Classical Greece

“ In her political degradation, Greece still was the most interesting country on the globe. Every city had a history; every monument betokened a triumph of human genius. On her classic soil the great miracles of civilization had been wrought—the immortal teacher of all the nations in art, in literature, in philosophy, in war itself. Every cultivated Roman traveled in Greece; every great noble sent his sons to be educated in her schools; every great general sent to the banks of the Tiber some memento of her former greatness, some wonder of artistic skill. ”

“ It is the nobler Hellenic race, with its original genius, its enterprise, its stern and rugged nature, strengthened by toil, and enterprise, and war, that we are now to contemplate. It is Greece—the land of song, of art, of philosophy—the land of heroes and freemen, to which we now turn our eyes—the most interesting, and the most famous of the countries of antiquity. ”

“ On this day, it is fitting that we reflect on the enormous contributions the Greek people have made to the modern world. The legacy of the ancient Greeks, in the fields of philosophy, literature, drama, sculpture, and architecture, continues to influence our beliefs, our values, and our concept of art. And, after more than 2,000 years, the ideology of Greece-as embodied in the concept of democracy-is still the ideal that guides us in charting our course for the future. ”

“ Again and again, as we study Greek thought and literature, behind the veil woven by time and distance, the face that meets us is our own, younger, with fewer lines and wrinkles on its features and with more definite and deliberate purpose in its eyes. For these reasons we are to-day in a position, as no other age has been, to understand Ancient Greece, to learn the lessons it teaches, and, in studying the ideals and fortunes of men with whom we have so much in common, to gain a fuller power of understanding and estimating our own. ”

“ Every idea, every image, every maxim, every reflection seems to emanate from one source. Nothing is foreign. Neither the inspiration, nor the spirit which regulated it and moulded it into beauty, borrowed a single impulse from anything existing beyond the circle of Hellenic thought. Greece supplied at once the matrix and the materials, the active power and that delicate sense of beauty and perfection which presided over its organisation and rendered it the delight of mankind.
In characterising this literature many singular notions have been broached. ”

“ It is the fashion of our day to think no evil of Greece. In art we are experiencing another Renaissance, not like that of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in a revival of ancient Rome, but in a movement leading behind Rome to the classic and even the pre-classic models of Greece. In itself it is a healthful tendency, a needed corrective to the sensational search for novelty which characterised the closing years of the nineteenth century. But in our admiration for the Greek spirit we ought not to forget that after Alexander that spirit lost much of its beauty, and aged very rapidly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Speaker, more than 2,500 years ago the people of Greece began to formulate the ideas that now serve as the foundation for our system of government, science, philosophy, law, literature, and art. The gift of Greek culture to the world, and the special debt this nation owes to Greece, is priceless. The Greek tradition that began in the mists of time with Homer led to the Golden Age and later to the intellectual and aesthetic enrichment of the Roman Republic and Empire, the European Renaissance, and our own nation's founding principles. ”

“ Shall we now leave the domain of historic events, of which the land of Greece presents so large and varied a store, and consider that other feature of national life and development which has made Greece the most notable of lands—the intellectual growth of its people, the splendor of art and literature which gave it a glory that glows unfading still? ”

“ Nothing so impresses the visitor to Greece—not the waters of the Ægean sea, with their myriad hues; not the Acropolis, eloquent with ruins; not even the lovely site of Athens itself—as the part which little Greece has played in the instruction of the world. With an area of less than twenty-five thousand square miles, not half of which is productive, and with a population of less than two and a half millions, this diminutive nation has a history without a parallel. ”

“ Greece is free—therefore she has a philosopher, who sees that every idea must have a form, and in every form discovers its appropriate life. And because philosophy has perceived that the principle of vitality and beauty flows from the divine mind into each and every earthly thing, therefore Greece has a sculptor, who can mould his thoughts into marble forms, from which the free grandeur of the soul emanates like a perpetual presence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus died the first and one of the greatest of ethical philosophers, and a man without a parallel, in his peculiar field, in all the history of mankind. Greece produced none like him, and this homely and humble personage, who wrote not a line, has been unsurpassed in fame and influence upon mankind by any of the host of illustrious writers who have made famous the Hellenic lands. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And although the ashes of her generals, her poets, her scholars, and her artists are scattered from their urns, and her statuary and her temples are mutilated and discolored ruins, ancient Greece lives also in the song, the art, and the research of modern times. In contemplating the influence of her genius, the mind is naturally fixed upon the chief repository of her taste and talent—Athens, "the eye of Greece"—from which have sprung "all the strength, the wisdom, the freedom, and the glory of the western world." ”

“ Gods, heroes, and men—religion and patriotism—matters divine, heroic, and human—were all woven together by the Greeks into one indivisible web, in which the threads of truth and reality, whatever they might originally have been, were neither intended to be, [p. 488] nor were actually, distinguishable. Composed of such materials, and animated by the electric spark of genius, the mythical antiquities of Greece formed a whole at once trustworthy and captivating to the faith and feelings of the people ”

“ As the Bard of Avon gathered the material of legend, romance, and history, and crowned the intellectual activity of the Elizabethan Age with results of enduring value, so the leading city of Greece centred in herself many influences of the Orient, and, in a period of great intellectual awakening under favorable conditions, became the genius that produced results of surpassing power and beauty. The Greeks created when European civilization was young, and as yet there was little of the ideal that, in the Attic Period, blossomed into the conceptions of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. ”

“ In fine, we accept of the present work as a valuable contribution to the history of Greece, and to the science itself of history; we accept it as a manifest improvement upon its predecessors in some of the highest and most important elements of historical composition; but we by no means accept it as the History of Greece, as the final narrative of the people of Athens and Sparta. ”

“ No contrast can be more startling than the speck of earth which Greece occupies in the map of the world, compared to the space claimed by the Grecian influences in the history of the human mind. In that contrast itself is the moral which Greece has left us—nor can volumes more emphatically describe the triumph of the Intellectual over the Material. ”

“ A consciousness that they were engaged in a sort of sacred contest, of which all Greece was spectator, pervaded the youth of every rank, and impelled them irresistibly into that course of studies which promised the greatest probability of success. Hence, no doubt much of the enthusiasm with which philosophy was cultivated. It was often not so much the abstract love of wisdom as a conviction of the political value of that wisdom which filled the schools of the great men who taught at Athens, whether they were physiologists, mathematicians, masters of music, of strategy, or of eloquence. ”

“ But for the light that shone from Greece in the breaking of the Renaissance, Europe would have perished in its Gothic darkness. They call her dead!—she can never die while her life, her soul, her genius breathe fire into the new nations, and give their youth all of greatness and of grace that they can claim. Greece dead! She reigns in every poem written, in every art pursued, in every beauty treasured, in every liberty won, in every god-like life and god-like death, in your fresh lands, which, but for her, would be barbarian now. ”

“ Throughout the eastern half of the Mediterranean countries, conquering Rome had been face to face with an older, a more polished, a more keenly intellectual, and more artistic culture than her own. This was the civilisation of Greece. We need not dwell upon the character of Hellenic culture. Anyone who has made acquaintance with the richness of Greek literature, the clear sureness of Greek art, the keen insight of Greek science and philosophy, and the bold experiments of Greek society—especially as represented by Athens—will understand at once what is meant. ”

“ Though we may thus explain the mythopœic fertility of the Greeks, I am far from pretending that we can render any sufficient account of the supreme beauty of their chief epic and artistical productions. There is something in the first-rate productions of individual genius which lies beyond the compass of philosophical theory: the special breath of the Muse (to speak the language of ancient Greece) must be present in order to give them being. ”

“ Here they built temples which became the wonder of the world, and in them they placed statues of the old gods of Hellas, beautiful statues wrought by master hands out of ivory and gold.
Poets and philosophers lived in Athens, too, and so literature and art spread the glory of Greece far and wide, moulding the thoughts and quickening the deeds of many peoples. ”

“ In its poets and orators, its historians and philosophers, Greece cannot be conceived from a central point, unless one brings, as a key to the understanding of it, an insight into the ideal forms of sculpture, and regards the images of statesmen and philosophers, as well as epic and dramatic heroes, from the artistic point of view. For those who act, as well as those who create and think, have, in those beautiful days of Greece, this plastic character. ”

“ Why should we follow ancient Greece? As long as the Athenian was stalwart, patriotic, full of rugged simplicity, the influence of Greece was all powerful in shaping the thought of the world and in moulding its history. ”

“ Still less ought we to consent to break up and disenchant in a similar manner the mythes of ancient Greece,—partly because they possess the mythical beauties and characteristics in far higher perfection, partly because they sank deeper into the mind of a Greek, and pervaded both the public and private sentiment of the country to a much greater degree than the British fables in England. ”

“ The foundation of this world seems to be the Myth; and as the world grew it developed in terms of Myth. The Greek mind had only one background. Athletics and Statuary, Epic and Drama, Religion and Art, Skepticism and Science expressed themselves through the same myths. In this lies the fascination of Greece for us. What a complete cosmos it is! And how different from any other civilization! Modern life, like modern language, is a monstrous amalgam, a conglomeration and mess of idioms from every age and every clime. The classic Greek hangs together like a wreath. ”