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The Greek View of Life

G >> Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson >> The Greek View of Life



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THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE

BY

G. LOWES DICKINSON, M.A.

SIXTH EDITION

NEW YORK

1909




PREFACE


The following pages are intended to serve as a general introduction to
Greek literature and thought, for those, primarily, who do not know
Greek. Whatever opinions may be held as to the value of translations, it
seems clear that it is only by their means that the majority of modern
readers can attain to any knowledge of Greek culture; and as I believe
that culture to be still, as it has been in the past, the most valuable
element of a liberal education, I have hoped that such an attempt as the
present to give, with the help of quotations from the original authors,
some general idea of the Greek view of life, will not be regarded as
labour thrown away.

It has been essential to my purpose to avoid, as far as may be, all
controversial matter; and if any classical scholar who may come across
this volume should be inclined to complain of omissions or evasions, I
would beg him to remember the object of the book and to judge it
according to its fitness for its own end.

"The Greek View of Life," no doubt, is a question-begging title, but I
believe it to have a quite intelligible meaning; for varied and manifold
as the phases may be that are presented by the Greek civilization, they
do nevertheless group themselves about certain main ideas, to be
distinguished with sufficient clearness from those which have dominated
other nations. It is these ideas that I have endeavoured to bring into
relief; and if I have failed, the blame, I submit, must be ascribed
rather to myself than to the nature of the task I have undertaken.

From permission to make the extracts from translations here printed my
best thanks are due to the following authors and publishers:--Professor
Butcher, Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. E. D. A. Morshead, Mr. B. B. Rogers, Dr.
Verrall, Mr. A. S. Way, Messrs. George Bell and Sons, the Syndics of the
Cambridge University Press, the Delegates of the Clarendon Press,
Oxford, Messrs. Macmillan and Co., Mr. John Murray, and Messrs. Sampson
Low, Marston and Co.--I have also to thank the Master and Fellows of
Balliol College, Oxford, for permission to quote at considerable length
from the late Professor Jowett's translations of Plato and Thucydides.

Appended is a list of the translations from which I have quoted.




LIST OF TRANSLATIONS USED


AESCHYLUS (B.C. 525--456). "The House of Atreus"
(I.E. the "Agamemnon," "Choephorae" and "Eumenides"),
translated by E. D. A. MORSHEAD (Warren and Sons).
The "Eumenides," translated by DR. VERRALL (Cambridge,
1885).

ARISTOPHANES (C. B.C. 444--380). "The Acharnians,
the Knights, and the Birds," translated by JOHN HOOKHAM
FRERE (Morley's Universal Library, Routledge).
[Also the "Frogs" and the "Peace" in his Collected
Works, (Pickering)].
The "Clouds," the "Lysistrata" ["Women in Revolt,"]
the "Peace," and the "Wasps," translated by B. B. ROGERS

ARISTOTLE (B.C. 384--322). The "Ethics," the "Politics,"
and the "Rhetoric," translated by J. E. C. WELLDON
(Macmillan & Co.).

DEMOSTHENES (B.C. 385--322). "Orations," translated by
C. R. KENNEDY (Bell).

EURIPIDES (B.C. 480--406). "Tragedies," translated by
A. S. WAY (Macmillan & Co.).

HERODOTUS (B.C. 484-- ). "The History," translated
by S. R. RAWLINSON (Murray).

HOMER. The "Iliad," translated by LANG, LEAF AND MYERS;
the "Odyssey," translated by BUTCHER & LANG (Macmillan).

PINDAR (B.C. 522--442). "Odes," translated by E. MYERS
(Macmillan & Co.).

PLATO (B.C. 430--347). The "Dialogues," translated by
B. JOWETT (Clarendon Press).
"The Republic," translated by DAVIES AND VAUGHAN
(Macmillan & Co.).

PLUTARCH. "Lives," DRYDEN'S translation, edited by
A. CLOUGH (Sampson Low, Marston & Co.).

SOPHOCLES (B.C. 496--406). Edited and Translated by DR. JEBB
(Cambridge University Press).

THUCYDIDES (B.C. 471-- ), edited and translated by
B. JOWETT (Clarendon Press).




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I.--THE GREEK VIEW OF RELIGION

1. Introductory

2. Greek Religion an Interpretation of Nature

3. Greek Religion an Interpretation of the Human Passions

4. Greek Religion the Foundation of Society

5. Religious Festivals

6. The Greek Conception of the Relation of Man to the Gods

7. Divination, Omens, Oracles

8. Sacrifice and Atonement

9. Guilt and Punishment

10. Mysticism

11. The Greek View of Death and a Future Life

12. Critical and Sceptical Opinion in Greece

13. Ethical Criticism

14. Transition to Monotheism

15. Metaphysical Criticism

16. Metaphysical reconstruction--Plato

17. Summary


CHAPTER II.--THE GREEK VIEW OF THE STATE

1. The Greek State a "City"

2. The Relation of the State to the Citizen

3. The Greek View of Law

4. Artisans and Slaves

5. The Greek State primarily Military, not Industrial

6. Forms of Government in the Greek State

7. Faction and Anarchy

8. Property and the Communistic Ideal

9. Sparta

10. Athens

11. Sceptical Criticism of the Basis of the State

12. Summary


CHAPTER III.--THE GREEK VIEW OF THE INDIVIDUAL

1. The Greek View of Manual Labour and Trade

2. Appreciation of External Goods

3. Appreciation of Physical Qualities

4. Greek Athletics

5. Greek Ethics--Identification of the Aesthetic and Ethical Points of View

6. The Greek View of Pleasure

7. Illustrations.--Ischomachus; Socrates

8. The Greek View of Woman

9. Protests against the Common View of Woman

10. Friendship

11. Summary


CHAPTER IV.--THE GREEK VIEW OF ART

1. Greek Art an Expression of National Life

2. Identification of the Aesthetic and Ethical points of View

3. Sculpture and Painting

4. Music and the Dance

5. Poetry

6. Tragedy

7. Comedy

8. Summary


CHAPTER V.--CONCLUSION




THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE




CHAPTER I

THE GREEK VIEW OF RELIGION


Section 1. Introductory.

In approaching the subject of the religion of the Greeks it is necessary
to dismiss at the outset many of the associations which we are naturally
inclined to connect with that word. What we commonly have in our mind
when we speak of religion is a definite set of doctrines, of a more or
less metaphysical character, formulated in a creed and supported by an
organisation distinct from the state. And the first thing we have to
learn about the religion of the Greeks is that it included nothing of
the kind. There was no church, there was no creed, there were no
articles; there was no doctrine even, unless we are so to call a chaos
of legends orally handed down and in continual process of transformation
by the poets. Priests there were, but they were merely public officials,
appointed to perform certain religious rites. The distinction between
cleric and layman, as we know it, did not exist; the distinction between
poetry and dogma did not exist; and whatever the religion of the Greeks
may have been, one thing at any rate is clear, that it was something
very different from all that we are in the habit of associating with the
word.

What then was it? It is easy to reply that it was the worship of those
gods--of Zeus, Apollo, Athene, and the rest--with whose names and
histories every one is familiar. But the difficulty is to realise what
was implied in the worship of these gods; to understand that the
mythology which we regard merely as a collection of fables was to the
Greeks actually true; or at least that to nine Greeks out of ten it
would never occur that it might be false, might be, as we say, mere
stories. So that though no doubt the histories of the gods were in part
the inventions of the poets, yet the poets would conceive themselves to
be merely putting into form what they and every one believed to be
essentially true.

But such a belief implies a fundamental distinction between the
conception, or rather, perhaps, the feeling of the Greeks about the
world, and our own. And it is this feeling that we want to understand
when we ask ourselves the question, what did a belief in the gods really
mean to the ancient Greeks? To answer it fully and satisfactorily is
perhaps impossible. But some attempt must be made; and it may help us in
our quest if we endeavour to imagine the kind of questionings and doubts
which the conception of the gods would set at rest.


Section 2. Greek Religion an Interpretation of Nature.

When we try to conceive the state of mind of primitive man the first
thing that occurs to us is the bewilderment and terror he must have felt
in the presence of the powers of nature. Naked, houseless, weaponless,
he is at the mercy, every hour, of this immense and incalculable
Something so alien and so hostile to himself. As fire it burns, as water
it drowns, as tempest it harries and destroys; benignant it may be at
times, in warm sunshine and calm, but the kindness is brief and
treacherous. Anyhow, whatever its mood, it has to be met and dealt with.
By its help, or, if not, in the teeth of its resistance, every step in
advance must be won; every hour, every minute, it is there to be
reckoned with. What is it then, this persistent, obscure, unnameable
Thing? What is it? The question haunts the mind; it will not be put
aside; and the Greek at last, like other men under similar conditions,
only with a lucidity and precision peculiar to himself, makes the reply,
"it is something like myself." Every power of nature he presumes to be a
spiritual being, impersonating the sky as Zeus, the earth as Demeter,
the sea as Poseidon; from generation to generation under his shaping
hands, the figures multiply and define themselves; character and story
crystallise about what at first were little more than names; till at
last, from the womb of the dark enigma that haunted him in the
beginning, there emerges into the charmed light of a world of ideal
grace a pantheon of fair and concrete personalities. Nature has become a
company of spirits; every cave and fountain is haunted by a nymph; in
the ocean dwell the Nereids, in the mountain the Oread, the Dryad in the
wood; and everywhere, in groves and marshes, on the pastures or the
rocky heights, floating in the current of the streams or traversing
untrodden snows, in the day at the chase and as evening closes in
solitude fingering his flute, seen and heard by shepherds, alone or with
his dancing train, is to be met the horned and goat-footed, the sunny-
smiling Pan.

Thus conceived, the world has become less terrible because more
familiar. All that was incomprehensible, all that was obscure and dark,
has now been seized and bodied forth in form, so that everywhere man is
confronted no longer with blind and unintelligible force, but with
spiritual beings moved by like passions with himself. The gods, it is
true, were capricious and often hostile to his good, but at least they
had a nature akin to his; if they were angry, they might be propitiated;
if they were jealous, they might be appeased; the enmity of one might be
compensated by the friendship of another; dealings with them, after all,
were not so unlike dealings with men, and at the worst there was always
a chance for courage, patience and wit.

Man, in short, by his religion has been made at home in the world; and
that is the first point to seize upon. To drive it home, let us take an
illustration from the story of Odysseus. Odysseus, it will be
remembered, after the sack of Troy, for ten years was a wanderer on the
seas, by tempest, enchantment, and every kind of danger detained, as it
seemed, beyond hope of return from the wife and home he had left in
Ithaca. The situation is forlorn enough. Yet, somehow or other, beauty
in the story predominates over terror. And this, in part at least,
because the powers with which Odysseus has to do, are not mere forces of
nature, blind and indifferent, but spiritual beings who take an
interest, for or against, in his fate. The whole story becomes familiar,
and, if one may say so, comfortable, by the fact that it is conducted
under the control and direction of the gods. Listen, for example, to the
Homeric account of the onset of a storm, and observe how it sets one at
ease with the elements:

"Now the lord, the shaker of the earth, on his way from the Ethiopians,
espied Odysseus afar off from the mountains of the Solymi: even thence
he saw him as he sailed over the deep; and he was yet more angered in
spirit, and wagging his head he communed with his own heart. 'Lo now, it
must be that the gods at the last have changed their purpose concerning
Odysseus, while I was away among the Ethiopians. And now he is nigh to
the Phaeacian land, where it is so ordained that he escape the great
issues of the woe which hath come upon him. But me-thinks, that even yet
I will drive him far enough in the path of suffering.'

"With that he gathered the clouds and troubled the waters of the deep,
grasping his trident in his hands; and he roused all storms of all
manner of winds, and shrouded in clouds the land and sea: and down sped
night from heaven. The East Wind and the South Wind clashed, and the
stormy West, and the North, that is born in the bright air, rolling
onward a great wave." [Footnote: Odyss. v. 282.--Translated by Butcher
and Lang.]

The position of the hero is terrible, it is true, but not with the
terror of despair; for as it is a god that wrecked him, it may also be a
god that will save. If Poseidon is his enemy, Athene, he knows, is his
friend; and all lies, after all, in the hands, or, as the Greeks said,
"on the knees," not of a blind destiny, but of beings accessible to
prayer.

Let us take another passage from Homer to illustrate the same point. It
is the place where Achilles is endeavouring to light the funeral pyre of
Patroclus, but because there is no wind the fire will not catch. What is
he to do? What _can_ he do? Nothing, say we, but wait till the wind
comes. But to the Greek the winds are persons, not elements; Achilles
has only to call and to promise, and they will listen to his voice. And
so, we are told, "fleet-footed noble Achilles had a further thought:
standing aside from the pyre he prayed to the two winds of North and
West, and promised them fair offerings, and pouring large libations from
a golden cup besought them to come, that the corpses might blaze up
speedily in the fire, and the wood make haste to be enkindled. Then
Iris, when she heard his prayer, went swiftly with the message to the
Winds. They within the house of the gusty West Wind were feasting all
together at meat, when Iris sped thither, and halted on the threshold of
stone. And when they saw her with their eyes, they sprung up and called
to her every one to sit by him. But she refused to sit, and spake her
word: 'No seat for me; I must go back to the streams of Ocean, to the
Ethiopians' land where they sacrifice hecatombs to the immortal gods,
that I too may feast at their rites. But Achilles is praying the North
Wind and the loud West to come, and promising them fair offerings, that
ye may make the pyre be kindled whereon lieth Patroclos, for whom all
the Achaians are making moan.'

"She having thus said departed, and they arose with a mighty sound,
rolling the clouds before them. And swiftly they came blowing over the
sea, and the wave rose beneath their shrill blast; and they came to
deep-soiled Troy, and fell upon the pile, and loudly roared the mighty
fire. So all night drave they the flame of the pyre together, blowing
shrill; and all night fleet Achilles, holding a two-handled cup, drew
wine from a golden bowl, and poured it forth and drenched the earth,
calling upon the spirit of hapless Patroclos. As a father waileth when
he burneth the bones of his son, new-married, whose death is woe to his
hapless parents, so wailed Achilles as he burnt the bones of his
comrade, going heavily round the burning pile, with many moans.

"But at the hour when the Morning Star goeth forth to herald light upon
the earth, the star that saffron-mantled Dawn cometh after, and
spreadeth over the salt sea, then grew the burning faint, and the flame
died down. And the Winds went back again to betake them home over the
Thracian main, and it roared with a violent swell. Then the son of
Peleus turned away from the burning and lay down wearied, and sweet
sleep leapt on him." [Footnote: Iliad xxiii. p. 193.--Translated by
Lang, Leaf and Myers.]

The exquisite beauty of this passage, even in translation, will escape
no lover of poetry. And it is a beauty which depends on the character of
the Greek religion; on the fact that all that is unintelligible in the
world, all that is alien to man, has been drawn, as it were, from its
dark retreat, clothed in radiant form, and presented to the mind as a
glorified image of itself. Every phenomenon of nature, night and "rosy-
fingered" dawn, earth and sun, winds, rivers, and seas, sleep and
death,--all have been transformed into divine and conscious agents, to
be propitiated by prayer, interpreted by divination, and comprehended by
passions and desires identical with those which stir and control
mankind.


Section 3. Greek Religion an Interpretation of the Human Passions.

And as with the external world, so with the world within. The powers of
nature were not the only ones felt by man to be different from and alien
to himself; there were others, equally strange, dwelling in his own
heart, which, though in a sense they were part of him, yet he felt to be
not himself, which came upon him and possessed him without his choice
and against his will. With these too he felt the need to make himself at
home, and these too, to satisfy his need, he shaped into creatures like
himself. To the whole range of his inner experience he gave definition
and life, presenting it to himself in a series of spiritual forms. In
Aphrodite, mother of Eros, he incarnated the passion of love, placing in
her broidered girdle "love and desire of loving converse that steals the
wits even of the wise"; in Ares he embodied the lust of war; in Athene,
wisdom; in Apollo, music and the arts. The pangs of guilt took shape in
the conception of avenging Furies; and the very prayers of the
worshipper sped from him in human form, wrinkled and blear-eyed, with
halting pace, in the rear of punishment. Thus the very self of man he
set outside himself; the powers, so intimate, and yet so strange, that
swayed him from within he made familiar by making them distinct;
converted their shapeless terror into the beauty of visible form; and by
merely presenting them thus to himself in a guise that was immediately
understood, set aside, if he could not answer, the haunting question of
their origin and end.

Here then is at least a partial reply to our question as to the effect
of a belief in the gods on the feeling of the Greek. To repeat the
phrase once more, it made him at home in the world. The mysterious
powers that controlled him it converted into beings like himself; and so
gave him heart and breathing-space, shut in, as it were, from the abyss
by this shining host of fair and familiar forms, to turn to the
interests and claims of the passing hour an attention undistracted by
doubt and fear.


Section 4. Greek Religion the Foundation of Society.

But this relation to the world of nature is only one side of man's life;
more prominent and more important, at a later stage of his development,
is his relation to society; and here too in Greek civilization a great
part was played by religion. For the Greek gods, we must remember, were
not purely spiritual powers, to be known and approached only in the
heart by prayer. They were beings in human form, like, though superior
to ourselves, who passed a great part of their history on earth,
intervened in the affairs of men, furthered or thwarted their
undertakings, begat among them sons and daughters, and followed, from
generation to generation, the fortunes of their children's children.
Between them and mankind there was no impassable gulf; from Heracles the
son of Zeus was descended the Dorian race; the Ionians from Ion, son of
Apollo; every family, every tribe traced back its origin to a "hero",
and these "heroes" were children of the gods, and deities themselves.
Thus were the gods, in the most literal sense, the founders of society;
from them was derived, even physically, the unit of the family and the
race; and the whole social structure raised upon that natural basis was
necessarily penetrated through and through by the spirit of religion.

We must not therefore be misled by the fact that there was no church in
the Greek state to the idea that the state recognised no religion; on
the contrary, religion was so essential to the state, so bound up with
its whole structure, in general and in detail, that the very conception
of a separation between the powers was impossible. If there was no
separate church, in our sense of the term, as an independent organism
within the state, it was because the state, in one of its aspects, was
itself a church, and derived its sanction, both as a whole and in its
parts, from the same gods who controlled the physical world. Not only
the community as a whole but all its separate minor organs were under
the protection of patron deities. The family centred in the hearth,
where the father, in his capacity of priest, offered sacrifice and
prayer to the ancestors of the house; the various corporations into
which families were grouped, the local divisions for the purpose of
taxation, elections, and the like, derived a spiritual unity from the
worship of a common god; and finally the all-embracing totality of the
state itself was explained and justified to all its members by the cult
of the special protecting deity to whom its origin and prosperous
continuance were due. The sailor who saw, on turning the point of
Sunium, the tip of the spear of Athene glittering on the Acropolis,
beheld in a type the spiritual form of the state; Athene and Athens were
but two aspects of the same thing; and the statue of the goddess of
wisdom dominating the city of the arts may serve to sum up for us the
ideal of that marvellous corporate life where there was no
ecclesiastical religion only because there was no secular state.

Regarded from this point of view, we may say that the religion of the
Greeks was the spiritual side of their political life. And we must add
that in one respect their religion pointed the way to a higher political
achievement than they were ever able to realise in fact. One fatal
defect of the Greek civilisation, as is familiar to students of their
history, was the failure of the various independent city states to
coalesce into a single harmonious whole. But the tendency of religion
was to obviate this defect. We find, for example, that at one time or
another federations of states were formed to support in common the cult
of some god; and one cult in particular there was--that of the Delphian
Apollo--whose influence on political no less than on religious life was
felt as far as and even beyond the limits of the Greek race. No colony
could be founded, no war hazarded, no peace confirmed, without the
advice and approval of the god--whose cult was thus at once a religious
centre for the whole of Greece, and a forecast of a political unity that
should co-ordinate into a whole her chaos of conflicting states.

The religion of the Greeks being thus, as we have seen, the
presupposition and bond of their political life, we find its sanction
extended at every point to custom and law. The persons of heralds, for
example, were held to be under divine protection; treaties between
states and contracts between individuals were confirmed by oath; the
vengeance of the gods was invoked upon infringers of the law; national
assemblies and military expeditions were inaugurated by public prayers;
the whole of corporate life, in short, social and political, was so
embraced and bathed in an idealising element of ritual that the secular
and religious aspects of the state must have been as inseparable to a
Greek in idea as we know them to have been in constitution.


Section 5. Religious Festivals.

For it was in ritual and art, not in propositions, that the Greek
religion expressed itself; and in this respect it was closer to the
Roman Catholic than to the Protestant branch of the Christian faith. The
plastic genius of the race, that passion to embody ideas in form, which
was at the root, as we saw, of their whole religious outlook, drove them
to enact for their own delight, in the most beautiful and telling forms,
the whole conception they had framed of the world and of themselves. The
changes of the seasons, with the toil they exact and the gifts they
bring, the powers of generation and destruction, the bounty or the
rigours of the earth; and on the other hand, the order and operations of
social phenomena, the divisions of age and sex, of function and of rank
in the state--all these took shape and came, as it were, to self-
consciousness in a magnificent series of publicly ordered _fetes_.
So numerous were these and so diverse in their character that it would
be impossible, even if it were desirable in this place, to give any
general account of them. Our purpose will be better served by a
description of two, selected from the calendar of Athens, and typical,
the one of the relations of man to nature, the other of his relation to
the state. The festivals we have chosen are those known as the
"Anthesteria" [Footnote: This interpretation of the meaning of the
"Anthesteria" is not accepted by modern scholars. It is not, however,
for typographical reasons, convenient to remove it from the text, and
the error is of no importance for the purpose of this book.] and the
"Panathenaea."

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