The Greek View of LifeDickinson, G. Lowes (Goldsworthy Lowes)
Religion
The Greek View of Life
Dickinson, G. Lowes (Goldsworthy Lowes)
Greece -- Civilization
the reins with such violence as to bring both the steeds on their
haunches, the one willing and unresisting, the unruly one very
unwilling; and when they have gone back a little, the one is overcome
with shame and wonder, and his whole soul is bathed in perspiration; the
other, when the pain is over which the bridle and the fall had given
him, having with difficulty taken breath, is full of wrath and
reproaches, which he heaps upon the charioteer and his fellow-steed, for
want of courage and manhood, declaring that they have been false to
their agreement and guilty of desertion. Again they refuse, and again he
urges them on, and will scarce yield to their prayer that he would wait
until another time. When the appointed hour comes, they make as if they
had forgotten, and he reminds them, fighting and neighing and dragging
them on, until at length he on the same thoughts intent, forces them to
draw near again. And when they are near he stoops his head and puts up
his tail, and takes the bit in his teeth and pulls shamelessly. Then the
charioteer is worse off than ever; he falls back like a racer at the
barrier, and with a still more violent wrench drags the bit out of the
teeth of the wild steed and covers his abusive jaws and tongue with
blood, and forces his legs and haunches to the ground and punishes him
sorely.
"And when this has happened several times and the villain has ceased
from his wanton way, he is tamed and humbled and follows the will of the
charioteer, and when he sees the beautiful one he is ready to die of
fear. And from that time forward the soul of the lover follows the
beloved in modesty and holy fear." [Footnote: Plato, Phaedrus. 246.--
Translated by Jowett.]
Even from this passage, in spite of its dualistic hypothesis, but far
more clearly from the whole tenor of his work, we may perceive that
Plato's description of virtue as an "order" of the soul is prompted by
the same conception, characteristically Greek, as Aristotle's account of
virtue as a "mean." The view, as we said at the beginning, is properly
aesthetic rather than moral. It regards life less as a battle between
two contending principles, in which victory means the annihilation of
the one, the altogether bad, by the other, the altogether good, than as
the maintenance of a balance between elements neutral in themselves but
capable, according as their relations are rightly ordered or the
reverse, of producing either that harmony which is called virtue, or
that discord which is called vice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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