What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?

by J. P. Mahaffy

But so much the scanty lyric fragments do tell us with a clear voice: these poets were thoroughly and even elaborately artistic, and their very careful workmanship, if it did arise from an appeal to the songs of the people, shows the very same fastidious care which we find in Theocritus, to purify their art from the clay or the dross of everyday language. Hence follows as a natural consequence, among a people of genius like the Greeks, a perfection both in form and in spirit, which we justly call classical and which forms the model for almost all subsequent poetry. There are no vagaries of metre or diction; there are no exaggerations of sentiment. Every civilised man of any epoch, every critic of judgment, who masters the poetry in the original, finds in it models of taste which have not since been excelled and only seldom equalled.

I need not delay long over a few apparent or real exceptions, so few that they are only enough for cavil, not for serious criticism. We have recovered recently the Persians of Timotheus, whose musical performances were very popular in his day. The poem is the worst that we know coming from its age and country. But we also know that we should merely regard it as the libretto of a musical performance, such as the libretti of the Italian operas we used to frequent in our youth, in which the text was not of the slightest importance and was generally very bad. The music was the only part of the performance we criticised. So the Persians of Timotheus is ridiculous as a poem on the great battle of Salamis, but even so is pronounced by the authorities on metre, such as Wilamowitz, to be very careful and polished in that respect. The Mimes of Herondas, another recent discovery, are also bad poetry, but then they are mere versifications of prose pieces, such as those of Sophron were, and meant, I believe, for acting on a cheap stage or for dramatic recitation. They can hardly be called poetry. In much earlier days, there was a good deal of tame moral teaching and proverbial philosophy expressed in verse. But that also was so, because as yet prose had not become an ordinary vehicle of writing, and any man who desired to teach, such as Solon, or Theognis, or Empedocles, must express himself in verse.

I will mention but one more feature in which Greek poetry had obviously an advantage over modern art of the same kind. Being almost altogether composed, not for a reading, but a listening public, it was closely associated with other arts, especially those of music and dancing, so as to form an essential part of many great public festivals. It was the soul which animated the frame of every national pageant. If a poet laureate nowadays is asked to celebrate a great public occasion by a poem, he writes an ode or an elegy, such as Tennyson’s “Bury the Great Duke, with a nation’s lamentation,” and sends it out to countless readers. The Greek poet, on similar occasions, would have a solemn procession, or a dance, or a scenic display, with appropriate music, to assist him. These environments secured two great qualities, or rather tended to secure them, for we must not assume perfection as a general result in any human product. It secured that the poet would aim at dignity, avoiding all mean and trivial topics. It also secured brevity, avoiding discursiveness, which is a fault of much modern poetry. Thus Wordsworth’s Excursion would have been intolerable to the poet himself, had he been a Greek, and to come to a more appropriate illustration, the exuberant and unlimited choruses in Mr. Swinburne’s Atalanta—otherwise a splendid reflection of Greek tragedy—would not have been tolerated on account of their redundancy, but the poet would have compressed them within such limits as would not put his chorus out of breath, or produce dizziness in his hearers.

The production of poetry for local and special public occasions was also a main cause of the use of distinct dialects, which did not become national property till some great work had sanctioned their literary use. Thus the artificial Homeric dialect became the lingua franca of all epic poets, whatever their country or their date, down to the end of old Greek history. Doric choral hymns were adopted by the Attic tragedies and put into the interludes of Attic dialogue. Luckily for us the Greeks wrote phonetically and did not conceal their local speech under the cloak of an artificial and false orthography. Thus the poetry of the nation has come to us in various dialects, but never, except with deliberate dramatic aim at vulgarity,[5] in the mere language of the common people.

But I must now abandon these general considerations and turn to the task of showing you, in some famous examples, how Greek poetry, possessing the excellence requisite for a high model, acted upon the greatest and best of our own poets, as well as on others in modern Europe.

Every one knows that the Greeks have left us three long epic poems—one the epic of war, the second the epic of voyage, the third, that of Apollonius Rhodius, the epic of adventure combined with a great love story. There were many other early epic poems composed in imitation of the Iliad and Odyssey, but they have been laid aside and forgotten, most probably because their material has been worked up by the Greeks into the nobler form of tragedy. For, as you know, the Greeks, who confined themselves to mythical subjects for these tragedies, avoided the Iliad and Odyssey, and utilised what were called the Cyclic poets. It is mere commonplace to tell you that the Iliad and Odyssey have been the unapproachable ideals for all subsequent time. The first and greatest foreign imitator was Virgil, and through his immortal epic, indirectly more even than directly, the world of poets has been swayed. It is nevertheless very remarkable that these two masterpieces, coming complete from the early genius of Greece, as Athena leaped full-armed from the brain of Zeus, appearing, like Melchisedec, without father, mother, or descent, to bless the father of the faithful, should never again have been equalled among men.

The best epic of modern Europe since the classical Renaissance is the Paradise Lost of Milton. He has given us ample evidence that he was a great poet, and yet how far below the Iliad and Odyssey does he fall! I need hardly tell you that the controversies which agitated his mind, and the mind of his age, disturbed the serenity of his poetic vision and dictated to him many digressions which are blots on the purity of his golden pages. But that is not to my mind his greatest defect. The action of the gods which in the Iliad is a mere preamble to the general action of the poem, or an irrelevant episode, and hardly interferes with its thoroughly human character, is in the theological poet far too prominent. It occupies in Milton’s poem the forefront, compared to which the episodes in Eden are but a small matter. The tremendous part of the poem is not Paradise lost by man, but heaven lost by the angels that fell. It is the conflict between gods and Titans, as the Greeks would have put it, and not the conflicts or mortal heroes that fascinate us. Another remark obtrudes itself as we pass on. The weakest book in all the Iliad is the Battle of the Gods. It might readily be expunged from the poem without loss. In Milton the Divine wholly outweighs the human in grandeur and is the essence of the poem.

There is another feature in this epic which disturbs our admiration—the great richness and even redundancy of the learned similes. In this Milton seems to have taken as his model the third Greek epic, which is now forgotten, but which had a great vogue in the Renaissance, I mean the Argonautics of Apollonius. His direct obligations to this poet have been noticed in many places by the commentators. I have no doubt that a careful study would show many more, and it is all the more interesting to reflect how a now forgotten Greek source has had so lasting an influence. The greatest contribution I know from Apollonius to modern poetry is the famous scene at the opening of Goethe’s Faust, where the world-weary philosopher determines to take a cup of poison, but is suddenly recalled to life by the Easter dawn with its Resurrection hymn. You have but to read the scene where Medea, wracked by what she believes a hopeless passion, turns at the end of a night of wakeful agony to the same escape, a cup of poison. But with the dawn and the awakening of human life, the sounds of men react upon her troubled spirit and cause her to put aside her dread resolve. With her also, and with the Greek poet, the conception is fresher and better. It is the youth and health of Medea, the wine of life glowing in her veins which calls her back from suicidal gloom when cheerful sounds of human life illumine the dawn. The effect of the Easter hymn on Faust, beautiful as it is with our Christian associations, does not seem so natural and is therefore on a lesser scale as poetry.

But when I have started upon the effects of the Greek epic in moulding the great English epic, which strives so hard to assume a different tone, with a different subject, I am understating the general influence of Greek poetry on Milton. In the days before him we may assume that most of the English poets knew their Greek at second hand, through Latin copies, or through French translations. Ben Jonson indeed, we are assured, knew Greek, and Chapman had in his excellent translation made the English world acquainted with Homer’s Iliad. It is easy to underrate this second-hand influence and to say that after all it was Latin and not Greek. Nothing would be more misleading. A poet may feel the greatness of another even though he does not comprehend his tongue. Thus Shakespeare, whose drama as a whole was clearly outside of all Hellenic influences of style, as soon as he read in North’s translation Plutarch’s Lives, saw in them subjects fit for his immortal plays. And not only as to subject, but as to treatment, he adheres so closely to the Greek master of biography that you can feel the profound respect and admiration the playwright had for his work. Thus the Antony and Cleopatra, to cite but one example, adheres point for point to the famous narrative of Plutarch, and adds nothing to his picture. The influence of Plutarch on the ruffians of the French Revolution is not less remarkable, and will, I think, occupy us in another connection. But then these men had for a century previously been taught by their classical drama to look to the Greeks for lofty principles and ideal characters. Yet for my purpose it is more relevant to cite a modern instance. No one would say for a moment that the Greek tone in Keats was got through Latin or French versions. Yet he seems never to have known Greek enough to read the originals, whose spirit he caught from the echoes of classical dictionaries.

But the indirect knowledge of earlier poets, such for example as the stray citation by Shakespeare of the words of Eteocles from Gascoigne’s play, are as nothing when we come to Milton, who shows himself transfused not only with Greek epic, but with the Greek drama. And from Milton, as the great master, comes that perfection of poetic style and of metre which has moulded all English poetry from his time onward. Matthew Arnold even speaks of him as standing above all his successors in this unique distinction. But when Arnold compares this excellence with that of Virgil, he should have added that Virgil also owed it to the Greeks. Nor do I find in Virgil’s Æneid anything like the familiarity with Greek tragedy which I find in Milton. Thus the whole situation at the opening of Paradise Lost is not due to Homer, but rather to the Prometheus Vinctus of Æschylus, where the Titan, overcome and chained to Mt. Caucasus by the superior might of Zeus, nevertheless proclaims his undaunted spirit; and of course this struggle between gods and Titans, which appears so frequently in Greek mythology, and hence in Greek poetry, is constantly present to Milton, and suggests to him simile and metaphor all through his poem.