What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?

by J. P. Mahaffy

If you want a model of the other kind of history—that which professes to be a sober record of carefully sifted facts, which professes to discard all that is miraculous or legendary, and insist upon testimony, then in the opinion of all the ages you find its perfection in Thucydides. There used to be a general agreement that in contrast to the obviously artistic turn of Herodotus, his successor had exalted history, as far as was possible, to the rank of an exact science. We now know that this view is very far from the truth. Thucydides, as his speeches should always have clearly demonstrated, was an artist just as consciously as Herodotus, nay rather a more subtle artist, in that he concealed his art and deluded mankind under the guise of a solemn and dignified person, telling nothing but the unvarnished truth.[11] For he too felt that the tragedies of human affairs were a fit and noble subject for the contemplation of men; he too felt that the lessons conveyed by the catastrophes in the affairs of brilliant polities and brilliant men are as valuable as those borrowed from legendary story for the tragic stage. The speeches he puts into the mouths of his characters are not those actually delivered, either in language, or probably even in substance. They are rather rhetorical expositions of the political situations, as the historian conceived them, and reflections which he thinks the reader ought to make. He also knows the more modern way of dealing with this side of history. His reflections on the Corcyrean massacre[12] are a famous specimen of this artistic or subjective writing. I have taken pains elsewhere to show that his picture of the degradation of politics in Greece so far as he represents it to be new and sudden, is false. All the vices which make up his brilliant but lurid sketch were old, well known, and ingrained in the Greek character.[13] But it was part of his artistic scheme to represent the vices of that age, and especially at Athens, culminating in a brutal and wholly unhistorical dialogue with the Melians, as the proper prelude to the great disaster in Sicily and the consequent fall of Athens. Thus choosing a far smaller and poorer subject than Herodotus, treating it also in a far poorer and narrower way, he has by those very restrictions intensified his book, and infused into it such dignity and pathos as to make it artistically worthy of the age of Phidias, of Aristophanes, of Socrates.

When we ask whether the diction of this great work is adequate to its artistic conception, the answer is not, I think, far to seek. There are two kinds of diction in Thucydides, a clear, chaste attractive narrative of facts, without ornament, but rising with its subject to a pathetic earnestness, which has seldom been surpassed. This narrative, like the dialogue of tragedy, is interrupted at suitable moments by the pretended speeches of the actors, which by a curious inversion are like the chorus in the play, giving the motives of the action and often the disguised opinions of the writer. These are expressed in obscure and contorted language, which ancient critics did not hesitate to stigmatise as thoroughly bad style. With models of clearness before him, such as Herodotus, Euripides, Antiphon, this fault is an idiosyncrasy of Thucydides, and yet a defect which has not failed to bring to him certain advantages. For obscurity always produces the impression of profundity, especially when it occurs in a solid and weighty author. Thus the many platitudes in Thucydides’ speeches, and the recurrence of obvious ideas, are disguised by contortions of expression, so that the discovery of the meaning is a mental exercise which flatters and thus pleases the reader, if he be curious in such things, still more the commentator, who finds wonderful scope for his often mediocre talent in such labour. This is the quality in Mr. George Meredith who makes his admirers think highly of themselves, while they despise others.[14]

Time fails me to illustrate further, in Xenophon and in Polybius, this artistic conception of a period of human history as a great drama, in which the rise, the splendour, and the fall of great men, great cities, great nations are told us with artistic selection of the details and artistic perfection of style. This was the conception which moved Gibbon to write the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He saw around him, at Rome, the gigantic relics of a bygone civilisation. He felt within him the power of style to present the facts in adequate form; and so we obtained another work of art, in which the presentation of the facts is not less important than the facts themselves. As the Greeks put it over and over again, and as Cicero repeats it, history is a form of eloquence, and that history only will last which possesses the sine qua non of a great or an attractive style. This is what the Greeks have taught us, and what many of us have ignored to our own ruin as permanent teachers.

I will conclude this part of my subject by reminding you that in biography, which as the idyll gives a single scene, or as a cameo gives the portrait of an individual—Plutarch has been the model to all modern biographers. How truly dramatic was his conception and his treatment of individual great lives will come home to you at once when I remind you that Shakespeare found in his Lives subjects for a series of tragedies, and in his diction language which required very little paraphrase.

Let us now turn back to the sister developments of eloquence, wherein the writing of history had accomplished such triumphs. These are in brief the eloquence of debate, and the eloquence of display. And the eloquence of debate may either be that of the courts, wherein private individuals, the plaintiff and defendant, are pitted one against the other, or that of the public assembly, where political deliberations are held and in which the orator seeks to persuade the majority to adopt his policy or to reject the policy of a political opponent. Remember that in all these cases the Greeks were equally adverse to extemporaneous effusions. They believed in the artistic arrangement and polished expression of every argument. In the law courts, where litigants had to appear in person, and not by counsel, it was the advocate’s duty to compose the client’s speech for him beforehand, and probably to instruct him in its proper delivery. As we never hear of any breaking down in court, of any client unable to remember or speak out what the advocate had prepared for him, I think it possible that the litigants were allowed to read their speeches. In any case, the composition of these speeches became a well-known and lucrative profession, and was accordingly adopted by the ablest men. The practice had long suggested the theory, and so from early times there were treatises composed, known as τέχναι, wherein the subtleties of the art of persuasion were carefully analysed and reduced to rule. The early treatises of this kind are lost, but we feel their results in the remains of Antiphon and Isæus, and can affirm that they were eminently practical, and thoroughly opposed to the froth and fury of what we call popular eloquence. The use of figures of speech is reduced to a minimum, the so-called flowers of rhetoric are wholly absent. All is tame, severe, temperate, not pretending to influence the passions but to convince the reason. And yet this latter is to be done not by speaking the language of the heart, but by the careful training of the intellect, and the perfection of the delivery.[15] To us moderns these things appear at first hearing to flavour of artificiality; the great bugbear of the modern mind, which contrasts it with the purity and sincerity of nature. The Greeks knew this contrast perfectly, and they met it, not by the folly of leaving nature to follow its own devices, but by making nature the highest artistic product. Thus the court advocates, composing for various clients, studied not only the proper arguments to be urged, but that these arguments must be presented “in character” and so they carefully kept before them the personality of the speaker. In Lysias especially, this expression of character in the speaker is part of his art, which so perfectly apes simplicity that it requires a careful analysis to detect behind the simple utterance of the homely citizen the subtle rhetorician.

This refinement of legal rhetoric seems to me to have been disregarded or abandoned when the pleaders became so celebrated that the fiction of a client speaking for himself was no longer plausible, and when the public that thronged the courts went to hear an oration of Demosthenes or Hypereides delivered by his client. Hence the speeches of Demosthenes are not so various in ethos, and many of them being delivered about his own private affairs, had already taught the public to recognise his great style. In particular, so many of his orations were not court speeches but political harangues that this latter branch of eloquence may be regarded as that in which he best showed his pre-eminence. And there are not a few instances where the ostensible case was only an excuse for promoting or vindicating a great policy. The acme of all this branch of Greek literature is the famous de Corona of Demosthenes, which great lawyers and political orators like Lord Brougham have declared to be the very ne plus ultra of eloquence intended not only to persuade, but also to persuade by all the arts of subtle logic, of brilliant sophistry, of red hot argument. And remember men like Lord Brougham, though infinitely better practical judges of the effect of such a speech than are mere scholars, did not know one tithe of the subtleties of style, which have only been detected by the minute studies, not only of the old Greek critics, but of modern German scholars.

Even in such a mighty speech as this you will notice the very scanty use of ornament. There are none of what we moderns call the flowers of rhetoric; there is no sounding peroration. It is the picture of a grave patriot vindicating his life’s work against the carping of his enemies and the criticism of his opponents. There are indeed passages of gross vituperation, wherein by scathing reflections on his opponent’s previous life, he replies to Æschines’ insinuations about his private character. Nor has the character of Æschines ever recovered from this “raking of his record,” which was probably not at all kept within the limits of the truth. But the restraints which have been usual among modern gentlemen in debate, especially the modern English gentlemen of the last century, were not regarded as essential to the dignity of the highest Greek court oration, and that was probably because the jury was composed of the middle and lower classes who were not shocked by any want of refinement.

Notwithstanding this limitation, there can be no question that in the oratory of debate the Greeks taught the Romans, then through them Mediæval Europe, then after the Renaissance, modern Europe directly, so that even now they are the acknowledged masters in this splendid art. It is all the more astonishing, as we might naturally think that a society without printing and consequently without a great reading public would not have aimed at producing an eloquence which was not only splendid to read when the heat of controversy was allayed, but worthy of study and of analysis by the critics of succeeding generations. Nevertheless, with no better means of publication for readers than manuscript copies, and without any hope of great celebrity, or of great profit as the authors of written speeches, these Greeks produced work which has perfectly stood the test even of new and exacting conditions. In spite of their limited public, the orators had attained to as clear a notion as we have of the importance of appealing to a reading and thinking public which could study their arguments and their style at full leisure, and so, not content with the orations primarily intended for delivery, they also perfected the prose essay, and even the prose dialogue, a very peculiar form of literature, inasmuch as it is the literary stereotyping of an apparently spontaneous conversation.

But when I speak of a reading public, perhaps I should limit it somewhat, and say a public accustomed to hear reading aloud. That is the intermediate stage between a mere audience and the mere readers of books. I am quite accustomed to that intermediate stage in Ireland. You may see there any day groups of people hearing a newspaper or book read out, and if the great body of the public is of this class, then the writer must think not only of what he has to say but how it will sound when read aloud. I take the same principle to have animated the composers of the splendid English Book of Common Prayer. They desired to affect the hearer not only by the sentiment, but by the sound of their Liturgy. Now this is the very step in prose writing which was taken by the Greek students of eloquence, and most notably by Isocrates, the father of the political prose essay in Europe.

There were no doubt accidental or personal causes which conspired to this result at this moment. Isocrates, with great natural gifts for style and for composition, was wholly deficient in voice and in physique for the profession of public speaking, nor had he the extraordinary energy and perseverance shown by Demosthenes in overcoming these defects. So it occurred to him that he might exercise his influence by prose writing in the form of open letters or political pamphlets, where he puts his thoughts into the most polished periods and the most refined language.