The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  He was something of a poseur, and evidently relished his renown. He had a gift for debate, and his namesake reports that he never lost an argument.42 He called freedom of speech the greatest of social goods, and made much use of it, with coarse humor and unfailing wit. He rebuked a woman who knelt with head to the ground before a holy image: “Are you not afraid,” he asked her, “to be in so indecent an attitude, when some god may be behind you, for every place is full of them?”43 When he saw the son of a courtesan throw a stone at a crowd he warned him, “Take care lest you hit your father.”44 He disliked women, and despised men who behaved like them; when a richly dressed and perfumed young Corinthian asked him a question he said, “I will not answer you until you tell me whether you are a boy or a girl.”45 All the world knows the story of how Alexander, at Corinth, came upon Diogenes lying in the sun. “I am Alexander the Great King,” said the ruler. “I am Diogenes the dog,” said the philosopher. “Ask of me any favor you choose,” said the King. “Stand out of the sun,” answered Diogenes. “If I were not Alexander,” said the young warrior, “I would be Diogenes”;46 but we do not hear that the philosopher returned the compliment. The two men died, we are asked to believe, on the same day in 323: Alexander at Babylon in his thirty-third year, Diogenes at Corinth in his nineties.47 The Corinthians placed a marble dog over his grave; and Sinope, which had banished him, raised a monument to his memory.

  Nothing could be clearer than the Cynic philosophy. It dallied with logic only long enough to dismiss as moonshine that theory of Ideas with which Plato was bewildering the intellectuals of Athens. Metaphysics, too, seemed to the Cynics a vain game; we should study nature not in order to explain the world, which is impossible, but that we may learn the wisdom of nature as a guide to life. The only real philosophy is ethics. The aim of life is happiness; but this is to be found not in the pursuit of pleasure but in a simple and natural life, independent as possible of all external aids. For though pleasure is legitimate if it results from one’s own labor and effort, and is not followed by remorse,48 yet it so often eludes us in the chase, or disappoints us when captured, that it may more wisely be called an evil than a good. A modest and virtuous life is the only road to abiding content; wealth destroys peace, and envious desire, like a rust, eats away the soul. Slavery is unjust but unimportant; the sage will find it as easy to be happy in bondage as in freedom; only internal freedom counts. The gods, said Diogenes, gave man an easy existence, but man has complicated it by itching for luxuries. Not that the Cynics put much faith in the gods. When a priest explained to Antisthenes how many good things the virtuous will enjoy after death, he asked, “Why, then, do you not die?”49 Diogenes smiled at the Mysteries, and remarked of the offerings set up in Samothrace by those who had survived shipwreck, “The offerings would have been much more numerous if those who were lost had offered them instead of those who were saved.”50 Everything in religion but the practice of virtue seemed to the Cynics superstition. Virtue must be accepted as its own reward and should not depend upon the existence or justice of the gods. Virtue consists in eating, possessing, and desiring as little as possible, drinking only water, and injuring no one. Asked how to defend oneself against an adversary, Diogenes answered, “By proving honorable and upright.”51 Only sexual desire seemed reasonable to the Cynics. They avoided marriage as an external bond, but patronized prostitutes. Diogenes advocated free love and a community of wives,52 and Antisthenes, seeking independence in everything, complained that he could not satisfy his hunger as solitarily as he could assuage his lust.53 Having accepted sexual desire as normal and natural, like hunger, the Cynics professed themselves unable to understand why men should be ashamed to satisfy the one appetite, like the other, in public.54 Even in death a man should be independent, choosing for it his own place and time; suicide is legitimate. Diogenes, some say, killed himself by holding his breath.55

  The Cynic philosophy was part of a “back-to-nature” movement which arose in fifth-century Athens as a reaction of maladjustment to an irksomely complex civilization. Men are not civilized by nature, and bear the restraints of ordered life only because they fear punishment or solitude. Diogenes stood to Socrates in somewhat the same relation as Rousseau to Voltaire: he thought that civilization was a mistake, and that Prometheus had deserved his crucifixion for bringing it to mankind.56 The Cynics, like the Stoics and Rousseau, idealized “nature peoples”;57 Diogenes tried to eat meat raw because cooking was unnatural.58 The best society, he thought, would be one without artifices or laws.

  The Greeks smiled upon the Cynics, and tolerated them as medieval society tolerated its saints. After Diogenes the Cynics became a religious order without religion; they made a rule of poverty, lived on alms, tempered their celibacy with promiscuity, and opened schools of philosophy. They had no homes, but taught and slept in the street or the temple porticoes. Through Diogenes’ disciples, Stilpo and Crates, the Cynic doctrine passed down into the Hellenistic age, and formed the basis of Stoicism. The school disappeared as an entity about the end of the third century; but its influence remained strong in the Greek tradition, and perhaps reappeared in the Essenes of Judea and the monks of early Christian Egypt. How far all these movements were influenced by, or influenced, similar sects in India, scholarship cannot yet say. The “back-to-nature” devotees of our own day are the intellectual descendants of those men and women of Oriental or Greek antiquity who, tired of unnatural and cramping restraints, thought that they could turn and live with the animals. No full life is without a touch of this urban fantasy.

  III. PLATO

  1. The Teacher

  Even Plato was moved by the Cynic ideal. In the second book of the Republic59 he describes with relish and sympathy a communistic and naturalistic Utopia. He rejects it, and goes on to portray a “second-best” state; but when he comes to picture his philosopher-kings we find the Cynic dream—of men without property and without wives, dedicated to plain living and high philosophy—capturing the citadel of the finest imagination in Greek history. Plato’s plan for a communistic aristocracy was the brilliant endeavor of a rich conservative to reconcile his scorn of democracy with the radical idealism of his time.

  He came of a family so ancient that on his mother’s side his pedigree went back to Solon, and on his father’s side to the early kings of Athens, even to Poseidon, god of the sea.60 His mother was the sister of Charmides and the niece of Critias, so that opposition to democracy was almost in his blood. Named Aristocles—“best and renowned”—the youth distinguished himself in almost every field: he excelled in the study of music, mathematics, rhetoric, and poetry; he charmed the women, and doubtless the men, with his good looks; he wrestled at the Isthmian games, and was nicknamed Platon, or broad, because of his robust frame; he fought in three battles, and won a prize for bravery.61 He wrote epigrams, amorous verses, and a tragic tetralogy; he was hesitating between poetry and politics as a career when, at the age of twenty, he succumbed to the fascination of Socrates. He must have known him before, since the great gadfly had long been a friend of his uncle Charmides; but now he could understand Socrates’ teaching, and enjoy the sight of the old man tossing ideas, like an acrobat, into the air, and impaling them on the prongs of his questioning. He burned his poems, forgot Euripides, athletics, and women, and followed the master as if under an hypnotic spell. Perhaps he took notes every day, feeling with an artist’s sensitivity the dramatic possibilities of this grotesque and lovable Silenus.

  Then, when Plato was twenty-three, came the tory revolution of 404, led by his own relatives; the tense days of the oligarchic terror, and the brave defiance of the Thirty by Socrates; the death of Critias and Charmides, the restoration of the democracy, the trial and death of Socrates: all the world seemed to collapse about the once carefree youth, and he fled from Athens as if it were a haunted city. He found some comfort at Megara in the home of Eucleides, and then at Cyrene, perhaps with Aristippus; thence he appears to have gone to Egypt and studied the mathematical a
nd historical lore of the priests.62 About 395 he was back in Athens, and a year later fought for the city at Corinth. About 387 he set forth again, studied the Pythagorean philosophy with Archytas at Taras and with Timaeus at Locri, passed over to Sicily to see Mt. Etna, formed a friendship with Dion of Syracuse, was introduced to Dionysius I, was sold into slavery, and was back safe in Athens in 386. With the three thousand drachmas raised to reimburse his ransomer, and which Anniceris refused, Plato’s friends now bought for him a suburban recreation grove named from its local god Academus;62a and there Plato founded the university that was destined to be the intellectual center of Greece for nine hundred years.*

  The Academy was technically a religious fraternity, or thiasos, dedicated to the worship of the Muses. The students paid no fees, but as they came for the most part from upper-class families their parents could be expected to make substantial donations to the institution; rich men, says Suidas, “from time to time bequeathed in their wills, to the members of the school, the means of living a life of philosophic leisure.”63 Dionysius II was reported to have given Plato eighty talents ($480,000)64—which might explain the philosopher’s patience with the King. The comic poets of the time satirized the students as affected in their manners and overnice in their dress—with elegant caps and canes, and a short cloak or academic gown;65 so old are the manners of Eton, and the black robes of scholarship. Women were admitted to the student body, for Plato remained to this extent a radical, that he was an ardent feminist. The chief studies were mathematics and philosophy. Over the portal was a warning inscription—medeis ageometretos eisito—“Let no one without geometry enter here”; perhaps a considerable measure of mathematics formed a requirement for admission. Most of the mathematical advances of the fourth century were made by men who had studied in the Academy. The mathematical course included arithmetic (theory of number), advanced geometry, “spheric” (astronomy), “music” (probably including literature and history), law, and philosophy.66 Moral and political philosophy came last, if Plato followed the advice which—half justifying Anytus and Meletus—he puts into the mouth of Socrates:

  Socr. You know that there are certain principles about justice and good which were taught us in childhood; and under their parental authority we have been brought up, obeying and honoring them.

  Glaucon. That is true.

  Socr. And there are also opposite maxims and habits of pleasure which flatter and attract our soul, but they do not influence those who have any sense of right, and who continue to honor the maxims of their fathers and obey them.

  Gl. True.

  Socr. Now, when a man is in this state, and the questioning spirit asks what is fair and honorable, and he answers as the law directs, and then arguments come and refute the word of the legislator, and he is driven into believing that nothing is fair any more than foul, or just and good any more than the opposite, and the same of all his time-honored notions, do you think that he will still honor and obey them?

  Gl. That is impossible.

  Socr. And when he ceases to think them honorable and natural as heretofore, and he fails to discover the true, can he be expected to pursue any life other than that which flatters his desires?

  Gl. He cannot.

  Socr. And from being an observer of the law he is converted into a lawless person?

  Gl. Unquestionably. . . .

  Socr. Therefore every care must be taken in introducing our thirty-year-old citizens to dialectic. . . . They must not be allowed to taste the dear delight too early; that is one thing specially to be avoided; for young men, as you may have observed, when they first get the taste in their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and refuting others in imitation of those who refute them; they are like puppy-dogs, who delight to tear and pull at all who come near them.

  Gl. Yes, that is their great delight.

  Socr. And when they have made many conquests and received defeats at the hands of many, they violently and speedily get into a way of not believing anything that they believed before, and hence . . . philosophy has a bad name with the rest of the world.

  Gl. That is very true.

  Socr. But when a man begins to get older, he will no longer be guilty of that sort of insanity; he will follow the example of the reasoner who is seeking for truth, and not of the eristic who is contradicting for the sake of amusement; and the greater consideration of his character will increase and not diminish the honor of the pursuit.67

  Plato and his aides taught by lecturing, by dialogue, and by setting problems to the students. One problem was to find “the uniform and ordered movements by the assumption of which the apparent motions of the planets can be accounted for”;68 possibly Eudoxus and Heracleides derived some stimulus from these tasks. The lectures were technical, and sometimes disappointed those who had hoped for practical gain; but pupils like Aristotle, Demosthenes, Lycurgus, Hypereides, and Xenocrates were deeply influenced by them, and in many cases published the notes they had taken. Antiphanes said humorously that just as, in a far northern city, words froze into ice as they were spoken, and were heard in the summer when they thawed, so the words spoken by Plato to his students in their youth were finally understood by them only in their old age.69

  2. The Artist

  Plato himself professed never to have written any technical treatises,70 and Aristotle refers to the teaching in the Academy as Plato’s “unwritten doctrine.”71 How far this differed from the teaching of the Dialogues we do not know.* Probably these were undertaken originally as a recreation, and in a half-humorous vein.72 It is one of the playful ironies of history that the philosophical works most reverenced and studied in European and American universities today were composed in an attempt to make philosophy intelligible to the layman by binding it up with a human personality. It was not the first time that philosophical dialogues had been written; Zeno of Elea and several others had used this method,73 and Simon of Athens, a leather cutter, had published, in dialogue, a report of the Socratic conversations held in his shop.74 It was in Plato a literary, not an historical, form; he did not pretend to give accurate accounts of conversations held thirty or fifty years before, nor even to keep his references consistent. Gorgias, as well as Socrates, was astounded to hear the words that the young dramatist-philosopher had put into his mouth.75 The Dialogues were written independently of one another, and perhaps at long intervals; we must not be shocked by slips of memory, much less by changes of view. There is no design unifying the whole, except as the continuing search of a visibly developing mind for a truth which it never finds.†

  The Dialogues are cleverly and yet poorly constructed. They vivify the drama of ideas, and build up a coherent and affectionate portrait of Socrates; but they seldom achieve unity or continuity, they often wander from subject to subject, and they are frequently cast into a clumsily indirect mood by being presented as narrative reports, by one man, of other men’s conversations. Socrates tells us that he has “a wretched memory,”77 and then recites to a friend, verbatim, fifty-four pages of a discussion which he had carried on in his youth with Protagoras. Most of the Dialogues are weakened by the absence of vigorous interlocutors capable of saying to Socrates something other than “yes” or its equivalent. But these faults are lost in the clear brilliance of the language, the humor of situation, expression, and idea, the living world of varied characters humanly realized, and the frequent opening of windows into a profound and noble mind. We may judge the value that the ancients unconsciously put upon these Dialogues when we consider that they are the most complete product that has come down to us from any Greek author. Their form entitles them to as high a place in the annals of literature as their content has given them in the history of thought.

  The earlier Dialogues are excellent examples of the youthful “eristic” condemned in the passage quoted a while back, but they are redeemed by the charming pictures they give of Athenian youth. The Symposium is the masterpiece of its genre, and the best introduction to Plato; i
ts dramatic mise en scene (“Imagine,” says Agathon to his servants, “that you are our hosts, and that I and the company are your guests”78), its living picture of Aristophanes, “hiccoughing because he had eaten too much,” its lively episode of the drunken and scandalous Alcibiades, above all, its subtle combination of merciless realism in the portrayal of Socrates with the loftiest idealism in his conception of love—these qualities make the Symposium one of the peaks in the history of prose. The Phaedo is more subdued, and more beautiful; here the main argument, however weak, is honest, and gives its opponents a fair chance; the style flows more smoothly over a scene whose noble calm overcomes its tragedy, making the death of Socrates come as quietly as the turn of a river out of sight around a bend. Part of the dialogue of the Phaedrus takes place on the banks of the Ilissus, while Socrates and his pupil are cooling their feet in the stream. Greatest of all dialogues, of course, is the Republic, being the fullest exposition of Plato’s philosophy, and in its earlier parts a dramatic conflict of personalities and ideas. The Parmenides is the worst specimen of empty logic-chopping in all literature, and the bravest example in the history of philosophy of a thinker irrefutably refuting his own most beloved doctrine—the theory of Ideas. Then, in the later Dialogues, the artistry of Plato wanes, Socrates fades from the picture, metaphysics loses its poetry, politics its youthful ideals; until, in the Laws, the weary inheritor of all the culture of many-sided Athens surrenders to the lure of Sparta, and gives up freedom, and poetry, and art, and philosophy itself.