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the later Acade

END OF THE GREEK AGE OF FAITH.

therein arguments suitable for his purpose against necessity, God, soothsaying; he did not admit that there is any such thing as justice in the abstract, declaring that it is a purely conventional thing; indeed, it was The duplicity of his rhetorical display, alternately in praise of justice and micians. against it, on the occasion of his visit to Rome, that led Cato to have him expelled from the city. Though Plato had been the representative of an age of faith, a secondary analysis of all his works, implying an exposition of their contradictions, ended in skepticism. If we may undertake to determine the precise aim of a philosophy whose representatives stood in such an attitude of rhetorical duplicity, it may be said to be the demonstration that there is no criterion of truth in this world. Persuaded thus of the impossibility of philosophy, Carneades was led to recommend his theory of the probable. "That which has been most perfectly analyzed and examined, and found to be devoid of improbability, is the most probable idea." The degeneration of philosophy now became truly complete, the labors of so many great men being degraded to rhetorical and artistic purposes. It was seen by all that Plato had destroyed all trust in the indications of the senses, and substituted for it the Ideal theory. Aristotle had destroyed that, and there was nothing left to the world but skepticism. A fourth fifth Academies. Academy was founded by Philo of Larissa, a fifth by Antiochus of Ascalon. It was reserved for this teacher to attach the Porch to the Academy, and to merge the doctrines of Plato in those of the Stoics. Such a heterogeneous mixture demonstrates the pass to which speculative philosophy had come, and shows us clearly that her disciples had abandoned her in despair.

The fourth and

age of Faith.

So ends the Greek age of Faith. How strikingly does its history reEnd of the Greek call the corresponding period of individual life—the trusting spirit and the disappointment of youth. We enter on it full of confidence in things and men, never suspecting that the one may disappoint, the other deceive. Our early experiences, if considered at all, afford only matter of surprise that we could ever have been seriously occupied in such folly, or actuated by motives now seeming so inadequate. It never occurs to us that, in our present state, though the pursuits may have changed, they are none the less vain, the objects none the less delusive.

The second age of Greek philosophy ended in sophism, the third in skepticism. Speculative philosophy strikes at last upon a limit which it can not overpass. This is its state even in our own times. It reverberates against the wall that confines it without the least chance of making its way through.

THE MACEDONIAN CAMPAIGN.

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CHAPTER VI.

THE GREEK AGE OF REASON.

RISE OF SCIENCE.

THE MACEDONIAN CAMPAIGN.-Disastrous in its political Effects to Greece, but ushering in the Age of Reason.

ARISTOTLE founds the Inductive Philosophy.-His Method the Inverse of that of Plato.—Its great Power.-In his own hands it fails for want of Knowledge, but is carried out by the Alexandrians.

ZENO.-His Philosophical Aim is the Cultivation of Virtue and Knowledge.—He is in the Ethical Branch the Counterpart of Aristotle in the Physical.

FOUNDATION OF THE MUSEUM OF ALEXANDRIA.—The great Libraries, Observatories, Botanical Gardens, Menageries, Dissecting Houses.—Its Effect on the rapid Development of exact Knowledge. — Influence of Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, Apollonius, Ptolemy, Hipparchus, on Geometry, Natural Philosophy, Astronomy, Chronology, Geography. Decline of the Greek Age of Reason.

THE conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great is a most important event in European history. That adventurer, carrying out the intentions of his father Philip, commenced his attack with apparently very insignificant means, having, it is said, at the most, only The Greek invathirty-four thousand infantry, four thousand cavalry, and sion of Persia. seventy talents in money. The result of his expedition was the ruin. of the Persian empire, and also the ruin of Greece. It was not without reason that his memory was cursed in his native country. Her lifeblood was drained away by his successes. In view of the splendid fortunes to be made in Asia, Greece ceased to be the place for an enterprising man. To such an extent did military emigration go, that Greek recruits were settled all over the Persian empire; their number was sufficient to injure irreparably the country from which they had parted, but not sufficient to hellenize the dense and antique populations among whom they had settled.

Not only was it thus by the drain of men that the Macedonian expedition was so dreadfully disastrous to Greece, the political consequences following those successful campaigns added to the baneful Its ruinous effect result. Alexander could not have more effectually ruined on Greece. Athens had he treated her as he did Thebes, which he leveled with the ground, massacring six thousand of her citizens, and selling thirty thousand for slaves. The founding of Alexandria was the commercial end of Athens, the finishing stroke to her old colonial system. It might have been well for her had he stopped short in his projects with the

128

ing of Alexandria.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND ARISTOTLE.

downfall of Tyre, destroyed, not from any vindictive reasons, as is someInjury to Athens times said, but because he discovered that that city was an from the found- essential part of the Persian system. It was never his intention that Athens should derive advantage from the annihilation of her Phoenician competitor; his object was effectually carried out by the building and prosperity of Alexandria.

of the Macedonian

campaigns.

Though the military celebrity of this great soldier may be diminished by the history of the last hundred years, which shows a uniform result of victory when European armies are brought in contact with Asiatic, even under the most extraordinary disadvantages, there can not be denied to him a profound sagacity and statesmanship excelled by no other conqueror. Before he became intoxicated with success, and, unfortunately, too habitually intoxicated with wine, there was much that was noble in his character. He had been under the instruction of Aristotle for several years, and, on setting out on his expedition, took with him so many learned men as almost to justify the remark applied to it, that it Scientific tendency was as much a scientific as a military undertaking. Among those who thus accompanied him was Callisthenes, a relation and pupil of Aristotle, destined for an evil end. Perhaps the assertion that Alexander furnished to his master nearly a million of dollars, and the services of several thousand men, for the purpose of obtaining and examining the specimens required in the composition of his work on the "History of Animals" may be an exaggeration, but there can be no doubt that in these transactions was the real beginning of that policy which soon led to the institution of the Museum at Alexandria. Origin of the influ- The importance of this event, though hitherto little underthrough Alexan stood, admits of no exaggeration, so far as the intellectual progress of Europe is concerned. It gave to the works of Aristotle their wonderful duration; it imparted to them not alone a Grecian celebrity, but led to their translation into Syriac by the Nestorians in the fifth century, and from Syriac by the Arabs into their tongue four hundred years later. They exercised a living influence over Christians and Mohammedans indifferently, from Spain to Mesopotamia.

der.

If the letter quoted by Plutarch as having been written by Alexander to Aristotle is authentic, it not only shows how thoroughly the pupil had been indoctrinated into the wisdom of the master, but warns us how liable we are to be led astray in the exposition we are presently to give of the Aristotelian philosophy. There was then, as unfortunately there has been too often since, a private as well as a public doctrine. Alexander upbraids the philosopher for his indiscretion in revealing things that it was understood should be concealed. Aristotle defends himself by asserting that the desired concealment had not been broken. By many other incidents of a trifling kind the attachment of the conqueror to philosophy is indicated; thus Harpalus and Nearchus, the

THE MERITS AND CRIMES OF ALEXANDER.

129

and undertakings

companions of his youth, were the agents employed in Scientific training some of his scientific undertakings, the latter being engaged of Alexander. in sea explorations, doubtless having in the main a political object, yet full of interest to science. Had Alexander lived, Nearchus was to have repeated the circumnavigation of Africa. Harpalus, while governor of Babylon, was occupied in the attempt to exchange the vegetation of Europe and Asia; he intertransplanted the productions of Persia and Greece, succeeding, as is related, in his object of making all European plants that he tried grow in Mesopotamia except the ivy. The journey to the Caspian Sea, the expedition into the African deserts, indicate Alexander's personal taste for natural knowledge; nor is it without sig nificance that, while on his deathbed, and, indeed, within a few days of his decease, he found consolation and amusement in having Nearchus by his bedside relating the story of his voyages. Nothing shows more strikingly how correct was his military perception than the intention he avowed of equipping a thousand ships for the conquest of Carthage, and thus securing his supremacy in the Mediterranean. Notwithstanding all this, there were many points of his character, and many events of his life, worthy of the condemnation with which they have been visited; the drunken burning of Persepolis, the prisoners he slaugh- His unbridled tered in honor of Hephaestion, the hanging of Callisthenes, iniquities. were the results of intemperance and unbridled passion. Even so steady a mind as his was incapable of withstanding the influence of such enormous treasures as those he seized at Susa, amounting, it is said, to four hundred millions of dollars; the plunder of the Persian empire; the inconceivable luxury of Asiatic life; the uncontrolled power to which he attained. But he was not so imbecile as to believe himself the descendant of Jupiter Ammon; that was only an artifice he permitted for the sake of influencing those around him. We must not forget that he lived in an age when men looked for immaculate conceptions and celestial descents. These Asiatic ideas had made their way into Europe. The Athenians themselves were soon to be reconciled to the appointment of divine honors to such as Antigonus and Demetrius, adoring them as gods-savior gods-and instituting sacrifices and priests for their worship.

passions and

Great as were the political results of the Macedonian expedition, they were equaled by the intellectual. The times were marked The Greek age of by the ushering in of a new philosophy. Greece had gone Reason ushered in. through her age of Credulity, her age of Inquiry, her age of Faith; she had entered on her age of Reason, and, had freedom of action been permitted to her, she would have given a decisive tone to the forthcoming civilization of Europe. As will be seen in the following pages, that great destiny did not await her. From her eccentric po- Its inability to acsition at Alexandria she could not civilize Europe. In her ization of Europe.

I

complish the civil

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ARISTOTLE.

old age, the power of Europe, concentrated in the Roman empire, overthrew her. There are very few histories of the past of more interest to modern times, and none, unfortunately, more misunderstood, than this Greek age of Reason manifested at Alexandria. It illustrates, in the most signal manner, that affairs control men more than men control affairs. The scientific associations of the Macedonian conqueror directly arose from the contemporaneous state of Greek philosophy in the act of reaching the close of its age of faith, and these influences ripened under the Macedonian captain who became King of Egypt. As it was, the learning of Alexandria, though diverted from its most appropriate and desirable direction by the operation of the Byzantine system, in the course of a few centuries acting forcibly upon it, was not without an influence on the future thought of Europe. Even at this day Europe will not bear to be fully told how great that influence has been.

Aristotle are its

prelude.

The age of Reason, to which Aristotle is about to introduce us, stands. in striking contrast with the preceding ages. It can not escape the reader that what was done by the men of science in Alexandria resembles what is doing in our own times; their day was the foreshadowing of ours. And yet a long and dreary period of almost twenty centuries parts us from them. Politically, Aristotle, through his friendship with The writings of Alexander and the perpetuation of the Macedonian influence in Ptolemy, was the connecting link between the Greek age of Faith and that of Reason, as he was also philosophically by the nature of his doctrines. He offers us an easy passage from the speculative methods of Plato to the scientific methods of Archimedes and Euclid. The copiousness of his doctrines, and the obscurity of many of them, might, perhaps, discourage a superficial student, unless he steadily bears in mind the singular authority they maintained for so many ages, and the brilliant results in all the exact parts of human knowledge to which they so quickly led. The history of Aristotle and his philosophy is therefore our necessary introduction to the grand, the immortal achievements of the Alexandrian school.

Aristotle was born at Stagira, in Thrace, B.C. 384. His father was Biography of an eminent author of those times on subjects of Natural HisAristotle. tory; by profession he was a physician. Dying while his son was yet quite young, he bequeathed to him not only very ample means, but also his own tastes. Aristotle soon found his way to Athens, and entered the school of Plato, with whom it is said he remained for nearly twenty years. During this period he spent most of his patrimony, and in the end was obliged to support himself by the trade of a druggist. At length differences arose between them, for, as we shall soon find, the great pupil was by no means a blind follower of the great master. In a fortunate moment, Philip, the King of Macedon, appointed him preceptor to his son Alexander, an incident of importance in the intel