Nationalism and Culture (63 page)

These splendid results of archeological research have, of course, opened up to historiography new and hitherto quite unknown fields, but they have also produced a whole series of new problems, at the solution of which science has thus far worked in vain. Thus, it is today undecided whether there were intimate connections between the Cretan and the Mycenian cultures, or whether we are here dealing with two distinct developments. The question whether the creators of these two cultures should or should not be regarded as Greeks remains quite unsolved. There have been discovered in Crete, it is true, thousands of clay tablets

bearing strange inscriptions j but science has not succeeded in deciphering them, and we wait still the many facts they might tell us. It was proved long ago that other languages were once spoken in Greece. A whole series of place-names, like Athens, Thebes, Corinth, Olympus and Parnassus, are still veiled in darkness j they have no sort of relation to the Greek language—belong, indeed, to no Indo-Germanic speech. Besides, Herodotus tells us that in his travels he visited various cities in which the Pelasgians spoke a peculiar language, which he designated as "barbaric." According to the sagacious inferences of Moritz Hoernes the Cretan-Mycenian culture is, so to speak, the connecting link between the ancient cultures of Egypt and the Orient and that of Greece *—a view that is constantly winning wider acceptance. The fact is that the active intellectual life of Greece first developed in the East, where intercourse with Egyptians, Phoenicians and Persians was most active.

But we are not here dealing with the question of how far Grecian culture was influenced by other cultures, but merely with the fact that it is one of the most splendid and all-embracing cultures that humanity has ever produced. It affected the whole subsequent development of the peoples of Europe more deeply and more permanently than did any other culture, and its remote effects are still becoming clearer and clearer. Before all, there is the kind of thought process which the Greeks brought closer to us than any other people of antiquity. Their peculiar gift for scientific observation and deductive reasoning, often enabling them to recognize facts which were not scientifically established until many centuries later, had much more kinship to our present ways of thinking than had the mysteries of the Egyptians or the Babylonians. Though it is today beyond question that the Greeks got their first knowledge of astronomy and other matters from the Oriental peoples, still they organized this knowledge with a luminous clarity and developed it to a height which no other people in ancient history was able to attain. Their highly developed matihematics is glorious evidence of this. The very fact that among the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Persians, all knowledge about nature was kept in the possession of the priests and Magi, while in Greece science and factual-theoretical thinking were carried on by men who had no connection of any kind with a priestly caste, is characteristic of the general status of intellectual life.

Although only fragments of the ideas of the Grecian thinkers have come down to us, and much.of this only at second hand—principally from Aristotle and Cicero—and the transmission was not without some distortion of the original text, still the little that we now possess gives a clear enough understanding of their intellectual productiveness. Even in the old Ionic nature philosophies one encounters that luminous keenness of observation

^ Kultur der Urzeit. Band II, 1912.

combined with clarity of expression which is so characteristic of the thinking of the Greeks. Thales, Anaximander, Pherecydes, Anaximenes, and others based everything on the study of nature, which gave to their teachings from the very beginning a distinctive stamp. On the basis of the statements of Anaximenes, who was already acquainted with the movements of the constellations and of the polestar, and the ideas of the Pythagoreans, Aristarchus of Samos arrived at last at the conclusion that the earth turns on its axis once every twenty-four hours and that the earth and ail the planets revolve about the sun once every year, while the sun and the fixed stars remain motionless in space. Of course the Greeks lacked any scientific hypotheses such as we have command of today, as a basis for their teachings. But the way in which they constructed for themselves a picture of the universe which quite overshadows everything that for fifteen hundred years the men of a later period believed in as unassailable truth, is very significant.

The ancient sages brought the same interest to the consideration of the changes in matter. The well-known division of matter into four basic elements—earth, water, air and fire—which is ascribed to Empedocles, controlled the ideas of men for many centuries and was at last only overthrown by the results of modern chemistry. The "atomists" took a decisive step toward the construction of a picture of the universe on natural foundations when they tried to establish the nature of matter. Of course, one cannot put the theories of a Democritus or a Leucippus without change on a level with the modern atomic theory of a Dalton or an Avogadroj the ancient lacked almost all the preparatory ideas for such. The thing about their theories, however, that arouses our astonishment even today is the magnitude of the undertaking, the all-embracing character of the concept, at a time when the most basic preliminaries of our present-day attainments in physics and chemistry were completely unknown. Since the atomists attributed every phenomenon to natural causes, they banished from their conception of the universe accident and whim, and, consequently, that manner of thought which tries to find a special purpose in all things. One can, therefore, understand why Bacon so greatly admired Democritus and preferred his doctrines to those of Aristotle and his blind Christian followers.

There have come down to us scarcely four hundred lines in all of Empedocles' great didactic poem about nature. He has been called the earliest forerunner of the Lamarckian-Darwinian theorists and, with the necessary limitations, the characterization may be allowed to stand. Empedocles recognized in love and aversion the two primitive forces which manifest themselves as attraction and repulsion and to whose operation the origin and dissolution of all things may be traced. Men, animals and plants are composed of the same materials, but the mixture is different

for each species. In the course of incalculable ages, by numberless combinations and separations, plants gradually came into existence, then animals. At first nature produced all organs separately: arms without shoulders, heads without necks, and so on; and finally only those forms persisted which were capable of existing independently.

It is even asserted of Xenophanes, the alleged founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, that he tried to explain the fossil imprints of plants and animals in stone as relics of once-living species that had become extinct. Xenophanes recognized also the anthropomorphism that underlies every belief in divinities, and asserted, many centuries before Feuerbach, that in God man reveres his own nature.

But not only the conception of things and the universe, the ways of thinking also early attracted the attention of the ancient thinkers and led them to the conviction that only through observation and experience could they arrive at definite laws and generalizations. This method seemed to them the first requisite for any knowledge whatever; by such a way of thinking the practical sciences, too, would necessarily be brought to fullest fruition. In fact, the geometry of Euclid reached a perfection such that it could survive for over two thousand years without revision of its content or change in its form. Not until the most recent time have new paths been opened up in this field. The same is true of the scientific experiments of Archimedes, who, with his theory of the lever, and so on, first laid the foundation for a science of mechanics.

The same freedom of thought is noticeable in all other fields as well. We encounter it in the philosophic schools of the Sophists, the Cynics, the Megarics and, later, the Stoics, who concerned themselves chiefly with the relations of men to society and its various institutions. From the rapid development of intellectual and social life in the Greek cities there gradually arose entirely new ideas about the causes of ethical feeling and the relations of men to one another. The ancient belief in the gods, which finds in the Homeric poems an expression as childlike as it is natural, was dwindling away. Philosophy had opened new perspectives to the thoughts of men and had shown them how to become the masters of their own destinies. Thus arose a transvaluation of all traditional moral concepts, which was carried, especially by the Cynics and the Sophists, to the utmost limit, till Socrates demonstrated the true basis of all ethical feeling in social communal life. "Virtue," said he, "is not a gift from the gods, but the proved knowledge of what is really good and enables men to live without constraining others, to act justly and to serve, not merely themselves, but the community. Without this a society is unthinkable." Later the Epicureans and the Stoics built further on this basis and developed their theories concerning the ethical consciousness of man.

Besides, a large number of the Greek thinkers busied themselves with

the question of public economy and of the political structure of social life, and individuals among them arrived at most far-reaching conclusions. In this the ancient traditions of a Golden Age, which poetry had kept alive among the people, played a not inconsiderable part and gradually shaped themselves into the doctrine of "natural right" which was so zealously advocated, especially by the Cynics. As a result of these ideas there developed gradually a totally new attitude toward social institutions and toward foreign peoples, which found its ripest expression in the teachings of Zeno, the pupil of the Cynic, Crates, and the Megarian, Stilpos, and culminated in the complete rejection of any exercise of force in society.

There is hardly any other period in history which displayed such a lofty and many-sided intellectual life. But our admiration becomes still greater when we contemplate the array of Hellenic letters. The very oldest of the poetic works of the Greeks that have come down to us, the Iliad and the Odyssey, exhibit a poetic perfection of such strength and beauty that they are properly regarded as the very epitome of epic poesy. Close interweaving of a naively sensuous conception of the universe with the deepest impulses of the human heart, overpoweringly colorful splendor of landscape, intimate intergrowth of the human soul with external nature and, above all, joyous spontaneity in depiction, reach here a height of perfection such as was seldom attained in later times, and only by the very great. The epic was succeeded by the didactic poem, as the inventor of which old Hesiod of Askra was honored. In the place of the wonderful and the adventurous of the ancient epic poetry, there appeared dependence on the native soil, feeling for the useful business of everyday life, deliberate contemplation of things.

The deeply implanted feeling of the Greeks for that most romantic of all arts, music, which finds such charming expression in the ancient myths of Amphion and Orpheus, led to the early development of lyric poetry to an unexampled height. If epic composition limited itself to the graphic depiction of the past, lyric poetry created its matter out of the inner experiences of the poet and wedded the rhythm of the verse to the notes of the lyre and the flute, and so gave utterance to every stirring of the soul. Thus, the poet became an indispensable guest at every public celebration, and cities competed with one another in devices to attract him within their walls, A long line of the most celebrated exponents of lyric poetic art came from the island of Lesbos, which came to be known as the native land of the Ijric, in the narrower sense. There wrote Ter-pondros, the actual creator of Melian poesy, who fused together music and verse with such consummate art that the legend ran that he had found again the lost lyre of Orpheus. The lyric reached its zenith on Lesbos in that noble pair of poets, Alcaeus, the violent hater of tyrants, and the great poetess, Sappho, whose intoxicating love poems are among the

loveliest that were ever written. Arion, too, the singer of the Dionysian festivals and inventor of the dithyramb, hailed from Lesbos. In Anacreon of Taos, the enthusiastic singer of love and wine, the lyric of the ancients found its most graceful and joyous representative. With him wrote Ibycus of Rhegium, Simonides of Ceos and, above all, Pindar of Thebes, whom Quintilian honored as the "prince of lyricists." Pindar was also famous throughout Greece as a writer of scholia. These scholia, or table songs, intended to lend added zest to the pleasures of the table, spread throughout all Hellas.^ And we should here think, too, of the former slave, Aesop, the waggish composer of animal fables, whose humorous tales went from mouth to mouth. Every city had its singers and poets, and there is scarcely another period in history in which, in so small a country and in such a comparatively short time, such an astonishing number of poets and thinkers made their appearance as in the little communities of Greece.

The Hellenes reached the summit of their poetic art in the drama, which developed from the ancient festival plays in honor of Dionysus, or Bacchus. Dramatic poetry had a long line of more or less notable forerunners, of whom Epigenes of Sicyon, Thespis of Icaryon and, especially, Phrynichus, author of the tragedy. The Cafture of Miletus, are oftenest mentioned. But the drama reached its highest perfection after the Persian wars, in the time of Athenian bloom, when Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, a constellation of three, illumined all Hellas with their glory, surrounded by poets like Philocles, Euphorion, Xenocles, Nichomachus and many others. Of the two hundred pieces by Aeschylus only seven have come down to us, among them his great tragedy Prometheus Bound, in which the daring temper, the gigantic power and the magnificence of his ideas are revealed at their strongest. It is said of Sophocles that he wrote far more than a hundred dramas, of which, however, only seven have been preserved. From these we get an idea of the greatness of his genius, which finds its most perfect expression in his Antigone. Of the work of Euripides, the "poet of enlightenment," as he has been called, more has been saved. Of the two hundred dramas that have been ascribed to him nineteen have been preserved to posterity. His art was soberer than that of Aeschylus