ABSTRACT
Ancient Greece was a small country. This is especially apparent when we turn our eyes from all the great and beautiful works of art to the men of narrow mind who formed a not inconsiderable part of the population. In the Grove of Academus and in the Garden of Epicurus flourished not only the fair flowers of philosophy: the rank weeds of meanness found a fertile soil there also. Greek literature bears, in point of fact, the impress of personal polemic. We find controversial discussion in the high-tuned poetry of Pindar, in the plays of Euripides, and in the comedies of Aristophanes, written for the general public, a personal polemic overflowing all bounds. We find abundant sarcasms and the stings of personal satire in the works of Plato, and even the cool and unemotional lectures of an Aristotle are at intervals spiced with cutting and snappish retorts to some personal antagonist or other. In the earliest specimens of biographical literature — the portraits of statesmen and commanders in Thucydides, Plato and Xenophon — we find, further, tendentious panegyric but also spiteful caricatures. And throughout the whole antiquity this kind of literature bears the same stamp: everything seems to be allowed save the writing of an objective estimate of the person in question. One creates https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780429031830/f207d991-3ec7-4f77-ad1a-81fef86b2ff0/content/inq_chapter5_132_1.tif"/>, ethical characters (Theophrastus and the New comedy), another concentrates on certain, in themselves unimportant details (so Neanthes diligently describes the manner in which great men met their death, others wrote books on longlived men), or else there is a bias in a certain direction as in Plutarch, for example, who stresses the educative side. Another again is at pains to glorify one person at the expense of somebody else. This is especially true of the polemic between the schools of philosophy, where all the powers of the imagination were brought into play in order to portray the virtues and moral superiority of the scholars favoured by the writer himself, 133who loses no opportunity in scoring off the coryphaeuses of the enemy camp. 1
