Vintage Reading by Robert Kanigel

Author:Robert Kanigel [Kanigel, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bancroft Press

The Greek Way

to Western Civilization

____________

By Edith Hamilton.

First published in 1930

Ever get your Thucydides mixed up with your Pericles? Do Aeschylus and Agathon and Aristophanes run together in your mind like a blur? Then this is the book for you.

The Greek Way renders the ancient Greek mind accessible to the modern reader. It serves up a delectable appetizer of Greek civilization that leaves you begging for the rest of the meal. It is a work of popularization of the highest order.

Hamilton goes to almost any length to ignite in her readers Greece’s glory. For example: There she is, faced with the task of making the great Greek poet Pindar—“hard, severe, passionless, remote, with a kind of haughty indifference”—comprehensible. The peculiar quality of austere literalmindedness that marked his work translates poorly, into English, Hamilton tells us. “One might almost as well try to put a symphony into words as try to give any impression of Pindar’s odes by an English transcription.”

What to do? How to convey this “great sweep of song” so resistant to translation? For starters, she tell us about Pindar—his aristocratic breeding, the “exacting discipline of the gentleman” to which he conformed, his celebration of the heroic in sport. But—and here is her achievement—it is a modern English poet, not Pindar himself, whose lines she reads to evoke in us a sense of the Greek’s rhythms; rather than botch Pindar, she quotes from Kipling! “What Kipling’s poetry says “is not of especial consequence,” Hamilton explains. It is its “great movement [that] holds the attention. The lines stay in the mind as music, not thoughts, and that is even truer of Pindar’s poetry.”

Hamilton takes similar leaps with the great Greek tragedians. Aeschylus evokes the same sense of exalted pain as Shakespeare; so she quotes MacBeth as much as Agamemnon. Sophocles—that “quintessence of the Greek”— reminds her of Milton; she reads a passage from the blind poet and concludes: “It is hard to believe that Sophocles did not write that.”

The Greek Way sets out with firm and overriding purpose to impress on the modern mind the Greek achievement, and never wanders from it. Hamilton doesn’t worry about nit-picky buts and maybes, sacrifices scholarly nuance. Indeed, when the book came out in 1930, she took her critical lumps for bulldozing important distinctions in her rush to get across the message. New Statesman declared that her excesses of enthusiasm would “make the ordinary reader thankful that his son is on the science side at school. The style is that of the direct statement with 75 percent of the statements unsupported by documentation.”

Such carping, though, was buried in praise for what the book so ably achieved. Wrote one reviewer: “We do not know a book which we prefer to this, if we were asked to recommend an introduction to the peculiar quality of Greek thought which gives it value to ordinary people.”

What was that “peculiar quality?” Taking us on a whirlwind tour of other ancient civilizations—India, Rome, Egypt—Hamilton approaches it by contrast to what it was not.

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