Greco-Roman civilization

“ One of the first needs of our young Western society as it struggled to its feet was a symbol of its unity—something corresponding to the attainment of self-consciousness by the individual human being—and for this it borrowed the last constructive idea of the Ancient Greek world. The mediaeval ‘Holy Roman Empire’ had quite a different purpose and function, in the childhood of modern Western civilization, from the purpose and function of the Roman Empire in the old age of Ancient Greece. But the young civilization did not think of inventing a new institution for its individual needs. ”

“ The Greeks thought of art, of literature, and of philosophy as well as of war, and gave their crowns of glory for civic and artistic excellence as well as for military success. The Greeks fought to preserve or extend their civilization; the Romans, in order to rule. They had very little respect for any thing beyond military genius. The successful warrior alone was the founder of a great family. The Roman aristocracy, so proud, so rich, so powerful, was based on the glory of battle-fields. Every citizen was trained to arms, and senators and statesmen commanded armies. ”

“ Possibly the wisdom they very early evinced had come down from father to son from the remotest antiquity. The divine savor may have leavened the whole race before history was written. With their uncorrupted and primitive habits, they had a moral force which enabled them to make great improvements. Without this force they never would have reached so high a culture. And when the moral force was spent, the civilization they created also passed away from them to other uncorrupted races. The Greeks learned from Egyptians, as Romans learned from Greeks. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The history of Greek civilization and education was so intermingled with the Roman that it can scarcely be distinguished from it. The Greek schools of philosophy and rhetoric were continued in Rome, Roman youths made up a great body of the attendance at the universities of Athens and Alexandria, and the Roman emperors did much for the support and extension of the work in these institutions. Hence from the Greeks have developed some of the most advanced intellectual and æsthetic ideas that civilization has known. ”

“ The culture of Greece culminated in its scientific achievements of the third century B. C. At that time in comparison with the Greeks the neighboring, peoples were at best semi-barbarians; in the eastern Mediterranean the Greeks were the dominant race, still animated by a strong love of political freedom. But the Roman conquest with its ruthless exploitation of the provinces ruined the Greek world economically and broke the morale of the Greek peoples, forcing them to seek their salvation in fawning servility to Rome. ”

“ And if Rome lived in the dust of her ancient roads and the ruins of her temples, the Italian peoples and States seemed singularly suggestive of Greece. Their republics and tyrants, their civic life and military adventurers, their rich cities with their colonies and commerce, their rapid changes of fortune, their swift oscillations from freedom to bondage and from bondage back to freedom, their love of art and of letters, their mutual jealousies and ambitions were Greek rather than Roman ”

“ The Grecian and Asiatic cities were humiliated by what they regarded as barbaric inroads; for the culture of Athens, Corinth, Antioch, and Ephesus, was higher than that of Rome, at that time; but who can doubt a beneficent change in the administration of public affairs? Society was doubtless improved everywhere by the Roman conquests. It is not probable that Athens, after she became tributary to Rome, was equal to the Athens of Pericles and Plato; but it is probable that society in Athens was better than what it was for a century before her fall. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Romans conquered, and the conquered provinces were to furnish soldiers or labourers, and were tied by means of despotism to the wheels of the proud state-carriage. The Greeks humanised; the Romans demoralised and organised. The Greeks played at soldiers in a spirit of glorious patriotism. The Romans were soldiers for the sake of conquest, plunder, and vain glory. Spirited youthfulness was the Greek element. Stern and calculating manliness the essence of the Roman. The Greek was free in life, in art, in the worship of his gods, in poetry and philosophy. ”

“ The good, if there was any good, that Roman dominion brought the world at that period was the spreading of Greek culture across the western half of the world. As Rome mastered the Greek states one by one, their genius won a subtler triumph over the conqueror. Her generals recognized and admired a culture superior to their own. They carried off the statues of Greece for the adornment of their villas, and with equal eagerness they appropriated her manners and her thought, her literature and her gods. ”

“ In the middle of the fifth century B.C., Ancient Greek civilization seemed triumphantly vigorous and secure. A generation before, it had flung back the onset of a political power which combined all the momentum of all the other contemporary civilizations in the world; and the victory had proved not merely the superiority of Greek arms—the Spartan spearman and the Athenian galley—but the superior vitality of Greek politics—the self-governing, self-sufficing city-state. ”

“ There is, perhaps, nothing in the history of human intelligence to compare with the dazzling 'swiftness of its development or the rapidity of its decline. War was followed by pillage and devastation, and victorious Roman generals, mere depredators and plunderers, crowded Rome with the stolen treasures of Greece, with the result that Greek art and Greek influence soon made themselves felt in-the imperial city, and for generations its artists were almost exclusively Greeks, chiefly portrait painters and decorators. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And even the minority who lorded it over that wide realm of subjugation and of restraint and forced labour were uneasy and unhappy in their souls; art and literature, science and philosophy, which are the fruits of free and happy minds, waned in that atmosphere. There was much copying and imitation, an abundance of artistic artificers, much slavish pedantry among the servile men of learning, but the whole Roman empire in four centuries produced nothing to set beside the bold and noble intellectual activities of the comparatively little city of Athens during its one century of greatness. ”

“ Without it, we may doubt if the work of the Greeks would have been saved for us when the storms from the north, invasions of barbarian peoples, fell at last upon the sunny lands filled with the spirit of Greek thought and the divine works of Greek artists. To Roman discipline, law, and government, we owe not only much that even now is every day of practical benefit to us, but the preservation of what we still possess of the treasures of Hellenic genius. ”

“ The apathy of the rulers of the civilized world to the astonishing circumstance of the descendants of that nation to which they owe their civilization—rising as it were from the ashes of their ruin, is something perfectly inexplicable to a mere spectator of the shews of this mortal scene. We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece. But for Greece—Rome, the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis of our ancestors, would have spread no illumination with her arms, and we might still have been savages and idolaters ”

“ Nevertheless we are much in advance of our forefathers of the eighteenth century, as regards the knowledge of Greek civilization. In the time of the French revolution, it was thought possible to reestablish in France the conditions of a Greek republic, and to educate children according to the system of Sparta. To-day we are well aware that no mind developed by modern civilization could find happiness under any of those socialistic despotisms which existed in all the cities of the ancient world before the Roman conquest. ”

“ OUR DEBT TO HELLAS. As a political power the Greek States left the world nothing of importance. As a people they were too individualistic, and seemed to have a strange inability to unite for political purposes. To the new power slowly forming to the westward—Rome—was left the important task, which the Greek people were never able to accomplish, of uniting civilization into one political whole. The world conquest that Greece made was intellectual. As a result, her contribution to civilization was artistic, literary, philosophical, and scientific, but not political. ”

“ 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 was not only that wars and faction fights had wasted the life of the Greek people, but with the opening of the far East by Alexander, and the development of the West under Roman rule, Commerce had shifted its centres, and the Greeks had left their old homes for new regions. Still keen on money, philosophy and art, they thronged Alexandria, Antioch and Rome, and a thousand other cities. ”

“ The worst feature is the predominance of crafty and cozening Greeks, who, by their versatility and diplomacy, can oust the Roman.
I cannot rule my spleen and calmly see A Grecian capital—in Italy! A flattering, cringing, treacherous artful race, Of torrent tongue, and never-blushing face; A Protean tribe, one knows not what to call, Which shifts to every form, and shines in all: Grammarian, painter, augur, rhetorician, Rope-dancer, conjurer, fiddler, and physician, All trades his own your hungry Greekling counts ”

“ Indeed, it is scarcely far-fetched to say that Greece was avenged for her slavery by the not less complete slavery of Rome to her intellectual supremacy. The Roman poets, dazzled by the brilliancy of their Athenian prototypes, fancied that only by imitating, could they hope to excel. A more unfortunate idea never took possession of a nation. ”