BOOKS
Toynbee's Greece BY HUGH LLOYD-JONES FOR Dr. Toynbee a 'civilisation' is the name of the unit which he likes to isolate from the rest of history, hypostatise by means of an analogy with the human individual, and accommodate to the laws of his own peculiar compound of Hegel- ian determinism and Jungian theories of the 'collective unconscious.' In this special sense, the 'Hellenic civilisation' comprises not merely the civilisation of ancient Greece, but that of the Hellenised Orient and of the Roman Empire to the time of Constantine. This* is a modernised version of a book originally written in 1914 as part of a series. What it offers is a summary account of the political and military history of the Greco-Roman epoch.
Ancient Greek thought presents, on the face of it, no strikingly close resemblance to nineteenth- century English liberalism; and yet the adherents of the latter have obstinately insisted on finding its reflection in the former. Lowes Dickinson, for instance, won a considerable reputation by pre- senting as an account of 'the Greek view of life' a book that tells one much about Victorian liberalism but nothing whatever about what it Professes to describe. It is not specially interesting to read yet another account of Hellenism written from a Victorian liberal point of view; but one must be grateful to the author for not having allowed a belief in the liberal myth about the Greeks to prevent his natural aversion to almost everything about them from being perceptible.
Dr. Toyabee scolds the Greeks severely for not having united during the fifth century. Once they Missed that chance, they'were done for; 'the neme- sis of this failure was the international and civil Warfare that devastated the Hellenic world, with hardly a breathing-space, for four hundred years.' He allows that after that Augustus managed to re- establish some kind of order; 'but the wounds that Hellenism had already inflicted on itself were lethal.' It is odd that the same writer should so strongly disapprove of Periclean Athens for having made the one serious attempt to unify Greece before the time of Philip. If the Athenians had resisted the temptation to turn the Delian league into an empire, Dr. Toynbee says, 'the economic tide making for closer political union' would probably have kept the league in being; and it would eventually have led to 'some kind of voluntary political unification of the Hellenic world as a whole.' Had the Greek city states been dominated by enlightened liberal manufacturers of the Manchester School, Dr. Toynbee's surmise Would undoubtedly be correct; and yet all we know of these communities, with their jealous Passion for independence, suggests that the only feasible means of unifying them at that date lay in the use of force. But Dr. Toynbee has assured us la a later 'work that no institution based on the use of force can have'any permanent importance.
Like many previous writers, .pc Toynbee grossly exaggerates the destructive consequences
* Hill 1:NISM : .1.111 HIS1010. OF A CIVILIZATION. By Arnold .1. Toynbee. (Home University. Library : C1.U.P., 7s Gd.) of the Peloponnesian War. It is true that in that war Athens lost her one real chance of uniting Greece under her own leadership. But her own recovery, and that of the other belligerents, was remarkably rapid; there is really much more to be said for the fourth century, and even for the Hellenistic Age, than Dr. Toynbee will allow. To read his brief and superficial summary, one would suppose the whole history of the Mediterranean world from kgospotami to Actium was one un- relieved stretch of disaster and decline. Dr. Toyn- bee lectures the pupils in this dismal academy with all the firmness of a well-informed and intelligent housemaster, liberal in the best sense, whose high Anglicanism has been softened by memories of a nonconformist background into a vague sympathy with all 'higher' forms of theism. At every crisis, he knows what would have been the only reasonable thing to do; he answers every question of right and wrong with the same un- hesitating assurance. He makes war and politics, as well as morals, seem childishly simple.
Take Dr. Toynbee's attitude to the greatest and most complex problem of ancient history, that of accounting for the decline of the Empire. He seems to take it for granted that this was due mainly to internal decay, and says little of external factors. Yet whoever looks at a map and compares the territory of the Empire with the vast areas occupied by the barbarians outside it must wonder not so much that the Empire fell as that it survived for anything like the time it did. Rome came near to destruction by the Cimbri; and later in the century Julius Cesar probably forestalled a similar threat. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Augustus was his stabilisation of the northern frontiers: a work in which his record of unbroken success was spoiled, late in his life, by the disaster of Varus, an event that carried the most sinister omen for the future.
Like most historians, Dr. Toynbee holds that an important factor in the collapse of the Empire was the decline of the Hellenic middle class; but the reasons that he gives for this are neither exhaustive nor convincing. He insists that the middle class was unable to feel towards a larger unit the same loyalty it had felt towards a city state; and he says little of the appalling burdens laid on that class by the fiscal and administrative policy of Diocletian and his successors. One is left wondering how so good a liberal would react to the suggestion that one of the numerous and com- plicated reasons why the Empire fell may have been that it tried to offer too many privileges to too many of its subjects.
But despite his great store of varied informa- tion, Dr. Toynbee is above all a historian of ideas; and among the reasons he gives for the decline we must expect ideas to bulk larger than mere brute facts. Hellenism seems to have been doomed from the start; for in the first chapter we are told that it was the first great civilisation to 'put its treasure' in 'Humanism, or Man-Worship.' The Olympian religion, Dr. Toynbee says, was a mere deification of barbarian humanity; belief in it, weak even in Homer's time, died out as early as the fifth and fourth centuries, to be replaced officially by state-worship and the cults of deified rulers. The deficiencies of these beliefs could scarcely be made good by the Orphic and Pythagorean cults, the mystery religions or the
superstition of astrology, nor by the abstract reli- gions excogitated by philosophers. All these are merely stages in the collapse of Hellenism and the inevitable triumph of the Church of Christ.
It is hard for the adherent of one religion to enter in imagination into the standpoint of another, or to see it as anything but an absurd superstition or a primitive groping towards the truth which he himself knows. It does not easily come home to him that the attitude of other men towards their divinities May not be the same as his own to his. Many modern scholars find it hard to accept, despite much evidence to the contrary, that the Greeks ever believed in the Olympian gods; both their numbers and their character seem to disqualify them as objects of genuine religious feeling. Yet a candid inquirer may well concede that, on a superficial view, many features of life on this planet are more easily explained on a polytheistic than on a monotheistic hypothesis. To take a mythological example, both Artemis and Aphrodite are powers to be reckoned with, and if like Hippolytus we lean too far towards the one, we may easily have trouble with the other. More- over, to call Olympianism 'man-worship' is monstrously unjust. No religion has insisted more firmly on the distinction between god and man, or has reminded its adherents oftener that they must remember the limitations of their mortal status. This attitude lies near the root of all the Greek art and literature of the greatest period; failure to sympathise with it has led, more than any other cause, to failure to understand that art.
For such a religious attitude to continue in existence, it is not necessary that its deities should continue to be believed in with the simplicity of an age of faith. Belief in the gods could become little more than formal without the essential atti- tude becoming modified; for even during the age of faith, the believer had been taught that the gods ruled the universe for 'their own sake, not for man's, and that their actions were for the most part incomprehensible to men. Thus religious belief conflicted only in the mildest way with the growth of philosophy, no particular body of dogmas having acquired a sanction that it was sacrilege to challenge. But not everyone could be tough enough to continue without the prop of some kind of supernatural agency, particularly when so many Oriental religions were at hand to offer such support. Even during the fifth century such beliefs had become influential; in the vast melting-pot of the Hellenistic world their import- ance grew; and once the barbarians had become necessary to the survival of the Empire, the time when it must make an ally of one or another of the dogmatic religions could not be long delayed.
Dr. Toynbee's utter lack of sympathy with the Greek religious outlook lies, it seems to me, at the root of his dislike for the civilisation he has described. He seems to think the Hellenic civilisa- tion perished at some time during the fourth cen- tury after Christ; but he allows that there have since occurred 'periodic eruptions' of the 'explo- sive Hellenic spirit' that lies buried beneath the surface, one of which was the Renaissance. The patronising distaste which pervades this facile and superficial summary must arouse the annoyance of those who still try to continue the tradition of independent thinking which this 'eruption' set in motion. But they must still thank Dr. Toynbee for not having pretended to like things he obviously neither approves of nor, for all his knowledge, understands.
Previous page
