What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?

by J. P. Mahaffy

In strong contrast to this school was the eloquence of display, referred to Gorgias as its earliest master, which made elegant composition and splendid delivery an end in itself, and, in the hands of the educators called Sophists, often chose a contemptible or repulsive subject in order to show how even the most trivial cause was capable of glorification by art, just as Teniers makes the pothouse and its drunken boors fit to take their place among the treasures that decorate a great mansion.

In these widely contrasted pursuits of careful speaking, there were several points in common. In both, the subject was either ephemeral or might be trivial; it was the treatment which was the great point of interest and which gave rise to theories and systems. In neither was it the intention to instruct or improve the hearer. In the one, to effect persuasion for the moment, in the other to gain admiration for the moment, was the object of the speaker. In both also, though most carefully composed, was the written word wholly subordinate to the spoken sound. When these studies first arose, there was as yet no reading public, no gathering of books, and studying them at home; but a public vastly fond of talking, and of hearing brilliant talk.

There were other occasions and interests in Greek life, where the subject was of such paramount importance, that for a long time style was regarded with suspicion, as giving a flavour of unreality to the statements of the speaker or writer. One was the narrative of those events that had taken place in past time; the other was the grave deliberation of public men regarding the future of the state, questions of justice and of policy in the treatment of citizens, or in the dealing with neighbouring powers. The earlier leaders of Greece, such as Aristides, Themistocles, Pericles, and the ambitious men who made themselves tyrants, all must have studied the art of persuasion with due care, but it was not for some generations that a professional orator like Demosthenes was intrusted with the charge of public affairs, and that the words orator and politician came to mean the same thing. Yet even here, the tendency in the Greek mind to submit everything to law and training, to turn every kind of human work into an art, was so strong, that no form of prose writing escaped this schooling, and all of it shows a strictness of rhetorical form which seems, at first study of it, artificial, until we come to learn that the highest products of human art are not spontaneous, but the result of careful reflection.

While these various efforts towards spoken eloquence were occupying men, we find that early annalists set down either in rude metrical form, or even in prose, past events, thus laying the foundation for the greatest development of prose. I mean history, not merely as a record of past events, but as an artistic product, on the same level as dramatic poetry or as fresco painting.[10] The earlier attempts are known to us only through names and scraps of writing; we cannot now tell how far Hecatæus and Xanthus the Lydian were historians in the artistic sense; but there is no doubt whatever that in Herodotus the Greeks have given not only to the ancient, but to the modern world, a model of the art of history which has never been excelled. And as if that were not enough, we have in Thucydides another model (one which professes not the charm of artistic narrative, but the strict analysis of positive facts) and in this model, which has imposed itself, or has imposed, on generations of historians, we have another specimen of the use of prose, which is likewise the highest model of the so-called science of history. This latter instance is all the more remarkable because the writer did not, like Herodotus, chose a great world-subject, but a long and dull civil war, in which no gigantic interests were at stake, and yet by his consummate art, by his intense seriousness, little skirmishes in which a few hundreds of men were engaged have become household words in modern life, while elsewhere many a shock of myriads has past into oblivion. Thus the little actions of the Athenian Phormio with his well trained boats against a superior force have given rise to a far larger literature than the great world-battles of Actium or Lepanto in the same seas. There was no Thucydides to write about these latter.

As I think it easier to impress a modern audience with the importance of Greek prose style in this particular branch of its excellence, I shall put it in the foremost place. Nothing strikes a reader of the Poetic of Aristotle (or of the treatise so called) as more incompetent than the illustration the writer uses to show that dramatic poetry is more philosophical than history. He says that the former portrays the general features of human character, as they must naturally develop, whereas history has no object but to narrate the details of what has happened, e.g. what Alcibiades did or suffered. I have already pointed out to you the astounding stupidity with which he has criticised the development of a noble tragic character by a great dramatist—the Iphigenia in Aulis of Euripides. His notion of the portraiture of human nature as it ought to develop is one of commonplace consistency, excluding all those storms and passions which suddenly supervene and which give to human character all its interest and its variety.

I have spoken to you of Aristotle’s judgments on tragic characters; but I am now concerned with his view of history, as a mere narrative of particulars, and I come to consider again his statement that Herodotus if put into metre would nevertheless be only history, and not dramatic poetry. It is a curious thing that we can here refute the critic from historical facts which he should have, nay must have, known. One episode in the history of Herodotus had already become a famous tragedy in the hands of Æschylus, whom we may fairly assert to be a very excellent judge of what was proper for a tragic subject. Another historic episode, the Fall of Miletus, was made the subject of a tragedy by Phrynichus, and if it displeased the Attic audience, who fined the poet, it was not because the subject was failing in tragic interest, but because it possessed too much, for it melted the whole audience into tears, and brought home to them their present misfortunes, as well as their recent blunders in policy, and their craven desertion of their kindred in Ionia.

The whole essence of prose history, as an art, first comprehended by Herodotus, is to regard the course of human affairs not as a mere catalogue of events but as a great human drama depending on large and eternal principles, wherein the rise and fall of great nations, still more the rise and fall of the great men who sway great nations, afford us the contemplation of “deeds, or series of events of importance and completeness, producing through the excitement of the feelings of pity and terror in the reader the purification of these emotions.” Aristotle adds to this his definition of tragedy that the subject must be sweetened by graces of diction in every part, and this is exactly what the first great historian did, and what every one of his successors is bound to do, if his work is to live as a work of art, and not to be laid by as a mere repertory for learned reference. History as a matter of style is therefore one of the great legacies of the Greeks to mankind.

But not only in the style does Herodotus agree with the definition of tragedy in Aristotle. He does so also in his subject. This must be great or dignified, it must have completeness in itself, and it must contain those changes of fortune which are so peculiarly affecting to every reader. The struggle between Persia and Greece, its inception, its varying fortunes, the subjugation of Ionia, the anguish of Greece—all leading to the climax at Salamis and Platea, and the craven flight of Xerxes to his home—what greater or more complete subject could a historian choose? And in order to sweeten it with words, there are many pauses in the action, filled with delightful digressions, far more various and more restful than the choruses in a Greek tragedy. These, and all the main narrative, and the dramatic dialogues which he composes for his actors, are presented to us in that easy and flowing style which seems natural and obvious, because it is the most perfect art.

I do not know whether this admirable simplicity is ever the spontaneous product of human genius. Whenever I have been able to reach the evidence, I have found it the result of great labour and fastidious care. I will give you an instance. There was no one more remarkable in Europe in his generation for pellucid simplicity of style than Ernest Renan. I once saw in a friend’s room a proof which Renan had sent him for revision. I was not allowed to study it, but a glance showed me that a thin strip of printed matter, the first draft, had been laid down on a large blue sheet of paper, all the wide margins of which were covered with corrections, alterations, and rehandlings of the printed sentences. There was much erased, much added, much changed more than once. There was perhaps three times as much in the corrections as in the original draft. The result, as we know, was something so easy and natural that it seemed to have flowed without the smallest effort from his pen.

But Herodotus is not the only model by whom the Greeks have established a standard for modern writers. He has about him the air of a story-teller, and he repeats many legends and wonders, so that graver and more sceptical generations set him down as a credulous traveller easily deceived by lying reports, if not as a deliberate writer of fiction. So many of these so-called lies or inventions have turned out after all to be true or probable (e.g., the tradition that the Etruscans came to Italy from the coast of Asia Minor by sea) that even from this point of view Herodotus has been vindicated by modern research.