Greek literature

“ 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; and the order in which its several fruits are produced is not the result of accident or caprice. Further, the old Greek literature has a striking completeness, due to the fact that each great branch of the Hellenic race bore a characteristic part in its development. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus, in the poetry of the first five centuries of Greek literature, especially at the close of this period, we find, instead of the calm enjoyment of outward nature which characterized the early epic poetry, a profound sense of the misery of human life, and an ardent longing for a condition of greater happiness. This feeling, indeed, was not so extended as to become common to the whole Greek nation, but it took deep root in individual minds, and was connected with more serious and spiritual views of human nature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet in spite of its obvious value Greek literature has been damned and banned in our enlightened age by some whose sole qualification for the office of critic often turns out to be a mental darkness about it so deep that, like that of Egypt, it can be felt. Only those who know Greek literature have any right to talk about its powers of survival. ”

“ Every Greek poet (I might indeed say every poet) is strictly the child of his day, the exponent of a national want, the preacher of a national aspiration, at once the outcome and the leader of a literary public, or at least of a public which craves after spiritual sustenance. From Homer to Menander this feature marks social life in Greece, and makes the history of Greek literature pre-eminently the history of the Hellenic people. ”

“ We have outlearned the physics, and perhaps the metaphysics of the Greeks; their knowledge of nature, in comparison with ours, was but as a genial beginning; their polities and their formal ethics we have tried and tested; but we have not risen above the power and inspiration of the story of Greece and Rome, and the exemplifications of life in the Greek and Latin Classics. It has not ceased to be true that he who best loves the Classics, and most deeply feels and glories in their unique excellence as literature, is he who still draws life from them, and discipline and knowledge. ”

“ Approaching the literature and language of the Greeks with this abundant knowledge of their real surroundings and conditions of life, he saw the deeper, fuller significance of every classical author and the great literary masterpieces were perceived as the expression of the national life. He appreciated language as the wonderful medium through which the more wonderful life of the versatile Greek expressed itself. The reason he was such a great philologist was because he was so great a realist, a man who was intensely interested in the Greek people, their history and life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When, at the Renaissance, Greek literature dawned upon Europe, the soil had been in some measure prepared for it. But, to get rid of the details of history, which are always wearisome and usually inaccurate, let us say generally, that the forms of art have been due to the Greek critical spirit. ”

“ 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 Greeks had arrived at a high degree of civilization before they can be said to have possessed a history of their own. Nations far behind them in intellectual development have infinitely excelled them in this respect. The imagination seems to have been entirely dazzled and fascinated with the glories of the heroic ages, and to have taken but little interest in the events which were daily passing around them. Poetry constitutes the chief part of early Greek literature. We give specimens of both Greek poetry and prose. ”

“ Accordingly, we should not say that the Greek civilization with its language, its art, its science, its philosophy, its eloquence, its literature, its civil and military life, was the outgrowth of the Greek genius, the native faculty of the Hellenic race, but rather that this genius, this spiritual faculty, this unrivalled intellectual-artistic endowment of the Greeks, was the continuous resultant at each moment in the history of the race of the collective culture-experiences through which, up to that moment, it had passed. ”

“ I would much rather attribute the increase to an equal growth of interest in Greek literature encouraged by the principles of literary art which were flourishing at that time and fostered by the steady development of Greek scholarship through those years. Aristotle's Poetics was one of the sources of criticism during these years and, as I shall show in the next section, the interest in Greek philosophy was predominant throughout [pg xv] the period. The authority of the classics and the classics themselves were uppermost in the current of literary thought ”

“ 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 ”

“ An illuminating history of Greek literature, in which learning is enlivened and supplemented by literary skill, by a true sense of the ‘humanities.’ The reader feels that this is no book of perfunctory erudition, but a labor of love, performed by a scholar, to whom ancient Greece and her literature are exceedingly real and vivid. ”

“ Between these two, Greek presents not so much the happy mean as the consummate union of all the best qualities. It evidently possessed, from the remotest time at which we have any traces of literature, an innate sense of proportion and grammatical symmetry to guide it, first into unconscious and then into conscious symmetry of accidence and syntax, besides a native melody at once sweet, vigorous, and disciplined, which made it the ideal raw material for prosody. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is not only that his recognition of the permanently significant and beautiful embodiment of the central facts of life in the Greek stories led him to select some of them as the subjects for several of his most important poems; but his whole feeling, notably his feeling for Nature, seems almost precisely that of the Greeks, especially, perhaps, of the earlier generations among whom their mythology took shape. To him also Nature appears alive with divinities. ”

“ But prescription and tradition are tenacious of their privileges. Greek has so long been regarded as the inheritance of philologists, that they are not prepared to resign what was once their exclusive possession, without a struggle. It is useless to point out to them that, if Greek is to maintain its place in modern education, it can only maintain it by virtue of its connection [257] with the humanities, by virtue of its intrinsic value as the expression of genius and art, and of its historical value as the key to the development and characteristics of the classics of the modern world ”