What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?

by J. P. Mahaffy

It remains for me to say a word to those who ask how far this great poetry of the Greeks was reduced to theory, among a nation who loved to reduce everything to theory. The climax of this tendency is shown in the work of Aristotle, as we shall see in another connection, and Aristotle has either written, or caused to be written, among his multifarious tracts, an essay called the Poetic, which is mainly, so far as we have it, an analysis of the meaning of Tragic poetry. There are, no doubt, some very important utterances in this tract, notably the famous definition of tragedy, upon which so many volumes have been written. But, on the whole, I know no poorer and more jejune exposition of a great subject, so much so that I cannot but suspect that it is one of the many outlying researches that he entrusted to his pupils. Here is the kind of criticism to which I take exception as unworthy of Aristotle: In the Iphigenia in Aulis Euripides has given us one distinct type in his wonderful gallery of heroines, all facing death for the real or supposed public good, either freely or under the coercion of cowardly or cruel princes. This Iphigenia is a young fresh creature just blooming into life, and she hears the first news of her fate with an outburst of passionate tears, and of supplication against the cruel sentence. Yet presently, when she finds her doom sealed, she resigns herself with the splendid dignity of an inborn gentlewoman, and so adds greatly to the “pity and the terror” of the tragedy.

The author of the Poetic says the character is not consistently drawn, and therefore faulty. What a contemptible judgment! It is only to be matched by the observation of the worthless pedant who tells us in his scholium that the Medea of Euripides had no business to shed tears over her children, as she was a hard and cruel character and about to murder them. So again this Aristotle says that poetry is essentially different from prose, and gives as an example that the work of Herodotus would not cease to be history even were it cast in metrical form. This observation misses the deeper distinction of poetic and prosaic thought, which does not depend on metrical form. There are many passages in Herodotus which despite their prose form are essentially poetry, as we shall see in the next lecture.

These criticisms will, I trust, console you when I add that I have no time left for a full consideration of the Poetic. It is not always given to those who do great work to expound how they did it. Even among the Greeks there was a current theory that the poet suffered under that divine madness which we call inspiration, and knew not the full force of what the Muse spoke through his lips. That this inspiration did not dispense with careful preparation, with elaborate metrical perfection, I have already told you. We have but recently learned from the Persians of Timotheus that this metrical perfection may also be used to convey the most ludicrously silly conceits.

Let us therefore take what Time has left us with thankfulness, and not disturb ourselves or mar our enjoyment by the application of barren theories. From Homer to the Anthology, you can find great poems and splendid fragments that will exalt you into the higher world reserved for those that can lay aside material cares. There you will enlarge the wealth of your souls; there you will enter upon the heritage left you by those that had attained and taken possession of the ideal to which all our love of beauty tends as its goal. But let me repeat to those who cannot quaff this poetry at the source: take it from the vessels of the English poets that are ready to your hands, not from the laboured prose of the modern scholar. Take Calverley’s Theocritus; take Browning’s Euripides; take Whitelaw’s Sophocles; take Frere’s Aristophanes. Thus may you reach not the real shrine, but, like some proselyte of old, the outer court of the matchless Temple.

III
GREEK PROSE

I SUPPOSE the ordinary critic, when reviewing the great subject before us, would hardly think to-day’s title one of sufficient importance to occupy a Boston audience, and yet it ought to be shown that in prose, fully as much as in poetry, the Greeks have been the teachers of civilised Europe. Probably also the subject will have to you this interest, that it is not at all so obvious as that of the last lecture. Everyone knows about the Greek poets; many of them are the household property of the modern world. But the origin and the development of Greek prose is not so generally studied, and its far-reaching influence not so widely understood. Moreover, we know something more of the early stages of its history, and though it also surprises us with its absolute perfection in our earliest authors, and seems to leap from the brain of the god as fully armed as the poetry of Homer, yet we have some traces of earlier efforts; we have some inkling of what went before Herodotus, more than we have of what went before Homer. That is mostly due to the late origin of prose writing among the Greeks. At first, verse form was universal for recording all topics of interest. Even genealogies were composed in hexameters. All the proverbial wisdom of the Seven Sages was in metrical form. Solon, the greatest of these sages, even preaches his politics, and gives us his autobiography, in elegiac metre. We seem to have travelled a long way from the epoch when such a man as Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Roosevelt would address the Senate or the people in verse; yet for all that Solon was a lawgiver, probably as great as either of them, and a very modern man, too, far more modern in tone and spirit than Mr. Gladstone. Nor am I sure that Mr. Roosevelt would not enjoy composing his messages to his Senate in verse; still less should I affirm that the German Emperor would not revel in heroic verse, as the proper vehicle for his exhortations to his subjects.

I note this in order to bring home to you the fact that late in Greek spiritual history the greatest men and their audiences remained satisfied with the shackles of metre, as conveying serious teaching in a more permanent and more popular form than prose. For of course at the beginning of society, when there are no written records, men are wont to clothe their legends and tales in that form, as it is a great aid to the memory, and can be easily taught to children, who remember the sound long before they pay attention to the sense. I will not speak of inscriptions in prose, as they are not intended in early days for works of art, any more than the earliest letters, which are mere messages conveyed by writing.

But there was an early attempt made, in the rich society of Ionia, to clothe thought in an artistic form without the shackles of metre, and that was the writing of the philosopher Heracleitus. I will speak of his great and pregnant theory hereafter; what concerns us now is that his obscure aphorisms were intended to strike the reader by their form, as well as their matter.

He had apparently a single predecessor in Pherecydes of Syros. The subjugation of Ionia by the Persians, and especially the fall of Miletus, seem to have put an end to this early picturesque writing and thinking until it woke up as the scientific vehicle of the Greek school of Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine.

It was in the opposite extreme of the Greek world, the far west, peopled mainly not by Ionians but by Dorians, that literary prose made a new beginning, which no political changes were able to crush, till all Greece fell under foreign domination. The first of these attempts was the composition, at Syracuse, of a treatise teaching citizens how to plead their cases in court. It was a time when revolutions in the state and consequent changes of property, arising from confiscations and exiles, often reversed by a turn of the wheel of fortune, made it vital for every plaintiff or defendant to be able to prove his case to a jury by persuasion. This school, though Doric in origin, passed to Attica, bred there a school of famous pleaders, from Antiphon to Demosthenes, who paid the closest attention to the form of their speeches, and so perfected the eloquence of the bar for all time.