Table Of Content

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

Description:

Edith Hamilton buoyantly captures the spirit and achievements of the Greek civilization for our modern world. In The Greek Way, Edith Hamilton captures with "Homeric power and simplicity" (New York Times) the spirit of the golden age of Greece in the fifth century BC, the time of its highest achievements. She explores the Greek aesthetics of sculpture and writing and the lack of ornamentation in both. She examines the works of Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Euripides, among others; the philosophy of Socrates and Plato’s role in preserving it; the historical accounts by Herodotus and Thucydides on the Greek wars with Persia and Sparta and by Xenophon on civilized living.