The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  The trouble is that Plato's ideal communities strike readers as poten­tially most unjust. In the Republic, the assumption is that the best community will be ruled by the best who are duly educated and selected for their responsibility. There are to be three classes: the workers, the warriors and the philosophic rulers. Citizens will be selected for each, but only the rulers will be put through a very long process of philosophical education which leads to the point where they will know the Forms and the supreme Form of the Good. Without any check or accountability or majority voting, they will then simply rule everyone else. Later in life, in his Laws, Plato does accept that even the rulers may need some laws which they themselves must obey. However, the problem then is that the laws which his long dialogue constructs are so dictatorial and repressive that no sane Greek contem­porary would accept for one moment that this community is the 'just' one in which he should live. The Republic, with fine regrets, had already banished artists, poets and even the 'deceiving' Homer. It had proposed that all goods should be held in common, including women

  (Aristophanes had made wonderful fun of this notion way back in the 390s, in my view because he had heard a very early report of Plato's emerging views on the subject). The Laws then multiplied the repression by proposing a Nocturnal Council (imitated, however, in Renaissance Venice) and threatening uses of religion to deter citizens from having sex.

  Plato's pupil, Aristotle, was born in Stageira in northern Greece in 384 bc, more than forty years after Plato; he lived until 32.2 bc. While shaped by Plato and sharing several approaches with him, he was much more of an empirical thinker, a brilliant classifier and categorizer and much more alert to everyday accepted wisdom which needed intellectual support, not demolition. He persistently stressed the exist­ence of exceptions and particular cases as opposed to all-embracing generalizations. Ever the empiricist, he ranged widely and even when set beside Plato's, his mind has the most amazing range in history. Philosophers admire him for his system of logic, including his dis­cussion of 'subject' and 'predicate'; and his outstanding writings on ethics. Some of his central ideas are now superseded, his views on perception, say, or the pervasive 'purposiveness' in biology, while others are certainly over-played, his distinction between the 'potential' and the 'actual', his four different types of cause or his elusive views on substances. But the discrimination and guiding use of inference with which he discusses them are immensely rewarding.

  Yet Aristotle was not only a pure philosopher. His theoretical inter­ests extended to political theory, to poetry, especially drama, to the constitutions, even, of 158 different Greek states, a massive under­taking which surely drew on research teams of his pupils. He wrote on the weather, On Colonies (for his pupil, Alexander), on the parts of animals, or on rhetoric. He even compiled chronological lists of victors in the major Greek games. His range was prodigious. His treatises on individual subjects do not follow the deductive methods of his most abstract treatises on logic, but the underlying approach is that all these forms of knowledge can, when understood, be brought as far as appropriate under logical and axiomatic reasoning.

  Aristotle is capable of some reassuringly mundane or inaccurate beliefs, nonetheless. He considers that a work of art gives pleasure when it resembles the object depicted: he has a rather straightforward view of a good drama, which should have items like a mistake (not a 'moral flaw'), a reversal of fortune and a recognition at its core. He would intensely dislike Pinter and Beckett, but he would much like the modern definition of a good novel as 'what happens next?' He was much too trusting in the apparently genuine documents which he used in the one of his 'Constitutions', that of the Athenians, which we know best: they tended to be fakes. His theories of change and of the desirable 'mean' between two extremes distorted his views of early Greek history. Like Plato, he saw the political conflicts of the archaic past in horizontal terms, as conflicts between classes: Plato and he had seen such conflicts played out in contemporary Sicily. In the past a vertical model of conflict between powerful men, backed by their dependants, would usually have been more appropriate. But even his mistakes are intriguing. Like Plato, he believed in a previous lost era of civilization: for Plato the imaginary 'Atlantis', for Aristotle, too, a world before a great flood. Rain, he believed, had washed away an old civilization in the plains, but a few survivors had lived on in the mountains and preserved the 'ancient wisdom'. Being simple people, shepherds and the like, they had gradually distorted it into myths.4 If Aristotle had met a modern shepherd or forester, he would have had to accept that the 'ancient wisdom' was sexist and racist. But he also believed that such a great flood would happen again.

  For non-philosophers, the most remarkable of his works are those on biology and natural history. These masterpieces of observation are rooted in the years before he went to Macedon, especially the years which he spent on the island of Lesbos. Aristotle's physiology is not always on the right lines, and although he has an idea of a hierarchy of natural kinds, he has no idea of evolution. But his fieldwork and classification are breathtaking, ranging from a superb account of the life cycle of a mosquito to a brilliant attempt to understand an octopus (including the use of its tentacles for sex) and some shrewd observa­tions about elephants. These observations were improved by the Macedonian conquests of Asia, except that he did not understand the size of an elephant's penis or its usual lifespan. Of course there are some quaint inferences: men with long penises, Aristotle believed, are less fertile because their sperm 'cools' as it has further to travel.

  But throughout, there is a superb range of empirical thinking. The sperm of Ethiopians, he insists, is not black, as some Greeks presumed, a fact which makes us wonder how he himself had established it.5

  Aristotle is less interested in the possible effects of luxury than in the futility of making money for its own sake. For him, a good, happy life is the 'activity of the soul in accordance with excellence', with sufficient 'external goods', but no more. Freedom concerns him in his writings on the ideal state, and he is certainly less authoritarian in this respect than Plato. Although he presents extreme democracy as a reprehensible attempt to be free to live as one pleases, a caricature of its principles, he accepts the good principle that citizens should rule and be ruled in turn. He does see that a state should be a partnership, common to all citizens, but because of his low opinion of the unedu­cated and property-less masses, including tradesmen, he opts for a constitution which includes farmers and soldiers but not all the poorer citizens in its territory. He was too strongly attracted by the idea of a 'mixed' constitution, an unrealizable ideal of mere theorists, and he also believed that a constitution which fell between two opposed extremes would be fairer because it stood midway as the 'mean' between them. He underestimated the justice, stability and sound sense of the democratic Athenians among whom he lived, but at least he did not deviate from it as unattractively as Plato and his proposed alternative.

  Notoriously, he had views on slaves and women. Unnamed thinkers, probably in Socrates' Athens, had denied that slavety was in 'accordance with nature': Aristotle disagreed. There were 'slaves by nature', he believed, who were incapable of foresight, deliberation or practical wisdom. At times he even writes as if they are animals. Most of the slaves whom Aristotle saw in Athens, western Asia or Macedon would have been non-Greek 'barbarians', whom he regarded as inferior by nature: he says explicitly that the existence of natural slaves can be proved both by theory and by experience.6 His views about natural slavery caused his own arguments serious problems on many counts, but they were not just a passing consequence of his theories on ruling or the household. What he saw in his own experience seemed to require them, just as his perceptions of women accounted for his view that they are defective versions of the rational 'polis-male': what he saw were uneducated, irrational beings, who would typically lament in public. Although women have a trace of a power of reason, it is very feeble and 'without authority'.7 For barbarians and women, therefore, freedom is a wholly
inappropriate state.

  For Aristotle, justice is the very nature of virtue and like Plato, his ethics and political theory are centrally concerned with it. Typically, Aristotle distinguishes several types of it, and although, oddly, he says nothing about criminal justice, he is explicitly concerned with notions of 'equality' and fairness. If the rulers of a state are unjust to those they rule, the result, he sees, will be civil strife. We have an equal claim to justice, but justice is not necessarily a claim to receive an equal amount. For Aristotle, a 'distributive' type of justice allots justice in accordance with the recipient's 'worth': this notion of proportionate justice is not at all the notion of a justice which distributes equal shares for all citizens, the justice which sustained Athenian democracy.

  In Plato's Republic, the participant, Adeimantus, complains to Soc­rates that philosophers are mostly weird or even wicked, and even the best of them are rendered useless in government. Plato and Aristotle had scores of pupils and listeners: did their teaching have a practical, political impact? The point here is not that Plato's Laws are completely impractical and that no state could possibly survive them, not even a little one with no more than Plato's ideal number of 5,040 land-holding citizens. Rather, Plato did try, we are told, to apply his philosophy to the reform of a real state by his visits, three in all, to the ruling tyrants in Sicily. His experience of the harsh elder tyrant Dionysius surely shaped his striking portrait of the insatiable 'tyrannical' man in his subsequent work, the Republic. His project, we are told, was that the state should be ruled by the 'best laws': the exceptional luxury of the Syracusan citizens should be curbed and the ruler, the Syracusan tyrant, must adopt philosophy like one of Plato's philosopher-kings. We know of these efforts from the remarkable Seventh Letter which is manifestly a fiction ascribed to Plato, but was surely written by a pupil soon after Plato's death. It is clearly apologetic, as it attempts to explain Plato's repeated visits to this brutal tyranny and to credit him with high hopes of the notorious Dion, uncle to the younger of the two tyrants. Supposedly, Dion was at first won over to Plato's reforming project, only to be led astray by undesirable friends. The fact was that Dion also ruled harshly when he had power in the 350s, that he murdered a political contemporary (which the Letter glosses over), that he probably used Plato in the hope of saving his own property from the tyrants' confiscation and that he was murdered by a particularly frightful Athenian who had also, wondrously, been a listener to Plato in the Academy. There was no philosopher-king here in the making.

  Nonetheless, the will to apply and reform was certainly there in Plato, and we must do justice to his interest in laws and his detestation of tyranny. Later sources credit him with many pupils who were asked, as he was, to help in drawing up laws for city-states: there is no evidence that any of them really did so. Several of them are also credited with actions against reigning tyrants, even with killing them. This involvement may be true. Two of Plato's former hearers did assassinate Cotys, the despotic king of Thrace, in 359 bc and six years later another is said to have killed Clearchus, a remarkable Greek tyrant at Heraclea on the south shore of the Black Sea.8 Aris­totle's pupil Callisthenes was also believed to have encouraged a plot against the 'tyrannical' Alexander. There are several stories of such involvement, but the Academy did not urge political murders and we do not know how far any philosophic principles inflamed these various people. They may have done, but not at Plato's direction.

  The more difficult legacy comes after Plato's death. We have a repulsive letter ascribed to Speusippus, his successor at the Academy, which is addressed to King Philip of Macedon and which smoothly assures Philip that his forceful conquest of so much of Greek city-territory in the north is simply the reclaiming of 'his own', his heritage, as is proven by some highly dubious references to the ancient Greek myths. This letter picks up contemporary diplomatic issues and is very well informed: it reads like a genuine flattery of the greatest enemy to Greek freedom in the years 343-342 bc. It is a major warning against allowing a philosopher near foreign affairs.

  A Platonist pupil, we are told, had also helped Philip to establish his rule in Macedon before his accession. We know nothing more of it, but we do know that in 322 bc, when the Athenians' democracy was at the mercy of Alexander's victorious Macedonian Successors, the Athenians chose the head of the Platonist Academy, Xenocrates, to go as one of their ambassadors to plead for a lenient treatment of their city-state: Xenocrates was a resident foreigner, not even a citizen. He was a landmark, the first of many future philosophers to be used on embassies (previously, Athenians had preferred to send theatre actors). The choice was surely made because the Academy stood so high in the respect of the Macedonian 'tyrants'; Alexander himself had favoured Xenocrates, who had addressed four books On Kingship to him, although, sadly, they do not survive.

  Similar involvement was even more obviously true of Aristotle. He lived at court in Macedon from 342 to 335 bc and he taught Alex­ander. Before he arrived King Philip had flattened his home town of Stageira, but the tradition that Aristotle did get the king to agree to its rebuilding now seems more likely, as archaeologists have proved there was some rebuilding on the site in Philip's reign, albeit on a smaller area. Perhaps Aristotle did also later receive funds and materials for his researches from the far-ranging Alexander. His visit, then, was not an entirely fruitless stay with the kings.

  Aristotle also developed close links with Philip's senior general, Antipater, and probably with his family. We have a text of his will, of which Antipater is to be an executor. He even wrote a work called Justified Claims, probably to help with the claims of the Greek states in the Peloponnese after the Spartan-led rebellion which Antipater crushed there in 331/0 bc. When Alexander died and the Athenians rebelled against the Macedonians, we can see why Aristotle, the friend of top Macedonians, was forced to leave the city: he was accused, tendentiously, of impiety, and so he left, saying that he wished to save the Athenians from 'sinning twice against philosophy' (the first sin was condemning Socrates). He is also reported as saying he became 'fonder of the myths as he became alone'.9

  He had some role, surely, in the continuing curiosity of Alexander about the Asia which he was conquering, but his main role appears to be in passing on his awful sense of geography. Aristotle believed that the edge of the world was visible from what we call the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan: like many, Aristotle confused them with the distant Caucasus. He also reasoned that the river Indus ran neatly round to Egypt and that modern Morocco is quite close to India, on the grounds that both lands have elephants. This view of the world can only have strengthened the young Alexander's resolve to conquer to the edge of it. For Aristotle, our world lies at the centre of the universe, and the assertions of astronomers are consistent with that view.10

  His real political influence followed after his death. Plato's admir­ation for the stars in the heavens, the universe and a supreme God were to be taken up in subsequent philosophy: they make him the father of a distinctive strand in Hellenistic religion. Aristotle's fol­lowers, rather, were to carry forward the systematic study of laws and constitutions. Their advice may well have been very important for the first ruling Ptolemies in Egypt's Alexandria, especially what they could say about a Library, a Museum and royal laws. Certainly, Aristotle's 158 local Constitutions influenced one of the major Alexandrian poets, Callimachus. But the most immediate impact came from a pupil of one of Aristotle's own former pupils, the Athenian Demetrius from Phaleron. In 317 bc the Macedonians put down the Athenians' attempt at a revived democracy and instead supported this Demetrius as the head of a restrictive oligarchy. The poor were disenfranchised and the rich were spared the expense, in future, of liturgies; Demetrius passed laws to limit luxury in funerary monuments and approved the appointment of 'inspectors of women', surely so as to curb female extravagance, including the city's notorious prostitution. Quite prob­ably, his motives were ethical, formed by Aristotelian values of moder­ation and restraint. He was then attacked
, inevitably, for his own luxury, including the supposed use of make-up and blond hair-dye and the acceptance of statues in his own honour ('360', it was alleged). His friends included other pupils of Aristotle, and he was most urbane in defending his own elegant and gentlemanly habits." His rule lasted ten years, until 307 bc, but when it fell and democracy returned, the Athenians ecstatically celebrated their liberation. Freedom was back, and one Sophocles promptly proposed that philosophers should be banned in future from teaching in the city unless they were licensed by the democracy.12 The Athenians did relent, but the proposal was eloquent. Democrats detested these philosopher-friends of kings and tyrants and their unbearable notions of an ideal state.

  20

  Fourth-century Athenians

  He is just the man to buy a little ladder for the pet jackdaw which he keeps indoors and to make a bronze shield which the jackdaw can carry as it hops on the ladder. When he has sacrificed an ox, he nails up the skull straight opposite the entrance to his house and ties it round with long ribbons so that people who go in can see that he has sacrificed an ox. And when he has processed with the cavalrymen, he gives everything else to his slave to take home, but throws back his cloak over his shoulder and walks round the agora in spurs. And when his little Maltese dog dies, he makes a monument for it and having put up a little grave-marker he inscribes on it, '[Barker (Kelados)j, a Maltan . . .' Theophrastus, caricaturing the Man of Petty Ambition with Athenian detail, Characters 21 (c. 330-310 bc)

  The nearest to an ideal state in the classical world was not the state of Plato or Aristotle: it was the Athenians', their contemporaries. To us, it is far from ideal as it was still a slave-society, using perhaps some 80,000 fellow humans as objects. But the philosophers' ideal states also took slavery for granted, although Plato in his Laws was the first to consider that the existence of slavery might corrupt slave-owning masters.