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From, A. Zimmern, Political Thought,
in R.W. Livingstone (ed.), The Legacy of Greece, Oxford University Press, 1921.
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Page 7
As for Thucydides, his knowledge of men, the fruit of patient experience deepened by disappointment, is felt behind every line of his book, as one descries it in the features of his undegenerate descendant Venizelos. Turn now to the moderns. Where in Hobbes or in Bentham, in Locke or Burke or Rousseau, in the individualists or the Socialists, the Hegelians or the anarchists, do we find, until quite recently, a really wide and open-minded attempt to see man as he is? Our ears are assailed by a chorus of catchwords, based on some arbitrary and ephemeral estimate of men's reactions to outward events and institutions. Men argue backwards and forwards as to whether 'human nature can be changed', whether man is guided solely by self-interest, or is only waiting to be set free from sordid cares to be guided solely by his love for his fellows, whether fear or hope, custom or the sense of adventure, form his natural and most compelling spur to action. Meanwhile in the great debate, in Burke's Reflections as in Marx's Capital, in Maine and Mill and Mazzini, as among the hacks who vulgarize their results in text-books and election literature, man as he is has vanished behind a cloud of doctrine or verbiage. We need the simplicity, or cynicism, of the Greeks to recall us to realities.
Let us for a moment imagine Thucydides face to face with the problems of our post-war world of to-day. We have only to read his immortal analysis of the war-mood of Greece, and of the nervous and emotional phenomena which accompanied it, to realize that his first effort would have been to explain us to ourselves. He would not allow us to acquiesce idly in our vague disillusionment, our impatience of foreigners, our suspicion of the idealisms of the Wilson brand. He would trace our discontent ruthlessly to its sources and hold up to our eyes the strange compound of sorrow and fatigue, impatience and disappointment, aspiration and helplessness which makes us what we are. 'The war-mood brought with it many and terrible symptoms such as have occurred and will always continue to occur, so long as human nature remains what it is; though in a severer or milder form, according to the variety of the particular cases.'
Cf. Ancient Greek History and the West * Greek is the higher life of man * Greek History Resources
Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome
A History of Greek Philosophy * Plato Home Page
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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/political-theory.asp?pg=7
