FOUR:  BACKFLASH TO ARISTOTLE

Before going on, we need to reconsider Aristotle. According to Aristotle the Perfect human specimen is the so called great-souled or great-minded man, and I mean MAN, because for Aristotle women were of limited value. They were misbegotten males who unfortunately had the task of breeding offspring. Aristotle did not believe offspring was related to the mother. The ancient Greeks in general tended to believe that mothers had no effect on children except for being their wombs. They did not contribute anything to the child. The fully formed child was injected in the process of intercourse. It would then develop into a baby but the baby was really only the father's nurtured by the surrogate mother. The original surrogate mother.

According to Aristotle, the perfect human specimen was tall, walked with a slow and measured gait, spoke with a low voice, and was extremely honest to the extent of recognizing that he was really something. The greatest virtue according to Aristotle, was pride, to be distinguished from arrogance. We, today, have quite a bit of trouble with the idea of pride. On the one hand, we are told to be proud of our country or proud of our football team or whatever--pride of place and pride of origins and pride of family. On the other hand we are told that pride is the deadliest of all deadly sins. We are also expected not to blow our own horns and tell the world how brilliant we are. At the same time we are encouraged to do so if we do it in a somewhat more restrained manner. Aristotle made no bones about his conviction that the truly great human being is a male of good birth. It never occurred to him that anyone could be a great soul or model of humanity if he came from low class background. That to Aristotle was obvious.

Aristotle based everything on this idea of a hierarchy. As did Plato. For the intelligent and competent, pride is the greatest of all virtues because it is the virtue of one who is honest with himself. The arrogant man would be one who deserves little but claims much. That of course is unacceptable. The humble phony would be one who deserves much but claims little. You might note that in the Christian context this is the way to go. We are encouraged to claim little no matter how much we might secretly think we actually deserve. According to Aristotle this is deception. There are very few truly great men according to Aristotle. I have no idea if he considered himself to be one of them. But the ones who are really great would be those who deserve much and claim much. They are not popular. They despise the adulation of the masses. They would not want to be on the New YorK Times best seller list. They would to write something which is accessible only to a very small elite group of discriminating individuals. According to Aristotle, the great man prefers the company of his peers. He does not want to be praised by those who have no business praising him because they don't understand what he is all about, those who are beneath him.

I am emphasizing this because it is one of a set of ideas which runs like a thread from ancient times through the Middle Ages into modern times. In the Medieval world pride was considered the most deadly of the mortal sins. After the collapse he Roman Empire in the West, we move from the emphasis on the grandeur and nobility of the human being to the grandeur and nobility of God in whose sight even the most elevated of humans is an insignificant worm. A nothing. Hence, for the medieval mindset all pride is false pride. Arrogance. There simply is no such thing as justified pride. On the other hand, Aristotle, at the high point of Greek civilization believes in justified pride. The modern world, beginning with the Renaissance and scholars such as Pico della Mirandola, returns to the Aristotelian way of looking at things, at least to some extent. Once again pride becomes respectable. This is the kind of overall patterns which you should try to remember and take from one class into the next class.

Back to the Romans. Unlike the Greeks, the Romans did not consider physical labor and getting their hands dirty, and doing things which were not just intellectually elevating the only things that humans should pursue. The Greeks, at least the upper class types who considered themselves to be fully human, tended to believe that what we might tend to call good, honest, sweaty-brow work was degrading to humanity. They believed that the most important thing that a person could do would be to think, to discuss philosophy or possibly to write tragedies. Worrying about everyday economic necessities they considered degrading. Ditto for agricultural activities. Even producing sculptures was frowned upon as being too close to physical labor. Paradoxically, the sculptures (in contrast to their artisan creators) were honored!  The Greeks loved theory. The Greeks loved everything which was done for its own sake. So, for example, they disapproved of the Sophists, migratory teachers who expected to be paid for their services. To them it was the equivalent of prostituting a noble calling. Personally, if I could, I would much prefer to live in a world without money, a world in which I could be absolutely certain that I do nothing for pay. I think for that reason I tend to empathize with the Greeks.

The Romans came from agricultural stock. During their republican period they squinted at the Greeks and with disgust, appalled by what they considered excessive Greek refinement and lack of the "masculine virtues."  The Romans were down to earth. Very, very practical. Every now and then a student makes a comment about pursuing only those things which have practical application and not worrying about other areas. This seems to be a fairly general American attitude. We tend to think in terms of what is useful. Are there practical applications to what I am doing? How does this connect to the Romans? The Romans thought very much in pragmatic terms as well.

The arts of the Romans were arts such as the law, which comes in handy if you are a militaristic-yet-fair nation in the process of expansion and want to control conquered territories justly. Another Roman art was the building of roads for the armies to march on. Yet another was the building of aqueducts to transport water to big cities for hundreds of miles. Then there was the development of an arch which made it possible not only to build those aqueducts and bridges but also to span vast expanses on interior space and construct temples and other public buildings. The Romans excelled in arts which had practical applications. In addition, they were superbly capable of ripping off what others were doing--and often improving on the original. They considered themselves justified in doing so.

While the Greeks considered teaching such an exalted profession, that it should not be paid because payment would somehow profane it, the Romans imported teachers from Greece and kept them as slaves! I suppose this is another way of not paying, though in fact, slaves were generally compensated and could eventually buy their freedom. The Romans also imported artists and art forms. They imported literary forms. The kinds of things for which they did not have an original talent, they borrowed elsewhere. In that sense the Romans became the distributors of Greek civilization. Which is one of the reasons we now speak of Greco-Roman civilization. The Greeks came first. The Romans came later, and the Romans had the mental attitude along with the roads and the people and the governmental structure to spread Greek ideas all over the Empire.

The period which we know as the Hellenistic era in Greece, the period after Alexander the Great, gradually shifts over into the Roman period, and educated Romans, even though some of the more traditional ones disapprove, quickly begin to pick up Greek ideas and learn the Greek language and paint a veneer of urban culture on a foundation of agriculture, if you understand the pun. It's like retaining a farming mentality while putting on city clothes and ways.

AD 500-AD 1650] [ONE] [TWO] [THREE] [FOUR] [FIVE] [SIX] [SEVEN] [EIGHT] [Untitled]

Posted 28 August 2000
Last revised: 00-09-08
Text and images copyright © Ingrid Shafer 2000