Part 536

Both voices spoke impressively to Greece, and her literature echoes their tones. So long as Greece was free and the spirit of freedom animated the Greeks, so long their literature was creative and genius marked it. When liberty perished, literature declined. The field of Chæronea was fatal alike to the political liberty and to the literature of Greece. The love of liberty was indeed pushed even to an extreme in Greece; and this also was due to the physical configuration of the country. Mountains, it has been said, divide; seas unite. The rise and the long continuance in so small a country of so many cities, having their own laws, constitution, separate history, and independent existence, can only be explained by the fact that in their early growth they were protected, each by the mountains which surrounded it, so effectually, and the love of liberty in this time was developed to such an extent, that no single city was able to establish its dominion over the others. … Everyone of the numerous states, whose separate political existence was guaranteed by the mountains, was actually or potentially a separate centre of civilisation and of literature. In some one of these states each kind of literature could find the conditions appropriate or necessary to its development. Even a state which produced no men of literary genius itself might become the centre at which poets collected and encouraged the literature it could not produce, as was the case with Sparta, to which Greece owed the development of choral lyric. … The eastern basin of the Mediterranean has deserved well of literature, for it brought Greece into communication with her colonies on the islands and on the surrounding coasts, and enabled the numerous Greek cities to co-operate in the production of a rich and varied literature, instead of being confined each to a one-sided and incomplete development. The process of communication began in the earliest times, as is shown by the spread of epic literature. Originating in Ionia, it was taken up in Cyprus, where the epic called the Cypria was composed, and, at the beginning of the sixth century it was on the coast of Africa in the colony of Cyrene. The rapid spread of elegiac poetry is even more strikingly illustrated, for we find Solon in Athens quoting from his contemporary Mimnermus of Colophon. Choral lyric, which originated in Asia Minor, was conveyed to Sparta by Alcman, and by Simonides of Ceos all over the Greek world. But although in early times we find as much interchange and reaction in the colonies amongst themselves as between the colonies and the mother-country, with the advance of time we find the centripetal tendency becoming dominant. {1638} The mother-country becomes more and more the centre to which all literature and art gravitates. At the beginning of the sixth century Sparta attracted poets from the colonies in Asia Minor, but the only form of literature which Sparta rewarded and encouraged was choral lyric. No such narrowness characterised Athens, and when she established herself as the intellectual capital of Greece, all men of genius received a welcome there, and we find all forms of literature deserting their native homes, even their native dialects, to come to Athens. … As long as literature had many centres, there was no danger of all falling by a single stroke; but when it was centralised in Athens, and the blow delivered by Philip at Chæronea had fallen on Athens, classical Greek literature perished in a generation. It is somewhat difficult to distinguish race-qualities from the characteristics impressed on a people by the conditions under which it lives, since the latter by accumulation and transmission from generation to generation eventually become race-qualities. Thus the Spartans possessed qualities common to them and the Dorians, of whom they were a branch, and also qualities peculiar to themselves, which distinguished them from other Dorians. … The ordinary life of a Spartan citizen was that of a soldier in camp or garrison, rather than that of a member of a political community, and this system of life was highly unfavourable to literature. … Other Dorians, not hemmed in by such unfavourable conditions as the Spartans, did provide some contributions to the literature of Greece, and in the nature of their contributions we may detect the qualities of the race. The Dorians in Sicily sowed the seeds of rhetoric and carried comedy to considerable perfection. Of imagination the race seems destitute: it did not produce poets. On the other hand, the race is eminently practical as well as prosaic, and their humour was of a nature which corresponded to these qualities. … The Æolians form a contrast both to the Spartans and to the Athenians. The development of individuality is as characteristic of the Æolians as its absence is of the Spartans. But the Æolians, first of all Greeks, possessed a cavalry, and this means that they were wealthy and aristocratic. … This gives us the distinction between the Æolians and the Athenians: among the former, individuality was developed in the aristocracy alone; among the latter, in all the citizens. The Æolians added to the crown of Greek literature one of the brightest of its jewels-lyric poetry, as we understand lyric in modern times, that is, the expression of the poet's feelings, on any subject whatever, as his individual feeling. … But it was the Ionians who rendered the greatest services to Greek literature. They were a quick-witted race, full of enterprise, full of resources. In them we see reflected the character of the sea, as in the Dorians the character of the mountains. The latter partook of the narrowness and exclusiveness of their own homes, hemmed in by mountains, and by them protected from the incursion of strangers and strange innovations. The Ionians, on the other hand, were open as the sea, and had as many moods. They were eminently susceptible to beauty in all its forms, to the charm of change and to novelty. They were ever ready to put any belief or institution to the test of discussion, and were governed as much by ideas as by sentiments. Keenness of intellect, taste in all matters of literature and art, grace in expression, and measure in everything distinguished them above all Greeks. The development of epic poetry, the origin of prose, the cultivation of philosophy, are the proud distinction of the Ionian race. In Athens we have the qualities of the Ionian race in their finest flower."

_F. B. Jevons, A History of Greek Literature, pages 485-490._

HELLENIC GENIUS AND INFLUENCE: Hellenism and the Jews.

"The Jewish region … was, in ancient times as well as in the Graeco-Roman period, surrounded on all sides by heathen districts. Only at Jamnia and Joppa had the Jewish element advanced as far as the sea. Elsewhere, even to the west, it was not the sea, but the Gentile region of the Philistine and Phenician cities, that formed the boundary of the Jewish. These heathen lands were far more deeply penetrated by Hellenism, than the country of the Jews. No reaction like the rising of the Maccabees had here put a stop to it, besides which heathen polytheism was adapted in quite a different manner from Judaism for blending with Hellenism. While therefore the further advance of Hellenism was obstructed by religious barriers in the interior of Palestine, it had attained here, as in all other districts since its triumphant entry under Alexander the Great, its natural preponderance over Oriental culture. Hence, long before the commencement of the Roman period, the educated world, especially in the great cities in the west and east of Palestine, was, we may well say, completely Hellenized. It is only with the lower strata of the populations and the dwellers in rural districts, that this must not be equally assumed. Besides however the border lands, the Jewish districts in the interior of Palestine were occupied by Hellenism, especially Scythopolis … and the town of Samaria, where Macedonian colonists had already been planted by Alexander the Great … while the national Samaritans had their central point at Sichem. The victorious penetration of Hellenistic culture is most plainly and comprehensively shown by the religious worship. The native religions, especially in the Philistine and Phenician cities, did indeed in many respects maintain themselves in their essential character; but still in such wise, that they were transformed by and blended with Greek elements. But besides these the purely Greek worship also gained an entrance, and in many places entirely supplanted the former. Unfortunately our sources of information do not furnish us the means of separating the Greek period proper from the Roman; the best are afforded by coins, and these for the most part belong to the Roman. On the whole however the picture, which we obtain, holds good for the pre-Roman period also, nor are we entirely without direct notices of this age. … In the Jewish region proper Hellenism was in its religious aspect triumphantly repulsed by the rising of the Maccabees; it was not till after the overthrow of Jewish nationality in the wars of Vespasian and Hadrian, that an entrance for heathen rites was forcibly obtained by the Romans. In saying this however we do not assert, that the Jewish people of those early times remained altogether unaffected by Hellenism. For the latter was a civilising power, which extended itself to every department of life. {1639} It fashioned in a peculiar manner the organization of the state, legislation, the administration of justice, public arrangements, art and science, trade and industry, and the customs of daily life down to fashion and ornaments, and thus impressed upon every department of life, wherever its influence reached, the stamp of the Greek mind. It is true that Hellenistic is not identical with Hellenic culture. The importance of the former on the contrary lay in the fact, that by its reception of the available elements of all foreign cultures within its reach, it became a world-culture. But this very world-culture became in its turn a peculiar whole, in which the preponderant Greek element was the ruling keynote. Into the stream of this Hellenistic culture the Jewish people was also drawn; slowly indeed and with reluctance, but yet irresistibly, for though religious zeal was able to banish heathen worship and all connected therewith from Israel, it could not for any length of time restrain the tide of Hellenistic culture in other departments of life. Its several stages cannot indeed be any longer traced. But when we reflect that the small Jewish country was enclosed on almost every side by Hellenistic regions, with which it was compelled, even for the sake of trade, to hold continual intercourse, and when we remember, that even the rising of the Maccabees was in the main directed not against Hellenism in general, but only against the heathen religion, that the later Asmonaeans bore in every respect a Hellenistic stamp-employed foreign mercenaries, minted foreign coins, took Greek names, etc., and that some of them, e. g. Aristobulus I., were direct favourers of Hellenism,—when all this is considered, it may safely be assumed, that Hellenism had, notwithstanding the rising of the Maccabees, gained access in no inconsiderable measure into Palestine even before the commencement of the Roman period."

_E. Schürer, History of the Jewish People in the Time of Christ, division 2, volume 1, pages 29-30._

HELLENIC GENIUS AND INFLUENCE: Hellenism and the Romans.

"In the Alexandrian age, with all its close study and imitation of the classical models, nothing is more remarkable than the absence of any promise that the Hellenic spirit which animated those masterpieces was destined to have any abiding influence in the world. … And yet it is true that the vital power of the Hellenic genius was not fully revealed, until, after suffering some temporary eclipse in the superficially Greek civilizations of Asia and Egypt, it emerged in a new quality, as a source of illumination to the literature and the art of Rome. Early Roman literature was indebted to Greece for the greater part of its material; but a more important debt was in respect to the forms and moulds of composition. The Latin language of the third century B. C. was already in full possession of the qualities which always remained distinctive of it; it was clear, strong, weighty, precise, a language made to be spoken in the imperative mood, a fitting interpreter of government and law. But it was not flexible or graceful, musical or rapid; it was not suited to express delicate shades of thought or feeling; for literary purposes, it was, in comparison with Greek, a poor and rude idiom. The development of Latin into the language of Cicero and Virgil was gradually and laboriously accomplished under the constant influence of Greece. That finish of form, known as classical, which Roman writers share with Greek, was a lesson which Greece slowly impressed upon Rome. … A close and prolonged study of the Greek models could not end in a mere discipline of form; the beauty of the best Greek models depends too much on their vital spirit. Not only was the Roman imagination enriched, but the Roman intellect, through literary intercourse with the Greek, gradually acquired a flexibility and a plastic power which had not been among its original gifts. Through Roman literature the Greek influence was transmitted to later times in a shape which obscured, indeed, much of its charm, but which was also fitted to extend its empire, and to win an entrance for it in regions which would have been less accessible to a purer form of its manifestation."

_R. C. Jebb, The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry, chapter 8._