but of the other,

Perhaps, during this digression, the objection may have been rising in your minds that if Greek music was so universally believed to have a moral or immoral influence, this was because it differed wholly in quality from that which we pursue, and that therefore an inference from one to the other is very hazardous. This is supported by the fact already adduced, that the actual remains of Greek music, though legible and intelligible in the literal sense, have no power whatever to speak to our musical emotions. We must therefore turn back from practice to theory and prove to you that, in spite of these difficulties, Greek music was distinctly the source and forerunner of our own. And I may say by way of preface to this part of my discourse that the simplicity of music, far from being a cause of its lesser emotional effect, may be the very reason why the great mass of people feel it more deeply. The intricacy and difficulty of our modern music tend to estrange it from the feelings of the larger public and to confine its influence to the special class of trained musicians. The Greeks left us no practical work on music, no criticism of existing compositions, no comparison of the effects produced on audiences by this or that artist, by this or that kind of instrument. We find only obvious generalities, such as the flute being more exciting than the harp. There is indeed one passage where Plato goes deeper and inveighs against purely instrumental music as more exciting and therefore possibly more mischievous than vocal music with an accompaniment, showing that he did not lay the stress of the emotion upon the words. Those who have gone deeply into modern music will agree with him; they feel that the emotions produced by a symphony of Beethoven are more subtle, and, because more subtle, deeper and more lasting than those produced by any vocal music, unless it be eight-part music, which approaches the richness of an orchestra.

But this suggestive remark is quite an exception. The extant musical tracts are wholly theoretical, and are concerned with the scientific basis of music, not its application to practice. And the first problem to which they applied themselves, which they solved, and have handed down to us, their heirs in art, is the determination of the proper scale or scales in which music should be composed. This was no easy thing to do, and if you take the trouble to hear the music of any people who have not adopted the Greek solution, or one like it, you will at once perceive the difference. I well remember persuading, with great difficulty, a band of gipsies, in Hungary, to play for me not the music of the Hungarians, for which they are so celebrated, but some of their own Oriental stuff, which they play among themselves in private. I found it wholly unintelligible on account of the scale, which seemed to have thirteen or fourteen notes within the octave. All this the Greeks had contemplated, and in some of their early scales they used quarter-tones and intervals strange and disagreeable to us. But, after much hesitation, they fixed upon the diatonic scale, which became the basis of their music, and in due time of ours. The varieties of this scale which they used were far greater than ours. We are contented with the variation of major and minor, and repeat the same intervals in the same order with a mere difference of pitch, very slightly modified by the temperament of our tuning. The Greeks thought the position of the two semitones far more important, and considered that the quality of the scale, quite apart from pitch, was produced by the variety in the placing of these intervals. But I must repeat that our extant treatises are so absolutely scientific and not practical that it would be impossible to attempt an analysis of them in a popular lecture. The discovery of the scientific basis of concord or harmony and its difference from discord had been made very early by the Pythagoreans, and I have often thought that their famous theory that numerical relations were the key of the universe was much stimulated and fortified by finding that octaves, fifths, and fourths, which are recognised by the ear as concords, can be produced by stopping a vibrating string at the points dividing it into portions represented by 1:2, 2:3, and 3:4. They did not acknowledge our favorite major ⅓ as a concord, the proportion being more complex, viz. 4:5 or 5:6; and indeed if the major ⅓ on our instruments be tuned to its full height of two full tones, it sounds sharp and very disagreeable. In this as in most detail we can follow and understand the Greek theory. When Aristotle tells us that the middle note of the scale is that to which the melody always returns, he is evidently speaking of the unaccompanied melody, and there are scores of our melodies that move up and down round this keynote, which may in these cases well represent the central note of the scale.

It is not possible for me to delay longer on this topic. I therefore sum up the result thus: the Greeks had a music to some extent homogeneous with ours; they attributed to its varieties great and direct effects on the morals of men. Seeing that in all their other arts they were so singularly modern and reasonable, it is surely well worth the careful consideration of educators whether similar effects be not latent in our music, e.g. whether the study of Handel, Corelli, Palestrina, may not have a strengthening effect on the mind, whereas the study of Chopin, of Verdi, even of Beethoven, with all the vague Weltschmerz which they contain, the unsatisfied longings, the unreasoning discontent, the suspended harmony, may not contribute directly to the vices of modern society, vices not unknown in the fashionable cities of this Commonwealth.

We now turn to the subject of household furniture and decoration, in which you will find that there are many and the best of our ideas borrowed from the Greeks.

We have not had the good fortune to unearth a Greek town of the best epoch from under lava or from beneath the débris of an earthquake. But it is likely that even if the ruins of Antioch were cleared of the great rocks that tumbled down upon it, in the many earthquakes of the early centuries of our era, some splendid houses might be discovered. So far, however, I do not know that, except at Delos, we have been able to find clear evidences that the wall decorations and the furniture of a Greek house were the same in kind as those which a century and a half of excavation has brought up from the dead in Pompeii and Herculaneum. These towns, as well as Naples, which was well known to Cicero as an essentially Greek town, were in close proximity to Puteoli, which again was for several centuries the great port for all Alexandrian luxuries since the second Ptolemy had made friends with the Romans. Through Puteoli, then, Greek artists and Greek designs made their way to that coast, and even the worship of Isis, and the frequent use of the ibis and the crocodile in their designs, show that the Hellenistic artists had felt the influence of native Egyptian work, just as the workman of the French “Empire” felt the breath of old Egypt, when Napoleon’s Commission brought out its splendid work on that mysterious country.

Although, therefore, all the little texts scrawled upon the walls by children are in Latin, I take it the furniture and decoration of the smart houses or villas uncovered are in Greek style, and may thus give us some suggestion of the inside of a Greek house. And let me add at once, that the discoveries of such ruins and remains at Rome in the time of the Renaissance moulded all the taste of that age, and produced house decoration, in direct imitation of the antique, which has been copied down to the present day.

VI

SCIENCE: GRAMMAR—LOGIC—MATHEMATICS—MEDICINE

WHEN I speak to you of Greek Science, of course I use the word in the old and proper sense to include all strict reasoning, especially of the deductive kind, particularly therefore pure Mathematics, and not merely the inferences from observation and experiment which now commonly assume and even monopolise the title of Science. I often see in educational programmes Science and Mathematics contrasted as distinct things, which indeed in this case they are, only because the Science so-called is often unworthy of the name. Sciences of observation were, I think, not formulated by the Greeks except in the case of Medicine, in which their results are still quoted with respect; in the case of Hydrostatics, as Heron’s great book shows; and in the case of Natural History, in which they made the first collection of facts that modern men of science can use; but we have lost what they said on their artistic observations, namely their minute observations of the anatomy of the human body, which, as I have told you, their sculptors learned to represent with such accuracy that no modern anatomist can find a flaw in their work. This was done by careful external observation, for the practice of dissecting the human body would have seemed to them impious and horrible. But, whenever it was possible, the Greeks went back to first principles and framed a theory from which they deduced the facts; and this it is which has made their science so valuable. It will not be hard to show you how in Logic—the Science of Reasoning,—in Arithmetic, and in Geometry—the science of the laws of lines, of figures, and of solid bodies in space—they are our teachers to the present day.

It is well to approach the subject of Logic through the avenue by which the Greeks approached it, through the analysis of ordinary language and as the natural expression of thinking. The early poets and great prose writers had so far perfected the use of language that the Greeks in the catalogue of human acquisitions came to put their speech on a very high pedestal. Delighted with it, and despising all other tongues as barbarous, they convinced themselves that the Greek word adequately expressed the nature of the thing it signified, and therefore that to understand their language properly was to understand the nature of things. Λὁγος meant not only speech (oratio), but reason (ratio), and so, after first seeking to obtain clear conceptions of abstract ideas, they advanced to the structure of sentences and analysed speech in so accurate a way that their technical terms are our technical terms of to-day. When you talk of infinitives, or genitives, or participles, you are only using words borrowed from Latin translations, often mistranslations, of the Greek. You find these logical studies in their beginning, but by no means in their infancy, in the Dialogues of Plato. Whole conversations are employed in trying to fix the connotation of important moral terms, such as holiness, or valour, or temperance. And we also find in some of the dialogues an appreciation of the difficulties contained in the form of simple propositions, the meaning of affirmation or negation, and the nature of the deduction of one proposition from another.

But I need not detain you with particulars about these early preparations for science, when we have before us in Aristotle various treatises on the analysis of speech from its logical side, and the laying down of the laws of formal thinking with such accuracy and completeness that nothing of importance has ever been added to it. We hear it often said that a single man apprehended and systematised these laws. That is not true; there were plenty of tentative essays before his time. But if there be one achievement which has made his name and fame everlasting, it is his treatment of the theory of Reasoning.

The mediæval universities knew this well, and so do the modern universities of Europe which are worthy of the name. I need not bear witness to the vast importance of common Logic by telling you that in my own youth nothing ever woke me up like having a good Logic put into my hands at the age of fourteen. For since that time I have been often teaching it and have watched its effects on hundreds of intelligent youths. Among all the subjects that we teach, not for the purpose of supplying mere facts, but for the purpose of training youth to judge facts and co-ordinate their knowledge, I know nothing that benefits the average student like the study of Aristotelian Logic. May I add that, so far as I know American education, the most serious defect I have observed in it is the small attention paid to this subject, and hence the vast number of your men and women who are unable to distinguish a sound from an unsound argument, still less to point out where the fallacy lies.

There are here present, I have no doubt, a large number of people, otherwise highly educated, who, were I to propose a stock example for their criticism, would feel at a loss how to deal with it. Let me give an illustration. “Every hen comes from an egg; every egg comes from a hen; therefore every egg comes from an egg.” Is this a correct argument? If not, where is it at fault? If you had all been trained in Whately’s Logic, or any other Logic of the kind, as we were in our youth, such a question would present no difficulty whatever.

But if you have failed to derive this lesson from the old Greeks, your English ancestors were better advised. All the subtlety of the mediæval schools, all the disputations of their universities, were based on Greek Logic; and, if they often wasted their time on idle problems, it must always be remembered that by this means Europe was trained to accuracy and subtlety in argument, and hence to weigh vague and random theorising and to make men competent critics of any new dogma. We often remark from our side of the Atlantic how many wild theories in religion, how many sham theories in science, blossom and flourish in this country, inhabited though it may be by a most shrewd and intelligent population. The simplest answer is to point to their ignorance of common Logic, and hence their liability to be deceived by the most vulgar fallacies. It would be easy to mention a book popular in this country, the pages of which any logically trained people would only use to wrap sardines or to heat a stove.

The Greeks do not parade their logic in their writings, though we know they were fond of subtleties; there are indeed examples of it in the Sophist of Plato, where this sort of thing is ridiculed in his travesty of two professional educators. But there are two great and solid proofs of the power which strict Logic had upon their minds. The first comes out in their literature. Wherever they undertake to argue an issue, whether political, social, or religious, their reasoning is clear and easily followed. They of course often start from traditional beliefs, which may not now command assent, but they always reason from these with clear and sober thinking. There was no more important cause for the permanence of that great literature. Its sound thinking has kept it from all extravagance and made it acceptable to educated men of all ages and nations. The second proof is my chief subject to-day: it is the peculiarly logical character of Greek mathematics which has made this too the model of the scientific thinking of the world.

Let me go back to the infancy of Greek science and give you evidence for this statement. Setting aside for the present the metaphysical thinkers, who will occupy us in another chapter, we may safely say that the earliest mathematicians were the school of Pythagoras, and also that their work started (so far as they did not start from the highest of all—pure thinking) from Arithmetic. To this science Pythagoras and his school attached such importance that they were supposed to hold that numbers were the essence of the universe. If you think that such a theory is mere nonsense, I may tell you that I have often heard my colleagues, distinguished in modern science, discuss a theory, alive at the present day, that the so-called material universe consists of mere motion, without anything to be moved! At the root of these speculations lies the fundamental distinction of form and matter, of the definite and the indefinite; and the Pythagoreans had got a glimpse of the eternal truth that it is only through our intuitions of space and time, and through abstract concepts explicating these, that we can bring the myriad phenomena of nature under intelligible law. It was an early anticipation, so far as we can explain it, of the great theory of Descartes, that all the universe could be reduced to mathematical relations, and these handled by algebra, which is in its essence but a very abstract and generalised arithmetic. If therefore all parts of the world stand in mutual arithmetical relations, of which the chemical law of definite proportions is the most signal example, the science of numbers must be the capital of every scientific man.

And remember that in Greek parlance this was the strict meaning of their arithmetic—a pure science, while they used the term logistic (or computation) for the working of practical rules. At the basis of their theory of numbers lay of course the one great assumption which makes the science possible—I mean the absolute equality of the units of any number used for the purpose of calculation.

This is not merely the abstraction from all their differences, as when I say that the present audience consists of five hundred people, regardless of the countless variations existing between the units of this crowd. It is the assumption of an ideal and accurate identity between each of the units, as to magnitude, which makes the expression of geometrical truths arithmetically possible.

The truth that 3² + 4² = 5² applies not only to numbers but to lines, and probably suggested the geometrical proof to Euclid (1, 47). But it is only true if the units in the measurement of each line are exactly equal.

Starting from this first assumption, the Pythagoreans began to speculate on the peculiarities of the natural series of units in use among men, and to deduce from these general considerations various theorems, which they believed might solve the secrets of nature. At the very outset they were struck with the obvious contrast between odd and even, which Plato, following them, regarded as a fundamental distinction in nature. Had they been told that, thousands of years later, men of science would find that a most primitive and fundamental distinction among animals is founded on this difference, I mean that of artio-dactyle, and perisso-dactyle, actually called by the Greek words, they would have said that this caused them no surprise, as their arithmetic had long since laid down the distinction as a law of nature. As simple specimens of the sort of treatment that the science of numbers received from them, I may cite the following: The successive additions of the odd numbers produce the squares of the series of even and odd.[32] The series of even numbers when added give us no such result, but rather this—that the addition of even numbers gives us figures which are the products of successive numbers differing by only one, e.g. 2 + 4 = 3 × 2; 2 + 4 + 6 = 4 × 3, and so on. These latter numbers were regarded as rectangles, when expressed in lines. It was by the discovery of the relation of the sides to the base of a right-angled triangle that they, so to speak, stumbled upon irrational numbers. If the two sides are each equal to 1, the hypothenuse is equal to √2, which is no integral number, but a problem in itself.[33]

All the results of this Pythagorean research lived through into the days of Plato and Aristotle and then, as we know from Euclid and Theon, into the learning of Alexandria. The importance recognised by them in the numbers ten and twelve was shown by the general adoption of a decimal system of notation, and of the division of time on a duodecimal system.

You will ask me what symbols the Greeks had which could enable them to treat arithmetical figures of any complexity, and on this I could give you now a very definite reply, but the details would lead us away from our subject, seeing that this notation was lost in the Dark Ages and was ultimately replaced by the Arabic numerals. But we now know that they had a very practical system of decimal notation based on the use of the letters of the alphabet; and the fact that several letters obsolete in the alphabet of the fifth century B.C. appear as symbols, proves that it was current as early as Pythagorean days. The sign for 6 is the digamma, that for 90 is the koph of the Phœnician alphabet, which is still found in Locrian inscriptions; the Phœnician letter known as sampi is used for 900. We know the practical management of this easy notation perfectly from the mass of accounts both private and public found on Egyptian papyri. It can express large numbers far more compendiously than the Roman system, often more compendiously even than ours. Suppose you desire to express any large number, say 20,050, here it is β/ΜΝ; say 47,678, it is δ/ΜΖΧΟΗ, and if there be small gain in simplicity here, I will give you 800,000 = 10,000 × 80 = π/Μ. But these are practical matters, though without an easy notation even the most scientific thinkers could not make large progress.[34]

The next great step was to pass from arithmetic to geometry as the science of space and to show how far the same laws governed both.

If we are not well informed upon the beginnings of arithmetic, we are more fortunate in the case of geometry, and here, if anywhere, the old Greeks have been the acknowledged teachers of modern Europe. For we have in the so-called Elements of Euclid, composed most probably at Alexandria about 300 B.C., a summary of all that had been discovered up to his day, doubtless with many new things of his own. He had distinctly built upon his predecessors; he has before him all through his book a problem discussed in Plato, that of the possible number of regular polyhedra, and its solution forms the climax of his work. But he begins from the very beginning and builds up his whole doctrine with such accuracy that a flaw in the demonstration is hard to be found.

How did this great master attain to such perfection? The form of his demonstrations does not suggest an intimacy with the logic of his immediate predecessor Aristotle; but from him he might easily have obtained the whole notion of a strictly deductive science, which, starting from the smallest possible number of primary data, proceeds to derive from these by strict demonstration proposition after proposition. Philosophers of our own time have often expressed wonder at the clearness with which these data are laid down. They are three in kind: first the common notions, which apply to all science and all practical life, such as “the whole is greater than its part”; secondly, the axioms peculiar to our intuition of space, such as “two right lines cannot enclose a space”; and thirdly the very simple postulates, which amount to the use of a ruler and compass with a pencil. There are besides very careful definitions, so careful that they are at first obscure, because they apply to the ideal construction of the mind in its intuition of pure space and do not concern themselves about the flaws of actual figures. Thus his “point which has no parts” is not nothing at all, but the minimum of definite place; his right line, “which lies in the same way (όμαλῶς) between any two points taken upon its length,” is simply unity of direction. Every other line varies in direction in some of its successive parts. This is a direct appeal to intuition, without which we can make no beginning in the science of space. Such also is the axiom about parallel lines. Such is also the proof by superposition, to show that two triangles, if some of their measurements be the same, must wholly coincide.

But I must not attempt to give you a lecture on the Elements of Euclid, of which some of you may have evil recollections. For it is the misfortune, as well as the glory, of a great work not only to be repeated for centuries, but to be parroted and travestied by those who merely accept its greatness from the voice of ages, and who come to think that the words of inspiration only require blind repetition to instruct men. So if Euclid has become in many classical schools a sort of amulet or fetish (which must for common decency be put in the programme but which may be learned by committing the proofs to memory without any intelligence) such a misfortune is not the fault of Euclid, but the most pathetic tribute to his genius. Let me also add, for the benefit of those of you who have never seen more than six books of the Elements, and who probably thought six more than enough, that these are but the introduction to the discussion of higher and more complex questions, which show the large advance made by the Greeks in this science, and which explain also how in other arts, such as architecture, there is no defect for want of scientific accuracy. Books VII-X are not on geometry, but on higher arithmetic, and even treat, as in Book X, of incommensurable or irrational quantities. With XI he begins to teach solid geometry, the measurement of pyramids, cones, spheres, and the like, ending (XIII) with the discussion of the five regular polyhedra, of which Plato had long since spoken.

From the great sequence of discoverers and teachers of pure mathematics, I need only here pick out three immortal names: Apollonius of Perga, living about 200 B.C., whose geometrical treatment of conic sections is, I am informed, a splendid monument of genius, which would still be the basis of modern study had not the treatment of these figures by analysis entirely superseded the geometrical method. Then there is Pappus in the second century A.D., who gives us in eight books a review of all the previous masters, with important additions of his own. The third name is Diophantus, who lived much later, perhaps in the fourth century, and whose work is considered the first great step toward the science of Algebra.

All these speculations were developed in the direction of mathematical physics by Archimedes, Heron, and other great men of the Alexandrian school. The triumphs of Archimedes in mechanics astonished the Romans, who, in the defence of Syracuse against their attack, found him equal to a host. But how little Archimedes confined himself to practical problems is shown by his famous method of determining the area of a circle by approximation, by inscribing and circumscribing polygons of a great number of sides, which can of course be treated and measured as a complex of triangles. This is still, I am told, the proof admitted by modern mathematicians as the best.

The works of Heron show not only an excellent practical knowledge of mechanics, but of hydrostatics, from which he deduces a number of most ingenious inventions, such as our penny in the slot, and even the construction of a whole scene acted by marionettes moving by a most elaborate hidden machinery. It[35] is a fine specimen of his ingenuity in using the ordinary mechanical contrivances. He postulates a tall hollow basis, adorned with pilasters, and having an architrave, with boards covering its upper surface. Over this stands a little round temple, visible from all sides, with six pillars. It is covered with a conical roof, and on the apex is a figure of Victory with outspread wings and holding in her right hand a garland. Under the centre of the roof stands a figure of Bacchus, holding a thyrsus in his left hand, and a cup in his right. At his feet lies a little stuffed panther. Before and behind Bacchus, and outside the temple, stands an altar with dry shavings of wood. Also on each side, outside the temple, a Bacchante, in a proper costume and attitude. The whole concern being set up at some suitable spot, the exhibitor will retire, and the automatic machine will presently move forward to a fixed spot. The moment it stops, the altar fire in front of Bacchus will light up, and from his thyrsus will flow milk or water, and from his cup wine will be poured out on the panther beneath him, the pilasters beneath will be adorned with garlands, the Bacchantes will dance round the temple; drums and cymbals will be heard. When this noise ceases, the figure of Bacchus will turn round to the other altar and all the movements be repeated in the other direction. As soon as this has happened the second time, the show is over, and the whole machine will return to its original place. We have felt bound, he adds, to make the measurements (which he gives) small, for if made large, the suspicion naturally arises in the audience that there is a man inside the machine producing all the movements. This precaution, then, should be observed in making any automatic machine.

He then proceeds to give in great detail the construction of this machine. It is as ingenious as any construction of the present day, but cannot be presented to you without a series of figures, which are given in his book. Any of you may read it in the Greek (Teubner text), to which is added an excellent German translation. It will be enough to mention that the lighting of the altar fires is done by concealing a lamp inside the altar immediately under the wood, and by withdrawing a metal plate which separates them. The flowing of milk and wine is produced by concealing two little reservoirs in the summit of the building, and leading the liquor by pipes down the inside of the pillars, and up the inside of the figure of Bacchus, so that, when the cocks are turned by machinery, the milk and wine flow and rise to the level of the thyrsus and the cup, which are set underneath the level of the cisterns. It is evident enough that people who could do these things were capable of inventing the sakia now in use throughout Egypt, where a horizontal wheel worked round a capstan by oxen moves another set perpendicularly, at right angles to it, furnished with jars, which get filled below and, when they pass over the highest point of their revolution, are emptied into a water course, and so irrigate a higher level. This is well known to have been the invention of these Alexandrian mechanicians, whose theory had long preceded their practice, and whose applications of science they never valued so highly as their pure speculations.

Perhaps before leaving the subject I should tell you what was the moving force in the automatic machinery. It was a weight suspended in the air by a rope over a pulley, which, as soon as it was allowed to sink from its support, made the rope, wrapped round the axle of a large wheel, move the wheel, that was in its turn connected with other wheels. With very great and ingenious contrivance, as the machinery was all carefully concealed, the exhibitor could take his seat among the spectators, and make the ignorant believe that the whole effect was produced by some magic.

Nor were the laws of optics and the correction of the illusions of sight neglected. Euclid wrote a work on the subject which is now lost; but the praise of it by competent men of the Alexandrian school shows that it was on a level with his other scientific productions. To our educated public, the work of the Greeks in most fields is known at least by hearsay; the great library of Greek mathematics, scores of volumes, some of which are only quite recently published, is, except for Euclid, absolutely unknown. Yet from it is derived not only the scanty knowledge of science that filtered through the Romans into Western Europe, but also that adopted by the Arabs, and which in translations from Arabic versions came from them into awakening Italy and Germany and France. But let me add that now, when their discoveries in pure mathematics are being weighed by the light of expert knowledge, we are assured by all those really competent to judge that in no field of learning have the old Greeks shown their amazing originality and acuteness more signally than in higher arithmetic and in higher geometry.

The great fathers of the exact sciences are therefore in arithmetic the Pythagoreans, whose history is too obscure to mention from it any single name before Archytas, Euclid, and Theon of Smyrna; in geometry, Euclid; in mechanics, Archimedes; in conic sections, Apollonius of Perga; in hydrostatics, Heron; in astronomy, Eudoxus and Hipparchus; last, but not least, in higher arithmetic and algebra, Diophantus; all of these were, moreover, men who did not confine themselves to any single department, but promoted accurate thinking in many. These, and others hardly less great, have left a record and a legacy to posterity second to none in its mighty consequences.

But among them all Aristotle stands out as the “master of those that knew”—the man who attained in the Middle Ages such celebrity and authority that he narrowly escaped being canonised as a saint in the Roman calendar. If that distinction really belonged to the benefactors of mankind, I know not that any man ever lived who had a better claim to it. For his life and activity mark an epoch not only in the progress of many sciences, but in the general culture of the human mind, to which I know no parallel. He was brought up under the influence of the Socratic method of inquiry as perfected by Plato, but, though in some popular works (now lost) he adopted the dialogue as the correct method of teaching, there can be no doubt that the sober and practical tone of his mind made him despise all the delays and delights of character-drawing, and of spinning out the subject, for what we have from him is pre-eminently plain and scientific in form. There is seldom an unnecessary sentence; if there be a metaphor, it is a mere flash of colour across the cold severity of his argument. He writes like a man who had no time to waste and a vast world of subjects to teach. If it was still an age when the sciences had not entered upon the path of observation and experiment, but were philosophical speculations, Aristotle did more than any man to establish a separation between philosophy and science, while fully recognising, what in our day most scientists ignore, that positive science without a sound knowledge of philosophy is apt to run into fatal mistakes.

Of course this immense programme which Aristotle set before him could not be carried out without large collaboration, and so we know that, as Plato seems to have underrated such collaboration, and thus have failed in fruitfulness among his pupils, Aristotle, who was not chosen as his successor by the school (I suppose as usual there were jealousies among the commonplace and docile pupils toward the great original thinker), formed and stimulated a band of helpers, who gathered special observations in botany, mineralogy, zoölogy, physics as the science of nature, and others who put into shape his views on rhetoric and on poetry, on ethics and on theology. We have, in my opinion, a new specimen of such delegated work in the now famous Constitution of Athens, which was known and quoted as Aristotle’s through later antiquity, but which is rather the work of a pupil and not a brilliant one. But then we know that Aristotle either wrote or brought out 158 of these tracts on Greek constitutions. To this I shall return in a subsequent lecture.

Theophrastus, Eudemus, and Aristoxenus are among the best-known names of these helpers, and from these we have valuable work extant. Physical geography was entrusted to Dikæarchus. All these researches were carried out in the same spirit, and with that unity of purpose that marks a school. There was apparently but one division of all the domain of science in which Aristotle did no original work, and yet his contribution to it is not to be underrated. This was the field of pure mathematics. For we know that he entrusted to his ablest pupil, Eudemus the Rhodian, the task of writing the history of what other men had done in this field. These books on the history of arithmetic, of geometry, and of astronomy (then called astrology) were well known and valued, and the modern critics declare that whatever is now known about the earlier development of mathematics was derived from this pure and rich source. Still more remarkable is it that this, the part of the edifice to which Aristotle himself did not contribute, should have been the only one that took root and flourished without any period of corruption or decay. As to Aristotle’s personal competence in this matter, I am assured by the best mathematicians that his not infrequent allusions to mathematics, by way of metaphor or illustration, show a clear and sound understanding of the subject. It is not, therefore, the vagary of an idle admirer, but the deliberate expression of a weighty judge, when we learn from him in his Discussion on Beauty—which he, being a Greek, of course seeks in form, symmetry, and proportion—that the highest and noblest examples of earthly beauty are to be found in mathematics.

Euclid was almost the contemporary of Aristotle, and so the Peripatetic Mathematics found at Alexandria a new home and a mighty development, which lasted for centuries and is not stayed to this day. But the rest of the vast system of Aristotle seems, after about two generations, to have fallen into incompetent hands. The activity of the Greek intellect passed into other channels and became again purely philosophical and ethical instead of scientific, as I shall show when I speak of the Stoic and Epicurean systems.

But there was another branch of practical science which, if not created by Aristotle, was certainly promoted by his studies in zoölogy and botany. We still regard these sciences as a necessary introduction to medicine, and we may be sure that in old days the order of such studies was not different. The distinction of being the father of rational medicine need not be added to the other crowns which adorn the great sage. Both Greeks and moderns are unanimous in awarding that honour to Hippocrates of Kos, where there was an old guild of physicians, of which he was neither the first nor the last of his name. Hence the works now known as those of Hippocrates may not all be the actual writing of one man; for as with Aristotle, so with Hippocrates, there was a school, and the pupils followed in the master’s path. But there is no doubt whatever as to the character and tone of his teaching. We find even a literary grandeur in his prose, that is not the writing of any but a great master. The famous opening of his Aphorisms is probably known to most of my hearers. But it is a puzzle to translate without dull amplification. Here is a paraphrase: “Life is brief, yet craft grows slowly; the right time is instantaneous, yet experience is treacherous, and decision burdensome.” As is the style, so is the thinking out of the problems before him. Starting from hygiene as the proper basis of medicine, he thinks those should be regarded as the earliest physicians who improved the food of primitive men by crushing grain, by cooking meat, and by selecting edible vegetables. From that time onward, there was growing up an experience of what was healthy and what the reverse. It is this experience which he seeks to systematise by careful observation and so to establish laws of hygiene, and the probable natural prophylactics or remedies afforded by air, water, and climate. He analyses with care the proper aspect for a town and decides (in the latitudes which he knew) for the eastern as the best and the western as the worst. He discusses the quality of the water supply, and lays great stress upon its altitude. He sets down careful clinical records of cases of fever—typhus, puerperal, malarious, and the like. The results of this rational treatment of disease were far-reaching and permanent. To cite to you the cloud of witnesses would be mere waste of time. But I will take one instance, closely related to the history of my great college and of medicine in Ireland.[36] The founder of the College of Physicians in Ireland under the Cromwellians and Charles II. was John Stearne, a grand-nephew of Archbishop Ussher, himself also a theologian and metaphysician. Driven out of Ireland by the stress of the Rebellion of 1641, and educated in all the medical learning of Cambridge, he returned with the Cromwellian restoration of order and became not only a Fellow of his college (along with some eminent Puritans from Harvard) but a distinguished practitioner in Dublin. By his influence was founded the Royal College of Physicians, once an adjunct to the University and ever since a great and dignified corporation, which has for many generations contributed eminent men to medical science.

But Stearne, like Hippocrates, not only practised; he wrote works on life and death; he was a theorist and a philosopher. This man, writing from the highest standpoint of Cambridge and of Dublin in the middle of the seventeenth century, tells us over and over again that the works of Hippocrates are wellnigh infallible, and are the only sure guide to medical science in his day.[37] The causes of this attitude are not far to seek. All mediæval medicine had been ruined by the admission of supernatural influences, special interventions, the action of evil spirits, the conjunction of hostile constellations, and other rubbish at which we now smile, but which men of science then deplored. The first great feature in Hippocrates is the utter ignoring of any such influences as the special causes of disease or cure. He is afraid of no ghost or goblin, he never mentions an incantation. And here is a momentous passage, which probably few of you have ever read, that expresses the mental attitude of his school. He is speaking of a class of patients affected with impotence who are venerated among the Scythians and even worshipped, each man fearing for himself, as he attributes the sickness to a special visitation of his God. “Well now I also think that these diseases are of divine ordinance and so are all the rest, but not one of them more divine or human than the rest, but all are homogeneous, and all from the gods. Yet each of them has its nature, and nothing happens without a natural cause.” He then goes on to explain the disease from the practice of too much riding, and observing that it attacks the rich more usually than the poor, because the latter do not live on horseback, he argues:

This was the spirit that died out when the Greek world decayed, and Europe fell a victim to ignorance and superstition. Then came the heyday of miraculous images, of relics with power to cure, of pilgrimages, of intercessions, of all that mental degradation which the Mediæval Church, far from repudiating, used for its own purposes. And so the resurrection of medical science was connected with rebellion against the Church. Among every three physicians, are two atheists, was the word, and even the pious Stearne, whom I have mentioned, preaches a purely Stoic creed, and systematically ignores all the rites of his church.

Hippocrates and his school had in their day to combat similar superstitions, just as the scientific medicine of our day has to deal with Lourdes and with Christian Science. Within the last few years, we have recovered from oblivion the ruins of the temple and town of Epidauros, where the god Æsculapius had a famous shrine, and where hundreds of pilgrims assembled to seek cures for their several ailments. Their recreation was as well looked after as in any modern watering-place; the theatre was the most splendid thing of the kind in Greece, and there were porticoes, and baths, and groves to secure that comfort and idle amusement which have a great effect on health. But as we know from the ridicule of Aristophanes, corroborated by numbers of inscriptions commemorating cures, the method of these Asklepiads was far behind those of Kos; it was superstitious and not scientific. Dreams and omens, charms and ceremonial acts still stood in the way of sound hygiene and careful clinical observation. Not that I deny the occurrence of cures under such treatment. The most sceptical examination of the annals of Lourdes shows that mental influences will cure not only mental diseases, and diseases known as nervous, but even those that seemed absolutely physical. And what the Blessed Virgin does for the faithful of Lourdes may doubtless be done by the influence of more human and tangible causes. These admissions, which I make freely, will not change the opinion now held by every true man of science. It is the opinion of Hippocrates and his school, and that which he sought to enforce by his theory and his practice. The great truth that work is what exhausts the human frame, and that food supplies this waste, was laid down clearly in their practice. The equally important principle, that no organ will keep in health and vigour without exercise of its natural function and that if disused it will shrink or decay, was also clearly pronounced. They even guessed that the greatest problem of medicine (which they failed to solve) was the passage from inorganic into organic substances.

It is of course idle to say that these practitioners were not encumbered and shackled by many false guesses, many pretended discoveries, many groundless speculations of their predecessors. But as the famous oath, which every practitioner in the school of Kos took, expresses clearly the high moral aim with which even now the physician enters on his noble work, the solemn declaration that he will not abuse his influence or intimacy in any house for selfish or immoral purposes, so in their scientific aims these Greeks sought to advance human knowledge by recording honestly their observations, even by telling of their failures, and by seeking to leave behind them such clinical work as might enlighten not only successors but opponents. If we compare this truly modest and scientific attitude with that of the doctors whom Molière scourged, and whose practice is but too well known to us from the minute account of their treatment of princely or even royal patients, we shall again come to the conclusion that where the Greeks failed to teach modern Europe it was not for want of rich suggestion and splendid anticipations of modern science.

I need hardly tell you (in conclusion) that I have not only confined myself to touching the fringes of these vast subjects; I have deliberately omitted large topics such as optics, and the correction of optical delusions, which the Greeks attained by a subtle use of curves, not merely sections of a large circle, but particularly by the use of the conic section still known by its Greek name of hyperbola. I have said nothing about their astronomy, with its prediction of eclipses, its application to the calendar, and its use as the basis of scientific geography. Had I attempted to weave all these matters into the present lecture, I must have given you a kaleidoscope and not a picture. The main fact to be impressed upon you is that the great triumphs of the Greeks in art and in literature were not attained without a strict education in hard thinking and close reasoning. Plato is said to have made it the first condition of entering on a course of philosophy that the pupil should have studied geometry.

It was in accordance with that principle that in our older universities every student, though he were a specialist in classics, must show an adequate knowledge of mathematics. No man in Trinity College, Dublin, can take the degree in languages without having been taught, and having qualified in, pure mathematics, physics, and astronomy. That was the kind of education given by the Greeks. So far as we have departed from it in our education; so far as we have substituted hurry for deliberation, quantity of facts for quality of knowledge, miscellaneous information for systematic thinking, so far we have rendered modern culture impotent to rival their excellence.

VII

POLITICS—SOCIOLOGY—LAW

THERE is no department of Greek life where we feel its modernness more intensely than when we come to consider political and social philosophy. The Greeks, and the Romans that learned from them, write and talk like thoroughly modern men; the discussions of Aristotle and the treatises of Cicero are quite fit to instruct us in the present day on the possibilities of organising human society. The rights of women, for example, are a topic with which they were perfectly familiar. Pass into what are justly called the Dark Ages or early Middle Ages, and you feel that the world has gone centuries back and not forward. The reign of superstition, the tyranny of the priest, the miseries of the churl, the childishness of art, the utter stagnation of literature, the substitution of fortresses for free cities, violence for law, savage rudeness for polished urbanity—these are the astounding conditions of an Europe most of which once had enjoyed real civilisation.

Among other causes of this strange retrogression in history, not the least is the disappearance of Greek life and culture into the East, where Constantinople still adhered to great Hellenic traditions at least in law, in language, and in art. All that Roman life and thought had borrowed from Greece was unable to make Latin culture fruitful and permanent, because it was borrowed from Greece and not really assimilated; so it came to pass that, compared with the brightness and buoyancy of Greek culture, the reign of the Latin through civilised Europe was an epoch of standstill, of formalism, of intellectual barrenness, of ossification. So long as the Romans were mere docile pupils of the Greeks, they made great progress in the arts of life; as soon as they felt themselves the acknowledged masters of the world and came to look down upon their teachers, their inborn coarseness and want of genius began to reassert itself, and but for the influence of an Oriental creed, domesticated among them by the Greeks, they would have relapsed, along with their barbarian invaders, into intellectual insignificance.

When we inquire into the causes that made politics so developed a feature among the Greeks, we shall in the first place find, even in Homer’s societies, the habit of open discussion a leading fact in everyday life. There is a sort of instinct to have things talked over and reasoned out, so much so that the very king, who has come to a decision with his council, and has ample authority to fulfil it, will not do so without calling together an assembly of the soldiers in the camp or the free citizens in the market-place, and seeking to obtain their approval by acclamation. This assembly, called together to approve, without any power of voting or of reversing the prince’s decision, is regarded by all historians as the embryo of the long-subsequent sovran assemblies of citizens in every Greek democracy. There seem even to have been assertions of absolute power in the mouth of the kings in some of the old texts of the Iliad, which were expunged by editors, certainly not those of Alexandria, to whom such an assertion could contain no offence, but by earlier editors who prepared the poems for the free cities of Greece.[38]

The next stimulant to the development of politics was the coexistence of many small city-states, with only a few miles square of territory, each a little sovranty where no king could maintain the mystery of seclusion or the obstacle of a solemn etiquette, which Xenophon perceived to be essential conditions of the great absolute monarchy of the Persians. So it came that the old sovranties, which Aristotle tells us had been hereditary and limited[39] as it were a model to later nations in constitutional sovranty, passed away, often without revolution, into aristocracies, which were the leading type throughout the civilised world both in classical and in mediæval times, so long as the mass of the people were too ignorant to take upon them the management of public affairs. Aristotle tells us that the masses easily remain quiet and contented, provided they are kept in employment and in comfort by the good management of the few. Such an example you are all familiar with in the Venetian Republic, which, like Carthage of old, maintained for a long period, without serious internal disturbance, a considerable empire with a population busy and rich by their trade.

Where the violence or the selfishness of the few in power who were descendants of the old families of nobles which had once been the council of the kings, or who had themselves been local chiefs—where, I say, the neglect or violence of these men produced intolerable hardships, we have sanguinary revolutions, at first usually under the leadership of an ambitious renegade or soldier of noble origin, who set the masses against the classes. Later, the masses were strong enough to make their revolutions by constitutional or semi-constitutional means, and so gained a political power which they could seldom maintain without putting to death or exiling the leaders of the nobles. A reader of Thucydides or Xenophon will recall the manner in which the exiles worked counter-revolutions, and thus stained the face of Greece with violence and bloodshed. These scenes of violence play so large a part in our Greek histories that you will wonder how any such people could be a model to others in methods of politics, and it is for that reason that I think it necessary to notice the matter. When we look below the surface we shall find that there were elements of order never eradicated, and that the crimes of the leaders of society did not infect the common-sense, or destroy the safety, of the mass of the people, until the general decadence in the days of Polybius and the Roman interference.

What is this evidence? It is not to be found without some reflection, for, as I have said, it is below the surface. There is no commoner phrase in the mouth of Greek revolutionists, or in the mouth of those that dreaded them, than “abolition of debts, and redivision of the land.”[40] Aristotle mentions these as the watchword of the mob-leaders. But when I was asked, years ago, by the late Henry Sidgwick of Cambridge, to find him actual instances of such a revolution in authentic Greek history, I well remember my own surprise, and his also, when I said there were none to be found. Some such things may possibly have happened in the great Sicilian troubles, when a tyrant drove out the old free population, and settled a town with the surrounding churls and his mercenary troops; but on the general face of Greek history, and in the records of the well known states, you will not find an instance.[41] The most radical measure to which I can point is the reduction of debts twenty-seven per cent. by Solon, who was a very conservative statesman, and one most anxious to guard the mercantile good character of his city. As there was no loss of public credit to Athens in his time, it is clear that the debts lightened by this exceptional proceeding must have been only the debts of a class, probably those due from poor farmers or labourers to their oppressive landlords. If so, it was not more trenchant than the present land legislation of the English Government in Ireland and Scotland, where the annual rents of tenants have, in violation of old and formal private contracts, been cut down by the state, often as much as twenty-seven per cent.

The Greeks were great traders by sea and land and no trade can be carried on without assured public credit. Unless investments are fairly safe, no mercantile society can thrive. The ordinary rate of interest in Greece, twelve per cent. per annum, appears at first hearing to be evidence of insecurity. It is nothing of the kind. It was not higher than the average interest[42] at Rome when that dominant people held the trade of the world, and made themselves as safe as could be. The difference between that and our three per cent. arises from the general scarcity at the time of great fortunes in money, owing to the difficulty of transit and the imperfect knowledge of a token currency. Banks and bills of exchange they commonly used, but to lend money to citizens of a neighbouring state, living under different laws and with strange courts of law, was never easy, and so the areas of lending and borrowing were not as they are now, a whole continent or even the whole globe. You might imagine such a state of things here in your country if each State was confined to seek investments within its own limits, in which case you might soon find a rate of interest for imported capital not lower than that among the Greeks.

There was another strong checking power which must always have moderated the revolutionary transports of the Greeks. It was the existence in all the greater cities of a large population of slaves. We know from the history both of Argos and of Sparta that this was a standing danger to the free population, and we may be sure that in many cases free men composed their differences, or at least moderated their victory over their opponents, rather than risk having both subdued by a foreign element.

You will tell me perhaps that the fact that all the Greek world held slaves is another antiquated standpoint, which prevents them from being fit teachers for modern nations. But to me that question does not appear so simple, and perhaps with the experiences of the last forty years, even the American public that has time for reflection may have some doubts on the matter. So great a thinker as Aristotle felt quite clear about it; he believed that there were inferior races fit only to be controlled, not to control, and he held that it was for their good when these were coerced by the superior intelligence and education of Greeks. He does not express himself, so far as I know, about the many slaves who were Greek prisoners of war, but from his general views it is certain that he would not approve of this form of slavery. Let me add in this connection that he repeatedly says analogous things of those occupied with low handicrafts, such as tinkers or cobblers, which require all their time and leave them no leisure to educate themselves or to learn higher things. He thinks these workers wholly unfit to be in the governing class of any state, and maintains that wherever they gained power it was in an extreme democracy which soon displayed the vices of that sort of government.

You must remember that in the small Greek polity, which consisted of a city and a territory of twenty or thirty miles square, the expedient of choosing representatives locally and sending them to the central assembly was never felt to be necessary. The citizen must go himself to the assembly and spend his day there; he was liable to be chosen (often by lot, that considers no convenience) for duties either administrative or judicial. It was evident that those bound to earn their daily bread must stand aside and permit the more leisured classes to do this work. This leisured class, moreover, was greatly enlarged by the existence of slaves, for even the poor Athenian had his manual labour done for him and so had the necessary time for attending public duties. The Greeks never dreamt of giving their judges or politicians large salaries, as we do, holding that the state had a right to claim the whole life and energy of its citizens. Against one another these citizens were amply protected by the laws; there was no protection against the demands of state, even when these involved the sacrifice of life itself.

Such being the general frame of mind among thoughtful Greeks and the great object of the most perfect state being to secure the happiness, and therefore of course the liberty, of the mass of its citizens, we need not wonder that they paid early and constant attention to the framing of their laws, so that these offered, first to the Romans (who used the Attic Code when drawing up the Laws of the XII Tables) and then to other nations, models of prudent legislation. All their theorists further insisted, with no uncertain voice, that the success of any code of laws must depend upon the enlightenment of the public that uses them. I proceed therefore to speak briefly on three aspects of Greek legislation, the criminal, the civil, and what I may call the international, in order to make clear in how many ways the Greeks were our masters, so that we may still study their methods of government with profit. The criminal law naturally comes first, for the most urgent essential of civilised life is public safety, enabling the citizen to go about when and where he likes without fear of personal molestation, or even of being the witness of violence. The Greeks were so well aware of this that they did not think any polity civilised till men had wholly abandoned the habit of carrying weapons, and if Aristotle or Thucydides had been told that in America a number of respectable citizens of free states still go armed, they would have said, “That was once the habit in Greece also, but now we are civilised, and regard such a practice as essentially barbarous.” If there had been any likelihood of its being revived they would certainly have made it penal, and such seems the proper course in any country where the losing of a man’s temper may cause the losing of his life, as well as that of others. In modern Europe we have happily reached that stage, and even in Ireland, where there are often people threatened for agrarian disputes, and protected by the police, the rest of the population walks about securely night and day, in crowded cities and in lonely wilds, without ever thinking of carrying a weapon.

The Attic law, which represents the highest, and also the purest Greek feeling, was extremely jealous not only of the safety, but of the dignity of the citizen, and any assault in the streets, even if it caused no dangerous hurt, was severely punished by the law. As in modern societies, even to touch a man rudely, or against his will, was punished as an assault, and if the man assaulted happened to be performing any official duty for the state, the offence might be considered in the light of lèse-majesté, or treason against the dignity of the state.

The penalty of death was indeed inflicted, especially in the older codes, with a frequency reminding us of the European codes of a hundred years ago. But as regards citizens there were two mitigations which made even these severe laws milder and more civilised than most of ours. In the first place, there was generally facility given to the man who was condemned to escape over the frontier, and except in cases of great crimes against the state, extradition was not thought of. Exile was of course a severe penalty, for it meant living abroad as a foreigner, not protected by the safeguards that encompassed the citizens around him. Secondly, the manner in which the death sentence was carried out was infinitely more humane and polite than our abominable executions. The case of Socrates is no doubt familiar to you all. He was left free of chains to talk with his friends and the cup of poison was placed beside him, to be taken before the setting of the sun. Even the jailor is represented as a humane and civil man, who carried out his function with every consideration. I will not deny that these very advanced features in Greek law were in contrast to some still barbarous survivals; I mean the torturing of slaves and the severity of making a death sentence follow on the majority of one in a very large jury. But survivals of barbarism were but yesterday frequent enough with ourselves.

Let us now turn to the characteristics of the civil law, by which I mean the laws controlling the holding of property, the making of contracts, and bequests by testament. I cannot see in the many contracts we have from Greece, or from Egyptian Greece, when settled by Greece immigrants, that the general spirit or the accuracy of these documents differs from those of our day, except that the penalties for breach of contract seem much severer than ours. In the case of a money obligation, the debtor who did not repay within a fixed date was commonly fined fifty per cent. for his delay. There may have been many cases of loans in kind, e.g., of seed corn, where such a penalty was not unreasonable, for there are things which are very valuable at a certain season, and which after that must lie useless for many months. But on the whole I think the Greek idea of keeping a contract was stricter than ours, and the law more severe. Such was also the case with the Roman law, which was borrowed from the Greek.

In so cursory a review of a large subject, I can only select one or two points as illustrations, and speak of them as specimens of the general enlightenment of the age. I therefore turn to a particular class about which we now know a great deal, more particularly owing to a large discovery of documents which I was fortunate enough to make in 1890. It is the Greek will or testament. Lawsuits concerning such documents also form the majority of the speeches of Isæus, the collection of which has been edited with great skill and learning by Mr. William Wyse of Trinity College, Cambridge. It used to be thought that all this matter of testament was due to the Romans. It seems now tolerably certain that in this as in most of the other refinements of life the Romans only transmitted to us what the Greeks had taught them.

In most early states it is only gradually, and not without some jealousy, that the individual is permitted to bequeath his property as he pleases. At first, he is regarded as the member of a clan, to which his property reverts under certain fixed conditions; later on, the state controls the division of it among the immediate family of the testator, and will not permit any passing of it away to strangers, still less to those who are not citizens. Whether the Greek states ever left absolute liberty to their citizens in this matter may be doubted, the interest of the state being much more jealously guarded among these small polities than among the large modern States, when an occasional misuse of such a power does no grave public mischief, and only excites moderate censure. But the whole form of the wills we have in Egyptian papyri, and of which we have examples in stone inscriptions, such as the record of the will of one Epicteta who bequeathed her estate to public and religious objects, is perfectly modern. Here I quote you the usual formula. First comes the date according to the years of kings or eponymous magistrates. Then “This is the will of Peisias the Lycian, son of X., of sound mind and deliberate intention. May it be my lot to live on in health and manage mine own property, but should anything human happen to me, I bequeath to my children so much, to my wife such and such things (often specifying the articles), I set free certain slaves, I set apart money for religious purposes. And I appoint as executors such and such people,” in the case of soldiers in Egypt generally the King and Queen and their children; and then there follow the names of several, often seven or eight, witnesses.[43] These habits, which imply a settled society, with ordinary habits and traditions, had spread from Greece to Greek Egypt three centuries before Christ. There is no doubt that they spread similarly not only to the west, but throughout Asia Minor and Syria so far as they were not in these regions already in vogue. I will only add that if you desire to read how clearly and carefully a long case involving the claim of a Greek in Egypt against a native corporation was examined and decided, you will find it in the Papyrus I of Turin[44] which was published years ago by Amédée Peyron, and which ought to be republished and made easier of access. We have the whole final decision of the court extending over many pages of Greek. The record must have been found intact in the earthen jar in which it was preserved. It rehearses the fortunes of the case from its outset, forty years before the decision. It gives the earlier decisions and a summary of the new evidence adduced; and it sums up the whole and gives judgment for the native corporation against the Greek with a clearness which could not be exceeded by the Supreme Court in America. Every word of it speaks strict law and plain common-sense. It was a case of conflicting evidence, and this is weighed with absolute fairness. There is not a word of superstition, of appeals to the providence of the gods or to any authority beyond that of educated human reason. As such, it is a document absolutely modern in the highest sense. This then was the tone of the civil law transmitted by Greece to succeeding centuries.