J. P. Mahaffy

“ It has been long the fashion—since the writings of Ernest Renan it has been almost a commonplace, to say: that while modern Europe owes to the Greeks all manner of wisdom and of refinement, in politics, literature, philosophy, architecture, sculpture, one thing there is which they could not impart to us,—religion. This deeper side of man, his relation to one God, his duty and his responsibilities beyond this ordinary life, we owe not to the Greeks, but to the legacy of the Semitic race. ”

“ The history of Greece, as I have often said already, is intensely modern,—far more so than any mediæval or than most recent histories. We [197] have to deal with a people fully developed, in its mature life; nay, even in its old age and decadence. To deny a historian the privilege and the profit of illumining his subject by the light of modern parallels, or the life of to-day by parallels from Greek history, is simply to condemn him to remain an unpractical pedant, and to abandon the strongest claim to a hearing from practical men. ”

“ But if the tyrannis was so unmixed an evil, how comes it to have been a constant and permanent phenomenon in Greek politics? Man may indeed, as Polybius says, be the most gullible of all animals, though professing to be the most sagacious, and may ever be ready to fall into the same snares that he has seen successful in entrapping others [82:2] . But surely it exceeds all the bounds of human, not to say Greek, stupidity that men should perpetually set a villain over them to plunder, violate, and exile men and women.
The real uses to politics of temporary despots. ”

“ But as a philosopher deeply interested in the real culture of the mind, perhaps as a theorist deeply impressed with the haphazard character of the traditional education, he felt that to intrust an uneducated mob with the control of public affairs was either to hand over the State to unscrupulous leaders, who would gain the favour of the crowd by false and unworthy means, or to run the chance of having the most important matters settled by the caprice of a many-headed and therefore wholly irresponsible tyrant. ”

“ As the Greek language has lasted in that wonderful country in spite of long domination by Romans, of huge invasion by Celts and Slavs, of feudal occupation by Frankish knights, of raid and rapine by Catalans and Venetians, ending with the cruel tyranny of the Turk, so the Greek spirit has lasted through all manner of metamorphose and modification, till the return wave has in our day made it the highest aspiration of our worldly perfection. ”

“ Even after all the full experience of Greek democracies, of the complete liberty of the free citizen, of the value of public discussion, and of the responsibility of magistrates to the people, we find all the later theorists deliberately asserting that if you could secure the right man, a single-headed State was the most perfect. All the abuses of tyranny, therefore, so carefully pictured by literary men, had not seemed to them equal to the abuses of mob-rule,—the violence and the vacillation of an incompetent or needy public. ”

“ In the shocking condition of cities like Athens before Peisistratus, or the Megara of Theognis, we may even go so far as to say that, without an interval during which both parties were taught simply to obey, no reasonable political life was possible. The haughty noble must be taught that he too had a master; he must be taught to treat his plebeian brother as another man, and not merely as a beast of burden. ”

“ And it is to me certain, that many of the virtues as well as the vices of the Athenian arose from his being an aristocrat in the strictest sense,—the member of a privileged and limited society ruling over inferiors, with the leisure obtainable by the poorest slaveholder, and the dignity always resulting from the consciousness of inherent superiority. And yet with all this, the type of perfection which the Greeks, as a people, ever held before them was not the polished democrat of Athens, but the blunt aristocrat of Sparta. ”

“ But Greek literature was in the hands of the aristocrats; and so we have a long catalogue of accusations from Alcæus, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plato, Polybius, Plutarch,—in fact all through Greek literature; according to which the tyrant is a ruffian who usurps power in order that he may gratify his lusts at the expense of all justice and mercy. Feeling himself the enemy of mankind, he is perpetually in a panic of suspicion, and surrounds himself with mercenaries who carry out his behests. ”

“ How did the Greeks of Europe and of Asia accommodate themselves to this altered state of things, which not only affected their political life, but led to a revolution in their social state? For it was the emigrant, the adventurer, the mercenary, who now got wealth and power into his hands, it was the capitalist who secured all the advantages of trade; and so there arose in every city a moneyed class, whose interests were directly at variance with the mass of impoverished citizens. ”

“ It was to this dispute that the real origin of the Peloponnesian war is to be traced. And though most people thought Athens quite justified in holding what she had obtained, and not surrendering the empire which had cost such labour and returned in exchange such great glory, yet the general feeling of the Greek world was distinctly in favour of the seceder,—in favour of the inalienable right of every city to reassert its autonomy as a separate State [180:1] , not only with communal independence, but with perfect liberty to treat as it chose with neighbouring States. ”

“ If his speakers, as one of them tells us, strove hard to conceal what they had to say under new and startling forms, in order to outrun in smartness the cleverness of their audience, and play a sort of intellectual hide-and-seek with their critics, so Thucydides himself plays hide-and-seek with the grammarians, both ancient and modern. To make out exactly what he means his speakers to say, and to render it with every shade of nicety into modern English, is a task to which many acute men have devoted years, and upon its success very considerable reputations depend. ”

“ It is indeed difficult to overrate the amount and the variety of the many hidden threads that unite our modern culture to that of ancient Greece, not to speak of the conscious return of our own century to the golden age of Hellenic life as the only human epoch in art, literature, and eloquence which ever approached perfection. ”

“ There seems, as it were, a national strain exercised by a conquering and imperial democracy, which its members may sustain for a generation or two, but which cannot endure. The sweets of accumulated wealth and domestic comfort in a civilized and agreeable society become so delightful that the better classes will not keep up their own energy. All work, says Aristotle, to which men submit, is for the purpose of having leisure; and so there is a natural tendency in the cultivated classes to stand aside from politics, and allow the established laws to run in their now accustomed grooves. ”

“ Whatever may be the case with the great States of modern days, this prognosis was thoroughly verified in Greek history. It may safely be said that no State was ever crushed by external adversaries at the period of its perfection. In every case internal decay has heralded the overthrow from without. There is no reasonable probability that, had there never been a Philip or an Alexander, Athens, Sparta, Thebes, or Argos would have risen into a glorious future and revived the splendours of Leonidas or of Pericles. We may deeply regret that the maintenance of such prosperity should seem impossible ”

“ The century at which we have now arrived in our survey—the fourth before Christ—was eminently the age of political theories devised by philosophers in their studies; and they give us the conclusions to which able thinkers had come, after the varying conflicts which had tested the capacities of all the existing States to attain peace with plenty at home, or power abroad. The Athenian supremacy had broken down; the Spartan, a still more complete hegemony, as the Greeks called it, had gone to pieces, not so much by the shock of the Theban military power, as by its own inherent defects. ”

“ Perhaps, indeed, the remoteness of foreign writers from political conflicts such as ours gives them a calmness and fairness which is of advantage, while the English writer can hardly avoid a certain amount of partisanship, however carefully he may strive to be scrupulously impartial. For in all these things we are compelled unconsciously to reflect not only our century, but our nation, and colour the acts and the motives of other days with the hues our imagination has taken from surrounding circumstances. ”

“ The manner in which the Ten Thousand were received, upon their return to Greek lands, shows all this plainly enough. Instead of being hailed as pioneers of a new conquest, as heroes who had done what nobody dreamed of doing before, they were merely regarded as a very large and therefore very dangerous body of turbulent marauders, who had acquired cohesion and discipline by the force of adversity, and who might make a dangerous attack on any civilized city, unless a little time were gained, during which their strength and harmony would give way to defections, and quarrels among themselves. ”

“ Perhaps the history of Greece has more right than any other to excite this interest, since the effects of that country and its people are probably far greater, certainly more subtle and various, than those of any other upon our modern life. It is curious that this truth is becoming recognized universally by the very generation which has begun to agitate against the general teaching of Greek in our higher schools. Nobody now attributes any real leading to the Romans in art, in philosophy, in the sciences, nay, even in the science of politics. ”

“ Had the Greeks not been subjected to this splendid training, which radiated from politics into art and letters, and which stimulated, though it did not create, that national genius that has since found no rival, all the glories of Hellenism, all the splendours of Alexander's successors, all the victories over Western barbarism would have been impossible. ”

“ As they looked upon the changing phases of society which make up that complicated and various whole called Greek history, they were led to one general conclusion. No State, however perfectly framed, however accurately balanced, was intended by Nature to last for ever. Polities, like individuals, had their youth, development, and decay, and would in the lapse of time give way to newer growths. In this we find one of the most curious contrasts between the buoyant, hopeful Greek and the weary, saddened modern. ”

“ How striking is the fact that the task of translating certain great masterpieces of poetry seems never completed, and that in the face of scores of versions, each generation of scholars will attack afresh Homer's Iliad, Dante's Divina Commedia, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, and Goethe's Faust! ”

“ It is remarkable how fully Thirlwall states this view of the Greek myths, and how clearly his cautious mind appreciates the indisputable weakness of all such legends in affording proper and trustworthy evidence. But when we come to persistent bodies of legend which assert that Oriental immigrants—Cadmus, Danaus, Pelops, &c.—brought civilization to yet barbarous Greece, Thirlwall, with all his doubts, with all his dislike to vague and shifting stories, cannot make up his mind to regard these agreeing myths as mere idle inventions. ”

“ From the days of Homer down, as I have shown amply in my Social Life in Greece, we find a low standard of truth and honesty in that brilliant society, which is gilded over to us by their splendid intellectual gifts. As Ulysses in legend, Themistocles in early, Aratus in later history are the types which speak home to Greek imagination and excite the national admiration, so in a later day Cicero, in a remarkable passage, where he discusses the merits and demerits of the race [152:2] , lays it down as an axiom that their honesty is below par, and will never rank in court with a Roman's word. ”

“ But at this period a despot, if he ruled over a large dominion, called himself a king; and we may therefore add to the list most of the so-called kings, who close the history of independent Greece, as they commenced it in the legends.
Greek hatred of the despot,
how far universal in early days.
The despot, or tyrant [80:2] as he is called, has a very bad reputation in Greek history. The Greeks of every age have not only loved individual liberty, but are a singularly jealous people, who cannot endure that one of themselves shall lord it over the rest. ”

“ The writers who have dealt with this great and various development of later Hellenism are either the historians of the Roman Empire—especially Duruy, who has kept up the thread of his Greek History in his popular History of Rome—or the theologians. The latter have a field so specially their own, and the literature of the subject is so enormous, that the mere historian of Greece and the Greeks must content himself with the pagan side. ”

“ He learned knowledge of the world and of war by travel and exciting campaigns, and completed his admirable and various training by a close intimacy with the best and most aristocratic Spartan life, together with that devotion to field-sports which is so far more gentlemanly and improving than training for athletics. In the whole range of Greek literature he appears the most cultivated of authors, in his external life he combines everything which we desire in the modern gentleman, though his superficiality of judgment and lesser gifts place him far below Thucydides, or even Polybius. ”

“ My reason for this omission was, that here, if anywhere, the excellence of the extant Hellenic work is acknowledged, while the fact that all those ignorant of the language are excluded from enjoying it, makes any discussion of it unsuited to the general public. For whatever may be said of good translations of foreign prose, poetry is so essentially the artistic expression of the peculiar tongue in which it originates, that all transference into alien words must produce a fatal alteration. A great English poet may indeed transfer the ideas of a Greek to his page ”