has always gone an 
 admiration for simplicity ; and for that reason in 
 modern times " the return to nature " has been 
 combined with " the simple life " as a moral ideal. 
 First, what is urban is subtle and all but dishonest ; 
 and what is countrified is straightforward. This 
 is, obviously, and always was, pure myth. The 
 countryman is by no means, and never was, guile- 
 less. Only the china shepherdess is more innocent 
 than the city girl : for the real shepherdess knows 
 too much to be a seemly decoration for a mantel- 
 piece in a drawing-room. But the myth expresses 
 a moral ideal. The country life in this sense is 
 part of the good old times, pure fairy-tale ; but 
 what does that matter ? 
 
 Even the city life of Greece, however, and especi- 
 ally that of Athens, retained at least material 
 simplicity. The Athenians were not rich men at 
 the time when their city was greatest. There were, 
 of course, the noblesse doree ; and most men, then 
 as now, really admired a show of riches. Alkibiades 
 did not really offend any one but later moralists 
 when he made his great show at Olympia. 1 Indeed 
 Athens felt proud of him. " She loves and she 
 detests and longs to have him," says Dionysus in 
 Aristophanes' Frogs.- But although the wealthy 
 
 1 Thucydides, VI. 16.2. J irogs, 1675.
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL 123 
 
 and the reckless may have been admired ; we cannot 
 say that Athens ever adopted the standards of 
 Imperial Rome or of modern cities. An Athenian 
 banquet was noted for frugality ; and indeed a show 
 of riches or an excessive amount of eatables was 
 thought to prove that you could not depend upon 
 the guests enjoying the conversation. 
 
 The poverty of Athens did not, however, exclude 
 the possibility of being victimised by a collector of 
 funds. A certain Aeschines is thus drawn : " The 
 neighbouring shopkeepers from whom he gets on 
 credit goods for which he never pays, have shut up 
 their shops and gone to law with him. Are not 
 his neighbours so cruelly used by him that they have 
 left their houses and are trying to take others at a 
 distance ? Whenever he has collected club sub- 
 scriptions, he fails to hand over the payments of 
 the other members and they are wrecked on this 
 little tradesman like chariots at the turning-post 
 of the course. Such a crowd goes at daybreak to 
 his house to demand the sums due to them that 
 passers-by fancy the people have come to attend a 
 funeral." 1 
 
 This half humorous description by Lysias, the 
 literary man who was a friend of Socrates and Plato, 
 gives us a. certain insight into the actual simplicity 
 of Athens. And this is easily made into an ideal 
 when incomes become disproportionate. When the 
 old school looked back to the old days, already most 
 of the Athenians, free men as they were, had to 
 exist upon a pittance from the public funds. But 
 the old school always sees the excellence of 
 poverty, especially when it is not their own. 
 Frugal simplicity is the way that other people 
 
 1 Lysias, Frag. I. Jebb, Attic Orators, p. 184 note.
 
 124 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 ought to live : and it is to be found most ideally 
 in the country. 
 
 Those who set the tone of the old school in their 
 view of the" country were what we should call small 
 farmers. They held in Attica the position of a 
 conservative democracy. They were freeholders 
 of small holdings, by contrast with the large land- 
 owners who set the tone in Sparta. But even in 
 Attica the ideal man of the country life is aristo- 
 cratic. The man who is "of kingly disposition," 
 an early riser, a keen agriculturist and a governor 
 of his bailiffs and dependants, is described in the 
 second half of Xenophon's Economist. He is 
 perhaps in part an ideal construction ; but even 
 as such, he is important as giving us an indication 
 of the best elements in the " manly man." Reading 
 between the lines, we perceive that the manly man 
 is physically developed and slow-witted, with a 
 sublime self-confidence and an honesty of purpose 
 as great as the evil he causes by being unable to see 
 the results of his own actions. He believes that 
 athletics develops character : for by character he 
 means reliability ; and he calls a man reliable of 
 whom he can feel certain that he will always do what 
 every one else does who is of the same social class. 
 The xaXox<xYa06<; always is a model of " good form." 
 But we must not be unkind. He is a fine fellow, 
 in his simple way. 
 
 We have an admirable account of him in Xeno- 
 phon's tractate on Hunting. 1 We see him going 
 out " in a loose light hunting dress, with foot-gear 
 
 1 The beginning and end of this are not by Xenophon but 
 there is no reason to suspect the central part of the tractate, 
 and in any case the spirit is clearly Xenophon's. cf. the dis- 
 cussion in the introduction to Mr. Dakyns' translation, vol. III., 
 part 2.
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL 125 
 
 to match and a stout stick in his hand." Before 
 the hunt begins " he will pray and give promise 
 to Apollo and to Artemis, our Lady of the Chase, to 
 share with them the produce of spoil." x Then, 
 when the hunt of the hare is up and the chase grows 
 hot, he wraps his cloak about his left arm, snatches 
 his stick and runs with the hounds, shouting to 
 the keeper, " Mark her, boy, mark her ! hey, lad ! 
 hey, lad ! " Or perhaps the hounds have outrun 
 him and he " cries to a passer-by as he tears along, 
 ' Hallo there, have you seen my hounds ? ' They 
 lose the scent or they are off again or, at the close 
 of the chase, they search everywhere for " the hare 
 that lies dead-beat." If it be a summer noon when 
 he stops " he will take care to halt on the way home 
 so that the feet of his hounds may not be blistered 
 on the road." The character of the man stands out 
 in this rapid sketch of a morning's hunt. And 
 sometimes he will go for bigger game. For deer he 
 will go with javelins ; or he may set traps in the 
 hills which he will inspect early in the morning ; - 
 or he will hunt wild boars, but not alone. Some- 
 times the boar turns on his assailant : then you wait 
 with your boar-spear fixed, " legs wider apart than 
 in wrestling," then lunge so that the boar does not 
 knock the spear out of your hand. If he does, 
 " the huntsman must throw himself upon his face, 
 and clutch tight hold of the brushwood under him, 
 since if the boar should attack him in that posture, 
 owing to the upward curve of its tusks, it cannot 
 get under him." 3 The beast stands and tramples 
 on him. Then a fellow huntsman provokes the 
 boar " making as though he would let fly at him ; 
 
 1 Xcn. Hunting, VI. n sq. *id. IX. 17. 
 
 * id. X. 13 sq.
 
 126 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 but let fly he must not, for fear of hitting the man 
 under him. The boar, seeing this, will leave the 
 fallen man, and in rage and fury turn to grapple 
 with his assailant. The other shall seize the instant 
 to spring to his feet and not forget to clutch his 
 boar-spear as he rises." Here is fresh air and keen 
 life and bravery and all that makes what Xenophon 
 and, one supposes, the old school with him, most 
 admired. 
 
 But conclusions are drawn in the same tractate 
 as to character and life. 1 From hunting one has 
 " health and quickening of eye and ear, and defiance 
 of old age." Such toil gives true nobility. 2 A 
 contrast comes to one's mind. In the perhaps too 
 satiric essay on " Exercise" in the Spectator, 3 health 
 and character are urged as reasons for hunting. But 
 the Greek feeling is very different from the English. 
 To the Greek health is quickness of eye and ear and 
 the outward suppleness of the body. It is TO xaXov. 
 For the body is a thing of outward and visible 
 splendour. To the English squire health means 
 digestion. " I consider the body," says the Spec- 
 tator, " as a system of tubes and glands, or, to use 
 a more rustic phrase, a bundle of pipes and strainers 
 fitted to one another after so wonderful a manner 
 as to make a proper engine for the soul to work with." 
 What could any soul do with such an instrument 
 except digest roast beef? "This description," the 
 Spectator continues, " does not only comprehend 
 the bowels, bones, tendons, veins, nerves and arteries, 
 but every muscle and every ligature, which is a 
 
 1 ch. xii. I neglect ch. xiii. as bad-tempered and less 
 valuable ; even if it is by Xenophon, it is in his cantankerous 
 mood. 
 
 1 " These are ' the best.' " 
 
 * Exercise : Sir Roger as Sportsman.
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL 127 
 
 composition of fibres that are so many imperceptible 
 tubes or pipes interwoven on all sides with invisible 
 glands or strainers." There must therefore be 
 exercise " to mix, digest, and separate the juices," 
 which will keep the understanding clear, and keep 
 off " spleen " in men and " vapours " in women. 
 The whole essay is an illumination. To the modern 
 man not only to the English squire the body 
 is all " insides " ; to the Greek it was fair form and 
 supple movement. And the contrast is well seen 
 in the prints and drawings of red-faced fox-hunters, 
 if we put them beside Xenophon's huntsmen or the 
 youths on the vase-paintings. From such compari- 
 sons one may understand the best that was in the 
 ideal of the old school at Athens. 
 
 With this ideal country life of the old school 
 went a genuine affection for animals ; and we should 
 not fail to notice it in considering the moral quality 
 of the Greeks. Xenophon says that the hunted 
 hare is so supple that one might well " be lost in 
 astonishment at her beauty." His affection does not 
 prevent his killing her ; but that is only the ingenuous- 
 ness of the old school. And for dogs there is no better 
 feeling in literature than in Xenophon where he 
 gives us the names of the pack and where he tells 
 us to be careful to give them a rest at noon. But of 
 all animals the Greek knows and loves best the horse. 
 That is expressed in their sculpture and in their 
 legends. And Xenophon as an exponent of the 
 old school is perhaps at his best when he speaks 
 of the horse. It reveals much as to character to 
 hear such keen appreciation for the psychology 
 as we should call it, of the horse, combined with 
 what we seem to value less, an enthusiasm for its 
 grace and strength. The treatise on Horsemanship
 
 128 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 makes a great point of gentleness in dealing with the 
 horse. For the horse is to learn " not fondness merely, 
 but an absolute craving for human beings." * "A 
 good deal can be done by touching and stroking." 
 " The groom must take his charge through crowds 
 . . . and if the colt is disposed to shy he must teach 
 him not by cruel but by gentle handling that they 
 are not really formidable." And again " the golden 
 rule in dealing with a horse is never to approach 
 him angrily . . . Thus when a horse is shy of any 
 object and refuses to approach it, you must teach 
 him that there is nothing to be alarmed at, parti- 
 cularly if he is a plucky animal ; or failing that, 
 touch the formidable object yourself and then 
 gently lead the horse up to it. The opposite plan 
 of forcing the frightened creature by blows only 
 intensifies its fear, the horse mentally associating 
 the pain he suffers at such moment with the object 
 of suspicion, which he naturally regards as its cause." 2 
 So in dealing with temper or spirit in a horse, 
 remember " that it takes the place of anger or passion 
 in a man ; and just as you may best avoid exciting 
 a man's ill-temper by not using harsh speech and 
 rough action, so you will best avoid enraging a 
 spirited horse by not annoying him." 3 Such an 
 understanding of animals is completed by genuine 
 admiration. A horse with free and joyous action 
 is a splendid sight : " Listen to what lookers-on 
 say The noble animal ! What willingness to work ! 
 What paces ! . . . A joy at once and a terror to 
 behold ! " 4 So in the processions you should have 
 " a high stepper and a showy animal." The gods 
 themselves care for these things. " Mane, forelock, 
 
 1 Horsemanship II., par. 4. Dakyns' trans. 
 
 1 id. VI., par. 13. J id. IX., par. 2, sq. *id. t. par. 17.
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL 129 
 
 and tail are triple gifts bestowed by the gods." 1 
 And "the horses on which gods and heroes ride, as 
 represented by the artist, have fine airs and graces. 
 The majesty of men themselves is best discovered 
 in the graceful handling of such animals." 2 There 
 speaks the Athenian. " A prancing horse is a 
 thing of beauty, a wonder and a marvel, riveting 
 the gaze of all who see him, young alike and grey- 
 beards. They will never turn their backs or weary 
 of gazing so long as he continues to display his 
 splendid action." Comment is superfluous. We 
 see here the feeling which made the frieze of the 
 Parthenon possible. 
 
 The " manly man " is one ideal of character to 
 the old school : the other is the " womanly woman." 
 She is either the mother of fifteen children or so 
 obviously interested in nothing else that one may 
 give her credit for fifteen although they may never 
 have been born. She is created for his own glory 
 by the obtuseness of the manly man out of his own 
 fifth rib. Her excellence is partly due to the fact 
 that she, the model woman, is the conservative of 
 conservatives. Aristophanes is a witness ; but 
 unfortunately for our purpose the wit of the come- 
 dian puts an alloy of realism into the figure of the 
 womanly woman. 
 
 " They roast their barley, sitting, as of old : 
 They on their heads bear burdens, as of old : 
 They keep their Thesmophoria, as of old : 
 They bake their honied cheesecakes, as of old : 
 They victimise their husbands, as of old : 
 They still secrete their lovers, as of old : 
 They buy themselves sly dainties, as of old : 
 They love their wine un watered, as of old." * 
 
 1 Horsemanship, V., par. 7. * id. XI., par. 9. 
 
 * Ecclesiasousai, 220 sq. Roger's trans. 
 K
 
 130 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 The very mingling of the elements of admiration 
 for old times, and a sly wink at actual facts is in 
 the mood of the old school. For although Aristo- 
 phanes can hardly be called simple-minded, the 
 oldest of the old school have that strange combina- 
 tion of views about women they are angels of 
 the home and yet really the work of the devil 
 himself. 
 
 Xenophon is a more ingenuous witness ; and he 
 has given us the womanly woman from her child- 
 hood up. The model wife is so young 1 as to be 
 hardly worth conversing with, and is married after 
 an education in " seeing and hearing as little as 
 possible and asking the fewest questions." 2 She 
 is then " tamed " by her husband, the metaphor 
 implies the domesticating of a timid wild animal. 
 And the husband says to her, " Don't imagine I 
 married you or your parents gave you to me from 
 any difficulty that either of us might have in finding 
 another bedfellow. Any one might do. But it was 
 because we thus could make the best (business) 
 partners." And as to your duties " God from birth 
 provided the woman's nature for indoor and the 
 man's for outdoor occupation." 2 ..." Thus for 
 a woman to bide tranquilly at home rather than 
 roam abroad is no dishonour, but for a man to 
 remain indoors, instead of devoting himself to 
 outdoor pursuits, is a thing discreditable." 3 This 
 is so delightful as hardly to need commentary. We 
 have seen the making of the angel ; and now we must 
 understand her beatific vision. It is her husband. 
 " The greatest joy of all," says the husband in 
 
 1 Econ.'III.,'i2, VII., 5 (15 years old). Ar. Pol. VII. 13350. 
 1 id. VII. 23. 
 3 id. VII. 30.
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL 131 
 
 Xenophon, " will be to prove yourself my better ; 
 to make me your faithful follower ; knowing no 
 dread lest as the years advance you should decline 
 in honour to your household, but rather trusting 
 that though your hair turn grey, yet in proportion 
 as you come to be a better helpmate to myself and 
 to the children, a better guardian of our home, so 
 will your honour increase throughout the household 
 as mistress, wife and mother, daily more dearly 
 prized." 1 Then follows a long sermon on order 
 and arrangement which the husband says his wife 
 was delighted to hear, but it all arose out of the fact 
 that he could not find something and his wife did 
 not know where it was. Pots and pans and arrange- 
 ments for breeding slaves properly are all carefully 
 described. 
 
 In spite, however, of this delightful life and the rapt 
 gaze upon her spouse, the devil came in. The lady 
 took to enamelling her skin and using rouge and 
 wearing high-heeled shoes ; upon which she received 
 another sermon, 2 her husband suggesting that 
 making the beds would be better for her complexion. 
 The worthy husband then shows how the limb of 
 Satan is converted and delights in nothing more than 
 in making the beds. 
 
 It would be unfair, however, to the ingenuous 
 Xenophon if we did not allow also for the fact that 
 he appreciated, as others of the old school often did, 
 the genuine affection of man and woman. It is 
 not always a question of believing in an angel with 
 a practical eye to keeping an effective upper servant ; 
 the old school is quite seriously romantic. Xeno- 
 phon has written in the Cyropaedeia the first love 
 story 1*1 Greek literature. The woman there is 
 
 iEcon. VII. 43. *id. X. 
 
 . 
 
 ^ ft*
 
 
 132 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 married and is loved passionately by a romantic 
 soldier who has captured her ; but she is strong 
 and fine, and her devotion to her husband is drawn 
 as the affection of an intellectual equal. To this 
 the old school could occasionally rise. 
 
 Thus we conclude that the positive ideal of those 
 who looked into the past for a better life and finer 
 characters combines elements of real moral excellence 
 with a moral obtuseness that is hardly to be sur- 
 passed in any age. The collection of slightly mean 
 moral platitudes to which they might be driven 
 when they were asked to express themselves, may 
 be found most candidly collected in the letter of 
 Isocrates to Democritos. It was written as late as 
 374 B.C., but the sentiments are old as the hills. 
 " First," says the writer to the youth, " be religious, 
 both in sacrifice and in keeping your oaths. For 
 that is the way to be lucky in business and to have 
 a good character. Always reverence the divine- 
 few/ especially in the way that every one else does. 1 
 For thus you will appear both to worship the gods 
 and to keep the laws. Be to your parents what you 
 want your children to be to you. Take exercise not 
 for strength but for health ; and stop before you are 
 over-tired. Think it not right to talk of what you 
 would be ashamed to do. Remember that the 
 majority do not know the truth they look to one's 
 reputation. . . Don't indulge yourself too much. 
 . . . Don't make any one your friend before finding 
 out what sort of man he has been to his former 
 friends. . . . Don't be eager to make friends, but 
 try to stick to it when you are in. ... Try your 
 friends in misfortune, for gold is tried in a furnace 
 and a friend in adversity. Beware of those who
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL 133 
 
 have money and don't know how to use it. They are 
 like a man who has a good horse and rides badly. 
 Look after your income ; you never can tell what 
 might happen. Do good to good men, for it is a 
 good treasure to lay up thankfulness in a trust- 
 worthy man. ... Be moderate in drink. . . . 
 Think nothing human safe. . . . Avoid blame 
 rather than danger. . . . Try to live in security, but 
 if danger comes, seek safety in war with dignity, not 
 ill-repute. Fate brings death to all ; but nature 
 a good death to the brave." 1 The rendering of 
 Greek ideals would be incomplete without the 
 candour of this miserable prudence masquerading as 
 morality. Some Greeks, and not the most foolish, 
 admired this sort of thing ; and the best of the old 
 school cannot escape the charge that this is part of 
 the wisdom of the good old times. " Always rever- 
 ence the divine but especially in the way that the 
 community does." This is the criterion of action 
 which has slipped out ; and by it the old school 
 must be judged. It combines their genuine ideal- 
 ism with their ludicrous obtuseness in regard to 
 moral questions. 
 
 But it is a postulate of the old school that the 
 old times exist no more. They have a grievance. 
 Both as to life and as to character they are pained 
 to know that their standards of excellence are not 
 universally admitted ; and they therefore adopt an 
 attitude of protest. Against what do they protest ? 
 First, against the supposed " unsettling " effects of 
 reasoning. We have an example of the effect of the 
 " new thought " upon a less vigorous mind than 
 Plato's, but one which was able to appreciate the 
 points made against the conventional view of 
 
 1 Isocrates, Ep. I., in the Teubner text.
 
 134 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 morality. It is the Dissoi Logoi. 1 And we shall 
 refer to it here simply as an example of what the 
 average Athenian might regard as dangerous. The 
 fragmentary discussion in this work turns on the 
 opposing views of moral problems which, it seems, 
 may equally well be held. It begins abruptly 
 " There are two views maintained in Greece by 
 philosophers about good and evil." On the one 
 hand the same things may be either, and the point 
 of view makes the only difference. The defeat of 
 the Persians was bad for them and good for Greece. 
 On the other hand it is absurd to suppose that the 
 same fact is referred to when you say you have done 
 good and when you say you have done harm to 
 anyone. The conclusion is that you might on the 
 one hand hold that good and evil were to be found 
 in every act ; or on the other that some acts were 
 good and some bad. 
 
 The same sort of attitude is adopted towards the 
 distinction between what is decorous and indecorous. 
 Here the arguments are intended to show that you 
 might hold that the distinction was purely conven- 
 tional or " subjective " or you might hold that the 
 two ideas do refer to objectively distinct facts. 
 But the force of the argument is not what would 
 most annoy the conventional. They would be more 
 pained by the cool reference to distinctions of 
 custom. " The Massagetae cook and eat their 
 parents, and they think it a fine tomb to be buried 
 in their children : but in Greece if any one did this 
 sort of thing he would be driven forth to die as a 
 
 1 Diels. Vorsokr. II. p. 334 sq. (Edit. 1912). It fills about a 
 dozen pages of text. It is believed to have been written about 
 404 B.C. ; and perhaps in Megara. cf. Taylor Varia Socratica,
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL 135 
 
 shameless villain." x It makes little difference to 
 the old-fashioned that the philosopher can make as 
 good a case against as for the subjectivity of all 
 standards of action or belief. From the purely 
 philosophic point of view the interest to us now, 
 and to those for whom the book was written, must 
 lie in the quality of the arguments used : but in 
 judging the old-fashioned Athenian the secondary 
 interest the collection of opposed customs and 
 irreconcilable beliefs must be regarded as most 
 important. For we can well imagine the pained 
 surprise of a true believer who hears his own tradi- 
 tion treated as merely one among many. The old 
 faith depends for its security upon being the truth 
 as compared with all possible errors. But when your 
 young men coolly classify you among the rest, you 
 perceive the looseness of their morals and the 
 strangeness of their belief. It is the young who have 
 gone wrong, according to the old school. For in 
 the old days no one argued the case as to whether 
 what our forefathers did was right but now that 
 argument is in the air every sacred custom has lost 
 its hold, and even we of the old school do not feel 
 so certain of ourselves as we should like. 
 
 There is another Dissoi Logoi, the quarrel of the 
 Just and the Unjust Reason in Aristophanes' Clouds.' 2 
 :< The old school for the youth," says Just Reason, 
 " was like this first, one might not hear a boy's 
 voice whispering, those of the same district walked in 
 order through the streets to the music-master's, 
 without overcoats even in thick snow. Then the 
 master taught them, sitting without crossing their 
 legs, either " Dread Pallas, Sacker of cities," or 
 " Some far-flung note," fitting the scale their 
 
 1 id. 639 sq. * 889 sq.
 
 136 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 fathers left. Any new-fashioned variations would 
 be rewarded with a whipping. . . ." "An obsolete 
 business," Unjust Reason interrupts, " like the 
 Bouphonia." And the orthodox reply in every age 
 " These old customs made our national heroes. 
 Now you teach the youth to molly-coddle. . . 
 But if you follow the better older Reason, you will 
 keep clear of the market place and the hot baths ; 
 and you will blush when you ought and be indignant 
 if anyone laughs at you. You will give up your 
 seats to older men and not be rude to your parents, 
 and not lose shame. And you won't go to the 
 dancing-girl's and get pelted with quinces by her 
 and lose your reputation. And you won't contra- 
 dict your father and call him " the old 'un." The 
 result will be that you will be strong and healthy 
 and not a babbler with no shoulders and a pasty 
 face." 
 
 The Unjust Reason, replies, with a sly hit at 
 " Eristic," by an argument in which he forces 
 the Just Reason to say that tradition itself is against 
 him ! For Heracles liked hot baths and good 
 dinners ; and " heroes " were not always strictly 
 moral. But as a second argument, if you give up 
 the old-fashioned ideas, " you'll have a fine time of 
 it with girls and wine and laughter, and you'll be 
 able to defend yourself too in a court of law." * 
 And " Just Reason " is compelled to admit that he 
 might find some advantages in that. So the 
 comedian twists the charge against " the new life " 
 it is less strict, but it is real living and not solemn 
 ritual. 
 
 What the orthodox Athenian would have said 
 to Aristophanes as a defender of old times is not 
 1 1073-
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL 137 
 
 so easily grasped as commentators imagine. The 
 comedy cuts both ways ; and the general discomfort 
 of the old school would not be eased by hearing 
 abuse of new-fangled notions combined with incon- 
 venient innuendo about the good old days. If 
 one is to decry the new ideas as immoral it must 
 obviously be maintained that there was no loose 
 living in the old days and that no good men practise 
 new customs. But when we put the good old days 
 face to face with the new life, the result is not such 
 as would leave even the traditionalist quite satis- 
 fied. His general objection to criticising anything 
 would, however, still survive. When it is pointed 
 out that the men of the good old days were not 
 exactly all they should have been, the old school 
 is reduced to mere annoyance at such insolence. 
 As Aristophanes l puts it : 
 
 " Hence moreover 
 
 You discover 
 That to sit with Socrates 
 In a dream of learned ease 
 Quibbling, counterquibbling, prating, 
 Argufying and debating 
 With the metaphysic sect, 
 Daily drinking in neglect, 
 Growing careless, incorrect, 
 While the practice and the rules 
 Of the true poetic schools 
 Are renounced or slighted wholly, 
 Is a madness and a folly." 
 
 The trouble clearly was the " unset tlement." 
 Tradition was not reverenced as it should be. 
 Why ? The old school readily asserted that it was 
 all on account of this new-fangled reasoning and 
 arguing about everything ; but what they meant was 
 
 1 Frogs, 1764.
 
 138 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 that the knowledge of foreign customs and non- 
 Athenian beliefs had at last compelled the few who 
 could not help thinking to compare beliefs and cus- 
 toms. We indeed can see, as Socrates saw, that 
 the unsettlement was due not to reasoning but to 
 tradition : for it was not due to reasoning that one 
 tradition contradicted another or that one people 
 held actions right which another held wrong. Our 
 tradition only fails to be unsettling when we are 
 ignorant of any other person's tradition ; and in that 
 sense knowledge of another tradition is the source 
 of unsettlement. But the knowledge of another 
 tradition does not disturb unless we can think of 
 our own tradition in exactly the same way as we 
 think of the tradition of others. 
 
 The habit of seeing two sides to a question was 
 obviously not a violent break with the Athenian 
 tradition ; it may be in a sense the legitimate 
 development of the Athenian love of the law-court. 
 Out of that love the lawyer advocate and special 
 pleader rose to pre-eminence in Athens ; and it is 
 the very essence of the advocate that he should 
 be able to make out a case for any person on any 
 ground. That simple men might be worried by 
 this seemingly evil agility of mind is easily under- 
 stood. So the two Athenians in Aristophanes' 
 Birds seek " some easier unlitigious place." x But 
 most Athenians delighted in a good argument, and 
 the speech writers made their living sometimes 
 a very good one by providing Dissoi Logoi of a 
 practical kind. Of these the best examples are 
 the Tetralogies of Antiphon. 2 They are models 
 
 1 Birds, 51 sq. " Our Athenians sit chirping and discussing 
 all the year, perched upon points of evidence and law." 
 1 cf. Jebb, Attic Orators I. 45 sq.
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL 139 
 
 for plaintiff and defendant in cases of homicide. 
 Short renderings are given of what (i) the accuser 
 may first say, then of what (2) the defendant might 
 reply, then of what (3) the accuser may answer to 
 that, and of what (4) the defendant may further 
 urge. The argument is sometimes subtle, as in the 
 case of the boy killed by accident : the thrower of 
 the javelin which killed him urges that the boy is 
 to blame for he was in the way ; to which the accuser 
 replies by saying that he is a plain man and cannot 
 follow this sort of thing. 1 Antiphon, the writer 
 of these model speeches, was indeed one of the 
 " dangerously subtle " party : but he was not a 
 philosopher and certainly was not disliked for his 
 skill. It was when the traditionalist Athenian 
 began to feel that this same method of his law-courts 
 could be used for criticising his tradition that the 
 resentment began to be felt. This is the point 
 concerning the attitude of the old school that 
 is not sufficiently appreciated. They remained 
 Athenian and therefore liked clever general speeches. 
 They had no objection whatever to the teachers of 
 rhetoric, the art of getting on or of political speaking. 
 No historical ground can be given for any Athenian's 
 confusing Gorgias and Protagoras with Socrates ; and 
 there was no general feeling against the wandering 
 scholars, the Sophists. There was, perhaps, a 
 feeling that they ought not to make fortunes out 
 of " benefiting humanity," a feeling which was 
 stronger among the later philosophers than among 
 the ordinary public. But in general the method 
 of the Sophists was not disliked, since it was based 
 upon the common Greek admiration for public 
 speaking ; and the purpose of the Sophists was not 
 
 'Tetral. II.
 
 140 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 disliked, since it was simply success in public life 
 and this was to every Greek a very legitimate ambi- 
 tion. It is quite clear that the average Athenian 
 objected to what was peculiar to Socrates and not 
 to what he shared with other Sophists ; that is 
 to a dialectic as opposed to a hortatory method 
 and a purpose which did not seem to give sufficient 
 importance to established political institutions and 
 established moral standards. The Sophist in so 
 far as he was a teacher, even a foreign teacher, of 
 method, was not disliked, and he was not laughed 
 at by Aristophanes. It was the scientific man be- 
 longing to a half-religious Academy, and not the 
 literary man, who was felt to be dangerous. Arguing 
 about what every one had taken for granted was the 
 offence, and, still more, pressing such arguments 
 to a conclusion. For the old school did not object 
 to a clever speech if its conclusion was not a new one ; 
 exactly as the orthodox in every age do not object 
 to reason being an " ancilla fidei " or " proving " 
 what they already believe to be true. What they 
 did object to was the implication that they did not 
 already know what was true, especially with respect 
 to morals. 
 
 The Athenians seem to have resented the idea of 
 " science " as applied either to nature (y) rap! 9ucreco<; 
 iGTopia) or to political life. Hence Aristophanes 
 can make points against Socrates in the Clouds 
 and against Euripides in the Frogs. In the 
 Clouds Socrates is drawn as a mathematical 
 or physical scientist ; and this is not unlikely to 
 have been true of Socrates in 423 B.C. when the 
 Clouds was written. 1 He has adopted the theory 
 
 1 For the whole argument cf. Taylor, Varia Socratica, ist 
 Series, ch. 4.
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL 141 
 
 of the Anaxagorean scientists that the earth is a 
 centre of rotatory motion (Sivrj) 1 which is cleverly 
 twisted by Aristophanes into a belief in " the heavenly 
 whirligig " (6 alOspioc, Slvo^). This has taken the 
 place of the personal explanation of natural phenom- 
 ena. Zeus no longer " rains " but the " Clouds " 
 rain ; and they are controlled by this force. 2 Be- 
 neath the fancy of the comic poet one feels the dis- 
 comfort of the average Athenian at these " new- 
 fangled" ideas. For although he would not say 
 that the new ideas were false, he would feel that 
 it was not quite " nice " to indulge at all in such 
 ideas. 
 
 So also with practical issues, the old school feels 
 uncomfortable when a scientific view is taken of 
 them, that is, when the thinker says that it is no 
 criterion of right and wrong that certain acts have 
 always been done. They feel that it is making a 
 useless confusion ; and therefore Aristophanes makes 
 Euripides say : 3 
 
 Thus it was that I began 
 
 With a nicer, neater plan, 
 
 Teaching men to look about, 
 
 Both within doors and without, 
 
 To direct their own affairs 
 
 And their house and household wares, 
 
 Marking everything amiss : 
 
 " Where is that ? and what is this ? 
 
 This is broken that is gone." 
 
 'Tis the modern style and tone. 
 
 1 This is admitted by Plato, Phaedo ggb. 
 
 * Clouds, 379, 370. So Aristophanes can play upon the like- 
 ness between the name of the new god and the old (id. 826). 
 ATvo (3a<riXeuet, TOV At 'e^eXvjXaxcoi;. The scholiast may be right 
 when he says (id. 1473) that Socrates is made to keep a model 
 sphere in his " Notion-shop " which Strepsiades takes for a 
 statue of Dinos. 
 
 1 Frogs, 12 10 sq.
 
 142 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 And Dionysus replies : 
 
 Yes, by Jove, and at their homes 
 Nowadays each master comes, 
 Of a sudden bolting in 
 With an uproar and a din ; 
 Rating all the servants round 
 " If it's lost it must be found. 
 Why was all the garlic wasted ? 
 There, the honey has been tasted : 
 And these olives pilfer'd here. 
 Where's the pot we bought last year ? 
 What's become of all the fish ? " 
 Thus it is but heretofore 
 The moment that they cross'd the door 
 They sat down to doze and snore. 
 
 Again, the old school might not feel complimented 
 by the poet, but they would say " You see ! This 
 confusion all comes of arguing about practical affairs. 
 We can understand a man arguing in law ; but 
 where is it going to end if you won't let anything 
 rest ? " Exactly so the maintainers of established 
 custom in every age, when driven from the defence 
 of a cosmological creed against science, make their 
 last stand against reasoning on the ground that it 
 makes men act differently from the majority. 
 
 The controversial attack upon new-fangled notions 
 joins here with the positive standards of the old 
 school. The ideal is to think and to act (AETOC t% TroXsox; 
 exactly as every one else does in your particular 
 city. And if any one is offensive so as to say 
 that customs vary, then you must deal with him 
 as St. Louis' model knight dealt with the Jew who 
 confuted him in an argument set upon him with 
 a stick !
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 SOCRATES 
 
 THE crisis in the conflict of Greek ideals is well 
 marked by the history of Socrates. He, more 
 than any of his contemporaries, understood the true 
 value of the new scientific spirit ; but he was 
 never misled into a barren opposition to traditional 
 beliefs and practices. He did more than any man 
 to produce the reasoning which eventually proved 
 the limitation of Greek ideals ; but he himself 
 never dealt with the evidence and was never really 
 freed from the burden of inherited custom and con- 
 temporary creeds. The very data of his philosophy 
 were the results of religious thought ; but, although 
 he was a discoverer of new facts and a keen critic 
 of accepted conventions, he never fully established 
 the fundamental nature of those realities of which 
 philosophy must take account, and he never in 
 his criticism managed to probe deeply enough 
 under the skin of the inherited belief which passes 
 for " experience." 
 
 Not unusually Socrates is represented by modern 
 philosophers as though he would agree with the 
 Christian Fathers in their righteous indignation at 
 the practices and beliefs of the wretched pagans, his 
 fellow-countrymen. But it is perhaps no longer 
 necessary to use Socrates as a stick for beating the 
 Athenians, since he more than any other would
 
 144 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 have laughed at so childish an occupation. He 
 knew how much he owed to Athens the record of 
 his debt is written in the Crito and in the 
 Apology. He could not live out of Athens. It 
 is, however, difficult to recognise the many points 
 of contact that a revolutionary may have with his 
 contemporary opponents, and it is for this reason 
 that morality as it was for Socrates has not been 
 fairly discussed. Some have made him appear to 
 have been much too far in advance of his day : 
 and others, who are really at the same stage in 
 philosophical thought as the average Athenian, 
 have supposed him as inconsistent as a liberal 
 theologian. 
 
 Our purpose here must be limited to showing the 
 contact of Socrates with the moral and social ideals 
 as they stood in his day. The larger question of 
 mystical or poetic emotion we shall put aside for 
 the present and confine our attention to the organised 
 and official religion of the Athenian state. Under 
 this heading, as we have said above, the Mysteries 
 must be included : but first it is better to concentrate 
 our attention upon the more obvious and elementary 
 facts of Athenian practice and belief. We shall 
 omit for the present the doctrine of Socrates as to 
 what ought to be done, and consider only his attitude 
 towards what actually was done. His ideals, 
 Athenian as they were in their source, go beyond the 
 accepted standards and we shall speak of them when 
 we deal with the Platonic philosophy of conduct. 
 Here it is only the life of Socrates which is in ques- 
 tion. His character is expressed in his criticism 
 of current belief and practice ; and his action with 
 respect to religious and moral standards is the 
 result of the criticism he passed.
 
 SOCRATES 145 
 
 By way of introduction it is necessary to say a 
 word as to the evidence for the opinions and character 
 of Socrates. In what follows it is accepted as 
 proved that the Socrates who speaks in the dialogues 
 of Plato is the historic Socrates. 1 The views there 
 put into the mouth of Socrates are not Plato's ; 
 and, although there is a certain artistic modification 
 of actual arguments and perhaps a deliberate change 
 of words, on the whole Plato was not using a mere 
 dummy behind which to shelter himself. It is 
 Socrates as he spoke in life and not Plato who speaks 
 in the Socrates of the dialogues. The philosophical 
 views of Socrates himself are given there and not 
 the later opinions of Plato. For it is perfectly 
 clear that Plato when he is conscious of presenting 
 non-Socratic views does not make Socrates the 
 speaker. In the Timaeus and the Laws the views 
 expressed are more likely to be the author's own ; 
 and it is only fair to him to suppose that, although 
 a certain amount of himself must have entered into 
 his presentation of his master, he did not deliber- 
 ately mislead us by creating a fictitious Socrates 
 when he takes pains to make Socrates speak. This 
 view implies that Xenophon's presentation of 
 Socrates is false. There may have been, of course, 
 traditional sayings of Socrates which have been 
 preserved by Xenophon and not by Plato. But 
 Xenophon had a habit of attempting to improve 
 on others by depending upon the work they had done 
 and at the same time contradicting their authority. 
 In all essentials his testimony is worthless, not 
 less as to the religious belief and practice of Socrates 
 than as to his character. He is an example of those 
 
 1 The proofs are in Taylor's Varia Socratica and Burnet's 
 edition of the Phaedo. 

 
 146 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 more recent biographers who attempt to substitute 
 for the portrait drawn by an artist a photographic 
 distortion, giving us only bombastic platitudes and 
 negligible gossip. Every sentence reported by 
 Xenophon to have been said by Socrates may have 
 been spoken and yet the result is a complete mis- 
 representation as complete as the portrait of a 
 friend taken by an amateur photographer. 1 
 
 The Ethical views of the real Socrates are those 
 expressed, not in the Memorabilia but in the Euthy- 
 phro, Gorgias, Meno and Republic. The contrast 
 between religious practice and moral action is not 
 Plato's but is really due to Socrates. There may 
 be implications developed by Plato which would 
 not have been so obvious at the time when Socrates 
 was disputing with the Sophists ; but speaking 
 generally the Ethical statements of Plato must be 
 regarded as historically the statements of the real 
 Socrates. And probably the hesitation in formu- 
 lating and the method of enforcing truths is a genuine 
 report of the Socratic moral teaching, since Plato 
 himself may very well have reached more certainty 
 and more systematic conceptions than his master. 
 Further, there is no ground for supposing that the 
 metaphysics in the dialogues is Plato's any more 
 than is the Ethics. The two are closely connected, 
 especially in the conception of intrinsic good. The 
 theory of Forms (Ideas), said to be held by Socrates, 
 is not Plato's own. The historic Socrates had 
 accepted from others, developed and maintained, 
 the theory of Forms, as he is said by Plato to have 
 done : and the opposite theory that Plato devel- 
 oped a metaphysic out of the Ethics and crude 
 
 1 The same sort of criticism must be passed upon Aristotle's 
 Socrates, cf. Taylor, Varia Socratica, ch. II.
 
 SOCRATES 147 
 
 hints of a Socrates such as Xenophon describes, 
 is historically impossible. The historic Socrates 
 seems to have had a perfectly definite, if somewhat 
 limited, metaphysics and to have been influenced 
 by this in his attitude towards religion. The theory 
 of Forms which is popularly known as Platonic 
 was really established before Socrates began to teach ; 
 and this is abundantly evident from the way in which 
 it is presented in the Phaedo. For it is there supposed 
 to be familiar to the speakers ; and nowhere in Plato 
 is it treated as a new discovery. It is referred to 
 as a ground for argument concerning immortality 
 and it had, no doubt, influenced the Socratic view of 
 the divine. But we may put aside for the present 
 the religious element in this metaphysics and deal 
 only with the more obvious expressions of the 
 attitude of Socrates 
 
 All this implies a much greater Socrates than 
 historians have generally supposed to exist ; and it 
 seems also to dethrone Plato or to make of him 
 a mere Boswell. But, so far as Socrates is concerned 
 the impression he made on his contemporaries and 
 successors could not be explained at all on the older 
 hypothesis. Only if the Platonic Socrates is the 
 historic Socrates can we explain the immense effect 
 of Socrates upon later thinkers, some of whom were 
 by no means Platonic. And, as for Plato, although 
 the new view may seem to make him less original 
 as a thinker, it makes him much more skilful as an 
 artist. This may be disputed, on the ground that 
 it is a finer art to produce by imagination a new 
 character than to present a person who actually 
 existed. But it is a much rarer gift to express the 
 inner and truest spirit of a real man than to write 
 fiction, for the material is more intractable. Nor is
 
 148 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 it a case of reproducing obvious features, for in 
 skilful portraiture the details may even seem 
 incorrect to the eye of a photographer. It is not 
 as though, in the Xenophontic manner, Plato had 
 told us the length of Socrates' nose or the number 
 of the hairs on his head ; and yet he has given us 
 the body of the man as well as his soul His Socrates 
 is flesh and blood, not an idealised myth created out 
 of profound admiration. So that the evidence of 
 Plato is not by any means like that, for instance, 
 of the Fourth Gospel. There scholars have indeed 
 found an intimate understanding : but there is 
 lacking that bodily form and exactness of place and 
 time which distinguish historical insight. Socrates 
 as he is presented to us by Plato lives in a world 
 we can recognise from other sources, and acts as 
 we are forced, also from other sources, to suppose 
 he did act. 
 
 This is not, of course, a defence of Plato. What 
 has been said is intended only to express the nature 
 of the source which we may use for understanding 
 the attitude of the historic Socrates. Obviously 
 even if that source is contaminated, even if the 
 Platonic Socrates is a dramatic rather than 
 an historic figure, his views would be of immense 
 importance ; since the expression of such views 
 at the date when the dialogues were first published 
 would of itself be important as evidence of the moral 
 situation. Whoever held such views they must 
 have had an important effect, and that they could 
 be put into the mouth of a man condemned by the 
 Athenian law would make them all the more pointed. 
 But we take it as proved that the views are those of 
 Socrates and we shall attempt to express the point 
 of view of which such views were the result.
 
 SOCRATES 149 
 
 Our problem then is to present the general atti- 
 tude of Socrates towards human life ; for his attitude 
 is typical of the change which came over Greek 
 tradition at the end of the fifth century. If he 
 thought in this way, it is reasonable to suppose 
 that many others were moving in the same direction 
 even though they may never have reached the same 
 conclusions. Not that there was a complete or 
 even partial conversion of all average men from 
 religion to philosophy, from traditional habit to 
 rational conduct, from argument to reasoning. 
 The average Athenian continued faithful to the old 
 tradition long after the philosophers opposed it, 
 as is implied in all the plays of Aristophanes. But 
 it is also implied in those plays that the average 
 man was troubled as his forefathers had not been. 
 Perhaps the majority were absolutely incompetent 
 to understand the change which had occurred in 
 the minds of the few ; and yet no one could avoid 
 the germ of new thought which was in the air. 
 You may hate the new-fangled ideas which you des- 
 pise so much that you cannot trouble to under- 
 stand them ; you may even laugh at revolutionaries 
 whom you cannot refute, and by your laughter 
 give yourself a momentary feeling that everything 
 is still as it always was. Indeed laughter will give 
 you a sort of courage. But into the midst of your 
 stalwart traditionalism an uneasy fear may creep, 
 and gnaw at your firmest beliefs and corrupt your 
 most inveterate habit. Thus the old moral standard 
 may be modified, even though no change is obvious 
 in practice or belief, if the attitude of the average 
 man is uncertain. The foundations may become 
 insecure ; and the very insecurity will lead men to 
 value new kinds of character and new kinds of life.
 
 150 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 The importance of the attitude of Socrates then is 
 not in that it was typical. It was never typical, 
 even among those later Stoics who strove to imitate 
 the master. But it was immensely effective. 
 
 We may divide his criticism of current beliefs and 
 admirations from his practice with respect to tradi- 
 tional custom. Intellectually he criticises " Homer " 
 and, in politics, the accepted moral standards of 
 greatness. Practically he conforms to the practice 
 of the polis, and yet belongs to a non-Athenian 
 group ; he is a " good citizen " and yet puts a limit 
 to his allegiance. 
 
 The intellectual attitude of Socrates towards the 
 tradition into which he was born may be seen, first, 
 in the Euthyphro. The subject is the religious and 
 moral standard implied in the life of the polis. 
 It is this and nothing less which is being criticised. 
 The contrast is between what is correct religious 
 action and what is moral action, between holiness 
 or piety and justice or virtue. It is not that 
 Socrates stood for morality as opposed to religious 
 practice, for he was not himself freed from the tradi- 
 tion which he was attempting to overcome. And his 
 position was such as may be imagined to exist when 
 it is not clear whether we are to contrast or to class 
 together a religious act such as going to church 
 and a moral act such as giving alms. The theory of 
 morals is a discovery, as chemistry or physics is. 
 Ethics arises out of an attempt to analyse experi- 
 ence. But in its early stages religion, which includes 
 " what must be done," has nothing to do with 
 morality. The purity that is required in early 
 ritual is not moral but ceremonial ; it consists in 
 not having done many things, some of which are 
 indeed immoral, some quite moral. Now so long
 
 SOCRATES 151 
 
 as religious practice continues, the confusion of 
 noral and immoral also continues. Thus in early 
 Christian times adultery is irreligious, but so also 
 is any sexual intercourse ; murder is an offence 
 agiinst God, but so also is eating meat on a fast 
 da/. The classification of acts as religious and 
 irreligious not only obscures, it actually endangers 
 the classification of acts as moral and immoral. 
 Anl thus religious practice continually degrades 
 not only the moral practice, but even the moral sense 
 of >elievers ; for the possibility of being religious 
 anc yet immoral, or moral and yet not religious, 
 is proved by almost every page of human 
 hisiory. This confusion and its evil results 
 are the first subject for the analytical criticism of 
 Socrates. 
 
 Euthyphro, in the dialogue called by his name, 
 is represented as simply the average good Athenian 
 who knows the traditional view of religious action 
 aid has never thought out its relation to morality. 
 Efc is driven by Socrates to admit that holiness is 
 lo/ed by the gods because it is holiness ; it is not 
 holiness because it is loved by the gods. 1 It is 
 not the divine taste which makes certain acts 
 religious. Euthyphro is trying to make morality 
 cut of religion, and he sees that morality cannot 
 imply arbitrary whim or caprice in a deity. At 
 list Socrates drives him to say that " piety and 
 holiness are that part of justice which has to do 
 with the attention which is due to the gods ; and 
 what has to do with the attention due to men is 
 the remaining part of justice." 2 But as to attention 
 to the gods, Socrates shows that the gods have 
 nothing to gain from the act of prayer or sacrifice, 
 
 1 Euth. 10. *id., 12 in fine.
 
 152 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 since they are no better for it. 1 And yet they likt 
 it. So that either we are back again at the oli 
 mistake of supposing an act holy because it is to 
 a god's arbitrary taste, or there is no such thing is 
 service of the gods at all. For benefiting oursehes 
 and our fellow men is by agreement that part of 
 justice which is not the concern of religion. 
 
 The attitude of Socrates is quite consistent, lut 
 it is not the expression of any definite concluson 
 on these questions. He is clear that there is a cis- 
 tinction of good and evil action, and that the dis- 
 tinction is not dependent upon an arbitrary vill. 
 He sees, more obscurely, that there is some on- 
 nection between that distinction and the traditioial 
 distinction between religious and irreligious action ; 
 but he is much puzzled that the two distinctions 
 are not identical in kind, and he seems to be very 
 doubtful indeed as to the purpose of prayer aid 
 sacrifice. He did, as we know, practise boti : 
 he may have felt some good to come from them, 
 but he never for a moment thought them of the sane 
 importance as moral action. At least with respect 
 to action having reference to our fellow men, he held 
 that good and evil are in the nature of things and 
 do not depend upon will, caprice or taste. 
 
 But if a distinction can be made between moral 
 good and evil, independently of the will of any god, 
 then we can make moral judgments concerning the 
 gods. That is to say, we may refer their actions 
 to a criterion which they have not established anc 
 which they cannot abolish. Certain actions are 
 reported by our religious authorities as having been 
 done by the gods, as that Cronos ate his children 
 and Zeus bound his father. " I am displeased 
 
 Euth., 15.
 
 SOCRATES 153 
 
 when I hear people say such things about the gods," 
 says Socrates ; "I expect that I shall be called a 
 sinner because I doubt these stories." 1 Euthyphro, 
 however, is willing to accept all the old traditions, 
 not troubling to apply a moral test to the actions 
 reported of the gods. The contrast is dramatically 
 cogent, and, as far as we know, historically correct. 
 This is the distinction between the attitude of 
 Socrates and that of the average Athenian. Neither 
 doubts the existence of certain superhuman powers 
 called divine, but to Socrates the dilemma is real ; 
 either the stories about the gods are false or the gods 
 are not worthy of worship. 2 He chooses, apparently 
 without any definite reason, to suppose that the 
 stories are false ; and he is thus in almost the same 
 position as Huxley was in the famous controversy 
 about the Gadarene swine. Huxley says in effect 
 to the modern Euthyphro, Mr. Gladstone, Either 
 the story of the Gadarene swine is false or Christ's 
 " destruction of other people's property is a mis- 
 demeanour of evil example." 3 It offends the ortho- 
 dox Euthyphro to hear that the story is false ; 
 but it offends him just as much to hear that Christ's 
 action may be judged by a moral standard which is 
 independent of him. Huxley chooses to suppose 
 that the story is false. And neither Huxley nor 
 Socrates refers to the third possibility that there 
 may have been no such persons as those whose 
 character is in dispute. For indeed we may grant 
 that it does not really matter to the argument of 
 
 1 Euth. 6. 
 
 1 So of the heroes who are the canonised saints of Greece : 
 " Let us oblige our poets to admit, either that the deeds in 
 question were not the deeds of these heroes or else that these 
 were not the children of gods." Rep. 391 . 
 
 3 Huxley, Essays, V., p. 369.
 
 154 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 Socrates whether the gods exist or not. The prob- 
 lem in the Euthyphro, as in the Republic, is as to the 
 moral standard. What sort of ideal are we to accept ? 
 What sort of character are we to admire ? Are we 
 to admire Hamlet, for example, or Macbeth ? We 
 need not first discover whether there were ever 
 historical or " real " characters of the same kind 
 as are presented to us by Shakespeare ; for the 
 moral criterion is not a test of existence but of 
 value. 
 
 Socrates may not have thought the question of 
 the moral character of gods independent of the 
 doubt as to their existence ; for, apart from Plato's 
 attempts to prove (in the Laws) the existence of 
 gods, hints are put into the mouth of Socrates him- 
 self that the problem was in the air, and that he 
 had thought of it. 1 But it is sufficient here to note 
 that he considers the existence proved of some 
 reality which may be called divine. The problem 
 of moral character, however, in the argument of 
 Socrates will hold whether there are gods or not. 
 For he says, in effect, the current moral ideal of 
 character is deficient. The stories of the gods are 
 " offensive and not to be repeated in our city," 
 lest the evil-doer suppose that he is only doing 
 what the first and greatest of the gods have done 
 before him. 2 The character of what is worshipped 
 has a direct effect upon the moral character of the 
 worshipper, and thus the creations of one generation 
 react upon the morality of future generations some- 
 
 1 Cratylus, 400, etc. 
 
 * Rep. 378. OUTOI Y e <" ^oY ot X a ^ e7t0 ' u8e Xexreov 
 vo> dxouovri, w? aSitov rd etex aTa u8v av OorjfiaffT^v TTOLOI, 
 ouS* a\5 dSixouvra Ttarepa xoXacov Ttavrl Tpdrcco, dXXa Spa>vj av 
 forep 6eo>v ot rcpomn TE xal
 
 SOCRATES 155 
 
 times, of course, for good, but sometimes for evil. 
 The character of Moses may be an influence for 
 good, but it may be also evil ; and we know how the 
 bloodthirsty vengeance said to be inculcated by 
 Jehovah against the Amalekites actually did incite 
 the devout Puritans to reckless slaughter. 
 
 " But surely," says Socrates, " God is really 
 good and must be so represented ? " Hence he 
 cannot be the cause of all things. " On the contrary 
 he is the author of only a small part of human 
 affairs : of the greater part he is not the author ; 
 for our evils far outnumber our goods : and the good 
 we must ascribe to no other than God, while we 
 must seek elsewhere and not in him the causes of 
 evil." l God cannot have done the ludicrous and 
 misleading acts which are reported of him ; for 
 " God is a being of perfect simplicity and truth, 
 both in deed and word, and neither changes in 
 himself nor imposes upon others, either by appari- 
 tions or by words, or by sending signs, whether in 
 dreams or in waking moments." 2 
 
 It is not so clear to us now as it would be to the 
 first readers of Plato that Socrates is here represented 
 as criticising and condemning the very core of the 
 moral tradition of Greece and of Athens. The 
 accepted influences of his time are brought to the 
 bar of something which, it was asserted, was superior 
 to them ; and although the philosopher might call 
 that reason, to the average man it seemed to be intel- 
 lectual vanity using " private judgment." Socrates 
 said that " Homer " spoke falsely : and he adduced 
 
 1 Rep. 3796. cf. what is said above about the devil. We see 
 here the presentation of the case for the necessity of a devil. 
 Unless evil is regarded as in some sense always and ultimately 
 opposed to good, we tend to underrate its importance. 
 
 2 id., 382. A direct attack on Iliad II. init.
 
 156 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 as truth not historic facts but moral judgments. 
 That is to say it was really a question of conflict 
 between ideals. This sort of character and this 
 sort of life is in the tradition, and this other sort is 
 the noble and the good. Criticism could not be 
 clearer. 
 
 Socrates adopted the same sort of intellectual 
 attitude towards the men admired by his contem- 
 poraries. He found as admired models, first, the 
 successful. The maintainers of " force " as the 
 ultimate criterion of value in political action were 
 not few in Greece ; and they were considerably 
 more consistent than modern Nietzscheans. Thrasy- 
 machus in the Republic and Callicles in the Gorgias 
 speak for many more than would like to hear their 
 moral standards so clearly expressed. It comes to 
 this the man really to be admired is he who has 
 force enough to get what he wants ; the state which 
 is best is the most powerful state. Those who 
 believe otherwise are sentimentalists who cannot 
 see facts, " real-politik," and so on ; and Socrates is 
 against this standard of value, says Callicles, only 
 because he is " effeminate " and has no " practical 
 experience " of " real life," but " flies from the 
 busy market-place in which men become distin- 
 guished and creeps into a corner and talks in a 
 whisper with three or four admiring youths." 1 
 We need not pursue the argument. The moral 
 standard advocated is " the strong man " as a model 
 for the individual and " big battalions " for the 
 state. And the crushing Socratic reply will never 
 affect the Thrasymachus and Callicles of our own 
 day, any more than it made a difference to the 
 admirations of the average Athenian. He says, 
 
 1 Gorgias, 4856.
 
 SOCRATES 157 
 
 however, that the more admirable character is the 
 man who knows the good of others and, being tem- 
 perate or ordered in his own activities, brings the 
 good into being. The state is best which promotes 
 the fullest and finest life. 
 
 But, secondly, the admiration of Socrates' con- 
 temporaries is given not merely to violent men and 
 states but to the actual achievements of the past. 
 " Did you never hear," says Callicles, " that Them- 
 istocles was a good man, and Cimon and Miltiades 
 and Pericles, who is just lately dead, and whom 
 you heard yourself ? " J To take the point in modern 
 times one must consider who the men are whose 
 monuments are the most prominent in London, 
 Berlin or Paris. We still say as Callicles did : 
 " Those men once made our state great : now, of 
 course, we have only trivial politicians." And the 
 reply of Socrates comes across the years : "You 
 praise the men who feasted the citizens and satis- 
 fied their desires, and people say that they have made 
 the city great, not seeing that its swollen and 
 ulcerated condition is to be attributed to these 
 elder statesmen ; for they have filled the city full 
 of harbours and docks and walls and revenues and 
 all that, and have left no room for justice and 
 temperance." 2 It is a crushing indictment of our 
 admired grandfathers, or rather of ourselves for 
 admiring those of our grandfathers most who have 
 left us material gain. It will be said by Callicles 
 that Themistocles and the rest fought and worked 
 for honour or prestige or even liberty ; for these are 
 words which are always useful in covering with a 
 cloak of glory the desire for wealth and power ; 
 and we need not discuss here the truth of the charge 
 
 1 Gorgias 503. *id., 518.
 
 158 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 made by Socrates against the spirit of Athens. 
 There is no modern state against which the same 
 charge could not be made. The point of interest 
 to us now is that, true or false or only exaggerated, 
 the view adopted by Socrates is opposed to the 
 accepted ideals, individual and social, of his time. 
 
 Intellectually, then, his attitude even towards 
 the established administration was not the tradi- 
 tional. In religious and moral theory as in political 
 conceptions of value he was an adverse critic of 
 Athens. And yet there is no Athenian in history 
 who can be said to have loved Athens better. I 
 thought in this manner and I spoke so, he declared, 
 because Athens was dear to me. " My excellent 
 friend," I used to say, " you are a citizen of Athens, 
 a city which is very great and very famous for 
 wisdom and power of mind ; are you not ashamed 
 of caring so much for the making of money and for 
 prestige and for honour ? Will you not think or 
 care about wisdom and truth and the perfection of 
 your soul ? " l But the Athenians did not under- 
 stand this kind of admiration for Athens. 
 
 It is not strange that Greek ideals should involve 
 on the one hand the admiration for Athens of the 
 fifth century and the enthusiasm, for old gods and 
 men of ancient days, and on the other hand the 
 condemnation by Socrates of so much that was 
 admired. For the finest quality of a great tradition 
 is the possibility it gives of continuous progress. 
 The end has come when no one can turn his eyes 
 away from the past, or when the greatness of our 
 state is held to be a thing already achieved. It was 
 to urge Athens forward that Socrates, her greatest 
 
 1 Apology, 29. Indeed the whole of the Apology is on this 
 theme.
 
 SOCRATES 159 
 
 son, condemned her accepted ideals. And after 
 all, as we shall see in his practical activities, although 
 he condemned the idols of the polis, Socrates never 
 forgot the element of good which remained in the 
 tradition. 
 
 What practical effect upon the actions of Socrates 
 had this critical attitude ? He seems in the first 
 place to have acted as far as he could in accordance 
 with general religious custom. This gives Xeno- 
 phon his ground for expressing surprise that the 
 charge against Socrates should have beer irreligion ; 
 since it is clear that so far as outer conformity went 
 Socrates never stood aside. We must imagine 
 him taking part in the festivals of the polis to 
 which we have referred above, and seeing in them 
 perhaps much more than the average Athenian did. 
 For it often happens that a revolutionary values his 
 tradition much more highly and derives from it 
 much more insight than those very traditionalists 
 do who condemn the revolutionary for being dis- 
 loyal. 
 
 Socrates allows it to be taken for granted that he 
 follows the usual Athenian practice in religion. 
 In the course of a half-ironic dispute, the point of 
 which is the futile subtlety of Sophists, he says : 
 " In the way of religion I have altars and temples 
 domestic and ancestral and all that other Athenians 
 have." " You have," replies Dionysodorus, his 
 opponent, " Apollo, Zeus, and Athena, . . . they 
 are your gods." ' Yes," says Socrates, " they are 
 my lords and ancestors." 1 He is represented at 
 the opening of the Republic as going down " to the 
 Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, to offer up 
 prayer to the goddess, and also from a wish to see 
 
 1 Euthydemus, 302.
 
 160 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 how the festival, then to be held for the first time, 
 would be celebrated." He is " very much pleased 
 with the native Athenian procession ; though that 
 of the Thracians appeared to be no less brilliant." 
 " We had finished our prayers and satisfied our 
 curiosity," he says ; and then they return to the 
 city. 1 It was a new festival in honour of Bendis, 
 a Thracian goddess, and the interest was obviously 
 in part that of all sight-seers ; but with the average 
 men present Socrates offers up his prayers and, as 
 we may gather from the conclusion of the Phaednts, 
 he could do that sort of thing well. He had, as 
 he says of himself, " enough religion for his needs." 2 
 The interest, although in some way religious, was 
 certainly not theological, and it may have been in 
 part that of an educated man in what is going on 
 around him. For Socrates was too fine to despise 
 what he himself could not use, if only it were of 
 use to others. But he deals in a summary fashion 
 with the futile attempt to rationalise traditional 
 beliefs which passed current as " liberal"' thought. 
 At the opening of the Phaedrus the scene is outside 
 the walls on the banks of the Ilissus. Socrates and 
 the young Phaedrus are looking for a cool spot 
 to sit with their feet in the water, and they find one 
 about a quarter of a mile above a ford at the temple 
 of Artemis where also is an altar to Boreas. 
 Phaedrus asks Socrates whether he believes that 
 Boreas really carried off Orithyia, and Socrates 
 answers : " The wise are doubtful and I should 
 not be singular if, like them, I too doubted. 
 I might have a rational explanation that Orithyia 
 was playing with Pharmacia when a northern gust 
 carried her over the neighbouring rocks : and this 
 1 Rep. 354. * Phaedrus, 242.
 
 SOCRATES 161 
 
 being the manner of her death she was said to have 
 been carried away by Boreas. (One might thus get 
 rid of a personal wind and yet continue to say the 
 creed.) There is a discrepancy, however, about the 
 locality ; according to another version of the story 
 she was taken from the Aeropagus and not from this 
 place. Now I quite acknowledge that these alle- 
 gories are very nice, but he is not to be envied who 
 has to invent them ; much labour and ingenuity 
 will be required of him, and when he has once begun 
 he must go on and rehabilitate hippocentaurs and 
 chimeras dire. Gorgons and winged steeds flow in 
 apace, and numberless other inconceivable and por- 
 tentous natures. And if he is sceptical about them, 
 and would fain reduce them one after another to 
 the rules of probability, this sort of crude philosophy* 
 will take up a great deal of time. Now I have no 
 leisure for such enquiries ; shall I tell you why ? 
 I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscrip- 
 tion says : to be curious about that which is not 
 my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own 
 self, would be ridiculous. And therefore I bid 
 farewell to all this : the common opinion is enough 
 for me. 2 For, as I was saying, I want to know not 
 about this, but about myself : am I a monster 
 more complicated and swollen with passion than the 
 serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler 
 sort, to whom Nature has given a diviner and lowlier 
 destiny ? " 3 
 To understand the revolutionary nature of the 
 
 ^Ypotxcp Tivl oo<p[qc, clodhopper's wisdom, wooden-headed 
 philosophy. 
 
 * 7TCi96(Aevo Ttji vo[uopLvt}> Ttepl aftrtov, almost "following 
 the general custom or accepting what has been the traditional 
 belief." 
 
 Phaedrus, 231: Jowett. 
 
 M
 
 162 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 attitude here adopted by Socrates we must imagine 
 some person nowadays, still interested in the good 
 that may come from religion, replying to a question 
 as to whether he believes that Christ ascended into 
 the blue heaven from the summit of Mount Tabor. 
 He might say, " Historians are doubtful and I 
 should not be singular if I doubted. But there are 
 liberal theologians and idealist philosophers who 
 give as a rational explanation that the appearance 
 of Christ disappeared here. There are a few diffi- 
 culties about this : but the worst of it is that by this 
 method you will have to find out some sort of truth 
 in the idea of angels and Beelzebub and the portents 
 of the Apocalypse. This sort of crude philosophy 
 will take up much time, and I have other things to 
 do. Let the creed stand as it does." We may thus 
 understand how painful to the average Athenian 
 was the Socratic attitude, and how perilously near 
 blasphemy his reverence seemed to be. 
 
 To return to the Phaedrus, midday comes and the 
 time when everything sleeps except the cicalas. 
 Then Socrates tells, half laughingly, the myth of 
 how these were once human beings and through love 
 of singing forgot to eat and sleep. The Muses 
 turned them into cicalas that they might always 
 sing. 1 Socrates reacts to the spirit of the place like 
 any other Greek. He too is willing to transform 
 the commonplace in a poetic vision ; and there 
 cannot be anywhere a finer expression of such feeling 
 than there is in the prayer he offers up, " when the 
 heat is abated," to " the gods of the place." " Be- 
 loved Pan," he prays, " and all ye other gods who 
 here inhabit, give me beauty in the inward soul, 
 and may the outer and the inner man be at one. 
 1 Phaedrus, 257.
 
 SOCRATES 163 
 
 May I count the wise man rich, and may my store 
 of gold be such as only the good can bear." " That 
 prayer," says Socrates, "is, I think, enough for 
 me." l And to add commentary to it is almost 
 an insult to the skill of Plato or to the intelligence 
 of the reader. We have here a rendering of Socrates' 
 practice which could hardly be surpassed for sub- 
 tlety and charm. And the average Athenian might 
 well be puzzled at the practical reverence of the 
 man combined with his apparent carelessness about 
 the content of tradition. If that had been all, 
 however, that could be said about the actions of 
 Socrates the charge against him would never have 
 been formulated. He is, so far, a good Athenian 
 with perhaps peculiar opinions and a too great 
 tendency to criticise. 
 
 On the other hand the evidence is conclusive that 
 Socrates belonged to what we should call a religious 
 brotherhood. Not only have we the evidence of 
 Aristophanes in the Clouds that Socrates was 
 popularly believed to practise secret rites with a 
 small company of friends ; but the popular belief 
 is confirmed by a careful reading of the Platonic 
 dialogues. For Socrates is said to have had two 
 quite different manners of speech, and even two 
 quite different subjects of discussion, with two 
 different companies of friends. There is, first, the 
 general discussion of logical and ethical issues 
 with Sophists and the rich young men ; and, secondly, 
 there is the profounder treatment of such problems 
 as immortality when Socrates is speaking to a 
 selected few. The popular imagination would easily 
 identify the rich young men with the selected 
 few ; for what other criterion could they under - 
 1 Phaedrus, 279.
 
 164 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 stand for selection by a teacher of pupils except that 
 they could pay well ? For us, however, it is clear 
 that Alcibiades for example did not belong to the 
 Socratic inner circle. 
 
 This selected few formed a sort of religious brother- 
 hood with Pythagorean and Orphic connections. 
 The language of the Phaedo is saturated with the 
 feeling of " mysteries." The position given to 
 mathematical symbolism is Pythagorean. The idea 
 of virtue as harmony or order is Pythagorean. The 
 practice of " philosophy " as an ascetic life is 
 Pythagorean. And the continual reference, when 
 Socrates is among those who could understand, to 
 the aloofness of the true philosopher, is in the 
 manner of one who belonged to some other associa- 
 tion than the polis. For in fact it was sufficiently 
 well known (i) that the members of this brother- 
 hood were young men with " new " views ; (2) that 
 they had a special science savouring of irreligion, 
 and (3) that they had religious practices which were 
 not those of the polis. Add only the air of mystery 
 which surrounds some movement not generally 
 understood in a time of great political excitement ; 
 and we understand both the practical life of Socrates 
 and the suspicion with which it was regarded. 
 
 The ideal of action among the old school as we 
 have said was "to do as the community does." 
 Socrates may have done that ; but he did more, 
 and the other part of his practice was not fiera 
 a-Jjc, 7c6Xeco^. That is the sum of the charge against 
 him on which he was ultimately condemned. And 
 the charge is quite clearly proved. But we must 
 allow also for certain non-modern elements hi the 
 mind of those who condemned him in order to assert 
 the supremacy of allegiance to the polis. Religion
 
 SOCRATES 165 
 
 still meant action. It was what the Socratic brother- 
 hood did or were suspected of doing which was 
 dangerous. It was an unofficial rite, not a creed 
 which was condemned ; and even asceticism might 
 be an ugly practice from this point of view. Sec- 
 ondly, such action, even if it were the turning of a 
 model sphere, might be regarded as magical and 
 effective in some uncanny way. The average 
 Athenian would feel that evil influences were 
 coming out of Socrates' thinking-shop. 
 
 The importance of this for our present purpose lies 
 in the practical attitude of Socrates towards the 
 sacredness of the polis. In the first place the Orphic- 
 Pythagorean brotherhood was not Athenian, and by 
 belonging to such a company Socrates doubtless 
 appeared to the average Athenian to stand in sym- 
 pathy outside the polis, much as a Roman Catholic 
 in the reign of Charles I. might be imagined by his 
 " communion with Rome " to stand in sympathy 
 outside England. At the best it was a case of 
 divided allegiance : at the worst it was an allegiance 
 to something other than the average Athenians 
 knew, which might, they thought, involve action 
 not altogether patriotic. And we can understand 
 how in a time of excitement the average Athenian 
 might suspect the worst. 
 
 Secondly, by active communication with this 
 brotherhood Socrates held closely to men like 
 Cebes and Simmias (hi the Phaedo] who belonged 
 to groups politically hostile to Athens. If the legend 
 of Euclides of Megara is true, the communication 
 of Socrates with foreign enemies did not cease 
 even during war. Who would not, then, suspect 
 spying and treating with the enemy or at any rate 
 an allegiance which sat very loosely ? And when
 
 166 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 we add that every one knew that Socrates was 
 generally in opposition politically even to a coali- 
 tion government, what need is there to say more ? 
 He had obstructed the popular condemnation of 
 the generals ; he had opposed the opponents of 
 democracy ; and yet he did nothing to assist the 
 restored democracy, and was always making sar- 
 castic remarks about amateur politicians. Whether 
 only as a public nuisance or as an active centre of 
 disloyalty to the polis, the case against him was clear. 
 From the Socratic point of view the result of 
 his life-work was not unexpected. Socrates knew 
 and Plato acknowledged that a higher allegiance 
 always seems to the average man a repudiation 
 of all allegiance and an undermining of the securities 
 of life. And indeed no method has yet been dis- 
 covered for giving different treatment, especially 
 in times of excitement, to crime which is below and 
 to moral genius which is above the accepted practices 
 of society. Neither the criminal nor the prophet 
 think or act JIETOC TTJ<; 7t6Xeco<;. Therefore the 
 polis treats them similarly. We have in Socrates, 
 then, (i) criticism of traditional standards in religion 
 and politics, (2) international connections which 
 seem to conflict with a supreme devotion to the 
 polis, and (3) at least hesitation in assisting popular 
 movements. It is to be hoped that it is not necessary 
 to show that these are all practical expressions of 
 a fine character. But if anyone still believes them 
 to be signs of a lack of proper devotion to his country, 
 no defence of Socrates is possible. On the other 
 hand we have (i) his " conformity " to the rites of 
 the city, (2) his ordinary service as soldier and citizen, 
 and (3) his final refusal to evade the Law which 
 condemned him to death. But is this inconsist-
 
 SOCRATES 167 
 
 ency ? As to conformity we have seen that it is 
 little more than good fellowship (aided by an undog- 
 matic agnosticism). As to his service of Athens, 
 he certainly never held that to imply any accept- 
 ance of all her policy. And as to the Laws his 
 attitude is no repudiation of the claim made for 
 the philosophers in the Theaetetus and the Republic 
 to stand above the trivial affairs of any particular 
 city. He refused to obey any command which 
 might have been given for him to stop what he was 
 doing. 1 He held by Athens, but there were quite 
 definite limits to his allegiance. There were some 
 acts to which no voice of any state or community 
 could compel him. And when the crisis came which 
 he had long expected he did not disguise the ulti- 
 mate issue. He loved something which he called 
 justice or truth better even than Athens ; and as 
 he was quite unable to make the cave-dwellers 
 see these realities, he was condemned. Should he 
 then have fled ? He might very well feel that the 
 alternative to dying was to be believed to be afraid 
 of death. He may have been mistaken in his judg- 
 ment. The world might not have condemned him 
 as a coward if he had fled from Athens ; and yet 
 the fear that they might moved him to stay. Death, 
 he held, was not so great an evil as the majority 
 imagined. But that was not the chief reason for 
 obedience to an Athens which condemned him to 
 death, in spite of his refusal to obey the order to 
 change his life. He stayed and died as the ultimate 
 proof that he was not against Athens. To the average 
 man the assertion of allegiance to something higher 
 or other than " our country " always sounds like 
 an allegiance to enemies of " our country " ; and 
 
 1 Apology 38 sq.
 
 168 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 the charge against Socrates was in effect that he 
 was anti- Athenian. His acceptance of the death 
 penalty was his one possible reply to that charge. 
 If he had gone into any other city, the charge would 
 seem to have been proved : but as he willingly 
 died by the hand of Athens he showed that he was 
 not anti- Athenian. And so in life and in death 
 he strove to unite an effort towards higher and nobler 
 allegiances with a devotion to what was best in 
 the tradition he condemned. His heart was never 
 shaken. He held to the high faith in a divine 
 reason which is supreme over the popular opinion. 
 His intense love of his fellow Athenians never 
 misled him into supposing that their actions were 
 above criticism or that anything they wanted him 
 to do or to stop doing must therefore be done or 
 left undone. To the many his last words in the 
 Apology were that he was certain the life which 
 they condemned was right. To the few in the 
 Phaedo he said that we are all children crying in 
 the dark. To both he said that there is nothing 
 finer or nobler in life than to seek, not in popular 
 custom or traditional belief, but in one's own reason, 
 the guidance for action. 
 
 Socrates was the model to whom not merely 
 Plato and Aristotle, but Epicureans and Stoics 
 looked, until the last rays of the Greek tradition 
 faded from the 'world. His character had as many 
 different imitators as his views had different and 
 even discordant interpretations. Some held him 
 a loyalist, others a rebel ; some a fakir, others a 
 diner-out ; some a scholar, some a saint. And 
 perhaps they were all right. . . . Such was 
 Socrates. The light of his character falls upon 
 every detail of ethical theory : it illuminates the
 
 SOCRATES 169 
 
 common plain of daily acts and the heroic heights 
 of intelligence and virtue. And even to-day it is 
 hard to write of Greek ideals without supposing 
 that to have produced Socrates alone is a sufficient 
 justification for the hopes of Athens and more 
 than an excuse for her many failures. For there 
 is no man who, having been so great, yet gives one 
 more of the feeling that what he did and was is as 
 nothing if compared to what may yet be done in 
 that human art of which he was a master a man of 
 passion and of intelligence " with a fierce heart 
 and a strong head and the whole force of his heart 
 devoted to keep the head above it cool."
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 THE two great Athenian philosophers of the fourth 
 century accept in part, systematise and develop, 
 the Athenian ideals of life and character. They 
 also point beyond such ideals to others of a more 
 complex and perhaps less practical kind. But in 
 the main Plato and Aristotle are Athenian. Even 
 in their criticism of Athens they belong to her rather 
 than to Sparta. They were directly influenced by 
 the customs and beliefs of Athens and they were 
 recognised as important by contemporary Athenians. 
 
 In our time the philosopher often belongs to a 
 small and exclusive class of " wise " men. Their 
 controversies leave the average man cold, even 
 when he hears of their existence. Their con- 
 clusions have no immediate effects upon ordinary 
 life, and the average man is hardly aware of the 
 names of those who teach or study philosophy. 
 On the other hand the philosopher in modern times 
 is hardly at all influenced by the current habits of 
 thought or action. Perhaps he does not even meet 
 men of the poorer classes, and he seldom condescends 
 to speak of his subject with the ordinary educated 
 man. His ethics and his metaphysics are not 
 immediately affected by the religious practice or 
 conventional beliefs of his time. 
 
 This segregate position is due not to any deficiency 
 170
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS 171 
 
 of modern philosophers or the modern man in the 
 street but to the increasing segmentation of modern 
 society in respect of " interests," and it is partly 
 for this reason that philosophy means now a special 
 form of study and not a " way of life " as it did for 
 Plato and Aristotle. Whereas in former times 
 men were separated chiefly by geographical obstacles 
 and distances, now that these have been almost 
 overcome, we tend to be separated by differences of 
 occupation. A common dwelling-place now does 
 not necessarily bring the inhabitants into contact, 
 each with the other. In the great city-regions 
 no one knows his neighbours. And it is more and 
 more possible for men to meet only those who are 
 interested in the same segment of life, however 
 far-off those others may dwell. Geographical or 
 linguistic divisions are still sufficiently important, 
 but the tendency of modern life seems to be in the 
 direction of separating and uniting men in reference 
 to occupation or interest ; so that the modern man, 
 in a society actually more complex, may be in 
 touch with fewer differences of view than the ancient 
 Athenian. 
 
 By contrast, in Athens of the fifth and fourth 
 centuries the philosopher was compelled to be in 
 contact with men who were interested in many 
 different aspects of life. It was impossible for 
 Plato or Aristotle to avoid conversation with shoe- 
 makers and merchants and politicians and " men 
 about town." The philosopher walked in pro- 
 cessions or at least attended popular fetes. He 
 was affected at every moment by what quite 
 unphilosophic men were thinking and doing ; and 
 therefore his evidence for social life was perhaps 
 more complex and was certainly more personal
 
 172 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 than the eTidence of the modern members of the 
 " thinking " caste. He knew men and did not 
 read statistics. On the other hand ordinary men 
 were more immediately and continuously aware of 
 what was going on in the Academy or the Lyceum 
 than a modern business man, for example, in New 
 York is aware of the Rockefeller Institute or of 
 Columbia College. The Athenian people were 
 proud of a great man who could attract followers, 
 and troubled if they suspected the tendency of his 
 teaching. It is true that the philosopher might 
 have to suffer for the average man's knowledge of 
 his existence. Protagoras and Socrates and Aris- 
 totle, and doubtless many others less acutely, were 
 made aware that they were watched. But the result, 
 except during moments of crisis or popular excite- 
 ment, was that the thinker did not feel himself to 
 be thinking in a vacuum. 
 
 With respect to the effect upon philosophers, 
 nothing could be more unlike Oxford or Cambridge 
 or Princeton than the position of philosophy in 
 the midst of an active and varied city such as 
 Athens. With all apologies, the position of Man- 
 chester University or of Harvard is much more 
 like that of the Philosophic Schools in Athens than 
 is the position of Colleges in what is called a Uni- 
 versity Town. But even with the " new " univers- 
 ities the analogy is very slight, in so far as Athens 
 was not a " one trade " town. " The Schools " 
 in Paris may be our nearest parallel ; and yet even 
 there the influence of current life is not as acutely 
 felt by thinkers as it was in Athens. Much as we 
 may have gained, therefore, since the days of Plato 
 and Aristotle, they had evidence for social and 
 ethical facts of a peculiarly valuable kind. Athens
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS 173 
 
 was always before them; and their ideals were 
 Athenian even when they went beyond the average 
 man in desiring consistent thought or intellectual 
 insight. It is clear, then, that we may speak of 
 Plato and Aristotle as Athenian in a sense in which 
 we could not speak of a modern philosopher as 
 representing the atmosphere or expressing the ideals 
 of his city. 
 
 The evidence for this is abundant. Aristotle 
 is obviously reporting and defending current prac- 
 tice in his treatment of slavery and of the position 
 of women. He makes the best case he can in his 
 theory of " the mean " for the average man's wisdom 
 in the proverb " Nothing too much." And even 
 Plato, who was less easily impressed by the average 
 intelligence or the established order, was greatly 
 influenced by the ordinary We of Athens. The 
 dialogue form of philosophical argument is due to 
 Athenian custom ; and Plato gives us his experience 
 of Athenian symposia and conversations in the public 
 meeting-places. Indeed the " democratic man " 
 and the others sketched at the end of the Republic 
 seem to be rather reports as to the character of men 
 Plato actually knew than abstract statements of 
 different attitudes. The traditional customs and 
 ceremonies affected his view of the world. The 
 doctrine of Recollection and the use of Myth are 
 due in great part to the Eleusinia and private 
 " mysteries " ; and the idea of immortality is modified 
 by Orphism. 
 
 So much with respect to the matter of their philo- 
 sophy ; as to the manner in both philosophers 
 the prominence given to metaphors drawn from 
 sculpture and painting is obviously Greek. The 
 Ideas of Plato and the language he uses of them are
 
 174 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 due to the etSoj; at which the sculptor looks, and 
 the " participation " of it by " the material." This 
 original metaphor, from the structure of matter or 
 the " physique " of living bodies, had been developed 
 in biological and geometrical theory ; but the word 
 still retained its old picturesque association. 1 
 Matter and form are in Aristotle frankly artistic 
 rather than what we should call " scientific " ideas. 2 
 The " creative (poetic) mind " implies an artistic 
 view of mental process. 3 And all this is in the 
 region of metaphysics. In ethical theory Plato's 
 ideal man is " finished off " by Socrates " in the 
 manner of a skilful artist." 4 The ethical teacher 
 is the true artist, 5 in the argument of the Gorgias. 
 And in Aristotle's view of the good life, the meta- 
 phors of fine art are everywhere obvious. 
 
 But along with the influence of art we must allow 
 for the influence of medical theory and practice in 
 the formation of the philosophers' ethical views. 
 This practice of medicine had given rise to the care 
 of health among quite ordinary business men ; for 
 we have a book " On Diet " published before Plato 
 wrote, which was obviously intended to be used, 
 not by the " idle rich," but by the artisan, farmer 
 or shopkeeper. 6 Life is supposed to be regulated 
 by attention to rules of bodily hygiene. Disease is 
 due to lack of order or harmony. Pleasure is a 
 " filling up," pain a " privation." Hence health is 
 
 1 cf. Taylor, Varia ^Socratica, ist series V. on the words 
 eI8o<;, Mix. 
 
 1 Metaphysics 10336. 
 
 * De Anima 4300, 12. cf. id. 4260. 
 4 Rep. 540. 
 
 * Gorgias. 465 sq. cf. 5036. 
 
 * cf. Taylor Varia Socratica, ist series, p. 238 note. The book 
 may be found in Kuhn's text I. 631 sq. 3rd Book, p. 716.
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS 175 
 
 a sort of democratic equality between the different 
 impulses, and the excellence of the body is due to 
 adjustment in reference to a mean. 
 
 The influence of all this on Plato and Aristotle 
 is very obvious. Plato definitely identifies virtue 
 with " health " l and Aristotle with a " mean." 
 Their ethical metaphors are often medical, as in the 
 famous description by Aristotle of the moral effect 
 of tragedy. For the idea of purification or purga- 
 tion of the emotions is, at least in part, medical. 
 
 Finally, lest it should be imagined that no exact 
 thinking lay behind the systematic and extended 
 research of Plato and Aristotle, we must note that 
 many other philosophers had worked at the same 
 problems. Unfortunately their works are only 
 known to us in fragments, and these fragments give 
 the impression of chance observations. It is, how- 
 ever, certain that the method and many of the con- 
 clusions which we now find in Plato and Aristotle 
 were to be found in earlier work. Treatises were 
 written and discoveries made both in the sphere of 
 physical science and in that of political and ethical 
 knowledge. These, as much as the beliefs and prac- 
 tices of the average man and the poets, Plato and 
 Aristotle could use. And we must therefore now 
 treat them as standing not only for the special insight 
 of two very great minds, but for the hard work done 
 by many who are known to us only by name. We 
 should not forget such excellent sayings as those of 
 Heracleitus " Character is a man's fate " or 
 " Much knowledge does not give sense " or " The 
 senses without thought are blind." Philosophers 
 continued the old fashion of proverbial philosophy, 
 giving it a new turn in epigram. So Democritus 
 
 1 cf. especially Sophist, 228.
 
 176 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 is known by abrupt sentences which carry a little 
 further the Greek feeling for knowledge in life. 
 " Fools become wise by experience " ; " The teacher 
 of fools is not reason but circumstance " ; and yet 
 " Many without conscious reasoning live according 
 to reason," and " The virtue of a man must be judged 
 not only from his acts but from his intentions." 
 Of general remarks we have " Not all relatives are 
 friends, but only those with the same interests," 
 and " He who wishes to live calmly must not 
 overwork either for himself or for the state, but all 
 he does must be done with due regard to his abilities 
 and his strength. He must not be dragged on even 
 by a favouring fortune." Such sayings indicate the 
 general atmosphere of the intellectual world in which 
 the work of Plato and Aristotle was produced ; and 
 they must be taken to indicate not merely occasional 
 flashes of insight but the steady progress of the dis- 
 cussion of moral problems. Indeed, the Greek attitude 
 towards morality would not be understood unless we 
 remembered that the Greeks were the originators 
 of exact and systematic thought. Moral philosophy 
 was, for them, a part of that great body of truth, 
 mathematical, physical and historical, of which 
 they laid the foundations. They were scientists 
 as well as artists, and they prided themselves as 
 much upon their mathematics and physics as 
 upon their drama and sculpture.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 PLATO ON RIGHT ACTION 
 
 We may now turn to the statement and develop- 
 ment of the Athenian ideal in Plato and Aristotle. 
 The philosophers set themselves to discover what 
 was implied in the common belief that one man was 
 morally better than another. That comparing of 
 men was the evidence in ordinary life of the ideal 
 aimed at, for there was clearly a standard of compari- 
 son. The good man seemed to have more of a parti- 
 cular quality than the man who usually did wrong ; 
 and if you held that it was worth while to aim at 
 being physically, intellectually and emotionally 
 developed, there must be some possibility of showing 
 what was admirable in such development. Thus 
 two beliefs seemed to be implied in the attitude of 
 the average man, (i)that some men, called " good," 
 had in them what others had not, and (2) that this 
 very thing was what it was well to acquire or to give 
 to others in education. What this was, then, the 
 philosophers set themselves to discover. Let us 
 call it virtue or excellence (aper^j, understanding 
 the word to mean^that which makes a man worthy 
 of admiration." 
 
 The problem was first stated as a question whether 
 a man could be made virtuous or excellent by teach- 
 ing ; and, since all genuine education seemed to 
 imply that he could, the answer was given that 
 
 N 177
 
 178 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 " virtue is knowledge." That is the phrase which 
 opens the history of ethical theory, and it is the first 
 statement of the Athenian ideal as explained by the 
 philosophers. It is a phrase which was undoubtedly 
 used by Socrates ; and in all that follows from it we 
 cannot well distinguish Socrates from Plato. But it 
 is perhaps better not to comment upon the phrase, 
 since it is not merely the meaning of the words or 
 the opinion of Plato which is our interest. The 
 problem of moral action and the ideal of life must 
 remain central and the view taken of it by Plato 
 secondary. We shall therefore not follow the 
 historical order of the Platonic dialogues or the detail 
 of the argument there given, but attempt to state 
 in modern terms the first philosophic conclusion 
 which was made with respect to the moral ideal 
 in life and character. 
 
 The problem whether virtue can be taught was 
 transformed into the question as to the nature of 
 virtue itself, and that again into the simpler and 
 more fundamental issue as to the nature of right 
 action. Protagoras, in the dialogue to which his 
 name is given, is questioned by Socrates as to his 
 special qualifications ; and since he claims to make 
 men virtuous, he is asked what precisely he gives 
 to them. His reply, with a subtle Platonic sarcasm, 
 is given in a long sermon on the excellence of virtue. 1 
 This is obviously no reply at all. But it is still the 
 practice of the reverend Protagorases of our day, who 
 imagine that the moral problem is solved by telling 
 men to be " good " or by dilating on the beauties 
 of virtue. They tell us neither what to do nor 
 why to do it. And Socrates is made to show that 
 sermonising implies the two pernicious ideas that 
 1 Protagoras 320.
 
 PLATO ON RIGHT ACTION 179 
 
 w already know all that is to be known about right 
 actions and, secondly, that we need not trouble 
 to inquire why one action is right and the other 
 wrong. The sermon-preacher, however, sees that 
 punishment is supposed to make men better, and 
 on the other hand that those who seem to have 
 the most opportunity for being good are often vicious. 
 These little difficulties he faces and passes on, with 
 the remark that " we cannot help it." 1 The confu- 
 sion, still common to-day, is admirably rendered. 
 Protagoras does not see the distinction between good 
 intentions, which cannot be taught, and the know- 
 ledge of right action which can. So Socrates indicates 
 that " when a man preaches, I never can remember 
 what it is all about " ; 2 and he returns to the original 
 question, " What is it that you give to a man when 
 you say you teach virtue ? " 3 There is at this 
 point a dispute about " Texts " which is like the 
 appeal to authoritative writings when the question 
 is as to fact, again a Platonic sarcasm. But the 
 issue is at length clear. What can be taught is 
 that certain actions have certain results, and all 
 moral instruction, in so far as it is effective, is not 
 an inducing of the pupil to mean well but a giving 
 of information as to what results follow from cer- 
 tain actions. This is a sort of calculation. 4 In so 
 far then, as " virtue," now meaning right action, 
 is dependent on this " science," " virtue is know- 
 ledge." 5 We have thus arrived at a definite solu- 
 tion ; but it is a solution only of the problem as to 
 what is given in education (i.e., knowledge of right 
 action) not the solution of the general question as 
 to the nature of " virtue." The method of calcula- 
 
 1 Prot., 324. * id., 334.6. * id., 339. 
 
 4 id., 357. *id., 361.
 
 i8o GREEK IDEALS 
 
 tion by which we are to discover right action is 
 also indicated. " Pleasure " is not the only good, 
 but in any life which is good pleasure is one element. 
 Therefore pleasure can be used as a sort of indication 
 of right action. 1 And we thus have a conception 
 of the art of life, fundamentally Greek, but also 
 philosophically exact. 
 
 An essential fact emerges from this, the dis- 
 tinction between " meaning well " and doing right 
 actions. When we study right action, we must 
 put aside for a moment the problem of " the good 
 will " and concentrate upon the action done. This 
 action is to be judged morally, not by reference to 
 the intentions of the man who does it. That is, we 
 put aside " virtue," in our sense of the word, which 
 is too vague a term, in order to discuss " justice " 
 or right action. 2 And although we may give a man 
 credit for being " virtuous " if his intentions are 
 good, we also demand of our ideal man that his 
 actions shall be right. This latter element we can 
 develop in action by teaching, and in that far 
 " virtue is knowledge." The ideal man is he who 
 has learnt what it is right to do. We condemn 
 the action of burning heretics as wrong ; but we 
 may regard the well-intentioned Inquisitor as a 
 " virtuous," if not an ideal man. The man, however, 
 who is most worth admiration is he who not only 
 intends to do right, but knows what it is right to do. 
 
 1 Prot. 35 (b). The subtlety of this is not often noticed. 
 Pleasure is not the good. Plato never says " good is happiness," 
 but of many good things, pleasure is one : and of all action which 
 leads to " good life " (or well-being) pleasure must be one of 
 the results. 
 
 1 The Greek word aperJ] will still bear the weight of the argument, 
 but the English word " virtue " breaks down here because of 
 its intimate association with intentions.
 
 The obvious difficulty, that one may know what 
 it is right to do and yet not do it, may be met 
 in] two ways. First, Socrates would say that true 
 knowledge compels. 1 If a man knows, in the real 
 and not in the superficial or formal sense, what it is 
 right to do, he must do it. For knowledge is not 
 a calm acquaintance but a passionate adhesion to 
 facts. No man does evil willingly ; but only because 
 he supposes it to be good : and in any case it is more 
 polite to suppose that what is wrong with the evil- 
 doer is his knowledge and not his intentions ! 
 The sermoniser abuses his congregation ; the moral 
 teacher instructs them. But secondly, even sup- 
 posing that a man may not do what he knows it 
 is right to do, nevertheless action which is right 
 contains in it something more than good intention ; 
 and that something more can only be put into it 
 by knowledge. Therefore if morality can be taught 
 at all, one must suppose that it is in some sense 
 knowledge. One cannot teach a man to want the 
 right thing though one may influence his taste 
 but he can be taught what is the right thing to 
 want. And indeed we may best see what is correct 
 in the phrase that moral excellence in action depends 
 upon knowledge by understanding to what it is 
 opposed. Socrates and Plato were really opposing 
 the two entirely inconsistent views of the average 
 man views held even to-day that (i) nobody 
 really knows what is right or no exact and universal 
 knowledge of morality is possible, and that (2) 
 we know it already ! The average man takes it 
 
 1 Prot. 352. Socrates says : The many think knowledge a 
 poor slave liable to be dragged about by passion, pleasure, pain, 
 lov and far. But is it not a noble thing well fitted to govern 
 mankind ? Protagoras replies Wisdom and knowledge ar of 
 all human things the mightiest.
 
 182 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 for granted that what he thinks right is right and, 
 when driven to doubt, he takes refuge in the rela- 
 tivity of all standards of right ! Plato and Socrates 
 say that we can know what it is right to do, but 
 that we can know it only by study of the subject. 
 How then are we to distinguish the knowledge of 
 morality (right action) from other kinds of know- 
 ledge ? In the Meno Plato urges the problem of 
 knowledge. It is shown to be of two kinds, one, 
 an awareness of certain objects (of which we may 
 not be conscious before they are brought to mind 
 and which we are therefore said to " remember ") 
 and the other based upon calculation, which is, 
 as it were, " popular." This latter is called " right 
 opinion " 1 which is in " moral-social action what 
 divination is in religion." This gives a sort of 
 ready-reckoning about what it is right to do ; and 
 this in fact is what people depend upon ; but if they 
 had exact knowledge they would be able to say why 
 one act was right and another wrong. It remains 
 the ideal that we should really know, and not 
 merely divine the right. Again, the knowledge of 
 what it is right to do is scientific and not emotional. 
 As cookery is to medicine (the real knowledge of 
 what is good for the body) so is " speechifying " 
 to the real knowledge of right and wrong. 2 It is 
 not the knowledge of how to do what you want to 
 do nor is it the knowledge of what most men want 
 to do. 3 People are always counting heads irrespec- 
 tive of their contents. They are always trying 
 to discover what it is right to do by taking a vote 
 on it. So Isocrates, the simple-minded contem- 
 porary of Plato, defends his own teaching by saying 
 that he is no abstract theorist, he teaches only 
 
 'Meno, 97. '.Gorgias. 465. 8 id., 472.
 
 PLATO ON RIGHT ACTION 183 
 
 what is recognised by all ! l And once again, the 
 knowledge of what is right is not knowledge of 
 what will bring pleasure, for some acts bring 
 pleasure which are not right ; " pleasure then, 
 like everything else, is to be sought for the 
 sake of that which is good and not that which 
 is good for the sake of pleasure." 2 And besides 
 most men admit that some pleasures may be " bad," 
 as for example the pleasure of believing a false 
 opinion ; 3 and other pleasure may be " mixed with 
 pain," as for example the pleasure of scratching 
 when there is itching. 4 
 
 So far we see only what is not the knowledge 
 of what is right ; and now we must say positively 
 what it is. It is the knowledge we most need, that 
 of ends, not of means. For the knowledge of how 
 to get what you want implies that you know already 
 what you should want (i.e., what you need) ; and 
 this is precisely what is lacking. The ideal man is 
 not he who knows what he wants, but he who wants 
 what he needs. Hence, to put it into modern terms, 
 what we most need is not more power over nature 
 (physical science) nor more command over men 
 (psychology, or popular " politics "), but more 
 knowledge of what to do with such power over 
 nature and such control of men as we have. And 
 yet no one, as Socrates and Plato say, seems to 
 value sufficiently this knowledge of what it is worth 
 while to do or to have. Indeed most men either 
 think they know enough as to the end of human 
 action or they think that the end cannot be known 
 
 1 Antid., 184. " Teachers of moral philosophy differ from each 
 other and from the world as to what is virtue : the virtue which 
 I inculcate is recognised by all." 
 
 Gorglas, 5000. * Philebus, 42. *id., 46.
 
 184 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 exactly and independently of this or that man's 
 desire. 
 
 Here the Athenian ideal of knowledge as essential 
 to the good life becomes clear and consistent. It 
 is clear that one may will what is right and do 
 what is wrong ; and in order to do what is right, 
 it is useful or perhaps necessary to know what 
 it is right to do. For, although one may happen 
 to do what is right without such knowledge, the 
 practice is haphazard and insecure. No know- 
 ledge can be more valuable than the knowledge 
 of right action ; and moral progress, individual 
 or social, means not mere good intentions, but 
 an increasing knowledge of what it is right to 
 do. What we want to know, then, is not how 
 to do anything, but what to do ; and this 
 implies that we must discover what actions are, 
 absolutely and independently of our special desires, 
 right. The fundamental distinction having been 
 made between good intentions and right actions, it 
 remains to be said how we distinguish right from 
 wrong action ; and this is done by reference to conse- 
 quences ; for the calculation to which Socrates is made 
 continually to refer is a calculation of consequences. 
 
 The consequences of right action are intrinsically 
 good ; and they are agreed to be, at least in part, 
 states of mind. " The good," says Socrates, 
 " which both you and I affirm to have the property 
 of making all men happy is some state or disposition 
 of the soul." 1 And that state of soul which is 
 the result of right action is described as a harmony 
 or a symmetry. The two metaphors are comple- 
 mentary ; for we must understand Plato's implica- 
 tion that we have here gone beyond the range of 
 
 'Philebus, 116.
 
 F 
 
 PLATO ON RIGHT ACTION 185 
 
 scientific formula. The " arrangement " metaphor 
 is in the Gorgias. " The good soul will be that in 
 which there is order " (x6CT[xo<;)' 1 And although 
 " arrangement " (T<XK;) is what is to the Greek mind 
 most striking even in harmony, yet we may count it 
 another metaphor in the Republic when Plato says 
 that right action will " set the principles of the 
 soul in tune together." 2 
 
 The ultimate metaphysical issue as to the nature 
 of what is intrinsically, eternally and universally 
 good is not clearly stated in the Platonic dialogues. 
 We may well believe that the omission is intentional ; 
 and we shall see the reason when we discuss Plato's 
 ideal man. In the Republic we read " let us put 
 aside for the present all enquiry into the real nature 
 of the chief good." 3 There certainly is an apparent 
 contradiction in " saying that men are ignorant of 
 what is good and then implying that they know what 
 it is " ; but there we must leave it now. So far, then, 
 concerning (i) the distinction between knowledge of 
 right and the intention to do right, (2) the kind of 
 knowledge (ends and not means) and (3) the method 
 by which this knowledge comes (calculation of 
 consequences). But before we pass on we may 
 remark upon the importance of all this to the 
 conception of the moral ideal. The original interest 
 remains. The teaching of " virtue ' is the reason 
 for our inquiry into its nature. And we have now 
 discovered that what may be taught is a distinction 
 between right and wrong action. Thus ethics 
 becomes scientific and its propositions have that 
 universality and exactness which alone makes know- 
 ledge transmissible to others or valuable to them 
 
 1 Gorgias, 5040. cf. Burnet, Greek Phil., p. 177. 
 Rep., 443. Rep., 505.
 
 i86 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 when transmitted. Ethics, therefore, is a study 
 of the nature of things and not a mere record of 
 customs. 
 
 In early times and to primitive minds in all times 
 there is no distinction between what is generally 
 done or what your grandfather did, and what 
 " ought " to be done. The study of " custom " 
 then appears^to be the study of morality. Thus 
 teaching morality is only teaching what was once 
 done or what is now done by most people. It is 
 the teaching not of principles but of general state- 
 ments concerning historical or contemporary facts. 1 
 And the learner gains, not a capacity for the judg- 
 ment of moral issues, but a ready acquiescence in 
 what is common. This is " good form." This is 
 what morality means for Xenophon. It is what is 
 meant by the majority in every age ; and it is still what 
 most men believe to be morality, although they may 
 say otherwise. It is the reason why they are more 
 offended when any one acts or thinks differently 
 from his fellows than when he does fashionable 
 acts which have the most evil consequences. It is 
 the reason why moral progress is so slow ; and the 
 reason why the moral leader is usually condemned 
 as immoral. 
 
 Now this situation is secure so long as there is 
 no contact between men with different traditions, 
 customs and beliefs, and no acquaintance with the 
 changes which history reveals. Moral provincialism 
 is the only security for the idea that right action 
 is what the majority of your acquaintances do. But 
 it begins to appear that in Athens one thing is done 
 and in Persia another. The old school shut their 
 
 1 So in the case of " what one ought to believe, " the old school 
 mean by that only " what Is or was usually believed."
 
 PLATO ON RIGHT ACTION 187 
 
 ears. The wilder sort rush into moral relativism. 
 And Socrates and Plato maintain that all will be 
 well if we think out what is right and the reasons 
 why it is right. 
 
 It is seen, then, that in order to find out what 
 ought to be done it is not enough to know what your 
 national customs are, for (a) other customs exist 
 at present in other places, and (b) every kind of act 
 has been done in the past. But men do make 
 distinctions in the value they attach to different 
 customs, and therefore even the old school really 
 support those whom they most fear, for they use 
 reason. Thus we arrive at the most important 
 conclusion that right action is distinguished from 
 wrong in accordance with general principles and 
 not by reference to historical or contemporary 
 habits. 
 
 We must also note that, according to Plato, the 
 reason why an action is right can always be given 
 and the knowledge of the reason is almost as im- 
 portant as the knowledge of which class of actions 
 is right. This implies that morality does not depend 
 upon a command, and that moral obligation is not 
 of the same kind as the obligation involved in civil 
 law. The origin of morality in a group may be 
 command by superiors. That is an historical 
 issue ; but in the discussion of the nature of morality 
 we must assert that the basis of morality is not 
 authority. The reason why we do an action, there- 
 fore, is of fundamental importance ; for the teaching 
 of such reasons and not the inculcation of commands 
 or precepts is moral instruction. And morality 
 itself is insecure so long as men are uncertain why 
 they believe the actions to be right which they accept 
 as right.
 
 i88 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 This gives precision and importance to the Athenian 
 ideal as to the value of thought in practical life. 
 If thinking can show us (i) which actions are right, 
 and (2) why they are right, if it can make morality 
 more secure than authority can, and if it can make 
 of the moral life a fine art rather than a mere 
 artisan's habit, then we have not repudiated 
 but fulfilled what was best in the Athenian spirit.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL MAN 
 
 THE importance of a knowledge of what is right 
 being recognised, the result of such knowledge is 
 next in question. This knowledge is valued for 
 its effects, and the governing conception is therefore 
 that of an ideal man. All men are guided, however 
 feebly, by their admiration for character, and their 
 actions are such as they hope may produce this 
 character or something like it in themselves. All 
 men have in that sense an ideal, and there may be 
 something admirable in what most men admire ; 
 but to Plato the most admirable type of character 
 is one which few men can even understand. The 
 ideal man in the Socratic-Platonic language is the 
 9iXocrocpo<;. In the Platonic dialogues that word 
 is used to indicate what is noblest and most worthy 
 of admiration in character ; and it would be a 
 mistake to translate it " philosopher " without any 
 comment, for it means rather " saint " than " intel- 
 lectual," and yet it is fundamental in Plato that we 
 cannot divide the two. 
 
 In many points Plato is simply Athenian or 
 typically Greek. He expects bodily beauty and 
 suppleness, intellectual ability and emotional inter- 
 ests. These are taken for granted in his description 
 of the ideal man, or they are referred to in passing. 
 Those for whom he wrote would readily suppose 
 him to accept as obvious such elements of excellence ; 
 and therefore he did not emphasise their value. He 
 
 189
 
 190 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 is also in agreement with the majority of Athenians 
 in their admiration for a quick wit ; and he supposes, 
 as they did, that an ideal man will feel the beauty 
 of form and colour and rhythm ; since the harmonious 
 ordering of impulses is ideal. So far Plato is simply 
 Greek. 
 
 Again, Plato leaves little doubt anywhere in his 
 writings as to his opinion of the normal and average 
 virtues. They are worthy of all reverence and are, 
 of course, immeasurably more worthy of admiration 
 than the glory of conquest or the domination over 
 others which are, secretly or openly, admired by the 
 majority. For action is either productive and 
 creative or it is merely acquisitive ; 1 and although 
 the majority may admire acquisitiveness, whether 
 it be the activity of a general or of a vermin-catcher/- 
 yet the best activities of man, like art and agricul- 
 ture, aim at production and not at destruction. 
 Further, as the body may be either diseased or 
 deformed, so may the soul. Vice is disease and ignor- 
 ance is deformity ; and of these two we must be 
 rid in order that the activities of the soul may be 
 free. 3 This common humanity is the basis of all 
 ideal life ; and, whatever be said of the heroic 
 heights of excellence in our ideal, we must not be 
 supposed to repudiate or to undervalue this basic 
 virtue which divides the real man from the lustful, 
 the domineering or the savage. 
 
 But Plato's ideal contains some elements of 
 exceptional quality. These are expressed in two 
 ways. The ideal man is sometimes said to be divinely 
 mad, and at other times to have the eye of his soul 
 fixed upon the Form of Good. This may be taken 
 to mean, in modern phraseology, that in an ideal 
 
 1 Sophist, 219. id. ibid. * id. 228. 

 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL MAN 191 
 
 character one should find both emotional inspiration 
 and insight. But Plato is not willing to divide deep 
 emotion from keen intelligence, and we must there- 
 fore separate them here only for the purposes of 
 explanation. 
 
 The height of emotion is expressed in the Phaedrus. 
 It is a madness or " an inspired departure from 
 established usages." It is a sort of " love, with 
 philosophic talk," which is described in the Sym- 
 posium, where it is said that what relates to love 
 or passion is to be discovered through a continuous 
 and increasing exaltation. 1 This leads at last to 
 that vision of beauty unalloyed in which the ideal 
 man becomes the friend of God and immortal, 
 thereby accomplishing what, as a philosopher, he 
 set out to do. Philosophy is therefore a kind of 
 life and not a subject to be studied ; and it is, 
 further, a life of the emotions which may be called 
 love. The ideal man begins his departure from the 
 commonplace in the discovery which, in Plato, is 
 always connected with the contact between persons. 
 This is thoroughly Greek. Socrates says that he 
 would like the country but for lack of companionship ; 
 and we cannot imagine Plato's ideal man going out to 
 find his highest emotion among stones and trees ; for 
 this would be secondary. 2 In the contact of persons is 
 
 1 Symposium 211. 
 
 * Contrast the mediaeval conception of the ideal monk. " You 
 will find in stones and trees what no master can teach," says 
 Bernard of Clairvaux, writing to the founder of Fountains 
 Abbey. The Platonic Eros is always a passion which originates 
 in the perception of beauty in another person ; and the beauty 
 is always physical as well as intellectual, although Socrates is 
 very careful to say that of the two intellectual or mental beauty 
 is the attraction which gives the best starting-point for " philo- 
 sophy." cf. Bion : "Blessed are they that love, for they shall 
 be loved in return."
 
 IQ2 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 the first illumination ; and therefore Plato is scornful 
 of books as conveying " philosophy." Then the 
 true passion is caught from every kind of contact ; 
 and the world, which to the practical man is just 
 so much food and clothing and the means to obtain 
 these, seems to the philosopher to thrill with the 
 near presence of what is most divine. 
 
 There is no doubt of the intensity of the emotion 
 which this is intended to convey ; and the ideal man 
 is therefore passionate. He is not swayed or troubled, 
 and in that sense he is not moved as men are who 
 are generally accounted to have passions. Indeed, 
 Plato is very insistent upon his calmness ; but it 
 is the calm of intensity, not of apathy. For the 
 word which runs through all Plato's descriptions of 
 ideal life is love. The connections of the word are 
 not repudiated, except in so far as they imply an 
 emotion which is easily satiated. For Eros, like 
 our Love, may mean anything, from the transitory 
 impulse to sexual gratification or the ungovernable 
 passion which sways the crowd, to the force " that 
 moves the sun and the other stars." It is necessary 
 therefore for us to distinguish the emotion which is 
 called love in the popular novel from the flame which 
 burns at the heart of the world. The majority of 
 men do not understand this latter, much less have 
 they even a momentary experience of it. But this 
 alone is the Eros to which Plato refers ; and this 
 alone is the element in the ideal life of which we 
 speak here. It is difficult to speak of this more 
 adequately or to describe it more splendidly than 
 Plato did. 
 
 Such enthusiasm is the reason for a life which, 
 in the accepted phrase, is ascetic, since no one lives 
 always on^the^ heights. Even if a man could, he
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL MAN 193 
 
 should not ; for he must come down to the inhabit- 
 ants of the ordinary world. But the moments of 
 madness or of vision are to be used throughout life ; 
 and philosophy is therefore a discipline. The 
 discipline is described in two ways. It is in the 
 first place a continual self-denial with respect to 
 bodily sensations of a violent kind, sometimes even 
 a repudiation of the Greek delight in seeing and 
 hearing much and variously. And, secondly, it 
 is a preparation for death. As to self-denial, the 
 language of Socrates in the Platonic dialogues is 
 recognised to be Pythagorean and Orphic. It is 
 the language of a religion not very different in its 
 practices from that of St. Francis of Assisi. 
 " Brother Ass," the body, must be controlled. 
 ' The true philosopher is temperate and refrains 
 from all the pleasures of the body and does not 
 give himself up to them . . . because when the 
 soul of any man feels vehement pleasure or pain, 
 she is forced at the same time to think that the 
 object, whatever it be, of those sensations is the 
 most distinct and truest, which it is not." 1 Asceti- 
 cism, therefore, is to be practised lest we be absorbed 
 in the senses and lest we be misled, " being dragged 
 away to the things which never remain the same." 
 On the other hand " those who rightly engage in 
 philosophy study only dying and death." The soul 
 of a philosopher longs to be released from her 
 " prison-house " ; and indeed the body is a tomb 
 (crtofAa, aTJfia) in the Pythagorean metaphor. 
 The development of anti-sensualism and the con- 
 templation of death had abnormal results in 
 mediaeval Europe and India. We of the twentieth 
 century, therefore, cannot judge quite fairly the 
 l Phaedo, 82.
 
 194 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 attitude of Socrates and Plato ; for we see the 
 abnormalities more clearly than the original idea. 
 But as it stands in the text of Plato the ideal man is 
 simply to avoid excess, to keep " in training," and 
 to face the fact of death lest " the child which is 
 in each one of us should be afraid of death as if it 
 were a bugbear." * The Phaedo, in which these words 
 occur, is a study of the idea of death only and not a 
 complete philosophy. We must allow for that. 
 But in other dialogues also it is clear that Plato 
 expects his ideal man to stand unmoved before the 
 spectacle of his fate, either singing a charm 
 against fear or finding a raft on which to sail the 
 untra veiled sea. 2 In both these ideas, asceticism 
 and the contemplation of death, Plato departs from 
 the orthodox Greek tradition ; for although it is 
 utterly and ludicrously false to suppose that life 
 to the Greeks was joyful and lighthearted, yet they 
 cannot be said to have ever repudiated bodily 
 sensation. And since our purpose here is not to 
 set out the Platonic system, but to treat it only as 
 an expression of Greek ideals, we shall say no more 
 of that part of Plato's teaching which is not Greek. 
 It must be remembered, however, that (i) it is not 
 therefore " Eastern " or " Egyptian." There is 
 no reason why Plato's asceticism should not be 
 individual, as the attitude of Shelley, though 
 un-English, was certainly not borrowed from the 
 tradition of other countries. And it must also be 
 remembered that (2) Plato never suggests asceticism 
 as a universal practice. This is not an age in which 
 the control of impulse is understood or approved 
 even by the few ; and therefore the conception need 
 not be further developed here ; but it might be 
 
 'Phaedo, 77. * Id., 114.
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL MAN 195 
 
 argued that Plato is right in supposing that the 
 highest enthusiasm and insight cannot be used in 
 normal life without asceticism and, on the other 
 hand, that only asceticism keeps the eye bright and 
 the spirit keen for the possibility of new visions. 1 
 
 The quality of insight in the ideal man is described 
 chiefly in the Republic. First, there is said to be 
 an important difference between opinion and know- 
 ledge. Knowledge is an immediate contact with 
 objects, which may be understood by the metaphor 
 of intellectual vision. The man who " sees " is 
 compared, in the famous simile of the Cave, with the 
 person whose eyes have beheld the sun and its light 
 upon objects, when the eyes of others have only 
 seen the shadows of the real. The whole myth is 
 a subtle reversal of the popular conception of the 
 philosopher. As we have seen, Aristophanes, in 
 the Clouds, probably uses a common idea of the 
 Socratic school when he supposes them to be 
 employed in grubbing about below the earth to see 
 "the things under the earth." 
 
 The interests of the philosopher seem to the vulgar 
 to be in the obscure and cavernous recesses of the 
 obvious. 2 So philosophy itself has been described, 
 even in modern times, as the toil of a blind man in 
 
 1 There is a mean " asceticism " by which men refuse to be drunk 
 because drink costs money or because of a headache next morn- 
 ing. This is expressly repudiated by Plato in the Phaedo. 
 The Platonic asceticism is a discipline for attaining more intense 
 emotions and experiences, not a repudiation of all feeling. 
 It is, therefore, to be considered always in connection with the 
 Platonic conception of love or passion. Nothing could be more 
 unlike the asceticism of the saints of the desert, with their fear 
 of personal affection. 
 
 * This is expressed in the proverbial view of philosophy by 
 the saying that " Truth is at the bottom of a well." Democritus 
 uses a like metaphor, " We know nothing clearly for Truth is 
 in the depths." (Frag. 117.)
 
 196 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 a dark room, searching for a black hat which is 
 not there. The Platonic reply is that the true 
 philosopher is the only person who is not in the 
 dark cave. He lives in Truth, " that naked and open 
 daylight that doth not show the masks and mum- 
 meries and triumphs of the world half so stately and 
 daintily as candlelights." 1 He alone has ascended. 
 He alone looks upward. And because his eyes are 
 dazzled with too much light, not because he is 
 accustomed to the obscure, he sees but feebly in 
 the world of ordinary life. 
 
 In ordinary experience, however, the vision is 
 not " instilled into blinded eyes " ; but " since there 
 is a faculty residing in the soul of each person, just 
 as we might suppose it to be impossible to turn the 
 eye round from darkness to light without turning 
 the whole body, so must this faculty be wheeled 
 round, in company with the entire soul, from the 
 perishing world, until it be enabled to endure the 
 contemplation of the real world and the bright 
 part thereof, which, according to us, is the Form of 
 Good." 2 The process is, therefore, gradual by 
 which men reach the ideal insight. And what they 
 see is " in the world of knowledge, the limit of our 
 enquiries, which can barely be perceived ; but 
 when it is perceived, we cannot help concluding 
 that it is in every case the source of all that is bright 
 and beautiful." 3 
 
 We have come to that which needed explanation 
 in our discussion of right and wrong action, to that 
 which distinguishes the results of action as intrinsic- 
 ally good or bad. This is the Form of Good, an 
 absolute reality which is independent of time and 
 
 1 Bacon, Essay I. * Rep., 3186. 
 
 * id., 517, cf. also 508, 509, for the Form of Good.
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL MAN 197 
 
 place. But in the published work of Plato, although 
 we read the acknowledgment that " the enlightened 
 are in a ludicrous difficulty if they can only explain 
 the chief good as insight into that which is good ; " 1 
 yet only the metaphor of sunlight is used to explain 
 the nature of the intrinsic good. For this is a 
 peculiar quality of Platonic theory : it is in all his 
 philosophy implied by Plato that there is a limit 
 to the use of formula ; and in describing the ideal 
 man's insight we have now reached that limit. 
 The rest is myth. Whatever Plato said in his 
 lectures, it is certain that he never published any 
 further statement as to the sun which the ideal man 
 beholds. In his letter to the friends of Dion he 
 writes, " There is not and there never will be any 
 treatise of mine on these ultimates. . . others have 
 tried to write of this, but they do not know what 
 they attempt. I could myself do this better than 
 any one, and I should consider it the proudest 
 deed of my life as well as a signal benefit to mankind, 
 to bring forward an exposition of Nature luminous 
 to all. But I think the attempt would not be 
 beneficial except to a few, and these require only 
 slight direction to enable them to find it out for 
 themselves ; to most persons it would do no good 
 but only fill them with empty conceit of knowledge 
 and with contempt for others. These matters cannot 
 be communicated in words as other sciences are, 
 but out of repeated debates on them and much social 
 intercourse there is kindled suddenly a light in the 
 mind, as from fire bursting forth, which, when once 
 generated keeps itself alive." 2 This unexplained 
 
 1 Rep. 505. 
 
 * Ep. VII., written in 353 B.C., cf. Grote, Plato I., p. 223, and 
 Burnet, Greek Philosophy.
 
 ig8 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 reality, however, is the object of the gaze of the 
 ideal man ; and seeing the real, the ideal man is 
 rendered somewhat aloof from the majority of 
 his fellows. " The lords of philosophy have never 
 from their youth upwards, known the way to the 
 Agora, or the Dicastery, or the council or any other 
 assembly. . . . But the philosopher does not hold 
 aloof in order that he may gain a reputation ; the 
 truth is that the outer form of him only is in the 
 city ; his mind, disdaining the littleness and nothing- 
 ness of human things, is " flying all abroad " as 
 Pindar says, measuring with line and rule the things 
 which are under and on the earth and above the 
 heaven. . . . When he is reviled he has nothing 
 personal to say in answer to the civilities of his 
 adversaries, for he knows no scandal of any one and 
 they do not interest him. When he hears a tyrant 
 or king eulogised he fancies that he is listening 
 to the praises of some keeper of cattle ... a 
 swineherd, or shepherd, or goatherd, who is congratu- 
 lated on the quality of the milk which he squeezes 
 from them. . . . Then again he observes that the 
 great man is of necessity ill-mannered and unedu- 
 cated as any shepherd, for he has no leisure, and he 
 is surrounded by a wall, which is his mountain- 
 pen. . . . And when they sing the praises of wealth 
 or family, he thinks that their sentiments only 
 betray a dull and narrow vision in those who utter 
 them, and who are not educated enough to look 
 at the whole, nor to consider that every man has 
 had thousands and thousands of progenitors, and 
 among them have been rich and poor, kings and 
 slaves, Hellenes and barbarians, many times over. 
 But, O my friend, when he draws that other (the 
 pettifogging politician) into upper air and gets him 

 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL MAN 199 
 
 out of his pleas and rejoinders into the contempla- 
 tion of justice and injustice in their own nature and 
 in their difference from one another and from all 
 other things ; or from commonplaces about the 
 happiness of kings to the consideration of govern- 
 ment, and of human happiness and misery in general, 
 when that narrow keen little legal mind is called 
 to account about all this, he gives the philosopher 
 his revenge." . . . Theodorus interrupts, " If you 
 could persuade everybody, Socrates, there would 
 be more peace and fewer evils among men." And 
 Socrates, " Evils can never pass away. . . . Where- 
 fore we ought to fly away from earth to heaven 
 as quickly as we can ; and to fly away is to become 
 like God, as far as this is possible ; and to become 
 like him is to become holy and just and wise." 1 
 
 So in the Republic the very highest task given 
 to the trained intellects of the community is to 
 fix their eyes upon the eternal good ; and it is said 
 that if their eyes can thus be held they are neverthe- 
 less the guides of all men, the seers upon the watch- 
 towers of the world. They not only come down into 
 the cave, in which all men live, but even in their 
 moments of highest vision they cry out to men and 
 tell them all that may yet be done. 
 
 It is at this highest point in his conception of 
 the ideal man that Plato expressly refers to the 
 capacities of women. Aristotle would have for- 
 gotten them long ago ; and the average Athenian, 
 who would not perhaps have understood the meaning 
 of Plato even as applied to men, would have felt 
 the philosopher's ideal to be simply fantastic when 
 he heard it applied to women also. So nowadays, 
 it is not the scientific or artistic genius who denies 
 
 ^heaetetus, 174. Jowett's trans.
 
 200 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 the capacity of women for science or art. If you 
 would hear of the limitations of women, go to the 
 average male fool. From him, as perhaps from the 
 average Athenian, you will hear that politics is very 
 difficult and science very abstract, and that the 
 higher branches of art demand a very continuous 
 strain. The average Athenian was, indeed, certain 
 that women were not capable of these ; perhaps 
 because he was aware that he was not. From him 
 therefore we should hear of the excellencies of life 
 which are reserved for the male sex ; but from 
 Plato we learn that " none of the occupations which 
 comprehend the ordering of the community belong 
 to woman as woman nor yet to man as man ; but 
 natural gifts are to be found here and there, in both 
 sexes alike ; and so far as her nature is concerned 
 the woman is admissible to all pursuits as well as 
 the man ; though in all of them the woman is weaker 
 than the man." l " There are some women who 
 are fit, and some who are unfit for the office of guar- 
 dians." And of all guardians we require that 
 " their final task shall be to lift up the eye of the 
 soul, and fix it upon that which gives light to all 
 things." But in this matter, " do not suppose," 
 says Socrates, " that my remarks were intended to 
 apply at all more to men than to women, so long as 
 we can find women whose talents are equal to the 
 situation." 2 
 
 Thus it appears that in the Athenian tradition, 
 in spite of evil practice in the seclusion of women, 
 and in spite of the current and popular judgment 
 expressed by Aristotle, there is to be found 
 an ideal for the human being which is inde- 
 
 1 Republic, 4556, 4560. Trans, by Davies and Vaughan. 
 id., 540.
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL MAN 201 
 
 pendent of the distinction between the sexes. It 
 is no small matter, though it may seem obvious to 
 us now, that Plato should claim forewomen the finest 
 qualities of that common humanity which the preju- 
 dices or the uncriticised customs of the world have 
 generally refused to recognise in them. And the 
 claim was made in Athens. Some would say that 
 in this Plato was not Athenian ; or it may be urged 
 that women were freer in other cities. Of that we 
 shall speak when we deal with the social position 
 of women in the ideal community. Here we speak 
 only of the individual capacities of women. And 
 in this regard, in recognising the heights of intelli- 
 gence or emotion of which women are capable, 
 Plato was Athenian; for only in Athens was such 
 capacity consciously valued for either men or 
 women. Other Greek cities had had great women. 
 Sappho and Corinna were not forgotten. But it is 
 absurd to say that, because in Sparta women were 
 developed as man-breeders, their highest capabili- 
 ties were recognised. Sparta valued emotion and 
 intelligence little enough even among its men ; it 
 certainly had no use for women intellectually great. 
 If however we make Athens even in this point 
 stand for all the possibilities of Greece in general, 
 then we must count it not only an Athenian but a 
 Greek ideal that women should rise to great heights. 
 And we must compare the Greek cities not with 
 modern Paris or New York or Los Angeles, but 
 with contemporary Asian or Egyptian towns. 
 Commentators seem to forget that Plato was read 
 in the Greek world, and that his sentiments were 
 probably shared by many who could not express 
 them so well. Indeed Plato himself, although he 
 admits that the idea of women as guardians may seem
 
 202 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 strange, makes his characters in the conversation 
 accept it. Adeimantus and Glaucon are not drawn 
 as geniuses ; and it is unlikely that Plato would 
 have made his characters admit the cogency of 
 Socrates' arguments if the real men upon whom 
 he modelled his dialogue had been violently opposed 
 to the revolutionary ideas suggested. We should 
 allow, therefore, for the belief in Greece, and in 
 Athens especially, that women are capable of the 
 very highest development. 
 
 The conclusion is obvious. The Platonic ideal, 
 in part a repudiation of accepted Greek conceptions, 
 is, in part, based upon the common Greek desire 
 for a higher human development. But even in 
 the effort to draw a figure more splendid than those 
 popularly admired or understood, Plato is Greek. 
 Intelligence he never separates from emotion ; 
 and he seeks everywhere for what is human, irrespec- 
 tive of sex distinctions, at that point at which the 
 human becomes in the truest sense divine. 
 
 The whole value of Plato's ideal of character, 
 however, would be misrepresented if we did not add 
 one further observation. There is no trace of 
 puritanic or sabbatical solemnity about Plato's 
 ideal man. Wit and the ability to laugh at himself 
 and incidentally at his readers, is perhaps the greatest 
 of all the excellencies of Plato ; and some of it is 
 conferred by him upon his vision of the ideal. Even 
 when he is speaking of his " heavenly city " where 
 justice will be found, we have to be on our guard 
 lest we take Plato more seriously than he did him- 
 self. And certainly in his drawing of the ideal man, 
 he is inclined to laughter. This is the great dis- 
 tinction between the Platonic and the Aristotelian 
 literature, in spite of Aristotle's occasional efforts
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL MAN 203 
 
 at a joke. 1 But the effect of Plato's wit upon Plato's 
 ideal man is that the emotional intensity of philo- 
 sophical Eros and the intellectual insight into the 
 Form of the Good are humanised and graced by 
 Socratic humour. Laughter saves the true philo- 
 sopher ; it brings the ascetic down from the pillar 
 and sends him, crowned, to a dinner-party ; it lifts 
 the head of the student in him and sets him hob- 
 nobbing with cobblers and bankers. For the fine- 
 ness of the ideal character, as Plato imagined it, 
 is not contaminated by common life ; and the rarer 
 air of the heights only gives one liberty to laugh at the 
 solemn nonsense of the majority of those (probably 
 including himself) who talk about virtue. A certain 
 buoyancy of spirit and lightness of touch upon great 
 subjects, prevents the Platonic ideal from becoming 
 what too many commentators have made it since 
 the Neoplatonists began that evil tradition, a com- 
 bination of a bishop and a fakir. The ideal man in 
 Plato, with all his enthusiasms and his insight, 
 fortunately remained an Athenian. 
 
 1 Politics, 13106, " A nose which goes too far at last ceases to 
 be a nose at all."
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 PLATO ON EDUCATION 
 
 EDUCATION is the name we give to the method by 
 which we seek to develop those characteristics which 
 we think admirable in man. It is generally regarded, 
 in fact, by those who undergo it, as a peculiar and 
 inexplicable form of torture. But it is intended 
 kindly, and it is supposed to fulfil a double function 
 to give to each generation the knowledge and ability 
 for action which has been acquired in the past, and 
 to make each generation capable of increasing such 
 knowledge and ability. For information has to be 
 given without destroying originality ; and the new 
 generation must be made able to react to unforeseen 
 issues without being left to go through all the bitter 
 experience of the race. The method we use is indi- 
 cated by the end we have in view or the end we 
 unconsciously accept as desirable. And so the 
 Greek system may be thought of as the result of an 
 ideal, from which Plato drew his chief inspiration. 
 In the first place, of the Greeks in general we may 
 say that they valued education more than most 
 races have done. Spartan legislation was based 
 upon an educational system : Athens had innumer- 
 able and well-frequented schools ; and even small 
 towns like Troezen and Mukalessos in Boeotia had 
 schools. 1 This implies, of course, only an education 
 
 1 cf. Freeman, Schools of Hellas, p. 76 sq., and for Plato, see 
 especially Nettleship on " Education in the Republic of Plato," 
 in Hellenica. 
 
 204
 
 PLATO ON EDUCATION 205 
 
 in reading and writing, in playing the lyre and 
 chanting, and in physical development. Except 
 in Sparta it implies also only an education for boys : 
 since girls were trained as housekeepers at home and 
 seldom acquired any intellectual interests. Thus 
 the system was of very limited value. But, even 
 so, it was more than Europe had for many centuries 
 after Greek civilisation had disappeared. 
 
 After the first stages of education, many even 
 of the free-born boys would have to earn a living ; 
 but some would be able to begin mathematics and 
 to continue more elaborately their early study of 
 " the poets." This, together with the use of the 
 public gymnasia, may be called secondary education ; 
 and it seems to have been common in all Hellas. 
 We must also allow for the military training which 
 followed " secondary " education ; and for the 
 highly valued system, of which the Sophists took 
 advantage, by which adults discussed scientific or 
 political subjects which were commonly of interest. 
 In most Greek cities there was an opportunity for 
 the contact of adult minds which is hardly possible 
 now even in our Universities. 
 
 The general Greek view of the importance of 
 education is well known. " First among human 
 things," says Antiphon the Sophist, " I reckon edu- 
 cation " ; and the philosophers only emphasised an 
 admitted truth when they made education the most 
 important element in their ideal societies. For 
 neither Plato nor Aristotle depart, in this point, from 
 the Greek tradition ; and although their system of 
 education and, in part, the purpose for which they 
 chiefly intended it are obsolete, the spirit in which 
 they treat the question and the general attitude 
 they adopt are of permanent importance.
 
 2o6 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 We may now turn to Plato's ideal of education. 
 There were many points in which he agreed with 
 other Athenians as to the character of the ideal man, 
 and, therefore, he accepts or takes for granted many 
 of the practices of Athenian education. Thus he 
 makes no comment on the accepted division of 
 method into gymnastic and music, except to point 
 out that gymnastic may be good for the mind as 
 well as for the body, 1 and that the body is affected 
 by the mind. 2 He accepts also the prominent place 
 given to intellectual training in the Athenian ideal. 
 On the other hand, he looks to Sparta rather than to 
 Athens for strictness of her system, since he greatly 
 and wrongly undervalued the Athenian desire for 
 individuality. He made a fetich of organisation ; 
 and yet in one point he seems to have correctly 
 criticised the Athenian system. It was too formless, 
 and it left too much to the caprice of parents, who 
 as a class were considered by Plato to be incom- 
 petent to judge either the purpose or the method 
 of education. To Plato, and to Aristotle after him, 
 the social effects of education seemed overwhelm- 
 ingly important, and he therefore considered that 
 the whole of society should direct the education of 
 each child by giving complete power to those who 
 were specialists in education. 3 This is taken for 
 granted both in the Republic and in the Laws. Edu- 
 cation, Plato says in the Laws, will never have its 
 V right place until the minister for education is 
 \ superior to the minister for war. Again, he opposed 
 the Athenian idea which cut off women from educa- 
 
 1 Rep., 376 in fine. 'id., 403. cf. Charmides. 
 
 1 It is important that it is society and not the state (in our modern 
 sense) which is to direct education. Neither Plato nor Aristotle 
 maintain that education should be directed by the state as 
 opposed, for example, to the Church.
 
 PLATO ON EDUCATION 207 
 
 tion, and here also he looked to Sparta, adding, 
 however, the very un-Spartan conception of the 
 value of training a woman's intelligence as well as her 
 body. He certainly never imagined that the only 
 purpose for which all women should be trained 
 was the bearing of children ; and he probably knew 
 that the untrained intelligence of the women was 
 one of the causes of the overwhelming supply of 
 fools in each generation. 
 
 The purpose of education to the mind of Plato, 
 as can be seen from what has been said above, 
 was to make a man able to influence those with whom 
 he lived and capable of reacting to their influence. 
 In that sense the purpose was social. Thus it is 
 impossible, in Plato's sense, to call a man educated 
 who has no human interests and is not to be stimu- 
 lated by the fortunes or thoughts of those around 
 him. Education is also to fit a man for a particular 
 task hi society. Not enough is generally made in 
 commentaries of the repudiation by Plato of that 
 vague general training which was customary at 
 Athens and in England is called the education of a 
 gentleman. That the whole man should be devel- 
 oped goes without saying ; but the whole man is 
 not conceived to be in his action or his career an 
 " all-round " man. He has one kind of task to 
 perform, and is trained for that task. 1 Specialisa- 
 tion, in our sense, was, of course, unknown in so 
 simple a society ; but already the philosophers 
 were able to view society as a complex of functions 
 
 1 Rep., 443, in fine, " after he has made the elements of his 
 nature into a real unity, he will then proceed to do whatever 
 he may have to do, whether it involve the acquisition of property 
 or attention to the wants of the body, whether it be a social 
 affair or a business transaction of his own." Trans. Davies and 
 Vaughan.
 
 208 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 to be performed by differently trained individuals. 
 The process of education is to be at once a gradual 
 discovery of the individual's capacity for this or that 
 definite task and his gradual preparation for that 
 task. 1 It is to be governed by the idea that educa- 
 tion is not a putting in of anything but a turning to 
 the light " of that faculty which resides in the soul 
 of each man." 2 
 
 With respect to method, the details do not con- 
 cern us here, since we are dealing only with the 
 governing conceptions of Plato, and in many of his 
 suggestions he does not depart from the accepted 
 practice of his time. He seems to allow for three 
 stages in education, one in childhood, one in youth 
 and one in adult years. In childhood the attention 
 should be given not to training the mind but to the 
 development of a certain attitude. Education must 
 begin with play and depends for its permanent value 
 on " atmosphere." Fair sights and sweet sounds 
 make the beginnings of human excellence ; for the 
 desire for what is good and beautiful must become 
 natural and must not be merely commanded. When 
 the intelligence is first addressed the crudities of 
 the traditional books must be omitted, for " unlovely 
 fiction must not be told to the young and undiscern- 
 ing." 3 It is during this period that the first indica- 
 tions are given of the quality of intelligence or spirit 
 in each child. 
 
 The education of youth is the time for the separate 
 use of physical and intellectual training. Not only 
 must the body be developed with an eye to beauty 
 
 1 Rep., 423, " each to some one work that each may practise 
 his own occupation." 
 
 *id., 518. 
 
 id., 378. This very important issue in the days of Plato 
 is of subordinate importance to us now.
 
 PLATO ON EDUCATION 209 
 
 and suppleness, as all Greeks admitted, but bodily 
 movement must give rhythm and harmony to the 
 mind. For this purpose Plato, in the Laws, suggests 
 dancing, 1 although he is against the then newly- 
 introduced dramatic or " programme " dances in 
 which imitation played too large a part. The dance 
 is, of course, a formal group movement. And even 
 in the Republic, where less detail is given as to the 
 method of physical education, it is said that athleti- 
 cism must be avoided, although the bodily training 
 suggested as a substitute is not as clear as it should 
 be for us un-Greek moderns to understand. 
 
 The intellectual training suggested by Plato is 
 again, as to its details, not of importance to us here. 
 The fundamental point, however, is that it is what 
 we should now call scientific. Plato, the literary 
 artist, is also the devoted adherent of mathematics. 
 No one has said more clearly than he that this is 
 the basis of all intellectual training ; and he gives 
 us quite clearly to understand that " scientific " 
 knowledge is not a memory for various fragments 
 of information but a grasp of principles. Upon 
 that grounding is based the study of the world of 
 nature and of man. Skill in expression, so highly 
 valued by the Athenians, is looked at askance by 
 Plato ; and the study of forms of speech is expressly 
 repudiated. Memory was of more importance then 
 than it is in an age of books ; and yet Plato never 
 loses sight of the supreme importance of individual 
 ability to reason. Examinations had happily not 
 yet been discovered in Europe ; but the inspiration 
 of each by the tradition of civilised society was 
 believed to be shown in his actions or ambitions. 
 
 As for science, it is to be studied not because it is 
 1 Laws, 7950.
 
 2io GREEK IDEALS 
 
 useful in trade or for any so-called practical end, but 
 chiefly because by it " the mind is led to look 
 upwards." 1 Science is to train the capacity for 
 thinking. During the years from twenty to thirty 
 in an ideal community the best are pursuing this 
 in all its different branches. And the result of a 
 trained general capacity for thinking is believed 
 by Plato to be a better type of specialised work ; but, 
 of course, better in this sense means morally or 
 " humanly " better and not merely better as a source 
 of wealth. 
 
 Along with training in exact sciences must go the 
 influence or teaching of " the poets." For, as we 
 have seen above, moral training is necessary as well 
 as intellectual ; and a man does not learn what it is 
 right to do by accident or by intuition. 
 
 This is, perhaps the place to speak of Plato's 
 conception of the place of art in life. All Greeks 
 agreed that art, and especially drama, had as its 
 social function some task which might be called 
 educative. But Plato turns aside from the general 
 and positive statement to a violent attack upon the 
 practices of his own day. His mistake is fairly 
 obvious, as is his general mistake in undervaluing 
 individuality and the danger which is the only test 
 of moral strength. But in this he is right : as music 
 must be simple and not imitative of objects, as myths 
 must be moral, so drama must be such as will make 
 us true to what is best in us. 2 Any form of art 
 
 1 Rep., 5290. This is a most " practical " end ; but the use 
 of English confines practice to the getting of money. We may 
 therefore call the Platonic ideal unpractical or at least not 
 " technical " and utilitarian. The truths taught are, however, 
 immensely important to Plato, and he never regards science as a 
 mere gymnastic. 
 
 1 This does not mean that Plato was attacking art. He was 
 attacking the art-pose and the sentimentalised of the day.
 
 PLATO ON EDUCATION 211 
 
 which sinks that which is best in the exciting of that 
 which is primitive and, therefore, commonest, is 
 hopelessly bad not only bad for moral reasons 
 but bad art. The principle is perhaps doubtful ; 
 but Plato's general argument seems to hold, even 
 though his application of the principle is wrong. He 
 exaggerated the value of what was old and already 
 established in art, and if he had done the same as to 
 science his own works would stand condemned: 
 but even if we deny that what is old is best, we may 
 still admit that the highest function of art is to 
 express and to excite in us what is best. 1 
 
 In all this we have been considering the training 
 into further and further excellence of an always 
 lessening number. For the higher abilities are less 
 common. Finally, no unimportant part of educa- 
 tion comes after the years during which the general 
 and fundamental abilities for life are acquired. 
 Adult education may in a sense be for every one ; 
 but in that sense education is not a system but is 
 simply derived from the hard blows of experience. 
 As a system adult education must be reserved for a 
 few, since the majority are either incapable of going 
 beyond the simplest truths and the most elementary 
 development or they are prevented by their social 
 occupations. Thus Plato never considers an adult 
 education which is merely an attempt to make up 
 for the deficiencies of the education endured in 
 earlier years. Ideally a system of adult education 
 is a system for training special abilities ; and 
 because it is such, Plato seems to be hostile to the 
 general and formless appetite for discussion in 
 
 1 There is an element of badinage in Plato's attack on art which 
 is completely missed by those who do not see that he himself 
 was quite consciously an artist, cf. also Laws, 719., and Gorgias, 
 502. I owe this suggestion to my friend, Mr. G. P. Moriarty.
 
 212 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 Athens. Those who pursue this highest part of 
 education in an ideal society would be from thirty 
 to thirty-five years old, 1 and specially capable. 
 For among them are to be found the ideal men and 
 women of society. Here, at least, Plato does not 
 undervalue individuality. He is indeed in his system 
 of education searching for those who are to be " the 
 spiritual power " ; and so carried away is he by this 
 idea that he seems often, though unintentionally, 
 to forget the common man. 2 The chief subject for 
 this period of education is the knowledge of social 
 facts and social laws. This, too, must be acquired 
 by hard application, and is always accompanied by 
 exact mathematical studies. It must by no 
 means be a mere discovery of what people want or 
 how people may be flattered. For it is to lead to a 
 discovery of what is universally right and of the best 
 social means of attaining it. In its widest sense 
 it may be called dialectic ; and this name, in spite 
 of its later evil associations, we may still keep, in 
 order to prevent ourselves thinking that Plato 
 means a vague and unsystematised dilettantism, 
 which is sometimes called the study of social life. 
 The highest purpose of education, then, is the 
 formation of a spiritual power in society, and this 
 power must be exactly and intelligently trained, 
 with a view to its importance for the real life of all 
 human beings. For the spiritual power exists 
 only that it may serve the community. It leads 
 to that never-ending pursuit of the fleeting image of 
 the Good which, as we have seen above, is the highest 
 element in the life of the ideal man. 
 
 Rep., 
 
 * He corrects himself often, remembering the charges against 
 the few." (Rep., 500.)
 
 PLATO ON EDUCATION 213 
 
 Thus, if we subordinate as we should the discus- 
 sion of Homer and the dramatists in the Republic 
 and the sometimes tiresome regulations in the Laws, 
 the Platonic ideal of education is seen to be of no 
 small value to us now. In the confusion of suggested 
 programmes it may be as well to receive from one 
 who at least at moments did see the fleeting image 
 of the Good, the conception of an education which 
 may not only preserve what is best in tradition but 
 give to all who are capable those visions by which 
 the future is made better than the past.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL SOCIETY 
 
 As a preliminary we assume that Plato does not speak 
 of the state or of politics in our sense of the words. 
 This will be obvious to scholars ; but its importance 
 is not very commonly recognised. The polis, as 
 we have seen, was in fact a union in the main 
 religious, having within it all those different activities 
 which we find in church, state, university, club 
 and theatre, all as functions of one organisation. 
 Plato in speaking of the ideal does not suggest a 
 new form of society but a reform of the polis. The 
 lines within which his idealisation was to work were, 
 therefore, strictly denned by circumstance and 
 tradition. He never dreams of a nation-state or 
 of the conflict of church and state or of an inter- 
 national finance or of scientific international unions. 
 We should have to be very careful, therefore, if we 
 were to apply any of Plato's idealisation of the polis 
 to the very different social circumstances in which 
 we now live. And it would be absurd to make 
 Plato into an advocate of state-absolutism or state- 
 education in our sense of the word state. For him, 
 as for later philosophers who have less excuse than 
 he had, there is no question of the conflict of institu- 
 tions ; for the only other possibility besides devo- 
 tion to the ideal polis was, to his mind, egoism or a 
 barren individual selfishness. It may have been so, 
 
 214
 
 although in this he seems to have been mistaken, 
 but it certainly is not so now ; for there are many 
 institutions to which a modern man may be bound 
 besides what we call a state. We must under- 
 stand the subject of the Republic and the Laws, 
 therefore, to be, not what we call a state, but 
 more nearly what we call society, meaning by 
 that word all the social relations of man. 
 
 Again, by necessity society appeared to the Greeks 
 as a complete organism in the midst of a surround- 
 ing vacuum or chaos. Hence Plato, mistakenly, 
 omits all definite reference to those men who pre- 
 sumably do not belong to his ideal society. 1 This 
 might be correct if the ideal society included all 
 men, but by the organisation of the Republic, par- 
 ticularly for war, we are given to understand that 
 there are other men outside. Their organisation 
 and purposes should not have been disregarded, for 
 the isolated polis was pure fiction. 
 
 This does not imply that Plato's ideal is entirely 
 inapplicable to our circumstances. His social ideal 
 is certainly less so than the ideal for the individual 
 man ; because social structure has changed more 
 in the interval than has individual character. But 
 in his most general statements as to the nature of 
 society and the methods for improving it, Plato has 
 not been made obsolete by the changes which have 
 occurred since he wrote. Society must still be 
 conceived in terms of individuals performing func- 
 tions or of functions for which individual abilities 
 are needed. A good society is still one in which 
 
 1 Aristotle corrects the isolation of the Platonic ideal in the 
 Laws (Pol. 12650, 7), but only because he thinks war is the chief 
 contact. I do not mean to imply that Plato entirely forgot the 
 existence of "foreign" states. The point is that he never 
 definitely considered what they would be like and how related.
 
 2i6 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 all the parts are co-ordinated. Education is still of 
 fundamental importance. And the ultimate end 
 to which we look must still be understood in the 
 terms of morality rather than wealth or power. 
 
 Again, in order to do justice to Plato's ideal for 
 society, it is necessary to remember the particular 
 evils which seemed to him to be most striking. He 
 does, indeed, speak in general terms of the nature 
 of society as a whole, and of dangers to social life 
 which arise from the nature of man. But the 
 greatest thinker cannot fail to be affected by the 
 particular circumstances of his life, and not even 
 Plato could be, except at rare moments, the specta- 
 tor of all time and all existence. Therefore, quite 
 apart from the limitations we have already described, 
 we must consider the particular issues which Plato 
 had most in mind when he was stating his ideal. 
 
 The evils in Athens impressed him more than those 
 in Sparta ; and this was partly because he lived in 
 Athens and not in Sparta. But it was also because 
 he lived in a period of political confusion in Athens 
 that organisation seemed to be the highest need. 
 He saw that amateur politics and amateur law- 
 making were then the greatest evil ; and he did not 
 quite appreciate the equal evil of specialism, because 
 there was no specialism in Athenian government. 
 Again he belonged to the old Aristocracy and to a 
 philosophical-religious group whose master had 
 been condemned by the democracy. He saw, 
 therefore, the evils due to the action of common 
 folk more clearly than those of which his own social 
 class was the cause. 
 
 The evils most hated by him were selfishness and 
 incompetence. Private greed seemed to him to 
 weaken society and official incompetence to render all
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL SOCIETY 217 
 
 common action futile. He thought that Athens 
 especially suffered thus ; and we need not suppose 
 that he was wrong. But many other evils, from 
 which the ideal society is the suggested refuge, 
 he did not see ; and it is at least arguable that, 
 even if we could make selfishness and incompetence 
 less frequent or less powerful in society, we should 
 still be a long way from the ideal. For Plato never 
 really discusses the social evils which are not due to 
 moral causes ; over-population in respect to food 
 conditions, 1 too rigid an organisation, disease or 
 famine all these may have in some sense moral 
 connections but they cannot be removed merely 
 by making men virtuous. 
 
 When these limitations are granted, the work of 
 Plato is seen to be not less great because of them. 
 He rises to a height unsurpassed so far in the con- 
 ception of a true society, which shall realise what 
 men have hoped for ever since they aimed at more 
 than food or clothing. The comparatively inade- 
 quate evidence he had before him did not hinder 
 his insight into the binding force of society or the 
 immense development of it which might be possible. 
 Behind or beneath all his ideals is a very clear 
 analysis of actual social experience which, however 
 limited, had in it all the essential elements of any 
 social life. That is what makes Plato still the most 
 suggestive of all writers on social theory. 
 
 This, then, is Plato's initial assumption. We 
 cannot discuss what can be made of society unless 
 we know at least some of the essential facts of 
 social life. But the description of what is normally 
 done must not be taken necessarily as evidence for 
 
 1 cf. Aristotle, Politics, 12656. On limiting population a 
 criticism of Plato.
 
 2i8 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 what ought to be done. In actual fact the structure 
 of society was then due to the exploitation of some 
 by others. It is^still^soj and the majority, now 
 as then, not only acquiesce but support this kind 
 of organisation, probably because no other possibility 
 has entered their heads, or because the alternative 
 seems to them to be chaos. For that reason it is 
 well said that the state rests upon indolence and 
 docility. In the Greek world it was usual to think 
 of the exploiters as criminal (tyrants or oligarchs). 
 But Plato's statement of facts would not be incorrect 
 if we removed the accusation of crime entirely ; for 
 the few who are able to live a humane and civilised 
 life in view of the established organisation of society 
 are not villains. It is simply a deficient and largely 
 unconscious social tradition which gives them their 
 position. We may, however, assume with Plato 
 that some who are not among the few may be cap- 
 able of living such a life, and that not all of those 
 few are capable ; since the few have not been 
 selected by any test of individual capacity for superior 
 development, and the social structure provides no 
 opportunity for the many to show what they can 
 do. 
 
 Even this actual society, however, holds together 
 and lives, in proportion as those who do this or 
 that are competent to do it ; and in proportion as 
 the aim of the individual acting is not altogether 
 private advantage. Although selfishness and incom- 
 petence exist, yet society holds together because 
 there is also a certain amount of effective action 
 having good social results. Or to put it in a less 
 Platonic but more modern way, society holds together 
 because it is so organised that good social results 
 follow from certain actions which are commonly
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL SOCIETY 219 
 
 done, whatever the motive of the doer may be. 
 A merchant may intend to serve only his own inter- 
 est, but if he is a competent merchant his action 
 has effects which are good for great numbers of 
 his fellow men. 
 
 What then is the ideal society ? In general 
 terms, it is one in which every member does that for 
 which he is best fitted, with a view to its social 
 results. In the process of education individual 
 competence is discovered ; and the system of 
 education is to allow of this special competence 
 being developed. Each individual is to perform one 
 special function in the organic whole which is 
 society ; and the organisation of society is to be 
 nothing but the providing of opportunities for each 
 to perform the function for which he is best fitted. 
 The ideal society is a real whole. It is not a mere 
 congeries of atomic individuals. As the blood in a 
 man's veins is the blood of his race, so the thought 
 and emotion of a man are the thought and emotion 
 of the community. And the tone, so to call it, 
 of the social idea in Plato is fundamentally religious, 
 as the life of Athens was a unity more obviously in 
 the religious than in the political sense. The full 
 life of the community, giving an opportunity for 
 the greatest enthusiasm and the keenest insight, 
 is the chief interest of Plato ; not only the mechan- 
 ism of law and administration. 
 
 So much in general ; the further detail in Plato's 
 suggestions must be discussed in reference to the 
 two entirely different works, the Republic and the 
 Laws. In each there is the expression of a social 
 ideal ; but in the Republic the ideal seems to be 
 both higher and more indefinite, whereas in the 
 Laws the ideal is almost as definite and as ephemeral
 
 220 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 in importance as a political programme. But there 
 are two still more fundamental distinctions between 
 the two books. First, the Republic is really 
 as much a study of social psychology as a Utopia, 
 and, secondly, in the Republic the chief interest 
 of the author is in social sentiments rather than 
 in the institutions which may be their embodi- 
 ment. 
 
 As to the first point, the Republic is obviously not 
 a Utopia in the same sense as Sir Thomas More's 
 work or that of Bacon or of Campanella. It is 
 not a programme for action ; nor does it pretend 
 to be a description of an actual city which could 
 exist on earth. In short it is in the main not an 
 ideal in the sense of what ought to be done. It is 
 a study of the necessary general conditions upon 
 which all social life is based. The meaning of it, 
 put abruptly, seems to be this : These are the 
 common features of every society in so far as it is 
 really a society, and not a mere collection of units. 
 Or we may put the thesis in this way : If you want 
 to know what makes Athens or Sparta a real polis, 
 each, we say, is a polis in so far as it has (i) a common 
 end, and (2) ability to attain that end. Hence 
 comes Plato's continual reminder that it does not 
 matter whether such a city as Socrates describes 
 could exist as if he should say, it makes no 
 difference to the truth that these are the essential 
 features of social life if these features cannot 
 be found without other non-essential details. 
 Hence also the parallel with individual psychology. 
 Plato does not say of the individual, " This is what 
 he ought to be " but " In so far as he is a real man 
 this is what he is," viz., a harmony of different 
 activities in view of a common purpose. And in so
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL SOCIETY 221 
 
 far as what is here spoken of is not an ideal individual 
 but the elements of all individuality, so what is 
 spoken of in regard to society is not an ideal society 
 but the essential elements of any society. In the 
 Laws, by contrast, there is no parallel with indivi- 
 dual psychology, nor any statement of habits upon 
 which social unity is based. But the plan of what 
 is to be done is more definite and detailed, and the 
 conditions of Greek city life (slavery, for example) 
 are given more prominence. 
 
 Secondly, in the Republic the emphasis is laid 
 upon the sentiment or loyalty of the members of 
 a society. It is mutual service and the desire of 
 each for all which is the bond, and gives its form to 
 thepolis. 1 In the Laws regulations are scrupulously 
 laid down and every member of society seems to be 
 doing what some other member has decided he 
 ought to do, a situation which is often called 
 " organisation." So Aristotle says, contrasting the 
 Laws with the Republic, " In the Laws there is 
 hardly anything but laws ; not much is said about 
 the constitution." 2 The conception of a common 
 spirit as the binding force of society has given place 
 somewhat to the idea of regulation ; but even here, 
 of course, it is the Greek and not our conception of 
 law which is prominent. 
 
 As regards the social ideal there is, of course, an 
 element of Utopia in the Republic. It is not alto- 
 gether a treatise on social psychology. And the 
 two interests, one of fact and one of moral ideal, are 
 interwoven ; or it may be that the two issues were 
 
 1 The training of the members is the real security for all. 
 " Regulations in an ill-organised community are useless and in 
 a well-organised community they come spontaneously." Rep., 
 427. 
 
 1 Politics, 12650, i.
 
 222 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 not distinct in Plato's mind. For there is a very 
 intimate connection between (i) the general features 
 of any genuine society and (2) the plan we should 
 adopt for curing social evils. No such plan is of 
 value unless it is based on a knowledge of social 
 facts, and yet no social psychology is more than 
 an academic impertinence if it implies no suggestion 
 as to the cure of evils. This very interweaving of 
 the two interests is one of the best reasons which 
 can be given for the immortal freshness of the 
 Republic. 
 
 But it may be disappointing to those who are 
 accustomed to more modern Utopias to hear nothing 
 of the dress and food in Plato's ideal society. The 
 health of its members is less evident than in Morris's 
 " Nowhere," and the absence of machinery and a 
 scientific training is perhaps alarming. If this be 
 thought a deficiency, it must be remembered that 
 Plato believed the civilisation of men to depend 
 less upon the number of their opportunities than 
 upon the use made of them. The Platonic Utopia 
 is, therefore, not a description of circumstances but 
 an exposition of social sentiment. The point at 
 which social psychology becomes a plan of social 
 reform is precisely here ; for all existing society gives 
 a hint of what is aimed at and never quite reached. 
 If these hints are carried to their legitimate conclu- 
 sion we should have the real society, of which all 
 existing societies are inadequate copies ; and this 
 real society (i.e., a society which is a society) is the 
 ideal. 
 
 The general features of all society are thus des- 
 cribed. Functions of three kinds have to be per- 
 formed : supply, administration and guidance. That 
 is to say, men living together in a real society require
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL SOCIETY 223 
 
 (i) food and clothing, (2) order and security, and 
 (3) intelligent prevision of means and ends. Each 
 man requires all three, because each man has body 
 and soul and spirit or mind ; but the three needs 
 in a real society are not supplied by each man for 
 himself. Hence there are three " classes " of men 
 in society, the function of each class being the supply 
 of one of the three needs of all men. For the exist- 
 ence of a society all three functions are equally 
 necessary ; but for the excellence of a society one 
 function may be more valuable than another ; or 
 to put the same idea in another form men differ 
 in ability, not so much in that one is superior to 
 the other, but in that one is best able to do one thing 
 and another another. If what one man is able 
 to do is more valuable to society than what another 
 is able to do, then the first man is superior to the 
 second. And value to society may be calculated 
 in two ways ; either what is supplied is fundamental 
 to all society, or it is essential to a particular kind 
 of society. Thus physical labour for food-supply 
 is more fundamental to all society than musical 
 ability, because no one who is without food can 
 listen to music ; but musical ability is as essential 
 as labour for supply in a highly civilised society, 
 because without it we lack a certain quality of 
 life. 
 
 Of the three social functions only one is discussed 
 in detail in the Republic, the supply of ideas which 
 comes from the " spiritual power " in society. The 
 warriors or administrators are dealt with by impli- 
 cation, since they are either part of the class called 
 guardians or they are in very close relation to that 
 section of society which is concerned with the pro- 
 duction of ideas. Of the guardians strictly so called
 
 224 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 we may say that they are the most important class, 
 for on their character and activity depends the quality 
 of society. They are described as philosophers ; and 
 Plato declares that the evil in society is only cured 
 in so far as the rulers are philosophers and the phil- 
 osophers are rulers. We must remember the mean- 
 ing of the word philosopher ; for the guardians are 
 the ideal men and women of whom we have spoken 
 above, but now in their social relations. Plato 
 never imagined, as some commentators seem to 
 imply, that all would be well if we gave Government 
 offices to the members of the Oxford Philosophical 
 Society or induced permanent heads of departments 
 to take the Moral Sciences Tripos. He was speaking 
 of what the Middle Ages and the Comtists called 
 " the spiritual power " in society. 
 
 Their education having been fully explained, 
 Plato defines their position and function as follows. 
 They are primarily a source of law. The Greek 
 conception of law, as flexible and personal, we have 
 already described : and here it is only necessary to 
 point out how in the Republic the source of good in 
 society is supposed to be personal and not imper- 
 sonal. The ennobling influence of persons rather 
 than the excellence of regulations is, for Plato, the 
 source of good in society. The guardians, or rather 
 outpost-men, of society are not simply to keep off evil 
 but to gather and to diffuse the good about them. To 
 make them into arbitrary tyrants, ruling unwilling 
 others for the good of these others, is to misrepresent 
 Plato, for there is no feeling of constraint in the 
 Republic : and indeed when there is any mention 
 of control, it is precisely the guardians whom 
 Plato is most anxious to control. But even these 
 are to be controlled by education, not by police ;
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL SOCIETY 225 
 
 and where enactments are spoken of, they are much 
 more in the spirit of a monastic rule than of a civil 
 law. So far are we moderns from appreciating this 
 Greek idea of control that we do not really understand 
 the force of a monastic rule, much less that of a Greek 
 law. It seems to us like a miserable subjection. 
 But we have to re-read the mediaeval thinkers in 
 order to understand their conceptions of the Rule. 
 We have to jog our slow imagination in order to feel 
 Socrates' language about the Laws as more than a 
 pretty metaphor. 
 
 Secondly the guardians are trained " statesmen." 
 There is here, as in the meaning of the word polis, a 
 wider implication than is in our word which refers 
 to the institution for law and government. A 
 statesman, in Plato's sense, is not concerned only 
 with what we call politics. The pettifogging politi- 
 cian is contrasted with the true philosopher ; but the 
 true statesman is he who, even in a private position, 
 knows " the royal science." l The conception of 
 trained statesmanship and of the high moral character 
 necessary for public activities is to be found in a 
 treatise of the Sophist Antiphon. 2 It is indeed 
 only the legitimate result of the Greek love of know- 
 ledge combined with the Greek interest in society. 
 But Plato makes his guardians know more than how 
 to manage men. They have the best scientific 
 knowledge of the day, and most of all, they know 
 what is good for the society of which they are a part. 
 They are therefore primarily educators, in the larger 
 sense of the word ; not as givers of instruction but 
 as contrivers of the development of the members of 
 the polis, since the knowledge by each of his need 
 for all increases, so the bond of society is more 
 
 1 Statesman, 259. * Saupe, Frag. Orat. Grace. 
 
 Q
 
 226 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 excellent. The conception of statesmanship as 
 education and of the true philosopher-statesman as 
 an educator connects with the Platonic, and indeed 
 the Athenian, view of law. For law is not command 
 but the reason in things. And as in true education 
 those who learn do not discover the opinion 
 of the teacher but the truth, so in society the 
 bond is not the expression of will but the nature 
 of things. 
 
 Again, the guardians are both male and female. 
 Capable women are selected by the same process 
 and for the same social services as capable men. 
 The property of all guardians is common, lest any 
 should aim at his own advantage : and the guardian 
 class, more than any other, is to have not its own 
 advantage but that of all society in view. For this 
 reason they are to sacrifice the dearest prejudice 
 of Greek individualism, the segregate family with 
 its enclosed women. No suggestion of Plato's has 
 been more absurdly misunderstood ; and Plato 
 knew that the suggestion would seem ludicrous. 1 
 The comic situation which might result from the 
 destruction of the Athenian family was expounded 
 with great glee by Aristophanes, as soon as the fifth 
 book of the Republic had been published, in his 
 Ecclesiazousai. 2 There we find it said that the result 
 would be complete communism in goods, for all 
 would be maintained by the state, and that there 
 would be complete freedom of intercourse between the 
 sexes except that special laws would prevent the ugly 
 or the deformed from not having a fair chance. No 
 one would know who his father was. In what follows 
 
 1 Rep., 452. " Let me ask those witty men to try to be serious 
 and remember that customs change." 
 1 From line 590.
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL SOCIETY 227 
 
 during the action of the play the most pointed situa- 
 tion, as against what is vulgarly called " the com- 
 munity of women," is in the legal compulsion of a 
 youth to leave the girl of his choice and satisfy the 
 claims of some old hags. 1 The treatment of Plato's 
 suggestion by the majority of commentators has 
 been in the manner of Aristophanes without the wit 
 or picturesqueness. A dull and gloomy puritanism, 
 combined, as it generally is, with a secret prurience, 
 has first misinterpreted and then condemned the 
 " free love " of the Republic. We need not trouble 
 to defend Plato ; for the best defence is to be found in 
 an understanding of what he says, if that can be 
 had without the admixture of apologetic or abusive 
 commentary. First, it is only among the guardians 
 (the spiritual power) and not in society at large that 
 the " pull " of family loyalties must be destroyed. 
 Secondly, the purpose is to achieve complete social 
 devotion without the obligation to celibacy. Of 
 the two plans for obtaining complete social service 
 Plato's was more reasonable than that of Pope 
 Gregory VII, who enforced celibacy for the first time 
 among the Roman clergy. 2 But in modern times it is 
 believed that social devotion can be had without 
 either enforced celibacy or the " common " family of 
 Plato. If it can, that is due to a fact upon which 
 Plato could not reckon, the nature of the modern 
 family. Hence thirdly, Plato suggests not the 
 destruction of the family in general, for of that he 
 did not speak, but the destruction of the Greek 
 family especially as it was found in Athens. The 
 destruction has actually taken place, and com- 
 
 1 Ecclesiazousai, 884 sq. 
 
 * cf. Lea's History of Sacerdotal Celibacy, for the results of the 
 un-Platonic plan.
 
 228 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 mentators still abuse Plato ! For we are enslaved 
 by words. What Plato suggested was that women 
 should not be regarded as property ; and he is made 
 in translation and in notes to say only that they 
 should be common property instead of private 
 property ! More moderns indeed are shocked by 
 the idea that women should not be private property 
 than are shocked by the idea that they should be 
 common property : for the English law and almost 
 universal custom still implies that married women 
 are " owned." But as a matter of fact Plato sug- 
 gests that they shall not be regarded as property 
 at all ; that is to say the female guardians shall have 
 precisely the same social standing as the male. 
 This is the intention of all the Socratic discussion 
 about what is usually called " the community of 
 women," and Aristophanes knew perfectly well that 
 Plato was not proposing a general promiscuity. 
 But even in the Platonic discussion the element 
 of humour is not absent, and we must be on our 
 guard in reading his discussion of women's rights to 
 distinguish his real intention from the play of his 
 fancy. So much with respect to the falsely so-called 
 " community " of women. 
 
 It is often said that Plato dislikes liberty ; and 
 the conception of guardians (a directive spiritual 
 power) is referred to as a proof of this. 1 But he, 
 like all Athenians, knew that the only good rule 
 is a rule over those who voluntarily accept it ; - 
 for even in the Laws, which is much more full of 
 regulations than the Republic, he compares his law 
 
 1 cf. Livingstone, Greek Genius, p. 186 sq. The author seems 
 to me to misunderstand the Platonic view of the distinction 
 between right and wrong. 
 
 * Statesman 276. Real politics as opposed to tyranny is 
 denned by reference to the voluntary.
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL SOCIETY 229 
 
 to the advice of a doctor to a free man, which creates 
 good will, by contrast with the commands of a slave 
 doctor ; * and again he says that " laws are framed 
 partly for good men to instruct them how they may 
 live on friendly terms with one another, and partly 
 for the sake of those who refuse to be instructed, 
 whose spirit cannot be hindered from doing all 
 evil." z The restrictive purpose of law is therefore 
 quite subordinate ; and in the Republic sentiment is 
 much more emphasised than regulation : " Every- 
 one should be governed by a power in his own heart, 
 the only alternative being to impose it from without. 
 . . . Law only withholds freedom until it has estab- 
 lished a guardian in the heart, from which time 
 men are free." 3 
 
 But Plato certainly does believe that it is more 
 important that men should do what is right than that 
 they should do what they like or even what they 
 think right. And although he reminds us often 
 that the ideal is that men should like to do what it 
 is right to do, he is perhaps too careless of their likes 
 and dislikes. Freedom to act as you like is only good 
 if it results in your acting rightly, and for this reason 
 Plato is summary with liberty. But one suspects 
 that what really offends those who criticise Plato on 
 this point is the assumption that the guardians 
 can know what is absolutely right. There is a 
 political subjectivism which implies that we can 
 never know what is right or that the will of any- 
 given community is right ; and this is imagined 
 to be the real defence of liberty. This certainly is 
 opposed by Plato. Perhaps he thinks that what is 
 right can be discovered more easily than it can in 
 fact ; perhaps he is too certain that one man can 
 
 1 Laws, 723. * id.., 880. * Rep., 590 sq.
 
 230 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 know it for another. 1 But surely his view is correct 
 when he says that the highest aim of society should 
 be not the will of its members but justice, and that 
 liberty itself is only a means by which right action 
 may be done. 
 
 So* far we have spoken chiefly of the Republic. 
 With respect to the Laws our subject here does not 
 require a detailed treatment : for the ideal in this book 
 is a concession to circumstances which no longer exist. 
 The Greek family and chattel slavery again appear. 
 Private property, especially in land, is restricted ; 2 
 and the social classes are less divided than in the 
 Republic. 3 But there are interesting developments. 
 The ideal state is governed much more by the idea 
 of peace, by contrast to the " mobilisation " in 
 the Republic. The legislator, it is said, should have 
 three things in view, that the state should be free, 
 at unity with itself and possessed of understanding. 
 " The principle for dealing between man and man," 
 
 1 It is a mistake to suppose that Plato's suggestion as to philo- 
 sopher kings has been tried and has failed. Some historians 
 have imagined that M. Aurelius Antoninus was an instance in 
 point. But this is to misunderstand Plato. There are two 
 fundamental elements in Plato's suggestion, one, that the 
 philosopher king shall know what to do, and not to be merely 
 well-intentioned ; and, the other, that he shall have power 
 and ability for creative legislation and not be merely scrupulous 
 as an official in carrying out existing laws. In neither sense is 
 Marcus an example. He was not a constructive thinker and 
 never claimed that he was : he was scrupulous in duty but not 
 a great inventor of institutions. To make the best of existing 
 institutions is entirely different from devising new institutions. 
 But the philosopher king is essentially a lawgiver, a creative 
 source of new social life, not a point of permanence and certainly 
 not an official. 
 
 1 Laws, V. 734 E. cf. Aristotle's excellent criticism : "It is 
 not the possessions but the desires of mankind which require 
 to bt equalised, and this is impossible, unless a sufficient educa- 
 tion is provided by society." Pol. 1266'). S. 
 
 id., V. .4 E.
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL SOCIETY 231 
 
 says Plato, " is very simple ; Thou shall not touch 
 that which is mine . . . without my consent, and 
 may I, being of sound mind, do to others as I would 
 that they should do to me." * And the regulation 
 of marriages is again explained : " Let there be one 
 word concerning all marriages. Every man should 
 follow not after the marriage that is most pleasing 
 to himself but after that which is most beneficial 
 to society." 2 The position of women is again 
 emphasised : " Nothing can be more absurd than 
 the practice which prevails in our own country 
 (Athens) of men and women not following the same 
 pursuits with all their strength and with one mind ; 
 for thus society instead of being a whole and as much 
 again, is reduced to a half and yet has the same 
 imposts to pay and the same toils to undergo." 3 
 We should not forget also that, in spite of all the con- 
 cessions to special circumstances, Plato in the Laws 
 still looks chiefly to the ideal life, which is certainly 
 not a devotion to the attainment of wealth and 
 power. What, he asks, will the members of so 
 organised a society do ? They will live, he answers, 
 " for night and day are not long enough for the accom- 
 plishment of their perfection and consummation." 4 
 The Laws also contain that subtle sentence " The 
 deeds a man does are not worth great enthusiasm, 
 and yet we must do them with all our heart," 5 in 
 which we may see the strange union of aloofness and 
 human feeling which is characteristic of Socrates and 
 Plato. 
 The result with respect to old controversies as 
 
 1 Laws, XL, 913. 
 
 1 id., 773. Men are to marry between 30 and 35. Divorce 
 for incompatibility of temper is to be allowed by a committee 
 of ten men and ten women. 
 
 id., 805. Jowett's trans. id. ,807. id., 8036.
 
 232 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 to the individual and society may be stated in this 
 way. The unit from which Plato starts is not the 
 individual but society ; and the individual to him 
 becomes a society rather than society an individual. 1 
 We, on the other hand, are so obsessed with 
 individualism that in order to realise what society 
 is we have to imagine it, quite falsely, to be an 
 individual. And as an ideal the social whole is more 
 in Plato's mind than what we call the liberty of 
 individuals. But this does not mean that Plato knew 
 the theories of modern " voluntaryism " and put 
 them aside ; he was indeed unaware of what modern 
 social theorists would call the individual. 2 But we 
 must recognise that Plato was speaking with the evid- 
 ence before him of a time when the more complex 
 modern individualism had not yet appeared ; and one 
 of the effects of social development has been a 
 higher estimation of spontaneity or originality in 
 modern times. Not that the amount of genius 
 or of the products of genius is greater ; but there 
 is more independence, at least in some countries, 
 than there was in Greece. Even in Plato's abso- 
 lutist conclusions, however, individuality is not 
 supposed to be absorbed by a super-personal society 
 or state, as it is in the Hegelians and at times even 
 in Rousseau. 
 
 Plato certainly speaks as though the individual 
 were entirely dependent upon society ; and as 
 though all his actions should be considered in their 
 
 1 That is to say the man is described as a complex of functions 
 in harmony. (Rep., 443.) When the crowd-mind is given a super- 
 personality that is the last absurdity of an obsolete individualism. 
 
 * I do not mean, of course, that he had no experience of 
 egoism. Alcibiades \vas an obvious example of that kind of 
 individualism. But I mean by individualism not egoism, but 
 the theory and practice of spontaneity.
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL SOCIETY 233 
 
 social effects. There is no appeal beyond the 
 community in an ideal community. But the dis- 
 ciple of Socrates can hardly be imagined as main- 
 taining that there is no appeal against any existing 
 institution, political or religious. There are times 
 when the good man has to stand aside if his state 
 acts unjustly ; there are times when he may be 
 put to death for disagreeing with the established 
 view. Never for a moment does Plato imagine 
 that the vote of the majority or the command of 
 an established government are tests of truth or 
 justice. 
 
 But the actual governments of the world are 
 judged by reference to an ideal community of which 
 individual insight makes us aware. A word must 
 therefore be said as to the relation of this ideal 
 society to the actual communities of men. In the 
 Laws the commonplace relation of a plan of reform 
 to an established system is the only issue. The 
 ideal is in this sense merely a mark of the general 
 direction which reform should take ; and this 
 being naturally conceived in the terms of the Greek 
 polis, the Laws have but little bearing upon modern 
 circumstances. But in the Republic the relation of 
 the ideal to actual society is more subtle. For, 
 in the first place, the ideal is stated to be unpractical 
 or in some sense not realisable in the world of space 
 and time. That is to say it is the soul of society 
 rather than its actual form. It is not because men 
 will never be perfect guardians or never give women 
 equality that the social conceptions of the Republic 
 are said by Plato to be independent of their possible 
 realisation in fact. It is because he is not thinking 
 in the main of a plan or programme, but of a new 
 spirit ; since on the one hand he says that the
 
 234 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 society of which he has been speaking is to be found 
 only in heaven, and on the other that the good man 
 lives in that society all his life. 1 The relation of 
 the ideal in this sense to the actual society of any 
 time is the relation of the standard of moral judg- 
 ment to the acts of men. It is to this society that 
 the good man appeals when he repudiates or hesi- 
 tates to give his allegiance to this or that actual 
 institution. To the majority who do not know 
 of that ideal society the refusal of complete sub- 
 servience to an actual church or state seems to be 
 an insolent egoism. Nevertheless the good man, in 
 Plato's conception, has not appealed to what is 
 foolishly called private judgment, but to a judgment 
 no less social in a society to which the majority 
 are blind. Here is the splendid source of those 
 still undervalued conceptions of the City of God and 
 the Communion of Saints. To those last sentences 
 of the ninth book of the Republic we may look as 
 the only safe foundation for allegiance and for 
 criticism. For nothing is more false than to make 
 Socrates and Plato maintainers of the absolute 
 right of any actual state or church. The extent of 
 their allegiance may have been great it was not 
 in fact but there never was any doubt of the 
 supremacy of that other allegiance to the ideal 
 society which is sometimes in conflict with the 
 state in which the body of the good man dwells. 
 And the commentators are indeed mistaken who 
 have supposed, because there is no appeal outside 
 or above " the city of God," that Socrates would 
 therefore maintain established governments at all 
 costs. What has confused them is that to Plato's 
 mind the contrast is not between social allegiance 
 
 > Rep. IX. in fine.
 
 PLATO ON THE IDEAL SOCIETY 235 
 
 and individualism but between two different kinds 
 of society. For very few in our time know that city 
 in which the good man dwells all his life. 
 
 Obviously this is a hint of myth, and Platonic 
 myth is too subtle for us to deal with it here ; but 
 the sense, crudely stated, is that there is a standard 
 for judging the action of any society. 1 The only 
 other possible view is that which is connected with 
 Protagoras in the Theaetetus. 2 " In politics the 
 followers of Protagoras affirm that right and wrong, 
 honourable and disgraceful, holy and unholy 
 are in reality to each state such as the state thinks 
 and makes lawful and that in determining these 
 matters no individual or state is wiser than another. 
 . . . When they speak of justice and injustice, piety 
 and impiety, they are confident that these have no 
 natural or essential basis the truth is that which 
 is agreed on at the time of the agreement and as 
 long as the agreement lasts ; and this is the philo- 
 sophy of the many, who do not altogether agree 
 with Protagoras." Again " they maintain that 
 the ordinances which the state commanded and 
 thought just were just to the state which imposed 
 them, while they were in force." 3 The opposition 
 of Socrates and Plato and even of Aristotle to this 
 form of political pragmatism is absolutely uncondi- 
 tional. The idea that no moral criterion exists 
 independently of and above the decision of any 
 actual state or community is disproved by Socrates 
 in the Theaetetus when he suggests that no one 
 admits this in questions of expediency. If a state 
 
 1 We may take it that the action of a state or of a society 
 means the action of definite human beings either in their quality 
 as members or as agents of the state or society. 
 
 * I72a, sq. Jowett's trans. 
 
 3 Theaetetus, 177 in fine.
 
 236 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 decides that slavery has good results, it hardly 
 follows that slavery therefore has good results for 
 that state. No one denies the possibility of exact 
 knowledge of independent (objective) facts in the 
 matter of expediency. And if the knowledge of 
 what is good, or of justice, seems not to be a know- 
 ledge of objective fact, that is only because the 
 majority have no very clear idea of the meaning of 
 good. 
 
 But if there is a good which is quite independent of 
 the wish or will of one or of many, the knowledge 
 of that good must be the most valuable asset in the 
 resources of society ; and those who know or who 
 are most capable of knowing that good are the most 
 valuable members of society. That these should 
 bring that good into being in the world of space and 
 time is more important than liberty, which is the 
 means of realising it, or order, which is its simplest 
 condition. For thus, and thus only, is the actual 
 state or community transformed into the image 
 of that heavenly city where justice always abides.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 ARISTOTLE'S IDEALS 
 
 THE arguments and conclusions of Aristotle often 
 imply that we may take for granted the work done 
 by Plato. For if we are to refer not to the actual 
 mention of the name of Plato in the Ethics or 
 Politics but to the attitude adopted towards life 
 in these two works, Aristotle agrees with Plato 
 more often than he criticises him. And where they 
 do not agree, Aristotle is more typically Greek than 
 Plato. This is not a compliment, for it implies that 
 wherever Plato had the insight or the courage to 
 think to an end, Aristotle harks back to the safe 
 shelter of popular agreement. He is perhaps for 
 that very reason more valuable historically for giving 
 us evidence of the general moral atmosphere ; 
 since in Ethics, if not also in general philosophy, 
 Aristotle is a non-Athenian who has acquired in 
 Athens what men like Plato could take for granted. 
 But if Aristotle has a more typically Greek ideal 
 of life, he is certainly less acute an exponent of 
 morality than Plato. His excellence is rather in 
 analysis and observation than in new and revolution- 
 ary hypotheses. Indeed if Homer may be said to 
 nod, Aristotle must be confessed to sleep soundly 
 through several chapters of the Ethics ; unless by 
 any chance it is moral philosophy to copy out 
 several times in a fair round-hand the statement that 
 
 237
 
 238 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 the pen is mightier than the sword and other such 
 wheezy and wrinkled truths. As one reads " the 
 philosopher " sometimes one imagines him platitudin- 
 ising after a large lunch which he had given to his 
 aged medical relatives from Stageira, who had come 
 to see how the young man was getting on. Some- 
 times even in his Politics, a much greater work than 
 the Ethics, one imagines him attempting to be im- 
 pressive, with a very unphilosophical result upon 
 anyone less reverent than a commentator. It is a 
 pity that Aristophanes could not have remarked 
 upon Aristotle as he did upon Socrates and Plato. 
 Such criticism must not, however, be taken to 
 imply any undervaluing of Aristotle's work. Irrever- 
 ence is a protection not from the platitudes of the 
 master but from the repetitions of his commentators. 
 And if we seem to find Polonius among the Aristo- 
 telians, we do not therefore deny that what he says is 
 true. It may be that there is some virtue which is 
 " in the mean " : it may be that some kind of 
 " good life " is promoted by the state. It may 
 even be " possible for men of moderate means to 
 act as they ought," as we read in the Ethics. 1 We 
 do not deny what Polonius says. Again, it is only 
 with respect to his statement of ideals that we are 
 speaking of Aristotle here. In the analysis of fact 
 and perhaps also in the range of knowledge his works 
 are superior to Plato's : and there is no denying the 
 justice of the mediaeval estimate of Aristotle as pre- 
 eminently the master. Our debt is so great to him, 
 both in method and in matter, that it seems un- 
 gracious to refuse him the first place among the 
 exponents of the ideal. But undeniably the works 
 which have come down to us are very limited in value 
 
 1 11790.
 
 ARISTOTLE'S IDEALS 239 
 
 in this respect. The heroic or the splendid in char- 
 acter is not to be found there ; and the fairest vision 
 of society they have to show is too painfully like 
 the mechanical republics of recent years. 
 
 The first and perhaps the most valuable expression 
 of the ideal in Aristotle is to be found in the insist- 
 ence upon positive action. The Greeks had always 
 expected a certain spontaneity as characteristic 
 of good life. But in all primitive stages of develop- 
 ment, and even in Athens of the fifth century, the 
 accepted view of the good life seems to imply that 
 it is essentially successful avoidance. Taboo is the 
 first guide to morality : and the primitive mind is 
 far more certain of what must not be done than of 
 anything that must be done. This survives even 
 into civilised times in the conception of a moral 
 law, since law in this sense means not only command 
 but also negative command. Early civil law is 
 always the statement of what must not be done ; and 
 philosophers, not Greek, have often foolishly sup- 
 posed that this is the nature of things. But there 
 is no reason why civil law should be conceived as a 
 command, still less as a negative command ; for the 
 whole atmosphere is primitive, in which what is not 
 to be done appears so vastly important. 
 
 The Greeks, like other people, had their taboo. 
 They had their negative command in morality, and 
 they had those among them who would think that 
 the good man was the man who had successfully 
 avoided evil-doing. There were various members 
 of the " old school " to whom vice appeared as 
 attractive ; since this illusion always accompanies 
 a primitive morality : and to them the chief moral 
 need would seem to be to keep men from doing what 
 they wanted to do.
 
 240 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 But the whole trend of Greek, and especially of 
 Athenian, thought was against the connecting of the 
 good life with negatives, since even when the Greek 
 thought of law as a basis for morality, he meant by 
 law what we mean when we speak of " natural law " 
 (the rule followed generally) and not what we mean 
 by civil or moral law. For, certainly, the con- 
 ception of law as command of a superior is not a part 
 of Greek morality. And the result is that the good- 
 ness of the good man seemed to them to be part of 
 himself and not something which has an origin 
 outside him. Virtue or excellence was essentially 
 spontaneous or natural. 
 
 This tendency to think of the good man in terms 
 of life and not of law is taken up and developed by 
 the philosophers. It is implied in Plato's conception 
 of virtue. But it is made explicit by Aristotle, especi- 
 ally in the Ethics. Hence we have in Aristotle the 
 famous definition of good as "an energising of the 
 soul in excellence during a full life." 1 And the 
 emphasis on energy is many times repeated : as for 
 example when he says that it is of small importance 
 to be excellent if you do not do something, "as if 
 you were asleep or otherwise inactive." " And as at 
 the Olympian games it is not the finest or strongest 
 who are crowned but those who actually contest 
 (for of these are the winners), so of those in life who 
 are fine men it is they who act rightly who attain 
 to anything." 2 Or again, " It is well said that one 
 becomes just by acting justly and wise by acting 
 wisely : but no one would be likely to become good 
 by not so acting. ; ^And yet many do not live thus, 
 but fly to talking ; and so think themselves philoso- 
 phers and increasingly worthy, just as the sick who 
 
 1 Eth. Nic., 10980, 16. * id., 10990, 4.
 
 ARISTOTLE'S IDEALS 241 
 
 listen carefully to the doctor and do nothing that 
 he suggests. As these cannot have healthy bodies 
 with such a course of medicine, so those cannot have 
 healthy souls with such a course of philosophy." l 
 Doubtless all moral ideals have implied some form 
 of activity as essential ; but in the Greek tradition, 
 as interpreted by Aristotle, this is not merely implied, 
 it is explicitly stated, developed and made the basis 
 for a moral attitude which is altogether removed from 
 the finicking avoidance of " temptation." 
 
 We know the tendency to call that man morally 
 " good " who is devoid of any intelligent or emotional 
 activity and in the process of doing nothing at all 
 therefore happens to a do nothing evil ; and we know 
 that it is often^a poor compliment to a'^man when 
 we can find nothing else to say but that he is a 
 " good " man. This barren conception of " good- 
 ness " is a result of basing morality upon a negative 
 command such that avoidance is^made to seem more 
 important morally than action. With this the 
 Aristotelian conception is contrasted ; the result 
 being that positive morality is substituted for the 
 primitive morality of taboos. And it follows from 
 this that (i) moral instruction is always instruction 
 in what to do, not in what to avoid, that (2) such 
 instruction is made effective not by penalties for 
 " sin " but by positive reasons for " virtue," and 
 that (3) the ideal life is one of full and increasing 
 development. With this preliminary conception 
 of the nature of " virtue " Aristotle begins. It is 
 fundamental to his ideal of the good man and of the 
 ideal society. 
 
 Aristotle's description of the ideal man is an 
 attempt to allow for the governing conceptions of the 
 
 1 Eth. Nic., 11056, 9. 
 R
 
 242 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 average man without forgetting the requirements of 
 the philosopher. Therefore he is more valuable than 
 Plato if we seek to understand the standards of the 
 average Greek, and less valuable than Plato in his 
 expression of exceptional or heroic character. The 
 ideal man, then, according to Aristotle, has perfect 
 self-control, greatness of spirit and intellectual 
 insight. The last of the three elements in the ideal 
 is philosophic. The average Athenian did not under- 
 stand or appreciate what the philosophers called 
 " theory " : and even though the Platonic idea of 
 philosophy is modified by Aristotle, enough remains 
 in the conception of the life of contemplation to 
 separate this ideal from the more ordinary ideals of 
 Greece. 
 
 But we may discuss this first, since (i) it is more 
 characteristic of Aristotle than the other conceptions 
 and (2) it has had an immense importance in later 
 history, in the formation of mediaeval conceptions 
 of " the contemplative life." The life of " theory " 
 or trained insight is said by Aristotle to be the highest 
 attainable by man, and indeed to be of such a kind 
 that we may call it divine. When he refers to it the 
 language of his Ethics becomes poetic and he says 
 that we should as far as possible " be immortals," 
 in accordance with that highest principle in us which 
 is man's true self. 1 Aristotle makes the ideal man 
 in this sense more self-sufficing than the ordinary 
 man and also somewhat aloof from the common 
 world. But the " other " world he inhabits is that 
 of clear, continuous and strenuous thinking His 
 activity is called " speculative " because most of 
 knowledge is due to observation ; and the word has 
 no connection with dreaming or what is sometimes 
 
 1 Eth., 11776, in fine.
 
 ARISTOTLE'S IDEALS 243 
 
 called meditation. Indeed Aristotle is very insistent 
 here, as he is in the earliest and basic conception of 
 his ethics, on the fact that excellence implies positive 
 activity. The moments of exceptional insight are 
 to be continued by vigorous application to the pur- 
 suits of real thinking throughout what Aristotle 
 is made, in the translations, to call the " contem- 
 plative life." For he supposes, as Plato did, that 
 real excellence is the ability to use exceptional 
 moments for the guidance or the elevation of a whole 
 lifetime. 
 
 The misunderstanding of this conception by 
 mediaeval Saints and Sages is instructive. To them 
 also the contemplative life was an ideal. Thomas 
 Aquinas sought in Aristotle the philosophical sup- 
 port for this ; and, perhaps owing to the association 
 of words in an inexact translation, he conceived the 
 Aristotelian theoretic life as a life of meditation in a 
 cloister. All great men must be astonished at their 
 followers : and " si quis piorum animis locus," 
 in some other sphere the original author must often 
 stand aghast at what his commentators make him 
 say. But of all transformations Aristotle has en- 
 dured the greatest. Imagine the many-sided Greek, 
 twice married, with neatly trimmed beard and a 
 pretty taste in dinners, with a wide experience of 
 the stage, of political life and scientific enquiry, 
 meeting the mediaeval monk who pursued what he 
 called the contemplative life. Even the Polonius 
 in Aristotle would be genuinely amused : for the 
 mediaeval monk understood little indeed of what the 
 Greek called contemplation. At its worst the monk's 
 contemplative life implied the somnolence of a vacant 
 mind secured from the struggle of life ; and at its 
 best this life meant a concentrati6n upon a fr-
 
 244 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 inherited metaphysical ideas or a continuous en- 
 thusiasm for a delightful but imaginary situation. 
 In either case it bears only the faintest resemblance 
 to the varied and emotional insight into present 
 facts which is the Aristotelian life of " theory." The 
 difference may be due largely to different social 
 circumstances : but it is certain that the Greek never 
 imagined anything like a cloister to be a possible 
 place for an endurable, still less an ideal, life. 
 
 The other elements in the Aristotelian ideal of 
 character self-control and greatness of spirit are 
 typically Greek. They are, in less philosophical 
 terms, implied in what we have already said as to the 
 ideals of the Homeric literature and of the fifth 
 century. Aristotle only formulates and analyses 
 them. Self-control is said to be between precipi- 
 tancy and weakness : l for a man should not be 
 " taken off his feet," but, on the other hand, he 
 should not be pig-headed, " opinionated, positive 
 and bearish." 2 It is difficult to become the great- 
 souled man, says Aristotle, for he must be the 
 " perfect gentleman." 3 He thinks greatly of great 
 things, and he judges rightly his own value, being 
 not supercilious or insolent, but affable and yet 
 independent. 4 In such phrases Aristotle attempts 
 not a new enthusiasm but the clear expression of 
 what is in the minds of average men. In that sense 
 only is it an ideal character that he is drawing : 
 and we must not suppose that even Greek thinkers 
 were blind to the possibly ludicrous results of the 
 commonly admired qualities. Thus Pericles as 
 drawn by Plutarch is self-controlled and great- 
 minded. The biographer says " Pericles acquired 
 
 1 Eth. Nic., 11506. id., 11516. 
 
 id., 11240, 3- 'id., 11246, sq.
 
 ARISTOTLE'S IDEALS 245 
 
 (from converse with Anaxagoras) not only an ele- 
 vation of sentiment and a loftiness and purity of 
 style, but likewise a gravity of countenance which 
 did not relax into laughter, a firm and even tone 
 of voice, an easy deportment and a decency of dress 
 which no vehemence of speaking ever put into 
 disorder. These things, and others of like nature, 
 excited admiration in all who saw him. . . . The 
 poet Ion says that he was proud and supercilious in 
 conversation, and that there was a great deal of 
 vanity and contempt of others mixed with his 
 dignity of manners . . . but Zeno asked those who 
 called the gravity of Pericles pride and arrogance 
 to be proud in the same way." When we read such 
 a description of the self-controlled and great-souled 
 man, uncomfortable memories of the " strong silent 
 man " the ideal of those who are unable to speak 
 coherently or to live with any subtlety stir within 
 the mind of anyone whose native literature is English. 
 We cannot as a race throw stones at the Greek con- 
 ception of dignity ; but we may be allowed to say 
 that it is sometimes comic. And were it not for the 
 portentous solemnity of commentators, the ideal man 
 of the Aristotelian Ethics would be seen more clearly 
 to lack the wit and the self-criticism so dear to the 
 more far-seeing Plato. 
 
 The Aristotelian ideal, however, is not complete 
 until we have allowed for the conception of " friend- 
 ship." That too is typically Greek, as is the sentence 
 " friendship is most necessary for life ; for no one 
 would choose to live without friends, even if he had 
 all other good things." l But again the analysis 
 of the social bond must be omitted here, since we 
 
 1 Eth. Nic., U53. This is the commonplace statement of 
 the facts to which Plato refers in his description of Eros.
 
 246 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 are concerned only with the ideal conceived. In 
 that regard the ideal friendship is said to be a union 
 of equals who are good (in the Aristotelian and 
 positive sense), 1 a union not for pleasure or profit 
 but of each for the sake of the other. 2 The con- 
 ception, then, implies that " the good life," already 
 as we have seen essentially a social life, is social in 
 the sense that one discovers in it the personality of 
 another. The height is reached which we have 
 been climbing since in earlier times keeping the 
 Anthesteria or going to the theatre to hear Euripides : 
 and what Aristotle says of friendship is little more 
 than any cultivated Athenian would have said. But 
 it implies a conception of ideal life and character 
 which was lost for centuries and is hardly common 
 even to-day. The discovery of personality and the 
 sufficient joy in that, without any further pleasure 
 or profit, is a fundamental conception. It is implied 
 in the Platonic conception of Eros, although Plato 
 puts it into the form of myth : but it is clearly 
 stated first by Aristotle. In it we find the explana- 
 tion of much that has pained later ages, the 
 joy of the Greeks in the companionship with boys 
 and the almost reckless disregard for the physical 
 basis of sex relationship. The peculiar forms in 
 which this ideal of discovering personality is to be 
 found in Athens were often evil and always very 
 limited in their value ; but the ideal in view should 
 not be forgotten, and that was altogether excellent. 
 We have ourselves to struggle to distinguish the 
 legitimate and natural play of personalities from the 
 twists and turns to which we are driven by social 
 convention or inherited prejudice. But we too can 
 see through to a better life in which the finest and 
 
 1 Eth. Nic., 11596. *id., 11570, 18.
 
 ARISTOTLE'S IDEALS 247 
 
 most enjoyable experience would be the friendship 
 which is the free interplay of personalities for no 
 other end than the delight of each in all. 
 
 At this point Aristotle begins to discuss society. 
 The bond of all society is said by him to be this very 
 " friendship " ; not any external convention makes 
 the polis, nor even brute need, but friendship in 
 its widest sense. It is strange that Aristotle should 
 have left undeveloped a conception so obviously 
 fruitful. There are indeed hints of the friendship- 
 theory of the Ethics when Aristotle discusses his 
 politics ; but the chief features of his political 
 theory do not show, as they might have shown, 
 the effect of his conception of friendship He seems 
 to be driven away from this fundamental idea into a 
 multitude of quasi-historical theories, and the result 
 is a lack of cohesion between the Politics and the last 
 part of the Ethics. It is with the Politics alone, 
 however, that we must now deal. 
 
 In the theory of society, as in the description of 
 individual character, the works of Aristotle contain 
 more analysis of fact than suggestions of an ideal. 
 This is peculiarly the case with the Politics. It is 
 a store of social science. It contains not only keen 
 criticism of social phenomena but also admirable 
 constructive suggestions. Its range is very great. 
 And therefore it must not be supposed that we 
 refuse it due recognition if we neglect the greater part 
 of it : for we cannot attempt to estimate its whole 
 value nor to give a complete exposition of its con- 
 tents. But as a statement of an ideal, in the sense in 
 which we are using the word, it falls short of the 
 precision and also of the elevation of Plato's work. 
 It is banal, and yet typically Greek. 
 
 The point of interest for us is the social ideal ex-
 
 248 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 pressed by Aristotle. What sort of society, in spirit 
 and in form, does he imagine will be best worth 
 working for ? It is of the first importance that 
 Aristotle names his ideal a polis. ^The polis, even at 
 a time when it was becoming obsolete in fact, still 
 obsessed the minds of philosophers ; and they 
 looked back rather than forward. Indeed not one 
 thinker in twenty is able to look forward. But to 
 Aristotle the polis meant more than it did to Plato : 
 it was the only conceivable form of social organisa- 
 tion and it was the ultimate and absolute social 
 union. The word itself carried the conceptions 
 back to a more primitive stage of social development: 
 and Aristotle's definition of the term never avoids 
 the limitations set by past history. The polis even 
 in its ideal form, remained for him a small, exclusive 
 but fully organised company of slave-owning males, 
 with a complete faith in the excellence of what is 
 established. In that form it still remains the ideal 
 of those who adore what they call the state. 
 
 There are, however, some differences. In the first 
 place, it has been said that the polis of Plato and 
 Aristotle is more of a church than a state : but there 
 is this distinction between them in Aristotle what 
 we may call the " secular " elements are more prom- 
 inent. Society still remains fundamentally religious 
 in spirit, but the forms of religion are definitely given 
 a subordinate place by contrast with Plato's ultimate 
 appeal to Apollo. 1 The " parochial Sinai " of 
 Aristotle is not, however, less absolute than Plato's. 
 Further, besides the absolute ideal, the pure essence 
 
 1 cf. Politics, 12990. Priests, masters of choruses, etc., are dis- 
 tinguished from political officers. We see here the beginning 
 of that specialisation of new institutions which is a mark of 
 social growth. 
 
 For the whole question see Newman's edition of the Politics.
 
 ARISTOTLE'S IDEALS 249 
 
 of the state, Aristotle allows for the " best in any 
 given circumstances." l This implies that there may 
 be many different forms of the ideal polis, in accord- 
 ance with different times and places : and Aristotle 
 is thus on the point of discovering what Montesquieu 
 and later writers on political theory have elaborated. 
 The Aristotelian ideal has, at any rate, this excellence 
 that it is conceived in terms of actual life. Hence 
 the arguments for slavery and the subjection of 
 women are fully developed, and the forms of govern- 
 ment are discussed in a broad spirit of accepting 
 facts ; so that what the ideal loses in elevation it 
 gains in actual contact with Greek circumstances. 
 The polis, again, is in Aristotle's conception to be 
 thoroughly organised for stability. Education is 
 to be aimed at the maintenance of the established 
 tradition ; 2 and the worst of all evils, for which most 
 elaborate remedies are suggested, is revolution. 3 
 As Plato thought selfishness and incompetence the 
 greatest evils, so Aristotle thinks of instability in the 
 form of government. 4 And indeed the common 
 experience of Greek cities, especially since the later 
 years of the Peloponnesian War, pointed to the evils 
 of continual change. Security in one's expectations 
 is, undoubtedly, one of the prime necessities 
 of any political institution ; and in this sense 
 the high value given to the static elements in 
 society by Plato andAristotle is not only thoroughly 
 Greek but permanently true. There is, on the other 
 hand, a certain prejudice among philosophers in 
 
 1 Politics, 12886., Bk. IV. init. *id. 1337/1. , 
 
 3 id. 13020., sq. Perhaps we ought to say " party politics " 
 
 rather than " revolution." The Greek word has no exact 
 
 English equivalent. 
 
 * Of course Plato also makes his ideal static, and supposes 
 
 change to be a great evil.
 
 250 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 favour of " the permanent " which Aristotle has 
 brought over from his metaphysics to his political 
 theory ; and this is altogether illegitimate. There 
 is no reason to suppose that a society which remains 
 unchanged is for that reason any better than a society 
 which changes : and since all society tends to change 
 the ideal should give a place to the principles of 
 change as well as to those of stability. It is peculiarly 
 pernicious to make education into a method for 
 maintaining what is established. On the whole, 
 however, we may allow that Aristotle is, in a limited 
 sense, correct in giving prominence to the mainten- 
 ance of a tradition. 
 
 Next, the essence of the ideal polis is, according to 
 Aristotle, the sharing in its administration and in its 
 general life by all the citizens. The true man is 
 a polites in this sense ; and the good man is the good 
 polites. 1 Thus, a form of what we should call 
 democracy is implied in what Aristotle desires. He 
 calls it constitutional government, but he means one 
 based upon many minds rather than upon the views 
 of a clique or a monarch. Here the Greek or Athen- 
 ian conception of liberty is formulated ; but the 
 philosophical position given to it is not prominent, 
 if we compare Aristotle's statements with the 
 enthusiasms of the earlier literature. And with his 
 usual attempt to be all things to all men Aristotle 
 " mixes " the forms of government so thoroughly 
 that he seems to imply that we can have in the same 
 state the excellencies of every obsolete method of 
 administration which has ever been tried. It 
 
 1 It is misleading to translate the word by the English word 
 " citizen." Our word is both too wide and too narrow. It 
 includes " imperial " interests and excludes urban life. On the 
 Contrary the Greek word has a very local restriction but indicates 
 an activity in affairs which we should call religious or cultural.
 
 ARISTOTLE'S IDEALS 251 
 
 is the hope of Polonius once again, tie is afraid of 
 going too far beyond any opinion which is or has 
 been held by a great number of men. 
 
 Finally, the ideal polis is said to be a complete 
 whole. It is, in the first place, not to be too large ; l 
 for otherwise the citizens would not know one 
 another and the social bond of " friendship " could 
 not really exist. 2 The limit of numbers is naturally 
 set by the rule that each citizen must share directly 
 in the making of law and in administration ; since 
 the representative method had not yet been dis- 
 covered. And the conception of immediate sharing 
 in citizenship is defined by the very restricted means 
 of communication then possible. In both points 
 therefore the ideal is out of date. Again, the polis 
 is not to be a company of men exactly alike, but of 
 individualised citizens. This is the essential differ- 
 ence between a military association and a state ; 
 and it marks Aristotle's divergence from the Spartan 
 conception which so many Athenian reformers 
 accepted. He is perfectly certain that the quality 
 of a state is the quality of the distinct and varied 
 individualities of its citizens ; and an ideal state, 
 therefore, requires individual freedom of develop- 
 ment. And again, the polis must be self-sufficing ; 
 that is to say it should not depend upon any other 
 group for provisions, 3 or for its organisation. This, 
 as we shall see, is in the main, a mistake. It is a 
 false ideal based upon a false judgment of fact ; 
 and it is a continuance in philosophy of the evil 
 in the Greek view of local autonomy. But it has 
 this amount of good in it ; the polis is conceived as 
 a society with all the essential functions of a high 
 form of social organisation. It is not a mere trading 
 
 1 Pol., 13260. *id., 12636. Md., 13266, 27.
 
 252 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 company or club of specialists. And, after all, our 
 ideal must be that some such complete society should 
 exist, even if we moderns refuse to suppose that it 
 can be found in a small city. 
 
 One statement always connected with the name 
 of Aristotle needs to be added. The state exists 
 for a moral end, the good life, which is the aim of 
 all men. Even in the restricted sense of the word 
 " state " (i.e., not society at large) this is true ; 
 and it is Greek. The value of the statement can 
 hardly be exaggerated, for it is, in fact, the only 
 basis upon which any ideal of social progress can be 
 secure ; but in itself it is not, in our sense of the 
 word, an ideal. Therefore it calls for no special 
 elaboration here. It is a part of the Greek tradition 
 which distinguishes that tradition entirely from the 
 cruder conceptions of society embodied in earlier 
 civilisations ; and in this, as in so much else, Aristotle 
 only gives precision to the commonly accepted 
 Greek hypothesis. But it simply means that every 
 social organisation implies a moral purpose, without 
 defining precisely which social organisation supports 
 this or that part of the whole moral life of man. 
 
 All these suggestions are admirable, although, as 
 we shall see, in part mistaken ; but from them all 
 one receives the impression of an ideal which is 
 somewhat commonplace. Aristotle does not, indeed, 
 pretend to suggest a transformation of society, and 
 the position he holds, in making the best of what 
 already is or is beginning to be, is a great one. But 
 from our point of view here the other excellent 
 suggestions he has to make must be omitted. 
 Those of them which are typically Greek are common 
 to nearly all writers ; and those which rise above 
 the practical wisdom of tradition are few.
 
 ARISTOTLE'S IDEALS 253 
 
 We must now pass to criticism. We have empha- 
 sised those elements in the ideals of Plato and 
 Aristotle which seem to be of permanent value ; 
 but we have implied that many of their suggestions 
 are obsolete. Some are even misleading. It would 
 be a blind admiration which refused to see the great 
 errors made by Plato and Aristotle, especially with 
 respect to social ideals ; and unless we give due 
 consideration to their errors we cannot rightly 
 estimate the excellence of their other statements. 
 
 As to ideals of individual character, enough has 
 been already written in correction or criticism of 
 some features in the Greek ideal, even in the most 
 exalted form given to it by the philosophers. There 
 is omission and there is exaggeration in their state- 
 ments ; but our tradition is strong enough to use 
 what is good and to supply the deficiencies. For 
 example, no word is said by the philosophers of 
 love between man and woman such as we conceive 
 it now. l And the attitude towards the future and 
 especially towards children as the guardians of the 
 future was not to them what it is to us. This is 
 general as against both Plato and Aristotle. The 
 deficiencies of the less philosophical ideals of Greece 
 we have supposed to be more obvious, and the 
 impercipience of Aristotle in particular we have 
 already noticed. We may, therefore, suppose that 
 the utility of such conceptions as those of right 
 action (independent of intention), positive morality 
 and intellectual insight, should not obscure our 
 judgment. We allow much to the Greeks in general, 
 more to the philosophers ; but they made mis- 
 
 1 This does not mean that romantic love between the sexes 
 was unknown, as we have seen in reference to Xenophon. cf. 
 above, p. 131.
 
 254 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 takes and they were undoubtedly limited in their 
 ideals of individual character. 
 
 We may now pass to the conception of an ideal 
 society. We have seen that it is based upon the 
 experience of the life of the polis and that it implied 
 a certain interpretation of that life ; and even 
 allowing for the excellent suggestion that society is 
 a real and living whole, allowing also for the inevit- 
 able limitations due to the circumstances of the time, 
 we must assert that both the average Athenian and 
 the philosophers made great mistakes in their 
 conception of an ideal society. 
 
 First, the ideal implies the isolation of a small 
 group of men. It disregards, on the one hand, the 
 fact that every Greek city and Athens most of all 
 was in some way dependent upon other cities. For 
 even if this fact is regarded as an evil, it should be 
 discussed in any adequate rendering of the nature 
 of society. But both Plato and Aristotle pass it 
 over with, at most, a bare recognition. And yet 
 the Republic of Plato is a discussion in the house of 
 a foreigner and in the midst of a family whose foreign 
 connections were numerous. 1 The chief speakers 
 of the Phaedo are foreigners ; and Plato must 
 himself have recognised how much Athens owed 
 to foreign science. As for Aristotle, if Athens had 
 
 1 Kephalos, the father of Polemarchus, was a Syracusan who 
 was invited to settle at Athens by Pericles. (Lysias : in Erat. 
 par. 4.) Polemarchus lived after the death of Kephalos at Thurii, 
 until driven out and back to Athens (412 B.C.) on a charge of 
 Attic sympathies. He and his brother Lysias lived in peace 
 in Athens and the Piraeus, where they, had three houses, one a 
 factory with a hundred and twenty slaves. They were robbed of 
 all their property by the Thirty in 404. Polemarchus was killed 
 and Lysias fled. From that time Lysias worked for the Demo- 
 cracy in Athens, receiving the citizenship in 403. (Jebb, Attic 
 Orators. I., 142 sq.)
 
 ARISTOTLE'S IDEALS 255 
 
 been intellectually self-sufficing he himself could not 
 have had a place there. How did he, a foreigner 
 from Stageira, happen to acquire so much in Athens 
 or teach so much to Athens ? His ideas could not 
 have come into contact with Plato's unless trade had 
 already connected the cities of the Greek world ; 
 and his conception of making a good life by isolat- 
 ing every small local group is, therefore, pure non- 
 sense. He, the observer, does not reckon with 
 important facts. But we must. 
 
 Attic vases were in Etruria before 550 B.C. Athens 
 imported corn, pigs, and cheese from Sicily, metal- 
 ware from Etruria, and woven stuffs from Carthage. 
 " All the pleasant things of Sicily and Italy were 
 brought together at Athens. They were paid for 
 partly in pottery and partly in Attic silver. The 
 Euboic-Attic standard was already in use in most 
 Sicilian states at the end of the sixth century." x 
 The gild of the alien corn-dealers in Peiraeus was 
 important enough to need special regulation. 2 
 The Megarian Decrees with which the Peloponnesian 
 War opened were based on the perfectly well-known 
 fact that Megara could be effectively blockaded 
 because it depended on " foreign " trade. And 
 therefore it must have been perfectly clear to prac- 
 tical politicians that the polis was not an economic 
 whole. It is true that the contact between states 
 seemed chiefly hostile ; but it led to war only because 
 war is the primitive method of commercial gain, 3 
 and the vague memories of the past rather than 
 
 1 Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus, p. 39. 
 
 * Jebb, Attic Orators I., p. 227. 
 
 8 This is impolite, but Aristophanes makes the remark in the 
 Lysistrata, " All war is for money," and even the Thucydidean 
 Pericles (I. 76) says that war is brought about by honour, fear, 
 and money gain.
 
 256 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 dreams of the future were the governing forces 
 even when philosophers searched for an ideal. 
 
 Again, Plato and still more Aristotle is wrong in 
 supposing that devotion to the polls was the loftiest 
 ideal imaginable. Even despised Sophists had 
 imagined a better ; and whatever the comparative 
 value of Hellenic unity and local independence, 
 Plato and Aristotle should not have omitted to 
 mention the dangers of a purely local sentiment. 
 For this civic patriotism was a continual danger to 
 the larger view of Greek destiny ; and it was recog- 
 nised at least by a few in every age that the war of 
 city against city was civil war. Gorgias, at Olympia, 
 made a speech in which " seeing Greece torn by 
 faction, he became a counsellor of concord." " It 
 befits us," says Lysias, speaking at Olympia in 388 
 B.C., " to desist from war among ourselves and 
 to cleave with a single purpose to the public weal, 
 ashamed for the past and apprehensive for the 
 future ; it befits us to imitate our forefathers, who 
 when the barbarians coveted the lands of others, 
 inflicted upon them the loss of their own ; and who 
 after driving out the tyrants established liberty for 
 all men alike." 1 Eight years after this Isocrates 
 addressed his Panegyricus to the Greek world. And 
 yet of all this there is only a hint in the ideals of 
 Plato and Aristotle, for Plato admits that the war of 
 Greek against Greek is like civil war ; and Aristotle 
 says that if Greeks were united they might conquer 
 the world. 2 Plato, indeed, in the Theaetetus, seems 
 to imply another standard of excellence than local 
 
 1 Lysias, Or. XXXIII., par. 6. He then appeals to Sparta 
 to lead. Isocrates looks to Athens as well, or as the inspiring 
 spirit. 
 
 * Plat. Rep., 469, and Aristotle, Pol., 13276.
 
 ARISTOTLE'S IDEALS 257 
 
 patriotism, but it is vague. And Aristotle is abso- 
 lutely blind to the pernicious consequences which 
 had already resulted from precisely that absolutism 
 and exclusiveness of the polis which he so blandly 
 accepts as an ideal. In moral judgment of social 
 organisation the influence of Aristotle has been most 
 evil ; since, when men forgot his metaphysics and 
 began to take his political theory for gospel, they 
 became worse than mediaeval. The followers of 
 Aristotle maintained the absolute right of every 
 powerful government and every unit of organised 
 society which had enough prejudice behind it to 
 be imagined self-sufficing ; and so we in the twen- 
 tieth century are still struggling against the limita- 
 tions of our masters, the Greek philosophers. 
 
 Finally, as against the ideals of both Plato and 
 Aristotle, and indeed of all Greece, the social end 
 should not be conceived as static. This from our 
 present point of view is a very grave defect ; for it 
 implies that there may be one form of society of 
 which one can hope for nothing better than that it 
 should remain as it is. The ideal then becomes a 
 goal of action and not a mark of direction ; but the 
 very essence of a moral ideal is that it should be 
 indefinitely in progress, and the excellence of any 
 social organisation is proportioned to the amount 
 of free play which it allows to the always increasing 
 activities of men. 
 
 The attitude of Greek philosophers is well expressed 
 in Aristotle's treatment of Revolution. The word 
 does not simply indicate violent subversion of law 
 and order ; it means also political change. That 
 change of the form of government could not occur 
 without violence was a fact in Greece, owing to^the 
 early stage of political development which had been
 
 258 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 so far reached. And violence is very rightly 
 considered by Aristotle to be the greatest danger 
 to be avoided. But it is obvious that Aristotle 
 desires to keep things as they are. Education is to 
 fit the new generation to the established structure 
 of society ; it is not said to be, what it equally well 
 may be, the source of legitimate enthusiasm for 
 changing the structure of society. And Plato too 
 does not leave us any hope in the Republic or in the 
 Laws that the governing authorities will continually 
 improve their rule. They are conceived as main- 
 taining a rule already perfect. 
 
 Two points must be made with respect to this 
 static conception of the ideal society. First, it is 
 obviously a reaction against the only too great 
 tendency of the Greeks to change. No Greek city 
 needed any philosophic invitation to ardtCTi? in 
 any sense of the word. Athens itself was peculiarly 
 restless. It was natural therefore that the ideal 
 should be conceived in the terms of permanence and 
 rest, as it was natural that the extremes to which 
 Greek individuals tended should be corrected by the 
 " nothing too much " of popular morality. Secondly, 
 all ages until the Renaissance have conceived 
 the history of man as a falling away from some 
 achieved or established order. The past is fixed, 
 the future is fluid. Hence when you come to think 
 of your social ideal you are influenced by the tradi- 
 tion into which you are born, and an established 
 ideal order is placed by philosophers in the future 
 indeed, but in a future that bears the features of the 
 traditional past. So the ideal life appears to be a 
 living up to an accepted or established state of 
 things and not, as it is to us, a continual search for 
 a new ideal.
 
 ARISTOTLE'S IDEALS 259 
 
 We suffer from the opposite error the belief in 
 inevitable progress. Change has become to us so 
 good that we forget that the world does not neces- 
 sarily and always change for the better. And as 
 for intellectual restlessness, we seem to need more 
 and not less of it ; since although we accept change 
 as a fact we do little to control its direction. 
 In part, therefore, we perceive the limitations 
 of the Greek ideal only because we need other ideals. 
 But in part we are correct in condemning a too 
 great admiration for stability and a false idea of the 
 future as a stable situation. We are compelled 
 to say to Plato and still more to Aristotle that the 
 best future society will be one in which changes 
 can be made without violence and one, therefore, 
 which is so constructed as to promote changes which 
 are progressive. For not all change is progress, 
 and in correcting the Greeks we should not forget 
 that unless we ourselves act to guide the changes in 
 society in accordance with definite ideals, the future 
 state of our civilisation will be even worse than the 
 present.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 THE AFTERGLOW 
 
 WHEN the vitality had gone out of Greek experience 
 and the originality out of Greek literature and 
 philosophy, there still remained for many years a 
 radiance in which subordinate details of the ideal 
 became more prominent. As water on a distant 
 hill seems brighter at sunset when the colour has 
 gone from the trees and the grass, so after the fourth 
 century one can make out some features in the 
 landscape of Greek experience which were not so 
 clear before. 
 
 Our task is not historical ; and therefore we shall 
 not trace the gradual development of the ideals 
 first expressed in the fifth and fourth centuries. 
 But certain features in the Greek conception of 
 life, which did not appear until after the fourth 
 century, are not necessarily new in that later time. 
 The polis had decayed and Greek life was no longer 
 politically or economically or even intellectually 
 independent ; and the result was an emphasis upon 
 aspects of life which had not appeared hitherto to 
 be so important. Artistically the later period is 
 generally condemned as decadent, although that 
 criticism is probably due to a perverse and antiquated 
 moralising rather than to clear aesthetic percep- 
 tion. For delicate and elaborate art is not therefore 
 less wonderful as art, and there is no reason why bad 
 
 260
 
 THE AFTERGLOW 261 
 
 drawing should be held essential to a pure morality. 
 In the same way the later literature of Greece is 
 condemned ; and justly, if originality is the highest 
 quality of literature. In moral perception and 
 creative idealism also the later period is much weaker. 
 But all these apparent changes must not be held to 
 be moral decay. The fatalism is certainly false 
 which implies that the weakening of the Greek ideal 
 must necessarily have occurred ; and even in allow- 
 ing that they had less originality, we must not refuse 
 to the later Greeks a genuine and valuable moral life. 
 
 Two aspects of the Greek ideal may be selected 
 in order to show what immediate result the Greek 
 view of life had upon the men of the centuries imme- 
 diately before and after the beginning of our era. 
 One is emphasised by the Stoics, the other by the 
 Epicureans. Many other Developments occurred, 
 as for example in the mysticism called Neoplatonic 
 philosophy. But the simplest and most Hellenic 
 of the later ideals were those which began with 
 Zeno and Chrysippus on the one hand and with 
 Epicurus on the other. 
 
 The Stoics preached a generous humaneness under 
 control of reason ; and they admired chiefly the 
 severity, the high purpose and the many interests 
 of Socrates. 1 The element of sobriety and immove- 
 ableness of spirit as an ideal in life is to be found very 
 early in the history of Greece and, as we have seen, 
 it is analysed by Aristotle ; but to give such a con- 
 ception prominence was only possible when society 
 had lost its vitality. There was, however, a certain 
 feeling for what later ages called Stoicism to be 
 found all through the Greek tradition, and it is 
 peculiar to Greece. It is the calm which survives 
 
 1 Diogenes Laertius VI., 2.
 
 262 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 the violence of passion or the rush of thought ; 
 it is not what is called Oriental subjection to fate, 
 even though the Greek poets are always reminding 
 us of the inevitable evils in human life. It is not 
 the surly blindness of northern races, who dare all 
 because they feel nothing. Greek calm as an ideal 
 for no one pretends that the Greeks attained it 
 was that of men open-eyed to evil, able to feel 
 intensely and yet somehow and somewhere within 
 them, secure. We cannot but connect it with the 
 Greek religious tradition. To them religion was a 
 common service for a common good, not a continual 
 terror of unintelligible powers nor an occasional 
 ecstasy ; and religion, therefore, among the thinking 
 few was easily transformed into morality, without 
 losing its intensity or its elevation. From the near 
 relationship to the divine 1 and the serenity which 
 comes to one for whom divisions of race, or caste, 
 or creed are of subordinate importance, 2 who watches 
 the gradual conquest of reason, 3 there comes a lofty 
 resolution. Practically this appears in universal 
 sympathy combined with calm. For sympathy and 
 calm are preached in all the fragments we have of 
 early Stoicism, and the result appears in the ethical 
 philosophy of Seneca and the meditations of Marcus 
 Aurelius. But as a Greek tradition it affected 
 many who were not in the strictest sense Stoic 
 philosophers. 
 
 The spirit of it is in Plutarch, when he is not too 
 mild and provincial. For Plutarch was a borough 
 councillor in his political conceptions and an 
 
 1 cf. the hymn to Zeus by Cleanthes. " Hail Zeus ! . . . whose 
 seed we are." 
 
 * cf. M. Aurelius on Socrates. 
 
 * " Chrysippus said that justice was in the nature of things and 
 not a convention." Diogenes Laertius VII., 128.
 
 THE AFTERGLOW 263 
 
 obscurantist in his general attitude ; and his writing 
 has interest only because not even unintelligence in 
 an early critic can prevent his putting down what is 
 of some importance to later generations : but in 
 some ways he is of the old Greek tradition, precisely 
 in that admiration for calm which is so closely 
 connected with affection for nature rather than dread 
 of the things of earth. " The very name of earth," 
 he says, " is truly dear and venerable to every Greek 
 and there is through all Greece the custom of adoring 
 and revering it as much as any of the other gods." x 
 The same spirit comes out hi his defence of vegetarian- 
 ism, where he makes the quieter animals complain 
 that they and not the wild beasts are killed by 
 men and that not for necessity but merely to give a 
 zest to appetite. 
 
 But stronger minds than Plutarch's had been 
 working for many years after Plato and Aristotle 
 at the elaboration of those ideals at which the old 
 tradition hinted. The first Stoics were genuine 
 Greeks. They desired to carry out that redemption 
 of man from impulse and the immoral currents of 
 physical life, which all Greeks knew in their hearts 
 was the glory of what Greece had begun. They 
 thought of a man so fine that he would feel with all 
 other men of whatever race and indeed with the 
 whole universe of life ; and yet they aimed at making 
 such a man secure from the degradation of being 
 absorbed altogether even in so great a feeling. 
 Stoic cosmopolitanism and humanitarianism are 
 not contradictions of Stoic calm. The one is the 
 necessary complement of the other ; and the two 
 make no unworthy ideal of character. But if we 
 seek for its root in history we find it to be Greek. 
 1 Face in the Orb of the Moon, ch. 21.
 
 264 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 As for the conception of an ideal manner of life, 
 first, asceticism was preached by Stoics ; but in the 
 Greek tradition it never was an end, nor was it a 
 preparation for any other life. It was simply the 
 necessary training for the ordinary human life of 
 a man who desires something more in life than wealth 
 and power. But asceticism is not the most promi- 
 nent feature of the Stoic ideal. We find that rather 
 in the aloofness from local interests, which is 
 generally regarded even nowadays as a deficiency. 
 Secondly, therefore, we must allow for the Stoic 
 ideal of life as being a departure from the old 
 loyalties of the polis. That also is Greek. It is 
 conceived that a man may live well in the service 
 of a loyalty as wide as humanity ; and this ideal 
 was not due to what historians have foolishly called 
 the decay of Greek civilisation but to the natural 
 development in the contact of many races and the 
 growing distinction of interests among those of 
 the same locality. Men were becoming more 
 specialised in their interests, and at the same time 
 more universalised in their contacts. The social 
 forces which had before joined only men of the same 
 locality were now separating the local groups into 
 classes and uniting distant men of the same type. 
 The Stoics attempted to set up the necessary ideal 
 of life for this changed world ; and it is nonsense 
 to complain of their lack of local feeling, as though 
 the antique polis still existed or as though that polis 
 was morally any better than the new world. Civic 
 patriotism in the old sense was obsolete and the 
 Stoics all but succeeded in establishing a new ideal. 
 But the vision faded. The confusion of narrow 
 religious enthusiasm, fantastic hopes, and, on the 
 other hand, egoistic or group desires for wealth
 
 THE AFTERGLOW 265 
 
 and power, overwhelmed the last traces of a rational 
 morality ; and then came barbarism. For whatever 
 the reason, whether because the Stoics had not 
 conceived their ideal clearly enough, or because 
 it was in part exaggerated, or because the circum- 
 stances of the time made the number of those who 
 understood it too small and ineffective, this last 
 gleam of the Greek ideal of calm and reasonable 
 humanism gradually disappeared. 
 
 The other element surviving from an old tradition 
 but prominent only in late expressions of the ideal 
 life is that of a calculus of pleasures. This in its 
 elaborate form is Epicurean. But it is not altogether 
 new in the Epicurean philosophy, and may be treated 
 as one of the subordinate conceptions of the ideal. 
 For this too is in the Greek tradition. There is a 
 certain sensuousness about Greek ideals of life, 
 which is abhorrent to moralists of the Kantian type. 
 We have seen it already in the love of physical beauty 
 and the delight in dance and song. By contrast, 
 in modern England, at least among the self-styled 
 " upper " classes, if you want to dance you must 
 pretend that you do it for charity or patriotism. 
 The idea that beauty needs no excuse is not regarded 
 as altogether proper. And this barren moralism 
 degrades the ordinary impulses of life without 
 thereby making the ideal any more effective. For 
 there are many ordinary experiences, such as eating 
 and drinking, which are regarded as " low " or at 
 least negligible from the point of view of the ideal 
 of life and character. But to neglect them or to 
 despise them has never yet redeemed them from 
 their lower and primitive connections, and those 
 ideals have been misleading which have implied 
 that one should not delight in food and drink. Only
 
 266 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 the beast does not eat for pleasure but for need. 
 It is indeed easy to show that one must not live 
 wholly to eat and drink ; and Kantian moralists 
 persist in supposing that if you do not regard what 
 is disagreeable as duty you must be a glutton and a 
 drunkard. But, the Epicurean might reply, surely 
 that is not the alternative. Food is not a mere 
 supply of fuel to a machine, but an occasion for 
 pleasurable experience ; and it may be an oppor- 
 tunity for excellence. This is an ideal. In practice 
 many races refuse to regard cooking as an art ; 
 and therefore they are compelled to sacrifice the 
 pleasure which an art of cookery can cause. But 
 Plato's sarcasms about cooking are an indication 
 that the majority of Greeks valued what conven- 
 tional moralists persist in regarding as degraded. 
 
 This pleasurable experience was what Epicurus 
 took as his starting-point and with a very sane view 
 of the physical basis of moral life, he attempted to 
 state an ideal in accordance with nature. But it 
 was not until the vitality of Greece had gone that 
 men could see clearly that naturalness which was 
 characteristic of the Greek conception of life, and 
 therefore Epicureanism is itself only a late reflection 
 -of the old thought. With the acceptance and 
 redemption of the sensuous went a reserve and 
 sobriety which was, no less than the calculus of 
 pleasures, to be found in Epicureanism. For indeed 
 the early Epicureans felt that one could not attain 
 to the fullness of pleasurable experience without 
 a discipline that we should call ascetic. This was, 
 however, a continuance of the old Athenian standard 
 of " externals " in the civilised life. As we have seen 
 in Athens of the best days private wealth was not 
 great, and for the majority life was much more
 
 THE AFTERGLOW 267 
 
 simple than our middle classes could now endure. 
 This produced in the Greek mind a very healthy 
 opposition to mere display : for the material neces- 
 sities of Athenian life were few and simple. Indeed 
 the simplicity of Athens continued to be a well- 
 known fact even in Lucian's day. Of Nigrinus, the 
 philosopher, Lucian says " He praised Greece and, 
 in particular, the Athenians. They are brought 
 up, he said, to poverty and to philosophy. The 
 endeavours whether of foreigners or of their own 
 countrymen to introduce luxury into their midst, 
 find no favour with them " l . . . "He further 
 commended the Athenian liberty and unpretentious 
 style of living, the peace and learned leisure which 
 they so abundantly enjoy. To dwell among such 
 men, he declared, is to dwell with philosophy ; a 
 single-hearted man who has been taught to despise 
 wealth may here preserve a pure morality. No life 
 could be more in harmony with the determined 
 pursuit of all that is truly beautiful." '- Thus even 
 if this be a romantic view of the poverty of Athens by 
 comparison with Rome, the ideal is clearly indicated. 
 No Greek could quite forget that the attention to 
 externals or material goods or physical pleasure in- 
 volved also a certain sobriety in the use of all these. 
 Thus far Epicureanism is genuinely Greek. 
 
 And as an abiding result of the Greek conceptions 
 of worth in life and character we may find in the 
 later ages the surviving reverence for reason. For 
 this is peculiar to the Greek civilisation among all 
 others ; and the place given to reason, more perhaps 
 than the place given to beauty, is the cause of that 
 
 1 Lucian, Xigrinus, c. 12. Then follows a story of the rich 
 man " taken down." 
 
 1 id., ch. 14. There follows the contrast with Rome.
 
 268 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 tendency among all who revolt from an established 
 tradition to look back to Athens. Men felt at the 
 Renaissance as they did in the Nineteenth Century 
 that Athenian philosophers first understood the 
 power of reasoning, and that Athenian fools had 
 at least more reverence than other fools for the 
 reasoning they could not use. Both Stoics and 
 Epicureans looked to a reasoned knowledge of the 
 physical universe as the only secure basis for a good 
 life. The Stoics had an elaborate physics : and 
 Epicurus required of his disciples a knowledge of 
 nature, although he said he cared nothing for Homer 
 and culture. For to the end the Greeks never meant 
 by reasoning the reading of other people's books ; 
 and it is strange that so many of those who are now 
 enthusiastic for the study of Greek literature should 
 be so opposed as they are to the Greek desire for 
 scientific knowledge and so forgetful of the Greek 
 subordination of mere literary form to exact thinking. 
 The ideal life, then, remains, so long as the Greek 
 tradition survives, a reasoned life, whether it be 
 Stoic or Epicurean or simply Eclectic. For the true 
 Greek continued to reason even when he saw the 
 uncertainty of the results. So Lucian, converted 
 into a Greek, in the Fisher, makes Philosophy, des- 
 cribing her followers, say, ' That vague lady with 
 an indefinite complexion, is Truth." He was himself 
 sufficiently secured by reasoning from the revivalisms 
 of his day : but although sceptical as to doctrine, 
 he is clear enough as to the general rule. In the 
 dialogues of the dead when Menippus meets Cheiron 
 there is some questioning as to the kind of life one 
 ought to choose ; for Cheiron has come down below 
 because he was tired of the life of earth. Menippus 
 warns him that he may become bored again and
 
 THE AFTERGLOW 269 
 
 Cheiron then asks what is to be done. The answer 
 is the very essence of Lucian " Take things as you 
 find them," he says, " like a sensible man, and make 
 the best of everything," It is not perhaps an 
 exalted sentiment, but it has about it that admirable 
 sense which is the result of reasoning, which indeed 
 those forget who call reasoning destructive as well 
 as those who indulge in rhetoric about its excellence. 
 The disappearance of typically Greek ideals was 
 gradual. It is possible to distinguish them from the 
 Roman ideals of life and character which they so 
 much influenced : and until about the second 
 century of our era the movements of thought if not 
 public activities may be shown to have been directed 
 by the remaining force in the old Greek view of life. 
 In a certain very wide sense the Greek ideals 
 influenced and modified the new Oriental religions 
 which took hold of Europe after the second cen- 
 tury. But the limited influence of Greek thought, 
 for example, on Christianity cannot be dealt with 
 here. The confusion of the time cannot be fairly 
 described in a summary. No doubt the criticism 
 of slavery and the cosmopolitanism of the fourth 
 century would have been impossible without what 
 Athens had done. But for all practical purposes 
 the Greek ideals of life and character were submerged 
 and indeed hardly remembered during the Dark and 
 Middle Ages. It is a mistake to imagine that what 
 Greece stood for was understood, criticised, and re- 
 jected, or that any choice was made, by men com- 
 petent to judge, between the Hellenic and other 
 traditions. The last traces of the Greek ideal 
 disappeared in a general confusion and not by any 
 designed opposition, in the collapse of the whole of 
 ancient civilisation. New ideals appeared and a new
 
 270 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 beginning was made, which itself came to an end 
 after about ten centuries. On the ideals of the 
 Middle Ages the Hellenic conceptions of man and the 
 world had only the very smallest influence. But with 
 the revival of unecclesiastical thought the value of 
 the Greek ideals began again to be recognised. The 
 Renaissance in Italy was really influenced by the 
 Greek spirit in its attempt to live naturally in the 
 reasoned enjoyment of beauty. Unfortunately the 
 scholars soon turned aside into an empty and alto- 
 gether un-Greek formalism: and the remnants of 
 mediae valism in the courts of the Renaissance turned 
 what was fundamental in Hellenic thought into 
 decorative nothings. 
 
 Greek influence revived in the Nineteenth Century. 
 But that was a period of aesthetic and affected 
 " culture," in the worst sense of that word of many 
 senses ; and to the mind of that time the Greeks 
 were sentimental schoolboys. The excellences in the 
 Greek ideal were often modified so as to suit the 
 atmosphere of a Victorian drawing-room. The 
 greater writers of the period, however, interpreted 
 justly the Greek admiration for exact thinking and 
 unsentimental art . The Greek influence on poetry and 
 on politics soon began to be felt, and perhaps it was 
 in part due to the Greek ideals that the world was 
 delivered from the superficial culture of the early 
 industrial period. For such men as Shelley and 
 Swinburne, as Goethe before them, saw through 
 the sentimentalism of the age to the real Greece. 
 They and a few like them felt the inspiration to 
 creative action which always comes from an under- 
 standing of Athenian literature. 
 
 In the main, however, the Nineteenth Century 
 understood as little of Greece as the early Romantics
 
 THE AFTERGLOW 271 
 
 understood of the Middle Ages. From that Classicism 
 we have been delivered by exact history and the 
 study of religion. There was a period in our 
 deliverance during which the Greek appeared to be 
 a mixture of North American Indian and Australian 
 aboriginee. But that has happily passed. And we 
 are now once more under the full influence of 
 ideals which, if not in themselves Greek, owe part 
 of their force to the work done in Athens. 
 
 An uncritical admiration is worthless. For there 
 was much that was mistaken in the Greek view of 
 politics and ethics, as there was in their geography 
 and mathematics : and there is no reason why we 
 should accept their opinions on man and society, 
 as we no longer accept their metaphysics and 
 geometry. Further, even in those points in which 
 they were correct, they were limited. To emphasise 
 this as Greek is to misrepresent what the Greek 
 intended. But we must acknowledge and repudiate 
 those limitations. There remains, however, the 
 inspiration of the method and the general attitude 
 which they were the first to value. A thoroughly 
 social life, reasoning and the love of beauty for its 
 own sake even if these were all that Athens 
 suggested these may be still directive ideals. 
 
 We still tend to take the outer form for the inner 
 spirit. We have ignorant and sentimental " Greek " 
 dancers and ungainly " Greek" dresses ; or we have 
 a study of Greek to the neglect of facts which alone 
 the Greeks valued. But from the imitators of 
 Greece and the grammars of Greek, the Greeks them- 
 selves may deliver us if we have the sense to see, 
 through what they did, the ideals at which they 
 aimed. These ideals illuminate our own desires, 
 and the critical study of them may give us many
 
 2 7 2 GREEK IDEALS 
 
 indications of the way in which to deal with the 
 evils of our own day. For liberty is not yet attained 
 in any country, society is not yet one, the love of 
 beauty is still believed to be somewhat improper, 
 and no one yet knows the true value of reasoning.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Achilles, 94 
 Adonia, 9 
 Aeschines, 36*, 99 
 Aeschylus, 97 
 Anthesteria, 6 
 Antyphon, 5, 130 
 Apaturia, 7 
 Asceticism, 195 
 Aristotle, 23759. 
 Aristophanes, 51, 58, 
 
 135. in 
 Athena, 7, 2559. 
 Athenian festivals, 5 
 Athens (life in), 11959. 
 Autonomy, 69, 73, 74 
 
 B 
 
 Beauty, 10 
 Brauron, 8 
 Britannia, 32 
 
 Celibacy, 227 
 Corinna, 201 
 Corn, 59 
 Croconidae, 53 
 
 D 
 
 Demeter, 35, 49 
 Demos, 33*1, 120 
 Demosthenes, 5, 36*1 
 Devil, 91 
 Dialectic, 212 
 Diodotus, 71 
 Dionysia, 5, 1659. 35 
 
 Ecclesia, 6 
 Education, 20459. 
 Eleusinia, 12, 46 
 Ephebos, 8 
 Epicurean, 261 
 Epic tradition, 6, 8759. 
 Epidaunia, 51 
 Eros, 192 
 
 Farnell, 25*1 
 Fasting, 54, 56 
 Festivals, 350 
 
 Guardians, 22459. 
 Gymnasia, 205 
 
 H 
 
 Hector, 99, 101 
 Hermaia, 10 
 Hermes, 15 
 Heroes. 93 
 Hesiod, 87. 98 
 Homer, 8759. 
 Huxley, 153 
 
 Ideal society, 21459. 
 
 Iliad, 94 
 
 Iliad (influence of), 96 
 
 Immortality, 47 
 
 Ionia, 29 
 
 Isocrates, 57, 132 182, 256
 
 274 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Jahwe. 31 
 
 K 
 
 Kephalos, 25411 
 Knowledge, 182, 208. 
 
 Law, Sosy. 
 
 Lenaea, 36 
 
 Liberty, 69, 7559., 228 
 
 Lysias, 123, 256 
 
 M 
 
 Manicheanism, 91 
 Matter, 92 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, 23on, 262 
 Megarian Decrees, 225 
 Morality, 18559. 
 Mysteries, 46 
 
 N 
 
 Napoleon, 93 
 Nemean games, 72 
 
 O 
 
 Odyssey, 94 
 
 Odyssey (influence of), 9659. 
 
 Odysseus, 101 
 
 Olives, 27 
 
 Olympian games, 7259. 
 
 Olympus, 90 
 
 Orphism, 47 
 
 Oscophoria, z6n 
 
 Panathenia, 6, 20 
 Pausanias, 22, 39*1 
 Parthenon, 25 
 
 frieze, 2 r 
 
 Peisistratus, 4* 
 
 Peplos, 22 
 
 Pericles, 35, 245 
 
 Persephone, 49 
 
 Philosophers, 170 
 
 Plato, 1 8, 89, 18959. 
 
 Plutarch, 3, 74, 263 
 
 Pluto, 56 
 
 Plynteria, 26 
 
 Poets, 43 
 
 Politics, 6459. 
 
 Polis, 2, 3, 6osq., 78, 82, 2485?. 
 
 Polis (ideal), 21459. 
 
 Pots (ceremony of), 15 
 
 Procharisteria, z6n 
 
 Protagoras, 5, 30, 
 
 Pythagoreans, 16459. 
 
 Pythagorean games, 27 
 
 Q 
 
 Quintillian, 25, 107 
 
 R 
 
 Reason, 27 
 
 Religion (Athenian), 62 
 Religion (Roman), 31 
 Republic, 21959. 
 
 Sappho, 201 
 Socrates, 28, 143 
 Sophists, 29 
 Sparta, 4. 68, 78, 205 
 Speaking (art of), 107 
 Synoikia, 10 
 
 Theatre, 3 
 Thebes, i 
 Thesmophoria, 10 
 Thucydides, 3 
 Tragedy, 39*9-
 
 Tragedy (effect of), 
 Treuga Dei, 50 
 Tyranny, 105 
 
 U 
 
 Utopia, 220. 
 
 Vases (attic), 225 
 Vase painting, no 
 Victory, 26 
 
 INDEX 
 
 275 
 
 w 
 
 War, 95 
 
 Women, izgsq., 226sq., iggsq. 
 
 Xenophon, 93, 106, 145 
 
 Z 
 
 Zeus, 7, 28 
 
 7 
 
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