On the Greek Way

A Beautiful Way of Being

[Greetings, friends, from Austin! Next week’s essay will arrive in your inbox from Athens, Greece, as I embark on my long-awaited trip to the origins of philosophy later this week. I’ve always dreamt of spending a meaningful amount of time breathing the same air and occupying the same places as the people who inspired the ideas I love dearly and write about often. Next week, that dream becomes a reality. (If you have been to the area and have any recommendations, please send them my way!)

In the meantime, I find myself getting into the mood and thinking about the Greek Way. What was Greek life like in the Golden Age of Athens? How did they view the world and everything in it? What can we learn from the city that gave birth to much of our roots? What about how they moved in the world has been lost and deserves to be reclaimed?

It’s hard to grasp (and harder to overstate) just how much the happenings in Athens across a few centuries over 2,400 years ago influenced the trajectory of the Western World (and continues to influence the Western individual). Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides… the list goes on. The only intellectual heritage that can rival it is that coming out of Jerusalem and, 500 years later, the teachings of Christ.

I’ve written before and often about the need to re-root ourselves in the ageless wisdom of the past (On Eternal Truth). For the Western individual, this project requires that we return to and study the works of ancient Athens. In her book The Greek Way, Edith Hamilton makes the case for communing with the ancient Greeks this way:

When the world is so storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages. The eternal perspectives are being blotted out, and our judgement of immediate issues will go wrong unless we bring them back. We can do so only, Socrates said in the last talk before his death, ‘when we seek the region of purity and eternity and unchangeableness, where when the spirit enters, it is not hampered or hindered, but ceases to wander in error, beholding the true and divine (which is not matter of opinion.)…’

‘Beyond the last peaks and all seas of the world,’ stands the serene republic of what Plato calls ‘the fair and immortal children of the mind.’ We need to seek that silent sanctuary to-day. In it there is one place distinguised even among the others for sanity and balance of thought—the literature of ancient Greece.¹

Yet it’s not just the literature of ancient Greece that gives us an eternal perspective. It’s their sculptures and their buildings. Their practices and traditions. It’s their way of life.

And it is to the Greek Way of life that we devote the rest of today’s essay.]

Figure: Pericles’ Funeral Oration by Phillip Foltz (1877)

Much of what we think and believe in the Western world is rooted in what happened in a small Greek town across two centuries nearly 2,400 years ago. The years 500 B.C. - 300 B.C. saw the birth of tragedy in the works of the great poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (see On Ancient Greek Tragedy). The same period also watched as the three fathers of philosophy—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—send the Western world down a path that valued wisdom. Pythagoras and Euclid catapulted the worlds of geometry and astronomy forward. Hippocrates provided the foundation for modern medicine and inspired the Hippocratic Oath that doctors in the United States still pledge today.

It’s hard to overstate the influence of Athens on the Western world… Western man became what he is largely due to what came out of Athens and mingled with the ideas of Jerusalem. From Athens sprang democracy, philosophy, art, architecture, theatre, medicine, and scientific thought. Not that those things didn’t exist outside of or before Athens, but the Greeks further perfected them with an eye toward beauty.

Before the ancient Greece of 500 B.C., the place of antiquity with the most extensive written record was Egypt, with its mastery of mathematics and obsession with death. We see this in things like the Book of the Dead and the Pyramids—remarkable works focused on rituals, sacred geometry, and what happens after death.

It’s easy to understand why the Egyptians were obsessed with death. Theirs was a culture where the everyday man existed in a general state of misery, subject, and slave to the ruling whims of the pharaoh and intellects of the priestly cast. In such a state, where man sees little hope of happiness in his outside world, we can understand why they might look to find comfort in one that comes after.

Then comes the Ancient Greeks. Where the Egyptians turned their eyes toward death, the Greeks fixed their gaze (primarily) on life. In the Ancient Greeks, the joy of life started to find its expression in the world. Wielding of the Logos (reason) was no longer limited to the priests, and the flame of individual sovereignty was fanned—man was not only allowed to do his thinking for himself, but he was told that exercising agency and vitality with excellence was his proper aim.

Love of reason and life and delight in the sharpening of mind and body distinguished the Greek Way. Aristotle captures the Greek command to wield reason in Ethics:

If reason is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything. This would seem, too, to be each man himself, since it is the authoritative and better part of him. It would be strange, then, if he were to choose not the life of his self but that of something else. And what we said before' will apply now; that which is proper to each thing is by nature best and most pleasant for each thing; for man, therefore, the life according to reason is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest.²

This sense of autonomy stirred in the Ancient Greeks an energy yet unseen in the world. They were a “high-spirited people full of physical vigor,” living in the “strong air of the mountains,” which provide refuge from despots and “summon a man to live dangerously.”³

In this fertile physical and intellectual environment, democracy blossomed. For the first time in recorded history, citizens were invited to actively participate in the decisions of government. Giving a public funeral oration in 431 B.C. in honor of the Athenian soldiers fallen in the Peloponnesian War, Pericles described the democratic environment of Ancient Athens this way:

Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighbouring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. Its administration favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if no social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition. The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. But all this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens. Against this fear is our chief safeguard, teaching us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly such as regard the protection of the injured, whether they are actually on the statute book, or belong to that code which, although unwritten, yet cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace.⁴ 

Within this world that promoted the energy and vitality of the individual, art and architecture flourished. From the “Golden Age” came masterpieces like the Parthenon and the Acropolis and sculptures that showcased the Greeks’ affinity for aesthetics. “The Parthenon was raised in triumph, to express the beauty and the power and the splendor of man.”⁵

Then came the birth of tragedy as an art form and the annual contests at the Theatre of Dionysus, largely considered the foundation of modern drama (see On Ancient Greek Tragedy). “What was then [and there] produced of art and of thought has never been surpassed and very rarely equaled, and the stamp of it is upon all the art and all the thought of the Western world.”⁶ No sculptures compared to theirs; no buildings were more beautiful; no writings were superior.

Add all this to the fact that the Greeks were the first to play on a grand scale and we see that Athens was where great mind and great body met great spirit. They had games and contests of every kind: races on horse, on foot, and by boat… contests of music, tragedy, and sport… enshrined in the statues many of us are familiar with—the disc thrower, the dancing flutist, the charioteer. If we knew nothing else of the Greeks, their games would reveal much about how much they prized the pursuit of excellence in body and mind.

Speaking of excellence of mind, the Greeks also had an insatiable desire for knowledge. Encapsulated in the phrase “know thyself” above the Temple of Delphi, the Greeks were known for their passion and love of learning. The mining of the word philosophy, philo mixed with sophia illustrates their “love of wisdom.” When Paul comes to Athens and arrives at the Areopagus with the message of the Gospels, the Greeks are quick to entertain Paul and want to hear him out:

So they took Paul and brought him to the Areopagus, where they asked him, ‘May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? For you are bringing some strange notions to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.’ Now all the Athenians and foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing more than hearing and articulating new ideas.⁷

This entertaining of new ideas and relentless pursuit of knowledge is the same strain of being that led the early philosophers of Greece to study and contemplate the heavenly bodies (whose unchanging nature meant, to the Greeks, that they were nearer eternity and the divine — see On the Stars as a Guide). Aristotle took this a step further, arguing that while heavenly bodies may be more “noble,” living things (e.g., animals) also carried the reflection of nature’s design and order—beauty was not just out there in the cosmos, there was everyday beauty waiting everywhere around us.

The glory, doubtless, of the heavenly bodies fills us with more delight than the contemplation of these lowly things, but the heavens are high and far off, and the knowledge of celestial things that our senses give us, is scanty and dim. Living creatures, on the contrary, are at our door, and if we so desire we may gain full and certain knowledge of each and all. We take pleasure in a statue’s beauty; should not then the living fill us with delight? And all the more if in the spirit of the love of knowledge we search for causes and bring to light evidences of meaning. Then will nature’s purpose and her deep-seated laws be revealed in all things, all tending in her multitudinous work to one form or another of the beautiful.⁸

This, then, is what we see and learn from the Greek Way. A life spent seeking beauty and pursuing excellence in all things is a beautiful and excellent life. It is a life that creates the conditions for our souls to flourish as we strive toward the the Summum Bonnum—or highest good. It is a way that creates the conditions for our souls to flourish.

It is a way that leads to life.

—

P.S. If English is a language of decoration, Greek (as used by the ancients at least) was a language that followed the maxim: nothing in excess. “The English method is to fill the mind with beauty; the Greek method was to set the mind to work.”⁹ The Greeks were lovers of beauty with economy. Where Aeschylus is short and to the point after Orestes learns his mother (Clytemnestra) killed his father (Agamemnon), “You brought me to birth and yet you cast me out to misery,” Shakespeare’s English poetry is neither brief nor simple:

—all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage—¹⁰

We see still another example of the Greek’s love of the beautifully simple in Homer’s Odyssey.

When the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, I bade my men on board and loose the hawsers. Then they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars; so we sailed on with sorrow in our hearts, but glad to have escaped death though we had lost our comrades.¹¹

1. Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (“Greek Way”), p. 10.

2. Aristotle, Ethics, Book X, Ch. 7.

3. The Greek Way, p. 27.

4. The Funeral Oration of Pericles in History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides.

5. The Greek Way, p. 51.

6. The Greek Way, p. 13.

7. Acts 17:19-21.

8. Edith Hamilton, p. 37, quoting a poetic transaction of Aristotle’s On the Parts of Animals, Book 1, Pt. 5.

9. The Greek Way, p. 63.

10. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 5.5.

11. Homer, Odyssey, Book IX.