The Historians' History of the World 04 [Greece to the Roman Conquest]

That we can so do, that we can have Socrates as our master, we owe wholly and solely to the loyalty and poetic genius of the man (Plato) who set himself in the days of that agony to show that—hard as it may be to define uprightness, courage, piety and what other virtues there may be—the upright and courageous and therefore happy man has demonstrated in his own person the reality of these abstractions. This alone would have sufficed to make Plato a benefactor to mankind; but this is only a small part of his labours. With all that Socrates and the school of sophistry taught him, he combines mathematics and the mysticism of Pythagoras. He founded the school which was destined to serve the purposes of organised scientific work for nearly a thousand years, and which is the prototype of all such organisations. He lays down the fundamental lines of every philosophical science, constructing, and, where he thinks he has found a better way, demolishing the foundations he himself has laid. Many of his intuitions have only been verified after the lapse of centuries and tens of centuries; others still await verification. The force inherent in him is best proved by the energy of those who assure us that he has had his day. He has set Eros as the mediator between heaven and earth; this Eros has no worthier abode than the writings of Plato; through them, even to-day, Psyche is learning the road heavenwards. But Plato is a Greek in every fibre, he can only be understood through his people, and his people through him.

Plato was a poet; and though he fixed his mind wholly on the eternal type, unduly despising the individual phenomenon, and thrusting his own individuality completely into the background, yet this individuality with its poetic genius cast light and shade in bewildering alternation over every field of contemplation, like the full moon as she fleets over the mountains and plains of Attica.

Science needed the cool judgment and caution of the systematiser. She found it in the person of Aristotle, the master-builder among men (baumeisterlicher Mann), as Goethe calls him. At his hands science first received systematic treatment and method—the tools of her craft. The existence of the man and his work attest for all time the unnatural character of a division of the one and indivisible body of science though it be only into natural and abstract sciences. For even in the collection of material, he laboured for all branches alike. It is idle to inquire which were the greater, his personal achievements or those which owed their birth to his example. For his successors carried on the work in his spirit, even more truly when, often after vehement controversy, they advanced beyond him, than when they rested content with merely working out the plan of the master-builder. Sprung of a family of physicians, and endowed with the Ionian temperament, the natural science of Ionia is the most substantial contribution he made to the legacy bequeathed by Plato. But he had likewise made himself familiar with all the accepted tricks of oratory at Athens, he speaks with authority on logic, rhetoric, and poetry, and he is capable of treating all literary forms with the hand of a master. Yet he did not discover his own peculiar style until he combined the bald simplicity of Ionian scientific phraseology with Attic balance and Attic elegance. Thus he became the father of scientific prose, of the text-book no less than the lecture and the practical investigation. Even in halting translations he afforded nutriment to powerful intellects. His own words will have a modern ring to the end of time.

It is a characteristic distinction between the two philosophers that Plato, the incomparable artist in words, fiercely attacked rhetoric, while Aristotle made it a cardinal item in his programme of education. It was a power and he reckoned with it accordingly, not without yielding more to contemporary taste than we can approve. To the modern mind rhetoric is the least congenial element in the culture and literature of antiquity. We can understand that in the political agitation which pervaded the Attic empire, oratory, which was a daily necessity in parliamentary debate and in the law courts, was bound to develop into an art, and that a literature should have arisen corresponding to that of our daily press. So, too, we can understand that the manifold intellectual activity of the age of the sophists, and the tentative efforts of science, needed an organ which should not only convey practical information but have an eye to effect. That this prose should become Attic, in spite of the fact that the language of Athens had barely passed through its first phase of development in tragedy, was inevitable from the time when Athens took the lead in Greece. In the sphere of language, at all events, the country attained to national unity. But to us there is at first sight something monstrous in the fact that in the age of Pericles a set form of oratory should arise which not only consciously competes with poetry but seeks to supplant it—and which actually succeeded in preventing the development of any new poetic method. The whole classic world, including the Latins, devoted no trifling labour and skill to this art of eloquence, and its art-theory ended by making poetry a mere subdivision of it. We are now coming to recognise more and more how much modern poetry in particular owes to this prose-poetry and its methods: the modern connecting-link of the rhyme was discovered beyond all dispute by that Gorgias whom Plato attacked as the champion of rhetoric; the intermediate links lie before us in an unbroken chain. Our astonishment subsides, if we so far rid ourselves of prejudice as to realise how arbitrary is every line of demarcation between poetry and prose. Not only the poems of Walt Whitman, but a great many of Goethe’s finest poems would be regarded by every Greek art-critic as prose. Prose really implies that the language proceeds on foot; the reverse,—that it soars aloft by means of this device or that,—applies to every conventionalised form of speech; whether it is cast into a regular measure or not is irrelevant in comparison with the fact that it is informed by measure. The Hellenic bias towards style manifests itself here in the creation of a definite form, and we cannot question the fact that the development of the period demanded a new style and one unhampered by the laws of metre. For at such a high point of civilisation the poetic form does not suffice for what the world has to say and wishes to hear. Empty and conventional jingle, relying on tricks of style, undoubtedly attained a bad eminence in Greek and Latin oratory; but a similar spectacle has been afforded by poetry and the arts of chisel and brush. If a man had something to say, like Aristotle, Polybius, and Plutarch, it did him no harm to clothe his thoughts in a form, the effect of which we perceive agreeably even without understanding the art to which it is due. It is the same artistic conventionality which to this day lends to French prose, whether it be that of literature or of polite conversation, the charm which the Teuton does not possess in equal measure. And the French have attained to it by a rhetorical schooling traditionally derived from the method of antiquity. That elegance is not an inborn quality with them is shown by the formlessness of so great a writer as Rabelais. Were we in a position to read the laws of Solon we should perceive that Attic elegance was likewise no gift of heaven. An art which we find still dominant in the sermons and hagiography of the Byzantines is a power not to be despised, even apart from its historical value.