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John Henry Newman |
Vol. 28, pp. 51-61 of
The Harvard Classics
John Henry Newman
(1801-1890). The Idea of a University. III. University Life at
Athens.
A boxer in public
games desired to study philosophy at Athens. There were no furnaces
to tend, no tables to wait on, no books or magazines to peddle, yet
this sturdy young Greek managed to work his way through college.
HOWEVER apposite
may have been the digression into which I was led when I had got
about half through the foregoing Chapter, it has had the
inconvenience of what may be called running me off the rails; and now
that I wish to proceed from the point at which it took place, I shall
find some trouble, if I may continue the metaphor, in getting up the
steam again, or if I may change it, in getting into the swing of my
subject.
It has been
my desire, were I able, to bring before the reader what Athens may
have been, viewed as what we have since called a University; and to
do this, not with any purpose of writing a panegyric on a heathen
city, or of denying its many deformities, or of concealing what was
morally base in what was intellectually great, but just the contrary,
of representing things as they really were; so far, that is, as to
enable him to see what a University is, in the very constitution of
society and in its own idea, what is its nature and object, and what
it needs of aid and support external to itself to complete that
nature and to secure that object.
So now let
us fancy our Scythian, or Armenian, or African, or Italian, or Gallic
student, after tossing on the Saronic waves, which would be his more
ordinary course to Athens, at last casting anchor at Piræus. He is
of any condition or rank of life you please, and may be made to
order, from a prince to a peasant. Perhaps he is some Cleanthes, who
has been a boxer in the public games. How did it ever cross his brain
to betake himself to Athens in search of wisdom? or, if he came
thither by accident, how did the love of it ever touch his heart? But
so it was, to Athens he came with three drachms in his girdle, and he
got his livelihood by drawing water, carrying loads, and the like
servile occupations. He attached himself, of all philosophers, to
Zeno the Stoic,—to Zeno, the most high-minded, the most haughty of
speculators; and out of his daily earnings the poor scholar brought
his master the daily sum of an obolus, in payment for attending his
lectures. Such progress did he make, that on Zeno’s death he
actually was his successor in his school; and, if my memory does not
play me false, he is the author of a hymn to the Supreme Being, which
is one of the noblest effusions of the kind in classical poetry. Yet,
even when he was the head of a school, he continued in his illiberal
toil as if he had been a monk; and it is said that once, when the
wind took his pallium, and blew it aside, he was discovered to have
no other garment at all;—something like the German student who came
up to Heidelberg with nothing upon him but a greatcoat and a pair of
pistols.
Or it is
another disciple of the Porch,—Stoic by nature, earlier than by
profession,—who is entering the city; but in what different fashion
he comes! It is no other than Marcus, Emperor of Rome and
philosopher. Professors long since were summoned from Athens for his
service, when he was a youth, and now he comes, after his victories
in the battlefield, to make his acknowledgments, at the end of life,
to the city of wisdom, and to submit himself to an initiation into
the Eleusinian mysteries.
Or it is a
young man of great promise as an orator, were it not for his weakness
of chest, which renders it necessary that he should acquire the art
of speaking without over-exertion, and should adopt a delivery
sufficient for the display of his rhetorical talents on the one hand,
yet merciful to his physical resources on the other. He is called
Cicero; he will stop but a short time, and will pass over to Asia
Minor and its cities, before he returns to continue a career which
will render his name immortal; and he will like his short sojourn at
Athens so well, that he will take good care to send his son thither
at an earlier age than he visited it himself.
But see
where comes from Alexandria (for we need not be very solicitous about
anachronisms), a young man from twenty to twenty-two, who has
narrowly escaped drowning on his voyage, and is to remain at Athens
as many as eight or ten years, yet in the course of that time will
not learn a line of Latin, thinking it enough to become accomplished
in Greek composition, and in that he will succeed. He is a grave
person, and difficult to make out; some say he is a Christian,
something or other in the Christian line his father is for certain.
His name is Gregory, he is by country a Cappadocian, and will in time
become preeminently a theologian, and one of the principal Doctors of
the Greek Church.
Or it is
one Horace, a youth of low stature and black hair, whose father has
given him an education at Rome above his rank in life, and now is
sending him to finish it at Athens; he is said to have a turn for
poetry: a hero he is not, and it were well if he knew it; but he is
caught by the enthusiasm of the hour, and goes off campaigning with
Brutus and Cassius, and will leave his shield behind him on the field
of Philippi.
Or it is a
mere boy of fifteen: his name Eunapius; though the voyage was not
long, seasickness, or confinement, or bad living on board the vessel,
threw him into a fever, and, when the passengers landed in the
evening at Piræus, he could not stand. His countrymen who
accompanied him, took him up among them and carried him to the house
of the great teacher of the day, Proæresius, who was a friend of the
captain’s, and whose fame it was which drew the enthusiastic youth
to Athens. His companions understand the sort of place they are in,
and, with the licence of academic students, they break into the
philosopher’s house, though he appears to have retired for the
night, and proceed to make themselves free of it, with an absence of
ceremony, which is only not impudence, because Proæresius takes it
so easily. Strange introduction for our stranger to a seat of
learning, but not out of keeping with Athens; for what could you
expect of a place where there was a mob of youths and not even the
pretence of control; where the poorer lived any how, and got on as
they could, and the teachers themselves had no protection from the
humours and caprices of the students who filled their lecture-halls?
However, as to this Eunapius, Proæresius took a fancy to the boy,
and told him curious stories about Athenian life. He himself had come
up to the University with one Hephæstion, and they were even worse
off than Cleanthes the Stoic; for they had only one cloak between
them, and nothing whatever besides, except some old bedding; so when
Proæresius went abroad, Hephæstion lay in bed, and practised
himself in oratory; and then Hephæstion put on the cloak, and
Proæresius crept under the coverlet. At another time there was so
fierce a feud between what would be called “town and gown” in an
English University, that the Professors did not dare lecture in
public, for fear of ill treatment.
But a
freshman like Eunapius soon got experience for himself of the ways
and manners prevalent in Athens. Such a one as he had hardly entered
the city, when he was caught hold of by a party of the academic
youth, who proceeded to practise on his awkwardness and his
ignorance. At first sight one wonders at their childishness; but the
like conduct obtained in the medieval Universities; and not many
months have passed away since the journals have told us of sober
Englishmen, given to matter-of-fact calculations, and to the
anxieties of money-making, pelting each other with snowballs on their
own sacred territory, and defying the magistracy, when they would
interfere with their privilege of becoming boys. So I suppose we must
attribute it to something or other in human nature. Meanwhile, there
stands the new-comer, surrounded by a circle of his new associates,
who forthwith proceed to frighten, and to banter, and to make a fool
of him, to the extent of their wit. Some address him with mock
politeness, others with fierceness; and so they conduct him in solemn
procession across the Agora to the Baths; and as they approach, they
dance about him like madmen. But this was to be the end of his trial,
for the Bath was a sort of initiation; he thereupon received the
pallium, or University gown, and was suffered by his tormentors to
depart in peace. One alone is recorded as having been exempted from
this persecution; it was a youth graver and loftier than even St.
Gregory himself: but it was not from his force of character, but at
the instance of Gregory, that he escaped. Gregory was his
bosom-friend, and was ready in Athens so shelter him when he came. It
was another Saint and Doctor; the great Basil, then, (it would
appear,) as Gregory, but a catechumen of the Church.
But to
return to our freshman. His troubles are not at an end, though he has
got his gown upon him. Where is he to lodge?; whom is he to attend?
He finds himself seized, before he well knows where he is, by another
party of men, or three or four parties at once, like foreign porters
at a landing, who seize on the baggage of the perplexed stranger, and
thrust half a dozen cards into his unwilling hands. Our youth is
plied by the hangers-on of professor this, or sophist that, each of
whom wishes the fame or the profit of having a houseful. We will say
that he escapes from their hands,—but then he will have to choose
for himself where he will put up; and, to tell the truth, with all
the praise I have already given, and the praise I shall have to give,
to the city of mind, nevertheless, between ourselves, the brick and
wood which formed it, the actual tenements, where flesh and blood had
to lodge (always excepting the mansions of great men of the place),
do not seem to have been much better than those of Greek or Turkish
towns which are at this moment a topic of interest and ridicule in
the public prints. A lively picture has lately been set before us of
Gallipoli. Take, says the writer, a multitude of the dilapidated
outhouses found in farm-yards in England, of the rickety old wooden
tenements, the cracked, shutterless structures of planks and tiles,
the sheds and stalls, which our by-lanes, or fish-markets, or
river-sides can supply; tumble them down on the declivity of a bare
bald hill; let the spaces between house and house, thus accidentally
determined, be understood to form streets, winding of course for no
reason, and with no meaning, up and down the town; the roadway always
narrow, the breadth never uniform, the separate houses bulging or
retiring below, as circumstances may have determined, and leaning
forward till they meet overhead;—and you have a good idea of
Gallipoli. I question whether this picture would not nearly
correspond to the special seat of the Muses in ancient times. Learned
writers assure us distinctly that the houses of Athens were for the
most part small and mean; that the streets were crooked and narrow;
that the upper stories projected over the roadway; and that
staircases, balustrades, and doors that opened outwards, obstructed
it;—a remarkable coincidence of description. I do not doubt at all,
though history is silent, that that roadway was jolting to carriages,
and all but impassable; and that it was traversed by drains, as
freely as any Turkish town now. Athens seems in these respects to
have been below the average cities of its time. “A stranger,”
says an ancient, “might doubt, on the sudden view, if really he saw
Athens.”
I grant all
this, and much more, if you will; but, recollect, Athens was the home
of the intellectual, and beautiful; not of low mechanical
contrivances, and material organization. Why stop within your
lodgings counting the rents in your wall or the holes in your tiling,
when nature and art call you away? You must put up with such a
chamber, and a table, and a stool, and a sleeping board, anywhere
else in the three continents; one place does not differ from another
indoors; your magalia in Africa, or your grottos in Syria, are not
perfection. I suppose you did not come to Athens to swarm up a
ladder, or to grope about a closet: you came to see and to hear, what
hear and see you could not elsewhere. What a food for the intellect
is it possible to procure indoors, that you stay there looking about
you? do you think to read there?; where are your books? do you expect
to purchase books at Athens?—you are much out in your calculations.
True it is, we at this day, who live in the nineteenth century, have
the books of Greece as a perpetual memorial; and copies there have
been, since the time that they were written; but you need not go to
Athens to procure them, nor would you find them in Athens. Strange to
say, strange to the nineteenth century, that in the age of Plato and
Thucydides, there was not, it is said, a bookshop in the whole place:
nor was the book trade in existence till the very time of Augustus.
Libraries, I suspect, were the bright invention of Attalus or the
Ptolemies; I doubt whether Athens had a library till the reign of
Hadrian. It was what the student gazed on, what he heard, what he
caught by the magic of sympathy, not what he read, which was the
education furnished by Athens.
He leaves
his narrow lodging early in the morning; and not till night, if even
then, will he return. It is but a crib or kennel,—in which he
sleeps when the weather is inclement or the ground damp; in no
respect a home. And he goes out of doors, not to read the day’s
newspaper, or to buy the gay shilling volume, but to imbibe the
invisible atmosphere of genius, and to learn by heart the oral
traditions of taste. Out he goes; and, leaving the tumble-down town
behind him, he mounts the Acropolis to the right, or he turns to the
Areopagus on the left. He goes to the Parthenon to study the
sculptures of Phidias; to the temple of the Dioscuri to see the
paintings of Polygnotus. We indeed take our Sophocles or Æschylus
out of our coat-pocket; but, if our sojourner at Athens would
understand how a tragic poet can write, he must betake himself to the
theatre on the south, and see and hear the drama literally in action.
Or let him go westward to the Agora, and there he will hear Lysias or
Andocides pleading, or Demosthenes haranguing. He goes farther west
still, along the shade of those noble planes, which Cimon has planted
there; and he looks around him at the statues and porticos and
vestibules, each by itself a work of genius and skill, enough to be
the making of another city. He passes through the city gate, and then
he is at the famous Ceramicus; here are the tombs of the mighty dead;
and here, we will suppose, is Pericles himself, the most elevated,
the most thrilling of orators, converting a funeral oration over the
slain into a philosophical panegyric of the living.
Onwards he
proceeds still; and now he has come to that still more celebrated
Academe, which has bestowed its own name on Universities down to this
day; and there he sees a sight which will be graven on his memory
till he dies. Many are the beauties of the place, the groves, and the
statues, and the temple, and the stream of the Cephissus flowing by;
many are the lessons which will be taught him day after day by
teacher or by companion; but his eye is just now arrested by one
object; it is the very presence of Plato. He does not hear a word
that he says; he does not care to hear; he asks neither for discourse
nor disputation; what he sees is a whole, complete in itself, not to
be increased by addition, and greater than anything else. It will be
a point in the history of his life; a stay for his memory to rest on,
a burning thought in his heart, a bond of union with men of like
mind, ever afterwards. Such is the spell which the living man exerts
on his fellows, for good or for evil. How nature impels us to lean
upon others, making virtue, or genius, or name, the qualification for
our doing so! A Spaniard is said to have travelled to Italy, simply
to see Livy; he had his fill of gazing, and then went back again
home. Had our young stranger got nothing by his voyage but the sight
of the breathing and moving Plato, had he entered no lecture-room to
hear, no gymnasium to converse, he had got some measure of education,
and something to tell of to his grandchildren.
But Plato
is not the only sage, nor the sight of him the only lesson to be
learned in this wonderful suburb. It is the region and the realm of
philosophy. Colleges were the inventions of many centuries later; and
they imply a sort of cloistered life, or at least a life of rule,
scarcely natural to an Athenian. It was the boast of the philosophic
statesman of Athens, that his countrymen achieved by the mere force
of nature and the love of the noble and the great, what other people
aimed at by laborious discipline; and all who came among them were
submitted to the same method of education. We have traced our student
on his wanderings from the Acropolis to the Sacred Way; and now he is
in the region of the schools. No awful arch, no window of
many-coloured lights marks the seats of learning there or elsewhere;
philosophy lives out of doors. No close atmosphere oppresses the
brain or inflames the eyelid; no long session stiffens the limbs.
Epicurus is reclining in his garden; Zeno looks like a divinity in
his porch; the restless Aristotle, on the other side of the city, as
if in antagonism to Plato, is walking his pupils off their legs in
his Lyceum by the Ilyssus. Our student has determined on entering
himself as a disciple of Theophrastus, a teacher of marvellous
popularity, who has brought together two thousand pupils from all
parts of the world. He himself is of Lesbos; for masters, as well as
students, come hither from all regions of the earth,—as befits a
University. How could Athens have collected hearers in such numbers,
unless she had selected teachers of such power? it was the range of
territory, which the notion of a University implies, which furnished
both the quantity of the one, and the quality of the other.
Anaxagoras was from Ionia, Carneades from Africa, Zeno from Cyprus,
Protagoras from Thrace, and Gorgias from Sicily. Andromachus was a
Syrian, Proæresius an Armenian, Hilarius a Bithynian, Philiscus a
Thessalian, Hadrian a Syrian. Rome is celebrated for her liberality
in civil matters; Athens was as liberal in intellectual. There was no
narrow jealousy, directed against a Professor, because he was not an
Athenian; genius and talent were the qualifications; and to bring
them to Athens, was to do homage to it as a University. There was a
brotherhood and a citizenship of mind.
Mind came
first, and was the foundation of the academical polity; but it soon
brought along with it, and gathered round itself, the gifts of
fortune and the prizes of life. As time went on, wisdom was not
always sentenced to the bare cloak of Cleanthes; but beginning in
rags, it ended in fine linen. The Professors became honourable and
rich; and the students ranged themselves under their names, and were
proud of calling themselves their countrymen. The University was
divided into four great nations, as the medieval antiquarian would
style them; and in the middle of the fourth century, Proæresius was
the leader or proctor of the Attic, Hephæstion of the Oriental,
Epiphanius of the Arabic, and Diophantus of the Pontic. Thus the
Professors were both patrons of clients, and hosts andproxeni of
strangers and visitors, as well as masters of the schools: and the
Cappadocian, Syrian, or Sicilian youth who came to one or other of
them, would be encouraged to study by his protection, and to aspire
by his example.
Even Plato,
when the schools of Athens were not a hundred years old, was in
circumstances to enjoy the otium cum dignitate. He
had a villa out at Heraclea; and he left his patrimony to his school,
in whose hands it remained, not only safe, but fructifying, a
marvellous phenomenon in tumultuous Greece, for the long space of
eight hundred years. Epicurus too had the property of the Gardens
where he lectured; and these too became the property of his sect. But
in Roman times the chairs of grammar, rhetoric, politics, and the
four philosophies, were handsomely endowed by the State; some of the
Professors were themselves statesmen or high functionaries, and
brought to their favourite study senatorial rank or Asiatic opulence.
Patrons
such as these can compensate to the freshman, in whom we have
interested ourselves, for the poorness of his lodging and the
turbulence of his companions. In every thing there is a better side
and a worse; in every place a disreputable set and a respectable, and
the one is hardly known at all to the other. Men come away from the
same University at this day, with contradictory impressions and
contradictory statements, according to the society they have found
there; if you believe the one, nothing goes on there as it should be:
if you believe the other, nothing goes on as it should not. Virtue,
however, and decency are at least in the minority everywhere, and
under some sort of a cloud or disadvantage; and this being the case,
it is so much gain whenever an Herodes Atticus is found, to throw the
influence of wealth and station on the side even of a decorous
philosophy. A consular man, and the heir of an ample fortune, this
Herod was content to devote his life to a professorship, and his
fortune to the patronage of literature. He gave the sophist Polemo
about eight thousand pounds, as the sum is calculated, for three
declamations. He built at Athens a stadium six hundred feet long,
entirely of white marble, and capable of admitting the whole
population. His theatre, erected to the memory of his wife, was made
of cedar wood curiously carved. He had two villas, one at Marathon,
the place of his birth, about ten miles from Athens, the other at
Cephissia, at the distance of six; and thither he drew to him
the élite, and at times the whole body of the
students. Long arcades, groves of trees, clear pools for the bath,
delighted and recruited the summer visitor. Never was so brilliant a
lecture-room as his evening banqueting-hall; highly connected
students from Rome mixed with the sharp-witted provincial of Greece
or Asia Minor; and the flippant sciolist, and the nondescript
visitor, half philosopher, half tramp, met with a reception,
courteous always, but suitable to his deserts. Herod was noted for
his repartees; and we have instances on record of his setting down,
according to the emergency, both the one and the other.
A higher
line, though a rarer one, was that allotted to the youthful Basil. He
was one of those men who seem by a sort of fascination to draw others
around them even without wishing it. One might have deemed that his
gravity and his reserve would have kept them at a distance; but,
almost in spite of himself, he was the centre of a knot of youths,
who, pagans as most of them were, used Athens honestly for the
purpose for which they professed to seek it; and, disappointed and
displeased with the place himself, he seems nevertheless to have been
the means of their profiting by its advantages. One of these was
Sophronius, who afterwards held a high office in the State: Eusebius
was another, at that time the bosom-friend of Sophronius, and
afterwards a Bishop. Celsus too is named, who afterwards was raised
to the government of Cilicia by the Emperor Julian. Julian himself,
in the sequel of unhappy memory, was then at Athens, and known at
least to St. Gregory. Another Julian is also mentioned, who was
afterwards commissioner of the land tax. Here we have a glimpse of
the better kind of society among the students of Athens; and it is to
the credit of the parties composing it, that such young men as
Gregory and Basil, men as intimately connected with Christianity as
they were well known in the world, should hold so high a place in
their esteem and love. When the two saints were departing, their
companions came around them with the hope of changing their purpose.
Basil persevered; but Gregory relented, and turned back to Athens for
a season.
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