VII Epilogue
ἡ πόλις ἡμῶν... τὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ὄνομα πεποίηκε
μηκέτι τοῦ γένους ἀλλὰ τῆς διανοίας δοκεῖν εἶναι.
Isocrates.
It was, according to Isocrates, the fruit of the activity of Athens that Hellas had ceased to be a geographical expression and had become the definition of an intellectual standpoint. In that very true sense Greek history cannot close. It falls into chapters which are ever to be continued as soon as man begins to think again. Whosoever from the beginning of his action already contemplates its final end and adapts his means thereto in earnest simplicity, whosoever knows that pride and vain ostentation will assuredly bring its own punishment, of whatever land or age he may be, he is a Greek. In that sense we cannot close Greek history. Greece, as Juvenal said in a very hackneyed phrase, vanquished the Roman, her barbarian conqueror, and the Roman took up the mission of extending Hellenism over the West. The history of Roman civilisation only begins in the second century, when Rome was first brought into contact with Greece. Elsewhere I hope we shall see how Greek culture permeated everything at Rome after that, supplied her with art and literature, taught her philosophy, overlaid and almost destroyed her native religion, and even wrote her history. Losing Hellas, Europe sank into ages of darkness: recovering her, the European nations began to think again. Shakespeare we trace through the Latins to Menander, Milton through Vergil to Homer and Theocritus, Bacon to Aristotle, Sir Thomas More to Plato, and so with the others. So that every one who reads books or enjoys art in Europe to-day is indirectly borrowing from Greece.
Moreover, it is fairly obvious that Greece has not ceased to exist as a geographical expression. The more we study modern Greece, the more we are convinced that the Hellenic race is by no means extinct. Greece was, it is true, conquered by the Romans in 146 B.C. They had been forced partly by the aggression of Pyrrhus and partly by the expansion of their own empire to take some action in the Eastern Mediterranean. There they found themselves physically as men among children, intellectually as children among men. Nothing is more striking than the almost reverent spirit in which the Roman soldiers first moved about among the old cities of Greece. But the Greeks were impossible neighbours, and at last, after infinite forbearance, the Romans were compelled by their masculine sense of order to take the responsibility of controlling Greece. Corinth was destroyed for a warning, Macedonia made a province. But cities like Athens and Sparta were left to govern themselves, though, of course, their foreign policy was subject to Roman control. Athens still continued to talk and write and teach. She became a sort of university town to which noble Romans were sent for their studies. Even when Achaia was added to the list of Roman provinces in the days of Augustus it did not mean that Athens ceased to be a free city. In the days of the Empire the more cultured emperors, like Nero and Hadrian, loved to pass their time in Greece, in the attempt to share in her intellectual prestige. So we have Nero performing in the Olympian Games, and Hadrian rebuilding a large part of Athens. It was Hadrian who attempted to complete the gigantic temple of Olympian Zeus begun by Peisistratus. The Athenian schools of philosophy continued to attract strangers from all parts of the world, until Christianity began to see its bitterest foe in the Stoics, who taught many of its doctrines. Julian the Apostate dreamed for a moment of reviving Greek philosophy, so as to overcome Christianity by borrowing many of its doctrines, but at last a decree of Justinian closed the Athenian schools of philosophy in A.D. 529. Meanwhile clouds of barbarian invaders were continually passing over the land. The Goths ravaged Greece under Alaric. The Slavs conquered and peopled a great part of it without, in the long run, materially altering its nationality. Norman invaders conquered it, and not long before our own conquest Harold Hardrada entered Athens in triumph. Then came the Latin crusaders and Venetians. All through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there were Frankish Dukes of Athens. In 1456 the Caliph Omar conquered her, and thenceforth, with a temporary period of Venetian triumph, the Turks ruled Greece with a heavy hand until the glorious War of Independence, in which Lord Byron played a part of prophet and warrior. In 1830 Greece was declared an independent kingdom, and shortly afterwards provided with a youthful European king from Bavaria. The experiment was not a success. The Greeks succeeded in getting rid of one king, and Europe obligingly furnished another from her inexhaustible stock of younger sons. Even yet the bed of a Greek king is not altogether a bed of roses. In 1897 the little kingdom plunged into a war with her big neighbour, Turkey, for which she lacked resources and organisation. Her flanks were turned, her armies miserably routed, and she lost a great deal of the credit she had won in the War of Independence. But her true element is still, as it was in ancient times, the sea.
We have already seen that Greek art still crops out in occasional masterpieces down to imperial times. With literature this is still more the case. Long after the best of Roman literature was over and done with, Greece kept putting forth new products. The Greek novel, for example, in Lucian and Heliodorus is something entirely fresh and of great importance in literary history. The biographies of Plutarch are a new departure; so are the guide-books of such writers as Pausanias.
The case of Lucian, in particular, shows that a Syrian of the second century A.D. could write in pure Attic Greek. In him we have the prototype of Swift and Sterne, a brilliant mocker and a creative genius. With him Greek literature expired laughing.
It only remains to glance at the decadence of Greek art and to see what form it took. The Romans, when they plundered and sacked Corinth, transported enormous quantities of plunder to Rome, and a taste for Greek art quickly sprang up among the wealthy senators. To meet their tastes, Greek artists were set to work. Some of their works, in the form of portraits, we shall meet again when we come to deal with Rome. Greek architects also evolved a Græco-Roman style, in which they blended, sometimes with the happiest results, massive Roman strength with Greek elegance and grace. In minor crafts such as gem-engraving Greek artists continued to produce exquisite work for the Roman market. The famous Portland Vase is a good example of this sort of work.115 Although the material is glass, it is genuine cameo-engraving, and must have involved infinite labour. The material of the vase was composed of two layers of glass, white over dark blue, and then the white was ground away by hand, so as to leave the design in white upon the blue background, a scheme of decoration imitated with great success by the Wedgwood artists. It is one of the tragedies of the British Museum that this priceless treasure was smashed to pieces by an insane visitor. It has, however, been repaired with great skill. In the Greek cities of South Italy where the taste of the patrons remained Greek we find preserved, as at Pompeii and Herculaneum, works thoroughly Greek in all branches of art, produced at various dates down to the first century A.D. Given good taste in the patron, Greek artists did not cease to be capable of fine art.
But every national virtue has its characteristic defect which will come to the surface as soon as the stimulus of national self-respect is removed. A strong conquering breed is apt to become cruel and vicious when it loses the power to conquer. A sensitive, artistic people is prone to sensuality and weakness in its latter days. An industrous commercial race degenerates into sordid greed. That is why a loss of national pride is such a serious loss in history. A characteristic virtue of the Greeks was, as we have seen, their supple facility of intellect, their adaptability to environment. This made them, in the days of their decline, sink readily to the position of flatterers and parasites. We find this character attached to the “Hungry Greekling” of Juvenal’s days. In history we meet him as the hanger-on of aristocracy or the crafty tool of emperors. The Romans started as a virile race of warriors, and ended as brutal gluttons with a craving for sensationalism, which the Greeks were only too ready to supply. Hence we get Græco-Roman art in the worst sense of the term, wretched stuff made by sneaks to satisfy the taste of bullies. Most of the sculpture galleries of Europe can supply examples. The Vatican and the Naples Museum are full of them. In the nineteenth century, when the taste of Europe had sunk to its lowest depth of artificiality, work of this kind appealed very strongly to critics. It is only fair to them to say that they had not much opportunity of knowing better, since genuine Greek work of the best periods was mostly lying below the surface unexcavated. Out of this mass of inferior material critics picked one or two examples for admiration. Even great men like Lessing and Winckelmann based excellent maxims of criticism on these rotten foundations. The “Laocoön,” a sensational work by Rhodian sculptors of the first century B.C., was taken by Lessing as the text of his great discourse on the proper functions of the arts. We, on the other hand, can see that this tangled triangle of writhing forms expressing violent emotion of pain and terror has a theatrical and sensational character abhorrent to the very spirit of Greek moderation. Exactly the same is true of the two Farnese masterpieces, the Bull116 and the Hercules. Such facts as these give one cause to ponder on the mutability of taste and the fallibility of artistic criticism. Restlessness, the symptom of nerves overwrought, is a feature of decadence, which we can observe in the late Greek vase-paintings. The spaces are covered with trivial ornament, the drawing is slack, the sole aim is prettiness. The vigour of the composition is frittered away upon trivial details. In short, the name of the disease from which Greek art was to perish is Vulgarity. Idealism without romanticism was the secret of Greek art at its best. When we find romance without ideals we have reached the nadir.