The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Schmidt - The Unity of the Ethics of Ancient Greece
Above-named article is a reply to the criticism of Davidson (Int. J. E., Vol. I, pp. 256, 257) on Schmidt's Die Ethik der alten Griechen. The sum of Davidson's criticism is given in his statement: "No account of Greek ethics can be satisfactory which does not fully recognize that Greek ethical ideals, theories, and practices were very different in the different epochs of Greek history, and even in the same epoch among different portions of the race" (Vol. I, p. 256). S. maintains that moral standards in Greece were more uniform than habits of life, consequently he disagrees with Davidson, when his critic says, "the morality of Corinth and Sybaris was altogether different from that of Athens or Sparta." For, says S., the intelligent Sybarite estimated the virtues, which he did not practise, much as the Athenian did.
S. allows differences of time to be of greater importance in determining types of morals than differences of locality. But at the same time he claims that the salient features of Greek ethics in the various periods of Hellenic history are much the same, and that to treat the subject in epochs would therefore offer serious difficulties; that there is much in which the people of Greece from Homer to the rise of the Roman emperors are an ethical unit. The Greek of the age of Homer, as well as of the age of Solon and Plato, agreed in the necessity of paying special honor to the dead, etc.; the Peripatetics maintain the views of old Greece on the family and state. In this way S. seeks to show that later Greece so rests on older Greece that it is not possible to mark off independent ethical periods; that, in a word, the ethics of Greece, omitting certain minor features, is a unit.