Miracle in Greece By PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR A RUINOUS blemish—and its
total absence is one of the innumerable delights of this astonishing work of Sir Maurice Bowra*—seems endemic in most books dealing with the life of the ancient Greeks.
The blemish is this. Dazzled by the achieve- ments of ancient Greece and overcome by its influence on later civilisations, historians, through unconscious vanity, have a tendency to identify their own civilisations with it. The result is that those awkward elements in Homeric or Peridean Greece which clash with the official mores of the historians' own society seem regrettable deviations Which must be hushed up or explained away. It has been—it still is—painful to many English classicists that in some ways their paragons are such bad hats; that their vindictiveness, in modern Europe, would disgrace an Albanian glen; that some of the noblest, after a war, would be shot as traitors; that all of them would be despised for superstition, feared as blackguards and domestic tyrants and shunned as braggarts. Post-Wilber- force sensibility is shocked by their ownership of Slaves and post-Labouchre prejudice shies like a frightened mustang from the certainty that these artisans of so much that is noble and immortal, Were they suddenly summoned from beyond the Styx to London, would be rounded up under the Criminal Law Amendment Act and clapped into Wormwood Scrubs by the drove. The Greeks, in fact, were nothing like the image of the English gentleman. Nor were they like unwigged French encyclopxdists or Renaissance Complete Men stripped of their brocade.
What they really were like, and the whole sweep of their history and development and achieve- Ment from post-Mycenwan times to the fall of Athens after the battle of Syracuse, is the theme of Sir Maurice's book. Anyone who may have felt in the past that his subject matter has been too mild a stimulus to his brilliant gifts will sit up here; the scholarly jog-trot has suddenly Sharpened into a mettlesome canter that only a tight reign holds back from a gallop. All is taut, Closely argued and compact. Each page bristles With bold and original conclusions. We had every right to expect deep scholarship; but we have sel- dom seen such enormous material so skilfully and excitingly marshalled. The author's admiration for the Greeks is everywhere manifest, but the book gains greatly from the sobriety, the sternness even, of his examination. 'The Greeks, who gave to mankind its most imaginative myths, have themselves become almost mythical.' Stripped of the dithyrambic haze of wonder, the Greek * THE GREEK EXPERIENCE. By C. M. Bowra. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 36s.) achievement emerges as something immeasurably more wonderful, valuable, clear and unique.
First Sir Maurice gazes at Greece itself, to locate and appraise what it was in the chiselling and astringent air, the intruding sea and the hard harmonies of the mountain ranges which turned the successive waves of northern strangers, who- ever they were, into Greeks; to determine how it shaped them, in spite of the manifold, disparate and often hostile politics which they evolved, into a unity of common descent, language, religion and culture. He is particularly illuminating on the emergence of the language, on the strength, con- cision and manceuvrability of its inflections, its beauty and its intrinsic intolerance to vagueness : factors which were to make it so apt a tool for the splendours to follow.
It is through these first splendours, the collection of the Homeric songs into the Iliad and the Odys- sey at the rebirth of literacy in the late eighth century, that we look back at the first doings of the Greeks. Through them we become familiar with the heroic principle and the nature of the gods. And it is vital to do so. For the gods and their own heroic ancestors were interchangeably the inspiration and the exemplars of the later Greeks, and their influence endured all through, and in spite of all the subsequent mutations of Greek life.
'A people gets the gods which it deserves.' Also, very often, it makes them in its own image. It is thus important that the brood of gods which the mountains brought forth were neither monsters nor disembodied spirits, but anthropomorphic super-Greeks, as it were, but divine and of a different essence. Only in ancient fables were a few demi-gods admitted to their company. But their similarity to human beings encouraged humans to become 'godlike,' It was their divinity and their splendour which attracted and impressed the Greeks, for they represented no moral system; their sanctions were all wayward, incalculable, personal matters depending on anger or affection; so 'good' was not a moral but a purely ontological term. Thus the cult of personal honour, the quest of glory, and loyalty to their own physical and mental talents became the ruling code of the heroes and those that came after them. It extended to loyalty to the family, to the city, and, in times of pan-Hellenic stress, to Hellenism itself. Victory in battle was the best that could happen to a hero; a brave death which left a legacy of fame was scarcely less so. Injury and insult had to be avenged without mercy. Apart from posthumous renown, all that was good was sought for in life itself; in health, beauty, riches, fame, friendship and love; in the exploitation of personal gifts to their utmost. A man's own existence after death held no promise but an eternal shadowy quaran- tine worse than the life of the meanest living serf.
The exploitation of personal gifts to the utmost. . . . This is really the keynote of the book. For vigour and bravery in war and skill in games were accompanied by the cult of vigour and adventurousness of the intellect. Sloth and cowardice became, by implication, the deadly sins. Intellectual enterprise and maturity balanced the unruliness of mere physical heroism, and four cardinal virtues—courage, temperance, justice and wisdom—became the basis of civic principle and morality.
The history of the Greeks is thus a study of man at the fullest and most energetic enjoyment and cultivation of his innate faculties. It is interest- ing to note, in the absorbing chapter on 'Myth and Symbol' how little use, compared to other mythologies, is made in the Greek myths of magical and shamanistic powers by mortals. All is permitted to the gods but man is much more often at odds with the supernatural, or helped by it, unasked, from on high, than resorting to it himself. Similarly, the chief aim of the Greek dramatists, forever warrening and delving in the ore of mythology, was to record the truth about man in his ineluctable conflict with the gods.
The chapters about the myths, the poetry and the tragedies are rich and revealing; so is the analysis of the development of Greek art, the impulses, the overcoming of limitations and the forward leaps in vase painting and statuary and architecture. All through the book argument is reinforced by the counterpointing of general trends with sudden clinching detail. In the long. essay dealing with Greek art the texts and quota- tions are backed by sixty-four pages of excellent and most relevant photographs. I was also helped, while reading this chapter, by Mr. A. W. Law- rence's magnificent and compendious new Greek Architecture,t a book whose fine text and multi- plicity of excellent drawings and photographs deserve far more than this passing and perfunc- tory-seeming tribute.
Perhaps their adventures into the realms of thought were the most surprising and heroic feats of these extraordinary people : their elevation of Babylonian and Egyptian mathematics into a system which remains valid today; their aspira- tions to define the reality that underlies phen- omena which we call philosophy; their intrepid advances and discoveries in natural science. They discovered the truth about the solar system and foreshadowed the theory of evolution and pro- pounded the atomic theory. They learnt how to assemble data and examine evidence, they worked out the rules of logic. The author conducts us through the enthralling labyrinths of history, geography, medicine, science and philosophy. It may seem a far cry from the long-shadowed spears of Troy to the laws of hydrostatics and the conic section; Sir Maurice convinces us that how- ever tenuous is the connecting thread, the one is the spiritual outcome of the other.
Such is their richness of content and the com- pactness Of their argument that one has the impression, on finishing these 200 pages, of having read, and painlessly assimilated, many volumes. One also has a compelling imnression, on closing the book, of having finished a masterr:?,e.
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t GREEK 'ARCH ITEC1URE. By A. W. Lawrence. (Penguin Books, 63s.)
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