Edith Hamilton’s classic The Greek Way isn’t explicitly libertarian, but it’s a book that libertarians, and particularly Objectivists, will enjoy. In it, Hamilton seeks the explanation of “the Greek miracle”; why is it that the Greeks were different?
Hamilton’s answer is the Greek culture’s embrace of reason. “By universal consent the Greeks belong to the ancient world…. But they are in it as a matter of centuries only.” Other ancient cultures, she writes, like Egypt or Mesopotamia, share the same sad features: “a despot enthroned, whose whims and passions are the determining factor in the state; a wretched, subjugated populace; a great priestly organization to which is handed over the domain of the intellect.” But with the Greeks “something completely new came into the world. They were the first Westerners; the spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery, and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world.”
That spirit was a spirit of curiosity and interest in this world, rather than mystical obsession with the “next”:
That which distinguishes the modern world from the ancient, and that which divides the West from the East, is the supremacy of mind in the affairs of men, and this came to birth in Greece and lived in Greece alone of all the ancient world. The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.
Hamilton’s writing is eloquent, simple, compulsively readable. And her explanation of the differences between Greece and the rest of the ancient world is still relevant in the present day, in which her words parallel the differences between ourselves and the enemy in the present war:
In Egypt the centre of interest was the dead….Countless numbers of human beings for countless numbers of centuries thought of death as that which was nearest and most familiar to them. It is an extraordinary circumstance which could be made credible by nothing less considerable than the immense mass of Egyptian art centred in the dead. To the Egyptian the enduring world of reality was not the one he walked in along the paths of every-day life but the one he should presently go to by way of death.There were two causes working in Egypt to bring about this condition. The first was human misery. The state of the common man in the ancient world must have been wretched in the extreme. Those tremendous works that have survived through thousands of years were achieved at a cost in human suffering and death which was never conceived of as a cost in anything of value. Nothing so cheap as human life in Egypt and Nineveh, as nothing more cheap in India and China to-day…. The instinctive recoil from the world of outside fact was enormously reinforced by the other great influence at work upon the side of death and against the use of the mind, the Egyptian priesthood….
The Egyptian priesthood’s monopoly on information, and intellectual manipulation of the people is reminiscent of the rule of the Mullahs in the Middle East today: “Ignorance was the foundation upon which the priest-power rested. In truth the two, the mystery and those who dealt in it, reinforced each other…. The power of the priest depended upon the darkness of the mystery; his effort must ever be directed toward increasing it and opposing any attempt to throw light upon it. The humble role played by…reason in the ancient world was assigned by an authority there was no appeal against.”
Greece took the opposite view. It embraced the present world, and relished the power of reason. The Greeks “resisted and rejoiced and turned full-face to life.” For one thing, the Greeks played games; they were “in love with play and played magnificently.”To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit which distinguished it from all that had gone before. It is a vital distinction. The joy in life is written upon everything the Greeks left behind…. The Greeks knew full how bitter life is as well as how sweet. Joy and sorrow, exultation and tragedy, stand hand in hand in Greek literature, but there is no contradiction involved thereby. Those who not know the one do not really know the other either. It is the depressed, the gray-minded people, who cannot rejoice just as they cannot agonize. The Greeks were not done in victims of depression. Greek literature is not done in gray or with a low palette. It is all black and shining white or black and scarlet and gold.
In subsequent chapters, Hamilton delves into Greek literature, including chapters on Pindar, Plato, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In her chapter on Herodotus, Hamilton connects the Greek love of reason and of this world—I’m tempted to call it “secularism,” but Hamilton does not deny that they were religious; but they weren’t mystics—with their love of freedom. At the battle of Marathon,
[a] free democracy resisted a slave-supported tyranny. The Athenians at Marathon advanced at a run; the enemy’s officers drove them into battle by scourging them. Mere numbers were powerless against the spirit of free men fighting to defend their freedom. Liberty proved her power.
I really enjoy Hamilton’s writing style. She was the author of several books—The Greek Way was her first, published when she was 60. After that she published a sequel, The Roman Way, another book on Greece (almost as good as her first), The Echo of Greece, translated Three Greek Plays, edited The Dialogues of Plato, and published her most famous book, Mythology. Hamilton also published collections of essays, including her fine The Ever-Present Past, which contains some wonderful literary criticism, including a very insightful essay about William Faulkner and some great thoughts on romanticism versus naturalism. She also published some less outstanding books on Christianity. (Hamilton was a Christian, and taught at a Christian girls school. Not much else is known about her, because all her personal belongings were destroyed in a flood late in life. But there is a biography of Hamilton, called Edith Hamilton: An Intimate Portrait, by Doris F. Reid.)
Now, it must be admitted that Hamilton’s picture of Greece is not entirely accurate. Greek culture did contain a great deal of mysticism—the very word “mystery” is a Greek one, and was used to describe things like the worship of Dionysus, which was anything but rational. Hamilton, however, doesn’t deny the presence of irrationality in Greek culture; rather, she argues that what made the Greeks different, and important, was the rationality that they embraced. Hamilton’s book is not a scholarly treatise on Greece; it is an appreciation, a sort of long poem about its greatness. And in that—in making you love Greece and want to know more about it—she succeeds brilliantly.
Previous entries in the Libertarian Bookworm are here.
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