The Greek View of LifeDickinson, G. Lowes (Goldsworthy Lowes)
Religion
The Greek View of Life
Dickinson, G. Lowes (Goldsworthy Lowes)
Greece -- Civilization
his boundless wealth, asks the Greek stranger who is the happiest man on
earth? expecting to hear in reply his own name. Solon, however, answers
with the name of Tellus, the Athenian, giving his reasons in the
following speech:
"First, because his country was flourishing in his days, and he himself
had sons both beautiful and good, and he lived to see children born to
each of them, and these children all grew up; and further because, after
a life spent in what our people look upon as comfort, his end was
surpassingly glorious. In a battle between the Athenians and their
neighbours near Eleusis, he came to the assistance of his countrymen,
routed the foe, and died upon the field most gallantly. The Athenians
gave him a public funeral on the spot where he fell, and paid him the
highest honours."
Later on in the discussion Solon defines the happy man as he who "Is
whole of limb, a stranger to disease, free from misfortune, happy in his
children, and comely to look upon," and who also ends his life well.
[Footnote: Herodotus, i. 30. 32.--Translated by Rawlinson]
Section 3. Appreciation of Physical Qualities.
While, however, the gifts of a happy fortune are an essential condition
of the Greek ideal, they are not to be mistaken for the ideal itself. "A
beautiful soul in a beautiful body," to recur to our former phrase, is
the real end and aim of their endeavour. "Beautiful and good" is their
habitual way of describing what we should call a gentleman; and no
expression could better represent what they admired. With ourselves, in
spite of our addiction to athletics, the body takes a secondary place;
after a certain age, at least, there are few men who make its systematic
cultivation an important factor of their life; and in our estimate of
merit physical qualities are accorded either none or the very smallest
weight. It was otherwise with the Greeks; to them a good body was the
necessary correlative of a good soul. Balance was what they aimed at,
balance and harmony; and they could scarcely believe in the beauty of
the spirit, unless it were reflected in the beauty of the flesh. The
point is well put by Plato, the most spiritually minded of the Greeks,
and the least apt to underprize the qualities of the soul.
"Surely then," he says, "to him who has an eye to see, there can be no
fairer spectacle than that of a man who combines the possession of moral
beauty in his soul with outward beauty of form, corresponding and
harmonizing with the former, because the same great pattern enters into
both.
"There can be none so fair.
"And you will grant that what is fairest is loveliest?
"Undoubtedly it is.
"Then the truly musical person will love those who combine most
perfectly moral and physical beauty, but will not love any one in whom
there is dissonance.
"No, not if there be any defect in the soul, but if it is only a bodily
blemish, he may so bear with it as to be willing to regard it with
complacency.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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