Gilbert Murray - Hellenism And the Modern World

E VERY CIVILIZATION has its roots in the past, and Europe has a great civilization of which we Europeans are all extremely conscious, though we hardly know what name to give it. We sometimes say 'Christian', sometimes 'Hellenic'. Of course, historically, we all have millions of ancestors: Europe is the product of multitudes of different nations and histories; yet it is surprising how little permanent effect most of them have had. Allowing for a vigorous influence from the North and a little, mostly unconscious, from the East, our vital inheritance seems really to come from three particular cities: Athens, Jerusalem and Rome.

The Roman influence is everywhere. It is by far the most visible and striking; but in almost every case, when we look beneath the surface, the real moving power is Greek. Our Latin alphabet is really Greek, our Roman Law Greek in origin, our political ideas almost entirely Greek. We even describe the tradition

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as 'Hellenic' because, as the Roman poet says, "Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit": "captured Greece made her rude conqueror captive". Greek culture was moving on much the same lines as Rome, but happened to be more advanced; also, Greece had from the most primitive times an extraordinary command of language: at a stage when other peoples could scarcely mumble, the Greeks were clearly articulate. They could think clearly; they could explain and teach.

In the ordinary regions of scientific knowledge Rome had simply to follow the lead of Greece. She had to learn from Greece her architecture, her field measurements, her seamanship and navigation, her medicine, her geography, geometry, astronomy and mathematics in general. We do not notice our dependence on Greece and Rome in such things, because discoveries in science, however glorious to the discoverer and important to society, are quickly surpassed by further discoveries and made obsolete. But in the region of things that are not ever surpassed, the regions of imagination and aspiration, Greece had the same unquestioned lead. A Roman with a love of poetry in the first or second century B.C. found abundance of magnificent Greek poetry to read, and very little in his own language or elsewhere. When Virgil's genius sought expression,

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it found it in the sort of pastorals that Theocritus wrote, in the poems about fields and crops and bees that Hesiod and Artus wrote, or in some part of the great heroic or romantic tradition expressed by so many Greek poets from Homer to Apollonius. Horace, a great original poet himself, can give no more emphatic advice to a young poet than to turn over his Greek models night and day. When Lucretius wanted to find the true secret of the universe, he could only go to a Greek philosopher for it; when he wanted the proper technique for expressing it in such a way as to move mankind, he went to Greek poets. The philosophy which moved the Romans most was, characteristically, that which was concerned with practice and told men and statesmen what to do. It was ethics, politics and, to some extent, religion. That sort of thing was only to be found in Greek writers. The Latin language had not even the necessary vocabulary, until great masters of language like Cicero invented the suitable words and could proceed to translate and explain. It is interesting to notice that Cicero, the first Roman philosopher, translates from the Greek, but in less than two centuries later the chief Roman philosopher of that time, Marcus Aurelius, actually writes in Greek. Roman civilization, as it became more perfect, became more Hellenic,