What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?

After more than half a century spent on the study of old Greek life in its art, politics, literature, philosophy, and science, I gladly adopt this ample and dignified occasion to give a review of what I have learned to this audience, whose intellectual standard, and whose sympathy with the work of a student, are recognised throughout the world. It is a great honour for any man from Europe to speak on this platform, but it implies, in consequence, a grave responsibility, and it is impossible to stand before you here without some feeling of awe, for I feel I am addressing not merely this most fastidious audience, or even the larger American public, with whom I gladly claim an old acquaintance through my books, but the great congregation of the educated classes in many and diverse lands.

I do not suppose that any of you will be disposed to dispute the fact (which the very title of these lectures presupposes)--that modern civilisation, from various points of view, owes a great debt to the old Greeks. If there be any such sceptic here, I trust he will be converted in the course of my conversation with him from this platform. But even to those who readily admit the fact, explicit proofs of it may not be useless, for they will show you the reasons that have long since persuaded the world of teachers to make Greek essential in a liberal education. Assuming, however, for the present the main fact, I think I shall begin this discourse most profitably by discussing the supposed causes which gave the Greeks this curious pre-eminence. It is perhaps, to use familiar words, putting the cart before the horse, but you need hardly be reminded that if in logic we often do not explain a statement until we have established its truth, in time the order is different. The causes of every great result are hidden in past ages, shrouded by the mists of antiquity, covered with the cloud of oblivion, so that in the present case the consideration of the prehistoric causes of the greatness of the Greek intellect may well precede the evidence of that greatness, which we gather by the lamp, often dim, of history, if not by the searchlight of archæological science. Though this subject cannot but prove dull to some of you, I shall do my best to relieve the dulness by illustrations or even by digressions into kindred fields of knowledge.

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.