See ON.
HELIOPOLIS: Battle of.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1800 (JANUARY-JUNE).
----------HELIOPOLIS: End--------
HELLAS.
HELLENES.
GRAIKOI.
GREEKS.
"To the Greek of the historical ages the idea of Hellas was
not associated with any definite geographical limits. Wherever
a Greek settlement existed, there for the colonists was
Hellas. … Of a Hellas lying within certain specified bounds,
and containing within it only Greek inhabitants, they knew
nothing."
_G. W. Cox,
History of Greece,
book 1, chapter 1._
"Their language was, … from the beginning, the token of
recognition among the Hellenes. … Where this language was
spoken—in Asia, in Europe, or in Africa—there was Hellas.
… A considerable number of the Greek tribes which immigrated
by land [from Asia] into the European peninsula [of Greece]
followed the tracks of the Italicans, and, taking a westward
route through Pæonia and Macedonia, penetrated through Illyria
into the western half of the Alpine country of Northern
Greece, which the formation of its hill ranges and valleys
renders more easily accessible from the north than Thessaly in
its secluded hollow. The numerous rivers, abounding in water,
which flow close by one another through long gorges into the
Ionian Sea, here facilitated an advance into the south; and
the rich pasture-land invited immigration; so that Epirus
became the dwelling-place of a dense crowd of population,
which commenced its civilized career in the fertile lowlands
of the country. Among them three main tribes were marked out,
of which the Chaones were regarded as the most ancient. …
Farther to the south the Thesprotians had settled, and more
inland, in the direction of Pindus, the Molossians. A more
ancient appellation than those of this triple division is that
of the Greeks (Graikoi), which the Hellenes thought the
earliest designation of their ancestors. The same name of
Græci (Greeks) the Italicans applied to the whole family of
peoples with whom they had once dwelt together in these
districts. This is the first collective name of the Hellenic
tribes in Europe. … Far away from the coast, in the
seclusion of the hills, where lie closely together the springs
of the Thyamis, Aous, Aracthus, and Achelous, extends at the
base of Tomarus the lake Ioannina, on the thickly wooded banks
of which, between fields of corn and damp meadows, lay Dodona,
a chosen seat of the Pelasgian Zeus, the invisible God, who
announced his presence in the rustling of the oaks, whose
altar was surrounded by a vast circle of tripods, for a sign
that he was the first to unite the domestic hearths and civic
communities into a great association centering in himself.
This Dodona was the central seat of the Græci; it was a sacred
centre of the whole district before the Italicans commenced
their westward journey; and at the same time the place where
the subsequent national name of the Greeks can be first proved
to have prevailed; for the chosen of the people, who
administered the worship of Zeus, were called Selli or Helli,
and after them the surrounding country Hellopia or Hellas."
{1636}
_E. Curtius,
History of Greece,
book 1, chapters 1 and 4 (volume 1)._
ALSO IN:
_G. Grote,
History of Greece,
part 2, chapter 2 (volume 2)._
_G. W. Cox,
History of Greece,
book 1, chapter 4._
_W. E. Gladstone,
Juventus Mundi,
chapter 4._
HELLENIC GENIUS AND INFLUENCE.
HELLENIC AND HELLENISTIC CULTURE.
HELLENISM.
"It was the privilege of the Greeks to discover the sovereign
efficacy of reason. They entered on the pursuit of knowledge
with a sure and joyous instinct. Baffled and puzzled they
might be, but they never grew weary of the quest. The
speculative faculty which reached its height in Plato and
Aristotle, was, when we make due allowance for time and
circumstance, scarcely less eminent in the Ionian
philosophers; and it was Ionia that gave birth to an idea,
which was foreign to the East, but has become the
starting-point of modern science,—the idea that Nature works
by fixed laws. A fragment of Euripides speaks of him as 'happy
who has learned to search into causes,' who 'discerns the
deathless and ageless order of nature, whence it arose, the
how and the why.' The early poet-philosophers of Ionia gave
the impulse which has carried the human intellect forward
across the line which separates empirical from scientific
knowledge; and the Greek precocity of mind in this direction,
unlike that of the Orientals, had in it the promise of
uninterrupted advance in the future,—of great discoveries in
mathematics, geometry, experimental physics, in medicine also
and physiology. … By the middle of the fifth century B. C.
the general conception of law in the physical world was firmly
established in the mind of Greek thinkers. Even the more
obscure phenomena of disease were brought within the rule.
Hippocrates writing about a malady which was common among the
Scythians and was thought to be preternatural says: 'As for me
I think that these maladies are divine like all others, but
that none is more divine or more human than another. Each has
its natural principle and none exists without its natural
cause.' Again, the Greeks set themselves to discover a
rational basis for conduct. Rigorously they brought their
actions to the test of reason, and that not only by the mouth
of philosophers, but through their poets, historians, and
orators. Thinking and doing—clear thought and noble
action—did not stand opposed to the Greek mind. The
antithesis rather marks a period when the Hellenic spirit was
past its prime, and had taken a one-sided bent. The Athenians
of the Periclean age—in whom we must recognise the purest
embodiment of Hellenism—had in truth the peculiar power,
which Thucydides claims for them, of thinking before they
acted and of acting also. … To Greece … we owe the love of
Science, the love of Art, the love of Freedom: not Science
alone, Art alone, or Freedom alone, but these vitally
correlated with one another and brought into organic union.
And in this union we recognise the distinctive features of the
West. The Greek genius is the European genius in its first and
brightest bloom. From a vivifying contact with the Greek
spirit Europe derived that new and mighty impulse which we
call Progress. Strange it is to think that these Greeks, like
the other members of the Indo-European family, probably had
their cradle in the East; that behind Greek civilisation,
Greek language, Greek mythology, there is that Eastern
background to which the comparative sciences seem to point.
But it is no more than a background. In spite of an
resemblances, in spite of common customs, common words, common
syntax, common gods, the spirit of the Greeks and of their
Eastern kinsmen—the spirit of their civilisation, art,
language, and mythology—remains essentially distinct. …
From Greece came that first mighty impulse, whose far-off
workings are felt by us to-day, and which has brought it about
that progress has been accepted as the law and goal of human
endeavour. Greece first took up the task of equipping man with
all that fits him for civil life and promotes his secular well
being; of unfolding and expanding every inborn faculty and
energy, bodily and mental; of striving restlessly after the
perfection of the whole, and finding in this effort after an
unattainable ideal that by which man becomes like to the gods.
The life of the Hellenes, like that of their Epic hero
Achilles, was brief and brilliant. But they have been endowed
with the gift of renewing their youth. Renan, speaking of the
nations that are fitted to play a part in universal history,
says 'that they must die first that the world may live through
them;' that a people must choose between the prolonged life,
the tranquil and obscure destiny of one who lives for himself,
and the troubled stormy career of one who lives for humanity.
The nation which revolves within its breast social and
religious problems is always weak politically. Thus it was
with the Jews, who in order to make the religious conquest of
the world must needs disappear as a nation.' 'They lost a
material city, they opened the reign of the spiritual
Jerusalem.' So too it was with Greece. As a people she ceased
to be. When her freedom was overthrown at Chaeronea, the page
of her history was to all appearance closed. Yet from that
moment she was to enter on a larger life and on universal
empire. Already during the last days of her independence it
had been possible to speak of a new Hellenism, which rested
not on ties of blood but on spiritual kinship. This
presentiment of Isocrates was marvellously realised. As
Alexander passed conquering through Asia, he restored to the
East, as garnered grain, that Greek civilisation whose seeds
had long ago been received from the East. Each conqueror in
turn, the Macedonian and the Roman, bowed before conquered
Greece and learnt lessons at her feet. To the modern world too
Greece has been the great civiliser, the oecumenical teacher,
the disturber and regenerator of slumbering societies. She is
the source of most of the quickening ideas which re-make
nations and renovate literature and art. If we reckon up our
secular possessions, the wealth and heritage of the past, the
larger share may be traced back to Greece. One half of life
she has made her domain,—all, or well-nigh all, that belongs
to the present order of things and to the visible world."
_S. H. Butcher,
Some Aspects of the Greek Genius,
pages 9-43._
"The part assigned to [the Greeks] in the drama of the nations
was to create forms of beauty, to unfold ideas which should
remain operative when the short bloom of their own existence
was over, and thus to give a new impulse, a new direction, to
the whole current of human life.
{1637}
The prediction which Thucydides puts into the mouth of the
Athenian orator has been fulfilled, though not in the sense
literally conveyed; 'Assuredly we shall not be without
witnesses,' says Pericles; 'there are mighty documents of our
power, which shall make us the wonder of this age, and of ages
to come.' He was thinking of those wide-spread settlements
which attested the empire of Athens. But the immortal
witnesses of his race are of another kind. Like the victims of
the war, whose epitaph he was pronouncing, the Hellenes have
their memorial in all lands, graven, not on stone, but in the
hearts of mankind. … Are we not warranted by what we know of
Greek work, imperfect though our knowledge is, in saying that
no people has yet appeared in the world whose faculty for art,
in the largest sense of the term, has been so comprehensive?
And there is a further point that may be noted. It has been
said that the man of genius sometimes is such in virtue of
combining the temperament distinctive of his nation with some
gift of his own which is foreign to that temperament; as in
Shakespeare the basis is English, and the individual gift a
flexibility of spirit which is not normally English. But we
cannot apply this remark to the greatest of ancient Greek
writers. They present certainly a wide range of individual
differences. Yet so distinctive and so potent is the Hellenic
nature that, if any two of such writers be compared, however
wide the individual differences may be,—as between
Aristophanes and Plato, or Pindar and Demosthenes,—such
individual differences are less significant than those common
characteristics of the Hellenic mind which separate both the
men compared from all who are not Hellenes. If it were
possible to trace the process by which the Hellenic race was
originally separated from their Aryan kinsfolk, the
physiological basis of their qualities might perhaps be traced
in the mingling of different tribal ingredients. As it is,
there is no clue to these secrets of nature's alchemy: the
Hellenes appear in the dawn of their history with that unique
temperament already distinct: we can point only to one cause,
and that a subordinate cause, which must have aided its
development, namely, the geographical position of Greece. No
people of the ancient world were so fortunately placed.
Nowhere are the aspects of external nature more beautiful,
more varied, more stimulating to the energies of body and
mind. A climate which, within three parallels of latitude,
nourishes the beeches of Pindus and the palms of the Cyclades;
mountain barriers which at once created a framework for the
growth of local federations, and encouraged a sturdy spirit of
freedom; coasts abounding in natural harbors; a sea dotted
with islands, and notable for the regularity of its
wind-currents; ready access alike to Asia and to the western
Mediterranean,—these were circumstances happily congenial to
the inborn faculties of the Greek race, and admirably fitted
to expand them."
_R. C. Jebb,
The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry,
pages 27-31._
"The sense of beauty which the Greeks possessed to a greater
extent than any other people could not fail to be caught by
the exceptionally beautiful natural surroundings in which they
lived; and their literature, at any rate their poetry, bears
abundant testimony to the fact. Small though Greece is, it
contains a greater variety, both in harmony and contrast, of
natural beauty than most countries, however great. Its
latitude gives it a southern climate, while its mountains
allow of the growth of a vegetation found in more northern
climes. Within a short space occur all the degrees of
transition from snow-topped hills to vine-clad fountains. And
the joy with which the beauty of their country filled the
Greeks may be traced through all their poetry. … The two
leading facts in the physical aspect of Greece are the sea and
the mountains. As Europe is the most indented and has
relatively the longest coast-line of all the continents of the
world, so of all the countries of Europe the land of Greece is
the most interpenetrated with arms of the sea. …
'Two voices are there: one is of the Sea,
One of the Mountains; each a mighty voice:
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice;
They were thy chosen music, Liberty!'
Both voices spoke impressively to Greece, and her literature
echoes their tones. So long as Greece was free and the spirit
of freedom animated the Greeks, so long their literature was
creative and genius marked it. When liberty perished,
literature declined. The field of Chæronea was fatal alike to
the political liberty and to the literature of Greece. The
love of liberty was indeed pushed even to an extreme in
Greece; and this also was due to the physical configuration of
the country. Mountains, it has been said, divide; seas unite.
The rise and the long continuance in so small a country of so
many cities, having their own laws, constitution, separate
history, and independent existence, can only be explained by
the fact that in their early growth they were protected, each
by the mountains which surrounded it, so effectually, and the
love of liberty in this time was developed to such an extent,
that no single city was able to establish its dominion over
the others. … Everyone of the numerous states, whose
separate political existence was guaranteed by the mountains,
was actually or potentially a separate centre of civilisation
and of literature. In some one of these states each kind of
literature could find the conditions appropriate or necessary
to its development. Even a state which produced no men of
literary genius itself might become the centre at which poets
collected and encouraged the literature it could not produce,
as was the case with Sparta, to which Greece owed the
development of choral lyric. … The eastern basin of the
Mediterranean has deserved well of literature, for it brought
Greece into communication with her colonies on the islands and
on the surrounding coasts, and enabled the numerous Greek
cities to co-operate in the production of a rich and varied
literature, instead of being confined each to a one-sided and
incomplete development. The process of communication began in
the earliest times, as is shown by the spread of epic
literature. Originating in Ionia, it was taken up in Cyprus,
where the epic called the Cypria was composed, and, at the
beginning of the sixth century it was on the coast of Africa
in the colony of Cyrene. The rapid spread of elegiac poetry is
even more strikingly illustrated, for we find Solon in Athens
quoting from his contemporary Mimnermus of Colophon. Choral
lyric, which originated in Asia Minor, was conveyed to Sparta
by Alcman, and by Simonides of Ceos all over the Greek world.
But although in early times we find as much interchange and
reaction in the colonies amongst themselves as between the
colonies and the mother-country, with the advance of time we
find the centripetal tendency becoming dominant.
{1638}
The mother-country becomes more and more the centre to which
all literature and art gravitates. At the beginning of the
sixth century Sparta attracted poets from the colonies in Asia
Minor, but the only form of literature which Sparta rewarded
and encouraged was choral lyric. No such narrowness
characterised Athens, and when she established herself as the
intellectual capital of Greece, all men of genius received a
welcome there, and we find all forms of literature deserting
their native homes, even their native dialects, to come to
Athens. … As long as literature had many centres, there was
no danger of all falling by a single stroke; but when it was
centralised in Athens, and the blow delivered by Philip at
Chæronea had fallen on Athens, classical Greek literature
perished in a generation. It is somewhat difficult to
distinguish race-qualities from the characteristics impressed
on a people by the conditions under which it lives, since the
latter by accumulation and transmission from generation to
generation eventually become race-qualities. Thus the Spartans
possessed qualities common to them and the Dorians, of whom
they were a branch, and also qualities peculiar to themselves,
which distinguished them from other Dorians. … The ordinary
life of a Spartan citizen was that of a soldier in camp or
garrison, rather than that of a member of a political
community, and this system of life was highly unfavourable to
literature. … Other Dorians, not hemmed in by such
unfavourable conditions as the Spartans, did provide some
contributions to the literature of Greece, and in the nature
of their contributions we may detect the qualities of the
race. The Dorians in Sicily sowed the seeds of rhetoric and
carried comedy to considerable perfection. Of imagination the
race seems destitute: it did not produce poets. On the other
hand, the race is eminently practical as well as prosaic, and
their humour was of a nature which corresponded to these
qualities. … The Æolians form a contrast both to the
Spartans and to the Athenians. The development of
individuality is as characteristic of the Æolians as its
absence is of the Spartans. But the Æolians, first of all
Greeks, possessed a cavalry, and this means that they were
wealthy and aristocratic. … This gives us the distinction
between the Æolians and the Athenians: among the former,
individuality was developed in the aristocracy alone; among
the latter, in all the citizens. The Æolians added to the
crown of Greek literature one of the brightest of its
jewels-lyric poetry, as we understand lyric in modern times,
that is, the expression of the poet's feelings, on any subject
whatever, as his individual feeling. … But it was the
Ionians who rendered the greatest services to Greek
literature. They were a quick-witted race, full of enterprise,
full of resources. In them we see reflected the character of
the sea, as in the Dorians the character of the mountains. The
latter partook of the narrowness and exclusiveness of their
own homes, hemmed in by mountains, and by them protected from
the incursion of strangers and strange innovations. The
Ionians, on the other hand, were open as the sea, and had as
many moods. They were eminently susceptible to beauty in all
its forms, to the charm of change and to novelty. They were
ever ready to put any belief or institution to the test of
discussion, and were governed as much by ideas as by
sentiments. Keenness of intellect, taste in all matters of
literature and art, grace in expression, and measure in
everything distinguished them above all Greeks. The
development of epic poetry, the origin of prose, the
cultivation of philosophy, are the proud distinction of the
Ionian race. In Athens we have the qualities of the Ionian
race in their finest flower."
_F. B. Jevons,
A History of Greek Literature,
pages 485-490._
HELLENIC GENIUS AND INFLUENCE:
Hellenism and the Jews.
"The Jewish region … was, in ancient times as well as in the
Graeco-Roman period, surrounded on all sides by heathen
districts. Only at Jamnia and Joppa had the Jewish element
advanced as far as the sea. Elsewhere, even to the west, it
was not the sea, but the Gentile region of the Philistine and
Phenician cities, that formed the boundary of the Jewish.
These heathen lands were far more deeply penetrated by
Hellenism, than the country of the Jews. No reaction like the
rising of the Maccabees had here put a stop to it, besides
which heathen polytheism was adapted in quite a different
manner from Judaism for blending with Hellenism. While
therefore the further advance of Hellenism was obstructed by
religious barriers in the interior of Palestine, it had
attained here, as in all other districts since its triumphant
entry under Alexander the Great, its natural preponderance
over Oriental culture. Hence, long before the commencement of
the Roman period, the educated world, especially in the great
cities in the west and east of Palestine, was, we may well
say, completely Hellenized. It is only with the lower strata
of the populations and the dwellers in rural districts, that
this must not be equally assumed. Besides however the border
lands, the Jewish districts in the interior of Palestine were
occupied by Hellenism, especially Scythopolis … and the town
of Samaria, where Macedonian colonists had already been
planted by Alexander the Great … while the national
Samaritans had their central point at Sichem. The victorious
penetration of Hellenistic culture is most plainly and
comprehensively shown by the religious worship. The native
religions, especially in the Philistine and Phenician cities,
did indeed in many respects maintain themselves in their
essential character; but still in such wise, that they were
transformed by and blended with Greek elements. But besides
these the purely Greek worship also gained an entrance, and in
many places entirely supplanted the former. Unfortunately our
sources of information do not furnish us the means of
separating the Greek period proper from the Roman; the best
are afforded by coins, and these for the most part belong to
the Roman. On the whole however the picture, which we obtain,
holds good for the pre-Roman period also, nor are we entirely
without direct notices of this age. … In the Jewish region
proper Hellenism was in its religious aspect triumphantly
repulsed by the rising of the Maccabees; it was not till after
the overthrow of Jewish nationality in the wars of Vespasian
and Hadrian, that an entrance for heathen rites was forcibly
obtained by the Romans. In saying this however we do not
assert, that the Jewish people of those early times remained
altogether unaffected by Hellenism. For the latter was a
civilising power, which extended itself to every department of
life.
{1639}
It fashioned in a peculiar manner the organization of the
state, legislation, the administration of justice, public
arrangements, art and science, trade and industry, and the
customs of daily life down to fashion and ornaments, and thus
impressed upon every department of life, wherever its
influence reached, the stamp of the Greek mind. It is true
that Hellenistic is not identical with Hellenic culture. The
importance of the former on the contrary lay in the fact, that
by its reception of the available elements of all foreign
cultures within its reach, it became a world-culture. But this
very world-culture became in its turn a peculiar whole, in
which the preponderant Greek element was the ruling keynote.
Into the stream of this Hellenistic culture the Jewish people
was also drawn; slowly indeed and with reluctance, but yet
irresistibly, for though religious zeal was able to banish
heathen worship and all connected therewith from Israel, it
could not for any length of time restrain the tide of
Hellenistic culture in other departments of life. Its several
stages cannot indeed be any longer traced. But when we reflect
that the small Jewish country was enclosed on almost every
side by Hellenistic regions, with which it was compelled, even
for the sake of trade, to hold continual intercourse, and when
we remember, that even the rising of the Maccabees was in the
main directed not against Hellenism in general, but only
against the heathen religion, that the later Asmonaeans bore
in every respect a Hellenistic stamp-employed foreign
mercenaries, minted foreign coins, took Greek names, etc., and
that some of them, e. g. Aristobulus I., were direct favourers
of Hellenism,—when all this is considered, it may safely be
assumed, that Hellenism had, notwithstanding the rising of the
Maccabees, gained access in no inconsiderable measure into
Palestine even before the commencement of the Roman period."
_E. Schürer,
History of the Jewish People in the Time of Christ,
division 2, volume 1, pages 29-30._
HELLENIC GENIUS AND INFLUENCE:
Hellenism and the Romans.
"In the Alexandrian age, with all its close study and
imitation of the classical models, nothing is more remarkable
than the absence of any promise that the Hellenic spirit which
animated those masterpieces was destined to have any abiding
influence in the world. … And yet it is true that the vital
power of the Hellenic genius was not fully revealed, until,
after suffering some temporary eclipse in the superficially
Greek civilizations of Asia and Egypt, it emerged in a new
quality, as a source of illumination to the literature and the
art of Rome. Early Roman literature was indebted to Greece for
the greater part of its material; but a more important debt
was in respect to the forms and moulds of composition. The
Latin language of the third century B. C. was already in full
possession of the qualities which always remained distinctive
of it; it was clear, strong, weighty, precise, a language made
to be spoken in the imperative mood, a fitting interpreter of
government and law. But it was not flexible or graceful,
musical or rapid; it was not suited to express delicate shades
of thought or feeling; for literary purposes, it was, in
comparison with Greek, a poor and rude idiom. The development
of Latin into the language of Cicero and Virgil was gradually
and laboriously accomplished under the constant influence of
Greece. That finish of form, known as classical, which Roman
writers share with Greek, was a lesson which Greece slowly
impressed upon Rome. … A close and prolonged study of the
Greek models could not end in a mere discipline of form; the
beauty of the best Greek models depends too much on their
vital spirit. Not only was the Roman imagination enriched, but
the Roman intellect, through literary intercourse with the
Greek, gradually acquired a flexibility and a plastic power
which had not been among its original gifts. Through Roman
literature the Greek influence was transmitted to later times
in a shape which obscured, indeed, much of its charm, but
which was also fitted to extend its empire, and to win an
entrance for it in regions which would have been less
accessible to a purer form of its manifestation."
_R. C. Jebb,
The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry,
chapter 8._
"Italy had been subject to the influence of Greece, ever since
it had a history at all. … But the Hellenism of the Romans
of the present period [second century B. C.] was, in its
causes as well as its consequences, something essentially new.
The Romans began to feel the lack of a richer intellectual
life, and to be startled as it were at their own utter want of
mental culture; and, if even nations of artistic gifts, such
as the English and Germans, have not disdained in the pauses
of their own productiveness to avail themselves of the paltry
French culture for filling up the gap, it need excite no
surprise that the Italian nation now flung itself with eager
zeal on the glorious treasures as well as on the vile refuse
of the intellectual development of Hellas. But it was an
impulse still more profound and deep-rooted which carried the
Romans irresistibly into the Hellenic vortex. Hellenic
civilization still assumed that name, but it was Hellenic no
longer; it was, it fact, humanistic and cosmopolitan. It had
solved the problem of moulding a mass of different nations
into one whole completely in the field of intellect, and to a
certain degree in that of politics, and, now when the same
task on a wider scale devolved on Rome, she entered on the
possession of Hellenism along with the rest of the inheritance
of Alexander the Great. Hellenism therefore was no longer a
mere stimulus, or subordinate influence; it penetrated the
Italian nation to the very core. Of course, the vigorous home
life of Italy strove against the foreign element. It was only
after a most vehement struggle that the Italian farmer
abandoned the field to the cosmopolite of the capital; and, as
in Germany the French coat called forth the national Germanic
frock, so the reaction against Hellenism aroused in Rome a
tendency, which opposed the influence of Greece on principle
in a style to which earlier centuries were altogether
unaccustomed, and in doing so fell not unfrequently into
downright follies and absurdities. No department of human
action or thought remained unaffected by this struggle between
the new fashion and the old. Even political relations were
largely influenced by it. The whimsical project of
emancipating the Hellenes, … the kindred, likewise Hellenic,
idea of combining republics in a common opposition to kings,
and the desire of propagating Hellenic polity at the expense
of eastern despotism—which were the two principles that
regulated, for instance, the treatment of Macedonia—were
fixed ideas of the new school, just as dread of the
Carthaginians was the fixed idea of the old; and, if Cato
pushed the latter to a ridiculous excess, Philhellenism now
and then indulged in extravagances at least as foolish. …
{1640}
But the real struggle between Hellenism and its national
antagonists during the present period was carried on in the
field of faith, of manners, and of art and literature. … If
Italy still possessed—what had long been a mere antiquarian
curiosity in Hellas—a national religion, it was already
visibly beginning to be ossified into theology. The torpor
creeping over faith is nowhere perhaps so distinctly apparent
as in the alterations in the economy of divine service and of
the priesthood. The public service of the gods became not only
more tedious, but above all more and more costly. … An augur
like Lucius Paullus, who regarded the priesthood as a science
and not as a mere title, was already a rare exception; and
could not but be so, when the government more and more openly
and unhesitatingly employed the auspices for the
accomplishment of its political designs, or, in other words,
treated the national religion in accordance with the view of
Polybius as a superstition useful for imposing on the public
at large. Where the way was thus paved, the Hellenistic
irreligious spirit found free course. In connection with the
incipient taste for art the sacred images of the gods began
even in Cato's time to be employed, like other furniture, to
embellish the chambers of the rich. More dangerous wounds were
inflicted on religion by the rising literature. … Thus the
old national religion was visibly on the decline; and, as the
great trees of the primeval forest were uprooted, the soil
became covered with a rank growth of thorns and briars and
with weeds that had never been seen before. Native
superstitions and foreign impostures of the most various hues
mingled, competed and conflicted with each other. … The
Hellenism of that epoch, already denationalized and pervaded
by Oriental mysticism, introduced not only unbelief but also
superstition in its most offensive and dangerous forms to
Italy; and these vagaries, moreover, had a special charm,
precisely because they were foreign. … Rites of the most
abominable character came to the knowledge of the Roman
authorities: a secret nocturnal festival in honour of the god
Bacchus had been first introduced into Etruria by a Greek
priest, and spreading like a cancer, had rapidly reached Rome
and propagated itself over all Italy, everywhere corrupting
families and giving rise to the most heinous crimes,
unparalleled unchastity, falsifying of testaments, and
murdering by poison. More than 7,000 men were sentenced to
punishment, most of them to death, on this account, and
rigorous enactments were issued as to the future. … The ties
of family life became relaxed with fearful rapidity. The evil
of grisettes and boy-favourites spread like a pestilence. …
Luxury prevailed more and more in dress, ornaments and
furniture, in the buildings and on the tables. Especially
after the expedition to Asia Minor, which took place in 564,
[B. C. 190] Asiatico-Hellenic luxury, such as prevailed at
Ephesus and Alexandria, transferred its empty refinement and
its petty trifling, destructive alike of money, time, and
pleasure, to Rome. … As a matter of course, this revolution
in life and manners brought an economic revolution in its
train. Residence in the capital became more and more coveted
as well as more costly. Rents rose to an unexampled height.
Extravagant prices were paid for the new articles of luxury.
… The influences which stimulated the growth of Roman
literature were of a character altogether peculiar and hardly
paralleled in any other nation. … By means of the Italian
slaves and freedmen, a very large portion of whom were Greek
or half Greek by birth, the Greek language and Greek knowledge
to a certain extent reached even the lower ranks of the
population, especially in the capital. The comedies of this
period indicate that even the humbler classes of the capital
were familiar with a sort of Latin, which could no more be
properly understood without a knowledge of Greek than Sterne's
English or Wieland's German without a knowledge of French. Men
of senatorial families, however, not only addressed a Greek
audience in Greek, but even published their speeches. …
Under the influence of such circumstances Roman education
developed itself. It is a mistaken opinion, that antiquity was
materially inferior to our own times in the general diffusion
of elementary attainments. Even among the lower classes and
slaves there was considerable knowledge of reading, writing,
and counting. … Elementary instruction, as well us
instruction in Greek, must have been long ere this period
imparted to a very considerable extent in Rome. But the epoch
now before us initiated an education, the aim of which was to
communicate not merely an outward expertness, but a real
mental culture. The internal decomposition of Italian
nationality had already, particularly in the aristocracy,
advanced so far as to render the substitution of a broader
human culture for that nationality inevitable: and the craving
after a more advanced civilization was already powerfully
stirring men's minds. The study of the Greek language as it
were spontaneously met this craving. The classical literature
of Greece, the Iliad and still more the Odyssey, had all along
formed the basis of instruction; the overflowing treasures of
Hellenic art and science were already by this means spread
before the eyes of the Italians. Without any outward
revolution, strictly speaking, in the character of instruction
the natural result was, that the empirical study of the
language became converted into a higher study of the
literature; that the general culture connected with such
literary studies was communicated in increased measure to the
scholars; and that these availed themselves of the knowledge
thus acquired to dive into that Greek literature which most
powerfully influenced the spirit of the age—the tragedies of
Euripides and the comedies of Menander. In a similar way
greater importance came to be attached to the study of Latin.
The higher society of Rome began to feel the need, if not of
exchanging their mother-tongue for Greek, at least of refining
it and adapting it to the changed state of culture. … But a
Latin culture presupposed a literature, and no such literature
existed in Rome. … The Romans desired a theatre, but the
pieces were wanting. On these elements Roman literature was
based; and its defective character was from the first and
necessarily the result of such an origin. … Roman poetry in
particular had its immediate origin not in the inward impulse
of the poet, but in the outward demands of the school, which
needed Latin manuals, and of the stage, which needed Latin
dramas. Now both institutions—the school and the stage—were
thoroughly anti-Roman and revolutionary. … The school and
the theatre became the most effective levers in the hands of
the new spirit of the age, and all the more so that they used
the Latin tongue.
{1641}
Men might perhaps speak and write Greek, and yet not cease to
be Romans; but in this case they were in the habit of speaking
in the Roman language, while the whole inward being and life
were Greek. It is one of the most pleasing, but it is one of
the most remarkable and in a historical point of view most
instructive, facts in this brilliant era of Roman
conservatism, that during its course Hellenism struck root in
the whole field of intellect not immediately political, and
that the school-master and the maître de plaisir of the great
public in close alliance created a Roman literature."
_T. Mommsen,
The History of Rome,
book 3, chapter 13 (volume 2)._
Panætius was the founder of "that Roman Stoicism which plays
so prominent a part in the history of the Empire. He came from
Rhodes, and was a pupil of Diogenes at Athens. The most
important part of his life was, however, spent at Rome, in the
house of Scipio Æmilianus, the centre of the Scipionic circle,
where he trained up a number of Roman nobles to understand and
to adopt his views. He seems to have taken the place of
Polybius, and to have accompanied Scipio in his tour to the
East (143 B. C.). He died as head of the Stoic school in
Athens about 110 B. C. This was the man who, under the
influence of the age, really modified the rigid tenets of his
sect to make it the practical rule of life for statesmen,
politicians, magnates, who had no time to sit all day and
dispute, but who required something better than effete
polytheism to give them dignity in their leisure, and
steadfastness in the day of trial. … With the pupils of
Panætius begins the long roll of Roman Stoics. … Here then,
after all the dissolute and disintegrating influences of
Hellenism,—its comœdia palliata, its parasites, its panders,
its minions, its chicanery, its mendacity—had produced their
terrible effect, came an antidote which, above all the human
influences we know, purified and ennobled the world. It
affected, unfortunately, only the higher classes at Rome; and
even among them, as among any of the lower classes that
speculated at all, it had as a dangerous rival that cheap and
vulgar Epicureanism, which puffs up common natures with the
belief that their trivial and coarse reflections have some
philosophic basis, and can be defended with subtle arguments.
But among the best of the Romans Hellenism produced a type
seldom excelled in the world's history, a type as superior to
the old Roman model as the nobleman is to the burgher in most
countries—a type we see in Rutilius Rufus, as compared with
the elder Cato. … It was in this way that Hellenistic
philosophy made itself a home in Italy, and acquired pupils
who in the next generation became masters in their way, and
showed in Cicero and Lucretius no mean rivals of the
contemporary Greek. … Till the poem of Lucretius and the
works of Cicero, we may say nothing in Latin worth reading
existed on the subject. Whoever wanted to study philosophy,
therefore, down to that time (60 B. C.) studied it in Greek.
Nearly the same thing may be said of the arts of architecture,
painting, and sculpture. There were indeed distinctly Roman
features in architecture, but they were mere matters of
building, and whatever was done in the way of design, in the
way of adding beauty to strength, was done wholly under the
advice and direction of Greeks. The subservience to Hellenism
in the way of internal household ornament was even more
complete. … And with the ornaments of the house, the proper
serving of the house, especially the more delicate
departments—the cooking of state dinners, the attendance upon
guests, the care of the great man's intimate comforts—could
only be done fashionably by Greek slaves. … But of course
these lower sides of Hellenism had no more potent effect in
civilising Rome than the employing of French cooks and valets
and the purchase of French ornaments and furniture had in
improving our grandfathers. Much more serious was the
acknowledged supremacy of the Greeks in literature of all
kinds, and still more their insistence that this superiority
depended mainly upon a careful system of intellectual
education. … This is the point where Polybius, after his
seventeen years' experience of Roman life, finds the capital
flaw in the conduct of public affairs. In every Hellenistic
state, he says, nothing engrosses the attention of legislators
more than the question of education, whereas at Rome a most
moral and serious government leaves the training of the young
to the mistakes and hazards of private enterprise. That this
was a grave blunder as regards the lower classes is probably
true. … But when Rome grew from a city controlling Italy to
an empire directing the world, such men as Æmilius Paullus saw
plainly that they must do something more to fit their children
for the splendid position they had themselves attained, and so
they were obliged to keep foreign teachers of literature and
art in their houses as private tutors. The highest class of
these private tutors was that of the philosophers, whom we
have considered, and while the State set itself against their
public establishments, great men in the State openly
encouraged them and kept them in their houses. … As regards
literature, however, in the close of the second century B. C.
a change was visible, which announced the new and marvellous
results of the first. … Even in letters Roman culture began
to take its place beside Greek, and the whole civilised world
was divided into those who knew Greek letters and those who
knew Roman only. There was no antagonism in spirit between
them, for the Romans never ceased to venerate Greek letters or
to prize a knowledge of that language. But of course there
were great domains in the West beyond the influence of the
most western Greeks, even of Massilia, where the first higher
civilisation introduced was with the Roman legions and
traders, and where culture assumed permanently a Latin form.
In the East, though the Romans asserted themselves as
conquerors, they always condescended to use Greek, and there
were prætors proud to give their decisions at Roman assize
courts in that language."
_J. P. Mahaffy,
The Greek World under Roman Sway,
chapter 5._
HELLENION, The.
See NAUKRATIS.
HELLESPONT, The.
The ancient Greek name of what is now called the straits of
The Dardanelles, the channel which unites the Sea of Marmora
with the Ægean. The name (Sea of Helle) came from the myth of
Helle, who was said to have been drowned in these waters.