Facts you should know about the classics

Men learned the art of writing, or began to express their ideas to each other by (at first) drawing little pictures of objects, about six thousand years ago, but none of the works which we call “classics” goes back to more than three thousand years ago. We should not expect to find many writings surviving from a date earlier than that, and as a matter of fact, except for business purposes writing was chiefly left to the priests. From ancient Egypt alone we have a few specimens of small books written by laymen; especially the Maxims of Ptah-Hotep, a very interesting series of counsels and reflections on conduct by a middle-class Egyptian of four thousand or more years ago.

This, however, is not great literature. For the older civilizations we have to consider only their religious literature, as certain collections of ritual and other sacred writings which, on the analogy of the Hebrew collection, we may call their “bibles.” The oldest is what we call The Book of the Dead of the Egyptians, parts of which go back thousands of years before Christ. It is not what we should describe as fine literature, and, as it is mainly concerned with the passage of the dead to another world, which to the Egyptians meant a tiresome story of devils and spells and magic, only scholars or special students read it today.

There is nothing corresponding to this in Babylonia, where men did not take an acute religious interest in death, but amongst the mass of writings (or inscribed clay tablets) that we have found we have fragments of a remarkable semi-sacred romance, now called The Story (or Epic) of Gilgamesch, into which are woven the early religious traditions of a creation, deluge, garden of bliss, etc. In substance the story goes back five or six thousand years.

The remaining “bibles” were all written after 1000 B. C., and at least in some of their pages they are really fine literature. The Old Testament, which is certainly a literary classic in its English translation, and has some notable poetry in the Hebrew, was written, as we have it, in the fifth century before Christ, but the pieces of which it was then composed spread over several centuries before that date.

The Persian sacred book, The Avesta, is a similar compilation of religious traditions and writings, covering much the same period. But it had not, like the Old Testament, the advantage of being translated in an age when men still wrote poetical English, and it is only of historical and religious interest, as an account of the high ideals and remarkable beliefs of the ancient Persians.

The oldest Hindu writings, The Vedas, mainly a collection of hymns, belong to the same period; the oldest parts (especially of the Rig Veda) may go back to 1000 B. C. There is some fine poetic writing in the earlier parts, but in the later this is succeeded by very abstract and subtle speculation which few would care to read.

The Chinese collection is called the King (which means “books” or “bible”), and it includes what are known as the Chinese classics. These are five books written by Kung-fu-tse (Confucius) and his disciples in the sixth century B. C. They are included, with the Persian and Hindu books, in the collection of translations known as The Sacred Books of the East. A good deal of early Buddhist literature also is included. But the chief interest of all these works is historical and religious, not literary, and we must pass on to Greece for the earliest works which live because of their splendid literary qualities.

The works of ancient Greece which we have are only a tithe of the works written even by the greater Greek writers, yet almost every surviving play or poem is treasured as a classic. If you draw up a list of the fifty greatest writers from the dawn of civilization to the nineteenth century, you will find that at least ten of them are Greeks. However, it was only certain parts of Greece which produced these wonderful artists, and these regions, taken together, never had a population as large as that of Chicago.

But we cannot here go into the historical reasons for their brilliance. It is enough for my purpose to say that the earliest Greeks were semi-barbarians who filtered down into what we call Greece from the north between 2000 and 1000 B. C. When they reached the Mediterranean they came into touch with the old civilizations and were refined. Large numbers of them crossed to Asia Minor, where they mingled with the polished Cretans and Persians, and it is here that the first great Greek poets and thinkers wrote.

Homer, their first poet, was regarded by the Greeks themselves in their most learned days as their greatest poet, a unique classic; and he is still one of the greatest poets of all time. Whether there ever was an individual named Homer is disputed. Most modern scholars have held for a long time that the poems to which his name is attached were slow growths contributed to by different poets of the tenth century B. C. But this is not at all settled, and many again think that Homer was an individual Greek of wonderful poetical power in or about the tenth century B. C.

His immortal works are the Iliad and the Odyssey. These are two long “epic” poems; that is to say long poems to be recited, not sung to music, telling of glorious deeds and romantic adventures. The first deals with the closing days of the ten-year siege of the city of Troy (or Ilium) in Asia Minor by the early Greeks. The hero is Achilles, the Greek prince, who sulks in his tent after a quarrel about a beautiful girl-captive, and is at last stung into action by the reverses of the Greeks and leads them on to the final destruction of Troy. Another of the chief Greek princes was Ulysses, and the Odyssey describes his wanderings over the ancient world after the fall of Troy.

Exploration in Asia Minor has discovered the remains of the city of Troy, and there is now no doubt that early Greek princes did bring their men overseas and destroy it. In the south of Greece we have found the palaces and graves of these princes, their inlaid bronze swords and golden death-masks, and we recognize the vivid realism of Homer. This great victory of the early Greeks would be the chief theme of the bards at every princes’ court, and all sorts of picturesque legends would be added to the truth. Homer weaves all these together in two great epics with masterly skill. You can see the heroes, sharply and vividly sketched, fighting their great duels, the scenes in camp and court, the dawn or the blaze of the sun on the blue Mediterranean. Much of this powerful and beautiful description is lost in translation, though the old translations by poets like Pope, Cowper and Bryant, are very fine, and the current translations, chiefly by Andrew Lang and collaborators, are excellent. Homer is next to Shakespeare, who surpasses him and all others in beautiful imagery and allegory.

The epic poem remained for two or three centuries the chief writing of the Greeks. They were then royalists with numbers of small courts of chiefs or princes where these story-poems were recited. As the race advanced in civilization, “lyric” poetry (short poems sung to the accompaniment of the lyre) developed. The most interesting writer of these is the female poet Sappho, who lived in the island of Lesbos in the seventh century. Between Sappho and Homer was the great poet Hesiod (9th century), whose chief poem, Works and Days, is full of moral and religious feeling; and in the sixth and fifth centuries Pindar won a high position in Greece and wrote great numbers of songs, hymns, odes, etc. Aesop’s famous Fables also appeared in the sixth century, though many doubt if there was such a person as Aesop.

But we must confine ourselves here to the greatest names, or this book would not get beyond Greece. Two other kinds of writers arose as Greek civilization moved on toward its most brilliant days. On the one hand was a series of scientists and philosophers, but we have none of the works of these. On the other hand tragedy was born, and Greece had, in a very short period, the three greatest tragedians the world has ever known: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Tragedy, like the epic before it, and the comedy which followed it, reflects the age in which it was born: just as we get snowdrops in the spring, roses in the summer, and berries in the autumn. King’s courts were by this time abolished and the crowd of citizens had to have their entertainments. At the same time a deeper religious mood passed over Greece, and in Aeschylus (born 523 B. C.) this came to inspire tragic poetry which is artistically magnificent. There was an old custom of having, on the festival of Dionysos, the god of dance and wine, a group of men quaintly dressed who danced round his altar chanting old verses. Out of this the poets created the play, and Athens built the first great theater.

Aeschylus used ancient legends of tragic happenings that seemed to have a profound and somber moral significance. Only seven of his seventy tragedies have been preserved, and as Sir Gilbert Murray has in recent years superbly translated three of the best of these (Agamemnon, Cheophori, Eumenides) an English reader can get a very good idea of his tragic grandeur. These three plays form a trilogy, or connected series, founded on the terrible legend of the curse on the house of King Agamemnon. Behind it all Aeschylus sees the action of a great mysterious principle, Fate, greater than the gods, which brings the punishment of crime. “Eumenides” means the “Avenging Fates.” Prometheus Bound, from which Shelley took the title of his great “lyrical drama,” Prometheus Unbound, is another masterpiece of this “father of tragedy.”

His rival and successor Sophocles (495-405) is considered even greater: indeed, the greatest tragic poet of all time. In fact there are experts who regard some of the masterpieces of Sophocles, such as the Antigone (which ought to be read in one of the current translations), Oedipus the King, and Electra, as the finest works that were ever written. The theme of them is, as in Aeschylus, that a semi-divine Fate rules gods and men and avenges crime. Both tragedians take crime on the grand scale—murder, rape, incest, etc., in the legends of the old royal families—and the characters they create will live forever. Sophocles, of whose one hundred and thirteen plays we have only seven, is a little less somber, more humane, more polished than Aeschylus. He creates tragic grandeur out of the moral and religious feelings of the time.

The contrast of the third and latest of the trio, Euripides (480-406), is interesting. He was a cultivated man and clearly did not believe the old legends in their religious side. Skepticism was growing in Greece. But the mass of the people were religious, and Euripides was not generally popular, though eighteen of his seventy-five plays have survived. Technically he improves on his predecessors but he has not the same glow of inspiration. He took similar themes to those of his predecessors—crimes and tragedies on the royal scale—but he was a more self-conscious artist and an intellectual. If you want to see how he wrote Greek tragedy, read a translation of the Medea, which is based upon the appalling crimes and tragic adventures of that legendary queen; and, incidentally, it is one of the first pleas for a more just treatment of women. Alcestis, Iphigenia, Orestes, etc., are other masterpieces of Euripides.

Comedy was the next form invented by the Greek poets, and Aristophanes (450-380), the greatest of the comedians, was a contemporary and (being very conservative) a bitter enemy of Euripides and all innovators. He satirized the growing woman-movement mercilessly in his Lysistrate and Ecclesiazusae, the philosophers in his Clouds, the democrats in his Knights, the democratic judges in his Wasps, and so on. But his wit was irresistible, and the stubborn old conservative was an idol of the Athenian people for forty years. Of his fifty plays, of which eleven survive, the Clouds (against the intellectuals and skeptics) is perhaps the best, though most mischievous. Translations of all these ancient classics can be got in the Bohn, “Everyman,” and other collections of great books.

Aristophanes was as free of speech in regard to sex as he was zealous for old creeds. A refinement of comedy came after his time, and the ablest representative of this “New Comedy,” reflecting the real domestic life of the Greeks, was “the gentle Menander.” But we have only fragments of his comedies. Aristophanes, the loosest, is the only comedian of whom entire plays have been preserved, and we must now take their tone as typically Greek. The austere moralists Sophocles and Euripides, remember, lived at the same time and were played before the same audiences.

History was a third line of development at the time, and two of the Greek historians, Herodotus (“the Father of History,” 484-425) and Thucydides (471-400) are classics. The former, who had traveled all over the civilized world, wrote mainly on the clash of the Greeks and the Persians, but he brings in the whole world which he has seen. The plan is imposing, but he is not critical, and not always reliable even about countries which he visited. Thucydides chiefly describes the Peloponnesian War (with Sparta) and is terser and more faithful to facts. His work is history in the modern sense and finely written.

A classic of a different kind is the orator Demosthenes (385-322), whose Philippics (or orations against King Philip of Macedon) are perhaps his best written speeches, and are models of oratory for all time. Philip was insidiously preparing to take over Greece, and Demosthenes fierily denounced him to the apathetic people. He does not use florid rhetoric, but a terse, strong, direct, and simple speech. This and his other speeches are literary masterpieces and are, in their plain, forcible style, considered “matchless eloquence.”

Before this a long series of philosophers had begun to use the now perfected Greek language, and the works of some of these are classics. Socrates wrote nothing—Plato gives us his ideas—and the books of the great majority of them have not been preserved. Epicurus, who comes nearest of them all to modern scientific thought, wrote three hundred works, but not one of them has been preserved. We have, in fact, only the writings of Plato and Aristotle.

Plato (427-347), a pupil of the famous Socrates, mainly expressed his ideas by means of dialogues between imaginary or real Athenian characters. In the Greek some of these dialogues (the Phaedo, Phaedrus, Timaeus, Critias, Symposium, etc.) are considered to belong to the finest prose-literature of the world, and the famous Greek scholar Dr. Jowett has given us a wonderful translation (in five volumes) of them all. Plato usually writes about religion and morality, but he was also the first social idealist, with very advanced views, and in his Republic he sketches an ideal commonwealth.

While Plato is the finest writer of all philosophers—and by far the easiest to read—his successor Aristotle (384-322) was the most learned man (in his time) of all writers and possibly the greatest thinker of all time. These wonderful Greeks were pioneers in everything. While some created the epic, the lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, etc., Aristotle created philosophy as a system of knowledge. The titles of his greater works (Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, Logic, Poetics, etc.—he invented these divisions of knowledge) show the vast range of his learning and thought, but his books are scarce and are read only by students of philosophy.

After the days of the philosophers Greece degenerated. The only other Greeks who could be deemed classics are the moralist and philosopher Plutarch (died 106 A. D.) and the very unmoral and witty satirist Lucian, whom we treat a little later. Plutarch’s Lives (of famous Greeks and Romans) are a biographical classic, but he was a very religious priest of Apollo and wrote much also on morals, and religion. After these the only great Greek writers were of Alexandria, but these are better known in mathematics and philosophy than as literary classics. Euclid’s Geometry, certainly a classic of its kind, also belongs to Alexandria, but was written in the third century before Christ.

From what we have now seen the reader will understand, and may learn with amazement, that one of the smallest nations which ever figured prominently in history produced a remarkable proportion of the world’s greatest literature, and indeed created nearly every branch of literature. Remember, too, that the Greek classics which we have are mere fragments of the whole. Literally thousands of important works of poets, dramatists, and thinkers have perished. Let us hope that we have the finest fragments. I have given as informing an account of these as my space allows, and will only add that if any reader who has access to a public library with collections of translations wishes to know a little more, without an extensive course of study, I would advise him to read a book of Homer’s Iliad, then the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the Antigone of Sophocles, the Medea of Euripides, the Clouds of Aristophanes, a few chapters of Herodotus, one of the orations of Demosthenes, and one (the Timaeus or the Phaedo) of Plato’s Dialogues.

The Roman literature is next in time to that of the Greeks and, in spite of the common misstatement that the Romans were a wholly practical and not an artistic people, it is next to it in importance. The Romans learned the fine arts from the Greeks, and at first they were content with translations of Greek works. Comedy especially appealed to them, and the first classical Roman writers were the great comedians Plautus (254-184 B. C.) and Terentius, or Terence (190-159). Plautus, using Greek and other plots, composed a hundred and thirty comedies, but only a score have survived the literary massacre of the early Middle Ages. The type of comedy he wrote may be understood from Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, which is, like many plays of the Renaissance writers, based upon the Menaechmei (a story of twins) of Plautus. Terentius, of whom we have six plays, writes purer Latin than Plautus and has more technical skill, but he has a less rich vein of comedy. He is the author of the much quoted line: “I am a man, and nothing human is foreign to me.”

Apart from these there was no Roman writer who need be mentioned here—I wish to restrict the list of names as much as possible—until the first century before Christ, when what is called the Golden Age of Roman literature began. The art, as usual, reflects the economic conditions. Rome’s conquest of the world was almost over, and the Eternal City was congested with wealth and athirst for every luxury and refinement. Within two centuries there appeared the great poets Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Catullus, the historians Caesar, Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, the satirists Martial and Juvenal, the orator and thinker Cicero, and the famous moralists Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. These are all classics, but we must confine ourselves to the chief works of the greater writers.

Vergil (70-19 B. C.) is one of the six greatest poets of all time. His chief work is inspired by Homer. It is a long epic poem (a volume in itself) describing the wanderings of Aeneas of Troy after the destruction of that city, working up the legend that he eventually reached Italy and founded Rome and the Romans. It is therefore known as The Aeneid. Vergil was so polished and conscientious a scholar that at his death he ordered the destruction of the manuscript of the great poem, as he had wished to give three further years to perfecting it before publication. The Emperor overruled his will and gave the masterpiece to the world. Vergil wrote also two series of poems of pastoral life, the Eclogues and the Georgics. He has not the greatness of Homer, but his work is so impressive that the Catholic poet Dante, twelve centuries later, took Vergil as his guide through the underworld.

The next greatest Latin poet, Horace (65-8 B. C.), is the most difficult to translate, yet in his pure humanity and praise of the common pleasures of life he comes nearest to modern sentiments. Apart from a long poem On the Art of the Poet, which is now chiefly read in Latin classes, he wrote a large number of satires, odes and letters which are exquisite poetical appreciations of a life of refined pleasure. It is generally said that he is Epicurean, but the phrase is misleading. Vergil also was a follower of Epicurus—most Roman gentlemen of that age were—yet he is sternly patriotic and speaks of the old Roman gods as if he accepted them.

Somewhere about the same time—we are not sure of the date—there lived a Latin poet of distinction named Lucretius who put into a poem called On the Nature of Things the serious philosophy of Epicurus about the world and human life. It is not strictly a literary classic, though a fine poem, but it is memorable as the only complete Epicurean work which we have and the nearest to modern thought. Mr. W. H. Mallock some years ago published a very free but admirable version of it in English verse.

Returning to the greater poets of the Golden Age, we have still to consider Catullus (87-54 B. C.) and Ovid (43 B. C.-18 A. D.). We have 116 exquisite lyrical poems of Catullus, a man of leisure and wealth who largely wrote verse about love for his lady-friends. Catullus is freer in his sentiments and expressions than Horace, but the fourth great Latin poet, Ovid, was the most outspoken of them all. In the gay society of Rome he published Songs of Love, The Art of Love, and Remedies of Love. But these are so far from reflecting the whole life of Rome that Ovid was exiled for his licentious poems—the real reason is said to have been an entanglement with the Emperor’s daughter—and in exile he wrote his more serious works. His masterpiece is the Metamorphoses, a mixture of history, legend and mythology in rich and very accomplished verse. Another distinguished poet of the first century is Lucan, whose Pharsalia (a poem on the civil war) has a high place in literature.

Of the historians Julius Caesar (100-44 B. C.), a very cultivated man as well as a great general, has left us Commentaries on his campaigns, especially in Gaul; plain, straightforward accounts of his actions in one of the easiest of Latin styles. Sallust (86-34) is more of a literary man as well as historian, but his chief work is lost and his Conspiracy of Catiline and War Against Jugurtha are not masterpieces.

The two most famous historians of Rome are Livy (59-17 B. C.) and Tacitus (55-117 A. D.). Livy belongs to the older Roman world, and his immense history of Rome in 142 books (only 35 of which have come down to us) is more patriotic than critical. Tacitus, on the other hand, falls in the period when the Stoic emperors raised the tone of the declining Empire. His History and Annals (of later Roman times) are both historical and literary classics: severe and very condensed (and difficult to read) in style, austerely moral in sentiment, and based on precise documents. In the Annals there is a famous reference to Christ and Nero’s persecution of the Christians, the genuineness of which is disputed. It seems to me sound enough in style but too late in date to be important.

Cicero, the greatest Roman orator, and a statesman and philosopher, belongs to the earlier period (106-43 B. C.), the close of the Republic. His style is a standard of Latin, yet it is comparatively easy to read. His speeches (chiefly delivered in the law-court) are models of oratory, avoiding florid rhetoric and relying, like those of Demosthenes, on force of language and skill of construction. He has left us also the best philosophical essays in the Latin language—the books On Duty are most interesting from the ethical point of view—and his many letters are excellent literature and afford valuable pictures of the time.

The moralist Seneca (4 B. C.-65 A. D.) is famous for the many long essays or books which he wrote, from the severe Stoic point of view, on every aspect of virtue and vice. He wrote in the time of Nero, and thus he reminds us that the corruption of that Emperor and his circle did not extend to all Rome. A little later was Epictetus, a Greek of the Roman Empire, whose very austere Stoic sentiments were collected by his pupils and published as his Encheiridion or Manual. Marcus Aurelius (121-180 A. D.), the most virtuous of the Stoic Emperors, compiled a little volume of moral Meditations, very austere in sentiment, which is still much read, though it was rather casually written. Another famous Stoic of the time (died 117 A. D.) was the Greek orator Dion Chrysostom (“Golden-mouthed”), whose eighty extant orations, mainly delivered in Rome, are fine literary expressions of the highest ideals of the time. There was a very considerable output of this severe moral literature at Rome.

More brilliant from the literary point of view were the satirists Juvenal (60-140 A. D.), and Martial (40-104). Juvenal’s Satires (five books) are famous in literature, but as pictures of Roman morals they are not now trusted. He wrote, not only as a poor man flaying the rich, but he told of the wealthy Romans of the generation before his own time. Martial has left us fourteen books of Epigrams: sprightly verses, of two or three lines each, hitting off the characters and manners of his age. He was a wealthy as well as a witty man, and his mild satires are valuable.

Pliny is the name of two Roman writers who rank as classics. The older Pliny (23 A. D.-79 A. D.) gives us a summary of the slender scientific knowledge of the Romans in his Natural History. The younger Pliny, his nephew, was the governor of a province, and his Letters (ten books) are good literature and valuable documents.

Lucian, of the second century, is rarely read today, but his witty and pungent Dialogues and his stories and essays put him in the rank of great writers. Apuleius was another witty story-writer. His Golden Ass has always been deemed a classic, though modern authorities would not permit a literal translation of it. The hero imagines himself turned into an ass by the blunder of a sorcerer and having a series of most picturesque adventures.

After the middle of the second century Rome was exhausted by war and literature ceased. There were several writers of some distinction in the fourth century, but their works are not classics. The great days of pagan literature were over. The pen passed to the hands of the new Christian writers.

This section is very short because since we are dealing with literary classics, not masterpieces of theological learning, it has to tell only of two books in a space of a thousand years, from the second century to the twelfth. These two books are St. Augustine’s Confessions and City of God. You will not find translations of any others in any modern collection of literary masterpieces. Even Clement of Alexandria, the most accomplished of the great fathers of the Church, is read only by theologians. St. Jerome, in my opinion, writes the best Latin, but his writings have a purely religious interest.

Augustine (354-430) was certainly the most learned, and probably the ablest, man of his age. His early philosophical essays are not now read, and the voluminous writings or dictated works—shorthand was common in his time—of his later years interest only theologians. But the small volume in which after his conversion to Christianity he describes and bemoans his earlier years, his Confessions, is a classical autobiography. He had really very little to “confess” beyond the fact that for a time he had a lady-companion (which was not then considered immoral), and the fierce light of his new asceticism causes him to write with a singular art and feeling about his youth.

In later years Augustine despised style, as most of the Christian leaders did, out of religious feeling, but he once more exerted all his art of learning in writing The City of God. The Roman Empire was in ruins and Augustine set out to prove that it mattered relatively little what became of the City of Man: that the essential thing was to be a citizen of the City of God. This idea he expands into a vast plan which includes a wonderful mass of mythology, history, and philosophy.

The Latin language was already degenerate in Augustine’s time, the schools were being closed everywhere, zeal for letters and science grew rarer and rarer. The few Christian laymen who wrote prose or verse are not mentioned even in larger sketches than this of the history of literature, and in a few centuries most of the chronicles and treatises written were of a shocking literary quality, though everybody still wrote in a sort of Latin. The only noticeable work—by no means a masterpiece—is On the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, a sixth-century Italian statesman who was put in prison and recommends all sufferers to find consolation, as he did, in Aristotle.