Will Durant

Our Oriental Heritage (The Story of Civilization, Vol.1) (Our Oriental Heritage)

Stefano Zorzi

Excepting machinery, there is hardly anyching secular in our culture that does not come from Greece. Schools, gymnasiums, arithmetic, geometry, I history, rhetoric, physics, biology, anatomy, hygiene, therapy, cosmetics, poetry, music, tragedy, comedy, philosophy, theology, agnosticism, skepti- cism, stoicism, epicureanism, ethics, politics, idealism, philanthropy, cyni- cisIn, tyranny, plutocracy, democracy: these are all Greek words for cul- tural forms seldom originated, but in many cases first matured for good or evil by the abounding energy of the Greeks. 

All the problems that disturb us today-the cutting down of forests and the erosion of the soil; the eman- cipation 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 confict of religion and science, and the weakening of the supernatural sup- ports 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.

We shall try to see the life of Grecce both in the mutual interplav of : cultural elements, and in the immense hve-act drama of its rise and fall. We shall begin with Crete and its lately resurrected civilization, because appar- ently from Crete, as well as from Asia, came that prehistoric culur Mycenae and Tiryns which slowly transformed the immigrating Achar and the invading Dorians into civilized Greeks; and we shall studv for of momenr the virile world of warriors and lovers, pirates and troubadon that has come down to us on the rushing river of Homer's verse, We shall watch the rise of Sparta and Athens under Lycurgus and Solon, and shall trace the colonizing spread of the fertile Greeks through all the isles of the Aegean, the coasts of Western Asia and the Black Sea, of Africa and Irs Sicily, France, and Spain. We shall see democracy fighting for its life at Marathon, stimulated by its victory, organizing itself under Pericles, and Aowering into the richest culture in history; we shall linger with pleasure over the spectacle of the human mind liberating itself from superstition. cre. ating new sciences, rationalizing medicine, secularizing history, and reach- ing unprecedented peaks in poetry and drama, philosophy, oratory, history. and art; and we shall record with melancholy the suicidal end of the Golden Age in the Peloponnesian War. We shall contemplate the gallant effort of disordered Athens to recover from the blow of her defeat; even her decline will be illustrious with the genius of Plato and Aristotle, Apelles and Prax- iteles, Philip and Demosthenes, Diogenes and Alexander. Then, in the wake of Alexander's generals, we shall see Greek civilization, too powerful for its little peninsula, bursting its narrow bounds, and overflowing again into Asia, Africa, and Italy: teaching the cult of the body and the intellect to the mystical Orient, reviving the glories of Egypt in Ptolemaic Alexandria, and enriching Rhodes with trade and art; developing geometry with Euclid at Alexandria and Archimedes at Syracuse; formulating in Zeno and Epicurus the most lasting philosophies in history; carving the Apbrodite of Melos, the Laocoön, the Victory of Sammothrace, and the Altar of Pergamum; striving and failing to organize its politics into honesty, unity, and peace; sinking ever deeper into the chaos of civil and class war: exhausted in soil and loins and spirit; surrendering to the autocracy, quietism, and mysticism of the Orient; and at last almost welcoming those conquering Romans through whom dying Greece would bequeath to Europe her sciences, her philoso phies, her letters, and her arts as the living cultural basis of our modern world.

Finally he offers a modest care and worship to his dead. He buries them in clay coffins or massive jars, for if they are unburied they may return. To keep them content below the ground he deposits with them modest portions of food articles for their toilette, and clay figurines of women to tend or console them chrough all eternity. Sometimes, with the sly economy of an incipient skeptic he substitutes clay animals in the grave in place of actual food. If he buries a king or a noble or a rich trader he surrenders to the corpse a part of the precious plate or jewelry that it once possessed, with touching sympathy he buries a set of chess with a good player, a clay orchestra with a musician, a boat with one who loved the sea. Periodically he returns to the grave to offer a sustaining sacrifice of food to the dead. He hopes that in some secret Elysium, or Islands of the Blest, the just god Rhadamanthus, son of Zeus Velchanos, will receive the purified soul, and give it the happiness and the peace that slip so elusively the fingers in this earthly quest. 

We do hot know which of the many roads to decay Crete chose; perhaps she took them all. Her once famous forests of cypress and cedar vanished; today two thirds of the island are a stony waste, incapable of holding the winter rains." Perhaps there too, as in most declining cultures, population control went too far, and reproduction was left to the failures. Perhaps, as wealth and luxury increased, the pursuit of physical pleasure sapped the vitality of the race, and wealkened its will to live or to defend itself; a nation is born stoic and dies epicurean. Possibly the collapse of Egypt after the death of Ikhnaton disrupted Creto-Egyptian trade, and diminished the riches of the Minoan kings. Crete had no great internal resources; her prosperity required commerce, and markets for her industries; like modern England she had become dangerously dependent upon control of the seas. Perhaps internal wars decimated the island's manhood, and lefe it disunited against foreign attack. Perhaps an earthquake shook the palaces into ruins, or sorne angry revolution avenged in a year of terror the accumulated oppresions of centuries.

Our Oriental Heritage (The Story of Civilization, Vol.1) (Our Oriental Heritage) quotes

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