Edith Hamilton

Apologetics ~ Edith Hamilton

Extracts from “The Greek Way” by Edith Hamilton, 1930

“Prose, always late of development, they [the Greeks] had time only to touch upon, but they left masterpieces. History has yet to find a greater exponent than Thucydides; outside of the Bible there is no poetical prose that can touch Plato. In poetry they are all but supreme; no epic is to be mentioned with Homer; no odes to be set beside Pindar; of the four masters of the tragic stage three are Greek.”
[Ch 1: East and West]

“None of the great civilisations that preceded them [the Greeks] and surrounded them served them as model. With them something completely new came into the world. They were the first Westerners; the spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world.”
[Ch 1: East and West]

“That which distinguishes the modern world from the ancient, and that which divides the West from the East, is the supremacy of mind in the affairs of men, and this came to birth in Greece . . . The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.”
[Ch 1: East and West]

“To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit which distinguished it from all that had gone before.”
[Ch 2: Mind and Spirit]

“The Greeks were keenly aware, terribly aware, of life’s uncertainty and the imminence of death . . . But never, not in their darkest moments, do they lose their taste for life.”
[Ch 2: Mind and Spirit]

“A tomb in Egypt and a theatre in Greece. The one comes to mind as naturally as the other.”
[Ch 2: Mind and Spirit]

“The fundamental fact about the Greek was that he had to use his mind. The ancient priests had said, ‘Thus far and no farther. We set the limits to thought.’ The Greeks said, ‘All things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits set to thought.’”
[Ch 2: Mind and Spirit]

“The sentences which Plato says were inscribed in the shrine at Delphi are singularly unlike those to be found in holy places outside of Greece, Know thyself was the first, and Nothing in excess the second, both marked by a total absence of the idiom of priestly formulas all the world over.”
[Ch 2: Mind and Spirit]

“Our word for school comes from the Greek word for leisure. Of course, reasoned the Greek, given leisure a man will employ it in thinking and finding out about things. Leisure and the pursuit of knowledge, the connection was inevitable – to a Greek.”
[Ch 2: Mind and Spirit]

“They [the Greeks] looked at it [the outside world] attentively and their minds worked upon what they saw. This is essentially the scientific method. The Greeks were the first scientists and all science goes back to them.”
[Ch 2: Mind and Spirit]

“The right of a man to say what he pleased was fundamental in Athens. ‘A slave is he who cannot speak his thought,’ said Euripides.”
[Ch 2: Mind and Spirit]

“Socrates was the only man in Athens who suffered death for his opinions. Three others were forced to leave the country. That is the entire list and to compare it with the endless list of those tortured and killed in Europe during even the last five hundred years is to see clearly what Athenian liberty was.”
[Ch 2: Mind and Spirit]

“What marked the Greeks off from Egypt and India was not an inferior degree of spirituality but a superior degree of mentality. Great mind and great spirit combined in them.”
[Ch 2: Mind and Spirit]

“A single sentence of Socrates, spoken when he was condemned to death, shows how the Greek could his his mind upon religion, and by means of human wisdom joined to spiritual insight could sweep aside all the superficialities and see through to the thing that is ultimate in religion: ‘Think this certain, that to a good man no evil can happen, either in life or in death.’ These words are the final expression of faith.”
[Ch 2: Mind and Spirit]

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