CHAPTER III

Political Thought before the Sophists

*

FROM HOMER TO SOLON

It is a fashion among Greek historians nowadays to draw parallels between the history of ancient Greece and that of the modern world. We read of the Greek ‘Middle Ages’, the Greek ‘Reformation’, the Greek ‘Renaissance’. Historians differ in the parallels they draw; and while one may compare the whole period of the classical age of Greece, down to the end of the fifth century, with the medieval period of our history, on the ground that both began in migrations of tribes and both ended in ‘the discovery of the world and of man’, another may compare the early period of Greek history, before the dawn of light in the days of Solon, with the period of our Middle Ages, and place the period of ‘Reformation’ and ‘Renaissance’ in the sixth century. If we follow the latter comparison, we may say that the political thought of the Greek Middle Ages is to be found in Homer and Hesiod, who, indeed, are its only writers. Homer is sometimes quoted as a believer in the divine right of monarchy:

1

But the lines refer only to command in war, and the words are spoken by Odysseus to a disordered army, which he is seeking to reduce to obedience to its commander-in-chief. The Homeric King has his title as an officer of the community. All the chieftains of a stem bear the name of ‘kings’, and all claim divine descent: the King can only be, and only is, distinguished from his fellows by the fact that he is the appointed officer of the whole community. Already, in Homeric days, the tribe is thus its own sovereign, and its nominal ruler is accredited to his position as its organ and representative. While Homer, in this sense, recognizes monarchy, Hesiod only knows the chieftaincy of many βασιλες. He rebukes in advance the ‘sophistic’ view held by the ‘kings’ of his generation; and to their philosophy, ‘Better be wicked than just’, he answers by an appeal to divine retribution.1

A new era dawned in the first days of Solon (circ. 600 B.C.). An economic crisis, of which the first mutterings may perhaps be detected in the verse of Hesiod, had visited Greece in the seventh century. The land of the poor had been eaten by mortgages and annexed by their wealthy neighbours; a new temper and new laws had to be found for Greece if chaos was to be avoided. The new temper was preached by Delphi: the new laws were found by law-givers like Solon. The preaching of Delphi was the inspiration of what is sometimes called the Greek Reformation. About 600 B.C. Delphi tore itself away from the tribe of the Phocians, and became a church-state. The oracle of Delphi was famous; its priests had an old tradition of their god, Apollo, as the inventor of purification from the guilt of blood: and they widened that tradition until they made him the interpreter of Greek ethics and the exponent of Greek law.² The gist of the ethical teaching of the oracle was the need of moderation. The beauty of temperance – the need of remembering that a bound is set to all things, which they may not overpass; that (as Pindar, echoing Delphi, sang³) ‘the way beyond the pillars of Hercules cannot be trod by the feet of wise men or fools’ – these were its lessons. The lust of gain, which had wrought all the past trouble, must come under rule and regimen: ‘nothing in excess’ must be, for the future, the motto of life. Thus was established a tradition which was to last long and to sink deep in Greek life – a tradition reinforced by the Pythagorean doctrine of Limit, and expounded in its classical form in the Aristotelian doctrine of the Mean.

If Apollo was the interpreter of ethics, he was also the exponent of law; and the law-givers, whose activity is coincident with the Greek Reformation, sought to translate into practice the Delphic lessons of limit and moderation. Later tradition spoke of Seven Sages, of whom Solon is the only historical figure; and it ascribed to the Seven a career of political activity, and something of a political philosophy couched in the form of proverbs – as Plato says – in which some facet of truth, taught by experience or discerned by inquisitive eyes, was permanently preserved. The ‘sayings of the Seven Sages’ are, indeed, largely ethical; but scattered among their ethical sayings we find political truths such as ‘Office will show the stuff of which a man is made.’1 Plato tells us that the fruits of their wisdom were dedicated by the Seven in congress to the temple of Apollo at Delphi,² thus attesting a tradition of their connection with the teaching of the god; and the Amphictyons are said to have inscribed their sayings on the temple-walls, so that they seemed to acquire something of the sanctity of a divine revelation. ‘In these celebrated names we have social philosophy in its early and infantile state.’³ Like the social philosophy of the Seven Sages, the political activity of the historical law-givers of the Solonian age followed the inspiration of Delphi. Their aim, so far as we can judge from the records of the work of Solon, was to apply the lessons of limit and moderation to the sphere of social and political life, and ‘to restore the unity of the State by restricting the use of wealth’.⁴ Solon sought to introduce into a State, torn by the dissensions of rich and poor, the ideal of social equality. He sought to put down the mighty from exerting the power of their wealth without limit, and he did what he could to exalt the poor. On the one hand, he cancelled, by his ‘Seisachtheia’, the debts accumulated on mortgage by the poor peasantry; he fixed a limit to the extent of landed properties; and he restricted by sumptuary laws the right of the wealthy to flaunt their wealth. On the other hand, he attempted to re-establish farmers as free-holders on their farms; and by giving facilities for foreigners to settle in Attica in order to exercise some skilled craft he encouraged the rise of industry, which was to prove, in the long run, the salvation of the poor, and to rescue them finally from the dependence and misery of a purely agrarian regime. In these, and in other ways, he sought to institute social equality. The humanity of Attic law, it has been said, reflects his mild and pious temper. To protect the weak and the needy he allowed any Athenian citizen to undertake without risk, on another’s behalf, a prosecution for a criminal offence; and herein he took a long step towards the institution of sure and even-handed justice. His ‘law of associations’ is also noteworthy.

‘He laid down the principle that an association with a common cult was entitled to give itself statutes, whose validity for the members of the association, the State would recognise, so far as they did not conflict with its laws. The law included even privateering and shipping companies, and the mention of the former proves clearly its antiquity. Here is erected the principle of freedom of associations; and it is significant that the Digest goes back to Solon’s law.’1

But the work of Solon went further. It was his purpose, as we learn from his own elegiac poems, in which he prepared and vindicated his work, to institute a general rule of balanced equality (or ‘isonomy’), under which no class could either parade a claim of social superiority or enjoy undue political privilege.

‘I gave the people such power as sufficed, neither taking from their due honour, nor giving yet more than was due: I gave heed that men who had influence and were famous for their wealth should suffer nothing unseemly: I stood, with my shield held aloft, to guard both the rich and the poor, nor did I permit either to triumph wrongfully.’

To one thinking in modern terms, it is natural to say that Solon was at once a legal reformer and a constitution-maker. The distinction is really foreign to Solon’s age and to Greek history in general. He did not make, and there never existed at Athens, a separate constitutional law. What he did was to enact the set of rules, which have just been described, as instructions for the officials of the State, intended to control their administrative action. Treating the officials as the servants of the law, he defined the law in writing, so that a written code superseded an unwritten tradition; and while he thus put into operation the Greek conception of the rule of law, he implicitly founded a constitutional scheme based on its sovereignty, in which the officials naturally fell into their place as its servants. To make sure that they should act according to law, he made them responsible to a public court, whose institution was his great innovation. This court was the Heliæa, a popular court of some thousands of judges, in which the poorest of the citizens could sit and judge, and which (besides hearing appeals in exceptional cases) had the right of reviewing the conduct of every official at the end of his term of office. Herein ‘Solon made the people sovereign of the verdict’; and on Aristotle’s principle that ‘the sovereign of the verdict is sovereign of the constitution’, he implicitly established popular sovereignty, or democracy.² But as his work stood, he only instituted democracy in the judicial sphere. He gave the people not so much the control of public policy, as the certainty of being governed legally in accordance with known rules.1 It was after all a less matter, though it was by no means unimportant, that he admitted the poorer Athenians to the Assembly, and thus gave them a voice in the election of their officials.

Almost all the details of Solon’s work, except those which are contained in his own poems, are still matters of dispute today. Among the Athenians themselves, by the end of the fifth century, there was already much dispute about the meaning and extent of his work; and these disputes were by no means academic, but vitally connected with actual affairs. On the one hand, the democratic party claimed him as the father of the Periclean democracy; on the other hand the ‘moderates’, who were oligarchically inclined, and who attempted a political revolution in 411, regarded him as the father of an ‘ancestral constitution’ ( ) of a moderate and mixed type, neither democratical nor yet oligarchical, to which, they urged, Athens ought to return. Aristotle seems to have followed the latter line of interpretation, both in the ’ and in the Politics, and to have held that Solon established the ancestral constitution by a proper mixture of the different elements of the State.² There is indeed much that is reminiscent of Solon in the political philosophy of Aristotle. Like Solon, he believes in the sovereignty of law. Like Solon, to whom he specifically refers,³ he believes that the people at large must receive, as a minimum of political power, ‘the right of electing to offices and calling the magistrates to account’. Above all, like Solon, he cherishes the conception of the neutral and moderate and mediatory State, which is a proper mixture of the different elements, and permits no element ‘to triumph wrongfully’.

This is perhaps the chief conception which the legislation and the elegies of Solon bequeathed to the Greeks. The neutral State, which the Greeks were to seek so long, and in so many different ways, in order to escape the strife that raged between the different sections of their society, found in him its first exponent. It was a conception natural to the troubled age in which he lived. At Megara the poetry of Theognis presents a sharp antithesis of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, and the poet laments the overthrow of a nobility of birth by a mob ‘wearing the skins of goats, and knowing nought of decrees or of laws’.1 If Solon had guided the State into its desired haven at Athens, Alcaeus at Mitylene ‘cannot comprehend the strife (στάσις) of winds’ that buffets the ship of state which Pittacus, ruling (590–580 B.C.) as dictator after a revolution in which Alcaeus and his brother nobles had been banished, is seeking to steer into safety. Even at Sparta, stablest of Greek States, there was sore trouble, springing from questions of the land; and the Spartans had to face a rebellion of their oppressed serfs in Messenia. The verse of Tyrtaeus, contemporary with this trouble and rebellion, is not only a trumpet-call to battle, but a political sermon in praise of law-abidingness (εὐνоμία).

PYTHAGOREANS AND IONIANS

The next epoch in the history of Greece, and of the political thought of Greece, is connected with the Ionic Renaissance. The Reformation which came from Delphi had been largely Doric in origin and tone. The great Doric State of Sparta always stood in close relations with Delphi; and the influence of the teaching of the oracle was towards a Doric way of life. The vases and the architecture of the sixth century both show a trend towards the Doric mode.² But in the colonial land of Ionia conditions had always been different from what they were on the Greek mainland. Here life had definitely run into the groove of cities from the first, and the old sanctities of tribal life had never found a home. In their place something of a rational and secularist temper flourished, in combination with an advanced and almost effeminate type of material civilization. In the hot-house air of the Ionic cities, thought and discussion played freely on all things in heaven and earth; and, perhaps aided to some extent by the influence of contact with the East, men began to turn to natural science, and from the days of Thales (circ. 585 B.C.) to investigate the problems of the material world. Puzzled by the riddle of the physical universe, seemingly composed of many elements, yet liable to changes which transmuted each one of these into another, they cast about to find the one Identical, the single substratum of matter which underlay all the elements, and from which they all proceeded. This single substratum of matter, this one stuff of which all things were made, however it might be conceived, they called Nature.1 It is perhaps too readily assumed that before Socrates men studied Nature alone, and that thinkers were first induced by his example to study Man (ἤθη).² But the conclusions at which the pre-Socratics arrived about Matter were not mere theories of physical scientists dealing with a problem of chemistry: they were, to those who propounded them, solutions of the riddle of the universe. As such, they applied to the life of man as much as they did to the life of the earth. Conclusions with regard to the elements of physical nature and their mutual relations involved similar conclusions about the elements of man’s moral nature and the connexion of those elements – about the elements of the State, and the scheme by which they were united.

This step from a supposed physical truth to its moral counterpart was perhaps made most readily by the Pythagoreans of the fifth century, when they turned into a system of philosophy the Rule of Pythagoras, an Ionian from the Island of Samos (circ. 530 B.C.), who had settled and founded a school in southern Italy. The unity to which they reduced physical elements was not a material substance, such as had been postulated by most of the Ionic philosophers, but the more immaterial³ principle of number. Such a principle was easily extended to the moral world of man’s conduct. The underlying principle of that world, it might be argued, was also one of number, or the observance of number.⁴ In this way the later Pythagoreans attained their idea of justice. Justice was a number ἰσάκις ἴσоς: it was a number multiplied into itself, a square number. A square number is a perfect harmony, because it is composed of equal parts, and the number of the parts is equal to the numerical value of each part. If justice is defined as a square number, it follows that justice is based on the conception of a State composed of equal parts. A number is square so long as the equality of its parts remains: a State is just, so long as it is distinguished by the equality of its parts, and justice is the preservation of such equality. But how is such equality to be preserved? By taking away from the aggressor, who has made himself too great and his victim too small, all the profit of his aggression, and by restoring it in its integrity to the loser. Hence the further definition of justice by the Pythagoreans as requital (τò ἀντιπεπоνθóς): with what measure you mete, it shall be measured out to you again. It is obvious that in this conception of justice there are elements which were to influence the trend of later political thought.1 Here is the idea of the State as a sum of equal members: here is the idea of its aim as consisting in a harmony or equipoise called justice, which preserves the nice adjustment of the members. In the Republic Plato adopts this conception of justice, and gives it a more spiritual content and a deeper truth. Justice is an adjustment, but an adjustment which gives to each of the spiritual factors which go to form the State – reason, spirit, and appetite – its right and proper place. In Aristotle’s theory of ‘particular’ justice the formal and numerical aspect of the Pythagorean conception may perhaps be traced. The theory of distributive and rectificatory justice in the Fifth Book of the Ethics, and the application of a theory of justice to commerce in the First Book of the Politics, may both owe something to Pythagorean teaching.²

Thus, perhaps, had the Pythagoreans of the fifth century helped the growth of political science by their application of the principles of natural philosophy to the State. Some of them went beyond the application of number to the conception of justice, and taught a definite theory of politics. The essence of that theory was the divine right of wisdom to rule the State; and its outcome was a belief in monarchy of a theocratic type, ruling jure divino over its subjects as God rules over the world. It is possible that such teaching is later than the fifth century, and only an echo of the philosopher king of the Republic; it is also possible that it preceded and helped to influence Plato.1 A later generation assigned to Pythagoras himself, in the sixth century, the tenets of his later disciples, and believed that he had attempted to realize them in practice. Tradition told of a club of Three Hundred founded by Pythagoras at Croton, which consisted of young men trained, like the Platonic guardians, in philosophy, and, like them, governing the State in the light of their philosophy. The Pythagorean principle (‘the goods of friends are common property’) was equally interpreted into an anticipation of the communism advocated by Plato. We may, however, regard these traditions and interpretations as a later reading of Platonic ideas into the mind of ‘the master’: ipse non dixit. The work which Pythagoras himself achieved, and the doctrines which he himself taught, were of a simpler pattern; and though he anticipated Plato, he did not anticipate him either by training young men for a life of politics or by advocating communism. When we clear away from his name, on the one hand, the later developments of his teaching due to the Pythagoreans of a later age of which we have already spoken, and on the other, the Platonic elements which crept into the later tradition about him, we shall find that what he did was to found a society, and to inculcate ‘a way of life’ on its members. He was the first, but by no means the last (supra, p. 11), for whom philosophy issued in a Rule to be communicated to a circle or ‘order’ of disciples; and herein he may already be said to have anticipated Plato. He founded his order in Croton, a city of southern Italy. The order became involved in political disturbances; but there is no evidence for the view that it ever sought to interfere in politics, or espoused the aristocratic side. The Rule of Pythagoras was a personal rule of purification, to be achieved by the practice of medicine and the study of ‘music’. The members of the order practised medicine to purge the body, and music for the purging of the soul. Their medicine was a matter of diet and prevention rather than of drugs and cure; they lived ascetic lives, holding certain foods taboo, and joining in vegetarian syssitia, which may be the basis in reality of the communism they are supposed to have professed. They held philosophy to be the highest form of music,1 and by philosophy they understood the study of science and especially of mathematics, to which they made no small contribution. ‘The originality of Pythagoras consisted in this, that he regarded scientific, and especially mathematical, study as the best purge of the soul.’² It is obvious that Plato was under no small debt to the teaching of Pythagoras. The training of the guardians of the Republic by gymnastic and music corresponds closely to the purging by medicine and music advocated by Pythagoras. Plato lays stress upon diet as part of gymnastic (403 E–4x0 B); and indeed it was the regular rule in actual Greek life for medicine to be practised in the gymnasia. Plato, again, like Pythagoras, is convinced of the value of mathematics; and the ‘music’ of the Republic rises, in the course of Plato’s exposition, from Homer and the lyre to astronomy and solid geometry.

There are two other elements in the teaching of Pythagoras which had a deep influence on Plato and Greek philosophy in general. One is the doctrine of the Three Classes of men – the lovers of Wisdom, the lovers of Honour, and the lovers of Gain – which perhaps implies a correlative doctrine of the Three Parts of the soul: Reason, Spirit, and Appetite. The debt of the Republic to Pythagorean doctrine on these points is both obvious and profound: the whole framework and scaffolding of the Republic, which depends on the analysis of the State into three classes and the Soul into three parts, may be said to be Pythagorean. The theory of ‘Limit’ is another element in the teaching of Pythagoras which affected both Plato and Aristotle. In his musical studies, which he had conducted on mathematical lines, he had found that of the four ‘fixed notes’ of the gamut the two intervening notes each constituted, in different ways, a Mean between the two extreme and opposite notes, the high and the low. This led him to believe that the Mean was a mixture or blend (κρᾶσις) or, in musical language proper, a harmony or ‘fitting together’ of two opposites. Similarly in the study of medicine he found that health was a harmony of vital forces and a blend of their opposition. In this way he came to believe that the Mean was the natural Limit or ordering bound (πέρας), to which opposites were necessarily related; by their relation to which they became at once ordered in nature and intelligible to man; and in which they were harmoniously reconciled. The influence of this belief on the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, and on their conception of the relation of ‘form’, as a limit, to ‘matter’, lies beyond our scope. But it is relevant to notice that the theory of Limit, and of the Mean as a limit, influenced the political theory of Aristotle very definitely. Not only does he believe in a limit of wealth and a limit to the size of the State: he believes in the ‘mean’ or mixed constitution, which is a blend of the two opposites of oligarchy and democracy, and in which the States of actual life may attain their true order or form. Here the theory of Pythagoras blends with the practice of Solon to produce the conception of the neutral and moderate State. But, as far as we know, the idea of Limit was not applied by Pythagoras himself to politics; and it is only with his later successors that the principle of Limit was applied to ethics (the finite and limited being made the symbol of virtue, and the infinite and unlimited the symbol of vice), or that the laws of number were applied to politics, and justice, as we have seen, was conceived to be of the nature of a square.

Pythagoreanism not only influenced Greek theory: it also influenced Greek politics. It has been suggested, as we have seen, that the constitution created by Cleisthenes at Athens, with its Sieyès-like logic and its mathematical treatment of Athenian life, shows traces of Pythagorean influence; and it has been noted that Cleisthenes had connexions with Samos, the home of Pythagoras. This is pure conjecture. We cannot trace any influence of Pythagoreanism on Greek politics till the fourth century; and by that time the influence is one not of Pythagoras himself, but of the later Pythagoreans. Thebes had come under their influence: the Pythagorean Lysis was the instructor of Epaminondas, who called him father; and Aristotle tells us that at Thebes, ‘as soon as the rulers became philosophers, the city began to flourish’.1 Archytas of Tarentum was a famous Pythagorean of the fourth century, who for a long time was supreme in his native city, and served seven times as its general, in spite of a law to the contrary. A man like Archytas, general of his city, and also teacher of philosophy to his disciples in his garden precinct at Tarentum, may naturally have served as a model for the Republic.² And indeed, when we remember that Archytas was living at Tarentum, and Epaminondas at Thebes, in the very days when Plato wrote, the Republic begins to assume a decidedly practical aspect.

When we turn from the history of Pythagoreanism to the early Ionic philosophers of Asia Minor, and attempt to discover how far they applied their physical conclusions to political speculation, we enter upon an obscurer theme. The members of the Ionic school, as we have seen, were physicists, occupied with the problem of matter, and seeking to discover the fundamental unity or ϕύσις (whether of water, or of air, or of fire) which underlay all its ‘appearances’. To what extent they touched upon human life in their teaching and writings it is difficult to discover. It is possible, and it has been suggested, that all the works entitled dealt with politics. Heraclitus’ work on Nature is certainly recorded to have been written in three books, one of which was concerned with politics.³ Yet the recorded utterances of Heraclitus (circ. 500 B.C.) upon politics are rather of the nature of disjointed apophthegms in the manner of the Seven Sages, than indicative of a political theory. That sense of the physical laws of the universe, which led him to say that the Furies would track down the sun if it left its course, finds its counterpart in the saying that the people must fight for their law as much as for their city’s walls. This parallel between the law of the world and the law of the State appears also in Anaximander, a precursor of Heraclitus, when he speaks of the physical elements as ‘suffering sentence of justice and paying the penalty one to another for their injustice’, and explains thereby the phenomena of change. But Anaximander is only drawing a parallel between the human world and the world of matter; and Heraclitus also seems to have advanced no further than parallelism. The parallel he draws is between matter of the soul of man; and the doctrine he propounds is that fire is the ϕύσις or single substratum of both. He is an Ionian physicist, after all; and the utmost reach of his philosophy is a parallel, pushed to the verge of identity, between the physical constitution of matter and the physical constitution of the soul. There is an eternal contention of fire and water; and fire is the principle of life, and water of death. ‘War is the father of all things’; but the duty of man and the world – the ‘justice’ and the truth of both – is to cling to fire. For truth resides in the common and identical substance, which is fire in the natural universe, and fire in the soul of man. This vitalizing fire permeates all things: to this ‘the thinker must cling, and not to his own wisdom, even as a city should to law’. ‘All human laws are sustained by the one divine law, which is infinitely strong, and suffices, and more than suffices, for them all.’ Thus are human laws explained by the physical law of the world: the physical law vivifies the laws of the moral world. Laws are emanations of that one law: they are embodiments of the common substance of the soul and the world, which is fire. This line of thought led Heraclitus to adopt an aristocratic temper. ‘Though wisdom is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own’; but ‘what wisdom or sense have the masses? many are evil, few are good’. ‘The Ephesians ought to hang themselves: they have expelled Hermodoros, the best man among them, saying “Let there be no best man among us”.’ Yet ‘one man is as good as ten thousand to me, if he be the best’. He who has kept his soul ‘dry’, and clung to fire, is the natural ruler of men. Here we see something of a Platonic character in Heraclitus: the one man who has clung to the Common (who has seen, as Plato would say, the Idea of the Good) is better than ten thousand others. And yet again there is something in Heraclitus of the Stoic cosmopolitan: the ‘wise man’ is wise by clinging to the common unity which pervades all the world; and the ideal State of such a man will be, in the long run, a State which embraces the world.

Some of the Ionic philosophers exercised an influence in actual politics. If we may count Xenophanes among the philosophers, we can even say that in one of them the practical motive was dominant. He was living and writing his elegiac verse at the end of the sixth century, when the gulf between the Greek and the Persian East was beginning to yawn wide; and he sought to fortify his fellow-countrymen, and to dissociate them from the East with which they were so closely connected, by preaching to them the lessons of the Delphic Reformation, and thus bringing them into line with the Greeks of the mainland. Ionian secularism had already shaken current beliefs in the gods; and Xenophanes, inspired by a moral indignation against representations of the gods which made them thieves and adulterers, and only encouraged vice, used the results of Ionian science to attack polytheism and to disprove the very existence of the gods of its worship. No other Ionian has so definitely practical a bent; but some even of the professed philosophers were not without an interest in practical affairs. Heraclitus, we are told, refused to take any part in public life at Ephesus, but he was at any rate ‘king’ of Ephesus, the priest of a branch of mysteries; and Thales (circ. 585 B.C.), the first of the Ionian physicists, is reported to have urged the Ionians of Asia Minor to unite in a federation with its capitol at Teos.1 The report comes from Herodotus: the suggestion of a federal State is remarkable. Like Thales, the Eleatic philosophers of the fifth century, who represented a revolt against the whole of the physical philosophy hitherto current, also exercised an influence in politics. Parmenidcs is said to have given laws to Elea: Zeno, his pupil, is recorded by Strabo to have deserved well of his State, and is said to have attempted to defend its liberty against a tyrant. A like activity is also recorded of Empedocles of Agrigentum, poet, philosopher, and biologist, who stands outside all the schools. He would appear to have been a democratic leader in his native city, and a champion of equality: he destroyed the caucus of the Thousand at Agrigentum, and was offered but refused the position of king.

THE TRANSITION FROM THE PHYSICISTS TO THE HUMANISTS

It is when we turn to the Athens of the later fifth century that we first find any real political thought existing as something independent of physical speculation. However much attention the physical philosophers may have paid to political life, their political theory was but an off-shoot of their cosmology, and an accident of their attempt to find a material substratum out of which the world of change was produced. When we attempt to discover what Athenians were thinking in the later fifth century, we seem to see men reflecting primarily about politics and the world of man’s conduct and institutions: if they turn to physics, it is ‘by way of illustration’, and to get examples (which, they fancy, will serve as proofs) for their political ideas.1 Physical science had come to Athens with Anaxagoras, during the ascendency of Pericles, who may have introduced the philosophy of Ionia to Athens as part of a policy of imparting to the Athenians ‘something of the flexibility and openness of mind which characterized their kinsmen across the sea’.² Archelaus of Athens, a disciple of Anaxagoras, and according to tradition the master of Socrates, was, we are told by Diogenes Laertius, the last of the physicists, and the first of the moralists, delivering lectures on law and justice. It was he who first drew the famous distinction between ϕύσις and νóμоς in the world of human affairs, and taught that ‘the noble and the base exist by convention (νóμῳ) and not by nature (ϕύσει)’.³

It was natural that the Greeks, and more particularly the Athenians, should soon turn from considering the riddle of the universe (for their thinkers began with the greatest first) to consider the riddle of a smaller κóσμоς, and to inquire into the ‘nature’ of the State and its relation to the individual. After the attempts of the Ionian physicists to solve the mystery of physical matter, and to find a single basis of all its changes, there was bound to come a reaction towards the study of man, a reaction proceeding from men more interested in human nature than in physical science.1 Here we might have expected the Greeks, believing as they did that the State was a moral order and each citizen a member thereof, to begin with the State, when they turned from things physical to things human. But with the Sophists of the later fifth century we seem to find such an expectation falsified.² In their teaching (at any rate, in the teaching of those whom Plato discusses) there is a detachment and even a glorification of the individual. Political thought seems to be sufficiently developed to run into individualism. A new and revolutionary spirit begins to appear. Hitherto the conception of ϕύσις had been used in a conservative sense. It had served, if anything, to justify the existing order of things, and to sustain the ancient mos majorum. Pythagoreans had found in their interpretation of ‘Nature’ a basis of justice: Heraclitus had been led by his sense of the stability of ‘the common’ to emphasize the majesty of human law. When we come to the Sophists we still find ϕύσις a current term; but ϕύσις is now often subversive. Opposed to νóμоς or convention, it supplies a standard by which the State and its law are judged and found wanting. How had this great change come about?

¹ Iliad, II. 204–6. I remember hearing the first line quoted in this sense by the German ambassador to England, some ten years ago.

¹ Works and Days, 248–64.

² Wilamowitz, op. cit., pp. 87–8.

³ Olymp., 3, 44–5.

¹ Plutarch, in the Convivium Septum Sapientium, introduces the Seven Sages in the act of discussing the conditions necessary to the greatest happiness of the State; and he professes to give the opinions held by each of the Seven.

² Protagoras, 343 b.

³ Grote, History of Greece, IV. 23.

⁴ Zimmern, op. cit., p. 127.

¹ Wilamowitz, op. cit., pp. 50–1.

² Arist., ’Αθην. πολ., IX. § 1.

¹ Zimmern, op. cit., pp. 130–1.

² Cf. Pol., 1273, b 35 sqq. (II. 12, § 2–6).

³ 1286, b 33–4 (III. 11, 8).

¹ Theognis, w. 350–1.

² Burnet, Greek Philosophy, p. 34.

¹ Nature really meant to the Ionians what we mean by Matter. They ‘had drawn the outlines of the theory of matter in the physicist’s sense of the word’ (Burnet, op. cit., p. 27).

² Aristotle, however (on whose dicta this assumption is based, cf. Met., 987, 1–4; 1078, b 17–19), while he speaks of Socrates as does not say that he was the first to turn to Ethics, but that he was the first to introduce definitions, and that he introduced them in the sphere of Ethics.

³ It is true that the Pythagoreans regarded number as extended in space.

⁴ For such an extension one may compare Plato, Gorgias, 507 E–508 A. Plato argues that moral selfishness (πλεоνεξία) contradicts the physical fellowship and friendship which holds together earth and heaven, and contravenes the principle of geometrical equality. He seems to be contending that as, e.g. the planets are kept together in fellowship by the fact that each keeps its appointed place, and does not violate equality by trespassing on that of its neighbour, so men should abide in a fellowship secured by the fact that each keeps his appointed place, and does not violate equality by trespassing to ‘get more’ (πλεоνεκτȋν). This is also the teaching of the Republic. Plato, who inherited much from Pythagoreanism, inherited, perhaps more than anything else, its mathematical interests, and approached philosophy from mathematics; while Aristotle, more like Empedocles, made his approach from biology (Burnet, Greek Philosophy, pp. 11, 71). There is probably a Pythagorean element in Plato’s comparison of the order of the human with that of the natural world, cf. infra, p. 157.

¹ Burnet, however (Early Greek Philosophy, p. 317; cf. also his Greek Philosophy, p. go), regards the definition of justice as a square, as ‘a mere sport of the analogical fancy’. But the same might be said of Herbert Spencer’s conception of the State as an organism – which is, none the less, a vital part of his system. And it is especially easy to apply mathematical analogies to justice: cf. Maine, Ancient Law (p. 58): ‘The equal division of numbers or physical magnitudes is doubtless closely entwined with our perceptions of justice; there are few associations which keep their ground in the mind so stubbornly or are dismissed from it with such difficulty by the deepest thinkers.’

² Aristotle distinguishes ‘universal’ justice, which is generally directed to the maintenance of social and moral order (‘the public side in law, and especially … its criminal element’), from ‘particular’ justice, which deals with the distribution of rights by the State to individuals and the correction or redress of private wrongs (cf. Sir Paul Vinogradoff, Columbia Law Review, Nov. 1908). He objects to the Pythagorean definition of justice as mere requital (Ethics, V. 1132, b 22); but he holds that proportionate requital is the very bond of the State. It is not only the basis of the action of the State in its work of distribution and correction: it regulates the voluntary dealings of the citizens with one another, and is the basis of commercial exchange.

¹ Cf. Campbell’s introduction to his edition of the Politicus, pp. xx–xxvii. It is possible that Plato refers to these tenets in the Politicus; cf. infra, pp. 317–18.

¹ Music (μоνσική) is the cult of the Muses – not of the muse of poetry only, but of all the nine, or, as we should say, of the liberal arts.

² Burnet (Greek Philosophy, pp. 41–2), whom I have followed in this account of the early Pythagoreans.

¹ Aristotle, Rhetoric, II. 23, § 11.

² Plato knew Archytas personally; infra, pp. 132–3.

³ Diog. Laert., IX. 5, Diogenes adds that one of the commentators, Diodotus, held the work to be not but : what was said was in the nature of an example or illustration. This view, however erroneous it may be, is interesting; it shows that a commentator believed that Heraclitus had made the transition from physics to politics. See also what is said below on Antiphon, p. 78.

¹ Aristotle illustrates his practical wisdom, in the first book of the Politics, by the story of the ‘corner’ in oil-presses.

¹ This is the opposite of what we have just seen in Anaximander and Heraclitus. They had argued from politics to physics – or at any rate from man to matter: this is to argue from physics to politics. One may detect a trace of this line of argument in the Phoenissae of Euripides (538–551), where it is argued that as night and day interchange equally on their yearly course, each yielding place to the other, so there should be equality and interchange of office in the State. Similarly Plato, in the Republic, uses the physical analogy of the dog to justify the assignation of the same political duties to man and woman; and Aristotle justifies slavery in the first book of the Politics by examples of similar subordination in nature. (A German writer, whom I followed too implicitly in the first edition (Dummler, Prolegomena zu Platons Staat), has suggested that behind the passage in the Phoenissae, and some other passages in other plays of Euripides, there lies a political treatise which Euripides had used, and whose writer had attempted, by a parallel between the order of the world and the order of the State, to justify the theory of a democratic State acting under the sovereignty of law. This is probably a carrying of the search for Quellen to too great a length. German writers are somewhat prone to discovering political treatises supposed to have been written in Athens during the Peloponnesian War; cf. infra, pp. 90–1.)

¹ Burnett, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 277.

² Ritter and Preller (8th ed.), § 218 b.

¹ Burnett, Greek Philosophy, p. 101.

² In reality, however, the Sophists are still believers in the State – provided that it is reformed and reconstructed: infra, p. 171 n. 1.