The Idea of Progress: An Inguiry into Its Origin and Growth. J. B. Bury
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origin of the idea (p. 253 sqq.). Recently Mr. R. H. Murray, in a learned appendix to his Erasmus and Luther, has developed the thesis that Progress was not grasped in antiquity (though he makes an exception of Seneca)—a welcome confirmation.]
I
It may, in particular, seem surprising that the Greeks, who were so fertile in their speculations on human life, did not hit upon an idea which seems so simple and obvious to us as the idea of Progress. But if we try to realise their experience and the general character of their thought we shall cease to wonder. Their recorded history did not go back far, and so far as it did go there had been no impressive series of new discoveries suggesting either an indefinite increase of knowledge or a growing mastery of the forces of nature. In the period in which their most brilliant minds were busied with the problems of the universe men might improve the building of ships, or invent new geometrical demonstrations, but their science did little or nothing to transform the conditions of life or to open any vista into the future. They were in the presence of no facts strong enough to counteract that profound veneration of antiquity which seems natural to mankind, and the Athenians of the age of Pericles or of Plato, though they were thoroughly, obviously "modern" compared with the Homeric Greeks, were never self-consciously "modern" as we are.
1.
The indications that human civilisation was a gradual growth, and that man had painfully worked his way forward from a low and savage state, could not, indeed, escape the sharp vision of the Greeks. For instance, Aeschylus represents men as originally living at hazard in sunless caves, and raised from that condition by Prometheus, who taught them the arts of life. In Euripides we find a similar recognition of the ascent of mankind to a civilised state, from primitive barbarism, some god or other playing the part of Prometheus. In such passages as these we have, it may be said, the idea that man has progressed; and it may fairly be suggested that belief in a natural progress lay, for Aeschylus as well as for Euripides, behind the poetical fiction of supernatural intervention. But these recognitions of a progress were not incompatible with the widely-spread belief in an initial degeneration of the human race; nor did it usually appear as a rival doctrine. The old legend of a "golden age" of simplicity, from which man had fallen away, was generally accepted as truth; and leading thinkers combined it with the doctrine of a gradual sequence of social and material improvements [Footnote: In the masterly survey of early Greek history which Thucydides prefixed to his work, he traces the social progress of the Greeks in historical times, and finds the key to it in the increase of wealth.] during the subsequent period of decline. We find the two views thus combined, for instance, in Plato's Laws, and in the earliest reasoned history of civilisation written by Dicaearchus, a pupil of Aristotle. [Footnote: Aristotle's own view is not very clear. He thinks that all arts, sciences, and institutions have been repeatedly, or rather an infinite number of times (word in Greek) discovered in the past and again lost. Metaphysics, xi. 8 ad fin.; Politics, iv. 10, cp. ii. 2. An infinite number of times seems to imply the doctrine of cycles.] But the simple life of the first age, in which men were not worn with toil, and war and disease were unknown, was regarded as the ideal State to which man would lie only too fortunate if he could return. He had indeed at a remote time ill the past succeeded in ameliorating some of the conditions of his lot, but such ancient discoveries as fire or ploughing or navigation or law-giving did not suggest the guess that new inventions might lead ultimately to conditions in which life would be more complex but as happy as the simple life of the primitive world.
But, if some relative progress might be admitted, the general view of Greek philosophers was that they were living in a period of inevitable degeneration and decay—inevitable because it was prescribed by the nature of the universe. We have only an imperfect knowledge of the influential speculations of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Empedocles, but we may take Plato's tentative philosophy of history to illustrate the trend and the prejudices of Greek thought on this subject. The world was created and set going by the Deity, and, as his work, it was perfect; but it was not immortal and had in it the seeds of decay. The period of its duration is 72,000 solar years. During the first half of this period the original uniformity and order, which were impressed upon it by the Creator, are maintained under his guidance; but then it reaches a point from which it begins, as it were, to roll back; the Deity has loosened his grip of the machine, the order is disturbed, and the second 36,000 years are a period of gradual decay and degeneration. At the end of this time, the world left to itself would dissolve into chaos, but the Deity again seizes the helm and restores the original conditions, and the whole process begins anew. The first half of such a world-cycle corresponds to the Golden Age of legend in which men lived happily and simply; we have now unfortunately reached some point in the period of decadence.
Plato applies the theory of degradation in his study of political communities. [Footnote: Plato's philosophy of history. In the myth of the Statesman and the last Books of the Republic. The best elucidation of these difficult passages will be found in the notes and appendix to Book viii. in J. Adam's edition of the Republic (1902).] He conceives his own Utopian aristocracy as having existed somewhere towards the beginning of the period of the world's relapse, when things were not so bad, [Footnote: Similarly he places the ideal society which he describes in the Critias 9000 years before Solon. The state which he plans in the Laws is indeed imagined as a practicable project in his own day, but then it is only a second-best. The ideal state of which Aristotle sketched an outline (Politics, iv. v.) is not set either in time or in place.] and exhibits its gradual deterioration, through the successive stages of timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and despotism. He explains this deterioration as primarily caused by a degeneration of the race, due to laxity and errors in the State regulation of marriages, and the consequent birth of biologically inferior individuals.
The theories of Plato are only the most illustrious example of the tendency characteristic of Greek philosophical thinkers to idealise the immutable as possessing a higher value than that which varies. This affected all their social speculations. They believed in the ideal of an absolute order in society, from which, when it is once established, any deviation must be for the worse. Aristotle, considering the subject from a practical point of view, laid down that changes in an established social order are undesirable, and should be as few and slight as possible. [Footnote: Politics, ii. 5.] This prejudice against change excluded the apprehension of civilisation as a progressive movement. It did not occur to Plato or any one else that a perfect order might be attainable by a long series of changes and adaptations. Such an order, being an embodiment of reason, could be created only by a deliberate and immediate act of a planning mind. It might be devised by the wisdom of a philosopher or revealed by the Deity. Hence the salvation of a community must lie in preserving intact, so far as possible, the institutions imposed by the enlightened lawgiver, since change meant corruption and disaster. These a priori principles account for the admiration of the Spartan state entertained by many Greek philosophers, because it was supposed to have preserved unchanged for an unusually long period a system established by an inspired legislator.
2.
Thus time was regarded as the enemy of humanity. Horace's verse,
Damnosa quid non imminuit dies?
"time depreciates the value of the world," expresses the pessimistic axiom accepted in most systems of ancient thought.
The theory of world-cycles was so widely current that it may almost be described as the orthodox theory of cosmic time among the Greeks, and it passed from them to the Romans.
[Footnote: Plato's world-cycle. I have omitted details not essential; e.g. that in the first period men were born from the earth and only in the second propagated themselves. The period of 36,000 years, known as the Great Platonic Year, was probably a Babylonian astronomical period, and was in any case based on the Babylonian sexagesimal system and connected with the solar year conceived as consisting of 360 days. Heraclitus seems to have accepted it as the duration of the world between his periodic universal conflagrations. Plato derived the number from predecessors, but based it on operations with the numbers 3, 4, 5, the length of the sides of the Pythagorean right-angled triangle. The Great Year of the Pythagorean Philolaus seems to have been different, and that of the Stoics was much longer (6,570,000 years).
I may refer here to Tacitus, Dialogus c. 16, as an appreciation of historical perspective unusual in ancient writers: