Delphi Complete Works of Demosthenes, page 607
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No account of Greek literature would be complete without a mention of the influence which has revolutionised human thought. It is a strange coincidence that Aristotle was born and died in the same years as Demosthenes. His native town was Stagira; he trained Alexander the Great, presided over the very famous Peripatetic School at Athens for thirteen years and found time to investigate practically every subject of which an ancient Greek could be expected to have any knowledge.
His method was the slow and very patient observation of individual facts. He is the complement of Plato, who tended to neglect the fact for the “idea” or general law or type behind it and logically prior to it. Deductive reasoning was Plato’s method — that of the poet or great artist, who worships not what he sees but the unseen perfect form behind; inductive reasoning was Aristotle’s method — that of the ordinary man, who respects what he sees that he may by patience find out what is the unseen class to which it belongs. This latter has been the foundation-stone of all modern science; in the main the resemblance between Aristotle’s system of procedure and that of the greatest liberators of the human mind, Bacon and Descartes, are more valuable than the differences.
It would be difficult to mention any really great subject on which Aristotle has not left some work which is not to be lightly disregarded. His works are in the form of disjointed notes, taken down at his lectures by his disciples. As a rule they are dry and precise, though here and there rays of glory appear which prove that the master was capable of poetic expression even in prose. A rather fine hymn has been ascribed to him. As we might expect, he is weakest in scientific research, mainly because he could not command the use of instruments familiar to us. That a human being who possessed no microscope should have left such a detailed account of the most minute marks on the bodies of fish and animals is an absolute marvel; so perfect is his description that it cannot be bettered to-day. Cuvier and Linnaeus are great names in Botany; Darwin said that they were mere schoolboys compared with Aristotle — in other words, botanical research had progressed thewrong way.
Many works have appeared on Ethics and Philosophy; few of them are likely to survive as long as Aristotle’s Ethics and Metaphysics Sometimes our modern philosophers seem to forget their obligation to resemble human beings in their writings. We hear so much of mist and transcendentalism, problems, theories, essays, critiques that a book of Aristotle’s dry but exact definition seems like the words of soberness after some nightmare. The man is not assaulting the air; his feet are on firm ground. This is how he proceeds. “Virtue is a mean between excess and defect.” In fact, his object appears to have been to teach something, not to mystify everybody and to cover the honourable name of philosophy with ridicule.
It is the same story everywhere. Do we want the best book on Rhetoric or Politics? Aristotle may supply it, mainly because he took the trouble to classify his instances and show the reason why things not only are of such a kind, but must inevitably be so. A course of Aristotelian study might profitably be prescribed to every person who thinks of talking in public; he would at least learn how to respect himself and his audience, however ignorant and powerful it may be; he would tend to use words in an exact sense instead of indulging in the wild vagueness of speech which is so common and so dangerous. This dry-as-dust philosopher who cut up animals and plants and wrote about public speeches and constitutions found time to give the world a book on Poetry. Modern scientists sometimes deny their belief in the existence of such a thing as poetry, or scoff at its value; no poetic treatise has yet appeared from them, for it seems difficult for modern science to keep alive in its devotees the weakest glimmerings of a sense of beauty. Herein their great founder and father shows himself to be more humane than his so-called progressive children. His Poetics was the foundation of literary criticism and shows no sign of being superseded.
Turning his eyes upwards, he gave the world a series of notes on what he saw there. Not possessing a telescope, he could but do his best with the methods available. Let us not jeer at his results; rather let us remember that this same astronomer found time to observe the heavens in addition to revolutionising thought in the brief compass of sixty-two years.
For the miracle of miracles is this man’s universality of outlook. It makes us ashamed of our own pretentiousness and swollen-headed pride when we reflect what this great architectonic genius has performed. Just as our bodies have decreased in size with the progress of history, so our intelligences seem to have narrowed themselves since Aristotle’s day. Great as our modern scientists are, there is not one of them who would be capable of writing an acknowledged masterpiece on Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetry, Metaphysics as well as on his own subject.
Nor have we yet mentioned this stupendous thinker’s full claim to absolute predominance in intellectual effort. His works on Medicine were known to and appreciated by the Arabs, who translated them and brought them to Spain and Sicily when they conquered those countries. Averroes commented on them and added notes of his own which contributed not a little to the development of the healing art. More than this, and greatest of all, during the later Middle Ages Aristotle’s system alone was recognised as possessing universal value; it was taken as the foundation on which the most famous and important Schoolmen erected their philosophies — Chaucer mentions a clerk who possessed twenty books, a treasure indeed in those days; it provided a European Church with a Theology and the cosmopolitan European Universities with a curriculum. Greater honour than this no man ever had or ever can have. Thus, although the Greek city-state seemed to perish in mockery with Demosthenes, yet the Greek spirit of free discussion which died in the great orator was set free in another form in that same year; leaving Aristotle’s body, it ranged through the world conquering and civilising. If in our ignorance and bigotry we try to kill Greek literature, we shall find that, like the hero of the Bacchae, we are turning our blows against our own selves, to the delight of all who relish exhibitions of perfect folly.
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‘The Death of Demosthenes’ by Alfred-Henri Bramtot, 1879
The site of the temple of Poseidon, Kalaureia, an island close to the coast of Troezen in the Peloponnesus of mainland Greece — where Demosthenes committed suicide, following Antipater’s decree that the Athenians should turn him over.
Demosthenes, Delphi Complete Works of Demosthenes
