The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  To accomplish all this peaceably there must be complete state control of education, publication, and other means of forming public opinion and personal character. The highest official in the state is to be the minister of education. Authority will replace liberty in education, for the intelligence of children is too undeveloped to excuse us for leaving to them the guidance of their own lives. Literature, science, and the arts are to be under censorship; they will be forbidden to express ideas which the councilors consider hurtful to public morals and piety. Since obedience to parents and the laws can be secured only through supernatural sanctions and aids, the state shall determine what gods are to be worshiped, and how, and when. Any citizen who questions this state religion is to be imprisoned; if he persists he is to be killed.138

  A long life is not always a blessing; it would have been better for Plato to have died before writing this indictment of Socrates, these prolegomena to all future Inquisitions. His defense would be that he loved justice more than truth; that his aim was to abolish poverty and war; that he could do this only by strict state control of the individual; and that this required either force or religion. The degenerative Ionian looseness of Athenian morals and politics, he thought, would be cured only by the Dorian discipline of the Spartan code. Through all of Plato’s thought runs the fear of the abuses of freedom, and the conception of philosophy as the policeman of the people and the regulator of the arts. The Laws offers the surrender of a dying Athens that had completely lived to a Sparta that, ever since Lycurgus, had been dead. When Athens’ most famous philosopher could find so little to say for freedom Greece was ripe for a king.

  Looking back over this body of speculation we are surprised to see how fully Plato anticipated the philosophy, the theology, and the organization of medieval Christianity, and how much of the modern Fascist state. The theory of Ideas became the “realism” of the Scholastics—the objective reality of “universals.” Plato is not only a prä-existent Christlich, as Nietzsche called him, but a pre-Christian Puritan. He distrusts human nature as evil, and thinks of it as an original sin tainting the soul. He breaks up into an evil body and a divine spirit139 that unity of body and soul which had been the educated Greek ideal of the sixth and fifth centuries; like a Christian ascetic he calls the body the tomb of the soul. He takes from Pythagoras and Orphism an Oriental faith in transmigration, karma, sin, purification, and “release”; he adopts, in his last works, the other-worldly tone of a converted and repentant Augustine. One would almost say that Plato was not Greek if it were not for his perfect prose.

  He remains the most likable of the Greek thinkers because he had the attractive faults of his people. He was so sensitive that like Dante he could see perfect and eternal beauty behind the imperfect and temporal form; he was an ascetic because at every moment he had to rein in a rich and impetuous temperament.140 He was a poet possessed by imagination, allured by every whimsy of thought, enthralled by the tragedy and comedy of ideas, flushed with the intellectual excitement of the free mental life of Athens. But it was his fate that he was a logician as well as a poet; that he was the most brilliant reasoner of antiquity, subtler than Zeno of Elea or Aristotle; that he loved philosophy more than he loved any woman or any man; and that in the end, like Dostoevski’s Grand Inquisitor, he concluded to a suppression of all free reasoning, a conviction that philosophy must be destroyed in order that man may live. He himself would have been the first victim of his Utopias.

  IV. ARISTOTLE

  1. Wander-Years

  When Plato died Aristotle built an altar to him, and gave him almost divine honors; for he had loved Plato even if he could not like him. He had come to Athens from his native Stageirus, a small Greek settlement in Thrace. His father had been court physician to Philip’s father, Amyntas II, and (if Galen was not mistaken) had taught the boy some anatomy before sending him to Plato.141 The two rival strains in the history of thought—the mystical and the medical—met and warred in the conjunction of the two philosophers. Perhaps Aristotle would have developed a thoroughly scientific mind had he not listened so long to Plato (some say for twenty years); the doctor’s son struggled in him with the Puritan’s pupil, and neither side won; Aristotle never quite made up his mind. He gathered about him scientific observations sufficient for an encyclopedia, and then tried to force them into the Platonic mold in which his scholastic mind had been formed. He refuted Plato at every turn because he borrowed from him on every page.

  He was an earnest student, and soon caught the eye of his master. When Plato read at the Academy his treatise on the soul, Aristotle, says Diogenes Laertius, “was the only person who sat it out, while all the rest rose up and went away.”142 After Plato’s death (347) Aristotle went to the court of Hermeias, who had studied with him at the Academy and had raised himself from slavery to be the dictator of Atarneus and Assus in upper Asia Minor. Aristotle married Hermeias’ daughter Pythias (344), and was about to settle in Assus when Hermeias was assassinated by the Persians, who suspected him of planning to help Philip’s proposed invasion of Asia.143 Aristotle fled with Pythias to near-by Lesbos, and spent some time there in studying the natural history of the island.144 Pythias died after giving him a daughter. Later Aristotle married, or lived with, the hetaira Herpyllis;145 but he maintained to the end a tender devotion to the memory of Pythias, and at his death asked that his bones be laid beside hers; he was not quite the emotionless bookworm that one might picture from his works. In 343 Philip, who probably had known him as a youth at Amyntas’ court, invited him to undertake the education of Alexander, then a wild lad of thirteen. Aristotle came to Pella and labored at the task for four years. In 340 Philip commissioned him to direct the restoration and repeopling of Stageirus, which had been laid waste in the war with Olynthus, and to draw up a code of laws for it; all of which he accomplished to the satisfaction of the city, which commemorated its re-establishment by him in an annual holiday.146

  In 334 he returned to Athens, and—probably aided by funds from Alexander—opened a school of rhetoric and philosophy. He chose as its home the most elegant of Athens’ gymnasiums, a group of buildings dedicated to Apollo Lyceus (God of Shepherds), surrounded with shady gardens and covered walks. In the morning he taught advanced subjects to regular students; in the afternoon he lectured to a more popular audience, probably on rhetoric, poetry, ethics, and politics. He collected here a large library, a zoological garden, and a museum of natural history. The school came to be called the Lyceum, and the group and its philosophy were named Peripatetic from the covered walks (peripatoi) along which Aristotle liked to move with his students as he discoursed.147 A sharp rivalry developed between the Lyceum, whose students were mostly of the middle class, the Academy, which drew its membership largely from the aristocracy, and the school of Isocrates, which was frequented chiefly by colonial Greeks. The rivalry was eased in time by the emphasis of Isocrates on rhetoric, of the Academy on mathematics, metaphysics, and politics, and of the Lyceum on natural science. Aristotle set his pupils to gathering and co-ordinating knowledge in every field: the customs of barbarians, the constitutions of the Greek cities, the chronology of victors in the Pythian games and the Athenian Dionysia, the organs and habits of animals, the character and distribution of plants, and the history of science and philosophy. These researches became a treasury of data upon which he drew, sometimes too confidently, for his varied and innumerable treatises.

  For the layman he wrote some twenty-seven popular dialogues, which Cicero and Quintilian considered equal to Plato’s; it was chiefly by these that he was known in antiquity.148 These dialogues were among the casualties of the barbarian conquest of Rome. What remains to us is a mass of technical, highly abstract, and inimitably dull works rarely referred to by ancient scholars, and apparently composed, in the last twelve years of his life, of notes made for his lectures by himself, or from his lectures by his pupils. These technical compendiums were not known outside the Lyceum until they were published by Andronicus of Rhodes in
the first century B.C.149 Forty of them survive, but Diogenes Laertius mentions 360 more—probably brief monographs. In these ashes of scholarship we must seek the once living thought that in later ages won for Aristotle the title of The Philosopher. We must approach him expecting no brilliance like Plato’s and no wit like Diogenes’, but only a rich argosy of knowledge, and such conservative wisdom as befits the friend and pensioner of kings.*

  2. The Scientist

  Aristotle has traditionally been considered as primarily a philosopher. Perhaps this is a mistake. Let us, if only for a fresh view, consider him chiefly as a scientist.

  His curious mind is interested, to begin with, in the process and technique of reasoning; and so acutely does he analyze these that his “Organon,” or Instrument—the name given after his death to his logical treatises—became the textbook of logic for two thousand years. He longs to think clearly, though he seldom, in his extant works, succeeds; he spends half his time defining his terms, and then feels that he has solved the problem. Definition itself he defines definitively as the specification of an object or idea by naming the genus or class to which it belongs (“man is an animal”) and the specific difference that distinguishes it from all other members of that class (“man is a rational animal”). It is characteristic of his methodical way that he arranged in ten “categories” the basic aspects under which anything may be considered: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, possession, activity, passivity—a classification that some writers have found an aid in the amplification of their flagging thought.

  He accepts the senses as the only source of knowledge. Universals are generalized ideas, not innate but formed from many perceptions of like objects; they are conceptions, not things.150 He lays down resolutely, as the axiom of all logic, the principle of contradiction: “It is impossible for the same attribute at once to belong and not to belong to the same thing in the same relation.”151 He exposes the fallacies into which sophists fall or lure us. He criticizes his predecessors for having drawn the universe, or their theories of it, out of their heads, instead of devoting themselves to patient observation and experiment.152 His ideal of deductive reasoning is the syllogism—a trio of propositions of which the third follows necessarily from the others; but he recognizes that a syllogism, to avoid begging the question, must presuppose a wide induction to make its major premise probable. Though in his philosophical treatises he too often loses himself in deductive reasoning, he lauds induction, accumulates in his scientific works a mass of specific observations, and occasionally records his own or others’ experiments.* With all his errors he is the father of scientific method, and the first man known to have organized co-operative scientific research.

  He takes up science where Democritus left it, and dares to enter every field. He is weakest in mathematics and physics, and confines himself there to a study of first principles. He seeks in the Physics not new discoveries but clear definitions of the terms used—matter, motion, space, time, continuity, infinite, change, end. Motion and space are continuous, they are not made up, as Zeno assumed, of small indivisible moments or parts; the “infinite” exists potentially, but not actually.153 He feels, though he does nothing to solve, the problems that were to arouse Newton—inertia, gravity, motion, velocity; he has some idea of the parallelogram of forces, and states the law of the lever: “The moving weight will more easily move” (the object) “the farther away it is from the fulcrum.”154

  He argues that the heavenly bodies—certainly the earth—are spherical, for only a spherical earth could explain the shape of the moon when it is eclipsed by the intervention of the earth between it and the sun.155 He has an admirable sense of geological time; periodically but imperceptibly, he tells us, the sea is replaced by land and land by the sea;156 countless nations and civilizations have appeared and disappeared, whether through swift catastrophe or slow time: “Probably every art and philosophy has been repeatedly developed to the utmost and has perished again.”157 Heat is the chief agent of geological and meteorological changes. He hazards explanations of clouds, fog, dew, frost, rain, snow, hail, wind, thunder, lightning, the rainbow, and meteors. His theories are often bizarre; but the epochal importance of the little treatise on meteorology is that it invokes no supernatural agencies, but seeks to account for the apparent whims of the weather through natural causes operating in certain sequences and regularities. Natural science could go no further until invention gave it instruments of greater scope and precision in observation and measurement.

  It is in biology that Aristotle is most at home, observes most widely and abundantly, and makes the most mistakes. The consolidation of previous discoveries in the final establishment of this vital science is his supreme achievement. With the help of his pupils, he gathered data on the fauna and flora of the Aegean countries, and brought together the first scientific collections of animals and plants. If we may follow Pliny,158 Alexander gave orders to his hunters, gamekeepers, fishermen, and others to supply Aristotle with whatever species and information he might request. The philosopher apologizes for his interest in lowly things: “In all natural objects there lies some marvel, and if any one despises the contemplation of the lower animals, he must despise himself.”159

  He classifies the animal kingdom into enaima and anaima—blooded and bloodless—approximately corresponding to our “vertebrates” and “invertebrates.” He subdivides the bloodless animals into testaceans, crustaceans, mollusks, and insects; the sanguineous into fishes, amphibians, birds, and mammals. He covers an impressively vast and varied field: organs of digestion, excretion, sensation, locomotion, reproduction, and defense; the types and ways of fishes, birds, reptiles, apes, and hundreds of other groups; their pairing seasons and their methods of bearing and rearing their young; the phenomena of puberty, menstruation, conception, pregnancy, abortion, heredity, twins; the habitats and migrations of animals, their parasites and diseases, their modes of sleep and hibernation. . . . He gives an excellent account of the life of the bee.160 He is full of queer incidental observations: that the blood of oxen coagulates more rapidly than that of most other animals; that some male animals, especially the goat, have been known to give milk; that “in both sexes the horse is the most salacious of animals after man.*161

  He is particularly interested in the reproductive structures and habits of animals, and marvels at the multiplicity of ways in which nature achieves the continuance of species, “preserving the type when she is unable to preserve the individual”;162 in this field his work remained unequaled until the last century. The life of animals moves about two foci—eating and procreation.163 “The female has an organ which must be regarded as an ovary, for it contains that which at first is undifferentiated egg, and which becomes by differentiation many eggs.”†164 The female element contributes to the embryo material and food, the male element contributes energy and movement; the female is the passive element, the male is the activating agent.165 Aristotle rejects the opinions of Empedocles and Democritus, that the sex of the embryo is determined by the temperature of the womb, or by the preponderance of one reproductive element over the other, and then reformulates the theories as his own: “Whenever the formative (male) principle fails to gain the upper hand, and from deficient warmth fails properly to cook the material and so fashion it into its own shape, then will this material pass over into . . . the female.”166 “Sometimes,” he adds, “women bring forth three or even four children, especially in certain parts of the world. The largest number ever brought forth is five, and such an occurrence has been witnessed on several occasions. There was once upon a time a woman who had twenty children at four births; and most of them grew up.”167

  He anticipates many theories of nineteenth-century biology. He believes that the organs and characteristics of the embryo are formed by tiny particles (the “gemmules” of Darwin’s “pangenesis”) that pass from every part of the adult into the reproductive elements.168 Like Von Baer he teaches that in the embryo the char
acters belonging to the genus appear first, those belonging to the species second, those belonging to the individual third.169 He states a principle on which Herbert Spencer prided himself, that the fertility of organisms, by and large, varies inversely as the complexity of their development.170 His description of the chick embryo shows him at his best:

  If you wish, try this experiment. Take twenty or more eggs and let them be incubated by two or more hens. Then each day, from the second to that of hatching, remove an egg, break it, and examine it. . . . With the common hen the embryo becomes first visible after three days. . . . The heart appears like a speck of blood, beating and moving as though endowed with life; and from it two veins with blood in them pass in a convoluted course, and a membrane carrying bloody fibers from the vein-ducts now envelops the yolk. . . . When the egg is ten days old, the chick and all its parts are distinctly visible.171

  The human embryo, Aristotle believes, develops like the chick: “In the same way the infant lies within its mother’s womb . . . for the nature of the bird can be likened to that of man.”172 His theory of analogous organs enables him to see the animal world as one: “A nail is the analogue of a claw, a hand of a crab’s nipper, a feather of a fish’s scale.”173 At times he comes close to a doctrine of evolution:

  Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation. . . . Thus, next after lifeless things in the upward scale comes the genus of plants, relatively lifeless as compared with animals, but alive as compared with corporeal objects. There is in plants a continuous scale of ascent towards the animal. There are certain objects in the sea concerning which one would be at a loss to determine whether they be animal or vegetable. . . . The sponge is in every respect like a vegetable. . . . Some animals are rooted, and perish if detached. . . . In regard to sensibility, some animals give no sign of it, others indicate it obscurely. . . . And so throughout the animal scale there is a graduated differentiation.174