GREEK CHARACTERISTICS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3115, 26 November 1913, Page 77

GREEK CHARACTERISTICS.

“THE GODLIKE MEN OF OLD HELLAS.”

By Edith Skahle Grosshaiin, M.A. Byron called modern Greece “land of lost gods and godlike men,” and people who take this view of the ancient inhabitants are apt to refer scornfully to their descendants as “wretched Levantines calling themselves Greeks.” But after all, what were these godlike men of old? Very human men who performed brilliant and glorious actions, but also in the course of their lives many base and ignoble deeds. If the legendary heroes and demigods were judged by the Ten Commandments and condemned for any single lapse, there is not one of them who would see salvation. Achilles, sulking furiously in his tent, watched with revengeful satisfaction the disasters that befell his countrymen , because he had a private grudge against their leader. Agamemnon stole away his ally’s captive, took to himself a foreign wife, and offered up his daughter as' a sacrifice to the gods. The wiles of Odysseus were those of a clever savage. Jason and Theseus heartlessly deserted the women to whom they owed everything. Now let us turn to history. “The tyrant of the Chersonese was freedom’s best and bravest friend. That tyrant was Miltiades.” Cimon, his son, loved money, indulged immoderately in wine and in irregular amours. ■ Themistocles thought nothing of feigning friendship with the Persian King and then sending him false information. After a glorious victory that was a miracle of naval genius, he proposed to set fire to the Allies’ fleet for the advantage of his own city. Expelled by the envy of his fellow-citizens solely because of his pre-eminent qualities, he found refuge with his country’s enemy and yet retained enough magnanimity tc take poison rather than consent to lead an army against that thankless country. The Romanised Greek Plutarch passed some severe strictures on Pericles for abandoning his lawful wife for Aspasia. Themistocles is the Tnost highly typical of all the ancient Hellenes, in his career mingling extraordinary patriotism with too ingenious self-seeking and self-preser-vation, the daring imagination of genius, the duplicity that would be revolting ;t it were not so curiously naive. He combined intellect and finesse with a lack of power to govern permanently and to suppress factiousness and envy—though this lack may a‘so be accounted for by the character of the Athenians themselves, for they were naturally democratic and difficult to govern, combining an unusual degree of individuality with universal personal ambition and envy' of those above them. The ancient Hellenes had not the rigid consistency of the Romans and the English. Even in the same man, as :n Pericles—or, to take extreme examples, the legendary Achilles or the historical Alcibia-des —good and evil lived together, and one or the other came out in their actions according to their impulses, or, as they imagined, at the will of the gods, without leaving on their minds any abiding sense of conscious virtue, or (in spite of avenging furies) of “penitential sorrow.” And they expressed everything as naturally as bulls roar or birds sing. The particularly “godlike” Diomedcs roared because of his wound, and Philoctetes made the seas resound with his laments. Their fortitude was not that of insensibility or muteness, except among the Spartans, who were singularly' unlike other States. It is just this inconsistency that makes them so attractive and gives them the charm of spontaneity, of childhood, of winds and waves, of variety and inconsequence. They were the most purely natural and the least artificial of all races. They had not the strong Hebraic sense of righteousness, the craving for perfect human goodness and for individual subjection that made the Jews so long-lived a race, that later on made Rome the centre of religion throughout the world, and that helped Britain to become the greatest of all Christian Em- } fires. Strictly speaking, the ancient Helenes had not what we understand by a “conscience” —that is, an internal judge to which they referred their actions and bv which they stood in their own minds condemned or approved ; nor had they an all-righteous God, to be an infallible external and eternal conscience to them. Their own gods drank too much wine now and then, intrigued against each other and against their own supreme god. indulged in miscellaneous amours, cheated and deceived each other, and had favourites and foes amongst mortals. The Hellenes were like their own gods. They ■were irresponsible, and for that reason delightful. As they' had no conscience, they had no sin, no heaven, and no hell. Their age was the childhood of the world. They often performed exploits of extraordinaryheroism and enterprise, devoted friendship, munificence, patriotism; and these are all the more striking because they appear unexpected and unpremeditated. They were the involuntary outcome of the performer*’ nature when Die mood and inspiration came. Never was virtue lees tiresome than among the Hel-

lenes, never more brilliantly attractive. Never has it been more tedious and unamiable than among the Romans and the British. And the Hellenes were never hypocrites, although they lied occasionally as shamelessly as babies or savages. In their later arid more civilised phases the instinctive prompting towards excellence became more of a conscious deal. Their philosophers began to inquire into the nature of this intuitive ideal —which was known most characteristically as “the good and the beautiful.” But they did not even then torment themselves about this ideal as the Hebrews and the Puritans did over theirs; they set themselves to understand it intellectually. In this way, without any Hebraic conception of sin or of sinfulness, the Platonic Socrates (whether as a living man or as an idealised conception) reached the level of one type of perfect manhood. His supreme quality was moderation, not a humdrum, negative sort of moderation, but perfect mental balance, under circumstances that to another man might have seemed so frightful that they excused extravagance. Never was a wise man placed in circumstances that might have more easily tempted their victim to regard himself as a divinely-inspired martyr and his enemies as inhuman monsters of evil. He was imprisoned and condemned to take his own life ignominiouely because he had been trying to make men seek after the truth. But he did not even think of himself as a martyr nor allow his pupils regard him, as anything more than a man whose fellow-citizens did not understand him. He saw without personal bias that Miletus was simply a dull, opinionated man, who could not in the least understand wisdom, and so felt that he must get rid of it somehow. Socrates did not regard his death as a heroic sacrifice. It is all so entirely human and so unexaggerated, that personality of his; so wise and all-compre-hending. The wisdom and moderation represent the Greek ideal in intellect, just as “beautifulness,” grace, and vitality were their almost unconscious ideal in action. This intellectual ideal is brought out by two of the most famous sayings of the Seven Sages, inscribed over the vestibule of the. Temple of Apollo at Delphi: “Know thyself” and “Excess in nothing.” After" tneir first spontaneous, childlike period they were the people who had the clearest intellectual light of any nation in the world, though as a race they did not’ live up to it. Still later on, when as a nationality they were dissolv ing and decaying, their genius became spiritualised ; and it was from this spiritualised Hellenic thought that St. Paul and the Christian fathers drew so much. But when we speak of Greeks, we are thinking not of these later types, but of the heroes of youthful Hellas. Now, I do not believe any candid person could read the story of modern Greece, rightly told, without feeling in it, even through the degradation of slavery and savagery, something of the same spirit, the same distinctive characteristics, that are to be found among the ancients, a capacity not quite stamped out for brilliant exploits, the ascejidency of ideas, activity, and certainly, too, all the old failings, even to the wiles, the love of gain (which, however, is far from being peculiar to Greeks), and the factiousness. The ancient wisdom is harder to seek out, hut they have had from the beginning of their re-birth an intense passion for knowledge. It is a good thing to acknowledge the failings of the ancients as well as their surpassing excellence, otherwise we shall be always judging the present inhabitants of their land by the standard of an imaginary perfection, that never did exist outside of the imaginations of nineteenth century poets of foreign countries.