Scholarship and Civilisation
Greek Studies. By Gilbert Murray. (Clarendon Press. 12s. 6d.)
DR. MURRAY'S new collection of addresses is a good book for any- one who is inclined to regard classical research. as merely raking over the dead ashes of learning. Such a view is largely the fault of those scholars who have been so dominated by the ideals of science that the only results they recognise are concrete pieces of new know- ledge ; profit -is, accordingly, only to be -derived from archaeology or the arid field of textual-criticism. But this is putting the cart before the horse with-a vengeance. Additions to our knowledge of classical antiquity are not ends in themselves, but means to the culti- vation of such•a familiarity with ancient civilisation that it may be used to illumine the dark places of our own. For a scholar to claim that his studies are objective is to emphasise that they are dead; and it is instructive to note that even some physicists assert that the answers we get from the physical world are determined by the ques- tions we ask it.
The liveliness of Greek studies, and of Dr. Murray's Greek Studies, lies in their subjectivity, their close connection With contemporary
life. The scholar must, on the one hand, be able to re-live the life of ancient Greece and, on the other, be sensitively aware, of the interests of the present. Past and present interact, fruitfully through him. The ancient civilisations are, being past, in a' sense unchanging, but the changing interests of the present, mediated by the scholar, bring different aspects constantly into view, readjust the emphasis and draw neglected fields into prominence. The significance of Dr. Murray's book lies in the picture it presents of this activity of classical scholarship.
The eleven studies are, as he admits in the preface, rather a mixed bag. Only two, The "tradition" or handing down of Greek Litera- ture (V) and The beginnings of Grammar (IX) are technical, and these in a most inoffensive way. The main core of the book is pro- vided by two groups of three lectures each, the first (II-IV) dated 1932, 1933, 5934, being a set of introductory lectures to Oxford " Greats " on Greek literature,- history and philosophy, the second consisting of the three J. H. Gray lectures given in Cambridge in 1928. The first of this latter group, Heracles, "the Besj of Men" (VI) interprets Sophodes's Trachiniae ; the second, Euripides' tragedies of 415 a.c.: the deceitfulness of life (VII), suggests that there was a theme common to the trilogy Alexandros, Palamedes, Troades (the last only of which survives in our tradition), while the third, Theopom pus, the Cynic as Historian (VIII) attributes the caustic qualities of this writer to his adherence to he Cynic sect. Through the whole group runs the attempt to.trace a theme which is a constant feature of fifth-century thought until it finds its complete, if rather crude, expression in fourth-century Cynicism, the desire to get below common conventions of thought and language to the truth beneath.
The subjectivity of classical studies is life-giving in so far as it provides a continually changing set of questions ; it stultifies itself when it begins to dictate the answers. The Greek civilisation which Dr. Murray evaluates has often a touch of Gladstonian Liberalism, often something League-of-Nations-Unionish about it. Here and there the reader cannot suppress the feeling that the scholar's spec- tacles are tinted, that the priest, be he never so devoted, has un- consciously worked the oracle. The last lecture, given to the Alex- andrian Society in Glasgow University in 1937, and entitled Humane Letters and Civilisation, provides a sort of unity to the collection. To achieve the primarily historical aim of the scholar, which is to re-create in himself the frame of mind of the ancient writer, not only a knowledge of political and economic history is necessary, but the employment of all the resources of scholarship "in the linguistic and imaginative senses of the word." This is Dr. Murray's claim, and his scholarship, reflected in the small mirror of this book, finds unity from it. If we ask why the scholar's aim is this, there is only the last sentence of the book as answer : "Thereby we minister to that. great spiritual adventure ,of mankind which we call civilisation." The reader will wish that he had developed this theme and told us exactly
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