The Greek Way

by Edith Hamilton

The ancient world, in so far as we can reconstruct it, bears everywhere the same stamp. In Egypt, in Crete, in Mesopotamia, wherever we can read bits of the story, we find the same conditions: a despot enthroned, whose whims and passions are the determining factor in the state; a wretched, subjugated populace; a great priestly organization to which is handed over the domain of the intellect.

Athens and Rome had little in common. That which distinguishes the modern world from the ancient, and that which divides the West from the East, is the supremacy of mind in the affairs of men, and this came to birth in Greece and lived in Greece alone of all the ancient world. The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.

To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit which distinguished it from all that had gone before. It is a vital distinction. The joy of life is written upon everything the Greeks left behind and they who leave it out of account fail to reckon with something that is of first importance in understanding how the Greek achievement came to pass in the world of antiquity.

The sentences which Plato says were inscribed in the shrine at Delphi are singularly unlike those to be found in holy places outside of Greece. Know thyself was the first, and Nothing in excess the second, both marked by a total absence of the idiom of priestly formulas all the world over.

The glory, doubtless, of the heavenly bodies fills us with more delight than the contemplation of these lowly things, but the heavens are high and far off, and the knowledge of celestial things that our senses give us, is scanty and dim. Living creatures, on the contrary, are at our door, and if we so desire we may gain full and certain knowledge of each and all. We take pleasure in a statue’s beauty; should not then the living fill us with delight? And all the more if in the spirit of the love of knowledge we search for causes and bring to light evidences of meaning. Then will nature’s purpose and her deep-seated laws be revealed in all things, all tending in her multitudinous work to one form or another of the beautiful.

The spirit has not essentially anything to do with what is outside of itself. It is mind that keeps hold of reality. The way of the spirit is by withdrawal from the world of objects to contemplation of the world within and there is no need of any correspondence between what goes on without and what goes on within. Not the mind but the spirit is its own place, and can make a Hell of Heaven, a Heaven of Hell.

Greek art is intellectual art, the art of men who were clear and lucid thinkers, and it is therefore plain art. Artists than whom the world has never seen greater, men endowed with the spirit’s best gift, found their natural method of expression in the simplicity and clarity which are the endowment of the unclouded reason. “Nothing in excess,” the Greek axiom of art, is the dictum of men who would brush aside all obscuring, entangling superfluity, and see clearly, plainly, unadorned, what they wished to express. Structure belongs in an especial degree to the province of the mind in art, and architectonics were pre-eminently a mark of the Greek. The power that made a unified whole of the trilogy of a Greek tragedy, that envisioned the sure, precise, decisive scheme of the Greek statue, found its most conspicuous expression in Greek architecture. The Greek temple is the creation, par excellence, of mind and spirit in equilibrium.

A Hindoo temple is a conglomeration of adornment. The lines of the building are completely hidden by the decorations. Sculptured figures and ornaments crowd its surface, stand out from it in thick masses, break it up into a bewildering series of irregular tiers. It is not a unity but a collection, rich, confused. It looks like something not planned but built this way and that as the ornament required. The conviction underlying it can be perceived: each bit of the exquisitely wrought detail had a mystical meaning and the temple’s exterior was important only as a means for the artist to inscribe thereon the symbols of the truth. It is decoration, not architecture.

The English method is to fill the mind with beauty; the Greek method was to set the mind to work.

The proper leaders of the world, the only ones who could be trusted to guide it disinterestedly, were a class from generation to generation raised above the common level, not by self-seeking ambition, but by birth; a class which a great tradition and a careful training made superior to the selfish greed and the servile meanness other men were subject to.

Aristocrats subjected themselves as proudly and willingly to the exacting discipline of the gentleman as they did to the rigid discipline of the warrior. High privilege was theirs, but it was weighted by great responsibility. The burden of leadership lay upon them; they must direct and protect the unprivileged. Nobility of birth must be matched by nobility of conduct.

Almost all his poems that we have are songs in honor of a noble victor at one of the four chief games—the Pythian near Delphi, the Isthmian at Corinth, the Nemean in Argolis, and, most glorious of all, the Olympic at Olympia. These triumphal odes are written in a way peculiar to Pindar.

Man is a shadow’s dream.”

The Athenians, he says, are “lovers of beauty without having lost the taste for simplicity, and lovers of wisdom without loss of manly vigor.”

People so devoted to poetry as to make it a matter of practical importance must have been, we feel, deficient in the sense for what is practically important, dreamers, not alive to life’s hard facts. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Greeks were pre-eminently realists. The temper of mind that made them carve their statues and paint their pictures from the living human beings around them, that kept their poetry within the sober limits of the possible, made them hard-headed men in the world of every-day affairs. They were not tempted to evade facts. It is we ourselves who are the sentimentalists.

We ourselves belong to an age of specialists, the result, really, of our belonging to an age that loves comfort. It is obvious that one man doing only one thing can work faster, and the reasonable conclusion in a world that wants a great many things, is to arrange to have him do it. Twenty men making each a minute bit of a shoe, turn out far more than twenty times the number of shoes that the cobbler working alone did, and in consequence no one must go barefoot. We have our reward in an ever-increasing multiplication of the things everyone needs but we pay our price in the limit set to the possibilities of development for each individual worker.

“To sum up”—the speaker is Pericles—“I say that Athens is the school of Greece and that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace”—

His habitual manner is a charming diffidence. “I know it may all be quite wrong,” he seems to say. He suggests merely—with a question mark. It is the way of the most sophisticated people in the ne plus ultra of civilized society.

“True comedy,” said Voltaire, “is the speaking picture of the Follies and Foibles of a Nation.” He had Aristophanes in mind, and no better description could be given of the Old Comedy of Athens. To read Aristophanes is in some sort like reading an Athenian comic paper. All the life of Athens is there: the politics of the day and the politicians; the war party and the anti-war party; pacifism, votes for women, free trade, fiscal reform, complaining taxpayers, educational theories, the current religious and literary talk—everything, in short, that interested the average citizen. All was food for his mockery. He was the speaking picture of the follies and foibles of his day.

CHREMYLUS: I’ll tell you why, straight out. Of all my slaves I know you are the best, most constant—thief. Well—I have been a good, religious man, But always poor—no luck. SLAVE: And so you have. CHREMYLUS: While a church robber, and those thieves who live On politics, get rich. SLAVE: And so they do. CHREMYLUS: So then I went to ask—not for myself, I’ve pretty well shot all my arrows now— But for my son, my only son. I prayed That he might change his ways and turn into A scoundrel, wicked, rotten through and through, And so live happily forever after. The god replied, the first man I fell in with To follow. SLAVE: Yes—Quite good. Of course, a blind man Can see it’s better nowadays to be A rotten scoundrel.

CHREMYLUS: Why, everything there is, is just Wealth’s slave. The girls, now, if a poor man comes along, Will they look at him? But just let a rich one, And he can get a deal more than he wants. SLAVE: Oh, not the sweet, good, modest girls. They never Would ask a man for money. CHREMYLUS: No? What then? SLAVE: Presents—the kind that cost a lot—that’s all. CHREMYLUS: Well, all the voting’s done for Wealth of course. You man our battleships. You own our army. When you’re an ally, that side’s sure to win. Nobody ever has enough of you. While all things else a man can have too much of— Of love. SLAVE: Of loaves. CHREMYLUS: Of literature. SLAVE: Of candy. CHREMYLUS: Of fame. SLAVE: Of figs. CHREMYLUS: Of manliness. SLAVE: Of mutton.

Aristophanes understood it too as none better: Come listen now to the good old days when the children, strange to tell, Were seen not heard, led a simple life, in short were brought up well.

Who lectures in the Hall of Arts to-day? LADY BLANCHE: I, madam, on Abstract Philosophy. There I propose considering at length Three points—the Is, the Might Be, and the Must. Whether the Is, from being actual fact, Is more important than the vague Might Be, Or the Might Be, from taking wider scope, Is for that reason greater than the Is: And lastly, how the Is and Might Be stand Compared with the inevitable Must! PRINCESS: The subject’s deep.