in the art of building?" "Nor for that." "Or for their ignorance of shoemaking?" "Not on any of these accounts; for the contrary is the case, as most of those who know such trades are servile." "Is it, then, an appellation of those who are ignorant of what is honorable, and good, and just?" "It appears so to me." "It, therefore, becomes us to exert ourselves in every way to avoid being like slaves." "But, by the gods, Socrates," rejoined Euthydemus, "I firmly believed that I was pursuing that course of study by which I should, as I expected, be made fully acquainted with all that was proper to be known by a man striving after honor and virtue; but now, how dispirited must you think I feel, when I see that, with all my previous labor, I am not even able to answer about what I ought most of all to know, and am acquainted with no other course which I may pursue to become better!"

10. The Schools of Alexandria

(Draper, J. W., History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, vol. 1, pp 187-92. New York, 1876)

An interesting description of the Alexandrian learning at its best is given in the following selection.

... A great state institution was founded at Alexandria. It became celebrated as the Museum. To it, as a centre, philosophers from all parts of the world converged. It is said that one time not less than fourteen thousand students were assembled there. Alexandria, in confirmation of the prophetic foresight of the great soldier who founded it, quickly became an immense metropolis, abounding in mercantile and manufacturing activity. As is ever the case with such cities, its higher classes were prodigal and dissipated, its lower only to be held in restraint by armed force. Its public amusements were such as might be expected theatrical shows, music, horse-racing. In the solitude of such a crowd, or in the noise of such dissipation, any one could find a retreat atheists who had been banished from Athens; devotees from the Ganges, monotheistic Jews, blasphemers from Asia Minor. . . .

The Alexandrian Museum soon assumed the character of a University. In it those great libraries were collected, the pride and boast of antiquity. Demetrius Phalareus was instructed to collect all the writings in the world. So powerfully were the exertions of himself and his successors enforced by the government that two immense libraries were procured. They contained 700,000 volumes. In this literary and scientific retreat, supported in ease and even in luxury — luxury, for allusions to sumptuous dinners have descended to our times - the philosophers spent their time in mental culture by study, or mutual improvement by debates. The king himself conferred appointments to these positions; in later times, the Roman emperors succeeded to the patronage, the government thereby binding in golden chains intellect

that might otherwise have proved troublesome. . . . A botanical garden, in connection with the Museum, offered an opportunity to those who were interested in the study of the nature of plants; a zoological menagerie afforded like facilities to those interested in animals. . . . An anatomical school [was added], suitably provided with means for the dissection of the human body, this anatomical school being the basis of a medical college for the education of physicians. For the astronomers Ptolemy Euergetes placed in the Square Porch an equinoctial and a solstitial armil, the graduated limbs of these instruments being divided into degrees and sixths. There were in the observatory stone quadrants, the precursors of our mural quadrants. On the floor a meridian line was drawn for the adjustment of the instruments. There were also astrolabes and dioptras. Thus, side by side, almost in the king's palace, were noble provisions for the cultivation of exact science and for the pursuit of light literature. Under the same roof were gathered together geometers, astronomers, chemists, mechanicians, engineers. There were also poets, who ministered to the literary wants of the dissipated city authors who could write verse, not only in correct metre, but in all kinds of fantastic forms trees, hearts, and eggs. Here met together the literary dandy and the grim theologian. . . .

...

... The Museum made an impression upon the intellectual career of Europe so powerful and enduring that we still enjoy its results. That impression was twofold, theological and physical. The dialectical spirit and literary culture diffused among the Alexandrians prepared that people, beyond all others, for the reception of Christianity. . . .

But it was not alone as regards theology that Alexandria exerted a power on subsequent ages; her influence was as strongly marked in the impression it gave to science. Astronomical observatories, chemical laboratories, libraries, dissecting-houses, were not in vain. There went forth from them a spirit powerful enough to tincture all future times. Nothing like the Alexandrian Museum was ever called into existence in Greece or Rome, even in their palmiest days. It is the unique and noble memorial of the dynasty of the Ptolemies, who have thereby laid the whole human race under obligations, and vindicated their title to be regarded as a most illustrious line of kings. The Museum was, in truth, an attempt at the organization of human know!edge, both for its development and its diffusion. It was conceived and executed in a practical manner worthy of Alexander. And though, in the night through which Europe has been passing a night full of dreams and delusions men have not entertained a right estimate of the spirit in which that great institution was founded, and the work it accomplished, its glories being eclipsed by darker and more unworthy things, the time is approaching when its action on the course of human events will be better understood, and its influences on European civilization more clearly discerned.

Thus, then, about the beginning of the third century before Christ, in consequence of the Macedonian campaign, which had brought the Greeks into contact with the ancient civilization of Asia, a great degree of intellectual activity was manifested in Egypt. On the site of the village of Rhacotis, once held as an Egyptian post to prevent the ingress of strangers, the Macedonians erected that city which was to be the entrepôt of the commerce of the East and West, and to transmit an illustrious name to the latest generations. Her long career of commercial prosperity, her commanding position as respects the material interests of the world, justified the statesmanship of her founder, and the intellectual glory which has gathered round her has given an enduring lustre to his name.

11. What We Owe to the Greeks

(Butcher, S. H., Some Aspects of the Greek Genius, Essay I. London, 1891)

In the first Essay in the above-cited volume, entitled "What We owe to Greece," Professor Butcher gives a very interesting picture of the Greek contribution to the life of the modern world. From it the following selections have been taken.

The Greeks, before any other people of antiquity, possessed the love of knowledge for its own sake. To see things as they really are, to discern their meanings and adjust their relations, was with them an instinct and a passion. Their methods in science and philosophy might be very faulty, and their conclusions often absurd, but they had that fearlessness of intellect which is the first condition of seeing truly. Poets and philosophers alike looked with unflinching eyes on all that met them, on man and the world, on life and death. They interrogated Nature, and sought to wrest her secret from her, without misgiving and without afterthought. Greece, first smitten with the passion for truth, had the courage to put faith in reason, and in following its guidance to take no count of consequences.

At the moment when Greece first comes into the main current of the world's history, we find a quickened and stirring sense of personality, and a free play of intellect and imagination. The oppressive silence with which Nature and her unexplained forces had brooded over man is broken. Not that the Greek temper is irreverent, or strips the universe of mystery. The mystery is still there and felt, and has left many undertones of sadness in the bright and heroic records of Greece; but the sense of mystery has not yet become mysticism. . . . Greek thinkers are not afraid that they may be guilty of prying into the hidden things of the gods. They hold frank companionship with thoughts that had paralysed Eastern nations into dumbness or inactivity, and in their clear gaze there is no ignoble terror. Inroads, indeed, there were at times from the East of strange gods and fanatical rites; and

...

half-lit spaces always remained in which forms of faith or ritual, lower as well as higher than the popular creed, took shelter; but, on the whole, we are henceforth in an upper and a serener air in which man's spiritual and intellectual freedom is assured. . ..

It was the privilege of the Greeks to discover the sovereign efficacy of reason. They entered on the pursuit of knowledge with a sure and joyous instinct. Baffled and puzzled they might be, but they never grew weary of the quest. The speculative faculty which reached its height in Plato and Aristotle, was, when we make due allowance for time and circumstance, scarcely less eminent in the Ionian philosophers; and it was Ionia that gave birth to an idea, which was foreign to the East, but has become the starting-point of modern science - the idea that Nature works by fixed laws. . . . The early poet-philosophers of Ionia gave the impulse which has carried the human intellect forward across the line which separates empirical from scientific knowledge; and the Greek precocity of mind in this direction, unlike that of the Orientals, had in it the promise of uninterrupted advance in the future of great discoveries in mathematics, geometry, experimental physics, in medicine also and physiology....

Again, the Greeks set themselves to discover a rational basis for conduct. Rigorously they brought their actions to the test of reason, and that not only by the mouth of philosophers, but through their poets, historians, and orators. Thinking and doing, "the spirit of counsel and might" - clear thought and noble action - did not to the Greek mind stand opposed. . . .

...

The East did not attempt to reconcile the claims of the state and the individual. The pliant genius of Greece first made 'the effort. In Greece first the idea of the public good, of the free devotion of the citizen to the state, of government in the interests of the governed, of the rights of the individual, took shape. The problem of the relation between the state and the individual was, indeed, very imperfectly solved in Greece. The demands, for instance, of the state were pitched too high, and implied a virtue almost heroic in its members. Even in Athens, where individual liberty was most regarded, certain urgent public needs were supplied mainly by the precarious method of private generosity instead of by state organisation. But though the Greeks may not have solved the political problem, they saw that there was a problem to solve, and set about it rationally; and they were the first to do so. They were gifted with a power, peculiarly Western, of delicate adjustment, of combining principles apparently opposite, of harmonising conflicting claims; they possessed a sense of measure, a flexibility, a faculty of compromise, opposed to the fatal simplicity with which Eastern politics had been stricken. Not tyranny, not anarchy, satisfied the Greek, but ordered liberty. . . .

This brief sketch may serve to indicate the qualities most distinctive

of the Greek genius - the love of knowledge, the love of rational beauty, the love of freedom. In their first contact with the East with Egypt and Assyria - during the period known as the GræcoPhoenician period of art, the Greeks had a trying ordeal to pass through. They came out of it, as we have seen, in a characteristic fashion.

1. Their political instinct was alien to Assyrian despotism. 2. Their lay instinct rose up against Egyptian priestcraft.

3. Their instinct for beauty and reason combined rejected in both arts in Assyrian and Egyptian alike—what was monstrous and lifeless.

4. Their instinct for knowledge, their curiosity, their cosmopolitanism, led them to adopt the foreign technique, and to absorb all that was fruitful in the foreigners' ideas. They borrowed from every source, but all that they borrowed they made their own. The Phoenicians, it has been said, taught the Greeks writing, but it was the Greeks who wrote. In every department the principle holds good. They stamped their genius upon each imported product, which was to them but the raw material of their art. . . . Such, briefly, is our debt to Greece. And when we speak of Greece we think first of Athens. . . .

To Greece, then, we owe the love of Science, the love of Art, the love of Freedom: not Science alone, Art alone, or Freedom alone, but these vitally correlated with one another and brought into organic union. And in this union we recognise the distinctive features of the West. The Greek genius is the European genius in its first and brightest bloom. From a vivifying contact with the Greek spirit Europe derived that new and mighty impulse which we call Progress....

From Greece came that first mighty impulse whose far-off workings are felt by us to-day, and which has brought it about that progress has been accepted as the law and goal of human endeavour. Greece first took up the task of equipping man with all that fits him for civil life and promotes his secular well-being; of unfolding and expanding every inborn faculty and energy, bodily and mental; of striving restlessly after the perfection of the whole, and finding in this effort after an unattainable ideal that by which man becomes like to the gods...