Toynbee: Ancient Greek History and the West

Page 10

(ii) The second is that the historical experience of the Greeks has been more finely expressed than ours. Its expression is in all Greek art and literature—for it is a great mistake to suppose that historical experience is expressed in so-called historical records alone. The great poets of Greece are of as much assistance in understanding the mental history of Greece (which is after all the essential element in any history) as the philosophers and historians. And Greek historical experience or mental history is better expressed in Greek literature than ours is in the literature of modern Europe. Without attempting to compare the two literatures as literatures it can be said with some confidence that the surviving masterpieces of Greek literature give a better insight into the subjective side of Greek history—into the emotions and speculations which arose out of the vicissitudes of Greek society and were its most splendid creations—than any insight into the subjective side of modern history which we can obtain by studying it through modern literature.

(iii) The third point is expressed in the concluding phrase of Aristotle's definition of tragedy (Poetics, vi. 2). 'Tragedy', he says, 'is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude ... through pity and fear effecting the proper καθαρσις {katharsis} or purgation, of these emotions.' (Butcher's translation.) This word καθαρσις {katharsis}--purgation, purification, cleansing, discharge—has been the subject of interminable controversy among scholars, but any one acquainted with Ancient Greek literature who has lived through the war will understand what it means. Certainly the writer found, in the worst moments of the war, that passages from the classics—some line of Aeschylus or Lucretius or Virgil, or the sense of some speech in Thucydides, or the impression of some mood of bitterness or serenity in a dialogue of Plato—would come into his mind and give him relief. These men had travelled along the road on which our feet were set; they had travelled it farther than we, travelled it to the end; and the wisdom of greater experience and the poignancy of greater suffering than ours was expressed in the beauty of their words. In the writer's personal experience that relief was obtained from acquaintance with Greek civilization as expressed in Greek literature. It put one in communication with a different civilization from our own—with people who had experienced all and more than we had experienced, and who were now at peace beyond the world of time and change. Καθαρσις {Katharsis}, then, is the emotional value which is peculiar to the study of a different civilization, and which one cannot get, at any rate with the same intensity, by the study of his own.

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Arnold Toynbee
Ancient Greek History and the West

Learned Freeware

Arnold Toynbee Ancient Greek History and the West

Learned Freeware

Arnold Toynbee
Ancient Greek History and the West