Ancient Greek literature

“ In attempting to understand the scope and development of Greek literature, our greatest difficulty comes from the fragmentary and one-sided nature of our tradition. There has perhaps never been any society in history so near to the highest side of our own as the Athens of Euripides and Plato. ”

“ A product of the great classical revival, its cause was necessarily linked with the civilisation of ancient Greece, and of that civilisation the worship of the old gods seemed to form an integral element. One need only think of the Italian Renaissance, with its predilection for the old mythology, to understand how much stronger and more passionate this feeling must have been among those to whom Greek literature still spoke in a living language, whose eyes, wherever they turned, still rested on the monuments, unrivalled, undesecrated, unfallen, unfaded, of Greek religious art. ”

“ J.P. Mahaffy, M.A., Fellow and Professor of Ancient History, Trinity College, Dublin. New York: Harper & Brothers.
It is easy to imagine a history of Greek literature which should be not only useful and stimulative to the student, but fascinating to the general mass of intelligent readers. The literature of Greece is not, like that of modern nations, the mirror of a many-colored life; but the originality, variety and perfection of its forms make it on the whole the most complete and splendid representation of thought and imagination which the world possesses. ”

“ In these times of slighting of the ancient world it is well to reflect how many of the commonest allusions of literature, and even of political editorials, depend for their meaning upon some knowledge of the Greek stories. ”

“ Originality, except in things themselves nobly worth while, may be a bane and not a benefit. The originality of the Greeks led to the production of works of poetic art which in themselves, on their own intrinsic merits, stand supreme. It is the manifold and universal excellence of the several kinds of Greek poetry—their perennial freshness, vigor, spontaneous vitality, their lucidity and their enkindling light—more than anything else that establishes the claim of Greek literature to its high place in the traditions and elements of civilization. ”

“ The Greeks are a people of such swift constructive imagination that they almost always obscure any problem of origins. So fair and magical are their cloud-capp’d towers that they distract our minds from the task of digging for foundations. There is scarcely a problem in the origins of Greek mythology and religion that has been solved within the domain of Greek thinking only. Ritual with them was, in the case of drama, so swiftly and completely transmuted into art that, had we had Greek material only to hand, we might never have marked the transition. ”

“ The plays then written, the subjects of which were the popular Greek legends, still rank, for grandeur of sentiment and nobility of feeling, with the finest poetry the world has ever produced. This proves to us that the Greeks were a highly refined and cultivated people. The Greek influence in art and literature has left its own mark in civilising and elevating mankind ”

“ Their history shows how they failed in perfectly carrying out their ideals because of certain weaknesses of character and of certain conditions and limitations in their life from which the men of to-day can learn many useful lessons. The greatness of the Greeks lies, not in what they did not do or did imperfectly, but in their spirit, that spirit which in their political history, their literature and their art sought for Freedom, for Truth, and for Beauty. ”

“ The author of the Platonic Epinomis felt this truth, which finds illustration not only in literature but in all other forms of artistic expression, when he said, "Whatever the Greeks take over from the foreign world they fashion into something far more beautiful." Other nations have struck out on new lines in many things, but in none has the world ever beheld such a transcendent wealth of original tendencies, impulses, products. Think of what—to speak of forms of poetry only—we owe in their beginnings to the Greeks: epic poetry, lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy. ”

“ Greek literature was The arts. no longer synonymous with epic poetry. Some of its most distinctive forms had not yet been evolved; indeed, it is only quite at the end of the period that prose-writing begins; but both lyric and elegiac poetry had been brought to perfection. In art, statuary was still comparatively stiff and crude; but in other branches, in architecture, in vase-painting and in coin-types, the aesthetic genius of the race had asserted its pre-eminence. Philosophy, the supreme gift of Greece to the modern world, had become a living power. ”

“ The Early Literature.—A process of natural growth may be traced through all the best work of the Greek genius. The Greeks were not literary imitators of foreign models; the forms of poetry and prose in which they attained to such unequalled excellence were first developed by themselves. Their literature had its roots in their political and social life; it is the spontaneous expression of that life in youth, maturity and decay ”

“ But for this absence of authentic history, Greek literature could never have become what it was. By the purely fictitious character of its poetry, and its freedom from the shackles of particular truths, it acquired that general probability which led Aristotle to consider poetry as more philosophical than history. Greek art, likewise, from the lateness of the period at which it descended from the representation of gods and heroes to the portraits of real men, acquired a nobleness and beauty of form which it could not otherwise have obtained. ”

“ The Greek artist, with his miraculous cunning of hand, could deal with such types as he could not have dealt with ‘the Word’ or with the ‘Buddha.’ Nor was he merely the exponent of the highest popular imagination, but, unconsciously perhaps and in obedience to a true art-tradition, at times a reformer and in any case a creator. For us his works have this value among others that, even more than the poetic literature, they reveal to us how the people at their best imagined their deities. ”

“ When we think of the debt which mankind owes to the Greeks, we are apt to think too exclusively of the masterpieces in literature and art which they have left us. But the Greek genius was many-sided; the Greek, with his insatiable love of knowledge, his determination to see things as they are and to see them whole, his burning desire to be able to give a rational explanation of everything in heaven and earth, was just as irresistibly driven to natural science, mathematics, and exact reasoning in general, or logic. ”

“ To confine art to architecture, sculpture and painting, is to rob it of half its meaning. The forms of art are as many and varied as are the interests of every-day life, and this belief is one of the great gifts of Greece to the world. It was not given to every Greek to be a great artist. Not every one could be an Aeschylus and write the Agamemnon, a Sophocles and write the Antigone, a Pheidias and create the Parthenon, or a Praxiteles and model the Hermes, but every one could work in the spirit of which these great works are the supreme examples. ”

“ The art of omission is the art which English writers most need to learn; the literary lima is their least-handled tool. Both art and tool were perfectly understood and constantly used by the Greeks.
The third mark of Greek Literature, with which I have to deal, is perhaps its most important, certainly its most universal quality. It is truthfulness. The Greeks told no fewer lies than other races, but they had the desire and the power to see the world as it is. By this essential quality they gave Europe the conception of philosophy and science. These we inherit from them alone ”

“ Greek simplicity recalls us to the central interests of the human heart. Greek truthfulness is a challenge to see the world as it is and shun the emptiness of mere music, the falsities of rhetoric or sentiment, the incompleteness of writers who, instead of seeing life as a whole, ignore or emphasize a part of it as their own sympathies dictate. Greek beauty is a memorial of an aspect of the universe to which ages of thought are often blind. Greek technique is a lesson in ‘form’ and a reminder of its place in literature. ”

“ THE SOURCES AND THE EVIDENCE The foundation of a serious and scientific study of Greek religion, as distinct from the mere mythology of Hellas, may almost be said to have been an achievement of the last generation of scholars. And it is only through recent research that the Hellenic spirit, so creative and imperial in the domains of literature, art and science, can be recognised as manifesting itself not unworthily in the sphere of religion. ”

“ In these five periods—periods of superb adolescence, early manhood, magnificent maturity, robust old age, and senility—we can trace the genius of the Greeks putting forth its vigor in successive works of art and literature, concentrating its energy at first upon its own self-culture, then extending its influence in every direction, and controlling the education of humanity, finally contenting itself with pondering and poring on its past, with mystical metaphysics and pedantic criticism. Yet even in its extreme decadence the Hellenic spirit is still potent. ”

“ The myths survive chiefly as material for literature, the shapes of the gods themselves chiefly as material for art. They are both of them objects not of belief but of imagination. Yet when the religious imagination of Greece deepens it twines itself still around these gracious and ever-moving shapes; the Zeus of Aeschylus moves on into the Zeus of Plato or of Cleanthes or of Marcus Aurelius. Hermes, Athena, Apollo, all have their long spiritual history. ”

“ For in spite of its secular freedom, which is its salient achievement, Greek literature in its highest and most popular forms, as well as in its narrower and more special, is deeply infused or preoccupied with religion and religious myth. In fact, it reflects the vivifying penetration of religion into all parts of Greek activity and mental life. ”

“ In such a manner the Greek mind humanized its world, and in doing so humanized itself, or rather divinized itself, without stretching to the breaking-point the strands which bound itself to its world. But it did not stop there, and we do it wrong if we dwell too exclusively on its triumphant achievements in literature and art. For 'speech created thought, which is the measure of the universe'. The Greeks were not only supreme artists but also the pioneers of thought. ”

“ The amount of latitude in literary expression varies no doubt with the prevalent popular morality of the period. But it would lead to infinite confusion to think of the poetry as a translation of conduct. A truer picture of Greek life is happily given us in those epigrams which deal with the material that history passes over and ideal poetry, at least in Greek literature, barely touches upon, the life of simple human relations from day to day within the circle of the family. ”

“ As the man of science delights in nature because she speaks of herself, so the student of literature delights in the poetry of the Greeks because it reveals the soul of man in its radiant and wondrously gifted youth. And so when we are asked whether modem poetry has not much to offer that is better than Greek poetry, and are told that it suits our times, being ampler and deeper in sentiment, and at least equally happy in marrying sense and verse, we can only reply that the thoughtful really live in no one time above another ”

“ No doubt we come prepared to regard them with eyes coloured, and a fancy haunted by the beauties of Grecian literature. Possibly, it is under the spell of Homeric verse that our eyes grow humid with delight at the aspect of Aphrodite, that we behold divinity in Zeus or Phœbos Apollo; but this only proves that the fragments of Hellenic civilisation throw a light upon each other, and are parts of one great whole. Perhaps, too, no man ever enjoyed the sculpture of Greece as he should, unless conversant with her poetry—the right hand of her art. ”

“ Greek literature—poetry, and to a certain extent prose also—has these peculiar excellences to so signal a degree, because it stood, as no other literature has since stood, in intimate relations with the whole of the life whence it sprung. Greek civilization had a solidarity and unity, and withal a noble simplicity, that gave to all parts and elements of it a vital interrelation and connection. Life, the whole life of the city-state, and sometimes of the whole nation, was the poet's inspirer, regulator, test. ”

“ We sit to-day beneath a Greek sky on the rising tiers of the modern centuries, and the drama of Athenian life is reproduced before our eyes. The greater protagonists of literature and life play out their rôles. ”

“ A close acquaintance with these creative ideas of the early world is necessary to an understanding of all subsequent life and literature. And it is not merely the names of Greek divinities and definitions of their character and qualities which put meaning into the numberless allusions of modern writers. One reason why many modern thinkers smile at the trite [Pg 70] ness and childishness of Greek fable is, that they have not caught the spirit and meaning of the Greek story. The great masters of thought, like Goethe, Shakespeare, Emerson, Tennyson, and Bryant, have seen deeper. ”