754 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13:
978-0671418007
The Story of Civilization is an 11-volume set of books by the
American writer, historian and philosopher Will Durant that focuses on a
philosophical understanding of Western history that was intended for the
general reader. Written over a period of more than fifty years, Volume 2:
The Life of Greece was originally published in 1939, and covers Ancient
Greece and the Hellenistic Near East up until the Roman conquest. The
extraordinary cultural achievements of the ancient Greeks seems to defy explanation,
and Durant really doesn’t try to do so, but this doesn’t take away from their
rightful place at the center of Western cultural achievement. But a major (and
troubling, in light of the West’s current climate of cultural timidity) theme
of this book is when a culture becomes advanced it also risks becoming decadent
and, consequently, ripe for conquest by uncultured barbarians. In Greece’s
case, those barbarians where the Macedonians (in our own day and age, the
barbarians are elitist Leftists). Just ask Durant:
No great nation is
ever conquered until it has destroyed itself. Deforestation and the abuse of
the soil, the depletion of precious metals, the migration of trade routes, the
disturbance of economic life by political disorder, the corruption of democracy
and the degeneration of dynasties, the decay of morals and patriotism, the
decline or deterioration of the population, the replacement of citizen armies
by mercenary troops, the human and physical wastage of fratricidal war, the
guillotining of ability by murderous revolutions and counterrevolutions – all
these had exhausted the resources of Hellas at the very time when the little
state on the Tiber, ruled by a ruthless and farseeing aristocracy, was training
hardy legions of landowners, conquering its neighbors and competitors, capturing
the food and minerals of the western Mediterranean, and advancing year by year
upon the Greek settlements in Italy.
But the strength of Greek culture is evident is that, despite their
conquest by Macedon and then, later, Rome, their culture continued to live,
thrive and survive to the extent that their conquerors adopted their language,
philosophies and ethics, seeing them as superior to their own (one of the
greatest insults a Roman could chuck at another Roman was to say “he has no
Greek”, meaning he was uneducated). Our own, Western culture is still indebted
to these long-lost people, as well, for amongst their many bequeaths are “schools,
gymnasiums, arithmetic, geometry, history, rhetoric, physics, biology, anatomy,
hygiene, therapy, cosmetics, poetry, music, tragedy, comedy, philosophy,
theology, agnosticism, skepticism, stoicism, epicureanism, ethics, politics,
idealism, philanthropy, cynicism, tyranny, plutocracy, democracy: these are all
Greek words for cultural forms seldom originated, but in many cases first
matured for good or evil by the abounding energy of the Greeks”.
For a one-volume study of a long-dead yet still-vital culture, The
Life of Greece is surprisingly complete as we get it all in its 700-or-so
pages: the governments of the city-states, their strictures on architecture,
their achievements in sculpture, their impact on literature. And, of course,
philosophy, which was right in Durant’s wheelhouse and with which this second
volume really shines: Durant has written a complete survey of the major Greek
philosophical movements, from Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Sages of
Greece (circa 600BC), to Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoics
(circa 3rd Century BC). Durant wrote in the
preface: “My purpose is to record and contemplate the origin, growth, maturity,
and decline of Greek civilization from the oldest remains of Crete and Troy to
the conquest of Greece by Rome…Excepting machinery, there is hardly anything
secular in our culture that does not come from Greece…We shall try to see the
life of Greece both in the mutual interplay of its cultural elements, and in
the immense five-act drama of its rise and fall”. And by God we do, for many of
the things that so tortured and perplexed the Greeks torture and perplex us, as
well:
All
the problems that disturb us today – the cutting down of forests and the
erosion of the soil; the emancipation of woman and the limitation of the
family; the conservatism of the established, and the experimentalism of the
unplaced, in morals, music, and government; the corruptions of politics and the
perversions of conduct; the conflict of religion and science, and the weakening
of the supernatural supports of morality; the war of the classes, the nations,
and the continents; the revolutions of the poor against the economically
powerful rich, and of the rich against the politically powerful poor; the
struggle between democracy and dictatorship, between individualism and
communism, between the East and the West – all these agitated, as if for our instruction,
the brilliant and turbulent life of ancient Hellas. There is nothing in Greek
civilization that does not illuminate our own. We shall try to see the life of
Greece both in the mutual interplay of its cultural elements, and in the
immense five-act drama of its rise and fall. We shall begin with Crete and its
lately resurrected civilization, because apparently from Crete, as well as from
Asia, came that prehistoric culture of Mycenae.
All of this – ALL OF THIS – is with us still, as Greece itself, but
in our current climate of cultural self-hatred and historical self-abasement,
will we hold onto Greece?
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