Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/149

 Art and Literature after Pericles 99 149. Aristotle (334-322 B. c.). One of Plato's students, Aris- totle, was destined to gain a reputation through the ages almost greater than that of his master. With the help of his own advanced students Aristotle composed treatises on almost every imaginable subject politics, ethics, economics, psychology, zool- ogy, astronomy, poetry, and the drama. Indeed, it seems to have been his ambition to tell everything that had ever been discovered and present this information in such a way that others could easily learn it. His skill and knowledge were so great that in the Middle Ages his books were almost the only ones studied in the medieval universities, and he is still revered as perhaps the great- est scholar that the world has ever produced. Certainly the writings of no other man have ever enjoyed such long and wide- spread and unquestioned authority. 150. Continued Disunion of the Greeks and their Loss of Independence. In one of his most famous dialogues, The Repub- lic, Plato discusses the best organization of government. It is remarkable that he always has in mind the old city-state of the Greeks and fails to see that the real question of his day was the relation of the various city-states like Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes to one another. He did not realize that no com- munity, no matter how well organized, can stand absolutely alone, but must, if war and confusion are to be avoided, come to some good understanding with its neighbors. And this under- standing the Greek cities had never reached, for they had never been willing to establish anything like a strong and permanent federal government, such as we have in the United States. One of the men who saw all this most clearly was the great orator and statesman Isocrates. He eloquently urged the Greeks to neglect their petty differences and enlarge their local patriotism into a loyalty toward the Greeks as a whole, and so create a Greek nation which should be able to defend itself against the "bar- barians," or non-Greek world. But the cities stubbornly refused to give up their independence, and as a consequence they soon fell under the sway of a foreign power, Macedonia, and later, as we shall see, were merged into the Roman Empire.