The Greek Way

by Edith Hamilton

  It is a society marked also by an exquisite urbanity, of men gently bred, easy, suave, polished. The most famous dinner-party that was ever given was held at the house of Agathon the Elegant, who declared to his guests as they took their places that he never gave orders to his servants on such occasions: “I say to them: Imagine that you are our hosts and I and the company your guests; treat us well and we shall commend you.” Into this atmosphere of ease and the informality past masters in the social art permit themselves, an acquaintance is introduced by mistake who had not been invited, a mishap with awkward possibilities for people less skilled in the amenities than our banqueters. Instantly he is made to feel at home, greeted in the most charming fashion: “‘Oh, welcome, Arisdodemus,’ and Agathon, ‘you are just in time to sup with us. If you come on any other matter put it off and make one of us. I was looking for you yesterday to invite you if I could have found you.’”

  Socrates is late. It appears that he has fallen into a meditation under a portico on the way. When he enters, “Agathon begged that he would take the place next to him ‘that I may touch you and have the benefit of that wise thought which came into your mind in the portico.’ ‘How I wish,’ said Socrates, taking his place as he was desired, ‘that wisdom could be infused by touch. If that were so how greatly should I value the privilege of reclining at your side, for you would fill me with a stream of wisdom plenteous and fair, whereas my own is of a very questionable sort.’” An argument is started and Agathon gives way: “I cannot refute you, Socrates.” “Ah no,” is the answer. “Say rather, dear Agathon, that you cannot refute the truth, for Socrates is easily refuted.” It is social intercourse at its perfection, to be accounted for only by a process of long training. Good breeding of that stamp was never evolved in one generation nor two, and yet these men were the grandsons of those that fought at Marathon and Salamis. Heroic daring and the imponderables of high civilization were the inheritance they were born to.

  Through the dialogues moves the figure of Socrates, a unique philosopher, unlike all philosophers that ever were outside of Greece. They are, these others, very generally strange and taciturn beings, or so we conceive them, aloof, remote, absorbed in abstruse speculations, only partly human. The completest embodiment of our idea of a philosopher is Kant, the little stoop-shouldered, absent-minded man, who moved only between his house and the university, and by whom all the housewives in Königsberg set their clocks when they saw him pass on his way to the lecture-room of a morning. Such was not Socrates. He could not be, being a Greek. A great many different things were expected of him and he had to be able to meet a great many different situations. We ourselves belong to an age of specialists, the result, really, of our belonging to an age that loves comfort. It is obvious that one man doing only one thing can work faster, and the reasonable conclusion in a world that wants a great many things, is to arrange to have him do it. Twenty men making each a minute bit of a shoe, turn out far more than twenty times the number of shoes that the cobbler working alone did, and in consequence no one must go barefoot. We have our reward in an ever-increasing multiplication of the things everyone needs but we pay our price in the limit set to the possibilities of development for each individual worker.

  In Greece it was just the other way about. The things they needed were by comparison few, but every man had to act in a number of different capacities. An Athenian citizen in his time played many parts. Æschylus was not only a writer of plays; he was an entire theatrical staff, actor, scenic artist, costumer, designer, mechanician, producer. He was also a soldier who fought in the ranks, and had probably held a civic office; most Athenians did. No doubt if we knew more about his life we should find that he had still other avocations. His brother-dramatist, Sophocles, was a general and a diplomat and a priest as well; a practical man of the theatre too, who made at least one important innovation. There was no artist class in Greece, withdrawn from active life, no literary class, no learned class. Their soldiers and their sailors and their politicians and their men of affairs wrote their poetry and carved their statues and thought out their philosophy. “To sum up”—the speaker is Pericles—“I say that Athens is the school of Greece and that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace”—that last word a touch so peculiarly Greek.

  So Socrates was everything rather than what we expect a learned man and a philosopher to be. To begin with, he was extremely social; he delighted above all in company. “I am a lover of knowledge,” he says of himself, “and men are my teachers.” He would have them gentlemen, however. He liked a man who had been brought up to do things properly. “A narrow, keen, little legal mind—one who knows not how to wear his cloak like a gentleman” is his dismissal of an objectionable person.

  He takes us sometimes into very illustrious company indeed. Just before a great public funeral he meets an acquaintance on his way from the Agora who tells him the Council are about to choose the orator for the occasion, and asks: “Do you think you could speak yourself if they were to choose you?” “It would be no great wonder if I could,” Socrates answers, “considering the admirable mistress I have in the art of speaking—she who has made so many good speakers, one of whom was the best among all the Greeks—Pericles.” “I suppose you mean Aspasia,” says the other. “Yes, I do,” replies Socrates. “Only yesterday I heard her composing an oration about these very dead. She had been told, as you were saying, that the Athenians were going to choose a speaker and she repeated to me the sort of speech he should deliver, partly improvising and partly putting together fragments of the funeral oration which Pericles spoke, but which, as I believe, she composed.” “Can you remember what Aspasia said?” the friend asks, and is told, “I ought to be able, for she taught me and she was ready to strike me because I kept forgetting.” The oration is then rehearsed and at its close Socrates, who has declared that he is afraid Aspasia will be angry with him for giving publicity to her speech, warns his hearer, “Take care not to tell on me to her and I will repeat to you many other excellent political speeches of hers.”

  At that famous supper table in Agathon’s house where a company of young men was gathered not easily matched for brilliancy by any other age; Agathon himself, who had just been awarded the first prize for a play, Aristophanes, greatest of comedians, that gilded youth, Alcibiades, among the brilliant always the most brilliant—by these and their like, Socrates, when he enters, is treated as a boon companion, beloved, admired, and the best of company. They joke with him and make fun of him with an undertone of loving delight in him, all of which Socrates receives with amused tolerance and the complete assurance of the man of the world. “Don’t answer him, dear Agathon,” calls out Phædrus, the young man who took that walk to the tall plane-tree, “for if he can only get a companion to whom he can talk, especially a good-looking one, he will be of no use for anything else.”

  In the conversation that follows, it appears that he can do all the things young men admire most, the world over. “He can drink any quantity of wine,” says Alcibiades, “and not get drunk.” This declaration is made in humorous despair, after he has insisted on Socrates’ draining a two-quart wine jar, which Socrates does with entire composure. Alcibiades himself, when he first appeared at the door, “crowned with a garland of ivy and violets,” had asked, “Will you have a very drunken man as companion?” And all the rest of the company had already echoed Aristophanes’ suggestion that they avoid deep drinking because they had all drunk too much the day before—“except Socrates, who can always drink or not, and will not care which we do.”

  So, too, he is the typical young man’s hero in his power to endure hardship. Alcibiades and he had messed together in one campaign and the young man says, “I had an opportunity of seeing his extraordinary power of sustaining fatigue. And his endurance was simply marvellous when we were cut off from supplies—there was no one to be compared with him.” It was w
inter and very cold, and everybody else “had on an amazing quantity of clothes and their feet done up in felt and fleeces,” but Socrates, “in ordinary dress and with bare feet, marched on the ice better than the others.” Yet with all this, “if we had a feast he was the only person who had real powers of enjoyment.”

  The Symposium ends with the narrator’s confesssion that they all did finally drink too much, and he himself fell asleep until the dawn, when, on waking up, he found everybody else asleep except Socrates, Aristophanes and Agathon. The two latter were still drinking while Socrates discoursed to them. He was arguing “that the true artist in tragedy would be an artist in comedy also. To which the others had to assent, being drowsy and not quite up to the argument. And first Aristophanes dropped off, then Agathon. Socrates having laid both to sleep, departed. At the Lyceum he took a bath and passed the day as usual.”

  He could make schoolboys feel equally at home with him: “His friend, Menexenus, came and sat down by us and Lysis followed. I asked, ‘Which of you two boys is the older?’ He answered that it was a matter of dispute between them. ‘Which is the better looking?’ The two lads laughed. ‘I shan’t ask you which is the richer,’ I said, ‘for you two are friends, are you not?’ ‘Certainly,’ they replied. ‘And friends have all things in common,’ I said, ‘so that one of you cannot be richer than the other.’ ‘No, indeed,’ they agreed.”

  Follows a talk on friendship, broken off by the boys’ tutors who bid them go home as it is getting late. “I said, however, a few words to the lads at parting: ‘O Menexenus and Lysis, here is a joke: you two boys and I, an old boy who would fain be one of you, think we are friends and yet we have not been able to discover what is a friend!’”

  Such a conclusion or rather absence of conclusion, illustrates the attitude peculiar to Socrates among all the great teachers of the world. He will not do their thinking for the men who come to him, neither in matters small nor great. In the Cratylus where that young man and his friend approach him with a question about language and how names are formed, all the satisfaction they get is: “If I had not been a poor man I might have heard the fifty-drachma course of the great Prodicus, which is a complete education in grammar and language—these are his own words—and then I should have been able at once to answer your question. But, indeed, I have only heard the single-drachma course, and therefore I do not know the truth about such matters. Still, I will gladly assist you in the investigation of them.” The investigation, however, ends with: “This may be true, Cratylus, but is also very likely to be untrue; and therefore I would not have you be too easily persuaded of it. Reflect well, for you are young and of an age to learn. And when you have found the truth, come and tell me.” To which the young man answers—he must have been very young—“I will do as you say, Socrates.”

  This ironic inconclusiveness is his most distinctive characteristic. Always when he is convicting his world of that dark crime in Greece, ignorance, as always when he is—so unobtrusively—leading them on to great thoughts and the conception of their high calling, he assumes that he is in the same case with his hearers, or worse. His habitual manner is a charming diffidence. “I know it may all be quite wrong,” he seems to say. He suggests merely—with a question mark. It is the way of the most sophisticated people in the ne plus ultra of civilized society.

  One other illustration must be given to show the deep seriousness which underlay that attitude so whimsical and deprecatory. It is taken from the talk during the summer stroll with Phædrus—“Is not the road to Athens made for conversation?” The younger man asks if they are not near the place where Boreas is said to have carried off Orithya: “The little stream is delightfully clear and bright. I can fancy there might be maidens playing near. Tell me, Socrates, do you believe the tale?” “The wise are doubtful,” Socrates answers, “and I should not be singular if, like them, I too, doubted. I might have a rational explanation that Orithya was playing when a northerly gust carried her over the rocks, and therefore she was said to have been carried off by Boreas. Now I quite acknowledge that these allegorical explanations are very nice, but he is not to be envied who has to make them up: much labor and ingenuity will be required of him; he will have to go on and rehabilitate Hippo-centaurs and chimæras dire. Gorgons and winged steeds flow in apace, and numberless inconceivable and portentous natures. And if he would fain reduce them to the rules of probability it will take up a deal of time. Now I have no leisure for such enquiries; shall I tell you why? I must first know myself, as the Delphic inscription says; to be curious about things not my concern while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be absurd. And therefore I bid farewell to all that sort of thing. I want to know about myself: am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a lowlier and a diviner destiny?”

  The complete lack of dogmatism in an avowed teacher is startling, not to say repellent, to most of us today, accustomed as we are and devoted as we are to ex cathedra utterances and ipse dixits. But in Athens, in Platonic Athens, at least, the idea that each man must himself be a research worker in the truth if he were ever to attain to any share in it, seemed rather to attract than to repel. Plato, it may be fairly admitted, knew something about the Greek way in such respects. For years and years after Socrates’ death he taught the men of Athens in the world’s first Academy, and there is no suggestion anywhere that he paid for his kind of teaching by unpopularity. If the Platonic dialogues point to any one conclusion beyond another, it is that the Athenian did not want someone else to do his thinking for him.

  In a sense, therefore, extraordinary man though he was, Socrates yet holds up the mirror to his own age. A civilized age, where the really important matters were not those touched, tasted, or handled, an age whose leaders were marked by a devotion to learning and finding out the truth, and an age able to do and dare and endure, still capable of an approach to the heroic deeds of a past only a few years distant. Mind and spirit in equal balance was the peculiar characteristic of Greek art. Intellectuality and exquisite taste balanced by an immense vitality was the distinctive mark of the people—as Plato saw them.

  VII

  Aristophanes and the Old Comedy

  “True comedy,” said Voltaire, “is the speaking picture of the Follies and Foibles of a Nation.” He had Aristophanes in mind, and no better description could be given of the Old Comedy of Athens. To read Aristophanes is in some sort like reading an Athenian comic paper. All the life of Athens is there: the politics of the day and the politicians; the war party and the anti-war party; pacifism, votes for women, free trade, fiscal reform, complaining taxpayers, educational theories, the current religious and literary talk—everything, in short, that interested the average citizen. All was food for his mockery. He was the speaking picture of the follies and foibles of his day.

  The mirror he holds up to the age is a different one from that held up by Socrates. To turn to the Old Comedy from Plato is a singular experience. What has become of that company of courteous gentlemen with their pleasant ways and sensitive feelings and fastidious tastes? Not a trace of them is to be found in these boisterous plays, each coarser and more riotous than the last. To place them in the audience is much more difficult than to imagine Spenser or Sir Philip Sidney listening to Pistol and Doll Tearsheet, just to the degree that Elizabeth’s court was on a lower level of civilization than the circle around Pericles, and Aristophanes capable of more kinds of vulgarity and indecency than Shakespeare ever dreamed of.

  None the less there is a close relationship between the comedy of Athens and the comedy of sixteenth-century England. The Zeitgeist of those periods of splendor and magnificent vigor was in many points, the most important points, alike. The resemblance between Aristophanes and certain of the comedy parts of Shakespeare jumps to the eye. The spirit of their times is in them. There is the same tremendous energy and verve and vitality; the same swinging, swashbuckling spi
rit; the same exuberant, effervescing flow of language; the same rollicking, uproarious fun. Falstaff is a character out of Aristophanes raised to the nth power; Poins, Ancient Pistol, Mistress Quickly, might have come straight out of any of his plays.

  The resemblance is not on the surface only. The two men were alike in the essential genius of their comedy. In those supreme ages of the drama, Elizabethan England and the Athens of Pericles, the step from the sublime to the ridiculous was easily taken. Uproarious comedy flourished side by side with gorgeous tragedy, and when one passed away the other passed away too. There is a connection between the sublime and the ridiculous. Aristophanes’ comedy and, pre-eminently, Shakespeare’s comedy, and theirs alone, has a kinship with tragedy. “The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give.” The audiences to whose capacity for heightened emotion Lear and the Œdipus Rex were addressed, were the same that delighted in Falstaff and in Aristophanes’ maddest nonsense, and when an age succeeded in no wise less keen intellectually, but of thinner emotions, great comedy as well as great tragedy departed.