The Greek Way To Western Civilization.

The Greek Way to Western Civilisation
Edith Hamilton

By
Mai Magdi & Yasmine Abd el-Wahab



CHAPTER ONE: EAST AND WEST:

1. The Beginning of the Greek civilization:
1.1. Hamilton talks about the great civilization and compares it to that of the ancient ages, and states it's effects on the Western mind and soul.
1.2. “Not merely Greece has a claim upon our attention because we “Europeans” are by our spiritual and mental inheritance partly Greek and at the same time we are influenced by the power “touching with light of reason and grace of beauty the wild northern savages”.


2. The Reason behind the Greek Achievements:

2.1. The reason behind the Greek achievements appears in the mental and spiritual activity. “When we find that the Greeks, too, lived in a reasonable world as a result of using their reason upon it, we accept the achievement as the natural thing that needs no comment”.



3. The Greeks are the First Intellectualists:

3.1. “The Greeks belong to the ancient world but they are in it as a matter of centuries only”, as in the ancient world you can find in every country the same “great priestly organisation to which is handed over the domain of the intellect, which is known now as the oriental state today” which contradicted that of the Greeks as they were the first intellectualists. “In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind”. So, “the modern spirit is the Greek discovery and the place of the Greek is the modern world”. “The world in which Greece came to life was one in which reason had played the smallest role.”


CHAPTER TWO: MIND AND SPIRIT:

4. The Athletic Contests:

4.1. The Greeks were the first people in the world to practice sports; all over Greece there were athletic contests of every description: horse races, music, dancing…etc.
4.2. These games are embodied in statues.
4.3. The Olympics were very important, when a game was held a truce of gods was proclaimed so that all Greece might come in safety.


5. The Greek spirit:

5.1. Inspite of her hard conditions, Greece rejoiced, resisted and turned full face to life.
5.2. The joy of life is written upon everything the Greeks left behind, and it is the key to understanding the Greek achievements.
5.3. The Greeks had physical vigor, high spirits and time, and they certainly enjoyed themselves.
5.4. “Love of reason and of life, delight in the use of the mind and body, distinguished the Greek way.”


6. The Greek Spirit through their Literature:

6.1. Their literature is marked by great sorrow.
6.2. Comedy and tragedy stood together in the Greek literature; there were no contradictions thereby.
6.3. Their joy was expressed in the early Greek lyrics as in Homer’s words.


7. Freedom in Greece:

7.1. Through all Greek history authoritarianism and submissiveness were not the direction it pointed to.
7.2. There is nothing that resembles a tyrannical ruler in Greece. Herodotus says in his account “they obey only the law”.
7.3. “The conception of the unimportance of the individual to the state has been replaced to the conception of liberty of the individual at a state in which he defends his own free will”.
7.4. “The right of a man to say what he pleased was fundamental in Athens; “a slave is he who can not speak his thoughts”, said Euripides.
7.5. After the bitter defeat of Athens and the gross mismanagement, Socrates was the only man in Athens who suffered death for his opinions. Three others were forced to leave the country. That’s the whole list which cannot be compared to the endless list of those tortured and killed in Europe during the last 500 years.


8. The Age of Reason in Greece:

8.1. “One of the earlier Greek philosophical sayings is that of Anaxagory: “all things were in chaos when mind arose and made order”.”
8.2. In the ancient world, Man was utterly at the mercy of what he must not try to understand, but the Greeks said “all things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits set to thought.”
8.3. “All things are at odds when God lets a thinker loose on this planet” and they were loose. The Greeks were intellectualists; they had a passion for thinking.
8.4. “The Greeks had free scope for their scientific genius and they laid the foundations of our science today”.
8.5. The Greeks could never leave anything unanalyzed or unrelated; their poetry is built on clarity of ideas with plan and logical sequence.
8.6. “Since reason is divine in comparison to man’s whole nature, life according to reason must be divine in comparison with usual human life…the characteristic of any nature is that which is best for it and gives most joy. Such to man is the life according to reason, since it is this that makes him man.”


9. Art and Spirit:

9.1. Plato, as a typical Greek, said that there are men who have intuition, insight and inspiration that lead them to do beautiful things, they don’t know why they do it and so they cannot explain it to others.
9.2. The nature and conditions of the greek's life shut them off from the supremacy of the spirit, but they knew the way of the spirit no less. The proof of that is the fact that the flame of their genius burned highest in their art.
9.3. Greece means Greek art to us and that is a field in which reason doesn’t rule.
9.4. What marked the Greeks from the East was not an inferior degree of spirituality but superior degree of mentality. Socrates last talk with his friends before his death shows the control of feelings by reason, and the balance between spirit and mind which belonged to the Greek.