(Continued from

THE sixth and seventh centuries before our era are marked by an effervescence of ethical wisdom; perhaps one country stimulated another, for a comparison of dates and histories points to a general revival of religious-hearted thought as taking place about this period. The sages of our race seem ever to have dowered us with fully as much wise lore as we can absorb or make a good use of. In Greece, wisdom was so plentiful, that after seven had been fixed upon as a perfect number of sages, it was found difficult to confine those who deserved the honour within the limits of it. They now mostly seem like lesser lights showing the way to the philosophic luminary Pythagoras.

One of those who are marked as proxime accessit to the constellation of sages is Epimenides, whose strange history has been exposed to doubt, apparently on the ground that he was of Crete, and the Cretans were liars.

Epimenides is the original of Rip Van Winkle, whom Washington Irving and Jefferson have made so real to us. It is told of him that once, when he was sent by his father into the fields to look for a sheep, he at midday turned out of the road, and lay down in a cave and fell asleep. Whether the cave was impregnated with gas such as helped the priestesses of the oracle into their trance, tradition does not say; but Epimenides slept for seven-and-fifty years. It is curious to

Vol. III., p. 540.)

think of this in connection with the fact that at the present day scientific theories should be put forward upon the possibility of prolonged suspension of animation by refrigeration, desiccation or otherwise. When we think of the various animals that hibernate, and of those that are dormant for indefinite periods, we may reasonably allow that, for an occasional human being of exceptional characteristics to suffer suspension of physical functions, may, however extraordinary, be yet an occurrence on the believable side of the borders of the marvellous. When Epimenides awoke, he went on looking for the stray sheep, thinking he had been taking a brief noonday nap; but, as he could not find that long defunct animal, he went back through the field, where he found everything changed, and the estate in another person's possession. In great perplexity he came again to the city, and, as he was going into his own house, he met certain folk who inquired of him who he was. At last he found his younger brother, who had now become an old man, and from him he learned all the truth.

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The theory must have been, that such a sleep betokened the prophetic faculty, and that Epimenides had been a visitor to the Olympian halls while his body lay sealed from his use; for when he was recognised he became regarded as a person especially beloved by the gods.

He was, as K. O. Müller gathers from the ancient sources of information, "A man of a sacred and marvellous nature, who was brought up by the nymphs, and whose soul quitted his body as long and as often as it pleased; according to the opinion of Plato and other ancients, his mind had a prophetic and inspired sense of divine things."

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The average commentator, however, unable to conceive of a prophet not of the Hebrews, writes such things as this about Epimenides: "All that is credible about him is, that he was a man superior talents, who pretended to intercourse with the gods; and, to support his pretensions, lived in retirement on the spontaneous productions of the earth, and practised arts of imposture; perhaps in his hours of pretended inspiration had the art of appearing totally insensible and entranced, easily mistaken by ignorant spectators for a power of dismissing and recalling his spirit." It is instructive to compare with this the view usually taken of the prophetic ecstasy when it happens to fall upon a Hebrew. Stochius, an expositor of a few centuries ago, describes the state as "A sacred ecstasy, or rapture of the mind out of itself, when, the use of the external senses being suspended, God reveals something in a peculiar manner to prophets and apostles, who are then taken or transported out of themselves." And a writer in Kitto's Cyclopædia follows with the note that "the same idea is intimated in the English word trance, from the Latin transitus, the state of being carried out of oneself

the nearest approach we can make to such a state, is that in which our mind is so occupied in the contemplation of an object as to lose entirely the consciousness of the body—a state in which

the highest order of ideas, whether belonging to the judgment or imagination, is undoubtedly attained."

Are we, then, to refuse Epimenides a place among the prophets," and not to allow that Greek wisdom, as all truly spiritual wisdom, comes secretly from supernal worlds, rather than by deductions from the commonplaces of materialised life?

Epimenides is credited with a considerable bulk of literary work; the titles of the subjects which he treated are, however, all that remain to us in this department.

They are evidence of his mystical bent: he wrote on Minos, the fabled Cretan lawgiver, who, like himself, is said to have loved retirement in a cave, wherein each time he stayed there a new law was communicated to him by Zeus. With Zeus he was, as Clement of Alexandria reads the tradition, as a familiar friend, discoursing with him after the manner in which Jehovah is said to have once conversed with Moses," as one speaking with his friend." The work treats also of Rhadamanthus, to whom a Cretan birthplace is given, a king whom legend relates to have become one of the judges of Hades, and whose name is now traced back to that of the Egyptian Deity of the Amenti, the regions of the unseen. A poetic theogony also is ascribed to Epimenides, and a treatise of his Of Oracles and Responses is referred to by Jerome, and is supposed to be the work from which quotation is made in Paul's Epistle to Titus (i. 12).

The history of Epimenides is not without evidences of other than literary activity. When the Athenians about 597 B.C. were in a state of discord and disease, and were troubled by certain sacrilegious acts which had occurred, and the Delphic priestess had enjoined upon

them to purify their city, they invited the Cretan prophet and sage to come and take means to rid them of the pollution. His ministrations allayed the despondency of the people, and they offered their benefactor a talent of gold, but he refused money and accepted instead a little branch of the sacred olive tree which grew on the Acropolis. He became acquainted with Solon, whom he is said to have privately instructed in the proper methods for the regulation of the Athenian Commonwealth. Another story is, that he was assisted by Solon, from which two accounts we may perhaps fairly infer that each learned from the other, as one great man cannot but learn from another. Plutarch

states that Epimenides was accounted one of the Seven Sages by those who would not admit Periandros into the number.

There was high culture in Greece even at the early date of Epimenides, a hundred years before the time of the first great dramatist. The wit and poetry combats, as well as athletic contests of the Olympian games, had been long established; and there was friendship with Egypt, and colonisation there.

It was still the heroic age; national life had scarcely built itself up in Greece out of clan and family life; the village patriarchal household and the city commune were the simple forms of society, and the kindly laws of hospitality shed a grand nobility over the rudeness of the time.

As civic life expanded, castes were formed, if indeed something of the kind is not to be found in the most primitive tribal state; and the early Athenians

were

divided into classes whose provinces were severally war, agriculture, the shepherd's trade, and handicraft; while there were also classes of serfs attached to the soil, which

they held by payment of rent, mostly in kind and according to their status, to the classes in power.

In whatever degrees of difference the social scale was disposed, Greek life extended itself with marvellous rapidity, until, half a millennium before our era, the Mediterranean was a sort of Hellenic lake, bordered with the visible results of the works of the artist, the sage, and the labourer. Forms of beauty in stone, metal, pottery, and in colour; forms of strength in law, order, and government; forms of mental art embodying inner glow and healthfulness in poetry and philosophy; results of well-trained labour in the harbour, the vessel, the temple, and the house. Awful wars, it is true, there were, as there are now, but rarely without some flash of virtue or stainless honour in them redeeming the Greek faults of deceit and corruption.

Pherekydes has the honour of being cited as one of the earliest Greeks who wrote in prose, and the greater honour of having been a teacher of Pythagoras. A number of verified predictions are attributed to him. As to his doctrines, some among ancient writers suppose that they were derived from the sacred books of the Phoenicians; others that he studied in Egypt, and learned there the symbolical method. These beliefs at least show that in the days before thoughts were circulated by printing it was deemed no marvel for the lore of one country to penetrate and influence another.

Anaximandros is one of that group of Greek philosophers who had ceased to look to interior, occult, or oracular revelations for the secrets of the laws of life, and searched instead into the facts of the external world. Both methods must result in the same story where they meet; spiritual explanations are

liable to get spoiled and confused in passage through inappreciative minds; external details are more generally comprehensible, but seem to lead the mind a long way round before it can find a direct path through them to the heart of things.

whom Cicero

Anaximandros, styles the fellow-countryman and crony of Thales, but who is otherwise regarded as rather his disciple and successor, avoided the pitfalls of ascribing to water, air, or fire the source and origin of life, and took refuge in infinity as the starting point and head of all things. Infinity, not in the sense of exhaustlessness of pervading Deity, but as denoting the unlimited range of physical nature, out of which all things visible come into being, and into which they fall by decay. Worlds, he thought, spring out innumerable in youth from that mighty bosom, and into it fall again, converted once more to that enduring seminal infinity which itself changes not, however mutable its parts. The earth, he supposed, was a globe, placed midmost the "vasty deep" as a centre; the moon, he had learned, shone by a false light, borrowing her splendour from the sun. The sun was so vast as to be at least no smaller than the earth, and composed of the purest fire.

No ignoble conception this of the physical framework of the universe; inadequate only, if it should seek to supplant deeper ethical consciousness of the meaning and divineness of life. There are two attempted solutions of the problem of human existence: man is either matter's supreme secretion; or a spiritual entity, fitting itself with the best suit of matter that is available, and making of it not only clothing fit for the terrestrial life, but even an individualised shape and beauty, and an instru

ment for many purposes and passions. sions. Anaximandros shows his preference for the former blunt hypothesis, when he defines the origin of animal life as taking place in moisture, the creatures being covered with prickly coats, which later are ruptured, when the animals pass to existence in a drier state, and man develops from them; the proof being that other animals speedily find pasture for themselves, while man, for a lengthened period from his birth, requires constant nursing. He could not therefore have been kept alive in the beginning of things, and must be the descendant of fishes, which, like whales, must have learned to suckle their young before being cast upon the shore to learn dryland existence.

Anaximandros is accounted the first who made public a concise statement of his views and opinions upon the nature of things, a course which had been foreign to the etiquette of the time. Previously these speculations were reserved for private discussion amongst the sages, or formed the stock-in-trade of the schools and the matter of the oral tradition.

The following may be quoted from the very few fragments that remain of the works of Anaximandros: "All things that exist are either the beginning, or derived from the beginning; of the infinite however there is no beginning, for otherwise it would have a termination. It is, moreover, uncreate and uncorruptible, by reason of being the beginning: for that which comes into being must needs come to ending, and termination is a property of all the corruptible."

Anaximenes, a reputed disciple of Anaximandros, instead of finding the primordial something in the unnamed infinite, took it to reside in eternal, infinite air. Our soul, because it is air, guards and

rules us, and the whole universe is begirt by spirit and air. Limitless in its kind, this creative air is bounded in such things as are produced of it. All things are made of air that is become dense, or made rare. The gods he regarded not as the authors of air, but as themselves sprung from it.

Anaxagoras was a sage of an uncompromising stamp. Of noble birth, he relinquished his patrimony to travel in pursuit of knowledge, and when he returned from his wanderings and found his possessions lying waste, he said, "I should not have been safe myself if those had not perished." When his relations blamed him for neglect of his estate, he replied, "Why, then, do you not take care of it ?" When he had made his final choice to give up the cares of worldly life, and to devote himself to philosophic study, and had decided to leave even politics to others whose minds were more decidedly bent upon busy affairs, he was reproached for having no affection for his country. His reply shows how large his estate and province was, and how he felt himself to be a member of a humanity that reaches beyond the markets of commodities and the arenas of power. He said, pointing the while up to heaven as the symbol of that life of ours that stretches beyond the merely mundane, "Be silent, for I have the greatest affection for my country.' We must be careful not to confound a saying like this with the effect it would produce if uttered to-day. When said, it might have come fresh from the deep well of profound conviction. Now, it would be borrowed, and probably a mere sentimental and superficial or canting expres

sion.

Anaxagoras came to Athens when a young man, and studied and taught there for a long period,

numbering among his hearers Pericles, Socrates, and Euripides.

In natural philosophy the doctrines are ascribed to him, that wind is due to local rarefaction of air by the sun; that the rainbow is the effect of the reflection of solar rays from a rain cloud; that the moon is an opaque body, illumined by the sun; and that the primary elements of everything were similarity of parts, the beginning of any substance being a mingling or cohesion, the end a separation, of parts. He practised astronomy, calculated eclipses, travelled into cultured Egypt for improvement, and used to say that he preferred a grain of wisdom to heaps of gold.

In metaphysical philosophy he abandoned the petty systems of his predecessors, and instead of regarding some elementary form of matter as the origin of the universe, he taught that mind was the principle of motion, and that Supreme Intelligence, distinct from the visible world, imparted form and order to what would otherwise be the chaos of nature.

Strange to say, these innovations afforded the Athenians a pretext for indicting Anaxagoras on the ground of impiety, the very quality that he would seem to have been trampling upon. There was, however, probably the bias of political faction underneath the impeachment, owing to the connection of Anaxagoras with Pericles, who belonged to a definite political party. When news was brought him of his condemnation to death, and at the same time, like Job, the news arrived of the death of his children, he said, "Nature has long since pronounced the same condemnation on both them and me ;" and of his children he specially said, "I knew that I had become the father of mortals."

When he was thrown into prison