Facts You Should Know About the Classics

Joseph McCabe

HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS GIRARD, KANSAS

Copyright, 1927, Haldeman-Julius Company

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

PREFACE

This Little Blue Book is not for students of literature, but just for folks who have not time or opportunity to read the works of the great writers of earlier days. Every thoughtful man or woman would like to know a little about them. Almost every day you read or hear an allusion to Homer or Plato, Vergil or Horace, Chaucer or Dante, and so on. You would like, if it is possible to tell you in a few simple pages, to know who these men were, in what circumstances and on what themes they wrote, what special interest or distinction the most famous plays or poems or books of each of them possesses.

By the classics we mean in literature, not merely the old Greek or Roman works, but the literary masterpieces of every age which live forever on account of their supreme art or interest. It is not good to be entirely ignorant about them: it is easy and pleasant to have a few intelligent ideas about them. About a hundred writers of the last three thousand years have earned this kind of immortality, and we will take them in order. Hence, although this small book cannot be a history of literature—I may provide one later—it will give a kind of sketch of that history and the place in it of each of the great writers who is described.

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FACTS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THE CLASSICS

CHAPTER I

CLASSICS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

Men learned the art of writing, or began to express their ideas to each other by (at first) drawing little pictures of objects, about six thousand years ago, but none of the works which we call “classics” goes back to more than three thousand years ago. We should not expect to find many writings surviving from a date earlier than that, and as a matter of fact, except for business purposes writing was chiefly left to the priests. From ancient Egypt alone we have a few specimens of small books written by laymen; especially the Maxims of Ptah-Hotep, a very interesting series of counsels and reflections on conduct by a middle-class Egyptian of four thousand or more years ago.

This, however, is not great literature. For the older civilizations we have to consider only their religious literature, as certain collections of ritual and other sacred writings which, on the analogy of the Hebrew collection, we may call their “bibles.” The oldest is what we call The Book of the Dead of the Egyptians, parts of which go back thousands of years before Christ. It is not what we should describe as fine literature, and, as it is mainly concerned[Pg 8] with the passage of the dead to another world, which to the Egyptians meant a tiresome story of devils and spells and magic, only scholars or special students read it today.

There is nothing corresponding to this in Babylonia, where men did not take an acute religious interest in death, but amongst the mass of writings (or inscribed clay tablets) that we have found we have fragments of a remarkable semi-sacred romance, now called The Story (or Epic) of Gilgamesch, into which are woven the early religious traditions of a creation, deluge, garden of bliss, etc. In substance the story goes back five or six thousand years.

The remaining “bibles” were all written after 1000 B. C., and at least in some of their pages they are really fine literature. The Old Testament, which is certainly a literary classic in its English translation, and has some notable poetry in the Hebrew, was written, as we have it, in the fifth century before Christ, but the pieces of which it was then composed spread over several centuries before that date.

The Persian sacred book, The Avesta, is a similar compilation of religious traditions and writings, covering much the same period. But it had not, like the Old Testament, the advantage of being translated in an age when men still wrote poetical English, and it is only of historical and religious interest, as an account of the high ideals and remarkable beliefs of the ancient Persians.

The oldest Hindu writings, The Vedas, mainly a collection of hymns, belong to the same[Pg 9] period; the oldest parts (especially of the Rig Veda) may go back to 1000 B. C. There is some fine poetic writing in the earlier parts, but in the later this is succeeded by very abstract and subtle speculation which few would care to read.

The Chinese collection is called the King (which means “books” or “bible”), and it includes what are known as the Chinese classics. These are five books written by Kung-fu-tse (Confucius) and his disciples in the sixth century B. C. They are included, with the Persian and Hindu books, in the collection of translations known as The Sacred Books of the East. A good deal of early Buddhist literature also is included. But the chief interest of all these works is historical and religious, not literary, and we must pass on to Greece for the earliest works which live because of their splendid literary qualities.

§1. GREEK LITERATURE

The works of ancient Greece which we have are only a tithe of the works written even by the greater Greek writers, yet almost every surviving play or poem is treasured as a classic. If you draw up a list of the fifty greatest writers from the dawn of civilization to the nineteenth century, you will find that at least ten of them are Greeks. However, it was only certain parts of Greece which produced these wonderful artists, and these regions, taken together, never had a population as large as that of Chicago.

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But we cannot here go into the historical reasons for their brilliance. It is enough for my purpose to say that the earliest Greeks were semi-barbarians who filtered down into what we call Greece from the north between 2000 and 1000 B. C. When they reached the Mediterranean they came into touch with the old civilizations and were refined. Large numbers of them crossed to Asia Minor, where they mingled with the polished Cretans and Persians, and it is here that the first great Greek poets and thinkers wrote.

Homer, their first poet, was regarded by the Greeks themselves in their most learned days as their greatest poet, a unique classic; and he is still one of the greatest poets of all time. Whether there ever was an individual named Homer is disputed. Most modern scholars have held for a long time that the poems to which his name is attached were slow growths contributed to by different poets of the tenth century B. C. But this is not at all settled, and many again think that Homer was an individual Greek of wonderful poetical power in or about the tenth century B. C.

His immortal works are the Iliad and the Odyssey. These are two long “epic” poems; that is to say long poems to be recited, not sung to music, telling of glorious deeds and romantic adventures. The first deals with the closing days of the ten-year siege of the city of Troy (or Ilium) in Asia Minor by the early Greeks. The hero is Achilles, the Greek prince, who sulks in his tent after a quarrel about a beautiful girl-captive, and is at last stung into[Pg 11] action by the reverses of the Greeks and leads them on to the final destruction of Troy. Another of the chief Greek princes was Ulysses, and the Odyssey describes his wanderings over the ancient world after the fall of Troy.

Exploration in Asia Minor has discovered the remains of the city of Troy, and there is now no doubt that early Greek princes did bring their men overseas and destroy it. In the south of Greece we have found the palaces and graves of these princes, their inlaid bronze swords and golden death-masks, and we recognize the vivid realism of Homer. This great victory of the early Greeks would be the chief theme of the bards at every princes’ court, and all sorts of picturesque legends would be added to the truth. Homer weaves all these together in two great epics with masterly skill. You can see the heroes, sharply and vividly sketched, fighting their great duels, the scenes in camp and court, the dawn or the blaze of the sun on the blue Mediterranean. Much of this powerful and beautiful description is lost in translation, though the old translations by poets like Pope, Cowper and Bryant, are very fine, and the current translations, chiefly by Andrew Lang and collaborators, are excellent. Homer is next to Shakespeare, who surpasses him and all others in beautiful imagery and allegory.

The epic poem remained for two or three centuries the chief writing of the Greeks. They were then royalists with numbers of small courts of chiefs or princes where these story-poems[Pg 12] were recited. As the race advanced in civilization, “lyric” poetry (short poems sung to the accompaniment of the lyre) developed. The most interesting writer of these is the female poet Sappho, who lived in the island of Lesbos in the seventh century. Between Sappho and Homer was the great poet Hesiod (9th century), whose chief poem, Works and Days, is full of moral and religious feeling; and in the sixth and fifth centuries Pindar won a high position in Greece and wrote great numbers of songs, hymns, odes, etc. Aesop’s famous Fables also appeared in the sixth century, though many doubt if there was such a person as Aesop.

But we must confine ourselves here to the greatest names, or this book would not get beyond Greece. Two other kinds of writers arose as Greek civilization moved on toward its most brilliant days. On the one hand was a series of scientists and philosophers, but we have none of the works of these. On the other hand tragedy was born, and Greece had, in a very short period, the three greatest tragedians the world has ever known: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Tragedy, like the epic before it, and the comedy which followed it, reflects the age in which it was born: just as we get snowdrops in the spring, roses in the summer, and berries in the autumn. King’s courts were by this time abolished and the crowd of citizens had to have their entertainments. At the same time a deeper religious mood passed over Greece, and[Pg 13] in Aeschylus (born 523 B. C.) this came to inspire tragic poetry which is artistically magnificent. There was an old custom of having, on the festival of Dionysos, the god of dance and wine, a group of men quaintly dressed who danced round his altar chanting old verses. Out of this the poets created the play, and Athens built the first great theater.

Aeschylus used ancient legends of tragic happenings that seemed to have a profound and somber moral significance. Only seven of his seventy tragedies have been preserved, and as Sir Gilbert Murray has in recent years superbly translated three of the best of these (Agamemnon, Cheophori, Eumenides) an English reader can get a very good idea of his tragic grandeur. These three plays form a trilogy, or connected series, founded on the terrible legend of the curse on the house of King Agamemnon. Behind it all Aeschylus sees the action of a great mysterious principle, Fate, greater than the gods, which brings the punishment of crime. “Eumenides” means the “Avenging Fates.” Prometheus Bound, from which Shelley took the title of his great “lyrical drama,” Prometheus Unbound, is another masterpiece of this “father of tragedy.”

His rival and successor Sophocles (495-405) is considered even greater: indeed, the greatest tragic poet of all time. In fact there are experts who regard some of the masterpieces of Sophocles, such as the Antigone (which ought to be read in one of the current translations), Oedipus the King, and Electra, as the finest works that were ever written. The theme of[Pg 14] them is, as in Aeschylus, that a semi-divine Fate rules gods and men and avenges crime. Both tragedians take crime on the grand scale—murder, rape, incest, etc., in the legends of the old royal families—and the characters they create will live forever. Sophocles, of whose one hundred and thirteen plays we have only seven, is a little less somber, more humane, more polished than Aeschylus. He creates tragic grandeur out of the moral and religious feelings of the time.

The contrast of the third and latest of the trio, Euripides (480-406), is interesting. He was a cultivated man and clearly did not believe the old legends in their religious side. Skepticism was growing in Greece. But the mass of the people were religious, and Euripides was not generally popular, though eighteen of his seventy-five plays have survived. Technically he improves on his predecessors but he has not the same glow of inspiration. He took similar themes to those of his predecessors—crimes and tragedies on the royal scale—but he was a more self-conscious artist and an intellectual. If you want to see how he wrote Greek tragedy, read a translation of the Medea, which is based upon the appalling crimes and tragic adventures of that legendary queen; and, incidentally, it is one of the first pleas for a more just treatment of women. Alcestis, Iphigenia, Orestes, etc., are other masterpieces of Euripides.

Comedy was the next form invented by the Greek poets, and Aristophanes (450-380), the[Pg 15] greatest of the comedians, was a contemporary and (being very conservative) a bitter enemy of Euripides and all innovators. He satirized the growing woman-movement mercilessly in his Lysistrate and Ecclesiazusae, the philosophers in his Clouds, the democrats in his Knights, the democratic judges in his Wasps, and so on. But his wit was irresistible, and the stubborn old conservative was an idol of the Athenian people for forty years. Of his fifty plays, of which eleven survive, the Clouds (against the intellectuals and skeptics) is perhaps the best, though most mischievous. Translations of all these ancient classics can be got in the Bohn, “Everyman,” and other collections of great books.

Aristophanes was as free of speech in regard to sex as he was zealous for old creeds. A refinement of comedy came after his time, and the ablest representative of this “New Comedy,” reflecting the real domestic life of the Greeks, was “the gentle Menander.” But we have only fragments of his comedies. Aristophanes, the loosest, is the only comedian of whom entire plays have been preserved, and we must now take their tone as typically Greek. The austere moralists Sophocles and Euripides, remember, lived at the same time and were played before the same audiences.

History was a third line of development at the time, and two of the Greek historians, Herodotus (“the Father of History,” 484-425) and Thucydides (471-400) are classics. The former, who had traveled all over the civilized[Pg 16] world, wrote mainly on the clash of the Greeks and the Persians, but he brings in the whole world which he has seen. The plan is imposing, but he is not critical, and not always reliable even about countries which he visited. Thucydides chiefly describes the Peloponnesian War (with Sparta) and is terser and more faithful to facts. His work is history in the modern sense and finely written.

A classic of a different kind is the orator Demosthenes (385-322), whose Philippics (or orations against King Philip of Macedon) are perhaps his best written speeches, and are models of oratory for all time. Philip was insidiously preparing to take over Greece, and Demosthenes fierily denounced him to the apathetic people. He does not use florid rhetoric, but a terse, strong, direct, and simple speech. This and his other speeches are literary masterpieces and are, in their plain, forcible style, considered “matchless eloquence.”

Before this a long series of philosophers had begun to use the now perfected Greek language, and the works of some of these are classics. Socrates wrote nothing—Plato gives us his ideas—and the books of the great majority of them have not been preserved. Epicurus, who comes nearest of them all to modern scientific thought, wrote three hundred works, but not one of them has been preserved. We have, in fact, only the writings of Plato and Aristotle.

Plato (427-347), a pupil of the famous Socrates, mainly expressed his ideas by means of dialogues between imaginary or real Athenian[Pg 17] characters. In the Greek some of these dialogues (the Phaedo, Phaedrus, Timaeus, Critias, Symposium, etc.) are considered to belong to the finest prose-literature of the world, and the famous Greek scholar Dr. Jowett has given us a wonderful translation (in five volumes) of them all. Plato usually writes about religion and morality, but he was also the first social idealist, with very advanced views, and in his Republic he sketches an ideal commonwealth.

While Plato is the finest writer of all philosophers—and by far the easiest to read—his successor Aristotle (384-322) was the most learned man (in his time) of all writers and possibly the greatest thinker of all time. These wonderful Greeks were pioneers in everything. While some created the epic, the lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, etc., Aristotle created philosophy as a system of knowledge. The titles of his greater works (Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, Logic, Poetics, etc.—he invented these divisions of knowledge) show the vast range of his learning and thought, but his books are scarce and are read only by students of philosophy.

After the days of the philosophers Greece degenerated. The only other Greeks who could be deemed classics are the moralist and philosopher Plutarch (died 106 A. D.) and the very unmoral and witty satirist Lucian, whom we treat a little later. Plutarch’s Lives (of famous Greeks and Romans) are a biographical classic, but he was a very religious priest of[Pg 18] Apollo and wrote much also on morals, and religion. After these the only great Greek writers were of Alexandria, but these are better known in mathematics and philosophy than as literary classics. Euclid’s Geometry, certainly a classic of its kind, also belongs to Alexandria, but was written in the third century before Christ.

§2. ROMAN LITERATURE

From what we have now seen the reader will understand, and may learn with amazement, that one of the smallest nations which ever figured prominently in history produced a remarkable proportion of the world’s greatest literature, and indeed created nearly every branch of literature. Remember, too, that the Greek classics which we have are mere fragments of the whole. Literally thousands of important works of poets, dramatists, and thinkers have perished. Let us hope that we have the finest fragments. I have given as informing an account of these as my space allows, and will only add that if any reader who has access to a public library with collections of translations wishes to know a little more, without an extensive course of study, I would advise him to read a book of Homer’s Iliad, then the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the Antigone of Sophocles, the Medea of Euripides, the Clouds of Aristophanes, a few chapters of Herodotus, one of the orations of Demosthenes, and one (the Timaeus or the Phaedo) of Plato’s Dialogues.