The Living, Past; What Is Civilisation ?

Northern Advocate, 10 August 1938, Page 2

The Living, Past; What Is Civilisation ?

The Civilisation of Greece and Rome, by Benjamin. Farrington. New People’s Library. (Golljmcz 1/-. N.Z. I 'G.) The question in the sub-title is asked, to invito answers, not to offer one. Tave you ever tried to define civilisation? It looks easy. Most of us foe! that wo know quite well what it means. But do we? And can we set it down, and find that it stands up to a few simple tests? The writer is not asking idle questions. Recently lie tried to shape a satisfying definition, without success. He then submitted the question io

friends, and to a smah group of publics teachers and writers who use the word frequently. One and all tried, and all failed to produce a definition that filled the bill. Dictionaries and the Encyclopaedia Britannica wore consulted, but they were not very helpful: for the most part evading or ignoring Iho heed for any definition. ■From Ploughstick to Wireless, Mr Chase, whose “Tyranny of Words" was reviewed in these columns a little while ago, reminded us that many of our most common words, such as ‘'freedom" and “democracy." were frequently used by people in argument. each one of whom meant by the word something different from what the otliers intended. There is, hardly any word of this sort more commonly used to-day than the word '‘civilisation," and it can mean anything from the first steps in progress made when man discovered his power to use tools to The amazing amplification of his resources which modern science has harnessed in his service.

One of the World’s Wonders. There is, however, a common consciousness of inheritance from the past. Not from Greece and Rome only, but from Egypt, Babylonia, and the further East. Greece and Rome are more significant because they each in turn received Into a ready fertility of mind the filtered deposit of knowledge and wisdom which earlier civilisations had accumulated.

What they received they magnified In their experience and more rapid expansion. Greece, especially, became the nursery of new thought, the pioneer of new ideas in government, philosophy, art and religion.

It is one of the wonders of the world that this small parcel of land, thrusting its many pronged peninsulas down into the Mediterranean, between the Adriatic and the Agean Seas, should have given to history so many immortal names, and to the progress of mankind so many powerful and enduring impulses, Roman law, and genius for military organisation, are a living part of British law and government.-as Roman roads are the foundation of English highways. Greece, being dead, yet speaketh in all that restless resolute search for truth we call science, and in all the conquests of mind and expansion of spirit we call philosophy and art. Art as a Friend to Man, It was Keats who said: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever . . . therefore, spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth of noble natures, of the gloomy days, of all the unhealthy and e’erdarkened ways: yes, in spile of all, some shape of beauty moves away the pall from bur dark spirits." And, did he not conclude his ode, "On a Grecian Urn," with the shining confidence that such things were an immortal inspiration;

"When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shall remain, in the midst of other woo Than ours a friend to man. to whom thou say’st, ■Beauty is truth, truth beauty'-—that is all. Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Scarcely out of his ’teens. Edgar Allan Poe, distraught and disquieted literary genius of America, sensitive of the healing and restoring power of the classic past, confessed its eternal recall to sanity:— On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home , To the glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Home. Democracy Then and Now.

About this past. Many havo hazy notions, second and third-hand. They would like to knovv more, and to know with understanding and certainty. They are not able to find the time tor wide reading. They cannot tackle the ponderous volume of Grote’s history of Greece, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Yet they would like to know. Others are saturated with Grote and Gibbon. have read widely among' the traditional writers and have pecome settled. They

are shy of a new interpretation. A 1 voice breaking in upon their quid, challenging their cherished notions, is unwelcome. Yet the antiquated sources of their ideas were not the last words on the subject, and a new point, o! view may bo close to the real truth. For both, this little book has a message worth considering. It is itioxpen-. sive to buy, it is easy to read. and. read through two or three limes, it will leave in a fender’s mind a clear and concise outline of what Rome and Greece wore, what they received from earlier periods of civilisation, added to the bequest, and passed it on to us. Some over-worshipped notions of Greece and Romo it will quietly debunk. For instance, we shall not suppose, when we have read this book, that the democracy or Athens was the I same thing as the democracy of Lin- | coin, Stanley Baldwin, or our present Prime Minister, Mr Savage. We shall ! know definitely that there is a good deal more than 24 centuries between them. The self-governing city-states of Greece enjoyed a very limited form of democracy, and the idea of national democracy was unrealised among ’ them.

Vital Vflstory, Socrates, Plain, Aristotle. Horner, Sophocles and the galaxy of names between Thales and Democritus in a period of 150 years, "one of the most vital 'in the intellectual history of mankind," comes near to us in this book, till even their names cease to be. strange. Over the War Museum in Auckland is an inscription, translated from the speech of a Greek orator, as reported by the Greek historian, Thucydides. The author of “The Civisilation of Greece and Rome" is a Professor of Classics at. Swansea University, and the author of “Science in Antiquity." His gift of engaging prose captures attention. His scholarship and profound human sympathies reward it. Every page temps to quotation, but it is impossible to begin, since one would not know where or how to stop. All I can do Is to commend the book' as one written in the spirit and hope of Thucydides, which be quotes: "If he who desires to have before his eyes a true picture of the events which have happened, and of the like events which may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things, shall pronounce what I have written to bo useful, than I shall be satisfied.”