I might add greatly to what I have already said about the Greeks, but I must confine myself to a few matters, repeating nothing that has been said in previous notes. The Greeks had very little regard for truthfulness. An oath was a matter of religion and was supposed to be binding upon them, but it was excusable to twist out of it. They also saw nothing immoral in theft. Hermes was the god of thieves, and “the wily Odysseus” was a favourite hero of the Greeks. Autolycus, the grandfather of Odysseus, was taught by Hermes himself to surpass all men in stealing and perjury. (Od. XIX, 395.) Hence it was thought quite a proper thing to make war for the purpose of robbing neighbours of territory or property. I need quote only the truly “German” opinions of Socrates and Aristotle placed by Mr. Zimmern at the head of his chapter on Warfare in The Greek Commonwealth. “But, Socrates, it is possible to procure wealth for the State from our foreign enemies.” “Yes, certainly you may, if you are the stronger power” (Xen. Mem., III, 6, 7). “War is strictly a means of acquisition, to be employed against wild animals and against inferior races of men who, though intended by nature to be in subjection to us, are unwilling to submit[!], for war of such a kind is just by nature” (Aristotle, Politics, 1256). On considering that such sentiments are expressed by their greatest philosophers, we are not surprised to find that the history of the Greeks is one of lies, perfidy, and cruelty.[56] It further illustrates their unsympathetic pagan character when we find the Greek mother mourning for her dead son because he will not “feed her old age,” and Socrates valuing friendship because friends were useful.[57] When the enthusiast is confronted with the debased Greek religion he tells us, or leads us to think, that the people did not believe in their dissolute gods. As regards this I cannot do better than quote the terse statement of Mr. Livingstone. After pointing out that there were some advanced thinkers among the Greeks who were more or less sceptics (and that there were also some small sects who are said to have had higher moral beliefs than their countrymen[58]) he says, “We are concerned with the state religion, which Athenians learnt to reverence as children, which permeated the national literature, which crowned the high places of the city with its temples, which consecrated peace and war and everything solemn and ceremonial in civil life, which by its intimate connection with these things acquired that support of instinctive sentiment which is stronger than any moral or intellectual sanction.”[59] Something may be added to this. Why was the Greek so greatly concerned about his tomb and his burial rites? The main reason why he burdened himself with a wife and household was that a son should be left to see to those rites and look after his tomb. He did not see his wife before marriage, and, however beautiful he found her to be, the uneducated girl would be no companion for him; and her beauty would soon fade in the unwholesome confined life she led. Her office was fulfilled when she had borne him sons—and he looked for his pleasures elsewhere. Surely this one fact alone proves that the Greeks had a very real belief in their religion. Again why do we find that only Socrates and a few other thinkers appear to have been charged with impiety? Mr. Livingstone, curiously enough, argues from this that there was greater freedom of thought among the Greeks. Surely the simple and natural explanation is far preferable, namely, that there were no other pronounced sceptics than those few advanced thinkers. Imagine the danger of declaring anything against the gods which would throw in doubt the divinity of the patron goddess Athena![60] It is often argued that the intelligent Greeks could no more have believed the monstrous stories of their gods, than we believe some of the Old Testament stories of Jehovah. But the position is entirely different. We disbelieve stories that offend our moral sense: the gods of the Greeks had a character similar to their own, and acted as they themselves would have acted if they had been gods. Also they had no ethnology, no knowledge of purer religions to teach them the falsity and depravity of their own—nor, indeed, would the proud Greeks have condescended to learn from barbarians (especially as they believed themselves descended from heroes who were sprung from the gods). Finally one has only to read the accounts of travellers in Greece to learn that the religion even lingers on to-day—see, for instance, S. C. Kaines Smith’s Greek Art and National Life (pp. 153, 172), where the woodcutters, when a tree is falling, throw themselves on the ground and hide their faces in deadly fear of the Dryads,[61] and an eminent Greek gentleman crosses himself at the name of the Nereïds. (See also W. H. D. Rouse’s Tales from the Isles of Greece. I learn from the Spectator review of a book just published, Balkan Home Life, by Lucy M. J. Garnett, that the religion has a very strong hold on the people.)
My statement has been very one-sided so far, as I have said very little of the virtues of the Greeks. These virtues were those of intelligent primitive people, love of freedom, justice, and equality (but confined to their own nation and not including their own women and slaves), personal courage, great patriotism, fidelity to kinsfolk and guests; they showed at times generosity to a valiant enemy and recognized some such duties as burying the dead. While I do not think we can carry the national virtues much further than this, there would be gradations of character among the Greeks, and probably many would be more or less kindly, others have a true affection for their wives, others show private virtues in various directions—we can only conjecture as to something of which there is very little evidence in their literature. On the one hand, we know that Socrates suffered martyrdom for the truth,[62] and we may surmise that there were other fine characters; on the other hand, we know that this highly intellectual nation put the philosopher to death as a blasphemer against their profligate gods.
But while we can give the Greeks credit for little of the morality of modern civilization, on the other hand we would be thinking very absurdly if we regarded their vices as though the people were on the same moral plane as ourselves. (This is the fact to be recognised. The ridiculous tendency of the modern enthusiast is to depict the Greeks as a highly moral nation striving for righteousness!) Strictly speaking, the Greek practices and habits should not be called vices, because the Greeks had no reason to believe that they were doing anything wrong. Their virtues and their vices were those of ordinary primitive life.[63] The moral principle, that highest product of creation, had not yet developed itself among the people to any appreciable extent, but we see it gradually emerging in the growing disbelief in the national religion among thinking men, and reaching an advanced stage in Plato, the greatest philosopher of antiquity. But to the average Greek, apart from religion (including respect for parents), the patriotism which they had learnt from Homer, their one great book, covered much of what they meant by “virtue”.[64] Whatever was good for the State was a virtue, whatever bad for the State a vice. We can hardly realize what Athens stood for in the Greek mind. For instance, Æschylus tells us that the patron goddess Athena came to Athens to preside over the balloting of the jurors and conduct the trial of Orestes, and also that the Furies lived among the citizens in a sacred grotto. The Greeks saw that they were immensely superior to the surrounding “barbarians,” and they regarded their State practically as an object of worship (as Rome was also regarded by the Romans).
It would have been interesting to discuss here the ethical views of the philosophers, but the subject is far too intricate for this note—and in any case they and their followers formed only a few exceptions among the Greeks. It will be seen later that the use of such words as “virtue,” “holiness,” etc., causes a vast deal of meaning to be read into Plato which never entered that philosopher’s mind.
The great outstanding fact about the Greeks is their astonishing intellect, combined with sound commonsense (σωφροσύνη) and a quite modern gift of humour. Their powerful intellect, however, had very poor material to work upon. In a previous note I have mentioned their remarkably limited idea of the world—but, while knowing this to be a fact, we still cannot realize the mental attitude of men who had even one false conception of such magnitude as regards their general outlook and thought. Let us take an instance of a different kind from the great philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), who came after Plato—bearing in mind that the average Greeks would be vastly more ignorant and superstitious than their greatest thinkers. In his Mechanica Aristotle explains the power of a lever to make a small weight lift a larger one. His explanation is that a circle has a certain magical character. A very wonderful thing is a circle, because it is both convex and concave; it is made by a fixed point and a moving line, which are contradictory to each other; and whatever has a circular movement moves in opposite directions. Also, Aristotle says, movement in a circle is the most natural movement! Hence we get the result: the long arm of the lever moves in the larger circle and has the greater amount of this magical natural motion, and so requires the lesser force! Again, let us take a story which was as firmly believed by Aristotle as the most ignorant of his countrymen. Our word halcyon is the Greek word Alkuon, meaning a bird, probably of the Kingfisher species. The Greeks supposed the word to be formed of two words, hals kuon, meaning “conceived in the sea”—therefore they believed the bird was so conceived and that it was bred in a nest floating on the sea—and, as the sea must then be smooth, they further believed that a period of fourteen days’ calm necessarily occurred about Christmas—finding there was no such period of calm around their own coasts they either thought that it must occur (and the birds breed) elsewhere, or, like Theocritus, that the bird could charm the sea into tranquillity.[65]
The Greeks believed queer things about animals. I take the following instances of birds alone from Mr. Rogers’ Introduction to his Birds of Aristophanes, so that I need not give references. By looking at a plover, who returns the look, a man is cured of jaundice. Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, was said to have been so named because, having been cast into the sea, she was rescued by widgeons (Greek, penelops). The song of the dying swan was a belief of the Greeks. The raven was the bird of augury and had mysterious knowledge. The cranes fought the pygmies and swallowed stones for ballast. The young storks fed their aged parents. The sisken foresees the winter and snowstorms. Mr. Rogers has no need to discuss the yet more extravagant stories of the phœnix, sirens, harpies, etc. Plutarch (De Is. and Os. LXXI) tells us how the Greeks regarded birds and other animals in relation to the gods; he says that while they did not, like the Egyptians, worship animals, “they said and believed rightly that the dove was the sacred animal of Aphrodite, the raven of Apollo, the dog of Artemis, and so on.” (Possibly Aristophanes’ comedy did not win the prize, because the audience saw little humour in exaggerating the powers which they really believed the birds to have. To the Greeks the birds were greater and the gods smaller than we ourselves picture them. Ruskin’s translation of Od. V. 67,[66] the seabirds which “have care of the works of the sea,” seems much more likely to be correct than the accepted version that the birds live by diving and fishing. Consider how the Greeks would regard the birds that flew round and over their ships or fishing-nets and over the waves and rocks, where the sea-gods lay beneath—and compare Il. II, 614.)[67]
All that has been said about the Greeks in this and previous notes is intended, not so much to exhibit the character of that nation—a matter which does not greatly concern me—but for other reasons. In one instance the intention was to indicate how vast a gulf exists between Christianity and the ancient world. Many classical enthusiasts do not seem to realize this, and a definitely pagan tendency is very apparent in their habits of thought.
But the main object of pointing out the inferior state of civilization among the Greeks, their non-moral character in certain respects, their ignorance and superstition, and their low standard of morality generally, has to do with the important question of interpreting Greek literature and philosophy. It would matter very little that the enthusiast should picture the Greeks as a race of saints and demigods, if there were no beautiful and valuable literature to be coloured and falsified by reason of such views. It is only by realizing the actual life and thought of this primitive race that we can understand their language, that is to say, we can learn what meanings should be attached to the words they use. Only thus can we interpret their literature. We have already had two simple illustrations of this. In one case what appears to be a poetic fancy in Theocritus, when the voyager hopes the halcyons will calm the sea for him, is seen to be a wish that the birds will actually exercise the power that they possess. The other instance appears on page 294. But much more important is it that, in reading words of knowledge such as references to the starry heavens or the constitution of matter, or mental or moral phenomena, we should not attribute to the Greek writer conceptions far larger and higher than he had in his mind. To amplify what I have said in a previous note, let us take the words in Plato, Aristotle or, say, Euripides which are translated by such English words as “morality,” “purity,” “virtue,” “honour,” “religion,” etc. It is clear that the original Greek expressions cannot signify, for instance, either purity as we know it, or even abstention from unnatural vice or from infanticide.[68] We are, therefore, mistranslating when we use such English words (because they are the nearest equivalent to the Greek expressions), and this fact needs to be steadily borne in mind. Again when interpreting, say, a Greek play, it is necessary to bear in mind, not only the supposed character of the dramatist, but also the actual, known character of the audience to whom the play was addressed. I now propose to give an illustration which will bring me on dangerous ground.