CHAPTER X. The Moral Consciousness of Hellas: an Ideal of Self-Realization

THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF HELLAS: AN IDEAL OF SELF-REALIZATION

The Greek ethical ideal, a creation of the natural feelings and impulses of the human mind and heart uninfluenced by theological doctrines, was one of the most imperishable products of Greek life and thought. This conception of what constitutes good life became a part of the Greek bequest to civilization. The modern world is thus indebted to Greece not only for priceless elements of its intellectual and art life, but for precious elements of its moral life as well. Throughout the medieval age, it is true, it was the ethical heritage from Judea that shaped and colored the moral ideal of the European peoples, but even during that period this Semitic ideal bore the deep impress of Greek ethics, while ever since the Renaissance it is the ethical bequest of Hellas which has steadily become an ever more and more dominant factor in the moral life of the Western nations. The conscience of the modern world of science is Hellenic rather than Hebraic.

I. INSTITUTIONS AND IDEAS DETERMINING THE MORAL TYPE

The Greek city state was the creator of the Greek conscience; that is to say, the relationships and activities of the Greek as a citizen, and not his relationships and activities as a husband or father or business man, determined his chief duties. Conscience was very little involved in that part of his life which lay outside the civic sphere. It was solely as a member of a city community, which was to the Greek what the Church was to the man of medieval times, that he could live the truly moral life and attain the highest virtue.

The common Greek view of man’s nature was like that of the Chinese moralists; that is, it conceived human nature as being essentially good. And this conception included the whole of man’s nature, his body as well as his spirit. As we shall learn, this doctrine influenced profoundly the Greek conception of what is permissible and right in conduct. It made it seem right to give full, though regulated and reasonable, indulgence to the bodily impulses and instincts. It made the fundamental maxim of Greek morality to be, Live according to nature. It left no place in Greek thought for the Oriental notion of an antagonism between the flesh and the spirit. Hence asceticism with its repressions of the bodily instincts and appetites, which is so common an expression of the moral sentiment among the Oriental races, found no place in Greek morality till after Greek culture had come in contact with the religious and ethical systems of Asia.

Closely connected with this idea of the essential goodness and oneness of man’s nature was the conception of unity and harmony in the god world. In passing from the Orient to Greece we leave behind not only Indian pessimism, but Egyptian and Persian dualism. We leave behind that conception of disharmony and conflict in the invisible world which is such a characteristic phase of much of Oriental thought. We hear, indeed, the faint echo of a prehistoric struggle between the earth gods and the sky gods. But all now is peace. The Titans are chained, and the gods that are the friends of men reign supreme.

Just as that Oriental dualistic world philosophy exercised a vast influence upon the moral ideals of the East and of the later Christian world that inherited that system of thought, making the moral life serious and strenuous, a fight against evil, so did the opposing Greek conception of unity and harmony in the god world exert a profound influence upon Greek morality, emptying the moral life of everything like strenuousness and battle. It made Greek morality to be like the morality of sensuous, joyous youth.

In strong contrast to Hebrew morality, which, as we have seen, was almost exclusively a religious one, springing, that is to say, from certain conceptions of God’s character and of his relations to man, Greek morality was in the main a lay or secular one. Aristotle, who gave scientific form to Greek ethics, allowed hardly any place in the moral code to religious duties. Yet, though the Greek moral ideal was not based upon religion, it was influenced by it; for there cannot be an entire separation of religion and morality. Religious beliefs, like beliefs of every other kind, help to shape men’s ideas of what is right and what is wrong in conduct.

The influence of the Greek religion upon Greek morality was not wholly favorable. The attribution by the Greeks of human frailties and vices to their gods tended to depress human morality, since men are never better than their gods. It is true that the moral character of the gods of any people is a creation of the moral consciousness of that people; still, after once called into existence and enthroned, these divinities react upon their creators and shape in a greater or less degree the moral character of their worshipers.

But though there were elements in some of the Greek cults, particularly in those of Dionysus and Aphrodite in the later period, that were harmful to morality, still in general Greek morality found in religion at once a restraining and a stimulating influence.

Even as early as the Homeric Age religion had become a moral force. It is the fear of the gods even more than the fear of men which is the motive force for rightdoing. Odysseus’ request of Ilus of Ephyra for poison with which to smear the points of his arrows is refused through fear of the divine anger, and Priam in praying Achilles for the body of Hector admonishes him to have reverence for the gods.

And throughout later times the gods are the guardians of morality. They are the avengers of perjury. They are the punishers of him who breaks the law of hospitality. Especially does Zeus, as the god of hospitality, “take note of those who welcome and those who maltreat the stranger.” The shrines of all the gods are places of refuge and sanctuary. The suppliant at the altar is sacrosanct. Here the hand of the avenger of injury is stayed. “Mercy,” says Sophocles, “shares the judgment seat of Zeus.” As the god of the suppliant, Zeus not only protects but purifies and delivers. Thus were the high moral qualities of mercy and forgiveness thrown into relief, and men, while taught self-restraint, were imbued with reverence for these attributes of character.

This high morality of the Greek religion reached its culmination in the worship of the Delphian Apollo. In truth, the history of Delphi is a large part of the history of Greek morality. It reflected from age to age the deepening moral perceptions of the race. The oracle thus stood in close relation with the great teachers of Greece. The ethical impulse of Pythagoreanism seems to have gone forth from Delphi. Apollo gave a religious sanction to the emancipation of the slave, and thus promoted social morality. The slave given his freedom by his master at Delphi became, as a freedman, sacrosanct. Apollo stimulated also political morality. Through the Delphic Amphictyony his influence was exerted in mitigating the barbarities of war between Greek and Greek, and in creating an Hellenic fraternity. Thus through religion was the narrow sphere embraced by the ordinary moral feelings of the Greeks broadened and brought to cover wide federations of cities and tribes.

Greek religion also exercised a stimulating influence upon morality through the Mysteries, especially through those of Eleusis. The greater number of these religious fraternities had an ethical aim--“the aim of worshiping a pure god, the aim of living a pure life, and the aim of cultivating a spirit of brotherhood.”

But the most noteworthy fact concerning Greek religion in its relations to Greek morality is this--that it was a religion practically without a priesthood. For there never arose in Greece a priestly class like that in Egypt, in Persia, in India, and in Judea. This is a fact of supreme importance in the history of Greek morals. It prevented the growth of a theocratic morality, with its artificial ritual duties and its conservative tendencies.

It is interesting to note that it was the early rise of philosophy in the Greek cities of Ionia that saved Hellas from the domination of a sacerdotal caste. For at the time this philosophy arose the Orphic doctrines were overspreading Greece. Now this was a priestly religion, that is, a religion interpreted and administered by priests. Its triumph in Greece would have meant the establishment of a powerful national priesthood. This misfortune was prevented by the intellectual and philosophical movement in Ionia. It is this fact which leads Professor Bury to pronounce the rise of the study of philosophy in the Ionian cities one of the most important facts in the history of Hellas; for “it meant the triumph of reason over mystery; it led to the discrediting of the Orphic movement; it insured the free political and social progress of Hellas.” And all this meant the keeping of the ground clear for the upgrowth and development of an essentially lay or secular morality, a morality that found its sanctions alone in the human reason and conscience.

There was one conception common to both Greek and Jew which reacted powerfully upon the moral system of each. This was what has been called the doctrine of race election. The Jews believed themselves to be the “chosen people.” The Greeks believed the same concerning themselves. They were the intellectually elect people. All other peoples were “barbarians.” Just as the Jewish doctrine of election excluded the Gentile world from the pale of Jewish moral sympathies, so did the Greek doctrine of separateness cause the Greek to shut out from his moral sympathies the entire non-Greek world. We shall see a little further on how this race egotism dictated large sections of the Greek code of morals.

II. THE IDEAL

As we have already noticed, it was out of his relations as a citizen that the primary duties of the Greek arose. His supreme duty was patriotism, devotion to his city. “Good citizen” and “good man” were interchangeable terms. And since a state of war rather than of peace was the normal relation of the Greek cities, the military virtues held the highest place in the ideal of excellence. “Their bodies,”--thus Thucydides makes one of his characters speak of the citizen soldiers of a typical Greek city--“their bodies they devote to their country as though they belonged to other men.” Thus the preëminent Greek virtue, courage, was almost synonymous with valor in war. To throw away one’s shield was the last infamy with the Greeks as with the Romans.

This type of character, blending the civic and the military virtues, is presented to us with incomparable charm in Plutarch’s Lives. Here we see the ideal in actual flesh and blood. It is the altruistic element in this type of character which renders it so morally attractive.

For we should not fail to note that in the Greek enumeration of the virtues, the virtue of self-sacrifice, which we give the first place in our own moral ideal, is hidden under courage or fortitude. With us this virtue expresses itself in a great variety of forms; with the Greeks, in one form chiefly--self-devotion on the battlefield. This altruism, it is true, was narrow; it did not look beyond one’s own city; but notwithstanding this limitation it was genuine altruism, for facing death in battle, as Aristotle says, is “the greatest and noblest of perils.” This ready self-devotion of the individual to the common interests of his city was the most attractive feature of Greek morality. It formed the basis of Greek civilization. When this virtue was lost the Greek city perished, and with it Greek civilization passed away.

Among all the cities of Greece, Sparta realized most perfectly the military virtues of the Greek ideal. The great place so long held by her in the ancient world she won through the loyalty of her citizens to the soldier’s ideal of obedience, courage, and self-devotion. The conduct of Leonidas and his companions in the pass of Thermopylæ not only had a bracing effect upon Greek character for generations, but has never ceased, through the inspiration of example, to add to the sum total in the world of loyalty to duty.

To the virtue of self-sacrifice, under the guise of fortitude, or the facing of danger or the endurance of pain in a worthy cause, the Greeks added temperance, justice, and wisdom.

The Greek virtue of temperance or moderation was essentially the same as our virtue of self-control or self-denial. It meant measure in all things, the avoidance of the too much and the too little. Everything must be in fair proportion. In building a house one should not go “beyond bounds in size, magnificence, and expense.” In conduct likewise the mean must always be the aim. Restraint must be laid upon one’s appetites and desires. Excessive ambition was a grave fault, as was an undue lack of ambition.

The Greek conception of justice was this: Do no wrong, and suffer no wrong to self or to others--with the emphasis on the latter part of the injunction. Christianity shifted the emphasis to the first part of the commandment.

By the term “wisdom” the Greeks covered very nearly what we mean by mental self-culture. Now there has been a wide divergence of opinion among different peoples respecting this matter. Primitive races can of course have no feeling of obligation as to intellectual self-culture; but even a people as advanced in civilization as the Romans may have little or no conscience concerning it. Throughout a great part of the medieval age in Europe mental culture was looked upon with suspicion. Very few regarded it as a duty. But since the Renaissance, that is, since the rebirth in the European world of the Greek spirit, intellectual culture has been coming to be regarded more and more as an urgent and imperious duty. It is to the ancient Greeks, as implied in what we have just said, that we are largely indebted for this ethical feeling. To the truly representative Greek the ethical imperative to seek self-realization called especially for the development of the mind, “his true self.” Mere intellectual curiosity, love of knowledge for its own sake, was, it is true, one of the creative forces of Greek intellectualism; but the ethical motive was ever near. In the Socratic philosophy indeed it is made the dominant motive for the reason that virtuous conduct is by Socrates held to be dependent upon knowledge, the knowledge of things as they really are, things human and divine. With the philosopher the gaining of this knowledge is the aim and end of life.

Asceticism, a chief characteristic of which is the conception that there is something meritorious in the illtreatment or neglect of the body, is one of the most striking phenomena in the moral history of mankind. The Oriental peoples especially have ever been easily persuaded, under the influence of religious ideas, that the body should be illtreated in the interest of the spirit.

In passing from Asia to Greece we seem to enter a new ethical atmosphere. We leave behind every trace of asceticism. We are no longer surrounded by unkempt, gaunt, hollow-eyed fakirs, anchorites, and monks. In Greek thought, as we have seen, there was no trace of that Oriental idea of a warring between body and spirit. This happy consciousness of the Greek of harmony in his own being had most important consequences for Greek morality. It made the development of the body, equally with that of the soul, an ethical requirement. The outcome was Greek athleticism, one of the most attractive phases of Hellenic civilization.

We do not mean to say that moral feeling was to the same degree active in calling into existence Greek athleticism that religious-ethical feeling was active in the creation of Oriental asceticism, but simply that the ethical motive held a place among the various motives and sentiments at work. Without this motive the Olympian games and the other sacred festivals into which athletic exercises and competitions entered, would never have won the place they held in Greek life and culture. When in later times these festivals, subjected to commercial and mercenary influences, lost wholly or in part this religious-ethical element, then they lost also their distinctive character, and that morally wholesome and uplifting influence which they had exercised upon the Greek world throughout the best days of Hellas.

Just as the cultured Greek brought the intellectual domain of life within the province of morals, so likewise did he with the æsthetic. It was not merely his æsthetic sense which was offended by ugliness in form, but also his moral sense. To the Greek mind, to love beauty, sensuous and spiritual, and to be beautiful was synonymous with being good. “He who is beautiful to look upon,” says Sappho, “is good; and who is good will soon be beautiful.” “The beautiful,” comments Wuttke in speaking of this phase of Greek ethics, “is per se the good; in enjoying and creating the beautiful man is moral.” “The ‘good’ and the ‘beautiful’”--thus G. Lowes Dickinson sums up the Greek view--“were one and the same thing; that is the first and the last word of the Greek ideal.”

This identification by the Greeks of goodness with beauty is one of the most important matters in Greek ethics. For the conception was not with them an inert thing. Greek civilization in all its phases was in a great measure the expression of this conviction. The Greeks filled the world with beautiful things because to create beauty was with them an ethical as well as an æsthetic impulse and necessity. They felt the holiness of beauty.

All the particular requirements of Greek morality, some of the most important of which we have now briefly commented upon, are summed up in the formula, Live conformably to nature. The idea here embodied of what constitutes man’s full duty springs naturally from the doctrine that man’s nature is essentially good. If that nature be good, then virtuousness will consist in the well-rounded symmetrical development of all the capacities of body and mind. Pindar’s profound injunction, “Be what you are,” embodies the essence of the teachings of the Greek moralists. They taught that man fulfills his destiny by becoming what he is in his innermost being--by complete self-realization.

III. LIMITATIONS AND DEFECTS OF THE IDEAL

A chief defect of Greek ethics was its aristocratic spirit. So many were the classes excluded in whole or in part from the moral field that Greek morality was almost as much a class morality as that of Brahmanic India. Entire races and classes were as completely outside the moral pale as is the Indian pariah. It was only the higher cultured classes of citizens who, the moral philosophers taught, were capable of attaining the noblest virtues and living the truly moral life. All others were regarded as living on a semimoral or nonmoral animal plane of existence.

Thus throughout a great part of the historic period the Greeks virtually excluded all non-Greek peoples from the moral domain. They regarded these non-Hellenic folk about as we regard animals, or as many a few generations ago looked upon the black race. They thought it right for them to make unprovoked war upon such people and to make slaves of those they might capture. Aristotle taught that to hunt barbarians for the purpose of getting slaves was just as right and proper as to hunt animals for food or sacrifice. In a word, non-Greeks were regarded as being practically outside the pale of humanity.

The moral status of the slave in ancient Greece was determined by the fact that slaves were usually barbarians. Since as non-Greeks they were already outside the moral pale, it followed naturally that as slaves they had no standing in the court of morals. Their status was almost the same as that of domestic animals. The Greek master never felt that he owed any moral duties to his slaves, though kind and merciful treatment of them was enjoined by the philosophers and moralists. According to Aristotle, the relation of slave and master is a purely natural one, like that of body and soul. He calls slaves “living instruments.”

Out of the family relationships arise a large part of the duties making up the moral code of the modern Western world, while in the atmosphere of the domestic circle are nourished many of what we regard as the most sacred and attractive of the virtues. Now these family virtues, which we esteem so highly, found only a very subordinate place in the Greek ideal of character, for the reason that the family, like the clan and the tribe, was almost absorbed by the city. In Sparta the family and family life practically disappeared. In Plato’s ideal republic the family is sacrificed to the state.

The status of the wife in most of the Greek cities was a low one. She was practically one of the slaves. Ethical sentiment, as was true of the sentiment of romantic love, seems to have been almost wholly lacking in the marriage relation.

Infancy, in its earliest stages, was in general never brought beneath the protecting ægis of the moral sentiment. In the practice of the exposure of ill-formed, weak, defective, or unpromising newborn infants the Greeks, like the Romans, never advanced much beyond the standpoint of barbarians. This abandonment or destruction by parents of their offspring did not offend the common conscience. Even the philosophers and moralists saw nothing in the practice to censure. Evidence of how general the custom was, is afforded by various tales and dramas which turn on the rescue of the hero in his infancy after having been cast out to die. The story of King Œdipus is typical.

In this connection a word must be said regarding chastity. We find here one of the most serious defects of Greek morality. The virtue of chastity was given a very low place, hardly any place at all, in the Greek ideal of character. It was the undervaluing of this virtue that without doubt was one of the contributing causes of the decline and early decay of Greek civilization.

Another equally grave defect in the Greek moral character was lack of respect for the aged. Save at Sparta and Athens, age was not reverenced in ancient Greece. In this respect the Greeks stood almost on a level with most primitive races.

A marked characteristic of Greek ethical feeling was a deep prejudice against manual and commercial occupations as unworthy of freemen. Aristotle taught that there was “no room for moral excellence” in the trades and employments of artisans, traders, and laborers. Even artists like Phidias and Polyclitus were looked upon as “miserable handicraftsmen.” Plato in his Laws says: “He who in any way shares in the illiberality of retail trade may be indicted by any one who likes for dishonoring his race, before those who are judged to be first in virtue; and if he appear to throw dirt upon his father’s house,--by an unworthy occupation,--let him be imprisoned for a year and abstain from that sort of thing.” In some cities the person who engaged in trade was disqualified for citizenship, and in others no mechanic or field laborer could enter the place where the freemen met.

This feeling that labor is degrading came in after the Homeric Age, with the rule of the oligarchs, and was the natural and inevitable outcome of slavery. The effect of slavery is to make work seem ignoble and servile, and to cause the industrial virtues to assume a low place in the moral ideal, or to drop out of it entirely. The high place assigned the industrial virtues in the moral ideals of ancient Persia and Israel was due probably as largely to the subordinate place which slavery held in those countries as to the influence of religious doctrines and physical environment.

Another ground for the feeling was that hard, coarse work destroys the suppleness and mars the beauty and symmetry of the body; and this to the Greek way of thinking was sufficient reason why the freeman--to use Plato’s phrase--“should abstain from that sort of thing.”

Still another reason for the feeling that the retail trades were unworthy of citizens was the conviction that this kind of business had “a strong tendency to make men bad.” The small merchants and traders in Greece certainly bore a very bad reputation, and it is probable that the public disesteem of their occupation and the contempt in which they themselves were held had the same sinister influence upon them that the similar feeling in Old Japan had upon the petty trader there.

In nothing did the ordinary Greek moral consciousness differ more widely from the Christian than in the matter of forgiving injuries. This was one of the virtues brought in by Christianity which to the Greek mind was foolishness. To the Greek the taking of revenge upon an enemy was a duty. A man should render himself useful to his friends and dangerous to his enemies. The Greek orator, in order to justify his resentment toward any one, always took pains to show that he had been injured in some way by the person, and hence had good ground for wishing to do him evil. Indeed, one who neglected to take revenge upon his personal enemy was looked upon as a weak, pusillanimous creature.

But out of this virtue of revenge, paradoxically enough, arose the virtue of forgiveness; for revenge was limited by the requirements of the virtue of moderation or self-restraint. The person seeking revenge for an injury must set reasonable bounds to his thirst for vengeance. Hence when the age of reflection came there were teachers of spiritual insight who, regarding the matter from this point of view, saw forgiveness to be a virtue because it required in the one forgiving great self-conquest and self-control.

Another serious defect in the ordinary Greek moral standard was the low place assigned to the virtue of veracity. The Greeks, in marked contrast to the ancient Persians, had only a very feeble sense of the sanctity of the plighted word. Untruthfulness was ingrained in the nation. The Homeric heroes were full of guile and deceit, and the historic Greeks were little better. They had throughout the ancient world a well-earned reputation for disregard of promises and oaths. When it seemed to them necessary to lie in order to gain a desired end, then lying appeared to them justifiable. Scythas, tyrant of Zancle, if we may judge from a story told by Herodotus, was the only Greek who kept his word to Darius. This man was in exile at Susa. He obtained from the king permission, presumably on parole, to visit Sicily, and honorably returned to Persia. The conduct of Scythas in this matter must have been exceptional, for, in the words of Herodotus, “him Darius regarded the most upright of all the Greeks to whom he afforded a refuge.”

The great moral teachers of Greece recognized this defect in the moral character of their countrymen and sought to correct it by extolling the virtue of truthfulness. After the Persian war a class of men arose, historians and philosophers, whom Schmidt, because of their reverence for truth, calls the ancestors of the modern men of science. Thucydides had the same sense of the sanctity of exactness in statement of fact as has the historian of to-day. Socrates died rather than cloak the truth before his judges. Aristotle said, “Friends and truth are both dear to us, but it is a sacred duty to prefer the truth.”

IV. THE MORAL EVOLUTION

The historical starting point of the moral evolution in Greece is the morality of the Homeric Age. This morality we find incarnated in the heroes of the time, Achilles and Odysseus, for, as Wundt observes, “the inmost moral convictions of a people are shown far more plainly in the character of its heroes than in its gods.”

The qualities of character with which, as worthy of admiration, the poet invests his heroes show that, notwithstanding the great advance already achieved in many of the arts of life, in morality the Greeks of this age were still in some respects on a level with savages. Thus the poet extols the “good Autolycus” for his skill in thievery and perjury. But stealing and lying, as with uncivilized people generally, to be proper and right, must be adroit and “for the good of friends and the harm of enemies.” Piracy was an honorable occupation. The bodies of enemies slain in battle were maltreated, as is the wont of savages. Conceptions of deity were crude and unethical, the gods being represented as capricious, profligate, partial, and unjust.

But there was a sound core in this morality. Clan virtues were firmly inwrought in character. The virtue of loyalty to comrades was strong; the ethical qualities of courage and self-devotion for the common good, and of hospitality to strangers were well developed; and the domestic virtues of chastity and constancy in woman are portrayed in such a way as to show that, if not common, they were at least held in high esteem and reverence.

From the Homeric Age onward there was a progressive purification of the moral feelings. One evidence of this ethical progress is found in the repudiation by the later moral consciousness of the primitive myths of the gods. These tales, as we have just noted, were coarse, sensual, and immoral. The philosophers of the sixth and following centuries, and the poets of this later time, denounced these stories as unworthy and unethical conceptions of deity. Pythagoras is said, upon his return from Hades, to have reported seeing there the souls of Homer and Hesiod undergoing punishment for what they had said of the gods. Pindar purges the tales of their grosser immoral elements. Others sought to relieve the poets of the charge of impiety by reading the myths as allegories. The Sophists and Stoics moralized them, giving them an ethical aim and purpose. Plato, in reprobating what Hesiod says of Uranus, declared it “the greatest of all lies in high places.” He would strike out from the poets all passages in which they told these lies about the gods and heroes, before allowing the boys and men to read them. In the hands of the later Attic tragedians the whole traditionary religious mythology was spiritualized and given a deeper ethical content and meaning.

This purifying of the Greek moral consciousness finds an exact parallel in what is taking place in the modern Christian world respecting the conceptions of deity found in the early chronicles of the Hebrew Bible and transmitted as a religious bequest to the European peoples. These ideas of God are rejected by the truer moral consciousness of to-day as the crude notions of a gross and morally immature age. Just as this modern rejection of these unworthy primitive conceptions of the divine character register our own moral advance, so does the rejection, by the later Greek thinkers and teachers, of the Homeric and Hesiodic conceptions of the gods register the advance in ethical thought in Greece during the interval that separates the era of these poets from the Solonian and Platonic Ages.

In an earlier chapter we spoke of the continuance theory of life after death, and of the retribution theory as marking an advance upon this in ethical feeling. At the opening of the historical period in Greece we find the primitive unethical continuance theory in existence, but in a state of transition into the retribution theory. The early Greek Hades, like the Babylonian Arallu and the Hebrew Sheol, was a place where moral distinctions were not recognized. The same phantom life was the lot of all alike who went down to the world of shadows. The Elysian Fields, it is true, had already been created, but these were simply a sort of aristocratic heaven, a “Greek Valhalla,” the abode of the great heroes of the race; and Tartarus also had been called into existence, but this was a prison house only for those who had incurred the special enmity of the gods. The fables of Tantalus, Ixion, and the Danaïdes show that the belief in an after life had no ethical significance for the masses.

But already in Pindar these ideas of the after life, through virtue of an ethical necessity, have undergone great changes. Just as the poet moralizes the Homeric conception of the gods, so does he moralize the Homeric conception of the underworld. Alongside the continuance theory we find now the retribution theory. The life beyond the grave is conceived as a life of rewards and punishments. The Elysian Fields have been “opened to moral worth,” and a tribunal, called into existence by a growing moral consciousness like that which created the Egyptian Judgment of the Dead, has been set up, and Rhadamanthus apportions the destiny of souls according to their merit and demerit. From the Persian war on, the life after death had ethical significance for all men, and not simply for exceptional cases. In the literature there are allusions in growing numbers to the retribution awaiting the wicked and the blessedness in store for those “unstained with vice.”

In Plato this moral evolution attains a stage almost identical with that reached by medieval Christian ethics. We find in the Republic a threefold division of the realm of the dead corresponding closely to the Schoolmen’s purgatory, heaven, and hell. Punishment is conceived as having for aim and end, in all save cases of abominable and incurable wickedness, the purification of earth-stained souls.

All these modifications in the topography, the classifications, and the arrangements of the underworld, like the similar changes effected by the modern spirit in the medieval conception of hell, were the work of a gradually clarifying moral sense, and bear witness to the progressive development of Greek ethical thought between the Homeric and the Alexandrian Age.

The early Greeks held a doctrine known as the Envy of the Gods. They imagined that the gods were envious of the great and prosperous. Hence they thought it was the envy of the gods which brought about the undoing of the great and powerful. Their prayer for a friend enjoying an unusual run of good fortune was, “May the gods not become envious.” We find this doctrine embodied in the Herodotean story of Crœsus, king of Lydia, whose long career of unbroken and dazzling prosperity ends at last in dreadful reverses and sudden downfall. The same belief colors the advice which Herodotus represents Artabanus, the uncle of Xerxes, as giving the king, who was meditating an attack on the Greek cities. The immoderate ambition of the king, in view of the envious nature of the gods, had awakened the apprehension of the old and experienced counselor, and he labored to dissuade the king from engaging in so vast a project. “Dost thou not notice,” said he, “how the lightning smites always the highest buildings and the tallest trees. Thus often the mighty host is overthrown by lightning sent by the jealous gods; for the gods are jealous of mortals, and will allow no one unduly to exalt himself.” There is here no suggestion of an ethical element. The envious gods overthrow things simply and solely because they are big and tall and cast them into the shade.

At a still later period the Athenian general Nicias gives memorable expression to this belief in his speech to his disheartened troops before Syracuse. He bade them take cheer from their wretched plight because the envious gods must certainly be disarmed by the sight of their woeful condition and would now pity and help.

But alongside this unethical doctrine of the Envy of the Gods the Greeks held another, which seems to have been simply a modification and outgrowth of the earlier crude conception of deity. This was the doctrine of Nemesis. There was here full recognition of the vicissitudes of human life. The great and the overpowerful are indeed destroyed by the gods,--there was no denying the fact,--but not merely because they are great, but because their greatness and their prosperity has made them self-confident, insolent, overbearing. In their blind arrogance they have overstepped the limits of moderation; hence their downfall wrought by the gods.

It was under the spell of this belief that Herodotus wrote his history of the Persian wars, although, as we have seen, he loved to rehearse stories which illustrated the doctrine of the envious nature of the gods. His narrative is in truth a great historical drama illustrating the moral order of the world and teaching the impressive lesson of how the gods punish presumptuous pride and overvaulting ambition. The historian prepares his pious readers for the final catastrophe by showing in vivid portrayal the transactions at the Hellespont. The swift current of the strait has broken the bridge of boats laid upon the waters by Xerxes. The all-powerful and audacious king orders that the sacred Hellespont be scourged with three hundred lashes, that fetters be cast into the rebellious waters, and that they be branded as a slave is marked with branding irons. All this is done, and the treacherous waters are cursed with blasphemous words.

Now follows quickly the tragic issue at Salamis of the vast undertaking, and the return passage of the Hellespont a few months later by the humbled and fugitive king. All this is the work of Nemesis, the punisher of those who have lifted up their hearts in insufferable pride and arrogance.

It is not alone in the dramatized history of Herodotus that we are able to trace the moral effects of the Persian wars in bringing into the foreground of the Greek consciousness the conception of Nemesis as the vindicator of the moral government of the world. “After the battle of Salamis,” in the words of the historian Abbott, “the instability of human greatness and the punishment of ‘insolence’ echoes as an undertone through all Greek thought.”

This deepened moral feeling of the nation found expression both in art and in the drama. The order given by the Athenians to Phidias to carve a statue of Nemesis as a memorial of the war was a sanction of that interpretation of the Persian overthrow which made it the work of the avenging goddess. But the fullest expression of this new ethical sentiment is found in Athenian tragedy. Æschylus was the representative of this moral awakening and advance. The doctrine of Nemesis colors all his dramas. He was the first to give to the legend of Niobe, originally merely a tale of the envy of Apollo, an ethical meaning as an instance of “retribution for presumptuous sin.” His imperishable tragedy Prometheus Bound makes the sufferings of the Titan to be but the just penalty of his presumption and self-will. His Agamemnon depicts with tragic intensity the awful vengeance with which the implacable goddess punishes unnatural crime. His Persians teaches how Nemesis humbles insolent pride and “Zeus tames excessive lifting up of heart.”

In the later Thucydides we meet with the same teaching concerning the moral government of the world. In a memorable passage of his History of the Peloponnesian War the historian becomes the moralist and gives his reader a tragic illustration of the workings of the law of Nemesis. Thucydides is approaching the chapter in his history which depicts the terrible catastrophe which befell the Athenians in Sicily. He skillfully foreshadows the coming tragedy by preluding his narrative of the Sicilian Expedition with an account of the arrogant and wicked conduct of the Athenians in driving the Melians from their island home and adding the stolen land to their own empire. This high-handed crime, like the impiety of the presumptuous Mede at the Hellespont, arouses the avenging Nemesis. The reader forecasts the future, and in the cruel fate of the Melians reads the doom of the Athenian army before Syracuse.

This moralizing of the primitive unethical conception of the gods as envious and unjust, and the evolving therefrom of the morally advanced doctrine of Nemesis, is an instructive illustration of how, as time passed, Greek ethical feeling was deepened and Greek ethical thought was purified and elevated through intellectual progress and the teachings of experience.

There was a still further evolution of Greek ethical thought along the line traced above. The mutations and tragedies of life,--terrible reverses of fortune, sudden loss of reputation and friends, irremediable ruin following great prosperity,--these things are by a truer moral insight recognized as the sign neither of the envy nor of the righteous anger of the gods, but of the divine pity and love. “The wholesomeness of punishment for the wrongdoer himself is the crown of Æschylean ethics.” Phidias taught the same lofty truth through carving the myth of Prometheus Unbound on the throne of his Olympian Zeus. It spoke, as no other scene wrought there, of the moral significance of suffering, of divine mercy and deliverance. And Plato’s philosophy accords with the Æschylean teaching that “Zeus has put in suffering sovereign instruction.” “Then this must be our notion of the just man,” he says, “that even when he is in poverty or sickness or any other seeming misfortune, all things will in the end work together for good to him in life and death.”

In this ethical interpretation of the vicissitudes of human life, of the miscarriage of ambitious plans, the wrecking of high hopes, the Greek thinkers reached at last the same elevated point of view that was attained by the great prophets of the Hebrew race.

In the ethics of war a similar though less marked development in moral feeling is traceable. Aside from the relapse into the practices of savagery under the malign influence of the Peloponnesian War, there was throughout Greek history a slow but steady amelioration of the primitive barbarities of warfare. In the Homeric Age moral feeling had hardly begun to exercise its influence in humanizing war and in setting limits to the rights of the conqueror. The Greeks of Homer were in some respects almost on the level of savages in their war practices. The life of the captive was in the hands of his captor, and he might be slain without offense to the common conscience. Women and children were, as a matter of course, appropriated by the conqueror or sold into slavery. Homer relates as something to be gloried in, how his hero Achilles dragged the body of Hector around the walls of Troy. Such an act of savagery evidently stirred in the poet’s listeners no feelings of reprobation.

In the historical period the mitigation of the barbarities of war was, after the protection of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, a chief object of the celebrated Amphictyonic League. The oath taken by the members of the league included the following engagement: “We will not destroy any Amphictyonic town, nor cut it off from running water, in war or in peace.” This was one of the most noteworthy efforts in antiquity to lay restraint upon the primitive license of war. Limits are set to the rights of the conqueror. War begins to have rules.

From the words which Thucydides puts into the mouth of the Platæans at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, we gather that at that time the common sentiment of Hellas condemned the slaughter of prisoners of war. At Athens this sentiment had found embodiment in the laws, which forbade the slaying of war captives. But under the demoralizing influences of the long and bitter struggle between Sparta and Athens, the little gain which had been made in the humanizing of war during the preceding centuries was lost. Prisoners of war were sold into slavery or killed without the least offense being given to the numbed conscience of Hellas. Even the terrible massacre, toward the end of the war, of the four thousand Athenian prisoners at Ægospotami, by the Spartan Lysander, awakened no protest in Greece at large. Never has “the moral damage of war” had a more tragic illustration.

During the century following the Peloponnesian War, however, there seems to have been a positive advance in this domain. In this period the grosser atrocities of war were in a measure mitigated by a growing humanitarian sentiment. But all efforts to humanize war seem to have been limited to wars between Greek and Greek. From first to last in Greek history war against barbarians was waged practically without the least mitigation of its primitive barbarities. It was the practice of Alexander the Great in his campaigns in Asia to massacre the men of non-Greek cities taken by assault, and to sell the women and children as slaves. We hear no protest, even on the part of the philosophers, against these atrocities so long as it is non-Greeks who are the victims of them.

But though the efforts of the Greeks to regulate and limit the rights of the conqueror were confined to wars of Greek against Greek, still these efforts are significant as a sign of an awakening ethical sentiment in this domain. This is a prophecy of a future day, distant though it be, when the growing conscience of mankind shall have rendered wars between civilized nations an impossible crime.

The common Greek conscience never condemned war in itself. There never sprang up in Greece an agitation like the Peace Movement of to-day in Christendom. How deeply ingrained in the Greek mind was the conviction that war is a part of the established order of things is shown by the fact that their treaties ending open hostilities were ordinarily drawn for a limited term of years. They were merely truces, as though peace were only an incident in international relations.

Even the philosophers regarded a state of war as the normal and natural relation of Hellenes and barbarians. Aristotle, as we have seen, taught that barbarians might, without moral scruple, be hunted like wild animals. Plato had no word of condemnation of war by Greek against non-Greek. But the Greeks had an uneasy feeling respecting the rightfulness of war between Greek and Greek; and there came a time when the best-instructed conscience of Greece positively denounced wars of this kind. Plato condemned wars between Hellenes and Hellenes as unnatural. This feeling had a kind of restraining influence upon the Greek cities, and there are many instances of arbitration in Greek history. Sometimes a single person of eminence acted as mediator; but oftener some city or league like the Delphian Amphictyony was chosen as the arbitrator. In the Hellenistic Age the Roman Senate frequently undertook the commission of arbitrating quarrels. The cities concerned were sometimes bound by oath or by a deposit of money to abide by the decision. Oftener, however, the decisions rendered, like those by the Hague Tribunal of to-day, depended for their execution upon the good will and honor of the states concerned. There are instances recorded where one or both of the parties refused to abide by the judgment of the arbitrator.

Various motives, it is true, were at work in these arbitration treaties, but the ethical motive was certainly operative to a greater or less degree. There was not lacking the feeling, vague though it may have been, which was later given explicit expression by Plato, that war between Greek and Greek was wrong and a crime against Hellenic civilization.

But the most interesting and instructive of all the measures taken by the Greeks to limit wars among themselves or to fence them away from a given district was the consecration, by common consent and agreement, of the land of Elis--wherein was situated the sacred Olympia--to perpetual peace and the establishment of a truce of forty days, embracing the festival period of the Olympian games, during which it was sacrilegious for one Greek city to make war upon another. With true vision the philosopher-historian Laurent sees in the little land of Elis, inviolable as a temple, a prophecy of the time when the whole earth shall be consecrated to perpetual peace--an ideal toward which humanity unceasingly advances.

From no other personage in history, aside from the founders of universal religions, has there flowed such a stream of moral influence as issued from the life and teachings of Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus. All the chief ethical systems of the Greco-Roman world were the development of germs found in his doctrines. The Cyrenaic and Eleatic, the Cynic, Stoic, and Epicurean, the Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Aristotelian systems had their sources here. The Stoic and Neoplatonic systems contributed important elements to early Christian ethics, while the Aristotelian system exercised a profound influence upon the scholastic ethics of medieval times. In the contribution which these various systems, especially the Stoic, have made to the world’s common fund of ethical thought and feeling is found in large part the measure of the ethical debt which modern civilization owes to Hellenism.

Socrates’ aim was to replace the artificial conventional conscience of his contemporaries by a natural rational conscience; in other words, to replace customary communal morality by reflective individual morality. His fundamental doctrine was that virtue is dependent upon knowledge; indeed he almost or quite made knowledge and virtue one and the same thing. He maintained that one can no more see the right without doing it than one can see a proposition to be true without believing it. Therefore without knowledge--insight--there can be no true virtue.

But clearness of vision requires the purification of the intellect, the getting rid of all false intellectual and moral notions; hence the aim and purpose of Socrates’ unique method of cross-examination was to show his interlocutor the baseless and mutually contradictory character of his inherited chance-acquired ideas and beliefs, and to bring him to that self-knowledge which is the beginning of real knowledge.

This practical identification by Socrates of knowledge and virtue, this doctrine of his that it is impossible that one should not will to do that which he sees to be good and right, overlooks the saddest and yet most certain fact of human experience, namely, that perversity of the human will which causes man though seeing the good to choose the evil. But it is a theory of human nature which, in the case of such happily constituted souls as Socrates, in whom the authority of conscience is sacrosanct and inviolable, is nearly or quite accordant with fact. With such persons to see an act to be right is to do it. With them dissonance between knowledge and volition is a moral impossibility.

Right here, however, a just criticism may be made of the Socratic philosophy. It is true that without self-knowledge, without the fulfilling of the Delphian requirement, “Know thyself,” one cannot be truly moral. But neither Socrates nor the Greek philosophers in general recognized that this self-knowledge comes through right living rather than through right thinking. As Goethe discerningly observes, man comes to know himself not through reflection but through conduct: “Do your duty and thou wilt know what thou art.”

And for the common moral life of the world there is a profound teaching in this Socratic doctrine which makes knowledge the spring of virtue. There is in knowledge, in insight, in the clear recognition of the relation of man’s highest good to virtue, an impelling force and authority. As the world advances in true knowledge, it will advance in true morality. The Renaissance is ever the precursor of the Reformation. It is this fact which should make optimists of us all, for the unceasing advance of the world in knowledge is well assured.

In the ethical system of Socrates we have a good illustration of the truth that great men are the product of their age. With all his originality and profound spiritual insight, Socrates could not and did not rise much above the plane of the common moral consciousness of his contemporaries. He stood on essentially Greek ground. His morality was the morality of his time and place. In his practical code of morals he made the Greek virtue of self-control or moderation a cardinal virtue; he laid the Greek emphasis upon the civic virtues, dying rather than disobey or evade the decree of his city; he entertained the common Greek ideas respecting the family and the domestic virtues; he saw nothing to disapprove in the life of the hetæra; he viewed the beautiful from a standpoint wholly Greek, almost identifying beauty with goodness; he was thoroughly Greek in the aristocratic tendency of his ethical teachings, making the practice of true virtue the prerogative of the cultured class alone; he had the ordinary Greek conscience in regard to slavery; and he never detached himself from that narrow Greek prejudice which saw in the Hellenes the elect race. He never proclaimed, as did many a later Greek and Roman moralist, the essential unity of the human race.

Socrates made virtue and man’s moral nature the subject of philosophic reflection. His pupil, Plato, systematized his master’s teachings, and, reducing these and the common ethical notions of his time to scientific form laid the basis of the science of ethics.

Plato agreed with Socrates in teaching that to know the good is necessarily to seek it. He accordingly makes wisdom the first of the virtues, by wisdom meaning insight, the clear recognition of what constitutes the highest good. Issuing from this primary virtue of wisdom, like a stream from a fountain, are the virtues of courage, temperance, and justice.

From wisdom comes courage, for perfect knowledge of good and evil casts out fear; and moderation, for knowledge of higher and lower, of the penalty that awaits all excess, leads to prudence and self-control; and justice, for knowledge of one’s relations to one’s fellows creates consideration for the rights of others. Plato here simply systematizes and reduces to scientific form those various virtues which the common Greek conscience recognized as constituting moral excellence.

Particularly noteworthy is Plato’s doctrine that virtue in the state is the same as virtue in the individual. There is need of emphasis being laid anew upon this teaching at the present time, when the disciples of Machiavelli would give fresh vogue to the doctrine of a double standard of morality, one for the individual and another for the state. The modern world might well sit at Plato’s feet and learn that virtue is ever one and the same, and that the moral law can no more be traversed with impunity by a nation than by a single individual.

In many of his ethical teachings Plato anticipated and deeply influenced Christian doctrines. He has been called the precursor of the Fathers of the Church. “His ideas on virtue,” as Denis observes, “take us far from Greece and antiquity; they seem addressed rather to the saints and anchorites than to the citizens of Sparta and Athens.” His doctrines that the way of approach to God is through contemplation; that withdrawal from the turmoil of public life is a furtherance of the true life; that the body is a “prison house” of the soul; that the soul is immortal and that there awaits it in the after life recompense for deeds done in the flesh; that expiation for sin is an ethical necessity; that punishment is not a deterrent and restraint but a remedy that restores to health the sin-diseased soul--all these ideas and principles were in exact accord with the Christian moral consciousness, and through St. Augustine and other Fathers of the Church came to enrich and reënforce the ethical system of the monastic and the papal Church of the medieval age.

Perhaps what is the most admirable of Plato’s teachings is embodied in this petition: “And may I, being of sound mind, do to others as I would that they should do to me.” The significance of this lies in the fact that it is a prayer, and that the petitioner asks that he may be of sound mind when he reflects on what he would like to have others do to him.

Yet notwithstanding the loftiness and nobility of much of Plato’s ethical thought, still, like Socrates, he stood almost wholly on Greek ground. His ethics is scarcely more than a justification of the common Greek morality of his time. He destroys the family in the interest of the state; he approves of the exposition of ill-formed, unpromising infants; he makes morality to be a class thing--only select and cultured souls are with him capable of genuine virtue. He accepts slavery as a necessary institution of the state; he practically shuts out the non-Greek world from the sphere of morality; and with the common Greek he believes that to do evil to one’s enemies is an imperative duty. Nor does Plato, like Hebrew seer, rise high enough above the general Greek viewpoint to discern the great law of moral progress, and to prevision the historical goal--ethical world unity.

Aristotle makes Plato’s classification of the virtues the basis of his well-rounded system of ethics. In one important respect, however, he differs from Plato; he did not believe that knowledge of the right necessarily leads to its practice. He recognized the fact that man though knowing the good often perversely follows evil.

The great defect of Aristotelian ethics is its failure to rise to the ethical conception of collective humanity. In the moral inequality of men, which he assumes as the presupposition of his ethics, he even exaggerated the common Greek view. He divided men so rigorously into classes with varying grades of moral capacity that his moral system was ethically like the caste system of the Indian Brahmans. To affirm the moral equality of men seemed to him to be a species of treason against the true humanity, a crime against Greek civilization.

According to Aristotle the slave was a being so morally different from the freeman as to constitute practically another species. He was not wholly incapable of virtue, but could practice only such servile virtues as obedience and humility. The last, though a virtue in a slave, was in a freeman an unworthy weakness.

Barbarians were slaves by nature. Hence it was right for the Greeks to make war on them and reduce them to slavery, because “for that end they were born.” Plato had in his Laws accepted slavery as a political necessity; Aristotle proclaimed it as a part of the natural order of things. This doctrine had far-reaching historical consequences. Aristotle’s declaration that slaves are merely animated instruments, are men incapable of virtue, worked as powerfully in destroying ancient slavery as the obiter dictum of Chief Justice Taney of the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Dred Scott case, that negro slaves have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, worked for the destruction of negro slavery in the Southern states. For, as Professor Denis says, by pushing too far the argument, by founding slavery on natural right, Aristotle provoked thought and protest, and led the Stoics to reject with indignation his theories and to proclaim the moral equality of master and slave, of Greek and barbarian.

Aristotle’s ethics exercised very little influence either upon the actual moral life or the ethical speculations of antiquity; but in the medieval time it came to exert a profound influence upon Christian ethics. The schoolmen made it the trunk into which they grafted Christian morals--with incongruous results, as we shall see later.

The political revolution in Hellas in the fourth century B.C. had deep import for Greek morality. That century saw the triumph of Macedonia over the Greek cities. This meant the triumph of despotic monarchy over city democracy. This revolution in the political realm meant a great revolution in the realm of morals, for the reason that, as we have seen, the old Greek ideal of excellence was largely based upon the relation of the individual to the state. With the loss of Greek liberty the very basis of the Greek ideal of character was removed, and the virtues of the type tended to disappear.

In the despotic monarchies of the successors of Alexander there was little room for the growth and exercise of those virtues of citizenship which had been nourished in the free air of the ancient city. The virtues now in vogue and fostered by the new monarchical régime were no longer those of the patriot citizen and the patriot warrior, but those of the pliant subject, the servile courtier, and the mercenary soldier. In Plutarch’s Lives, out of the twenty heroes and worthies whom the biographer selected as the noblest representatives of the virtues most highly esteemed by the Greeks, we find only two who lived after the general loss of Greek freedom, and these were men whose characters were formed in the cities of the Achæan League, in which the ancient liberties of Hellas were maintained till the rise of the Roman power. It could not be otherwise, so completely were the fortunes of the Greek moral ideal bound up with the fortunes of the Greek city state.

But besides the decay of the free city there were other causes contributing to the moral decadence which marked Hellenism in the Alexandrian Age. The close contact of Greek culture with the corrupt society of the Orient had disastrous consequences for Greek morality. The principal courts of the Hellenistic East were plague spots of moral contagion. The virus of gross sensual immorality was communicated to Greece, and Greek society was fatally infected. The Orontes emptied into the Ilissus and the Eurotas, as later it emptied into the Tiber.

And still another contributing cause of the moral decline in Hellas was the sudden acquisition of vast individual and social wealth through the conquest and exploitation of the East. The morals of no age or people have been proof against suddenly acquired riches. One explanation of this is that new and untried sources of pleasure, most often illicit sensuous pleasure, are opened up, and the temptation to selfish indulgence is irresistible, coming as it does before self-restraint, in the face of these unaccustomed solicitations, has become a habit.

Still another cause of the moral degeneracy of the age, one which we shall have occasion to speak of more at length a little further on, is to be sought in the fact that the period was one of transition in religion as well as in politics and social relations. Greek morality was, it is true, based in the main upon the old system of independent city life. Yet Greek morality was in a way braced by religion and even in part based upon it. Now in the Alexandrian Age the religious system of Hellas was undergoing a process of disintegration. Men were losing faith in their ancestral gods. Philosophic skepticism was widespread. Inevitably this movement in the religious realm caused all that part of the moral system dependent in any degree upon the old religious doctrines and teachings to weaken and crumble away.

There were, however, two ethical products of the Hellenistic Age which render that period one of the most important of all epochs in the moral evolution of humanity. These were Stoicism and Epicureanism. At first blush it may seem strange that out of the same environment there should arise two systems of life and thought so strongly contrasted. But both of these systems are perfectly natural, indeed inevitable, products of an epoch, such as the Alexandrian Age was, of transition and moral decadence. In such times strong, self-reliant, deeply moral natures ever seek refuge in the philosophy and creed of Zeno, while those of less sturdy faith in the moral order of the world, of a less strong sense of duty, turn to the philosophy and creed of Epicurus.

Springing up in Greece as an offshoot of the Socratic philosophy just after the death of Alexander, Stoicism became the creed of the select spirits of the age. The crowning virtues of the moral ideal it held aloft were self-control, imperturbability, the patient endurance of the ills of life. Amidst the wreck of worlds one must stand unmoved and erect.

In the very rigid restraint it placed upon the appetites, passions, and emotions the Stoic ideal of character differed widely from the ordinary Greek ideal. It approached here the ascetic type. However, in general the Stoic type of character was closely related to the historic ideal of the Greek race. The Stoics adopted the fundamental maxim of classical Greek morality, namely, that man should live conformably to nature. They possessed the common Greek consciousness in the light esteem in which they held the family relations and duties. They were aristocratic in their moral sympathies and looked upon the multitude with disdain. They regarded the gentler virtues, compassion and forgiveness, as weaknesses, and ranked humility as a virtue only in the slave.

Because of the weak sense of duty possessed in general by the Greeks, the Stoic ideal of character did not become a really important factor in the ethical life of the ancient world till after its adoption by the finer spirits, like Marcus Aurelius, among the Romans, to whose sense of “the majesty of duty” the ideal made strong and effective appeal. It never influenced the masses, but for several centuries it gave moral support and guidance to the best men of the Roman race.

Alongside Stoicism grew up Epicureanism, which made pleasure, not gross sensuous pleasure, but rational refined enjoyment, the chief good, and hence the pursuit of pleasure “the highest wisdom and morality.” But this philosophy made pleasurable feeling dependent upon tranquillity of mind. To secure this mental repose, one must get rid of fear of the gods and of death. These ignoble and disquieting fears Epicurus and his disciples sought to banish by teaching that the gods do not concern themselves with human affairs, and that death ends all for man.

Epicureanism in its moral code was at one with the common Greek consciousness in making moderation or prudence a cardinal virtue; but it differed radically from the ordinary Greek mode of thought in its depreciation and neglect of the civic virtues. Hence the system was at once a symptom and a cause of the decay of the Greek city state and of the old moral ideal which was based so largely upon it.

The philosophy of Epicurus, as we have already said, is the natural product of an age of transition and social dislocation. It offers an ideal of life which is eagerly adopted by those unable to combat trouble, by those to whom duty does not appeal as something dignified and majestic. Hence in the decadent and unsettled age of the Roman Empire it became the rule of life of large numbers of the cultured classes of society, and must be regarded as one of the disintegrating agencies of Greco-Roman civilization.

A general view of the society of the Hellenistic world toward the opening of the Christian era discloses the fact that the moral evolution so long in progress has effected such changes in the Greek moral consciousness as to render this ethical movement an important preparation for the incoming of the moral ideal of Christianity. These changes are especially to be observed in the growth of humanitarian sentiment and in a broadening of the moral sympathies.

The Greeks, compared with the Romans, were naturally a humane folk. When it was proposed to introduce at Athens the gladiatorial games, the orator Demonax told the people that they should first tear down the ancestral altar to Pity, a shrine which, in the words of Lecky, “was venerated throughout the ancient world as the first great assertion among mankind of the supreme sanctity of mercy.” One of the motives of Pythagoras in forbidding the use of meat as food was, seemingly, to inspire a horror of shedding blood, even that of an animal. The laws of Athens permitted no punishment more severe than a painless death.

This natural humaneness of the Greek spirit deepened as the centuries passed. Contrasted with the Periclean Age the Platonic Age shows, Professor Mahaffy affirms, “a greater gentleness and softness, ... a nearer approach to the greater humanity of Christian teaching.” We have already noted this movement in the domain of war practices and customs, where it found expression in the amelioration of the gross, archaic barbarities of primitive warfare. In the social sphere the progressive evolution is evidenced by the growing mildness of slavery and the frequency of the manumission of slaves.

The broadening movement ran parallel with the humanitarian. Classical Greek morality, as we have seen, was narrow and racial. Now one of the most important facts in the moral evolution of Hellas was the broadening of the moral sympathies, especially during the three centuries immediately preceding our era. This development is connected closely with the great expansion movement which followed the conquests of Alexander and which resulted in the Hellenization of the East. Everywhere the Greeks came in close contact with various peoples upon whom they had been accustomed to look with aversion or disdain. Ancient prejudices were dispelled, race barriers were leveled, and the moral sympathies overspread wide areas from which they had hitherto been excluded by ignorance and race egotism.

It would doubtless be unhistorical to represent this movement as anything more than a tendency--a dawning recognition by select spirits of the ethical kinship of all men, and the coextension of the moral law with the human race. It may, however, rightly be compared with that broadening of the moral feelings which we have traced among the people of Israel, and which resulted in a morality at first as narrow and exclusive as that of the Greeks, widening at last into the ethical universalism of the great teachers of the nation.

The widening movement was represented, and was given its chief impetus, by the Stoics. The Stoic ideal of character differed from the ordinary Greek ideal especially in its cosmopolitanism. Influenced by the spirit of the age in which it had birth, it ignored the old distinction between Greek and non-Greek and proclaimed the essential brotherhood of man. The Stoic regarded the world and not his native city as his fatherland. The Cynics, whom we may regard as extreme Stoics, looked upon city patriotism as a narrow prejudice and refused to give love of one’s city a place among the virtues. Just as the Greek age was merging into the Greco-Roman the broadening movement found its noblest representative in Plutarch, “the last of the Greeks.” His chief characteristics were his broad interests and his universal moral sympathies. He had moved far away from the common Greek standpoint. He had emancipated himself from the tyranny of the common Greek prejudices. Under the influences of his time he had become a cosmopolitan. To him the Greek was no longer an elect race. His moral sympathies embraced all mankind. His was almost a Christian conscience, save as to the purely theological virtues.

This enlargement of the intellectual and moral outlook of the Greek world presaged the dawn of a new epoch in the moral evolution of humanity. It made easier for many the acceptance of the Gospel teachings of human brotherhood and universal love. Christian ethics was largely debtor to the cosmopolitan spirit of Greek culture, especially as embodied in the Stoic ideal of moral excellence.

To trace further this moral development in the ancient world we must now turn from following its course among the Greeks to follow it among that kindred people, the Romans, who, through the political unification of the world, reënforced this growing universalism in the moral domain, and thereby reached that ethical conception of collective humanity which Israel had reached through spiritual intuition, and Hellas through philosophical reflection and widening culture.