The Greek Way

1.26 MB·English

by  Edith Hamilton

The GREEK WAY
BOOKS BY EDITH HAMILTON

The Greek Way
The Roman Way
Three Greek Plays
Mythology
Witness to the Truth
Spokesmen for God
The Echo of Greece
The Ever-Present Past
The GREEK WAY
Edith Hamilton

W· W· Norton & Company
New York London
Published as a Norton 1964, 1983; reissued 1993

All rights reserved
Copyright © 1930, 1943 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Copyright renewed 1958 by Edith Hamilton
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hamilton, Edith, 1867–1963.

The Greek way / Edith Hamilton.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN: 978-0-393-31077-1

1. Greece—Civilization—To 146 B.C. 2. Greek literature—History and
criticism.

I. Title.

DF77.H34 1994

938—dc20 93–8330
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
TO

DORIS FIELDING REID

Kon và à v øí wv
CONTENTS

Preface

I East and West
II Mind and Spirit
III The Way of the East and the West in Art
IV The Greek Way of Writing
V Pindar, The Last Greek Aristocrat
VI The Athenians as Plato Saw Them
VII Aristophanes and the Old Comedy
VIII Herodotus, The First Sight-seer
IX Thucydides, The Thing That Hath Been Is That Which Shall Be
X Xenophon, The Ordinary Athenian Gentleman
XI The Idea of Tragedy
XII Æschylus, The First Dramatist
XIII Sophocles, Quintessence of the Greek
XIV Euripides, The Modern Mind
XV The Religion of the Greeks
XVI The Way of the Greeks
XVII The Way of the Modern World
References
PREFACE

The first edition of The Greek Way was an incomplete work. A number of
the writers of the great age of Greece were discussed in it, but others quite
as notable and important were omitted. The result was a picture of Greek
thought and art at the time of their highest achievement with some of the
very greatest thought and art left out; the poet Pindar, for instance, put by
the Greeks themselves in the same class with Æschylus; the two historians,
Herodotus and Thucydides, still foremost among the historians of the
world. There cannot, indeed, be any real perception of the breadth and
depth and splendor of the intellectual life in fifth-century Athens without
some knowledge of Herodotus with his keen curiosity and warm humanity,
and the profundity of thought and somber magnificence of Thucydides.
The present volume has made good the former omissions. All the
writers of the Periclean age are considered.
I have felt while writing these new chapters a fresh realization of the
refuge and strength the past can be to us in the troubled present. “Let us
keep our silent sanctuaries,” Sénancour wrote, “for in them the eternal
perspectives are preserved.” Religion is the great stronghold for the
untroubled vision of the eternal; but there are others too. We have many
silent sanctuaries in which we can find a breathing space to free ourselves
from the personal, to rise above our harassed and perplexed minds and
catch sight of values that are stable, which no selfish and timorous
preoccupations can make waver, because they are the hard-won and
permanent possession of humanity. “Excellence,” said Aristotle, “much
labored for by the race of men.”
When the world is 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