II. THE SOCRATIC SCHOOLS
1. Aristippus
If it was a middling age in science the fourth century was the heyday of philosophy. The early thinkers had propounded vague cosmologies; the Sophists had doubted everything but rhetoric; Socrates had raised a thousand questions and answered none; now all the seeds that had been planted in two hundred years sprouted into great systems of metaphysical, ethical, and political speculation. Athens, too poor to maintain its state medical service, nevertheless opened private universities that made it, as Isocrates said, the “school of Hellas,” the intellectual capital and arbiter of Greece. Having weakened the old religion, the philosophers struggled to find in nature and reason some substitute for it as a prop of morals and a guide to life.
They explored first the paths opened up by Socrates. While the Sophists relapsed for the most part into the teaching of rhetoric, and disappeared as a class, the pupils of Socrates became the storm centers of violently divergent philosophies. Eucleides of Megara, who had often traveled to Athens to hear Socrates, stirred up his native city with “a rage of disputes,” as Timon of Athens phrased it,19 and developed the dialectic of Zeno and Socrates into an eristic, or art of argument, that questioned every conclusion, and led in the next century to the skepticism of Pyrrho and Carneades. After Eucleides’ death his brilliant disciple Stilpo led the Megarian school more and more towards the Cynic point of view: since every philosophy can be refuted, wisdom lies not in metaphysical speculation but in such simple living as will liberate the individual from dependence upon the external factors in well-being. When, after the sack of Megara, Demetrius Poliorcetes inquired how much Stilpo had lost, the sage replied that he had never possessed anything but knowledge, and no one had taken this away.20 In his later years he numbered among his students the founder of the Stoic philosophy, so that the Megarian school may be said to have begun with one Zeno, and ended with another.
The elegant Aristippus, after Socrates’ death, traveled to various cities, spent some time with Xenophon at Scillus but more with Lais in Corinth,21 and then settled down to found a school of philosophy in his native Cyrene, on the coast of Africa. The wealth and luxury of the upper classes in the half-Oriental city had formed his habits, and he agreed most with that part of his master’s doctrine which called happiness the greatest good. Handsome in figure, refined in manners, clever in speech, he made a way for himself everywhere. Shipwrecked and penniless in Rhodes, he went to a gymnasium, discoursed, and so fascinated the men there that they provided him and his companions with all comforts; whereupon he remarked that parents should arm their children with such wealth that even after a shipwreck it should be able to swim to land with its owner.22
His philosophy was simple and candid. Whatever we do, said Aristippus, is done through hope of pleasure or fear of pain—even when we impoverish ourselves for our friends, or give our lives for our generals. Therefore, by common consent, pleasure is the ultimate good, and everything else, including virtue and philosophy, must be judged according to its capacity to bring us pleasure. Our knowledge of things is uncertain; all that we know directly and surely is our feelings; wisdom, then, lies in the pursuit not of abstract truth but of pleasurable sensations. The keenest pleasures are not intellectual or moral, they are physical or sensual; therefore the wise man will seek physical delights above all. Nor will he sacrifice a present good to a conjectural future good; only the present exists, and the present is probably as good as the future, if not better; the art of life lies in plucking pleasures as they pass, and making the most of what the moment gives.23 The use of philosophy is that it may guide us not away from pleasures, but to the most pleasant choice and use of them. It is not the ascetic who abstains that is pleasure’s master, but rather the man who enjoys pleasures without being their slave, and can prudently distinguish between those that endanger him and those that do not; hence the wise man will show a discriminating respect for public opinion and the laws, but will seek as far as possible “to be neither the master nor the slave of any man.”24
If it is a credit to a man that he practices what he preaches, Aristippus deserves some honor. He bore poverty and riches with equal grace, but made no pretense to impartiality between them. He insisted on being paid for his instructions, and did not hesitate to flatter tyrants to gain his end. He smiled patiently when Dionysius I spat upon him: “A fisherman,” he said, “must put up with more moisture than this to. catch even a smaller fish.”25 When a friend reproached him for kneeling before Dionysius he answered that it was not his fault if the King “had his ears in his feet”; and when Dionysius asked him why philosophers haunt the doors of the rich, but the rich do not frequent the presence of philosophers, he replied, “Because the first know what they want but the second do not.”26 Nevertheless he despised men who pursued wealth for its own sake. When the rich Phrygian Simus displayed to him an ornate house paved with marble, Aristippus spat in his face; and when Simus protested he excused himself on the ground that he could not find, amid all this marble, “a more suitable place to spit in.”27 Having made money, he spent it lavishly on good food, good clothing, good lodging, and (as they seemed to him) good women. Being reproved for living with a courtesan, he answered that he had no objection to living in a house, or sailing in a ship, that other men had used before him.28 When his mistress said to him, “I am in a family way by you,” he replied, “You can no more tell that it was I, than you could tell, after going through a thicket, which thorn had scratched you.”29
People liked him despite his honest ways, for he was a person of pleasant manner, refined culture (pace Simus), and kindly heart. Doubtless his blunt hedonism was in part due to his delight in scandalizing the respectable sinners of the town. He gave himself away by reverencing Socrates, loving philosophy,* and confessing that the most impressive spectacle in life is the sight of a virtuous man steadily pursuing his course in the midst of vicious people.31 Before his death (356) he remarked that the greatest legacy he was leaving to his daughter Arete was that he had taught her “to set a value on nothing that she can do without”32—a strange surrender to Diogenes. She succeeded him as head of the Cyrenaic school, wrote forty books, had many distinguished pupils, and earned from her city an honorable epitaph—“The Light of Hellas.”33