Livingstone, On the Ancient Greek Literature

Page 8

Like the writer of the Pentateuch, Homer lived in a world whose emotions were elemental, and writing of this kind came naturally to him. The weight of tradition began to weigh on succeeding ages, but it never became heavy, because the accumulations were small and the world was still comparatively simple. Also its poets and prose writers moved in the fields of action as soldiers and politicians, continually confronting the realities of life, and knowing them as they are, not as they appear in a study. Thus their topics are central, the writing is simple. The subjects of the Oedipus Tyrannus or the Hercules Furens might be called morbid; but not the handling of them by Sophocles and Euripides. The unnatural element is in the background and almost unnoticed; the interest lies in the spectacle of great men in overwhelming disaster—an elemental theme and belonging to the general life of man. The treatment is as simple as in Homer, the figures few, subordinate interests out of sight, the light thrown full on the central tragedy. Hence comes a rare intensity, an immediacy of impression, a sense of nearness to the thing described, which will strike anyone who reads the messenger's speech in the Hercules Furens, or the scene where the identity of Oedipus is discovered, or indeed any great passage in Greek Drama. This simplicity of treatment persists, when with Menander and the Alexandrians we pass into a world more like our own and find literature, still simple in form, but more artistic, more intellectual, more literary, less centrally and fundamentally human.

It would be foolish to demand that modern writers should have the simplicity of Homer or the age of Pericles, or to pretend that they cannot be great without it. Every age must and will have its own literature, reflecting the minds and circumstances of those who write it. Nor is the advantage entirely on the side of the Greeks. A drama of Shakespeare or a novel of Tolstoi, with their long roll of dramatis personae, are more like life than a Greek tragedy with its absence of byplot and its few, central, characters. A modern historian would have recorded and discussed aspects of the history of fifth-century Greece which Thucydides ignores. Modern literature may claim that, with less intensity, it has greater amplitude and a more faithful presentation of the complexity of life. On the other hand the Greeks are free from that dominance of the abnormal which is one danger of modern literature; they do not explore sexual and other aberrations or encourage their readers to explore them. They are also free from that dominance of the unessential, which, in life as in literature, is a more innocent but more subtle and perhaps equally ruinous vice. That is why their simplicity is refreshing and salutary. Porro unum necessarium. In life human beings return from a distracting variety of interests to a few simple things; or, if they do not return, run the risk of losing their souls. In literature, which is the shadow of life, they need to do the same.

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R. W. Livingstone
On the Ancient Greek Literature

Learned Freeware

R. W. Livingstone On the Ancient Greek Literature

Learned Freeware

R. W. Livingstone
On the Ancient Greek Literature