THREE strains merged in Greek philosophy: the physical, the metaphysical, and the ethical. The physical culminated in Aristotle, the metaphysical in Plato, the ethical in Zeno of Citium. The physical development ended in the separation of science from philosophy in Archimedes and Hipparchus; the metaphysical ended in the skepticism of Pyrrho and the later Academy; the ethical remained until Epicureanism and Stoicism were conquered or absorbed by Christianity.
I. THE SKEPTICAL ATTACK
Amid this spreading Hellenistic culture Athens—mother of much of it, mistress of most of it—retained her leadership in two realms: the drama and philosophy. The world was not too busy with war and revolutions, new sciences and new religions, the love of beauty and the quest of gold, to spare some time for the unanswerable but inescapable problems of truth and error, matter and mind, freedom and necessity, nobility and baseness, life and death. From all the cities of the Mediterranean young men made their way, often through a thousand hardships, to study in the halls and gardens where Plato and Aristotle had left almost living memories.
At the Lyceum the industrious Theophrastus of Lesbos carried on the empirical tradition. The Peripatetics were scientists and scholars rather than philosophers; they devoted themselves to specialist research in zoology, botany, biography, and the history of science, philosophy, literature, and law. In his thirty-four years of leadership (322-288) Theophrastus explored many fields, and published four hundred volumes dealing with almost every subject from love to war. His pamphlet “On Marriage” severely handled the female sex, and was severely handled in turn by Epicurus’ mistress Leontium, who wrote a learned and devastating reply.1 Nevertheless it is to Theophrastus that Athenaeus attributes the tender sentiment that “it is through modesty that beauty becomes beautiful.”2 Diogenes Laertius describes him as “a most benevolent man, and very affable”; so eloquent that his original name was forgotten in that which Aristotle gave him, meaning that he spoke like a god; so popular that two thousand students flocked to his lectures, and Menander was among his most faithful followers.3 Posterity preserved with especial care his book ofCharacters, not because it created a literary form, but because it sharply satirized the faults that all men ascribe to other men. Here is the Garrulous Man who “begins with a eulogy of his wife, relates the dream he had the night before, tells dish by dish what he had for supper,” and concludes that “we are by no means the men we were” in former times. And here is the Stupid Man who “when he goes to the play, is left at the end fast asleep in an empty house . . . after a hearty supper he has to get up in the night, returns only half awake, misses the right door, and is bitten by his neighbor’s dog.”4
One of the few events in Theophrastus’ life was the issuance of a state decree (307) requiring the Assembly’s approval in the selection of leaders for the philosophical schools. About the same time Agnonides indicted Theophrastus on the old charge of impiety. Theophrastus quietly left Athens; but so many students followed him that the storekeepers complained of a ruinous fall in trade. Within a year the decree was annulled, the indictment was withdrawn, and Theophrastus returned in triumph to preside over the Lyceum almost till his death at eighty-five. “All Athens,” we are told, attended his funeral. The Peripatetic school did not long survive him: science left impoverished Athens for affluent Alexandria, and the Lyceum, which had dedicated itself to research, subsided into a penurious obscurity.
Meanwhile Speusippus had succeeded Plato, and Xenocrates Speusippus, at the Academy. Xenocrates governed the school for a quarter of a century (339-314), and brought new credit to philosophy by the honorable simplicity of his life. Absorbed in study and teaching, he left the Academy but once a year, to see the Dionysian tragedies; when he appeared, says Laertius, “the turbulent and quarrelsome rabble of the city made way for him to pass.”5 He refused all fees, and became so poor that he was on the verge of being imprisoned for taxes when Demetrius of Phalerum paid his arrears and had him freed. Philip of Macedon said that among the many Athenian ambassadors sent to him Xenocrates was the only one who proved incorruptible. His reputation for virtue annoyed Phryne. Pretending that she was being pursued, she took refuge in his house; and seeing that he had but one bed she asked if she might share it with him. He consented, we are told, out of humane considerations; but he proved so cold to her entreaties and her charms that she fled from his bed and board, and complained to her friends that she had found a statue instead of a man.6 Xenocrates would have no mistress but philosophy.
With his death the metaphysical strain in Greek thought neared exhaustion in the very grove that had been its shrine. The successors of Plato were mathematicians and moralists, and spent little time on the abstract questions that had once agitated the Academy. The skeptical challenges of Zeno the Eleatic, the subjectivism of Heracleitus, the methodical doubt of Gorgias and Protagoras, the metaphysical agnosticism of Socrates, Aristippus, and Eucleides of Megara resumed control of Greek philosophy; the Age of Reason was over. Every hypothesis had been conceived, aired, and forgotten; the universe had preserved its secret, and men had grown weary of a search in which even the most brilliant minds had failed. Aristotle had agreed with Plato on only one point—the possibility of acquiring ultimate truth.7 Pyrrho voiced the suspicions of his time in suggesting that it was above all on this point that they had both been mistaken.
Pyrrho was born at Elis about 360. He followed Alexander’s army to India, studied under the “Gymnosophists” there, and perhaps learned from them something of the skepticism for which his name became a synonym. Returning to Elis he lived in serene poverty as a teacher of philosophy. He was too modest to write books, but his pupil Timon of Phlius, in a series of Silloi or Satires, sent Pyrrho’s opinions abroad into the world. These opinions were basically three: that certainty is unattainable, that the wise man will suspend judgment and will seek tranquillity rather than truth, and that, since all theories are probably false, one might as well accept the myths and conventions of his time and place. Neither the senses nor reason can give us sure knowledge: the senses distort the object in perceiving it, and reason is merely the sophist servant of desire. Every syllogism begs the question, for its major premise assumes its conclusion. “Every reason has a corresponding reason opposed to it”;8 the same experience may be delightful or unpleasant according to circumstance and mood; the same object may seem small or large, ugly or beautiful; the same practice may be moral or immoral according to where and when we live; the same gods are or are not, according to the different nations of mankind; everything is opinion, nothing is quite true. It is foolish, then, to take sides in disputes, or to seek some other place or mode of living, or to envy the future or the past; all desire is delusion. Even life is an uncertain good, death not a certain evil; one should have no prejudices against either of them. Best of all is a calm acceptance: not to reform the world, but to bear with it patiently; not to fever ourselves with progress, but to content ourselves with peace. Pyrrho tried sincerely to live this half-Hindu philosophy. He conformed humbly with the customs and worship of Elis, made no effort to avoid dangers or prolong his life,9 and died at the age of ninety. His fellow citizens so approved of him that in his honor they exempted philosophers from taxation.
By the irony of time it was the followers of Plato who carried forward this attack upon metaphysics. Arcesilaus, who became head of the “Middle Academy” in 269, transformed Plato’s rejection of sense knowledge into a skepticism as complete as Pyrrho’s, and probably under Pyrrho’s influence10 “Nothing is certain,” said Arcesilaus, “not even that.”11 When he was told that such a doctrine made life impossible he answered that life had long since learned to manage with probabilities. A century later a still more vigorous skeptic took charge of the “New Academy,” and pressed the doctrine of universal doubt to the point of intellectual and moral nihilism. Carneades of Cyrene, coming to Athens like a Greek Abelard about 193, made life bitter for Chrysippus and his other teachers by arguing with galling subtlety against every doctrine that they taught. As they had undertaken to make him a logician he used to say to them (turning the tables on Protagoras): “If my reasoning is right, well and good; if it is wrong, give me back my tuition fee.”12 When he set up shop for himself he lectured one morning for an opinion, the next morning against it, proving each so well as to destroy both; while his pupils, and even his biographer, sought in vain to discover his real views. He undertook to refute the materialistic realism of the Stoics by a Platonic-Kantian critique of sensation and reason. He attacked all conclusions as intellectually indefensible, and bade his students be satisfied with probability and the customs of their time. Sent to Rome by Athens as one of an embassy (155), he shocked the Senate by speaking one day in defense of justice, and on the morrow deriding it as an impracticable dream: if Rome wished to practice justice it would have to restore to the nations of the Mediterranean all that it had taken from them by superior force.13 On the third day Cato had the embassy sent home as a danger to public morals. Perhaps Polybius, who was then a hostage with Scipio, heard these addresses or of them, for he speaks with the anger of a practical man against those philosophers
who in the discussions of the Academy have trained themselves in extreme readiness of speech. For some of them, in their efforts to puzzle the minds of their hearers, resort to such paradoxes, and are so fertile in inventing plausibilities, that they wonder whether or not it is possible for those in Athens to smell eggs roasted in Ephesus, and are in doubt whether all the time they are discussing the matter in the Academy they are not lying in their beds at home and composing this discourse in a dream. . . . From this excessive love of paradox they have brought all philosophy into disrepute. . . . They have implanted such a passion in the minds of our young men that they never give even a thought to the ethical and political qaestions that really benefit students of philosophy, but spend their lives in the vain attempt to invent useless absurdities.14