IN 404 B.C., after almost thirty years of war between the Greek states, Athens fell. The most glorious century of Greek achieve 'ment ended in the darkest tragedy known to history. The Periclean empire had been the greatest political structure ever built on Hellenic soil ; indeed, it had for a time seemed to be the destined home for Greek culture throughout all ages to come.
In the funeral speech over the dead Athenian soldiers, which Thucydides wrote soon after the end of the war and put in Pericles'. mouth, he still saw Athens as lit by the last beams of that radiance. Through his words there still glows something of the ardour of that brief but brilliant dream, well worthy of the Athenian genius-the dream of building a state so skilfully that it might keep strength and spirit in perpetual equipoise.
When he composed that speech, he already knew the paradoxical truth which all his generation had to learn: that even the most solid of earthly powers must vanish into air, and that only the seemingly brittle splendour of the spirit can long endure. It seemed as if the development of Athens had been suddenly reversed. She was thrown back a hundred years, to the epoch of isolated city-states. The victory over Persia, in which she had been the leader and the champion of tht Greeks, had allowed her to aspire to hegemony over them. Now, just before she could secure it, it was snatched from her grasp.
The Greek world was convulsed by her disastrous fall. It left a great gap among the Hellenic states, which it proved impossi ble to fill. The moral and political repercussions of the defeat were felt as long as the state, as such, continued to have any real existence and meaning for the Greeks. From the very first, Greek civilization had been inseparably connected with the life of the city-state; and the connexion was closest of all in Athens.
Therefore the effects of the catastrophe were, inevitably, far more than merely political. It shook all moral laws ; it struck at the roots of religion. If the disaster was to be repaired, the process must start with religion and ethics. This realization entered both the theorizing of philosophers and the day-to-day life of the average man; because of it, the fourth century was an age of constant endeavours at internal and external reconstruc tion. But the blow had struck so deep that, from this distance, it seems doubtful from the very start whether the innate Greek belief in the value of this world, their confidence that they could bring 'the best state', 'the best life', into being here and now, could ever have survived such an experience to be re-created in its original purity and vigour. It was in that time of suffering that the Greek spirit first began to turn inwards upon itself-as it was to do more and more throughout the succeeding centuries.
But the men of that age, even Plato, still believed that their task was a practical one. They had to change the world, this world-even although they might not manage to do it com pletely at the moment. And (although in a rather clifferent sense) that is how even the practical statesmen now envisaged their mission.
The speed of the external recovery made by the Athenian stace, and the vast amount of material and spiritual resources which it called into play, were truly astounding. This supreme crisis showed, more clearly than any other occasion in the history of Athens, that her true strength-even as a state-was the strength of the spirit. It was her spiritual culture which guided her upwards on the path to recovery, which in the time of her gravest need won back the hearts of the Greeks who had turned away from her, and which proved to all Hellas that she had a right ro survive, even when she lacked the power to assert it.
Thereiore the intellectual movement which took place in Athens during the first decades of the fourth century must occupy the centre of our interest, even from the political point of view.
When Thucydides looked back to the greatest era of Athenian power, under Pericles, and saw that the heart and soul of that power was the spirit of man, he saw truly. Now, as ever-indeed much more than ever-Athens was the cultural centre of Greece, its paideusis. But all its energies were concentrated upon the heavy task set by history to the new generation: the reconstruc tion of the state and of all life, upon a firm and lasting basis.
During the war, and even before its outbreak, changes in the structure of life had initiated this process, by which all the energies of the higher intellect were focused upon the state. It was not only the new educational theories and experiments of the sophists which pointed in that direction. Poets, orators, and his torians too were drawn, ever more irresistibly, into the general current. At the end of the great war, the younger generation had been schooled by the frightful experiences of its last decade to throw all their strength into the task of the moment. If the existing state gave them no worthy social or political work to do, it was inevitable for their energies to seek some intellectual outlet. We have already traced the growth in educational emphasis throughout the art and thought of the fifth century, as far as the great History of Thucydides, which drew the appropriate moral from the political developments of the entire century. The same current of ideas now flows into the great stream of reconstruction. The immediate political and social crisis, with all the suffering it entailed, vastly increased the stress on education, strengthened its importance, enriched its meaning.
Thus, the concept of paideia became the real expression of the rising generation's spiritual purpose. The fourth century is the classical epoch in the history of paideia, if we take that to mean the development of a conscious ideal of education and culture. There was good reason for it to fall in that critical century. It is that very awareness of its problems that distinguishes the Greek spirit most clearly from other nations. It was simply be cause the Greeks were fully alive to every problem, every difficulty confronting them in the general intellectual and moral collapse of the brilliant fifth century, that they were able to understand the meaning of their own education and culture so clearly as ·to become the teachers of all succeeding nations. Greece is the school of the western world.
Paideia The Ideals of Greek Culture - Volume II In Search of the Divine Centre
Werner Jaeger
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