Greco-Roman antiquity

“ In the days when Paul preached at Athens, the old capital of Greece, much of the ancient splendour and power of the Greek people had passed away, for the Romans had conquered their country, and they were no longer a free nation.
Yet, although the Greeks had been forced to yield to Rome, their conquerors knew that the Grecian scholars and artists were far better educated and more highly gifted than themselves, and Greek statues and writings had therefore become the fashion throughout the Roman Empire. Indeed, many of the Greek sculptors and authors are remembered and admired to this day. ”

“ It is now proposed briefly to relate how this line was lost, when the politeness and philosophy, the literature and the Art of Greece were chained to the triumphal cars of Roman conquerors,—and how it seems to have been found again in our own day, after slumbering so long in ruined temples, broken statues, and cinerary urns.
The scholar who studies the aesthetical anatomy of Greek Art has a melancholy pleasure, like a surgeon, in watching its slow, but inevitable atrophy under the incubus of Rome. ”

“ In science and philosophy none to compare with Aristotle and Plato.
And in the arts, all the finest sculpture and architecture in Rome is known to have been copied from the Greeks. Where are the Roman names to put with those of Phidias and Praxiteles?
Everywhere, throughout the world, if a great literary work or a great artistic work was done, it was done either by a Greek or by some one of another race who had learnt from the Greeks. If Rome had conquered and possessed the world by her arms, Greece had conquered and possessed it by her thought. ”

“ Phidias, being asked how he conceived the idea of his Olympian Jupiter, answered by repeating a passage of Homer. We can scarcely conceive of the enthusiasm which the Greeks exhibited in the cultivation of art. Hence it has obtained an ascendency over that of all other nations. Roman art was the continuation of the Grecian. The Romans appreciated and rewarded Grecian artists. They adopted their architecture, their sculpture, and their paintings; and, though art never attained the estimation and dignity in Rome that it did in Greece, it still can boast of a great development. ”

“ This little touch [Pg 99] of art throws a gleam of inner light on the struggle towards originality and truth which characterized the Greek principles of beauty and fitness in literature and art, in direct contrast to that which was always turning back to those fossil forms which were only respectable on account of their age and their mystery, but of which the tradition and intention were already lost.
Roman patterns were merely Greek adaptations with an Etruscan flavour, which was a survival of the earliest Italian art. ”

“ From this time forth not only were Greek philosophers of eminence drawn to live themselves at Rome, and so to meet her statesmen and nobles in habits of intercourse, but the higher classes of the great capital commonly completed their education by visiting and studying at Athens, Rhodes, and other centres of Grecian thought. Thus by the fusion of Greece with the empire, while her political importance dwindled away, her influence upon the mind of her subjugators was immensely increased. But the Roman on his side obtained a sort of victory. ”

“ Now I am going to tell you about a civilization so much older than that, that it makes the Roman Empire seem like a thing of to-day!
The Greeks are the most ancient people in Europe. Their early history, before there were books or written records, has come down to us through legends and tradition; that is, fanciful stories, in which fact and fable are mingled, handed down from generation to generation. These legends tell us that the founders of their nation were not men but gods, who came down from heaven and peopled the land ”

“ The dignity and value of the Greeks from that time forward belong to them only as individual philosophers, preceptors, astronomers, and mathematicians, literary men and critics, medical practitioners, etc. In all these respective capacities, especially in the great schools of philosophical speculation they still constitute the light of the Roman world; though, as communities, they have lost their own orbit, and have become satellites of more powerful neighbors. ”

“ Many influences had been at work to blur the clean-cut outlines of Hellenic imagination, and to sophisticate the ancestral faith both of Greece and Rome. Men wished to believe in the ancient gods, but they were no longer the gods of Homer or of Aeschylus, the gods worshipped by the men who fought [pg 459] in the Samnite or the Punic wars. Greek philosophy for eight centuries had been teaching a doctrine of one Divine force or essence, transcending the powers and limitations of sense, or immanent in the fleeting world of chance and change. ”

“ This did not mean, however, that men had lost their religious longing. Far from it. For there is abundant proof that under the stimulus of Greek philosophy and mysticism, questionings as to the nature of man, his relation to divinity, and his immortality became more earnest. To these questions the Greco-Roman religion offered no answer.
The oriental gods, however, were of a very different sort from those of Greece and Rome: they required a spiritual devotion on the part of their devotees and they made strong appeals to the religious emotions. ”

“ The Greeks, at that period, were the noblest race of the ancient world—immortal for genius and art. But power dazzled them, and little remained of that glorious spirit which was seen at Thermopylae and Marathon. The Greek ascendency in Asia and Egypt was followed by the same luxury and extravagance and effeminacy that resulted from the rule of Persia. The Greeks had done great things, and contributed to the march of civilization, but they had done their work, and their turn of humiliation must come. Their vast empire fell into the hands of the Romans, and the change was beneficial to humanity. ”

“ Everything we have of their [Pg 36] art shows their imitation of Grecian models. Their embroideries would certainly have shown the same impress.
Greece—herself crushed and demoralized—even as late as the Eastern Empire gave to Rome the fashion of the Byzantine taste, which she at once adopted, and it was called the Romanesque. This style, which was partly Arab, still prevails in Eastern Europe, having clung to the Greek Church. In her best days, Roman poetry, architecture, and decorative arts were Greek of Greece, imitating its highest types, but never creating. ”

“ It was from Cyme that the Romans as well as the Etruscans took their alphabet. The more highly developed Greek political institutions, Greek art, Greek literature, and Greek mythology found a ready reception among the Italian peoples and profoundly affected their political and intellectual progress. Traces of this Greek influence are nowhere more noticeable than in the case of Rome itself, and the cultural ascendancy which Greece thus early established over Rome was destined to last until the fall of the Roman Empire. ”

“ The Graeco-Roman period in the literature of Hellenism may be dated from the Roman subjugation of Greece. “Greece made a captive of the rough conqueror,” but it did not follow from this intellectual conquest that Athens became once more the intellectual centre of the world. The Graeco-Roman period.Under the empire, indeed, the university of Athens long enjoyed a pre-eminent reputation. But Rome gradually became the point to which the greatest workers in every kind were drawn. ”

“ The citizens of this great state, which was to include, not only Greece and the Levant, but the whole Mediterranean and lands far beyond its shores, were to be proud of the name of Roman. Yet Rome, destined to be the Mistress of the World, and in political power an empire, succeeding where Greece {409} had failed, owed all that was most worth while in the things of the higher intellectual life of the mind to Greece. The Greek spirit was never to die. ”

“ The work of Greece is far beyond the furthest reach of Roman work—the glad spring, the grace of conscious strength that is beautiful as well as strong, the restfulness withal of perfect harmony that is thinking of more than merely utilitarian values; of these Rome knows not the secret. Beside the flight of Greek art she is pedestrian; to the Greek artist she plays at best but the part of Roman artisan. Forceful, massive, successful up to its highest desire, the Roman work is finished and perfect. ”

“ But the efforts of the Senate to safeguard these oracles only prove that the older and wiser men in the community realised how dangerous they were, and the comparison with Greece leads to a consideration of certain essential differences between the Greek and the Roman temperament which made that which was meat for one into poison for the other. [Pg 69]
In the older purer age of Greece the gods were never far away from men, they lived almost side by side with them ”

“ In these provinces they were copyists of the Greeks: they lacked ideality. They had, also, far less delicacy of perception, flexibility, and native refinement of manners. But they had more sobriety of character and more endurance. They were a disciplined people; and in their capacity for discipline lay the secret of their supremacy in arms and of their ability to give law to the world. If they produced a much less number of great men than the Greeks, there was more widely diffused among Roman citizens a conscious dignity and strength. ”

“ It is historically true that attempts were made from time to time by patriotic Romans to preserve the old Latin faith in its original purity from foreign invasion. The introduction of Greek gods was at first vigorously opposed, but the 73exquisite beauty of Greek sculpture, the irresistible influence of Greek literature, and the overwhelming fascination of Greek myths, finally destroyed this opposition, and placed Apollo and Æsculapius in the Roman pantheon beside Jupiter and Minerva.
At another time the senate declared war on the Egyptian worship which was gradually making its way into Rome. ”

“ We possess only what has drifted ashore from the wreck of a stranded vessel; and though this includes some of the most precious articles amongst its once abundant cargo, yet if any man will cast his eyes over the citations in Diogenes Laërtius, Athenæus, or Plutarch, or the list of names in Vossius de Historicis Græcis, he will see with grief and surprise how much larger is the proportion which, through the enslavement of the Greeks themselves, the decline of the Roman Empire, the change of religion, and the irruption of barbarian conquerors, has been irrecoverably submerged. ”

“ Relation of Roman to Greek Literature: the Poets of the Republican Era.—Latin literature was almost wholly imitative or borrowed, being a reproduction of Greek models; still it performed a most important service for civilization: it was the medium for the dissemination throughout the world of the rich literary treasures of Greece.
It was the dramatic productions of the Greeks which were first studied and copied at Rome. Livius Andronicus, Naevius, Ennius, Plautus, and Terence, all of whom wrote under the republic, are the most noted of the Roman dramatists. ”

“ The Greek race, suffering a long occultation under the blaze of the Roman empire, into which for a time it had been absorbed, but again emerging from this blaze and reassuming a distinct Greek agency and influence, offers a subject great by its own inherent attractions, and separately interesting by the unaccountable neglect which it has suffered. ”

“ The average200 Roman citizen, though practical and unimaginative, was still enamored of the beautiful myths and exquisite statues of the Greek gods. And it was only by Hellenizing their own deities that they could bring themselves into touch and communion with the Hellenic spirit. The æsthetical and fascinating influence of the Greek language, literature and sculpture, was overwhelming. "At bottom, the Roman religion was based only on two ideas—the might of the gods who were friendly to Rome, and the power of the ceremonies over the gods. ”

“ They were intensified by the number of Greeks who flocked to Rome as ambassadors, teachers, physicians, merchants and artists, and by the multitude of educated Greek slaves employed in Roman households. And as the Hellenic civilization was more ancient and had reached a higher stage than the Latin, it was inevitable that the latter should borrow largely from the former and consciously or unconsciously imitate it [pg 120] in many respects. In fact the intellectual life of Rome never attained the freedom and richness of that of Greece upon which it was always dependent. ”

“ The sculpture of the human figure became a noble object of ambition, and was most munificently rewarded. Great artists arose, whose works adorned the temples of Greece, so long as she preserved her independence; and when it was lost, their priceless productions were scattered over Asia and Europe. The Romans especially seized what was most prized, whether or not they could tell what was most perfect. Greece lived in her marble statues more than in her government or laws. ”

“ Whatever may have been the reason, whether the common longing for mystic assurance of safety and salvation had come naturally to the front in the Roman and Italian mind, or whether the large number of Greeks, slaves, traders, and other members of the lower and immigrant classes had moved the natives by mystic practices which they had brought with them, certain it is that a considerable part of the Romans found no satisfaction for their deeper longings in the traditional religion, and turned to a form of the Greek mysteries. ”