THE LEGACY OF GREECE.
fTo THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."' Sia,—Your review of The Legacy of Greece was of unusual interest, but some sentences in it must have deprived many classical men of their sleep on the night of February 'llth. I had hoped that a sufferer better qualified than myself would have taken up the challenge, but as no letter has appeared may I try to say very briefly what must certainly not remain unsaid? Your reviewer feels a strong antipathy to the Greeks; indeed, the uglier features of their civilization produce in him a sensation of " repugnance" and even of " physical nausea." This peculiarity is perhaps unfortunate for a writer who is to criticize Thucydides, but, apart from that, one is tempted to ask him -what civilization ho supposes to have been without ugly features, and what level of morality he expected to find in a people only separated by a few generations from savagery and by a few miles from the outrageous Orient. It would be interesting to know, too, how he regards our own early Middle Ages, a period whis has more to blame and less to admire than the worst age of the Greeks. But these instinctive and unreasoning dislikes are not properly a subject for argument at all—tutti i gusti son gusti. It is a different matter when your reviewer suggests that Thucydides did not know right from wrong. True, he was " by nature a good man," but he did not " think it necessary to make any protest " against the arguments and conduct of the Athenian envoys at Melos. This is a strange comment. For it is only through Thucydides that we have an account of the Melian debate at all. Quite pos- sibly he invented much of it, and certainly he reshaped the whole of it. The debate, as Thucydides reports it, is itself a protest; that is what it is for. The intention and effect of all Thucydides' debates is to explain the psychological situation at a given moment during the War; the manifest intention and overwhelming effect of the Melian debate is to show the moral degeneration of imperial Athens in 416. There could be no interest, other than a psychological one, in the discussion of the treatment of such a tiny town; the sack of Melos was not in itself worth thirty lines of text. Yet Thucydides gives it thirty chapters. Those thirty chapters form a terrible indictment of the imperialist spirit in Athens; the effect of them is devastating. The Athenians are made to set forth with cyniCal brutality the point of view of the bully who admits no motive but self-interest, and the Melians reply that the gods will help them because they are "just men fighting against unjust." And yet "Thucydides . . . did not . . . make
i
any protest." Shakespeare does not protest in a footnote
against Matbet ferocity; after the " debate " between Dido and Aeneas Vergil does not olatiorve that Aeneaee behaviour here is reprehensible. Shakespeare's " protest" is Maeduff, and Vergirs. is Hannibal ,andthe agony of the Panic: Wars :— " Exoriare aliquis-nostris ex ossibas niter."
And the "protest" of Thucydides. is. the ruin and liorror of the Sicilian Expedition. His next chapter begins: "The same winter the Athenians resolVed to sail again to Sicily. with a [We welcome Mr. Roxburgli'S gallant and' ingenious. defence of hiS Gteek clients, and especially of Thucydides. We must, however,protest against that portion. of it'which is arithmetical. Ile speaks of the historian producing thirty chapters on the
Mellen controversy! The unscholarly reader turns to his Jowett expecting to find half a volume devoted"to Melos. But to his astonishment discovers that the chapters are only sections, ono only three, and several only six lines long! The whole thing is disposed of in less than ten pages. The way in which the story is followed up,seems to iii. Roxburgh a proof of censure. To us it is proof-of' callousness. Thatshowever, is a matter of personal' feeling. WO agree in thinking the History one of the greatest things. in literature.—Ers Spectator."
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