_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 {katharsis} or purgation, of these emotions.' (Butcher's
translation.) This word καθαρσις {katharsis}--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 {Katharsis},
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.