Part 62
"Thou mistakest the matter, Aristodemus; the greater magnificence they have shown in their care of _thee_, so much the more honor and service thou owest them."
"Be assured," said Aristodemus, "if I once could be persuaded the gods took care of man, I should want no monitor to remind me of my duty."
"And canst thou doubt, Aristodemus, if the gods take care of man? Hath not the glorious privilege of walking upright been _alone_ bestowed on him, whereby he may, with the better advantage, survey what is around him, contemplate, with more ease, those splendid objects which are above, and avoid the numerous ills and inconveniences which would otherwise befall him? Other animals, indeed, they have provided with feet, by which they may remove from one place to another; but to _man_ they have also given _hands_, with which he can form many things for his use, and make himself happier than creatures of any other kind. A tongue hath been bestowed on every other animal, but what animal, except man, hath the power of forming words with it, whereby to explain his thoughts, and make them intelligible to others? And to show that the gods have had regard to his very _pleasures_, they have not limited them, like those of other animals, to _times_ and seasons, but man is left to indulge in them whenever not hurtful to him.
"But it is not with respect to the body alone that the gods have shown themselves thus bountiful to man! Their most excellent gift is that _soul_ they have infused into him, which so far surpasses what is elsewhere to be found. For, by what animal, except man, is even the _existence_ of those gods discovered, who have _produced_, and still _uphold_, in such regular order, this beautiful and stupendous frame of the universe? What other species of creatures are to be found that can serve, that can adore them? What other animal is able, like man, to provide against the assaults of heat and cold, of thirst and hunger? That can lay up remedies for the time of sickness and improve the strength nature hath given by a well-proportioned exercise? That can receive, like him, information and instruction, or so happily keep in memory what he hath seen, and heard, and learnt? These things being so, who seeth not that man is, as it were, _a god_ in the midst of this visible creation; so far doth he surpass, whether in the endowments of soul or body, all animals whatsoever that have been produced therein! For, if the _body_ of the _ox_ had been joined to the _mind_ of _man_, the acuteness of the latter would have stood him in small stead, while unable to execute the well-designed plan; nor would the _human_ form have been of more use to the brute, so long as it remained destitute of understanding! But in thee, Aristodemus, hath been joined to a wonderful _soul_, a body no less wonderful, and sayest thou, after _this_, 'the gods take no thought for me!' What wouldst thou, then, more to convince thee of their care?"
"I would they should send, and inform me," said Aristodemus, "what things I _ought_ or _ought not_ to do in like manner as thou sayest they frequently do to thee."
"And what then, Aristodemus! Supposest thou, that when the gods give out some oracle to _all_ the Athenians, they mean it not for _thee_? If, by their prodigies, they declare aloud to all Greece--to _all_ mankind--the things which shall befall them, are they dumb to _thee_ alone? And art _thou_ the only person whom they have placed beyond their care? Believest thou they would have wrought into the mind of man a persuasion of their being _able_ to make him happy or miserable, if so be they had no such _power_? or would not even man himself, long ere this, have seen through the gross delusion? How is it, Aristodemus, thou rememberest, or remarkest not, that the kingdoms and commonwealths most renowned as well for their _wisdom_ as antiquity, are those whose piety and devotion hath been the most observable? And why thinkest thou that the providence of God may not easily extend itself throughout the whole universe? As, therefore, among men, we make best trial of the affection and gratitude of our neighbor, by showing him kindness, and discover his wisdom, by consulting him in our distress; do thou, in like manner, behave towards the gods, and, if thou wouldst experience what their wisdom, and what their love, render thyself deserving the communication of some of those divine secrets which may not be perpetrated by man, and are imparted to those alone who consult, who adore, who obey the Deity. Then shalt thou, my Aristodemus, understand there is a Being whose eye pierceth throughout all nature, and whose ear is open to every sound; _extended_ to all places; _extending_ through all time, and whose bounty and care can know no other bounds than those fixed by his own creation!"
By this discourse, and others of the like nature, Socrates taught his friends that they were not only to forbear whatever was impious, unjust, or unbecoming before _men;_ but even, when alone, they ought to have a regard to their actions; since the gods have their eyes continually upon us, and none of our designs can be concealed from them.
EURIPIDES.
Euripides flourished about 450 B.C.; was born 480 B.C. He spent his youth in the highest mental and physical training. He was a native of Athens, and enjoyed the most glorious days of her annals, being brought in direct connection with Æschylus and Sophocles, and in his older days was a pupil of Socrates.
In comparing Euripides and the other two masters in Grecian tragedy, it may be said that he ranks first in tragic representation and effect; Sophocles first in dramatic symmetry and ornament; Æschylus first in poetic vigor and grandeur. Æschylus was the most sublime; Sophocles the most beautiful; Euripides the most pathetic. The first displays the lofty intellect; the second exercises the cultivated taste; the third indulges the feeling heart. Each, as it were, shows a fine piece of sculpture. In Æschylus, it is a naked hero, with all the strength, boldness, and dignity of olden time. In Sophocles and Euripides, it may be perhaps the same hero; but with the former, he has put on the flowing robes, the elegant address, and the soft urbanity of a polished age; with the latter, he is yielding to some melancholy emotion, ever heedless of his posture or gait, and casting his unvalued drapery negligently about him. They have been compared by an illustration from another art: "The sublime and daring Æschylus resembles some strong and impregnable castle situated on a rock, whose martial grandeur awes the beholder--its battlements defended by heroes, and its gates proudly hung with trophies." Sophocles appears with splendid dignity, like some imperial palace of richest architecture; the symmetry of the parts and the chaste magnificence of the whole delight the eye and command the approbation of the judgment. The pathetic and moral Euripides has the solemnity of a Gothic temple, whose storied windows admit a dim religious light, enough to show its high embowed roof, and the monuments of the dead which rise in every part, impressing our minds with pity and terror as emblems of the uncertain and short duration of human greatness, and with an awful sense of our own mortality.
ARISTOPHANES.
Very little is known about the life of Aristophanes. He was born about 444 B.C., and devoted himself to comic poetry. He wrote fifty-four plays, of which eleven are extant.
The comedies of Aristophanes are universally regarded as the standard of Attic writing in its greatest purity. His genius was vast, versatile, and original, and his knowledge of human nature surpassed by Homer and Shakspeare alone.
The noble tone of morals, the elevated taste, the sound political wisdom, the boldness and acuteness of the satire, the grand object, which is seen throughout, of correcting the follies of the day, and improving the condition of his country--all these are features in Aristophanes, which, however disguised, as they intentionally are, by coarseness and buffoonery, entitle him to the highest respect from every reader of antiquity. He condescended, indeed, to play the part of jester to the Athenian tyrant. But his jests were the vehicles for telling to them the soundest truths. They were never without a far higher aim than to raise a momentary laugh. He was no farce writer, but a deep philosophical politician; grieved and ashamed at the condition of his country, and through the stage, the favorite amusement of Athenians, aiding to carry on the one great common work, which Plato proposed in his dialogues, and in which all the better and nobler spirits of the time seem to have concurred as by a confederacy--the reformation of an atrocious democracy. There is as much system in the comedies of Aristophanes as in the dialogues of Plato. Every part of a vitiated public mind is exposed in its turn. Its demagogues in the Knights, its courts of justice in the Wasps, its foreign policy in the Acharnians, its tyranny over the allies in the Birds, the state of female society in the Sysistrate and the Ecclesiazusæ, and its corrupt poetical taste in the Frogs. No one play is without its definite object; and the state of national education, as the greatest cause of all, is laid open in the Clouds. Whatever light is thrown, by that admirable play, upon the character of Socrates, and the position which he occupies in the Platonic Dialogues--a point, it may be remarked, on which the greatest mistakes are daily made--it is chiefly valuable as exhibiting, in a short but very complete analysis, and by a number of fine Rembrandt-like strokes, not any of which must be overlooked, all the features of that frightful school of sophistry, which at that time was engaged systematically in corrupting the Athenian youth, and against which the whole battery of Plato was pointedly directed.
PLATO.
Plato was born in the year 429 B.C., and died when he was eighty-two years old, on his birthday. He was a pupil of Socrates, the first and purest of moral philosophers. By the rare union of a brilliant imagination with a fondness for severe mathematical studies and profound metaphysical investigations; by extensive foreign travel; by familiar intercourse with the most enlightened men of his time,
## particularly Socrates, whose instructive conversations he attended for
eight years, as well as by the correspondence which he maintained with the Pythagoreans of Magna Græcia, this great philosopher came to surpass all others in the vastness and profoundness of his views, and in the correctness and eloquence with which he expressed them; while his pure moral character entitled him to take his place by the side of Socrates. Socrates once said, "For what higher reward could a teacher ask than to have such pupils as Xenophon and Plato?"
The object of Plato was evidently the noble one of placing before man a high intellectual, and consequently, by implication, a high moral standard as the end and object of his aspirations; to encourage his efforts after the true, the pure, the beautiful, and the virtuous, knowing that the character would be purified in the endeavor, and that the consciousness of the progress made, step by step, would be of itself a reward. The object of science was, as he taught, the true, the eternal, the immutable, that which is; in one alone could these attributes be found united--that is God. Man's duty, then, according to the Platonic system is to know God and His attributes, and to aim at being under the practical influence of this knowledge. This the Christian is taught, but much more simply and plainly, to know God, and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent, and to propose to himself a perfect standard, to be perfect even as his Father in heaven is perfect, and to look forward, by that help which Plato had no warrant to look for, to attain the perfect measure of the fulness of Christ. Although Plato believed and taught that man ought to strive after and devote himself to the contemplation of the One, the Eternal, the Infinite, he was humbly conscious that no one could attain to the perfection of such knowledge; that it is too wonderful and excellent for human powers. Man's incapacity for apprehending this knowledge he attributed to the soul, during his present state of existence, being cramped and confined by its earthly tabernacle.
Plato defined virtue to be the imitation of God, or the free effort of man to attain to a resemblance to his original, or, in other terms, a unison and harmony of all our principles and actions according to reason, whence results the highest degree of happiness. Evil is opposed to this harmony as a disease of the soul. Virtue is _one_, indeed, but compounded of four elements--_wisdom_, _courage_, _temperance_, and _justice_. In his practical philosophy he blended a rigid principle of moral obligation with a spirit of gentleness and humanity; and education he described as a liberal cultivation and moral discipline of the mind. Politics he defined to be the application, on a great scale, of the laws of morality; for a society, being composed of individuals, is under similar moral obligations, and the end of politics to be liberty and concord. Beauty he considered to be the sensible representation of moral and physical perfection; consequently it is one with truth and goodness, and inspires love, which leads to virtue.
Would that many so-called Christian legislators and Christian people would go to this "heathen" philosopher and learn of him--learn that to do right is always and ever the highest safety, the highest expediency, the highest "conservatism," the highest good!
How beautifully Akenside expresses this:--
"Thus was beauty sent from heaven, The lovely ministress of truth and good, In this dark world: for TRUTH AND GOOD ARE ONE, AND BEAUTY DWELLS IN THEM, AND THEY IN HER, WITH LIKE PARTICIPATION. Wherefore, then, O sons of earth! would ye dissolve the tie? O wherefore, with a rash, impetuous aim, Seek ye those flowery joys with which the hand Of lavish fancy paints each flattering scene Where beauty _seems_ to dwell, nor once inquire Where is the sanction of eternal truth, Or where the seal of undeceitful good, To save your search from folly! wanting these, Lo! beauty withers in your void embrace, And with the glittering of an idiot's toy Did fancy mock your vows."
THE PERFECT BEAUTY.
(_By Plato._)
"He who aspires to love rightly, ought from his earliest youth to seek an intercourse with beautiful forms, and first to make a single form the object of his love, and therein to generate intellectual excellencies. He ought, then, to consider that beauty in whatever form it resides is the brother of that beauty which subsists in another form; and if he ought to pursue that which is beautiful in form, it would be absurd to imagine that beauty is not one and the same thing in all forms, and would therefore remit much of his ardent preference towards one, through his perception of the multitude of claims upon his love. In addition, he would consider the beauty which is in souls more excellent than that which is in form. So that one endowed with an admirable soul, even though the flower of the form were withered, would suffice him as the object of his love and care, and the companion with whom he might seek and produce such conclusions as tend to the improvement of youth; so that it might be led to observe the beauty and the conformity which there is in the observation of its duties and the laws, and to esteem little the mere beauty of the outward form. He would then conduct his pupil to science, so that he might look upon the loveliness of wisdom; and that contemplating thus the universal beauty, no longer would he unworthily and meanly enslave himself to the attractions of one form in love, nor one subject of discipline or science, but would turn towards the wide ocean of intellectual beauty, and from the sight of the lovely and majestic forms which it contains, would abundantly bring forth his conceptions in philosophy; until, strengthened and confirmed, he should at length steadily contemplate one science which is the science of this universal beauty.
[Illustration: FROM ANCIENT SCULPTURING.]
"Attempt, I entreat you, to mark what I say with as keen an observation as you can. He who has been disciplined to this point in love, by contemplating beautiful objects gradually, and in their order, now arriving at the end of all that concerns love, on a sudden beholds a beauty wonderful in its nature. This is it, O Socrates, for the sake of which all the former labors were endured. It is eternal, unproduced, indestructible; neither subject to increase nor decay; not, like other things, partly beautiful and partly deformed; not at one time beautiful and at another time not; not beautiful in relation to one thing and deformed in relation to another; not here beautiful and there deformed; not beautiful in the estimation of one person and deformed in that of another; nor can this supreme beauty be figured to the imagination like a beautiful face, or beautiful hands, or any portion of the body, nor like any discourse, nor any science. Nor does it subsist in any other that lives or is, either in earth, or in heaven, or in any other place; but it is eternally uniform and consistent, and monoeidic with itself. All other things are beautiful through a participation of it, with this condition, that although they are subject to production and decay, it never becomes more or less, or endures any change. When any one, ascending from a correct system of love, begins to contemplate this supreme beauty, he already touches the consummation of his labor. For such as discipline themselves upon this system, or are conducted by another beginning to ascend through these transitory objects which are beautiful, towards that which is beauty itself, proceeding as on steps from the love of one form to that of two, and from that of two, to that of all forms which are beautiful; and from beautiful forms to beautiful habits and institutions, and from institutions to beautiful doctrines; until, from the meditation of many doctrines, they arrive at that which is nothing else than the doctrine of the supreme beauty itself, in the knowledge and contemplation of which at length they repose.
"Such a life as this, my dear Socrates," exclaimed the stranger Prophetess, "spent in the contemplation of the beautiful, is the life for men to live; which, if you chance ever to experience, you will esteem far beyond gold and rich garments, and even those lovely persons whom you and many others now gaze on with astonishment, and are prepared neither to eat nor drink so that you may behold and live forever with these objects of your love! What, then, shall we imagine to be the aspect of the supreme beauty itself, simple, pure, uncontaminated with the intermixture of human flesh and colors, and all other idle and unreal shapes attendant on mortality; the divine, the original, the supreme, the monoeidic beautiful itself? What must be the life of him who dwells with and gazes on that which it becomes us all to seek? Think you not that to him alone is accorded the prerogative of bringing forth, not images and shadows of virtue, for he is in contact not with a shadow but with reality; with virtue itself, in the production and nourishment of which he becomes dear to the gods, and if such a privilege is conceded to any human being, himself immortal?"--_From the Banquet, translated by the poet Shelley._
THE LAST HOURS OF SOCRATES.
(_By Plato._)
"When the dead arrive at the place to which their demon leads them severally, first of all they are judged, as well those who have lived well and piously, as those who have not. And those who appear to have passed a middle kind of life, proceeding to Acheron, and embarking in the vessels they have, on these arrive at the lake, and there dwell, and when they are purified, and have suffered punishment for the iniquities they may have committed, they are set free, and each receives the reward of his good deeds, according to his deserts; but those who appear to be incurable, through the magnitude of their offences, either from having committed many and great sacrileges, or many unjust and lawless murders, or other similar crimes, these a suitable destiny hurls into Tartarus, whence they never come forth. But those who appear to have been guilty of curable, yet great offences, such as those who through anger have committed any violence against father or mother, and have lived the remainder of their life in a state of penitence, or they who have become homicides in a similar manner, these must fall into Tartarus, but after they have fallen, and have been there for a year, the wave casts them forth, the homicides into Cocytus, but the parricides and matricides into Pyriphlegethon; but when, being borne along, they arrive at the Acherusian lake, there they cry out to and invoke, some those whom they slew, others those whom they injured, and invoking them, they entreat and implore them to suffer them to go out into the lake, and to receive them, and if they persuade them, they go out, and are freed from their sufferings, but if not, they are borne back to Tartarus, and thence again into the rivers, and they do not cease from suffering this until they have persuaded those whom they have injured; for this sentence was imposed upon them by the judges. But those who are found to have lived an eminently holy life, these are they, who, being freed and set at large from these regions in the earth, as from prison, arrive at the pure abode above, and dwell on the upper parts of the earth. And among these, they who have sufficiently purified themselves by philosophy shall live without bodies, throughout all future time, and shall arrive at habitations yet more beautiful than these, which it is neither easy to describe, nor at present is there sufficient time for the purpose.
"But for the sake of these things which we have described, we should use every endeavor, Simmias, so as to acquire virtue and wisdom in this life; for the reward is noble, and the hope great.