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# 2025-06-02 - The Lessons of the Past by Edith Hamilton | |
I am posting an abridged version of an essay I found in the | |
little free library. | |
> Edith Hamilton is among the world's leading authorities on the | |
> Graeco-Roman civilization, a study which has occupied her for more | |
> than half her years (she was born in 1867). Her "The Greek Way" | |
> and "The Roman Way" have become classics in the field. She | |
> received her advanced education at Bryn Mawr College and the | |
> universities of Leipzig and Munich. She was headmistress of the | |
> Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore from 1896 to 1922. In 1957, in | |
> recognition of her devotion and scholarship, the Greek government | |
> made her an honorary citizen of Athens. | |
Is there an ever-present past? Are there permanent truths which are | |
forever important for the present? Today we are facing a future more | |
strange and untried than any other generation has faced. ... In such | |
a position can we afford to spend time on the past? That is the | |
question I am often asked. | |
I urge it without qualifications. We have a great civilization to | |
save--or to lose. | |
The point which I want to make is... that Socrates found on every | |
street corner and in every Athenian equivalent of the baseball field | |
people who were caught up by his questions into the world of thought. | |
To be able to be caught up into the world of thought--that is to be | |
educated. | |
There is today a clearly visible trend toward making it the aim of | |
education to defeat the Russians. That would be a sure way to defeat | |
education. Genuine education is possible only when people realize | |
that it has to do with persons, not with movements. | |
When I read educational articles it often seems to me that this | |
important side of the matter, the purely personal side, is not | |
emphasized enough; the fact that it is so much more agreeable and | |
interesting to be an educated person than not. The sheer pleasure of | |
being educated does not seem to be stressed. Once long ago I was | |
talking with Professor Basil L. Gildersleeve of Johns Hopkins | |
University, the greatest Greek scholar our country has produced. He | |
was an old man and he had been honored everywhere, in Europe as well | |
as in America. He was just back from a celebration held for him at | |
Oxford. I asked him what compliment received in his long life had | |
pleased him the most. The question amused him and he laughed over | |
it, but he thought too. Finally he said, "I believe it was when one | |
of my students said, 'Professor, you have so much fun with your | |
mind.'" Robert Louis Stevenson said that a man ought to be able to | |
spend two or three hours waiting for a train at a little country | |
station when he was all alone and had nothing to read, and not be | |
bored for a moment. | |
What is the education which can do this? What is the furniture which | |
makes the only place belonging absolutely to each one of us, the | |
world within, a place where we like to go? | |
[The Greeks] had a passion for thinking things out, and they loved | |
unclouded clarity of statement as well as of thought. The Romans | |
did, too, in their degree. They were able to put an idea into an | |
astonishingly small number of words without losing a particle of | |
intelligibility. | |
Just what the teaching in the schools was which laid the foundation | |
of the Greek civilization we do not know in detail; the result we do | |
know. Greek children were taught, Plato said, to "love what is | |
beautiful and hate what is ugly." When they grew up their very pots | |
and pans had to be pleasant to look at. It was part of their | |
training to hate clumsiness and awkwardness; they loved grace and | |
practiced it. "Our children," Plato said, "will be influenced for | |
good by every sight and sound of beauty, breathing in, as it were, a | |
pure breeze blowing to them from a good land." | |
All the same, the Athenians were not, as they showed Socrates when he | |
talked to them, preoccupied with enjoying lovely things. The | |
children were taught to think. | |
Basic to all Greek achievement was freedom. ... At Marathon and at | |
Salamis overwhelming numbers of Persians had been defeated by small | |
Greek forces. It had been proven that one free man was superior to | |
many submissively obedient subjects of a tyrant. Athens was the | |
leader in that amazing victory, and to the Athenians freedom was | |
their dearest possession. Demosthenes said that they would not think | |
it worth their while to live if they could not do so as free men... | |
Freedom of speech was the right the Athenians prized most and there | |
has never been another state as free in that respect. | |
But those free Greeks owned slaves. What kind of freedom was that? | |
The question would have been incomprehensible to the ancient world. | |
There had always been slaves; they were a first necessity. The way | |
of life everywhere was based upon them. They were taken for granted; | |
no one ever gave them a thought. The very best Greek minds the | |
thinkers who discovered freedom and the solar system, had never an | |
idea that slavery was evil. It is true that the greatest thinker of | |
them all, Plato, was made uncomfortable by it. He said that slaves | |
were often good, trustworthy, doing more for a man than his own | |
family would, but he did not follow his thought through. The glory | |
of being the first one to condemn it belongs to a man of the | |
generation before Plato, the poet Euripides. He called it, "That | |
thing of evil," and in several of his tragedies showed its evil for | |
all to see. A few centuries later the great Greek school of the | |
Stoics denounced it. Greece first saw it for what it is. But the | |
world went on in the same way. The Bible accepts it without comment. | |
Two thousand years after the Stoics, less than a hundred years ago, | |
the American Republic accepted it. | |
A reflective Roman traveling in Greece in the second century A.D. | |
said, "None ever throve under democracy save the Athenians; /they/ | |
had sane self-control and were law-abiding." He spoke truly. That | |
is what the Athenian education aimed at, to produce men who would be | |
able to maintain a self-governed state because they were themselves | |
self-governed, self-controlled, self-reliant. Plato speaks of "the | |
education in excellence which makes men long to be perfect citizens, | |
knowing both how to rule and be ruled." Pericles said "We do not | |
allow absorption in our own affairs to interfere with participation | |
in the city's; we yield to none in independence of spirit and | |
complete self-reliance, but we regard him who holds aloof from public | |
affairs as useless." They called the useless man a "private" | |
citizen, /idiotes/, from which our word "idiot" comes. | |
They were free because of willing obedience to law, not only the | |
written, but still more the unwritten, kindness and compassion and | |
unselfishness and the many qualities which cannot be enforced, which | |
depend on a man's free choice, but without which men cannot live | |
together. | |
The Athenians in their dangerous world needed to be a nation of | |
independent men who could take responsibility, and they taught their | |
children accordingly. They thought about every boy. Someday he | |
would be a citizen of Athens, responsible for her safety and her | |
glory, "each one," Pericles said, "fitted to meet life's chances and | |
changes with the utmost versatility and grace." To them education | |
was by its very nature an individual matter. | |
That kind of education is not geared toward mass production. It does | |
not produce people who instinctively go the same way. | |
The Greeks can help us, help us as no other people can, to see how | |
freedom is won and how it is lost. Above all, to see in clearest | |
light what freedom is. [Greece] rose because there was in the Greeks | |
the greatest spirit that moves in humanity, the spirit that sets men | |
free. | |
Plato put into words what that spirit is. "Freedom" he says, "is no | |
matter of laws and constitutions; only he is free who realizes the | |
divine order within himself, the true standard by which a man can | |
steer and measure himself." True standards, ideals that lift life | |
up, marked the way of the Greeks. | |
> The time for extracting a lesson from history is every at hand for | |
> them who are wise. --Demosthenes | |
Edith Hamilton | |
The Greek Way | |
Echo of Greece | |
See also: | |
Greece and The East by William Stearns Davis | |
A Day In Old Athens by William Stearns Davis | |
A Victor of Salamis by William Stearns Davis | |
tags: article,history,political | |
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