Seven Sages of Greece

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ But we need not necessarily suppose that a superstition so universal was borrowed, and not conceived, by the early Greeks. The same causes which had made them worship the earth and the sea, extended their faith to the rivers and the mountains, which in a spirit of natural and simple poetry they called "the children" of those elementary deities. The very soil of Greece, broken up and diversified by so many inequalities, stamped with volcanic features, profuse in streams and mephitic fountains, contributed to render the feeling of local divinity prevalent and intense. ”

“ Modern Greek Literature is by no means so wild and imperfect as might be expected from a nation in such a chaotic and uncultivated condition. The people of Greece are hardly more civilized than the Servians, the Dalmatians, or any other of the half-savage tribes that inhabit the south-eastern corner of Europe, but the influence exercised by the antique glory of the land still remains to develop among them a degree of artistic power and beauty unknown to their neighbors. ”

“ They belong to the spheres of poetry and religion, not to philosophy.
It must not be supposed, when we speak of the philosophy of Greece, that we refer only to the mainland of what is now called Greece. Very early in history, Greeks of the mainland migrated to the islands of the Aegean, to Sicily, to the South of Italy, to the coast of Asia Minor, and elsewhere, and founded flourishing colonies. The Greece of philosophy includes all these places. It is to be thought of rather racially than territorially. It is the philosophy of the men of Greek race, wherever they happened to be situated. ”

“ It is its higher achievement that makes any particular religion of importance in the history of civilisation; and we are now aware that Greek religion can claim this importance. Nor can the lower elements as a whole be shown to be the germs of the higher within the Hellenic period proper. We cannot show the evolution of the personal anthropomorphic deities of Greece from magic ritual or totemism or theriomorphism without transcending the chronologic limits of the period within which it is allowable to speak of a Hellenic people at all. ”

“ Out of these elements the sacerdotal families of Greece framed its religion, which, however, is by no means to be considered a system of materialism. They conceived every portion of nature to be animated by its particular soul, just as they believed the whole, as a whole, to have one universal soul, the source of all the others. Their mythology was based on unity. At every step backwards we find the number of gods diminish, till at length we arrive at the Great One, surrounded by the unfathomable splendours of eternity. ”

“ Thus, what was a certainty in the East, became a proposition in Ionia, and ultimately a doubt, at Athens. In Greece, indeed, as everywhere, religion was connected with the first researches of philosophy. From the fear of the gods, to question of the nature of the gods, is an easy transition. The abundance and variety of popular superstitions served but to stimulate curiosity as to their origin; and since in Egypt the sole philosophers were the priests, a Greek could scarcely converse with an Egyptian on the articles of his religion without discussing also the principles of his philosophy. ”

“ The habit of distinguishing the interpreted from the literal mythe has passed from the literary men of antiquity to those of the modern world, who have for the most part construed the divine mythes as allegorized philosophy, and the heroic mythes as exaggerated, adorned, and over-colored history. The early ages of Greece have thus been peopled with quasi-historical persons and quasi-historical events, all extracted from the mythes after making certain allowances for poetical ornament. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Small-featured and large-minded Greece is thus set in contrast with Asia, where the mind and body were equally palsied in the effort to overcome immense plains and interminable mountain-chains. But whatever the reason, whether geographical or ethnological, it is certain that the people of Greece were endowed with a transcendent genius for art, which embraced all departments of life as by an instinct. Every divinity was made a plain figure to the mind, every mystery was symbolized in some positive beautiful myth, and every conception of whatever object became statuesque and clear. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It is in this intellectual sphere only that the Greeks have been gifted with extraordinary power, and have exerted a mighty influence on after-ages. Plato and Aristotle, far more than Leonidas and Alexander the Great, contain nearly the sum and essence of all truly permanent and influential, which the Greeks have bequeathed to posterity. It is evident that I include under these great names the whole classical culture which formed the basis of this Greek science—the general refinement of minds—the fine arts, and above all, the glorious old poetry of Greece. ”

“ Even the shrill song of the humble grasshopper held sweet music for the Greek. He revelled in the loveliness and colour of life. He was inspired by the glory of the human form. He extolled the majesty of man. The Hebrew mind was nursed by meditation; the Hellenic drew its nourishment from contemplation. Nature was the Greek’s sole guide in taste as well as in conduct; from nature he learnt the canons of the beautiful as well as the laws of right and wrong. Hence no country has produced greater poets than Greece, or fewer saints. ”

“ It was in the attempt, however, to chain this spirit, and to imprison it in durable forms, that all the poetry and arts of Greece consisted. They beheld within them a world of loveliness, of living forms which knocked at the golden door of fancy, and demanded their dismissal from the spiritual to the material universe. All their studies were but how to dress these celestial habitants in fitting habiliments to go abroad in; and their lives were often spent in the throes of creatures big with immortal beauty. It is a privilege to the world to converse with minds of such a nature. ”

“ Opposed to this religion of the infinite is the finite religion of Greece.
Man in Greece stands in the centre of a beautiful cosmos which is not alien to his spirit. The gods on high, conceived after the likeness of man, are the expression of a free people conscious of their freedom. And the divinities worshiped, under the form of Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite—what are they but idealized and glorified Greeks? ”

“ The foremost and most general of all is, the expansive force of Grecian intellect itself,—a quality in which this remarkable people stand distinguished from all their neighbors and contemporaries. Most, if not all nations have had mythes, but no nation except the Greeks have imparted to them immortal charm and universal interest ”

“ The other great Italic philosophers just named, living, as we have seen, in the previous century, can scarcely have thought of Athens as a centre of Greek thought. Indeed, the very fact that these men lived in Italy made that peninsula, rather than the mother-land of Greece, the centre of Hellenic influence. ”

“ During the most flourishing period of Athenian literature manuscripts were indifferently written, without division into parts, and without marks of punctuation. They were scarce and costly, could be obtained only by the wealthy, and read only by those who had had considerable literary training. Under these circumstances the Greeks could never become a reading people; and thus the great mass even of the Athenians became acquainted with the productions of the leading poets of Greece only by hearing them recited at their solemn festivals and on other public occasions. ”

“ It is not, therefore, surprising that false ideas of the state of Greece have prevailed, or indeed that they still continue to prevail, even among the foreigners long resident in the new Greek kingdom. The military operations of the Greeks, both at sea and on shore, were remarkable, not only for a total want of all scientific knowledge, but also for the absence of every shadow of discipline, and the first elements of order and subordination. ”

“ With us these aërial beings, or spectres of crime, too commonly assume an aspect grotesque or devilish, but they nevertheless keep alive in the popular mind the spirit of romance and poetry, one of the never-failing handmaids of religion. Mythology rarely penetrates down to these primitive superstitions, which, however, constitute the basis of the whole science, and in Greece assumed, in many cases, forms of beauty analogous to its loftier and more poetic fables. ”

“ For, where knowledge is at all held in honour, men will always be found sufficiently prone to the palpable and visible. But even these pursuits assumed a peculiar form in Greece. The genius of the nation, essentially creative, developed its force and its peculiar energy in framing systems of physics, explaining the origin of the world, the birth of the human race, its early fortunes and fabulous history. Every great philosopher became, like an intellectual sun, the centre of a system of physics, and his disciples like satellites revolved around him, receiving and reflecting his light. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is not only against the foreign potentates that the Athenians avow themselves incapable of self-defence, but even against the incursions of the Ætolians,—Greeks like themselves, though warlike, rude, and restless. When such were the feelings of a people—once the most daring, confident, and organising, and still the most intelligent, in Greece, we may see that the history of the Greeks as a separate nation or race is reaching its close ”