same precision we use, and they too used, in describing the natural history and physiology of a plant. The thing is defined, and its mode of action explained. So in the Rhetoric, Aristotle analyzes the qualities of youth, old age, and middle life, because the public orator will have men of each sort in his audience, and must know what kind of argument will gain or lose their votes. So in the Ethics, with scientific objectivity, he represents the man of perfect virtue, the norm or standard by which other men are to be judged. So in the Characters, Theophrastus exhibits the nature and activity of The Flatterer, The Surly Man, The Boor, and so on, some thirty types in all, who depart from the standard set in the Ethics, treating them as dispassionately as if they were flowers. From what I can learn, there has been no comparable body of systematic knowledge produced upon this subject since the Middle Ages, and none on any part of it that is not either copied from Greece, or, if to some extent original, inferior to the work of Aristotle and Theophrastus as a guide to the individual in studying himself, or to the leader in studying his fellows.

Let us turn to a few passages from Greek literature which may serve to illustrate at least a part of what has been said, and to build up, perhaps in the rough, the conception I have thus far been trying to take to pieces. They represent to me, either directly or by contrast, the Greek ideal of humanity—that human ideal which, in spite of its limitations, still makes the classics worth our study.

The Greeks conceived of the ideal man as one possessing insight enough to distinguish between the sorrows which every one must undergo, such as the pains attendant upon age and death, and the sorrows which men bring upon themselves through folly and hardness of heart. Thus, near the opening of the Odyssey, Homer puts into the mouth of Zeus the following speech upon the relations of fate and free will:

'Lo you now, how vainly mortal men do blame the gods! For of us they say comes evil, whereas they even of themselves, through the blindness of their own hearts, have sorrows beyond that which is ordained. Even as of late Aegisthus, beyond that which was ordained, took to him the wedded wife of the son of Atreus and killed her lord on his return, and that with sheer doom before his eyes, since we had warned him by the embassy of Hermes the keen-sighted, the slayer of Argos, that he should neither kill the man, nor woo his wife. For the son of Atreus shall be avenged at

the hand of Orestes, so soon as he shall come to man's estate and long for his own country. So spake Hermes, yet he prevailed not on the heart of Aegisthus, for all his good will; but now hath he paid one price for all."

On the evidence of this passage at least, it would be unsafe to accuse the Greeks of fatalism. But such evidence is not uncommon in the Greek poets, if we are careful to watch when their dramatic characters are not misled or purposely deceiving, but are telling the ultimate truth. In Sophocles' Antigone, for example, there is a similar utterance, made by the tyrant Creon, when his eyes are opened, and he finds himself, through his own misguided action, bereft of his wife, and of Haemon, his son, and hated of gods and

men:

'Enter CREON, on the spectators' left, with attendants, carrying the shrouded body of HAEMON on a bier.

'CHORUS. Lo, yonder the king himself draws near, bearing that which tells too clear a tale-the work of no stranger's madnessif we may say it but of his own misdeeds.

'CREON. Woe for the sins of a darkened soul, stubborn sins, fraught with death! Ah, ye behold us, the sire who hath slain, the son who hath perished! Woe is me, for the wretched blindness of my counsels! Alas, my son, thou hast died in thy youth, by a timeless doom, woe is me!-thy spirit hath fled-not by thy folly, but by mine own!'8

Creon is a king, of noble blood. He does not lean to the worse, but, as we should say, is a person of good intentions. Yet in him there had been blindness of heart, an infatuate self-will, which recoiled upon himself in sorrows beyond those which are ordained for the man of insight. The poet is clear on this point. Death, the supreme evil, death, which to the Greek is not swallowed up in victory, is a thing that no one can avoid; but life can be ordered aright, and man, if he cleaves to divine justice, man the versatile, the courageous, is for life the master of circumstance.

'Wonders are many,' [sings the Chorus in Antigone,] 'and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south-wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him; and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the 7 Translation by Butcher and Lang, p. 2.

8 Jebb, The Tragedies of Sophocles, translated into English prose, p. 169.

immortal, the unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the offspring of horses, as the plows go to and fro from year to year.

'And the light-hearted race of birds, and the tribes of savage beasts, and the sea-brood of the deep, he snares in the meshes of his woven toils, he leads captive, man excellent in wit. And he masters by his arts the beast whose lair is in the wilds, who roams the hills; he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke upon its neck, he tames the tireless mountain bull.

'And speech, and wind-swift thought, and all the moods that mould a state, hath he taught himself; and how to flee the arrows of the frost, when 'tis hard lodging under the clear sky, and the arrows of the rushing rain; yea, he hath resource for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come: only against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hath devised escapes.

'Cunning beyond fancy's dream is the fertile skill which brings him, now to evil, now to good. When he honors the laws of the land, and that justice which he hath sworn by the gods to uphold, proudly stands his city: no city hath he who, for his rashness, dwells with sin. Never may he share my hearth, never think my thoughts, who doth these things!"

The seamy side of human nature, we observe, did not escape the vision of the Greeks. As a further illustration, I may quote from the Politics of Aristotle, which often has a bearing upon the commonest problems of to-day. Does not the following recall the recent history of our laboring classes, with their successive strikes, and the constant growth of their demands?

'The avarice of mankind is insatiable; at one time two obols was pay enough, but now, when this sum has become customary, men always want more and more without end; for it is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it. The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the nobler sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more; that is to say, they must be kept down, but not ill-treated. '10

Does our higher education in America school the nobler sort of natures in the art of self-restraint? Will our college graduates • Jebb, The Tragedies of Sophocles, translated into English prose, pp. 138139.

10 Aristotle, Politics, tr. Jowett, 2. 7.

appreciate the saw of Hesiod, whether in the outlay of words or in the acquisition of wealth, that the half is more than the whole? Can our emancipated ladies take to heart the thought of Nicias, which he uttered just before the dreadful termination of the siege at Syracuse? When they have done as men sometimes do, will they suffer what men can bear?

But Greek literature in general has an application to modern life. Let us take at random one of the Characters of Theophrastus, The Complaisant Man. Have we not met him in business, among traveling salesmen, in our college halls, and among professional politicians? He is perennial.

"THE COMPLAISANT MAN

'Complaisance may be defined as a mode of address calculated to give pleasure, but not with the best tendency.

"The Complaisant Man is very much the kind of person who will hail one afar off with "my dear fellow"; and, after a large display of respect, seize and hold one by both hands. He will attend you a little way, and ask when he is to see you, and will take his leave with a compliment upon his lips. Also, when he is called in to an arbitration, he will seek to please, not only his principal, but the adversary as well, in order that he may be deemed impartial. He will say, too, that foreigners speak more justly than his fellowcitizens. Then, when he is asked to dinner, he will request the host to send for the children; and will say of them, when they come in, that they are as like their father as figs, and will draw them towards him, and kiss them, and establish them at his side-playing with some of them, and himself saying "Wineskin," "Hatchet," and permitting others to go to sleep upon him, to his anguish."11

But we must hasten to a close. Without further preliminary, I will quote from the description of the Magnanimous or Highminded Man in the Nicomachean Ethics:

'Highmindedness, as its very name suggests, seems to be occupied with high things. Let us begin, then, by ascertaining the character of those things. It makes no difference whether we consider the moral state or the person in whom the moral state is seen.

'A highminded person seems to be one who regards himself as

11 The Characters of Theophrastus, ed. Jebb-Sandys (1909), pp. 43, 45.

worthy of high things, and who is worthy of them; for he who does so without being worthy is foolish, and no virtuous person is foolish or absurd.

'Such, then, is the highminded person. One who is worthy of small things, and who regards himself as worthy of them, is temperate or sensible, but he is not highminded; for highmindedness can only exist on a large scale, as beauty can only exist in a tall person. Small people may be elegant and well-proportioned, but not beautiful.

'He who regards himself as worthy of high things, and is unworthy of them, is conceited-although it is not every one who takes an exaggerated view of his own worth that is a conceited person.

'He who takes too low a view of his own worth is mean-minded, whether it be high things, or moderate, or even small things that he is worthy of, so long as he underrates his deserts. This would seem to be especially a fault in one who is worthy of high things; for what would he do, it may be asked, if his deserts were less than they are?

"The highminded man, while he holds an extreme position by the greatness of his deserts, holds an intermediate . . . position by the propriety of his conduct, as he estimates his own deserts aright, while others rate their deserts too high or too low.

'But if, then, he regards himself as worthy of high things, and is worthy of them, and especially if he is worthy of the highest things, there will be one particular object of his interest. Desert is a term used in reference to external goods, but we should naturally esteem that to be the greatest of external goods which we attribute to the gods, or which persons of high reputation most desire, or which is the prize awarded to the noblest actions. But honor answers to this description, as being the highest of external goods.

'The highminded man, then, bears himself in a right spirit towards honors and dishonors. It needs no proof that highminded people are concerned with honor; for it is honor more than anything else of which the great regard themselves, and deservedly regard themselves, as worthy. The mean-minded man underestimates himself both in respect of his own deserts and in comparison with the acknowledged deserts of the highminded man. The conceited man overestimates his own deserts, but he does not estimate his own deserts more highly than the highminded man.

"The highminded man, as being worthy of the highest things, will be in the highest degree good, for the better man is always worthy