Chapter V · FREETHOUGHT IN GREECE

As to the obvious Asiatic influences on historic Greek civilization, compare Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, 1872, p. 64; Von Ihering, Vorgeschichte der Indo-Europäer, Eng. tr. (“The Evolution of the Aryan”), p. 73; Schömann, Griech. Alterthümer, 2te Aufl. 1861, i, 10; E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alterth. ii, 155; A. Bertrand, Études de mythol. et d’archéol. grecques, 1858, pp. 40–41; Bury, introd. p. 3. It seems clear that the Egyptian influence is greatly overstated by Herodotos (ii. 49–52, etc.), who indeed avows that he is but repeating what the Egyptians affirm. The Egyptian priests made their claim in the spirit in which the Jews later made theirs. Herodotos, besides, would prefer an Egyptian to an Asiatic derivation, and so would his audience. But it must not be overlooked that there was an Egyptian influence in the “Minoan” period.

The whole problem of Oriental “influence” has been obscured, and the solution retarded, by the old academic habit of discussing questions of mental evolution in vacuo. Even the reaction against idolatrous Hellenism proceeded without due regard to historical sequence; and the return reaction against that is still somewhat lacking in breadth of inference. There has been too much on one side of assumption as to early Oriental achievement; and too much tendency on the other to assume that the positing of an “influence” on the Greeks is a disparagement of the “Greek mind.” The superiority of that in its later evolution seems too obvious to need affirming. But that hardly justifies so able a writer as Professor Burnet in concluding (Early Greek Philosophy, 2nd ed. introd. pp. 22–23) that “the” Egyptians knew no more arithmetic than was learned by their children in the schools; or in saying (id. p. 26) that “the” Babylonians “studied and recorded celestial phenomena for what we call astrological purposes, not from any scientific interest.” How can we have the right to say that no Babylonians had a scientific interest in the data? Such interest would in the nature of the case miss the popular reproduction given to astrological lore. But it might very well subsist.

Professor Burnet, albeit a really original investigator, has not here had due regard to the early usage of collegiate or corporate culture, in which arcane knowledge was reserved for the few. Thus he writes (p. 26) concerning the Greeks that “it was not till the time of Plato that even the names of the planets were known.” Surely they must have been “known” to some adepts long before: how else came they to be accepted? As Professor Burnet himself notes (p. 34), “in almost every department of life we find that the corporation at first is everything and the individual nothing. The peoples of the East hardly got beyond this stage at all: their science, such as it is, is anonymous, the inherited property of a caste or guild, and we still see clearly in some cases that it was once the same among the Hellenes.” Is it not then probable that astronomical knowledge was so ordered by Easterns, and passed on to Hellenes?

There still attaches to the investigation of early Greek philosophy the drawback that the philosophical scholars do not properly posit the question: What was the early Ionic Greek society like? How did the Hellenes relate to the older polities and cultures which they found there? Professor Burnet makes justifiable fun (p. 21, note) of Dr. Gomperz’s theory of the influence of “native brides”; but he himself seems to argue that the Greeks could learn nothing from the men they conquered, though he admits (p. 20) their derivation of “their art and many of their religious ideas from the East.” If religion, why not religious speculation, leading to philosophy and science? This would be a more fruitful line of inquiry than one based on the assumption that “the” Babylonians went one way and “the” Greeks another. After all, only a few in each race carried on the work of thought and discovery. We do not say that “the English” wrote Shakespeare. Why affirm always that “the” Greeks did whatever great Greeks achieved?

On the immediate issue Professor Burnet incidentally concedes what is required. After arguing that the East perhaps borrowed more from the West than did the West from the East, he admits (p. 21): “It would, however, be quite another thing to say that Greek philosophy originated quite independently of Oriental influence.”

§ 1

“It is plain enough that Homer and Hesiod represent, both theologically and socially, the close of a long epoch, and not the youth of the Greek world, as some have supposed. The real signification of many myths is lost to them, and so is the import of most of the names and titles of the elder Gods, which are archaic and strange, while the subordinate personages generally have purely Greek names” (Professor Mahaffy, History of Classical Greek Literature, 1880, i, 17).

§ 2

As to the non-religiousness of the Homeric epics, there is a division of critical opinion. Meyer insists (Gesch. des Alt. ii, 395) that, as contrasted with the earlier religious poetry, “the epic poetry is throughout secular (profan); it aims at charming its hearers, not at propitiating the Gods”; and he further sees in the whole Ionian mood a certain cynical disillusionment (id. ii, 723). Cp. Benn, Philos. of Greece, p. 40, citing Hegel. E. Curtius (G. G. i, 126) goes so far as to ascribe a certain irony to the portraiture of the Gods (Ionian Apollo excepted) in Homer, and to trace this to Ionian levity. To the same cause he assigns the lack of any expression of a sense of stigma attaching to murder. This sense he holds the Greek people had, though Homer does not hint it. (Cp. Grote, i, 24, whose inference Curtius implicitly impugns.) Girard (Le Sentiment religieux en Grèce, 1869), on the contrary, appears to have no suspicion of any problem to solve, treating Homer as unaffectedly religious. The same view is taken by Prof. Paul Decharme. “On chercherait vainement dans l’Iliade et dans l’Odyssée les premières traces du scepticisme grec à l’égard des fables des dieux. C’est avec une foi entière en la réalité des événements mythiques que les poètes chantent les légendes ...; c’est en toute simplicité d’âme aussi que les auditeurs de l’épopée écoutent....” (La critique des traditions religieuses chez les grecs, 1904, p. 1.) Thus we have a kind of balance of contrary opinions, German against French. Any verdict on the problem must recognize on the one hand the possibilities of naïve credulity in an unlettered age, and on the other the probability of critical perception on the part of a great poet. I have seen both among Boers in South Africa. On the general question of the mood of the Homeric poems compare Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion, 1912, p. 77, and Hist. of Anc. Greek Lit. pp. 34, 35; and A. Benn, The Philosophy of Greece in Relation to the Character of its People, 1898, pp. 29–30.

“He [Pindar] was honestly attached to the national religion and to its varieties in old local cults. He lived a somewhat sacerdotal life, labouring in honour of the Gods, and seeking to spread a reverence for old traditional beliefs. He, moreover, shows an acquaintance with Orphic rites and Pythagorean mysteries, which led him to preach the doctrine of immortality, and of rewards and punishments in the life hereafter. [Note.—The most explicit fragment (θρῆνοι, 3), is, however, not considered genuine by recent critics.]... He is indeed more affected by the advance of freethinking than he imagines; he borrows from the neologians the habit of rationalizing myths, and explaining away immoral acts and motives in the Gods; but these things are isolated attempts with him, and have no deep effect upon his general thinking” (Mahaffy, Hist. of Greek Lit. i, 213–14).

The leaning to pantheism is established by the discovery that the disputed lines, “Zeus is sky, earth, and heaven: Zeus is all things, yea, greater than all things” (Frag. 443), belonged to the lost tragedy of the Heliades (Haigh, Tragic Drama of the Greeks, 1896, p. 88). For the pessimism see the Prometheus, 247–51. The anti-anthropomorphism is further to be made out from the lines ascribed to Æschylus by Justin Martyr (De Monarchia, c. 2) and Clemens Alexandrinus (Stromata, v, 14). They are expressly pantheistic; but their genuineness is doubtful. The story that Æschylus was nearly killed by a theatre audience on the score that he had divulged part of the mysteries in a tragedy (Haigh, The Attic Theatre, 1889, p. 316; Tragic Drama, pp. 49–50) does not seem to have suggested to Aristotle, who tells it (Nicomachean Ethics, iii, 2), any heterodox intention on the tragedian’s part; but it is hard to see an orthodox believer in the author either of the Prometheus, wherein Zeus is posed as brutal might crucifying innocence and beneficence, or of the Agamemnon, where the father, perplexed in the extreme, can but fall back helplessly on formulas about the all-sufficiency of Zeus when called upon to sacrifice his daughter. Cp. Haigh, Tragic Drama, p. 86 sq. “Some critics,” says Mr. Haigh (p. 88), “have been led to imagine that there is in Æschylus a double Zeus—the ordinary God of the polytheistic religion and the one omnipotent deity in whom he really believed. They suppose that he had no genuine faith in the credibility of the popular legends, but merely used them as a setting for his tragedies; and that his own convictions were of a more philosophical type,” as seen in the pantheistic lines concerning Zeus. To this Mr. Haigh replies that it is “most improbable that there was any clear distinction in the mind of Æschylus” between the two conceptions of Zeus; going on, however, to admit that “much, no doubt, he regarded as uncertain, much as false. Even the name ‘Zeus’ was to him a mere convention.” Mr. Haigh in this discussion does not attempt to deal with the problem of the Prometheus.

The hesitations of the critics on this head are noteworthy. Karl Ottfried Müller, who is least himself in dealing with fundamental issues of creed, evades the problem (Lit. of Anc. Greece, 1847, p. 329) with the bald suggestion that “Æschylus, in his own mind, must have felt how this severity [of Zeus], a necessary accompaniment of the transition from the Titanic period to the government of the Gods of Olympus, was to be reconciled with the mild wisdom which he makes an attribute of Zeus in the subsequent ages of the world. Consequently, the deviation from right ... would all lie on the side of Prometheus.” This nugatory plea—which is rightly rejected by Burckhardt (Griech. Culturgesch. ii, 25)—is ineffectually backed by the argument that the friendly Oceanides recur to the thought, “Those only are wise who humbly reverence Adrasteia (Fate)”—as if the positing of a supreme Fate were not a further belittlement of Zeus.

Other critics are similarly evasive. Patin (Eschyle, éd. 1877, p. 250 sq.), noting the vagaries of past criticism, hostile and other, avowedly leaves the play an unsolved enigma, affirming only the commonly asserted “piety” of Æschylus. Girard (Le sentiment religieux en Grèce, pp. 425–29) does no better, while dogmatically asserting that the poet is “the Greek faithful to the faith of his fathers, which he interprets with an intelligent and emotional (émue) veneration.” Meyer (iii, §§ 257–58) draws an elaborate parallel between Æschylus and Pindar, affirming in turn the “tiefe Frömmigkeit” of the former—and in turn leaves the enigma of the Prometheus unsolved. Professor Decharme, rightly rejecting the fanciful interpretations of Quinet and others who allegorize Prometheus into humanity revolting against superstition, offers a very unsatisfying explanation of his own (p. 107), which practically denies that there is any problem to solve.

Prof. Mahaffy, with his more vivacious habit of thought, comes to the evaded issue. “How,” he asks, “did the Athenian audience, who vehemently attacked the poet for divulging the mysteries, tolerate such a drama? And still more, how did Æschylus, a pious and serious thinker, venture to bring such a subject on the stage with a moral purpose?” The answers suggested are: (1) that in all old religions there are tolerated anomalous survivals; (2) that “a very extreme distortion of their Gods will not offend many who would feel outraged at any open denial of them”; (3) that all Greeks longed for despotic power for themselves, and that “no Athenian, however he sympathized with Prometheus, would think of blaming Zeus for ... crushing all resistance to his will.” But even if these answers—of which the last is the most questionable—be accepted, “the question of the poet’s intention is far more difficult, and will probably never be satisfactorily answered.” Finally, we have this summing-up: “Æschylus was, indeed, essentially a theologian ... but, what is more honourable and exceptional, he was so candid and honest a theologian that he did not approach men’s difficulties for the purpose of refuting them or showing them weak and groundless. On the contrary, though an orthodox and pious man, though clearly convinced of the goodness of Providence, and of the profound truth of the religion of his fathers, he was ever stating boldly the contradictions and anomalies in morals and in myths, and thus naturally incurring the odium and suspicion of the professional advocates of religion and their followers. He felt, perhaps instinctively, that a vivid dramatic statement of these problems in his tragedies was better moral education than vapid platitudes about our ignorance, and about our difficulties being only caused by the shortness of our sight” (Hist. of Greek Lit. i, 260–61, 273–74).

Here, despite the intelligent handling, the enigma is merely transferred from the great tragedian’s work to his character: it is not solved. No solution is offered of the problem of the pantheism of the fragment above cited, which is quite irreconcilable with any orthodox belief in Greek religion, though such sayings are at times repeated by unthinking believers, without recognition of their bearing. That the pantheism is a philosophical element imported into the Greek world from the Babylonian through the early Ionian thinkers seems to be the historical fact (cp. Whittaker, as last cited): that the importation meant the dissolution of the national faith for many thinking men seems to be no less true. It seems finally permissible, then, to suggest that the “piety” of Æschylus was either discontinuous or a matter of artistic rhetoric and public spirit, and that the Prometheus is a work of profound and terrible irony, unburdening his mind of reveries that religion could not conjure away. The discussion on the play has unduly ignored the question of its date. It is, in all probability, one of the latest of the works of Æschylus (K. O. Müller, Lit. of Anc. Greece, p. 327; Haigh, Tragic Drama, p. 109). Müller points to the employment of the third actor—a late development—and Haigh to the overshadowing of the choruses by the dialogue; also to the mention (ll. 366–72) of the eruption of Etna, which occurred in 475 B.C. This one circumstance goes far to solve the dispute. Written near the end of the poet’s life the play belongs to the latest stages of his thinking; and if it departs widely in its tone from the earlier plays, the reasonable inference is that his ideas had undergone a change. The Agamemnon, with its desolating problem, seems to be also one of his later works. Rationalism, indeed, does not usually emerge in old age, though Voltaire was deeply shaken in his theism by the earthquake of Lisbon; but Æschylus is unique even among men of genius; and the highest flight of Greek drama may well stand for an abnormal intellectual experience.

This development was indeed autochthonous, save insofar as the germ of the tragic drama may have come from the East in the cult of Dionysos, with its vinous dithyramb: the “Greek intellect” assuredly did wonderful things at Athens, being placed, for a time, in civic conditions peculiarly fitted for the economic evocation of certain forms of genius. But the above-noted developments in Pindar and in Æschylus had been preceded by the great florescence of early Ionian philosophy in the sixth century, a growth which constrains us to look once more to Asia Minor for a vital fructification of the Greek inner life, of a kind that Athenian institutions could not in themselves evoke. For while drama flourished supremely at Athens, science and philosophy grew up elsewhere, centuries before Athens had a philosopher of note; and all the notable beginnings of Hellenic freethought occurred outside of Hellas proper.

§ 3

It is historically certain that Lydia had an ancient and close historical connection with Babylonian and Assyrian civilization, whether through the “Hittites” or otherwise (Sayce, Anc. Emp. of the East, 1884, pp. 217–19; Curtius, Griech. Gesch. i, 63, 207; Meyer, Gesch. des Alterth. i, 166, 277, 299, 305–10; Soury, Bréviaire de l’hist. du matérialisme, 1881, pp. 30, 37 sq. Cp. as to Armenia, Edwards, The Witness of Assyria, 1893, p. 144); and in the seventh century the commercial connection between Lydia and Ionia, long close, was presumably friendly up to the time of the first attacks of the Lydian Kings, and even afterwards (Herodotos i, 20–23), Alyattes having made a treaty of peace with Miletos, which thereafter had peace during his long reign. This brings us to the time of Thales (640–548 B.C.). At the same time, the Ionian settlers of Miletos had from the first a close connection with the Karians (Herod. i, 146, and above pp. 120–21), whose near affinity with the Semites, at least in religion, is seen in their practice of cutting their foreheads at festivals (id. ii, 61; cp. Grote, ed. 1888, i, 27, note; E. Curtius, i, 36, 42; Busolt, i, 33; and Spiegel, Eranische Alterthumskunde, i, 228). Thales was thus in the direct sphere of Babylonian culture before the conquest of Cyrus; and his Milesian pupils or successors, Anaximandros and Anaximenes, stand for the same influences. Herakleitos in turn was of Ephesus, an Ionian city in the same culture-sphere; Anaxagoras was of Klazomenai, another Ionian city, as had been Hermotimos, of the same philosophic school; the Eleatic school, founded by Xenophanes and carried on by Parmenides and the elder Zeno, come from the same matrix, Elea having been founded by exiles from Ionian Phokaia on its conquest by the Persians; and Pythagoras, in turn, was of the Ionian city of Samos, in the same sixth century. Finally, Protagoras and Demokritos were of Abdera, an Ionian colony in Thrace; Leukippos, the teacher of Demokritos, was either an Abderite, a Milesian, or an Elean; and Archelaos, the pupil of Anaxagoras and a teacher of Sokrates, is said to have been a Milesian. Wellhausen (Israel, p. 473 of vol. of Prolegomena, Eng. tr.) has spoken of the rise of philosophy on the “threatened and actual political annihilation of Ionia” as corresponding to the rise of Hebrew prophecy on the menace and the consummation of the Assyrian conquest. As regards Ionia, this may hold in the sense that the stoppage of political freedom threw men back on philosophy, as happened later at Athens. But Thales philosophized before the Persian conquest.

§ 4

The recent work of Mr. F. M. Cornford, From Philosophy to Religion (1912), puts forth an interesting and ingenious theory to the effect that early Greek philosophy is a reduction to abstract terms of the practice of totemistic tribes. On this view, when the Gods are figured in Homer as subject to Moira (Destiny), there has taken place an impersonation of Nomos, or Law; and just as the divine cosmos or polity is a reflection of the earthly, so the established conception of the absolute compulsoriness of tribal law is translated into one of a Fate which overrules the Gods (p. 40 sq.). So, when Anaximandros posits the doctrine of four elements [he did not use the word, by the way; that comes later; see Burnet, ch. i, p. 56, citing Diels], “we observe that this type of cosmic structure corresponds to that of a totemic tribe containing four clans” (p. 62). On the other hand, the totemistic stage had long before been broken down. The “notion of the group-soul” had given rise to the notion of God (p. 90); and the primitive “magical group” had dissolved into a system of families (p. 93), with individual souls. On this prior accumulation of religious material early philosophy works (p. 138).

It does not appear why, thus recognizing that totemism was at least a long way behind in Thales’s day, Mr. Cornford should trace the Ionian four elements straight back to the problematic four clans of the totemistic tribe. Dr. Frazer gives him no data whatever for Aryan totemism; and the Ionian cities, like those of Mesopotamia and Egypt, belong to the age of commerce and of monarchies. It would seem more plausible, on Mr. Cornford’s own premises, to trace the rival theories of the four elements to religious philosophies set up by the priests of four Gods of water, earth, air, and fire. If the early philosophers “had nothing but theology behind them” (p. 138), why not infer theologies for the old-established deities of Mesopotamia? Mr. Cornford adds to the traditional factors that of “the temperaments of the individual philosophers, which made one or other of those schemes the more congenial to them.” Following Dr. F. H. Bradley, he pronounces that “almost all philosophic arguments are invented afterwards, to recommend, or defend from attack, conclusions which the philosopher was from the outset bent on believing before he could think of any arguments at all. That is why philosophical reasonings are so bad, so artificial, so unconvincing.”

What is clear is that the religious or theistic basis had ceased to exist for many educated Greeks in that environment. The old God-ideas have disappeared, and a quasi-scientific attitude has been taken up. It is apparently conditioned, perhaps fatally, by prior modes of thought; but it operates in disregard of so-called religious needs, and negates the normal religious conception of earthly government or providence. Nevertheless, it was not destined to lead to the rationalization of popular thought; and only in a small number of cases did the scientific thinkers deeply concern themselves with the enlightenment of the mass.

The common verdict of the historians of philosophy, who find in Xenophanes an early and elevated doctrine of “Monotheism,” is closely tested by J. Freudenthal, Ueber die Theologie des Xenophanes, 1886. As he shows, the bulk of them (cited by him, pp. 2–7) do violence to Xenophanes’s language in making him out the proclaimer of a monotheistic doctrine to a polytheistic world. That he was essentially a pantheist is now recognized by a number of writers. Cp. Windelband, as cited, p. 48; Decharme, as cited, p. 46 sq. Bréton, Poésie philos. en Grèce, pp. 47, 64 sq., had maintained the point, against Cousin, in 1882, before Freudenthal. But Freudenthal in turn glosses part of the problem in ascribing to Xenophanes an acceptance of polytheism (cp. Burnet, p. 142), which kept him from molestation throughout his life; whereas Anaxagoras, who had never attacked popular belief with the directness of Xenophanes, was prosecuted for atheism. Anaxagoras was of a later age, dwelling in an Athens in which popular prejudice took readily to persecution, and political malice resorted readily to religious pretences. Xenophanes could hardly have published with impunity in Periklean Athens his stinging impeachments of current God-ideas; and it remains problematic whether he ever proclaimed them in face of the multitude. It is only from long subsequent students that we get them as quotations from his poetry; there is no record of their effect on his contemporaries. That his God-idea was pantheistic is sufficiently established by his attacks on anthropomorphism, taken in connection with his doctrine of the All.

A confusion of tradition has arisen between the early Herakleitos, “the Obscure,” and the similarly-named writer of the first century of our era, who was either one Herakleides or one using the name of Herakleitos. As the later writer certainly allegorized Homer—reducing Apollo to the Sun, Athenê to Thought, and so on—and claimed thus to free him from the charge of impiety, it seems highly probable that it is from him that the scholiast on the Iliad, xv, 18, cites the passage scolding the atheists who attacked the Homeric myths. The theme and the tone do not belong to 500 B.C., when only the boldest—as Herakleitos—would be likely to attack Homer, and when there is no other literary trace of atheism. Grote, however (i, 374, note), cites the passages without comment as referring to the early philosopher, who is much more probably credited, as above, with denouncing Homer himself. Concerning the later Herakleitos or Herakleides, see Dr. Hatch’s Hibbert Lectures on The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, 1890, pp. 61, 62.

But even apart from the confusion with the late Herakleides, there is difficulty in settling the period of the Ephesian thinker. Diogenes Laërtius states that he flourished about the 69th Olympiad (504–500 B.C.). Another account, preserved by Eusebius, places him in the 80th or 81st Olympiad, in the infancy of Sokrates, and for this date there are other grounds (Ueberweg, i, 40); but yet other evidences carry us back to the earlier. As Diogenes notes five writers of the name—two being poets, one a historian, and one a “serio-comic” personage—and there is record of many other men named Herakleitos and several Herakleides, there is considerable room for false attributions. The statement of Diogenes that the Ephesian was “wont to call opinion the sacred disease” (i, 6, § 7) is commonly relegated to the spurious sayings of Herakleitos, and it suggests the last mentioned of his namesakes. But see Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures on Indian Religion, p. 6, for the opinion that it is genuine, and that by “opinion” was meant “religion.” The saying, says Dr. Müller, “seems to me to have the massive, full, and noble ring of Herakleitos.” It is hardly for rationalists to demur.

Still, there was only to be a partial enlightenment of the race, such as we have seen occurring, perhaps about the same period, in India. Sophocles, even while dramatizing the cruel consequences of Greek religion, never made any sign of being delivered from the ordinary Greek conceptions of deity, or gave any help to wiser thought. The social difference between Greece and the monarchic civilizations was after all only one of degree: there, as elsewhere, the social problem was finally unsolved; and the limits to Greek progress were soon approached. But the evolution went far in many places, and it is profoundly interesting to trace it.

§ 5

The striking resemblance between the doctrine and practice of the Pythagoreans and those of the Jewish Essenes has led Zeller to argue (Philos. der Griechen, Th. iii, Abth. 2) that the latter were a branch of the former. Bishop Lightfoot, on the other hand, noting that the Essenes did not hold the specially prominent Pythagorean doctrines of numbers and of the transmigration of souls, traces Essenism to Zoroastrian influence (Ed. of Colossians, App. on the Essenes, pp. 150–51; rep. in Dissertations on the Apostolic Age, 1892, pp. 369–72). This raises the issue whether both Pythagoreanism and Essenism were not of Persian derivation; and Dr. Schürer (Jewish People in the Time of Jesus, Eng. tr. Div. II, vol. ii, p. 218) pronounces in favour of an oriental origin for both. The new connection between Persia and Ionia just at or before the time of Pythagoras (fl. 530 B.C.) squares with this view; but it is further to be noted that the phenomenon of monasticism, common to Pythagoreans and Essenes, arises in Buddhism about the Pythagorean period; and as it is hardly likely that Buddhism in the sixth century B.C. reached Asia Minor, there remains the possibility of some special diffusion of the new ideal from the Babylonian sphere after the conquest by Cyrus, there being no trace of a Persian monastic system. The resemblances to Orphicism likewise suggest a Babylonian source, as does the doctrine of numbers, which is not Zoroastrian. As to Buddhism, the argument for a Buddhist origin of Essenism shortly before our era (cp. A. Lillie, Buddhism in Christendom and The Influence of Buddhism on Primitive Christianity; E. Bunsen, The Angel-Messiah; or, Buddhists, Essenes, and Christians—all three to be read with much caution) does not meet the case of the Pythagorean precedents for Essenism. Prof. Burnet (Early Greek Philos. 2nd ed. p. 102) notes close Indian parallels to Pythagoreanism, but overlooks the intermediate Persian parallels, and falls back very unnecessarily on the bald notion that “the two systems were independently evolved from the same primitive systems.”

It is noteworthy, however, that in conjecturing that the whole solar system moves round a “central fire,” Pythagoras carried his thought nearly as far as the moderns. The fanciful side of his system is seen in his hypothesis of a counter-earth (Anti-chthon) invented to bring up the number of celestial bodies in our system to ten, the “complete” number. (Berry, as cited.) Narrien (p. 163) misses this simple explanation of the idea.

An opposite view of the Pythagorean evolution is taken by Professor Burnet. He is satisfied that the long list of the Pythagorean taboos, which he rightly pronounces to be “of a thoroughly primitive type” (p. 105), and not at all the subtle “symbols” which they were latterly represented to be, were really the lore of Pythagoras. It is not easy thus to conceive a thinker of the great Ionian age as holding by thoroughly primitive superstitions. Perhaps the solution lies in Aristotle’s statement that Pythagoras was first a mathematician, and only in later life a Pherekydean miracle-monger (Burnet, p. 107, note 3). He may actually have started the symbolic view of the taboos which he imposed.

§ 6

The question of the deity of the sun raised an interesting sociological question. Athenians saw no blasphemy in saying that Gê (Gaia) or Dêmêter was the earth: they had always understood as much; and the earth was simply for them a Goddess; a vast living thing containing the principle of life. They might similarly have tolerated the description of the sun as a kind of red-hot earth, provided that its divinity were not challenged. The trouble lay rather in the negative than in the positive assertion, though the latter must for many have been shocking, inasmuch as they had never been wont to think about the sun as they did about the earth.

§ 7

Dr. Verrall’s Euripides the Rationalist, 1897, is fairly summed up by Mr. Haigh (Tragic Drama of the Greeks, pp. 262, 265, notes): “He considers that Euripides was a skeptic of the aggressive type, whose principal object in writing tragedy was to attack the State religion, but who, perceiving that it would be dangerous to pose as an open enemy, endeavoured to accomplish his ends by covert ridicule.... His plays ... contain in reality two separate plots—the ostensible and superficial plot, which was intended to satisfy the orthodox, and the rationalized modification which lay half concealed beneath it, and which the intelligent skeptic would easily detect.” For objections to this thesis see Haigh, as cited; Jevons, Hist. of Greek Lit. p. 222, note; and Dr. Mozley’s article in the Classical Review, Nov. 1895, pp. 407–13. As to the rationalism of Euripides in general see many of the passages cited by Bishop Westcott in his Essays in the Hist. of Relig. Thought in the West, 1891, pp. 102–27. And cp. Dickinson, The Greek View of Life, pp. 46–49; Grote, Hist. i, 346–48; Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 231; Murray, Anc. Greek Lit. pp. 256, 264–66.

Over the latest play of Euripides, the Bacchæ, as over one of the last plays of Æschylus, the Prometheus, there has been special debate. It was probably written in Macedonia (cp. ll., 408, 565), whither the poet had gone on the invitation of King Archelaos, when, according to the ancient sketch of his life, “he had to leave Athens because of the malicious exultation over him of nearly all the city.” The trouble, it is conjectured, “may have been something connected with his prosecution for impiety, the charge on which Socrates was put to death a few years after” (Murray, Euripides translated into English Rhyming Verse, 1902, introd. essay, p. lii). Inasmuch as the play glorifies Dionysos, and the “atheist” Pentheus (l. 995) who resists him is slain by the maddened Bacchantes, led by his own mother, it is seriously argued that the drama “may be regarded as in some sort an apologia and an eirenicon, or as a confession on the part of the poet that he was fully conscious that in some of the simple legends of the popular faith there was an element of sound sense (!) which thoughtful men must treat with forbearance, resolved on using it, if possible, as an instrument for inculcating a truer morality, instead of assailing it with a presumptuous denial” (J. E. Sandys, The Bacchæ of Euripides, 1880, introd. pp. lxxv–vi). Here we have the conformist ethic of the average English academic brought to bear on, and ascribed to, the personality of the Greek dramatist.

An academic of the same order, Prof. Mahaffy, similarly suggests that “among the half-educated Macedonian youth, with whom literature was coming into fashion, the poet may have met with a good deal of that insolent second-hand skepticism which is so offensive to a deep and serious thinker, and he may have wished to show them that he was not, as they doubtless hailed him, the apostle of this random speculative arrogance” (Euripides in Class. Writ. Ser. 1879, p. 85). As against the eminently “random” and “speculative arrogance” of this particular passage—a characteristic product of the obscurantist functions of some British university professors in matters of religion, and one which may fitly be pronounced offensive to honest men—it may be suggested on the other hand that, if Euripides got into trouble in Athens by his skepticism, he would be likely in Macedonia to encounter rather a greater stress of bigotry than a freethinking welcome, and that a non-critical presentment of the savage religious legend was forced on him by his environment.

Much of the academic discussion on the subject betrays a singular slowness to accept the dramatic standpoint. Even Prof. Murray, the finest interpreter of Euripides, dogmatically pronounces (introd. cited p. lvii) that “there is in the Bacchæ real and heartfelt glorification of Dionysus,” simply because of the lyrical exaltation of the Bacchic choruses. But lyrical exaltation was in character here above all other cases; and it was the dramatist’s business to present it. To say that “again and again in the lyrics you feel that the Mænads are no longer merely observed and analysed: the poet has entered into them and they into him,” is nothing to the purpose. That the words which fall from the Chorus or its Leader are at times “not the words of a raving Bacchante, but of a gentle and deeply musing philosopher,” is still nothing to the purpose. The same could be said of Shakespeare’s handling of Macbeth. What, in sooth, would the real words of a raving Bacchante be like? If Milton lent dignity to Satan in Puritan England, was Euripides to do less for Dionysos in Macedonia? That he should make Pentheus unsympathetic belongs to the plot. If he had made a noble martyr of the victim as well as an impassive destroyer of the God, he might have had to leave Macedonia more precipitately than he left Athens.

Prof. Murray recognizes all the while that “Euripides never palliates things. He leaves this savage story as savage as he found it”; that he presents a “triumphant and hateful Dionysus,” who gives “a helpless fatalistic answer, abandoning the moral standpoint,” when challenged by the stricken Agavê, whom the God has moved to dismember her own son; and that, in short, “Euripides is, as usual, critical or even hostile to the myth that he celebrates” (as cited, pp. liv-lvi). To set against these solid facts, as does Mr. Sandys (as cited, pp. lxxiii-iv), some passages in the choruses (ll. 395, 388, 427, 1002), and in a speech of Dionysos (1002), enouncing normal platitudes about the wisdom of thinking like other people and living a quiet life, is to strain very uncritically the elastic dramatic material. So far from being “not entirely in keeping” with the likely sentiments of a chorus of Asiatic women, the first-cited passages—telling that cleverness is not wisdom, and that true wisdom acquiesces in the opinions of ordinary people—are just the kind of mock-modest ineptitudes always current among the complacent ignorant; and the sage language ascribed to the heartless God is simply a presentment of deity in the fashion in which all Greeks expected to have it presented.

The fact remains that the story of the Bacchæ, in which the frenzied mother helps to tear to pieces her own son, and the God can but say it is all fated, is as revolting to the rational moral sense as the story of the Prometheus. If this be an eirenicon, it is surely the most ironical in literary history. To see in the impassive delineation of such a myth an acceptance by the poet of popular “sound sense,” and “a desire to put himself right with the public in matters on which he had been misunderstood,” seems possible only to academics trained to a particular handling of the popular creed of their own day. This view, first put forward by Tyrwhitt (Conjecturæ in Æschylum, etc. 1822), was adopted by Schoone (p. 20 of his ed. cited by Sandys). Lobeck, greatly daring wherever rationalism was concerned, suggested that Euripides actually wrote against the rationalists of his time, in commendation of the Bacchic cult, and to justify the popular view in religious matters as against that of the cultured (Aglaophamus—passages quoted by Sandys, p. lxxvi). Musgrave, following Tyrwhitt, makes the play out to be an attack on Kritias, Alkibiades, and other freethinkers, including even Sokrates! K. O. Müller, always ineptly conventional in such matters, finds Euripides in this play “converted into a positive believer, or, in other words, convinced that religion should not be exposed to the subtilties of reasoning; that the understanding of man cannot subvert ancestral traditions which are as old as time,” and so on; and in the Polonius-platitudes of Tiresias and the worldly-wise counsels of Cadmus he finds “great impressiveness” (Hist. Lit. Anc. Greece, p. 379).

The bulk of the literature of the subject, in short, suggests sombre reflections on the moral value of much academic thinking. There are, however, academic suffrages on the side of common sense. Mr. Haigh (Tragic Drama of the Greeks, pp. 313–14) gently dismisses the “recantation” theory; Hartung points out (Euripides restitutus, 1844, ii, 542, cited by Sandys) that Euripides really treats the legend of Pentheus very much as he treats the myth of Hippolytos thirty years earlier, showing no change of moral attitude. E. Pfander (cited by Sandys) took a similar view; as did Mr. Tyrrell in his edition of the play (1871), though the latter persisted in taking the commonplaces of the chorus about true wisdom (395) for the judgments of the dramatist. Euripides could hardly have been called “the philosopher of the stage” (Athenæus, iv, 48) on the strength of sentiments which are common to the village wiseacres of all ages. The critical method which ascribes to Euripides a final hostility to rationalism would impute to Shakespeare the religion of Isabella in Measure for Measure, when the talk of the Duke as a friar counselling a condemned man is wholly “pagan” or unbelieving.

In his admirable little book, Euripides and his Age (1913), Prof. Murray repeats his account of the Bacchæ with some additions and modifications. He adheres to the “heartfelt glorification of Dionysus,” but adds (p. 188): “No doubt it is Dionysus in some private sense of the poet’s own ... some spirit of ... inspiration and untrammelled life. The presentation is not consistent, however magical the poetry.” As to the theory that “the veteran free-lance of thought ... now saw the error of his ways and was returning to orthodoxy,” he pronounces that “Such a view strikes us now as almost childish in its incompetence” (p. 190). He also reminds us that “the whole scheme of the play is given by the ancient ritual.... All kinds of small details which seemed like ... rather fantastic invention on the part of Euripides are taken straight from Æschylus or the ritual, or both.... The Bacchæ is not free invention; it is tradition” (pp. 182–84). And in sum: “It is well to remember that, for all his lucidity of language, Euripides is not lucid about religion” (p. 190).

In conclusion we may ask, How could he be? He wrote plays for the Greek stage, which had its very roots in religious tradition, and was run for the edification of a crudely believing populace. It is much that in so doing Euripides could a hundred times challenge the evil religious ethic given him for his subject-matter; and his lasting vogue in antiquity showed that he had a hold on the higher Greek conscience which no other dramatist ever possessed.

§ 8

The wide subject of the teaching of Sokrates, Plato, and Aristotle must here be noticed briefly, with a view only to our special inquiry. All three must be inscribed in any list of ancient freethinkers; and yet all three furthered freethought only indirectly, the two former being in different degrees supernaturalists, while the last touched on religious questions only as a philosopher, avoiding all question of practical innovation.

The same account holds good of the best of the so-called Sophists, as Gorgias the Sicilian (? 485–380), who was a nihilistic skeptic; Hippias of Elis, who, setting up an emphatic distinction between Nature and Convention, impugned the political laws and prejudices which estranged men of thought and culture; and Prodikos of Kos (fl. 435), author of the fable of Herakles at the Parting of the Ways, who seems to have privately criticized the current Gods as mere deifications of useful things and forces, and was later misconceived as teaching that the things and forces were Gods. Cp. Cicero, De nat. Deorum, i, 42; Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Mathematicos, ix, 52; Ueberweg, vol. i, p. 78; Renouvier, i, 291–93. Cicero saw very well that if men came to see in Dêmêtêr merely a deification of corn or bread, in Dionysos wine, in Hephaistos fire, and in Poseidon only water, there was not much left in religion. On the score of their systematic skepticism, that is, their insistence on the subjectivity of all opinion, Prof. Drews pronounces the Sophists at once the “Aufklärer” and the Pragmatists of ancient Greece (Gesch. des Monismus, p. 209). But their thought was scarcely homogeneous.

The long-debated issue as to the real personality of Sokrates is still open. It is energetically and systematically handled by Prof. August Döring in Die Lehre des Sokrates als sociales Reformsystem (1895), and by Dr. Hubert Röck in Der unverfälschte Sokrates (1903). See, in particular, Döring, pp. 51–79, and Röck, pp. 357–96. From all attempts to arrive at a conception of a consistent Sokrates there emerges the impression that the real Sokrates, despite a strong critical bent of mind, had no clearly established body of opinions, but was swayed in different directions by the itch for contradiction which was the driving power of his dialectic. For the so-called Sokratic “method” is much less a method for attaining truth than one for disturbing prejudice. And if in Plato’s hands Sokrates seldom reaches a conclusion that his own method might not overthrow, we are not entitled to refuse to believe that this was characteristic of the man.

Upon the debate as to the legal punishability of Sokrates turns another as to the moral character of the Athenians who forced him to drink the hemlock. Professor Mahaffy, bent on proving the superiority of Athenian culture and civilization to those of Christendom, effectively contrasts the calm scene in the prison-chamber of Sokrates with the hideous atrocities of the death penalty for treason in the modern world and the “gauntness and horror of our modern executions” (Social Life in Greece, 3rd. ed. pp. 262–69); and Mr. Bleeckly (Socrates and the Athenians, 1884, pp. 55–63) similarly sets against the pagan case that of the burning of heretics by the Christian Church, and in particular the auto da fé at Valladolid in 1559, when fifteen men and women—the former including the conscientious priests who had proposed to meet the hostility of Protestant dissent in the Netherlands by reforms in the Church: the latter including delicately-nurtured ladies of high family—were burned to death before the eyes of the Princess Regent of Spain and the aristocracy of Castile. It is certainly true that this transaction has no parallel in the criminal proceedings of pagan Athens. Christian cruelty has been as much viler than pagan, culture for culture, as the modern Christian environment is uglier than the Athenian. Before such a test the special pleaders for the civilizing power of Christianity can but fall back upon alternative theses which are the negation of their main case. First we are told that “Christianity humanizes men”; next that where it does not do so it is because they are too inhuman to be made Christians.

But while the orthodoxy of pagan Athens thus comes very well off as against the frightful crime-roll of organized Christianity, the dispassionate historian must nonetheless note the dehumanizing power of religion in Athens as in Christendom. The pietists of Athens, in their less brutish way, were as hopelessly denaturalized as those of Christian Europe by the dominion of a traditional creed, held as above reason. It matters not whether or not we say with Bishop Thirlwall (Hist. of Greece, 2nd ed. iv, 556) that “there never was a case in which murder was more clearly committed under the forms of legal procedure than in the trial of Socrates,” or press on the other side the same writer’s admission that in religious matters in Athens “there was no canon, no book by which a doctrine could be tried; no living authority to which appeal could be made for the decision of religious controversies.” The fact that Christendom had “authorities” who ruled which of two sets of insane dogmas brought death upon its propounder, does not make less abominable the slaying of Bruno and Servetus, or the immeasurable massacre of less eminent heretics. But the less formalized homicides sanctioned by the piety of Periklean Athens remain part of the proof that unreasoning faith worsens men past calculation. If we slur over such deeds by generalities about human frailty, we are but asserting the impossibility of rationally respecting human nature. If, putting aside all moral censure, we are simply concerned to trace and comprehend causation in human affairs, we have no choice but to note how upon occasion religion on one hand, like strong drink on another, can turn commonplace men into murderers.

As to his practical failure see the story of his and his pupils’ attempts at Syracuse (Grote, History, ix, 37–123). The younger Dionysios, whom they had vainly attempted to make a model ruler, seems to have been an audacious unbeliever to the extent of plundering the temple of Persephone at Lokris, one of Jupiter in the Peloponnesos, and one of Æsculapius at Epidaurus. Clement of Alexandria (Protrept. c. 4) states that he plundered “the statue of Jupiter in Sicily.” Cicero (De nat. Deorum, iii, 33, 34) and Valerius Maximus (i, 1) tell the story of the elder Dionysios; but of him it cannot be true. In his day the plunder of the temples of Dêmêtêr and Persephone in Sicily by the Carthaginians was counted a deadly sin. See Freeman, History of Sicily, iv, 125–47, and Story of Sicily, pp. 176–80. In Cicero’s dialogue it is noted that after all his impieties Dionysios [the elder, of whom the stories are mistakenly told] died in his bed. Athenæus, however, citing the biographer Klearchos, tells that the younger Dionysios, after being reduced to the rôle of a begging priest of Kybelê, ended his life very miserably (xii, 60).

Prof. Bain (Practical Essays, p. 273), citing Grote’s remark on the “cautious prose compositions of Aristotle,” comments thus: “That is to say, the execution of Sokrates was always before his eyes; he had to pare his expressions so as not to give offence to Athenian orthodoxy. We can never know the full bearings of such a disturbing force. The editors of Aristotle complain of the corruption of his text: a far worse corruption lies behind. In Greece Sokrates alone had the courage of his opinions. While his views as to a future life, for example, are plain and frank, the real opinion of Aristotle on the question is an insoluble problem.” (See, however, the passage in the Metaphysics cited below.)

The opinion of Grote and Bain as to Aristotle’s caution is fully coincided in by Lange, who writes (Gesch. des Mater. i, 63): “More conservative than Plato and Sokrates, Aristotle everywhere seeks to attach himself as closely as possible to tradition, to popular notions, to the ideas embodied in common speech, and his ethical postulates diverge as little as may be from the customary morals and laws of Greek States. He has therefore been at all times the favourite philosopher of conservative schools and movements.”

[In previous editions I remarked that “the lack of fresh science, which was the proximate cause of the stagnation of Greek thought, has been explained like other things as a result of race qualities: ‘the Athenians,’ says Mr. Benn (The Greek Philosophers, i, 42), ‘had no genius for natural science: none of them were ever distinguished as savans.... It was, they thought, a miserable trifling [and] waste of time.... Pericles, indeed, thought differently....’ On the other hand, Lange decides (i, 6) “that with the freedom and boldness of the Hellenic spirit was combined ... the talent for scientific deduction. These contrary views,” I observed, “seem alike arbitrary. If Mr. Benn means that other Hellenes had what the Athenians lacked, the answer is that only special social conditions could have set up such a difference, and that it could not be innate, but must be a mere matter of usage.” Mr. Benn has explained to me that he does not dissent from this view, and that I had not rightly gathered his from the passage I quoted. In his later work, The Philosophy of Greece considered in relation to the character and history of its people (1898), he has pointed out how, in the period of Hippias and Prodikos, “at Athens in particular young men threw themselves with ardour into the investigation of” problems of cosmography, astronomy, meteorology, and comparative anatomy (p. 138). The hindering forces were Athenian bigotry (pp. 113–14, 171) and the mischievous influence of Sokrates (pp. 165, 173).

Speaking broadly, we may say that the Chaldeans were forward in astronomy because their climate favoured it to begin with, and religion and their superstitions did so later. Hippokrates of Kos became a great physician because, with natural capacity, he had the opportunity to compare many practices. The Athenians failed to carry on the sciences, not because the faculty or the taste was lacking among them, but because their political and artistic interests, for one thing, preoccupied them—e.g., Sokrates and Plato; and because, for another, their popular religion, popularly supported, menaced the students of physics. But the Ionians, who had savans, failed equally to progress after the Alexandrian period; the explanation being again not stoppage of faculty, but the advent of conditions unfavourable to the old intellectual life, which in any case, as we saw, had been first set up by Babylonian contacts. (Compare, on the ethnological theorem of Cousin, G. Bréton, Essai sur la poésie philos. en Grèce, p. 10.) On the other hand, Lange’s theory of gifts “innate” in the Hellenic mind in general is the old racial fallacy. Potentialities are “innate” in all populations, according to their culture stage, and it was their total environment that specialized the Greeks as a community.]

§ 9

This strange retention of the theorem of the existence of anthropomorphic Gods, with a flat denial that they did anything in the universe, might be termed the great peculiarity of average ancient rationalism, were it not that what makes it at all intelligible for us is just the similar practice of modern non-Christian theists. The Gods of antiquity were non-creative, but strivers and meddlers and answerers of prayer; and ancient rationalism relieved them of their striving and meddling, leaving them no active or governing function whatever, but for the most part cherishing their phantasms. The God of modern Christendom had been at once a creator and a governor, ruling, meddling, punishing, rewarding, and hearing prayer; and modern theism, unable to take the atheistic or agnostic plunge, relieves him of all interference in things human or cosmic, but retains him as a creative abstraction who somehow set up “law,” whether or not he made all things out of nothing. The psychological process in the two cases seems to be the same—an erection of æsthetic habit into a philosophic dogma, and an accommodation of phrase to popular prejudice.

It was in keeping with this general but mostly placid and non-polemic latitudinarianism that the New Academy, the second birth, or rather transformation, of the Platonic school, in the hands of Arkesilaos and the great Carneades (213–129), and later of the Carthaginian Clitomachos, should be marked by that species of skepticism thence called Academic—a skepticism which exposed the doubtfulness of current religious beliefs without going the Pyrrhonian length of denying that any beliefs could be proved, or even denying the existence of the Gods.

For the arguments of Carneades against the Stoic doctrine of immortality see Cicero, De natura Deorum, iii, 12, 17; and for his argument against theism see Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Math. ix, 172, 183. Mr. Benn pronounces this criticism of theology “the most destructive that has ever appeared, the armoury whence religious skepticism ever since has been supplied” (The Philosophy of Greece, etc., p. 258). This seems an over-statement. But it is just to say, as does Mr. Whittaker (Priests, Philosophers, and Prophets, 1911, p. 60; cp. p. 86), that “there has never been a more drastic attack than that of Carneades, which furnished Cicero with the materials for his second book, On Divination”; and, as does Prof. Martha (Études Morales sur l’antiquité, 1889, p. 77), that no philosophic or religious school has been able to ignore the problems which Carneades raised.

Here and there, through the centuries, the old intellectual flame burns whitely enough: the noble figure of Epictetus in the first century of the new era, and that of the brilliant Lucian in the second, in their widely different ways remind us that the evolved faculty was still there if the circumstances had been such as to evoke it. Menippos in the first century B.C. had played a similar part to that of Lucian, in whose freethinking dialogues he so often figures; but with less of subtlety and intellectuality. Lucian’s was indeed a mind of the rarest lucidity; and the argumentation of his dialogue Zeus Tragædos covers every one of the main aspects of the theistic problem. There is no dubiety as to his atheistic conclusion, which is smilingly implicit in the reminder he puts in the mouth of Hermes, that, though a few men may adopt the atheistic view, “there will always be plenty of others who think the contrary—the majority of the Greeks, the ignorant many, the populace, and all the barbarians.” But the moral doctrine of Epictetus is one of endurance and resignation; and the almost unvarying raillery of Lucian, making mere perpetual sport of the now moribund Olympian Gods, was hardly better fitted than the all-round skepticism of the school of Sextus Empiricus to inspire positive and progressive thinking.

It was, in fact, impossible that the Greeks should either stifle or persecute science or freethought as it was either stifled or persecuted by ancient Jews (who had almost no science by reason of their theology) or by modern Christians, simply because the Greeks had no anti-scientific hieratic literature. It remains profoundly significant for science that the ancient civilization which on the smallest area evolved the most admirable life, which most completely transcended all the sources from which it originally drew, and left a record by which men are still charmed and taught, was a civilization as nearly as might be without Sacred Books, without an organized priesthood, and with the largest measure of democratic freedom that the ancient world ever saw.