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A UTHOR : TOYNBEE, ARNOLD JOSEPH TITLE: THE TRAGEDY OF PLACE: OXFORD DATi:. 1921 Master Negative # COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT —Hzi&loArJ3_ BIBLIOGRAPHIC MICROFORM TARGET Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record W^rmf* Toynbee, Arnold Joseph, 1889- 1975 The tragedy of Greece ; a lecture delivered for the pro- fessor of Greek to candidates for honours in literae humaniores at Oxford in May 1920, by A. J. Toynbee ... Oxford, The Clarendon press, 1921. 42 p. 18i« Restrictions on Use: \^ Greece— Hist— Addresses, essays, lectures. i. Title. Library of Congress DFJ18.T6 i2j 21-18523 FILM SIZE: 3r /i-x TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA REDUCTION RATIO: VXK^. IMAGE PLACEMENT: lA I IlyW IB IIB DATE FILMED: %/_^^:^_^j_ INITIALS tzJT. HLMEDBY: RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS. INC WOODBRIDGE. cf c Association for Information and Image Management 1100 Wayne Avenue, Suite 1100 Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 ^^ WJ>.. % ^^ W.3. W. %<. ^^ *f V ^„_„_.- '^ --■ ' - ^y-- '■ r OXFORD \r THE CLARENDON PRESS *^|.»S-^*J__* 1921 Columbia Winiomsitp intfjeCttpof^toSork LIBRARY I 1 ll THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE (i/^ Lecture delivered for the Professor of Qreek to Candidates for Honours in Literae Humaniores at Oxford in 3Aay ig20 BY A. J. TOYNBEE Ipse Epicurus obit decurso lumine vitae, qui genus humanum ingenio superavit et omuls restinxit, slellas exortus ut aetherius sol. tu vero dubitabis et indignabcre obire? Lucretius iii. 1043 5. OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1921 I 2. /- 9 ? ^ y OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY HUMPHREY MILFORD PUBLISHEB TO THE DJJIVKRSITY T / VJ u u The JVork of Art I BELIEVE that most of you who are attendine argued that the direct experience we have of our own civilization makes it possible for us to have a deeper, and therefore a more humane and scientific, understanding of it than we can ever have of Ancient Greece. And one might go on to argue, on grounds of humanism alone, that such a comprehension of the character and origins of our civilization would have a more profound humanizing inHuence upon its development than a less intimate study of a different civilization could produce. This argu- ment is bound, I think, to appeal to the generation which has experienced the war. The war is obviously one of the great crises of our civiliza^ tion. It is like a conflagration lighting up the dim past and throwing it into perspective. The war makes it impossible for us to take our own history for granted. We are bound to inquire into the causes of such an astonishing catastrophe, and as soon as we do that we find ourselves inquiring into the evolution of Western Civiliza- tion since it emerged from the Dark Age. The shock of the Peloponnesian War gave just the same intellectual stimulus to Thucydides, and made him preface his history of that war with a critical analysis, brief but unsurpassed, of the origins of Hellenic civilization— the famous intro- A 4 10 THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE ductory chapters of Book I. May not these chapters point the road for us and counsel us to concentrate upon the study of our own history ? You see the question deserves very serious consideration, not merely from the utilitarian, but from the scientific and humane point of n iew. I am going to suggest in answer four points in favour of studying the civilization of Ancient Greece: (i) In Greek history the plot of civilization has been worked out to its conclusion. We can sit as spectators through the whole play ; we can say : *This or that is the crisis; from this point onwards the end is inevitable ; or if this actor had acted otherwise in those circumstances the issue would not have been the same.' We can grasp the structure of the tragedy and divide it into acts. But in our own history we are like players in the middle of the piece, and though we may be able to say ' This is the third act or the fourth act\ we caimot say *This is the last act or the last but one \ We cannot foretell the future ; the work of art we are studying is incomplete, and therefore we cannot |)ossibly apprehend it as an artistic whole, however vivid may be our experience of isolated scenes and situations. (ii) My first point, then, in favour of Greek history is its completeress and its true persj)ective n' THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE 11 from our point of view. My second is that the historical experience of the Greeks has been more finely expressed than ours. Its expression is in all Greek art and literature — for do not make the mistake of supposing that historical experience is expressed in so-called historical records alone. The great poets of Greece whom you have been studying hitherto will be of as much assistance to you in understanding the mental history of Greece (which is atler all the essential element in any history) as the philosophers and historians whom you are going to study now. And Greek historical exj>erience or mental history is better expressed in Greek literature than ours is in the literature of modern Europe. I am not attempting to compare the two literatures as literatures, but I do say with some confidence that the surviving masterpieces of Greek literature which vou have been studying give you a better insight into the subjective side of Greek history — into the emotions and sjxiculations wliich arose out of the vicissitudes of Greek society and were its most splendid creations — than any insight into the subjective side of modern history which you can obtain by studying it through modern literature, (iii) My third point is expressed in the conclud- ing phrase of Aristotle's definition of tragedy (Poetics, vi. 2). ' Tragedy \ he says, ' is an imita- 12 THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE tion of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude . . . through pity and fear effecting the proper KaBapcn^^ or purgation, of these emotions/ (Butchers translation.) This word KaOapcTL^ — purgation, purification, cleansing, discharge — has been the subject of interminable controversy among scholars, but I think any one acquainted with Ancient Greek literature who has lived through the war will understand what it means. Certainly I found, in the worst moments of the war, that passages from the classics — some line of Aeschylus or Lucretius or Virgil, or the sense of some speech in Thucydides, or the impres- sion of some mood of bitterness or serenity in a dialogue of Plato — would come into my mind and give me relief. I felt that these men had travelled along the road on which our feet were set ; that they had travelled it farther than we, travelled it to the end ; and that the wisdom of greater experience and the poignancy of greater suffering than ours was expressed in the beauty of their words. Personally I got that relief from acquain- tance with Greek civilization as expressed in Greek literature, and I got it because it put me in com- munication with a different civilization from our own — with people who had experienced all and more than we had experienced, and who were now at peace beyond the world of time and change. \ '1^ rHE TRAGEDY OF GREECE 13 (iv) KdOap(n9 seems to me the emotional value which is peculiar to the study of a different civil- ization, and which you cannot get, at any rate with the same intensity, by the study of your own. And this emotional value has its intellectual counterpart in the comparative method of study, which you get by studying, not your own circum- stances, but circiun stances comparable to, without being identical with, your own. This is a common- place in the field of language. The study of Ancient Greek is generally admitted to have more educative value for an Englishman than the study of modern French or German, because Greek and English embody the fundamental principles of human language in entirely independent forms of expression, while French and English, in addition to the elements common to all language, share the special background of the Bible and the Classics, which have given them an extensive common stock of phraseology and imagery. This applies equally to the study of civilization. One learns more by studying Ancient Greek religion and comparing it with Christianity than by studying Christianity in ignorance of other religious phenomena ; and one learns more about institutions by studying the Greek city-state and comparing it with the modern national state than by merely studying the evolu- tion of the national state in modern Europe. If 14 THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE we take utility to mean intellectual and not praictical utility — and as humanists and scientists we do — we may claim without paradox that the study of Greek civilization is valuable just because it is not our own. These, then, are my four points in favour of Greek history : we possess the whole tragedy, it is a magnificent expression of the plot, and it has a peculiar emotional and intellectual value which the drama in which we ourselves are actors cannot have for us. In the reniainder of the time at my disposal I propose to give a sketch of the plot of Greek history — every one must make his own sketch; I offer mine to provoke you to make yours — and I shall then try to illustrate my second point, the beauty of the expression, by quoting half a dozen passages from ancient authors. The other two points — the cathartic and the comparative value of Greek history — are matters of personal ex|)eri- ence. I have little doubt that you will experience them yourselves in your studies during the next two years. ''I'* THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE 15 II The riot The genesis of Ancient Greek civilization is certainly later than the twelfth century b.c., when Minoan civilization, its predecessor, was still in process of dissolution; and the termination of Ancient Greek civilization must certainly be placed before the eighth century a.d., when modern AVestern civilization, its successor, had ali*eady come into being. Between these extreme points we cannot exactly date its l)egiiniing and end, but we can see that it covers a period of seventeen or eighteen centuries. It is easier to divide the tragedy into acts. We can at once discern two dramatic crises — the out- break of the Feloponnesian War and the foundation of the Roman Empire. We can for convenience take precise dates- 431 h.c. and 31 b.c— and group the action into three acts or phases, one before, one between, and one after these critical moments. I will give you my analysis in tabular form : ^c^/(llthcent.-431 b.c). 1. Synoikismos (formation of the city-state, the cell of Greek society), 11th ccnt.-750 b.c. A 5 -w 16 THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE 2. Colonization (propeigation of the citv-state round the Mediterranean), 750-600 b.c. 3. Economic revolution (change from extensive to intensive growth), 600-500 b.c. 4. Confederation (repulse of Oriental universal empire and creation of an inter-state federation, the Delian League), 500-431 b.c. Act //(431 B.C.-31 B.C.). 1. The Greek wars (failure of inter-state federation), 431-355 b.c. ^l. The Oriental wars (the superman, conquest of the East, struggle for the spoils, har- barian invasion),' 355-272 b.c 3. The first rally (change of scale and fresh experiments in federation — Seleucid Asia, Roman Italy, Aetolian and Achaean ' United States'), 272-218 b.c 4. The Roman wars (destruction of four great powers by one ; devastation of tlie Medi- terranean world), 218-146 b.c 5. The class wars (capitalism, lx)lshevism, Napoleonism), 146-31 b.c. Jet III (SI B.c-7th cent. a.d.). 1. The second rally (final experiment in federa- tion — compromise between city - state autonomy and capitalistic centralization), 31 B.C-A.D. 180. I A THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE 17 2. The first dissolution (external front broken by tribesmen, internal by Christianity), A.D.180-284 . 3. The final rally (Constantine rbv Srj/iou TT/Doo-eraiptYef— tribesmen on to the land, bishops into the bureaucracy), a.d. 284- 378. 4. The final dissolution (break of tradition) A. D. 378-7th cent. This analysis is and must be subjective. Everv one ha.s to make his own, just as every one has to apprehend for himself the form of a work of art. But however you may analyse the plot and group it into acts, I want to insist that the action is con- tinuous, and that the first emergence of the Greek city-state in the Aegean and the last traces of municipal self-government in the Roman Empire are phases in the history of a single civilization. This civilization as a whole is the subject of your historical studies in Literae Humaniores ; I may remind you that in your final schools one paper out of three is allotted to the general field of * Ancient History ' ; but there is a danger of the unity of your studies being obscured by the per- haps undue concentration of the ' Greats ' course upon two 'special periods', isolated from each other chronologically, and entitled respectively a6 I '. NBKSAAlllAVtU^ 18 THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE a special |)eriiKl of ' Greek '' and a special period of * Roman "* history. I want to warn you against being misled by this division. Your studies of Greek and Latin literature have no doubt con- vinced you that the difference of language there is less significant than the unity of form, and that you are really dealing with one literature, the Hellenic, which in many of its branches was imitated and proptigated in the Latin language, just as it was to a lesser extent in Hebrew, or later on in Syriac and Arabic, in certain branches such as theology and science. I wish to suggest to you that the unity is even more apparent when, instead of confining our attention to literature, we regard the whole field of civilization. You cannot reallv draw a distinction between Greek history and Roman history. At most you can say that at some point Greek history enters on a phase which it may be convenient to distinguish verbally by connecting it with the name of Rome. Take the case of the Roman Empire— you may possibly have been surprised that 1 have taken the Roman Empire as the third act in the tragedy of Greece ; vet when you study the Empire you find that it was essentially a Greek institution. Institution- ally it was at lx)ttom a federation of city-states, a solution of the political problem with which Greek society had been wrestling since the fifth * THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE 19 century, b. c. And even the non-nmnicipal ele- ment, the centralized bureaucratic organization which Augustus spread like a fine, almost impal- pable net to hold his federation of municipalities together, was largely a fruit of Greek administra- tive experience. As papyrology reveals the administrative system of the Ptolemaic Dynasty — the Greek successors of Alexander who preceded the Caesars in the government of Egypt — we are learning that even those institutions of the Empire which have been regarded as most un-Greek may have been borrowed through a Greek intermediary. Lnperial jurisprudence, again, interpreted Roman municipal law into the law of a civilization by reading into it the principles of Greek moral philosophy. And Greek, not Latin, was still the language in which most of the greatest literature of the Imperial period was written. I need only mention works which are still widely read and which have influenced our own civilization — Plutarch's Lives, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, and the New Testament. They are all written in Greek, and who will venture to assert that the age in which they were written falls outside Greek history, or that the social experience which pro- duced them was not an act in the tragedy of Hellenic civilization ? Even statistically the Empire was more Greek than anything else. 20 THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE Prolmbly A considerable nmjonty of its iiihabitantb spoke Greek as a lingua franca, if not as their mother-tongue. Nearly all tlie great industrial and connnercial centres were in the Greek or Ilellenized provinces. Possibly, during the first two centuries of the Empire, more Greek was spoken than Latin by the proletariat of Rome itself. The Greek core of the Ronuui Empire played the part of Western Europe in the nKxlern world. The Latinized provinces were thinly populated, backward, and only suj)erficially initiated into the fraternity of civilization. l^tinizeis history. "ES^l yap t(o Sciua yfufaOai KaKm : ' Evil had to befall so-and-so, and there- fore '—the story of a catastrophe follows in each case. The thought behind the phrase is expressed in Solon's wonls to Croesus (Herodotus, Bk. I, ch. 32): 'Croesus, I know that God is ever envious and disordering' (rapax^Sf?), 'and you ask me about the destiny of man ! ' Note the epithet I have translated 'disordering'; we sliall meet the word rapaxv again. It is the bitter plu-ase of a man who lived on from the ^ great age into the war, but not so bitter as the truth which the writer could not brinjr himself wholly to express. ' No single phenomenon ', as contemporary Greek science realized, ' is more or less divine than any other', and the 'envious and disordering' power, which wi-ecked Greek civilization, was not an external force, but the very spirit of man by which that civilization had Ix'en created. There is a puzzling line in Homer which is applied once or twice to featurcs in a landscape— for instance, to a river : ' The gods call it Xanthos, mankind Skamandros.' So we might say of the downfall of Greece : the Greeks attri- buted it to the malignity of God, but the divine oracles gave a different answer. Why did the Confederacy of Delos break down and Greece lose her youth in a ruinous war.? Because of the evil in the hearts of men— the envy aroused by the political and commercial greatness of Athens in the governing classes of Sparta and Corinth ; and the covetousness aroused by sudden greatness in the Athenians, tempting their statesmen to degrade the presidency of a free confederacy into a dominion of Athens over Greece, and tempting the Athenian proletariat, and the proletariat in the confederate states, to misuse democracy for the exploitation of the rich by the poor. Envy and covetousness begat injustice, \. ^*S|!p^^j"'::! 24 THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE 25 and injustice disloyalty. The city-states, in their rivalry for dominion or their I'esentnient against the domineering of one state over another, forgot their loyalty to the common weal of Greece and fought each other for empire or liberty. And the wealthy and well-born citizena forgot their loyalty to the city in their blind, rancorous feud against the proletariat that was stripping them of property and power, and betrayed their community to foreign enemies. ' Strange how mortals blame the gods. They say that evil is our handiwork, when in truth they bring their sufferings on themselves. By their own folly they force the hand of fate. See, now, how Aigisthos forced it in taking the wedded wife of Atreides and slaying her lord when he returned, yet he had sheer destruction l)efore his eyes, for we ourselves had forewarned him not to slay the king nor wed his wife, or vengeance would come by Atreides** son Orestes, whene'er he should grow to manhood and long for his home. So spake our messenger, but he did not soften the heaii: of Aigisthos, though he wished him well, and now Aigisthos has paid in full ' (Odyssey, a 32-43). These lines from the first canto of the Odyssey were imagined by a generation which could still afford to en*, but as Greece approached her hour of destiny, her prophetic inspiration grew clearer. •9 The poets of the sixth century were haunted mort! insistently than the Homeridai by the possibilities of disaster inherent in success of every kind — in personal prosperity, in military victory, and in the social triumph of civilization. They traced the mischief to an aberration of the human s[)irit under the shock of sudden, unexp)ected attain- ment, and they realized that both the accumulated achievement of generations and the greater promise of the future might be lost irretrievably by failui-e at this critical moment. ' Surfeit (/f6poy) breeds sin (tz/Spfy) when prosperity visits unbalanced minds."* In slightly different words, the proverb recurs in the collections of verses attributed to Theognis and to Solon. Its maker refrained from adding what was in his and his hearers'* thoughts, that vppi?r once engendered, breeds drr] — the complete and certain destruction into which the sinner walks with unseeing eyes. But the whole moral mystery, to its remorseless end, was uttered again and again in passionate words by Aeschylus, who consciously discarded the primitive magicid deter- minism in which Herodotus atlterwards vainly sought relief. (ovaav kv kukoi? Pporiov VpplV TOT rj TOO , on TO KVpiOV flOATf (f>d0S TOKOV, "IS^^SSaf S 26 THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE Saifiovd T* eray, dfia^ov.i diroXefioUy dvUpov Opdaos, fifXai- va^ fjL€\dOpoi(riy "Arasy ^ISofiiva? TOK^VCTLV. But Old Sin loves, when comes the hour again, To bring forth New, Which laugheth lusty amid the tears of men ; Yea, and Unruth, his comrade, wherewith none May plead nor strive, which dareth on and on. Knowing not fear nor any holy thing; Two fires of darkness in a house, born true, Like to their ancient spring. {Agavwmnon,, vv. 7(53 71, Mun'ay's translation.) The poet of the crowning victory over Pei*sia was filled with awe, as well as exultation, at the possibilities for good or evil which his triumphant generation held in their hands. Were thev true metal or base ? The times would test them, but he had no doubt about the inexorable law. Ov yap (OTiu €waX^L9 ttXovtov npo? Kopov duSpl XaKTio'atn'L p.iyav Slkt}^ ffoyfiou e/y ddv€Lav. Never shall state nor gold Shelter his heart fn)m aching Whoso the Altar of Justice old Spumeth to night unwaking. (Agarrwmiion, vv. 381-4, Murray's translation). THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE^ 27 The Agamemnon was written when Athens stood at the height of her gli>ry and her power, and l)efore her sons, following the devices of their hearts, 'like a boy chasing a winged bird,' had set a fatal stumbling-block in the way of their city, or smirched her with an intolerable stain. The generation of Marathon foreboded the catastrophe of the Peloponnesian War, yet the shock, when it came, was beyond their powers of imagination, and the effect of it on the mind of Greece was first expressed by the generation which was smitten bv the war in eiirly manhood. I will quote Thucydides (iii. 82) : *So the class-war at Korkyra grew more and more savage, and it made a particular impression lK?cause it was the first outbreak of an upheaval that spread in time through almost the whole of Greek society. In every state there were conflicts of class, and the leaders of the respective parties now procured the intervention of the Athenians or the Lakedaimonians on their side. In i)eace-time thev would have had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to call in the foreigner, but now there was the war, and it was easy for any party of violence to get their opponents crushed and them- selves into power by an alliance with one of the belligerents. This recrudescence of class-war brought one calamity after another Uj)on the 28 THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE states of Greece — calamities that (xrcur and will continue to occur as long as human nature remains what it is, however thev mav be modified or occasionally mitigated by changes of circumstance. Under the favourable conditions of peace-time, communities and individuals do not have their hands forced by the logic of events, and can there- fore act up to a higher standard. But war strips away all the margins of ordinary life and breaks in character to circumstance by its brutal training. So the states were torn by the class- war, and the sensation made by each outbreak had a sinister effect on the next — in fact, there was something like a competition in perfecting the fine art of conspiracies and atrwities. . . . (iii. 83) *Thus the class- war plunged Greek society into every kind of moral evil, and honesty, which is the chief constituent of idealism, was laughed out of existence in the prevailing atmo- sphere of hostility and suspicion. No argument was cogent enough and no pledge solemn enough to reconcile opponents. The only argument that appealed to the party momentarily in power was the unlikelihood of their remaining there long and the consequent advisability of taking no risks with their enemies. And the stupider the conjbatants, the greater their chances of survival, just because they were terrified at their deficiencies, expected to THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE 29 l3e outwitted and outmanceuvred by their opponents, and therefore plunged recklessly into action, while their superiors in intellect, who trusted to their wits to protect them and disdained practical precau- tions, were often caught defenceless and brought to destruction.' There you have the effect of the great Greek war upon the first generation. Thucydides, of course, had a sensitive and emotional tempera- ment. He is always controlling himself and reining himself in. But one is struck by an outburst of the same feeling in a younger man, Xenophon, who was ordinarily in harmony with his age and was probably rather unimaginative and self- complacent by nature. The war had given Xenophon his opportunity as a soldier and a writer. He was not inclined to quarrel with the 'envious and disordering' powers that had ruined Greek civilization. But in the last paragraph of the History of his Own Times he is carried away, for he has just been describing the battle of Mantinea (362 B.C.), in which he had lost his son. 'The result of the battle', he writes, 'dis- appointed every one's expectations. Almost the whole of Greece had mobilized on one side or the other, and it was taken for granted that if it came to an action, the victors would Ixi able to do what they likwl and the vanquished would be at their 30 THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE mercy. But Providence so disposed it that both sides . . . claimed the victory and yet neither had gained a foot of territory, a single city or a particle of power beyond what they had possessed before the battle. On the contrary, there was more unsettlement and disorder (rapax'?) i" Greece after the battle than before it. But I do not propose to carry my narrative further and will leave the sequel to any other historian who cares to record it.' {HeUenka^ vii. 5 fin.). I must refrain from quoting Plato, but I would recommend you, while studying his metaphysics for your philosophy, to note his moods and emotions for the light they throw upon the history of his lifetime. Plato's long life— 428 to 347 b.c— practically coincided with the first phase of the second act of the tragedy— the series of wars that began in 431 b.c, and that had reduced the Greek city-states to complete disunion and exhaustion by 355. Plato belonged to the cultured governing class which was hit hardest by these first disasters. At the age of twenty-nine, after witnessing the downfall of Athens, he had to witness the judicial murder of Sok rates — the greatest man of the older generation, who had been appreciated and loved by Plato and his friends. Plato's own most promising pupil, whom he had marked out for his successor, was killed in action in a particularly THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE 31 aimless recrudescence of the war. Plato's political disillusionment and perversity are easy to under- stand. But it is curious and interesting to watch the clash between his political bitterness and his intellectual serenity. In the intellectual and artistic sphere— as a writer, musician, mathema- tician, metaphysician — he stood consciously at the zenith of Greek history ; but whenever he turned to politics he seems to have felt that the spring had gone out of the year. He instinctively ante- dated the setting of his dialogues. The characters nearly all belong to the generation of Sok rates, which had grown to manhood Ixifore the war and whose memories conjured up the glory that the war had extinguished. Note his ' other- worldli- ness', for it is a feature that comes into Greek civilization with him and gradually permeates it. He turns from science to theology, from the world of time and change to the world of archetypes or idea.s. He turns from the social religion of the city-state to a personal religion for which he takes symbols from primitive mythology. He turns from politics to Utopias. But Plato only lived to see the first |)hase of the catastrophe. As we watch the remainder of this second act — those four terrible centuries that followed the year 431 B.(:. — there come tidings of calamity after lalamity, like the messages of disaster in the Book 32 THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE of Job, and as the world crumbles, people tend more and more to lay up their treasure elsewhere. In the Laws^ Plato places his utopia no farther away than Crete. Two centuries later the followers of Aristonikos the Bolshevik, outlawed by the cities of Greece and Asia, proclaim themselves citizens of the City of the Sun. Two centuries later still, the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, despairing of this world, pray for its destruction by fire to make way for the Kingdom of Heaven. Plato's state of mind gives you the atmosphere of the first phase after the catastrophe. For the second phase — the concpiest of the East and the struggle for the spoils— I will refer you to Mr. Edwyn Bevan's Lectures on the Stoics ami Sceptics and to Professor Gilbert Murray's Conway Memorial lecture on The Stoic Philosophy. They show you a system of philosophy which is no longer a pure product of speculation but is primarily a moral shelter erected hastily to meet the storms of life. For the third phase— the rally of civilization in the middle of the third century b.c. — I will simply refer you to Plutarch's lives of the Spartan kings Agis and Kleomenes, and if you read them I think you will feel the gallantry of this rally and the pathos of its failure. And then comes the fourth phase — the Roman wars against the other great powers of the Medi- '^i^ THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE 33 terranean world. The Hannibalic war in Italy was, I should imagine, the most terrible war that there has ever l>een, not excepting the recent war in Europe. The horror of that war haunted later generations, and its mere memory made oblivion seem a desirable release from an intolerable world. Nil igitur mors est nobis neque pertinet hilum, (|uandot|uidem natura animi mortalis habetur. et velut anteacto nil tempore sensimus aegri, ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis, omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu horrida contremuere sub altis aetheris oris, in dubioque fuere utrorum ad regna cadendum omnibus humanis esset terraque marique, sic, ubi non erimus, cum corporis atque animai discidium fuerit quibus e sumus uniter apti, scilicet hand nobis quicquam, qui non erimus tum, accidere onniino poterit sensumque movere, non si terra mari miscebitur et mare caelo. I suppose I must try to translate that. It is of course a passage of Luci-etius (iii. 830-842) which follows uj)on an elaborate argument to prove that death destroys personality and that the soul is not immortal. ' So death is nothing to us and matters nothing to us, since we have proved that the soul is not immortal. And as in time past we felt no ill, when the Phoenicians were pouring in to battle on every front, when the world rocked with the shock 34 THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE and tumult of war and shivered from centre to firmament, when all mankind on sea and land must fall under the victor's empire and victory was in doubt— so, when we have ceased to exist, when bodv and soul, whose union is our being, have been })arted, then nothing can touch us — we shall have ceased to exist — and nothing can make us feel, no, noi if earth is confounded with sea and sea with heaven." Lucretius wrote that about a hundred and fifty years after Hannilml evacuated Italy, but the horror is still vivid in his mind, and his poetry arouses it in our minds as we listen. Personally, I remember how those lines kept running in my head about this time two years ago. But the victors suffered with the vanquished in the common ruin of civilization. The whole MediteiTanean world, and the devastated area in Italy most of all, was shaken by the economic and social revolutions which the Roman wars brought in their train, llie proletariat was oppressed to such a degree that the unity of society was per- manently destroyed and Greek civilization, after being threatened with a violent extinction by Bolshevik outbreaks — the slave wars in Sicily, the insurrection of Aristonikos and the massacres of Mithradates in Anatolia, the outbreaks of Sparta- kos and Catilina in Italy— was eventually sup- THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE 35 planted by a rival civilization of the proletariat — the Christian Church. The revolutionary last phase in the second act — the final phase before the foundation of the Empire — has left its expression in the cry of the Son of Man : ' The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.' It was one of those anonymous phrases that are in all men's mouths because they express what is in all men's hearts. Tiberius Gracchus used it in his public speeches at Rome; two centuries later it reappears in the discourses of Jesus of Nazareth. Ergo inter sese paribus concurrei e telis Romanas acies iterum videre Philippi, nee fuit indignum superis bis sanguine nostro Emathiam et latos Haemi pinguescere campos . . . Di patrii, Indigetes, et Romule, Vestaque mater quae Tuscum Tiberim et Romana Palatia servas, hunc saltem everso iuvenem succurrere saeclo ne prohibete. satis iam pridem sanguine nostro Laomedonteae luimus periuria Troiae . . . vicinae ruptis inter se legibus urbes arma ferunt ; saevit toto Mars impius orbe ; ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae, addunt in spatio, et frustra retinacula tendens fertur equis auriga neque audit currus habenas. (Georgks, i. 4j89 seqq.) 'Therefore Philippi saw Roman armies turn their swords against each other a second time in battle, and the gods felt no pity that Emathia 36 THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE and the broad plains of Haemns should twice be fattened with our blood. . , . ' Gods of our fathers, gods of our country, god of our city, goddess of our hearths \\ ho watxihest over Tuscan Tiber and Roman Palatine, suffer this last saviour to succour our fallen generation. Oui- })lood has flowed too long. We have paid in full for the sins of our forefathers — the broken faith of ancient Troy. . . . 'The bonds are broken between neighbour cities and they meet in arms. Ungodly war rages the world over. The chariots launched on the race gather speed as they go ; the driver vainly draws the reins ; the steeds carry him away, and the team will not answer to the bridle. ' It is a prayer for the lifting of the cui*se, and this time the ' envious and disordering ' powers gave ear. The charioteer regained control, and we are carried on to the third act of the tragedy, in which, to my mind, no small part of its beauty and a very great part of its significance is to l)e found. The imperial peace could not save the body of Greek civilization — the four centuries of war had inflicted mortal wounds ; but I am not sure that it did not save its soul. Although Augustus had not the abilities of Caesar, he felt and pitied the son*ows of the world, and he suc- ceeded in expressing the pity and re[)entance, the THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE 37 ruthfulness for and piety towards the past, which were astir in the spirits of his generation. But I cannot find a phrase to characteri/.e the Empire. The words 'Decline and Fair suggest themselves, but how should they be applied ? Gibbon took the second century of the Empire, the age of the Antonines, as the Golden Age of the Ancient World, and traced the decline and fall of the Empire from the death of Marcus Aurelius. On the other hand, if my reading of the plot is right, the fatal catastrophe occurred six centuries earlier, in the year 4<31 n. c, and the Empire itself was the decline and fall of Greek civilization. But was it only that ? One is apt to think so when one reads the diary of Marcus Aurelius, and pictures him in his quarters at Carnuntum, fighting finely but hopelessly on two fronts- -against the bar- barians on the Danube and the sadness in his own soul. ' Human life ! Its duration is momentary, its substance in perpetual flux, its senses dim, its physical organism perishable, its consciousness a vortex, its destiny dark, its repute uncertain — in fact, the material element is a rolling stream, the spiritual element dreams and vapour, life a war and a sojourning in a far country, fame oblivion. What can see us through ? One thing and one onlv — philosophy, and that means keeping the '■'■:Py'f^~f^iX'P^. ' 38 THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE spirit within us unspoiled and undishonoured, not giving way to pleasure or pain, never acting unthinkingly or deceitfully or insincerely, and never being dependent on the moral support of others. It also means taking what comes content- edly as all part of the process to which we owe our own being ; and, above all, it means facing death calmly — taking it simply as a dissolution of the atoins of which every living organism is com- posed. Their perpetual transformation does not hurt the atoms, so why should one mind the whole organism being transformed and dissolved ? It is a law of nature, and natural law can never be wrong/ (MdpKos *AvT(iivLvo^ eh lavTov, ii fin.) But having quoted you Marcus Aurelius, the first citizen of the Empire, 1 am lx)und to add a quotation from Paul of Tarsos, a citizen who has as good a claim as any other to be heard : ' " How are the dead raised up ? With what body do they come ? ^ Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die. ... It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption ; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory ; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. ' . . . It startles us to be reminded that these two actors appeared on the stage in the same act of the drama, and that Paul actually played his part a century before Marcus played his. Paul's voice THE TRAGEDY OF GREECE 39 suggests not only a younger generation but quite a different play. His thought in the lines I have quoted is inspired by a predecessor whom Marcus regarded as one of the innumerable prophets of the proletariat. ' Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die, it brinireth forth much fruit.' The saying was included in the miscellaneous traditions about Jesus of Nazareth which wei*e passing from mouth to mouth among the illiterate masses, but which had not l)egun to excite the curiosity of the etlucated classes in Marcus' day. What would the scrholar have made of it if a collection of these traditions had fallen under his eye, scrawled on bad paper in barbarous Greek? Little enough, for he would have missed the whole background of his own sentiment and thought, which was nothing less than the background of Greek civilization. Great literary memories crowd the brief passage of his diary wliich I have quoted above — Epiktetos and Lucretius and the Stoa, Plato and Sokrates, Demokritosand the Hippokratean school of medi- cine from which I took my first quotation, and simpler minds and more primitive artists in the dim generations behind. We are carried right back through the tragedy at which we have been looking on. 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