GREEK LITERATURE

The Greeks have been recognized as an exceptional people

and they are known in history as the noble Greeks. Because
of their attainments in literature, painting, sculpture,
architecture and philosophy, the term “the glory that was
Greece is particularly applicable to them.

Out of the darkness the barbarism that prevailed in ancient

times when absolute despots governed their people
capriciously, cruelly, and ruthlessly, when the governed were
a wretched and miserable populace, when superstition and
ignorance was rampant, the cities of Greece arose. These
cities became centers of white-hot intellectual energy, and
their inhabitants pursued beauty in any form and developed
a passion for democracy in its truest sense.

Their neighbors did not understand the Greeks and their way
of life. Herodotus, the Great Greek historian, was a great
traveler. When he was in Persia, the Persian queen, Atossa,
asked him, “Who are the Greeks?”

“I am a Greek,” Herodotus answered. “When you look at me

you see a Greek.”

“What master do they obey then?”, the queen ask again.

“The Greeks have no master; they are not slaves,” was the
bold answer of Herodotus.

“Whom do they obey then?”, the queen insisted.

“They obey the laws!”

“The laws? What are the laws? They have no master. What a
strange people,” the queen shook her head.

GREEK ART
The Greeks produced a civilization which in many ways has
never been surpassed in the world. Of what they have
accomplished in art very little remains, and we are not even
sure that what we have is the best. But the pieces which
remain have aroused the admiration and astonishment of
the world. There is no sculpture comparable to theirs; there
are no buildings more beautiful and more admirable than
those they built; there are no literary pieces superior that
theirs. In fact in literature they are all but supreme- no epic
poet to compare with Homer, no lyric poet to equal Pindar.
The Greeks cultivated prose rather late, but history has no
greater exponent than Herodotus and Thucydides; and there
is no prose, aside from the bible, more poetic than that of
Plato. Of the four great tragic writers the world has
produced, three are Greeks; the fourth is Shakespeare. Of
their painting nothing remains but we have the statement of
a contemporary commenting on a painting of Helen of Troy
by Polygnotus: “In her eyes, one could read the story of the
Trojan War!”

How different was Greek art from the known forms of art all
over the world in those times and even now! Egypt produced
an art that was unnatural, stiff in its fixity of expression. The
artists were unable to work with freedom. Indian art, on the
other hand, was absolutely free, but the results were
strange. Consider the famous statue of Siva, an Indian god,
represented as performing an intricate dance. The god
stands poised, arrested in movement; the movements of the
dance are represented by many heads and arms curving
from the body to denote the rhythm of the dance.

Now consider a Greek statue of Hermes, the messenger of

the gods. The statue represents a perfectly beautiful human
form, recognizably a human being. Every detail shows an
exact knowledge of the human body. There is nothing to
denote that he is a god, no halo around his head, but his
absolute beauty is the mark of his divinity.
To understand the Greeks we must try to recapture their
experience to ask what it did for them, and what it cost.
Such a search cannot be entirely successful, for to probe a
distant past is extremely difficult.