II Ancient Greek Civilization as a Work of Art

Civilizations are the greatest and the rarest achievements of human society. Innumerable societies have been coming into being and perishing during many hundreds of thousands of years, and hardly any of them have created civilizations. One can count the civilizations on one’s fingers. We have had perhaps three in Europe: the Minoan in the Aegean Islands (the dates 4000-1100 B. C. roughly cover its history); the Greek or Graeco-Roman round the coasts of the Mediterranean (its history extends between the eleventh century B. C. and the seventh century A. D.); and our modern Western civilization round the coasts of the Atlantic, which began to emerge from twilight in the eighth century A. D. and is still in existence. Then there are the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Lower Mesopotamia, which were first dominated by Ancient Greece and then amalgamated into the single Middle Eastern civilization of Islam; and there are the civilizations of India and China. Even if we count as civilizations the societies existing in Mexico and Peru before the Spanish Conquest, the total number of known independent civilizations, compared with the total number of known human societies, is very small. And it is so because the achievement is astonishingly difficult. There are two constant factors in social life—the spirit of man and its environment. Social life is the relation between them, and life only rises to the height of civilization when the spirit of man is the dominant partner in the relationship—when instead of being moulded by the environment (as it is in the tropical forests of Central Africa and Brazil), or simply holding its own against the environment in a kind of equilibrium (as it does on the steppes of Central Asia or Arabia, among the nomads), it moulds the environment to its own purpose, or ‘expresses’ itself by ‘impressing’ itself upon the world. The study of a civilization is not different in kind from the study of a literature. In both cases one is studying a creation of the spirit of man, or, in more familiar terms, a work of art.

Civilization is a work of art—in the literal meaning of the phrase and not merely by a metaphor. It is true that works of art are made by individuals, civilization by a society. But what work of art is there in which the individual artist owes nothing to others? And a civilization, the work of countless individuals and many generations, differs in this respect from a poem or a statue not in kind but only in degree. It is a social work of art, expressed in social action, like a ritual or a play. One cannot describe it better than by calling it a tragedy with a plot, and history is the plot of the tragedy of civilization.

Students of the drama, from Aristotle onwards, seem to agree that nearly all the great tragedies in literature are expositions of quite a few fundamental plots. And it is possible that the great tragedies of history—that is, the great civilizations that have been created by the spirit of man—may all reveal the same plot, if we analyse them rightly. Each civilization—for instance, the civilization of Mediaeval and Modern Europe and again that of Ancient Greece—is probably a variant of a single theme. And to study the plot of civilization in a great exposition of it—like the Hellenic exposition or our own Western exposition—is surely the right goal of a humane education.

But of course one asks: Why study Ancient Hellenic civilization rather than ours? The study of any one civilization is so complex, it demands so many preliminary and subordinate studies—linguistic, institutional, economic, psychological—that it is likely to absorb all one’s energies. The greatest historians have generally confined themselves to the study of a single civilization, and the great Greek historians—Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius—concentrated on their own, and only studied others in so far as their own came into contact with them. Clearly, people who are going to be historians, not for life, but as an education for life, must make their choice. They must practically confine themselves to studying one civilization if they are to reap the fruits of study at all, and in this case it is natural to ask: Why study Hellenism rather than our own history? There are two obvious arguments in favour of studying modern history. It seems more familiar and it seems more useful. And it would be a mistake to misrepresent these arguments by stating them only in their cruder forms. ‘Familiar’ does not mean ‘easy’, and to say that modern history seems more useful than ancient does not mean that the study of it is a closer approximation to a Pelman course. There is an exceedingly crude view of education among some people just now—perhaps it is largely due to the war, and may disappear like other ugly effects of the war—which inclines to concentrate education on applied chemistry, say, or engineering, with a vague idea that people whose education has been devoted to these subjects will be more capable of competing with foreigners in the dye industry or of working in munition factories in the next emergency. In the same way, conceivably, concentration on modern history might be supposed to equip a student for securing concessions abroad for a firm, or for winning a parliamentary election. Of course, this attitude, though it is rather widespread just now, is absurd. The fallacy lies in confusing the general theoretical knowledge of a subject acquired through being educated in it with the technical knowledge and personal experience which one must have to turn the same subject to practical account in after life. There is no difference of opinion on this point between ‘humanists’ and ‘scientists’. The issue is between people who do not appreciate the value of the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself, and those who do appreciate it and who therefore understand what education means. True lovers of knowledge and true believers in education will be found on the same side in this controversy, whether the subject of their study happens to be the spirit of man or the laws of its environment. But apart from that crude utilitarianism, which is as unscientific as it is un-humane, a serious argument for studying modern rather than ancient history can also be stated from the humane and the scientific point of view. It may be argued that the direct experience we have of our own civilization makes it possible for us to have a deeper, and therefore a more humane and scientific, understanding of it than we can ever have of Ancient Greece. And one might go on to argue, on grounds of humanism alone, that such a comprehension of the character and origins of our civilization would have a more profound humanizing influence upon its development than a less intimate study of a different civilization could produce. This argument is bound to appeal to the generation which has experienced the war. The war is obviously one of the great crises of our civilization. It is like a conflagration lighting up the dim past and throwing it into perspective. The war makes it impossible for us to take our own history for granted. We are bound to inquire into the causes of such an astonishing catastrophe, and as soon as we do that we find ourselves inquiring into the evolution of Western Civilization since it emerged from the Dark Age. The shock of the Peloponnesian War gave just the same intellectual stimulus to Thucydides, and made him preface his history of that war with a critical analysis, brief but unsurpassed, of the origins of Hellenic civilization—the famous introductory chapters of Book I. May not these chapters point the road for us and counsel us to concentrate upon the study of our own history?

This question deserves very serious consideration, not merely from the utilitarian, but from the scientific and humane point of view. But the answer is not a foregone conclusion. There is a case for studying the civilization of Ancient Greece which can be summed up in four points, as follows:

(i) In Greek history the plot of civilization has been worked out to its conclusion. We can sit as spectators through the whole play; we can say: ‘This or that is the crisis; from this point onwards the end is inevitable; or if this actor had acted otherwise in those circumstances the issue would not nave been the same.’ We can grasp the structure of the tragedy and divide it into acts. But in our own history we are like players in the middle of the piece, and though we may be able to say ‘This is the third act or the fourth act’, we cannot say ‘This is the last act or the last but one’. We cannot foretell the future; the work of art we are studying is incomplete, and therefore we cannot possibly apprehend it as an artistic whole, however vivid may be our experience of isolated scenes and situations. The first point in favour of Greek history is its completeness and its true perspective from our point of view.

(ii) The second is that the historical experience of the Greeks has been more finely expressed than ours. Its expression is in all Greek art and literature—for it is a great mistake to suppose that historical experience is expressed in so-called historical records alone. The great poets of Greece are of as much assistance in understanding the mental history of Greece (which is after all the essential element in any history) as the philosophers and historians. And Greek historical experience or mental history is better expressed in Greek literature than ours is in the literature of modern Europe. Without attempting to compare the two literatures as literatures it can be said with some confidence that the surviving masterpieces of Greek literature give a better insight into the subjective side of Greek history—into the emotions and speculations which arose out of the vicissitudes of Greek society and were its most splendid creations—than any insight into the subjective side of modern history which we can obtain by studying it through modern literature.

(iii) The third point is expressed in the concluding phrase of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy (Poetics, vi. 2). ‘Tragedy’, he says, ‘is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude ... through pity and fear effecting the proper καθαρσις or purgation, of these emotions.’ (Butcher’s translation.) This word καθαρσις—purgation, purification, cleansing, discharge—has been the subject of interminable controversy among scholars, but any one acquainted with Ancient Greek literature who has lived through the war will understand what it means. Certainly the writer found, in the worst moments of the war, that passages from the classics—some line of Aeschylus or Lucretius or Virgil, or the sense of some speech in Thucydides, or the impression of some mood of bitterness or serenity in a dialogue of Plato—would come into his mind and give him relief. These men had travelled along the road on which our feet were set; they had travelled it farther than we, travelled it to the end; and the wisdom of greater experience and the poignancy of greater suffering than ours was expressed in the beauty of their words. In the writer’s personal experience that relief was obtained from acquaintance with Greek civilization as expressed in Greek literature. It put one in communication with a different civilization from our own—with people who had experienced all and more than we had experienced, and who were now at peace beyond the world of time and change. Καθαρσις, then, is the emotional value which is peculiar to the study of a different civilization, and which one cannot get, at any rate with the same intensity, by the study of his own.

(iv) This emotional value has its intellectual counterpart in the comparative method of study, which one gets by studying, not his own circumstances, but circumstances comparable to, without being identical with, his own. This is a commonplace in the field of language. The study of Ancient Greek is generally admitted to have more educative value for an Englishman than the study of modern French or German, because Greek and English embody the fundamental principles of human language in entirely independent forms of expression, while French and English, in addition to the elements common to all language, share the special background of the Bible and the Classics, which have given them an extensive common stock of phraseology and imagery. This applies equally to the study of civilization. One learns more by studying Ancient Greek religion and comparing it with Christianity than by studying Christianity in ignorance of other religious phenomena; and one learns more about institutions by studying the Greek city-state and comparing it with the modern national state than by merely studying the evolution of the national state in modern Europe. If we take utility to mean intellectual and not practical utility—and as humanists and scientists we do—we may claim without paradox that the study of Greek civilization is valuable just because it is not our own.

These, then, are four points in favour of Greek history: we possess the whole tragedy, it is a magnificent expression of the plot, and it has a peculiar emotional value and a peculiar intellectual value which the drama in which we ourselves are actors cannot have for us.

At this point it is necessary to give a sketch of the plot of Greek history—every one must make his own sketch; the writer offers his to provoke the reader to make his own—and then to illustrate the second point, the beauty of the expression, by quoting half a dozen passages from ancient authors. The other two points—the cathartic and the comparative value of Greek history—are matters of personal experience. I have little doubt that the reader will experience them himself if he takes up this study seriously and from a broad point of view.