NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS

Τύχη IN POLYBIUS

Homer's allegory of the Litai or prayers that limp tardily on the trail of Wrong among its many other applications symbolizes the relation of the unpopular monster Negative Criticism to the swift diffusion of Error. An eminent scholar has the happy thought that Aidōs is just our "social compunction." The reviewers single this fancy out as the most noteworthy thing in his book. Mr. Graham Wallas and Miss Jane Addams seize upon it as an anticipation of the social-settlement ideal in antiquity, and the thing is done. A generation which no longer reads Jebb or Tennyson, who knew better, is fixed in the formula that Aidōs is social compunction. The more common way is the uncritical acceptance by a brilliant English or French lecturer of the "results" of a German "investigation." This lends wings to misconceptions that might otherwise remain innocuously buried in the dusty archives of exchanged doctors' dissertations. Of the many available examples the one selected for this brief note is Professor Bury's adoption of Rudolph von Scala's thesis that Polybius, beginning with Demetrius of Phaleron's sentimental and rhetorical conception of the rôle of Fortune in human affairs, advanced to the stern scientific faith in causation which left no place for fortune or the gods in "pragmatic history," and that later interpolations in his text reveal this progress in his thought. It all sounds very learned and plausible in the exposition of Dr. von Scala and Professor Bury. There is but one objection to it: If you read Polybius you find that it isn't so. The matter is quite simple. The fundamental fallacy of the argument is the tacit assumption that we or any other critics possess a final and consistent philosophy of fate, fortune, and providence which we can apply as a canon to measure the deviations of earlier thinkers from perfect consistency. There is no example of such consistency except perhaps in a few Haeckels and La Mettries. Plato affirms as positively as Lucretius or as Polybius in his alleged later manner that nothing can happen without a cause. Yet in his Laws (709 A, B) he attributes a large part in human affairs to Tyche. And as if this were not enough, later in the same work he argues that the divine Providence extends to the minutest details. Dante, who in effect accepts the determinist argument that Buridan's ass would

1 iii. 47. 8.

starve and whose faith in Providence is absolute, nevertheless personifies and almost deifies Fortune. The emperor Julian, for all his neo-] -Platonic mysticism an extremely rational thinker familiar with the Aristotelian and Democritean theories of causation, nevertheless acknowledges, as other great statesmen and generals have done, the incalculable part of fortune in human success and failure. Renan, who repeatedly rejects the appeal in history to any causes save those cognizable by science, speaks of Sennacherib's defeat as the moment when the fortune and future of humanity turned on the throw of the dice. Of this general character are all the inconsistencies noted in Polybius. I have examined every passage in which the word Tyche or its synonyms occur, and not one raises a rational presumption of a radical change in his opinions. Polybius is always willing to dramatize or personify Fortune and moralize the lessons her vicissitudes teach in the rise and fall of empires.2 It is for him the quality of a great soul to bear the strokes of Fortune bravely. He shares that deepest and finest Greek moral feeling that derives from the instability of Fortune and the frailty of our human condition a warning against self-exaltation and ruthlessness to others. He is always willing to speak with the vulgar of the power of Fortune in things that he cannot otherwise explain. He recognizes the fact of accident or spontaneity and the appearance of Providence in the fortunes of men and states. But where he has, or thinks he has, an explanation by traceable causes, he is always as contemptuous as is Thucydides of the cheap and easy resort to chance or supernatural intervention. And in this connection he enunciates the commonplaces of ancient science that

1 Polybius thinks this sentiment characteristic of men truly great, xxxix. 3. 7.

2 Examples in von Scala, pp. 171-72, and cf. also xvi. 31. 5: μépaiтo tô túxn; ΧΧ. 7. 2: ἀλλ ̓ ὥσπερ ἐπίτηδες . ἡ τύχη; χχίν. 8. 2: δίκην ἡ τύχη βουλομένη

λαβεῖν; fr. 78.

3 i. 1. 2; vi. la 6.

It is idle to try to trace this thought to one source, for it pervades all Greek literature. Cf. Polybius xv. 1. 8; xxxvii. 1g; xxxix. 3. 7; Herodotus i. 86; Isocrates i. 29; Demosthenes De corona 252; Sophocles O.C. 567.

5 xxxvii. 9. Hercod, pp. 100-101, collects the passages where Tuxŋ is used loosely and is not to be pressed. Warde Fowler, "Polybius' Conception of rúxn," Classical Review, XVII, 445, quotes the Greek of many of them and discusses the whole question sensibly, but not trenchantly.

6 x. 33. 4; x. 37. 4; x. 40. 6; x. 40. 9; xi. 2. 10; xi. 4. 4; xi. 4. 7; xi. 19. 6; xi. 24a 3; xv. 10. 5 (in a speech); xviii. 33. 7; xviii. 46. 15; xxiv. 9. 1-2; xxxviii 16 5.

* ταὐτόματον xv. 16. 6; xv. 33. 1; xviii. 12. 2: ἐπὶ βραχὺ μὲν καὶ ταὐτομάτου συνεργήσαντος.

8 xi. 24. 8: θεός ... TIS; xxviii. 9. 4: daμovoßλáßelav; so xxxvii in fine; xl. 13; in his own person he prays to all the gods and deprecates the płóvos of Túxn.

ii. 38. 5: paûλov yàp; cf. x. 5. 8; x. 9. 2; xviii. 28. 4; xxii. 16. 4: ĦλŋV TEXEWS ὀλίγων; xxxvii. 4.

nothing happens without a cause and that chance is only a name for our ignorance. In particular, he shares Kipling's distaste for those who attribute the achievements of successful men2 solely to Fortune:

And I took the chance they wouldn't

And now they're calling it luck.

There is a cause for the success of the Achaean League-its appeal to the principle of equality and true democracy. And the main thesis of his book is that the Roman conquest of the world was not due to Fortune, but to Roman character and Roman institutions. Literal-minded criticism pronounces this grossly inconsistent with passages of sentimental reflection on the omnipotence of Fortune as revealed in the succession of worldempires and the rapid conquest of the world by Rome. But the contradiction on which von Scala and his followers chiefly rely disappears if we take into consideration the contexts. Polybius begins by announcing his intention to explain how and by what kind of polity the Romans reduced the whole habitable world under their dominion. Secure in this main design, he allows himself to lapse into rhetoric and speaks of Fortune as reducing all things to unity, and of his work as intended to bring out this design of Fortune and the consequent lesson of the unity of world-history. Yet again later in the same book he avers that it was not by chance (Fortune), as some of the Greeks think, or by accident (avroμárws) that the Romans not only attempted, but achieved universal hegemony. This is thought to be a flagrant contradiction of the other passage from the prooemium. But it seems so only because those who quote it omit the prefacing words by which Polybius reconciles the two. For his sentence begins: "From which it is plain that our original proposition was true that it was not by chance," etc. This is evidently intended as a reference to the statement in the prooemium of his design to show "how and by what kind of polity" the Romans, etc. Polybius evidently is not troubled by the inconsistency of saying in one paragraph that it was not by chance that Rome, etc., and in another that Fortune in our day has displayed her wondrous power, etc. And there are probably many living writers who would cheerfully be guilty of the same inconsistency in writing of the world-war. That is not all. In the passage i. 63. 9 Polybius says that the Romans won their empire not by chance, ἀλλὰ λίαν εἰκότως. That also is an almost explicit quotation of the words of his prooemium καὶ λίαν εὐλόγοις ἀφορμαῖς χρησάμενοι.

ii. 38. 5; fr. 84, kevŵs.

2 E.g. Scipio x. 2; x. 3. 7; Philopoemen xi. 16. 4; Eumenes xx. 23. 4.

3 ii. 38.

4 i. 1. 5; i. 3. 7.

5 i. 4. 1; i. 4. 5.

6 i. 63. 9.

7 Cf. vi. la, where he again emphasizes this original purpose almost in the same words.

There is, then, for a criticism that keeps the entire context in mind and is guided by flexible literary feeling no serious contradiction, and certainly none that justifies the desperate expedient of the assumption that the second passage was interpolated by Polybius himself after he had developed his later philosophy of causation which allowed no place to the action of Fortune. This is the strongest support of von Scala's theory. It would be wearisome and superfluous to go through the text of Polybius and explain away all the other alleged contradictions. It is enough to note that, as Hercod points out,' the contradictory passages are so distributed that no theory of the composition of Polybius' history will account for them without resorting to the uncontrollable hypothesis of later insertions by the author. It is perhaps for this reason that Croiset, who is acquainted with von Scala's book, pays no attention to his hypothesis. Hercod perhaps sufficiently refutes it together with the theory of Hirzel that Polybius' Tyche is a symbol of the Stoic póvoa. Hercod's own explanation is that Polybius' popular language cannot be pinned down to philosophic consistency. To this I have added the definite argument that Polybius quotes his own prooemium and feels no inconsistency, and the further consideration that such consistency is no more to be expected in great writers than in popular usage. The "investigation," then, is merely an example of the kind of philology well characterized by Matthew Arnold long ago: "Things are naturally all of a piece and follow one uniform rule. . . . . People do not vary. People do not contradict themselves, people do not have undercurrents of meaning, people do not divine."

It is the assump

One adjunct of the theory I have thus far passed over. tion that Polybius' earlier views were determined by Demetrius of Phaleron's treatise on Fortune, chiefly known to us by Plutarch's Consolation. Polybius quotes an impressive passage from Demetrius about the vicissitudes of Fortune in the fall of the Persian Empire and the conquests of Alexander. And as often happens with other writers, we can trace elsewhere in his phrasing the influence of a passage which he knew well enough to quote. But many of the resemblances collected by von Scala and gravely arranged in parallel columns are the merest commonplaces of reflection on the mutability of Fortune that could be equally well paralleled in any literature. The most important parallel of all in this connection, he, and so far as I know all other writers on the subject, strangely enough omit. It is the great passage on Tyche in Demosthenes' On the Crown. That is obviously an anticipation if not the source of the Demetrius passage which is supposed to have been Polybius' chief inspiration. And Polybius, as it would be easy to show, was not unacquainted with Demosthenes.

1 La conception de l'histoire dans Polybe, p. 113. 3 Cf. Dem. De corona 208, 252, 254, 271.

2 xxix. 6c.

PAUL SHOREY

ON A FRAGMENT OF GORGIAS

καὶ τὸ ἀγώνισμα ̓ ἡμῶν κατὰ τὸν Λεοντῖνον Γοργίαν διττῶν [δὲ] ἀρετῶν δεῖται, τολμῆς καὶ σοφίας· τολμῆς μὲν τὸ κίνδυνον ὑπομεῖναι, σοφίας δὲ τὸ αἴνιγμα γνῶναι. ὁ γάρ τοι λόγος καθάπερ τὸ κήρυγμα τὸ Ὀλυμπίασι καλεῖ μὲν τὸν βουλόμενον, στεφανοῖ δὲ τὸν δυνάμενον. Clement Stromata i. 11. 51: Stählin, Vol. II, p. 33, 1. 18.]

<διττόν, > διττῶν δὲ Cobet. [δὲ] Wilamowitz, δὴ Bernays. τὸ κίνδυνον . TÒ αἴνιγμα (πλίγμα Diels), τὸν κίνδυνον . . . . τὰ αἴσιμα (cf. Iliad xv. 207) Bernays, Rheinisches Museum, 1853, p. 432=Gesammelte Abhandlungen, I, 121.

The text and apparatus are Stählin's; in Diels's Vorsokratiker the fragment is numbered 8 (Vol. II [3d ed.], p. 249). The latter has inserted λíyμa into his text, comparing the metaphor kaтаяλyńσα which Aristophanes attributes to Thrasymachus (Daitales), if Dindorf's emendation is right.

These two sentences have been assigned to the Ολυμπικὸς λόγος οἱ Gorgias ever since Bernays detected in them the oldest prose reference to the Olympic games. He believed that the mention of the herald's summons made this certain. But then aiviyua became unintelligible, and he asked whether Clement or his scribe imagined that there was a riddle competition at Olympia. So the word was emended to bring it into harmony with the second sentence, and, as may be seen from the text printed above, other words which do not suit the hypothesis that Gorgias uttered them at Olympia are now treated as Clement's additions.

But all this depends upon the double assumption that Clement drew two consecutive sentences from one speech, and that both must allude to the Olympic contest. With a writer who interweaves quotations from all sources into his discourse this is a hazardous procedure. If it can be shown that the first sentence, as it stands, is a plain allusion to a famous legendary feat of copía, that Gorgias had excellent grounds for comparing his own σopía to it, and that Clement actually turns Gorgias' vaunt against vain contending with words, then the text will be justified.

When Gorgias arrived in Athens in 427, he professed himself able to answer any question addressed to him. This is the boast with which he opens the discussion in Plato's Gorgias, after custom had staled his triumphs. But his first exhibition in Athens was conducted in a manner so impressive that the story, repeated in the literature of rhetoric for centuries, was actually used by Themistius as the ground of a comparison with the universal instruction of the sun-god. I arrange four of these passages below, as their language sheds light upon the origin of our fragment.

1. Quorum [sc. sophistarum] e numero primus est ausus Leontinus Gorgias in conventu poscere quaestionem, id est, iubere dicere, qua de re quis vellet audire. Audax negotium: dicerem impudens, nisi, etc. [Cicero De finibus ii.