[501] “His [Socrates’] significancy for moral philosophy lies in his calling attention to _rational_ knowledge as the source of the moral.”--WUTTKE, _Christian Ethics_ (1873), vol. i, p. 69. [502] _Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité_ (1879), t. i, pp. 125 f. [503] Cf. _Gorgias_, 478, 479. [504] _Laws_, tr. Jowett, xi. 913. Plato saw what the socialist-philosopher Lloyd saw when he wrote, “More searching ... than the Golden Rule is that which commands us to inquire if what we desire for ourselves and others is a right desire” (_Man the Social Creator_ (1906), p. 147). [505] In the _Republic_ Plato reaches the conception of a Greek brotherhood, but beyond this he never advanced. [506] Xen. _Mem._ ii. 6, 35. [507] _Politics_, i. 7, sec. 5; 8, sec. 12; vii. 2, sec. 15; 14, sec. 21. [508] _Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité_ (1879), t. i, p. 228. [509] “A moral ideal which was not coextensive with the whole spiritual nature of man was taken by the schoolmen from the Aristotelian ethics, and then the so-called religious virtues were more or less cumbrously and precariously built upon it. Supernaturalism in morals was added to the classic naturalism as a divine appendix to ethics.”--NEWMAN SMYTH, _Christian Ethics_ (1892), p. 133. [510] The downfall of the institutions of the free city state was to Greek morality what the downfall of the papal Church would have been to the morality of the medieval ages. [511] Philopœman and Aratus. [512] This ascetic tendency in Stoicism is doubtless to be attributed to the influence of the Orient upon Greek life and thought. [513] Consistently so, since only through self-control and the avoidance of all excesses of passion, appetite, and desires can one maintain that tranquillity of mind which is the condition precedent of happiness. [514] Lecky, _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 228. [515] Mahaffy, _Social Life in Greece_, p. 264. The author contrasts this humaneness of the laws of the Athenian democracy four centuries before Christ with the atrocious cruelty of the criminal laws of Christian Europe down almost to the nineteenth century. [516] _Social Life in Greece_ (1888), p. 269. [517] _Ibid._ p. 554. [518] The Apostle Paul at Athens, seeking common ground with his hearers for the doctrine he preached that God hath made of one blood all nations of men, finds it in the familiar line of the Stoic Cleanthes--“We are the offspring of God.” [519] Plutarch died about 40 A.D. [520] “From contact with the Greeks, therefore, Christianity obtained this support, that an ideal long known to the Western world, the Stoic ideal, was found to correspond with it, so that the preaching of the Apostles was in this respect not out of harmony with the wants and aspirations of the higher and better minds of the age.”--MAHAFFY, _Progress of Hellenism in Alexander’s Empire_ (1905), p. 146.