Part 15 (1/2)

(4) The concourse in Athens, and some other cities, of alert and capable men from all parts of the Greek-speaking world,[322] and of men of other speech who came thither to learn.

(5) The special growth of civic and peaceful population in Attica by the free incorporation of the smaller towns in the franchise of Athens.

Athens had thus the largest number of free citizens of all the Greek cities to start with,[323] and the maximum of domestic peace.

(6) The maintenance of an ideal of cultured life as the outcome of these conditions, which were not speedily overridden either by (_a_) systematic militarism, or (_b_) industrialism, or (_c_) by great acc.u.mulation of wealth.

(7) The special public expenditure of the State, particularly in the age of Pericles, on art, architecture, and the drama, and in stipends to the poorer of the free citizens.

Thus the culture history of Greece, like the political, connects vitally from the first with the physical conditions. The disrupted character of the mainland; the diffusion of the people through the aegean Isles; the spreading of colonies on east and west, set up a mult.i.tude of separate City-States, no one of which could decisively or long dominate the rest.

These democratic and equal communities reacted on each other, especially those so placed as to be seafaring. Their separateness developed a mult.i.tudinous mythology; even the G.o.ds generally recognised being wors.h.i.+pped with endless local particularities, while most districts had their special deities. For each and all of these were required temples, altars, statues, sacred vessels, which would be paid for by the public[324] or the temple revenues, or by rich devotees; and the countless myths, multiplied on all hands because of the absence of anything like a general priestly organisation, were an endless appeal to the imitative arts. Nature, too, had freely supplied the ideal medium for sculpture and for the finest architecture--pure marble. And as the political dividedness of h.e.l.lenedom prevented even an approach to organisation among the scattered and independent priests, so the priesthood had no power and no thought of imposing artistic limitations on the shapers of the art objects given to their temples. In addition to all this, the local patriotism of the countless communities was constantly expressed in statues to their own heroes, statesmen, and athletes. And in such a world of sculpture, formative art must needs flourish wherever it could ornament life.

We have only to compare the conditions in Judea, Persia, Egypt, and early Rome to see the enormous differentiation herein implied. In Mazdean Persia and Yahwistic Judea there was a tabu on all divine images, and by consequence on all sculpture that could lend itself to idolatry.[325] (This tabu, like the monotheistic idea, was itself the outcome of political and social causation, which is in large part traceable and readily intelligible.) In Italy, in the early historic period, outside of Etruria, there had been no process of culture-contact sufficient to develop any of the arts in a high degree; and the relation of the Romans to the other Italian communities in terms of situation and inst.i.tutions[326] was fatally one of progressive conquest. Their specialisation was thus military or predaceous; and the formal acceptance of the deities of the conquered communities could not prevent the partial uniformation of wors.h.i.+p. Thus Rome had nearly everything to learn from Greece in art as in literature. In Egypt, again, where sculpture had at more than one time, in more than one locality, reached an astonis.h.i.+ng excellence,[327] the easily maintained political centralisation[328] and the commercial isolation made fatally for uniformity of ideal; and the secure dominion of the organised priesthood, cultured only sacerdotally, always strove to impose one stolid conventional form on all sacred and ritual sculpture,[329] which was copied in the secular, in order that kings should as much as possible resemble G.o.ds. Where the bulk of Greece was ”servile to all the skyey influences,” physically as well as mentally, open on all sides to all cultures, all pressures, all stimuli, Egypt and Judea and Persia were relatively iron-bound, and early Rome relatively inaccessible.

Finally, as militarism never spread Spartan-wise over pre-Alexandrian Greece, and her natural limitations prevented any such exploitation of labour as took place in Egypt, the prevailing ideal in times of peace, at least in Attica, was that of the cultured man, kalokagathos, supported by slave labour but not enormously rich, who stimulated art as he was stimulated by it. a.s.suredly he was in many cases a dilettante, if not an amateur, else had art been in a worse case.

It is to be remembered that in later Greece, from about the time of Apelles, all free children were taught to draw (Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ x.x.xv, 36, 15); and long before, the same authority tells us, art was taken up by men of rank. The introduction of painting into the schools at Sicyon took place about 350 B.C., and thence the practice spread all over h.e.l.las. Aristotle, too (_Politics_, v [viii], 3), commends the teaching of drawing to children, noting that it enables men to judge of the arts and avoid blunders in picture-buying--though he puts this as an inferior and incidental gain. Thus the educated Greeks were in a fairly good sense all dilettanti and amateurs. On the whole subject see K.J. Freeman, _Schools of h.e.l.las_, 1908, pp. 114-17.

-- 2

In literature Greek development is as clearly consequent as in art. The Homeric poems are the outcome of a social state in which a cla.s.s of bards could find a living by chanting heroic tales to aristocratic households. Lyric genius is indeed something specially incalculable; and it is startling to realise that about the time of the rude rule of Peisistratos at Athens, Sappho in Lesbos was not merely producing the perfect lyrics which to this day men reckon unmatched, but was the centre of a kind of school of song. But Lesbos was really the home of an ancient culture--”the earliest of all the aeolic settlements, anterior even to Kyme”[330]--and Sappho followed closely upon the lyrists Pittakos and Alkaios. So that here too there is intelligible causation in environment as well as genius. In other directions it is patent. The drama, tragic and comic alike, was unquestionably the outcome of the public wors.h.i.+p of the G.o.ds, first provided for by the community, later often exacted by it from rich aspirants to political power. Greek drama is a clear evolution, on the tragic side, from the primitive ritual of Dionysos, Beer-G.o.d or Wine-G.o.d; individual genius and communal fostering combining to develop a primitive rite into a literary florescence.[331]

For all such developments special genius is as a matter of course required, but potential genius occurs in all communities in given forms at a given culture stage; and what happened in Athens was that the special genius for drama was specially appealed to, evoked, and maintained. aeschylus in Egypt and Aristophanes in Persia must have died with all their drama in them. Further, as Grote has so luminously shown,[332] the juridical life of Athens, with its perpetual play of special pleading in the dikasteries, was signally propitious to the spirit of drama. The constant clas.h.i.+ng and contrast of ethical points of view, the daily play of eristic thought, was in itself a real drama which educated both dramatists and audience, and which inevitably affected the handling of moral problems on the stage. Athens may thus be said to have cultivated discussion as Sparta cultivated ”Laconism”; and both philosophy and drama in Greece are steeped in it. Myths thus came to be handled on the stage with a breadth of reflection which was nowhere else possible.

Historiography, science, and philosophy, again, were similarly fostered by other special conditions. Abstract and physical science began for Greece in the comparison and friction of ideas among leisured men, themselves often travelled, living in inquisitive communities often visited by strangers. What Egypt and Syria and Phoenicia had to give in medical lore, in geometry, and in astronomy, was a.s.similated and built upon, in an atmosphere of free thought and free discussion, whence came all manner of abstract philosophy, a.n.a.lytical and ethical. Plato and Aristotle are the peaks of immense acc.u.mulations of more primitive thought beginning on the soil laid by Semitic culture in Asia Minor; Socrates was stimulated and drawn out by the Athenian life on which he didactically reacted; Hippocrates garnered the experience of many medical priests. History was cultivated under similar conditions of manifold intercourse and intelligent inquisitiveness. Herodotus put down the outcome of much questioning during many travels, and he had an appreciative public with similar tastes.[333] The manifold life of h.e.l.las and her neighbours, Egypt, Persia, Syria, was an endless ground for inquiry and anecdote. The art of writing, acquired long before from Phoenicia, was thus put to unparalleled uses; and at length the theme of the Peloponnesian war, in which all the political pa.s.sions of h.e.l.las were embroiled for a generation, found in Thucydides a historian produced by and representative of all the critical judgment of the critical Athenian age. Plutarch, in a later period, condenses a library of lesser writers.

Thus in respect of every characteristic and every special attainment of Greek life we can trace external causation, from the geographical conditions upwards, without being once tempted to resort to the verbalist explanation of ”race qualities” or ”national genius.” If h.e.l.las developed otherwise than Phoenicia from any given date onwards, the causes lay either in the environment or in the set previously given to Phoenician life by its special antecedents, which in turn were determined by environment. To suppose that ”the Greeks” started primordially with a unique connatural bent to a relatively ”ideal”

method of life, preferring culture to riches and art to luxury, is to entail the further a.s.sumption of a separate biological evolution from the pre-human stage. To put the problem clearly, let us say that if we suppose the ancestors of the Greeks three millenniums before Homer to have been planted in Australia, with none of the domesticable animals which have played so decisive a part in the development of human societies, there is no good reason to think that the ”race” would have risen to any higher levels than had been reached by the Australian aborigines at the time of their discovery by Europeans. One of the most remarkable things about those aborigines is their disproportionately high cranial capacity, which seems compatible with a mental life that their natural environment has always precluded. Many plain traces of gross primeval savagery remain in Greek literature and religion; and to credit all Greek progress to a unique racial faculty is to turn the back upon all the acc.u.mulating evidence which goes to show that from the first entrance of the Greeks into Greece they blended with and a.s.similated the culture of the races whom they found there.[334] The futility of the whole racial thesis becomes evident, finally, the moment we reflect how unequal Greek culture was; how restricted in h.e.l.las, how special to Athens was it on the intellectual side when once Athens had reached her stature; how blank of thought and science was all h.e.l.lenic life before the contact of Semitic survivals in Ionia; how backward were many sections of the pagan h.e.l.lenic stock to the last; and how backward they have been since the political overturn in antiquity.

The vitiating concept of racial genius appears incidentally, but definitely, in Dr. Cunningham's contrast of Phoenicians and Greeks as relatively wealth-seekers and culture-seekers, ingrained barbarians and ingrained humanists (_Western Civilisation_, pp. 72, 73, 98, 99, etc.), and in his phrase as to the persistent ”principles which the Greek and the Phoenician respectively represented.” The ant.i.thesis, it is here maintained, is spurious.

Many Greeks were in full sympathy with the Phoenician norm; many Phoenicians must have been capable of delighting in the Greek norm had they been reared to it. At a given period the Phoenicians had a higher life than the Greeks; and had the Phoenicians evolved for ages in the Greek environment, with an equivalent blending of stocks and cross-fertilisation of cultures, they could have become all that the Greeks ever were. The a.s.sertion that when we see ”the destruction and degradation of human life in the march of material progress, we see what is alien to the Greek spirit” (_id._ p. 99) will not bear examination. Greek slavery, like every other, was just such a degradation of human life. And to speak of a ”consciousness of her mission” on the part of ”Athens”

(_id._ pp. 72, 73) is to set up a pseudo-ent.i.ty and a moral illusion.

It is remarkable that even among students well abreast of evolutionary thought there is still a strong tendency to think of Greek civilisation in terms of some occult virtue of ”h.e.l.lenic spirit,” something unique in social phenomena, something not to be accounted for like the process of evolution in other races. Thus so accomplished and critical a thinker as Prof. Gilbert Murray seems to account for every Greek advance beyond savagery as a result of ”h.e.l.lenism.” _E.g._, ”Human sacrifice, then, is one of the barbarities which h.e.l.lenism successfully overcame” (_The Rise of the Greek Epic_, 1907, p. 16); ”Solved by the progressive, or, I may say, by the h.e.l.lenic spirit” (_Id._ p. 25). In this way the discrediting and abandonment of the use of poisoned arrows in the ”Homeric” period (_Id._ pp. 120-21) seems to be ascribed either to the Homeric or to the h.e.l.lenic ”spirit.”

Now, Mr. Murray himself incidentally notes (p. 121) that poisoned weapons are forbidden in the Laws of Manu; and it might be pointed out that even among the barbaric and ill-advantaged Somali, when visited by Burton fifty years ago, the use of poisoned arrows was already restricted to ”the servile cla.s.s” (_First Footsteps in East Africa_, ed. 1910, p. 45; cp. p. 74). The use of poisoned arrows, in short, is common in savagery, and is transcended by all races alike when they rise some way above that level. The ”h.e.l.lenes,” to start with, were savages like the rest, and rose like others in virtue of propitious conditions. So with human sacrifice. According to Herodotus, the Egyptians had abandoned it before the Greeks.

Shall we describe the Egyptian progress as a matter of ”Egypticism”

or ”the Egyptian spirit”?

Defences of the Greeks, such as that made so ably by Mr. Murray against the aspersions cast upon ”Paganism” by uncritical Christians, are to be sympathetically received in the light of their purport; but the true historical method is surely not to exhibit the historic Greeks as ”ant.i.theses” to ”the pagan man” of modern anthropology, but to show Christians how they and their creed have evolved from savagery even as did the Greeks. (Cp. the author's _Christianity and Mythology_, 2nd ed. p. 77 _sq._, as to the pro-h.e.l.lenic handling of Greek phenomena by other scholars.)

Should the general line of causation here set forth be challenged, it will suffice, by way of test, to turn to the special case of Sparta. If it were ”Greek character” that brought forth Greek art, letters, and science, they ought to have flourished in Greek Sparta as elsewhere. It is, however, the notorious historic fact that during all the centuries of her existence, after the pre-Lycurgean period, Sparta contributed to the general deed of man virtually nothing, either in art or letters, in science or philosophy.

The grounds for holding that choral poetry flourished pre-eminently at Sparta (see K.O. Muller, _History of the Dorians_, Eng. tr. ii, 383) are not very strong. See Busolt, _Griechische Geschichte_, 1885, i, 158, 159, for what can be finally said on this head. Ernst Curtius (_Griechische Geschichte_, 1858, i, 240) writes on this subject as a romantic enthusiast. Burckhardt (_Griechische Culturgeschichte_, i, 116-19) examines the subject with his usual care, but decides only that the Spartans employed music with a special eye to military education. And Muller acknowledges that though many Spartan lyrists are named, ”there has not been preserved a single fragment of Spartan lyric poetry, with the exception of Alkman's,” the probable reason being ”a certain uniformity and monotony in their productions, such as is perceived in the early works of art.” On the whole question cp. K.J.

Freeman's _Schools of h.e.l.las_, chs. i and xi.

In the story of h.e.l.las, Sparta stands almost alone among the peoples as yielding no foothold to the life of the mind, bare of nearly all memory of beauty,[335] indigent in all that belongs to the spirit, morally sterile as steel. Yet ”the Dorians of Laconia are perhaps the only people in Greece who can be said to have preserved in any measure the purity of their Greek blood.”[336] Before such a phenomenon the dogma of race-character instantly collapses, whereas in terms of the reaction of conditions the explanation is entirely adequate. As thus:--

1. Sparta was by situation one of the most secluded of the Greek States.

In the words of Euripides, it was ”hollow, surrounded by mountains, rugged, and difficult of access to an enemy.”[337] Compared in particular with Athens, it was not only landward and mountain-walled, but out of the way of all traffic.[338]