The Greek Way. Edith Hamilton.

The Greek Way
Edith Hamilton
New York: Time, Inc. 1930.

In the dark days after the assassination of John Kennedy, Bob Kennedy read this book. He said it helped him to accept the reality of what happened and to begin to move on to his own presidential bid. RayS.

The ideas in Hamilton's book come in bunches. Although I have not used standard paragraphing in this review, I think the combination of ideas helps to convey not only the ideas but the spirit behind the ideas in visualizing the civilization of Athens. To those who are offended by my failure to paragraph conventionally, I sincerely apologize. I chose to emphasize the spirit as well as the ideas. RayS.

The ancient Greeks faced the ugliest matters with candor. The Greeks created the scientific spirit. They observed the world around them and reasoned on what they observed. The Greeks were protagonists for the mind in an irrational world. Greek art was alive and gives life. In contrast, the Egyptians' interest was in the dead. In India: the outside was illusion; truth was an inner disposition. In India; Buddhism was the triumph of the spirit over the mind.

Greek spirit: rejoice in life; the world is a beautiful place and a delight to live in. Joy, sorrow, exultation, tragedy stood hand in hand in Greek literature. Even in the darkest moments, the Greeks did not lose their taste for life. The tomb represented Egypt; the theater represented Greece. The exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence. Mind ordered chaos. Everything is to be examined and called into question. Philosophy: the love of knowledge. Reason makes man man. The truth of poetry and the truth of science were both true. Partisans don't care about the question or seeking the truth; they only aim to convince. Art unites what is outside of us with what is within. Medieval churches were erected in reverence to Almighty God; the Parthenon expressed the beauty, power and splendor of man.

The Greeks saw the beauty of common things. Hebrew poetry was designed to make people feel, not think; therefore, much reiteration. English poetry: fill the mind with beauty; the Greeks set the mind to work.

No one who desired power was fit to wield it.

To us, poetry and art are superficial decorations of life. The Greeks faced facts; they did not desire to escape from them.

Voltaire: comedy is the follies and foibles of a nation. Aristophanes was more vulgar and indecent than Shakespeare ever thought of being. The extent of freedom of speech in Athens would have been staggering to us. Aristophanes: grand talk that covered empty content. For Aristophanes, indecency was just a part of life.

Socrates: wisdom begins in wonder. Herodotus never judged or condemned. The gods hated the arrogance of power. Thucydides: what has been will be. Greed: passion for power and possession that no power and possession satisfies. Power corrupts men. Great power destroys itself."The arrogance that springs from a consciousness of power was the sin the Greeks hated most." The Spartans were part of a well-functioning machine. Athens: union of individuals; freedom limited by self-control. Poets, dramatists and historians were generals and explorers--combination of mind and action. You can only conquer a country through generosity. Democracy: the average man will do his duty. Willing obedience always beats forced obedience The true leader must undergo more than those he commands. Ideal of free individuals unified by spontaneous service to the common life.

Tragedy: pain transmitted into exultation; contradiction of pleasure through pain; the desire to live in the face of death. True tragedy: each side has a claim on our sympathy. With hopelessness, tragedy departs. Tragedy's preoccupation is suffering; dignity of a soul in agony; feels greatly. Ibsen's plays aren't tragedies; they are dramas with unhappy endings. Anna Karenina is a tragedy; Madame Bovary is not. Through tragedy, an ultimate reality. Aeschylus: presenting suffering and death to exalt and not depress. Tragedy discloses invincible spirit when disaster is irreparable. Fullness in life is in its hazards. Turn defeat into victory. Mankind, meeting disaster grandly, is still undefeated. Pain and error are steps in the ladder of knowledge. He who learns must suffer.

Acceptance of tragedy is not acquiescence or resignation; active, not passive; accepts, seeing clearly that it must be. (RFK)

Sophocles: restraint, detached observer of life. Euripides: saddest but not the most tragic; poet of grief. Modern minds fix on what is wrong, not with what is good in the world they live in. To Euripides, the gods were inferior to human beings. "One thing done to help Athens Euripides had been fitted to do: he could so write as to show the hideousness of cruelty and men's fierce passions and the piteousness of suffering, weak and wicked human beings and move men thereby to compassion which they were learning to forget." The religion of the drama: "Men were set free from themselves...when they all realized together the universal suffering of life."

The Greeks saw things as parts of the whole. "As they looked at human life, the protagonist was not human; the chief role was played by that which embodies the riddle of the world, that Necessity which brings us here and takes us hence, which gives good to one and evil to another, which visits the sins of the father upon the children and sweeps away innocent and guilty in fire and pestilence and earthquake...." "To Aeschylus, Clytemnestra's significance...lay in what was clear for all to see, outstanding, uncomplicated, a great and powerful nature brought to ruin by a hatred within her she could not resist because it was the instrument of fate."

Pain is the most individualizing thing on earth; to suffer is to be alone.

The enforcement of a just law without exceptions, regardless of circumstances, was also absolute injustice.

The Greeks saw what was permanently important in man and united him to the rest of mankind.

Greeks: balance, clarity, harmony and completeness.

The paradox of truth.

The Greeks played; the Romans watched others play.