Ancient Greeks

“ Greece no longer occupies in the map of the world the position it occupied in antiquity. It has been lifted out of the centre of civilisation, to be cast upon its outskirts, or, which is the same thing, civilisation has shifted its seat. Nor are the Greeks any longer what they formerly were, though perhaps by a fortunate combination of circumstances they might still be rendered so. At present there is the same difference between them and their ancestors as between a jar of Falernian, and an empty jar. The clay, indeed, is there, beautifully moulded, and the purple hue of life is on the cheek ”

“ The history of ancient Greece is the study of legislators, philosophers, and poets; it is the history of men, compared with the history of titles. What the Greeks were, was a reality, not a promise. And what we are and hope to be, is derived, as it were, from the influence and inspiration of these glorious generations.
Whatever tends to afford a further illustration of the manners and opinions of those to whom we owe so much, and who were perhaps, on the whole, the most perfect specimens of humanity of whom we have authentic record, were infinitely valuable. ”

“ In feature and build the modern Greek still possesses the characteristic traits of his ancestors. Scientific researches and anatomical observations made upon the skulls of ancient Greeks are said to prove that if art had glorified to a slight extent the splendid models of statues, it could not have strayed very far from the originals. Such pure and perfect types are constantly met with at the present day in the modern Greeks, who, as a rule, possess fine open foreheads, straight noses, and fine eyes full of fire and intelligence, furnished with black lashes and well-defined eyebrows ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now because the Greek communities lived in the plains, separated from each other by mountains, instead of forming one large kingdom, they formed a great many small ones. There was in ancient times no King of Greece, but Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes and countless other cities had their own independent forms of government, their own rulers, their own armies, their own ships, and except that they were all Greek and were all bound together by ties of language and religion, they were quite independent of each other. ”

“ The Greek drama began as a religious observance in honour of Dionysus. To the Greeks this god personified both the spring and the vintage, the latter a very important time of year in a vine-growing country, and he was a symbol to them of that power there is in man of rising out of himself, of being impelled onwards by a joy within him that he cannot explain, but which makes him go forward, walking, as it were, on the wings of the wind, of the spirit that fills him with a deep sense of worship. ”

“ They loved the sea and were at home upon it, and this sea-faring life developed the same spirit of freedom and independence.
The mild climate relieved the Greeks of many cares which come to those who live in harsher lands, but the atmosphere was clear and bracing, which stimulated clear thinking. The Greeks were the first great thinkers in the world; they were possessed of a passion for knowing the truth about all things in heaven and earth, and few people have sought truth with greater courage and clearness of mind than the Greeks. ”

“ But although all these circumstances and many others contributed, as we have shown, to expedite the progress of the Greeks in civilisation, they were none of them the fountain head, which lies far beyond our ken. It were in fact as easy to tell why one star differs from another star in glory, as why one nation or one man rises in intellect above his fellows. But we are supplied with a link in the chain which connects the above effects with their cause, by the physical organisation of the Greeks, who possessed the most perfect forms in which humanity ever appeared. ”

“ This, likewise, was the conviction of the ancient Greeks, [1241] in whose literature we everywhere discover vestiges of a passion for that voluptuous solitude which men taste in artificial and secluded plantations, amid flower-beds and arbours and hanging vines and fountains and smooth shady walks. No full description, however, of an Hellenic garden has survived; even the poets have contented themselves with affording us glimpses of their “studious walks and shades.” ”

“ The Greek people were lovers of freedom, truth, self-control and beauty. It is in their political history, their literature and their architecture that we shall see some of the outward and visible signs of the spirit that inspired them, and the land of Greece is the setting in which they played their part in the history of civilization. ”

“ As the trees, plants, and flowers owed their nourishment to their genial, fostering care, these divinities were [168] regarded by the Greeks as special benefactors to mankind. Like all the nymphs, they possessed the gift of prophecy, for which reason many of the springs and fountains over which they presided were believed to inspire mortals who drank of their waters with the power of foretelling future events. ”

“ Some of the Greeks of to-day are the lineal descendants of the Athenians and Spartans, but the ancient Greek standards of conduct, the Greek ideals, died twenty centuries ago, to be resurrected, it is true, by the renaissance, and to enjoy the glorious privilege of a new and wider sphere of life,—but among an alien people, and under a northern sun. ”

“ We might then commence at once with Homer and Hesiod: but if we were to adopt this course, we should, like an epic poet, place our beginning in the middle of the history; for, like the Pallas of Grecian poetry, who sprang full-armed from the head of Jupiter, the literature of Greece wears the perfection of beauty in those works which Herodotus and Aristotle, and all critical and trust-worthy inquirers among the Greeks, recognised as being the most ancient that had descended to their times. ”

“ The Greeks lived at a time when so much was being done for the first time, and to all their art they brought a spirit of Youth and of Joy in creation, yet also a spirit of Patience in achieving results, for they were never in a hurry, and they knew that there were no short cuts to the perfection which was to them so important a part of beauty. ”

“ Of the literature produced by the Greeks in the fifth century B.C., we possess about a twentieth part; of that produced in the seventh, sixth, fourth, and third, not nearly so large a proportion. All that has reached us has passed a severe and far from discriminating ordeal. It has secured its life by never going out of fashion for long at a time; by appealing steadily to the book-trade throughout a number of successive epochs of taste—fourth-century Greece, pre-Christian Alexandria, Augustan Rome, the great Hellenic revival of the Antonines, the narrower Attic revival of the later sophists. ”

“ Happily, however, we are not confined within the Greek paradise. Wider fields are open to us; our subject is not only Greek, but ancient art and ritual. We can turn at 15once to the Egyptians, a people slower-witted than the Greeks, and watch their sluggish but more instructive operations. To one who is studying the development of the human mind the average or even stupid child is often more illuminating than the abnormally brilliant. Greece is often too near to us, too advanced, too modern, to be for comparative purposes instructive. ”

“ The Greeks, however, were not content with one set of traditions, or upon the whole inclined to give currency to the most gloomy. On the contrary, their poets casting backward the light of their imagination, and kindling up the landscapes of the far past, called up the vision of the golden age, when neither the domestic hearth [525] nor the altars of the gods were stained with blood, and the fruits of the field,—milk, honey, cheese, and butter sufficed to sustain life. But we must escape from these shadowy times, and come down to the age of beef and mutton. ”

“ And even in the popular religion of the Greeks are many things capable of a deeper import and more spiritual signification; though they seem only rare vestiges of ancient truth, vague presentiments, fugitive tones, and momentary flashes, revealing a belief in a Supreme Being, Almighty Creator of the Universe, and Common Father of Mankind. ”

“ The history of Greek civilization may be divided into two periods. The first lasted until the days of Alexander; it included the early experiments made by Greek states in the art of governing themselves, the repulse of the Barbarian, the great days of Athens, the disastrous Peloponnesian War. Through all this period Greece was learning how to do things. She was in the making and was creating what was to live as long as men should love what was great, but she was living for herself. ”

“ The ancient Greeks have departed, and, except when the prying hand of the archaeologist has torn away their surroundings, they have lain undisturbed for many centuries in the bosom of the earth. Let it be our wish that she still continue to rest lightly on good and bad alike. ”

“ It must not be thought that the Greeks perfectly fulfilled their great ideals. Greek history shows quite clearly that they did not. If the story of the Greeks as it has been told in this book has emphasized their ideals rather than their failure always to attain these, it is because their ideals are the imperishable gifts they have given to the world. But the Greeks were not dreamers; they were practical men, keen and interested in all the practical affairs of every day life. ”

“ But there have not been wanting eminent scholars, who have insisted that our exalted ideas of the ancient Greeks are really derived from a comparatively few exceptional and shining examples, and that the ancient population may have resembled the present citizens more than we are prone to think, in traits and general ability. ”

“ The classic Greeks had inherited from their barbaric ancestors a doctrine of the universe essentially similar to that of the North American Indian, the West African, and the Siberian. We know, more intimately than the heathen religion of our own land, the ancient Greek scheme of nature-spirits impelling and directing by their personal power and will the functions of the universe, the ancient 207Greek religion of nature, developed by imagination, adorned by poetry, and consecrated by faith. ”

“ The Greek mind, however, even in this the earliest of its productions, appears richer and more various in its forms, and at the same time to take a loftier and a wider range, than is the case in the religion of the oriental neighbours of the Greeks, the Phrygians, Lydians, and Syrians. ”

“ We shall now pass from the primitive aliments of the heroic times to those almost infinite varieties of good things which the ingenuity of later ages brought into use. The reader, not already familiar with the gastronomic fragments of ancient literature, will probably be surprised at the omniverous character of the Greeks, to whom nothing seems to have come amiss, from the nettle-top to the peach, from the sow’s metra to the most delicate bird, from the shark to the small semi-transparent aphyæ, caught along the shores of Attica. ”

“ Iphigenia then gives way to her feelings. There are strangers to be sacrificed; to that she is accustomed, but these men are Greeks. Yet she herself suffered bitter things at the hands of the Greeks; should she not avenge these? By degrees, however, as she thinks of her youth, of her home, she melts, and at length withdraws into the Temple, raging against the cruel deed that she must do, and not at all sure that she can nerve herself to do it.
The coming of these Greeks has brought Greece vividly back to the thoughts of the Chorus. ”

“ An inquiry, of which the object should be to select and unite all the parts of the Greek mythology which have reference to natural phenomena and the changes of the seasons, although it has never been regularly undertaken, would doubtless show that the earliest religion of the Greeks was founded on the same notions as the chief part of the religions of the East, particularly of that part of the East which was nearest to Greece, Asia Minor. ”

“ Greek literature, so far as we have hitherto followed its progress, was a common property of the different races of the nation; each race cultivating that species of composition which was best suited to its dispositions and capacities, and impressing on it a corresponding character. In this manner the town of Miletus in Ionia, the Æolians in the island of Lesbos, the colonies in Magna Graecia and Sicily, as well as the Greeks of the mother country, created new forms of poetry and eloquence. ”

“ The imagination is kindled and takes a colour from the unearthly creations presented to it, and you return with something like reluctance to the glare and turmoil and busy passions of the world. Among the Greeks, as we have observed, the dead were invested with a sanctity which all good men esteemed inviolable, and this persuasion acquired additional force from the belief, that, though separated, the spirit and the body were not yet wholly independent of each other. ”