Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 1 of 2)Symonds, John Addington
History
Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 1 of 2)
Symonds, John Addington
Greek poetry -- History and criticism
While fixing our thoughts upon Pericles as the exponent of the
mature spirit of free Hellas, we owe some attention to his master,
the great Anaxagoras, who first made reason play the chief part in
the scheme of the universe. Of the relations of Anaxagoras to his
pupil Pericles, this is what Plutarch tells us: "He that saw most
of Pericles, and furnished him most especially with a weight and
grandeur of sense superior to all arts of popularity, and in general
gave him his elevation and sublimity of purpose and of character, was
Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ, whom the men of those times called by the
name of Nous--that is, mind or intelligence; whether in admiration
of the great and extraordinary gift he displayed for the science of
nature, or because he was the first of the philosophers who did not
refer the first ordering of the world to fortune or chance, nor to
necessity or compulsion, but to a pure, unadulterated intelligence,
which in all other existing mixed and compound things acts as a
principle of discrimination, and of combination of like with like."
Thus we may say, without mysticism, that at the very moment in history
when the intelligence of mankind attained to freedom, there arose
a philosopher in Anaxagoras to proclaim the freedom and absolute
supremacy of intelligence in the universe; and a ruler in Pericles to
carry into action the laws of that intelligence, and to govern the most
uncontrollably free of nations by reason. When Pericles died, Athens
lost her Zeus, her head, her real king. She was left a prey to parties,
to demagogues, to the cold encroaching policy of Sparta. But Pericles
had lived long enough to secure the immortality of what was greatest in
his city--to make of Athens in her beauty "a joy forever."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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