READING HALL

THE DOORSOF WISDOM

ANTIGONUS GONATAS

CHAPTER I.

THE TEACHERS OF ANTIGONOS

Antigonus, called Gonatas, son of Demetrios the Besieger and of Phila, was in all probability born at the end of 320 or early in 319, when Demetrios was a mere boy of seventeen. The moralists of a later time were accustomed to quote him as an example of how a man might, by his own conduct, avoid being visited with the sins of his forefathers. And indeed his forefathers had passed on to him a mixed inheritance.

Few families possessed such a consistent record of crime and misfortune as that of his grandfather Antipatros. Of those of the numerous sons and daughters of the regent whose careers are known to us, not one enjoyed good fortune. Kassandros, for all his high political ability, was execrated throughout Greece as a ‘tyrant’, and more than execrated in Macedonia as the butcher of the old royal house; and history chose to remember him, not as the founder of Salonica, but as the murderer of the mother, the wife, and the son of the great Alexander. Of Kassandros’ sons, one murdered his mother, the last of Philip’s daughters; another was murdered; both alike lost their kingdom. To Antipatros’ three daughters, Phila, Eurydice, Nikaia, the fates gave even less. Of Phila’s tragic life we shall speak presently. Eurydice was married to Ptolemy I, the able king of an established kingdom; she lived to be supplanted by her own maid of honour, to see herself repudiated and her son disinherited of his crown; one of her daughters, Lysandra, was married to Kassandros’ ill-fated son Alexander, and after his death to the no less ill-fated Agathocles, while her exiled son, Ptolemy Keraunos, is known chiefly as the murderer of his benefactor Seleucus and of the sons of his half-sister Arsinoe, and as the prince whose folly let the flood of Celtic invasion sweep through Macedonia. Nikaia, having been married to and perhaps repudiated by the ill-fated Perdiccas, was next married to Lysimachus of Thrace; her son Agathocles was murdered by his father, and of her daughters, Eurydice was married to Kassandros’ son, the matricide Antipatros, and Arsinoe to Ptolemy II of Egypt, to be repudiated, much as her aunt Eurydice before her, in favour of her quondam step-mother Arsinoe Philadelphos. It is a dreary chronicle; the superstitious might be forgiven, for supposing that a member of Antipatros’ house started life at a considerable disadvantage.

There was, however, another side to the shield; and Antigonus, if on the mother’s side he inherited a fair share of misfortune, inherited also a great deal of character and political wisdom. Antipatros may not have been an attractive figure, —it was of course inevitable that Greek tradition should be something less than just to the conqueror in the Lamian war and the cause of the suicide of Demosthenes,—but he is a remarkably solid one. The pupil and friend of Aristotle, a past master in the art of statesmanship, he stood out as the wisest of the group of Alexander’s generals. While Alexander was conquering Asia, there fell to Antipatros the difficult and thankless task of securing his rear and holding down Greece; and in the war after Alexander’s death, when Greece so nearly threw off the Macedonian yoke, on Antipatros fell the odium of the political arrangements made in the conquered states. In politics Antipatros had neither illusions nor sentiment. What raises him above the level of his contemporaries, many of whom were far more successful, is this; that he alone of the Successors refused to worship Alexander as a god, and that he nevertheless, almost alone of them, kept faith with Alexander’s house.

Antipatros’ political ability and political theories descended to Antigonus through his mother Phila. She appears to us in brief outline as one of the noblest women of a time when the women were generally distinguished, either for good or evil. She could by her tact quell a tumult in camp, for she knew the right thing to say to each discontented mercenary; she used to provide marriage portions for the sisters and daughters of the men who had nothing; she often defended and obtained the acquittal of others unjustly accused. Married to Krateros, the best beloved of all Alexander’s generals, his death in battle against Eumenes in 321 left her early a widow with one son; and in the next year, as part of a political arrangement between the old Antigonus and Antipatros, she was married to Demetrios. Demetrios was at the time a mere boy,—he cannot have been much over sixteen,—and it is implied that Phila was not only older but considerably older than himself; and his dislike to the marriage called forth the frank cynicism of his father, who whispered him that people must marry against their inclinations if they got enough by it. Phila was incalculably superior to her husband. She bore with his innumerable infidelities, of which of course the time thought nothing; she bore even with his taking a second and a third legitimate wife, which even that easy-going epoch considered scandalous; if she left him when he was prosperous and polygamous, she returned to him when he was in misfortune, as after Ipsos; she went as his envoy to her brother Kassandros, doing her best to keep peace between the two; and, at the last, such acceptance as Demetrios had from the Macedonians as their king was largely due to her as Antipatros’ daughter. If the comparison of Demetrios with Mark Antony be a stock one, Phila may very justly take her place beside the gracious figure of Octavia.

That Antigonus was the son of his mother rather than of his father comes out on every page of his history. He had inherited, it is true, from the old Antigonus strength of purpose, but none of the overbearing ambition that had accompanied it. He possessed also to the full the most honourable characteristic of his father’s house; he had the same devoted loyalty to Demetrios as Demetrios had had to the elder Antigonus. But he inherited neither his father’s genius nor the instability which made that father impossible. Demetrios was incomparably the most brilliant figure of that age of giants. Brave as a hero and beautiful as a god; of such majesty that strangers followed him merely to gaze, of such attraction that whole communities spontaneously worshipped him; a great mechanician, a great admiral, a great leader, of inexhaustible energy and world­embracing ideas; to the superficial eye he had everything and more than everything, (save hereditary claim), that had belonged to Alexander. But that which in Alexander lay hidden beneath the glittering surface was lacking in Demetrios. Demetrios could win hearts but not keep them; conquer kingdoms only to lose them; gain victories which led no whither; and through his life runs a gradual thread of disillusionment, whereby he who at the beginning had expected too much of his fellow men ended by conceding them too little, and the king and hero gradually passed into the adventurer, till at the last the man who had been worshipped as a present deity on earth was hunted down and caged like a wild beast, a danger too great even to that society.

Antigonus was between eighteen and nineteen years old at the time of the battle of Ipsos; but he was in all probability not present at the battle. For in 303 Demetrios had married the Epirot princess Deidameia, and Phila’s position at his court must have become impossible. This marriage, like the revival in the same year of the League of Corinth, was a part of the political combination which he was forming against Phila’s brother; it was useful to acquire the possibility of interference in Epirus, and still more useful, since Kassandros had married Philip’s daughter, to be married to Alexander’s cousin. Deidameia was too important a person for the marriage to be looked on in the light of some of Demetrios’ other unions; and Phila left him, though she returned to him after the disaster of Ipsos. As Demetrios left Deidameia in Athens when he sailed for Asia, Phila cannot have remained there also; we must conclude that in 303 she, and in all probability her son with her, went to Kassandros, perhaps (as Octavia in like case) to play the part of peacemaker.

For the time being, Antigonus was quite eclipsed by the youthful brilliancy of Deidameia’s brother Pyrrhus The young prince of Epirus, who was nearly a year younger than Antigonus, had been brought up an exile at the court of the Illyrian prince Glaucias; and though Glaucias had restored him at the age of twelve to his share of Epirot kingship, Pyrrhus had again lost his kingdom in a revolution when about seventeen, and betaken himself with his only remaining possession, his sword, to his brother-in-law Demetrios. It was the year before Ipsos, and Demetrios welcomed him gladly. In the life-long rivalry of Pyrrhus and Antigonus, the more precocious Pyrrhus thus gained, and for a long time kept, the start; for while Antigonus was probably not at Ipsos at all, Pyrrhus had already shown his mettle in this his first battle, defeating the forces immediately opposed to him. He adhered to Demetrios after the defeat, and was left by him as his governor in Greece when he crossed the Aegean. Events, however, moved quickly in those troubled years. In the year after Ipsos Phila rejoined her husband in Asia, bringing with her their daughter Stratonice for the celebration of her marriage with Seleucus; and in the year 299 Seleucus brought about peace between Demetrios and Ptolemy. This ended the association of Pyrrhus and Demetrios. Demetrios sent him to Egypt as his hostage, where the young man fell completely under the glamour of the brilliant court of Alexandria; and when in 298 Deidameia died, the last link that bound him to his former patron snapped. He attached himself at Alexandria to the party of Berenice, and Ptolemy, liking his address, gave him the hand of Antigone, Berenice’s daughter by her first marriage, and with money and troops restored him to his kingdom on Kassandros’ death in 297. Henceforward Pyrrhus was the consistent enemy of the house of Demetrios.

Phila’s return, Pyrrhus’ departure, Deidameia’s death, opened the way for the beginning of Antigonus’ political career; and in 296 he is found acting as his father’s governor in some part of Greece. He was probably present at the siege of Athens in 295/4; he certainly accompanied his father on the expedition which in 294 gave Demetrios the crown of Macedonia. Henceforward, while Demetrios reigned in Macedonia, Antigonus governed for him in Greece.

He had grown up as heir to the greatest throne in the world; and before reaching manhood had seen his house, in one day’s battle, reduced almost to the condition of fugitives. He had watched his father attempting to rule Greek states by sentiment, and had seen the cities, which yesterday were fawning on and worshipping him, today shut their gates in his face. Meantime he had been learning from his mother, possibly too from Kassandros, something of the policy of the old Antipatros, a policy stern perhaps and harsh, but based on an idea of duty of a kind and absolutely discarding every form of sentiment. And he had mastered the fact, to be spoken of presently, that the rule of the sea, once secured, had endured to Demetrios unshaken by every vicissitude on land. Now fortune had again turned her wheel, and at the age of twenty-five he stood heir once more to another great kingdom. If Antigonus was not by this time absolutely contemptuous of whatever fortune might bring him, it was not the fault of that goddess.

What fortune brought him at the moment was teachers. Plato, in a well-known paradox, had laid it down that for the world to be well governed philosophers must become kings or kings philosophers; and the world was ripe for experiment. Never yet had philosophy attained to such a position as she held at the beginning of the third century; and if she could hardly herself aspire to rule, save as Demetrios of Phaleron had ruled Athens,—and philosophy as such had no concern with an unconstitutional ruler supported by foreign spears,—she could and did aspire to train a king; and Antigonus inevitably offered himself for the attempt. He had probably met both Menedemos and Zeno before 301; but a boy of sixteen is perhaps hardly likely to have frequented with much profit the philosophic schools, and from 301 to 294 both Athens and Eretria were closed to him. Now, however, that Athens and Euboea both formed part of his father’s kingdom, and were under his personal governorship, the opportunity came; and in Menedemos of Eretria he found the man.

Eretria was a good type of the provincial town that does not forget that it has once been greater than provincial. The Eretrians remembered that they had once ruled the sea and sent out many colonies, and had stood shoulder to shoulder with Athens against the Persian. They remembered their early school of art; and while their old rival, Chalcis, for all its splendid public buildings and its famous market-place, had become a garrison town of the Antigonids, a great fortress and arsenal, at Eretria gathered all elements of culture in the island that had not yielded to the enormous centralizing pull of Athens. When at a later date the Romans took the town, they found it full of pictures and statues by the old masters of a number and quality out of all proportion to its size and wealth; and a school of philosophy went by its name.

The centre of cultivated society in Eretria at the time was the philosopher Menedemos. An Eretrian by birth, the son either of a master builder or of a scene painter,—his father at any rate worked for his living, and Menedemos learnt his trade,—he had studied under Stilpon at Megara, in the school of Phaidon in Elis, and for a while in Athens, where, like Cleanthes after him, he had worked in a mill by night that he might by day have food and leisure to attend lectures. Little esteemed at first in his native town, he soon won the highest position there, both politically and socially; he went on important embassies, and was elected one of the Probouloi, the board of magistrates who in Eretria saw to the finances and the foreign relations of the town; he became the informal head of the little commonwealth. The reason of his success is not far to seek; for though he was no great thinker, and though his chief claim to the title of ‘philosopher’ must rest on mental attitude rather than actual teaching, he had the one great gift of character. A well-built, rather stout man, sun-burnt as an athlete, of straightforward speech and biting tongue, he appears before us, not as a searcher after wisdom, but as dignified and cultured man of the world; a student of men, rather than of books; one who not only took the lead in the public life of his native town, but who in private gathered round him a notable circle. Indolent, and contemptuous of the routine of the schools, with which he had little enough in common, he taught, not a host of pupils on the ranged benches of a class-room, but a few who walked or sat with him informally, as it might chance. His spiritual affinities went back behind the schools to Socrates; like him, he wrote nothing and left nothing behind him, attempting to stimulate those who came to him by conversation and question, to call out rather than to impart; to mould each for his own life, rather than all to a pattern. The portrait which remains to us is an attractive picture of a very human man, one who could inspire love no less than fear,—one whose friendship for his friend became proverbial, and with whom the mocking speech was often enough redeemed by the kindly action. Ill doers feared that mocking speech, invincible in retort, and apt to go to its point with a coarseness of satire as brutal as effective; while behind it lay a nobility of character that could deter a man from doing a dubious act ‘lest Menedemos should hear’. His chief faults—no great weight in the balance—were perhaps a certain measure of pomposity, and too high an opinion of the deference due to a philosopher.

It is perhaps at his famous suppers rather than in the lecture-room that we see him most clearly. His friends came on to them after dining elsewhere, each bringing his own cushion, if he wanted one, to sit on a straw mat in summer or a sheepskin in winter and join in a dessert consisting of a very little fruit and wine and a great deal of intellectual conversation. There they would sit on through the night, solving the universe, or listening to ‘the word that chastens those who care to hear’, as a poet of the circle put it; cock-crow would not always part them. By this last phrase we are reminded,—we are no doubt meant to be reminded,—of that more famous banquet at which Socrates, after the wondrous discourse in praise of love, drank the whole company under the table and himself departed soberly at cock-crow to his daily work.

The circle of friends whom Menedemos gathered round him was a notable one for a provincial town, as notability went. Hither came the poets Aratos of Soloi, (undistinguished as yet, save perhaps for his leaning to Stoicism), and Antagoras of Rhodes, the friend of the grave heads of the Academy: we shall meet both again at Antigonus’ court. Hither came Dionysius of Herakleia, who was afterwards to become Zeno’s pupil and to earn renown of a kind by deserting the Stoics for the Cyrenaic doctrine of pleasure; a man of some parts nevertheless, for he admired Aratos, and left among his writings two, of which the unusual titles rouse our curiosity, ‘On the Kings of ancient days’ and ‘On the morals of barbarous peoples’. Hither, too, came jolly souls like the ‘philosopher’ Ktesibios, who brought officers from Antigonus’ garrison at Chalcis to play tennis with him, and said that philosophy was a splendid thing, for it got him so many invitations to dinner.

But the brightest member of the circle was the youthful Lykophron of Chalcis. He was probably already known as the author of the Alexandra, the most obscure piece of verse then in existence; afterwards he was to arrange the comic poets in the library at Alexandria. But at present he was writing tragedies; and Menedemos, it is said, found them to his taste. Lykophron himself had a frank admiration for the master, and wrote in his honour the satyr-play Menedemos from which has survived the already quoted account of Menedemos’ suppers. Good-natured banter there was in it in plenty; and if the reference to cock-crow recalls the Banquet of Plato, it may be a harmless conceit to see in the choice of Seilenos as a vehicle for the praise of Menedemos a reference to Plato’s famous comparison of Socrates to the carved figures of the old Satyr, whose grotesque shell hid the inner divinity.

Into this society, in the intervals of campaigning, came the crown prince Antigonus. His earliest teacher had been the Megarian philosopher, Euphantos of Olynthos, who wrote a treatise for him on the art of governing a kingdom. Euphantos, however, was a pupil of Euboulides, and probably taught the regular Megarian doctrine, that there was only one good, unchangeable and unalterable, though known by different names, and only one virtue, the knowledge thereof. Antigonus may well have wondered what the knowledge of an unchangeable good could do toward the solution of the problems of the struggling universe as they presented themselves to him. Menedemos also taught that virtue was one; but we may suppose that he did not thrust the doctrine of the unchangeable good upon Antigonus. What he did was to deal faithfully with his faults, as with those of a common man; on one occasion he had to remind him, sharply enough, that he was a king’s son. Antigonus had met a character of a type different to those at Demetrios’ court; and he recognized the fact. It is written that he loved Menedemos, and called him his teacher; and the two remained close friends down to Menedemos’ death.

Menedemos was able to give the prince an example of that rare thing, a philosopher at home in the work-a-day world. He not only loved his country—many did that—but he also served her; it is probable that to the Eretrians his political activity may have seemed more important than his lectures. It has been well said that he represents an interval of truce in the bitter feud between, philosophy and practical life. It might, perhaps, be equally true to put it that he was the forerunner of the Stoics in the influence which they were so soon to exert upon those in high places; it was not for nothing, nor was it chance, that Menedemos was to be the first to influence Antigonus. Whether his influence was exerted on the lines which the Stoics afterwards laid down for the true practice of kingship we do not know. Apart from this, it can be seen that Menedemos’ society would be stimulating, and would make for independence of character and judgement. But there was something deeper and wider to come, if it could be found; for this, Antigonus had to go to Athens, and seek knowledge at the fountain head.

Athens was no longer head of a great confederacy, or mistress of the sea; but the fact merely served to emphasize her intellectual pre-eminence. She was still, and for some time yet was to remain, the spiritual centre of the Greek world; to Athens, sooner or later, came most of those who had any message for that world, and most of those who desired to be hearers. Antigonus in any case spent much of his time in Athens; and of teachers he found plenty of choice.

There was Plato’s school, the Academy, under the headship of the universally respected Polemon. Its repute in Athens stood high, not merely through the glamour of its founder’s name, but from its well understood if unostentatious patriotism. Its leaders were Athenian of the Athenians; in fair weather and foul they had stood quietly by their native city, and even if they had taken no active part against Philip their attitude was never in doubt; the time was to come when Athens would owe her safety to their intervention. But intellectually the school was moribund. Polemon and his friend Krates might be looked upon as relics of the Age of Gold; but they were relics. Polemon led the life of a recluse, and his school had nothing new to say to the world, nothing to meet men’s present needs. It had become merely orthodox; it was on its way to become orthodoxy in decay, and, like other decaying matter, to breed strange forms of life alien to its own substance. Within the lifetime of those then living, Plato’s school was to fall to preaching pure scepticism and suspension of judgement.

Over against the Academy stood the Peripatetics of the Colonnade, the successors of Aristotle under the headship of Theophrastus, a man whose many-sided learning can be illustrated from the fact that he was at once a great botanist, a great jurist, and the first historian of philosophy. The about anything, and you were in the way of knowledge. So they diligently collected facts, from the constitutions of states to the characters of individuals, from the heights of mountains to the habits of molluscs, from the cedar which is in Lebanon to the hyssop which is upon the wall; all was grist for the Peripatetic mill.

In sharpest contrast to the Academy was the open and avowed sympathy of this school with Macedonia, inevitable in the followers of one who had been born in Macedonia, who had been the teacher and friend of Alexander and Antipatros, and whose principal successors were all aliens. Their fortunes had fluctuated with the fluctuations of Athenian politics. Aristotle had had to leave Athens and seek refuge with Antipatros, at whose court he had died; Athens had not been his birth-place, and she had not his grave. With Kassandros’ domination came the palmy days of the school. Faithful to his father’s friend, he had entrusted the governorship of Athens to a Peripatetic, Demetrios of Phaleron; for ten years the school was all powerful, and Theophrastus inspired the laws made by the philosophic governor. Then came Demetrios the Besieger; Demetrios of Phaleron fled to Kassandros and thence to Egypt; Theophrastus was banished by the triumphant democracy. It is true that he was soon recalled, and taught in Athens till his death; but the school never really recovered its position there, though Theophrastus’ successor, Straton, was a great physicist. The Macedonia of its sympathies had been the Macedonia of Antipatros and Kassandros. It had no part or lot in the Macedonia of Demetrios, and its heart went to Alexandria with his namesake: Straton was the tutor of Ptolemy II, and corresponded with Arsinoe. In Alexandria it still had a great work to do, in founding the Museum after its own model, and helping to turn it into the paths of natural science; but in Athens the best of its work was over.

The age, however, was one that called for a new message. Alexander had enlarged alike the bounds of the world and of human endeavour, and new thoughts and forms of activity were crowding in upon men. The clever Greek, his career hitherto bounded by the offices at the disposal of one small city, might now become chancellor of an empire; all the great monarchies required every able man they could get for finance and administration; no one need limit his ambition. Alexander had put into circulation huge masses of hoarded gold, which could not fail, at least for a time, to raise the general standard of the world’s well-being; every country was full of veterans returning to spend at home the spoils of Asia. Great new cities were springing up, affording endless employment to architects, to sculptors, to overseers of slaves, to men in a hundred departments of human activity; trade was seeking out new routes for itself, grasping with a myriad hands at the wealth of the East. Men’s lives were becoming very full, and with this there must have come to each man the feeling, as it has come with every great expansion in civilization, of the increased importance of his own individual life. A man no longer felt himself a part of his own city state, with his life bound up in the corporate life within those city walls; he felt himself a separate individual; his home might be what and where he chose to make it. There were, of course, thousands who had no such feelings, thousands who clung, actually or in idea, to the city state, regretting the past; many, perhaps, to whom the present was actually repulsive, and who despaired of their world. But that the new philosophies arose out of despair is not easily to be believed. They arose to meet a want; and the want was! a rule of conduct for the individual, who had in a great new world become conscious of the increased importance of his own individual life.

The want was met. Plato and Aristotle had desired above all things to know, and when they turned to politics and ethics, they had dealt—they could not otherwise—with the city state, and with man as a member thereof and in relation thereto. But man had now become a citizen of the world; philosophy had to deal with him as such; and the question he asked of his teachers was, how was he to act in relation to himself. Inevitably the philosophy of knowledge was to be replaced by  the philosophy of conduct The Cynics, indeed, were already teaching a rule of conduct, of which the essence was, to have done with illusions and to get back to nature; but they appealed largely to the poor, and most men were probably revolted by their roughness and their neglect of the ordinary decorums and courtesies of life, rather than attracted by the nobility and manliness inherent in their teaching.

From this .position arose the new-schools. Already by the beginning of the century the Athenian Epicurus had gathered about him in his garden a number of friends; soon his teaching drew half Athens. Men flocked out of all the other schools to the Garden, and they never returned. The amiable and attractive character of the teacher, conjoined with the charm of what he taught, exactly met the needs of the numerous class to whom the new world was oppressive and peace desirable. How to escape from the delusions which made of that world a nightmare, from the fear of the gods and of death, from the spur of ambition and desire; how to find happiness in oneself, in the calm of a virtuous and well-ordered mind that had cast off the worry and trouble of external things; these ideas were greedily absorbed. And if some laid too much stress on one side only of their founder’s teaching, and chose to treat physical pleasure as a means to the much-desired happiness, it is possible that the attraction of the school for the average man was not thereby materially diminished.

But Antigonus’ choice was not any of these. He turned as little to the Macedonian Colonnade as to the Athenian Academy or Garden. The first two had nothing to teach him; he was not in search of abstract knowledge, or of large collections of facts, or of a rule of conduct befitting the members of a small city state. The Garden had less than nothing to teach him. What could there be in common between the gentle frugal Athenian, who preached freedom from worry, and the rough-spoken hard-drinking Northerner to whom half the practical problems of a noisy and troublesome universe were already crying for solution? What it? was that led Antigonus elsewhere we do not know; perhaps the advice of Menedemos; perhaps it was some touch of greatness in himself that turned him to the greatest man in Athens, or the world.

For the greatest man in Athens at this time was not Polemon or Theophrastus, or even Epicurus. He was a gaunt middle-aged Phoenician, weak of body, swarthy of skin, his face lined and shrunken, who carried his head on one side and loved to sit in the sunshine and eat green figs; Zeno of Kition, the founder of the philosophy called Stoic. Of how and why Zeno came to Athens the accounts vary; it is certain that he was for a while a pupil of Krates the Cynic, and always retained traces of the Cynic teaching, and that he was some time in the city before he opened his own school, toward the end of the archonship of Clearchus, 301/0. His Semitic nature made him very strange in Athens. He was almost an ascetic in food and dress, as the standard of the time went. In the city of talkers he could keep silence and enjoin it upon others. In the city whose idiom set the standard for the world he was careless how he spoke; current coin, he would say, purchased nothing more for having a pretty picture on it; to the end his  Greek was full of solecisms. In that great centre of intellectual activity he was too shy to lecture to a class; he walked in the Pictured Porch with two or three friends only, and if a crowd gathered to hear him he dispersed them by threatening to make a collection. In the home of fashion he gave offence by not repelling the poor and the dirty. His teaching must at first have seemed one gigantic paradox.

To a world that wanted, and was prepared to welcome, some practical rule for making its life better and happier, he preached the strangest and most impossible idealism. He bade men live according to nature, while he bruised and lacerated poor human nature with every fresh precept. He flung in men’s faces a rule of virtue so unworkable that he had to modify it himself in his own lifetime. He set up as the ideal an imaginary Wise Man so aloof that neither he nor his followers ever pretended to have any chance of attaining to it, and so seemingly ridiculous that every succeeding century riddled it with criticism, each new wit draped it with facile laughter. Small wonder that his followers were at first but few.

Yet he was of those who have moved the world. The very severity of his teaching seems to have acted as a kind of tonic on noble natures; and ideals are perhaps none the worse for being unattainable. To say that nothing mattered but virtue and vice was to the world foolishness; but it was a noble folly that urged men to despise pain and misfortune, and to treat wealth and power, good report and evil report, as matters altogether indifferent. To call all sins equally sinful was a paradox; but it at least emphasized the sinfulness of sin. To preach the suppression of all emotions—if indeed he ever did preach it—was absurd; but at least it involved the restraint of the unworthy ones. From the strife and turbulence of the world the Stoic could withdraw into his own soul, and there, even if a slave or a beggar, he could be free, he could be rich, he could be a king; nevertheless, as a citizen of the world, he was rather to go out into the world and there play his part; and as he was directed to find his happiness in virtue, and virtue in his own strength of mind and will, he would probably play his part well. Moreover, when things indifferent—that is to say, everything intermediate between absolute virtue and absolute vice—were at last admitted to belong to two classes, the Stoic became bounden to choose the preferable class; and therewith came into the world the first beginnings, as a philosophic concept, of the idea of duty. The ideal Wise Man was a monster of self-sufficiency passionless, pitiless, perfect; but in the attempt to reach perfection the Stoic was led to examine the progress which he was making, and therewith came into the world the idea of conscious moral growth. A philosophy which started from the moral consciousness of the individual was led to take up and develop, though it did not actually originate the notion of conscience. The idea of conscience is still perhaps incomplete; the idea of duty is still far from the categorical imperative; but it was much to get a start made. And if the Stoic, happily, never realized his Wise Man, in the struggle toward him he realized much else; and the men whom he formed were men. Of all the systems of the Greek world, Stoicism is the only one that in any sense comes home to ourselves, or has any affinity to the feelings of modern men and women. And it is not merely through its influence upon St. Paul that Stoicism affects the world today. The later Stoics travelled far from Zeno; they learnt much that he did not know; nevertheless, without his impulse they would not have been.6We may pass over Aristotle, and treat Plato as poetry; but we cannot imagine a time when men, for their own sakes, will cease to read the slave Epictetus and his imperial pupil.

Zeno in his own life attempted in many ways to practise what he preached, and rather more. He taught self-control, and his own passed into a proverb. He taught freedom from false pride, and gave an object lesson of it by attending the lectures of a rival. In his theory all men were foolish and sinful; in fact, he taught that one must try to find the good in people and not the bad. He certainly never said that one should love one’s enemy; but he did something very like it. He uttered some extravagant paradoxes; but his life was held to be the pattern of temperance. This was the Zeno to whom Antigonus turned; and we would gladly know more of their relationship. The friendship between the full-blooded prince and the shy philosopher must have been a quaint one. It is known what Zeno thought of friendship; a friend was a second self. Antigonus sought him out whenever he came to Athens, and loaded him with presents, with which the philosopher, true to his own teaching, refused to be either pleased or displeased, treating them as things altogether indifferent. He would drag Zeno off to some boisterous supper-party, not at all to the taste of that retiring ascetic, who would slip quietly away as soon as he could. Zeno understood absolutely how to keep his independence and dignity with his over-mastering pupil. He rebuked him severely for drunkenness. He refused at a later time to make any petitions to him on behalf of third persons, though he knew they would be granted as soon as asked. To one who quoted at him the verse that he who associated with a tyrant became a slave, he replied that it depended entirely on your own state of mind. With great skill he avoided politics, and escaped the risks of his school becoming stamped as pro-Macedonian, like the Colonnade; and the Athenians, though slow to learn his value, ended by honouring him no less than did Antigonus.

Yet it was not merely a case of the attraction of two opposites. It is perhaps not quite right to call Antigonus definitely a Stoic, though his sympathy with sortie of the Stoic tenets, and the amount which he owed to Zeno, will appear when we come to consider his character as king of Macedonia : but it may be noted here that to some small extent his mind and Zeno’s worked on parallel lines, and that some of the things which Zeno could tell him fitted in with what he had already learnt in the school of life. If we seek the bond of union between these two opposite natures, we shall probably find  that it consisted in a kind of savage honesty common to both, a desire for the thing as it really is. It is certain that Antigonus, whose admiration and respect for Zeno knew no bounds, refused to recognize between them any difference of rank or race, or anything but the generous rivalry of a common aim.

Somewhat such, however imperfectly sketched, were the teachers of the future king.

CHAPTER II.

THE EMPIRE OF DEMETRIOS ON LAND

ANTIGONUS GONATAS