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An Historical Summary of the Anthropological Period. The Anthropological Period begins with the Persian Wars, 490 and 480 B.C. After the battle of Marathon there sprang up a distinct impulse toward knowledge all over Greece; and detailed investigations were begun in mathematics, astronomy, biology, medicine, history, and physics. Science, which had up to this time been unorganized and undifferentiated, now became sharply divided into the special sciences. But what makes the Persian Wars of particular importance is that they are the starting-point in the motherland of the movement in the study of man and human relations. The battle of Marathon does not therefore mark the end of the Cosmological movement and the waning of the Greeks’ interest in science; but it marks rather the beginning in Athens of the Anthropological movement. The Cosmological and the Anthropological Periods overlap.

The Anthropological Period easily divides itself into three epochs from the point of view of its political affairs:—

1. The Persian Wars, 490 and 480 B.C.

2. The Age of Pericles, 467–428 B.C.

3. The Peloponnesian Wars, 432–403 B.C.

The first epoch is the birth and the last epoch the decadence of pure Greek civilization, while the thirty-nine years of the supremacy of Pericles cover the ripest period of Greek life. In this connection it is well to mention Hegel’s thought that nations do not ripen intellectually until they begin to decay politically (“The owl of Minerva does not start upon its flight until the evening twilight has begun to fall”). Plato and Aristotle do not come until after this period, when Greek political life had begun to wane.

The following table is a partial list of the notable men of the period, with the date of their birth:—

Æschylus, 525 (dramatist before Pericles).

Sophocles, 495 (dramatist during Age of Pericles).

Phidias, 490.

Euripides, 480 (dramatist of the Sophistic and the new learning).

Herodotus, 475.

Thucydides, 471.

Xenophon, 430?

Aristophanes, 444.

Anaxagoras, 500.

Empedocles, 495.

Protagoras, 480.

Democritus, 470.

Sophists (many), 450–350.

Socrates, 469.

Antisthenes, 440.

Aristippus, 435.

Plato, 427.

The Persian Wars and the Rise of Athens. The blow that had been impending over Greece during the sixth century had been struck, but had been averted in the Persian Wars of 490 B.C. and 480 B.C. The powerful and splendidly organized “barbaric neighbor,” who had threatened the civilization of the Greek cities of Asia Minor for so many years, had swept over the Hellespont into Greece and had been turned back. It has been pointed out14 that the Persian Wars were only one of a series of conflicts between Oriental and Occidental civilizations; and that the strip of Asia Minor along the Mediterranean has always been a disputed borderland between irreconcilable hemispheres. First was the mythical invasion of Troy; then the Persian Wars; then came the arms of Alexander conquering Persia; then the invasion of the Mohammedans to the very walls of Tours; then the Crusades; and to-day we still have the eternal Eastern question with us. While each of these conflicts was momentous for Europe, none was more important in its issues for the world than the Persian Wars. For through those wars did Greece first come to a consciousness of herself. Never before did she realize her united strength,—the greatness of her inherited instincts. The fifth century B.C. was the most clearly conscious moment of Greece, if not of the world. Classic Greece—the Greece whose thought became fundamental to western civilization—was born from the Persian Wars.

The centre of gravity of the Greek world was shifted after the Persian Wars from Miletus to Athens, from the colonies to the motherland. Indeed, the history of classic Greece is almost entirely the history of Athens. Of the large cities of Greece,—Corinth, Ægina, Sparta, and Thebes,—Athens was naturally the locality where Grecian civilization would centre when the commercial and maritime colonies fell. The Ionian race, by whom it had been settled, was a mixed race, and by nature very versatile. Before the Persian Wars it had been under the wise tyranny of Pisistratus, who took the first steps toward the founding of an Athenian empire. In the period between the two wars, Themistocles had built the Athenian fleet and thereby made Athens the great maritime and naval centre of Greece. There was, indeed, every reason why Athens and not some other Grecian city should become the new centre of classic Greece. The Spartans were oligarchical, stern, unintellectual, and offensive to strangers; the people of Thebes were held under a strict aristocratic government, the people of Thessaly were aristocratic, luxurious, and stagnant; but the Athenians were democratic, social to strangers, literary, liberal, frugal, and alert. After the Persian Wars the power of the Delian confederacy became more and more centralized in the city of Athens. Controlling the fleet of the Confederacy for her own defense and using the rich treasury of the Confederacy for her own municipal improvements, Athens under the brilliant rule of Pericles, who summoned scholars and artists from all Greece, was the only city of Greece where the Renaissance of Greece was possible. Athens had become the eye of Greece, and the following description of the Greek Renaissance is especially significant in regard to her.

The Greek Enlightenment. Following the Persian Wars there arose throughout Greece a great national intellectual movement. The years mark the Greek Renaissance, the Age of Pericles, and the time when the Greek masterpieces in literature and plastic art were produced. Perhaps the greatest Greek production was Athens itself, whose cultural influence was personified in the scholar-politician, Pericles.

1. The Impulse for Learning. In the first place there was a general impulse throughout Greece for education. Everybody seemed to want to know what the schools of Cosmologists had had to say about science. The Greeks now had wealth and therefore leisure; they had come into contact with the Oriental peoples and therefore they had their curiosity excited. Learning, which had been confined in the Cosmological Period to a few scholars in the schools, now came forth into the market place. Learning in the fifth century B.C. was drawn from the schools into publicity. The objects of interest had greatly widened and the learning of the scholars began to filter into the general consciousness. Whereas in the sixth century philosophy was a matter between learned men, in the fifth century we find Socrates and the Sophists teaching whosoever would listen.

2. The Practical Need of Knowledge. But mere curiosity will not entirely explain the Greek intellectual movement. There had grown up an imperative practical need for knowledge. In Athens and other Greek cities the democracy of the fifth century B.C. had supplanted the tyranny of the sixth century. Duty and inclination together forced the citizen into active participation in public affairs. In these democratic cities family tradition and character were no longer sufficient for success; but it became generally recognized that the most useful and successful man was the educated man. The complex relations existing between states and between the citizens in the states made education absolutely necessary for the politician. Nowhere was the need of an education more imperative than in Athens; nowhere was the need more easily filled. In a very short time after the Persian Wars the social position of science changed to one of power; and the inner character of science changed from the study of nature to the study of ethical and political problems. Scientists became teachers of eloquence, for the citizen now needed to be an orator and a rhetorician. Statesmen and generals must know how to persuade. Courts of law were public, their proceeding oral, and personal attendance was therefore required. There was no man in Athens who might not be condemned, if he could not personally in court refute falsehoods and disentangle sophistries. Besides, to be beaten in debate was as disgraceful in the eyes of the public as to lose one’s cause.

Two classes of men, with an importance hitherto unknown, appear in Greek history,—the rhetoricians and the dialecticians. Rhetoric was public oratory, necessary for the public defense of one’s rights, or for the maintenance of one’s dignity, or for the gratification of one’s ambition. The dialectic was, on the other hand, argument employed in private between two persons, usually friends, to unravel an obscurity, to reduce an opponent to silence, to exercise one’s self in the mastery of a subject, or to sift evidence. The dialectic, therefore, became a distinct mental pursuit for men who had a natural defect in public speaking or rhetoric. Besides rhetoric and dialectic, there grew up somewhat later what was called the eristic. Eristic was polemical argument consisting of catch-phrases and logical subtleties. It was taught as an art of adroit argument.

The great Greek tragedies occupy a place in the development of the dialectic and the satisfying of the need of knowledge. Science, through the drama, transformed the old religious views and brought its new interpretation to the common people. The development of the fifth-century drama out of the epic of the sixth century was not merely a change in architectonic, but a transformation of its ethical and religious spirit. The germ was in the previous ethics, lyrics, and gnomics, yet it was fully amplified in the drama. Instead of a summary of deeds the tragic poet makes his characters talk, defend, refute, accuse, lament, etc. This gives rise to exigencies that require the dialectic. In the conflicting duties and in the justification of the wrong done by the wrong suffered, dialectical skill is called for in the drama to weigh the ethical motives in a manner that the epic does not demand. Thus the drama of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides was a link between the lyric and gnomic poetry of the sixth century B.C. and the dialogue literature of Plato.15

3. The Critical Attitude of Mind. The most important characteristic of this period is neither the intensified social curiosity nor the increased social needs. It is rather ethical in its character. It is the “critical” or “individualistic” attitude of mind. This began with the “free city feeling”—the consciousness of the free man in a free state—in the first half of the fifth century B.C., and developed rapidly into individualism and critical skepticism toward the end of that century.

If one were to compare in a single word the history of Greece before the Persian Wars with that after the Persian Wars, he would say that the former was traditional and the latter was critical. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the Cosmological Period Greek traditional customs were being weakened by attacks upon them. Religious ideas were threatened by the Cosmologists. The subordination of the gods to the cosmic substance was an attack upon the established polytheism of the Epic, and the attack became direct in the hands of Xenophanes. It was “the divestiture of Nature of its gods by science.” The Mysteries were a part of this departure from the traditional religion. But the new and more critical scientific attitude toward traditional religion was only incidental to the growing criticism of law. In the days of the oligarchy there were two self-evident political assumptions: (1)that law has validity because it is law; (2)that obedience to law is for one’s advantage. When, however, the political disturbances began, a self-conscious individualism developed among the Greeks. The Gnomic Poets had been the first to appeal to the individual consciousness of the people. All through the sixth century B.C. Greece had stern experiences, and the individual found himself questioning the sanctity of tradition and of time-honored laws. There was no longer a tacit acquiescence in established order, and the claims of authority were no longer, as formerly, unchallenged. Confidence in political assumptions began to waver, and a critical attitude was taken toward laws which changed from year to year. The appearance everywhere of the tyrant, the vigorous personality who could set up his will against the will of a traditional aristocracy, impressed the age with the power of individual egoism. The seat of authority was shifted from tradition to the individual reason, and all institutions were brought under individual criticism.

The Persian Wars mark the point of transition from the traditional attitude to the critical attitude of the Greek mind. In themselves the Persian Wars were a great moral uplift, and were a return for a time to the traditional institutions. The changes long since begun were suspended for a time in the united effort of the Greek nation. But the tendencies became more insistent when the danger was past. The Persian Wars had cleared the atmosphere of its pessimism and had given freedom to the intellectual movement. Then later, in the heat of that intellectual movement, individualism and criticism came to fullest fruitage. Doubt grew into positive skepticism.

In the last part of the fifth century B.C., critical skepticism became universal. In religion the anthropomorphism of the Epic passes under ridicule. Critias declares that the gods are the invention of shrewd statecraft. In literature the Epic, in which the gods interfere in all human details, yields to the naturalistic descriptions of Herodotus and Thucydides, and to the personal note of lyric and satirical poetry. More important than all was the change of attitude toward the laws. Instead of the law having a divine authority, the individual placed himself above it and sat in judgment upon it. The tribal conception of guilt, that when a member of a tribe sinned the whole tribe would suffer at the hands of the gods, had given way at the time of the Persian Wars to that of personal responsibility and retribution. It was noted that laws change in the same state, that they differ in different states, and that moral customs have a great variety. All laws seem therefore to be made by man, and the question then arose, Is there any law which has universal validity? Is there any real prius or “Nature” of laws? In the Anthropological Period, the important question was about the real prius or “Nature” of human institutions, just as in the Cosmological Period the question was about the real prius or “Nature” of the world of physical phenomena. Yet the question of the Anthropologists was a part of the Cosmological problem. The Cosmologists had called the real prius or “Nature” (φύσις), that which ever remains like itself, and it is now asked if “Nature” in itself contains any unchanging and eternal politico-moral law. The contrast is thus drawn for all time between natural law and statute law, and the distinction dominates this period. Human legal institutions were regarded as only makeshifts, and often even as contradicting the divine law. The conflict between natural or divine law and human law appears worked out in the Antigone of Sophocles.

The same interest in the foundations of morality and moral relations opened up the whole subject of the power of human consciousness to discern such relations. It was a logical necessity that turned thought from a review of man’s relations with his fellows to a criticism of his own constitution. What is man? What are his faculties? Has he any that give him the truth and the reality? Or do they all deceive him so that he cannot detect the real from the sham of life? What are the mental faculties used in disputation, and how are they to be trained so that man may rise to an eminence of culture among his fellows? The Greek thus turned to a criticism of his knowing faculties, and the positive social and moral demands made such a criticism necessary to his well-being. Greek science took a strong anthropological direction, and logic, ethics, psychology, rhetoric, etc., took the place of natural science subjects. The Greek in the fifth century B.C. was interested in man—in his inner activities, his ideations and volitions. Of this critical and individualistic attitude Euripides is the literary exponent; Pericles is the political personification; Socrates and the Sophists are its philosophical expression.

The Significance of the Sophists. The Sophists were the direct means of bringing this intellectual change into Greek life. They were the bearers of this Greek Enlightenment, and they were the missionaries that spread its influence far and wide. This significance of the Sophists to the culture of Greece was never understood by the historian until Hegel set them in their true light. The dark side of their character has been painted in blackest colors, so that the word “Sophist” has carried an opprobrium with it. They were, however, the exponents of the Greek illumination, and not the cause of it. They therefore share all its weaknesses and its excellencies; and any judgment upon them is a judgment upon the time itself. The most accurate description of them is that they were the exponents of Greek culture in the age of Pericles; the worst that can be said of them is that they stimulated the Greek spirit in directions in which it should have been controlled. Their true work was to carry the gospel of Greek individualism everywhere; their fault lay in the fact that too frequently they confused individualism with hypocrisy, and led their hearers to believe that appearance knowledge is the same as true knowledge.

The word “Sophist” had a development among the Greeks. It first meant a wise man (the Cosmologists, from Thales to Anaxagoras, were Sophists); then a teacher of wisdom; then a paid teacher of wisdom. Moreover, among the Sophists there is a difference between the early Sophists, who were inspired by a distinct desire to spread culture, and the later Sophists, who were mercenary teachers, and had on that account degenerated into mere quibblers. In general, the ground of the contemporary hostility to the Sophists was the hatred of the conservative and reactionary party, to which belonged Aristophanes the satirist, Æschylus “the father of tragedy,” and the exponent of institutional morals, and Xenophon, who stood for a complete return to a patriarchal state. This party was very bitter against the exponents of the new and radical spirit springing up in Greece. All the philosophers of the new learning, including Socrates, suffered at the hands of those who would conserve the old traditions. In particular, the accusations against the Sophists of this period were: they were cavilers; they taught for pay; they represented the universalizing of education against the old aristocracy; they menaced institutions.

The Sophists were then primarily and, on the whole, the transmitters to the people of the culture of the time. They were the teachers of the humanities to that age. They were not technically philosophers, but were interested in philosophical questions. Protagoras was the only Sophist who was the author of any fruitful philosophical conceptions. Gorgias made occasional essays into philosophy. But besides Protagoras and Gorgias no other Sophists can be classed as philosophers, except possibly Hippias and Prodicus.

The Sophists introduced a profusion of knowledge among the people. They made investigations in language, logic, and the theory of cognition. They taught literature, history, grammar, the principles of the dialectic, the eristic, and rhetoric—all subjects concerned with the art of human expression. They studied and taught the special subjects concerned with human relations, like ethics, the theory of knowledge, psychology, and politics. Anything that had a place in Greek culture was systematically and skillfully presented by such men as Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, and Prodicus, who were men of encyclopædic erudition. The Sophist took the education of the Greek child at the age of sixteen, after he had received his elementary training, first at home and then at the hands of the teacher at school. The Greek boy’s education was naturally divided into two parts: gymnastics for the body and music for the soul. Under music was included geometry, performance on the lyre, pronunciation, the chorus and poetry, astronomy, physics, and geography. At the age of sixteen he got his instruction by meeting public men, such as the Sophists, in the street, in the Agora, and other public places. It was at this period of his life that the Sophist took his education into those higher branches which were necessary for his success in politics, society, and law. Thus the instruction of the Sophist was usually for a specific purpose, and thus rhetoric, dialectic, and the mental sciences were in great demand.

The Prominent Sophists. The list of Sophists is a long one. The first to call himself a Sophist and a teacher of public virtue was, according to Plato, Protagoras of Abdera. He was also probably the most eminent of the number. He was born about 480 B.C. Polus and Thrasymachus were the last; and Aristotle mentions the Sophists as in the past. So that we may conclude that as a band they existed only one hundred years (450–350 B.C.). Already at the beginning of the fourth century (400 B.C.) their importance had greatly diminished. In this hundred years we find some fourteen or fifteen prominent Sophists. There is, first, Protagoras, whose theory of knowledge is not only in itself a contribution to thought, but also of importance as a factor in forming the materialist atomistic doctrine of the school of Abdera,—the school of Leucippus and Democritus; Gorgias of Leontini, the head of an embassy to Athens, a man of eloquence, whose style was imitated by Thucydides and whom we might have studied in connection with the Eleatic school, for he carried out still further the doctrines of Zeno; Prodicus, the pupil of Protagoras and Gorgias, a brilliant man and a traveler, whose method of instruction was used by Socrates; Hippias, contemporary of Prodicus, remarkable for his mathematical, physical, and historical erudition, and a man full of vanity; the brothers, Euthydemus and Dionysiodorus, teachers of eristic; the rhetorician Thrasymachus and the rhetoricians of the school of Gorgias, viz., Polus, Lycophron, Protarchus, and Alcidamus; Evenus, rhetorician, moralist, and poet; Critias, the leader of the thirty; Callicles and Hippodamus.

Many of these men were reformers. Some (as Alcidamus) were opposed to the institution of slavery in Greece; some to marriage; some (as Lycophron) to the nobility; some to the inequality of property; while Hippodamus was the first to propose an ideal state.

The method of argumentation employed by the Sophists was first to perplex and confuse their opponents as to what had been taken in the past as valid. Then they made their opponents ridiculous by drawing out consequences from their statements. Their conclusions were often verbal and their witticisms vulgar.16

The Philosophy of the Sophists. The philosophy of the Sophists was only the logical following out of the general attitude of the time toward all traditions. The more the old physical theories fell into disrepute, the more the changes of the world of politics seemed to indicate instability everywhere, the more opinions differed on the same subject,—so much the more did the possibility present itself to the Sophists of taking two contradictories as equally true, and so much the faster did the whole Greek world lose faith in any valid truth and in any certain knowledge. The dogmatism of the Cosmological Period is thus naturally followed by the skepticism of the Anthropological. Beginning with the cautious and enlightened relativism of Protagoras, there grew up a volume of criticism, until the later Sophists applied destructive doctrines to everything. The best representatives of the philosophical aspect of the Sophistic movement were Protagoras and Gorgias.

1. The Relativism of Protagoras. Although theoretically skepticism is the centre and logical result of the Sophistic movement, the teaching of the greatest Sophist, Protagoras, cannot be strictly called skepticism. Philosophically, skepticism is not the denial of this or that particular belief as true, but the denial of the existence of any truth whatever. Protagoras refused to make any positive statements—either in denial or affirmation—about ultimate truth, because, as he said, we have no insight whatever into the nature of absolute truth. Our knowledge is confined to motions and the phenomena of motion. His teaching would be called in modern times relativism or phenomenalism. The fundamental principle beneath such a doctrine is that knowledge is human—never absolute, but always relative.

The relativism of Protagoras was based on two principles: the first is that of universal change, which he borrowed from Heracleitus; the second is, so far as we know, original with Protagoras,—that sense-perception is the only source and only kind of knowledge. In Heracleitus’ doctrine change is universal, each term of a series of changes passing into another. The senses are a part of this flux, and since they are, according to Protagoras, the only source of knowledge, knowledge is ephemeral and unreal. Reason is extended and continued sensation. A movement external to the organism stimulates an organ of the body and is met by a reacting movement of the organ. The result is perception. Perception being itself a process, each present moment of perception is the only knowledge. We cannot know things as they are in themselves; there is no insight into the Being of things over and above our perceptions. On the contrary, reality is not only what it perceptually appears for each individual, but also what it appears at each individual momentary perception.

What is the result of such a theory of knowledge? Protagoras expresses it well in his famous words, “Man is the measure of all things.” It is absolute sensationalism. There is no truth except that of the present moment. Each man sees the truth for himself at the moment of his perception. It does not matter if another has a different perception. It does not matter if at the next moment his perception differs. Each perception exists at the moment, is true, and at that moment is the only perception. There are as many truths as there are individuals, as many as there are moments in an individual’s life. Each individual is the measure of the true, the beautiful, and the good; for a thing that is good or true to one man may be harmful or false to another. Metaphysical discussions are vain, for the only reality to prove is the content of the present moment. All causes and ultimate criteria are impossible to be known.

2. The Nihilism of Gorgias. As the philosophy of Protagoras teaches that everything is equally true, that of Gorgias teaches that everything is equally false. Gorgias declared that Being, knowledge, and the communication of knowledge are impossible. Starting from the dialectic of the Eleatic, Zeno (as Protagoras started from that of Heracleitus), Gorgias maintained: (1)Nothing is; (2)If anything is, it cannot be thought; (3)Even if it can be thought, it cannot be communicated. The knowledge of the thing is different from the thing; the expression of the thought in words is different from the thought itself.

The Ethics of the Sophists.—The Application of their Critical Theory to Political Life. The ethical-political life was of paramount importance to the Greek. When the later Sophists began to scrutinize it from the point of view of the individual, their skepticism became a direct menace to Greek political institutions. The individual became a law unto himself, and the citizen set himself up as superior to society. Since the time of the Gnomic poets the content of both moral and political laws had become more and more a subject of reflection; and at the time of the Sophists the whole foundation of law was called in question. When the individual man is declared to be the measure of all things, all legal and moral institutions hang in the balance. All rules of conduct and all laws become then artificial and merely conventional products; and just as there is no standard of truth or error in knowledge, so there is no standard of good citizenship or morality. The good man is the prudent man; the good citizen is the successful and powerful man. Might is right.

Thus the Sophists came to teach such doctrines as these: Laws are made by the strongest, represent their will, and must be obeyed if they cannot be disobeyed; it takes a strong man to make a law, but a stronger to break it; the laws are only conventions invented either by the many to restrain the powerful few, or by the few to enslave the many. Even religions are devices of the crafty to enchain the people. Obedience to law is therefore a matter of personal interest. Happiness is the most important consideration of the individual. Sometimes personal interest conflicts with law and law does not then bring happiness, for criminals are often the most happy. It is not obedience to law that brings happiness but (Polus) a shrewd calculation of ends with no regard to right or law. The Sophists made no attempt to put their theories into execution. They expressed the sentiments of the Greek people, and Greek public opinion then pointed to segregation and individualism. Plato said that, after all, the Greek public was the great Sophist.

It was thus that the distinction arose between positive law and natural law. Reflecting upon the differences among the constitutions of the Greek states and upon the constant alterations in these constitutions, the Sophist concluded that the greater part of them were of human invention. They were positive laws and were to be contrasted with natural law, which was such law as is binding on all men equally. Natural law is therefore of greater worth than positive law, and is set in antithesis to it. Sir Henry Maine says in his Ancient Law that the Greeks did not found any system of jurisprudence, because natural law was always referred to by them in arguing any question. The only way to find natural law is to strip it of the mass of conventional laws. The word “nature” has been in its history one of the most ambiguous of words; and Protagoras’ teaching that “nature” consists of primary ethical feelings is hardly a complete and satisfactory definition. The more the theory of the Sophists limited “nature” to human nature, and to human nature in its capricious and individual aspects, so much the more did statute laws appear antagonistic to natural law and seem to be detrimental to it.

Summary.

1. Although a skepticism and a criticism, Sophistry was a relative advance over the traditionalism and dogmatism of the Cosmologists.

2. Sophistry turned the attention to man and his interests as the principal object of inquiry.

3. The Sophists stood for freedom of thought by pointing to individual consciousness as the final court of appeal.

4. Although the Sophists differed very much in their teaching, they had a mutual dependence and common presuppositions.

5. The Sophists disregarded the likenesses and emphasized the differences among men.

6. The Sophists built up their doctrines upon the basis of a sensationalist psychology.