Classical Culture

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28950, 18 July 1959, Page 3

Classical Culture

Hellenism. The History of. a Civilisation. By Arnold J. Toynbee. Oxford University Press. 255 pp. Index. In this outstanding contribution to the Home University Library Dr. Toynbee surveys the history of the Greek world and of Greek culture ‘by Rome and its dissemination throughout the known world until its decline and fall and replacement by partly Hellenised Judiac religion. To read this book is a stimulating experience. We are never left with a mere catalogue of events but are led to see a developing pattern. Main themes are picked out and events which have always seemed fortuitous or have seemed to contradict our conception of Greece fit into a complex but clear interpretation. In the opening chapters a brief description of the landscape of the Aegean basin relates its complex pattern of islands and mountains to a geological Fault line extending from South America via Asia to Morocco. This proves to be a foretaste of the synoptic view which, turned to historical events, links equally complex detail into equally definite main lines of stress and collapse. The decay of the classical world is not a subject that lends itself to optimism. Toynbee is perhaps less depressing than Gibbon, partly because he gives proper mportance to the survival of elenents of classical culture (far nore than, was necessary or even entirely safe for Christianity) into the medieval and modern world, and partly because, by isolating he main reasons for the collapse, he is able .to make a plea that the decline we detect in our time tnay not inevitably lead to a fad. \ central feature of the Hellenic way of life was loyalty to a city state, the political organisation that had led primitive man out .of a complete dependence on nature and the family. The city state made possible the intellectual golden age of the Greeks Slaves and women, excluded from the life of reason and faith in mankind, kept alive more primitive nature religions and when the rational age of Greece aeclined were ready to further its religious adversaries. Moreover, the price of the advantages of the city state was the rivalry between states, the local exclusive loyalty which led to continual warfare between states. This warfare had already become an anachronism in .the early history of Greece when the Greek world had become an economic unit • , , Much of the Hellenic outlook survives into our time- It is more broadly based now. Women and the economically less fortunate are much less rigorously excluded from the life of reason But, Dr. Toynbee reminds us. we “harbour at our peril” the most destructive legacy of tne Hellenic outlook, local loyalties in conflict with economic reality. These nationalistic sentiments could destroy our world as- they had in effect destroyed the Hellenic world before the Augustan peace came too late to save it-