What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?Mahaffy, J. P. (John Pentland)
Philosophy
What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?
Mahaffy, J. P. (John Pentland)
Civilization; Greece -- Civilization; Greece -- Intellectual life
It is of course an illogical division to separate art from literature.
Among the Greeks, at all events, literature in all its forms, was not
only an art but the most perfect art. No statue of Lysippus is more
perfect than a drama of Sophocles. But for convenience’ sake, and in
this age where literature is seldom an art, we may speak of Greek art as
that division of their work where they dealt not with words, but with
other materials, and where they combined the uses of life with the love
of the beautiful, as no other nation ever did. We may add that in regard
to Greek influence on modern life (which is our proper subject), none
has been greater and more permanent than that of art in this sense.
Thousands of men have copied, or imagined they copied, Greek art, who
were never able to read one word of Greek and who never cared one jot
about Greek literature. I take to-day its more solid and larger
expressions--architecture and sculpture, reserving for my next lecture
the more subjective arts and those of mere ornament.
It is not true, as you might suppose, that these latter were later in
development than the art of architecture. Far from it. In rude
pre-historic ages, when the knowledge of building had not advanced
beyond the question of mere safety, we find delicate and beautiful
ornaments put upon arms and on personal decorations. The most elaborate
tattooing of the savage is consistent with extreme rudeness in his
dwelling.[20]
The earliest form of house we know, which was designed not only for
shelter and durability, but also for safety, is the _underground_
beehive house. Beehive huts of stone are common in many nations, and may
perhaps best be seen now in the huts of the monks on the wild rock of
Skellig Michael, which is the nearest land in the British Islands to the
traveller coming from America. But such huts are not easily defended
against an enemy. This latter advantage is obtained by making the hut a
chamber underground,[21] and only to be entered by a passage long,
narrow, and low, in fact a sort of horizontal shaft into which the
enemy can only creep on hands and feet, and so can have his head chopped
off as soon as it appears within the chamber, without possibility of
using his weapons. I have seen this form of house in the most primitive
village of the stone and bone age, which is known as the Weem of Scale,
on a very wild bay of the main island of the Orkneys, looking northwest
into the Atlantic. There, under the sands accumulated by the gales of
thousands of years, we find small subterranean huts, with nooks in the
stone work to hold rude vessels and implements, and with a low covered
way for the owner to creep in and find himself at home. The weapons
found in such houses, many of which are yet unexplored, are either of
stone or bone or shell. These dwellings, once a very general type--for
remember, similar wants in mankind produce similar satisfactions of that
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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