HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY.

PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY.

THIS essay is an attempt to indicate the lie of the main highroads through a large and difficult territory, the main highroads and nothing more.

The territory in question is the period which lies between the death of Aristotle and the rise of Christianity. It is the time during which the schools of Greece were "hellenising" the world, a time of great enlightenment, of vigorous propaganda, of high importance to history. It is a time full of great names: in one school alone we have Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Panatius, Posidonius. Yet, curiously enough, it is represented in our tradition by something very like a mere void. There are practically no complete books preserved, only fragments and indirect quotations. Consequently, in the search for information about this age we must throw our nets wide. Besides the Hellenistic writers proper, we shall draw on Cicero, Pliny, Seneca, and the like for evidence about their teachers and masters. We shall use some Christian and Gnostic documents and works like the Hermetic writings and the Mithras liturgy. I must also acknowledge a special debt to the researches of Wendland and Reitzenstein.

The Hellenistic age seems at first sight to have entered on an inheritance such as our speculative anarchists sometimes long for a tabula rasa on which a new and highly gifted generation of thinkers might write clean and certain the book of their discoveries about life. For it is clear that

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by the time of Plato the traditional religion of the Greek states was, at least among educated Athenians, a bankrupt concern. There was hardly one aspect in which it could bear criticism; and in the kind of test that chiefly matters, the satisfaction of men's ethical requirements and aspirations, it was if anything weaker than elsewhere. religious belief that is scientifically preposterous may still have a long and comfortable life. Any worshipper can suspend the scientific part of his mind while worshippng. But a religious belief that is morally contemptible is in serious danger, because, when the religious emotions surge up, the moral emotions are not far away. And the clash cannot be hidden.

What we have to consider is the Hellenistic Philosophy. I call it Philosophy rather than Religion because, though it ended in Religion, that end was the time of its weakness rather than its strength. It is a fairly clear history. A soil once teeming with wild weeds was with extraordinary speed swept bare and prepared for planting. Skilled gardeners chose carefully the best of plants and tended the garden with love and devotion. But it so happened that the old roots and seeds had never really been eradicated, and at the end of a few generations the much-tended garden was really a garden of weeds again, weeds rank and luxuriant and often in their way beautiful, with here and there a half-strangled garden flower or two gleaming in the midst of them. Does that comparison seem disrespectful to traditional religion? Is philosophy all flowers and traditional religion all weeds? Well, we must remember what a weed is. Weed" is only a name for all the natural wild vegetation which the earth sends up of herself, which lives and insists on living without the conscious labour of man. The flowers are what we keep alive with difficulty, the weeds are what conquer us.

The great thing to remember is that the mind of man cannot be enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some particular set of superstitions. There is an infinite supply of other superstitions always at hand; and the mind that

desires such things—that is, the mind that has not trained itself to the discipline of reasonableness and honesty-will, as soon as its devils are cast out, proceed to fill itself with their relations.

Let us first consider the result of the mere denial of the Olympian religion. The essential postulate of that religion was that the world is governed by a number of definite personal gods, possessed of a human sense of justice and fairness and capable of being influenced by ordinary human motives. For instance, they helped the good and punished the bad, and they tended to regard as good those who paid them proper attention and as bad those who did not.

Speaking broadly, what was left when this conception was proved inadequate? If it was not these personal gods who made things happen, what was it? If the Tower of Siloam was not deliberately thrown down by the gods so as to kill and hurt a carefully collected number of wicked people, while letting the good escape, what was the explanation of its falling? The answer is obvious, but it can be put in two ways. You can either say: "It was just chance that the Tower fell at that particular moment when so-and-so was under it." Or you can say, with rather more reflection but not any more common sense: "It fell because of a definite chain of causes. It was bound to fall."

There is no real difference in these statements, at least in the meaning of those who ordinarily utter them. Both are compatible with a reasonable and scientific view of the world. But in the Hellenistic age, when the best Greek philosophy was spreading rapidly and superficially over minds that were not ripe for it, both views turned back instinctively into a theology as personal as that of the Olympians. It was not, of course, Zeus or Apollo who willed this: it happened by chance. That is, Chance or Fortune willed it. And Tuchê became a goddess like the rest. The great catastrophes, the great transformations of the Mediterranean world which marked the Hellenistic period, had a strong influence here. If Alexander and his generals had practised some severely orthodox Macedonian

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religion, it would have been easy to see that the gods Macedonia were the real rulers of the world. But they mos markedly did not. They accepted hospitably all the religion that crossed their path. Some power or other was disturbin the world, that was clear. It was not exactly the work of mar because sometimes the good were exalted, sometimes the bad sometimes the Greek, sometimes the barbarian. It wa Fortune. Happy was the man who knew how to placat Fortune and make her smile upon him!

It is worth remembering that the best seed-ground fo superstition is a society in which the fortunes of men seem t bear practically no relation to their merits and efforts. A stable and well-governed society does tend, speaking very roughly, to ensure that the virtuous and industrious apprentic shall succeed in life, while the wicked and idle apprentice fails And in such a society people tend to lay stress on the reason able or visible chains of causation. But in a country suffering from earthquakes or pestilences, in a court governed by the whim of a despot, in a district which is habitually the seat o a war between alien armies, the ordinary virtues of diligence honesty, and kindliness seem to be of little avail. The only way to escape destruction is to win the favour of the prevailing powers, take the side of the strongest invader, flatter the despot placate the Fate or Fortune or angry God that is sending the earthquake or the pestilence. The Hellenistic period pretty certainly falls in some degree under all of these categories And one result is the sudden and enormous spread of the worship of Fortune. Of course there was always a protest There is the famous Nullum numen habes si sit sapientia: no te, Nos facimus, Fortuna, deam, taken by Juvenal from the Greek,1 There are many unguarded phrases and at leas three corrections in Polybius. Most interesting of all perhaps there is the first oration of Plutarch on the Fortune o Alexander. A sentence in Pliny's Natural History, ii. 22 seems to go back to Hellenistic sources.

1 Juv. x. 365 f.

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2 Pol. ii. 38, 5, x. 5, 8, xviii. 11, 5.

"Throughout the whole world, at every place and hour, by every voice, Fortune alone is invoked and her name spoken: she is the one defendant, the one culprit, the one thought in men's minds, the one object of praise, the one cause. She is worshipped with insults, counted as fickle and often as blind, wandering, inconsistent, elusive, changeful, and friend of the unworthy. . . . . We are so much at the mercy of chance that Chance is our god."

The word used is first Fortuna and then Sors. This shows how little real difference there is between the two apparently contradictory conceptions-" Chance would have it so"; "It was fated to be." The sting of both phrases lies in their denial of the value of human endeavour.

Yet, on the whole, as one might expect, the believers in Destiny are a more respectable congregation than the worshippers of Chance. It requires a certain amount of thoughtfulness to see the simple fact that nothing really happens by chance. It is the beginning, perhaps, of science. Philosophers of the fifth century had laid stress on the áváy dúoos,1 the Necessity or Chain of causes in Nature. After the rise of Stoicism Fate becomes something less physical, more related to conscious purpose. It is not Anankê, but Heimarmenê. Heimarmene, in the striking simile of Zeno, is like a fine thread running through the whole of existence—the world, we must remember, was to the Stoics a living whole-like that invisible thread of life which passes on from generation to generation and keeps the type alive; it runs, causing, causing, for ever, both the infinitesimal and the infinite. It is the Λόγος τοῦ κόσμου, the Νοῦς Διός, rather hard to distinguish from the Pronoia or Providence, which is the work of God, and indeed the very essence of God. Cleanthes, in one of his finest hymns, prays to ǹ Пeπρwμévn.

That is a noble conception. But the vulgar, of course, can turn Kismet into a stupid idol as easily as they can 2 Arnim, Fragm, Stoic., Zeno 87.

1 Eur., Tro. 886. Arnim, Chrysip. 918.