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Seeing with Greek Eyes In 1942, when Edith Hamilton republished The Greek Way, her already classic study which had appeared a few years earlier, the survival of the liberal Western tradition was very much in doubt. The atavistic barbarism of fascism appeared poised to wipe out the twenty-five centuries of slow progress the human race had made since a handful of squabbling, parochial Greek city-states had first liberated the human mind from the shadows of superstition and bondage to the irrational. "When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view," wrote Hamilton," then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages." With the world at war, the legacy of the Greeks seemed all the more precious given the real possibility of its extinction. More than fifty years later, the chief threats to the ideals of freedom and democracy are in abeyance. Not only fascism but communism as well has been shattered against that "fortress of the spirit" whose first bricks were laid by the Greeks. Even those cultures that seem to offer an alternative vision to the West, such as the Islamic states and China, are compelled to admit, if only by their actions, some degree of submission to the Western way. There is no nation in the world, Western or otherwise, that does not desire the advantages of science and technology, such as antibiotics and advanced weaponry, or that does not acknowledge--if only by attempting to suppress them--the powerful ideas of individual autonomy and human rights. What Jacques Ellul said over twenty years ago is even more obvious today: most of the nations of the world are either Western or trying to become so, for they have "inherited the consciousness of and desire for freedom. Everything they do today and everything they seek is an expression of what the western world has taught them." And the first teachers of the West--"the first Westerners," as Hamilton called them--were the Greeks. "The spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery," she wrote, "and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world." When Hamilton wrote these words, the place of the Greeks in the pedigree of the West was a truism so obvious that she could confidently assert, "There is no danger now that the world will not give the Greek genius full recognition. Greek achievement is a fact universally acknowledged." If this was true when the Western ideal was threatened with extinction, how much more obvious should it be today, when this century's dominant challenges to that ideal have been defeated, and when academic caretakers of the Greeks enjoy a freedom and pros- perity that every day offer proof of the continuing vitality of the "Greek way." Yet in some elite circles these days, the very phrase "Greek genius" is considered reactionary and "Eurocentric," and those writers like Edith Hamilton who have frankly acknowledged Greek superiority are considered at best naive vulgarizers, or worse, insid- ious apologists for Western hegemony and oppression. Indeed, "Edith Hamilton" has become a term of opprobrium in the profession of classics, a reflexive smear used to dismiss any affirmation of the heritage left us by the Greeks. (Gary Wills expressed this con- tempt when he recently scorned the "rather gaga (or Edith Hamilton) idealization of 'the Greek spirit' "which he detected in a recent celebration of the Greek achievement.) Such scorn is part of a larger rejection of what one historian of ancient Greece calls, with oblig- atory sneering quotes, the "now-embarrassing essentialist fantasies about the 'Greek miracle' "--as though the appearance of rational thought or the ideal of freedom in a world that had never known either were not indeed miraculous. Hamilton can, to be sure, sound at times a bit too earnest for our jaded taste. After all, she was born in 1867, so her prose and her enthusiasm are decidedly late Victorian. A phrase like "a sapphire sea washing enchanted islands purple in a luminous air" seems, to us, overripe. We moderns prefer to affect a cynical, world-weary pose, the better to guard against endorsing naive "illusions." Moreover, Hamilton appears to slight what Nietzsche convinced our century was really most fascinating about the Greeks: the dark, wild, Dionysian forces seething beneath their sunlit, marmoreal repose. Finally, Hamilton says little about the topics our therapeutic culture enjoys brooding over, such as slavery, homosexuality, and the status of women. To her critics, Edith Hamilton's Greeks look sus- piciously like staid, late-Victorian bourgeoisie--a self-flattering, presentist fabrication that ignores just how different and irrational and at times unpleasant the real Greeks really were. Yet Hamilton's critics are confusing two different issues: the historical reality of the Greeks--what they actually did and how they lived; and the influence of the Greeks--the ideas that acquired a life of their own as they were taken up by the Romans, absorbed into Christianity, and "rediscovered" in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The strangeness or irrationality of Greek life and culture, fascinating as it may be, is primarily an issue for the historian. It was taken up early in this century by classicists and social scientists alike. In 1921, Gilbert Murray envisaged a debunker of the Greeks scoff- ing, "These Greeks whom you call 'noble' have long since been exposed. Anthropology has turned its searchlights upon them."' By 1938 the poet Louis MacNeice wrote of the Greeks, "And how one can imagine oneself among them I do not know; / It was all so unimaginably different / And all so long ago."' The "strangeness" of the Greeks should be no surprise; every ancient society, inhabiting an uncertain, violent, and harsh world where survival could never be taken for granted, is strangely different from our own. What is unique about the Greeks, however, is their "spirit," the ideals they introduced into the world, their "sheer originality and brilliance," as Bernard Knox puts. That those ideals could be contradicted by the Greeks' behavior reflects only the banal truth that humans rarely live up to their own aspirations; it does not mean that the ideals themselves are faulty, or that the Greeks should not be appreciated for articulating them. It is true that while Greeks extolled freedom and individual autonomy, they owned slaves and relegated women to an inferior status--as did every ancient society, and as do many societies still today (though few in the Greek-influenced West). In this, the Greeks were products of their place and time. More important to recognize is that the principles upon which we base our criticism of the Greeks have their origins with the Greeks themselves, in ideals that transcended their articular environment in a way unique among ancient societies, perhaps with the exception of the Hebrews. As interesting as the historical reality of the Greeks is, more relevant for us are the Greek ideals that still shape every aspect of our culture. Those ideals--not the particulars of female oppression or the brutal facts of slavery--were the subjects of Hamilton's book. The more significant reasons for the classics profession's current distaste for someone like Edith Hamilton, however, lie in two intellectual currents that increasingly define scholarly activity in America: postmodernism and multiculturalism, both of which represent a sustained attack on everything that makes the West (and perforce the Greeks) distinct. Multiculturalism, for all its talk of celebrating cultural diversity, is at heart a species of anti-humanist and anti-liberal identity politics. It locates individual identity in ethnic particularity and scorns the liberal notion of universal human nature as, in the words of one exponent, "an ethnocentric and oppressively universalistic humanism in which the legitimating norms which govern the substance of citizenship are identified most strongly with Anglo-American cultural-political communities." From this multiculturatist assumption follow two contradictory positions. One is cultural relativism, the belief that all cultures are equal and cannot be compared in terms of superiority or inferiority, since all standards of judgment are locally "constructed" to serve local interests; and there is no consistent "good" or "evil" or "truth." The other is a vision of history as therapeutic melodrama, a saga of Western evils such as sexism, racism, colonialism, imperialism, etc., being inflicted on innocent non-Westerners, who are to be judged only by the privileged standards afforded to victims. Yet opposed as they are, both these positions necessarily deny the existence of something like a "Greek genius" distinct from and superior to the spirit of other ancient cultures. One multiculturalist tactic for diminishing the Greeks is to deny their originality, asserting that they begged, borrowed, or stole their ideas from other cultures. We need not dwell on Afrocentrism, the idea that the Greeks stole everything good they knew from black Egyptians; the incoherence and historical ignorance of this theory have been amply and repeatedly demonstrated. But even scholars who should know better indulge the current fashion for Greek-bashing by attributing their achievements to a vaguely defined East. Gary Wills, for instance, has asserted that "'the West' [including the Greeks] is an admittedly brilliant derivative of the East." To which Victor Hanson and John Heath respond, "Can Mr. Wills please demonstrate from what part of the East did the West brilliantly derive democracy, free inquiry, the idea of a middle class, political freedom, literature apart from religion, citizen militias ... and a language of abstraction and rationalism?" The answer, of course, is "Nowhere"--these were all Greek inventions. There was no polis at Karnak, no Plato in Babylon, no trial by jury in Sardis. That the Greeks borrowed from their Mediterranean neighbors is obvious; no human society lives in a vacuum, untouched by the customs of other peoples with whom they war, trade, and intermarry. The Greeks benefited immensely from a geography that placed them near enough to the great ancient civilizations of Egypt and the Tigris-Euphrates river valleys to be influenced by them, but not so close as to be absorbed into them. More important, however, is what the Greeks made of their borrowings. Consider the Greek alphabet, the elements of which were adapted from the Phoenician around the ninth century. The Greek changes--such as using Phoenician consonant letters to signify vowels--made possible in just a few centuries the language of Homer's epics and Sappho's lyrics, a literary speech unrivalled in expressive power, complexity, and sheer beauty by anything found among the few remnants of Phoenician writing. Another tack taken by the debunkers is to deny that the Greeks were alone in creating their distinctive ideas. For example, Martha Nussbaum has recently argued that all societies have had concepts of freedom, human rights, and religious tolerance." But she can make this remarkable case only by defining these in vague and elastic terms, and by ignoring this critical point: it is not enough to find in the historical record behaviors or pronouncements that bear some resemblance to "religious tolerance" or "freedom" or "equality." After all, as Plato reminds us, even thieves divvy up the loot according to egalitarian principles, but such self-interested sharing is hardly the machinery of democracy. Far more crucial is evidence that a particular society recognized these abstractions as goods to be rationally defined and consciously pursued apart from the practical and selfish needs of king or priest. Only thus could such goods rise above the accidents of history and geography and the whims of political and religious authorities, to become part of a living, developing intellectual tradition capable of influencing subsequent societies--as did the Greek idea of freedom. The simple fact is that neither Nussbaum nor anybody else can find a society contemporary with fifth-century Athens that left behind a sustained, self-conscious reflection upon freedom or equality as a concept to be rationally analyzed or a principle to be actively cultivated. If multiculturalist attempts to denigrate the Greeks' achievements or their uniqueness necessarily fail, the attacks deriving from current postmodern intellectual fads are no more successful. One such fashion focuses on the "Other," the despised alien that Westerners allegedly constructed in order to define themselves and justify their oppressive power. Classicist Paul Cartledge devoted a book on the Greeks entirely to demonstrating their wicked indulgence of this nasty habit: "The Greeks ... in various ways constructed their identities negatively, by means of a series of polarized oppositions of themselves to what they were not." In itself this would be unexceptional, since every human society defines itself at some level in opposition to those who appear different and strange, perhaps inferior and even subhuman. What is unusual in the Greeks is a real curiosity about people different from themselves and a willingness to consider whether those peoples might have something worthy to offer. The Histories of Herodotus, for example, are filled with just this sort of fascination with the "Other," a fascination unparalleled in the writings of other ancient Mediterranean peoples. The whole second book, concentrating on the Egyptians, examines their cus- toms for the most part with tolerance and even sympathy, going so far as to assert that many Greek practices were borrowed from them. So sympathetic was Herodotus to non-Greek peoples that Plutarch later called him philobarbaros, "foreigner-loving." Plato too recognized the achievements of the Egyptians, and even quoted an Egyptian priest's condescending dismissal of the Greeks as "children," newcomers with no tradition of learning and science. These are hardly the attitudes of blinkered xenophobes anxious to protect their ethnic identity from contamination by a despised "Other." Indeed, the very notion of cultural relativity--that the differences among cultures cannot be judged or ranked by any transcendent standard--is itself an invention of the fifth-century Greek Sophists, against whom ethical absolutists like Plato and Socrates battled. Twenty-five centuries before today's multiculturalists, the Greek Pindar said that "Custom is the king in all things." Cartledge's analysis, however, is not so much a historical description as a moral indictment. Speaking of Greek freedom, for example, he says it "was dearly bought ... at the expense of others, the excluded many: free foreigners and women (Greek as well as barbarian), but above all slaves.... Indeed, the exclusion of those various 'outgroups,' the collective Other, was arguably the very condition and basic premise of the Classical Greeks' cultural achievements." In other words, because the Greeks did not immediately extend the idea of freedom to every human alive--because they didn't meet modern expectations (which themselves derive from the Greeks)--we are to consider them undeserving of admiration, and their ideals flawed. Yet before freedom could be posited as a natural right of all human beings simply because they are human, it had to be identified as a good worth fighting for. The unalterable fact remains that it was among property-owning, Greek citizen males that we find the first recorded identification of freedom as something so essential to human happiness as to be worth suffering and dying for. Once this step was taken, the genie was out of the bottle: the possibility emerged that freedom could one day be seen as a good for everybody--which is exactly what happened. Another postmodern strategy for diminishing the Greeks is to emphasize a radical version of the "strangeness" that became a fashionable theme early in this century. Some scholars turn the Greeks themselves into "Others" whose difference from us is so extreme as to render negligible any influences they may have had on us. (Cartledge, in fact, admits his sympathy with the "intention to defamiliarize the ancient Greeks and so to knock them off the pedestal on which our Roman, Renaissance, Enlightenment, or Romantic forebears once placed them as being essentially like us, only earlier, and thus anticipating and legitimating fundamental characteristics of our own culture.") Scholars who write about Greek social history are especially fond of emphasizing how alien Greek life and culture were. Some scholars of ancient sexuality, for example, draw upon the radical social constructionism of Michel Foucault, which denies any stable human nature and instead reduces human identity to the expression of local power structures. Thus they see Greek sexuality as a collection of social constructs legitimizing political privilege and exclusion. "Sexual behavior [in ancient Athens]," according to this view, "served to position social actors in the places assigned to them by virtue of their political standing, in the hierar- chical structure of the Athenian polity." Hence, sexual practices such as passive sodomy were condemned not because the behaviors themselves were considered unnatural or destructive, but only if they violated the particular protocols and conventions established by the game of Athenian citizenship. Since those protocols were time-bound and culture-specific, nothing the Greeks wrote about sexuality is ultimately relevant to us, whose mores answer the needs of our own, equally oppressive power structures. The Greeks can have only an anthropological interest; they are useful only as career fodder or as occasions for advancing some ideological program or other. Some postmodern feminist scholars paint the Greeks as arch-misogynists who kept their women locked away in dark, dank quarters while the men cavorted with concubines and boys. For example: "In the case of a society dominated by men who sequester their wives and daughters, denigrate the female role in reproduction, erect monuments to the male genitalia, have sex with the sons of their peers, sponsor public whorehouses, create a mythology of rape, and engage in rampant saber-rattling, it is not inappropriate to refer to a reign of the phallus. Classical Athens was such a society." The bizarre thesis that all women in such a "phallocracy" were sequestered, starved, and nameless can be argued only on the basis of tendentious interpretations of the fragmentary literary and archaeological evidence--and by ignoring the numerous magnificent literary and historical women whom these supposedly women-hating Greeks immortalized. The larger implication of the phallocracy thesis is that on yet another count the Greeks should not be admired, since their ideals of freedom and equality were compromised by their benighted, sexist behavior. Thus postmodernism attacks or denies the Greek legacy. Postmodernists denigrate rationalism and science--two of the greatest achievements of the Greeks, who first defined man as a "rational animal"; these are regarded not as the means for acquiring truth but rather as arbitrarily constructed "discourses" to justify and legitimize political power. The universal human identity that forms the ground for natural rights is equally suspect, regarded as a fiction masking the West's oppression of all those "Others" who do not fit its tendentious definition of humanity. Yet it was the Greeks who first began to recognize a common humanity more important than local tribal affiliations. It was the Greek Diogenes who identified himself as a "citizen of the world" rather than just a member of some paro hial city-state. Without that recognition of a common humanity, slavery might never have been abolished in the West, women might never have been granted equality (as they still have not in some non-Western countries), and the liberal notion of innate rights possessed by all humans merely by virtue of being human would never have existed. The pseudo-sophisticated fads of postmodernism and multiculturatism account for the distaste that Edith Hamilton and other celebrators of Greek values arouse in many academic intellectuals. The irony is that fifty years from now these current academic fash- ions, already beginning to seem somewhat frayed and worn, will appear as quaint and dated as Hamilton's overripe rhetoric. Applied to the Greeks, postmodernist approaches yield little in the way of fresh insights into the continuing vitality of Greek ways, evident everywhere in an increasingly Westernized world. They say much, however, about the crisis of rationalism in higher education, the failure of intellectual nerve that has petrified into an affectations, mastered in graduate school and maintained for the careerist rewards that follow. Intellectuals fervently embrace a congeries of anti-Western cliches, despite the triumph everywhere of the Western way, or at least the discrediting of any viable alternative to liberal democracy and free enterprise. Ultimately, however, the greatest testimony to the "Greek spirit" so oft derided by the postmodernist or multiculturalist critic is the critic himself, whose life and mind are what they are because of the Greeks. A science whose origins lie among the Greeks has enabled him to survive birth and childhood, grow to maturity well-fed and safe, and live a life of material abundance that people in earlier times would not have dared dream of. He lives free from the arbitrary whims of the priest or aristocratic thug or village big-man, in a polity governed by law and by institutions that follow agreed upon rules and protocols. He is free to speak his mind and to criticize--not just without fear of reprisal, but even with the expectation of prestige and reward--the very culture that makes him what he is. And that is the greatest irony: for the spirit of criticism that among so many academics has fossilized into a pose has its origins nowhere but among the Greeks, who were the first to question critically everything from the gods to political power to their very selves, the first to live what Socrates called "the examined life." No matter what he says, then, the critic of the Greeks has already voted for the Greeks with his feet. As Victor Hanson and John Heath write, "Not one of the multiculturalist classicists really wishes ... to live under indigenous pre-Columbian ideas of government, Arabic protocols for female behavior, Chinese canons of medical ethics, Islamic traditions of church and state, African approaches to science, Japanese ideas of race, Indian social castes, or Native American notions of private property." The purpose of this book is not to dwell on postmodernist academics and their discontents, but rather to recover those core ideas invented by the Greeks that have shaped the world we live in and the assumptions we share about human identity and the human good--in short, the ideas that have created Western civilization. For if we look beyond surface forms, we find that the essential ideals of the West--freedom, individualism, consensual government, and the rational pursuit of knowledge--have their origins among the Greeks. Even Hebraism influenced the West only after it passed through the crucible of Hellenism. But before we identify the unique Greek achievement, we must strip away the modern interpretations that obscure it. I will address the lives of the Greeks and those practices--the treatment of women, sexuality, slavery, and war--most often targeted and distorted by modern critics. The "postmodernist" Greeks are all the rage these days, not just in academe but also in the larger culture, where anti-Hellenism often serves an anti-Western agenda, tracing the alleged sins of the West back to Greek origins. But as we will see, these sins are really the sins of humanity, discoverable in all times and places. Among the Greeks, however, they coexisted with a unique virtue: the recognition that these practices should not be taken for granted but, like all things, be critically examined. --From the Introduction |
