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RESTLESS SPIRITS
By Michael Dirda Michael Dirda Email Bio October 25, 1998
7-9 minutes

THE GREEKS AND GREEK CIVILIZATION By Jacob Burckhardt Edited by Oswyn Murray
Translated from the German by Sheila Stern St. Martin's. 449 pp. $27.95 Reviewed by
Michael Dirda, a writer and editor for Book World. Jacob Burckhardt's famous book,
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), disclosed the forces
underlying an entire culture, and imaginatively portrayed the new sense of self
that led to immemorial achievement in the arts, government, philosophy and science.
To this day the "essay" remains a vital work of scholarship, as well as a vastly
entertaining work of popular history, jargon-free, anecdote-rich, available in
paperback. Yet Burckhardt (1818-1897) was more than just a Renaissance man. Indeed,
he has an equal claim to being considered a major scholar of ancient history. Early
in his career he brought out The Age of Constantine the Great (1852), an account of
the transition from classical times to the Christian era. (This period of late
antiquity is currently the hot field in classical studies.) Then, in the second
half of his academic life, he regularly presented a survey course on Greek culture.
There is still some question whether Friedrich Nietzsche, who was briefly his
colleague at the University of Basel, may have taken some ideas for The Birth of
Tragedy from Burckhardt, whom he revered and called "our great teacher" and the
"profoundest student of {Greek} culture now living." Oswyn Murray judiciously
allows both men the joint discovery that "individual contest and the desire to be
supreme lay at the center of early Greek attitudes to the world." Those academic
lectures -- the basis for The Greeks and Greek Civilization -- were never published
during their author's lifetime. When they did appear posthumously (in 1898-1902),
they were attacked on various fronts: They were insufficiently "scientific"; they
were critical of later Athenian democracy; they were composed by a non-specialist.
In fact, Burckhardt was once again practicing Kulturgeschichte, cultural history,
and his principal aim was to grasp, through wide reading and a kind of creative
sympathy (what he called Anschauung), the beliefs, attitudes and soul of the
ancient Greeks. As edited (and abridged) by Murray and translated by Sheila Stern,
the result offers page after page of deeply interesting observations and anecdotes;
as its author said of his book on Constantine, it is "addressed not to scholars but
to thoughtful readers of all classes." Don't look for a standard history of ancient
Greece though; Burckhardt doesn't discuss the origins of the Peloponnesian War or
analyze the political career of Pericles. Instead he reveals how deeply myth
pervades early Hellenic culture; points out how much of everyday life was linked to
a vivid Homeric past; analyzes the crucial religion-like importance of the polis,
or city-state; and, in a chapter of somber majesty, describes the Greek propensity
for melancholy and pessimism. The Greeks, it seems, were haunted by a sense of
doom; they knew that there was no armor against fate: "The hero of myth
scrupulously directs his whole life according to an obscure saying of the gods, but
all in vain; the predestined infants (Paris, Oedipus among others) left to die of
exposure, are rescued and afterwards fulfil what was predicted for them." The
thought of mankind's savior Prometheus, chained to his icy mountain ledge,
constantly reminded the Spartans and Athenians of the sort of treatment they could
expect from the gods. As almost everyone agreed, not to be born was best. Solon,
one of the seven wise men of Greece, even claimed that "Not one mortal is happy;
everyone under the sun is unhappy." The best of all destinies then was to die
young, at a moment of great good fortune, and thus avoid the indignities of old age
or the hammer blows and sorrows of Fate. Following this general assessment of the
Hellenic character, Burckhardt traces the cultural history of the Greeks from the
heroic ethos of the Trojan War, through the "agonal" age of gymnastic competition,
on to the celebrated fifth century of Socrates, and then closes with a survey of
the time of Alexander the Great and the even later Hellenistic era. Whatever the
period, the Greek spirit remains at heart competitive: "Always to be the best and
to outdo the others" -- such is the advice given to Achilles by his father.
Battles, Olympiads, foot races, contests between poets, orators, and tragedians,
barter and trade as a way to wealth (the Greeks disdained manual labor) -- these
are all aspects of the agonal. Alas, an era of celebrities like sexy, horse-racing
Alcibiades succeeds the reign of heroes ("men engaged in war," such as Ajax or
Odysseus, "have no need of jousting"). By the time of Alexander we sink to the
level of Herostratus, who to gain immortal fame simply burned down the temple at
Ephesus. In passing, Burckhardt discusses all sorts of fascinating matters: the
portrayal of women in Euripides, the use of modern-sounding gobbledygook to hide
unpleasant realities -- "Military occupation (phrourai) became protection'
(phulakai)" -- and the shifting civic fortunes of Demosthenes, who at the end of
his life mourned that "if he had foreseen the evils, anxieties, envious
persecutions, slanders and feuding of political life, he would rather have taken
the short road to death." Burckhardt adds, with characteristic dry humor, "In time
all Athenian politicians probably came to feel the same." For after the devastation
of the Peloponnesian War, the Greek world grows increasingly like our own: Personal
ambition replaces devotion to the polis, there are manifold abuses of and by
democratic government, realpolitik drives out nobility of spirit ("Sparta spared
Athens only to prevent Thebes from becoming too powerful"), oratorical skill
becomes the path to power, and the entire citizenry demands "rights, not duties,
and pleasure instead of work." Glory itself soon comes to seem a thing of the past.
As one would expect of a Swiss historian, Burckhardt appraises the changing aspects
of Greek civilization with cool even-handedness, dispassionately seeking to
understand rather than judge or extol. Yet, because of the wealth of matter about
ancient life, his book may be thoroughly enjoyed just for its incidental pleasures,
being something of a classical equivalent to those fact-filled accounts of "what
Jane Austen wore" or "how the Victorians lived." ("Courtiers around Mithridates,"
we learn, "let him cauterize or operate on them, because he liked to play the
doctor.") As a plus, Burckhardt's prose (in English, at least) simply rushes along
without any longueurs. Classicists will debate the book's merits as scholarship --
Murray calls it "the greatest work of nineteenth-century cultural history and the
most convincing portrait of the Greeks in the modern age" -- but for most of us, I
think, it embodies our own contemporary sense of history: Not of Whiggish progress,
but of increasing corruption and decay after a semi-mythical golden age. We may
begin with time, as the Greeks called the love of honor, but we end with
demagogues, crime, nervous merriment, and growing indifference to public life.