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Title: The Legacy of Greece
       Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T.
       L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W.
       Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir
       Reginald Blomfield

Author: Various

Editor: R.W. Livingstone

Release Date: August 6, 2007 [EBook #22259]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

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The Legacy of GREECE

_Essays by_ GILBERT MURRAY, W. R. INGE,
J. BURNET, SIR T. L. HEATH, D'ARCY W.
THOMPSON, CHARLES SINGER, R. W.
LIVINGSTON, A. TOYNBEE, A. E. ZIMMERN,
PERCY GARDNER, SIR REGINALD BLOMFIELD

_Edited by_

R. W. LIVINGSTONE

[Illustration]

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS


PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE
UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD
BY JOHN JOHNSON
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY




In spite of many differences, no age has had closer affinities with
Ancient Greece than our own; none has based its deeper life so largely
on ideals which the Greeks brought into the world. History does not
repeat itself. Yet, if the twentieth century searched through the past
for its nearest spiritual kin, it is in the fifth and following
centuries before Christ that they would be found. Again and again, as we
study Greek thought and literature, behind the veil woven by time and
distance, the face that meets us is our own, younger, with fewer lines
and wrinkles on its features and with more definite and deliberate
purpose in its eyes. For these reasons we are to-day in a position, as
no other age has been, to understand Ancient Greece, to learn the
lessons it teaches, and, in studying the ideals and fortunes of men with
whom we have so much in common, to gain a fuller power of understanding
and estimating our own. This book--the first of its kind in
English--aims at giving some idea of what the world owes to Greece in
various realms of the spirit and the intellect, and of what it can still
learn from her.

THE EDITOR.

_October 1921._




CONTENTS


                                                                  PAGE

THE VALUE OF GREECE TO THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD.
By GILBERT MURRAY, F.B.A., Regius Professor of Greek in
the University of Oxford                                             1

RELIGION. By W. R. INGE, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's                   25

PHILOSOPHY. By J. BURNETT, F.B.A., Professor of Greek in the
University of St. Andrews                                           57

MATHEMATICS AND ASTRONOMY.
By Sir T. L. HEATH, K.C.B., K.C.V.O., F.R.S.                        97

NATURAL SCIENCE. By D'ARCY W. THOMPSON, F.R.S.,
Professor of Natural History in the University of St. Andrews      137

BIOLOGY. By CHARLES SINGER, Lecturer in the History of Medicine
in University College, London                                      163

MEDICINE. By CHARLES SINGER                                        201

LITERATURE. By R. W. LIVINGSTONE, Fellow of Corpus Christi
College, Oxford                                                    249

HISTORY. By ARNOLD TOYNBEE, Koraés Professor of Byzantine and
Modern Greek Language, Literature, and History in the
University of London                                               289

POLITICAL THOUGHT. By A. E. ZIMMERN, late Wilson Professor of
International Politics, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth   321

THE LAMPS OF GREEK ART. By PERCY GARDNER, F.B.A., Merton
Professor of Classical Archaeology in the University of Oxford     353

ARCHITECTURE. By Sir REGINALD BLOMFIELD, F.S.A., R.A.              397




THE VALUE OF GREECE TO THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD


If the value of man's life on earth is to be measured in dollars and
miles and horse-power, ancient Greece must count as a poverty-stricken
and a minute territory; its engines and implements were nearer to the
spear and bow of the savage than to our own telegraph and aeroplane.
Even if we neglect merely material things and take as our standard the
actual achievements of the race in conduct and in knowledge, the average
clerk who goes to town daily, idly glancing at his morning newspaper, is
probably a better behaved and infinitely better informed person than the
average Athenian who sat spellbound at the tragedies of Aeschylus. It is
only by the standard of the spirit, to which the thing achieved is
little and the quality of mind that achieved it much, which cares less
for the sum of knowledge attained than for the love of knowledge, less
for much good policing than for one free act of heroism, that the great
age of Greece can be judged as something extraordinary and unique in
value.

By this standard, if it is a legitimate and reasonable one to apply, we
shall be able to understand why classical Greek literature was the basis
of education throughout all later antiquity; why its re-discovery,
however fragmentary and however imperfectly understood, was able to
intoxicate the keenest minds of Europe and constitute a kind of
spiritual 'Re-birth', and how its further and further exploration may be
still a task worth men's spending their lives upon and capable of giving
mankind guidance as well as inspiration.

But is such a standard legitimate and reasonable? We shall gain nothing
by unanalysed phrases. But I think surely it is merely the natural
standard of any philosophical historian. Suppose it is argued that an
average optician at the present day knows more optics than Roger Bacon,
the inventor of spectacles; suppose it is argued that therefore he is,
as far as optics go, a greater man, and that Roger Bacon has nothing to
teach us; what is the answer? It is, I suppose, that Roger Bacon,
receiving a certain amount of knowledge from his teachers, had that in
him which turned it to unsuspected directions and made it immensely
greater and more fruitful. The average optician has probably added a
little to what he was taught, but not much, and has doubtless forgotten
or confused a good deal. So that, if by studying Roger Bacon's life or
his books we could get into touch with his mind and acquire some of that
special moving and inspiring quality of his, it would help us far more
than would the mere knowledge of the optician.

This truth is no doubt hard to see in the case of purely technical
science; in books of wider range, such as Darwin's for instance, it is
easy for any reader to feel the presence of a really great mind,
producing inspiration of a different sort from that of the most
excellent up-to-date examination text-book. In philosophy, religion,
poetry, and the highest kinds of art, the greatness of the author's mind
seems as a rule to be all that matters; one almost ignores the date at
which he worked. This is because in technical sciences the element of
mere fact, or mere knowledge, is so enormous, the elements of
imagination, character, and the like so very small. Hence, books on
science, in a progressive age, very quickly become 'out of date', and
each new edition usually supersedes the last. It is the rarest thing for
a work of science to survive as a text-book more than ten years or so.
Newton's _Principia_ is almost an isolated instance among modern
writings.

Yet there are some few such books. Up till about the year 1900 the
elements of geometry were regularly taught, throughout Europe, in a
text-book written by a Greek called Eucleides in the fourth or third
century B. C.[1] That text-book lasted over two thousand years. Now, of
course, people have discovered a number of faults in Euclid, but it has
taken them all that time to do it.

    [1] Since this paper was first written _Euclid_, Book I, in the
    Greek, has been edited with a commentary by Sir Thomas Heath
    (Cambridge Press, 1920). It is full of interest and instruction.

Again, I knew an old gentleman who told me that, at a good English
school in the early nineteenth century, he had been taught the
principles of grammar out of a writer called Dionysius Thrax, or Denis
of Thrace. Denis was a Greek of the first century B. C., who made or
carried out the remarkable discovery that there was such a thing as a
science of grammar, i. e. that men in their daily speech were
unconsciously obeying an extraordinarily subtle and intricate body of
laws, which were capable of being studied and reduced to order. Denis
did not make the whole discovery himself; he was led to it by his master
Aristarchus and others. And his book had been re-edited several times in
the nineteen-hundred odd years before this old gentleman was taught it.

To take a third case: all through later antiquity and the middle ages
the science of medicine was based on the writings of two ancient
doctors, Hippocrates and Galen. Galen was a Greek who lived at Rome in
the early Empire, Hippocrates a Greek who lived at the island of Cos in
the fifth century B. C. A great part of the history of modern medicine
is a story of emancipation from the dead hand of these great ancients.
But one little treatise attributed to Hippocrates was in active use in
the training of medical students in my own day in Scotland and is still
in use in some American Universities. It was the Oath taken by medical
students in the classic age of Greece when they solemnly faced the
duties of their profession. The disciple swore to honour and obey his
teacher and care for his children if ever they were in need; always to
help his patients to the best of his power; never to use or profess to
use magic or charms or any supernatural means; never to supply poison or
perform illegal operations; never to abuse the special position of
intimacy which a doctor naturally obtains in a sick house, but always on
entering to remember that he goes as a friend and helper to every
individual in it.

We have given up that oath now: I suppose we do not believe so much in
the value of oaths. But the man who first drew up that oath did a great
deed. He realized and defined the meaning of his high calling in words
which doctors of unknown tongues and undiscovered countries accepted
from him and felt to express their aims for well over two thousand
years.

Now what do I want to illustrate by these three instances? The rapidity
with which we are now at last throwing off the last vestiges of the yoke
of Greece? No, not that. I want to point out that even in the realm of
science, where progress is so swift and books so short-lived, the Greeks
of the great age had such genius and vitality that their books lived in
a way that no others have lived. Let us get away from the thought of
Euclid as an inky and imperfect English school-book, to that ancient
Eucleides who, with exceedingly few books but a large table of sand let
into the floor, planned and discovered and put together and re-shaped
the first laws of geometry, till at last he had written one of the great
simple books of the world, a book which should stand a pillar and beacon
to mankind long after all the political world that Eucleides knew had
been swept away and the kings he served were conquered by the Romans,
and the Romans in course of time conquered by the barbarians, and the
barbarians themselves, with much labour and reluctance, partly by means
of Eucleides' book, eventually educated; so that at last, in our own
day, they can manage to learn their geometry without it. The time has
come for Euclid to be superseded; let him go. He has surely held the
torch for mankind long enough; and books of science are born to be
superseded. What I want to suggest is that the same extraordinary
vitality of mind which made Hippocrates and Euclid and even Denis of
Thrace last their two thousand years, was also put by the Greeks of the
great age into those activities which are, for the most part at any
rate, not perishable or progressive but eternal.

This is a simple point, but it is so important that we must dwell on it
for a moment. If we read an old treatise on medicine or mechanics, we
may admire it and feel it a work of genius, but we also feel that it is
obsolete: its work is over; we have got beyond it. But when we read
Homer or Aeschylus, if once we have the power to admire and understand
their writing, we do not for the most part have any feeling of having
got beyond them. We have done so no doubt in all kinds of minor things,
in general knowledge, in details of technique, in civilization and the
like; but hardly any sensible person ever imagines that he has got
beyond their essential quality, the quality that has made them great.

Doubtless there is in every art an element of mere knowledge or science,
and that element is progressive. But there is another element, too,
which does not depend on knowledge and which does not progress but has a
kind of stationary and eternal value, like the beauty of the dawn, or
the love of a mother for her child, or the joy of a young animal in
being alive, or the courage of a martyr facing torment. We cannot for
all our progress get beyond these things; there they stand, like light
upon the mountains. The only question is whether we can rise to them.
And it is the same with all the greatest births of human imagination. As
far as we can speculate, there is not the faintest probability of any
poet ever setting to work on, let us say, the essential effect aimed at
by Aeschylus in the Cassandra-scene of the _Agamemnon_, and doing it
better than Aeschylus. The only thing which the human race has to do
with that scene is to understand it and get out of it all the joy and
emotion and wonder that it contains.

This eternal quality is perhaps clearest in poetry: in poetry the
mixture of knowledge matters less. In art there is a constant
development of tools and media and technical processes. The modern
artist can feel that, though he cannot, perhaps, make as good a statue
as Pheidias, he could here and there have taught Pheidias something: and
at any rate he can try his art on subjects far more varied and more
stimulating to his imagination. In philosophy the mixture is more subtle
and more profound. Philosophy always depends in some sense upon science,
yet the best philosophy seems generally to have in it some eternal
quality of creative imagination. Plato wrote a dialogue about the
constitution of the world, the _Timaeus_, which was highly influential
in later Greece, but seems to us, with our vastly superior scientific
knowledge, almost nonsensical. Yet when Plato writes about the theory of
knowledge or the ultimate meaning of Justice or of Love, no good
philosopher can afford to leave him aside: the chief question is whether
we can rise to the height and subtlety of his thought.

And here another point emerges, equally simple and equally important if
we are to understand our relation to the past. Suppose a man says: 'I
quite understand that Plato or Aeschylus may have had fine ideas, but
surely anything of value which they said must long before this have
become common property. There is no need to go back to the Greeks for
it. We do not go back and read Copernicus to learn that the earth goes
round the sun.' What is the answer? It is that such a view ignores
exactly this difference between the progressive and the eternal, between
knowledge and imagination. If Harvey discovers that the blood is not
stationary but circulates, if Copernicus discovers that the earth goes
round the sun and not the sun round the earth, those discoveries can
easily be communicated in the most abbreviated form. If a mechanic
invents an improvement on the telephone, or a social reformer puts some
good usage in the place of a bad one, in a few years we shall probably
all be using the improvement without even knowing what it is or saying
Thank you. We may be as stupid as we like, we have in a sense got the
good of it.

But can one apply the same process to _Macbeth_ or _Romeo and Juliet_?
Can any one tell us in a few words what they come to? Or can a person
get the good of them in any way except one--the way of vivid and loving
study, following and feeling the author's meaning all through? To
suppose, as I believe some people do, that you can get the value of a
great poem by studying an abstract of it in an encyclopaedia or by
reading cursorily an average translation of it, argues really a kind of
mental deficiency, like deafness or colour-blindness. The things that we
have called eternal, the things of the spirit and the imagination,
always seem to lie more in a process than in a result, and can only be
reached and enjoyed by somehow going through the process again. If the
value of a particular walk lies in the scenery, you do not get that
value by taking a short cut or using a fast motor-car.

In looking back, then, upon any vital and significant age of the past we
shall find objects of two kinds. First, there will be things like the
Venus of Milo or the Book of Job or Plato's _Republic_, which are
interesting or precious in themselves, because of their own inherent
qualities; secondly, there will be things like the Roman code of the
Twelve Tables or the invention of the printing-press or the record of
certain great battles, which are interesting chiefly because they are
causes of other and greater things or form knots in the great web of
history--the first having artistic interest, the second only historical
interest, though, of course, it is obvious that in any concrete case
there is generally a mixture of both.

Now Ancient Greece is important in both ways. For the artist or poet it
has in a quite extraordinary degree the quality of beauty. For instance,
to take a contrast with Rome: if you dig about the Roman Wall in
Cumberland you will find quantities of objects, altars, inscriptions,
figurines, weapons, boots and shoes, which are full of historic interest
but are not much more beautiful than the contents of a modern rubbish
heap. And the same is true of most excavations all over the world. But
if you dig at any classical or sub-classical site in the Greek world,
however unimportant historically, practically every object you find will
be beautiful. The wall itself will be beautiful; the inscriptions will
be beautifully cut; the figurines, however cheap and simple, may have
some intentional grotesques among them, but the rest will have a special
truthfulness and grace; the vases will be of good shapes and the
patterns will be beautiful patterns. If you happen to dig in a
burying-place and come across some epitaphs on the dead, they will
practically all--even when the verses do not quite scan and the words
are wrongly spelt--have about them this inexplicable touch of beauty.

I am anxious not to write nonsense about this. One could prove the point
in detail by taking any collection of Greek epitaphs, and that is the
only way in which it can be proved. The beauty is a fact, and if we try
to analyse the sources of it we shall perhaps in part understand how it
has come to pass.

In the first place, it is not a beauty of ornament; it is a beauty of
structure, a beauty of rightness and simplicity. Compare an athlete in
flannels playing tennis and a stout dignitary smothered in gold robes.
Or compare a good modern yacht, swift, lithe, and plain, with a
lumbering heavily gilded sixteenth-century galleon, or even with a
Chinese state junk: the yacht is far the more beautiful though she has
not a hundredth part of the ornament. It is she herself that is
beautiful, because her lines and structure are right. The others are
essentially clumsy and, therefore, ugly things, dabbed over with gold
and paint. Now ancient Greek things for the most part have the beauty of
the yacht. The Greeks used paint a good deal, but apart from that a
Greek temple is almost as plain as a shed: people accustomed to
arabesques and stained glass and gargoyles can very often see nothing in
it. A Greek statue has as a rule no ornament at all: a young man racing
or praying, an old man thinking, there it stands expressed in a stately
and simple convention, true or false, the anatomy and the surfaces right
or wrong, aiming at no beauty except the truest. It would probably seem
quite dull to the maker of a mediaeval wooden figure of a king which I
remember seeing in a town in the east of Europe: a crown blazing with
many-coloured glass, a long crimson robe covered with ornaments and
beneath them an idiot face, no bones, no muscles, no attitude. That is
not what a Greek meant by beauty. The same quality holds to a great
extent of Greek poetry. Not, of course, that the artistic convention was
the same, or at all similar, for treating stone and for treating
language. Greek poetry is statuesque in the sense that it depends
greatly on its organic structure; it is not in the least so in the sense
of being cold or colourless or stiff. But Greek poetry on the whole has
a bareness and severity which disappoints a modern reader, accustomed as
he is to lavish ornament and exaggeration at every turn. It has the
same simplicity and straightforwardness as Greek sculpture. The poet has
something to say and he says it as well and truly as he can in the
suitable style, and if you are not interested you are not. With some
exceptions which explain themselves he does not play a thousand pretty
tricks and antics on the way, so that you may forget the dullness of
what he says in amusement at the draperies in which he wraps it.

But here comes an apparent difficulty. Greek poetry, we say, is very
direct, very simple, very free from irrelevant ornament. And yet when we
translate it into English and look at our translation, our main feeling,
I think, is that somehow the glory has gone: a thing that was high and
lordly has become poor and mean. Any decent Greek scholar when he opens
one of his ancient poets feels at once the presence of something lofty
and rare--something like the atmosphere of _Paradise Lost_. But the
language of _Paradise Lost_ is elaborately twisted and embellished into
loftiness and rarity; the language of the Greek poem is simple and
direct. What does this mean?

I can only suppose that the normal language of Greek poetry is in itself
in some sense sublime. Most critics accept this as an obvious fact, yet,
if true, it is a very strange fact and worth thinking about. It depends
partly on mere euphony: _Khaireis horôn fôs_ is probably more beautiful
in sound than 'You rejoice to see the light', but euphony cannot be
everything. The sound of a great deal of Greek poetry, either as we
pronounce it, or as the ancients pronounced it, is to modern ears almost
ugly. It depends partly, perhaps, on the actual structure of the Greek
language: philologists tell us that, viewed as a specimen, it is in
structure and growth and in power of expressing things, the most perfect
language they know. And certainly one often finds that a thought can be
expressed with ease and grace in Greek which becomes clumsy and involved
in Latin, English, French or German. But neither of these causes goes,
I think, to the root of the matter.

What is it that gives words their character and makes a style high or
low? Obviously, their associations; the company they habitually keep in
the minds of those who use them. A word which belongs to the language of
bars and billiard saloons will become permeated by the normal standard
of mind prevalent in such places; a word which suggests Milton or
Carlyle will have the flavour of those men's minds about it. I therefore
cannot resist the conclusion that, if the language of Greek poetry has,
to those who know it intimately, this special quality of keen austere
beauty, it is because the minds of the poets who used that language were
habitually toned to a higher level both of intensity and of nobility
than ours. It is a finer language because it expresses the minds of
finer men. By 'finer men' I do not necessarily mean men who behaved
better, either by our standards or by their own; I mean men to whom the
fine things of the world, sunrise and sea and stars and the love of man
for man, and strife and the facing of evil for the sake of good, and
even common things like meat and drink, and evil things like hate and
terror, had, as it were, a keener edge than they have for us and roused
a swifter and a nobler reaction.

Let us resume this argument before going further. We start from the
indisputable fact that the Greeks of about the fifth century B. C. did
for some reason or other produce various works of art, buildings and
statues and books, especially books, which instead of decently dying or
falling out of fashion in the lifetime of the men who made them, lasted
on and can still cause high thoughts and intense emotions. In trying to
explain this strange fact we notice that the Greeks had a great and
pervading instinct for beauty, and for beauty of a particular kind. It
is a beauty which never lies in irrelevant ornament, but always in the
very essence and structure of the object made. In literature we found
that the special beauty which we call Greek depends partly on the
directness, truthfulness, and simplicity with which the Greeks say what
they want to say, and partly on a special keenness and nobility in the
language, which seems to be the natural expression of keen and noble
minds. Can we in any way put all these things together so as to explain
them--or at any rate to hold them together more clearly?

An extremely old and often misleading metaphor will help us. People have
said: 'The world was young then.' Of course, strictly speaking, it was
not. In the total age of the world or of man the two thousand odd years
between us and Pericles do not count for much. Nor can we imagine that a
man of sixty felt any more juvenile in the fifth century B. C. than he
does now. It was just the other way, because at that time there were no
spectacles or false teeth. Yet in a sense the world _was_ young then, at
any rate our western world, the world of progress and humanity. For the
beginnings of nearly all the great things that progressive minds now
care for were then being laid in Greece.

Youth, perhaps, is not exactly the right word. There are certain
plants--some kinds of aloe, for instance--which continue for an
indefinite number of years in a slow routine of ordinary life close to
the ground, and then suddenly, when they have stored enough vital force,
grow ten feet high and burst into flower, after which, no doubt, they
die or show signs of exhaustion. Apart from the dying, it seems as if
something like that happened from time to time to the human race, or to
such parts of it as really bear flowers at all. For most races and
nations during the most of their life are not progressive but simply
stagnant, sometimes just managing to preserve their standard customs,
sometimes slipping back to the slough. That is why history has nothing
to say about them. The history of the world consists mostly in the
memory of those ages, quite few in number, in which some part of the
world has risen above itself and burst into flower or fruit.

We ourselves happen to live in the midst or possibly in the close of one
such period. More change has probably taken place in daily life, in
ideas, and in the general aspect of the earth during the last century
than during any four other centuries since the Christian era: and this
fact has tended to make us look on rapid progress as a normal condition
of the human race, which it never has been. And another such period of
bloom, a bloom comparatively short in time and narrow in area, but
amazingly swift and intense, occurred in the lower parts of the Balkan
peninsula from about the sixth to the fourth centuries before Christ.

Now it is this kind of bloom which fills the world with hope and
therefore makes it young. Take a man who has just made a discovery or an
invention, a man happily in love, a man who is starting some great and
successful social movement, a man who is writing a book or painting a
picture which he knows to be good; take men who have been fighting in
some great cause which before they fought seemed to be hopeless and now
is triumphant; think of England when the Armada was just defeated,
France at the first dawn of the Revolution, America after Yorktown: such
men and nations will be above themselves. Their powers will be stronger
and keener; there will be exhilaration in the air, a sense of walking in
new paths, of dawning hopes and untried possibilities, a confidence that
all things can be won if only we try hard enough. In that sense the
world will be young. In that sense I think it was young in the time of
Themistocles and Aeschylus. And it is that youth which is half the
secret of the Greek spirit.

And here I may meet an objection that has perhaps been lurking in the
minds of many readers. 'All this,' they may say, 'professes to be a
simple analysis of known facts, but in reality is sheer idealization.
These Greeks whom you call so "noble" have been long since exposed.
Anthropology has turned its searchlights upon them. It is not only their
ploughs, their weapons, their musical instruments, and their painted
idols that resemble those of the savages; it is everything else about
them. Many of them were sunk in the most degrading superstitions: many
practised unnatural vices: in times of great fear some were apt to think
that the best "medicine" was a human sacrifice. After that, it is hardly
worth mentioning that their social structure was largely based on
slavery; that they lived in petty little towns, like so many wasps'
nests, each at war with its next-door neighbour, and half of them at war
with themselves!'

If our anti-Greek went further he would probably cease to speak the
truth. We will stop him while we can still agree with him. These charges
are on the whole true, and, if we are to understand what Greece means,
we must realize and digest them. We must keep hold of two facts: first,
that the Greeks of the fifth century produced some of the noblest poetry
and art, the finest political thinking, the most vital philosophy, known
to the world; second, that the people who heard and saw, nay perhaps,
even the people who produced these wonders, were separated by a thin and
precarious interval from the savage. Scratch a civilized Russian, they
say, and you find a wild Tartar. Scratch an ancient Greek, and you hit,
no doubt, on a very primitive and formidable being, somewhere between a
Viking and a Polynesian.

That is just the magic and the wonder of it. The spiritual effort
implied is so tremendous. We have read stories of savage chiefs
converted by Christian or Buddhist missionaries, who within a year or so
have turned from drunken corroborees and bloody witch-smellings to a
life that is not only godly but even philanthropic and statesmanlike. We
have seen the Japanese lately go through some centuries of normal growth
in the space of a generation. But in all such examples men have only
been following the teaching of a superior civilization, and after all,
they have not ended by producing works of extraordinary and original
genius. It seems quite clear that the Greeks owed exceedingly little to
foreign influence. Even in their decay they were a race, as Professor
Bury observes, accustomed 'to take little and to give much'. They built
up their civilization for themselves. We must listen with due attention
to the critics who have pointed out all the remnants of savagery and
superstition that they find in Greece: the slave-driver, the
fetish-worshipper and the medicine-man, the trampler on women, the
bloodthirsty hater of all outside his own town and party. But it is not
those people that constitute Greece; those people can be found all over
the historical world, commoner than blackberries. It is not anything
fixed and stationary that constitutes Greece: what constitutes Greece is
the movement which leads from all these to the Stoic or fifth-century
'sophist' who condemns and denies slavery, who has abolished all cruel
superstitions and preaches some religion based on philosophy and
humanity, who claims for women the same spiritual rights as for man, who
looks on all human creatures as his brethren, and the world as 'one
great City of gods and men'. It is that movement which you will not find
elsewhere, any more than the statues of Pheidias or the dialogues of
Plato or the poems of Aeschylus and Euripides.

From all this two or three results follow. For one thing, being built up
so swiftly, by such keen effort, and from so low a starting-point, Greek
civilization was, amid all its glory, curiously unstable and full of
flaws. Such flaws made it, of course, much worse for those who lived in
it, but they hardly make it less interesting or instructive to those who
study it. Rather the contrary. Again, the near neighbourhood of the
savage gives to the Greek mind certain qualities which we of the safer
and solider civilizations would give a great deal to possess. It springs
swift and straight. It is never jaded. Its wonder and interest about the
world are fresh. And lastly there is one curious and very important
quality which, unless I am mistaken, belongs to Greek civilization more
than to any other. To an extraordinary degree it starts clean from
nature, with almost no entanglements of elaborate creeds and customs and
traditions.

I am not, of course, forgetting the prehistoric Minoan civilization, nor
yet the peculiar forms--mostly simple enough--into which the traditional
Greek religion fell. It is possible that I may be a little misled by my
own habit of living much among Greek things and so forgetting through
long familiarity how odd some of them once seemed. But when all
allowances are made, I think that this clean start from nature is, on
the whole, a true claim. If a thoughtful European or American wants to
study Chinese or Indian things, he has not only to learn certain data of
history and mythology, he has to work his mind into a particular
attitude; to put on, as it were, spectacles of a particular sort. If he
wants to study mediaeval things, if he takes even so universal a poet as
Dante, it is something the same. Curious views about the Pope and the
emperor, a crabbed scholastic philosophy, a strange and to the modern
mind rather horrible theology, floating upon the flames of Hell: all
these have somehow to be taken into his imagination before he can
understand his Dante. With Greek things this is very much less so. The
historical and imaginative background of the various great poets and
philosophers is, no doubt, highly important. A great part of the work of
modern scholarship is now devoted to getting it clearer. But on the
whole, putting aside for the moment the possible inadequacies of
translation, Greek philosophy speaks straight to any human being who is
willing to think simply, Greek art and poetry to any one who can use his
imagination and enjoy beauty. He has not to put on the fetters or the
blinkers of any new system in order to understand them; he has only to
get rid of his own--a much more profitable and less troublesome task.

This particular conclusion will scarcely, I think, be disputed, but the
point presents difficulties and must be dwelt upon.

In the first place, it does not mean that Greek art is what we call
'naturalist' or 'realist'. It is markedly the reverse. Art to the Greek
is always a form of _Sophia_, or Wisdom, a _Technê_ with rules that have
to be learnt. Its air of utter simplicity is deceptive. The pillar that
looks merely straight is really a thing of subtle curves. The funeral
bas-relief that seems to represent in the simplest possible manner a
woman saying good-bye to her child is arranged, plane behind plane, with
the most delicate skill and sometimes with deliberate falsification of
perspective. There is always some convention, some idealization, some
touch of the light that never was on sea or land. Yet all the time, I
think, Greek art remains in a remarkable degree close to nature. The
artist's eye is always on the object, and, though he represents it in
his own style, that style is always normal and temperate, free from
affectation, free from exaggeration or morbidity and, in the earlier
periods, free from conventionality. It is art without doubt; but it is
natural and normal art, such as grew spontaneously when mankind first
tried in freedom to express beauty. For example, the language of Greek
poetry is markedly different from that of prose, and there are even
clear differences of language between different styles of poetry. And
further, the poetry is very seldom about the present. It is about the
past, and that an ideal past. What we have to notice there is that this
kind of rule, which has been usual in all great ages of poetry, is
apparently not an artificial or arbitrary thing but a tendency that grew
up naturally with the first great expressions of poetical feeling.

Furthermore, this closeness to nature, this absence of a unifying or
hide-bound system of thought, acting together with other causes, has led
to the extraordinary variety and many-sidedness which is one of the most
puzzling charms of Ancient Greece as contrasted, say, with Israel or
Assyria or early Rome. Geographically it is a small country with a
highly indented coast-line and an interior cut into a great number of
almost isolated valleys. Politically it was a confused unity made up of
numerous independent states, one walled city of a few thousand
inhabitants being quite enough to form a state. And the citizens of
these states were, each of them, rather excessively capable of forming
opinions of their own and fighting for them. Hence came in practice much
isolation and faction and general weakness, to the detriment of the
Greeks themselves; but the same cause led in thought and literature to
immense variety and vitality, to the great gain of us who study the
Greeks afterwards. There is hardly any type of thought or style of
writing which cannot be paralleled in ancient Greece, only they will
there be seen, as it were, in their earlier and simpler forms. Traces of
all the things that seem most un-Greek can be found somewhere in Greek
literature: voluptuousness, asceticism, the worship of knowledge, the
contempt for knowledge, atheism, pietism, the religion of serving the
world and the religion of turning away from the world: all these and
almost all other points of view one can think of are represented
somewhere in the records of that one small people. And there is hardly
any single generalization in this chapter which the author himself could
not controvert by examples to the contrary. You feel in general a great
absence of all fetters: the human mind free, rather inexperienced,
intensely interested in life and full of hope, trying in every direction
for that excellence which the Greeks called _aretê_, and guided by some
peculiar instinct toward Temperance and Beauty.

The variety is there and must not be forgotten; yet amid the variety
there are certain general or central characteristics, mostly due to this
same quality of freshness and closeness to nature.

If you look at a Greek statue or bas-relief, or if you read an average
piece of Aristotle, you will very likely at first feel bored. Why?
Because it is all so normal and truthful; so singularly free from
exaggeration, paradox, violent emphasis; so destitute of those
fascinating by-forms of insanity which appeal to some similar faint
element of insanity in ourselves. 'We are sick', we may exclaim, 'of the
sight of these handsome, perfectly healthy men with grave faces and
normal bones and muscles! We are sick of being told that Virtue is a
mean between two extremes and tends to make men happy! We shall not be
interested unless some one tells us that Virtue is the utter abnegation
of self, or, it may be, the extreme and ruthless assertion of self; or
again, that Virtue is all an infamous mistake! And for statues, give us
a haggard man with starved body and cavernous eyes, cursing God--or give
us something rolling in fat and colour....'

What is at the back of this sort of feeling? which I admit often takes
more reasonable forms than these I have suggested. It is the same
psychological cause that brings about the changes of fashion in art or
dress: which loves 'stunts' and makes the fortunes of yellow newspapers.
It is boredom or _ennui_. We have had too much of A; we are sick of it,
we know how it is done and despise it; give us some B, or better still
some Z. And after a strong dose of Z we shall crave for the beginning
of the alphabet again. But now think of a person who is not bored at
all; who is, on the contrary, immensely interested in the world, keen to
choose good things and reject bad ones; full of the desire for knowledge
and the excitement of discovery. The joy to him is to see things as they
are and to judge them normally. He is not bored by the sight of normal,
healthy muscles in a healthy, well-shaped body; he is delighted. If you
distort the muscles for emotional effect, he would say with
disappointment: 'But that is ugly!' or 'But a man's muscles do _not_ go
like that!' He will have noted that tears are salt and rather warm; but
if you say like a modern poet that your heroine's tears are 'more hot
than fire, more salt than the salt sea', he will probably think your
statement απιθανον {apithanon} 'unpersuasive', and therefore ψυχρον
{psychron} 'chilling'.

It is perhaps especially in the religious and moral sphere that we are
accustomed to the habitual use of ecstatic language: expressions that
are only true of exalted moments are used by us as the commonplaces of
ordinary life. 'It is a thousand times worse to see another suffer than
to suffer oneself.' 'True love only desires the happiness of the beloved
object.' This kind of 'high falutin'' has become part of our regular
mental habit, just as dead metaphors by the bushel are a part of our
daily language. Consequently we are a little chilled and disappointed by
a language in which people hardly ever use a metaphor except when they
vividly realize it, and never utter heroic sentiments except when they
are wrought up to the pitch of feeling them true. Does this mean that
the Greek always remains, so to speak, at a normal temperature, that he
never has intense or blinding emotions? Not in the least. It shows a
lack of faith in the value of life to imagine such a conclusion. It
implies that you can only reach great emotion by pretence, or by
habitually exaggerating small emotions, whereas probably the exact
reverse is the case. When the great thing comes, then the Greek will
have the great word and the great thought ready. It is the habitual
exaggerator who will perhaps be bankrupt. And after all--the great
things are sure to come!

The power of seeing things straight and knowing what is beautiful or
noble, quite undisturbed by momentary boredoms or changes of taste, is a
very rare gift and never perhaps possessed in full by any one. But there
is a profound rule of art, bidding a man in the midst of all his study
of various styles or his pursuit of his own peculiar imaginations, from
time to time _se retremper dans la nature_--'to steep himself again in
nature'. And in something the same way it seems as if the world ought
from time to time to steep itself again in Hellenism: that is, it ought,
amid all the varying affectations and extravagances and changes of
convention in art and letters, to have some careful regard for those
which arose when man first awoke to the meaning of truth and beauty and
saw the world freely as a new thing.

Is this exaggeration? I think not. But no full defence of it can be
attempted here. In this essay we have been concerned almost entirely
with the artistic interest of Greece. It would be equally possible to
dwell on the historical interest. Then we should find that, for that
branch of mankind which is responsible for western civilization, the
seeds of almost all that we count best in human progress were sown in
Greece. The conception of beauty as a joy in itself and as a guide in
life was first and most vividly expressed in Greece, and the very laws
by which things are beautiful or ugly were to a great extent discovered
there and laid down. The conception of Freedom and Justice, freedom in
body, in speech and in mind, justice between the strong and the weak,
the rich and the poor, penetrates the whole of Greek political thought,
and was, amid obvious flaws, actually realized to a remarkable degree
in the best Greek communities. The conception of Truth as an end to
pursue for its own sake, a thing to discover and puzzle out by
experiment and imagination and especially by Reason, a conception
essentially allied with that of Freedom and opposed both to anarchy and
to blind obedience, has perhaps never in the world been more clearly
grasped than by the early Greek writers on science and philosophy. One
stands amazed sometimes at the perfect freedom of their thought. Another
conception came rather later, when the small City States with exclusive
rights of citizenship had been merged in a larger whole: the conception
of the universal fellowship between man and man. Greece realized soon
after the Persian war that she had a mission to the world, that
Hellenism stood for the higher life of man as against barbarism, for
Aretê, or Excellence, as against the mere effortless average. First came
the crude patriotism which regarded every Greek as superior to every
barbarian; then came reflection, showing that not all Greeks were true
bearers of the light, nor all barbarians its enemies; that Hellenism was
a thing of the spirit and not dependent on the race to which a man
belonged or the place where he was born: then came the new word and
conception ανθρωποτης {anthrôpotês}, _humanitas_, which to the Stoics
made the world as one brotherhood. No people known to history clearly
formulated these ideals before the Greeks, and those who have spoken the
words afterwards seem for the most part to be merely echoing the
thoughts of old Greek men.

These ideas, the pursuit of Truth, Freedom, Beauty, Excellence are not
everything. They have been a leaven of unrest in the world; they have
held up a light which was not always comforting to the eyes to see.
There is another ideal which is generally stronger and may, for all we
know, in the end stamp them out as evil things. There is Submission
instead of Freedom, the deadening or brutalizing of the senses instead
of Beauty, the acceptance of tradition instead of the pursuit of Truth,
the belief in hallucination or passion instead of Reason and Temperate
Thought, the obscuring of distinctions between good and bad and the
acceptance of all human beings and all states of mind as equal in value.
If something of this kind should prove in the end to be right for man,
then Greece will have played the part of the great wrecker in human
history. She will have held up false lights which have lured our ship to
dangerous places. But at any rate, through calm and storm, she does hold
her lights; she lit them first of the nations and held them during her
short reign the clearest; and whether we believe in an individual life
founded on Freedom, Reason, Beauty, Excellence and the pursuit of Truth,
and an international life aiming at the fellowship between man and man,
or whether we think these ideals the great snares of human politics,
there is good cause for some of us in each generation at the cost of
some time and trouble to study such important forces where they first
appear consciously in the minds of our spiritual ancestors. In the
thought and art of ancient Greece, more than any other, we shall find
these forces, and also to some extent their great opposites, fresh,
clean and comparatively uncomplicated, with every vast issue wrought out
on a small material scale and every problem stated in its lowest terms.

GILBERT MURRAY.




RELIGION


Those who write about the Greeks must beware of a heresy which is very
rife just now--the theory of _racialism_. Political ethnology, which is
no genuine science, excused the ambition of the Germans to themselves,
and helped them to wage war; it has suggested to the Allies a method of
waging peace. The false and mischievous doctrine of superior and
inferior races is used to justify oppression in Europe, and murder by
torture in America. It will not help us to understand the Greeks. The
Greeks were a nation of splendid mongrels, made up of the same elements,
differently mixed, as ourselves. Their famous beauty, which had almost
disappeared when Cicero visited Athens, was mainly the result of a
healthy outdoor life and physical training, combined with a very
becoming costume. They were probably not handsomer than Oxford rowing
crews or Eton boys. Their flowering time of genius was due to the same
causes which produced similar results in the Italian Renaissance. The
city-state is a forcing-house of brilliant achievement, though it
quickly uses up its human material. We cannot even regard the Greeks as
a homogeneous mixed race. The Spartiates were almost pure Nordics; the
Athenians almost pure Mediterraneans. The early colonists, from whom
sprang so many of the greatest names in the Hellenic roll of honour, are
not likely to have kept their blood pure. Nor was there ever a Greek
culture shared by all the Greeks. The Spartan system, that of a small
fighting tribe encamped in a subject country, recalls that of Chaka's
Zulus; Arcadia was bucolic, Aetolia barbarous, Boeotia stolid, Macedonia
half outside the pale. The consciousness of race among the Greeks
counted practically for about as much as the consciousness of being
white men, or Christians, does in modern civilization.

Greece for our purposes means not a race, but a culture, a language and
literature, and still more an attitude towards life, which for us begins
with Homer, and persists, with many changes but no breaks, till the
closing of the Athenian lecture-rooms by Justinian. The changes no doubt
were great, when politically Greece was living Greece no more, and when
the bearers of the tradition were no longer the lineal descendants of
those who established it. But the tradition, enshrined in literature, in
monuments, and in social customs, survived. The civilization of the
Roman Empire was not Italian but Greek. After the sixth century,
Hellenism--the language, the literature, and the attitude towards
life--was practically lost to the West for nearly a thousand years. It
was recovered at the Renaissance, and from that time to this has been a
potent element in western civilization. The Dark Ages, and the early
Middle Ages, are the period during which the West was cut off from
Hellenism. Yet even then the severance was not complete. For these were
the ages of the Catholic theocracy; and if we had to choose one man as
the founder of Catholicism as a theocratic system, we should have to
name neither Augustine nor St. Paul, still less Jesus Christ, but Plato,
who in the _Laws_ sketches out with wonderful prescience the conditions
for such a polity, and the form which it would be compelled to take.
Even in speculative thought we know that Augustine owed much to the
Platonists, the Schoolmen to Aristotle, the mystics to the pupil of
Proclus whom they called Dionysius. Only Greek science, and the
scientific spirit, were almost completely lost, and a beginning _de
novo_ had to be made when the West shook off its fetters.

Hellenism then is not the mind of a particular ethnic type, nor of a
particular period. It was not destroyed, though it was emasculated, by
the loss of political freedom; it was neither killed nor died a natural
death. Its philosophy was continuous from Thales to Proclus, and again
from Ficino and Pico to Lotze and Bradley, after a long sleep which was
not death. Its religion passes into Christian theology and cultus
without any real break. The early Church spoke in Greek and thought in
Greek. In the days of Greek freedom to be a Greek had meant to be a
citizen of a Greek canton; after Alexander it meant to have Greek
culture. None of the great Stoics were natives of Greece proper; Zeno
himself was a Semite. Of the later Greek writers, Marcus Aurelius was a
Romanized Spaniard, Plotinus possibly a Copt, Porphyry and Lucian
Syrians, Philo, St. Paul, and probably the Fourth Evangelist were Jews.
These men all belong to the history of Greek culture. And if these were
Greeks how shall we deny the name to Raphael and Michael Angelo, to
Spenser and Sidney, to Keats and Shelley? When Blake wrote--

    The sun's light when he unfolds it,
    Depends on the organ that beholds it,

he was summing up, not only the philosophy of the Lake Poets but the
fundamental dogma of the maturest Greek thought. Would not Plato have
rejoiced in Michael Angelo's confession of faith, which Wordsworth has
translated for us?

    Heaven-born, the soul a heavenward course must hold;
    Beyond the visible world she soars to seek
    (For what delights the sense is false and weak)
    Ideal Form, the universal mould.
    The wise man, I affirm, can find no rest
    In that which perishes; nor will he lend
    His heart to aught that doth on time depend.

Has the highest aspect of Greek religion ever been better expressed than
by Wordsworth himself, to whom, as to Blake, it came by inspiration and
not from books?

    While yet a child, and long before his time
    Had he perceived the presence and the power
    Of greatness; and deep feelings had impressed
    So vividly great objects that _they lay_
    _Upon his mind like substances_, whose presence
    Perplexed the bodily sense.

The spirit of man does not live only on tradition; it can draw direct
from the fountain-head. We are dealing with a permanent type of human
culture, which is rightly named after the Greeks, since it attained its
chief glory in the literature and art of the Hellenic cities, but which
cannot be separated from western civilization as an alien importation.
Without what we call our debt to Greece we should have neither our
religion nor our philosophy nor our science nor our literature nor our
education nor our politics. We should be mere barbarians. We need not
speculate how much we might ultimately have discovered for ourselves.
Our civilization is a tree which has its roots in Greece, or, to borrow
a more appropriate metaphor from Clement of Alexandria, it is a river
which has received affluents from every side; but its head waters are
Greek. The continuity of Greek thought and practice in religion and
religious philosophy is especially important, and it is necessary to
emphasize it because the accident of our educational curriculum leaves
in the minds of most students a broad chasm between the Stoics and the
Christians, ignores the later Greek philosophy of religion altogether,
and traces Christian dogma back to Palestine, with which it has very
little connexion.

Our sense of continuity is dulled in another way. There is a tendency to
isolate certain aspects of Hellenic life and thought as characteristic,
and to stamp others, which are equally found among the ancient Greeks,
as untypical and exceptional. In the sphere of religion, with which we
are concerned in this essay, we are bidden to regard Plato and Euripides
as rebels against the national tradition, and not as normal products of
their age and country. I do not feel at liberty to pick and choose in
this fashion. A national character may be best exemplified in its
rebels, a religion in its heretics. If Nietzsche was right in calling
Plato a Christian before Christ, I do not therefore regard him as an
unhellenic Greek. Rather, I trace back to him, and so to Greece, the
religion and the political philosophy of the Christian Church, and the
Christian type of mysticism. If Euripides anticipated to an
extraordinary degree the devout agnosticism, the vague pantheism, the
humanitarian sentiment of the nineteenth (rather than of the twentieth)
century, I do not consider that he was a freak in fifth-century Athens,
but that Greece showed us the way even in paths where we have not been
used to look to her for guidance. I am equally reluctant to assume,
without evidence, that the later Platonism, whether we call it religion
or philosophy, is unhellenic. It is quite unnecessary to look for
Asiatic influences in a school which clung close to the Attic tradition.
It is more to the purpose to show how a religious philosophy of mystical
revelation and introspection grew naturally out of the older
nature-philosophies, just as in our own day metaphysics and science have
both been driven back upon the theory of knowledge and psychology. It
should not be necessary to remind Hellenists that 'Know thyself' passed
for the supreme word of wisdom in the classical period, or that
Heracleitus revealed his method in the words 'I searched myself'.

We shall come presently to certain parts of our modern heritage which
are not Greek either by origin or by affinity. These will not be found
in Euripides or Plato any more than in Herodotus or Sophocles. But some
developments of religion which our Hellenists particularly dislike, and
are therefore anxious to disclaim as alien to Greek thought and
practice, such as asceticism, sacramental magic, religious persecution,
and timid reliance on authority, are maladies of the Greek spirit, and
came into the Church from Hellenistic and not from Jewish sources. It
was Cleanthes who wished to treat Aristarchus as the Church treated
Galileo, for anticipating Galileo's discovery. It was Plutarch, or
rather his revered father, who said, 'You seem to me to be handling a
very great and dangerous subject, or rather to be raising questions
which ought not to be raised at all, when you question the opinion we
hold about the gods, and ask reasons and proofs for everything. The
ancient and ancestral faith is enough; and if on one point its fixed and
traditional character be disturbed, it will be undermined and no one
will trust it'. It is true that Celsus accused the Christians of saying,
'Do not inquire; only believe.' But this was not the attitude of Clement
and Origen, still less of that most courageous pioneer St. Paul; it was
rather the attitude of the average devout pagan. At this time the
defence of popular superstition was no longer a matter of mere policy
but of heartfelt need. Marcus Aurelius was a great immolator of white
cows. The Christians were disliked, not as superstitious, but as
impious. Alexander of Abunoteichos expelled 'Christians and Epicureans'
by name from his _séances_. Lucian is the Voltaire of a credulous age.
As for sacerdotal magic, Ovid explicitly ascribed the _ex opere operato_
doctrine to the Greeks.

    Graecia principium moris fuit; illa nocentes
      impia lustratos ponere facta putat,
    a nimium faciles, qui tristia crimina caedis
      fluminea tolli posse putatis aqua.

The Christian Church was the last great creative achievement of the
classical culture. It is neither Asiatic nor mediaeval in its essential
character. It is not Asiatic; Christianity is the least Oriental of all
the great religions. The Semites either shook it off and reverted to a
Judaism purged of its Hellenic elements, or enrolled themselves with
fervour under the banner of Islam, which Westcott called 'a petrified
Judaism'. Christian missions have had no success in any Asiatic
country. Nor is there anything specifically mediaeval about Catholicism.
It preserved the idea of Roman imperialism, after the secular empire of
the West had disappeared, and even kept the tradition of the secular
empire alive. It modelled all its machinery on the Roman Empire, and
consecrated the Roman claim to universal dominion, with the Roman law of
_maiestas_ against all who disputed its authority. Even its favourite
penalty of the 'avenging flames' is borrowed from the later Roman codes.
It maintained the official language of antiquity, and the imperial title
of the autocrat who reigned on the Seven Hills. Nor were the early
Christians so anxious as is often supposed to disclaim this continuity.
At first, it is true, their apologetic was directed to proving their
continuity with Judaism; but Judaism ceased to count for much after the
destruction of the Holy City in A. D. 70, and the second-century
apologists appeal for toleration on the ground that the best Greek
philosophers taught very much the same as what Christians believe. 'We
teach the same as the Greeks', says Justin Martyr, 'though we alone are
hated for what we teach.' 'Some among us', says Tertullian, 'who are
versed in ancient literature, have written books to prove that we have
embraced no tenets for which we have not the support of common and
public literature.' 'The teachings of Plato', says Justin again, 'are
not alien to those of Christ; and the same is true of the Stoics.'
'Heracleitus and Socrates lived in accordance with the divine Logos',
and should be reckoned as Christians. Clement says that Plato wrote 'by
inspiration of God'. Augustine, much later, finds that 'only a few words
and phrases' need be changed to bring Platonism into complete accord
with Christianity. The ethics of contemporary paganism, as Harnack
shows, with special reference to Porphyry, are almost identical with
those of the Christians of his day. They differ in many points from the
standards of 500 years earlier and from those of 1,500 years later, but
the divergences are neither racial nor credal. Catholic Christianity is
historically continuous with the old civilization, which indeed
continued to live in this region after its other traditions and customs
had been shattered. There are few other examples in history of so great
a difference between appearance and reality. Outwardly, the continuity
with Judaism seems to be unbroken, that with paganism to be broken. In
reality, the opposite is the fact.

This most important truth has been obscured from many causes. The gap in
history made by our educational tradition has been already mentioned.
And our histories of the early Church are too often warped by an
unfortunate bias. Christianity has been judged at its best, paganism at
its worst. The rhetorical denunciations of writers like Seneca, Juvenal,
and Tacitus are taken at their face value, and few have remembered the
convention which obliged a satirist to be scathing, or the political
prejudice of the Stoics against the monarchy, or the non-representative
character of fashionable life in the capital. The modern Church
historian, as Mr. Benn says, has gathered his experience in a college
quadrangle or a cathedral close, and knows little enough about his own
country, next to nothing about what morality was in the Middle Ages, and
nothing at all about what it still is in many parts of Europe. In the
most recent books, however, there is a real desire to hold the scales
fairly, and Christianity has nothing to fear from an impartial
judgement.

There is also an assumption, which we find even in such learned writers
as Harnack and Hatch, that the Hellenic element in Christianity is an
accretion which transformed the new religion from its original purity
and half-paganized Europe again. They would like to prove that
underneath Catholicism was a primitive Protestantism, which owed nothing
to Greece. The truth is that the Church was half Greek from the first,
though, as I shall say presently, the original Gospel was not. St. Paul
was a Jew of the Dispersion, not of Palestine, and the Christianity to
which he was converted was the Christianity of Stephen, not of James the
Lord's brother. His later epistles are steeped in the phraseology of the
Greek mysteries. The Epistle to the Hebrews and the Fourth Gospel are
unintelligible without some knowledge of Philo, whose theology is more
Greek than Jewish. In the conflict about the nature of the future life,
it was the Greek eschatology which prevailed over the Jewish. St. Paul's
famous declaration, 'We look not at the things which are seen, but at
the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are
temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal', is pure
Platonism and quite alien to Jewish thought. Judaic Christianity was a
local affair, and had a very short life.

Further, too much is made of the conflict between the official cults of
paganism and Christian public worship. It is forgotten how completely,
in Hellenistic times, religion and philosophy were fused. Without
under-estimating the simple piety which, especially in country
districts, still attached itself to the temples and their ritual, we may
say confidently that the vital religion of the empire was associated
with the mystery-religions and with the discipline of the 'philosophic
life'. It is in this region that the continuity of Catholicism with
Hellenism is mainly to be found. The philosophers at this time were
preachers, confessors, chaplains, and missionaries. The clerical
profession, in nearly all its activities, is directly descended from the
Hellenistic philosophers.

This claim of continuity may seem paradoxical when we remember the
savage persecutions of the Christians by the imperial government. Of
these persecutions there were several causes. The empire, like all
empires of the same type, rested partly on religious support. Augustus
encouraged his court poets to advocate a revival of piety and sound
morals. A government cannot inquire into religious conviction, but it
can enforce conformity and outward respect for the forms of worship as
'by law established'. The Christians and Epicureans were held guilty of
the same political offence--'atheism'. The State had no quarrel with the
mystery-religions, which were a private matter, but open disrespect to
the national deities was flat disloyalty. The pagans could not
understand why the Church would make no terms with the fusion of
religions (θεοκρασια {theokrasia}) which seemed to them the natural
result of the fusion of nationalities. Apuleius makes Isis say, when she
reveals herself to Lucius, 'cuius numen unicum multiformi specie, ritu
vario, nomine multiiugo totus veneratur orbis'; and she then recounts
her various names. This more than tolerant hospitality of the spirit
seemed to the mixed population of the empire the logical recognition of
the actual political situation, and those who deliberately stood outside
it were at least potentially enemies of society. This was the real
quarrel between the Church and the empire. It is the old State religion
which Augustine attacks, ridiculing the innumerable Roman godlings whose
names he perhaps found in Varro. It is true that Plato, Euripides, and
Xenophanes had attacked the official mythology with hardly less
asperity; but they did not escape censure, and the Christian alienation
from the Olympians was far more fundamental.

The pagan revival under the empire was rather like Neo-Catholicism in
France. It was patriotic, nationalistic, and conservative, rather than
strictly religious. Celsus, in his lost book against the Christians,
seems to have appealed to their patriotism, urging them to support their
country and its government in dangerous times. As the Church grew in
numbers and power, and the old traditions crumbled away, largely from
the fall in the birth-rate among the upper and middle classes, the
conservatives became more anxiously attached to their own culture, and
saw in Christianity a 'shapeless darkness' which threatened to
extinguish 'all the beautiful things in the world'. We can partly
sympathize with this alarm, though not with the foolish policy which it
inspired. The early persecutions were like Russian 'pogroms', instigated
or connived at by the government as a safety valve for popular
discontent. For at this time the common people hated the Christians, and
half believed the monstrous stories about them. The attacks were not
continuous, and were half-hearted, very unlike the systematic
extermination of Jews and Protestants in Spain. At Alexandria Hadrian
found a money-loving population worshipping Christ and Sarapis almost
indifferently. A wrong impression is formed if we picture to ourselves
two sections of society engaged in constant war. The first real war was
the last, under Diocletian; it was to decide whether paganism or
Christianity was to be the state religion. However, there is no doubt
that the persecutions helped to seal the fate of the old culture.

Harnack traces three stages in the Hellenization of Christianity. 'In
the earliest Christian writings, apart from Paul, Luke, and John', he
cannot find any considerable traces of Greek influence. 'The real influx
of Greek thought and life' began about 130. The exception is so
important as to make this statement of little or no value. After 130, he
says, 'the philosophy of Greece went straight to the core of the new
religion'. A century or so later, 'Greek mysteries and Greek
civilization in the whole range of its development exercise their
influence on the Church, but as yet not its mythology and polytheism;
these were still to come'. 'Another century had to elapse before
Hellenism as a whole and in every phase of its development was
established in the Church.' The process which he describes began, in
fact, as soon as Christian preachers used the Greek language, and was
never so complete as he says. The Logos-Christology, to which he justly
attributes the greatest importance, is already present in St. Paul's
epistles; the name only is wanting; and the sharp contradiction which
he finds between the Christian idea of a revelation made through a
person at a certain date, and the Greek idea of an apprehension of
timeless and changeless truth, always open to individuals after the
appropriate discipline, was faced and in part overcome by the Greek
Fathers. Harnack also regards Gnosticism as an embodiment of the
genuinely Greek view of revelation, forgetting that orthodox Platonism
was as hostile to Gnosticism as the Church itself. In rejecting
Gnosticism, the Church in fact decided for genuine Hellenism against a
corrupted and barbarized development of it. On the other hand, there is
no period at which we can speak of a complete conquest of Christianity
by Greek ideas. There was a large part of the old tradition which
perished with its defenders, who, obeying the melancholy law which
directs human survival, died out to make way for immigrants and for the
formerly submerged classes, the people with few wants, who were
indifferent to a culture which they had never been allowed to share.

One more cause of misunderstanding may be illustrated from the writings
of Matthew Arnold. He divides the human race into Hebraizers and
Hellenizers, and classifies the modern English and Americans as
Hebraizers. The fundamental maxim of Hebrew ethics, according to him, is
'Walk by the light you have'; of Greek ethics, 'Take heed that the light
which is in thee is not darkness'. The Hebraizer is conscientious but
unenlightened; the Hellenizer is clear-headed but unscrupulous.
Professor Santayana has lately noted the same difference between the
type of character developed by the Latin nations and by the
Anglo-Saxons. The Mediterranean civilization, older and more
sophisticated, is careful to get its values right; the northern man is
bent on doing something big, no matter what, and follows Clough's
advice:

    Go! say not in thine heart, And what then, were it accomplished,
      Were the wild impulse allayed, what is the use and the good?

But Santayana does not make the mistake of regarding the Reformation as
a return to Palestinian Christianity. This was, indeed, the opinion of
the Reformers themselves; but all religious innovation seeks to base
itself on some old tradition. Christianity at first sought for its
credentials in Judaism, though the Jews saw very quickly that it
'destroyed the Law'. The belief of the Reformers was plausible; for they
rejected just those parts of Catholicism which had nothing to do with
Palestine, but were taken over from the old Hellenic or Hellenistic
culture. But the residuum was less Jewish than Teutonic. On one side,
indeed, the Reformation was a return to Hellenism from Romanism. Early
Christian philosophy was mainly Platonic; early Christian ethics (as
exemplified especially in writers like Ambrose) were mainly Stoical.
There had been a considerable fusion of Plato and the Stoa among the
Neoplatonists, so that it was easy for the two to flourish together.
Augustine banished Stoical ethics from the Church, and they were revived
only at the Reformation. Calvinism is simply baptized Stoicism; it is
logically pantheistic, since it acknowledges only one effective will in
the universe. The creed of nineteenth-century science is very similar.
Puritanism was not at all like Judaism, in spite of its fondness for the
Old Testament; it was very like Stoicism. The Reformation was a revolt
against Latin theocracy and the hereditary paganism of the Mediterranean
peoples; it was not really a return to pre-Hellenic Christianity. It
sheltered the humanism of Erasmus and the late-flowering English
Renaissance, and Christian Platonism has nowhere had a more flourishing
record than in Protestant Britain.

At the present time a more drastic revolt is in progress among the
_plebs urbana_, which does in truth threaten with destruction 'what we
owe to Greece'. The industrial revolution has generated a new type of
barbarism, with no roots in the past. For the second time in the history
of Western Europe, continuity is in danger of being lost. A generation
is growing up, not uneducated, but educated in a system which has little
connexion with European culture in its historical development. The
Classics are not taught; the Bible is not taught; history is not taught
to any effect. What is even more serious, there are no social
traditions. The modern townsman is _déraciné_: he has forgotten the
habits and sentiments of the village from which his forefathers came. An
unnatural and unhealthy mode of life, cut off from the sweet and
humanizing influences of nature, has produced an unnatural and unhealthy
mentality, to which we shall find no parallels in the past. Its chief
characteristic is profound secularity or materialism. The typical town
artisan has no religion and no superstitions; he has no ideals beyond
the visible and tangible world of the senses. This of course opens an
impassable gulf between him and Greek religion, and a still wider gulf
between him and Christianity. The attempts which are occasionally made,
especially in this country, to dress up the Labour movement as a return
to the Palestinian Gospel, are little short of grotesque. The contrast
is well summed up by Belfort Bax, in a passage quoted by Professor
Gardner. 'According to Christianity, regeneration must come from within.
The ethics and religion of modern socialism on the contrary look for
regeneration from without, from material conditions and a higher social
life.' Here the gauntlet is thrown down to Christ and Plato alike.

Quite logically the new spirit is in revolt against what it calls
intellectualism, which means the application of the dry light of reason
to the problems of human life. It wishes to substitute for reason what
some of its philosophers call instinct, but which should rather be
called sentiment and emotion. There is no reconciliation between this
view of life and Hellenism. For science is the eldest and dearest child
of the Greek spirit. One of the great battles of the future will be
between science and its enemies. The misologists have numbers on their
side; but 'Nature', whom all the Greeks honoured and trusted, will be
justified in her children.

The new spirit is especially bitter against the Stoical ethics, which as
we have seen were taken over, with the Platonic metaphysics, by
Christianity. Stoicism teaches men to venerate and obey natural law; to
accept with proud equanimity the misfortunes of life; to be beneficent,
but to inhibit the emotion of pity; to be self-reliant and
self-contained; to practise self-denial for the sake of self-conquest;
and to regard this life as a stern school of moral discipline. All this
is simply detestable to the new spirit, which is sentimental,
undisciplined, and hedonistic. It remembers the hardness of Puritanism,
and has no admiration for its virtues.

It is often said that the modern man has entirely lost the Greek love of
beauty. This is, I think, untrue, and unjust to our present
civilization, unlovely as it undoubtedly is in many ways. It is curious
that modern critics of the Greeks have not called attention to the
_aesthetic_ obtuseness which showed itself in the defective reaction of
the ancients against cruelty. It was not that they excluded beautiful
actions from the sphere of aesthetics; they never thought of separating
the beautiful from the good in this way. But they were not disgusted at
the torture of slaves, the exposure of new-born children, or the
massacre of the population of a revolted city. The same callousness
appears in the Italian cities at the Renaissance; Ezzelino was a
contemporary of the great architects and painters. I cannot avoid the
conclusion that it is connected in some obscure way with the artistic
creativeness of these two closely similar epochs. The extreme
sensibility to physical suffering which characterizes modern
civilization arose together with industrialism, and is most marked in
the most highly industrialized countries. It has synchronized with the
complete eclipse of spontaneous and unconscious artistic production,
which we deplore in our time. Evelyn, in the seventeenth century, was
still able to visit a prison in Paris to gratify his curiosity by seeing
a prisoner tortured, and though he did not stay to the end of the
exhibition he shows that his stomach was not easily turned. It is
certain that our repugnance to such sights is aesthetic rather than
moral, and probable that it is strongest in the lower social strata.
Several years ago I went to the first night of a rather foolish play
about ancient Rome, in which an early Christian is brought in to be very
mildly tortured on the stage. At the first crack of the whip my
neighbours sprang from their seats, crying, 'Shame! Stop that!'; and the
scene had to be removed in subsequent performances. The operatives in a
certain factory stopped the engines for an hour because they heard a cat
mewing among the machinery. Having with difficulty rescued the animal
from being crushed they strangled it. The explanation of this extreme
susceptibleness must be left to psychologists; but I am convinced that
we have here a case of transferred aesthetic sensibility. We can walk
unmoved down the streets of Plaistow, but we cannot bear to see a horse
beaten. The Athenians set up no Albert Memorials, but they tortured
slave-girls in their law-courts and sent their prisoners to work in the
horrible galleries of the Laureion silver-mines.

This emergence of a new spirit, which seems to be almost independent of
all traditions, makes it difficult to estimate our present indebtedness
to Greece in matters of religion. It would be difficult even if the
industrial revolution had not taken place. The northern Europeans have
hardly yet attained to self-expression. Their religion is a mixture of
Greek, Latin, and Hebrew elements which refuse to be harmonized, and
which in this country sometimes clash with the ideal of a gentleman,
that lay religion of the English-speaking peoples, which has no longer
any connexion with heraldry or property in land. The English gentleman
is not a Greek any more than he is a Jew. His code makes Odysseus an
amusing rascal; Achilles a violent and sulky savage; and Aristotle's
μεγαλοψυχος {megalopsychos} (as has been said) is rather like a nobleman
in a novel by Disraeli, but not like any other sort of gentleman. The
Englishman is by nature religious; but Christianity in its developed
form is a Mediterranean religion; in all external features it might have
been very different if it had been first planted north of the Alps.
There is, therefore, a chronic confusion in Protestantism which makes
its conflicts with the Latin Church like the battles of undisciplined
barbarians against well-drilled troops.

Nevertheless, though it is so difficult to separate out the various
threads which make up the tangled skein of our modern religion, it may
be worth while to make the attempt to distinguish, first, those parts of
current Christianity which are not Greek, in the wide sense which I have
chosen for the word, and then those which, in the same sense, are Greek
by origin or affinity.

Among those elements which are not Greek, the first place must be given
to the original Gospel, of which I have said nothing yet. Our records of
the Galilean ministry, contained in the three synoptic Gospels, were not
compiled till long after the events which they describe, and must not be
used uncritically. But in my opinion, at any rate, the substance of the
teaching of Christ comes out very clearly in these books. No Hellenic
influence can be traced in it; there is not even any sign of the
Hellenized Judaism which for us is represented by his contemporary
Philo. But neither is it possible to call the Gospel Jewish, except with
many qualifications. Christ came before his countrymen as a prophet; he
deliberately placed himself in the line of the prophetic tradition.
Like other prophets of his nation, he did not altogether eschew the
framework of apocalyptic which was at that time the natural mould for
prophecy. But he preached neither the popular nationalism, nor the
popular ecclesiasticism, nor the popular ethics. His countrymen rejected
him as soon as they understood him. The Gospel was, as St. Paul said, a
new creation. It is most significant that it at once introduced a new
ethical terminology. The Greek words which we translate love (or
charity), joy, peace, hope, humility, are no part of the stock-in-trade
of Greek moralists before Christ. Men do not coin new words for old
ideas. Taken as a whole the Gospel is profoundly original; and a
Christian can find strong evidence for his belief that in Christ a
revelation was made to humanity at large, in which the religion of the
Spirit, in its purest and most universal form, was for the first time
presented to mankind. This revelation has to a considerable extent
passed into the common consciousness of the civilized world; but its
implications in matters of conduct, individual, social, and
international, are still imperfectly understood and have never been
acted upon, except feebly and sporadically. It is a reproach to us that
the teaching of Christ must be regarded as only one of many elements
which make up what we call Christianity. The Quakers, as a body, seem to
me to come nearest to what a genuinely Christian society would be.

Secondly, the Greeks escaped the evils of priestly government. The
Oriental type of theocracy, with which they were familiar in the Egypt
of the Pharaohs, was alien to their civilization. Their sacrifices were
for the most part of the genial type, a communion-meal with the god. But
even in Greece we must remember the gloomy chthonian rites, and the
degradations of Orphism mentioned by Plato in the _Republic_. 'They
persuade not only individuals but whole cities that expiations and
atonements for sin may be made by sacrifices and amusements which fill
a vacant hour, and are equally at the service of the living and of the
dead; the latter sort they call mysteries, and they redeem us from the
pains of hell, but if we neglect them no one knows what awaits us.' This
exploitation of sacramentalism was common enough in Greece; but the
characteristic Caesaro-Papism of Byzantium and modern imperialism was
wholly foreign to Hellenism. It was introduced by Constantine as part of
the Orientalizing of the empire begun by Diocletian. As Seeley says,
'Constantine purchased an indefeasible title by a charter. He gave
certain liberties and received in return passive obedience. He gained a
sanction for the Oriental theory of government; in return he accepted
the law of the Church. He became irresponsible to his subjects on
condition of becoming responsible to Christ.'

The Greeks never had a book-religion, in the sense in which Judaism
became, and Islam always was, a book-religion. But they were in some
danger of treating Homer and Hesiod as inspired scriptures. To us it is
plain that a long religious history lies behind Homer, and that the
treatment of the gods in Epic poetry proves that they had almost ceased
to be the objects of religious feeling. Some of them are even comic
characters, like the devil in Scottish folklore. To turn these poems
into sacred literature was to court the ridicule of the Christians. But
Homer was never supposed to contain 'the faith once delivered to the
saints'; no religion of authority could be built upon him, and Greek
speculation remained far more unfettered than the thought of Christendom
has been until our own day.

Those who have observed the actual state of Christianity in
Mediterranean countries cannot lay much stress on the difference between
Christian monotheism and pagan polytheism. The early Church fought
against the tendency to interpose objects of worship between God and
man; but Mariolatry came in through a loophole, and the worship of the
masses in Roman Catholic countries is far more pagan than the
service-books. In the imagination of many simple Catholics, Jesus, Mary,
and Joseph are the chief potentates in their Olympus.

The doctrine of the creation of the world in time, which was denied by
most pagan thinkers and affirmed by most Christian divines, belongs to
philosophy rather than to religion. The disbelief in the pre-existence
of the soul, a doctrine which for Greek thought stands or falls with the
belief in survival after death, is more important, and may be partly
attributable to Jewish influence. But pre-existence does not seem to
have been believed by the majority of Greeks, and in fact almost
disappears from Greek thought between Plato and the Neoplatonists. It is
possible that the Pythagorean and Platonic doctrine may still have a
future.

There are some who will insist that these differences are insignificant
by the side of the fact that Christianity was the idealistic side of a
revolt of the proletariat against the whole social order of the time.
This notion, which made Christ 'le bon sans-culotte', has again become
popular lately; some have even compared the early Christians with
Bolsheviks. It is a fair question to ask at what period this was even
approximately true. Christ and his apostles belonged to the prosperous
peasantry of Galilee, a well-educated and comfortable middle class. The
domestic slaves of wealthy Romans, who embraced the new faith in large
numbers, were legally defenceless, but by no means miserable or
degraded. After the second century the comparison of the Christians to
modern revolutionists becomes too absurd for discussion. There is a good
deal of rhetorical declamation about riches and poverty in the Christian
Fathers; but unfortunately the Church seems to have done very little to
protest against the crying economic injustices of the fourth and fifth
centuries. From first to last there was nothing of the 'Spartacus'
movement about the Catholic Church. As soon as the persecutions ceased,
the bishops took their place naturally among the nobility.

When we turn to the obligations of modern religion to Greece, it is
difficult to know where to begin.

The conception of philosophy as an _ars vivendi_ is characteristically
Greek. Nothing can be further from the truth than to call the Greeks
'intellectualists' in the disparaging sense in which the word is now
often used. The object of philosophy was to teach a man to live well,
and with that object to think rightly about God, the world, and himself.
This close union between metaphysics, morals, and religion has remained
as a permanent possession of the modern world. Every philosopher is now
expected to show the bearing of his system on morality and religion, and
the criticism is often justified that however bold the speculations of
the thinker, he is careful, when he comes to conduct, to be conventional
enough. The Hellenistic combination of Platonic metaphysics with Stoic
ethics is still the dominant type of Christian religious philosophy. It
is curious to observe how competing tendencies in these systems--the
praise of isolated detachment and of active social sympathy--have
continued to struggle against each other within the Christian Church.

The place of asceticism in religion is so important, and so much has
been written rather unintelligently about the contrast between Hellenism
and Christianity in this matter, that I propose to deal with it, briefly
indeed, but with a little more detail than a strict attention to
proportion would justify. It has often been assumed that a nation of
athletes, who made heroes of Heracles and Theseus, Achilles and Hector,
could have had nothing but contempt for the ascetic ideal. But in truth
asceticism has a continuous history within Hellenism. Even Homer knows
of the priests of chilly Dodona, the Selli, whose bare feet are
unwashed, and who sleep on the ground. This is probably not, as
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff thinks, a description of savage life, but of an
ascetic school of prophets. For the fastdays which introduced the
Thesmophoria were observed by the Athenian matrons in the same way; they
went unshod and sat on the bare earth; and we may compare the
Nudipedalia, ordered by the Romans in time of dearth and mentioned by
Petronius and Tertullian. Prophets and prophetesses fasted at Miletus,
Colophon, and other places. National fasts were ordered in times of
calamity or danger, and Tarentum kept a yearly fast of thankfulness for
deliverance from a siege. The flagellation of boys at Sparta hardly
comes into account, being probably a substitute for human sacrifice; but
the continuance of the cruel rite till nearly the end of antiquity
causes surprise. The worship of Dionysus Zagreus in Thrace was
accompanied by ascetic practices before Pythagoras. Vegetarianism, which
has always played an important part in the ascetic life, was obligatory
on all Pythagoreans; but in this school there was another motive besides
the desire to mortify the flesh. Those who believe in the transmigration
of souls into the bodies of animals must regard flesh-eating as little
better than cannibalism. The Pythagorean and the Orphic rules of life
were well known throughout antiquity, and were probably obeyed by large
numbers. The rule of continence was far less strict than in the Catholic
'religious' life; but Empedocles, according to Hippolytus, advised
abstinence from marriage and procreation, and the tendency to regard
celibacy as part of the 'philosophic life' increased steadily. The Cynic
Antisthenes is quoted by Clement of Alexandria as having expressed a
wish to 'shoot Aphrodite, who has ruined so many virtuous women'. But
the asceticism of the early Cynics and of some Stoics was based not on
self-devotion and spirituality but on the desire for independence, and
often took repulsive forms. Of some among them it may be said that they
did not object to sensual pleasure, they only objected to having to pay
for it. Desire for self-sufficiency is always part of asceticism, but
in the Christian saints it has been a small part. The Greeks who
practised it were from first to last too anxious to be invulnerable;
this was the main attraction of the philosophic life from the time of
Antisthenes, and it remained the main attraction to the end. But
Cynicism and Stoicism (which tend to run together) became gentler, more
humane, and more spiritual under the Roman empire. Seneca, Epictetus,
and Marcus Aurelius often seem to be half Christian. Direct influence of
Christian ethics at this early period is perhaps unlikely; it is enough
to suppose that the spirit of the age affected in a similar way all
creeds and denominations. Self-mortification tended to assume more and
more violent forms, till it culminated in the strange aberrations of
Egyptian eremitism. It is impossible to regard these as either Greek or
Christian; they indicate a pathological state of society, which can be
partly but not entirely accounted for by the conditions of the time.
After a few centuries a far more wholesome type of monachism supplanted
the hermits; the anchorites of the Middle Ages retained the solitary
life, but were very unlike the crazy savages of the Thebaid. In modern
times, those who have been most under the Greek spirit have generally
lived with austere simplicity, but without any of the violent
self-discipline which is said to be still practised by some devout
Catholics. The assiduous practice of self-mastery and the most sparing
indulgence in the pleasures of sense are the 'philosophic life' which
the Greek spirit recommends as the highest. The best Greeks would blame
the life of an English clergyman, professor, or philosopher as too
self-indulgent; we often forget how frugally and hardily the Greeks
lived at all times. But here we have to consider the differences of
climate, and the apparent necessity of a rather generous diet for the
Nordic race.

The influence of the Greek mysteries upon Christianity is a keenly
debated question, in which passion and prejudice play too large a part.
The information necessary for forming a judgement has been much enlarged
by recent discoveries in Egypt and elsewhere, and, as usually happens,
the importance of the new facts has been sometimes exaggerated.
Protestant theology has on the whole minimized the influence of the
mysteries, and has post-dated it, from an unwillingness to allow that
there was already a strong Catholic element in the Christianity of the
first century. Orthodox Catholicism has ignored it from different but
equally obvious motives. Modernist Catholicism has in my opinion
antedated the irruption of crude sacramentalism into the Church, and has
greatly overstated its importance in the religion of the first-century
Christians. This school practically denies anything more than a
half-accidental continuity between the preaching of the historical
Christ, whom they strangely suppose to have been a mere apocalyptist,
one of the many Messiahs or Mahdis who arose at this period in
Palestine, and the Catholic Church, which according to them belonged to
the same type of religion as the worship of Isis and Mithra. Another
bone of contention is the value of the mystery-religions of Greece. The
very able German scholars who have written on the subject, such as
Reitzenstein and still more Rohde, seem to me much too unsympathetic in
their treatment of the mystery-cults. Lastly, some competent critics
have lately urged that this side of Christianity owed more to
Judaism--Hellenized Judaism, of course--than has been hitherto supposed.

Plato in the _Phaedo_ says that 'those who established our mysteries
declare that all who come to Hades uninitiated will lie in the mud;
while he who has been purified and initiated will dwell with the gods'.
For, as they say in the mysteries, 'Many are the thyrsus-bearers, but
few are the inspired'. This sacramentalism was not unchallenged, as we
have already seen from Plato himself. Diogenes is said to have asked
whether the robber Pataecion was better off in the other world than the
hero Epaminondas, because the former had been initiated, and the latter
had not. But Orphism, though liable to degradation, purified and
elevated the old Bacchic rites. As Miss Harrison says, the Bacchanals
hoped to attain unity with God by intoxication, the Orphics by
abstinence. The way to salvation was now through 'holiness' (ὁσιοτης
{hosiotês}). To the initiated the assurance was given, 'Happy and
blessed one! Thou shalt be a god instead of a mortal.' To be a god meant
for a Greek simply to be immortal; the Orphic saint was delivered from
the painful cycle of recurring births and deaths. And Orphic purity was
mainly, though not entirely, the result of moral discipline. Cumont says
that the mystery-cults brought with them two new things--mysterious
means of purification by which they proposed to cleanse away the
defilements of the soul, and the assurance that an immortality of bliss
would be the reward of piety. The truth, says Mr. H. A. Kennedy, was
presented to them in the guise of divine revelations, esoteric doctrines
to be carefully concealed from the gaze of the profane, doctrines which
placed in their hands a powerful apparatus for gaining deliverance from
the assaults of malicious demonic influences, and above all for
overcoming the relentless tyranny of fate. This demonology was believed
everywhere under the Roman empire, the period of which Mr. Kennedy is
thinking in this sentence, and it has unfortunately left more traces in
St. Paul's epistles than we like to allow. The formation of brotherhoods
for mystic worship was also an important step in the development of
Greek religion. These brotherhoods were cosmopolitan, and seem to have
flourished especially at great seaports. They were thoroughly popular,
drawing most of their support from the lower classes, and within them
national and social distinctions were ignored. Their ultimate aim cannot
be summed up better than in Mr. Kennedy's words--'to raise the soul
above the transiency of perishable matter through actual union with the
Divine'. It has been usual to distinguish between the dignified and
officially recognized mysteries, like those of Eleusis, and the
independent voluntary associations, some of which became important. But
there was probably no essential difference between them. In neither case
was there much definite teaching; the aim, as Aristotle says, was to
produce a certain emotional state (ου μαθειν τι δειν αλλα παθειν {ou
mathein ti dein alla pathein}). A passion-play was enacted amid the most
impressive surroundings, and we need not doubt that the moral effect was
beneficial and sometimes profound. When the Egyptian mysteries of Isis
and Osiris were fused with the Hellenic, a type of worship was evolved
which was startlingly like Christianity. A famous Egyptian text contains
the promise: 'As truly as Osiris lives, shall he [the worshipper] live;
as truly as Osiris is not dead, shall he not die.' The thanksgiving to
Isis at the end of the _Metamorphoses_ of Apuleius is very beautiful in
itself, though it is an odd termination of a licentious novel. The
Hermetic literature also contains doctrine of a markedly Johannine type,
as notably in a prayer to Isis: 'Glorify me, as I have glorified the
name of thy son Horus.' I agree with those critics (Cumont, Zielinski,
and others) who attach the 'higher' Hermetic teaching to genuinely
Hellenic sources. But it is not necessary to ascribe all the higher
teaching to Greece and the lower to Egypt.

Much of St. Paul's theology belongs to the same circle of ideas as these
mysteries. Especially important is the psychology which divides human
nature into spirit, soul, and body, spirit being the divine element into
which those who are saved are transformed by the 'knowledge of God'.
This knowledge is a supernatural gift, which (in the _Poimandres_)
confers 'deification'. St. Paul usually prefers 'Pneuma' as the name of
this highest part of human nature; in the Hermetic literature it is not
easy to distinguish between Pneuma and Nous, which holds exactly the
same place in Neoplatonism. The notion of salvation as consisting in the
knowledge of God is not infrequent in St. Paul; compare, for example, 1
Cor. xiii. 12 and a still more important passage, Phil. ii. 8-10. This
knowledge was partly communicated by visions and revelations, to which
St. Paul attributed some importance; but on the whole he is consistent
in treating knowledge as the crown and consummation of faith. The
pneumatic transformation of the personality is the centre of St. Paul's
eschatology. 'Though our outward man perish, our inward man is renewed
day by day.' The 'spiritual body' is the vehicle of the transformed
personality; for 'flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God'.
The expression 'to be born again' is common in the mystery literature.

It would be easy to find many other parallels in St. Paul's epistles, in
the Johannine books which are the best commentary upon them, and in the
theology of the Greek Fathers, which prove the close connexion of early
Christianity with the mystery-religions of the empire. Twenty years ago
it might have been worth while to draw out these resemblances in greater
detail, even in so summary a survey as this. But at present the tendency
is, if not to over-estimate the debt of the Christian religion to
Hellenistic thought and worship, at any rate to ignore the great
difference between the higher elements in the mystery-religions, which
the new faith could gladly and readily assimilate, and the lower type,
the theosophy, magic, and theurgy, which was not in the line of Hellenic
development, and is not to be found in the New Testament. Wendland,
always a judicious critic, has said very truly that St. Paul stands to
the mystery-religions as Plato to Orphism; they are not the centre of
his religious life, but they gave him effective forms of expression for
his religious experience. Or, as Weinel says, 'St. Paul's doctrine of
the Spirit and of Christ is not an imitation of mystery-doctrine, but
inmost personal experience metaphysically interpreted after the manner
of his time.' Writers like Loisy, who say that for St. Paul Jesus was
'a Saviour God, after the manner of Osiris, Attis, or Mithra', and who
proceed to draw out obvious parallels between the sufferings, death, and
resurrection of these mythological personages and the gospels of the
Christian Church, surely forget that St. Paul was a Jew, and that there
are some transformations of which the religious mind is incapable. He
never speaks of Christ as a 'Saviour God'. Even more perverse are the
arguments which are used to prove that the centre of St. Paul's religion
was a gross and materialistic sacramental magic. The apostle, whose
antipathy to ritual in every shape is stamped upon all his writings, who
thanks God that he baptized very few of the Corinthians, who declares
that 'Christ sent him not to baptize but to preach the Gospel', is
accused of regarding baptism as 'an _opus operatum_ which secures a
man's admission into the kingdom apart from the character of his future
conduct'. And yet in the Epistle to the Romans, as Weinel says, 'baptism
only once enters his mind, and the Lord's Supper not even once'. Baptism
for him is no _opus operatum_, but a ceremony of social significance, a
symbol conditioning a deeper experience of divine grace, already
embraced by faith. These same critics proceed to illustrate St. Paul's
doctrine of the Lord's Supper by references to the religion of the
Aztecs and other barbarians. But it is hardly worth while to argue with
those who suppose that a man with St. Paul's upbringing and culture
could have dallied with the notion of 'eating a god'. The 'table of the
Lord' is the table at which the Lord is the spiritual host, not the
table on which his flesh is placed. Does any one suppose that 'the table
of demons' which is contrasted with the 'table of the Lord' is the table
at which demons are eaten? Demons had no bodies, as we learn from the
ουκ ειμι δαιμονιον ασωματον {ouk eimi daimonion asômaton} of a
well-known passage in a New Testament manuscript.

Crude sacramentalism certainly came in later. Its parentage may be
traced, if we will, to those mystery-mongers whom Plato mentions with
disapproval. If Hellenism is the name of a way of thinking, this form of
religion is not healthy Hellenism; that it was held by many Hellenes
cannot be denied.

The biblical doctrine of the Fall of Man, which the Hebrews would never
have evolved for themselves, remained an otiose dogma in Jewish
religion. It was revivified in Christianity under Greek influence. Man,
as Empedocles and others had taught, was 'an exile and vagabond from
God'; his body was his tomb; he is clothed in 'an alien garment of
flesh'. He is in a fallen state and needs redemption. Hellenism had
become a religion of redemption; the empire was quite ready to accept
this part of Christian doctrine. The sin of Adam became the first scene
in the great drama of humanity, which led up to the Atonement. At the
same time the whole process was never mere history; its deepest meaning
was enacted in the life-story of each individual. Greek thought gave
this turn to dogmas which for a Jew would have been a flat historical
recital. In modern times the earlier scenes in the story, at any rate,
are looked upon as little more than the dramatization of the normal
experience of a human soul. But Greek thought, while it remained true to
type, never took sin so tragically as Christianity has done. The
struggle against evil has become sterner than it ever was for the
Greeks. It must, however, be remembered that the large majority of
professing Christians do not trouble themselves much about their sins,
and that the best of the Greeks were thoroughly in earnest in seeking to
amend their lives.

Redemption was brought to earth by a Redeemer who was both God and Man.
This again was in accordance with Greek ideas. The Mediator between God
and Man must be fully divine, since an intermediate Being would be in
touch with neither side. The victory of Athanasius was in no sense a
defeat for Hellenism. The only difficulty for a Greek thinker was that
an Incarnate God ought to be impassible. This was a puzzle only for
philosophers; popular religion saw no difficulty in a _Christus
patiens_. The doctrine of the Logos brought Christianity into direct
affinity with both Platonism and Stoicism, and the Second Person of the
Trinity was invested with the same attributes as the Nous of the
Neoplatonists. But the attempts to equate the Trinity with the three
divine hypostases of Plotinus was no more successful than the later
attempt of Hegel to set the Trinity in the framework of his philosophy.

The subject of eschatology is so vast that it is hopeless to deal with
it, even in the most summary fashion, in one paragraph. It is usually
said that the resurrection of the body is a Jewish doctrine, the
immortality of the soul a Greek doctrine. But the Jews were very slow to
bring the idea of a future life into their living faith; to this day it
does not seem to be of much importance in Judaism. Some form of
Millenarianism--a reign of the saints on earth--would seem to be the
natural form for Jewish hopes to take. This belief, which was the
earliest mould into which the treasure of the new revelation was poured,
has never quite disappeared from the Church, and in times of excitement
and upheaval it tends to reassert itself. The maturest Greek philosophy
regards eternity as the divine mode of existence, while mortals are
born, live, and die in time. Man is a microcosm, in touch with every
rung of the ladder of existence; and he is potentially a 'participator'
in the divine mode of existence, which he can make his own by living, so
far as may be, in detachment from the vain shadows and perishable goods
of earth. That this conception of immortality has had a great influence
upon Christian thought and practice needs no demonstration. It is and
always has been the religion of the mystic. But the Orphic tradition,
with its pictures of purgatory and of eternal bliss and torment, has on
the whole dominated the other two in popular Christian belief. It has
been stripped of its accessories--the belief in reincarnation and the
transmigration of souls, doctrines which maintain a somewhat uneasy
existence within the scheme of the Neoplatonists. The picture of future
retribution is even more terrifying without them. Both the philosophical
and the popular beliefs about the other world are far more Greek than
Jewish; but the attempt to hold these very discrepant beliefs together
has reduced Christian eschatology to extreme confusion, and many
Christians have given up the attempt to formulate any theories about
what are called the four last things. On such a mysterious subject,
definiteness is neither to be expected nor desired. The original Gospel
does not encourage the natural curiosity of man to know his future fate;
and the three types of eschatology which we have described have all
their value as representing different aspects of religious faith and
hope. We must after all confess the truth of St. Paul's words, that 'eye
hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of
man to conceive, the things that God hath prepared for them that love
him'. The same apostle reminds us that 'now we see through a mirror, in
riddles, and know only in part'; the face to face vision, and the
knowledge which unites the knower and the known, may be ours when we
have finished our course. In these words, which recall Plato's famous
myth of the Cave, St. Paul is fundamentally at one with the Platonists;
and it may well be that it is by this path that our contemporaries may
recover that belief in eternal life which is at present burning very
dimly among us.

In conclusion, what has the religion of the Greeks to teach us that we
are most in danger of forgetting? In a word, it is the faith that Truth
is our friend, and that the knowledge of Truth is not beyond our reach.
Faith in honest seeking (ζητησις {zêtêsis}) is at the heart of the Greek
view of life. 'Those who would rightly judge of truth', says Aristotle,
'must be arbitrators, not litigants'. 'Happy is he who has learnt the
value of research' (ἱστορια {historia}), says Euripides in a fragment.
Curiosity, as the Greeks knew and the Middle Ages knew not, is a
virtue, not a vice. Nature, for Plato, is God's vicegerent and revealer,
the Soul of the universe. Human nature is the same nature as the divine;
no one has proclaimed this more strongly. Nature is for us; chaos and
'necessity' are the enemy. The divorce between religion and humanism
began, it must be admitted, under Plato's successors, who unhappily were
indifferent to natural science, and did not even follow the best light
that was to be had in physical knowledge. In the Dark Ages, when the
link with Greece was broken, the separation became absolute. The
luxuriant mythology of the early Greeks was not unscientific. In the
absence of knowledge gaps were filled up by the imagination, and the
'method of trial and error'. The dramatic fancy which creates myths is
the raw material of both poetry and science. Of course religious myths
may come to be a bar to progress in science; they do so when, in a
rationalizing age, the question comes to be one of fact or fiction. It
is a mistake to suppose that the faith of a 'post-rational' age, to use
a phrase of Santayana, can be the same as that of an unscientific age,
even when it uses the same formulas. The Greek spirit itself is now
calling us away from some of the vestments of Greek tradition. The
choice before us is between a 'post-rational' traditionalism,
fundamentally sceptical, pragmatistic, and intellectually dishonest, and
a trust in reason which rests really on faith in the divine Logos, the
self-revealing soul of the universe. It is the belief of the present
writer that the unflinching eye and the open mind will bring us again to
the feet of Christ, to whom Greece, with her long tradition of free and
fearless inquiry, became a speedy and willing captive, bringing her
manifold treasures to Him, in the well-grounded confidence that He was
not come to destroy but to fulfil.

W. R. INGE.




PHILOSOPHY


If we consider the philosophical tendencies of the day, we shall
probably observe first of all that the artificial wall of partition
between philosophy and science--and especially mathematical science--is
beginning to wear very thin. On the other hand, we cannot fail to notice
a reaction against what is called intellectualism. This reaction takes
many forms, the most characteristic perhaps of which is a renewed
interest in Mysticism. It leads also to a strong insistence on the
practical aspect of philosophic thought, and to a view of its bearing on
what had been regarded as primarily theoretical issues, which is known
by the rather unfortunate name of Pragmatism. Now it is just on these
points that we have most to learn from the Greeks, and Greek philosophy
is therefore of special importance for us at the present time. At its
best, it was never divorced from science, while it found a way of
reconciling itself both with the interests of the practical life and
with mysticism without in any way abating the claims of the intellect.
It is solely from these points of view that it is proposed to regard
Greek philosophy here. It would be futile to attempt a summary of the
whole subject in the space available, and such a summary would have no
value. Many things will therefore be passed over in silence which are
important in themselves and would have to be fully treated in a complete
account. All that can be done now is to indicate the points at which
Greek philosophy seems to touch our actual problems. It will be seen
that here, as elsewhere, 'all history is contemporary history', and that
the present can only be understood in the light of the past.

The word 'philosophy' is Greek and so is the thing it denotes. Unless we
are to use the term in so wide a sense as to empty it of all special
meaning, there is no evidence that philosophy has ever come into
existence anywhere except under Greek influences. In particular,
mystical speculation based on religious experience is not itself
philosophy, though it has often influenced philosophy profoundly, and
for this reason the pantheism of the _Upanishads_ cannot be called
philosophical. It is true that there is an Indian philosophy, and indeed
the Hindus are the only ancient people besides the Greeks who ever had
one, but Indian science was demonstrably borrowed from Greece after the
conquest of Alexander, and there is every reason to believe that those
Indian systems which can be regarded as genuinely philosophical are a
good deal more recent still. On the other hand, the earliest
authenticated instance of a Greek thinker coming under Indian influence
is that of Pyrrho (326 B. C.), and what he brought back from the East
was rather the ideal of quietism than any definite philosophical
doctrine. The barrier of language was sufficient to prevent any
intercourse on important subjects, for neither the Greeks nor the
Indians cared to learn any language but their own. Of course philosophy
may culminate in theology, and the best Greek philosophy certainly does
so, but it begins with science and not with religion.

By philosophy the Greeks meant a serious endeavour to understand the
world and man, having for its chief aim the discovery of the right way
of life and the conversion of people to it. It would not, however, be
true to say that the word had always borne this special sense. At any
rate the corresponding verb (φιλοσοφειν {philosophein}) had at first a
far wider range. For instance, Herodotus (i. 30) makes Croesus say that
Solon had travelled far and wide 'as a philosopher' (φιλοσοφεων
{philosopheôn}), and it is clear from the context that this refers to
that love of travel for the sake of the 'wonders' to be seen in strange
lands which was so characteristic of the Ionian Greeks in the fifth
century B. C. That is made quite plain by the phrase 'for the sake of
sightseeing' (θεωριης ἑινεκεν {theôriês heineken}) with which the word
is coupled. Again, when Thucydides (ii. 40) makes Pericles say of his
fellow citizens 'we follow philosophy without loss of manliness'
(φιλοσοφουμεν ανευ μαλακιας {philosophoumen aneu malakias}), it is
certainly not of philosophy in the special sense he is thinking. He is
only contrasting the culture of Athens with the somewhat effeminate
civilization of the Ionians in Asia Minor. Even in the next century,
Isocrates tried to revert to this wider sense of the word, and he
regularly uses it of the art of political journalism which he imparted
to his pupils.

Tradition ascribes the first use of the term 'philosophy' in the more
restricted sense indicated above to Pythagoras of Samos, an Ionian who
founded a society for its cultivation in southern Italy in the latter
half of the sixth century B. C. It is notoriously difficult to make any
positive statements about Pythagoras, seeing that he wrote nothing; but
it is safer on general grounds to ascribe the leading ideas of the
system to the master rather than to his followers. Moreover, this
particular tradition is confirmed by the fact, for which there is
sufficient evidence, that the name 'philosophers' originally designated
the Pythagoreans in a special way. For instance, we know that Zeno of
Elea (_c._ 450 B. C.) wrote a book 'Against the Philosophers', and in
his mouth that can only mean 'Against the Pythagoreans'. Now the
Pythagorean use of the term depends on a certain way of regarding man,
which there is good reason for ascribing to Pythagoras himself. It has
become more or less of a commonplace now, but we must try to seize it in
its original freshness if we wish to understand the associations the
word 'philosophy' came to have for the Greeks. To state it briefly, it
is the view that man is something intermediate between God and 'the
other animals' (ταλλα ζωα {talla zôa}). As compared with God, he is
'mere man', liable to error and death (both of which are spoken of as
specially _human_, ανθρωπινα {anthrôpina}); as compared with 'the other
animals', he is kindly and capable of civilization. The Latin word
_humanus_ took over this double meaning, which is somewhat arbitrarily
marked in English by the spellings _human_ and _humane_. Now it is clear
that, for a being subject to error and death, wisdom (σοφια {sophia}) in
the full sense is impossible; that is for God alone. On the other hand,
man cannot be content, like 'the other animals' to remain in ignorance.
If he cannot be wise, he can at least be 'a lover of wisdom', and it
follows that his chief end will be 'assimilation to God so far as
possible' (ὁμοιωσις τω θεω κατα το δυνατον {homoiôsis tô theô kata to
dynaton}), as Plato put it in the _Theaetetus_. The mathematical studies
of the Pythagoreans soon brought them face to face with the idea of a
constant approximation which never reaches its goal. There is, then,
sufficient ground for accepting the tradition which makes Pythagoras the
author of this special sense of the word 'philosophy' and for connecting
it with the division of living creatures into God, men and 'the other
animals'. If the later Pythagoreans went a step further and classified
rational animals into gods, men and 'such as Pythagoras', that was due
to the enthusiasm of discipleship, and is really a further indication of
the genuinely Pythagorean character of this whole range of ideas. We may
take it, then, that the word 'philosophy' had acquired its special sense
in southern Italy before the beginning of the fifth century B. C.

It is even more certain that this sense was well known at Athens, at
least in certain circles, not long after the middle of the fifth
century. To all appearance, this was the work of Socrates (470-399
B.C.). Whatever view may be taken of the philosophy of Socrates or of
its relation to that expounded in Plato's earlier dialogues (a point
which need not be discussed here), it is at least not open to question
that he was personally intimate with the leading Pythagoreans who had
taken refuge at Thebes and at Phlius in the Peloponnesus when their
society came to be regarded as a danger to the state at Croton and
elsewhere in southern Italy. That happened about the middle of the fifth
century, and Socrates must have made the acquaintance of these men not
long after. At that time it would be quite natural for them to visit
Athens; but, after the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (431 B. C.),
all intercourse with them must have ceased. They were resident in enemy
states, and Socrates was fighting for his country. With the exception of
the brief interval of the Peace of Nicias (421 B. C.), he can have seen
nothing of them for years. Nevertheless it is clear that they did not
forget him; for we must accept Plato's statement in the _Phaedo_ that
many of the most distinguished philosophers of the time came to Athens
to be with Socrates when he was put to death, and that those of them who
could not come were eager to hear a full account of what happened. It is
highly significant that, even before this, two young disciples of the
Pythagorean Philolaus, Simmias and Cebes, had come from Thebes and
attached themselves to Socrates. For that we have the evidence of
Xenophon as well as of Plato, and Xenophon's statement is of real value
here; for it was just during these few years that he himself associated
with Socrates, though he saw him for the last time a year or two before
his trial and death. Whatever other inferences may be drawn from these
facts, they are sufficient to prove that Socrates had become acquainted
with some of the leading philosophers of the Greek world before he was
forty, and to make it highly probable that it was he who introduced the
word 'philosophy' in its Pythagorean sense to the Athenians.

So much for the word; we have next to ask how there came to be such a
thing as philosophy at all. It has been mentioned that Pythagoras was an
Ionian, and we should naturally expect to find that he brought at least
the beginnings of what he called philosophy from eastern Hellas. Now it
has been pointed out that Greek philosophy was based on science, and
science originated at Miletus on the mainland of Asia Minor nearly
opposite the island of Samos, which was the original home of Pythagoras.
The early Milesians were, in fact, men of science rather than
philosophers in the strict sense. The two things were not differentiated
yet, however, and the traditional account of the matter, according to
which Greek philosophy begins with Thales (_c._ 585 B. C.), is after all
quite justified. The rudimentary mathematical science of which, as
explained elsewhere in this volume, he was the originator in fact led
him and his successors to ask certain questions about the ultimate
nature of reality, and these questions were the beginning of philosophy
on its theoretical side. It is true that the Milesians were unable to
give any but the crudest answers to these questions, and very likely
they did not realise their full importance. These early inquirers only
wanted to know what the world was made of and how it worked, but the
complete break with mythology and traditional views which they effected
cleared the way for everything that followed. It was no small thing that
they were able to discard the old doctrine of what were afterwards known
as the 'elements'--Fire, Air, Earth, and Water--and to regard all these
as states of a single substance, which presented different appearances
according as it was more or less rarefied or condensed. Moreover,
Anaximander at least (_c._ 546 B. C.), the successor of Thales, shook
himself free of the idea that the earth required support of some kind to
keep in its place. He held that it swung free in space and that it
remained where it was because there was no reason for it to fall in one
direction rather than another. In general these early cosmologists saw
that weight was not an inherent quality of bodies and that it could not
be used to explain anything. On the contrary, weight was itself the
thing to be explained. Anaximander also noted the importance of rotary
or vortex motion in the cosmical scheme, and he inferred that there
might be an indefinite number of rotating systems in addition to that
with which we are immediately acquainted. He also made some very
important observations of a biological character, and he announced that
man must be descended from an animal of a different species. The young
of most animals, he said, can find their food at once, while that of the
human species requires a prolonged period of nursing. If, then, man had
been originally such as he is now, he could never have survived. All
this, no doubt, is rudimentary science rather than philosophy, but it
was the beginning of philosophy in this sense, that it completely
transformed the traditional view of the world, and made the raising of
more ultimate problems inevitable.

This transformation was effected in complete independence of religion.
What we may call secularism was, in fact, characteristic of all eastern
Ionian science to the end. We must not be misled by the fact that
Anaximander called his innumerable worlds 'gods' and that his successor
Anaximenes spoke of Air as a 'god'. These were never the gods of any
city and were never worshipped by any one, and they did not therefore
answer at all to what the ordinary Greek meant by a god. The use of the
term by the Milesians means rather that the place once occupied by the
gods of religion was now being taken by the great fundamental phenomena
of nature, and the later Greeks were quite right, from their own point
of view, in calling that atheism. Aristophanes characterizes this way of
speaking very accurately indeed in the _Clouds_ when he makes
Strepsiades sum up the teaching he has received in the words 'Vortex has
driven out Zeus and reigns in his stead', and when he makes Socrates
swear by 'Chaos, Respiration and Air'. So too the Milesians spoke of the
primary substance as 'ageless and deathless', which is a Homeric phrase
used to mark the difference between gods and men, but this only means
that the emotion formerly attached to the divine was now being
transferred to the natural.

The Milesians, then, had formed the conception of an eternal matter out
of which all things are produced and into which all things return, and
the conception of Matter belongs to philosophy rather than to science.
But besides this they had laid the foundations of geometry, and that led
in other hands to the formulation of the correlative conception of Limit
or Form. It is needless to enumerate here the Milesian and Pythagorean
contributions to plane geometry; it will be sufficient to remind the
reader that they covered most of the ground of _Euclid_, Books I, II,
IV, and VI, and probably also of Book III. In addition, Pythagoras
founded Arithmetic, that is, the scientific theory of numbers
(αριθμητικη {arithmêtikê}), as opposed to the practical art of
calculation (λογιστικη {logistikê}). We also know that he discovered the
sphericity of the earth, and the numerical ratios of the intervals
between the concordant notes of the octave. It is obvious that he was a
scientific genius of the first order, and it is also clear that his
methods included those of observation and experiment. The discovery of
the earth's spherical shape was due to observation of eclipses, and that
of the intervals of the octave can only have been based on experiments
with a stretched string, though the actual experiments attributed by
tradition to Pythagoras are absurd. It was no doubt this last discovery
that led him to formulate his doctrine in the striking saying 'Things
are numbers', thus definitely giving the priority to the element of form
or limit instead of to the indeterminate matter of his predecessors.

Pythagoras further differed from his predecessors in one respect which
proved of vital moment. So far was he from ignoring religion, that he
founded a society in southern Italy which was primarily a religious
community. It is quite possible that he was influenced by the growth of
the Orphic societies which had begun to spread everywhere in the course
of the sixth century, but his religion differed from the Orphic in many
ways. In particular, Apollo and not Dionysus was the chief god of the
Pythagoreans, and all our evidence points to the conclusion that
Pythagoras brought his religion, as he had brought his science, from
eastern Hellas, though rather from the islands of the Aegean than from
mainland Ionia. He was much influenced, we can still see, by certain
traditions of the temple of Delos, which had become the religious centre
of the Ionic world. There had, of course, been plenty of religious
speculation among the Greeks before Pythagoras, and it was of a type not
unlike that we find in India, though there are insuperable difficulties
in the way of assuming any Aegean influence on India or any Indian
influence on the Aegean at this date. It may be that the beginnings of
such ideas go back to the time when the Greeks and the Hindus were
living together, though it is still more likely that both the Greeks and
the Indians were affected by a movement originating in the north, which
brought to both of them a new view of the soul. The Delian legend of the
Hyperboreans may be thought to point in this direction. However that may
be, the main purpose of the religious observances practised by the
Orphics and Pythagoreans alike was to secure by means of 'purifications'
(καθαρμοι {katharmoi}) the ransom (λυσις {lysis}) of the soul, which was
regarded as a fallen god, from the punishment of imprisonment in
successive bodies. There is no reason to suppose that Pythagoras
displayed any particular originality in this part of his teaching. It
all depends on the doctrine of transmigration or rebirth (παλιγγενεσια
{palingenesia}), which is often incorrectly designated by the late and
inaccurate term 'metempsychosis'. There is no doubt that Pythagoras
taught this, and also the rule of abstinence from animal flesh which is
its natural corollary, but such ideas had been well known in many parts
of Greece before his time. The real difficulty is to see the connexion
between all this and his scientific work. Here we are of course confined
to inferences from what we are told by later writers; but, if the
doctrine which Plato makes Socrates expound in the early part of the
_Phaedo_ is Pythagorean, as it is generally supposed to be, we may say
that what Pythagoras did was to teach that, while the ordinary methods
of purification were well enough in their way, the best and truest
purification for the soul was just scientific study. It is only in some
such way as this that we can explain the religious note which is
characteristic of all the best Greek science. It involves the doctrine
that the Theoretic Life is the highest way of life for man, a belief
still held by Plato and Aristotle, and to which we shall have to return.
We may note at once, however, that it is not an 'intellectualist' ideal.
There is no question of idle contemplation; it is a strenuous way of
life, the aim of which is the soul's salvation, and it gives rise to an
eager desire to convert other men. Just for that reason, the Pythagorean
philosopher will take part in practical life when the opportunity
offers, and he will even rule the state if called upon to do so. The
Pythagorean society was a proselytizing body from the first, and it
tried to bring in all it could reach, without distinction of
nationality, social position, or sex (for women played a great part in
it from the first). It was precisely its zeal for the reform of human
life, and its attempt to set up a Rule of the Saints in the cities of
southern Italy that led to its unpopularity. If the Pythagoreans had
contented themselves with idle speculation, they would not have been
massacred or forced to take refuge in flight, a fate which overtook them
before the middle of the fifth century.

It soon proved, however, that the Pythagorean doctrine in its entirety
was too high a one for its adherents, and a rift between Pythagorean
religion and Pythagorean science was inevitable. Those who were capable
of appreciating the scientific side of the movement would tend more and
more to neglect the religious rule which it prescribed, and we find
accordingly that before the end of the fifth century the leading
Pythagoreans, the men whose names we know, are first of all men of
science, and more and more inclined to drop what they doubtless regarded
as the superstitious side of the doctrine. In the end they were absorbed
in the new philosophical schools which arose at Athens. The mass of the
faithful, on the other hand, took no interest in arithmetic, geometry,
music, and astronomy, and with them to follow Pythagoras meant to go
barefoot and to abstain from animal flesh and beans. These continued the
tradition even after scientific Pythagoreanism had become extinct as
such, and they were a favourite subject of ridicule with the comic poets
of the fourth century B. C.

It is easy for us to see now that all this indicates a real weakness in
Pythagoreanism. Science and religion are not to be brought into union by
a simple process of juxtaposition. We do not know how far Pythagoras
himself was conscious of the ambiguity of his position; it would not be
surprising if he came to feel it towards the end of his life, and we
know for certain that he lived long enough to witness the beginnings of
the revolt against his society in Croton and elsewhere. It is for this
reason that he removed to Metapontum where he died, and where Cicero was
able to visit his tomb long afterwards. We shall see later what the weak
point in his system was, and we shall have to consider how the discord
he had left unresolved was ultimately overcome. For the present, it is
more important to note that he was the real founder both of science, and
of philosophy as we understand them now. It is specially true of science
that it is the first steps which are the most difficult, and Pythagoras
left a sufficient achievement in mathematics behind him for others to
elaborate. The Greeks took less than three centuries to complete the
edifice, and that was chiefly due to Pythagoras, who had laid the
foundations truly and well.

We have now seen how the two great conceptions of Matter and Form were
reached; the next problem Greek philosophy had to face was that of
Motion. At first the fact of movement had simply been taken for granted.
The Ionian tendency was to see motion everywhere; it was rest that had
to be explained, or rather the appearance of it. However, when the new
conception of an eternal matter began to be taken seriously,
difficulties made themselves felt at once. If reality was regarded as
continuous, it appeared that there was no room for anything else, not
even for empty space, which could only be identified with the unreal,
and it was easy to show that the unreal could not exist. But, if there
is no empty space, it seems impossible that there should be any motion,
and the world of which we suppose ourselves to be aware must be an
illusion. Such, briefly stated, was the position taken up by another
Ionian of southern Italy, Parmenides of Elea (_c._ 475 B. C.), who had
begun as a Pythagorean, but had been led to apply the rigorous method of
reasoning introduced into geometry with such success by the Pythagoreans
to the old question of the nature of the world which had occupied the
Milesians. The remarkable thing about the earliest geometers is, in
fact, that they did not formulate the conception of Space, which seems
to us at the present day fundamental. They were able to avoid it because
they possessed the conception of Matter, and regarded Air as the normal
state of the material substratum. The confusion of air with empty space
is, of course, a natural one, though it may be considered surprising
that it should not have been detected by the founders of geometrical
science. Such failures to draw all the consequences from a new discovery
are common enough, however, in the history of scientific thought.

Parmenides cleared up this ambiguity, not by affirming the existence of
empty space, but by denying the possibility of such a thing, even before
it had been asserted by any one. He saw that the Pythagoreans really
implied it, though they were quite unconscious of the fact. He is
interesting to us as the first philosopher who thought of expounding his
system in verse. It was not a very happy thought, as the arguments in
which he deals do not readily lend themselves to this mode of
expression, and we may be thankful that none of his successors except
Empedocles followed his example. It has the very great inconvenience of
making it necessary to use different words for the same thing to suit
the exigencies of metre. And if there ever was an argument that demanded
precise statement, it was that of Parmenides. As it is, his poem has the
faults we should look for in a metrical version of Euclid. On the other
hand, Parmenides is the first philosopher of whom we have sufficient
remains to enable us to follow a continuous argument; for we have
nothing of Pythagoras at all, and only detached fragments of the rest.
We can see that he was ready to follow the argument wherever it might
lead. He took the conception of matter which had been elaborated by his
predecessors and he showed that, if it is to be taken seriously, it must
lead to the conclusion that reality is continuous, finite, and
spherical, with nothing outside it and no empty space within it. For
such a reality motion is impossible, and the world of the senses is
therefore an illusion. Of course that was not a result in which it was
possible for men to acquiesce for long, and historically speaking, the
Eleatic doctrine must be regarded as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of earlier
speculation. There is no reason to believe, however, that Parmenides
himself meant it to be understood in this way. He believed firmly that
he had found the truth.

Several attempts were made to escape the conclusions of Parmenides, and
they all start by abandoning the assumption of the homogeneity and
continuity of matter which had been implicit in the earlier systems,
though it was first brought to the light of day by Parmenides. Here
again the influence of contemporary science on philosophic thought is
clearly marked. Empedocles of Agrigentum (_c._ 460 B. C.), the only
citizen of a Dorian state who finds a place in the early history of
science and philosophy, was the founder of the Sicilian school of
medicine, and it was probably his pre-occupation with that science that
led him to revive the old doctrine of Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, which
the Milesians had cast aside, but which lent itself readily to the
physiological theories of the day. He did not use the word afterwards
translated 'elements' (στοιχεια {stoicheia}) for these. It means
literally 'letters of the alphabet', and appears to have been first
employed in this connexion by the Pythagoreans at a later date, when
they found it necessary to take account of the new theory. Empedocles
spoke of the 'four roots' of things, and by this he meant to imply that
these four forms of matter were equally original and altogether
disparate. That furnished at least a partial answer to the arguments of
Parmenides, which depended on the assumption that matter was
homogeneous. He also found it necessary to assume two sources of motion
or forces, as we might call them, though Empedocles thought of them as
substances, one of which tended to separate the 'four roots' and the
other to combine them. These he called Love and Strife, and he supposed
the life of the world to take the form of alternate cycles, in which one
or the other prevailed in turn. In all this he was plainly influenced by
his physiological studies. He thinks of the world as an animal organism
subject to what are now called anabolism and catabolism. The details of
the theory make this quite clear. A similar doctrine was taught by
Anaxagoras (_c._ 460 B. C.), who came from Clazomenae in Asia Minor to
Athens after the Persian Wars, and was one of the teachers of Pericles.
His doctrine of 'seeds', in which the traditional 'opposites'--wet and
dry, cold and hot--were combined in different proportions, is rather
more subtle than that of Empedocles, and it is possible to see in it a
curious anticipation of certain features in modern chemistry.
Anaxagoras too felt it necessary to assume a force or source of motion,
but he thought that one would suffice to account for the rotation
(περιχωρησις {perichôrêsis}) to which he attributed the formation of the
world. He called that force Mind (νους {nous}), but his own
description of it shows that he regarded it as corporeal, though he
thought it was something more tenuous and unmixed than other bodies.
There is little doubt that he selected the term in order to mark the
identity of the source of motion in the world with that in the animal
organism. That again is in accordance with the scientific interests of
the time. In his astronomical theories, however, Anaxagoras showed
himself a true eastern Ionian, and lagged far behind the Pythagoreans.
For him, as for the Ionians of the Aegean down to and including
Democritus, the earth was flat, and the eddy or vortex which gave rise
to the world was still rotation in a plane. A more satisfying answer to
Parmenides was the doctrine of Atomism, which frankly accepted the
existence of space, and asserted that it was just as real as body. The
first hint of such a solution was given by Melissus (_c._ 444 B. C.),
who was a Samian but a member of the Eleatic school. He said, 'If things
are a many, then each of them must be such as I have shown the One to
be.' That was meant as a _reductio ad absurdum_; but, when Leucippus of
Miletus (_c._ 440 B. C.), who had also studied in the school of Elea,
ventured to assert the existence of the Void, there was no longer any
reason for shirking the conclusion which Melissus had stated only to
show its impossibility. The atoms are, in fact, just the continuous
indivisible One of Parmenides multiplied _ad infinitum_ in an infinite
empty space. On that side at least, the theory of body was now complete,
and the question asked by Thales was answered, and it is of great
interest to observe that this was brought about by the renewal of
intercourse between the Ionians of Italy and those of the Aegean, a
renewal which was made possible by the establishment of the Athenian
Empire. Nothing makes us feel the historical connexion more vividly than
the re-emergence of the names of Miletus and Samos after all these
years. There were, however, certain more fundamental problems which
Atomism could not solve, and which were first attacked at Athens itself.
So far, it will be noted, Athens has played no part at all in our story,
and in fact no more than two Athenians ever became philosophers of the
first rank. It is true that they were called Socrates and Plato, so the
exception is a considerable one. It was the foundation of the Athenian
Empire that made Athens the natural meeting-place of the most diverse
philosophical and scientific views. It was here that the east and west
of Hellas came together, and that the two streams of tradition became
one, with the result that a new tradition was started which, though
often interrupted for a time, continues to the present day.

If we wish to understand the development of Greek philosophy, it is of
the first importance that we should realize the intellectual ferment
which existed at Athens in the great days of the Periclean age. It has
been mentioned already that Anaxagoras of Clazomenae had settled there,
and it was not long before his example was followed by others. In
particular, Zeno of Elea (_c._ 450 B. C.), the favourite disciple of
Parmenides, had a considerable following at Athens. He made it his
business to champion the doctrine of his master by showing that those
who refused to accept it were obliged to give their assent to views
which were at least as repugnant to common sense, and in this way he
incidentally did much for mathematics and philosophy by raising the
difficulties of infinite divisibility and continuity in an acute form.
All that is something quite apart from the influence of the 'sophists'
at a rather later date, though they too came both from the east and from
the west, and though they had been influenced by the more strictly
philosophical schools of these regions. It was into this Athens that
Socrates was born (470 B. C.) about ten years after the battle of
Salamis, and he was naturally exposed to all these conflicting
influences, of which Plato has given us a vivid description in the
_Phaedo_, from his earliest youth. He cannot, in fact, be understood at
all unless this historical background is kept constantly in view. There
can be no reasonable doubt that at a very early age he attached himself
to Archelaus, an Athenian who had succeeded Anaxagoras, when that
philosopher had to leave Athens for Lampsacus. Ion of Chios, a
contemporary witness, said that Socrates had visited Asia Minor with
Archelaus, and that appears to refer to the siege of Samos, when
Socrates was under thirty. There is no reason whatever to doubt the
statement, which Plato makes more than once, that he had met Parmenides
and Zeno at a still earlier date. At any rate, the influence of Zeno on
the dialectic of Socrates is unmistakable. We may also take it that he
was familiar with all sorts of Orphic and Pythagorean sectaries.
Aeschines of Sphettos wrote a dialogue entitled _Telauges_, in which he
represented Socrates as rallying the extreme asceticism of the strict
followers of Pythagoras. So far, however, as we can form a picture of
him for ourselves, he was not the sort of man to become the disciple of
any one. He was a genuine Athenian in respect of what is called his
'irony', which implies a certain humorous reserve which kept him from
all extravagances, however interested he might be in the extravagances
of others. Nevertheless, while still quite a young man, he had somehow
acquired a reputation for 'wisdom', though he himself disclaimed
anything of the sort. He had also, it appears, gathered round him a
circle of 'associates' (ἑταιροι {hetairoi}). The only direct evidence we
have for these early days is the _Clouds_ of Aristophanes (423 B. C.),
which is of course a comedy and must not be taken too literally. On the
other hand, a comic poet who knew his business (and surely Aristophanes
did) could hardly present a well-known man to the Athenian public in a
manner which had no relation to fact at all. It is fortunate that there
is a passage in Xenophon's _Memorabilia_ (i. 6) which seems to supply us
with the very background we need to make the _Clouds_ intelligible. It
represents Socrates in an entirely different light from that in which he
appears in the rest of the work, and it can hardly be Xenophon's own
invention. It seems to refer to a time when Plato and Xenophon were
babies, if not to a time before they were born, and it is probable that
it comes from some literary source which we can no longer trace. We are
told, then, that Antiphon the sophist was trying to detach his
companions (συνουσιασται {synousiastai}) from Socrates, and a
conversation followed in which he charged him with teaching his
followers to be miserable rather than happy, and added that he was right
not to charge a fee for his teaching, since in fact it was of no value.
It will be seen that this implies a regular relation between Socrates
and his followers which was sufficiently well known to arouse
professional jealousy. Socrates does not attempt to deny the fact. He
says that what he and his companions do is to spend their time together
in studying the wisdom of the men of old which they have left behind
them in books, and that, if they come upon anything which they think is
good, they extract it for their own use, and count it great gain if, in
doing this, they become friends to one another. It is obvious that this
suggests something quite different from the current view of Socrates as
a talker at street corners, something much more like a regular school,
and that, so far as it goes, it explains the burlesque of Aristophanes.

The Socrates of whom we know most is, however, quite differently
engaged. He has devoted his life to a mission to his fellow men, and
especially to his fellow citizens. If we may so far trust Plato's
_Apology_, the occasion of that was the answer received from the Delphic
oracle by Chaerephon, whom we know from Aristophanes as one of the
leading disciples of Socrates in the earlier part of his life.
Chaerephon asked the god of Delphi whether there was any one wiser than
Socrates, and this of course implies that Socrates had a reputation for
'wisdom' before his mission began. The oracle declared that there was no
one wiser, and Plato makes Socrates say in the _Apology_ that this was
the real beginning of that mission. He set out at first to prove that
the oracle was wrong, and for that purpose he tried to discover some one
wiser than himself, a search in which he was disappointed, since he
could only find people who thought they were wise, and no one who really
was so. He therefore concluded that what the oracle really meant was
that Socrates was wiser than other people in one respect only. Neither
he nor any one else was really 'wise', but Socrates was wiser than the
rest because he knew he was not wise and they thought they were. It
ought to be clear that this is mostly 'irony', and it is not to be
supposed that Socrates attached undue importance to the oracle, which he
speaks of quite lightly, but he could hardly have told the story at all
unless it was generally known that his mission did in fact date roughly
from that period of his life. Historically it would probably be truer to
say that the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, in which Socrates served
with great distinction as a hoplite, marked the decisive turning-point.
It was in the camp at Potidaea that he once stood in a trance for
twenty-four hours (431 B. C.), and that seems to point to some great
psychological change, which may very well have been occasioned or
accelerated by his experiences in the war. At any rate we now find him
entirely devoted to the conversion of his fellow citizens, and we must
try to understand what the message he had for them was.

In the _Apology_ Socrates declares that his mission was divinely imposed
upon him, so that he dare not neglect it, even if it should lead to his
death, as in fact it did. The tone here is quite different from the
half-humorous style in which he deals with the Delphic oracle, and even
the 'divine sign'. That only warned him not to do things, mostly quite
trivial things, which he was about to do, and never told him to do
anything; this, on the contrary, was a positive command, laid upon him
by God, and there can be no doubt that Plato means us to understand this
to have been the innermost conviction of Socrates. It is hard to believe
that Plato could have misrepresented his master's attitude on such a
point. He was present at the trial, and the _Apology_ must have been
written not very long afterwards, when the memory of it was still fresh
in people's minds. Now Plato tells us quite clearly that what Socrates
tried to get the Athenians to understand was the duty of 'caring for
their souls' (ψυχης επιμελειο {psychês epimeleio}). That is confirmed
from other sources, and indeed it is generally admitted. The phrase has,
however, become so familiar that it does not at once strike us as
anything very new or important. To an Athenian of the fifth century B.
C., on the other hand, it must have seemed very strange indeed. The word
translated 'soul' (ψυχη {psychê}) occurs often enough, no doubt, in the
literature of the period, but it is never used of anything for which we
could be called upon to 'care' in the sense evidently intended by
Socrates. Its normal use is to denote the breath of life, the 'ghost' a
man 'gives up' at the moment of death. It can therefore be rendered by
'life' in all cases where there is a question of risking or losing life
or of clinging to it when we ought to be prepared to sacrifice it, but
it is not used for the seat of conscious life at all. It is sometimes
employed to signify the seat of the dream-consciousness or of what is
now called the subconscious or subliminal self, but never of the
ordinary waking consciousness which is the seat of knowledge and
ignorance, goodness and badness.[2] On the other hand, that use of the
word is quite common in the fourth century, and it may be inferred that
this change was due to Socrates. More than once Aristophanes ridicules
him for holding some strange view of the 'soul', and these jests were
made at a time when Plato was only a child. We cannot, of course, expect
to get any very definite idea from them as to the real teaching of
Socrates on this subject, but it is not impossible to see what it was,
if we take into account the views of the soul which had been held by the
philosophical schools of eastern and western Ionia.

    [2] See my paper on 'The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul'.
    _Proceedings of the British Academy_, 1915-16, pp. 235 sqq.

The Ionians of Asia Minor had certainly identified the soul with that in
us which is conscious, and which is the seat of goodness and badness,
wisdom and folly; but they did not regard it as what we call the self or
treat it as an individual. Anaximenes and his school held that the soul
was what they called Air, but that was just because they regarded Air as
the primary substance of which all things are made. The soul was
something, in fact, that comes to us from outside (θυραθεν {thyrathen})
by means of respiration. As Diogenes of Apollonia expresses it, it is 'a
small portion of the god', that is, of the primary substance, enclosed
in a human body for a time, and returning at death to the larger mass of
the same substance outside. The formula 'Earth to earth and air to air'
was accepted as an adequate description of what takes place at death.
The western Ionians, and especially the Pythagoreans, held a very
different view. For them, the soul was something divine. It was, in
fact, a fallen god, imprisoned in the body as a punishment for antenatal
sin, and it deserved our care in this sense, that it was our chief
business in life to purify it so as to secure its release from the
necessity of reincarnation in another body. But, during this present
life, they held that this divine element slumbers, except in prophetic
dreams. As Pindar puts it, 'It sleeps when the limbs are active.'
Neither of these views was familiar to the ordinary Athenian, but
Socrates of course knew both well, and felt satisfied with neither. When
he spoke of the soul he did not mean any mysterious fallen god which
was the temporary tenant of the body, but the conscious self which it
lies with us to try to make wise and good. On the other hand, his
insistence on our duty to 'care for' it is quite inconsistent with the
view that it is merely something extrinsic, as all the eastern Ionians
down to Anaxagoras had taught. It is, on the contrary, our very self,
the thing in us which is of more importance to us than anything else
whatever. It was to this doctrine of the soul and our duty to it that
Socrates felt he must convert mankind and especially his
fellow-citizens. It was a strange and novel doctrine then; and, if it
has become a commonplace since, that only shows that he was successful,
if not in persuading his fellowmen to act on this knowledge, at least in
making them aware of it. It was in this way that Socrates healed the
rift between science and religion which had proved fatal to the
Pythagorean society, and it may be suggested that the significance of
his teaching is not exhausted yet. As has been indicated above it is to
be found clearly stated in Plato's _Apology of Socrates_, and it
furnishes the only clue to a right understanding of the great series of
Platonic dialogues down to and including the _Republic_ in which
Socrates is represented as the chief speaker. Whether Plato added much
or little of his own to the doctrine of his master in these dialogues is
an interesting historical problem, but it need not concern the ordinary
reader, at least in the first instance. We know from the allusions of
Aristophanes that Socrates himself taught a new doctrine of the soul
when Plato was a child, and no sympathetic reader can fail to see that
the passage of the _Apology_ to which we have referred is intended to be
a faithful account of that doctrine. All the rest is simply its
legitimate development, and it is not of very great importance for us to
determine whether that development is due to Socrates or to Plato. The
inspiration which has been derived from these writings by many
generations will not be lessened by any decision we may come to on this
point, so long as we keep clearly in mind that the new doctrine of soul
is their principal theme, and that this must be understood in the light
of the doctrines which had prepared the way for it. What Socrates did
was really this. He deepened the meaning of the Eastern Ionian doctrine
by informing it with some of the feeling and emotion which had
characterized the Pythagorean teaching on the subject, while on the
other hand he rationalized the Pythagorean theory by identifying the
soul with our conscious personality.

Now if this is a correct account of what Socrates taught, he must be
regarded as inaugurating an entirely new period in the history of
philosophy. That is implied in the common term 'Presocratics' generally
applied to his predecessors, though the ordinary textbooks are by no
means clear as to the grounds for assigning this pre-eminent position to
Socrates. We can also see how natural it was for him to lay such
emphasis on the conversion of souls as he certainly did. That purpose
continued to dominate Greek philosophy to the very end. No doubt
successive schools varied in their conception of what conversion meant,
but that is the link which binds them all together. In fact, it gave
rise to a new literary form, the 'hortatory discourse' (προτρεπτικος
λογος {protreptikos logos}), which was more and more cultivated as time
went on, and was at last taken over by the fathers of the Christian
church along with much else of a more fundamental character.

It has been noted already that Socrates had followers among all the
leading philosophical schools of the time, and the possibility is not to
be excluded that we may still learn more of him from the discovery of
new sources. For the present, the recovery of some new and fairly
extensive fragments of the _Alcibiades_ of Aeschines of Sphettos is the
chief addition to our sources of information. We know that Aeschines was
a disciple of Socrates, and the tradition of antiquity was that his
dialogues gave the most faithful picture of the man as he really was. If
so, that was probably because Aeschines had no philosophy of his own.
For us the chief importance of the new fragments is that, if we read
them along with those already known (and it is unfortunate that the old
and the new have not yet been printed together), they strongly confirm
the impression we get from Plato of the manner of Socrates and his
method of argument, and that helps to reassure us as to the essentially
historical character of the Platonic Socrates. The fragments of
Aeschines also corroborate Plato by showing that the conversion of
Alcibiades (whose life he had saved when a young man) was one of the
things that lay nearest his heart.

But the real successor of Socrates was, of course, Plato himself
(427-347 B. C.). It is not possible to give even an outline of Plato's
philosophy here. Indeed the time has hardly come for that yet, though
much admirable work is now being done, especially by a French professor,
M. Robin, which promises more certain conclusions than have yet been
possible. All that can be attempted here is to indicate the attitude of
Plato to some of the problems we have been discussing. His very great
contributions to the theory of knowledge will be passed over, as they
are beginning to be well understood, and the _Theaetetus_ in particular,
with its sequel the _Sophist_, is more and more coming to occupy its
rightful place as the best introduction to philosophy in general. It is
necessary, however, just to notice in passing a fundamental question of
method which the Platonic dialogues themselves suggest. It is this.
While Socrates is present in every one of them except the _Laws_, he
takes practically no part in some of them, and the dialogues in which
this is the case are known on other grounds to belong to the later years
of Plato's life. There must be some reason for this, and it is obviously
prudent to treat these later dialogues in the first instance as our
primary evidence for Plato's own views. Indeed, it is only after his
philosophy has been reconstructed from these sources and from the
sometimes obscure references to it in Aristotle, that it will be safe
to attempt an answer to the question of how much there may be in the
dialogues of his early life which is properly to be assigned to Plato
himself rather than to Socrates. That is a historical question of great
interest; but, as has been said, the solution of it, if that should ever
prove possible, would not greatly affect the impression that Athenian
philosophy leaves upon us as a whole.

Now, if we consider Plato's later, and presumably therefore most
independent writings, we find, just as we should expect from a disciple
of Socrates, that the doctrine of soul holds the first place, but that
it has certain features of its own which there is no sufficient ground
for attributing to Socrates. We are too apt to think of Plato as mainly
occupied with what is called the 'theory of Ideas', a theory which is
discussed once or twice in his earlier dialogues, and which is there
ascribed to Socrates, but which plays no part at all in his mature
works. There the chief place is undoubtedly taken by the doctrine of the
soul, and we can see that it is of the first importance for Plato. Soul
is regarded as the source of all motion in the world, because it is the
only thing in the world that moves without being itself moved by
anything else. It is this and this alone that enables Plato to account
for the existence of the world and of mankind, and to avoid the theory
of 'two worlds' into which, as he points out in the _Sophist_, 'the
friends of the Ideas', whoever they may have been, were only too apt to
fall. In Plato this view of the soul culminates in theology of a kind
which he nowhere attributes to Socrates. He represents him, indeed, as a
man of a deeply religious nature, but we do not gather that he had felt
the need of a formal doctrine of God. Plato, on the other hand, has left
us the first systematic defence of Theism we know of, and it is based
entirely on his doctrine of soul as the self-moved mover. But the
highest soul, or God, is not only the ultimate source of motion, but
also supremely good. Now, since there are many things in the world which
are not good, and since it would be blasphemy to attribute these to
God, there must be other souls in the world which are relatively at
least independent. God is not, directly at least, the cause of all
things, but it is not easy to discover the relation in which these other
souls are thought of as standing to God. In the _Timaeus_, the matter is
put in this way. The soul of the world, and all other souls human and
divine, are the work of the Creator, who is identified with God, and
they are not inherently indestructible, since anything that has been
made can be unmade. They are, however, practically indestructible, since
God made all things because He was good and wished them also to be as
good as possible. His goodness, therefore, will not suffer Him to
destroy what He has once made. That of course is mythically expressed,
and Plato is not committed to it as a statement of his own belief, since
it is only the account which _Timaeus_ puts into the mouth of the
Creator. We can see, however, what was the problem with which he was
occupied, and it is not perhaps illegitimate to infer that he approached
the question which still baffles speculation from the point of view that
God's omnipotence, as we should call it, is limited by his goodness.
This is a much more important limitation than that imposed by the
existence of matter, to which Timaeus also refers. In that, he is simply
following the tradition of the Pythagorean society to which he belonged,
as is shown by his identification of matter with space, or rather with
'room'. So far as can be seen at present, we are not entitled to ascribe
this view to Plato without more ado, but that is a point on which the
last word has not yet been said.

The description of the creation given by Timaeus is of course to be
regarded as mythical in its details, but it has features from which we
may learn a good deal as to the direction taken by Plato's thoughts
about the world. In particular, while the important part played by
geometry is quite intelligible in the mouth of a Pythagorean, he makes
use of certain theories which we know to belong to the most recent
mathematics of the day, in particular the complete doctrine of the five
regular solids, which was due to Theaetetus, who was one of the earliest
members of the Academy, and whom Plato represents as having made the
acquaintance of Socrates just before the master's death. Theaetetus died
young, but we know enough of him to feel sure that he was one of the few
great original mathematicians who have appeared in history. In the
_Timaeus_ the theory of the regular solids is used to get rid once more
of the doctrine of four ultimate 'elements'. These, Timaeus says, are so
far from being elements or letters of the alphabet, that they are not
even syllables. The way in which the so-called elements are built up out
of molecules corresponding in their configuration to the regular solids,
and the explanations of their transmutation into one another based on
the geometrical construction of these figures, is apt to strike the
average reader as fantastic, but one of the most distinguished living
mathematicians and physicists has stated that he is struck most of all
by their resemblance to the scientific theories of the twentieth
century. It will be well, therefore, to avoid hasty judgements on this
point. It is at any rate easy to understand how the study of mathematics
came to hold the preponderating place it did in the Platonic Academy.

In accordance with the plan of this paper, something must now be said of
Plato's attitude to the practical life, a point on which it is very easy
to make mistakes. No one has insisted more strongly than he has on the
primacy of the Theoretic Life. The philosopher is the man who is in love
with the spectacle of all time and all existence and that is what
delivers him from petty ambitions and low desires. He has made the
toilsome ascent out of the Cave in which the mass of men dwell, and in
which they only behold the shadows of reality. But, even in this
enthusiastic description of the philosophic life, an equal stress is
laid on the duty of philosopher to descend into the Cave in turn and to
rescue as many of their former fellow-prisoners as may be, even against
their will, by turning them to the light and dragging them up into the
world of truth and reality. It is quite easy to understand, in view of
this, that Plato devoted some of the best years of his life to practical
affairs and that he relinquished the studies of the Academy for a time
in order to direct the education of Dionysius II. The thing appeared
well worth doing; for Greek civilization in Sicily, and consequently, as
we can now see, the civilization of western Europe, was seriously
threatened by the Carthaginians. They had been held at bay by Dionysius
I, but after his death everything depended on his successor. Now the
education of Dionysius II had been completely neglected, but he had good
natural abilities, and his uncle Dion, who was Plato's friend, was ready
to answer for his good intentions. Plato could not turn a deaf ear to
such a call. Unfortunately Dionysius was vain and obstinate, and he soon
became impatient of the serious studies which Plato rightly regarded as
necessary to prepare him for his task. The result was a growing
estrangement between Plato and his pupil, which made it impossible to
hope for a successful issue to the plans of Dion. It is unnecessary to
tell the whole story here, but it is right to say that there was nothing
at all impracticable in what Plato undertook, and that he was certainly
justified in holding that the education of Dionysius must be completed
before it would be safe to entrust him with the championship of the
cause of Hellenism in the west.

His failure to make anything of Dionysius did not lead Plato to abandon
his efforts to heal the wounds of Hellenism. One of the studies most
ardently pursued in the Academy was Jurisprudence, of which he is the
real founder. It was not uncommon for Greek states to apply to the
Academy for legislators to codify existing law or to frame a new code
for colonies which had just been founded. That is the real explanation
of the remarkable work entitled the _Laws_, which must have occupied
Plato for many years, and which was probably begun while he was still
directing the studies of Dionysius. It appears to have been left
unfinished; for, while some parts of it are highly elaborated, there are
others which make upon us the impression of being a first draft. Even
so, it is a great work if we regard it from the proper point of view. It
is, in the first place, a codification of Greek, and especially Athenian
law, of course with those reforms and improvements which suggest
themselves when the subject is systematically treated, and it formed the
basis of Hellenistic, and through that of Roman law, to which the world
owes so much. There is no more useful corrective of the popular notion
of Plato as an unpractical visionary than the careful study of the
dullest and most technical parts of the _Laws_ in the light of the
_Institutes_.

No attempt has been made here to describe the system of Plato as a
whole, and indeed the time has not yet come when such an attempt can
profitably be made. We have no direct knowledge of his teaching in the
Academy; for we only possess the works which he wrote with a wider
public in view. In the case of Aristotle (384-322 B. C.), a similar
reservation must be made, though for just the opposite reason. We have
only fragments of his published works and what we possess is mainly the
groundwork of his lectures in the Lyceum. It will be seen that there is
still very much to be done here too. From the nature of the case, notes
for lectures take a great deal for granted that would be more fully
explained when the lectures were delivered, and some of the most
important points are hardly developed at all. Nevertheless there are
certain things which come out clearly enough, and it so happens that
they are points of great importance from which we can learn something
with regard to the philosophical problems of the present day.

In the first place, it is desirable to point out that Aristotle was not
an Athenian, but an Ionian from the northern Aegean, and that he was
strongly influenced by eastern Ionian science, especially by the system
of Democritus (which Plato does not appear to have known) and by the
medical theories of the time. That is why he is so unsympathetic to the
western schools of philosophy, and especially to the Pythagoreans and
the Eleatics. Empedocles alone, who was a biologist like himself, and
the founder of a medical school, finds favour in his eyes. He is not,
therefore, at home in mathematical matters and his system of Physics can
only be regarded as retrograde when we compare it with that of the
Academy. He did indeed accept the doctrine of the earth's sphericity,
but with that exception his cosmological views must be called
reactionary. Where he is really great is in biology, a field of research
which was not entirely neglected by the Academy, but which had been
treated as secondary in comparison with mathematics and astronomy. The
contrast between Plato and Aristotle in this respect seems to repeat on
a higher plane that between Pythagoras and Empedocles, and this suggests
something like a law of philosophical development which may perhaps
throw light on the present situation. It seems as if this alternation of
the mathematical and the biological interest was fundamental in the
development of scientific thought and that the philosophy of different
periods takes its colour from it. The philosophy of the nineteenth
century was dominated in the main by biological conceptions, while it
seems as if that of the twentieth was to be chiefly mathematical in its
outlook on the world. We must not, of course, make too much of such
formulas, but it is instructive to study such alternations in the
philosophy of the Greeks, where everything is simpler and more easily
apprehended.

On the other hand, Aristotle had been a member of the Academy for twenty
years, and that could not fail to leave its mark upon him. This no doubt
explains the fact, which has often been noted, that there are two
opposite and inconsistent strains in all Aristotle's thinking. On the
one hand, he is determined to avoid everything 'transcendental', and his
dislike of Pythagorean and Platonist mathematics is mainly due to that.
On the other hand, despite his captious and sometimes unfair criticisms
of Plato, he evidently admired him greatly and had been much influenced
by him. It may be suggested that the tone of his criticisms is partly
due to his annoyance at finding that he could not shake off his
Platonism, do what he would. This is borne out by the fact that, when he
has come to the furthest point to which his own system will take him, he
is apt to take refuge in metaphors of a mythical or 'transcendental'
character, for which we are not prepared in any way and of which no
explanation is vouchsafed us. That is particularly the case when he is
dealing with the soul and the first mover. On the whole his account of
the soul is simply a development of eastern Ionian theories, and we feel
that we are far removed indeed from the Platonist conception of the
soul's priority to everything else. But, when he has told us that the
highest and most developed form of soul is Mind, we are suddenly
surprised by the statement that Mind in this sense is merely passive,
while there is another form of it which is separable from matter, and
that alone is immortal and everlasting. This has given rise to endless
controversy which does not concern us here, but it seems best to
interpret it as an involuntary outburst of the Platonism Aristotle could
not wholly renounce. Very similar is the passage where he tries to
explain how the first mover, though itself unmoved, communicates motion
to the world. 'It moves it like a thing beloved,' he tells us, and
leaves us to make what we can of that. And yet we cannot help feeling
that, in passages like this, we come far nearer to the beliefs Aristotle
really cared about than we do anywhere else. At heart he is a Platonist
in spite of himself.

Aristotle's attitude to the practical life is also dependent on
Plato's. In the Tenth Book of the _Ethics_ he puts the claims of the
Contemplative Life even higher than Plato ever did, so that the
practical life appears to be only ancillary to it. He does not feel in
the same degree as Plato the call for the philosopher to descend once
more into the Cave for the sake of the prisoners there, and altogether
he seems far more indifferent to the practical interests of life.
Nevertheless he followed Plato's lead in giving much of his time to the
study of Politics and that too with the distinctly practical aim of
training legislators. He has often been criticized for his failure to
see that the days of the city-state were numbered, and for the way in
which he ignores the rise of an imperial monarchy in the person of his
own pupil Alexander the Great. That, however, is not quite fair.
Aristotle had a healthy dislike of princes and courts, and the
city-state still appealed to him as the normal form of political
organization. He could not believe that it would ever be superseded, and
he wished to contribute to its better administration. He had, in fact, a
much more conservative outlook than Plato, who was inclined to think
with Isocrates, that the revival of monarchy was the only thing that
could preserve Hellenism as things were then. We must remember that
Aristotle was not himself a citizen of any free state, and that he could
hardly be expected to have the same political instincts as Plato, who
belonged by birth to the governing classes of Athens and had inherited
the liberal traditions of the Periclean Age. This comes out best of all
perhaps, in the attitude of the two philosophers to the question of
slavery. In the _Laws_, which deals with existing conditions, Plato of
course recognizes the _de facto_ existence of slavery, though he is very
sensible of its dangers and makes many legislative proposals with a view
to their mitigation. In the _Republic_, on the other hand, where there
is no need to trouble about existing conditions, he makes Socrates
picture for us a community in which there are apparently no slaves at
all. Aristotle is also anxious to mitigate the worst abuses of slavery,
but he justifies the institution as a permanent one by the consideration
that barbarians are 'slaves by nature' and that it is for their own
interest to be 'living tools'. This insistence upon the fundamental
distinction between Greeks and barbarians must have seemed an
anachronism to many of Aristotle's contemporaries and it had been
expressly denounced by Plato as unscientific.

The immediate effect of Aristotle's rejection of Platonist mathematics
was one he certainly neither foresaw nor intended. It was to make a
breach between philosophy and science. Mathematical science, whether
Aristotle realized it or not, was still in the vigour of its first
youth, and mathematicians were stirred by the achievements of the last
generation to attempt the solution of still higher problems. If the
Lyceum turned away from them, they were quite prepared to carry on the
Academic tradition by themselves, and they succeeded for a time beyond
all expectation. The third century B. C. was, in fact, the Golden Age of
Greek mathematics, and it has been suggested that this was due to the
emancipation of mathematics from philosophy. If that were true, it would
be very important for us to know it; but it can, I think, be shown that
it is not true. The great mathematicians of the third century were
certainly carrying on the tradition of their predecessors who had been
philosophers as well as mathematicians, and it is not to be wondered at
that they were able to do so for a time. But the really striking fact is
surely that Greek mathematics became sterile in a comparatively short
time, and that no further advance was made till the days of Descartes
and Leibniz, with whom philosophy and mathematics once more went hand in
hand.

Nor was the effect of this divorce on philosophy itself less
disastrous. Theophrastus continued Aristotle's work on Aristotle's
lines, and founded the science of Botany as his predecessor had founded
that of Zoology, but the Peripatetic School practically died out with
him and had very little influence till the study of Aristotle was
revived long afterwards by the Neoplatonists.

For the present, the divorce of science and philosophy was complete. The
Stoics and the Epicureans had both, indeed, a scientific system, but
their philosophy was in no sense based upon it. The attitude of Epicurus
to science is particularly well marked. He took no interest in it
whatever as such, but he used it as an instrument to free men from the
religious fear to which he attributed human unhappiness. For that
purpose, the science of the Academy, which had led up to a theology, was
obviously unsuitable, and, like a true eastern Ionian as he was,
Epicurus harked back to the atomic theory of Democritus, adding to it,
however, certain things which really made nonsense of it, such, for
instance, as the theory of absolute weight and lightness, which
Aristotle had unfortunately taught. The Stoics too were corporealists,
and found such science as they required in the system of Heraclitus,
though they also adopted for polemical purposes much of Aristotle's
Logic, taking pains, however, to alter his terminology. Both these
schools, in fact, while remaining faithful to the idea of philosophy as
conversion, forgot that it had always been based on science in its best
days. It was this, no doubt, which chiefly commended Stoicism and
Epicureanism to the Romans, who were never really interested in science.
Both Stoicism and Epicureanism made a practical appeal, though of a
different kind, and that served to gain credit for them at Rome.

The Academy which Plato had founded still continued to exist, though it
was diverted from its original purpose not more than a generation after
Plato's death. Mathematics, we have seen, had made itself independent,
and the most pressing necessity of the time was certainly the criticism
of the new dogmatism which the Stoics had introduced. That was really
carrying on one side of Platonism and not the least important. It is
true indeed that the Academy appears to us at this distance of time
mainly as a school of scepticism, but we must remember that its
scepticism was directed entirely to the sensible world, as to which the
attitude of Plato himself was not fundamentally different. The real
sceptics always refused to admit that the Academics were sceptics in the
proper sense of the word, and it is possible that the tradition of
Platonism proper was never wholly broken. At any rate, by the first
century B. C., we begin to notice that Stoicism tends to become more and
more Platonic. The study of Plato's _Timaeus_ came into favour again,
and the commentary which Posidonius (_c._ 100 B. C.) wrote upon it had
great influence on the development of philosophy down to the end of the
Middle Ages. It is this period of eclecticism which is reflected for us
in the philosophical writings of Cicero. It had great importance for the
history of civilization, but it is far removed from the spirit of
genuine Greek philosophy. That was dead for the present, and it did not
come to life again till the third century of our era, when Platonism was
revived at Rome by Plotinus.

It is only quite recently that historians of Greek philosophy have begun
to do justice to 'Neoplatonism'. That is partly due to the contemporary
philosophical tendencies noted at the beginning of this paper, and
partly to historical investigations into the philosophy of the Middle
Ages, which is more and more seen to be dependent mainly on Neoplatonism
down to and including the system of St. Thomas Aquinas. It was in fact
the most decisive fact in the history of Western European civilization
that Plotinus founded his school at Rome rather than at Athens or
Alexandria; for that is how Western Europe became the real heir to the
philosophy of Greece. Every one knows, of course, that Plotinus was a
'mystic', but the term is apt to suggest quite wrong ideas about him. He
is often spoken of still as a man who introduced oriental ideas into
Greek philosophy, and he is popularly supposed to have been an Egyptian.
That is most improbable; and, if it were true, it would only make it the
more remarkable that, though he certainly studied at Alexandria for
eleven years, he never even mentions the religion of Isis, which was so
fashionable at Rome in his day, and which had fascinated so genuine a
Greek as Plutarch some generations before. There is no doubt that what
Plotinus believed himself to be teaching was genuine Platonism, and that
he had prepared himself for the task by a careful study of Aristotle and
even of Stoicism, so far as that served his purpose. No doubt he was too
great a man to make himself the mere mouthpiece of another's thought;
but, for all that, he was the legitimate successor of Plato, and it may
be added that M. Robin, who has taken upon himself the arduous task of
extracting Plato's real philosophy from the writings of Aristotle, has
come to the conclusion that there is a great deal more 'Neoplatonism' in
Plato than is sometimes supposed.

Plotinus is a mystic, then, though not at all in the sense in which the
term is often misused. He sets before his disciples a 'way of life'
which leads by stages to the highest life of all, but that is just what
Pythagoras and Plato had done, and it is only the continuation of a
tradition which goes back among the Greeks to the sixth century B. C.,
nearly a thousand years before the time of Plotinus. His aim, like that
of his predecessors, is the conversion of souls to this way of life, and
he differs from such thinkers as the Stoics and the Epicureans in
holding that the 'way of life' to which he calls them must be based once
more on a systematic doctrine of God, the World and Man. The result was
that the divorce which had existed for centuries between science and
philosophy was once more annulled. We cannot say, indeed, that Plotinus
himself made any special study of Mathematics, but there is no doubt at
all that his followers did, and it is due to them, and especially to
Proclus, that we know as much of Greek Mathematics as we do. Proclus was
indeed the systematizer of the doctrine of Plotinus, though he differs
from him on certain points, and his influence on later philosophy cannot
be overestimated. It can be distinctly traced even in Descartes, whom it
reached through a number of channels, the study of which has recently
been undertaken by a French scholar, Professor Gilson, of the University
of Strasbourg. When his researches are complete, the continuity of Greek
and modern philosophy will be plainly seen, and the part played by
Platonism in the making of the modern European mind will be made
manifest. We shall then understand better than ever why Greek philosophy
is a subject of perennial interest.

The history of Greek philosophy is, in fact, the history of our own
spiritual past, and it is impossible to understand the present without
taking it into account. In particular, the Platonist tradition underlies
the whole of western civilization. It was at Rome, as has been pointed
out, that Plotinus taught, and it was in certain Latin translations of
the writings of his school that St. Augustine found the basis for a
Christian philosophy he was seeking. It was Augustine's great authority
in the Latin Church that made Platonism its official philosophy for
centuries. It is a complete mistake to suppose that the thinking of the
Middle Ages was dominated by the authority of Aristotle. It was not till
the thirteenth century that Aristotle was known at all, and even then he
was studied in the light of Platonism, just as he had been by Plotinus
and his followers. It was only at the very close of the Middle Ages that
he acquired the predominance which has made so strong an impression on
the centuries that followed. It was from the Platonist tradition, too,
that the science of the earlier Middle Ages came. A considerable portion
of Plato's _Timaeus_ had been translated into Latin in the fourth
century by Chalcidius with a very elaborate commentary based on ancient
sources, while the _Consolation of Philosophy_, written in prison by the
Roman Platonist Boethius in A. D. 525, was easily the most popular book
of the Middle Ages. It was translated into English by Alfred the Great
and by Chaucer, and into many other European languages. It was on these
foundations that the French Platonism of the twelfth century, and
especially that of the School of Chartres, was built up, and the
influence of that school in England was very great indeed. The names of
Grosseteste and Roger Bacon may just be mentioned in this connexion, and
it would not be hard to show that the special character of the
contribution which English writers have been able to make to science and
philosophy is in large measure attributable to this influence.

But the interest of Greek philosophy is not only historical; it is full
of instruction for the future too. Since the time of Locke, philosophy
has been apt to limit itself to discussions about the nature of
knowledge, and to leave questions about the nature of the world to
specialists. The history of Greek philosophy shows the danger of this
unnatural division of the province of thought, and the more we study it,
the more we shall feel the need of a more comprehensive view. The
'philosophy of things human', as the Greeks called it, is only one
department among others, and the theory of knowledge is only one
department of that. If studied in isolation from the whole, it must
inevitably become one-sided. From Greek philosophy we can also learn
that it is fatal to divorce speculation from the service of mankind. The
notion that philosophy could be so isolated would have been wholly
unintelligible to any of the great Greek thinkers, and most of all
perhaps to the Platonists who are often charged with this very heresy.
Above all, we can learn from Greek philosophy the paramount importance
of what we call the personality and they called the soul. It was just
because the Greeks realized this that the genuinely Hellenic idea of
conversion played so great a part in their thinking and in their lives.
That, above all, is the lesson they have to teach, and that is why the
writings of their great philosophers have still the power to convert the
souls of all that will receive their teaching with humility.

J. BURNET.




MATHEMATICS AND ASTRONOMY


It has been well said that, if we would study any subject properly, we
must study it as something that is alive and growing and consider it
with reference to its growth in the past. As most of the vital forces
and movements in modern civilization had their origin in Greece, this
means that, to study them properly, we must get back to Greece. So it is
with the literature of modern countries, or their philosophy, or their
art; we cannot study them with the determination to get to the bottom
and understand them without the way pointing eventually back to Greece.

When we think of the debt which mankind owes to the Greeks, we are apt
to think too exclusively of the masterpieces in literature and art which
they have left us. But the Greek genius was many-sided; the Greek, with
his insatiable love of knowledge, his determination to see things as
they are and to see them whole, his burning desire to be able to give a
rational explanation of everything in heaven and earth, was just as
irresistibly driven to natural science, mathematics, and exact reasoning
in general, or logic.

To quote from a brilliant review of a well-known work: 'To be a Greek
was to seek to know, to know the primordial substance of matter, to know
the meaning of number, to know the world as a rational whole. In no
spirit of paradox one may say that Euclid is the most typical Greek: he
would know to the bottom, and know as a rational system, the laws of the
measurement of the earth. Plato, too, loved geometry and the wonders of
numbers; he was essentially Greek because he was essentially
mathematical.... And if one thus finds the Greek genius in Euclid and
the _Posterior Analytics_, one will understand the motto written over
the Academy, μηδεις αγεωμετρητος εισιτω {mêdeis ageômetrêtos eisitô}. To
know what the Greek genius meant you must (if one may speak εν αινιγματι
{en ainigmati}) begin with geometry.'

Mathematics, indeed, plays an important part in Greek philosophy: there
are, for example, many passages in Plato and Aristotle for the
interpretation of which some knowledge of the technique of Greek
mathematics is the first essential. Hence it should be part of the
equipment of every classical student that he should have read
substantial portions of the works of the Greek mathematicians in the
original, say, some of the early books of Euclid in full and the
definitions (at least) of the other books, as well as selections from
other writers. Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff has included in his
_Griechisches Lesebuch_ extracts from Euclid, Archimedes and Heron of
Alexandria; and the example should be followed in this country.

Acquaintance with the original works of the Greek mathematicians is no
less necessary for any mathematician worthy of the name. Mathematics is
a Greek science. So far as pure geometry is concerned, the
mathematician's technical equipment is almost wholly Greek. The Greeks
laid down the principles, fixed the terminology and invented the methods
_ab initio_; moreover, they did this with such certainty that in the
centuries which have since elapsed there has been no need to
reconstruct, still less to reject as unsound, any essential part of
their doctrine.

Consider first the terminology of mathematics. Almost all the standard
terms are Greek or Latin translations from the Greek, and, although the
mathematician may be taught their meaning without knowing Greek, he will
certainly grasp their significance better if he knows them as they arise
and as part of the living language of the men who invented them. Take
the word _isosceles_; a schoolboy can be shown what an isosceles
triangle is, but, if he knows nothing of the derivation, he will wonder
why such an apparently outlandish term should be necessary to express so
simple an idea. But if the mere appearance of the word shows him that it
means a thing _with equal legs_, being compounded of ισος {isos}, equal,
and σκελος {skelos}, a leg, he will understand its appropriateness and
will have no difficulty in remembering it. _Equilateral_, on the other
hand, is borrowed from the Latin, but it is merely the Latin translation
of the Greek ισοπλευρος {isopleuros}, _equal-sided_. _Parallelogram_
again can be explained to a Greekless person, but it will be far better
understood by one who sees in it the two words παραλληλος {parallêlos}
and γραμμη {grammê} and realizes that it is a short way of expressing
that the figure in question is contained by parallel lines; and we shall
best understand the word _parallel_ itself if we see in it the statement
of the fact that the two straight lines so described go _alongside one
another_, παρ' αλληλας {par' allêlas}, all the way. Similarly a
mathematician should know that a _rhombus_ is so called from its
resemblance to a form of spinning-top (ῥομβος {rhombos} from ῥεμβω
{rhembô}, to spin) and that, just as a parallelogram is a figure formed
by two pairs of parallel straight lines, so a _parallelepiped_ is a
solid figure bounded by three pairs of parallel planes (παραλληλος
{parallêlos}, parallel, and επιπεδος {epipedos}, plane); incidentally,
in the latter case, he will be saved from writing 'parallel_o_piped', a
monstrosity which has disfigured not a few textbooks of geometry.
Another good example is the word _hypotenuse_; it comes from the verb
ὑποτεινειν {hypoteinein} (c. ὑπο {hypo} and acc. or simple acc.), to
_stretch under_, or, in its Latin form, to _subtend_, which term is used
quite generally for 'to be opposite to'; in our phraseology the word
_hypotenuse_ is restricted to that side of a right-angled triangle which
is opposite to the right angle, being short for the expression used in
Eucl. i. 47, ἡ την ορθην γωνιαν ὑποτεινουσα πλευρα {hê tên orthên gônian
hypoteinousa pleura}, 'the side subtending the right angle', which
accounts for the feminine participial form ὑποτεινουσα {hypoteinousa},
_hypotenuse_. If mathematicians had had more Greek, perhaps the
misspelt form 'hypot_h_enuse' would not have survived so long.

To take an example outside the Elements, how can a mathematician
properly understand the term _latus rectum_ used in conic sections
unless he has seen it in Apollonius as the _erect side_ (ορθια πλευρα
{orthia pleura}) of a certain rectangle in the case of each of the three
conics?[3] The word _ordinate_ can hardly convey anything to one who
does not know that it is what Apollonius describes as 'the straight line
drawn down (from a point on the curve) in the _prescribed_ or _ordained_
manner (τεταγμενως κατηγμενη {tetagmenôs katêgmenê})'. _Asymptote_ again
comes from ασυμπτωτος {asymptôtos}, _non-meeting_, _non-secant_, and had
with the Greeks a more general signification as well as the narrower one
which it has for us: it was sometimes used of parallel lines, which also
'do not meet'.

    [3] In the case of the parabola, the base (as distinct from the
    'erect side') of the rectangle is what is called the _abscissa_ (Gk.
    αποτεμνομενη {apotemnomenê}, 'cut off') of the ordinate, and the
    rectangle itself is equal to the square on the ordinate. In the case
    of the central conics, the base of the rectangle is 'the transverse
    side of the figure' or the transverse diameter (the diameter of
    reference), and the rectangle is equal to the square on the diameter
    conjugate to the diameter of reference.

Again, if we take up a textbook of geometry written in accordance with
the most modern Education Board circular or University syllabus, we
shall find that the phraseology used (except where made more colloquial
and less scientific) is almost all pure Greek. The Greek tongue was
extraordinarily well adapted as a vehicle of scientific thought. One of
the characteristics of Euclid's language which his commentator Proclus
is most fond of emphasizing is its marvellous _exactness_ (ακριβεια
{akribeia}). The language of the Greek geometers is also wonderfully
concise, notwithstanding all appearances to the contrary. One of the
complaints often made against Euclid is that he is 'diffuse'. Yet
(apart from abbreviations in writing) it will be found that the
exposition of corresponding matters in modern elementary textbooks
generally takes up, not less, but more space. And, to say nothing of
the perfect finish of Archimedes's treatises, we shall find in Heron,
Ptolemy and Pappus veritable models of concise statement. The purely
geometrical proof by Heron of the formula for the area of a triangle,
Δ{D}=√_{s(s-a)(s-b)(s-c)}_, and the geometrical propositions in Book I
of Ptolemy's _Syntaxis_ (including 'Ptolemy's Theorem') are cases in
point.

The principles of geometry and arithmetic (in the sense of the theory of
numbers) are stated in the preliminary matter of Books I and VII of
Euclid. But Euclid was not their discoverer; they were gradually evolved
from the time of Pythagoras onwards. Aristotle is clear about the nature
of the principles and their classification. Every demonstrative science,
he says, has to do with three things, the subject-matter, the things
proved, and the things from which the proof starts (εξ ὡν {ex hôn}). It
is not everything that can be proved, otherwise the chain of proof would
be endless; you must begin somewhere, and you must start with things
admitted but indemonstrable. These are, first, principles common to all
sciences which are called _axioms_ or _common opinions_, as that 'of two
contradictories one must be true', or 'if equals be subtracted from
equals, the remainders are equal'; secondly, principles peculiar to the
subject-matter of the particular science, say geometry. First among the
latter principles are definitions; there must be agreement as to what we
mean by certain terms. But a definition asserts nothing about the
existence or non-existence of the thing defined. The existence of the
various things defined has to be _proved_ except in the case of a few
primary things in each science the existence of which is indemonstrable
and must be _assumed_ among the first principles of the science; thus in
geometry we must assume the existence of points and lines, and in
arithmetic of the unit. Lastly, we must assume certain other things
which are less obvious and cannot be proved but yet have to be
accepted; these are called _postulates_, because they make a demand on
the faith of the learner. Euclid's Postulates are of this kind,
especially that known as the parallel-postulate.

The methods of solution of problems were no doubt first applied in
particular cases and then gradually systematized; the technical terms
for them were probably invented later, after the methods themselves had
become established.

One method of solution was the _reduction_ of one problem to another.
This was called απαγωγη {apagôgê}, a term which seems to occur first in
Aristotle. But instances of such reduction occurred long before.
Hippocrates of Chios reduced the problem of duplicating the cube to that
of finding two mean proportionals in continued proportion between two
straight lines, that is, he showed that, if the latter problem could be
solved, the former was thereby solved also; and it is probable that
there were still earlier cases in the Pythagorean geometry.

Next there is the method of mathematical _analysis_. This method is said
to have been 'communicated' or 'explained' by Plato to Leodamas of
Thasos; but, like reduction (to which it is closely akin), analysis in
the mathematical sense must have been in use much earlier. _Analysis_
and its correlative _synthesis_ are defined by Pappus: 'in analysis we
assume that which is sought as if it were already done, and we inquire
what it is from which this results, and again what is the antecedent
cause of the latter, and so on, until by so retracing our steps we come
upon something already known or belonging to the class of principles.
But in synthesis, reversing the process, we take as already done that
which was last arrived at in the analysis, and, by arranging in their
natural order as consequences what were before antecedents and
successively connecting them one with another, we arrive finally at the
construction of that which was sought.'

The method of _reductio ad absurdum_ is a variety of analysis. Starting
from a hypothesis, namely the contradictory of what we desire to prove,
we use the same process of analysis, carrying it back until we arrive at
something admittedly false or absurd. Aristotle describes this method in
various ways as _reductio ad absurdum_, proof _per impossibile_, or
proof leading to the impossible. But here again, though the term was
new, the method was not. The paradoxes of Zeno are classical instances.

Lastly, the Greeks established the form of exposition which still
governs geometrical work, simply because it is dictated by strict logic.
It is seen in Euclid's propositions, with their separate formal
divisions, to which specific names were afterwards assigned, (1) the
_enunciation_ (προτασις {protasis}), (2) the _setting-out_ (εκθεσις
{ekthesis}), (3) the διορισμος {diorismos}, being a re-statement of what
we are required to do or prove, not in general terms (as in the
_enunciation_), but with reference to the particular data contained in
the _setting-out_, (4) the _construction_ (κατασκευη {kataskeuê}), (5)
the _proof_ (αποδειξις {apodeixis}), (6) the _conclusion_ (συμπερασμα
{symperasma}). In the case of a problem it often happens that a solution
is not possible unless the particular data are such as to satisfy
certain conditions; in this case there is yet another constituent part
in the proposition, namely the statement of the conditions or limits of
possibility, which was called by the same name διορισμος {diorismos},
definition or delimitation, as that applied to the third constituent
part of a theorem.

We have so far endeavoured to indicate generally the finality and the
abiding value of the work done by the creators of mathematical science.
It remains to summarize, as briefly as possible, the history of Greek
mathematics according to periods and subjects.

The Greeks of course took what they could in the shape of elementary
facts in geometry and astronomy from the Egyptians and Babylonians. But
some of the essential characteristics of the Greek genius assert
themselves even in their borrowings from these or other sources. Here,
as everywhere else, we see their directness and concentration; they
always knew what they wanted, and they had an unerring instinct for
taking only what was worth having and rejecting the rest. This is
illustrated by the story of Pythagoras's travels. He consorted with
priests and prophets and was initiated into the religious rites
practised in different places, not out of religious enthusiasm 'as you
might think' (says our informant), but in order that he might not
overlook any fragment of knowledge worth acquiring that might lie hidden
in the mysteries of divine worship.

This story also illustrates an important advantage which the Greeks had
over the Egyptians and Babylonians. In those countries science, such as
it was, was the monopoly of the priests; and, where this is the case,
the first steps in science are apt to prove the last also, because the
scientific results attained tend to become involved in religious
prescriptions and routine observances, and so to end in a collection of
lifeless formulae. Fortunately for the Greeks, they had no organized
priesthood; untrammelled by prescription, traditional dogmas or
superstition, they could give their reasoning faculties free play. Thus
they were able to create science as a living thing susceptible of
development without limit.

Greek geometry, as also Greek astronomy, begins with Thales (about
624-547 B. C.), who travelled in Egypt and is said to have brought
geometry from thence. Such geometry as there was in Egypt arose out of
practical needs. Revenue was raised by the taxation of landed property,
and its assessment depended on the accurate fixing of the boundaries of
the various holdings. When these were removed by the periodical flooding
due to the rising of the Nile, it was necessary to replace them, or to
determine the taxable area independently of them, by an art of
land-surveying. We conclude from the Papyrus Rhind (say 1700 B. C.) and
other documents that Egyptian geometry consisted mainly of practical
rules for measuring, with more or less accuracy, (1) such areas as
squares, triangles, trapezia, and circles, (2) the solid content of
measures of corn, &c., of different shapes. The Egyptians also
constructed pyramids of a certain slope by means of arithmetical
calculations based on a certain ratio, _se-qeṭ_, namely the ratio of
half the side of the base to the height, which is in fact equivalent to
the co-tangent of the angle of slope. The use of this ratio implies the
notion of similarity of figures, especially triangles. The Egyptians
knew, too, that a triangle with its sides in the ratio of the numbers 3,
4, 5 is right-angled, and used the fact as a means of drawing right
angles. But there is no sign that they knew the general property of a
right-angled triangle (= Eucl. I. 47), of which this is a particular
case, or that they proved any general theorem in geometry.

No doubt Thales, when he was in Egypt, would see diagrams drawn to
illustrate the rules for the measurement of circles and other plane
figures, and these diagrams would suggest to him certain similarities
and congruences which would set him thinking whether there were not some
elementary general principles underlying the construction and relations
of different figures and parts of figures. This would be in accord with
the Greek instinct for generalization and their wish to be able to
account for everything on rational principles.

The following theorems are attributed to Thales: (1) that a circle is
bisected by any diameter (Eucl. I, Def. 17), (2) that the angles at the
base of an isosceles triangle are equal (Eucl. I. 5), (3) that, if two
straight lines cut one another, the vertically opposite angles are equal
(Eucl. I. 15), (4) that, if two triangles have two angles and one side
respectively equal, the triangles are equal in all respects (Eucl. I.
26). He is said (5) to have been the first to inscribe a right-angled
triangle in a circle, which must mean that he was the first to discover
that the angle in a semicircle is a right angle (cf. Eucl. III. 31).

Elementary as these things are, they represent a new departure of a
momentous kind, being the first steps towards a _theory_ of geometry. On
this point we cannot do better than quote some remarks from Kant's
preface to the second edition of his _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_.

'Mathematics has, from the earliest times to which the history of human
reason goes back, (that is to say) with that wonderful people the
Greeks, travelled the safe road of a _science_. But it must not be
supposed that it was as easy for mathematics as it was for logic, where
reason is concerned with itself alone, to find, or rather to build for
itself, that royal road. I believe on the contrary that with mathematics
it remained for long a case of groping about--the Egyptians in
particular were still at that stage--and that this transformation must
be ascribed to a _revolution_ brought about by the happy inspiration of
one man in trying an experiment, from which point onward the road that
must be taken could no longer be missed, and the safe way of a science
was struck and traced out for all time and to distances illimitable....
A light broke on the first man who demonstrated the property of the
isosceles triangle (whether his name was Thales or what you will)....'

Thales also solved two problems of a practical kind: (1) he showed how
to measure the distance of a ship at sea, and (2) he found the heights
of pyramids by means of the shadows thrown on the ground by the pyramid
and by a stick of known length at the same moment; one account says that
he chose the time when the lengths of the stick and of its shadow were
equal, but in either case he argued by similarity of triangles.

In astronomy Thales predicted a solar eclipse which was probably that of
the 28th May 585 B. C. Now the Babylonians, as the result of
observations continued through centuries, had discovered the period of
223 lunations after which eclipses recur. It is most likely therefore
that Thales had heard of this period, and that his prediction was based
upon it. He is further said to have used the Little Bear for finding the
pole, to have discovered the inequality of the four astronomical
seasons, and to have written works _On the Equinox_ and _On the
Solstice_.

After Thales come the Pythagoreans. Of the Pythagoreans Aristotle says
that they applied themselves to the study of mathematics and were the
first to advance that science, going so far as to find in the principles
of mathematics the principles of all existing things. Of Pythagoras
himself we are told that he attached supreme importance to the study of
arithmetic, advancing it and taking it out of the region of practical
utility, and again that he transformed the study of geometry into a
liberal education, examining the principles of the science from the
beginning.

The very word μαθηματα {mathêmata}, which originally meant 'subjects of
instruction' generally, is said to have been first appropriated to
mathematics by the Pythagoreans.

In saying that arithmetic began with Pythagoras we have to distinguish
between the uses of that word then and now. Αριθμητικη {Arithmêtikê}
with the Greeks was distinguished from λογιστικη {logistikê}, the
science of calculation. It is the latter word which would cover
arithmetic in our sense, or practical calculation; the term αριθμητικη
{arithmêtikê} was restricted to the science of numbers considered in
themselves, or, as we should say, the Theory of Numbers. Another way of
putting the distinction was to say that αριθμητικη {arithmêtikê} dealt
with absolute numbers or numbers in the abstract, and λογιστικη
{logistikê} with numbered _things_ or concrete numbers; thus λογιστικη
{logistikê} included simple problems about numbers of apples, bowls, or
objects generally, such as are found in the Greek Anthology and
sometimes involve simple algebraical equations.

The Theory of Numbers then began with Pythagoras (about 572-497 B. C.).
It included definitions of the unit and of number, and the
classification and definitions of the various classes of numbers, odd,
even, prime, composite, and sub-divisions of these such as odd-even,
even-times-even, &c. Again there were figured numbers, namely,
triangular numbers, squares, oblong numbers, polygonal numbers
(pentagons, hexagons, &c.) corresponding respectively to plane figures,
and pyramidal numbers, cubes, parallelepipeds, &c., corresponding to
solid figures in geometry. The treatment was mostly geometrical, the
numbers being represented by dots filling up geometrical figures of the
various kinds. The laws of formation of the various figured numbers were
established. In this investigation the _gnomon_ played an important
part. Originally meaning the upright needle of a sun-dial, the term was
next used for a figure like a carpenter's square, and then was applied
to a figure of that shape put round two sides of a square and making up
a larger square. The arithmetical application of the term was similar.
If we represent a unit by one dot and put round it three dots in such a
way that the four form the corners of a square, _three_ is the first
gnomon. _Five_ dots put at equal distances round two sides of the square
containing four dots make up the next square (3²), and _five_ is the
second gnomon. Generally, if we have _n²_ dots so arranged as to fill up
a square with _n_ for its side, the gnomon to be put round it to make up
the next square, _(n+1)²_, has _2n+1_ dots. In the formation of squares,
therefore, the successive gnomons are the series of odd numbers
following 1 (the first square), namely 3, 5, 7, ... In the formation of
_oblong_ numbers (numbers of the form _n(n+1)_), the first of which is
1. 2, the successive gnomons are the terms after 2 in the series of
_even_ numbers 2, 4, 6.... Triangular numbers are formed by adding to 1
(the first triangle) the terms after 1 in the series of natural numbers
1, 2, 3 ...; these are therefore the gnomons (by analogy) for triangles.
The gnomons for pentagonal numbers are the terms after 1 in the
arithmetical progression 1, 4, 7, 10 ... (with 3, or 5-2, as the common
difference) and so on; the common difference of the successive gnomons
for an _a_-gonal number is _a-2_.

From the series of gnomons for squares we easily deduce a formula for
finding square numbers which are the sum of two squares. For, the gnomon
_2n+1_ being the difference between the successive squares _n²_ and
_(n+1)²_, we have only to make _2n+1_ a square. Suppose that _2n+1=m²_;
therefore _n=½(m²-1)_, and _{½(m²-1)}²+m²={½(m²+1)}²_, where _m_ is any
odd number. This is the formula actually attributed to Pythagoras.

Pythagoras is said to have discovered the theory of proportionals or
proportion. This was a numerical theory and therefore was applicable to
commensurable magnitudes only; it was no doubt somewhat on the lines of
Euclid, Book VII. Connected with the theory of proportion was that of
_means_, and Pythagoras was acquainted with three of these, the
arithmetic, geometric, and sub-contrary (afterwards called harmonic). In
particular Pythagoras is said to have introduced from Babylon into
Greece the 'most perfect' proportion, namely:

_a:(a+b)/2=2ab/(a+b):b_,

where the second and third terms are respectively the arithmetic and
harmonic mean between _a_ and _b_. A particular case is 12:9=8:6.

This bears upon what was probably Pythagoras's greatest discovery,
namely that the musical intervals correspond to certain arithmetical
ratios between lengths of string at the same tension, the octave
corresponding to the ratio 2:1, the fifth to 3:2 and the fourth to 4:3.
These ratios being the same as those of 12 to 6, 8, 9 respectively, we
can understand how the third term, 8, in the above proportion came to
be called the 'harmonic' mean between 12 and 6.

The Pythagorean arithmetic as a whole, with the developments made after
the time of Pythagoras himself, is mainly known to us through
Nicomachus's _Introductio arithmetica_, Iamblichus's commentary on the
same, and Theon of Smyrna's work _Expositio rerum mathematicarum ad
legendum Platonem utilium_. The things in these books most deserving of
notice are the following.

First, there is the description of a 'perfect' number (a number which is
equal to the sum of all its parts, i.e. all its integral divisors
including 1 but excluding the number itself), with a statement of the
property that all such numbers end in 6 or 8. Four such numbers, namely
6, 28, 496, 8128, were known to Nicomachus. The law of formation for
such numbers is first found in Eucl. IX. 36 proving that, if the sum
(S_{n}) of _n_ terms of the series 1, 2, 2², 2³ ... is prime, then
S_{n}.2^{n-1} is a perfect number.

Secondly, Theon of Smyrna gives the law of formation of the series of
'side-' and 'diameter-' numbers which satisfy the equations _2x²-y²=±1_.
The law depends on the proposition proved in Eucl. II. 10 to the effect
that _(2x+y)²-2(x+y)²=2x²-y²_, whence it follows that, if _x_, _y_
satisfy either of the above equations, then _2x+y_, _x+y_ is a solution
in higher numbers of the other equation. The successive solutions give
values for _y/x_, namely 1/1, 3/2, 7/5, 17/12, 41/29, ..., which are
successive approximations to the value of √2 (the ratio of the diagonal
of a square to its side). The occasion for this method of approximation
to √2 (which can be carried as far as we please) was the discovery by
the Pythagoreans of the incommensurable or irrational in this particular
case.

Thirdly, Iamblichus mentions a discovery by Thymaridas, a Pythagorean
not later than Plato's time, called the επανθημα {epanthêma} ('bloom')
of Thymaridas, and amounting to the solution of any number of
simultaneous equations of the following form:

_x+x₁+x₂+ ... +x_{n-1} = s_,
    _x+x₁ = a₁_,
    _x+x₂ = a₂_,
         ...
_x+x_{n-1} = a_{n-1}_,

the solution being _x=((a₁+a₂+ ... +a_{n-1})-s)/(n-2)_.

The rule is stated in general terms, but the above representation of its
effect shows that it is a piece of pure algebra.

The Pythagorean contributions to geometry were even more remarkable. The
most famous proposition attributed to Pythagoras himself is of course
the theorem of Eucl. I. 47 that the square on the hypotenuse of any
right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other
two sides. But Proclus also attributes to him, besides the theory of
proportionals, the construction of the 'cosmic figures', the five
regular solids.

One of the said solids, the dodecahedron, has twelve regular pentagons
for faces, and the construction of a regular pentagon involves the
cutting of a straight line 'in extreme and mean ratio' (Eucl. II. 11 and
VI. 30), which is a particular case of the method known as the
_application of areas_. This method was fully worked out by the
Pythagoreans and proved one of the most powerful in all Greek geometry.
The most elementary case appears in Eucl. I. 44, 45, where it is shown
how to apply to a given straight line as base a parallelogram with one
angle equal to a given angle and equal in area to any given rectilineal
figure; this construction is the geometrical equivalent of arithmetical
_division_. The general case is that in which the parallelogram, though
applied to the straight line, overlaps it or falls short of it in such a
way that the part of the parallelogram which extends beyond or falls
short of the parallelogram of the same angle and breadth on the given
straight line itself (exactly) as base is similar to any given
parallelogram (Eucl. VI. 28, 29). This is the geometrical equivalent of
the solution of the most general form of quadratic equation _ax±mx²=C_,
so far as it has real roots; the condition that the roots may be real
was also worked out (=Eucl. VI. 27). It is in the form of 'application
of areas' that Apollonius obtains the fundamental property of each of
the conic sections, and, as we shall see, it is from the terminology of
application of areas that Apollonius took the three names _parabola_,
_hyperbola_, and _ellipse_ which he was the first to give to the three
curves.

Another problem solved by the Pythagoreans was that of drawing a
rectilineal figure which shall be equal in area to one given rectilineal
figure and similar to another. Plutarch mentions a doubt whether it was
this problem or the theorem of Eucl. I. 47 on the strength of which
Pythagoras was said to have sacrificed an ox.

The main particular applications of the theorem of the square on the
hypotenuse, e. g. those in Euclid, Book II, were also Pythagorean; the
construction of a square equal to a given rectangle (Eucl. II. 14) is
one of them, and corresponds to the solution of the pure quadratic
equation _x²=ab_.

The Pythagoreans knew the properties of parallels and proved the theorem
that the sum of the three angles of any triangle is equal to two right
angles.

As we have seen, the Pythagorean theory of proportion, being numerical,
was inadequate in that it did not apply to incommensurable magnitudes;
but, with this qualification, we may say that the Pythagorean geometry
covered the bulk of the subject-matter of Books I, II, IV and VI of
Euclid's _Elements_. The case is less clear with regard to Book III of
the _Elements_; but, as the main propositions of that Book were known to
Hippocrates of Chios in the second half of the fifth century B. C., we
conclude that they, too, were part of the Pythagorean geometry.

Lastly, the Pythagoreans discovered the existence of the incommensurable
or irrational in the particular case of the diagonal of a square in
relation to its side. Aristotle mentions an ancient proof of the
incommensurability of the diagonal with the side by a _reductio ad
absurdum_ showing that, if the diagonal were commensurable with the
side, it would follow that one and the same number is both odd and even.
This proof was doubtless Pythagorean.

A word should be added about the Pythagorean astronomy. Pythagoras was
the first to hold that the earth (and no doubt each of the other
heavenly bodies also) is spherical in shape, and he was aware that the
sun, moon and planets have independent movements of their own in a sense
opposite to that of the daily rotation; but he seems to have kept the
earth in the centre. His successors in the school (one Hicetas of
Syracuse and Philolaus are alternatively credited with this innovation)
actually abandoned the geocentric idea and made the earth, like the sun,
the moon, and the other planets, revolve in a circle round the 'central
fire', in which resided the governing principle ordering and directing
the movement of the universe.

The geometry of which we have so far spoken belongs to the Elements.
But, before the body of the Elements was complete, the Greeks had
advanced beyond the Elements. By the second half of the fifth century B.
C. they had investigated three famous problems in higher geometry, (1)
the squaring of the circle, (2) the trisection of any angle, (3) the
duplication of the cube. The great names belonging to this period are
Hippias of Elis, Hippocrates of Chios, and Democritus.

Hippias of Elis invented a certain curve described by combining two
uniform movements (one angular and the other rectilinear) taking the
same time to complete. Hippias himself used his curve for the
trisection of any angle or the division of it in any ratio; but it was
afterwards employed by Dinostratus, a brother of Eudoxus's pupil
Menaechmus, and by Nicomedes for squaring the circle, whence it got the
name τετραγωνιζουσα {tetragônizousa}, _quadratrix_.

Hippocrates of Chios is mentioned by Aristotle as an instance to prove
that a man may be a distinguished geometer and, at the same time, a fool
in the ordinary affairs of life. He occupies an important place both in
elementary geometry and in relation to two of the higher problems above
mentioned. He was, so far as is known, the first compiler of a book of
Elements; and he was the first to prove the important theorem of Eucl.
XII. 2 that circles are to one another as the squares on their
diameters, from which he further deduced that similar segments of
circles are to one another as the squares on their bases. These
propositions were used by him in his tract on the squaring of _lunes_,
which was intended to lead up to the squaring of the circle. The
essential portions of the tract are preserved in a passage of
Simplicius's commentary on Aristotle's _Physics_, which contains
substantial extracts from Eudemus's lost _History of Geometry_.
Hippocrates showed how to square three particular lunes of different
kinds and then, lastly, he squared the sum of a circle and a certain
lune. Unfortunately the last-mentioned lune was not one of those which
can be squared, so that the attempt to square the circle in this way
failed after all.

Hippocrates also attacked the problem of doubling the cube. There are
two versions of the origin of this famous problem. According to one
story an old tragic poet had represented Minos as having been
dissatisfied with the size of a cubical tomb erected for his son Glaucus
and having told the architect to make it double the size while retaining
the cubical form. The other story says that the Delians, suffering from
a pestilence, consulted the oracle and were told to double a certain
altar as a means of staying the plague. Hippocrates did not indeed solve
the problem of duplication, but reduced it to another, namely that of
finding two mean proportionals in continued proportion between two given
straight lines; and the problem was ever afterwards attacked in this
form. If _x_, _y_ be the two required mean proportionals between two
straight lines _a_, _b_, then _a:x=x:y=y:b_, whence _b/a=(x/a)³_, and,
as a particular case, if _b=2a_, _x³=2a³_, so that, when _x_ is found,
the cube is doubled.

Democritus wrote a large number of mathematical treatises, the titles
only of which are preserved. We gather from one of these titles, 'On
irrational lines and solids', that he wrote on irrationals. Democritus
realized as fully as Zeno, and expressed with no less piquancy, the
difficulty connected with the continuous and the infinitesimal. This
appears from his dilemma about the circular base of a cone and a
parallel section; the section which he means is a section 'indefinitely
near' (as the phrase is) to the base, i. e. the _very next_ section, as
we might say (if there were one). Is it, said Democritus, equal or not
equal to the base? If it is equal, so will the very next section to it
be, and so on, so that the cone will really be, not a cone, but a
cylinder. If it is unequal to the base and in fact less, the surface of
the cone will be jagged, like steps, which is very absurd. We may be
sure that Democritus's work on 'The contact of a circle or a sphere'
discussed a like difficulty.

Lastly, Archimedes tells us that Democritus was the first to state,
though he could not give a rigorous proof, that the volume of a cone or
a pyramid is one-third of that of the cylinder or prism respectively on
the same base and having equal height, theorems first proved by Eudoxus.

We come now to the time of Plato, and here the great names are Archytas,
Theodoras of Cyrene, Theaetetus, and Eudoxus.

Archytas (about 430-360 B. C.) wrote on music and the numerical ratios
corresponding to the intervals of the tetrachord. He is said to have
been the first to write a treatise on mechanics based on mathematical
principles; on the practical side he invented a mechanical dove which
would fly. In geometry he gave the first solution of the problem of the
two mean proportionals, using a wonderful construction in three
dimensions which determined a certain point as the intersection of three
surfaces, (1) a certain cone, (2) a half-cylinder, (3) an anchor-ring or
_tore_ with inner diameter _nil_.

Theodorus, Plato's teacher in mathematics, extended the theory of the
irrational by proving incommensurability in certain particular cases
other than that of the diagonal of a square in relation to its side,
which was already known. He proved that the side of a square containing
3 square feet, or 5 square feet, or any non-square number of square feet
up to 17 is incommensurable with one foot, in other words that √3, √5
... √17 are all incommensurable with 1. Theodorus's proof was evidently
not general; and it was reserved for Theaetetus to comprehend all these
irrationals in one definition, and to prove the property generally as it
is proved in Eucl. X. 9. Much of the content of the rest of Euclid's
Book X (dealing with compound irrationals), as also of Book XIII on the
five regular solids, was due to Theaetetus, who is even said to have
discovered two of those solids (the octahedron and icosahedron).

Plato (427-347 B. C.) was probably not an original mathematician, but he
'caused mathematics in general and geometry in particular to make a
great advance by reason of his enthusiasm for them'. He encouraged the
members of his school to specialize in mathematics and astronomy; e. g.
we are told that in astronomy he set it as a problem to all earnest
students to find 'what are the uniform and ordered movements by the
assumption of which the apparent motions of the planets may be
accounted for'. In Plato's own writings are found certain definitions,
e. g. that of a straight line as 'that of which the middle covers the
ends', and some interesting mathematical illustrations, especially that
in the second geometrical passage in the _Meno_ (86E-87C). To Plato
himself are attributed (1) a formula _(n²-1)²+(2n)²=(n²+1)²_ for finding
two square numbers the sum of which is a square number, (2) the
invention of the method of analysis, which he is said to have explained
to Leodamas of Thasos (_mathematical_ analysis was, however, certainly,
in practice, employed long before). The solution, attributed to Plato,
of the problem of the two mean proportionals by means of a frame
resembling that which a shoemaker uses to measure a foot, can hardly be
his.

Eudoxus (408-355 B. C.), an original genius second to none (unless it be
Archimedes) in the history of our subject, made two discoveries of
supreme importance for the further development of Greek geometry.

(1) As we have seen, the discovery of the incommensurable rendered
inadequate the Pythagorean theory of proportion, which applied to
commensurable magnitudes only. It would no doubt be possible, in most
cases, to replace proofs depending on proportions by others; but this
involved great inconvenience, and a slur was cast on geometry generally.
The trouble was remedied once for all by Eudoxus's discovery of the
great theory of proportion, applicable to commensurable and
incommensurable magnitudes alike, which is expounded in Euclid's Book V.
Well might Barrow say of this theory that 'there is nothing in the whole
body of the elements of a more subtile invention, nothing more solidly
established'. The keystone of the structure is the definition of equal
ratios (Eucl. V, Def. 5); and twenty-three centuries have not abated a
jot from its value, as is plain from the facts that Weierstrass repeats
it word for word as his definition of equal numbers, and it corresponds
almost to the point of coincidence with the modern treatment of
irrationals due to Dedekind.

(2) Eudoxus discovered the method of exhaustion for measuring
curvilinear areas and solids, to which, with the extensions given to it
by Archimedes, Greek geometry owes its greatest triumphs. Antiphon the
Sophist, in connexion with attempts to square the circle, had asserted
that, if we inscribe successive regular polygons in a circle,
continually doubling the number of sides, we shall sometime arrive at a
polygon the sides of which will coincide with the circumference of the
circle. Warned by the unanswerable arguments of Zeno against
infinitesimals, mathematicians substituted for this the statement that,
by continuing the construction, we can inscribe a polygon approaching
equality with the circle _as nearly as we please_. The method of
exhaustion used, for the purpose of proof by _reductio ad absurdum_, the
lemma proved in Eucl. X. 1 (to the effect that, if from any magnitude we
subtract not less than half, and then from the remainder not less than
half, and so on continually, there will sometime be left a magnitude
less than any assigned magnitude of the same kind, however small): and
this again depends on an assumption which is practically contained in
Eucl. V, Def. 4, but is generally known as the Axiom of Archimedes,
stating that, if we have two unequal magnitudes, their difference
(however small) can, if continually added to itself, be made to exceed
any magnitude of the same kind (however great).

The method of exhaustion is seen in operation in Eucl. XII. 1-2, 3-7
Cor., 10, 16-18. Props. 3-7 Cor. and Prop. 10 prove that the volumes of
a pyramid and a cone are one-third of the prism and cylinder
respectively on the same base and of equal height; and Archimedes
expressly says that these facts were first proved by Eudoxus.

In astronomy Eudoxus is famous for the beautiful theory of concentric
spheres which he invented to explain the apparent motions of the
planets and, particularly, their apparent stationary points and
retrogradations. The theory applied also to the sun and moon, for each
of which Eudoxus employed three spheres. He represented the motion of
each planet as produced by the rotations of four spheres concentric with
the earth, one within the other, and connected in the following way.
Each of the inner spheres revolves about a diameter the ends of which
(poles) are fixed on the next sphere enclosing it. The outermost sphere
represents the daily rotation, the second a motion along the zodiac
circle; the poles of the third sphere are fixed on the latter circle;
the poles of the fourth sphere (carrying the planet fixed on its
equator) are so fixed on the third sphere, and the speeds and directions
of rotation so arranged, that the planet describes on the second sphere
a curve called the _hippopede_ (horse-fetter), or a figure of eight,
lying along and longitudinally bisected by the zodiac circle. The whole
arrangement is a marvel of geometrical ingenuity.

Heraclides of Pontus (about 388-315 B. C.), a pupil of Plato, made a
great step forward in astronomy by his declaration that the earth
rotates on its own axis once in 24 hours, and by his discovery that
Mercury and Venus revolve about the sun like satellites.

Menaechmus, a pupil of Eudoxus, was the discoverer of the conic
sections, two of which, the parabola and the hyperbola, he used for
solving the problem of the two mean proportionals. If _a:x=x:y=y:b_,
then _x²=ay_, _y²=bx_ and _xy=ab_. These equations represent, in
Cartesian co-ordinates, and with rectangular axes, the conics by the
intersection of which two and two Menaechmus solved the problem; in the
case of the rectangular hyperbola it was the asymptote-property which he
used.

We pass to Euclid's times. A little older than Euclid, Autolycus of
Pitane wrote two books, _On the Moving Sphere_, a work on Sphaeric for
use in astronomy, and _On Risings and Settings_. The former work is the
earliest Greek textbook which has reached us intact. It was before
Euclid when he wrote his _Phaenomena_, and there are many points of
contact between the two books.

Euclid flourished about 300 B. C. or a little earlier. His great work,
the _Elements_ in thirteen Books, is too well known to need description.
No work presumably, except the Bible, has had such a reign; and future
generations will come back to it again and again as they tire of the
variegated substitutes for it and the confusion resulting from their
bewildering multiplicity. After what has been said above of the growth
of the Elements, we can appreciate the remark of Proclus about Euclid,
'who put together the Elements, collecting many of Eudoxus's theorems,
perfecting many of Theaetetus's and also bringing to irrefragable
demonstration the things which were only somewhat loosely proved by his
predecessors'. Though a large portion of the subject-matter had been
investigated by those predecessors, everything goes to show that the
whole arrangement was Euclid's own; it is certain that he made great
changes in the order of propositions and in the proofs, and that his
innovations began at the very beginning of Book I.

Euclid wrote other books on both elementary and higher geometry, and on
the other mathematical subjects known in his day. The elementary
geometrical works include the _Data_ and _On Divisions_ (_of figures_),
the first of which survives in Greek and the second in Arabic only; also
the _Pseudaria_, now lost, which was a sort of guide to fallacies in
geometrical reasoning. The treatises on higher geometry are all lost;
they include (1) the _Conics_ in four Books, which covered almost the
same ground as the first three Books of Apollonius's _Conics_, although
no doubt, for Euclid, the conics were still, as with his predecessors,
sections of a right-angled, an obtuse-angled, and an acute-angled cone
respectively made by a plane perpendiular to a generator in each case;
(2) the _Porisms_ in three Books, the importance and difficulty of which
can be inferred from Pappus's account of it and the lemmas which he
gives for use with it; (3) the _Surface-Loci_, to which again Pappus
furnishes lemmas; one of these implies that Euclid assumed as known the
focus-directrix property of the three conics, which is absent from
Apollonius's _Conics_.

In applied mathematics Euclid wrote (1) the _Phaenomena_, a work on
spherical astronomy in which ὁ ὁριζων {ho horizôn} (without κυκλος
{kyklos} or any qualifying words) appears for the first time in the
sense of _horizon_; (2) the _Optics_, a kind of elementary treatise on
perspective: these two treatises are extant in Greek; (3) a work on the
Elements of Music. The _Sectio Canonis_, which has come down under the
name of Euclid, can, however, hardly be his in its present form.

In the period between Euclid and Archimedes comes Aristarchus of Samos
(about 310-230 B. C.), famous for having anticipated Copernicus.
Accepting Heraclides's view that the earth rotates about its own axis,
Aristarchus went further and put forward the hypothesis that the sun
itself is at rest, and that the earth, as well as Mercury, Venus, and
the other planets, revolve in circles about the sun. We have this on the
unquestionable authority of Archimedes, who was only some twenty-five
years later, and who must have seen the book containing the hypothesis
in question. We are told too that Cleanthes the Stoic thought that
Aristarchus ought to be indicted on the charge of impiety for setting
the Hearth of the Universe in motion.

One work of Aristarchus, _On the sizes and distances of the Sun and
Moon_, which is extant in Greek, is highly interesting in itself, though
it contains no word of the heliocentric hypothesis. Thoroughly classical
in form and style, it lays down certain hypotheses and then deduces
therefrom, by rigorous geometry, the sizes and distances of the sun and
moon. If the hypotheses had been exact, the results would have been
correct too; but Aristarchus in fact assumed a certain angle to be 87°
which is really 89° 50', and the angle subtended at the centre of the
earth by the diameter of either the sun or the moon to be 2°, whereas we
know from Archimedes that Aristarchus himself discovered that the latter
angle is only 1/2°. The effect of Aristarchus's geometry is to find
arithmetical limits to the values of what are really trigonometrical
ratios of certain small angles, namely

1/18 > sin 3° > 1/20, 1/45 > sin 1° > 1/60, 1 > cos 1° > 89/90.

The main results obtained are (1) that the diameter of the sun is
between 18 and 20 times the diameter of the moon, (2) that the diameter
of the moon is between 2/45ths and 1/30th of the distance of the centre
of the moon from our eye, and (3) that the diameter of the sun is
between 19/3rds and 43/6ths of the diameter of the earth. The book
contains a good deal of arithmetical calculation.

Archimedes was born about 287 B. C. and was killed at the sack of
Syracuse by Marcellus's army in 212 B. C. The stories about him are well
known, how he said 'Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the
earth' (πα βω και κινω ταν γαν {pa bô kai kinô tan gan}); how, having
thought of the solution of the problem of the crown when in the bath, he
ran home naked shouting ἑυρηκα, ἑυρηκα {heurêka, heurêka}; and how, the
capture of Syracuse having found him intent on a figure drawn on the
ground, he said to a Roman soldier who came up, 'Stand away, fellow,
from my diagram.' Of his work few people know more than that he invented
a tubular screw which is still used for pumping water, and that for a
long time he foiled the attacks of the Romans on Syracuse by the
mechanical devices and engines which he used against them. But he
thought meanly of these things, and his real interest was in pure
mathematical speculation; he caused to be engraved on his tomb a
representation of a cylinder circumscribing a sphere, with the ratio
3/2 which the cylinder bears to the sphere: from which we infer that he
regarded this as his greatest discovery.

Archimedes's works are all original, and are perfect models of
mathematical exposition; their wide range will be seen from the list of
those which survive: _On the Sphere and Cylinder_ I, II, _Measurement of
a Circle_, _On Conoids and Spheroids_, _On Spirals_, _On Plane
Equilibriums_ I, II, the _Sandreckoner_, _Quadrature of the Parabola_,
_On Floating Bodies_ I, II, and lastly the _Method_ (only discovered in
1906). The difficult Cattle-Problem is also attributed to him, and a
_Liber Assumptorum_ which has reached us through the Arabic, but which
cannot be his in its present form, although some of the propositions in
it (notably that about the 'Salinon', salt-cellar, and others about
circles inscribed in the αρβηλος {arbêlos}, shoemaker's knife) are quite
likely to be of Archimedean origin. Among lost works were the
_Catoptrica_, _On Sphere-making_, and investigations into polyhedra,
including thirteen semi-regular solids, the discovery of which is
attributed by Pappus to Archimedes.

Speaking generally, the geometrical works are directed to the
measurement of curvilinear areas and volumes; and Archimedes employs a
method which is a development of Eudoxus's method of exhaustion. Eudoxus
apparently approached the figure to be measured from below only, i. e.
by means of figures successively inscribed to it. Archimedes approaches
it from both sides by successively inscribing figures and circumscribing
others also, thereby compressing them, as it were, until they coincide
as nearly as we please with the figure to be measured. In many cases his
procedure is, when the analytical equivalents are set down, seen to
amount to real _integration_; this is so with his investigation of the
areas of a parabolic segment and a spiral, the surface and volume of a
sphere, and the volume of any segments of the conoids and spheroids.

The newly-discovered _Method_ is especially interesting as showing how
Archimedes originally obtained his results; this was by a clever
mechanical method of (theoretically) _weighing_ infinitesimal elements
of the figure to be measured against elements of another figure the area
or content of which (as the case may be) is known; it amounts to an
_avoidance_ of integration. Archimedes, however, would only admit that
the mechanical method is useful for finding results; he did not consider
them proved until they were established geometrically.

In the _Measurement of a Circle_, after proving by exhaustion that the
area of a circle is equal to a right-angled triangle with the
perpendicular sides equal respectively to the radius and the
circumference of the circle, Archimedes finds, by sheer calculation,
upper and lower limits to the ratio of the circumference of a circle to
its diameter (what we call π {p}). This he does by inscribing and
circumscribing regular polygons of 96 sides and calculating
approximately their respective perimeters. He begins by assuming as
known certain approximate values for √3, namely 1351/780 > √3 > 265/153,
and his calculations involve approximating to the square roots of
several large numbers (up to seven digits). The text only gives the
results, but it is evident that the extraction of square roots presented
no difficulty, notwithstanding the comparative inconvenience of the
alphabetic system of numerals. The result obtained is well known, namely
3-1/7 > π {p} > 3-10/71.

The _Plane Equilibriums_ is the first scientific treatise on the first
principles of mechanics, which are established by pure geometry. The
most important result established in Book I is the principle of the
lever. This was known to Plato and Aristotle, but they had no real
proof. The Aristotelian _Mechanics_ merely 'refers' the lever 'to the
circle', asserting that the force which acts at the greater distance
from the fulcrum moves the system more easily because it describes a
greater circle. Archimedes also finds the centre of gravity of a
parallelogram, a triangle, a trapezium and finally (in Book II) of a
parabolic segment and of a portion of it cut off by a straight line
parallel to the base.

The _Sandreckoner_ is remarkable for the development in it of a system
for expressing very large numbers by _orders_ and _periods_ based on
powers of myriad-myriads (10,000²). It also contains the important
reference to the heliocentric theory of the universe put forward by
Aristarchus of Samos in a book of 'hypotheses', as well as historical
details of previous attempts to measure the size of the earth and to
give the sizes and distances of the sun and moon.

Lastly, Archimedes invented the whole science of hydrostatics. Beginning
the treatise _On Floating Bodies_ with an assumption about uniform
pressure in a fluid, he first proves that the surface of a fluid at rest
is a sphere with its centre at the centre of the earth. Other
propositions show that, if a solid floats in a fluid, the weight of the
solid is equal to that of the fluid displaced, and, if a solid heavier
than a fluid is weighed in it, it will be lighter than its true weight
by the weight of the fluid displaced. Then, after a second assumption
that bodies which are forced upwards in a fluid are forced upwards along
the perpendiculars to the surface which pass through their centres of
gravity, Archimedes deals with the position of rest and stability of a
segment of a sphere floating in a fluid with its base entirely above or
entirely below the surface. Book II is an extraordinary _tour de force_,
investigating fully all the positions of rest and stability of a right
segment of a paraboloid floating in a fluid according (1) to the
relation between the axis of the solid and the parameter of the
generating parabola, and (2) to the specific gravity of the solid in
relation to the fluid; the term 'specific gravity' is not used, but the
idea is fully expressed in other words.

Almost contemporary with Archimedes was Eratosthenes of Cyrene, to whom
Archimedes dedicated the _Method_; the preface to this work shows that
Archimedes thought highly of his mathematical ability. He was indeed
recognized by his contemporaries as a man of great distinction in all
branches, though the names Beta and Pentathlos[4] applied to him
indicate that he just fell below the first rank in each subject. Ptolemy
Euergetes appointed him to be tutor to his son (Philopator), and he
became librarian at Alexandria; he recognized his obligation to Ptolemy
by erecting a column with a graceful epigram. In this epigram he
referred to the earlier solutions of the problem of duplicating the cube
or finding the two mean proportionals, and advocated his own in
preference, because it would give any number of means; on the column was
fixed a bronze representation of his appliance, a frame with
right-angled triangles (or rectangles) movable along two parallel
grooves and over one another, together with a condensed proof. The
_Platonicus_ of Eratosthenes evidently dealt with the fundamental
notions of mathematics in connexion with Plato's philosophy, and seems
to have begun with the story of the origin of the duplication problem.

    [4] This word primarily means an all-round athlete, a winner in all
    five of the sports constituting the πενταθλον {pentathlon}, namely
    jumping, discus-throwing, running, wrestling, and boxing (or
    javelin-throwing).

The most famous achievement of Eratosthenes was his measurement of the
earth. Archimedes quotes an earlier measurement which made the
circumference of the earth 300,000 stades. Eratosthenes improved upon
this. He observed that at the summer solstice at Syene, at noon, the sun
cast no shadow, while at the same moment the upright gnomon at
Alexandria cast a shadow corresponding to an angle between the gnomon
and the sun's rays of 1/50th of four right angles. The distance between
Syene and Alexandria being known to be 5,000 stades, this gave for the
circumference of the earth 250,000 stades, which Eratosthenes seems
later, for some reason, to have changed to 252,000 stades. On the most
probable assumption as to the length of the stade used, the 252,000
stades give about 7,850 miles, only 50 miles less than the true polar
diameter.

In the work _On the Measurement of the Earth_ Eratosthenes is said to
have discussed other astronomical matters, the distance of the tropic
and polar circles, the sizes and distances of the sun and moon, total
and partial eclipses, &c. Besides other works on astronomy and
chronology, Eratosthenes wrote a _Geographica_ in three books, in which
he first gave a history of geography up to date and then passed on to
mathematical geography, the spherical shape of the earth, &c., &c.

Apollonius of Perga was with justice called by his contemporaries the
'Great Geometer', on the strength of his great treatise, the _Conics_.
He is mentioned as a famous astronomer of the reign of Ptolemy Euergetes
(247-222 B. C.); and he dedicated the fourth and later Books of the
_Conics_ to King Attalus I of Pergamum (241-197 B. C.).

The _Conics_, a colossal work, originally in eight Books, survives as to
the first four Books in Greek and as to three more in Arabic, the eighth
being lost. From Apollonius's prefaces we can judge of the relation of
his work to Euclid's _Conics_, the content of which answered to the
first three Books of Apollonius. Although Euclid knew that an ellipse
could be otherwise produced, e. g. as an oblique section of a right
cylinder, there is no doubt that he produced all three conics from right
cones like his predecessors. Apollonius, however, obtains them in the
most general way by cutting any oblique cone, and his original axes of
reference, a diameter and the tangent at its extremity, are in general
oblique; the fundamental properties are found with reference to these
axes by 'application of areas', the three varieties of which,
_application_ (παραβολη {parabolê}), application with an _excess_
(ὑπερβολη {hyperbolê}) and application with a _deficiency_ (ελλειψις
{elleipsis}), give the properties of the three curves respectively and
account for the names _parabola_, _hyperbola_, and _ellipse_, by which
Apollonius called them for the first time. The principal axes only
appear, as a particular case, after it has been shown that the curves
have a like property when referred to any other diameter and the tangent
at its extremity, instead of those arising out of the original
construction. The first four Books constitute what Apollonius calls an
elementary introduction; the remaining Books are specialized
investigations, the most important being Book V (on normals) and Book
VII (mainly on conjugate diameters). Normals are treated, not in
connexion with tangents, but as _minimum_ or _maximum_ straight lines
drawn to the curves from different points or classes of points.
Apollonius discusses such questions as the number of normals that can be
drawn from one point (according to its position) and the construction of
all such normals. Certain propositions of great difficulty enable us to
deduce quite easily the Cartesian equations to the _evolutes_ of the
three conics.

Several other works of Apollonius are described by Pappus as forming
part of the 'Treasury of Analysis'. All are lost except the _Sectio
Rationis_ in two Books, which survives in Arabic and was published in a
Latin translation by Halley in 1706. It deals with all possible cases of
the general problem 'given two straight lines either parallel or
intersecting, and a fixed point on each, to draw through any given point
a straight line which shall cut off intercepts from the two lines
(measured from the fixed points) bearing a given ratio to one another'.
The lost treatise _Sectio Spatii_ dealt similarly with the like problem
in which the intercepts cut off have to contain a given rectangle.

The other treatises included in Pappus's account are (1) On _Determinate
Section_; (2) _Contacts_ or _Tangencies_, Book II of which is entirely
devoted to the problem of drawing a circle to touch three given circles
(Apollonius's solution can, with the aid of Pappus's auxiliary
propositions, be satisfactorily restored); (3) _Plane Loci_, i. e. loci
which are straight lines or circles; (4) Νευσεις {Neuseis},
_Inclinationes_ (the general problem called a νευσις {neusis} being to
insert between two lines, straight or curved, a straight line of given
length _verging_ to a given point, i. e. so that, if produced, it passes
through the point, Apollonius restricted himself to cases which could be
solved by 'plane' methods, i. e. by the straight line and circle only).

Apollonius is also said to have written (5) a _Comparison of the
dodecahedron with the icosahedron_ (inscribed in the same sphere), in
which he proved that their surfaces are in the same ratio as their
volumes; (6) _On the cochlias_ or cylindrical helix; (7) a 'General
Treatise', which apparently dealt with the fundamental assumptions, &c.,
of elementary geometry; (8) a work on _unordered irrationals_, i. e.
irrationals of more complicated form than those of Eucl. Book X; (9) _On
the burning-mirror_, dealing with spherical mirrors and probably with
mirrors of parabolic section also; (10) ωκυτοκιον {ôkytokion} ('quick
delivery'). In the last-named work Apollonius found an approximation to
π {p} closer than that in Archimedes's _Measurement of a Circle_; and
possibly the book also contained Apollonius's exposition of his notation
for large numbers according to 'tetrads' (successive powers of the
myriad).

In astronomy Apollonius is said to have made special researches
regarding the moon, and to have been called ε {e} (Epsilon) because the
form of that letter is associated with the moon. He was also a master of
the theory of epicycles and eccentrics.

With Archimedes and Apollonius Greek geometry reached its culminating
point; indeed, without some more elastic notation and machinery such as
algebra provides, geometry was practically at the end of its resources.
For some time, however, there were capable geometers who kept up the
tradition, filling in details, devising alternative solutions of
problems, or discovering new curves for use or investigation.

Nicomedes, probably intermediate in date between Eratosthenes and
Apollonius, was the inventor of the _conchoid_ or _cochloid_, of which,
according to Pappus, there were three varieties. Diocles (about the end
of the second century B. C.) is known as the discoverer of the _cissoid_
which was used for duplicating the cube. He also wrote a book περι
πυρειων {peri pyreiôn}, _On burning-mirrors_, which probably discussed,
among other forms of mirror, surfaces of parabolic or elliptic section,
and used the focal properties of the two conics; it was in this work
that Diocles gave an independent and clever solution (by means of an
ellipse and a rectangular hyperbola) of Archimedes's problem of cutting
a sphere into two segments in a given ratio. Dionysodorus gave a
solution by means of conics of the auxiliary cubic equation to which
Archimedes reduced this problem; he also found the solid content of a
_tore_ or anchor-ring.

Perseus is known as the discoverer and investigator of the _spiric
sections_, i. e. certain sections of the σπειρα {speira}, one variety of
which is the _tore_. The _spire_ is generated by the revolution of a
circle about a straight line in its plane, which straight line may
either be external to the circle (in which case the figure produced is
the tore), or may cut or touch the circle.

Zenodorus was the author of a treatise on _Isometric figures_, the
problem in which was to compare the content of different figures, plane
or solid, having equal contours or surfaces respectively.

Hypsicles (second half of second century B. C.) wrote what became known
as 'Book XIV' of the _Elements_ containing supplementary propositions on
the regular solids (partly drawn from Aristaeus and Apollonius); he
seems also to have written on polygonal numbers. A mediocre astronomical
work (Αναφορικος {Anaphorikos}) attributed to him is the first Greek
book in which we find the division of the zodiac circle into 360 parts
or degrees.

Posidonius the Stoic (about 135-51 B. C.) wrote on geography and
astronomy under the titles _On the Ocean_ and περι μετεωρων {peri
meteôrôn}. He made a new but faulty calculation of the circumference of
the earth (240,000 stades). _Per contra_, in a separate tract on the
size of the sun (in refutation of the Epicurean view that it is as big
as it _looks_), he made assumptions (partly guesswork) which give for
the diameter of the sun a figure of 3,000,000 stades (39-1/4 times the
diameter of the earth), a result much nearer the truth than those
obtained by Aristarchus, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy. In elementary geometry
Posidonius gave certain definitions (notably of parallels, based on the
idea of equidistance).

Geminus of Rhodes, a pupil of Posidonius, wrote (about 70 B. C.) an
encyclopaedic work on the classification and content of mathematics,
including the history of each subject, from which Proclus and others
have preserved notable extracts. An-Nairīzī (an Arabian commentator on
Euclid) reproduces an attempt by one 'Aganis', who appears to be
Geminus, to prove the parallel-postulate.

But from this time onwards the study of higher geometry (except
sphaeric) seems to have languished, until that admirable mathematician,
Pappus, arose (towards the end of the third century A. D.) to revive
interest in the subject. From the way in which, in his great
_Collection_, Pappus thinks it necessary to describe in detail the
contents of the classical works belonging to the 'Treasury of Analysis'
we gather that by his time many of them had been lost or forgotten, and
that he aimed at nothing less than re-establishing geometry at its
former level. No one could have been better qualified for the task.
Presumably such interest as Pappus was able to arouse soon flickered
out; but his _Collection_ remains, after the original works of the great
mathematicians, the most comprehensive and valuable of all our sources,
being a handbook or guide to Greek geometry and covering practically the
whole field. Among the original things in Pappus's _Collection_ is an
enunciation which amounts to an anticipation of what is known as
Guldin's Theorem.

It remains to speak of three subjects, trigonometry (represented by
Hipparchus, Menelaus, and Ptolemy), mensuration (in Heron of
Alexandria), and algebra (Diophantus).

Although, in a sense, the beginnings of trigonometry go back to
Archimedes (_Measurement of a Circle_), Hipparchus was the first person
who can be proved to have used trigonometry systematically. Hipparchus,
the greatest astronomer of antiquity, whose observations were made
between 161 and 126 B. C., discovered the precession of the equinoxes,
calculated the mean lunar month at 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, 2-1/2
seconds (which differs by less than a second from the present accepted
figure!), made more correct estimates of the sizes and distances of the
sun and moon, introduced great improvements in the instruments used for
observations, and compiled a catalogue of some 850 stars; he seems to
have been the first to state the position of these stars in terms of
latitude and longitude (in relation to the ecliptic). He wrote a
treatise in twelve Books on Chords in a Circle, equivalent to a table of
trigonometrical sines. For calculating arcs in astronomy from other arcs
given by means of tables he used propositions in spherical trigonometry.

The _Sphaerica_ of Theodosius of Bithynia (written, say, 20 B. C.)
contains no trigonometry. It is otherwise with the _Sphaerica_ of
Menelaus (fl. A. D. 100) extant in Arabic; Book I of this work contains
propositions about spherical triangles corresponding to the main
propositions of Euclid about plane triangles (e.g. congruence theorems
and the proposition that in a spherical triangle the three angles are
together greater than two right angles), while Book III contains genuine
spherical trigonometry, consisting of 'Menelaus's Theorem' with
reference to the sphere and deductions therefrom.

Ptolemy's great work, the _Syntaxis_, written about A. D. 150 and
originally called Μαθηματικη συνταξις {Mathêmatikê syntaxis}, came to be
known as Μεγαλη συνταξις {Megalê syntaxis}; the Arabs made up from the
superlative μεγιστος {megistos} the word al-Majisti which became
_Almagest_.

Book I, containing the necessary preliminaries to the study of the
Ptolemaic system, gives a Table of Chords in a circle subtended by
angles at the centre of ½° increasing by half-degrees to 180°. The
circle is divided into 360 μοιραι {moirai}, parts or degrees, and the
diameter into 120 parts (τμηματα {tmêmata}); the chords are given in
terms of the latter with sexagesimal fractions (e. g. the chord
subtended by an angle of 120° is 103^{p} 53′ 23″). The Table of Chords
is equivalent to a table of the _sines_ of the halves of the angles in
the table, for, if (crd. 2 α {a}) represents the chord subtended by an
angle of 2 α {a} (crd. 2 α {a})/120 = sin α {a}. Ptolemy first gives the
minimum number of geometrical propositions required for the calculation
of the chords. The first of these finds (crd. 36°) and (crd. 72°) from
the geometry of the inscribed pentagon and decagon; the second
('Ptolemy's Theorem' about a quadrilateral in a circle) is equivalent to
the formula for sin (θ-φ) {th-ph}, the third to that for sin ½ θ {th}.
From (crd. 72°) and (crd. 60°) Ptolemy, by using these propositions
successively, deduces (crd. 1½°) and (crd. ¾°), from which he obtains
(crd. 1°) by a clever interpolation. To complete the table he only needs
his fourth proposition, which is equivalent to the formula for cos (θ+φ)
{th+ph}.

Ptolemy wrote other minor astronomical works, most of which survive in
Greek or Arabic, an _Optics_ in five Books (four Books almost complete
were translated into Latin in the twelfth century), and an attempted
proof of the parallel-postulate which is reproduced by Proclus.

Heron of Alexandria (date uncertain; he may have lived as late as the
third century A. D.) was an almost encyclopaedic writer on mathematical
and physical subjects. He aimed at practical utility rather than
theoretical completeness; hence, apart from the interesting collection
of _Definitions_ which has come down under his name, and his commentary
on Euclid which is represented only by extracts in Proclus and
an-Nairīzī, his geometry is mostly mensuration in the shape of numerical
examples worked out. As these could be indefinitely multiplied, there
was a temptation to add to them and to use Heron's name. However much of
the separate works edited by Hultsch (the _Geometrica_, _Geodaesia_,
_Stereometrica_, _Mensurae_, _Liber geëponicus_) is genuine, we must now
regard as more authoritative the genuine _Metrica_ discovered at
Constantinople in 1896 and edited by H. Schöne in 1903 (Teubner). Book I
on the measurement of areas is specially interesting for (1) its
statement of the formula used by Heron for finding approximations to
surds, (2) the elegant geometrical proof of the formula for the area of
a triangle Δ {D} = √{_s (s-a) (s-b) (s-c)}, a formula now known to be
due to Archimedes, (3) an allusion to limits to the value of π {p} found
by Archimedes and more exact than the 3-1/7 and 3-10/71 obtained in the
_Measurement of a Circle_.

Book I of the _Metrica_ calculates the areas of triangles,
quadrilaterals, the regular polygons up to the dodecagon (the areas even
of the heptagon, enneagon, and hendecagon are approximately evaluated),
the circle and a segment of it, the ellipse, a parabolic segment, and
the surfaces of a cylinder, a right cone, a sphere and a segment
thereof. Book II deals with the measurement of solids, the cylinder,
prisms, pyramids and cones and frusta thereof, the sphere and a segment
of it, the anchor-ring or tore, the five regular solids, and finally the
two special solids of Archimedes's _Method_; full use is made of all
Archimedes's results. Book III is on the division of figures. The plane
portion is much on the lines of Euclid's _Divisions_ (of figures). The
solids divided in given ratios are the sphere, the pyramid, the cone and
a frustum thereof. Incidentally Heron shows how he obtained an
approximation to the cube root of a non-cube number (100). Quadratic
equations are solved by Heron by a regular rule not unlike our method,
and the _Geometrica_ contains two interesting indeterminate problems.

Heron also wrote _Pneumatica_ (where the reader will find such things as
siphons, Heron's Fountain, penny-in-the-slot machines, a fire-engine, a
water-organ, and many arrangements employing the force of steam),
_Automaton-making_, _Belopoeïca_ (on engines of war), _Catoptrica_, and
_Mechanics_. The _Mechanics_ has been edited from the Arabic; it is
(except for considerable fragments) lost in Greek. It deals with the
puzzle of 'Aristotle's Wheel', the parallelogram of velocities,
definitions of, and problems on, the centre of gravity, the distribution
of weights between several supports, the five mechanical powers,
mechanics in daily life (queries and answers). Pappus covers much the
same ground in Book VIII of his _Collection_.

We come, lastly, to Algebra. Problems involving simple equations are
found in the Papyrus Rhind, in the _Epanthema_ of Thymaridas already
referred to, and in the arithmetical epigrams in the Greek Anthology
(Plato alludes to this class of problem in the _Laws_, 819 B, C); the
Anthology even includes two cases of indeterminate equations of the
first degree. The Pythagoreans gave general solutions in rational
numbers of the equations _x²+y²=z²_ and _2x²-y²=±1_, which are
indeterminate equations of the second degree.

The first to make systematic use of symbols in algebraical work was
Diophantus of Alexandria (fl. about A. D. 250). He used (1) a sign for
the unknown quantity, which he calls αριθμος {arithmos}, and compendia
for its powers up to the sixth; (2) a sign ([Transcriber's Note:
Symbol]) with the effect of our _minus_. The latter sign probably
represents ΛΙ {LI}, an abbreviation for the root of the word λειπειν
{leipein} (to be wanting); the sign for αριθμος {arithmos}
([Transcriber's Note: Symbol]) is most likely an abbreviation for the
letters αρ {ar}; the compendia for the powers of the unknown are Δ^Υ
{D^Y} for δυναμις {dynamis}, the square, Κ^Υ {K^Y} for κυβος {kybos},
the cube, and so on. Diophantus shows that he solved quadratic equations
by rule, like Heron. His _Arithmetica_, of which six books only (out of
thirteen) survive, contains a certain number of problems leading to
simple equations, but is mostly devoted to indeterminate or
semi-determinate analysis, mainly of the second degree. The collection
is extraordinarily varied, and the devices resorted to are highly
ingenious. The problems solved are such as the following (fractional as
well as integral solutions being admitted): 'Given a number, to find
three others such that the sum of the three, or of any pair of them,
together with the given number is a square', 'To find four numbers such
that the square of the sum _plus_ or _minus_ any one of the numbers is a
square', 'To find three numbers such that the product of any two _plus_
or _minus_ the sum of the three is a square'. Diophantus assumes as
known certain theorems about numbers which are the sums of two and three
squares respectively, and other propositions in the Theory of Numbers.
He also wrote a book _On Polygonal Numbers_ of which only a fragment
survives.

With Pappus and Diophantus the list of original writers on mathematics
comes to an end. After them came the commentators whose names only can
be mentioned here. Theon of Alexandria, the editor of Euclid, lived
towards the end of the fourth century A. D. To the fifth and sixth
centuries belong Proclus, Simplicius, and Eutocius, to whom we can never
be grateful enough for the precious fragments which they have preserved
from works now lost, and particularly the _History of Geometry_ and the
_History of Astronomy_ by Aristotle's pupil Eudemus.

Such is the story of Greek mathematical science. If anything could
enhance the marvel of it, it would be the consideration of the shortness
of the time (about 350 years) within which the Greeks, starting from the
very beginning, brought geometry to the point of performing operations
equivalent to the integral calculus and, in the realm of astronomy,
actually anticipated Copernicus.

T. L. HEATH.




NATURAL SCIENCE

_Aristotle_


There is a little essay of Goethe's called, simply, _Die Natur_. It
comes among those tracts on Natural Science in which the poet and
philosopher turned his restless mind to problems of light and colour, of
leaf and flower, of bony skull and kindred vertebra; and it sounds like
a prose-poem, a noble paean, eulogizing the love and glorifying the
study of Nature. Some twenty-five hundred years before, Anaximander had
written a book with the same title, _Concerning Nature_, περι φυσεως
{peri physeôs}: but its subject was not the same. It was a variant of
the old traditional cosmogonies. It told of how in the beginning the
earth was without form and void. It sought to trace all things back to
the Infinite, το απειρον {to apeiron}--to That which knows no bounds of
space or time but is before all worlds, and to whose bosom again all
things, all worlds, return. For Goethe Nature meant the beauty, the all
but sensuous beauty of the world; for the older philosopher it was the
mystery of the Creative Spirit.

Than Nature, in Goethe's sense, no theme is more familiar to us, for
whom many a poet tells the story and many a lesser poet echoes the
conceit; but if there be anywhere in Greek such overt praise and worship
of Nature's beauty, I cannot call it to mind. Yet in Latin the _divini
gloria ruris_ is praised and _Natura daedala rerum_ worshipped, as we
are wont to praise and worship them, for their own sweet sakes. It is
one of the ways, one of the simpler ways, in which the Roman world seems
nearer to us than the Greek: and not only seems, but is so. For compared
with the great early civilizations, Rome is modern and of the West;
while, draw her close as we may to our hearts, Greece brings along with
her a breath of the East and a whisper of remote antiquity. A Tuscan
gentleman of to-day, like a Roman gentleman of yesterday, is at heart a
husbandman, like Cato; he is _ruris amator_, like Horace; he gets him to
his little farm or vineyard (_O rus, quando te aspiciam!_), like Atticus
or the younger Pliny. As Bacon praised his garden, so does Pliny praise
his farm, with its cornfields and meadowland, vineyard and woodland,
orchard and pasture, bee-hives and flowers. That God made the country
and man made the town was (long before Cowper) a saying of Varro's; but
in Greek I can think of no such apophthegm.

As Schiller puts it, the Greeks looked on Nature with their minds more
than with their hearts, nor ever clung to her with outspoken admiration
and affection. And Humboldt, asserting (as I would do) that the
portrayal of nature, for her own sake and in all her manifold diversity,
was foreign to the Greek idea, declares that the landscape is always the
mere background of their picture, while their foreground is filled with
the affairs and actions and thoughts of men. But all the while, as in
some old Italian picture--of Domenichino or Albani or Leonardo
himself--the subordinated background is delicately traced and
exquisitely beautiful; and sometimes we come to value it in the end more
than all the rest of the composition.

Deep down in the love of Nature, whether it be of the sensual or
intellectual kind, and in the art of observation which is its outcome
and first expression, lie the roots of all our Natural Science. All the
world over these are the heritage of all men, though the inheritance be
richer or poorer here and there: they are shown forth in the lore and
wisdom of hunter and fisherman, of shepherd and husbandman, of artist
and poet. The natural history of the ancients is not enshrined in
Aristotle and Pliny. It pervades the vast literature of classical
antiquity. For all we may say of the reticence with which, the Greeks
proclaim it, it greets us nobly in Homer, it sings to us in Anacreon,
Sicilian shepherds tune their pipes to it in Theocritus: and anon in
Virgil we dream of it to the coo of doves and the sound of bees'
industrious murmur.

Not only from such great names as these do we reach the letter and the
spirit of ancient Natural History. We must go a-wandering into the
by-ways of literature. We must eke out the scientific treatises of
Aristotle and Pliny by help of the fragments which remain of the works
of such naturalists as Speusippus or Alexander the Myndian; add to the
familiar stories of Herodotus the Indian tales of Ctesias and
Megasthenes; sit with Athenaeus and his friends at the supper table,
gleaning from cook and epicure, listening to the merry idle troop of
convivial gentlemen capping verses and spinning yarns; read Xenophon's
treatise on Hunting, study the didactic poems, the Cynegetica and
Halieutica, of Oppian and of Ovid. And then again we may hark back to
the greater world of letters, wherein poet and scholar, from petty
fabulist to the great dramatists, from Homer's majesty to Lucian's wit,
share in the love of Nature and enliven the delicate background of their
story with allusions to beast and bird.

Such allusions, refined at first by art and hallowed at last by familiar
memory, lie treasured in men's hearts and enshrine themselves in our
noblest literature. Take, of a thousand crowding instances, that great
passage in the _Iliad_ where the Greek host, disembarking on the plains
of the Scamander, is likened to a migrating flock of cranes or geese or
long-necked swans, as they fly proudly over the Asian meadows and alight
screaming by Cayster's stream--and Virgil echoes more than once the
familiar lines. The crane was a well-known bird. Its lofty flight brings
it, again in Homer, to the very gates of heaven. Hesiod and Pindar speak
of its far-off cry, heard from above the clouds: and that it 'observed
the time of its coming', 'intelligent of seasons', was a proverb old in
Hesiod's day--when the crane signalled the approach of winter, and when
it bade the husbandman make ready to plough. It follows the plough, in
Theocritus, as persistently as the wolf the kid and the peasant-lad his
sweetheart. The discipline of the migrating cranes, the serried wedge of
their ranks in flight, the good order of the resting flock, are often,
and often fancifully, described. Aristotle records how they have an
appointed leader, who keeps watch by night and in flight keeps calling
to the laggards; and all this old story Euripides, the most naturalistic
of the great tragedians, puts into verse:

    The ordered host of Libyan birds avoids
    The wintry storm, obedient to the call
    Of their old leader, piping to his flock.

Lastly, Milton gathers up the spirit and the letter of these and many
another ancient allusion to the migrating cranes:

    Part loosely wing the region; part more wise,
    In common ranged in figure, wedge their way
    Intelligent of seasons, and set forth
    Their aery caravan, high over seas
    Flying, and over lands; with mutual wing
    Easing their flight; so steers the prudent crane.

But the natural history of the poets is a story without an end, and in
our estimation, however brief it be, of ancient knowledge, there are
other matters to be considered, and other points of view where we must
take our stand.

When we consider the science of the Greeks, and come quickly to love it
and slowly to see how great it was, we likewise see that it was
restricted as compared with our own, curiously partial or particular in
its limitations. The practical and 'useful' sciences of chemistry,
mechanics, and engineering, which in our modern world crowd the others
to the wall, are absent altogether, or so concealed that we forget and
pass them by. Mathematics is enthroned high over all, as it is meet she
should be; and of uncontested right she occupies her throne century
after century, from Pythagoras to Proclus, from the scattered schools of
early Hellenic civilization to the rise and fall of the great
Alexandrine University. Near beside her sits, from of old, the
daughter-science of Astronomy; and these twain were worshipped by the
greatest scientific intellects of the Greeks. But though we do not hear
of them nor read of them, we must not suppose for a moment that the
practical or technical sciences were lacking in so rich and complex a
civilization. China, that most glorious of all living monuments of
Antiquity, tells us nothing of her own chemistry, but we know that it is
there. Peep into a Chinese town, walk through its narrow streets,
thronged but quiet, wherein there is neither rumbling of coaches nor
rattling of wheels, and you shall see the nearest thing on earth to what
we hear of Sybaris. To the production of those glowing silks and
delicate porcelains and fine metal-work has gone a vast store of
chemical knowledge, traditional and empirical. So was it, precisely, in
ancient Greece; and Plato knew that it was so--that the dyer, the
perfumer, and the apothecary had subtle arts, a subtle science of their
own, a science not to be belittled nor despised. We may pass here and
there by diligent search from conjecture to assurance; analyse a
pigment, an alloy or a slag; discover from an older record than the
Greeks', the chemical prescription wherewith an Egyptian princess
darkened her eyes, or study the pictured hearth, bellows, oven,
crucibles with which the followers of Tubal-Cain smelted their ore. Once
in a way, but seldom, do we meet with ancient chemistry even in Greek
literature. There is a curious passage (its text is faulty and the
translation hard) in the story of the Argonauts, where Medea concocts a
magic brew. She put divers herbs in it, herbs yielding coloured juices
such as safflower and alkanet, and soapwort and fleawort to give
consistency or 'body' to the lye; she put in alum and blue vitriol (or
sulphate of copper), and she put in blood. The magic brew was no more
and no less than a dye, a red or purple dye, and a prodigious deal of
chemistry had gone to the making of it. For the copper was there to
produce a 'lake' or copper-salt of the vegetable alkaloids, which
copper-lakes are among the most brilliant and most permanent of
colouring matters; the alum was there as a 'mordant'; and even the blood
was doubtless there incorporated for better reasons than superstitious
ones, in all probability for the purpose of clarifying (by means of its
coagulating albumen) the seething and turbid brew.

The 'Orphic' version of the story, in which this passage occurs, is
probably an Alexandrine compilation, and whether the ingredients of the
brew had been part of the ancient legend or were merely suggested to the
poet by the knowledge of his own day we cannot tell; in either case the
prescription is old enough, and is at least pre-Byzantine by a few
centuries. Such as it is, it does not stand alone. Other fragments of
ancient chemistry, more or less akin to it, have been gathered together;
in Galen's book on _The making of Simples_, in Pliny, in Paulus
Aegineta, and for that matter in certain Egyptian papyri (especially a
certain very famous one, still extant, of which Clement of Alexandria
speaks as a secret or 'hermetic' book), we can trace the broken and
scattered stones of a great edifice of ancient chemistry.

Nevertheless, all this weight of chemical learning figures scantily in
literature, and is conspicuously absent from our conception of the
natural genius of the Greeks. We have no reason to suppose that ancient
chemistry, or any part of it, was ever peculiarly Greek, or that this
science was the especial property of any nation whatsoever; moreover it
was a trade, or a bundle of trades, whose trade-secrets were too
precious to be revealed, and so constituted not a science but a
mystery. So has it always been with chemistry, the most cosmopolitan of
sciences, the most secret of arts. Quietly and stealthily it crept
through the world; the tinker brought it with his solder and his flux;
the African tribes who were the first workers in iron passed it on to
the great metallurgists who forged Damascan and Toledan steel.

This 'trade' of Chemistry was never a science for a Gentleman, as
philosophy and mathematics were; and Plato, greatest of philosophers,
was one of the greatest of gentlemen. Long, long afterwards, Oxford said
the same thing to Robert Boyle--that Chemistry was no proper avocation
for a gentleman; but he thought otherwise, and the 'brother of the Earl
of Cork' became the Father of scientific Chemistry.

Now I take it that in regard to biology Aristotle did much the same
thing as Boyle, breaking through a similar tradition; and herein one of
the greatest of his great services is to be found. There was a wealth of
natural history before his time; but it belonged to the farmer, the
huntsman, and the fisherman--with something over (doubtless) for the
schoolboy, the idler, and the poet. But Aristotle made it a science, and
won a place for it in Philosophy. He did for it just what Pythagoras had
done (as Proclus tells us) for mathematics in an earlier age, when he
discerned the philosophy underlying the old empirical art of 'geometry',
and made it the basis of 'a liberal education'.[5]

    [5] επι δε τουτοις Πυθαγορας την περι αυτην φιλοσοφιαν εις σχημα
    παιδειας ελευθερου μετεστησεν. {epi de toutois Pythagoras tên peri
    autên philosophian eis schêma paideias eleutherou metestêsen.}
    _Procli Comment. Euclidis lib. I, Prolegom. II_ (p. 65, ed.
    Friedlein).

The Mediterranean fisherman, like the Chinese fisherman or the Japanese,
has still, and always has had, a wide knowledge of all that pertains to
and accompanies his craft. Our Scottish fishermen have a limited
vocabulary, which scarce extends beyond the names of the few common
fishes with which the market is supplied. But at Marseilles or Genoa or
in the Levant they have names for many hundreds of species, of fish and
shell-fish and cuttle-fish and worms and corallines, and all manner of
swimming and creeping things; they know a vast deal about the habits of
their lives, far more, sometimes, than do we 'scientific men'; they are
naturalists by tradition and by trade. Neither, by the way, must we
forget the ancient medical and anatomical learning of the great
Aesculapian guild, nor the still more recondite knowledge possessed by
various priesthoods (again like their brethren of to-day in China and
Japan) of the several creatures, sacred fish, pigeons, guinea-fowl,
snakes, cuttlefish, and what not, which time out of mind they had
reared, tended, and venerated.

Of what new facts Aristotle actually discovered it is impossible to be
sure. Could it ever be proved that he discovered many, or could it even
be shown that of his own hand he discovered nothing at all, it would
affect but little our estimate of his greatness and our admiration of
his learning. He was the first of Greek philosophers and gentlemen to
see that all these things were good to know and worthy to be told. This
was his great discovery.

I have sought elsewhere to show that Aristotle spent two years, the
happiest years perhaps of all his life--a long honeymoon--by the
sea-side in the island of Mytilene, after he had married the little
Princess, and before he began the hard work of his life: before he
taught Alexander in Macedon, and long before he spoke _urbi et orbi_ in
the Lyceum. Here it was that he learned the great bulk of his natural
history, in which, wide and general as it is, the things of the sea have
from first to last a notable predominance.

I have tried to illustrate elsewhere (as many another writer has done)
something of the variety and the depth of Aristotle's knowledge of
animals--choosing an example here and there, but only drawing a little
water from an inexhaustible well.

A famous case is that of the 'molluscs', where either Aristotle's
knowledge was exceptionally minute, or where it has come down to us with
unusual completeness.

These are the cuttle fish, which have now surrendered their Aristotelian
name of 'molluscs' to that greater group which is seen to include them,
together with the shell-fish or 'ostracoderma' of Aristotle. These
cuttle-fishes are creatures that we seldom see, but in the Mediterranean
they are an article of food and many kinds are known to the fishermen.
All or wellnigh all of these many kinds were known to Aristotle. He
described their form and their anatomy, their habits, their development,
all with such faithful accuracy that what we can add to-day seems of
secondary importance. He begins with a methodical description of the
general form, tells us of the body and fins, of the eight arms with
their rows of suckers, of the abnormal position of the head. He points
out the two long arms of Sepia and of the calamaries, and their absence
in the octopus; and he tells us, what was only confirmed of late, that
with these two long arms the creature clings to the rock and sways about
like a ship at anchor. He describes the great eyes, the two big teeth
forming the beak; and he dissects the whole structure of the gut, with
its long gullet, its round crop, its stomach and the little coiled
coecal diverticulum: dissecting not only one but several species, and
noting differences that were not observed again till Cuvier re-dissected
them. He describes the funnel and its relation to the mantle-sac, and
the ink-bag, which he shows to be largest in Sepia of all others. And
here, by the way, he seems to make one of those apparent errors that, as
it happens, turn out to be justified: for he tells us that in Octopus,
unlike the rest, the funnel is on the upper side; the fact being that
when the creature lies prone upon the ground, with all its arms
outspread, the funnel-tube (instead of being flattened out beneath the
creature's prostrate body) is long enough to protrude upwards between
arms and head, and to appear on one side or other thereof, in a
position apparently the reverse of its natural one. He describes the
character of the cuttle-bone in Sepia, and of the horny pen which takes
its place in the various calamaries, and notes the lack of any similar
structure in Octopus. He dissects in both sexes the reproductive organs,
noting without exception all their essential and complicated parts; and
he had figured these in his lost volume of anatomical diagrams. He
describes the various kinds of eggs, and, with still more surprising
knowledge, shows us the little embryo cuttle-fish, with its great
yolk-sac attached, in apparent contrast to the chick's, to the little
creature's developing head.

But there is one other remarkable feature that he knew ages before it
was rediscovered, almost in our own time. In certain male cuttle-fishes,
in the breeding season, one of the arms develops in a curious fashion
into a long coiled whip-lash, and in the act of breeding may then be
transferred to the mantle-cavity of the female. Cuvier himself knew
nothing of the nature or the function of this separated arm, and indeed,
if I am not mistaken, it was he who mistook it for a parasitic worm. But
Aristotle tells us of its use and its temporary development, and of its
structure in detail, and his description tallies closely with the
accounts of the most recent writers.

A scarcely less minute account follows of the 'Malacostraca' or
crustaceans, the lobsters and the crabs, the shrimps and the prawns, and
others of their kind, a chapter to which Cuvier devoted a celebrated
essay. There be many kinds of crabs--the common kind, the big 'granny'
crabs, the little horsemen-crabs, that scamper over the sand and which
are for the most part empty, that is to say, whose respiratory cavities
are exceptionally large; and there are the freshwater crabs. There are
the little shrimps and the big hump-backed fellows, or prawns; there are
the 'crangons' or squillae; and the big lobsters and the crawfish or
'langoustes', their spiny cousins. We read about their beady eyes, which
turn every way; about their big rough antennae and the smaller,
smoother pair between; the great teeth, or mandibles; the carapace with
its projecting rostrum, the jointed abdomen with the tail-fins at the
end, and the little flaps below on which the female drops her spawn. In
more or less detail these things are severally described, and the many
limbs severally enumerated, in one kind after another. The descriptions
of the lobster and the langouste are particularly minute, and the
comparison or contrast between the two is drawn with elaborate
precision. In the former, besides other differences between male and
female, the female is said to have the 'first foot' (or leg) bifurcate,
while in the male it is undivided. It seems a trifling matter, but it is
true; it is so small a point that I searched long before at last I found
mention made of it in a German monograph. The puzzling thing is that it
is (as we should say) the last and not the first leg which is so
distinguished; but after all, it is only a convention of our own to
count the limbs from before backwards. To inspect a lobster's limbs, we
lay it on its back (as Aristotle did), and see the legs overlapping,
each hinder one above the one before; the hindmost is the first we see,
and the one we must first lift up to inspect the others.

Aristotle's account of fishes is a prodigious history of habits, food,
migrations, modes of capture, times and ways of spawning, and anatomical
details; but it is not here that we can elucidate or even illustrate
this astonishing Ichthyology. It is not always easy to understand--but
the obstacle lies often, I take it, in our own ignorance. The
identification of species is not always plain, for here as elsewhere
Aristotle did not reckon with a time or place where the familiar words
of Greek should be unknown or their homely significance forgotten. Among
the great host of fish-names there are several referring, somehow or
other, to the Grey Mullet, which puzzle both naturalist and
lexicographer. A young officer told me the other day how he had watched
an Arab fisherman emptying out his creel of Grey Mullet on some Syrian
beach, and the Arab gave four if not five names to as many different
kinds, betwixt which my friend could see no difference whatsoever. Had
my friend been an ichthyologist he would doubtless have noticed that one
had eyelids and the others none; that one had little brushes on its
lips, another a small but wide-open slit under the jaw, another a yellow
spot on its gill-covers, and so on. The Mullets are a difficult group,
but Aristotle, like the Arab fisherman, evidently recognized their fine
distinctions and employed the appropriate names. Again, Aristotle speaks
of a certain nest-building fish, the 'phycis', and regarding this Cuvier
fell into error (where once upon a time I followed him). In Cuvier's
time there was but one nest-building fish known such as to suit,
apparently, the passage, namely the little black goby; but after
Cuvier's day the nest-building habits of the 'wrasses' became known to
naturalists, as they had doubtless been known ages before to the
fishermen--and to Aristotle.

Like almost every other little point on which we happen to touch, we
might make this one the starting-point (here comes in the delight and
fascination of the interpreter's task!) for other stories.

Speusippus, Plato's successor in the Academy, was both philosopher and
naturalist, and we may take it, if we please, that his leaning towards
biology, and the biological trend which at this time became more and
more marked in Athenian philosophy, were not unconnected with the great
impulse which Aristotle had given. However this may be, Speusippus wrote
a book περι Ὁμοιων {peri Homoiôn} 'Concerning Resemblances'; and this,
of which we only possess a few fragmentary sentences, must have been a
very curious and an interesting book. He mentions, among other similar
cases, that our little fish _phycis_ has a close outward semblance to
the sea-perch; and this is enough to clinch the proof that Aristotle's
nest-building fish was not a goby but a wrasse. The whole purport of
Speusippus's book seems to have been to discuss how, or why, with all
Nature's apparently infinite variety, certain animals have a singularly
close resemblance to certain others, though they be quite distinct in
kind. It is a problem which perplexes us still, when we are astonished
and even deluded by the likeness between a wasp and a hover-fly, a
merlin and a cuckoo. In certain extreme cases we call it 'mimicry', and
invoke hypotheses to account for this 'mimetic' resemblance; and those
of us who reject these hypotheses must fain take refuge in others, as
far-reaching in their way. This at least we know, that Speusippus seized
upon a real problem of biology, of lasting interest and even of
fundamental importance.

To come back to Aristotle and his fishes, let us glance at one little
point more. The reproduction of the eel is an ancient puzzle, which has
found its full solution only in our own day. While the salmon, for
instance, comes up the river to breed and goes down again to the sea,
the eel goes down to the ocean to spawn, and the old eels come back no
more but perish in the great waters. The eel's egg develops into a
little flattened, transparent fish, altogether different in outward
appearance from an eel, which turns afterwards into a young eel or
'elver'; and Professor Grassi, who had a big share in elucidating the
whole matter, tells us the curious fact that he found the Sicilian
fishermen well acquainted with the little transparent larva (the
_Leptocephalus_ of modern naturalists), that they knew well what it was,
and that they had a name for it--_Casentula_. Now Aristotle, in a
passage which I think has been much misunderstood (and which we must
admit to be in part erroneous), tells us that the eel develops from what
he calls γης εντερα {gês entera}, a word which we translate, literally,
the 'guts of the earth', and which commentators interpret as
'earthworms'! But in Sicilian Doric, γης εντερα {gês entera} would at
once become γας εντερα {gas entera}; and between 'Gasentera' and the
modern Sicilian 'Casentula' there is scarce a hairbreadth's difference.
So we may be permitted to suppose that here again Aristotle was
singularly and accurately informed; and that he knew by sight and name
the little larva of the eel, whose discovery and identification is one
of the modest triumphs of recent investigation.

Aristotle's many pages on fishes are delightful reading. The anatomist
may read of such recondite matters as the _placenta vitellina_ of the
smooth dog-fish, whereby the viviparous embryo is nourished within the
womb, after a fashion analogous to that of mammalian embryology--a
phenomenon brought to light anew by Johannes Müller, and which excited
him to enthusiastic admiration of Aristotle's minute and faithful
anatomy. Again we may read of the periodic migration of the tunnies, of
the great net or 'madrague' in which they are captured, and of the
watchmen, the θυννοσκοποι {thynnoskopoi}, the 'hooers' of our ancient
Cornish fishery, who give warning from tower or headland of the
approaching shoal. The student may learn what manner of fish it was (the
great Eagle-ray) with whose barbed fin-spine--most primitive of
spear-heads--Ulysses was slain; and again, he may learn not a little
about that ναρκη {narkê}, or torpedo, to which Meno compared his master
Socrates, in a somewhat ambiguous compliment.

In rambling fashion Aristotle has a deal to tell us about insects, and
he has left us a sort of treatise on the whole natural history of the
bee. He knew the several inmates of the hive, though like others of his
day (save, perhaps, only Xenophon), and like Shakespeare too, he took
the queen-bee for a king. He describes the building of the comb, the
laying of the eggs, the provision of the larvae with food. He discusses
the various qualities of honey and the flowers from which these are
drawn. He is learned in the diseases and the enemies of bees. He tells
us many curious things about the economy of the hive and the arts of the
bee-keeper, some of which things have a very modern and familiar look
about them: for instance, the use of a net or screen to keep out the
drones, a net so nicely contrived that these sturdy fellows are just
kept out, while the leaner, slenderer workers are just let in. But it
would be a long, long story to tell of Aristotle's knowledge of the bee,
and to compare it with what is, haply, the still deeper skill and
learning of that master of bee-craft, Virgil.

Then, having perfect freedom to go whithersoever we chose and to follow
the bees across the boundless fields of ancient literature, we might
read of the wild bees and of their honey out of a rock, and of the
hive-bees too, in Homer; follow them to their first legendary home in
Crete, where the infant Jupiter was fed on honey--as a baby's lips are
touched with it even unto this day; trace their association with
Proserpine and her mother, or their subtler connexion with Ephesian
Diana; find in the poets, from Hesiod to the later Anthology, a hundred
sweet references--to the bee-tree in the oak-wood, to the flowery hill
Hymettus. Perhaps, at last, we might even happen on the place where
Origen seems so strangely to foreshadow Shakespeare--speaking of the
king of the bees with his retinue of courtiers (his officers of sorts),
the relays of workmen (the poor mechanic porters crowding in), the
punishment of the idle (where some, like magistrates, correct at home),
the wars, the vanquished, and the plunder (which pillage they with merry
march bring home To the tent-royal of their Emperor).

Go back to Aristotle, and we may listen to him again while he talks of
many other kindred insects: of the humble-bee and its kind, of the
mason-bee with its hard round nest of clay, of the robber-bees, and of
the various wasps and hornets; or (still more curiously and
unexpectedly) of the hunter-wasp or 'ichneumon', and how it kills the
spider, carries it home to its nest, and lays its eggs in its poor body,
that the little wasp-grubs may afterwards be fed. Or again of the great
wasps which he calls Anthrenae, and how they chase the big flies, and
cut off their heads, and fly away with the rest of the carcass--all
agreeing to the very letter with what Henri Fabre tells us of a certain
large wasp of Southern Europe, and how it captures the big 'taons' or
horse-flies: 'Pour donner le coup de grâce à leurs Taons mal sacrifiés,
et se débattants encore entre les pattes du ravisseur, j'ai vu des
Bembex mâchonner la tête et le thorax des victimes.' Verily, there is
nothing new under the sun.

With the metamorphoses of various insects Aristotle was well acquainted.
He knew how the house-fly passes its early stages in a dung-hill, and
how the grubs of the big horse-flies and Tabanids live in decayed wood;
how certain little flies or gnats are engendered (as he calls it) in the
slime of vinegar. He relates with great care and accuracy the
life-history of the common gnat, from its aquatic larva, the little red
'blood-worm' of our pools; he describes them wriggling about like tiny
bits of red weed, in the water of some half-empty well; and he explains,
finally, the change by which they become stiff and motionless and hard,
until a husk breaks away and the little gnat is seen sitting upon it;
and by and by the sun's heat or a puff of wind starts it off, and away
it flies.

Some of these stories are indeed remarkable, for the events related are
more or less hidden and obscure; and so, with all this knowledge at
hand, it is not a little strange that Aristotle has very little indeed
to tell us about the far more obvious phenomena of the life-history of
the butterfly, and of the several kinds of butterflies and moths. He
does tell us briefly that the butterfly comes from a caterpillar, which
lives on cabbage-leaves and feeds voraciously, then turns into a
chrysalis and eats no more, nor has it a mouth to eat withal; it is hard
and, as it were, dead, but yet it moves and wriggles when you touch it,
and after a while the husk bursts and out comes the butterfly. The
account is good enough, so far as it goes, but nevertheless Aristotle
shows no affection for the butterfly, does not linger and dally over it,
tells no stories about it. This is all of a piece with the rest of
Greek literature, and poetry in particular, where allusions to the
butterfly are scanty and rare. I think the Greeks found something
ominous or uncanny, something not to be lightly spoken of, in that all
but disembodied spirit which we call a butterfly, and they called by the
name of ψυχη {psychê}, the Soul. They had a curious name (νεκυδαλλος
{nekydallos}) for the pupa. It sounds like a 'little corpse' (νεκυς
{nekys}); and like a little corpse within its shroud or coffin the pupa
sleeps in its cocoon. A late poet describes the butterfly 'coming back
from the grave to the light of day'; and certain of the Fathers of the
Church, St. Basil in particular, point the moral accordingly, and draw a
doubtless time-honoured allegory of the Resurrection and the Life from
the grub which is not dead but sleepeth, and the butterfly which (as it
were) is raised in glory.

Of one large moth, Aristotle gives us an account which has been a puzzle
to many. This begins as a great grub or caterpillar, with (as it were)
horns; and, growing by easy stages, it spins at length a cocoon. There
is a class of women who unwind and reel off the cocoons, and afterwards
weave a fabric with the thread; and a certain woman of Cos is credited
with the invention of this fabric. This is, at first sight, a plain and
straightforward description of the silkworm; but we know that it was not
till long afterwards, nearly a thousand years after, in Justinian's
reign, that the silkworm and the mulberry-tree which is its food were
brought out of the East into Byzantine Greece. We learn something of
this Coan silkworm from Pliny, who tells us that it lived on the ash and
oak and cypress tree; and from Clement of Alexandria and other of the
Fathers we glean a little more--for instance, that the larva was covered
with thick-set hairs, and that the cocoon was of a loose material
something like a spider's web. All this agrees in every particular with
a certain large moth (_Lasiocampa otus_), which spins a rough cocoon not
unlike that of our Emperor moth, and lives in south-eastern Europe,
feeding on the cypress and the oak. Many other silkworms besides the
true or common one are still employed, worms which yield the Tussore
silks of India and other kindred silks in Japan; and so likewise was
this rough silky fabric spun and woven in Hellas, until in course of
time it was surpassed and superseded by the finer produce of the 'Seric
worm', and the older industry died out and was utterly forgotten.

Ere we leave the subject of insects let us linger a moment over one
which the Greeks loved, and loved most of all. When as schoolboys we
first began to read our Thucydides, we met in the very beginning with
the story of how rich Athenians wore Golden Grasshoppers (as the
schoolmaster calls them) in their hair. These golden ornaments were, of
course, no common grasshoppers, but the little Cicadas, whose sharp
chirrup seemed delightful music to the Greeks. It is unpleasant to our
ears, as Browning found it; but in a multitude of Greek poets, in
Alcaeus and Anacreon and all through the whole Anthology, we hear its
praise. We have it, for instance, in the _Birds_:

    Though the hot sun be shining in the sky
    In the deep flowery meadow-grass I lie:
    To listen to the shrill melodious tune
    Of crickets, thrilled to ecstasy at noon.

Of this familiar and beloved insect Aristotle gives a copious account.
He describes two separate species, which we still recognize easily; a
larger one and the better singer, the other smaller and the first to
come and last to go with the summer season. He recognized the curious
vocal organ, or vibratory drum, at the cicada's waist, and saw that some
cicadas possessed it and others not; and he knew, as the poets also
knew, that it was the males who sang, while their wives listened and
were silent. He tells how the cicada is absent from treeless countries,
as, for instance, from Cyrene (and why, I wonder, does he go all the way
to Cyrene for his illustration?), neither is it heard in deep and
sunless woods; but in the olive-groves you hear it at its best, for an
olive-grove is sparse and the sun comes through. Then he tells us
briefly, but with remarkable accuracy, the story of the creature's life:
how the female, with her long ovipositor, lays her eggs deep down in
dead, hollow twigs, such as the canes on which the vines are propped;
how the brood, when they escape from the egg, burrow underground; how
later on they emerge, especially in rainy weather, when the rains have
softened the soil; how then the larva changes into another form, the
so-called 'nymph'; and how at last, when summer comes, the skin of the
nymph breaks and the perfect insect issues forth, changes colour, and
begins to sing. In Aristophanes, in Theocritus, in Lucretius, Virgil,
Martial, and in the Anthology, we may gather up a host of poetical
allusions to the natural history thus simply epitomized.

The Book about Animals, the _Historia Animalium_ as we say, from which I
have quoted these few examples of Aristotle's store of information, may
be taken to represent the first necessary stage of scientific inquiry.
There is a kind of _manual_ philosophy (as old Lord Monboddo called it)
which investigates facts which escape the vulgar, and may be called the
_anecdotes_ or _secret history_ of nature. In this fascinating pursuit
Gilbert White excelled, and John Ray and many another--the whole
brotherhood of simple naturalists. But such accumulated knowledge of
facts is but the foundation of a philosophy; and 'nothing deserves the
name of philosophy, except what explains the causes and principles of
things'. Aristotle would have done much had he merely shown (as Gilbert
White showed to the country gentlemen of his day) that the minute
observation of nature was something worth the scholar and the
gentleman's while; but, far more than this, he made a Science of natural
knowledge, and set it once for all within the realm of Philosophy. He
set it side by side with the more ancient science of Astronomy, which
for many hundred years in Egypt and the East, and for some few centuries
in Hellas, had occupied the mind of philosophers and the attention of
educated men. I have quoted before a great sentence in which he explains
his purpose, and makes excuse for his temerity. 'The glory, doubtless,
of the heavenly bodies fills us with more delight than the contemplation
of these lowly things; for the sun and stars are born not, neither do
they decay, but are eternal and divine. But the heavens are high and
afar off, and of celestial things the knowledge that our senses give us
is scanty and dim. The living creatures, on the other hand, are at our
door, and if we so desire it we may gain ample and certain knowledge of
each and all. We take pleasure in the beauty of a statue, shall not then
the living fill us with delight; and all the more if in the spirit of
philosophy we search for causes and recognize the evidences of design.
Then will nature's purpose and her deep-seated laws be everywhere
revealed, all tending in her multitudinous work to one form or another
of the Beautiful.'

Aristotle's voluminous writings have come down to us through many grave
vicissitudes. The greatest of them all are happily intact, or very
nearly so; but some are lost and others have suffered disorder and
corruption. The work known as the 'Parts of Animals' opens (as our text
has it) with a chapter which seems meant for a general exordium to the
whole series of biological treatises; and I know no chapter in all
Aristotle's books which better shows (in plainer English or easier
Greek) the master-hand of the great Teacher and Philosopher. He begins
by telling us (it has ever since been a common saying) that every
science, every branch of knowledge, admits of two sorts of
proficiency--that which may properly be termed scientific knowledge, and
that which is within the reach of ordinary educated men. He proceeds to
discuss the 'method' of scientific inquiry, whether we should begin with
the specific and proceed to the general, or whether we are to deal first
with common or generical characters and thereafterward with special
peculiarities. Are we entitled to treat of animals, as is done in
mathematical astronomy, by dealing first with facts or phenomena and
then proceeding to discover and relate their several causes? At once
this leads to a brief discussion (elaborated elsewhere) of the two great
Causes, or aspects of cause--the final cause and the 'moving' or
efficient cause--the _reason why_ or the purpose for which, and the
antecedent cause which, _of necessity_, brings a thing to be such as it
is. Here is one of the great crucial questions of philosophy, and
Aristotle's leaning to the side of the Final Cause has been a dominant
influence upon the minds of men throughout the whole history of
learning. Empedocles had taken another view: he held that the rain comes
when it listeth, or 'of necessity'; that we have no right to suppose it
comes to make the corn grow in spring, any more than to spoil the autumn
sheaves: that the teeth grow by the operation of some natural (or
physical) law, and that their apparent and undoubted fitness for cutting
and grinding is not purposeful but coincident; that the backbone is
divided into vertebrae because of the antecedent forces, or flexions,
which act upon it in the womb. And Empedocles proceeds to the great
evolutionary deduction, the clear prevision of Darwin's philosophy, that
fit and unfit arise alike, but that what is fit to survive does survive
and what is unfit perishes.

The story is far too long and the theme involved too grave and difficult
for treatment here. But I would venture to suggest that Aristotle
inclined to slur over the physical and lean the more to the final cause,
for this simple reason (whatever other reasons there may be), that he
was a better biologist than a physicist: that he lacked somewhat the
mathematical turn of mind which was intrinsic to the older schools of
philosophy. For better for worse the course he took, the choice he made,
was of incalculable import, and had power for centuries to guide (dare
we say, to bias) the teaching of the schools, the progress of learning,
and the innermost beliefs of men.

In this one short but pregnant chapter of Aristotle's there is far more
than we can hope even to epitomize. He has much to say in it of
'classification', an important matter indeed, and he discusses it as a
great logician should, in all its rigour. Many commentators have sought
for Aristotle's 'classification of animals'; for my part I have never
found it, and, in our sense of the word, I am certain it is not there.
An unbending, unchanging classification of animals would have been
something foreign to all his logic; it is all very well, it becomes
practically necessary, when we have to arrange our animals on the
shelves of a museum or in the arid pages of a 'systematic' catalogue;
and it takes a new complexion when, or if, we can attain to a real or
historical classification, following lines of actual descent and based
on proven facts of historical evolution. But Aristotle (as it seems to
me) neither was bound to a museum catalogue nor indulged in visions
either of a complete _scala naturae_ or of an hypothetical phylogeny. He
classified animals as he found them; and, as a logician, he had a
dichotomy for every difference which presented itself to his mind. At
one time he divided animals into those with blood and those without, at
another into the air-breathers and the water-breathers; into the wild
and the tame, the social and the solitary, and so on in endless ways
besides. At the same time he had a quick eye for the great natural
groups, such 'genera' (as he called them) as Fish or Bird, Insect or
Mollusc. So it comes to pass that, while he fashioned no hard and fast
scheme of classification, and would undoubtedly (I hold) have thought it
vain to do so, the threads of his several partial or temporary
classifications come together after all, though in a somewhat hazy
pattern, yet in a very beautiful and coherent parti-coloured web. And
though his order is not always our order, yet a certain exquisite
orderliness is of the very essence of his thought and style. It is the
characteristic which Molière hits upon in _Les Femmes savantes_,--'Je
m'attache _pour l'ordre_ au péripatétisme'.

Before he finishes the great chapter of which we have begun to speak he
indicates that there are more ways than one of relating, or
classifying, our facts; that, for instance, it may be equally proper and
necessary to deal now with the animals and their several parts or
properties, and at another time with the parts or properties as such,
explaining and illustrating them in turn by the several animals which
display or possess them. The 'Parts of Animals' is, then, a corollary, a
necessary corollary, to the more anecdotal _Historia Animalium_. And yet
again, there is a third alternative--to discuss the great functions or
actions or potentialities of the organism, as it were first of all in
the abstract, and then to correlate them with the parts which in this or
that creature are provided and are 'designed' to effect them. This
involves the conception and the writing of separate physiological
treatises on such themes as Respiration, Locomotion, on Sleeping and
Waking, and lastly (and in some respects the most ambitious, most
erudite, and most astonishing of them all) the great account of the
Generation of Animals.

So the whole range, we might say the whole conceivable range, of
biological science is sketched out, and the greater part of the great
canvas is painted in. But to bring it into touch with human life, and to
make good its claim to the high places of philosophy, we must go yet
farther and study Life itself, and what men call the Soul. So grows the
great conception. We begin with trivial anecdote, with the things that
fisherman, huntsman, peasant know; the sciences of zoology, anatomy,
physiology take shape before our very eyes; and by evening we sit humbly
at the feet of the great teacher of Life itself, the historian of the
Soul. It is not for us to attempt to show that even here the story does
not end, but the highest chapters of philosophy begin. Then, when we
remember that this short narrative of ours is but the faintest
adumbration of one side only of the philosopher's many-sided task and
enterprise, we begin to rise towards a comprehension of Roger Bacon's
saying, that 'although Aristotle did not arrive at the end of knowledge,
he set in order all parts of philosophy'. In the same spirit a modern
critic declares: 'Il n'a seulement défini et constitué chacune des
parties de la science; il en a de plus montré le lien et l'unité'.

Aristotle, like Shakespeare, is full of old saws, tags of wisdom, jewels
five words long. Here is such a one, good for teacher and pupil
alike--Δει πιστευειν τον μανθανοντα {Dei pisteuein ton manthanonta}. It
tells us that the road to Learning lies through Faith; and it means that
to be a scholar one should have a heart as well as brains.

By reason partly of extraneous interpolation, but doubtless also through
a lingering credulity from which even philosophers are not immune, we
find in Aristotle many a strange story. The goats that breathe through
their ears, the vulture impregnated by the wind, the eagle that dies of
hunger, the stag caught by music, the salamander which walks through
fire, the unicorn, the mantichore, are but a few of the 'Vulgar Errors'
or 'Received Tenents' (as Sir Thomas Browne has it) which are
perpetuated, not originated, in the _Historia Animalium_. Some of them
come, through Persia, from the farther East: and others (we meet with
them once more in Horapollo the Egyptian priest) are but the exoteric or
allegorical expression of the arcana of ancient Egyptian religion.

So it comes to pass that for two thousand years and throughout all lands
men have come to Aristotle, and found in him information and
instruction--that which they desired. Arab and Moor and Syrian and Jew
treasured his books while the western world sat in darkness; the great
centuries of Scholasticism hung upon his words; the oldest of our
Universities, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, were based upon his teaching, yea,
all but established for his study. Where he has been, there, seen or
unseen, his influence remains; even the Moor and the Arab find in him,
to this day, a teacher after their own hearts: a teacher of eternal
verities, telling of sleep and dreams, of youth and age, of life and
death, of generation and corruption, of growth and of decay: a guide to
the book of Nature, a revealer of the Spirit, a prophet of the works of
God.

The purpose of these little essays, I have been told (though I had half
forgotten it), is to help though ever so little to defend and justify
the study of the language and the vast literature of Greece. It is a
task for which I am unfitted and unprepared. When Oliver Goldsmith
proposed to teach Greek at Leyden, where he 'had been told it was a
desideratum', the Principal of that celebrated University met him (as we
all know) with weighty objections. 'I never learned Greek', said the
Principal, 'and I don't find that I have ever missed it. I have had a
Doctor's cap and gown without Greek. I have ten thousand florins a year
without Greek; and, in short', continued he, 'as I don't know Greek, I
do not believe there is any good in it.'--I have heard or read the story
again and again, for is it not written in the _Vicar of Wakefield_? But
I never heard that any man, not Goldsmith himself, attempted to confute
the argument. I agree for the most part with the Principal, and can see
clearly that all the Greek that Goldsmith knew, and all the Greek in all
the world, would have meant nothing and done nothing for him. But there
is and will be many another who finds in Greek wisdom and sweet Hellenic
speech something which he needs must have, and lacking which he would be
poor indeed: something which is as a staff in his hand, a light upon his
path, a lantern to his feet.

In this workaday world we may still easily possess ourselves, as Gibbon
says the subjects of the Byzantine Throne, even in their lowest
servitude and depression, were still possessed, 'of a golden key that
could unlock the treasures of antiquity, of a musical and prolific
language that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the
abstractions of philosophy'.

Our very lives seem prolonged by the recollection of antiquity; for, as
Cicero says, not to know what has been transacted in former times is to
continue always a child. I borrow the citation from Dr. Johnson, who
reminds us also of a saying of Aristotle himself, that as students we
ought first to examine and understand what has been written by the
ancients, and then cast our eyes round upon the world. And Johnson
prefaces both quotations by another:

        Tibi res antiquae laudis et artis
    ingredior, sanctos ausus recludere fontes.

But now I, who have dared to draw my tiny draft from Aristotle's great
well, seem after all to be seeking an excuse, seeking it in example and
precept. Precept, at least, I know to be of no avail. My father spent
all the many days of his life in the study of Greek; you might suppose
it was for Wisdom's sake,--but my father was a modest man. The fact is,
he did it for a simpler reason still, a very curious reason, to be
whispered rather than told: he did it _for love_.

Nigh forty years ago, I first stepped out on the east-windy streets of a
certain lean and hungry town (lean, I mean, as regards scholarship)
where it was to be my lot to spend thereafter many and many a year. And
the very first thing I saw there was an inscription over a very humble
doorway, '_Hic mecum habitant Dante, Cervantes, Molière_'. It was the
home of a poor schoolmaster, who as a teacher of languages eked out the
scanty profits of his school. I was not a little comforted by the
announcement. So the poor scholar, looking on the ragged regiment of his
few books, is helped, consoled, exalted by the reflection: _Hic mecum
habitant ... Homerus, Plato, Aristoteles_. And were one in a moment of
inadvertence to inquire of him why he occupied himself with Greek, he
might perchance stammer (like Dominie Sampson) an almost inarticulate
reply; but more probably he would be stricken speechless by the enormous
outrage of the request, and the reason of his devotion would be hidden
from the questioner for ever.

D'ARCY WENTWORTH THOMPSON.




BIOLOGY


_Before Aristotle_

What is science? It is a question that cannot be answered easily, nor
perhaps answered at all. None of the definitions seem to cover the field
exactly; they are either too wide or too narrow. But we can see science
in its growth and we can say that being a process it can exist only as
growth. Where does the science of biology begin? Again we cannot say,
but we can watch its evolution and its progress. Among the Greeks the
accurate observation of living forms, which is at least one of the
essentials of biological science, goes back very far. The word
_Biology_, used in our sense, would, it is true, have been an
impossibility among them, for _bios_ refers to the life of man and could
not be applied, except in a strained or metaphorical sense, to that of
other living things.[6] But the _ideas_ we associate with the word are
clearly developed in Greek philosophy and the foundations of biology are
of great antiquity.

    [6] The word _Biology_ was introduced by Gottfried Reinhold
    Treviranus (1776-1837) in his _Biologie oder die Philosophie der
    lebenden Natur_, 6 vols., Göttingen, 1802-22, and was adopted by
    J.-B. de Lamarck (1744-1829) in his _Hydrogéologie_, Paris, 1802. It
    is probable that the first English use of the word in its modern
    sense is by Sir William Lawrence (1783-1867) in his work _On the
    Physiology, Zoology, and Natural History of Man_, London, 1819;
    there are earlier English uses of the word, however, contrasted with
    _biography_.

The Greek people had many roots, racial, cultural, and spiritual, and
from them all they inherited various powers and qualities and derived
various ideas and traditions. The most suggestive source for our purpose
is that of the Minoan race whom they dispossessed and whose lands they
occupied. That highly gifted people exhibited in all stages of its
development a marvellous power of graphically representing animal forms,
of which the famous Cretan friezes, Vaphio cups (Fig. 5), and Mycenean
lions provide well-known examples. It is difficult not to believe that
the Minoan element, entering into the mosaic of peoples that we call the
Greeks, was in part at least responsible for the like graphic power
developed in the Hellenic world, though little contact has yet been
demonstrated between Minoan and archaic Greek Art.

For the earliest biological achievements of Greek peoples we have to
rely largely on information gleaned from artistic remains. It is true
that we have a few fragments of the works of both Ionian and
Italo-Sicilian philosophers, and in them we read of theoretical
speculation as to the nature of life and of the soul, and we can thus
form some idea of the first attempts of such workers as Alcmaeon of
Croton (_c._ 500 B. C.) to lay bare the structure of animals by
dissection.[7] The pharmacopœia also of some of the earliest works of
the Hippocratic collection betrays considerable knowledge of both native
and foreign plants.[8] Moreover, scattered through the pages of
Herodotus and other early writers is a good deal of casual information
concerning animals and plants, though such material is second-hand and
gives us little information concerning the habit of exact observation
that is the necessary basis of science.

    [7] The remains of Alcmaeon are given in H. Diel's _Die Fragmente
    der Vorsokratiker_, Berlin, 1903, p. 103. Alcmaeon is considered in
    the companion chapter on _Greek Medicine_.

    [8] Especially the περι γυναικειης φυσιος {peri gynaikeiês physios},
    _On the nature of woman_, and the περι γυναικειων {peri gynaikeiôn},
    _On the diseases of women_.

Something more is, however, revealed by early Greek Art. We are in
possession of a series of vases of the seventh and sixth centuries
before the Christian era showing a closeness of observation of animal
forms that tells of a people awake to the study of nature. We have thus
portrayed for us a number of animals--plants seldom or never appear--and
among the best rendered are wild creatures: we see antelopes quietly
feeding or startled at a sound, birds flying or picking worms from the
ground, fallow deer forcing their way through thickets, browsing
peacefully, or galloping away, boars facing the hounds and dogs chasing
hares, wild cattle forming their defensive circle, hawks seizing their
prey. Many of these exhibit minutely accurate observation. The very
direction of the hairs on the animals' coats has sometimes been closely
studied, and often the muscles are well rendered. In some cases even the
dentition has been found accurately portrayed, as in a sixth-century
representation on an Ionian vase of a lioness--an animal then very rare
on the Eastern Mediterranean littoral, but still known in Babylonia,
Syria, and Asia Minor. The details of the work show that the artist must
have examined the animal in captivity (Figs. 1 and 2).

[Illustration: FIG. 1. Lioness and young from an Ionian vase of the
sixth century B. C. found at Caere in Southern Etruria (Louvre, Salle E,
No. 298), from _Le Dessin des Animaux en Grèce d'après les vases
peints_, by J. Morin, Paris (Renouard), 1911. The animal is drawing
itself up to attack its hunters. The scanty mane, the form of the paws,
the udders, and the dentition are all heavily though accurately
represented.]

[Illustration: FIG. 2. A, Jaw bones of lion; B, head of lioness from
Caere vase (Fig. 1), after Morin. Note the careful way in which the
artist has distinguished the molar from the cutting teeth.]

Animal paintings of this order are found scattered over the Greek world
with special centres or schools in such places as Cyprus, Boeotia, or
Chalcis. The very name for a painter in Greek, _zoographos_, recalls the
attention paid to living forms. By the fifth century, in painting them
as in other departments of Art, the supremacy of Attica had asserted
itself, and there are many beautiful Attic vase-paintings of animals to
place by the side of the magnificent horses' heads of the Parthenon
(Fig. 6). In Attica, too, was early developed a characteristic and
closely accurate type of representation of marine forms, and this
attained a wider vogue in Southern Italy in the fourth century. From the
latter period a number of dishes and vases have come down to us bearing
a large variety of fish forms, portrayed with an exactness that is
interesting in view of the attention to marine creatures in the
surviving literature of Aristotelian origin (Fig. 3).

[Illustration: FIG. 3. Paintings of fish on plates. Italo-Greek work of
the fourth century B. C. From Morin.

  A. Sargus vulgaris.
  B. Crenilabrus mediterraneus.
  C. Uranoscopus scaber?]

These artistic products are more than a mere reflex of the daily life
of the people. The habits and positions of animals are observed by the
hunter, as are the forms and colours of fish by the fisherman; but the
methods of huntsman and fisher do not account for the accurate portrayal
of a lion's dentition, the correct numbering of a fish's scales or the
close study of the lie of the feathers on the head, and the pads on the
feet, of a bird of prey (Fig. 4). With observations such as these we are
in the presence of something worthy of the name _Biology_. Though but
little literature on that topic earlier than the writings of Aristotle
has come down to us, yet both the character of his writings and such
paintings and pictures as these, suggest the existence of a strong
interest and a wide literature, biological in the modern sense,
antecedent to the fourth century.

[Illustration: FIG. 4. Head and talons of the Sea-eagle, _Haliaëtus
albicilla_:

  A, From an Ionic vase of the sixth century B. C.
  B, Drawn from the object.

From Morin.]

Greek science, however, exhibits throughout its history a peculiar
characteristic differentiating it from the modern scientific standpoint.
Most of the work of the Greek scientist was done in relation to man.
Nature interested him mainly in relation to himself. The Greek
scientific and philosophic world was an anthropocentric world, and this
comes out in the overwhelming mass of medical as distinct from
biological writings that have come down to us. Such, too, is the
sentiment expressed by the poets in their descriptions of the animal
creation:

    Many wonders there be, but naught more wondrous than man:

       *       *       *       *       *

    The light-witted birds of the air, the beasts of the weald and the wood
    He traps with his woven snare, and the brood of the briny flood.
    Master of cunning he: the savage bull, and the hart
    Who roams the mountain free, are tamed by his infinite art.
    And the shaggy rough-maned steed is broken to bear the bit.

    Sophocles, _Antigone_, verses 342 ff.

    (Translation of F. Storr.)

It is thus not surprising that our first systematic treatment of animals
is in a practical medical work, the περι διαιτης {peri diaitês}, _On
diet_, of the Hippocratic Collection. This very peculiar treatise dates
from the later part of the fifth century. It is strongly under the
influence of Heracleitus (_c._ 540-475) and contains many points of view
which reappear in later philosophy. All animals, according to it, are
formed of fire and water, nothing is born and nothing dies, but there is
a perpetual and eternal revolution of things, so that change itself is
the only reality. Man's nature is but a parallel to that of the
universal nature, and the arts of man are but an imitation or reflex of
the natural arts or, again, of the bodily functions. The soul, a mixture
of water and fire, consumes itself in infancy and old age, and increases
during adult life. Here, too, we meet with that singular doctrine, not
without bearing on the course of later biological thought, that in the
foetus all parts are formed simultaneously. On the proportion of fire
and water in the body all depends, sex, temper, temperament, intellect.
Such speculative ideas separate this book from the sober method of the
more typical Hippocratic medical works with which indeed it has little
in common.

After having discussed these theoretical matters the work turns to its
own practical concerns, and in the course of setting out the natures of
foods gives in effect a rough classification of animals. These are set
forth in groups, and from among the larger groups only the reptiles and
insects are missing. The list has been described, perhaps hardly with
justification, as the _Coan classificatory system_. We have here,
indeed, no _system_ in the sense in which that word is now applied to
the animal kingdom, but we have yet some sort of definite arrangement of
animals according to their supposed natures. The passage opens with
mammals, which are divided into domesticated and wild, the latter being
mentioned in order according to size, next follow the land-birds, then
the water-fowl, and then the fishes. These fish are divided into (1) the
haunters of the shore, (2) the free-swimming forms, (3) the
cartilaginous fishes or Selachii, which are not so named but are placed
together, (4) the mud-loving forms, and (5) the fresh-water fish.
Finally come invertebrates arranged in some sort of order according to
their structure. The characteristic feature of the 'classification' is
the separation of the fish from the remaining vertebrates and of the
invertebrates from both. Of the fifty animals named no less than twenty
are fish, about a fifth of the number studied by Aristotle, but we must
remember that here only edible species are mentioned. The existence of
the work shows at least that in the fifth century there was already a
close and accurate study of animal forms, a study that may justly be
called scientific. The predominance of fish and their classification in
greater detail than the other groups is not an unexpected feature. The
Mediterranean is especially rich in these forms, the Greeks were a
maritime people, and Greek literature is full of imagery drawn from the
fisher's craft. From Minoan to Byzantine times the variety, beauty, and
colour of fish made a deep impression on Greek minds as reflected in
their art.

Much more important, however, for subsequent biological development
than such observations on the nature and habits of animals, is the
service that the Hippocratic physicians rendered to Anatomy and to
Physiology, departments in which the structure of man and of the
domesticated animals stands apart from that of the rest of the animal
kingdom. It is with the nature and constitution of man that most of the
surviving early biological writings are concerned, and in these
departments are unmistakable tendencies towards systematic arrangement
of the material. Thus we have division and description of the body in
sevens from the periphery to the centre and from the vertex to the sole
of the foot,[9] or a division into four regions or zones.[10] The
teaching concerning the four elements and four humours too became of
great importance and some of it was later adopted by Aristotle. We also
meet numerous mechanical explanations of bodily structures, comparisons
between anatomical conditions encountered in related animals,
experiments on living creatures,[11] systematic incubation of hen's eggs
for the study of their development, parallels drawn between the
development of plants and of human and animal embryos, theories of
generation, among which is that which was afterwards called
'pangenesis'--discussion of the survival of the stronger over the
weaker--almost our survival of the fittest--and a theory of inheritance
of acquired characters.[12] All these things show not only extensive
knowledge but also an attempt to apply such knowledge to human needs.
When we consider how even in later centuries biology was linked with
medicine, and how powerful and fundamental was the influence of the
Hippocratic writings, not only on their immediate successors in
antiquity, but also on the Middle Ages and right into the nineteenth
century, we shall recognize the significance of these developments.

    [9] περι ἑβδομαδων {peri hebdomadôn}. The Greek text is lost. We
    have, however, an early and barbarous Latin translation, and there
    has recently been printed an Arabic commentary. G. Bergstrasser,
    _Pseudogaleni in Hippocratis de septimanis commentarium ab Hunnino
    Q. F. arabice versum_, Leipzig, 1914.

    [10] περι νουσων δ {peri nousôn d}.

    [11] περι καρδιης {peri kardiês}.

    [12] Especially in the περι γονης {peri gonês}.

[Illustration: Fig. 5. MINOAN GOLD CUP. SIXTEENTH CENTURY B. C.]

[Illustration: Fig. 6. HORSE'S HEAD. FROM PARTHENON. 440 B. C.]

Such was the character of biological thought within the fifth century,
and a generation inspired by this movement produced some noteworthy
works in the period which immediately followed. In the treatise περι
τροφης {peri trophês}, _On nourishment_, which may perhaps be dated
about 400 B. C., we learn of the pulse for the first time in Greek
medical literature, and read of a physiological system which lasted
until the time of Harvey, with the arteries arising from the heart and
the veins from the liver. Of about the same date is a work περι καρδιης
{peri kardiês}, _On the heart_, which describes the ventricles as well
as the great vessels and their valves, and compares the heart of animals
with that of man.

A little later, perhaps 390 B. C., is the treatise περι σαρκων {peri
sarkôn}, _On muscles_, which contains much more than its title suggests.
It has the old system of sevens and, inspired perhaps by the philosophy
of Heracleitus (_c._ 540-475), describes the heart as sending air, fire,
and movement to the different parts of the body through the vessels
which are themselves constantly in movement. The infant in its mother's
womb is believed to draw in air and fire through its mouth and to eat
_in utero_. The action of the air on the blood is compared to its action
on fire. In contrast to some of the other Hippocratic treatises the
central nervous system is in the background; much attention, however, is
given to the special senses. The brain resounds during audition. The
olfactory nerves are hollow, lead to the brain, and, convey volatile
substances to it which cause it to secrete mucus. The eyes also have
been examined, and their coats and humours roughly described; an
allusion, the first in literature, is perhaps made to the crystalline
lens, and the eyes of animals are compared with those of man. There is
evidence not only of dissection but of experiment, and in efforts to
compare the resistance of various tissues to such processes as boiling,
we may see the small beginning of chemical physiology.

An abler work than any of these, but exhibiting less power of
observation is a treatise, περι γονης {peri gonês}, _On generation_,
that may perhaps be dated about 380 B. C.[13] It exhibits a writer of
much philosophic power, very anxious for physiological explanations, but
hampered by ignorance of physics. He has, in fact, the weaknesses and in
a minor degree the strength of his successor Aristotle, of whose great
work on generation he gives us a fore-taste. He sets forth in
considerable detail a doctrine of pangenesis, not wholly unlike that of
Darwin. In order to explain the phenomena of inheritance he supposes
that vessels reach the seed, carrying with them samples from all parts
of the body. He believes that channels pass from all the organs to the
brain and then to the spinal marrow (or to the marrow direct), thence to
the kidneys and on to the genital organs; he believes, too, that he
knows the actual location of one such channel, for he observes, wrongly,
that incision behind the ears, by interrupting the passage, leads to
impotence. As an outcome of this theory he is prepared to accept
inheritance of acquired characters. The embryo develops and breathes by
material transmitted from the mother through the umbilical cord. We
encounter here also a very detailed description of a specimen of
exfoliated _membrana mucosa uteri_ which our author mistakes for an
embryo, but his remarks at least exhibit the most eager curiosity.[14]

    [13] The three works περι γονης {peri gonês}, περι φυσιος παιδιου
    {peri physios paidiou}, περι νουσων δ {peri nousôn d}, _On
    generation_, _on the nature of the embryo_, _on diseases, book IV_,
    form really one treatise on generation.

    [14] περι φυσιος παιδιου {peri physios paidiou}, _On the nature of
    the embryo_, § 13. The same experience is described in the περι
    σαρκων {peri sarkôn}, _On the muscles_.

The author of this work on generation is thus a 'biologist' in the
modern sense, and among the passages exhibiting him in this light is his
comparison of the human embryo with the chick. 'The embryo is in a
membrane in the centre of which is the navel through which it draws and
gives its breath, and the membranes arise from the umbilical cord....
The structure of the child you will find from first to last as I have
already described.... 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. You will find exactly as I say, for the nature of the bird can be
likened to that of man. The membranes [you will see] proceed from the
umbilical cord, and all that I have said on the subject of the infant
you will find in a bird's egg, and one who has made these observations
will be surprised to find an umbilical cord in a bird's egg.'[15]

    [15] περι φυσιος παιδιου {peri physios paidiou}, _On the nature of
    the embryo_, § 29.

The same interest that he exhibits for the development of man and
animals he shows also for plants.

     'A seed laid in the ground fills itself with the juices there
     contained, for the soil contains in itself juices of every nature
     for the nourishment of plants. Thus filled with juice the seed is
     distended and swells, and thereby the power (= faculty ἡ δυναμις
     {hê dynamis}) diffused in the seed is compressed by pneuma and
     juice, and bursting the seed becomes the first leaves. But a time
     comes when these leaves can no longer get nourished from the juices
     in the seed. Then the seed and the leaves erupt below, for urged by
     the leaves the seed sends down that part of its power which is yet
     concentrated within it and so the roots are produced as an
     extension of the leaves. When at last the plant is well rooted
     below and is drawing its nutriment from the earth, then the whole
     grain disappears, being absorbed, save for the husk, which is the
     most solid part; and even that, decomposing in the earth,
     ultimately becomes invisible. In time some of the leaves put forth
     branches. The plant being thus produced by humidity from the seed
     is still soft and moist. Growing actively both above and below, it
     cannot as yet bear fruit, for it has not the quality of force and
     reserve (δυναμις ισχυρη και πιαρα {dynamis ischyrê kai piara}) from
     which a seed can be precipitated. But when, with time, the plant
     becomes firmer and better rooted, it develops veins as passages
     both upwards and downwards, and it draws from the soil not only
     water but more abundantly also substances that are denser and
     fatter. Warmed, too, by the sun, these act as a ferment to the
     extremities and give rise to fruit after its kind. The fruit thus
     develops much from little, for every plant draws from the earth a
     power more abundant than that with which it started, and the
     fermentation takes place not at one place but at many.'[16]

    [16] περι φυσιος παιδιου {peri physios paidiou}, _On the nature of
    the embryo_, § 22.

Nor does our author hesitate to draw an analogy between the plant and
the mammalian embryo. 'In the same way the infant lives within its
mother's womb and in a state corresponding to the health of the mother
... and you will find a complete similitude between the products of the
soil and the products of the womb.'

The early Greek literature is so scantily provided with illustrations
drawn from botanical study, that it is worth considering the remarkable
comparison of generation of plants from cuttings and from seeds in the
same work.

     'As regards plants generated from cuttings ... that part of a
     branch where it was cut from a tree is placed in the earth and
     there rootlets are sent out. This is how it happens: The part of
     the plant within the soil draws up juices, swells, and develops a
     pneuma (πνευμα ισχει {pneuma ischei}), but not so the part without.
     The pneuma and the juice concentrate the power of the plant below
     so that it becomes denser. Then the lower end erupts and gives
     forth tender roots. Then the plant, taking from below, draws juices
     from the roots and transmits them to the part above the soil which
     thus also swells and develops pneuma; thus the power from being
     diffused in the plant becomes concentrated and budding, gives forth
     leaves.... Cuttings, then, differ from seeds. With a seed the
     leaves are borne first, then the roots are sent down; with a
     cutting the roots form first and then the leaves.'[17]

    [17] Ibid. § 23.

But with these works of the early part of the fourth century the first
stage of Greek biology reaches its finest development. Later
Hippocratic treatises which deal with physiological topics are on a
lower plane, and we must seek some external cause for the failure. Nor
have we far to seek. This period saw the rise of a movement that had the
most profound influence on every department of thought. We see the
advent into the Greek world of a great intellectual movement as a result
of which the department of philosophy that dealt with nature receded
before Ethics. Of that intellectual revolution--perhaps the greatest the
world has seen--Athens was the site and Socrates (470-399) the
protagonist. With the movement itself and its characteristic fruit we
are not concerned. But the great successor and pupil of its founder
gives us in the _Timaeus_ a picture of the depth to which natural
science can be degraded in the effort to give a specific teleological
meaning to all parts of the visible Universe. The book and the picture
which it draws, dark and repulsive to the mind trained in modern
scientific method, enthralled the imagination of a large part of mankind
for wellnigh two thousand years. Organic nature appears in this work of
Plato (427-347) as the degeneration of man whom the Creator has made
most perfect. The school that held this view ultimately decayed as a
result of its failure to advance positive knowledge. As the centuries
went by its views became further and further divorced from phenomena,
and the bizarre developments of later Neoplatonism stand to this day as
a warning against any system which shall neglect the investigation of
nature. But in its decay Platonism dragged science down and destroyed by
neglect nearly all earlier biological material. Mathematics, not being a
phenomenal study, suited better the Neoplatonic mood and continued to
advance, carrying astronomy with it for a while--astronomy that affected
the life of man and that soon became the handmaid of astrology;
medicine, too, that determined the conditions of man's life was also
cherished, though often mistakenly, but pure science was doomed.

But though the ethical view of nature overwhelmed science in the end,
the advent of the mighty figure of Aristotle (384-322) stayed the tide
for a time. Yet the writer on Greek Biology remains at a disadvantage in
contrast with the Historian of Greek Mathematics, of Greek Astronomy, or
of Greek Medicine, in the scantiness of the materials for presenting an
account of the development of his studies before Aristotle. The huge
form of that magnificent naturalist completely overshadows Greek as it
does much of later Biology.

CHARLES SINGER.


_After Aristotle_

All Aristotle's surviving biological works refer primarily to the animal
creation. His work on plants is lost or rather has survived as the
merest corrupted fragment. We are fortunate, however, in the possession
of a couple of complete works by his pupil and successor Theophrastus
(372-287), which may not only be taken to represent the Aristotelian
attitude towards the plant world, but also give us an inkling of the
general state of biological science in the generation which succeeded
the master.

[Illustration: Fig. 7. ARISTOTLE
From HERCULANEUM
Probably work of fourth century B. C.]

These treatises of Theophrastus are in many respects the most complete
and orderly of all ancient biological works that have reached our time.
They give an idea of the kind of interest that the working scientist of
that day could develop when inspired rather by the genius of a great
teacher than by the power of his own thoughts. Theophrastus is a
pedestrian where Aristotle is a creature of wings, he is in a relation
to the master of the same order that the morphologists of the second
half of the nineteenth century were to Darwin. For a couple of
generations after the appearance of the _Origin of Species_ in 1859 the
industry and ability of naturalists all over the world were occupied in
working out in detail the structure and mode of life of living things
on the basis of the Evolutionary philosophy. Nearly all the work on
morphology and much of that on physiology since his time might be
treated as a commentary on the works of Darwin. These volumes of
Theophrastus give the same impression. They represent the remains--alas,
almost the only biological remains--of a school working under the
impulse of a great idea and spurred by the memory of a great teacher. As
such they afford a parallel to much scientific work of our own day,
produced by men without genius save that provided by a vision and a hope
and an ideal. Of such men it is impossible to write as of Aristotle.
Their lives are summed up by their actual achievement, and since
Theophrastus is an orderly writer whose works have descended to us in
good state, he is a very suitable instance of the actual standard of
achievement of ancient biology. 'Without vision the people perish' and
the very breath of life of science is drawn, and can only be drawn, from
that very small band of prophets who from time to time, during the ages,
have provided the great generalizations and the great ideals. In this
light let us examine the work of Theophrastus.

In the absence of any adequate system of classification, almost all
botany until the seventeenth century consisted mainly of descriptions of
species. To describe accurately a leaf or a root in the language in
ordinary use would often take pages. Modern botanists have invented an
elaborate terminology which, however hideous to eye and ear, has the
crowning merit of helping to abbreviate scientific literature. Botanical
writers previous to the seventeenth century were substantially without
this special mode of expression. It is partly to this lack that we owe
the persistent attempts throughout the centuries to represent plants
pictorially in herbals, manuscript and printed, and thus the possibility
of an adequate history of plant illustration.

Theophrastus seems to have felt acutely the need of botanical terms,
and there are cases in which he seeks to give a special technical
meaning to words in more or less current use. Among such words are
_carpos_ = fruit, _pericarpion_ = seed vessel = pericarp, and _metra_,
the word used by him for the central core of any stem whether formed of
wood, pith, or other substance. It is from the usage of Theophrastus
that the exact definition of fruit and pericarp has come down to us.[18]
We may easily discern also the purpose for which he introduces into
botany the term _metra_, a word meaning primarily the _womb_, and the
vacancy in the Greek language which it was made to fill. '_Metra_,' he
says, 'is that which is in the middle of the wood, being third in order
from the bark and [thus] like to the marrow in bones. Some call it the
_heart_ (καρδιαν {kardian}), others the _inside_ (εντεριωνην
{enteriônên}), yet others call only the innermost part of the metra
itself the heart, while others again call this _marrow_.'[19] He is thus
inventing a word to cover all the different kinds of core and importing
it from another study. This is the method of modern scientific
nomenclature which hardly existed for botanists even as late as the
sixteenth century of our era. The real foundations of our modern
nomenclature were laid in the later sixteenth and in the seventeenth
century by Cesalpino and Joachim Jung.

    [18] It is possible that Theophrastus derived the word pericarp from
    Aristotle. Cp. _De anima_, ii. 1, 412 b 2. In the passage το φυλλον
    περικαρπιου σκεπασμα, το δε περικαρπιον καρπου {to phyllon
    perikarpiou skepasma, to de perikarpion karpou}, in the _De anima_
    the word does not, however, seem to have the full technical force
    that Theophrastus gives to it.

    [19] _Historia plantarum_, i. 2, vi.

Theophrastus understood the value of developmental study, a conception
derived from his master. 'A plant', he says, 'has power of germination
in all its parts, for it has life in them all, wherefore we should
regard them not for what they are but for what they are becoming.'[20]
The various modes of plant reproduction are correctly distinguished in a
way that passes beyond the only surviving earlier treatise that deals
in detail with the subject, the Hippocratic work _On generation_. 'The
manner of generation of trees and plants are these: spontaneous, from a
seed, from a root, from a piece torn off, from a branch or twig, from
the trunk itself, or from pieces of the wood cut up small.'[21] The
marvel of germination must have awakened admiration from a very early
date. We have already seen it occupying a more ancient author, and it
had also been one of the chief preoccupations of Aristotle. It is thus
not remarkable that the process should impress Theophrastus, who has
left on record his views on the formation of the plant from the seed.

    [20] _Ibid._ i. 1, iv.

    [21] _Historia plantarum_, ii. 1, i.

     'Some germinate, root and leaves, from the same point, some
     separately from either end of the seed. Thus wheat, barley, spelt,
     and all such cereals [germinate] from either end, corresponding to
     the position [of the seed] in the ear, the root from the stout
     lower part, the shoot from the upper; but the two, root and stem,
     form a single continuous whole. The bean and other leguminous
     plants are not so, but in them root and stem are from the same
     point, namely, their place of attachment to the pod, where, it is
     plain, they have their origin. In some cases there is a process, as
     in beans, chick peas, and especially lupines, from which the root
     grows downward, the leaf and stem upward.... In certain trees the
     bud first germinates within the seed, and, as it increases in size,
     the seeds split--all such seeds are, as it were, in two halves;
     again, all those of leguminous plants have plainly two lobes and
     are double--and then the root is immediately thrust out. But in
     cereals, the seeds being in one piece, this does not happen, but
     the root grows a little before [the shoot].

     'Barley and wheat come up monophyllous, but peas, beans, and chick
     peas polyphyllous. All leguminous plants have a single woody root,
     from which grow slender side roots ... but wheat, barley, and the
     other cereals have numerous slender roots by which they are matted
     together.... There is a contrast between these two kinds; the
     leguminous plants have a single root and have many side-growths
     above from the [single] stem ... while the cereals have many roots
     and send up many shoots, but these have no side-shoots.'[22]

    [22] _Historia plantarum_, viii. 1, i.

There can be no doubt that here is a piece of minute observation on the
behaviour of germinating seeds. The distinction between dicotyledons and
monocotyledons is accurately set forth, though the stress is laid not so
much on the cotyledonous character of the seed as on the relation of
root and shoot. In the dicotyledons root and shoot are represented as
springing from the same point, and in monocotyledons from opposite poles
in the seed.

No further effective work was done on the germinating seed until the
invention of the microscope, and the appearance of the work of Highmore
(1613-85),[23] and the much more searching investigations of Malpighi
(1628-94)[24] and Grew (1641-1712)[25] after the middle of the
seventeenth century. The observations of Theophrastus are, however, so
accurate, so lucid, and so complete that they might well be used as
legends for the plates of these writers two thousand years after him.

    [23] Nathaniel Highmore, _A History of Generation_, London, 1651.

    [24] Marcello Malpighi, _Anatome plantarum_, London, 1675.

    [25] Nehemiah Grew, _Anatomy of Vegetables begun_, London, 1672.

Much has been written as to the knowledge of the sex of plants among the
ancients. It may be stated that of the sexual elements of the flower no
ancient writer had any clear idea. Nevertheless, sex is often attributed
to plants, and the simile of the _Loves of Plants_ enters into works of
the poets. Plants are frequently described as male and female in ancient
biological writings also, and Pliny goes so far as to say that some
students considered that all herbs and trees were sexual.[26] Yet when
such passages can be tested it will be found that these so-called males
and females are usually different species. In a few cases a sterile
variety is described as the male and a fertile as the female. In a small
residuum of cases diœcious plants or flowers are regarded as male and
female, but with no real comprehension of the sexual nature of the
flowers. There remain the palms, in which the knowledge of plant sex had
advanced a trifle farther. 'With dates', says Theophrastus, 'the males
should be brought to the females; for the males make the fruit persist
and ripen, and this some call by analogy _to use the wild fig_
(ολυνθαζειν {olynthazein}).[27] The process is thus: when the male is in
the flower they at once cut off the spathe with the flower and shake the
bloom, with its flower and dust, over the fruit of the female, and, if
it is thus treated, it retains the fruit and does not shed it.'[28] The
fertilizing character of the spathe of the male date palm was familiar
in Babylon from a very early date. It is recorded by Herodotus[29] and
is represented by a frequent symbol on the Assyrian monuments.

    [26] Pliny, _Naturalis historia_, xiii. 4.

    [27] The curious word ολυνθαζειν {olynthazein}, here translated _to
    use the wild fig_, is from ολυνθος {olynthos}, a kind of wild fig
    which seldom ripens. The special meaning here given to the word is
    explained in another work of Theophrastus, _De causis plantarum_,
    ii. 9, xv. After describing caprification in figs, he says το δε επι
    των φοινικων συμβαινον ου ταυτον μεν, εχει δε τινα ὁμοιοτητα τουτω
    δι' ὁ καλουσιν ολυνθαζειν αυτους {to de epi tôn phoinikôn symbainon
    ou tauton men, echei de tina homoiotêta toutô di' ho kalousin
    olynthazein autous} 'The same thing is not done with dates, but
    something analogous to it, whence this is called ολυνθαζειν'
    {olynthazein'}.

    [28] _Historia plantarum_, ii. 8, iv.

    [29] Herodotus i. 193.

The comparison of the fertilization of the date palm to the use of the
wild fig refers to the practice of Caprification. Theophrastus tells us
that there are certain trees, the fig among them, which are apt to shed
their fruit prematurely. To remedy this 'the device adopted is
caprification. Gall insects come out of the wild figs which are hanging
there, eat the tops of the cultivated figs, and so make them swell'.[30]
These gall-insects 'are engendered from the seeds'.[31] Theophrastus
distinguished between the process as applied to the fig and the date,
observing that 'in both [fig and date] the male aids the female--for
they call the fruit-bearing [palm] _female_--but whilst in the one there
is a union of the two sexes, in the other things are different'.[32]

    [30] _Historia plantarum_, ii. 8, i.

    [31] _Ibid._ ii. 8, ii.

    [32] _Historia plantarum_, ii. 8, iv.

Theophrastus was not very successful in distinguishing the nature of the
primary elements of plants, though he was able to separate root, stem,
leaf, stipule, and flower on morphological as well as to a limited
extent on physiological grounds. For the root he adopts the familiar
definition, the only one possible before the rise of chemistry, that it
'is that by which the plant draws up nourishment',[33] a description
that applies to the account given by the pre-Aristotelian author of the
work περι γονης {peri gonês}, _On generation_. But Theophrastus shows by
many examples that he is capable of following out morphological
homologies. Thus he knows that the ivy regularly puts forth roots from
the shoots between the leaves, by means of which it gets hold of trees
and walls,[34] that the mistletoe will not sprout except on the bark of
living trees into which it strikes its roots, and that the very peculiar
formation of the mangrove tree is to be explained by the fact that 'this
plant sends out roots from the shoots till it has hold on the ground and
roots again: and so there comes to be a continuous circle of roots round
the tree, not connected with the main stem, but at a distance from
it'.[35] He does not succeed, however, in distinguishing the real nature
of such structures as bulbs, rhizomes, and tubers, but regards them all
as roots. Nor is he more successful in his discussion of the nature of
stems. As to leaves, he is more definite and satisfactory, though wholly
in the dark as to their function; he is quite clear that the pinnate
leaf of the rowan tree, for instance, is a leaf and not a branch.

    [33] _Ibid._ i. 1, ix.

    [34] _Ibid._ iii. 18, x.

    [35] _De causis plantarum_, ii. 23.

Notwithstanding his lack of insight as to the nature of sex in flowers,
he attains to an approximately correct idea of the relation of flower
and fruit. Some plants, he says, 'have [the flower] around the fruit
itself as vine and olive; [the flowers] of the latter, when they drop,
look as though they had a hole through them, and this is taken for a
sign that it has blossomed well; for if [the flower] is burnt up or
sodden, the fruit falls with it, and so it does not become pierced. Most
flowers have the fruit case in the middle, or it may be the flower is on
the top of the pericarp as in pomegranate, apple, pear, plum, and myrtle
... for these have their seeds below the flower.... In some cases again
the flower is on top of the seeds themselves as in ... all thistle-like
plants'.[36] Thus Theophrastus has succeeded in distinguishing between
the hypogynous, perigynous, and epigynous types of flower, and has
almost come to regard its relation to the fruit as the essential floral
element.

    [36] _Historia plantarum_, i. 13, iii.

[Illustration: Fig. 8. THEOPHRASTUS
From VILLA ALBANI
Copy (second century A. D.?) of earlier work]

Theophrastus has a perfectly clear idea of plant distribution as
dependent on soil and climate, and at times seems to be on the point of
passing from a statement of climatic distribution into one of real
geographical regions. The general question of plant distribution long
remained at, if it did not recede from, the position where he left it.
The usefulness of the manuscript and early printed herbals in the West
was for centuries marred by the retention of plant descriptions prepared
for the Greek East and Latin South, and these works were saved from
complete ineffectiveness only by an occasional appeal to nature.

With the death of Theophrastus about 287 B. C. pure biological science
substantially disappears from the Greek world, and we get the same type
of deterioration that is later encountered in other scientific
departments. Science ceases to have the motive of the desire to know,
and becomes an applied study, subservient to the practical arts. It is
an attitude from which in the end applied science itself must suffer
also. Yet the centuries that follow were not without biological writers
of very great ability. In the medical school of Alexandria anatomy and
physiology became placed on a firm basis from about 300 B. C., but
always in the position subordinate to medicine that they have since
occupied. Two great names of that school, Herophilus and Erasistratus,
we must consider elsewhere.[37] Their works have disappeared and we have
the merest fragments of them. In the last pre-Christian and the first
two post-Christian centuries, however, there were several writers,
portions of whose works have survived and are of great biological
importance. Among them we include Crateuas, a botanical writer and
illustrator, who greatly developed, if he did not actually introduce,
the method of representing plants systematically by illustration rather
than by description. This method, important still, was even more
important when there was no proper system of botanical nomenclature.
Crateuas by his paintings of plants, copies of which have not improbably
descended to our time, began a tradition which, fixed about the fifth
century, remained almost rigid until the re-discovery of nature in the
sixteenth. He was physician to Mithridates VI Eupator (120-63 B. C.),
but his work was well known and appreciated at Rome, which became the
place of resort for Greek talent.[38]

    [37] See the companion chapter on _Greek Medicine_.

    [38] The surviving fragments of the works of Crateuas have recently
    been printed by M. Wellmann as an appendix to the text of
    Dioscorides, _De materia medica_, 3 vols., Berlin, 1906-17, iii. pp.
    144-6. The source and fate of his plant drawings are discussed in
    the same author's _Krateuas_, Berlin, 1897.

Celsus, who flourished about 20 B. C., wrote an excellent work on
medicine, but gives all too little glimpse of anatomy and physiology.
Rufus of Ephesus, however, in the next century practised dissection of
apes and other animals. He described the decussation of the optic nerves
and the capsule of the crystalline lens, and gave the first clear
description that has survived of the structure of the eye. He regarded
the nerves as originating from the brain, and distinguished between
nerves of motion and of sensation. He described the oviduct of the sheep
and rightly held that life was possible without the spleen.

The second Christian century brings us two writers who, while
scientifically inconsiderable, acted as the main carriers of such
tradition of Greek biology as reached the Middle Ages, Pliny and
Dioscorides. Pliny (A. D. 23-79), though a Latin, owes almost everything
of value in his encyclopaedia to Greek writings. In his _Natural
History_ we have a collection of current views on the nature, origin,
and uses of plants and animals such as we might expect from an
intelligent, industrious, and honest member of the landed class who was
devoid of critical or special scientific skill. Scientifically the work
is contemptible, but it demands mention in any study of the legacy of
Greece, since it was, for centuries, a main conduit of the ancient
teaching and observations on natural history. Read throughout the ages,
alike in the darkest as in the more enlightened periods, copied and
recopied, translated, commented on, extracted and abridged, a large part
of Pliny's work has gradually passed into folk-keeping, so that through
its agency the gipsy fortune-teller of to-day is still reciting garbled
versions of the formulae of Aristotle and Hippocrates of two and a half
millennia ago.

The fate of Dioscorides (flourished A. D. 60) has been not dissimilar.
His work _On Materia Medica_ consists of a series of short accounts of
plants, arranged almost without reference to the nature of the plants
themselves, but quite invaluable for its terse and striking descriptions
which often include habits and habitats. Its history has shown it to be
one of the most influential botanical treatises ever penned. It provided
most of the little botanical knowledge that reached the Middle Ages. It
furnished the chief stimulus to botanical research at the time of the
Renaissance. It has decided the general form of every modern
pharmacopœia. It has practically determined modern plant nomenclature
both popular and scientific.

Translated into nearly every language from Anglo-Saxon and Bohemian to
Arabic and Hebrew, appearing both abstracted and in full in innumerable
beautifully illuminated manuscripts, some of which are still among the
fairest treasures of the great national libraries, Dioscorides, the
drug-monger, appealed to scholasticized minds for centuries. The
frequency with which fragments of him are encountered in papyri shows
how popular his work was in Egypt in the third and fourth centuries. One
of the earliest datable Greek codices in existence is a glorious volume
of Dioscorides written in capitals,[39] thought worthy to form a wedding
gift for a lady who was the daughter of one Roman emperor and the
betrothed of a second.[40] The illustrations of this fifth-century
manuscript are a very valuable monument for the history of art and the
chief adornment of what was once the Royal Library at Vienna[41] (figs.
9-10). Illustrated Latin translations of Dioscorides were in use in the
time of Cassiodorus (490-585). A work based on it, similarly
illustrated, but bearing the name of Apuleius, is among the most
frequent of mediaeval botanical documents and the earliest surviving
specimen is contemporary with Cassiodorus himself.[42] After the
revival of learning Dioscorides continued to attract an immense amount
of philological and botanical ability, and scores of editions of his
works, many of them nobly illustrated, poured out of the presses of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

[Illustration: Fig. 9
ΣΟΓΚΟΣ ΤΡΥΦΕΡΟΣ {SOGKOS TRYPHEROS} = _Crepis paludosa_, _Mœn._]

[Illustration: Fig. 10
ΓΕΡΑΝΙΟΝ {GERANION} = _Geranium pyrenaicum_, _L._

Fifth-century drawings from JULIANA ANICIA M.S., copied from originals
of first century B. C. (?)]

    [39] The manuscript in question is Med. Graec. 1 at what was the
    Royal Library at Vienna. It is known as the _Constantinopolitanus_.
    After the war it was taken to St. Mark's at Venice, but either has
    been or is about to be restored to Vienna. A facsimile of this grand
    manuscript was published by Sijthoff, Leyden, 1906.

    [40] The lady in question was Juliana Anicia, daughter of Anicius
    Olybrius, Emperor of the West in 472, and his wife Placidia,
    daughter of Valentinian III. Juliana was betrothed in 479 by the
    Eastern Emperor Zeno to Theodoric the Ostrogoth, but was married,
    probably in 487 when the manuscript was presented to her, to
    Areobindus, a high military officer under the Byzantine Emperor
    Anastasius.

    [41] The importance of this manuscript as well as the position of
    Dioscorides as medical botanist is discussed by Charles Singer in an
    article 'Greek Biology and the Rise of Modern Biology', _Studies in
    the History and Method of Science_, vol. ii, Oxford, 1921.

    [42] This manuscript is at the University Library at Leyden, where
    it is numbered Voss Q 9.

But the greatest biologist of the late Greek period, and indeed one of
the greatest biologists of all time, was Claudius Galen of Pergamon (A.
D. 131-201). Galen devoted himself to medicine from an early age, and in
his twenty-first year we hear of him studying anatomy at Smyrna under
Pelops. With the object of extending his knowledge of drugs he early
made long journeys to Asia Minor. Later he proceeded to Alexandria,
where he improved his anatomical equipment, and here, he tells us, he
examined a human skeleton. It is indeed probable that his direct
practical acquaintance with human anatomy was limited to the skeleton
and that dissection of the human body was no longer carried on at
Alexandria in his time. Thus his physiology and anatomy had to be
derived mainly from animal sources. He is the most voluminous of all
ancient scientific writers and one of the most voluminous writers of
antiquity in any department. We are not here concerned with the medical
material which mainly fills these huge volumes, but only with the
physiological views which not only prevailed in medicine until Harvey
and after, but also governed for fifteen hundred years alike the
scientific and the popular ideas on the nature and workings of the
animal body, and have for centuries been embedded in our speech. A
knowledge of these physiological views of Galen is necessary for any
understanding of the history of biology and illuminates many literary
allusions of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Between the foundation of the Alexandrian school and the time of Galen,
medicine was divided among a great number of sects. Galen was an
eclectic and took portions of his teaching from many of these schools,
but he was also a naturalist of great ability and industry, and knew
well the value of the experimental way. Yet he was a somewhat windy
philosopher and, priding himself on his philosophic powers, did not
hesitate to draw conclusions from evidence which was by no means always
adequate. The physiological system that he thus succeeded in building up
we may now briefly consider (fig. 11).

[Illustration: FIG. 11. Illustrating Galen's physiological teaching.]

The basic principle of life, in the Galenic physiology, is a _spirit_,
_anima_ or _pneuma_, drawn from the general world-soul in the act of
respiration. It enters the body through the _rough artery_ (τραχεια
αρτηρια {tracheia artêria}, _arteria aspera_ of mediaeval notation), the
organ known to our nomenclature as the trachea. From this trachea the
pneuma passes to the lung and then, through the _vein-like artery_
(αρτηρια φλεβωδης {artêria phlebôdês}, _arteria venalis_ of mediaeval
writers, the pulmonary vein of our nomenclature), to the left ventricle.
Here it will be best to leave it for a moment and trace the vascular
system along a different route.

Ingested food, passing down the alimentary tract, was absorbed as chyle
from the intestine, collected by the portal vessel, and conveyed by it
to the liver. That organ, the site of the innate heat in Galen's view,
had the power of elaborating the chyle into venous blood and of imbuing
it with a spirit or pneuma which is innate in all living substance, so
long as it remains alive, the _natural spirits_ (πνευμα φυσικον {pneuma
physikon}, _spiritus naturalis_ of the mediaevals). Charged with this,
and also with the nutritive material derived from the food, the venous
blood is distributed by the liver through the veins which arise from it
in the same way as the arteries from the heart. These veins carry
nourishment and _natural spirits_ to all parts of the body. _Iecur fons
venarum_, the liver as the source of the veins, remained through the
centuries the watchword of the Galenic physiology. The blood was held to
ebb and flow continuously in the veins during life.

Now from the liver arose one great vessel, the hepatic vein, from
division of which the others were held to come off as branches. Of
these branches, one, our _common vena cava_, entered the right side of
the heart. For the blood that it conveyed to the heart there were two
fates possible. The greater part remained awhile in the ventricle,
parting with its impurities and vapours, exhalations of the organs,
which were carried off by the _artery-like vein_ (φλεπς αρτηριωδης
{phleps artêriôdês}, the mediaeval _vena arterialis_, our pulmonary
artery) to the lung and then exhaled to the outer air. These impurities
and vapours gave its poisonous and suffocating character to the breath.
Having parted thus with its impurities, the venous blood ebbed back
again from the right ventricle into the venous system. But for a small
fraction of the venous blood that entered the right ventricle another
fate was reserved. This small fraction of venous blood, charged still
with the _natural spirits_ derived from the liver, passed through minute
channels in the septum between the ventricles and entered the left
chamber. Arrived there, it encountered the external pneuma and became
thereby elaborated into a higher form of spirit, the _vital spirits_
(πνευμα ζωτικον {pneuma zôtikon}, _spiritus vitalis_), which is
distributed together with blood by the arterial system to various parts
of the body. In the arterial system it also ebbed and flowed, and might
be seen and felt to pulsate there.

But among the great arterial vessels that sent forth arterial blood thus
charged with vital spirits were certain vessels which ascended to the
brain. Before reaching that organ they divided up into minute channels,
the _rete mirabile_ (πλεγμα μεγιστον θαυμα {plegma megiston thauma}),
and passing into the brain became converted by the action of that organ
into a yet higher type of spirits, the _animal spirits_ (πνευμα ψυχικον
{pneuma psychikon}, _spiritus animalis_), an ethereal substance
distributed to the various parts of the body by the structures known
to-day as nerves, but believed then to be hollow channels. The three
fundamental faculties (δυναμεις {dynameis}), the _natural_, the _vital_,
and the _animal_, which brought into action the corresponding functions
of the body, thus originated as an expression of the primal force or
pneuma.

This physiology, we may emphasize, is not derived from an investigation
of human anatomy. In the human brain there is no _rete mirabile_, though
such an organ is found in the calf. In the human liver there is no
_hepatic vein_, though such an organ is found in the dog. Dogs, calves,
pigs, bears, and, above all, Barbary apes were freely dissected by Galen
and were the creatures from which he derived his physiological ideas.
Many of Galen's anatomical and physiological errors are due to his
attributing to one creature the structures found in another, a fact that
only very gradually dawned on the Renaissance anatomists.

The whole knowledge possessed by the world in the department of
physiology from the third to the seventeenth century, nearly all the
biological conceptions till the thirteenth, and most of the anatomy and
much of the botany until the sixteenth century, all the ideas of the
physical structure of living things throughout the Middle Ages, were
contained in a small number of these works of Galen. The biological
works of Aristotle and Theophrastus lingered precariously in a few rare
manuscripts in the monasteries of the East; the total output of hundreds
of years of Alexandrian and Pergamenian activities was utterly
destroyed; the Ionian biological works, of which a sample has by a
miracle survived, were forgotten; but these vast, windy, ill-arranged
treatises of Galen lingered on. Translated into Latin, Syriac, Arabic,
and Hebrew, they saturated the intellectual world of the Middle Ages.
Commented on by later Greek writers, who were themselves in turn
translated into the same list of languages, they were yet again served
up under the names of such Greek writers as Oribasius, Paul of Aegina,
or Alexander of Tralles.

What is the secret of the vitality of these Galenic biological
conceptions? The answer can be given in four words. _Galen is a
teleologist_; and a teleologist of a kind whose views happened to fit in
with the prevailing theological attitude of the Middle Ages, whether
Christian, Moslem, or Jewish. According to him everything which exists
and displays activity in the human body originates in and is formed by
an intelligent being and on an intelligent plan, so that the organ in
structure and function is the result of that plan. 'It was the Creator's
infinite wisdom which selected the best means to attain his beneficent
ends, and it is a proof of His omnipotence that he created every good
thing according to His design, and thereby fulfilled His will.'[43]

    [43] A good instance of Galen's teleological point of view is
    afforded by his classical description of _the hand_ in the περι
    χρειας των εν ανθρωπου σωματι μοριων {peri chreias tôn en anthrôpou
    sômati moriôn}, _On the uses of the parts of the body of man_, i. 1.
    This passage is available in English in a tract by Thomas Bellott,
    London, 1840.

After Galen there is a thousand years of darkness, and biology ceases to
have a history. The mind of the Dark Ages turned towards theology, and
such remains of Neoplatonic philosophy as were absorbed into the
religious system were little likely to be of aid to the scientific
attitude. One department of positive knowledge must of course persist.
Men still suffered from the infirmities of the flesh and still sought
relief from them. But the books from which that advice was sought had
nothing to do with general principles nor with knowledge as such. They
were the most wretched of the treatises that still masqueraded under the
names of Hippocrates and Galen, mostly mere formularies, antidotaries,
or perhaps at best symptom lists. And, when the depression of the
western intellect had passed its worst, there was still no biological
material on which it could be nourished.

The prevailing interest of the barbarian world, at last beginning to
settle into its heritage of antiquity, was with Logic. Of Aristotle
there survived in Latin dress only the _Categories_ and the _De
interpretatione_, the merciful legacy of Boethius, the last of the
philosophers. Had a translation of Aristotle's _Historia animalium_ or
_De generatione animalium_ survived, had a Latin version of the
Hippocratic work _On generation_ or of the treatises of Theophrastus _On
plants_ reached the earlier Middle Ages, the whole mental history of
Europe might have been different and the rediscovery of nature might
have been antedated by centuries. But this was a change of heart for
which the world had long to wait; something much less was the earliest
biological gift of Greece. The gift, when it came, came in two forms,
one of which has not been adequately recognized, but both are equally
her legacy. These two forms are, firstly, the well-known work of the
early translators and, secondly, the tardily recognized work of certain
schools of minor art.

The earliest biological treatises to become accessible in the west were
rendered not from Greek but from Arabic.[44] The first of them was
perhaps the treatise περι μυων κινησεως {peri myôn kinêseôs}, _On
movement of muscles_ of Galen, a work which contains more than its title
suggests and indeed sets forth much of the Galenic physiological system.
It was rendered into Latin from the Arabic of Joannitius (Hunain ibn
Ishaq, 809-73), probably about the year 1200, by one Mark of Toledo. It
attracted little attention, but very soon after biological works of
Aristotle began to become accessible. The first was probably the
fragment _On plants_. The Greek original of this is lost, and besides
the Latin, only an Arabic version of a former Arabic translation of a
Syriac rendering of a Greek commentary is now known! Such a work
appeared from the hand of a translator known as Alfred the Englishman
about 1220 or a little later. Neither it nor another work from the same
translator, _On the motion of the heart_, which sought to establish the
primacy of that organ on Aristotelian grounds, can be said to contain
any of the spirit of the master.[45]

    [44] The early European translations from the Arabic are tabulated
    with unparalleled learning by M. Steinschneider, 'Die Europäischen
    Uebersetzungen aus dem Arabischen bis Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts',
    in the _Sitzungsberichte der kais. Akad. der Wissenschaften in
    Wien_, cxlix and cli, Vienna, 1904 and 1905.

    [45] C. H. Haskins, 'The reception of Arabic science in England,'
    _English Historical Review_, London, 1915, p. 56.

A little better than these is the work of the wizard Michael the Scot
(1175?-1234?). Roger Bacon tells us that Michael in 1230 'appeared [at
Oxford], bringing with him the works of Aristotle in natural history and
mathematics, with wise expositors, so that the philosophy of Aristotle
was magnified among the Latins'.[46] Scott produced his work _De
animalibus_ about this date and he included in it the three great
biological works of Aristotle, all rendered from an inferior Arabic
version.[47] Albertus Magnus (1206-80) had not as yet a translation
direct from the Greek to go upon for his great commentary on the
_History of animals_, but he depended on Scott. The biological works of
Aristotle were rendered into Latin direct from the Greek in the year
1260 probably by William of Moerbeke.[48] Such translations, appearing
in the full scholastic age when everything was against direct
observation, cannot be said to have fallen on a fertile ground. They
presented an ordered account of nature and a good method of
investigation, but those were gifts to a society that knew little of
their real value.[49]

    [46] Roger Bacon, _Opus majus_, edited by J. H. Bridges, 3 vols.,
    London, 1897-1900. Vol. iii, p. 66.

    [47] On the Aristotelian translations of Scott see A. H. Querfeld,
    _Michael Scottus und seine Schrift, De secretis naturae_, Leipzig,
    1919; and C. H. Haskins, 'Michael Scot and Frederick II' in _Isis_,
    ii. 250, Brussels, 1922.

    [48] J. G. Schneider, _Aristotelis de animalibus historiae_,
    Leipzig, 1811, p. cxxvi. L. Dittmeyer, _Guilelmi Moerbekensis
    translatio commentationis Aristotelicae de generatione animalium_,
    Dillingen, 1915. L. Dittmeyer, _De animalibus historia_, Leipzig,
    1907.

    [49] The subject of the Latin translations of Aristotle is traversed
    by A. and C. Jourdain, _Recherches critiques sur l'âge des
    traductions latines d'Aristote_, 2nd ed., Paris, 1843; M. Grabmann,
    _Forschungen uber die lateinischen Aristoteles Ubersetzungen des
    XIII. Jahrhunderts_, Münster i/W., 1916; and F. Wüstenfeld, _Die
    Ubersetzungen arabischer Werke in das Lateinische seit dem XI.
    Jahrhundert_, Göttingen, 1877.

Yet the advent of these texts was coincident with a returning desire to
observe nature. Albert, with all his scholasticism, was no contemptible
naturalist. He may be said to have begun first-hand plant study in
modern times so far as literary records are concerned. His book _De
vegetabilibus_ contains excellent observations, and he is worthy of
inclusion among the fathers of botany. In his vast treatise _De
animalibus_, hampered as he is by his learning and verbosity, he shows
himself a true observer and one who has absorbed something of the spirit
of the great naturalist to whose works he had devoted a lifetime of
study and on which he professes to be commenting. We see clearly the
leaven of the Aristotelian spirit working, though Albert is still a
schoolman. We may select for quotation a passage on the generation of
fish, a subject on which some of Aristotle's most remarkable
descriptions remained unconfirmed till modern times. These descriptions
impressed Albert in the same way as they do the modern naturalist. To
those who know nothing of the stimulating power of the Aristotelian
biological works, Albert's description of the embryos of fish and his
accurate distinction of their mode of development from that of birds, by
the absence of an allantoic membrane in the one and its presence in the
other, must surely be startling. Albert depends on Aristotle--a
third-hand version of Aristotle--but does not slavishly follow him.

'Between the mode of development (_anathomiam generationis_) of birds'
and fishes' eggs there is this difference: during the development of the
fish the second of the two veins which extend from the heart [as
described by Aristotle in birds] does not exist. For we do not find the
vein which extends to the outer covering in the eggs of birds which some
wrongly call the navel because it carries the blood to the exterior
parts; but we do find the vein that corresponds to the yolk vein of
birds, for this vein imbibes the nourishment by which the limbs
increase.... In fishes as in birds, channels extend from the heart first
to the head and the eyes, and first in them appear the great upper
parts. As the growth of the young fish increases the albumen decreases,
being incorporated into the members of the young fish, and it disappears
entirely when development and formation are complete. The beating of
the heart ... is conveyed to the lower part of the belly, carrying pulse
and life to the inferior members.

'While the young [fish] are small and not yet fully developed they have
veins of great length which take the place of the navel-string, but as
they grow and develop, these shorten and contract into the body towards
the heart, as we have said about birds. The young fish and the eggs are
enclosed and in a covering, as are the eggs and young of birds. This
covering resembles the dura mater [of the brain], and beneath it is
another [corresponding therefore to the pia mater of the brain] which
contains the young animal and nothing else.'[50]

    [50] The enormous _De Animalibus_ of Albert of Cologne is now
    available in an edition by H. Stadler, _Albertus Magnus De
    Animalibus Libri XXVI nach der cölner Urschrift_, 2 vols., Münster
    i/W., 1916-21. The quotation is translated from vol. i, pp. 465-6.

In the next century Conrad von Megenberg (1309-98) produced his _Book of
Nature_, a complete work on natural history, the first of the kind in
the vernacular, founded on Latin versions, now rendered direct from the
Greek, of the Aristotelian and Galenic biological works. It is well
ordered and opens with a systematic account of the structure and
physiology of man as a type of the animal creation, which is then
systematically described and followed by an account of plants. Conrad,
though guided by Aristotle, uses his own eyes and ears, and with him and
Albert the era of direct observation has begun.[51]

    [51] Conrad's work is conveniently edited by H. Schultz, _Das Buch
    der Natur von Conrad von Megenberg, die erste Naturgeschichte in
    deutscher Sprache, in Neu-Hochdeutsche Sprache bearbeitet_,
    Greifswald, 1897. Conrad's work is based on that of Thomas of
    Cantimpré (1201-70).

But there was another department in which the legacy of Greece found an
even earlier appreciation. For centuries the illustrations to herbals
and bestiaries had been copied from hand to hand, continuing a tradition
that had its rise with Greek artists of the first century B. C. But
their work, copied at each stage without reference to the object, moved
constantly farther from resemblance to the original. At last the
illustrations became little but formal patterns, a state in which they
remained in some late copies prepared as recently as the sixteenth
century. But at a certain period a change set in, and the artist, no
longer content to rely on tradition, appeals at last to nature. This new
stirring in art corresponds with the new stirring in letters, the
Arabian revival--itself a legacy of Greece, though sadly deteriorated in
transit--that gave rise to scholasticism. In much of the beautiful
carved and sculptured work of the French cathedrals the new movement
appears in the earlier part of the thirteenth century. At such a place
as Chartres we see the attempt to render plants and animals faithfully
in stone as early as 1240 or before. In the easier medium of parchment
the same tendency appears even earlier. When once it begins the process
progresses slowly until the great recovery of the Greek texts in the
fifteenth century, when it is again accelerated.

During the sixteenth century the energy of botanists and zoologists was
largely absorbed in producing most carefully annotated and illustrated
editions of Dioscorides and Theophrastus and accounts of animals,
habits, and structure that were intended to illustrate the writings of
Aristotle, while the anatomists explored the bodies of man and beast to
confirm or refute Galen. The great monographs on birds, fishes, and
plants of this period, ostensibly little but commentaries on Pliny,
Aristotle, and Dioscorides, represent really the first important efforts
of modern times at a natural history. They pass naturally into the
encyclopaedias of the later sixteenth century, and these into the
physiological works of the seventeenth. Aristotle was never a dead hand
in Biology as he was in Physics, and this for the reason that he was a
great biologist but was not a great physicist.

With the advance of the sixteenth century the works of Aristotle, and to
a less extent those of Dioscorides and Galen, became the great stimulus
to the foundation of a new biological science. Matthioli (1520-77), in
his commentary on Dioscorides (first edition 1544), which was one of the
first works of its type to appear in the vernacular, made a number of
first-hand observations on the habits and structure of plants that is
startling even to a modern botanist. About the same time Galenic
physiology, expressed also in numerous works in the vulgar tongue and
rousing the curiosity of the physicians, became the clear parent of
modern physiology and comparative anatomy. But, above all, the
Aristotelian biological works were fertilizers of the mind. It is very
interesting to watch a fine observer such as Fabricius ab Acquapendente
(1537-1619) laying the foundations of modern embryology in a splendid
series of first-hand observations, treating his own great researches
almost as a commentary on Aristotle. What an impressive contrast to the
arid physics of the time based also on Aristotle! 'My purpose', says
Fabricius, 'is to treat of the formation of the foetus in every animal,
setting out from that which proceeds from the egg: for this ought to
take precedence of all other discussion of the subject, both because it
is not difficult to make out Aristotle's view of the matter, and because
his treatise on the Formation of the Foetus from the egg is by far the
fullest, and the subject is by much the most extensive and
difficult.'[52]

    [52] Hieronimo Fabrizio of Acquapendente, _De formato foetu_, Padua,
    1604.

The industrious and careful Fabricius, with a wonderful talent for
observation lit not by his own lamp but by that of Aristotle, bears a
relation to the master much like that held by Aristotle's pupil in the
flesh, Theophrastus. The works of the two men, Fabricius and
Theophrastus, bear indeed a resemblance to each other. Both rely on the
same group of general ideas, both progress in much the same ordered calm
from observation to observation, both have an inspiration which is
efficient and stimulating but below the greatest, both are enthusiastic
and effective as investigators of fact, but timid and ineffective in
drawing conclusions.

But Fabricius was more happy in his pupils than Theophrastus, for we may
watch the same Aristotelian ideas fermenting in the mind of Fabricius's
successor, the greatest biologist since Aristotle himself, William
Harvey (1578-1657).[53] This writer's work _On generation_ is a careful
commentary on Aristotle's work on the same topic, but it is a commentary
not in the old sense but in the spirit of Aristotle himself. Each
statement is weighed and tested in the light of experience, and the
younger naturalist, with all his reverence for Aristotle, does not
hesitate to criticize his conclusions. He exhibits an independence of
thought, an ingenuity in experiment, and a power of deduction that
places his treatise as the middle term of the three great works on
embryology of which the other members are those of Aristotle and Karl
Ernst von Baer (1796-1876).[54]

    [53] William Harvey, _Exercitationes de generatione animalium_,
    London, 1651.

    [54] Karl Ernst von Baer, _Ueber die Entwickelungsgeschichte der
    Thiere_, Königsberg, 1828-37.

With the second half of the seventeenth century and during a large part
of the eighteenth the biological works of Aristotle attracted less
attention. The battle against the Aristotelian physics had been fought
and won, but with them the biological works of Aristotle unjustly passed
into the shadow that overhung all the idols of the Middle Ages.

The rediscovery of the Aristotelian biology is a modern thing. The
collection of the vast wealth of living forms absorbed the energies of
the generations of naturalists from Ray (1627-1705) and Willoughby
(1635-72) to Réaumur (1683-1757) and Linnaeus (1707-1778) and beyond to
the nineteenth century. The magnitude and fascination of the work seems
almost to have excluded general ideas. With the end of this period and
the advent of a more philosophical type of naturalist, such as Cuvier
(1769-1832) and members of the Saint-Hilaire family, Aristotle came
again to his own. Since the dawn of the nineteenth century, and since
naturalists have been in a position to verify the work of Aristotle, his
reputation as a naturalist has continuously risen. Johannes Müller
(1801-58), Richard Owen (1804-92), George Henry Lewes (1817-78), William
Ogle (1827-1912) are a few of the long line of those who have derived
direct inspiration from his biological work. With improved modern
methods of investigation the problems of generation have absorbed a
large amount of biological attention, and interest has become specially
concentrated on Aristotle's work on that topic which is perhaps, at the
moment, more widely read than any biological treatise, ancient or
modern, except the works of Darwin. That great naturalist wrote to Ogle
in 1882: 'From quotations I had seen I had a high notion of Aristotle's
merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he
was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different
ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.'

CHARLES SINGER.




MEDICINE

     Ἡροφιλος δε εν τω Διαιτητικω και σοφιαν φησιν ανεπιδεικτον και
     τεχνην αδηλον και ισχυν αναγωνιστον και πλουτον αχρειον και λογον
     αδυνατον, ὑγιειας απουσης.

    {Hêrophilos de en tô Diaitêtikô kai sophian phêsin anepideikton kai
    technên adêlon kai ischyn anagôniston kai plouton achreion kai logon
    adynaton, hygieias apousês.}


Herophilos, a Greek philosopher and physician (_c._ 300 B. C.), has
truly written 'that Science and Art have equally nothing to show, that
Strength is incapable of effort, Wealth useless, and Eloquence powerless
if Health be wanting'.[55] All peoples therefore have had their methods
of treating those departures from health that we call disease, and among
peoples of higher culture such methods have been reduced in most cases
to something resembling a system. In antiquity, as now, a variety of
such systems were in vogue, and those nations who practised the art of
writing from an early date have left considerable records of their
medical methods and doctrines. We may thus form a fairly good idea of
the medical principles of the Mesopotamian, the Egyptian, the Iranian,
the Indian, and the Chinese civilizations. Much in these systems, as in
the medical procedure of more primitive tribes, was based upon some
theory of disease which fitted in with a larger theory of the nature of
evil. Of these theories the commonest was and is the demonic, the view
that regards deviation from the normal state of health as due either to
the attacks of supernatural beings or to their actual entry into the
body of the sufferer. A medical system based on such a view is
susceptible of great elaboration in a higher civilization, but not being
founded on observation is hardly capable of indefinite development, for
a point must ultimately be reached at which the mind recoils from
complex conclusions far remote from observed phenomena. The medicine of
the ancient and settled civilization of such a people as the
Assyro-Babylonians, for instance, of which substantial traces have been
recovered, is hardly, if at all, more effective, though far more
systematized, than that of many a wild and unlettered tribe that may be
observed to-day. Of such medicine as this we may give an account, but we
can hardly write a _history_. We cannot establish those elements of
continuity and of development from which alone history can be
constructed.

    [55] The works of Herophilus are lost. This fine passage has been
    preserved for us by Sextus Empiricus, a third-century physician, in
    his προς τοις μαθηματικους αιτιρρητικοι {pros tois mathêmatikous
    aitirrêtikoi}, which is in essence an attack on all positive
    philosophy. It is an entertaining fact that we should have to go to
    such a work for remains of the greatest anatomist of antiquity. The
    passage is in the section directed against ethical writers, xi. 50.

It is the distinction of the Greeks alone among the nations of antiquity
that they practised a system of medicine based not on theory but on
observation accumulated systematically as time went on. The claim can be
made for the Greeks that some at least among them were deflected by no
theory, were deceived by no theurgy, were hampered by no tradition in
their search for the facts of disease and in their attempts at
interpreting its phenomena. Only the Greeks among the ancients could
look on their healers as _physicians_ (= naturalists, φυσις {physis} =
nature), and that word itself stands as a lasting reminder of their
achievement.[56]

    [56] The word φυσικος {physikos}, though it passed over into Latin
    (Cicero) with the meaning _naturalist_, acquired the connotation of
    _sorcerer_ among the later Greek writers. Perhaps the word
    _physicianus_ was introduced to make a distinction from the
    charm-mongering _physicus_. In later Latin _physicus_ and _medicus_
    are almost always interchangeable.

At a certain stage in the history of the Western world--the exact point
in time may be disputed but the event is admitted by all--men turned to
explore the treasures of the ancient wisdom and the whole mass of Greek
medical learning was gradually laid before the student. That mass
contained much dross, material that survived from early as from late
Greek times which was hardly, if at all, superior to the debased
compositions that circulated in the name of medicine in the middle
centuries. But the recovered Greek medical writings also contained some
material of the purest and most scientific type, and that material and
the spirit in which it was written, form the debt of modern medicine to
antiquity.

It is a debt the value of which cannot be exaggerated. The physicians of
the revival of learning, and for long after, doubtless pinned their
faith too much to the written word of their Greek forbears and sought to
imprison the free spirit of Hippocrates and Galen in the rigid wall of
their own rediscovered texts. The great medical pioneers of a somewhat
later age, enraged by this attempt, the real nature of which was largely
hidden from them, not infrequently revolted and rightly revolted against
the bondage to the Greeks in which they had been brought up. Yet it is
sure that these modern discoverers were the true inheritors of the
Greeks. Without Herophilus we should have had no Harvey and the rise of
physiology might have been delayed for centuries; had Galen's works not
survived, Vesalius would never have reconstructed Anatomy, and Surgery
too might have stayed behind with her laggard sister, Medicine; the
Hippocratic collection was the necessary and acknowledged basis for the
work of the greatest of modern clinical observers, Thomas Sydenham, and
the teaching of Hippocrates and of his school is the substantial basis
of instruction in the wards of a modern hospital. In the pages which
follow we propose therefore to review the general character of medical
knowledge in the best Greek period and to consider briefly how much of
that great heritage remained accessible to the earlier modern
physicians. The reader will thus be able to form some estimate of the
degree to which the legacy has been passed on to our own times.

It is evident that among such a group of peoples as the Greeks, varying
in state of civilization, in mental power, in geographical and economic
position and in general outlook, the practice of medicine can have been
by no means uniform. Without any method of centralizing medical
education and standardizing teaching there was a great variety of
doctrines and of practice in vogue among them, and much of this was on a
low level of folk custom. Such lower grade material of Greek origin has
come down to us in abundance, though much of it, curiously enough, from
a later time. But the overwhelming mass of earlier Greek medical
literature sets forth for us a pure scientific effort to observe and to
classify disease, to make generalizations from carefully collected data,
to explain the origin of disease on rational grounds, and to apply
remedies, when possible, on a reasoned basis. We may thus rest fairly
well assured that, despite serious and irreparable losses, we are still
in possession of some of the very finest products of the Greek medical
intellect.

There is ample evidence that the Greeks inherited, in common with many
other peoples of Mediterranean and Asiatic origin, a whole system of
magical or at least non-rational pharmacy and medicine from a remoter
ancestry. Striking parallels can be drawn between these folk elements
among the Greeks and the medical systems of the early Romans, as well as
with the medicine of the Indian Vedas, of the ancient Egyptians, and of
the earliest European barbarian writings. It is thus reasonable to
suppose that these elements, when they appear in later Greek writings,
represent more primitive folk elements working up, under the influence
of social disintegration and consequent mental deterioration, through
the upper strata of the literate Greek world. But with these elements,
intensely interesting to the anthropologist, the psychologist, the
ethnologist, and to the historian of religion, we are not here greatly
concerned. Important as they are, they constitute no part of the special
claim of the Greek people to distinction, but rather aid us in uniting
the Greek mentality with that of other kindred peoples. Here we shall
rather discuss the course of Greek scientific medicine proper, the type
of medical doctrine and practice, capable of development in the proper
sense of the word, that forms the basis of our modern system. We are
concerned, in fact, with the earliest evolutionary medicine.

We need hardly discuss the first origins of Greek Medicine. The material
is scanty and the conclusions somewhat doubtful and perhaps premature,
for the discovery of a considerable fragment of the historical work of
Menon, a pupil of Aristotle, containing a description of the views of
some of the precursors of the Hippocratic school, renews a hope that
more extended investigation may yield further information as to the
sources and nature of the earliest Greek medical writings.[57] The study
of Mesopotamian star-lore has linked it up with early Greek astronomical
science. The efforts of cuneiform scholars have not, however, been
equally successful for medicine, and on the whole the general tendency
of modern research is to give less weight to Mesopotamian and more to
Egyptian sources than had previously been admitted; thus very recently
an Egyptian medical papyrus of about 1700 B. C. has been described which
bears a distinct resemblance to some of the Hippocratic treatises.[58] A
number of drugs, too, habitually used by the Greeks, such as
_Andropogon_, _Cardamoms_, and _Sesame orientalis_, are of Indian
origin. There are also the Minoan cultures to be considered, and though
our knowledge is not yet sufficient to speak of the heritage that Greek
medicine may or may not have derived from that source, it seems not
improbable that Greek hygiene may here owe a debt.[59] Omitting,
therefore, this early epoch, we pass direct to the later period,
between the sixth and fourth centuries, from which documents have
actually come down to us.

    [57] This fragment has been published in vol. iii, part 1, of the
    _Supplementum Aristotelicum_ by H. Diels as _Anonymi Londinensis ex
    Aristotelis Iatricis Menonis et Aliis Medicis Eclogae_, Berlin,
    1893. See also H. Bekh and F. Spät, _Anonymus Londinensis, Auszuge
    eines Unbekannten aus Aristoteles-Menons Handbuch der Medizin_,
    Berlin, 1896.

    [58] As we go to press there appears a preliminary account of the
    very remarkable Edwin Smith papyrus, see J. H. Breasted in _Recueil
    d'études egyptologiques dédiées à la mémoire de Champollion_, Paris
    1922, and _New York Historical Society Bulletin_, 1922.

    [59] It is tempting, also, to connect the Asclepian snake cult with
    the prominence of the serpent in Minoan religion.

The earliest medical school of which we have definite information is
that of Cnidus, a Lacedaemonian colony in Asiatic Doris. Its origin may
perhaps reach back to the seventh century B. C. We have actual records
that the teachers of Cnidus were accustomed to collect systematically
the phenomena of disease, of which they had produced a very complex
classification, and we probably possess also several of their actual
works. The physicians of Cos, their only contemporary critics whose
writings have survived, considered that the Cnidian physicians paid too
much attention to the actual sensations of the patient and to the
physical signs of the disease. The most important of the Cnidian
doctrines were drawn up in a series of _Sentences_ or Aphorisms, and
these, it appears, inculcated a treatment along Egyptian lines of the
symptom or at most the disease, rather than the patient, a statement
borne out by the contents of the gynaecological works of probable
Cnidian origin included in the so-called 'Hippocratic Collection'. A few
names of Cnidian physicians have, moreover, come down to us with titles
of their works, and a later statement that they practised anatomy. There
can be little doubt too that the Cnidian school drew also on Persian and
Indian Medicine.

The origin of the school of the neighbouring island of Cos was a little
later than that of Cnidus and probably dates from the sixth century B.
C. Of the Coan school, or at least of the general tendencies that it
represented, we have a magnificent and copious literary monument in the
Corpus Hippocraticum, a collection which was probably put together in
the early part of the third century B. C. by a commission of Alexandrian
scholars at the order of the book-loving Ptolemy Soter (reigned 323-285
B. C.). The elements of which this collection is composed are of varying
dates from the sixth to the fourth century B. C., and of varying value
and origin, but they mainly represent the point of view of physicians
of the eastern part of the Greek world in the fifth and fourth
centuries.

The most obvious feature, the outstanding element that at once strikes
the modern observer in these 'Coan' writings, is the enormous emphasis
laid on the actual course of disease. 'It appears to me a most excellent
thing', so opens one of the greatest of the Hippocratic works, 'for a
physician to cultivate _pronoia_.[60] Foreknowing and foretelling in the
presence of the sick the past, present, and future (of their symptoms)
and explaining all that the patients are neglecting, he would be
believed to understand their condition, so that men would have
confidence to entrust themselves to his care.... Thus he would win just
respect and be a good physician. By an earlier forecast in each case he
would be more able to tend those aright who have a chance of surviving,
and by foreseeing and stating who will die, and who will survive, he
will escape blame....'[61]

    [60] This word _pronoia_, as Galen explains (εις το Ἱπποκρατους
    προγνωστικον {eis to Hippokratous prognôstikon}, K. xviii, B. p.
    10), is not used in the philosophic sense, as when we ask whether
    the universe was made by chance or by _pronoia_, nor is it used
    quite in the modern sense of _prognosis_, though it includes that
    too. _Pronoia_ in Hippocrates means knowing things about a patient
    before you are told them. See E. T. Withington, 'Some Greek medical
    terms with reference to Luke and Liddell and Scott,' _Proceedings of
    the Royal Society of Medicine_ (_Section of the History of
    Medicine_), xiii, p. 124, London, 1920.

    [61] _Prognostics_ 1.

Just as the Cnidians by dividing up diseases according to symptoms
over-emphasized diagnosis and over-elaborated treatment, so the Coans
laid very great force on prognosis and adopted therefore a largely
expectant attitude towards diseases. Both Cnidian and Coan physicians
were held together by a common bond which was, historically if not
actually, related to temple worship. Physicians leagued together in the
name of a god, as were the Asclepiadae, might escape, and did escape,
the baser theurgic elements of temple medicine. Of these they were as
devoid as a modern Catholic physician might be expected to be free from
the absurdities of Lourdes. But the extreme cult of prognosis among the
Coans may not improbably be traced back to the medical lore of the
temple soothsayers whose divine omens were replaced by indications of a
physical nature in the patient himself.[62] We are tempted too to link
it with that process of astronomical and astrological prognosis
practised in the Mesopotamian civilizations from which Ionia imitated
and derived so much. Religion had thus the same relation to medicine
that it would have with a modern 'religious' medical man as suggesting
the motive and determining the general direction of his practice though
without influence on the details and method.

    [62] There is a discussion of the relation of the Asclepiadae to
    temple practice in an article by E. T. Withington, 'The Asclepiadae
    and the Priest of Asclepius,' in _Studies in the History and Method
    of Science_, edited by Charles Singer, vol. ii, Oxford, 1921.

During the development of the Coan medical school along these lines in
the sixth and fifth centuries, there was going on a most remarkable
movement at the very other extreme of the Greek world. Into the course
and general importance of Sicilian philosophy it is not our place to
enter, but that extraordinary movement was not without its repercussion
on medical theory and practice. Very important in this direction was
Empedocles of Agrigentum (_c._ 500-_c._ 430 B. C.). His view that the
blood is the seat of the 'innate heat', εμφυτον θερμον {emphyton
thermon}, he took from folk belief--'the blood is the life'--and this
innate heat he closely identified with soul. More profitable was his
doctrine that breathing takes place not only through what are now known
as the respiratory passages but also through the pores of the skin. His
teaching led to a belief in the heart as the centre of the vascular
system and the chief organ of the 'pneuma' which was distributed by the
blood vessels. This pneuma was equivalent to both soul and life, but it
was something more. It was identified with air and breath, and the
pneuma could be seen to rise as shimmering steam from the shed blood of
the sacrificial victim--for was not the blood its natural home? There
was a pneuma, too, that interpenetrated the universe around us and gave
it those qualities of life that it was felt to possess. Anaximenes (_c._
610-_c._ 545 B. C.), an Ionian predecessor of Empedocles, may be said to
have defined for us these functions of the pneuma; ὁιον ἡ ψυχη ἡ ἡμετερα
αηρ ουσα συγκρατει ἡμας, ὁλον τον κοσμον πνευμα και αηρ περιεχει {hoion
hê psychê hê hêmetera aêr ousa synkratei hêmas, holon ton kosmon pneuma
kai aêr periechei}, 'As our soul, being air, sustains us, so pneuma and
air pervade the whole universe';[63] but it is the speculation of
Empedocles himself that came to be regarded as the basis of the
Pneumatic School in Medicine which had later very important
developments.

    [63] The works of Anaximenes are lost. This phrase of his, however,
    is preserved by the later writer Aetios.

Another early member of the Western school who made important
contributions to medical doctrine--in which relation alone we need
consider him--was Pythagoras of Samos (_c._ 580-_c._490 B. C.). For him
number, as the purest conception, formed the basis of philosophy. Unity
was the symbol of perfection and corresponded to God Himself. The
material universe was represented by 2, and was divided by the number
12, whence we have 3 worlds and 4 spheres. These in turn, according at
least to the later Pythagoreans, give rise to the four elements, earth,
air, fire, and water--a primary doctrine of medicine and of science
derived perhaps from ancient Egypt and surviving for more than two
millennia. The Pythagoreans taught, too, of the existence of an animal
soul, an emanation of the soul of the universe. In all this we may
distinguish the germ of that doctrine of the relation of man and
universe, microcosm and macrocosm, which, suppressed as irrelevant in
the Hippocratic works, reappears in the Platonic and especially in the
Neoplatonic writings, and forms a very important dogma in later
medicine.

A pupil of Pythagoras and an older contemporary of Empedocles was
Alcmaeon of Croton (_c._ 500 B. C.), who began to construct a positive
basis for medical science by the practice of dissection of animals, and
discovered the optic nerves and the Eustachian tubes. He even extended
his researches to Embryology, describing the head of the foetus as the
first part to be developed--a justifiable deduction from appearances.
Alcmaeon introduced also the doctrine that health depends on harmony,
disease on discord of the elements within the body. Curiosity as to the
distribution of the vessels was excited by Empedocles and Alcmaeon and
led to further dissection, and Alcmaeon's pupils Acron (_c._ 480 B. C.)
and Pausanias (_c._ 480 B. C.), and the later Philistion of Lokri,[64]
the contemporary of Plato, all made anatomical investigations.

    [64] For the work of these physicians see especially M. Wellmann,
    _Fragmentsammlung der griechischen Aerzte_, Bd. I, Berlin, 1901.

The views of Empedocles, and especially his doctrine that regarded the
heart as the main site of the pneuma, though rejected by the Coan school
as a whole, were not without influence on Ionia. Diogenes of Apollonia,
the philosopher of pneumatism, a late fifth-century writer who must have
been contemporary with Hippocrates the Great, himself made an
investigation of the blood vessels; and the influence of the same school
may be traced in a little work περι καρδιης {peri kardiês}, _On the
heart_, which is the best anatomical treatise of the Hippocratic
Collection. This work describes the aorta and the pulmonary artery as
well as the three valves at the root of each of the great vessels, and
it speaks of experiments to test their validity. It treats of the
pericardium and of the pericardial fluid and perhaps of the musculi
papillares, and contrasts the thickness of the walls of right and left
ventricles. The author considers that the left ventricle is empty of
blood--as indeed it is after death--and is the source of the innate heat
and of the absolute intelligence. These views fit in with the doctrines
of Empedocles, so that we may perhaps even venture to regard this work
as a surviving document of the Sicilian school. It is interesting to
observe that we have here the first hint of human dissection, for the
author tells us that the hearts of animals may be compared to that of
man. The distinction of having been the first to write on human anatomy,
as such, belongs however, probably to a later writer, Diocles, son of
Archidamus of Carystus, who lived in the fourth century B. C.[65]

    [65] Galen, περι ανατομικων εγχειρησεων {peri anatomikôn
    encheirêseôn}, _On anatomical preparations_, § 1, K. II, p. 282.

We may now turn to the Hippocratic Corpus as a whole. This collection
consists of about 60 or 70 separate works, written at various periods
and in various states of preservation. At best only a very small
proportion of them can be attributed to Hippocrates, but the discussion
of the general question of the 'genuineness' of the works is now
admitted to be futile, for it is certain that we have no criteria
whatever to determine whether or no a particular work be from the pen of
the Father of Medicine, and the most we can ever say of such a treatise
is that it appears to be of his school and in his spirit. Yet among the
great gifts of this collection to our time and to all time are two which
stand out above all others, the picture of a man, and the picture of a
method.

The man is Hippocrates himself. Of the actual details of his life we
know next to nothing. His period of greatest activity falls about 400 B.
C. He seems to have led a wandering life. Born of a long line of
physicians in the island of Cos, he exerted his activities in Thrace,
Abdera, Delos, the Propontis (Cyzicus), Thasos, Thessaly (notably at
Larissa and Meliboea), Athens, and elsewhere, dying at Larissa in
extreme old age about the year 377 B. C. He had many pupils, among whom
were his two sons Thessalus and Dracon, who also undertook journeys, his
son-in-law Polybus, of whose works a fragment has been preserved for us
by Aristotle,[66] together with three other Coans bearing the names
Apollonius, Dexippus, and Praxagoras. This is practically all we know
of him with certainty. But though this glimpse is very dim and distant,
yet we cannot exaggerate the influence on the course of medicine and the
value for physicians of all time of the traditional picture that was
early formed of him and that may indeed well be drawn again from the
works bearing his name. In beauty and dignity that figure is beyond
praise. Perhaps gaining in stateliness what he loses in clearness,
Hippocrates will ever remain the type of the perfect physician. Learned,
observant, humane, with a profound reverence for the claims of his
patients, but an overmastering desire that his experience shall benefit
others, orderly and calm, disturbed only by anxiety to record his
knowledge for the use of his brother physicians and for the relief of
suffering, grave, thoughtful and reticent, pure of mind and master of
his passions, this is no overdrawn picture of the Father of Medicine as
he appeared to his contemporaries and successors. It is a figure of
character and virtue which has had an ethical value to medical men of
all ages comparable only to the influence exerted on their followers by
the founders of the great religions. If one needed a maxim to place upon
the statue of Hippocrates, none could be found better than that from the
book Παραγγελιαι {Parangeliai}, _Precepts_:

  ην γαρ παρη φιλανθρωπιη παρεστι και φιλοτεχνιη

  {ên gar parê philanthrôpiê paresti kai philotechniê}

  'Where the love of man is, there also is love of the Art.'[67]

    [66] _Historia animalium_, iii. 3, where it is ascribed to Polybus.
    The same passage is, however, repeated twice in the Hippocratic
    writings, viz. in the περι φυσιος ανθρωπου {peri physios anthrôpou},
    _On the nature of man_, Littré, vi. 58, and in the περι οστεων
    φυσιος {peri osteôn physios}, _On the nature of bones_, Littré, ix.
    174.

    [67] Παραγγελιαι {Parangeliai}, § 6.

The numerous busts of him which have reached our time are no portraits.
But the best of them are something much better and more helpful to us
than any portrait. They are idealized representations of the kind of man
a physician should be and was in the eyes of the best and wisest of the
Greeks.[68]

    [68] See Fig. 1.

[Illustration: Fig. 1. HIPPOCRATES
British Museum, second or third century B. C.]

[Illustration: Fig. 2. ASCLEPIUS
British Museum, fourth century B. C.]

The method of the Hippocratic writers is that known to-day as the
'inductive'. Without the vast scientific heritage that is in our own
hands, with only a comparatively small number of observations drawn from
the Coan and neighbouring schools, surrounded by all manner of bizarre
oriental religions in which no adequate relation of cause and effect was
recognized, and above all constantly urged by the exuberant genius
for speculation of that Greek people in the midst of whom they lived and
whose intellectual temptations they shared, they remain nevertheless,
for the most part, patient observers of fact, sceptical of the
marvellous and the unverifiable, hesitating to theorize beyond the data,
yet eager always to generalize from actual experience; calm, faithful,
effective servants of the sick. There is almost no type of mental
activity known to us that was not exhibited by the Greeks and cannot be
paralleled from their writings; but careful and constant return to
verification from experience, expressed in a record of actual
observations--the habitual method adopted in modern scientific
departments--is rare among them except in these early medical authors.

The spirit of their practice cannot be better illustrated than by the
words of the so-called 'Hippocratic oath'. That document, though of late
date in its present form, throws a flood of light on the ethics of Greek
medicine.

     'I swear by Apollo the physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and
     Panacea, invoking all the gods and goddesses to be my witnesses,
     that I will fulfil this Oath and this written covenant to the best
     of my power and of my judgment.

     'I will look upon him who shall have taught me this art even as on
     mine own parents; I will share with him my substance, and supply
     his necessities if he be in need; I will regard his offspring even
     as my own brethren, and will teach them this art, if they desire to
     learn it, without fee or covenant. I will impart it by precept, by
     lecture and by all other manner of teaching, not only to my own
     sons but also to the sons of him who has taught me, and to
     disciples bound by covenant and oath according to the law of the
     physicians, but to none other.

     'The regimen I adopt shall be for the benefit of the patients to
     the best of my power and judgment, not for their injury or for any
     wrongful purpose. I will not give a deadly drug to any one, though
     it be asked of me, nor will I lead the way in such counsel; and
     likewise I will not give a woman a pessary to procure abortion. But
     I will keep my life and my art in purity and holiness. Whatsoever
     house I enter, I will enter for the benefit of the sick, refraining
     from all voluntary wrongdoing and corruption, especially seduction
     of male or female, bond or free. Whatsoever things I see or hear
     concerning the life of men, in my attendance on the sick or even
     apart from my attendance, which ought not to be blabbed abroad, I
     will keep silence on them, counting such things to be as religious
     secrets.

     'If I fulfil this oath and confound it not, be it mine to enjoy
     life and art alike, with good repute among all men for all time to
     come; but may the contrary befall me if I transgress and violate my
     oath.'[69]

    [69] Translation by Professor Arthur Platt.

Respected equally throughout the ages by Arab, Jew, and Christian, the
oath remains the watchword of the profession of medicine.[70] The
ethical value of such a declaration could not escape the attention even
of a Byzantine formalist, and it is interesting to observe that in our
oldest Greek manuscript of the Hippocratic text, dating from the tenth
century, this magnificent passage is headed by the words 'from the oath
of Hippocrates according as it may be sworn by a Christian.'[71]

    [70] It must, however, be admitted that in the Hippocratic
    collection are breaches of the oath, e. g. in the induction of
    abortion related in περι φυσιος παιδιου {peri physios paidiou}.
    There is evidence, however, that the author of this work was not a
    medical practitioner.

    [71] Rome Urbinas 64, fo. 116.

When we examine the Hippocratic corpus more closely, we discern that not
only are the treatises by many hands, but there is not even a uniform
opinion and doctrine running through them. This is well brought out by
some of the more famous of the phrases of this remarkable collection.
Thus a well-known passage from the _Airs, Waters, and Places_ tells us
that the Scythians attribute a certain physical disability to a god,
'but it appears to me', says the author, 'that these affections are just
as much divine as are all others and that no disease is either more
divine or more human than another, but that all are equally divine, for
each of them has its own nature, and none of them arise without a
natural cause.' But, on the other hand, the author of the great work on
_Prognostics_ advises us that when the physician is called in he must
seek to ascertain the nature of the affections that he is treating, and
especially 'if there be anything divine in the disease, and to learn a
foreknowledge of this also.'[72] We may note too that this sentence
almost immediately precedes what is perhaps the most famous of all the
Hippocratic sentences, the description of what has since been termed the
_Hippocratic facies_. This wonderful description of the signs of death
may be given as an illustration of the habitual attitude of the
Hippocratic school towards prognosis and of the very careful way in
which they noted details:

     'He [the physician] should observe thus in acute diseases: first,
     the countenance of the patient, if it be like to those who are in
     health, _and especially if it be like itself, for this would be the
     best_; but the more unlike to this, the worse it is; such would be
     these: _sharp nose, hollow eyes, collapsed temples; ears cold,
     contracted, and their lobes turned out; skin about the forehead
     rough, distended, and parched; the colour of the whole face
     greenish or dusky_. If the countenance be so at the beginning of
     the disease, and if this cannot be accounted for from the other
     symptoms, inquiry must be made whether he has passed a sleepless
     night; whether his bowels have been very loose; or whether he is
     suffering from hunger; and if any of these be admitted the danger
     may be reckoned as less; and it may be judged in the course of a
     day and night if the appearance of the countenance proceed from
     these. But if none of these be said to exist, and the symptoms do
     not subside in that time, be it known for certain that death is at
     hand.'[73]

    [72] Kühlewein, i. 79, regards this as an interpolated passage.

    [73] Littré, ii. 112; Kühlewein, i. 79. The texts vary: Kühlewein is
    followed except in the last sentence.

Again, in the work _On the Art_ [_of Medicine_] we read: 'I hold it to
be physicianly to abstain from treating those who are overwhelmed by
disease',[74] a prudent if inhumane procedure among a people who might
regard the doctor's powers as partaking of the nature of magic, and
perhaps a wise course to follow at this day in some places not very far
from Cos. Yet in the book _On Diseases_ we are advised even in the
presence of an incurable disease 'to give relief with such treatment as
is possible'.[75]

    [74] Περι τεχνης {Peri technês}, § 3.

    [75] Περι νουσων α' {Peri nousôn a'}, § 6.

Furthermore, works by authors of the Hippocratic school stand sometimes
in a position of direct controversy with each other. Thus in the
treatise _On the Heart_ an experiment is set forth which is held to
prove that a part at least of imbibed fluid passes into the cavity of
the lung and thence to the parts of the body, a popular error in
antiquity which recurs in Plato's _Timaeus_. This view, however, is
specifically held to be fallacious by the author of the work _On
Diseases_, who is supported by a polemical section in the surviving
Menon fragment.

Passages like these have convinced all students that we have to deal in
this collection with a variety of works written at different dates by
different authors and under different conditions, a state that may be
well understood when we reflect that among the Greeks medicine was a
progressive study for a far longer period of time than has yet been the
case in the Western world. An account of such a collection can therefore
only be given in the most general fashion. The system or systems of
medicine that we shall thus attempt to describe was in vogue up to the
Alexandrian period, that is, to the beginning of the third century B. C.

Anatomy and physiology, the basis of our modern system, was still a very
weak point in the knowledge of the pre-Alexandrians. The surface form of
the body was intimately studied in connexion especially with fractures,
but there is no evidence in the literature of the period of any closer
acquaintance with human anatomical structure.[76] The same fact is well
borne out by Greek Art, for in its noblest period the artist betrays no
evidence of assistance derived from anatomization. Such evidence is not
found until we come to sculpture of Alexandrian date, when the somewhat
strained attitudes and exaggerated musculature of certain works of the
school of Pergamon suggest that the artist derived hints, if not direct
information, from anatomists who, we know, were active at that time. It
is not improbable, however, that separate bones, if not complete
skeletons, were commonly studied earlier, for the surgical works of the
Hippocratic collection, and especially those on fractures and
dislocations, give evidence of a knowledge of the relations of bones to
each other and of their natural position in the body which could not be
obtained, or only obtained with greatest difficulty, without this aid.

    [76] A reference to dissection in the περι αρθρων {peri arthrôn},
    _On the joints_, § 1, appears to the present writer to be of
    Alexandrian date.

There are in the Hippocratic works a certain number of comparisons
between human and animal structures that would have been made possible
by surgical operations and occasional accidents. The view has been put
forward that some anatomical knowledge was derived through the practice
of augury from the entrails of sacrificial animals. It appears, however,
improbable that a system so scientific and so little related to temple
practice would have had much to learn from these sources, and, moreover,
since we know that animals were actually dissected as early as the time
of Alcmaeon it would be unnecessary to invoke the aid of the priests.
The unknown author of the περι τοπων των κατα ανθρωπον {peri topôn tôn
kata anthrôpon}, _On the sites of_ [_diseases_] _in man_, a work written
about 400 B. C., declares indeed that 'physical structure is the basis
of medicine', but the formal treatises on anatomy that we possess from
Hippocratic times give the general anatomical standard of the corpus,
and it is a very disappointing one. The tract _On Anatomy_, though
probably of much later date (perhaps _c._ 330 B. C.), is inferior even
to the treatise _On the Heart_ (perhaps of about 400 B. C.).

Physiology and Pathology are almost as much in the background as anatomy
in the Hippocratic collection. As a formal discipline and part of
medical education we find no trace of these studies among the
pre-Alexandrian physicians. But the meagreness of the number of
ascertained facts did not prevent much speculation among a people eager
to seek the causes of things. Of that speculation we learn much from the
fragments of contemporary medical writers and philosophers, from the
medical works of the Alexandrian period, and to some extent from the
Hippocratic writings themselves. But the wiser and more sober among the
writers of the Hippocratic corpus were bent on something other than the
causes of things. Their pre-occupation was primarily with the suffering
patient, and the best of them therefore excluded--and we may assume
consciously--all but the rarest references to such speculation.

The general state of health of the body was considered by the
Hippocratists to depend on the distribution of the four elements, earth,
air, fire, and water, whose mixture (_crasis_) and cardinal properties,
dryness, warmth, coldness, and moistness, form the body and its
constituents. To these correspond the cardinal fluids, blood, phlegm,
yellow bile and black bile. The fundamental condition of life is the
_innate heat_, the abdication of which is death. This innate heat is
greatest in youth when most fuel is therefore required, but gradually
declines with age. Another necessity for the support of life is the
_pneuma_ which circulates in the vessels. All this may seem fanciful
enough, but we may remember that the first half of the nineteenth
century had waned before the doctrine of the humours which had then
lasted for at least twenty-two centuries became obsolete, and perhaps it
still survives in certain modern scientific developments. Moreover, the
finest and most characteristic of the Hippocratic works either do not
mention or but casually refer to these theories which are not essential
to their main pre-occupation. Their task of observation of symptoms, of
the separation of the essentials from the accidents of disease, and of
generalization from experience could go on unaffected by any view of the
nature of man and of the world. Even treatment, which must almost of
necessity be based on _some_ theory of causation, was little deflected
by a view of elements and humours on which it was impossible to act
directly, while therapeutics was further safeguarded from such influence
by the doctrine of _Nature as the healer of diseases_, νουσων φυσεις
ιητροι {nousôn physeis iêtroi}, the _vis medicatrix naturae_ of the
later Latin writers and of the present day.

Diseases are to be cured, in the Hippocratic view, by restoring the
disturbed harmony in the relation of the elements and humours. These, in
fact, tend naturally to an equilibrium and in most cases if left to
themselves will be brought to this state by the natural tendency to
recovery. The process is known as _pepsis_ or, to give it the Latin
form, _coctio_, and the turning-point at which the effects of this
process exhibit themselves is the _crisis_, a term which, together with
some of its original content, has still a place in medicine. Such a
turning-point does in fact occur in many diseases, especially those of a
zymotic character, on certain special days, though undue emphasis was
laid by the Greek physicians upon the exact numerical character of the
event. It was no unimportant duty of the physician to assist nature by
bringing his remedies to bear at the critical times. If the crisis is
wanting, or if the remedies are applied at the wrong moment, the disease
may become incurable. But diseases were only immediately or proximately
caused by disturbances in the balance or harmony of the humours. This
was a mere hypothesis, as the Hippocratists themselves well knew. There
were other more remote causes which came into the actual purview of the
physician, conditions which he could and did study. Such conditions
were, for instance, injudicious modes of life, exposure to climatic
changes, advancing age, and the like. Many of these could be directly
corrected. But for those that could not there were various therapeutic
measures at hand.

That human bodies are and normally remain in a state of health, and that
on the whole they tend to recover from disease, is an attitude so
familiar to us to-day that we scarcely need to be reminded of it. We
live some twenty-three centuries later than Hippocrates; for some
sixteen of those centuries the civilized world thought that to retain
health periodical bleedings and potions were necessary; for the last
century or two we have been gradually returning on the Hippocratic
position!

The chief glory of the Hippocratic collection regarded from the clinical
point of view is perhaps the actual description of cases. A number of
these--forty-two in all--have survived.[77] They are not only unique as
a collection for nearly 2,000 years, but they are still to this day
models of what succinct clinical records should be, clear and short,
without a superfluous word, yet with all that is most essential, and
exhibiting merely a desire to record the most important facts without
the least attempt to prejudge the case. They illustrate to the full the
Greek genius for seizing on the essential. The writer shows not the
least wish to exalt his own skill. He seeks merely to put the data
before the reader for his guidance under like circumstances. It is a
reflex of the spirit of full honesty in which these men lived and worked
that the great majority of the cases are recorded to have died. Two of
this remarkable little collection may be given:

     'The woman with quinsy, who lodged with Aristion: her complaint
     began in the tongue; voice inarticulate; tongue red and parched.
     _First day_, shivered, then became heated. _Third day_, rigor,
     acute fever; reddish and hard swelling on both sides of neck and
     chest; extremities cold and livid; respiration elevated; drink
     returned by the nose; she could not swallow; alvine and urinary
     discharges suppressed. _Fourth day_, all symptoms exacerbated.
     _Fifth day_, she died.'

    [77] They are to be found as an Appendix to Books I and III of the
    _Epidemics_ and embedded in Book III.

We probably have here to do with a case of diphtheria. The quinsy, the
paralysis of the palate leading to return of the food through the nose,
and the difficulty with speech and swallowing are typical results of
this affection which was here complicated by a spread of the septic
processes into the neck and chest, a not uncommon sequela of the
disease. The rapid onset of the conditions is rather unusual, but may be
explained if we regard the case as a mild and unnoticed diphtheria,
subsequently complicated by paralysis and by secondary septic infection,
for which reasons she came under observation.

     'In Thasos, the wife of Delearces who lodged on the plain, through
     sorrow was seized with an acute and shivering fever. From first to
     last she always wrapped herself up in her bedclothes; kept silent,
     fumbled, picked, bored and gathered hairs [from the clothes];
     tears, and again laughter; no sleep; bowels irritable, but passed
     nothing; when urged drank a little; urine thin and scanty; to the
     touch the fever was slight; coldness of the extremities. _Ninth
     day_, talked much incoherently, and again sank into silence.
     _Fourteenth day_, breathing rare, large, and spaced, and again
     hurried. _Seventeenth day_, after stimulation of the bowels she
     passed even drinks, nor could retain anything; totally insensible;
     skin parched and tense. _Twentieth day_, much talk, and again
     became composed, then voiceless; respiration hurried. _Twenty-first
     day_, died. Her respiration throughout was rare and large; she was
     totally insensible; always wrapped up in her bedclothes; throughout
     either much talk, or complete silence.'

This second case is in part a description of low muttering delirium, a
common end of continued fevers such as, for instance, typhoid. The
description closely resembles the condition known now in medicine as the
'typhoid state'. Incidentally the case contains a reference to a type of
breathing common among the dying. The respiration becomes deep and slow,
as it sinks gradually into quietude and becomes rarer and rarer until it
seems to cease altogether, and then it gradually becomes more rapid and
so on alternately. This type of breathing is known to physicians as
'Cheyne-Stokes' respiration in commemoration of two distinguished Irish
physicians of the last century who brought it to the attention of
medical men.[78] Recently it has been partially explained on a
physiological basis. We may note that there is another and even better
pen-picture of Cheyne-Stokes respiration in the Hippocratic collection.
It is in the famous case of 'Philescos who lived by the wall and who
took to his bed on the first day of acute fever'. About the middle of
the sixth day he died and the physician notes that 'the respiration
throughout was _like that of a person recollecting himself_ and was
large and rare'. Cheyne-Stokes breathing is admirably described as 'that
of a person recollecting himself'.

    [78] John Cheyne (1777-1836) described this type of respiration in
    the _Dublin Hospital Reports_, 1818, ii, p. 216. An extreme case of
    this condition had been described by Cheyne's namesake George Cheyne
    (1671-1743) as the famous 'Case of the Hon. Col. Townshend' in his
    _English Malady_, London, 1733. William Stokes (1804-78) published
    his account of Cheyne-Stokes breathing in the _Dublin Quarterly
    Journal of the Medical Sciences_, 1846, ii, p. 73.

Such records as these may be contrasted with certain others that have
come down from Greek antiquity. We may instance two steles discovered at
Epidaurus in 1885, bearing accounts of forty-four temple cures. The
following two are fair samples of the cures there described:

     '_Aristagora of Troizen._ She had tape-worm, and while she slept in
     the Temple of Asclepius at Troizen, she saw a vision. She thought
     that, as the god was not present, but was away in Epidaurus, his
     sons cut off her head, but were unable to put it back again. Then
     they sent a messenger to Asclepius asking him to come to Troizen.
     Meanwhile day came, and the priest actually saw her head cut off
     from the body. The next night Aristagora had a dream. She thought
     the god came from Epidaurus and fastened her head on to her neck.
     Then he cut open her belly, and stitched it up again. So she was
     cured.'

     'A man had an abdominal abscess. He saw a vision, and thought that
     the god ordered the slaves who accompanied him to lift him up and
     hold him, so that his abdomen could be cut open. The man tried to
     get away, but his slaves caught him and bound him. So Asclepius cut
     him open, rid him of the abscess, and then stitched him up again,
     releasing him from his bonds. Straightway he departed cured, and
     the floor of the Abaton was covered with blood.'[79]

    [79] The Epidaurian inscriptions are given by M. Fraenkel in the
    _Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum_ IV, 951-6, and are discussed by
    Mary Hamilton (Mrs. Guy Dickins), _Incubation_, St. Andrews, 1906,
    from whose translation I have quoted. Further inscriptions are given
    by Cavvadias in the _Archaiologike Ephemeris_, 1918, p. 155 (issued
    1921).

In the records of almost all temple cures, a great number of which have
survived in a wide variety of documents, an essential element is the
process of εγκοιμησις {enkoimêsis}, _incubation_ or temple sleep,
usually in a special sleeping-place or Abaton. The process has a close
parallel in certain modern Greek churches and in places of worship much
further West; there are even traces of it in these islands, and it is
more than probable that the Christian practice is descended by direct
continuity from the pagan.[80] The whole character of the temple
treatment was--and is--of a kind to suggest to the patient that he
should dream of the god, an event which therefore usually takes place.
Such treatment by suggestion is applicable only to certain classes of
disease and is always liable to fall into the hands of fanatics and
impostors. The difficulty that the honest practitioner encounters is
that the sufferer, in the nature of the case, can hardly be brought to
believe that his ailment is what in fact it is, a lesion of the mind. It
is this which gives the miracle-monger his chance.

    [80] We are almost told as much in the apocryphal _Gospel of
    Nicodemus_, § 1, a work probably composed about the end of the
    fourth century.

Examine for a moment the two cases from Epidaurus, which are quite
typical of the series. We observe that the first is described simply as
a case of 'tape-worm' without any justification for the diagnosis. It is
not unfrequent nowadays for thin and anxious patients to state,
similarly without justification, that they suffer from this condition.
They attribute certain common gastric experiences to this cause of which
perhaps they have learned from sensational advertisements, and then they
ask cure for a condition which they themselves have diagnosed, but which
has no existence in fact. Such a case is often appropriately treated by
suggestion. Though the elaborateness of the suggestion in the temple
cure is a little startling, yet it can easily be paralleled from the
legends of the Christian saints. Moreover, we must remember that we are
not here dealing with an account set down by the patient herself, but
with an edificatory inscription put up by the temple officials.

In the second inscription, the man with an abdominal abscess, we have a
much simpler state of affairs. It is evident that an operation was
actually performed by the priest masquerading as Asclepius, while the
patient was held down by the slaves. He is assured that all is a dream
and departs cured with the tell-tale comment 'and the floor of the
Abaton was covered with blood'.

These cases might be multiplied indefinitely without great profit for
our particular theme, for in such matters there is no development, no
evolution, no history. There can be no doubt that a very large part of
Greek practice was on this level, as is a small part of modern medicine,
but it is not a level with which we are here dealing and we shall
therefore pass it by. But a word of caution must be added. Such temple
worship has been compared with modern psycho-analysis. That method, like
all methods, has doubtless been abused at times; but it is in essence,
unlike the temple system, a purely scientific process by which the
ultimate basis of the patient's delusions are laid bare and demonstrated
to him.

There is indeed another side to these Asclepian temples. They gradually
developed along the lines of our health resorts and developed many of
the qualities--lovely and unlovely--that we associate with certain
continental watering places. On the bad side they became gossiping
centres or even something little better than brothels, as we may gather
from the _Mimes_ of Herondas. On the good side they formed a quiet
refuge among beautiful and interesting surroundings where the sick,
exhausted, and convalescent might gain the benefits that accrue from
pure air, fine scenery, and a regular and regulated mode of life. It is
more than probable too that the open air and manner of living benefited
many cases of incipient phthisis.

Returning to the Hippocratic collection, the purely surgical treatises
will be found no less remarkable than those of clinical observation. A
very able surgeon, Francis Adams (1796-1861), who was eminent as a Greek
scholar, gave it as his opinion in the middle of the nineteenth century
that no systematic writer on surgery up to his time had given so good
and so complete an account of certain dislocations, notably of the
hip-joint, as that to be found in the Hippocratic collection. Some types
of injury to the hip, as described in the Hippocratic writings, were
certainly otherwise quite inadequately known until described by Sir
Astley Cooper (1768-1841), himself a peculiarly Hippocratic
character.[81] The verdict of Adams was probably just, though since his
time the surgery of dislocations, aided especially by X-rays, has been
enabled to pass very definitely beyond the Hippocratic position.
Admirable, too, is the Hippocratic description of dislocation of the
shoulder and of the jaw. In dislocation of hip, shoulder, or jaw, as in
most similar lesions, there is considerable deformity produced. The
nature and meaning of this deformity is described with remarkable
exactness by the Hippocratic writer, who also sets forth the resulting
disability. The principles and indeed the very details of treatment in
these cases are, save for the use of an anaesthetic, practically
identical with those of the present day. The processes are unfortunately
not suitable for detailed quotation and description here, but they are
of special interest since a graphic record of them has come down to us.
There exists in the Laurentian Library at Florence a ninth-century Greek
surgical manuscript which contains figures of surgeons reducing the
dislocations in question. There is good reason to suppose that these
miniatures are copied from figures first prepared in pre-Christian times
many centuries earlier, and we may here see the actual processes of
reduction of such fractures, as conducted by a surgeon of the direct
Hippocratic tradition[82] (see Figs. 3, 4).

    [81] Astley Paston Cooper, _Treatise on Dislocations and Fractures
    of the Joints_, London, 1822, and _Observations on Fractures of the
    Neck and the Thighbone_, &c., London, 1823.

    [82] This famous manuscript is known as Laurentian, Plutarch 74, 7,
    and its figures have been reproduced by H. Schöne, _Apollonius von
    Kitium_, Leipzig, 1896.

[Illustration: From MS. of APOLLONIUS OF KITIUM, of Ninth Century
Copied from pre-christian original

Fig. 3 REDUCING DISLOCATED SHOULDER

Fig. 4 REDUCING DISLOCATED JAW]

In keeping with all this is most of the surgical work of the collection.
We are almost startled by the modern sound of the whole procedure as we
run through the rough note-book κατ' ιητρειον {kat' iêtreion},
_Concerning the Surgery_, or the more elaborate treatise περι ιητρου
{peri iêtrou}, _On the Physician_, where we may read minute directions
for the preparation of the operating-room, and on such points as the
management of light both artificial and natural, scrupulous cleanliness
of the hands, the care and use of the instruments, with the special
precautions needed when they are of iron, the decencies to be observed
during the operation, the general method of bandaging, the placing of
the patient, the use and abuse of splints, and the need for tidiness,
order, and cleanliness. Many of these directions are enlarged upon in
other surgical works of the collection, among which we find especially
full instructions for bandaging and for the diagnosis and treatment of
fractures and dislocations. A very fair representation of such a surgery
as these works describe is to be found on a vase-painting of Attic
origin of the earlier part of the fifth century, and, therefore, a
generation before Hippocrates (see fig. 5). There are also several
beautiful representations on vases of the actual processes of bandaging
(fig. 6).

[Illustration: FIG. 5.
A GREEK CLINIC OF ABOUT 480-470 B. C. From a vase-painting.

In the centre sits a physician holding a lancet and bleeding a patient
from the median vein at the bend of the right elbow into a large open
basin. Above and behind the physician are suspended three cupping
vessels. To the right sits another patient awaiting his turn; his left
arm is bandaged in the region of the biceps. The figure beyond him
smells a flower, perhaps as a preservative against infection. Behind the
physician stands a man leaning on a staff; he is wounded in the left
leg, which is bandaged. By his side stands a dwarfish figure with
disproportionately large head, whose body exhibits deformities typical
of the developmental disease now known as _Achondroplasia_; in addition
to these deformities we note that his body is hairy and the bridge of
his nose sunken; on his back he carries a hare which is almost as tall
as himself. Talking to the dwarf is a man leaning on a long staff, who
has the remains of a bandage round his chest.

See E. Pottier, 'Une Clinique grecque au V^{e} siècle (vase antique du
collection Peztel)', _Fondation Eugène Piot, Monuments et Mémoires_,
xiii. 149, Paris, 1906. (Some of our interpretations differ from those
of M. Pottier.)]

[Illustration: FIG. 6. A kylix from the Berlin Museum of about 490 B. C.
It bears the inscription ΣΟΣΙΑΣ ΕΠΟΙΗΣΕΝ {SOSIAS EPOIÊSEN}, _Sosias
made_ (_me_), and represents Achilles bandaging Patroclus, the names of
the two heroes being written round the margin. The painter is
Euphronios, and the work is regarded as the masterpiece of that great
artist. The left upper arm of Patroclus is injured, and Achilles is
bandaging it with a two-rolled bandage, which he is trying to bring down
to extend over the elbow. The treatment of the hands, a department in
which Euphronios excelled, is particularly fine. Achilles was not a
trained surgeon, and it will be observed, from the position of the two
tails of the bandage, that he will have some difficulty when it comes to
its final fastening!]

Among the surgical procedures of which descriptions are to be found in
the Hippocratic writings are the opening of the chest for the condition
known as _empyema_ (accumulation of pus within the pleura frequently
following pneumonia), and trephining the skull in cases of fracture of
that part--two fundamental operations of modern surgery. Surgical art
has advanced enormously in our own times, yet a text-book containing
much that is useful to this day might be prepared from these surgical
contents of the collection alone.

When we pass to the works on Medicine, in the restricted sense, we enter
into a region more difficult and perhaps even more fascinating. We are
no longer dealing with simple lesions of known origin, but with the
effects of disease and degeneration, of the essential character of which
the Hippocratic writers could in the nature of the case know very
little. Rigidly guarding themselves from any attempt to explain disease
by more immediate and hypothetical causes and thus diverting the
reader's energies in the medically useless direction of vague
speculation--the prevalent mental vice of the Greeks--the best of these
physicians are content if they can put forward generalized conclusions
from actually observed cases. Many of their thoughts have now become
household words, and they have become so, largely as a direct heritage
from these ancient physicians. But it must be remembered that ideas so
familiar to us were with them the result of long and carefully recorded
experience and are like nothing that we encounter in the medicine of
other ancient nations. Such conclusions are best set forth perhaps in
the wonderful book of the _Aphorisms_ from which we may permit ourselves
a few quotations:

     'Life is short, and the Art long; the opportunity fleeting;
     experiment dangerous, and judgement difficult. Yet we must be
     prepared not only to do our duty ourselves, but also patient,
     attendants, and external circumstances must co-operate.'[83]

    [83] The first lines are the source of the famous lines in Goethe's
    _Faust_:

      'Ach Gott! die Kunst ist lang
      Und kurz ist unser Leben,
      Mir wird bei meinem kritischen Bestreben
      Doch oft um Kopf und Busen bang.'

In this one memorable paragraph, so condensed in the original as to be
almost untranslatable, he who 'first separated medicine from philosophy'
puts aside at once all speculative interest while in the actual presence
of the sick. His whole energy is concentrated on the case in hand with
that peculiar attitude, at once impersonal and intensely personal, that
has since been the mark of the physician, and that has made of Medicine
both a science and an art.

     'For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure.'[84]

     'The aged endure fasting most easily; next adults; next young
     persons, and least of all children, and especially such as are the
     most lively.'

     'Growing bodies have the most innate heat; they therefore require
     the most nourishment, and if they have it not they waste. In the
     aged there is little heat, and therefore they require little fuel,
     for it would be extinguished by much. Similarly fevers in the aged
     are not so acute, because their bodies are cold.'

     'In disease sleep that is laborious is a deadly symptom; but if
     sleep relieves it is not deadly.'

     'Sleep that puts an end to delirium is a good symptom.'

     'If a convalescent eats well, but does not put on flesh, it is a
     bad symptom.'

     'Food or drink which is a little less good but more palatable is to
     be preferred to such that is better but less palatable.'

     'The old have generally fewer complaints than young; but those
     chronic diseases which do befall them generally never leave them.'

    [84] The extreme of treatment refers in the original to the extreme
    restriction of diet, ες ακριβειην {es akribeiên}, but the meaning of
    the Aphorism has always been taken as more generalized.

Here we have a group of observations, some of which have become
literally household words, nor is it difficult to understand how such
sayings have passed from professional into lay keeping. This magnificent
book of _Aphorisms_ was very early translated into Latin, probably
before and certainly not later than the sixth century of the Christian
era, and thus became accessible throughout the West. Manuscripts of this
Latin version, dating from the ninth and tenth centuries of our era,
have survived in the actual places in which they were written, at Monte
Cassino in Southern Italy and at Einsiedeln in Switzerland, and in 991
the book of _Aphorisms_ was well known and closely studied at the
Cathedral school of Chartres. From France the _Aphorisms_ reached
England, and they are mentioned in documents of the tenth or eleventh
century. By now, too, the book had been translated into Syriac and later
into Arabic and Hebrew, so that in the true mediaeval period it was
known both East and West, and in the vernacular as well as the classical
tongues. From the oriental dialects several further translations were
again made into Latin. An enormous number of manuscripts of the work
have survived in almost every Western dialect, and these show on the
whole that the text has been surprisingly little tampered with. In the
middle of the thirteenth century some of the better-known Aphorisms were
absorbed into a very popular Latin poem that went forth in the name of
the medical school of Salerno, though with a false ascription to a yet
earlier date. The Salernitan poem, being itself translated into every
European vernacular, further helped to bring Hippocrates into every
home.

But by no means all the Aphorisms are of a kind that could well become
absorbed into folk medicine. It is only those concerning frequently
recurring states to which this fate could befall. The book contains also
a number of notes on rare conditions seldom seen or noted save by
medical men. Such are the following very acute observations:

     'Spasm supervening on a wound is fatal.'

     'Those seized with tetanus die within four days, or if they survive
     so long they recover.'

     'A convulsion, or hiccup, supervening on a copious discharge of
     blood is bad.'

     'If after severe and grave wounds no swelling appears, it is very
     serious.'

These four sentences all concern wounds. The first two refer to the
disease _tetanus_, which is very liable to supervene on wounds fouled
with earth, especially in hot and moist localities. The disease is
characterized by a series of painful muscular contractions which in the
more severe and fatal form may become a continuous spasm, a type that is
referred to in the first sentence. It is true of tetanus that the later
the onset after the wound is sustained the better the chance of
recovery. This is brought out by the second sentence. The third and
fourth sentences record untoward symptoms following a severe wound, now
well recognized and watched for by every surgeon. There were, of course,
innumerable illustrations of the truth of these Aphorisms in extensive
wounds, especially those involving crushed limbs, in the late war.

     'Phthisis occurs most commonly between the ages of eighteen and
     thirty-five.'

     'Diarrhœa supervening on phthisis is mortal.'

The period given by the _Aphorisms_ for the maximum frequency of onset
of the disease is closely borne out by modern observations. The second
Aphorism is equally valid; continued diarrhœa is a very frequent
antecedent of the fatal event in chronic phthisis, and post-mortem
examination has shown that secondary involvement of the bowel is an
exceedingly common condition in this disease.

No less remarkable is the following saying: 'In jaundice it is a grave
matter if the liver becomes indurated.' Jaundice is a common and
comparatively trivial symptom following or accompanying a large variety
of diseases. In and by itself it is of little importance and almost
always disappears spontaneously. There is a small group of pathological
conditions, however, in which this is not the case. The commonest and
most important of these are the fatal affections of cirrhosis and cancer
of the liver in which that organ may be felt to be enlarged and
hardened. If therefore the liver can be so felt in a case of jaundice,
it is, as the Aphorism says, of gravest import. Representations of such
cases have actually come down to us from Greek times. Thus on a monument
erected at Athens to the memory of a physician who died in the second
century of the Christian era we may see the process of clinical
examination (fig. 7). The physician is palpating the liver of a dwarfish
figure whose swollen belly, wasted limbs, and anxious look tell of some
such condition as that described in the Aphorism. The ridge caused by
the enlarged liver can even be detected on the statue.

[Illustration: Fig. 7. ATHENIAN FUNERARY MONUMENT
Second century A. D. British Museum

Inscription reads: 'Jason, also called Dekmos, the Acharnian, a
physician', followed by his genealogy. By side of patient stands a
cupping vessel.]

'We must attend to the appearances of the eyes in sleep as presented
from below; for if a portion of the white be seen between the closing
eyelids, and if this be not connected with diarrhœa or severe purging,
it is a very bad and mortal symptom.' In this, the last Aphorism which
we shall quote, we see the Hippocratic physician actually making his
observations. Now during sleep the eyeball is turned upward, so that if
the eye be then opened and examined only the white is seen. In the later
stages of all wasting and chronic diseases the eyelids tend not to be
closed during sleep. Such patients, as is well known, often die with the
eyes open and sometimes exhibiting only the whites.

But the Hippocratic physician was not content to make only passive
observation; he also took active measures to elicit the 'physical
signs'. In modern times a large, perhaps the chief, task of the student
of medicine is to acquire a knowledge of these so-called physical signs
of disease, the tradition of which has been gradually rebuilt during the
last three centuries. Among the most important measures in which he
learns to acquire facility is that of auscultation. This useful process
has come specially into vogue since the invention of the stethoscope in
1819 by Laennec, who derived valuable hints for it from the Hippocratic
writings. Auscultation is several times mentioned and described by the
Hippocratic physicians, who used the direct method of listening and not
the mediate method devised by Laennec. There are, however, certain cases
in which the modern physician still finds the older non-instrumental
Hippocratic method superior. In the Hippocratic work περι νουσων {peri
nousôn}, _On diseases_, we read of a case with fluid in the pleura that
'you will place the patient on a seat which does not move, an assistant
will hold him by the shoulders, and you will shake him, applying the ear
to the chest, so as to recognize on which side the sign occurs'. This
sign is still used by physicians and is known as _Hippocratic
succussion_. In another passage in the same work the symptoms of
pleurisy are described and 'a creak like that of leather may be heard'.
This is the well known _pleuritic rub_ which the physician is accustomed
to seek in such cases, and of which the creak of leather is an excellent
representation.

Such quotations give an insight into the general method and attitude of
the Hippocratics. Of an art such as medicine, which even in those times
had a long and rational tradition behind it, it is impossible to give
more than the merest glimpse in such a review as this. The actual
practice is far too complex to set down briefly. This is especially the
case with the ancient teaching as regards epidemic disease at which we
must cursorily glance. The Hippocratic physicians and indeed all
antiquity were as yet ignorant of the nature, and were but dimly aware
of the existence, of infection.[85] For them acute disease was something
imposed on the patient from outside, but how it reached him from outside
and what it was that thus reached him they were still admittedly
ignorant. In this dilemma they turned to prolonged observation and noted
as a result of repeated experience that epidemic diseases in their world
had characteristic seasonal and regional distributions. One country was
not quite like another, nor was one season like another nor even one
year like another. By a series of carefully collated observations as to
how regions, seasons, and years differed from each other, they succeeded
in laying the basis of a rational study of epidemiology which gave rise
to the notion of an 'epidemic constitution' of the different years, a
conception which was very fertile and stimulating to the great
clinicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is by no
means without value even for the modern epidemiologist. The work of the
modern fathers of epidemiology was consciously based on Hippocrates.

    [85] The ancients knew almost nothing of infection _as applied
    specifically_ to disease. All early peoples--including Greeks and
    Romans--believed in the transmission of qualities from object to
    object. Thus purity and impurity and good and bad luck were
    infections, and diseases were held to be infections in that sense.
    But there is little evidence in the belief of the special
    infectivity of _disease as such_ in antiquity. Some few diseases
    are, however, unequivocally referred to as infectious in a limited
    number of passages, e. g. ophthalmia, scabies, and phthisis in the
    περι διαφορας πυρετων {peri diaphoras pyretôn}, _On the differentiae
    of fevers_, K. vii, p. 279. The references to infection in antiquity
    are detailed by C. and D. Singer, 'The scientific position of
    Girolamo Fracastoro', _Annals of Medical History_, vol. i, New York,
    1917.

Before parting with the Hippocratic physician a word must be said as to
his therapeutic means. His general armoury may be described as
resembling that of the modern physician of about two generations ago.
During those two generations we have, it is true, added to our list of
effective remedies but, on the other hand, there has been by common
consent a return to the Hippocratic simplicity of treatment. After rest
and quiet the central factor in treatment was Dietetics. This science
regarded the age--'Old persons use less nutriment than young'; the
season--'In winter abundant nourishment is wholesome, in summer a more
frugal diet'; the bodily condition--'Lean persons should take little
food, but this little should be fat, fat persons on the other hand
should take much food, but it should be lean'. Respect was also paid to
the digestibility of different foods--'white meat is more easily
digestible than dark'--and to their preparation. Water, barley water,
and lime water were recommended as drinks. The dietetic principles of
the Hippocratics, especially in connexion with fevers, are substantially
those of the present day, and it may be said that the general medical
tendency of the last generation in these matters has been an even closer
approximation to the Hippocratic. 'The more we nourish unhealthy bodies
the more we injure them'; 'The sick upon whom fever seizes with the
greatest severity from the very outset, must at once subject themselves
to a rigid diet'; 'Complete abstinence often acts well, if the strength
of the patient can in any way sustain it'; yet 'We should examine the
strength of the sick, to see whether they be in condition to maintain
this spare diet to the crisis of the disease'. 'In the application of
these rules we must always be mindful of the strength of the patient and
of the course of each particular disease, as well as of the constitution
and ordinary mode of life in each disease.'

Besides diet the Hippocratic physician had at his disposal a
considerable variety of other remedies. Baths, inunctions, clysters,
warm and cold suffusions, massage and gymnastic, as well as gentler
exercise are among them. He probably employed cupping and bleeding
rather too freely, and we have several representations of the
instruments used for these operations (fig. 8). He was no great user of
drugs and seldom names them except, we may note, in the works on the
treatment of women, which are probably of Cnidian origin and whence the
greater part of the 300 constituents of the Hippocratic pharmacopœia are
derived. Thus his list of drugs is small but several known to him are
still used by us.

The work of these men may be summed up by saying that without
dissection, without any experimental physiology or pathology, and
without any instrumental aid they pushed the knowledge of the course and
origin of disease as far as it is conceivable that men in such
circumstances could push it. This was done as a process of pure
scientific induction. Their surgery, though hardly based on anatomy, was
grounded on the most carefully recorded experience. In therapeutics they
allowed themselves neither to be deceived by false hopes nor led aside
by vain traditions. Yet in diagnosis, prognosis, surgery and
therapeutics alike they were in many departments unsurpassed until the
nineteenth century, and to some of their methods we have reverted in the
twentieth. Persisting throughout the ages as a more or less definite
tradition, which attained clearer form during and after the sixteenth
century, Hippocratic methods have formed the basis of all departments of
modern advance.

But the history of Greek medicine did not end with the Hippocratic
collection; in many respects it may indeed be held only to begin there;
yet we never get again a glimpse of so high an ethical and professional
standard as that which these works convey. From Alexandrian times
onwards, too, the history of Greek medicine becomes largely a history of
various schools of medical thought, each of which has only a partial
view of the course and nature of medical knowledge. The unravelling of
the course and teachings of these sects has long been a pre-occupation
of professed medical historians, but the general reader can hardly take
an interest in differences between the Dogmatists, Empirics, and
Methodists whose doctrines are as dead as themselves. In this later
Alexandrian and Hellenistic age the Greek intellect is no less active
than before, but there is a change in the taste of the material. A
general decay of the spirit is reflected in the medical as in the
literary products of the time, and we never again feel that elevation of
a beautiful and calmly righteous presence that breathes through the
Hippocratic collection and gives it a peculiar aroma.

We shall pass over the general course of later Greek medicine with great
rapidity. A definite medical school was established at Alexandria and
others perhaps at Pergamon and elsewhere. Athens, after the death of
Aristotle and his pupils, passes entirely into the background and is of
no importance so far as medicine is concerned. At Alexandria, where a
great medical library was collected, anatomy began to be studied and two
men whose discoveries were of primary importance for the history of that
subject, Erasistratus and Herophilus, early practised there. With
anatomy as a basis medical education could become much more systematic.
It is a very great misfortune that the works of these two eminent men
have disappeared. Of Herophilus fragments have survived embedded in the
works of Galen (A. D. 130-201), Caelius Aurelianus (fifth century), and
others. These fragments have been the subject of one of the earliest,
most laborious, and most successful attempts made in modern times to
reconstruct the lost work of an ancient author.[86] For Erasistratus our
chief source of information are two polemical treatises directed against
him by Galen. Recently, too, a little more information concerning the
works of both men has become available from the Menon papyrus.

    [86] K. F. H. Marx, _Herophilus, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der
    Medizin_, Karlsruhe, 1838.

It has been found possible to reconstruct especially a treatise on
anatomy by Herophilus with a considerable show of probability. He opened
by giving general directions for the process of dissection and followed
with detailed descriptions of the various systems, nervous, vascular,
glandular, digestive, generative, and osseous. There was a separate
section on the liver, a small part of which has survived. It is of his
account of the nervous system that we have perhaps the best record, and
it is evident that he has advanced far beyond the Hippocratic position.
In the braincase he saw the membranes that cover the brain and
distinguished between the cerebrum and cerebellum. He attained to some
knowledge of the ventricles of the brain, the cranial and spinal nerves,
the nerves of the heart, and the coats of the eye. He distinguished the
blood sinuses of the skull, and the _torcular Herophili_ (winepress of
Herophilus), a sinus described by him, has preserved his name in modern
anatomical nomenclature. He even made out more minute structures, such
as the little depression in the fourth ventricle of the brain, known to
modern anatomists as the _calamus scriptorius_, which still bears the
name which he gave it (καλαμος ὡ γραφομεν {kalamos hô graphomen}),
because it seemed to him, as Galen tells us, to resemble the pens then
in use in Alexandria.[87] We still use, too, his term _duodenum_
(δωδεκαδακτυλος εκφυσις {dôdekadaktylos ekphysis} = twelve-finger
extension), for as Galen assures us, Herophilus 'so named the first part
of the intestine before it is rolled into folds'.[88] The duodenum is a
U-shaped section of the intestine following immediately on the stomach.
Being fixed down behind the abdominal cavity it cannot be further
convoluted, and this accounts for Galen's description of it. It is about
twelve fingers' breadth long in the animals dissected by Herophilus.

    [87] Galen, περι ανατομικων εγχειρησεων {peri anatomikôn
    encheirêseôn}, _On anatomical preparations_, ix. 5 (last sentence).

    [88] Galen, περι φλεβων και αρτηριων ανατομης {peri phlebôn kai
    artêriôn anatomês}, _On the anatomy of veins and arteries_, i.

Erasistratus, the slightly younger Alexandrian contemporary of
Herophilus, has the credit of further anatomical discoveries. He
described correctly the action of the epiglottis in preventing the
entrance of food and drink into the windpipe during the act of
swallowing, he saw the lacteal vessels in the mesentery, and pursued
further the anatomy of the brain. He improved on the anatomy of the
heart, and described the auriculo-ventricular valves and their mode of
closure. He distinguished clearly the motor and sensory nerves. He seems
to have adopted a definitely experimental attitude--a very rare thing
among ancient physicians--and a description of an experiment made by him
has recently been recovered. 'If', he says, 'you take an animal, a bird,
for example, and keep it for a time in a jar without giving it food and
then weigh it together with its excreta you will find that there is a
considerable loss of weight.'[89] The experiment is a simple one, but it
was about nineteen hundred years before a modern professor, Sanctorio
Santorio (1561-1636), thought of repeating it.[90]

    [89] The quotation is from chapter xxxiii, line 44 of the _Anonymus
    Londinensis_. H. Diels, _Anonymus Londinensis_ in the _Supplementum
    Aristotelicum_, vol. iii, pars 1, Berlin, 1893.

    [90] Sanctorio Santorio, _Oratio in archilyceo patavino anno 1612
    habita; de medicina statica aphorismi_. Venice, 1614.

The anatomical advances made by the Alexandrian school naturally reacted
on surgical efficiency. The improvement so effected may be gathered, for
instance, from an account of the anatomical relationships in certain
cases of dislocation of the hip given by the Alexandrian surgeon
Hegetor, who lived about 100 B. C. In his book περι αιτιων {peri
aitiôn}, _On causes_ [_of disease_], he asks 'why (certain surgeons) do
not seek another way of reducing a luxation of the hip.... If the joints
of the jaw, shoulder, elbow, knee, finger, &c., can be replaced, the
same, they think, must be true of all parts, nor can they give an
account of why the femur cannot be put back into its place.... They
might have known, however, that from the head of the femur arises a
ligament which is inserted into the socket of the hip bone ... and if
this ligament is once ruptured the thigh bone cannot be retained in
place'.[91] This passage contains the first description of the structure
known to modern anatomists as the _ligamentum teres_, a strong fibrous
band which unites the head of the femur with the socket into which it
fits in the hip bone, like the string that binds the cup and ball of a
child's toy. This ligament is ruptured in certain severe cases of
dislocation of the hip.

    [91] This is the only passage of Hegetor's writing that has
    survived. It has been preserved in the work of Apollonius of Citium.

After the establishment of the school at Alexandria, medical teaching
rapidly became organized, but throughout the whole course of antiquity
it suffered from the absence of anything in the nature of a state
diploma. Any one could practise, with the result that many quacks,
cranks, and fanatics were to be found among the ranks of the
practitioners who often were or had been slaves. The great Alexandrian
school, however, did much to preserve some sort of professional
standard, and above all its anatomical discipline helped to this end.

Between the founding of the Alexandrian school and Galen we are not rich
in medical writings. Apart from fragments and minor productions, the
works of only five authors have survived from this period of over four
hundred years, namely, Celsus, Dioscorides, Aretaeus of Cappadocia, and
two Ephesian authors bearing the names of Rufus and Soranus.

The work of Celsus of the end of the first century B. C. is a Latin
treatise, probably translated from Greek, and is the surviving medical
volume of a complete cyclopaedia of knowledge. In spite of its
unpromising origin it is an excellent compendium of its subject and
shows a good deal of advance in many respects beyond the Hippocratic
position. The moral tone too is very high, though without the lofty and
detached beauty of Hippocrates. Anatomy has greatly improved, and with
it surgical procedure, and the work is probably representative of the
best Alexandrian practice. The pharmacopœia is more copious, but has not
yet become burdensome. The general line of treatment is sensible and
humane and the language concise and clear. Among other items he
describes dental practice, with the indications for and methods of tooth
extraction, the wiring of teeth, and perhaps a dental mirror. There is
an excellent account of what might be thought to be the modern operation
for removal of the tonsils. Celsus is still commemorated in modern
medicine by the _area Celsi_, a not uncommon disease of the skin. The
_De re medica_ is in fact one of the very best medical text-books that
have come down to us from antiquity. It has had a romantic history.
Forgotten during the Middle Ages, it was brought to light by the
classical scholar Guarino of Verona (1374-1460) in 1426, and a better
copy was discovered by his friend Lamola in 1427. Another copy was found
by Thomas Parentucelli (1397-1455), afterwards Pope Nicholas V in 1443,
and the text was later studied by Politian (1454-94). Though one of the
latest of the great classical medical texts to be discovered, it was one
of the first to be printed (Florence, 1478), and it ran through very
many early editions and had great influence on the medical renaissance.

[Illustration: Fig. 8. VOTIVE TABLET representing cupping and bleeding
instruments from Temple of Asclepius at Athens. In centre is represented
a folding case containing scalpels of various forms. On either side are
cupping vessels.]

After Celsus comes Dioscorides in the first century A. D. He was a Greek
military surgeon of Cilician origin who served under Nero, and in him
the Greek intellect is obviously beginning to flag. His work is
prodigiously important for the history of botany, yet so far as rational
medicine is concerned he is almost negligible. He begins at the wrong
end, either giving lists of drugs with the symptoms that they are said
to cure or to relieve, or lists of symptoms with a series of named
drugs. Clinical observation and record are wholly absent, and the spirit
of Hippocrates has departed from this elaborate pharmacopœia.

With the second century of the Christian era we terminate the creative
period of Greek medicine. We are provided with the works of four
important writers of this century, of whom three, Rufus of Ephesus,
Soranus of Ephesus, and Aretaeus of Cappadocia, though valuable for
forming a picture of the state of medicine in their day, were without
substantial influence on the course of medicine in later ages.

Rufus of Ephesus, a little junior to Dioscorides, has left us the first
formal work on human anatomy and is of some importance in the history of
comparative anatomy. In medicine he is memorable as the first to have
described bubonic plague, and in surgery for his description of the
methods of arresting haemorrhage and his knowledge of the anatomy of
the eye. A work by him _On gout_ was translated into Latin in the sixth
century, but remained unknown till modern times.

Soranus of Ephesus (A. D. _c._ 90-_c._ 150), an acute writer on
gynaecology, has left a book which illustrates well the anatomy of his
day. It exercised an influence for many centuries to come, and a Latin
abstract of it prepared about the sixth century by one Moschion has come
down to us in an almost contemporary manuscript.[92] It is interesting
as opposing the Hippocratic theory that the male embryo is originated in
the right and the female in the left half of the womb, a fallacy derived
originally from Empedocles and Parmenides, but perpetuated by Latin
translations of the Hippocratic treatises until the seventeenth century.
His work was adorned by figures, and some of these, naturally greatly
altered by copyists, but still not infinitely removed from the facts,
have survived in a manuscript of the ninth century, and give us a
distant idea of the appearance of ancient anatomical drawings.[93] We
may assist our imagination a little further, in forming an idea of what
such diagrams were like, with the help of certain other mediaeval
figures representing the form and distribution of the various anatomical
'systems', veins, arteries, nerves, bones, and muscles which are
probably traceable to an Alexandrian origin.[94]

    [92] Leyden Voss 4° 9^{*} of the sixth century is a fragment of this
    work.

    [93] V. Rose, _Sorani Ephesii vetus translatio Latina cum additis
    Graeci textus reliquiis_, Leipzig, 1882; F. Weindler, _Geschichte
    der gynäkologisch-anatomischen Abbildung_, Dresden, 1908.

    [94] The discovery and attribution of these figures is the work of
    K. Sudhoff. A bibliography of his writings on the subject will be
    found in a 'Study in Early Renaissance Anatomy' in C. Singer's
    _Studies in the History and Method of Science_, vol. i, Oxford,
    1917.

Aretaeus of Cappadocia was probably a contemporary of Galen (second half
of the second century A. D.). As a clinical author his reputation stands
high, perhaps too high, his descriptions of pneumonia, empyema,
diabetes, and elephantiasis having especially drawn attention. In
treatment he uses simple remedies, is not affected by polypharmacy, and
suggests many ingenious mechanical devices. It would appear that
Aretaeus is not an independent writer, but mainly a compiler. He relies
largely on Archigenes, a distinguished physician contemporary with
Juvenal, whose works have perished save the fragments preserved in this
manner by Aretaeus and Aetius. Aretaeus was a very popular writer among
the Greeks in all ages, but he was not translated into Latin, and was
unknown in the West until the middle of the sixteenth century.[95] He is
philologically interesting as still using the Ionic dialect.

    [95] First Latin edition Venice, 1552; first Greek edition Paris,
    1554.

There remains the huge overshadowing figure of Galen. The enormous mass
of the surviving work of this man, the dictator of medicine until the
revival of learning and beyond, tends to throw out of perspective the
whole of Greek medical records. The works of Galen alone form about half
of the mass of surviving Greek medical writings, and occupy, in the
standard edition, twenty-two thick, closely-printed volumes. These cover
every department of medicine, anatomy, physiology, pathology, medical
theory, therapeutics, as well as clinical medicine and surgery. In style
they are verbose and heavy and very frequently polemical. They are
saturated with a teleology which, at times, becomes excessively tedious.
In the anatomical works, masses of teleological explanation dilute the
account of often imperfectly described structures. Yet to this element
we owe the preservation of the mass of Galen's works, for his intensely
teleological point of view appealed to the theological bias both of
Western Christianity and of Eastern Islam. Intolerable as literature,
his works are a valuable treasure house of medical knowledge and
experience, custom, tradition, and history.

As in the case of the Hippocratic corpus, so in the case of the Galenic
corpus we are dealing to some extent with material from various
sources. In the case of Galen, however, we have a good standard of
genuineness, for he has left us a list of his books which can be checked
off against those which we actually possess. The general standpoint of
the Galenic is not unlike that of the Hippocratic writings, but the
noble vision of the lofty-minded, pure-souled physician has utterly
passed away. In his place we have an acute, honest, very contentious
fellow, bristling with energy and of prodigious industry, not unkindly,
but loving strife, a thoroughly 'aggressive' character. He loves truth,
but he loves argument quite as much. The value of his philosophical
writings, of which some have survived, cannot be discussed here, but it
is evident that he is frequently satisfied with purely verbal
explanations. An ingenious physiologist, a born experimenter, an
excellent anatomist and eager to improve, possessing a good knowledge of
the human skeleton and an accurate acquaintance with the internal parts
so far as this can be derived from a most industrious devotion to
dissection of animals, equipped with all the learning of the schools of
Pergamon, Smyrna, and Alexandria, and rich with the experience of a vast
practice at Rome, Galen is essentially an 'efficient' man. He has the
grace to acknowledge constantly and repeatedly his indebtedness to the
Hippocratic writings. Such was the man whose remains, along with the
Hippocratic collection, formed the main medical legacy of Greece to the
Western world.

Some of Galen's works are mere drug lists, little superior to those of
Dioscorides;[96] with the depression of the intelligence that
corresponded with the break up of the Roman Empire, it was these that
were chiefly seized on and distributed in the West. Attractive too to
the debased intellect of the late Roman world were certain spurious,
superstitious, and astrological works that circulated in the name of
Galen and Hippocrates.[97] The Greek medical writers after Galen were
but his imitators and abstractors, but through some of them Galen's
works reached the West at a very early period in the Middle Ages. Such
abstractors who were early translated into Latin were Oribasius
(325-403), Paul of Aegina (625-690), and Alexander of Tralles (525-605).
Of the best and most scientific of Galen's works the Middle Ages knew
little or nothing.

    [96] e. g. περι κρασεως και δυναμεως των ἁπαντων φαρμακων {peri
    kraseôs kai dynameôs tôn hapantôn pharmakôn} and the φαρμακα
    {pharmaka}.

    [97] e. g. _De dinamidiis Galeni_, _Secreta Hippocratis_ and many
    astrological tracts.

Later Galen and Hippocrates became a little more accessible, not by
translation from the Greek, but by translation from the Arabic of a
Syriac version. The first work to be so rendered was a version of
_Aphorisms_ of Hippocrates which, however, as we have seen, were already
available in Latin dress, together with the Hippocratic _Regimen in
acute diseases_, and certain works of Galen as corruptly interpreted by
Isaac Judaeus. These were rendered from Arabic into Latin by
Constantine, an African adventurer who became a monk at Monte Cassino
and died there in 1087. Constantine was a wretched craftsman with an
imperfect knowledge of both Arabic and Latin. More effective was the
great twelfth-century translator from the Arabic, Gerard of Cremona
(died 1185), who turned many medical works into Latin from Arabic, and
who was followed by a whole host of imitators. Yet more important for
the advance of medicine, however, was the learned revival of the
thirteenth century. In the main that revival was based on translations
from Arabic, but a certain number of works were also rendered direct
from the Greek. During the thirteenth century Aristotle's scientific
works began to be treated in this way, but more important for the course
of medicine were those of Galen, and they had to wait till the following
century. The long treatise of Galen, περι χρειας των εν ανθρωπου σωματι
μοριων {peri chreias tôn en anthrôpou sômati moriôn}, _On the uses of
the bodily parts in man_, was translated from the Greek into Latin by
Nicholas of Reggio in the earlier part of the fourteenth century. This
work, with all its defects, was by far the best account of the human
body then available. Many manuscripts of the Latin version have
survived, and it was translated into several vernaculars, including
English, and profoundly influenced surgery. The rendering into Latin of
this treatise, and its wide distribution, may be regarded as the
starting-point of modern scientific medicine. Its appearance is moreover
a part of the phenomenon of the revived interest in dissection which had
begun to be practised in the Universities in the thirteenth century,[98]
and was a generally accepted discipline in the fourteenth and
fifteenth.[99]

    [98] Dissection of animals was practised at Salerno as early as the
    eleventh century.

    [99] The sources of the anatomical knowledge of the Middle Ages are
    discussed in detail in the following works: R. R. von Töply,
    _Studien zur Geschichte der Anatomie im Mittelalter_, Vienna, 1898;
    K. Sudhoff, _Tradition und Naturbeobachtung_, Leipzig, 1907; and
    also numerous articles in the _Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und
    Naturwissenschaften_; Charles Singer, 'A Study in Early Renaissance
    Anatomy', in _Studies in the History and Method of Science_, vol. i,
    Oxford, 1917.

Until the end of the fifteenth century progress in anatomy was almost
imperceptible. During the fifteenth century more Galenic and Hippocratic
texts were recovered and gradually turned into Latin, but still without
vitally affecting the course of Anatomy. The actual printing of
collected editions of Hippocrates and Galen came rather late, for the
debased taste of the Renaissance physicians continued to prefer
Dioscorides and the Arabs, of whom numerous editions appeared, so that
medicine made no advance corresponding to the progress of scholarship.
The Hippocratic works were first printed in 1525, and an isolated
edition of the inferior Galen in 1490, but the real advance in Medicine
was not made by direct study of these works. So long as they were
treated in the old scholastic spirit such works were of no more value
than those of the Arabists or others inherited from the Middle Ages.
Even Hippocrates can be spoilt by a commentary, and it was not until the
investigator began actually to compare his own observations with those
of Hippocrates and Galen that the real value of these works became
apparent. The department in which this happened first was Anatomy, and
such revolutionaries as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1518), who never
published, and Vesalius (1514-1564), whose great work appeared in 1543,
were really basing their work on Galen, though they were much occupied
in proving Galen's errors. Antonio Benivieni (died 1502), an eager
prophet of the new spirit, revived the Hippocratic tradition by actually
collecting notes of a few cases with accompanying records of deaths and
post-mortem findings, among which it is interesting to observe a case of
appendicitis.[100] His example was occasionally followed during the
sixteenth century, as for instance, by the Portuguese Jewish physician
Amatus Lusitanus (1511-_c._ 1562), who printed no fewer than seven
hundred cases; but the real revival of the Hippocratic tradition came in
the next century with Sydenham (1624-1689) and Boerhaave (1668-1738),
who were consciously working on the Hippocratic basis and endeavouring
to extend the Hippocratic experience.

    [100] Benivieni's notes were published posthumously. Some of the
    spurious Greek works of the Hippocratic collection have also case
    notes.

Lastly surgery came to profit by the revival. The greatest of the
sixteenth-century surgeons, the lovable and loving Ambroise Paré
(1510-1590), though he was, as he himself humbly confessed, an ignorant
man knowing neither Latin nor Greek, can be shown to have derived much
from the works of antiquity, which were circulating in translation in
his day and were thus filtering down to the unlearned.

Texts of Hippocrates and of Galen had formed an integral part in the
medical instruction of the universities from their commencement in the
thirteenth century. The first Greek text of the _Aphorisms_ of
Hippocrates appeared in 1532, edited by no less a hand than that of
François Rabelais. With the further recovery of the Greek texts and
preparation of better translations, these became almost the sole mode of
instruction during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The
translators became legion and their competence varied. One highly
skilled translator, however, is of special interest to English readers.
Thomas Linacre (1460?-1524), Physician to Henry VIII, Tutor to the
Princess Mary, founder and first president of the College of
Physicians, a benefactor of both the ancient Universities and one of the
earliest, ablest, most typical, and most exasperating of the English
humanists, spent much energy on this work of translation for which his
abilities peculiarly fitted him. He was responsible for no less than six
important works of Galen, of which one, the _De temperamentis et de
inaequali intemperie_, printed at Cambridge in 1521, was among the
earliest books impressed in that town and is said to be the first
printed in England for which Greek types were used. It has been honoured
by reproduction in facsimile in modern times. Such works as these,
purely literary efforts, had great vogue for a century and more, and
were much in use in the Universities. These humanistic products
sometimes produced, among the advocates of the new scientific method, a
degree of fury which was only rivalled by that of some of the humanists
themselves towards the translators from the Arabic. But these are now
dead fires. As the clinical and scientific methods of teaching gained
ground, textual studies receded in medical education, as Hippocrates and
Galen themselves would have wished them to recede.

The texts of Hippocrates and Galen have now ceased to occupy a place in
any medical curriculum. Yet all who know these writings, know too, not
only that their spirit is still with us, but that the works themselves
form the background of modern practice, and that their very phraseology
is still in use at the bedside. Modern medicine may be truly described
as in essence a creation of the Greeks. To realize the nature of our
medical system, some knowledge of its Greek sources is essential. It
would indeed be a bad day for medicine if ever this debt to the Greeks
were forgotten, and the loss would be at least as much ethical as
intellectual. But there is happily no fear of this, for the figure and
spirit of Hippocrates are more real and living to-day than they have
been since the great collapse of the Greek scientific intellect in the
third and fourth centuries of the Christian era.

CHARLES SINGER.

     The author has to thank Mr. R. W. Livingstone, Dr. E. T.
     Withington, Prof. A. Platt, and Mr. J. D. Beazley for corrections
     and suggestions.




LITERATURE


A man walking down Shaftesbury Avenue from Piccadilly to Charing Cross
Road passes the _Lyric Theatre_. If it is the evening, a _dramatic_
performance is probably taking place inside. It may be a _tragedy_, or
some form of _comedy_. If it is a _musical comedy_ and he enters, he
will see elaborate _scenery_ and a play which may open with a _prologue_
and which is partly composed of _dialogue_ between the various
_characters_, partly of songs in various _metres_ sung by a _chorus_ to
the accompaniment of an _orchestra_. As the words in italics indicate,
our imaginary passer-by will have seen, though he may not have suspected
it, a symbol of the indelible mark which the Greeks have set on the
aesthetic and intellectual life of Europe, and of the living presence of
Greece in the twentieth century. An ancient Athenian might be startled
at the sight of a musical comedy and its chorus, but he would be looking
at his own child, a descendant, however distant, degenerate, and hard to
recognize, of that chorus which with dance and song moved round the
altar of Dionysus in the theatre of his home.

The same imprint, clear or faint, is on all our literary forms, except
perhaps one. Epic, lyric, elegiac, dramatic, didactic, poetry, history,
biography, rhetoric and oratory, the epigram, the essay, the sermon, the
novel, letter writing and literary criticism are all Greek by origin,
and in nearly every case their name betrays their source. Rome raises a
doubtful claim to satire, but the substance of satire is present in the
Old Comedy, and the form seems to have existed in writings now lost.
There are even one or two _genres_, such as the imaginary speech, which
Greece invented and which are not, fortunately, found in modern
literature. When the curtain rose on Homer, European literature did not
exist: long before it falls on the late Byzantines, the lines were laid
on which it has moved up to our own day. This is the entire work of a
single people, politically weak, numerically small, materially
poor--according to the economy of nature which in things of the mind and
the spirit gives a germinating power to few. The Greeks are justly
admired for individual poems, plays, and pieces of writing; but it was
something even greater to have explored the possibilities of literature
so far that posterity, while it has developed Greek _genres_, has not
hitherto been able to add to them. This is one part of the Greek Legacy
to literature.

Another part are the works themselves. Literature can only be judged by
reading it, and certainly it cannot be characterized in a few pages. But
a man ignorant of Greek and anxious to estimate its value might form
some idea by inquiring the opinions of qualified judges. He would find
them unanimous: I suppose it is true that no man of eminence qualified
to speak has ever spoken of Greek literature in any tone but one. The
first testimony is that of the Romans. It is borne by their literature,
starting in translations from Greek, adopting one after another of their
_genres_, permeated through and through (and most of all in the greatest
writers) by imitations, reminiscences, influences of Greek, confessing
and glorying in the debt. 'In learning,' says Cicero, 'and in every
branch of literature, the Greeks are our masters.'[101] A Roman boy
should begin his studies with Greek, Quintilian thought, 'because Latin
learning is derived from Greek.'[102] The same note is repeated in the
literature of the Renaissance, and re-echoed by the most various voices
of our own century.

    [101] _Tusc._ 1. 1. 2.

    [102] _Inst. Or._ I. 1. 12.

'Though one of the Greek tragedians may seem rather greater and more
complete than another, their work as a whole has a single pervading
quality. It is marked by grandeur, excellence, sanity, complete
humanity, a high philosophy of life, a lofty way of thinking, a powerful
intuition (_Anschauung_). We find these qualities in their surviving
lyric and epic poetry as well as in their drama: we find them in their
philosophers, orators, and historians and, to an equally high degree, in
their surviving sculpture.'[103]

    [103] Goethe, _Gespräche_, 3. 387.

'Beside the great Attic poets, like Aeschylus and Sophocles, I am
absolutely nothing.'[104]

    [104] Ibid., 3. 443.

'He spoke with great animation of the advantage of classical study,
Greek especially. "Where," he said, "would one look for a greater orator
than Demosthenes; or finer dramatic poetry, next to Shakspere, than that
of Aeschylus or Sophocles, not to speak of Euripides." Herodotus he
thought "the most interesting and instructive book, next to the Bible,
which had ever been written".'[105]

    [105] Wordsworth, _Table-talk_.

'The period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the death
of Aristotle is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself or with
reference to the effects which it has produced upon the subsequent
destinies of civilized man, the most memorable in the history of the
world.... The wrecks and fragments of these subtle and profound minds,
like the ruins of a fine statue, obscurely suggest to us the grandeur
and perfection of the whole. Their very language ... in variety, in
simplicity, in flexibility, and in copiousness, excels every other
language of the western world.' Then, after some words on their
sculpture, he adds: 'their poetry seems to maintain a very high, though
not so disproportionate a rank, in the comparison' (with other
literatures).[106]

    [106] Shelley, _On the Manners of the Ancients_.

'The Greeks are the most remarkable people who have yet existed.... They
were the beginners of nearly everything, Christianity excepted, of which
the modern world makes its boast.... They were the first people who had
a historical literature; as perfect of its kind (though not the highest
kind) as their oratory, their sculpture, and their architecture. They
were the founders of mathematics, of physics, of the inductive study of
politics, of the philosophy of human nature and life. In each they made
the indispensable first steps, which are the foundation of all the
rest.'[107]

    [107] Mill, _Dissertations_, ii. 283 f.

'I have gone back to Greek literature with a passion quite astonishing
to myself.... I felt as if I had never known before what intellectual
enjoyment was. Oh that wonderful people! There is not one art, not one
science, about which we may not use the same expression which Lucretius
has employed about the victory over superstition "_Primum Graius homo_".
I think myself very fortunate in having been able to return to these
great masters while still in the full vigour of life and when my taste
and judgement are mature. Most people read all the Greek that they ever
read before they are five-and-twenty.... A young man, whatever his
genius may be, is no judge of such a writer as Thucydides. I had no high
opinion of him ten years ago. I have now been reading him with a mind
accustomed to historical researches and to political affairs; and I am
astonished at my own former blindness, and at his greatness. I could not
bear Euripides at college. I now read my recantation. He has faults
undoubtedly. But what a poet!'[108]

    [108] Macaulay, _Life and Letters_, i. 43.

These men--and there is no difficulty in adding to their number--are not
only qualified but unprejudiced witnesses. They have no _parti pris_.
They cannot be accused, as schoolmasters and dons are sometimes accused,
of holding shares in a great Trading Bank of Greece and Rome Unlimited,
and having a personal motive for their enthusiasm. Nor can it be said
that they admired Greece because they knew nothing better. All--Goethe
no less than the others--had English literature in their hands, knew it
well and appreciated its greatness. Yet this, given in their own words,
is the impression which Greek made on them. _Securus iudicat orbis
terrarum_; and the verdict here is plain. It is clear that we have in
Greek a surviving body of poetry and prose which is of unique interest
to any one who cares for literature.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have tried to give a summary answer to the question, What did the
Greeks achieve? They invented every literary _genre_ which we know, they
laid the lines which European literature has followed, they created a
body of prose and poetry which has won the homage of the world. The
further question, What can the world still learn from them, is less easy
to answer. The answer lies in Greek literature, and the essence of a
literature cannot be extracted and bottled in a number of abstract
formulae. No literature is great in virtue of its qualities, which are
always something less than the literature itself, but only in so far as
it expands to the breadth of the universe and climbs to its height. This
is the final test which must be applied. How far Greek literature
satisfies it, can be judged from the testimonies which have been quoted
above.

Remembering this let us deliberately narrow our view and talk of
qualities: and here, narrowing it again, let us confine the discussion
to certain qualities, which are found indeed in all literatures, but are
elsewhere neither so universal nor carried to so high a power. No one
can think of Greek literature without thinking of them; they live on the
lips of its admirers, and in them the inspiration of Greek literature is
chiefly enshrined. These essential qualities are Simplicity, Perfection
of Form, Truth and Beauty. Greek literature is much more than these
qualities. The _Agamemnon_, the _Oedipus_, the _Bacchae_ are not to be
explained wholly by them. The greatness of these plays is partly
something individual, and partly it is what makes _King Lear_ or
_Faust_ or _Brand_ great: and that is neither entirely nor mainly
simplicity or beauty or truth or form. But my object is to emphasize
qualities for which Greek is exceptional, and though some critics may
have talked of the beauty of Greek literature till beauty was absurdly
supposed to be its chief or only quality, they were right to recognize
the prominence of beauty there, and though truth is a mark of the
greatest writing in all languages, it is more universal in Greek than in
any other literature.

       *       *       *       *       *

If a reader turned from Milton to Homer, from Shakespeare to Sophocles,
from Plato or Aristotle to some modern work on ethics