What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?

by J. P. Mahaffy

I know that there are two considerations which, in the minds of people who are easily satisfied, pass for an adequate account of this extraordinary genius of the Greeks. It is usual, especially among those who will not take the trouble to learn Greek, to say that it was really through Rome that the greatness of the Hellenic race was created. Rome conquered the Western world with her roads, her armies, her laws, her language, and impressed even on barbarians the culture which she had herself adopted and developed. The Latin races which were in the van of civilisation up to the seventeenth century were the daughters of Rome and had little direct teaching from Greece.

All this is perfectly true, but it only moves the problem one step backward. Assuming that the Romans were the carriers of enlightenment to the North and West of Europe, why did they depend so completely on Greek teaching; why did they one and all confess that this was the unique source of their progress? They came in due time into contact with the culture of Carthage, of Syria, of Egypt. But the splendours of these countries were never to the Romans more than mere curiosities, whereas Greek culture was the very breath of their intellectual life. Virgil, a very great poet, frames every one of his works on Greek models, and translates even from second-rate Greek work. Horace, a very great artist, prides himself on having made Greek lyrics at home in his country, and Lucretius, whose reputation for originality among modern critics is mainly due to the total loss of the original which he copied, himself claims as his main credit that he had ventured to reproduce a yet uncopied species of Greek poetry. It is hard to conceive a more complete case made out for the unparalleled influence of Hellenic genius upon proud and dominant neighbours. I will merely remind you how a fresh wave of Greek influence, coming into Romanised Europe in the fifteenth century, caused such a revolution in literature and art as to be called a new birth (Renascence).

Let us turn to a widely different kind of explanation, which is wont to be set forth at the opening of most modern histories of Greece, as a vera causa to account for a wonderful and exceptional result. This theory is the echo of the famous opening of Buckle’s great book on Civilisation, wherein it is asserted that man is the creature of external circumstances and that these determine not only his physical, but his intellectual increase. In particular, the greatness of Egypt and its early victory over the obstacles of nature are attributed to the heat and moisture of the climate; and so we are told that the temperate airs of the Ægean, the multitude of its islands, its indented coast, its fiords, its broken outlines, and varied scenery—these are such that the people living among them would naturally develop the qualities which have given the primacy in its turn to Greece. Such conclusions are based upon very superficial and inaccurate observation. It was assumed that Egypt had been necessarily an unity, owing to the isolation of its land from neighbours, and to the fact that its great high-road, the Nile, traversed the whole country. We now know this to be false, and that the reduction of Egypt first to two, and then to one state was not accomplished till after ages of separation among its nomes, and was accomplished not by natural necessity but by the genius of a conqueror. As regards the physical peculiarities of that country, they are all to be found again on the Indus, with its affluents from far inland Alps bringing down a periodical inundation, with its great delta spreading from Hyderabad, with its long course through a desert which affords it not a rivulet of increase: yet the peoples of the Indus have never thriven and waxed great like the Egyptians. So far as our evidence leads us, we may assert that had the Egyptians been settled on the Indus, and the population of the Indus on the Nile, the respective parts played by these rivers in civilisation would have been reversed. I am equally convinced that had the Greek race been settled on the Adriatic, with many fiords and islands, and over against Italy, instead of Asia Minor, or on the west coast of Italy, with its headlands and bays, its great and fruitful islands within sight,—these circumstances would have been equally favourable to their genius, whereas they were not sufficient to raise the Corsicans and Sardinians, perhaps the best situated of all, from a very low level among nations. I will not cite Sicily, drawn from its obscurity by the Greeks, for they were already great in the scale of nations when they transformed that splendid island, long undistinguished under Sikels, Sicans, Phœnicians, into a brilliant province of Hellenedom. It may perhaps occur to some of you that the special qualities of the race came from its being a purer branch of the great Aryan stock than its brethren; that it was pre-eminently Japhet dwelling in the tents of Shem, unalloyed with the dross of lower races, whose animalism has survived in the defects of other Aryan stocks that dwelt among them. But the very opposite seems to be the case. The more we study the Greek language, the more we are impressed with the number of strange roots, which point to a non-Aryan origin. Many of the words in commonest use, such as βασιλεὑς and τὑραννος, are not to be explained from Aryan roots, and anyone who has studied such place-names as Tiryns, Assos, and their congeners will fairly conclude that the Greeks were not purer from admixture than the Slavs or the Celts.[1] After all that has been adduced, therefore, to account for the intellectual supremacy of the Greeks, we are compelled to fall back on the ultimate fact—which has not been explained—that they possessed a national genius denied to their brethren and their neighbours. It is as yet an ultimate fact that the human race is not promoted, except in numbers, by heat and moisture. Some have been higher from the earliest moment that we can observe, or infer, their conditions. Others have remained lower in spite of the most favourable circumstances. This is a riddle which no historian has yet solved. But is it stranger, I ask, than the sporadic and unaccountable appearance, in a settled and known society, of individual genius? This is the parallel case wherewith I cannot explain, but only vindicate my position. Is it stranger that one nation should emerge into history with exceptional gifts than that there emerges into life, according to no law that we know, individual genius? If you look back at the family history of those that have made or upset empires, that have added new domains to science, that have created the poetry of the world, you will find no law or reason to explain their sporadic appearance, like that of brilliant meteors across the orderly stars of the sky. They generally come from undistinguished parents; they have undistinguished brothers and sisters; they do not transmit their great qualities, save in some rare occasions, as if to show that there is even here no prohibitive law. They may be single, or eldest, or youngest, children, or in the middle of a large family. They need not be noted for physical health. There was once a posthumous and yet prematurely born infant, so puny and wretched that, but for the sorrows of the widowed mother, little pains would have been taken to keep it alive, for it was her first born. Charitable neighbours nursed it with amazing care, and so saved its miserable spark of life from extinction. After a delicate and monotonous youth, the child went to Cambridge; he was known in later years as Sir Isaac Newton.

But if, so long as civilised societies cloak the first beginnings of individual human life in mystery, we can only refer the sporadic occurrence of genius to chance, is it any wonder, after the lapse of ages has covered with its mists the childhood of nations, that we should be unable to give any better answer to explain the occurrence of national genius in one race, while its brothers and sisters are not above the vulgar average? On one thing only I insist: let us not deny a great fact because we cannot explain it.

Assuming then as ultimate that one nation may be gifted above the rest with genius, let us consider in what the pre-eminence consists. And here again we shall be aided by the analogy of individual genius. The first and most superficial answer is that genius is original, that it strikes out new ideas, new solutions of problems, new lines of research, while the average man can only learn what others have already discovered for him. But a deeper and more careful inquiry reveals to us that absolutely new ideas are of the very rarest occurrence; almost the whole work of human genius consists in assimilating what others have thought, in combining what others have imagined separate, in recasting the form of their thought, and so producing what seems a perfectly new thing, and yet is only the old under a new aspect. No instance of this is more signal than that of a great composer in music. The gift of original melody, as it is called, is rare and precious. The possessor of it is justly considered a genius. But no melody could possibly speak to us except a combination of perfectly well known elements. The only originality is in their assimilation and reproduction.

If then we admit that the assimilation of what others have done is a most important feature in genius, we can affirm not only that the Greeks were gifted with this power, but we can go further and say that they settled in a part of the world eminently suited to suggest new ideas and to afford scope for all the combinations which their genius prompted them to make. I have already explained how widely I differ from those who have laid great stress on the characteristics of the country occupied by this race. External nature was the very thing that the Greeks, all through their great history, felt less keenly than we should have expected. Their want of a sense of the picturesque in nature has even been cited as a notable defect. But, though repudiating all this kind of argument, I am quite ready for widely different reasons to lay much weight on the geographical position of Greece. It is an argument which you will not find, I think, in your histories. This people established their home on the confines of two very diverse civilisations, so that they were able to assimilate ideas from both and to weave them into a fabric of their own.

Concerning the influences coming from the south-east, there was never any doubt. All the legends about Cadmus, Danaus, and the like assert the importation of the culture of Phœnicia and of Egypt into Greece. The same thing is said of the empire of Minos of Crete, which is now found to have been a reality, and from which a very early culture passed through the Ægean Islands to the coasts of Greece. Whether the early graphic systems used at Cnossos made their way to Mycenæ or Tiryns we have no evidence to determine. Most probably they did, and these may have been the “dire symbols” which Homer mentions as sent with Bellerophon to seal his fate with the Lycian king. But in any case the Phœnician alphabet came in; the use of engraved seals was carried by the same traders from Babylon; the ostrich eggs, the ivory from Africa, the designs on many objects, tell no uncertain tale. For all that, the earliest art of Greece—I will not call it Hellenic as yet—is not Oriental but European, and with features of its own. And this need not be referred to its originality; far more probably was it caused by assimilating another kind of culture, which had features of its own and which can be shown to have had its influence on Mycenæan art. This civilisation dwelt in central Europe and came from the north to Greece. It has been called Keltic, it has been called Pelasgian; we find it in tombs, and in raths even as far as Ireland. It was from this source that came the fancy for Baltic amber as an ornament—a thing as strange in Greece as the ostrich egg. From here too came the shape of early bronze weapons, probably the habit of burying the dead in beehive tombs; actually many of the patterns used for ornament on tools and weapons. And who can tell how much more filtered in from this source, which the old Greeks called Pelasgian? Thus the Hellenic race was on the verge of two kinds of culture, and created from both that distinct type which ultimately became the most perfect in the world.

The genius for assimilating might seem to imply a collateral weakness—the danger of absorption or degeneration into the nations whose ideas are adopted and developed. There are cases in the history of man where a conquered race has abandoned its language and religion and adopted those of its conquerors. There are other cases where the conqueror has been absorbed and the subject race has reasserted itself in spite of dominant language and legislation intended to secure its ultimate absorption. It is one of the salient features of the Hellenic race that, though very receptive of foreign ideas, though always ready to profit by the discoveries of neighbours, it never abandoned its primacy in type, and was never absorbed into any other population, except perhaps in isolated cases and after centuries of separation from the mother stock. The Eretrians whom Darius brought as prisoners to Asia and settled in the rich fields of Babylonia were doubtless in the long run absorbed by the surrounding nationalities, but they were still recognisable when Alexander conquered his Empire nearly two hundred years later, and possibly they too may have kept up the affecting custom of the people of Posidonia (Pæstum in Italy) at the other extremity of the civilised world, who were indeed, as Strabo tells us, centuries later, barbarised out and out by the Samnites, but who nevertheless still met once a year to lament their fate, and to deplore their loss of Hellenic life. Apart from these few and small exceptions, this race has absolutely refused to be absorbed by any other, however civilised, however dominant, and has remained the same in language and in characteristics from the days when Homer composed for the Achæan chiefs, down to this day, when every scholar or student looks upon Athens as the goal of his pilgrimage.

The permanence of the Greek language is a great and striking evidence. There was never, I suppose, a generation of Greeks from the 8th century B.C. to the 20th A.D. which did not understand Homer; but if you are disposed to ascribe this to sentimental causes, then I say that the earliest Attic prose differs from the Attic prose of to-day so little as to afford us an unique example of persistency. Let me state it in this way: Herodotus, if you recalled him from his grave and put a Greek newspaper of to-day into his hands, would at first find the type novel, but would presently recognise in it his own alphabet. He would then discover a dialect of his Greek, as he heard it at Athens, and though he would doubtless call it very vulgar, and even barbarised, he would in a day or two read it quite fluently. So far as my knowledge goes, you will find nothing like this in Europe.

Turning to persistence of characteristics, it is superfluous for me to expound to you this topic at any length, for in the book which forms the basis of the old acquaintance between you and me, I mean my Social Life in Greece, the main thesis, then, but now no longer, a paradox, was that, though the classical Greeks did great intellectual and artistic work which their descendants could not attempt to rival, yet the moral features of the Homeric, the Alcaic, the Pindaric, the Platonic, the Xenophontic, the Demosthenic Greek were much the same as those of our friends who are now laying claim to Macedonia. There is the same cleverness, not without a special delight in overreaching an opponent, the same diligence, the same genuine patriotism, but also the same undying jealousy of the success of others, the same want of spirituality in religion, the same light esteem for veracity. The models of Phidias and Polycletus, of Scopas and Praxiteles, were doubtless to be found in real life[2]; so were the characters of Plato’s Dialogues, and in this consisted the genius of their art and their literature, that they apprehended and perpetuated the ideal, while the average man and average society in Greece formed a standard of cultivated society, high, but by no means perfect. I only mention their average qualities in order to emphasise the fact that I do not stand before you a pedant seeing nothing but the greatness of his favourite study, but as a plain man estimating the history of the past in the light of common-sense.