[This is Chapter Three of Murphey’s book Understanding the Modern Predicament.]
Chapter Three
Despite
the profound contributions the ancient Greeks made to Western civilization,
they did not provide later humanity with final solutions to the main human
questions.
We
are not armed in the modern period with a ready-made paradigm -- i.e., model --
provided by the Greeks (just as we are not from the Romans and the Middle Ages, although that will be the subject of the
ensuing two chapters). None was paradigmatic -- and this has the important
consequence that in the modern age we face the perennial problems of mankind
anew. This leaves us free to be existentially at odds with ourselves.
The
history of the ancient Greeks tells of a continuing struggle with the basic
problems of life. More effervescently perhaps than others, they shared the
cosmic immaturity of the human race. The many-sided, diverse nature of their
experience affords an excellent example of the "shaking out process"
through which mankind has been passing.
Every
aspect of Greek life contained diversity, change and conflict. This was true as
to each separate feature -- its philosophy, its
culture, its drama, its economics and politics. There was diversity from city
to city and even within a given city from period to period. To suggest a
homogeneous Greek thrust is to simplify away the differences among them.
In
this chapter I will look at their achievements and their limitations, to show
in greater detail just why it is that their heritage to us is one of richness,
but not of solution.
Man
the Measure. Protagora's comment that "man is the measure of all
things” is an expression of humanism. The Greek experience was anthropocentric,
although this was by no means unmixed. There was a decided turn away from the
irrational, demonic world -- and here the gulf opened between the
reality-oriented modern mind and the primitivism of the Cargo Cults. Once this
step was taken, a vast number of others became possible."
Bruno
Snell has written that "the heroes of the Iliad...no longer feel that they
are the playthings of irrational forces" and that "they acknowledge
their Olympian gods who constitute a well-ordered and meaningful world"l
He admits that "they continued throughout to preserve a belief in
magic," but magic was not a controlling theme: "All those who helped
to advance the new era had as little regard for it as Homer." Thucydides
indicated his own separation from the irrational when he said that "for
those who put their faith in oracles, here is one solitary instance of their
having been proved accurate."2
Man
was elevated rather than debased. Snell points to an "immense
difference" between Greek and Oriental religion, observing that "throughout
his poems Homer has his gods appear in such a manner that they do not force man
down into the dust; on the contrary, when a god associates with a man, he
elevates him, and makes him free, strong, courageous, certain of himself."
Werner Jaeger confirms this when he writes that "the Homeric epics contain
the germ of all Greek philosophy. In them we can clearly see the
anthropocentric tendency of Greek thought, that tendency which contrasts so
strongly with the theomorphic philosophy of the Oriental who sees God as the
sole actor and man as merely the instrument or object of that divine authority.
Homer," he says, "definitely places man and his fate in the
foreground."3 Still further, T. G. Tucker has noted that
"there never were minds more free from the anguish of moral yearnings, or
ideals of self-mortification, than those of classical
Again,
this was not unmixed. There was much to contradict it, although at least during
the pre-Christian era these contradictions did not reverse the emphasis.
Herodotus repeatedly stated a doctrine that, if it had not been balanced by
other factors, could have inhibited the creativity of ancient man: "God is
envious of human prosperity...what a chancy thing life is...Great wealth can
make a man no happier than moderate means, unless he has the luck to continue
in prosperity to the end...until he is dead, keep the word 'happy' in
reserve." He was quoting Solon, but elsewhere he stated on his own behalf
that "in this world nobody remains prosperous for long."
Snell
reports that vestiges of the original belief in "the uncanny and the
spooky, the belief in ghosts and magic" remained in Homer. A belief in
fate was a major theme: "In Homer," Snell says, "the outstanding
feats of a man are said to spring, not from his individual character or from
his special gifts, but from the divine force which flows through him."
This was not without its impact on the individual: "There are personal
fates, but no personal achievements... Helplessness is a fundamental motif in
the early Greek personal lyric."
Accordingly,
Moses Hadas has quoted E. R. Dodds that "the Greeks were as continuously
and deeply concerned with the supernatural as any people in history."6
Although Hadas points out that "uncompromising intellectuality does in
fact characterize much of the best Greek work," he sets off against this
an observation that "we must be aware that rationalism was never the sole
nor even the dominant outlook in Greece itself, and that later ages which
insisted that it was were only seeking buttresses for their own outlook."
Just
the same, Hadas' overriding message in The Greek Ideal and Its Survival is
that the Greeks did make "man the measure.” He emphasizes that despite
important opposing elements the Greek religious view was such that men still
felt it not only possible to live energetic lives on this earth, but were
impelled to do so. "What we have, in effect, is a world of gods and men in
which each party attends to its own business and according to its own
standards. That is why, though the gods of the (Homeric) epic are potent, the
poem is still anthropocentric." The gods became mere data: "Because
the Greeks set about doing with all their might what their hands found to do,
accepting divine intervention as an ineluctable hazard, not as a law and
promise, they were able to achieve the things they did achieve."
Hadas
notes two features that were picked up by Machiavelli and Spinoza and that
influenced Renaissance thinking. First, the separation between the sphere of
men and the sphere of the gods lent itself naturally to a separation of church
and state. "The first step in making man rather than external authority
the measure of all things is to separate government from religion, and this was
done, most implicitly and thoroughly, by Machiavelli.” Second, the Greeks had
not developed an organized priestly class. "The second step is to separate
religion from an organized authority based on a specific revelation, and this
was done, most explicitly and thoroughly, by Spinoza.”
Because
of Christianity, for many centuries the main Greek influence on later Western
civilization was not anthropomorphic, but Platonic. But Hadas makes the
surprising point that Plato and even Aristotle were the exceptions
and not the rule in Greek life. “Plato is in fact a deviation.
Unquestioning submission to a spiritual authority and aspiration toward an
undefined goal is not what sets the Greeks apart from other men...In Greece
itself, apparently, Plato’s influence was limited. His Academy was, as we shall
see, exclusive and to a degree esoteric. Virtually all of the literary figures
of the next generation were alumni not of the Academy but of the
Through
Plato, the Greeks contributed much to Christianity; but through what was
otherwise an anthropocentric view they contributed to the secular foundations
of the modern age.
Intellectual Variety. The Greeks did not present
later man with an intellectual consensus; what they did do was to foretell
later ideas: there was little that they did not explore first. According to Hadas, “the major genres and subject matter of literature,
as of philosophy and plastic art, have been laid down by the Greeks.”
We
can get some idea of the extent to which modern thinking was foretold by taking
a single area such as political philosophy; one who is absorbed in the
discussions of the modern era can only be surprised to learn how much of that
discussion was taken up in Greek thought.
It
was not new when nineteenth century socialists such as Marx launched attacks on
monogamous marriage and discussed in detail the idea of collectivizing
child-rearing. Two thousand years ago Aristophanes' comedy Ecclesiazusae
presented precisely such a scheme.7 A
character in the comedy fervently endorses a radically egalitarian system of
sex-on-demand and a community of parentage. More profoundly, this idea comes
from Plato. When the modern anarchist John Henry Mackay advocates such a plan,
he has substantial precursors in Greek thought.
Collectivist
thought in general has important roots in several aspects of Greek life and
thought: in the communal, barracks life of the Spartan as established by
Lycurgus; in the writing of Xenophon praising the Spartan state; in the
The
nineteenth century classical liberal Frederic Bastiat ascribed much of the
collectivist thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the study
of ancient civilization, including the Greeks. “Antiguity presents everywhere
-- in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome -- the spectacle of a few men molding mankind
according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud,"
Bastiat wrote.8 Modern man did not look back upon them and learn
exclusively liberating notions.
But
monarchical thought, partially distinguishable from these collectivist ideas,
also received support from the Greeks. Rostovtzeff relates that "Greek
philosophy in early Hellenistic times added....the theory that kingship was
the best form of government and that kings were identical with the
State and, as it were, an incarnation of it. Various schools...vied with each
other in finding arguments to prove that monarchy, from the philosophical
standpoint, was the best possible form of government."9
Set
off against socialism and monarchism, however, were significant contributions
to later classical liberal ideals. F. A. Hayek looked upon Athenian ideals as
an historical source for what he takes to be the central idea behind classical
liberal thought -- the concept of Isonomia,
later known as the Rule of Law.
It was the achievement of the Greeks that they became in their diversity the fount, not certainly of a consensus, but of the contending branches of political thought. The multi-tracked intellectuality was present in the other major areas of thought, as well.
Intellectual Method. The Greeks did not
"solve" the major questions of intellectual method -- but they did go
far into rational method to open up avenues that are pertinent today.
Snell
says of Hecataeus, for example, that "it remains
his particular achievement that he placed knowledge, as it was understood by
him, in a position whence it could be advanced and augmented. Like Xenophanes, only more concretely, he holds that knowledge
consists of the data gained from inquiry and search." Snell tells us that
"this enthusiasm for knowledge lives on in Herodotus. For
him experience forms the one and only basis of knowledge. He
distinguishes between what he has seen himself, what he has heard from
eye-witnesses, and what he has learned merely as rumour.
"
At
the same time, Snell acknowledges that this was just a beginning,
that real empirical science did not develop in ancient
Empirical
science as we know it may not have been rising, but strides were nevertheless
made in the applications of reason.
Although
the sophists deserve and have received considerable criticism, Werner Jaeger
credits sophistic culture with having made "one of the greatest
discoveries which the mind of man has ever made: it was not until it explored
these three of its activities (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) that the mind
apprehended the hidden law of its own structure."
Foretelling
the moderns, specialization was the hallmark of much Greek thought. Hadas
remarks of Plato that "specialization was a cardinal principle in his
social thinking." He adds that "in respect to educational theory
Aristotle went beyond Plato in specialization."
Snell
stresses the gradual formulation of a language fitted to logical thought. He
traces the movement from purely proper nouns, which denote a single object, to
concrete nouns, which denote classes of objects...and then to abstract nouns
through the use of mythical names and the figurative use of concrete
nouns...and still further the development of connecting parts of speech. He
refers to a "strange threefold development": "At first the
logical element is merely understood from the context; as a second step,
certain words which had at first had a different function came to represent the
latent logic; and finally this logic, now overtly expressed, becomes an object
of reflexion" We see how subtle and yet pivotal
the contributions may be that a culture such as that of Greece has made to
Western civilization.
Heroic
Emulation. The Greek contributions were by no means entirely cerebral. The
other dimensions of life were equally creative.
Competitiveness
for honor was a major factor in Greek creativity. It is amusing to read of the
horror expressed, according to Herodotus, by a certain Tritantaechmes:
"Good heavens, Mardonius, what kind of men are
these that you have brought us to fight against -- men who compete with one
another for no material reward, but only for honor:" Heroic emulation was
given a high place in Pericles' funeral oration: "What made (Athens) great
was men with a spirit of adventure, men who knew their duty, men who were
ashamed to fall below a certain standard...Famous men have the whole earth as
their memorial...their memory abides and grows. It is for you to try to be like
them."
"The
Homeric ideal is summarized in a single line," Hadas says, “--‘to strive
always for excellence and to surpass all others."' He adds that the most
striking feature of the Homeric ethos is the enormous importance attached to
individual prowess, individual pride, individual reputation." Snell tells
us that "since the days of Jacob Burckhardt the
competitive character of the great Greek achievements has rightly been
stressed...From his earliest boyhood the young nobleman is urged to think of
his glory and honor; he must look out for his good name." Jaeger adds that
the hero was considered the highest type of humanity.
Although
I have no theory to explain the ultimate origins of Greek creativity, this
heroic competition was clearly a major spur to it. The competitiveness in
athletics and military action is, of course, legendary, and Tucker speaks of
this competition as a cause also of the greatness of Greek sculpture.
"Nothing could foster great sculpture," he says, "better than
this -- first, a deliberate aim at the representation of ideal humanity;
second, a constant stimulus of rivalry on all sides towards its perfect
attainment." Jaeger refers to the competitiveness as a key to Greek drama
and poetry.
Artistic
Flowering. This rivalry for honor took place within a leisured life that
was made possible by the economic base founded on slavery and by a high level
of state aid. These brought a new splendor to cultural pursuits during the Age
of Pericles. Abbott relates that "by direct or indirect means Pericles
made the state the paymaster of a vast number of citizens, and the state was
practically himself...At the same time the public festivals of the city were
enlarged and adorned with new splendor." Under Pericles' patronage, Pheidias the sculptor and Ictinus
the architect worked to produce "the unrivalled triumph of architectural
skill," the Acropolis, in honor of Athena. This flowering was a quick one;
Abbott remarks that “this magnificence was not the result of centuries of toil;
it was the work of fifty years. In 479 B. C. Athens was a heap of blackened
ruins; in 429 B. C. all the great works of the Periclean
age had been accomplished except the Erectheum.
Athens indeed became a vast workshop." But this development was typical;
the encouragement of the arts was common among the Greek tyrannies.
This
splendor was entirely public. It wasn't shared by private life. Tucker says
there was "no magnificence of streets or private houses,” and speaks of
the “insignificance of the private dwellings.”
The
beauty of Greek sculpture and architecture lay in its idealization and
simplicity. Tucker comments that “throughout all the truly classical period you
will find nothing embodied by Athenian artists in stone or in metal which does
not carry with it some feeling of majesty and dignity, heroism or other
loftiness, or else stir the mind to keen pleasure in the contemplation of
physical and mental perfection.” Seeking to explain this, Tucker reflects that
“their choice of these higher and healthier themes was intuitive or inbred, the
spontaneous outcome of a judgment sane and true”; it was almost certainly
related to the humanistic idealism of Greek religion and to the heroic
conception held of man.
Balance
and Harmony. Broad conceptions of balance, harmony, beauty and justice
entered into the Greek mentality. Snell reports that behind the world of the
gods the Greeks perceived "an even more universal plan which controlled
the life of man and gave it meaning." He goes so far as to assign this
perception a place of central importance in the development of Western
civilization when he says that “our European culture may well be said to rest
on the discovery of the Greeks that this plan takes different manifestations:
to the intellect it appears in the shape of law, to the senses it is beauty, to
the active spirit it is justice. The persuasion that truth, beauty and justice
exist in the world, even though their appearance is largely hidden, is our
ever-present heirloom from the Greeks."
Werner
Jaeger has similarly written about the role played by Greek harmony: "The
subsequent influence of the conception of harmony on all aspects of Greek life
was immeasurably great. It affected not only sculpture and architecture, but
poetry and rhetoric, religion, and morality; all Greece came to realize that
whatever a man made or did was governed by a severe rule, which like the rule
of justice could not be transgressed with impunity -- the rule of fitness or
propriety."
Economics
and Technology. Characteristic Greek energy extended also into economics.
Herodotus spoke with pride of the Samians as being
“responsible for three of the greatest building and engineering feats in the
Greek world: the first is a tunnel nearly a mile long, eight feet wide and
eight feet high, driven clean through the base of a hill nine hundred feet in
height. The whole length of it carries a second cutting thirty feet deep and
three broad, along which water from an abundant source is led through pipes
into the town ... Secondly, there is the artificial harbor enclosed by a
breakwater...and, last, the island has the biggest of all known Greek temples.”
Although
he notes that during the Hellenistic period there was a slow economic erosion
caused by a number of factors, Rostovtzeff describes a high level of
attainment: “Greece, in spite of her poor natural resources, had developed
these remarkably by the long and steady efforts of her people. There is not the
slightest doubt that even in the third century Greece was one of the best
cultivated countries in the world. Her vineyards and olive-groves, her
fruit-gardens and kitchen gardens were famous. The standard of her agriculture
and the quality of her pasturage were very high. Thousands of men turned to
account the wealth of the sea: there was abundance of fish, salt, sponges, and
shell-fish for dyeing, and their exploitation was well organized. Mines and
quarries were worked as long as there were minerals… Greek artisans were still
the most efficient and the most artistic. Trade relations were firmly
established between the various parts of the Greek world." Poland, Reisinger and Wagner relate that "the third century
became the age of inventions and discoveries and the flourishing period of the sciences."ll
Transmission
of Culture. The Greeks were the great cultural source. According to Jaeger,
they became during the Hellenistic period "the teachers of all succeeding
nations. Greece," he adds, "is the school of the western world."
The conquests of Alexander the Great in the East were followed by deep cultural
influence, so that, as Reisinger and Wagner have
observed, "henceforth the Greek language and civilization formed the bond
of union which embraced the kingdoms of his successors." Still later, the
Romans appropriated and continued to spread Greek culture.
Greek
culture came to transcend a given city or nation. Hadas writes that "what
enabled the Greek ideal to survive was its detachment from national sovereignty
and its transformation into something like a religious cult," and he notes
that "what was transmitted, naturally, was neither of the classical
Greeks' strains separately -- Chthonic or Olympian, mystic or rational,
Platonic or Isocratean -- but an amalgam compounded
of the two along with new ingredients contributed by the subjects of the
cultural empire."
Isonomia. F. A. Hayek has presented the dual
concepts of personal liberty and "Isonomia"
as of primary importance in the struggle within Western civilization for
individual liberty. In The Constitution of Liberty he contests the
common assertion that the ancients did not enjoy individual liberty: "This
is true of many places and periods even in ancient Greece, but certainly not of
Athens at the time of its greatness...surely not of those Athenians to whom
Pericles said that 'the freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also
to our ordinary life...' and whose soldiers, at the moment of supreme danger
during the Sicilian expedition, were reminded by their general that, above all,
they were fighting for a country in which they had 'unfettered discretion to
live as they pleased.’”12
It
is true that even in Periclean Athens the state
pressed closely, absorbing the lives of the people, so that it is not incorrect
to say, as Jaeger has, that "the Athenian state dominated the lives of its
members to a degree unparalleled outside Sparta." But this was a different
sort of dominance, unlike the subserviency, say, of
the Egyptians under the Pharoahs. The citizen's
relation to the state was that of a free citizen under the Rule of Law. The
Athenian ideal of "Isonomia" expressed what
we have come to know as the "Rule of Law." It involved "the
equality of laws to all manner of persons," at least among free men.
Herodotus
reports a debate among advocates of democracy, oligarchy and monarchy. The
advocate of democracy asked his listeners to "contrast with (monarchy) the
rule of the people: first, it has the finest of all names to describe it -- isonomy,
or equality before the law; and, secondly, the people in power do none of the
things that monarchs do." He added that "I have no wish to rule -- or
to be ruled either."
Pericles' funeral oration emphasized this: "Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law." He added that "in public affairs we keep to the law. This is because it commands our deep respect." Abbott tells us that the Greek attitude was that “bad or good, the law must be strictly obeyed. If it worked ill it might be corrected, but obeyed it must be.”
The
courts were a primary institution. The body of jurors was known as the Heliaea. Abbott comments about Pericles
and the Heliaea that "above all, he established
the majesty of law, and claimed for it the support of the whole nation. Every
Athenian had now a direct reason for knowing what the law was, and for helping
to maintain it. The reign of the Heliaea was the
reign of law."
Even
this had its imperfections, sometimes severe, according to present standards.
The law was said to be equal, but the jurymen had discretion in practice about
how to interpret it. Abbott takes some of the gloss off when he tells us of the
type of things to which a “legal realist” would point today: "The rich
offered the most tempting victims to courts largely composed of the very poor.
The establishment of such courts was a step onwards in the development of
class-hatred, ranging the rich and poor on opposite sides; for though the law
was the same for all, the administration of it was now as entirely in the hands
of the poor, as it had once been in the hands of the rich. And along with this
inequality went the degradation of moral sentiment, which could not fail to
arise in men who were engaged from morning to night not only in listening to
legal quibbles, or falsehoods, but in deciding for hire on the lives and
properties of others without the least responsibility or control." In such
a situation, demagoguery would run high.
Nevertheless,
equality before the law has been one of the central concepts in Western law and
in the history of liberty, as Hayek has emphasized. The Greek application of it
was not perfect, but the Athenian concept was important
to later generations; it has been a leading
principle within classical liberalism and was important in medieval thinking.
It is a major Constitutional principle in American jurisprudence.
The
connection between the Rule of Law and the liberty of the individual in the
sense of the lack of arbitrary restraint is apparent. Snell argues that there
is no incongruity between the Athenian's personal absorption into the community
and this personal liberty; the Rule of Law was the key. “It should not surprise
us that the cognizance of individuality and the communal establishment of the
polis are contemporary events; for to be a citizen is not the same as belonging
to a mass of retainers. The law is the new link which binds men together.”
These
and still other achievements have come down to us. Their value cannot be
diminished and ought not to be debunked. And yet, each has rarely involved a clear,
unmixed blessing; even in the areas of greatest achievement, there have been
human blemishes, combined with much complexity and contradictory tendencies.
The Greeks themselves were child-men. They did not resolve the problematic
nature of life for us.
No
Social, Economic Paradigm. In the social and economic areas, they adopted
make-shift solutions that we would be unwilling to accept as a paradigm in
modern Western civilization. Hadas makes the point that “we are stirred by the
democratic ideals of Athens as set forth in Pericles' Funeral Oration, but we
are aware that the entire system rested upon the institution of slavery, that
citizenship was rigidly exclusive, and that women were relegated to an inferior
legal and social status." Abbott distinguishes between the Greeks'
solution and our own aspirations with the observation that "the most
obvious point of difference in Greek civilization, when we compare it with our
own, is the existence of slavery. There were slaves everywhere; in every workshop
and every household; on the farms and in the mines; the police were slaves, the
clerks in public offices were slaves."
It
may have been true, as Rostovtzeff states, that "the free play of economic
forces... with which the State very seldom interfered" was "the
essence of the Greek economic system," and that this was akin to laissez-faire
capitalism --and further that this economic freedom was the key to the progress
the Greeks made in the economic area --, but a "capitalism" involving
slave labor would not have pleased Adam Smith, Richard Cobden or the other
modern proponents of capitalism. Nor would such advocates of free trade have
been happy with the protectionist economic policies adopted by the various
cities; Rostovtzeff says that "none of the Greek cities abolished its
restrictive measures against its neighbors or its oppressive
customs-duties." Still further, modern business enterprise would not
welcome the condition Rostovtzeff tells us about when he says that
"organized bands of pirates had their own well-protected harbours (not only in Crete) and were welcomed in all
commercial ports when they appeared laden with their booty."
The
Greeks during the Age of Pericles were able at least temporarily to put
together a combination of factors that helped them overcome some of the major
questions that have plagued Western civilization. They had personal absorption
into the state, and yet liberty; democracy, but not egalitarian leveling; a
leisured, aristocratic life, but a pluralism of types within the leisured
group; the free play of economic forces, but still a lifestyle which was not
typically bourgeois.
Abbott
ascribes this mainly to slavery, though other factors must be taken into
account, since obviously slavery existed elsewhere without producing the same
combination of cultural factors. Abbott asks "what was the effect of
slavery on the Athenian democracy?" and he answers ''as a first and
obvious effect it allowed the citizen an amount of leisure which without it
would have been impossible. While the slave was at work, the master was in the
Ecclesia, or in the law-courts, or in the market-place, or in one of the
numerous portocoes." Slavery and the state
payment for certain services rendered to the citizen permitted leisure even to
the poor citizen. This in turn, according to Abbott, blunted any tendency
Athenian democracy may have had to turn toward socialism.
This slave-based leisure negated the predominance of a commercial lifestyle, so there was no fifth century Sinclair Lewis to pen his dissatisfaction with an Athenian Babbitt. The "capitalism" of Athens produced a culture that was more in keeping with the ideal that intellectuals have sought than has been the busy, work-ethic type of capitalism known to modern times. Instead of preparing a student for business, Athenian schools centered on "self-culture and worthy citizenship." "The daily life of the Greek, especially the Athenian, was often spent in busily doing nothing."
Perhaps
in the leisure produced by modern technology we will be able to find a cultural
form akin to this, unless our own spiritual imperfections cause us to degrade
our leisure into less-than-noble uses; but in the absence of such a plateau for
leisure it is difficult to emulate the Greeks. We would hardly wish to adopt the
slavery that permitted such a life.
No
Solution to Class Antagonism. There was a certain stability in Periclean Athens in the absence of a thrust toward
socialism, but a centuries-long perspective of Greek experience makes it clear
that the Greeks found no solution to the antagonism between the haves and the
have-nots. There is a reminder of the nicknames given the groups within the
French Revolution in Abbott's description of the men of the Plain, the Shore
and the Mountain, as taken from Plutarch: "the men of the Plain were
chiefly...rich landholders of a strict conservative type, who wished to retain
unimpaired all their ancient rights and privileges. The men of the Mountain
were the poor goat-herds...They were the radical party...whose only hope of
improving their condition lay in breaking the power of their opponents, and
removing the barriers of birth and privilege."
Jaeger
tells of class conflicts in the seventh century B.C. and he traces them through
the sixth century, in which the landowning nobility was displaced by men of
commercial wealth. The fifth century continued the social upheaval. And
Rostovtzeff says that in the third century "class war was rife and the
sharp social contrast between rich and poor led to acute conflicts in many
cities." Though I cannot agree with Marx that this conflict overshadows
all else in history, class warfare was typical of the Greeks, as
contemporaneously it was of the Romans. The ancients bequeathed no panacea
here.
The
Changing Concept of Areté. Throughout Greek history, emphasis was
placed on virtue, excellence, a sense of the noble -- areté. This concept
went hand in hand with heroic emulation.
No
one view of the ideal man comes down from this Greek conception. Over the
centuries, the Greeks themselves changed their view of it. In the Iliad
of Homer, it was totally in line with the early aristocratic ideal of Pindar. But Hesoid introduced the areté of working class
virtue, the excellence of "righteousness and work." In praise of
Sparta, Tyrtaeus exalted the heroic patriot, and made
the state the measure. "Whatever helps the state is good, whatever injures
it is bad," was Tyrtaeus' view according to
Jaeger. Solon recognized a pluralism of virtues, allowing for various goals. A
primary tendency as time passed was to shift from the ideal of physical
excellence to moral and intellectual excellence. The Qdyssey
exalts both warlike valor and intellectual merit; Xenophanes recommended "his 'wisdom' as more
profitable to the State" than "wrestling and boxing and
running," thereby rejecting Pindar. In the time
of Socrates the identification of the individual and the state tended to break
up, according to Jaeger, with individual virtues becoming important.
Intellectualizing the matter, Plato ascribed all separate virtues to a single
one -- knowledge.
The
upshot is that the existential problem is not solved for us by a consensus
arrived at by Greek culture. The argument over values and lifestyles in modern
thought was typical also of the Greeks.
Paideia. Werner Jaeger's monumental
two-volume Paideia: The Ideals of Greek
Culture tells of a similar evolution in the Greek concept of paideia. For centuries, Homer was the paramount educational
instrument; the purpose of education was not to learn a craft or profession,
but to receive from the past the heritage reflecting Greek values, although
Jaeger says that the deliberate formation of character in keeping with a
cultural ideal began as late as Pericles. When at that time introspective
intellect was turned inward upon Greek society, the Sophists caused the Greeks
to become conscious of their own culture. The concept of paideia
became enlarged in meaning; it came to include not just education, but the
totality of culture, including "all the artistic forms and the intellectual
and aesthetic achievements of their race." In Socrates it took still
another twist: it came to refer to the inner life of a man, as though it were a
personal possession that could be protected against the outside world. This was
a spiritualization of paideia.
No
Final Religious Paradigm. If there is anything paradigmatic in Greek
religion, it is its openness -- its lack of a paradigm --, although the portion
of it assignable to Plato contradicts even this. The predominant Greek tendency
was not to insist on a single religious form or to seek to convert others to a
"true" view; "dispersed as they were over various lands, they
worshipped their god in many shapes and under many names."
Tucker
speaks of the many "inconsistent and even incompatible elements" in
Greek religion, and ascribes this to the Greeks' origins. "We have already
observed that the classical Greek was the outcome of a blending of northern
invaders, akin to the Teutons and Celts, with earlier
denizens of the country, who were of a quite alien Mediterranean stock. Greek
religion was equally the outcome of a blending of the two." One of these
original sources had had a religion based on "the powers of nature and
their personification" and the other had been based instead on "a
worship of ancestors and their ghosts."
The
result was polytheism and a certain ambiguity even about the gods that were
believed in. Hadas reflects that "even on the question of the sovereignty
of Zeus, where we should expect a definite and consistent position, there is
ambiguity; sometimes Zeus is sovereign, bound by no will but his own, and
sometimes he is subordinate to Fate and only the executive arm for the decrees
of Fate. "
As
with other facets of Greek society, there was no final formulation; Greek religion
changed with time. The totemic aspects had dropped out prior to Homer; with
Homer the gods were thought close enough to man to encourage a "robust
confidence in man's own godlikeness"; this was shaken in the fifth and
sixth centuries when moral qualities were ascribed to the gods, raising them
high above the human level and giving man himself less confidence; however,
with the advent of tragedy man was put on his own, "no longer protected by
the gods' heavenly radiance," and began to make his own decisions.
There
came an age of skepticism in which the Sophists "abolished all ties of
religion and custom by branding them mere conventions." Euripidean intellectualism criticized "not only the
gods, but the whole mythology," according to Jaeger. "There is no
greater proof of the fact that his generation questioned everything and
believed nothing, than the disintegration of all life and tradition into
discussion and philosophizing."
Then
came the rise of Platonism and its opposite, the Epicurean view. These were
followed by the Stoics. During the Hellenistic Age that followed, the Stoic and
Epicurean philosophies predominated. Stoicism constituted, according to Hadas,
a fusion of the Platonic with the non-Platonic. It was Epicureanism, Hadas
says, that truly represented the Greek tradition; but the Platonic view related
most to the Christianity that later swept the Roman world.
In
religion as in other things the Greeks left us not a "solution,” but a
variety of rich sources.
The
Exuberant Child-Man. There are a number of other ways in which Greek
culture left open questions -- as in their failure to settle upon a final
political model, their continuous harsh warfare, the non-paradigmatic
implications of their small size and scale; this discussion has been by no
means complete. My overall impression, especially as I have read the histories
written by their own historians, has been that the Greeks were child-like. I
was about to write "delightfully, interestingly, exuberantly
childlike," but such a judgment can only be made at a distance. Had we
lived among them, we might have found many aspects neither delightful nor
interesting in a favorable sense. Those annihilated in the sacking of a city or
who survived to be pressed into slavery had occasion, in fact, to rue the
exuberance.
But
from a distance they were indeed delightful and exuberant and deeply
interesting. Their accomplishments were great, but they were people, subject to
the ordinary foibles. We smile when we read of the phallic processions and
the statues of Hermes with an erect penis.
We smile again when we read Herodotus' believing account of the comparative
casualties supposedly suffered by the Greeks and the Persians at Platae: "... of the 300,000 men (of the Persians), not
3,000 survived. The Spartan losses in the battle amounted to 91 killed; the Tegeans lost 16, the Athenians 52." Humanity at large
is reflected in Thucydides' accounts of the fickleness of Athenian character,
as when he reports a letter from Nicias observing
that "I know the Athenian character from experience: you like to be told
pleasant news, but if things do not turn out in the way you have been led to
expect, then you blame your informants afterwards." He tells of the voters
at Athens who will permit their judgments to be swayed “by any clever speech
designed to create prejudice,” and of Nicias' choice
"to meet his own death himself at the hands of the enemy" rather than
to “be put to death on a disgraceful charge and by an unjust verdict of the
Athenians."
There
was indeed Olympian elevation, but Euripides saw fit instruments for his
realism in "lying, treachery, malice, uncleanness, jealousy, rage,
vengeance, envy." The public taste in 5th century Athens was reflected in
Aristophanes' comedies, which were "distinguished by three
characteristics: the direct attacks on public characters; the extravagant forms
assumed by the choruses; and the nakedness of their indecency.”
Jaeger
writes of the human weakness that accompanied the nobility and energy of the
late 5th century; even among so fine a flowering he finds “something
inexpressibly sad about the hypocrisy which was the necessary price for all
that brilliance, and the moral rootlessness of a
world which would give anything and do anything for outward success."
Sadness,
however, does not best summarize the Greeks; at least, not a sadness differing
from the sadness inherent in any review of humanity's immaturity. From our
distance they are immensely entertaining and enjoyable. They involved all that
goes into a good play. Most assuredly they hold the mirror up to ourselves.
1. So
that I can avoid the pedantry of including hundreds of footnotes, I will be
footnoting to a given source only once in each chapter. The single footnote
will cite all of the pages to which I would otherwise refer by specific
footnotes. The references to Snell, for example, are as follows: Bruno Snell, The
Discovery of the Mind (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), pp. 22, 32, 61,
35, l00, 143, 147, 144, 236, 159-160, 258, 69, 174, 177, 24, 201, 179, 108,
180. The pages are referred to in the order in which I have cited material from
Snell in the chapter.
2. Thucydides,
History of Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (Baltimore: Penguin
Books, 1954), pp. 324, 12l, 117, 440, 462.
3. Werner
Jaeger, Paideia: Ideals of Culture,
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), Vol. I, pp. 51, 311, 90, 265, 229,
163, 134, 224, 171, 69, 89, 272, 300, 348, 331; Volume II: pp. 5, 157, 160, 70.
4. T.
G. Tucker, Life in Ancient Athens, The Social and Public Life of a Classical
Athenian From Day to Day (New
York: The Macmillan Company, 1906), pp. 210, 298, 47, 282, 183, 204-205, 209.
5. Herodotus,
The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt
(Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1954), pp. 25, 15, 507, 199-200, 210, 212, 122, 123,
579.
6. Moses
Hadas, The Greek Ideal and Its Survival (New York: Harper Colophon
Books, 1960), p. 10, referring to E.R. Dodds' The Greeks and the Irrational;
pp. 8, 50, 104-105, 126-127, 82, 1, 86, 87, 18, 21, 98, 93-94, 11, 77, 89, 36,
97, 98.
7. Aristophanes'
comedy is set out in Joseph B. Gittler, Social
Thought Among Early Greeks (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press,
1941), pp. 150-157. It is a delightful spoof on socialist thought. The theme of
the socialist model argued by one of the characters is illustrated by the
following passages:
"Praxagora: First, I'll provide that the silver, and land,
and whatever beside each man shall possess, shall be common and free, one fund for the public; then out of it
we will feed and maintain you, like housekeepers true, dispensing, and sparing, and caring for you...No girl
will of course be permitted to mate except in accord with the rules of the State. By the side of her
lover, so handsome and tall, will be stationed the squat, the ungainly and small."
8. Frederic
Bastiat, The Law, trans. Dean Russell (Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation
for Economic Education, 1950), p. 50.
9. M.
Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World
(London: Oxford University Press, 1941), pp. 268, 210, 212, 273, 185, 196, 209.
10. Evelyn
Abbott, Pericles and the Golden Age of Athens (New York: G. P. Putnam's
Sons, 1891), pp. 308, 325, 135-136, 304, 150, 262, 264-265, 342, 343, 344, 9,
320, 328.
11. F.
Poland, E. Reisinger and R. Wagner, The Culture of
Ancient Greece and Rome (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1926), pp. l22,
68, 240.
12. F.
A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1960), pp. 164-166.