# 2026-06-13 - The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton
Reading The Queer Thing About Sin left me wanting to know more about
ancient Greek history. So i read The Echo of Greece, and it was a
perfect fit. It covers the same time period and gives another
perspective on many of the same subjects.
This is the second thing i've read by Edith Hamilton. A year ago i
found one of her essays in a little free library [3].
The Echo of Greece presents self control as part of Greece's national
ethos. It wasn't something new that appeared only when the economy
contracted. It was the Greek way of being in contrast to the
excesses of Persia and Rome. I can easily imagine any part of a
national ethos being weaponized to oppress minorities during hard
times.
> The quality they valued most--the Greek word is sophrosuné--cannot
> be expressed by any single English word. It is oftenest translated
> by self-control, but it meant more than that. It was the spirit
> behind the two great Delphic sayings, "Know thyself" and
> "Nothing in excess." ... This was the virtue the Greeks esteemed
> beyond all others not because they were moderate lovers of the
> golden mean, but because their spontaneity and ever-changing
> variety and ardent energy of life had to have the strong control of
> a disciplined spirit or end in senseless violence.
This book "paints a picture" of exceptional individuals and brief
periods of Greek history that were exceptions to normal patterns.
In these Greece may have collectively demonstrated self control,
but even in the best of times, debt and political corruption were
driving Greece "under the thumbs" of other countries. Self control
was more of an ideal than a sustainable way of being.
The author contrasted the Greek Way and the Roman Way. Greece
assumed that people were good at their core and that freedom brought
out their best. Rome and its church assumed that people were bad at
their core and that control and obedience were most important. In
other words, domination was better than freedom.
I was fascinated by the section on Menander and his plays. They
completely avoided mention of freedom and politics, doing the
opposite of the Greek plays of earlier centuries. Instead they
focused on the private lives of affluent people. But these plays
contained deep, intellectual ideas. It wasn't as though Greece had
turned into a full-blown "idiocracy".
Since this book was written, quite a bit of additional material has
been discovered from Menander [1]. The best preserved of his plays
is Dyskolos [2].
What follows are my notes from the book.
# Introduction
Fourth century Athens is completely overshadowed by Athens of the
fifth century, so much so that it is little considered. Any brief
history of Greece will more likely than not end with Athens' defeat
in the Peloponnesian War in 404 B.C There will be references,
perhaps, to Demosthenes and Philip of Macedon and Alexander the
Great, all too important to be omitted, but no account of the time
they lived in will be thought necessary. Real interest in Greece
ceases with Sparta's victory over Athens. Plato and Aristotle live in
a timeless world of philosophy without any local habitation, and are
hardly thought of as Greeks but as intellectual forces.
And yet, their century, the fourth century, has a special claim on
our attention apart from the great [people] it produced, for it is
the prelude to the end of Greece, not only of [its] glory, but of
[its] life historically. Greek genius did not come to an end, but it
took a new direction in new places. Science and mathematics went on
to triumphs in Greek colonies and in foreign cities crowded with the
Greeks Alexander had set traveling away from home, but none came back
to Greece and to Athens. Not one really great name relieves the
blankness.
The fourth century is the introduction to a world-tragedy, the
disappearance of creative power in Greece. With its close there is an
end of the art and philosophy which have made a few centuries in
Athens more precious to the West than many ages in many countries.
The years which ushered in this loss to the world never to be
replaced have a unique importance.
During the century that follows, Athens drops out of history. Two
famous schools are founded, the Stoics and the Epicureans, but they
are the last flaming up of Greek genius in Greece until Plutarch
appears more than three hundred years later when the ancient world
was passing away.
Plutarch was such a voluminous writer and so much of what he wrote
has come down to us that in addition to the wealth of historical
information his Lives give us, we can construct a personal history of
him and his circle as of no other Greek. If only we could do that for
Plato and Aristotle about whom we know almost nothing personal. And
yet it is true that Plutarch, so essentially Greek as he is, can help
us to understand the heterogeneous collection of fourth-century
Athens' great [persons]. We know all Greeks better through him, Plato
as well as Menander.
With him the Greek spirit has a brief renaissance which ends with the
two greatest Stoics, Epictetus, the slave, and Marcus Aurelius, the
emperor, both of whom wrote in Greek although the one was Roman bred
and the other Roman born and bred. The explanation usually given for
their doing so is that by then it had become a popular fashion in
Rome to speak Greek, but that was not a consideration likely to
influence either man. They wrote in Greek because they wanted to
express Greek thoughts, and they were the last to do so. The Greek
Fathers of the Church were caught up in doctrinal disputes foreign to
the Greek way of thinking. The shadow of the Dark Ages already lay
upon them and they were not able to see what was unimportant. ...
Theological hatred is based on a totalitarian rule over [people's]
minds and spirits which Socrates and the others would have viewed
with abhorrence. To them as to all Greeks freedom was first in
importance. Fundamental to everything the Greeks achieved was their
conviction that good for humanity was possible only if [people] were
free, body, mind, and spirit, and if each [person] limited [their]
own freedom. A good state or work of art or piece of thinking was
possible only through the self-mastery of the free individual,
self-government.
# Chapter 1: Freedom
In the early fifth century B.C. when the Age of Pericles still lay in
the future, Western civilization reached a crossroads.
To the Greeks of that day their most precious possession, freedom,
was the distinguishing mark between East and West. Despotism was the
form of rule in the East. Despots, as far as the Greeks knew
them--there were none in their part of the world--always acted in the
same way, clearing the road to the throne by exterminating the royal
family, shedding blood without measure, using any means to forward
their ends, and generally successful in increasing enormously for a
time the power of the state. They did not enslave the people for they
were already slaves, helpless masses at the ruler's disposal.
Aristotle spoke for Greece when he said that Asiatics were slaves by
nature. "You do not know what freedom is," Herodotus reports a Greek
saying to a Persian. "If you did you would fight for it with bare
hands if you had no weapons."
The ancient civilizations were alike in one respect, in a refusal to
recognize limits. Exaggeration was stamped upon them, a rejection of
the limits of reality. ... Eastern life was lived at extremes.
Freedom, the power to live under one's own control and not another's,
is unthinkable in such an atmosphere. Unlimited freedom is chaos. It
would destroy [hu]mankind. Any order, by whatever means, is
preferable. The East had an endless succession of despotisms because
it never conceived of order in any other way. ... Freedom was born in
Greece because there [people] limited their own freedom.
Fundamental in the Greeks was their conviction that limits were good.
Exaggeration was foreign to them. They detested extremes and the idea
of the limitless repelled them. Greek words which meant boundless,
illimitable, and the like, had a bad connotation. Not only the
everyday [people] but the thinkers and the artists all kept a firm
hold on reality. ...The Greeks did not want the transcendental and
the mysterious. They wanted the truth and they never thought it could
be found by escaping from the real.
The quality they valued most--the Greek word is sophrosuné--cannot
be expressed by any single English word. It is oftenest translated by
self-control, but it meant more than that. It was the spirit behind
the two great Delphic sayings, "Know thyself" and "Nothing in
excess." ... This was the virtue the Greeks esteemed beyond all
others not because they were moderate lovers of the golden mean, but
because their spontaneity and ever-changing variety and ardent energy
of life had to have the strong control of a disciplined spirit or end
in senseless violence.
That was the Greek ideal, and the result was their freedom. The idea
that only the [person] who holds [themself] within self-chosen limits
can be free is one of their great legacies to us.
At this point slavery, universal in the world then, confronts the
readers. Many [people] in Athens had no share in the rights of
[humanity], but no one ever gave a thought to slaves, no more in the
West than in the East. Everywhere the way of life depended on them.
One cannot say that they were accepted as such, for there was no
acceptance. Everyone used them, no one paid any attention to them.
... When the Greek achievement is considered, what must be remembered
is that the Greeks were the first who thought about slavery. To think
about it was to condemn it, and by the end of the second century, two
thousand years before our [US] Civil War, the great school of the
Stoics, most widely spread of Greek philosophies, was denouncing
[slavery] as an intolerable wrong.
At least the Athenian citizen had true freedom. There has never been
a state more free; there have been few as free. Never was freedom of
speech restricted; not in times of utmost peril when an enemy was
advancing to the very walls of the city.
[In The Queer Thing About Sin, i read that Athenian citizens had been
put to death for being atheists and for being gay.]
# Chapter 2: Athens' Failure
"The kind of events that once took place will by reason of human
nature take place again." So Thucydides wrote at the end of the
Peloponnesian War and the end of the great age of Athens. The kind of
events that took place in the first free nation of the world may by
reason of this unchanging human nature be repeated in the modern
world. The course that Athens followed can be to us not only a record
of old unhappy far-off things, but a blueprint of what may happen
again.
"Free!" cries Hecuba in the play of that name.
> No [one] in the whole world is free. Not one.
> Slaves all to what they own or want or fear.
Euripides was watching the home of freedom become a place where no
one could believe in freedom.
Two passages in Sophocles give the full measure of the change. In an
early play the chorus sings exultingly, striking the authentic note
of Athens at [its] height:
> Wonders are there many, none more wonderful than [humanity].
> [Theirs] the might that crosses seas swept white by storm blasts.
> [Theirs] are speech and wind-swift thought--
Just before the poet's death and the end of the war he put into words
what he had come to feel as he watched the beloved city turn away
from all that was good.
Not to be born is past all prizing best.
Next best when one has seen the light
Is to go thither swiftly whence [one] came.
The glowing confidence in [humanity's] mastery of life had sunk to
nothing.
The change was in the people. It was shown most conspicuously in the
art of the day, as any Greek would expect. It is difficult if not
impossible for us to realize how very serious a matter beauty and art
were to the Greeks. ... Beautiful art produced beautiful characters.
That was in the Greek creed.
There is great significance, therefore, in the change in artistic
expression which began near the end of the fifth century and went on
during the entire fourth. Briefly, it was a relaxing of control to
begin with and finally in a number of the arts a rejection of
everything that interfered with an artist's freedom. Sculpture was
least affected..., but in poetry and music the difference between the
new and the old was a chasm that could hardly be crossed. Complete
freedom for the artist to do whatever [they] pleased was unknown in
the earlier days. For instance, strict metrical rules had governed
both poetry and music, quite as complicated and authoritative as
those that dictate the structure of the verse long beloved of English
poets, the sonnet.
Popularity was what they chiefly thought of as they tried novelty
after novelty and one daring experiment followed another. The artist
along with the politician had thrown aside self-discipline.
But the Greek artist now was free from standards and Greek art came
to an end, never to live again.
[Socrates] set himself... to think out how [Greece] could be saved.
The way he found was peculiar to himself--not by any mass movements,
not by putting an end to poverty or to war or to any gross evil. He
saw the salvation of the state in terms of each separate Athenian.
Every [person's] good was the source of good for the community, just
as every [person's] good was dependent on the good of the community.
The two could not be separated. Only a good [person] could be a good
citizen and a state could be good only when its citizens were good.
The condition of the state was bound up with the condition of the
souls of the [people] who lived in it. Socrates' eyes were fixed on
the individual, and on the most individual part of [a person], the
inner realm where alone [a person] could be absolute master.
Socrates told them that the citizens of a democracy could be slaves.
[People] were free not when freed from this or that outside rule, but
when they were masters of themselves.
What he taught he lived. He was himself the example of the life of
self-controlled freedom.
The most excellent constitution, the best laws, were mere forms
unless the people obeyed the voice of God within them.
The earliest political manifestation of it was a demand that the
Athenians should be paid for public services. This was startlingly
new, but it seemed only right and reasonable. ... Plato and Aristotle
strongly objected, but apparently they stood alone.
Now instead of [people] giving to the state the state was to give to
them. ... Athens was more and more looked on as a co-operative
business possessed of great wealth in which all citizens had a right
to share. The larger and larger funds demanded made heavier and
heavier taxation necessary, but that troubled only the well-to-do,
always a minority, and no one gave a thought to the possibility that
the source might be taxed out of existence. Politics was now closely
connected with money, quite as much as with voting.
Responsibility was the price every [one] must pay for freedom. It was
to be had on no other terms.
# Chapter 3: The Schools of Athens
In fourth-century Athens teachers were among the most famous [people]
of the day. They founded their own schools, Plato the Academy,
Aristotle the Lyceum, Isocrates, most popular of the three, a school
of rhetoric, speech-making, Plato called it disdainfully. ... Athens
was full of educational fervor. Such times come for the most part
when there is an increasing lack of confidence in the state.
The great schools are a distinguishing feature of the fourth century.
The fifth century took educational matters very quietly. There were
primary schools for the children and a two-year military course was
obligatory at the age of eighteen, but that was all there was in the
way of systematic training.
The Sophists, the Wise Men, as they were called, had a great success
for many years. They came to Athens long before the end of the War
and their popularity continued until the great fourth-century
teachers started their schools. The accusation most often made
against them was that they took money for their teaching. ... Plato
charged his pupils nothing; Isocrates charged only foreigners.
Isocrates attacked the very foundation of the Academy, declaring that
Plato's idea of philosophy was fundamentally false. "Never," he said,
"does that deserve the name of philosophy (the love of wisdom) which
is of no immediate use." He was himself, he claimed, a true
philosopher, clear-headed, realistic, sensible. "I hold that [person]
wise who can usually think out the best course to take and that
[person] a philosopher who seeks to gain that insight." A mere
theorizer, he said, was incapable of it, a [person] of finespun
speculations and lifeless abstractions.
Plato struck back and with harder blows. He held rhetoric in contempt
and described the teachers of it as "Hunters after young men of
wealth and position with sham education as their bait and a fee for
their object." He dismissed as peremptorily their subject matter,
Isocrates' "art of composing and delivering speeches" which he was so
proud to teach. Plato says caustically in one of those comments of
his which fling open a door and disclose a height not seen before,
"Nothing spoken or written is of any great value if the object is
merely to be believed, not to be criticised and thus learn more."
Both headmasters had admirable platforms. Plato's was brief, but
comprehensive: "Education is the fairest thing that the best of
[people] can have," and "The particular learning which leads you
throughout your life to hate what should be hated and love what
should be loved will be rightly called education. People are educated
who have seen the beautiful and just and good in their truth."
Isocrates' declaration was on another level, a list of attainable
qualities, but there could hardly be a better description of a
[person of refinement]. He said that a [person] he educated would be
"First, capable of usually hitting upon the right course. Secondly,
[they] will meet any company, however disagreeable, with easy
good-temper and show to all [people] fairness and gentleness.
Thirdly, [they] will be master of [themself] in misfortune and pain.
Fourthly and most important, [their] head will not be turned by
success. Those whose soul is well tuned to play its part in all these
ways I regard as educated."
Whatever was wrong in Athens of the fourth century, it was not the
conception of what ought to be the aim of education or the standards
for an educated [person].
When Aristotle founded the Lyceum both Plato and Isocrates were dead.
... The Lyceum was new in every sense. Its object was not to arouse
the love of the good and develop the search for it, but to train and
inform the mind. Apparently the Academy had convinced Aristotle that
no school or institution could do the first; the second could be done
in a classroom. The knowledge Plato would lead his young Academicians
to was the vision of the truth. Aristotle wanted for his pupils
accurate knowledge of facts and some understanding of their relations
to each other.
It is our great loss that we know so little of what was taught in the
schools and how, but the most important matter we do know, what their
headmasters were like.
# Chapter 4: The School Teachers
## Isocrates
But Isocrates was too far-sighted to be at ease. Foreign affairs,
always the weak point in a democracy, were not going well and the
reason, he told the Athenians, was to be found at home. ... They were
looking to the state to guarantee not freedom as in the old days, but
privilege. Great danger lay in that course. [People] bent on
self-interest were always short-sighted.
"If you truly wished to find out what is best for the country you
would listen more to those who oppose you than to those who try to
please you. How can [people] decide wisely without giving an unbiased
hearing to both sides?"
They could take from the rich to give to the poor; they could
stimulate trade; they could see to it that every Athenian had a free
ticket to the theatre. Affairs at home gave them little trouble, but
affairs abroad were another story. In point of fact, the foreign
policy they were pursuing could not but end disastrously. They were
trying with no success to appease Persia, still the great Oriental
power, while fighting Greeks in one exhausting war after another and
turning allies into enemies.
Early in the fourth century Persia took over the Greek cities in Asia
Minor with the consent of the other Greeks. Sparta had fought
[Persia] and been beaten and there was no other Greek state able to
go on with the war. Xenophon quotes from the treaty which he calls
The King's Peace (The King at that time meant the Persian ruler.);
"The King thinks it just that the cities in Asia shall belong to him.
Should any parties refuse to accept this peace I will make war upon
them by land as well as by sea, with ships and with money."
Isocrates seems to have been the only one who opposed the treaty, and
certainly he was the only one who looked at it in relation to all
Greece.
His solution was a union of Greeks brought about by an invasion of
Persia which if successful, as Isocrates took for granted, would not
only save freedom and civilization in Greece, but extend them into
Asia. He threw himself into urging this course with all his power.
When he preached his crusade he was almost sixty years old, but he
lived to be nearly a hundred, and forty years of life still lay
before him, years of increasing discouragement.
He had returned to his conviction that war was the great evil and
peace the great good for the world. His claim to fame does not rest
on his political sagacity. .... In any event, the most
forward-looking foresight seems shortsighted when considered after a
lapse of centuries. But the fact that he was the first to declare
(under Thucydides' guidance) that power tends to corrupt and absolute
power corrupts absolutely, and the first to urge giving up war as a
policy and substituting good will for armed forces, sets him so far
in advance of his age that on that score alone he could never be
forgotten. These two great ideas express in a sense what he was. No
small views or selfish views had a place in his mind. He was built on
large and noble lines. Whatever he urged was for some high good.
## Plato
During his short essay into politics what had impressed him most
profoundly and most painfully was the low stature morally and
intellectually of the leading politicians. They were all of them
striving for their own selfish interests and the average decent
citizen was incapable of standing out against them. Plato had found
himself powerless, and he left the political scene with the
conviction that the one essential was good leaders. To find young men
capable of leading and to develop to the full their capacity by the
right kind of education was now his object.
At heart Plato was a reformer, not the philosophical contemplative
[people] called him. A life of contemplation was far from what he
wanted for his pupils...
Socrates never conceived, any more than Christ did, of establishing
an institution to spread the truth--an Academy or a theological
seminary. To both, the truth they knew could not be expressed in
statements and taught to others. A [person] could be aroused to seek
it, that was all. [One] could find it only by seeking it [oneself].
Socrates never wrote down a word; Christ wrote only once, with his
finger in the dust.
Through all the years of his peaceful academic retirement he held
fast to the conviction that the aim of the good life was to forward
the good of the state. This sharply practical side of him has been
little emphasized, but he illustrated it in his life up to the end.
He would always leave the Academy if he thought he could be of use,
and take part in some political venture.
The Academy did not save Athens. It had a long life, longer than any
school there has ever been. When it was closed it had been in
existence for nearly nine hundred years, but as far as our scanty
knowledge goes it had no effect politically. ... In politics the
Academy was a failure and that fact would have condemned it in
Plato's eyes.
The scientist's love of learning and of assembling and ordering all
his eyes and ears brought to him, which burned in Aristotle, was not
shared by Plato. To him the truth was not to be found in that way.
## Aristotle
There were no fixed dogmas in the Academy; everything was open to
discussion, to attack and defense. No one claimed to be teaching the
truth; all were seeking it.
Aristotle's path to the truth was not Plato's. He belonged to another
order. This basic difference between the two comes out perpetually in
their writings. Through Plato Aristotle came to believe in God, but
Plato never attempted to prove His reality. Aristotle had to do so.
Plato contemplated Him; Aristotle produced arguments to demonstrate
Him. Plato never defined Him, but Aristotle thought God through
logically and concluded with entire satisfaction to himself that He
was the Unmoved Mover. Plato said, "To find the Father and Creator of
all is hard, and having found Him it is impossible to utter Him."
Mystery Aristotle rejected. To him the unknown was to be investigated
as quickly and thoroughly as possible and then clearly explained.
When the process was applied to God He became the rational center of
an orderly universe.
They agreed little better on terrestrial matters. In regard to the
labor question, even more important to the ancient world than to us
with our machinery, they saw things differently. A laborer in those
days was a slave, and Aristotle thought slavery not only a necessary
institution, but one rooted in human nature and therefore beneficent
and permanent. "It is clear," he says, "that some [people] are by
nature free and others slaves, and that for the latter slavery is
both expedient and right," and he proceeds as always to define: "A
slave is a machine which breathes, a piece of animated property."
There could not be a statement more comfortable to a slave-owner.
Plato could not look at the matter comfortably.
A great Greek scholar, Professor Jaeger, says that this was
Aristotle's unique achievement. He alone united the world of
scientific thought and the world of meta-physical thought which is
made up of philosophy and art and religion. He brought the two
together and held them together as no one else has done.
He said in effect: "You cannot find out what is best by thought
alone. Observation and experience are necessary as well as logical
reasoning and intuitive knowledge." This conception was to affect the
basic thinking of the western world.
But always he brought his world of fact into connection with Plato's
world of truth. To the end of his Plato never let him go.
Often in the old days when he was happy in the Academy he had heard
Plato illustrate or describe a spiritual truth, immortality, or the
soul or the life of the world to come, by telling a story. He was
nothing of a prophet, he would say to his listeners, he was making
the tale up, but the truth could be seen in an allegory sometimes
better than in a statement, "and will save us if we are obedient to
the word spoken. Thus shall we live dear to one another and the gods,
both here and when, like conquerors in the games, we receive our
reward." The Greek word Plato uses for the story or the word spoken
is myth. To us it connotes unreality; it did not to the Greek.
Aristotle was thinking of the truth Plato had taught him to see in a
myth, in a story, in a poetic expression, and he wrote: "The more
lonely and alone I am the more I have come to love myths." Through
his life he had loved more and more the factual truth. At the end he
loved Plato's truth, which is one with beauty and goodness and could
be expressed in some measure, Plato said, only by art, music, poetry,
myths.
# Chapter 5: Demosthenes
His point of view was uncomplicated, easily grasped by the [person]
in the street. There were no uncertainties to blur the vision.
Athens' enemy was not Persia, but Macedon. Persia was across the sea,
Macedon near, terribly near. Persia was making no threatening moves.
Philip was preparing to conquer not only Athens but Greece, and the
Athenians must be prepared to defend it and die for it. That was his
policy complete. Of course, he told them, they must get other Greeks
to join them--Philip had a large and admirable fighting force--but
only for this crucial emergency. There was never a thought in
Demosthenes' mind of a future United States of Greece or even of
Greek states coming together in a confederacy. He was not hoping for
anything bigger and better. The two qualities seldom went together to
a Greek. All Demosthenes wanted was allies to help Athens put down
"the Macedonian wretch." It was a simple, easily understood program
which presented almost insuperable practical difficulties such as
changing Athens' ages-old enemies into ... allies and making over the
indifferent and discouraged Athenians into fighters.
Astonishingly he carried it through.
Demosthenes is a strange figure as he stands in the Assembly in
fourth-century Athens pouring forth words of fire. He belongs to
another age; he is a hundred years too late. There were very great
[individuals] in Athens at that time, [people] of lofty nobility, his
equals in character, even his superiors, [people] of intellect beyond
his power to fathom, and [people] of patriotism which even his pure
and deep passion for his country could not surpass, but of them all
he alone was heroic.
He stands in the front rank of Greece not because of an eloquent
tongue and an elegant style. He is there with the [people] who fell
at Thermopylae and all the others who have so acted as to raise the
standard for the world of what brave [people] can do.
After Alexander's death Athens rose up a second time against the
Macedonians and suffered [its] final defeat. Again Demosthenes was
foremost in urging [Athens] to fight. After the battle he killed
himself so as not to fall into the hands of the enemy.
# Chapter 6: Alexander the Great
There, is something breath-taking in Alexander The Great's Empire.
Like everything stupendous--the pyramids, the Grand Canyon,
Mt. Everest--one can never get quite used to it. It drives us out
beyond the everyday limits we set for our selves of the possible.
There is a fairy-tale quality, too, in the swiftness of its creation.
In eleven years Alexander made himself master of the immense stretch
of land from the Adriatic into India and across the Indus, from upper
Egypt to the northernmost point of the Black Sea, from the Indian
Ocean to the Caspian; almost as big as the Roman Empire at its height
after a thousand years of fighting.
Of all the subjects he listened to Alexander liked literature best.
The historians gravely assure us that Aristotle's success as a
teacher is proved by his pupil becoming a lover of Homer, but in
those circumstances the Iliad must have seemed an oasis in the
desert.
There was no one now to oppose any ideas that had struck him. They
were not many. Foremost was the notion that everybody was like
everybody else. He must have got this from Aristotle's biology. He
could have got it nowhere else. The Greek mind of the day had not yet
considered the unity of the human race, and it is not credible that
Alexander himself conceived it. He was not a thinker; he was a
passionate lover of action, preferably violent action, happiest in
battle, glorying in danger, an adventurer in every sense of the word.
Aristotle had distinguished between the nature of peoples who sought
for freedom and those who acquiesced in slavery, but Alexander had
not listened.
But left to himself Alexander happily dismissed racial and national
distinctions. They were unimportant. ... All he had to do was to
conquer a nation thoroughly and then make it follow the desired
pattern. The matter presented itself to him as simply as that.
Alexander was little more than a boy, only twenty or so, when he set
off to conquer the world. It was a boy's dream made into a brief
semblance of reality by an amazing young man who not only had supreme
confidence in himself, but was able to inspire multitudes... with the
same confidence. He could make people believe in him to a degree
hardly surpassed in history.
Not many of the world's great leaders have used Alexander's methods.
He made his army follow him on perilous adventures and terrifying
marches into the unknown by making them feel that he was one with
them, sharing their hardships and dangers, literally leading them,
always foremost in the battle.
They entered India and passed over the river Indus. According to
Alexander's notions of geography they were by now very near to the
end of the world, which of course he desired ardently to reach. And
then, with the goal almost within his grasp as he thought, the
soldiers refused to go on. The army told their general they wanted no
more conquests and were going home. It cannot be doubted that he
brought everything he had, all his authority, all his great personal
power, to bend them to his will. He did not change them.
The mutiny is very important. It marks the beginning of a break
between him and the Greeks.
There had been difficulties even before they left Babylon. It had
become evident that the great plan of uniting the West and the East
was up against a real obstacle. Alexander was finding it very
difficult to orientalize his Macedonians. He himself adopted easily
and quickly oriental ways. He dressed in gorgeous Persian
robes--after all, he was very young and very handsome--and he lived
after the fashion of a Persian despot, which was an exceedingly
pleasant way of life. But the Greek soldiers did not like it. Greek
ways were good enough for them. In point of fact they felt themselves
immensely superior to the conquered, as all conquerors have always
done except Alexander only. His present aim was to become a Persian
to the Persians, and for the moment he gave little thought to the
much less agreeable task of remaining a Greek to the Greeks.
During the long march from Greece to Babylon Alexander had shown
himself properly desirous of bringing Greek ways to Persia.
After he returned from India he proceeded to put into effect another
and more drastic plan, intermarriage between the two nations. This
was an unheard-of procedure. Greeks did not marry foreigners under
penalty of losing their citizenship, an inestimable loss. Anyone who
so offended became a [person] without a country and [their] children
the same, a terrible fate in the ancient world. The superiority of
Greeks to all other nations was proudly and effectively maintained.
Alexander rejected it.
But Alexander had not forgotten or forgiven. Before he started for
the Far East he had arranged to have thirty thousand young Persians
made over into a proper disciplined force. Now he put them into the
army on an equality with the Greeks, an inevitable source of
perpetual dissension and weakened discipline, which Alexander
certainly was aware of and as certainly had provided for. His next
step was to send the Greek soldiers home, beginning with the
disabled. It would seem that he had decided he could depend upon the
Persians and could not upon the Greeks. According to Plutarch there
was a terrible uproar.
He had planned, Plutarch says, to make the world Greek. What happened
was that he turned Persian. Nothing is clearer than that he had lost
whatever of Greek excellence he had had in him by nature or by
education. Moderation, reasonableness, self-control, had gone.
The last glimpse of him the ancient historians give us shows no trace
of the Greek, only the Eastern despot complete. Shortly before his
death his most intimate friend died from disobeying his physician's
orders. Alexander's grief literally knew no bounds. He crucified the
physician; he fell upon a mountain tribe and put them all to the
sword as an offering to the dead man's spirit; he set aside millions
of money for his tomb.
With all his extraordinary personal power and his equally
extraordinary confidence that he could do and dare beyond everyone
else, with all his fiery ambitions, his splendid prowess, his disdain
of pain and death, he never grew up. When he died he was still a boy,
not a Greek boy, however, but sunk in effortless luxury and corrupted
into irresponsible cruelty. Conquered Persia had taken captive her
conqueror.
His death showed the thinness of the Greek veneer he had applied to
the unchanging East. The Greek columns in his towns remained; a few
are still standing today. The inhabitants became Asiatic. When he
died there was chaos. His empire fell to pieces almost before he was
buried. His family perished in a riot of murder after the fashion of
Orientals upon a change of ruler. All were killed, his little son,
his wives, his mother, his brother.
# Chapter 7: Menander
While Alexander was fighting and enjoying himself in the East a boy
was growing up in Athens who was to become one of the two most famous
writers of comedy in the ancient world. His name was Menander and of
all the playwrights he was the best-loved. He was especially popular
in Rome.
Not one of his plays has come down to us entire, but we have many
scenes, sometimes connected so that the plot can be made out. ... All
in all we have quite enough to know what he was like and also what
the audience that applauded him was like.
Antiquity prized him above all for his truth to life, that is, to
human nature, but we can get more from him than that. We can see in
his mirror Athenian life at the end of the fourth century. His comedy
is a true comedy of manners and as such it must deal only with the
familiar.
There is another witness besides Menander to the change that had come
over the Athenian people. He is Theophrastus, to whom Aristotle left
his school, the Lyceum, when he finally retired in the year of
Alexander's death. Menander was one of his pupils. He was, of course,
a philosopher and he also wrote many learned works on botany... but
he was a keen observer of [people] as well and he has left us a book
which is a series of sketches of people shrewdly and sharply drawn.
Nevertheless, when the news of Alexander's death and the chaos that
followed reached Athens, the city took fire; the citizens rose up and
in company with other Greek states defied Macedon. The revolt was
quickly put down, but with a burdensome and humiliating result, a
Macedonian garrison lodged with them to keep them in order. Then the
Athenians definitely retired to private life.
The year his first play was produced saw the defeat of the uprising
to throw off the control of Macedon and the Macedonian garrison
installed. It was the year, too, when Demosthenes ended his long
struggle against Philip and Alexander and took poison. Zeno, founder
of the Stoics, was in Athens by then and so was Epicurus, a close
friend of Menander's. Much was going on in the city which by any
usual standards would be of interest to everyone, but Menander chose
to ignore it all. ... Whatever verged on the public scene might be
in some way connected with Macedonians and no playwright should
remind them of the foreign garrison within their country.
In private life, however, there were plenty of interests, diverting
and exciting, first-rate dramatic material. Menander followed his
audience there. The background of his stage as far as we can see it,
is always the same, a prosperous, well-ordered home...
That is the atmosphere of the plays. In all of them the pleasures
that money can buy are well to the fore. Of course there are slaves
to do everything for everybody and also, a specially luxurious touch,
Persian servants whose task is to fan the flies away. No doubt a
touch of high fashion, too.
Food is by no means taken for granted. It is a very agreeable
addition to life's enjoyments, and we know why. Menus are
occasionally given and they sound excellent.
The word freedom is never found. All this is significant because it
shows a reversal of a long habit.
There is, indeed, an astonishing amount of high thinking and wise
thinking in the lines antiquity quoted and preserved. The people they
were addressed to could be counted upon to be instantly caught by
anything fine and good. Christ said, "Out of the heart proceed evil
thoughts. These are what defile a [person]." Four hundred years
earlier Menander said, "All that defiles a [person] comes from
within." Christ's saying about the beam in one's own eye and the mote
in one's neighbor's, Menander anticipated: "When you would say some
evil of your neighbor, first think of all the evil in yourself."
Hamlet's, "Conscience doth make cowards of us all" is an echo of
Menander, "The [person] who has a load upon [their] mind--conscience
makes [them] a coward." ...
The attitude in the plays toward slavery is proof enough by itself
that the Athenians of the day were not at their ease about slaves.
The picture Menander leaves us with is that of an eminently civilized
people. They are more than respectable; they are estimable, kindly,
well-meaning, well-mannered. Their standards are high and their
intelligence is excellent. They accept their loss of freedom quietly,
without any ill-bred fussing, and are ready to make the best of what
is left to them. Private property is safe; they can have what they
want for comfort at home and they are able to put out of mind what
they cannot have. After all, was political freedom ever very
important to them? Before the Macedonians took it away from them they
had willingly given up much of their independence. They had begun to
rely more and more upon the state and less and less upon themselves.
Independence is freedom's other name, and the people Menander wrote
for were prepared by the time the garrison was installed to live
contentedly without freedom.
This picture of the Athenians is of real importance for the reason
that with the end of the fourth century, during the lifetime of
Menander's audience, the greatness of Athens came to an end, and none
of the other writers of the day show us so clearly why that was.
Athens declined quietly and inconspicuously, in a civilized way.
[It] faded out, and Menander shows us why. His small men and women
absorbed in small personal matters could not keep [its] greatness
alive.
As far as we can tell, Athens retired contentedly to the position of
a university town. [Its] light of genius flickered up waveringly a
few times and then died forever.
# Chapter 8: The Stoics
[Stoicism] started in Greece in the early third century B.C., but it
can be known in its true nature only in Rome in the second century
A.D. There in the persons of two men, one a slave and one an emperor,
it showed itself at its highest so that any account of it which was
limited to its career in Greece would be so imperfect as to miss most
of the truth. This Greek philosophy of the classical world must be
studied chiefly in Rome when the classical world had ended.
The Greeks were notably disinclined to theology. Dogma did not
interest them. The first really dogmatic teacher in Athens was the
founder of Stoicism, Zeno. It was a religion first, a philosophy only
second.
His favorite spot was a porch--stoa in Greek--where he spoke so often
he became known as the Stoic.
Not much of Zeno's teaching has survived. We know what Stoicism is
chiefly from his followers... [Socrates] had said to his judges,
"No evil can happen to a good mail either in life or after death."
This saying is the very heart of Zeno's doctrine. ... Socrates said,
"Nothing which does not make a [person] worse can harm [them]."
[Zeno said] The only thing of importance is what you are and that is
in your own power and in your power only. Nothing and no one can make
you good or bad except yourself, and that is all that matters. To
those Athenians this was a message of hope to the despairing, of
liberty to the conquered, of courage and self-reliance.
Yet it was no easy way out. It was hard doctrine; nevertheless, it
took hold of the people and it spread.
Stoicism never became really Romanized in spite of the great Romans
who adopted it.
There is even something essentially Greek in Stoic austerity, remote
as that seems from Periclean Athens. It was not like any other kind
of austerity. There was nothing in excess. The body was not to be
mortified or punished or weakened. The Stoic did not hate it, [one]
was indifferent to it. Undoubtedly it was hardened and made more fit
by the way [one] lived, but that was not [the] object. [One] lived
simply and plainly because outside pleasures meant nothing to [one].
[One] was not given to fasting and the idea of self-chastisement
never entered [one's] mind. Greek moderation was always present.
## Marcus Aurelius
The last Stoic we know of was an extremely conspicuous person. This
religion of rejecting life's pleasures; of detachment from all that
[people] seek and have sought and will forever seek, power, honor,
case, applause; a religion of wanting with a single-hearted devotion
one thing only, to be and to do good; a religion of supreme
self-denial--this was embraced by a Roman emperor. It does not need a
moment's thought to realize how extraordinary this was.
He met life with enduring courage and unfailing sweetness, but always
sadly. And he was unlike most of the saints in turning away from the
solitary life he longed for and staying in the world of affairs which
he hated. But in the matter of importance, sheer goodness, he was
truly a saint.
He was not designed by nature to be the emperor of the world, but in
actual fact he was the best of what are known as the five good
emperors, of which the judgment of history is that the world has
never had better rulers.
And on nearly every page in one form or another he bids himself,
"practice tolerance and self-restraint and remember everything else
is not yours nor in your power."
Did he ever seriously consider all the things that were factually in
his power? The evidence is overwhelming that none of them represented
any value to him; in his eyes they had no real existence.
Stoicism also lived on. It merged into Christianity with little
difficulty. An early Stoic wrote, "They who turn to God He hardens,"
and in those days Christianity too was a hard religion. A Christian
was expected to give up much and to live dangerously. The Stoics
found it congenial. They had by then turned away from most of their
theology, always the separating factor in religions, and in their
fundamental belief they had much akin to Him who said: Be of good
cheer: I have overcome the world.
# Chapter 9: Plutarch
Plutarch was no eccentric genius. He was a steady-thinking,
sober-minded man, obviously qualified to represent his [Greek peers].
The reason that Greece saw things so differently from the great
Latins was due to a fundamental difference in the way the two
countries looked at life. Reality was for the most part unpleasant to
the Romans and pleasant to the Greeks.
The Lives as they have come down to us have been changed from their
original form. As Plutarch planned the work, it was to consist of a
series of parallels, one Greek life and one Roman, followed by a
comparison, but in our collection the comparison is lacking in a
number of cases. Several single lives, too, have been added. Also,
some of the parallels have been lost. In the long lapse of time,
however, between Plutarch's day and ours, the wonder is that so much
has been preserved, another proof of his great popularity.
As a Greek, Plutarch had for his birthright the belief that [people]
had within them "the mysterious preference for the best," and that
they could strengthen it or weaken it, and he knew his own
obligation. "Admirable actions," he writes, "can produce, even in the
minds of those who only read about them, an eagerness which may lead
them to imitate them."
Plutarch's Lives is essentially a book of such patterns, models on
which [people] may mold themselves, and, above all, be inspired to do
so. What has made the book live for 1800 years is that Plutarch's
spirit breathes through it and sweeps the reader along, a glowing
sense of how great and how good greatness and goodness are, how
wonderful human beings can be, how admirable are courage and the
disdain of death and the high sense of honor and the contempt of the
petty and the mean.
Plutarch called himself a Platonist. His bent of mind, however, was
more Socratic than Platonic. He wanted to do what Cicero said
Socrates had done, "bring philosophy down from heaven into the cities
and the homes of [people]." ... That was exactly Plutarch's idea.
Philosophy must work in daily life to guide [people] in the path to
virtuous action.
# Chapter 10: The Greek Way and the Roman Way
The influence of Greece and the power of Greek thought is generally
passed over in any account of the beginning of the Christian Church
for the reason that it was powerful only at the beginning and came to
an end quickly. In those first years two roads lay open before the
Church, the Greek way and the Roman way. They were distinct from each
other; they had few points of contact. ... but not in the same sense.
Rome was the ruler of the world... Spiritually, in the world of
thought and art, Greece was the ruler.
Greeks could never make a Greek Empire. They did not really like
working together; they wanted freedom to do as each one pleased. But
to the Romans union was strength, and that was what mattered. Mind
and spirit--they were fairly negligible. What was important was the
will. ... The Romans were wonderful organizers, and an organization
is not a place where people are encouraged to seek or to be free.
To the Romans the first essentials were obedience to authority and
disciplined control...
The Romans thought poorly of human nature. It was tolerable only when
under strong control. Humanity was evil throughout. This was far from
the Greek way.
author: Hamilton, Edith, 1867-1963
(TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Edith_Hamilton
(HTM) source: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.126619
tags: ebook,history,philosophy
title: The Echo of Greece
# Footnotes
(TXT) [1] Menander (wikipedia)
(TXT) [2] Dyskolos (wikipedia)
(DIR) [3] The Lessons of the Past by Edith Hamilton
# Tags
(DIR) ebook
(DIR) history
(DIR) philosophy