The Greek Way

by Edith Hamilton

  As flakes of snow fall thick of a winter’s day, and the crests of the high hills are covered, and the farthest headlands and the meadow grass and the rich tillage of men. Over the inlets and the shore of the gray sea fast it falls and only the on-sweeping wave can ward it off.

  These three instances, from Æschylus, the Hymn to Demeter, and the Iliad are selected almost at random. There is hardly a Greek poem from which such examples could not be taken. The Greeks liked facts. They had no real taste for embroidery, and they detested exaggeration.

  Sometimes, if rarely, the Greek idea of beauty is found in English poetry. Curiously, Keats, than whom no poet delights more in rich detail, has in the Ode to Autumn written a poem more like the Greek than any other in English; the concluding lines are pure Greek:

  Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

  Among the river sallows, borne aloft

  Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

  And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

  The red-breast whistles from a garden croft,

  And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

  The things men live with, noted as men of reason note them, not slurred over or evaded, not idealized away from actuality, and then perceived as beautiful—that is the way Greek poets saw the world.

  It follows that the fancy which must ever roam very far from home, played a humble role in Greek poetry. They never wanted to “splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comet’s hair.” What have not our lover-poets said of their beloved! Earth in her springtime, the starry heavens, sun and moon and dawn and sunset, have not sufficed for them:

  Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air

  Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

  She seemed a splendid angel, newly dressed,

  Save wings, for heaven—

  Everyone can supply quotations for himself.

  The Greek lover-poet kept his Greek sense for fact. Occasionally he would allow himself a brief flight of fancy: “Flower among the flowers, Zenophile is blooming. My girl is better than garlands sweet to smell.” But as a rule he was chary of imagery and of adjectives as well. One epithet or two, at most, contented him: “Golden Telesila,” “Heliodora, delicate darling,” “Demo with the lovely hair,” “Wide-eyed Anticleia,” “A forehead white as ivory above dark-lashed eyes.” Such modest tributes were all that the girls whose beauty inspired the Greek sculptors could win from lovers who had been trained in the Greek way.

  Everywhere fancy travels with a tight rein in the poetry of Greece, as everywhere in English poetry it is given free course. Byron uses no curb when he wants to describe a high mountain:

  —the monarch of mountains.

  They crowned him long ago

  On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds,

  With a diadem of snow.

  When Æschylus has the same thing in mind, he will allow himself a single touch, but no more:

  the mighty summit, neighbor to the stars.

  Coleridge is not using his eyes when he perceives Mont Blanc

  like some sweet beguiling melody,

  So sweet, we know not we are listening to it—

  Pindar is observing Ætna with accurate care:

  Frost-white Ætna, nurse all year long of the sharp-biting snow.

  Coleridge was letting his fancy wander where it pleased. He was occupied with what he happened to feel when he stood before the mountain. Obviously he might have felt almost anything else; there is no logical connection between the spectacle and his reaction. The Greek poet was a precise observer giving a truthful account of a great snow mountain. His attitude was that the mountain is the important thing, not this or that fanciful idea it might suggest to him. He felt limited by the facts; the English poet was completely independent of them.

  Meleager prays for night to come as a Greek lover would do: “Morning star, herald of dawn, swiftly come as the evening star and bring again in secret her whom thou takest from me.” Juliet’s prayer is after the model of English poetry:

  Come, gentle night; come, loving black-brow’d night.

  Give me my Romeo: and when he shall die,

  Take him and cut him out in little stars,

  And he will make the face of heaven so fine,

  That all the world will be in love with night—

  “Gray dawn,” says the Greek lover, “hater of those who love, why risest thou so swift around my bed where but now I nestled close to Demo? Would thou wouldst turn thy fleet steeds backward and be evening, O bearer of the sweet light that is so bitter to me.” Not in that direct and literal fashion does the English lover cry out upon the dawn:

  What envious streaks

  Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.

  Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day

  Stands tiptoe on the misty morning tops—

  The influence of the English Bible has had its share in making the Greek way hard for us. The language and the style of it have become to us those appropriate to religious expression, and Greek religious poetry which makes up much of the lyrical part of the tragedies, perhaps the greatest of all Greek poetry, is completely un-Hebraic. Hebrew and Greek are poles apart. Hebrew poetry is directed to the emotions; it is designed to make the hearer feel, not think. Therefore it is a poetry based on reiteration. Everyone knows the emotional effect that repetition produces, from the tom-tom in the African forest to the rolling sound of “Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us—to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness; and that we should not dissemble nor cloak them—when we assemble and meet together—to ask those things which are requisite and necessary—” Nothing is gained for the idea by these repetitions; the words are synonyms; but the beat upon the ear dulls the critical reason and opens the way to gathering emotion. The method is basic in Hebrew poetry:

  To cause it to rain on the earth where no man is, on the wilderness wherein there is no man.

  Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, thou that didst not travail with child—

  The complete contrast this way of writing offers to the Greek can be seen most clearly in passages where the idea expressed is the same. In the Sermon on the Mount—the style of the New Testament is, of course, formed on that of the Old—occurs the passage:

  Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

  This thought is expressed in the Greek way by Æschylus:

  Men search out God and searching find him.

  Not a word more is added. The poet felt the statement as it stood adequate for the idea and he had no desire to elaborate or ornament it.

  The chorus in the Agamemnon, to which this sentence belongs, is a good instance of Greek brevity and straightforwardness:

  He wills and it is done. One spoke, saying, God cares not when men tread underfoot holy things inviolate. But who spoke thus knew not God. We have seen with our eyes the price they pay whose breath is pride, who dare beyond man’s daring, whose dwellings overflow with riches. The greatest good is not there, wealth enough to keep misery away and a heart wise to use it. Gold is no bulwark to the arrogant, to him who spurns out of sight the great altar of God’s justice. Temptation that persuades to evil, offspring intolerable of far-seeing destruction—when these constrain, there is no remedy. No hiding place can cover sin. It ever blazes forth, a light of death.

  All these ideas are found repeatedly in the Bible and are familiar through many a well-known verse from psalm or prophet, but written as the Hebrew writes they are so long that quotation here is impossible.

  One parallel, however, must be given in full. A familiar and completely characteristic example of the Hebrew way is the description of wisdom in Job:

  But where shall wisdom be found? an
d where is the place of understanding? The depth saith, It is not in me: and the sea saith, It is not with me. It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof. It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire. The gold and the crystal cannot equal it: and the exchange of it shall not be for jewels of fine gold. No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is above rubies. The topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal it, neither shall it be valued with pure gold. Whence then cometh wisdom? and where is the place of understanding?—Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.

  The thought behind these sonorous sentences is simple: wisdom cannot be bought; it is the reward of righteousness. The effectiveness of the statement consists entirely in the repetition. The idea is repeated again and again with only slight variations in the imagery, and the cumulative effect is in the end great and impressive. It happens that a direct comparison with the Greek way is possible, for Æschylus too had his conception of the price of wisdom:

  God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

  This passage is as characteristically Greek as the quotation from Job is Hebrew. There is little repetition, little enhancement, in the statement. The thought that wisdom’s price is suffering and that it is always paid unwillingly although sent in truth as a gift from God, is stated almost as briefly and almost as plainly as is possible to language. The poet is preoccupied with his thought. He is concerned to get his idea across, not to emotionalize it. His sense for beauty is as unerring as the Hebrew poet’s, but it is a different sense for beauty.

  The same difference between the two methods is marked in another parallel where the wicked man is shown praying to deaf ears. In the Bible it runs:

  When distress and anguish cometh then shall they call upon me but I will not answer; then they shall seek me but they shall not find me.

  The Greek expresses the bare idea, not a word more:

  And does he pray, no one hears.

  Socrates and Phædrus once were discussing a certain piece of writing for which the younger man had a great admiration. He insisted that Socrates should feel the same. “Well,” said the latter, “as to the sentiments, I submit to your judgment but as to the style, I doubt whether the author himself would be able to defend it. I speak under correction, but I thought he repeated himself two or three times, either from want of words or want of pains. And he seemed to me ambitious to show that he could say the same thing over in two or three ways—”

  We are lovers of beauty with economy, said Pericles. Words were to be used sparingly like everything else.

  Thucydides gives in a single sentence the fate of those brilliant youths who, pledging the sea in wine from golden goblets, sailed away to conquer Sicily and slowly died in the quarries of Syracuse: “Having done what men could, they suffered what men must.” One sentence only for their glory and their anguish. When Clytemnestra is told that her son is searching for her to kill her, all she says of all she feels, is: “I stand here on the height of misery.”

  Macbeth at the crisis of his fate strikes the authentic note of English poetry. He is neither brief nor simple:

  —all our yesterdays have lighted fools

  The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

  Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player

  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage—

  The English poet puts before his audience the full tragedy as they would never see it but for him. He does it all for them in words so splendid, in images so poignant, they are lifted to a vision that completely transcends themselves. The Greek poet lifts one corner of the curtain only. A glimpse is given, no more, but by it the mind is fired to see for itself what lies behind. The writer will do no more than suggest the way to go, but he does it in such a fashion that the imagination is quickened to create for itself. Pindar takes two lovers to the door of their chamber and dismisses them: “Secret are wise persuasion’s keys unto love’s sanctities.” This is not Shakespeare’s way with Romeo and Juliet. The English method is to fill the mind with beauty; the Greek method was to set the mind to work.

  V

  Pindar

  The Last Greek Aristocrat

  “Pindar astounds,” says Dr. Middleton in The Egoist, “but Homer brings the more sustaining cup. One is a fountain of prodigious ascent; the other, the unsounded purple sea of marching billows.”

  The problem anyone faces who would write about Pindar is how to put a fountain of prodigious ascent into words. Homer’s unsounded purple sea is in comparison easy to describe. Homer tells a great story simply and splendidly. Something of his greatness and simplicity and splendor is bound to come through in any truthful account of him; the difficult thing would be to obscure it completely. The same is true of the tragedians. The loftiness and majesty of their thoughts break through our stumbling attempts at description no matter how little is left of the beauty of their expression. Even translation does not necessarily destroy thoughts and stories. Shelley’s poet

  hidden

  In the light of thought,

  Singing hymns unbidden

  Till the world is wrought

  To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not—

  could be turned into another tongue without a total loss.

  But this kind of poetry is at the opposite pole to Pindar’s. Hopes and fears unheeded by the world he lived in were never his. The light of thought shed no glory of new illumination upon his mind. Such thinking as he did went along conventional, ready-made channels and could have moved no one to sympathy except the most stationary minds of his day. Nevertheless he was a very great poet. He is securely seated among the immortals. And yet only a few people know him. The band of his veritable admirers is and always has been small. Of all the Greek poets he is the most difficult to read, and of all the poets there ever were he is the most impossible to translate. George Meredith with his fountain of prodigious ascent gives half of the reason why. So, too, does Horace, who paints essentially the same picture of him:

  Like to a mountain stream rushing down in fury,

  Overflowing the banks with its rain-fed current,

  Pindar’s torrent of song sweeps on resistless,

  Deep-voiced, tremendous.

  Or by a mighty wind he is borne skyward,

  Where great clouds gather.

  Pindar is all that. One feels “life abundantly” within him, inexhaustible spontaneity, an effortless mastery over treasures of rich and incomparably vivid expression, the fountain shooting upward, irresistible, unforced—and beyond description. But in spite of this sense he gives of ease and freedom and power, he is in an equal degree a consummate craftsman, an artist in fullest command of the technique of his art, and that fact is the other half of the reason why he is untranslatable. His poetry is of all poetry the most like music, not the music that wells up from the bird’s throat, but the music that is based on structure, on fundamental laws of balance and symmetry, on carefully calculated effects, a Bach fugue, a Beethoven sonata or symphony. One might almost as well try to put a symphony into words as try to give any impression of Pindar’s odes by an English transcription.

  We ourselves know little about that kind of writing. It is impossible to illustrate Pindar’s poetry from English poetry. Metre was far more important to the Greeks than it is to us. That may seem a strange assertion. The rhythmic beauty and lovely sound of the verse of countless English poets is one of the characteristics we think most of in them. Even so, it is true that the Greeks thought more of metrical perfections. They would have in their poetry balanced measure answering measure, cunningly sought correspondence of meaning and rhythm; they loved a great sweep of varied movement, swift and powerful, yet at the same time absolutely controlled. The sound is beau
tiful in

  Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang

  and in

  Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave

  Nevertheless Shakespeare and Milton are painters with words more than they are master craftsmen in metrical effects. “A poem is the very image of life,” Shelley said. No Greek poet would have thought about his art like that, hardly more than Bach would about his. The English-speaking race is not eminently musical. The Greek was, and the sound of words meant to them something beyond anything we perceive. Pindar’s consummate craftsmanship, which produces the effect upon the ear of a great sweep of song, cannot be matched in English literature.

  But Kipling has something akin to him. The swift movement and the strong beat of the measure in some of his poems come nearer than anything else we have—if not to Pindar himself, at any rate to what an English reader unversed in the intricacies of musical composition can get from him. Compare