The Legacy of Greece Part 18

Legacies of this type from Ancient Greek society are prominent in the Middle Ages--the childhood of modern Western civilization which followed the 'Dark Age' crisis of birth. One of the first needs of our young Western society as it struggled to its feet was a symbol of its unity--something corresponding to the attainment of self-consciousness by the individual human being--and for this it borrowed the last constructive idea of the Ancient Greek world. The mediaeval 'Holy Roman Empire' had quite a different purpose and function, in the childhood of modern Western civilization, from the purpose and function of the Roman Empire in the old age of Ancient Greece. But the young civilization did not think of inventing a new inst.i.tution for its individual needs. In its subconscious pursuit of its own development it conceived itself to be reviving one of the customs of its venerable parent. The political thinkers of Charlemagne's day never imagined that the idea of world unity could be embodied in any other form.

Again, a century or so later, certain portions of Western society, especially the populations of North and Central Italy and the Low Countries, had outdistanced the rest in economic development and needed inst.i.tutions of local self-government to give their economic vitality free play. In this case, again, Western civilization reverted to an Ancient Greek inst.i.tution and revived the 'city-state'. A little later still, the rapidly growing and differentiating body of Western civilization was impelled towards territorial expansion, and sought it, like Ancient Greece in a similar period, round the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean. This mediaeval movement of expansion, which is commonly called the Crusades, but which made itself felt in Spain and Sicily and the Aegean as well as in the 'Holy Land', is a remarkable parallel to the propagation of Ancient Greek city-states round the same sh.o.r.es between about 750 and 600 B. C. In drifting back upon the Mediterranean, the mediaeval West was searching for new realms to conquer, but it was really captured by the romance of its ancestral home.

Here, then, are three prominent features in mediaeval Western history--the Holy Roman Empire, the Flemish and Italian communes, and the Crusades--which were legacies from Ancient Greek history in the sense of being subconscious reversions to the habits of the parent society. But have these mediaeval legacies from Ancient Greece been really important const.i.tuents in our history viewed as a whole? Have they not rather been false growths which led to little or nothing? The Holy Roman Empire was never more than a mirage. The sense of unity in the modern Western world is derived not from this but from a really original inst.i.tution, the early Papal Church, in which any legacy from Ancient Greece would be hard to discern. The national states of modern Europe and America are derived not from mediaeval Ghent or Bruges or Florence or Venice but from the new, though clumsy, feudal communities of mediaeval England and France. And the expansion of Western society has not followed the direction indicated by the Crusades. The false trail of the Mediterranean was practically abandoned after less than three centuries' trial. The true domain of modern Western civilization has been found in regions which Ancient Greece hardly explored: Northern Germany and Scandinavia and the British Isles, the North Sea and the Baltic, the Atlantic and the continent of America. Thus our mediaeval legacies from Ancient Greece--the subconscious reversions of childhood--are historical curiosities rather than vital links between the two civilizations. Our really important legacy from Ancient Greece was adopted with full consciousness and deliberation when we stood on the threshold of our own maturity.

The legacy of this third type which we have received from Ancient Greece has been given the general name of the Renaissance. It was a determined and successful attempt, on the part of our society, to learn everything that the literary and artistic remains of our great predecessor could teach us. It lay within our choice to study these remains or to pa.s.s them by, and the fact that we chose to study them has been one of the greatest and the most fortunate decisions in the career of our civilization. The several aspects of this acceptance of what Ancient Greece had to offer have been treated already in the other chapters in this volume. Here it is merely necessary to point out that the Renaissance was a study and a.s.similation not only of Ancient Greek literature and art, but of architecture, natural science, mathematics, philosophy, political ideas, and all the other higher expressions of a great society. The absorption of this vast current of life largely accounts for the wonderful impetus which has revealed itself in Western civilization during the last four centuries.

Has the current now spent its force? Has the legacy adopted four centuries ago been used up and exhausted? Under the inspiration of Ancient Greece, has the modern West now created a literature, art, architecture, science, mathematics, philosophy, and political thought which equal or surpa.s.s the Ancient patterns and turn them from an inspiration into an enc.u.mbrance? That seems to be the fundamental question behind the controversy about the study of Ancient Greek life in England to-day. Perhaps the answer may be found--if we may go back to our metaphor--in the uniqueness of the individual personality.

If one considers the relations of a parent and child, or indeed of any two human beings, it is evident that the one could never exhaust all that could be learnt from the personality of the other. The one might acquire every physical, mental, and moral attainment that the other could display, and yet the other's unique individuality would remain--an inexhaustible subject of study, throwing perpetual new light upon the life of the observer himself and of his fellow human beings. This is true of any two human beings, but if the two happen to be people of commanding character and genius it becomes a truism which it would be almost ludicrous to question. Let us apply this to the study not of one individual but of one society by another, and let us take the case in point, in which the two societies happen to be great civilizations. The study of a great civilization has a unique value, not merely for members of another civilization which stands to it in the relation of child to parent, but for every seeker after knowledge who has a civilization of his own. This ultimate and most precious legacy of Ancient Greece is at the disposal of Moslems, Hindus, and Chinese, as well as Westerners. For receiving it there are two qualifications: a good understanding and an open mind.

II

_Ancient Greek Civilization as a Work of Art_

Civilizations are the greatest and the rarest achievements of human society. Innumerable societies have been coming into being and peris.h.i.+ng during many hundreds of thousands of years, and hardly any of them have created civilizations. One can count the civilizations on one's fingers.

We have had perhaps three in Europe: the Minoan in the Aegean Islands (the dates 4000-1100 B. C. roughly cover its history); the Greek or Graeco-Roman round the coasts of the Mediterranean (its history extends between the eleventh century B. C. and the seventh century A. D.); and our modern Western civilization round the coasts of the Atlantic, which began to emerge from twilight in the eighth century A. D. and is still in existence. Then there are the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Lower Mesopotamia, which were first dominated by Ancient Greece and then amalgamated into the single Middle Eastern civilization of Islam; and there are the civilizations of India and China. Even if we count as civilizations the societies existing in Mexico and Peru before the Spanish Conquest, the total number of known independent civilizations, compared with the total number of known human societies, is very small.

And it is so because the achievement is astonis.h.i.+ngly difficult. There are two constant factors in social life--the spirit of man and its environment. Social life is the relation between them, and life only rises to the height of civilization when the spirit of man is the dominant partner in the relations.h.i.+p--when instead of being moulded by the environment (as it is in the tropical forests of Central Africa and Brazil), or simply holding its own against the environment in a kind of equilibrium (as it does on the steppes of Central Asia or Arabia, among the nomads), it moulds the environment to its own purpose, or 'expresses' itself by 'impressing' itself upon the world. The study of a civilization is not different in kind from the study of a literature. In both cases one is studying a creation of the spirit of man, or, in more familiar terms, a work of art.

Civilization is a work of art--in the literal meaning of the phrase and not merely by a metaphor. It is true that works of art are made by individuals, civilization by a society. But what work of art is there in which the individual artist owes nothing to others? And a civilization, the work of countless individuals and many generations, differs in this respect from a poem or a statue not in kind but only in degree. It is a social work of art, expressed in social action, like a ritual or a play. One cannot describe it better than by calling it a tragedy with a plot, and history is the plot of the tragedy of civilization.

Students of the drama, from Aristotle onwards, seem to agree that nearly all the great tragedies in literature are expositions of quite a few fundamental plots. And it is possible that the great tragedies of history--that is, the great civilizations that have been created by the spirit of man--may all reveal the same plot, if we a.n.a.lyse them rightly.

Each civilization--for instance, the civilization of Mediaeval and Modern Europe and again that of Ancient Greece--is probably a variant of a single theme. And to study the plot of civilization in a great exposition of it--like the h.e.l.lenic exposition or our own Western exposition--is surely the right goal of a humane education.

But of course one asks: Why study Ancient h.e.l.lenic civilization rather than ours? The study of any one civilization is so complex, it demands so many preliminary and subordinate studies--linguistic, inst.i.tutional, economic, psychological--that it is likely to absorb all one's energies.

The greatest historians have generally confined themselves to the study of a single civilization, and the great Greek historians--Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius--concentrated on their own, and only studied others in so far as their own came into contact with them. Clearly, people who are going to be historians, not for life, but as an education for life, must make their choice. They must practically confine themselves to studying one civilization if they are to reap the fruits of study at all, and in this case it is natural to ask: Why study h.e.l.lenism rather than our own history? There are two obvious arguments in favour of studying modern history. It seems more familiar and it seems more useful. And it would be a mistake to misrepresent these arguments by stating them only in their cruder forms. 'Familiar' does not mean 'easy', and to say that modern history seems more useful than ancient does not mean that the study of it is a closer approximation to a Pelman course. There is an exceedingly crude view of education among some people just now--perhaps it is largely due to the war, and may disappear like other ugly effects of the war--which inclines to concentrate education on applied chemistry, say, or engineering, with a vague idea that people whose education has been devoted to these subjects will be more capable of competing with foreigners in the dye industry or of working in munition factories in the next emergency. In the same way, conceivably, concentration on modern history might be supposed to equip a student for securing concessions abroad for a firm, or for winning a parliamentary election. Of course, this att.i.tude, though it is rather widespread just now, is absurd. The fallacy lies in confusing the general theoretical knowledge of a subject acquired through being educated in it with the technical knowledge and personal experience which one must have to turn the same subject to practical account in after life. There is no difference of opinion on this point between 'humanists' and 'scientists'. The issue is between people who do not appreciate the value of the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself, and those who do appreciate it and who therefore understand what education means. True lovers of knowledge and true believers in education will be found on the same side in this controversy, whether the subject of their study happens to be the spirit of man or the laws of its environment. But apart from that crude utilitarianism, which is as unscientific as it is un-humane, a serious argument for studying modern rather than ancient history can also be stated from the humane and the scientific point of view. It may be argued that the direct experience we have of our own civilization makes it possible for us to have a deeper, and therefore a more humane and scientific, understanding of it than we can ever have of Ancient Greece. And one might go on to argue, on grounds of humanism alone, that such a comprehension of the character and origins of our civilization would have a more profound humanizing influence upon its development than a less intimate study of a different civilization could produce. This argument is bound to appeal to the generation which has experienced the war. The war is obviously one of the great crises of our civilization. It is like a conflagration lighting up the dim past and throwing it into perspective. The war makes it impossible for us to take our own history for granted. We are bound to inquire into the causes of such an astonis.h.i.+ng catastrophe, and as soon as we do that we find ourselves inquiring into the evolution of Western Civilization since it emerged from the Dark Age. The shock of the Peloponnesian War gave just the same intellectual stimulus to Thucydides, and made him preface his history of that war with a critical a.n.a.lysis, brief but unsurpa.s.sed, of the origins of h.e.l.lenic civilization--the famous introductory chapters of Book I. May not these chapters point the road for us and counsel us to concentrate upon the study of our own history?

This question deserves very serious consideration, not merely from the utilitarian, but from the scientific and humane point of view. But the answer is not a foregone conclusion. There is a case for studying the civilization of Ancient Greece which can be summed up in four points, as follows:

(i) In Greek history the plot of civilization has been worked out to its conclusion. We can sit as spectators through the whole play; we can say: 'This or that is the crisis; from this point onwards the end is inevitable; or if this actor had acted otherwise in those circ.u.mstances the issue would not nave been the same.' We can grasp the structure of the tragedy and divide it into acts. But in our own history we are like players in the middle of the piece, and though we may be able to say 'This is the third act or the fourth act', we cannot say 'This is the last act or the last but one'. We cannot foretell the future; the work of art we are studying is incomplete, and therefore we cannot possibly apprehend it as an artistic whole, however vivid may be our experience of isolated scenes and situations. The first point in favour of Greek history is its completeness and its true perspective from our point of view.

(ii) The second is that the historical experience of the Greeks has been more finely expressed than ours. Its expression is in all Greek art and literature--for it is a great mistake to suppose that historical experience is expressed in so-called historical records alone. The great poets of Greece are of as much a.s.sistance in understanding the mental history of Greece (which is after all the essential element in any history) as the philosophers and historians. And Greek historical experience or mental history is better expressed in Greek literature than ours is in the literature of modern Europe. Without attempting to compare the two literatures as literatures it can be said with some confidence that the surviving masterpieces of Greek literature give a better insight into the subjective side of Greek history--into the emotions and speculations which arose out of the vicissitudes of Greek society and were its most splendid creations--than any insight into the subjective side of modern history which we can obtain by studying it through modern literature.

(iii) The third point is expressed in the concluding phrase of Aristotle's definition of tragedy (_Poetics_, vi. 2). 'Tragedy', he says, 'is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude ... through pity and fear effecting the proper ?a?a?s?? {katharsis} or purgation, of these emotions.' (Butcher's translation.) This word ?a?a?s?? {katharsis}--purgation, purification, cleansing, discharge--has been the subject of interminable controversy among scholars, but any one acquainted with Ancient Greek literature who has lived through the war will understand what it means. Certainly the writer found, in the worst moments of the war, that pa.s.sages from the cla.s.sics--some line of Aeschylus or Lucretius or Virgil, or the sense of some speech in Thucydides, or the impression of some mood of bitterness or serenity in a dialogue of Plato--would come into his mind and give him relief. These men had travelled along the road on which our feet were set; they had travelled it farther than we, travelled it to the end; and the wisdom of greater experience and the poignancy of greater suffering than ours was expressed in the beauty of their words. In the writer's personal experience that relief was obtained from acquaintance with Greek civilization as expressed in Greek literature. It put one in communication with a different civilization from our own--with people who had experienced all and more than we had experienced, and who were now at peace beyond the world of time and change. ?a?a?s?? {Katharsis}, then, is the emotional value which is peculiar to the study of a different civilization, and which one cannot get, at any rate with the same intensity, by the study of his own.

(iv) This emotional value has its intellectual counterpart in the comparative method of study, which one gets by studying, not his own circ.u.mstances, but circ.u.mstances comparable to, without being identical with, his own. This is a commonplace in the field of language. The study of Ancient Greek is generally admitted to have more educative value for an Englishman than the study of modern French or German, because Greek and English embody the fundamental principles of human language in entirely independent forms of expression, while French and English, in addition to the elements common to all language, share the special background of the Bible and the Cla.s.sics, which have given them an extensive common stock of phraseology and imagery. This applies equally to the study of civilization. One learns more by studying Ancient Greek religion and comparing it with Christianity than by studying Christianity in ignorance of other religious phenomena; and one learns more about inst.i.tutions by studying the Greek city-state and comparing it with the modern national state than by merely studying the evolution of the national state in modern Europe. If we take utility to mean intellectual and not practical utility--and as humanists and scientists we do--we may claim without paradox that the study of Greek civilization is valuable just because it is not our own.

These, then, are four points in favour of Greek history: we possess the whole tragedy, it is a magnificent expression of the plot, and it has a peculiar emotional value and a peculiar intellectual value which the drama in which we ourselves are actors cannot have for us.

At this point it is necessary to give a sketch of the plot of Greek history--every one must make his own sketch; the writer offers his to provoke the reader to make his own--and then to ill.u.s.trate the second point, the beauty of the expression, by quoting half a dozen pa.s.sages from ancient authors. The other two points--the cathartic and the comparative value of Greek history--are matters of personal experience.

I have little doubt that the reader will experience them himself if he takes up this study seriously and from a broad point of view.

III

_The Plot of Ancient Greek Civilization_

The genesis of Ancient Greek civilization is certainly later than the twelfth century B. C., when Minoan civilization, its predecessor, was still in process of dissolution; and the termination of Ancient Greek civilization must certainly be placed before the eighth century A. D., when modern Western civilization, its successor, had already come into being. Between these extreme points we cannot exactly date its beginning and end, but we can see that it covers a period of seventeen or eighteen centuries.

It is easier to divide the tragedy into acts. We can at once discern two dramatic crises--the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War and the foundation of the Roman Empire. We can for convenience take precise dates--431 B. C. and 31 B. C.--and group the action into three acts or phases, one before, one between, and one after these critical moments.

It is best to give the a.n.a.lysis in tabular form:

_Act I_ (11th cent.-431 B. C.).

1. Synoikismos (formation of the city-state, the cell of Greek society), 11th cent.-750 B. C.

2. Colonization (propagation of the city-state round the Mediterranean), 750-600 B. C.

3. Economic revolution (change from extensive to intensive growth), 600-500 B. C.

4. Confederation (repulse of Oriental universal empire and creation of an inter-state federation, the Delian League), 500-431 B. C.

_Act II_ (431 B. C.-31 B. C.).

1. The Greek wars (failure of inter-state federation), 431-355 B.

C.

2. The Oriental wars (the superman, conquest of the East, struggle for the spoils, barbarian invasion), 355-272 B. C.

3. The first rally (change of scale and fresh experiments in federation--Seleucid Asia, Roman Italy, Aetolian and Achaean 'United States'), 272-218 B. C.

4. The Roman wars (destruction of four great powers by one; devastation of the Mediterranean world), 218-146 B. C.

5. The cla.s.s wars (capitalism, bolshevism, Napoleonism), 146-31 B.

C.

_Act III_ (31 B. C.-7th cent. A. D.).

1. The second rally (final experiment in federation--compromise between city-state autonomy and capitalistic centralization), 31 B. C.-A. D. 180.

2. The first dissolution (external front broken by tribesmen, internal by Christianity), A. D. 180-284.

3. The final rally (Constantine t?? d??? p??seta????eta? {ton demon prosetairizetai}--tribesmen on to the land, bishops into the bureaucracy), A. D. 284-378.

4. The final dissolution (break of tradition), A. D. 378-7th cent.

This a.n.a.lysis is and must be subjective. Every one has to make his own, just as every one has to apprehend for himself the form of a work of art. But however the historian may a.n.a.lyse the plot and group it into acts, it must be borne in mind that the action is continuous, and that the first emergence of the Greek city-state in the Aegean and the last traces of munic.i.p.al self-government in the Roman Empire are phases in the history of a single civilization. It may seem a paradox to call this civilization a unity. But the study of Greek and Latin literature leaves no doubt in one's mind that the difference of language there is less significant than the unity of form, and that one is really dealing with a single literature, the h.e.l.lenic, which in many of its branches was imitated and propagated in the Latin language, just as it was to a lesser extent in Hebrew, or later on in Syriac and Arabic. The unity is even more apparent when, instead of confining our attention to literature, we regard the whole field of civilization. It is not really possible to draw a distinction between Greek history and Roman history.

At most one can say that at some point Greek history enters on a phase which it may be convenient to distinguish verbally by connecting it with the name of Rome. To take the case of the Roman Empire--the reader may possibly have been surprised to find the Roman Empire treated as the third act in the tragedy of Greece; yet when one studies the Empire one finds that it was essentially a Greek inst.i.tution. Inst.i.tutionally it was at bottom a federation of city-states, a solution of the political problem with which Greek society had been wrestling since the fifth century B. C. And even the non-munic.i.p.al element, the centralized bureaucratic organization which Augustus spread like a fine, almost impalpable net to hold his federation of munic.i.p.alities together, was largely a fruit of Greek administrative experience. As papyrology reveals the administrative system of the Ptolemaic Dynasty--the Greek successors of Alexander who preceded the Caesars in the government of Egypt--we are learning that even those inst.i.tutions of the Empire which have been regarded as most un-Greek may have been borrowed through a Greek intermediary. Imperial jurisprudence, again, interpreted Roman munic.i.p.al law into the law of a civilization by reading into it the principles of Greek moral philosophy. And Greek, not Latin, was still the language in which most of the greatest literature of the Imperial period was written. One need only mention works which are still widely read and which have influenced our own civilization--Plutarch's _Lives_, Marcus Aurelius' _Meditations_, and the New Testament. They are all written in Greek, and who will venture to a.s.sert that the age in which they were written falls outside Greek history, or that the social experience which produced them was not an act in the tragedy of h.e.l.lenic civilization? Even statistically the Empire was more Greek than anything else. Probably a considerable majority of its inhabitants spoke Greek as a lingua franca, if not as their mother-tongue. Nearly all the great industrial and commercial centres were in the Greek or h.e.l.lenized provinces. Possibly, during the first two centuries of the Empire, more Greek was spoken than Latin by the proletariat of Rome itself. The Greek core of the Roman Empire played the part of Western Europe in the modern world. The Latinized provinces were thinly populated, backward, and only superficially initiated into the fraternity of civilization. Latinized Spain and Africa were the South America, Latinized Gaul and Britain the Russia of the Ancient Greek world. The pulse of the Empire was driven by a Greek heart, and it beat comparatively feebly in the non-Greek extremities.

IV

_The Literary Expression of the Plot_