THE INHERITANCE OF GREECE

(Napisao: gosp. Marko Marelić -  S. Francisco - USA)
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A dedicated study of the long and glorious Greek history will conclude that the Battle of Chaeronea marks an appropriate end to this account of ancient Greek history. Greece did not cease to exist at that time, and Greeks had not completed their contributions to world civilization. But within a few years of this famous battle the conditions throughout the Near East were so massively disturbed that the old Greece quickly became a thing of the past. Philip of Macedon was murdered in 336, less than two years after his great victory and he was succeeded by his twenty-two-year-old son, Alexander, who was later known as Alexander the Great. This romantic young prince soon after embarked upon the war against Persia which Isocrates had urged and that Philip had planned. In the spring of 334 he crossed into Asia Minor, where in the next ten years he overthrew the Persian Empire and led his victorious army through Persia and Afghanistan to far away India. When Alexander died at Babylon in the early summer of 323, he ruled territories that extended from the Adriatic to the Indus, and Greece had become a relatively unimportant part of this huge Macedonian Empire. In ten brief years, this land of warring city-states had become a corner of a world empire, never having gone through a period of national unity. The program of Isocrates and the Panhellenists had never been given a trial.

Alexander's untimely death was followed by long years of warfare among his generals. At least three dynasties held parts of his former empire - the Antigonids dominated Macedonia and European Greece, the Seleucids held Asia, and the Ptolemies ruled Egypt. The two latter dynasties took over territories formerly ruled by the Persians and were inhabited almost entirely by Orientals. Alexander and his successors made strenuous efforts to Hellenize their kingdoms by founding cities which they endowed with Greek political institutions and which they filled with Greek immigrants. Nevertheless, they learned quickly that Orientals must be governed in an oriental manner, as under the Persian regime. In the end, the Greek rulers learned more from the Orientals than the Orientals learned from them. Moreover, the Greeks were not as successful as the Persians in ruling subject populations. Whereas the Persians had made their empire last two hundred years, the Seleucids had lost the eastern half of their empire to a native dynasty (the Arsacids, or Parthians) within fifty years, and within little more that a century the whole Near East was thrown into pandemonium by native revolts in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor.

Behind all this confusion it is possible to trace the steady progress of that world unity which the Orientals had been talking about for many centuries. The Persians claimed that their empire realized this ancient ideal politically, and the Hebrew prophets, long before Alexander, had foretold of a time when all men would be united in the worship of the one true God. Alexander's spectacular exploits advertised this idea of world unity among the Greeks, and his successors were rarely satisfied with ruling only a fraction of his former empire. They never ceased striving by fair or foul means to acquire it all. Likewise, the unfortunate peoples whom they governed desired world unity for many reasons, not the least of which was the belief that it alone offered hope of escape from the constant wars that were ruining them. Then as even today, men longed for One World, but no one knew exactly how to achieve it. At last the Romans succeeded where the Greeks had failed. They stepped in to fill the vacuum and stopped the anarchy that followed the collapse of the Greek dynasties. At the beginning of the Christian era, Augustus ruled a world that was more solidly united that it had ever been under Alexander or the Persians, and his successors maintained this unity for almost five hundred years. They passed on the ideal of world unity into the Middle Ages and into Modern Times. The second half of ancient history therefore has greater interest and meaning for us today than does the first half.

European Greece took little direct part in the huge struggles that followed the death of Alexander the Great. Her strength was ebbing fast. Her energetic and ambitious young men began pouring into the new cities of the Orient or entered the mercenary armies of Alexander's successors. Her trade was diverted to other channels. Class antagonisms became more bitter than ever, and bloody wars were frequent. The historian Polybius, who lived in the second century before Christ, shows third-century Greece as truly to be pitied. The Greek people had not lost their physical or intellectual vigor - but the world had passed them by.

The intellectual life of the new age created what is known as Hellenistic culture - as opposed to the Hellenic culture of the centuries before Alexander. This new Hellenistic culture was a blend of Greek and Oriental elements and it arose not in Greece itself, but in the cities along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean from Troad to Cyrene. Here the Greeks and Orientals had been living side by side for a long time, mingling their blood and their ideas. At first, in the early Hellenistic times, the Greeks clearly held the upper hand, and the third century was an important period in the history of Greek philosophy and scholarship as well as art and science. Literary men continued or slightly modified the old Greek traditions in comedy, poetry and historical writings. As time passed however, true Greeks became less common among the intellectual leaders of the Hellenistic world, and their places were taken by Greek-speaking Orientals. In the end, the Mohammedan conquests of the seventh century after Christ put the Orientals in control once more. In Syria and Egypt, oriental rulers held sway and oriental culture dominated; and even the Byzantine Empire was more oriental than the Greek. Before its collapse however, the Hellenistic world had drawn heavily upon the ancient cultures of the Orient and Greece, and had passed on their best features to Rome and the West.

It was the Hellenistic Greek culture that the Romans knew. In the second and first centuries before Christ, educated Romans were deeply influenced by Greeks, and in general their instincts led them to admire the Greek rather than the oriental elements in the Hellenistic amalgam. They were thus led back to a study of the Hellenic culture of earlier times. The early Church Fathers owed an equal debt to the late Hellenistic culture of the early centuries of the Christian era. Roman writers and Church Fathers preserved most of what the Middle Ages knew of Greek culture.

The great intellectual leaders of the Renaissance period spoke much of Greece, but they saw her largely through Roman eyes. When artists wanted to imitate Greek statues, they used Roman copies as their models; architects knew Greek architecture through late Roman buildings (often the work of Syrians); and scholars studied Greek literature only after first saturating themselves in Roman literature. Seventeenth-century scholars knew Greek well, and printed great editions of the Greek classics, but knowledge of Greece sadly declined during the urbane and Rome-admiring eighteenth century.

Early in the nineteenth century a great revival of interest in all things Greek spread over Europe. The Greek language was taught widely in schools, which were attended by rapidly increasing numbers of persons, and thousands of youngsters in all the countries of western Europe and the United States were drilled in the rudiments of Greek grammar. It cannot be said that all who painfully worked their way through a few pages of the Anabasis and the Iliad thereby became accomplished Greek scholars, or that they learned much of the true Greek spirit. But many imbibed something of this spirit, and others never forgot teachers who had been more successful in the great endeavor. The intellectual leaders of the nineteenth century, almost without exception, had received a classical training in their youth. Artists studied Greek models - real ones this time - and poets imitated or translated Greek masters. Philosophers and theologians again studied Plato, and scholars drew lessons from the history of ancient Greece. In Germany an ideal Greece was created by a long succession of thoughtful men from Winckelmann and Goethe, through the great scholars of the mid-century, to Eduard Meyer and Wilamowitz; in England, a rather different ideal was created by Byron and Shelley, Grote and Jowett, and Sir Gilbert Murray; and everywhere such classic ideals were upheld for public approbation and imitation. The nineteenth century was one of the truly great centuries in the history of human thought and civilization, and its debt to ancient Greece was enormous.

Today things are different. Greek has again become a dead language, known chiefly to the specialized scholars who use it as a tool in their researches. A young person seeking a liberal education no longer has the time to become proficient in the ancient languages. There is too much else that they must know. Fortunately however, there are other ways in which people can familiarize themselves with the great achievements of Greece and drink in something of her spirit. It would be a sad day for humanity if all knowledge of the Greek miracle were to be lost. Those who prize beauty in art and literature, or who seek truth in science and philosophy, or those who wish to direct their lives according to the dictates of reason, and those who consider intellectual integrity to be their dearest possession, will always find sympathy and inspiration in the famous Greeks who long ago distinguished themselves for these very qualities. The many-sided and brilliant Greek people turned the thought of Europe and the world in new directions and, like the great histories of Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides, and many others their magnificent creations have become possessions forever.

Compiled by: Marko Marelich
Retired Mechanical Engineer
San Francisco, California - USA
March 7, 2006