The Greeks
H.D.F. Kitto
Pelican Books, 1957

"[T]he fact that Achilles has his strength from a god or makes a wise decision with the help of Athena, does not in the least detract from the greatness of Achilles: the gods do not so favour ordinary men, and he whom they do favour is not ordinary. We are not to think that the gods suddenly took up any weakling and gave him strength: they did not behave like this." (KITTO, p. 54)

"The gods, to the Greek, are not necessarily benevolent. If they are offended they hit out implacably: as Achilles says to the broken Priam, they give two sorrows for every blessing. Nor is this clear appreciation of the human scene relieved either by bright hopes of a better world hereafter or by any belief in progress. As to the former, the Greek in Homer could look forward to a dim shadowy life in Hades; and as Achilles said, 'I would rather be a slave on earth than a King in Hades.' The only real hope of immortality was that one's fame might live on in song. As to the latter, it was impossible; for the nature of the gods cannot change, and that the nature of men should change was an idea that occurred to nobody for a long time yet; and even if it did, the gods would still give the two sorrows for every blessing. Life would still remain what it is, in all its essentials. One can imagine such an outlook, so remarkably free from illusions, developing into an arid religion and breeding a resigned and hopeless fatalism; but it was combined with this almost fierce joy in life, the exultation in human achievement and in human personality. So far was the Greek from thinking that Man was a mere nothing in the sight of the gods that he had always to be reminding himself that Man is not God, and that it is impious to think it. Never again, until the Greek spirit intoxicated Italy at the Renaissance, do we find such superb self-confidence in humanity - a self-confidence which, in Renaissance Italy, was not restrained by the modesty imposed on the Greek by his instinctive religious outlook." (KITTO, pp. 60-61)

"[W]hat impressed the Greeks, even those who disliked the Spartan state, was the fact that they had imposed on their lives a certain form, or pattern, and renounced so much for it." (KITTO, p. 93) [PSA: The same can be said for the bios theoretikos of the philosophers: much is renounced for the sake of a form of life or way of being that enacts what is true and good and beautiful]

"[T]he Athenians undoubtedly had a genius for statesmanship.... [N]ever did the Roman state, as such, transfigure the life of its members as the Athenian polis did during the sixth, fifth and fourth centuries, and even later. If a political system can do this, one is surely entitled to attribute political genius to the people who invented it - though one should be careful not to pretend that the system was ideal; and the most important manifestation of that genius was, I think, the general disposition of the Athenians to deal with social troubles as reasonable people, acting together, not, like children or fanatics, by violence. Time after time we see them doing this: the privileged class is open to argument, and - on the whole - loyally accepts the verdict. There was, in the Athenian life, a pervading sense of the common interest, *to koinon*..." (KITTO, pp. 97-98)

"Such was the spirit of the dawning Periclean Age - if we remember too that it was steeped in the perennial Homer, who taught that habit of mind - essentially aristocratic, in whatever class of society it may be found - which puts quality before quantity, noble struggle before mere achievement, and honour before opulence." (KITTO, p. 117)

"Beneath this general aversion to the professional there was a more or less conscious theory of the polis: namely that the duty of taking part, at the appropriate season of life, in all the affairs of the polis was one that the individual owed both to the polis and to himself. It was part of that full life which only the polis could provide: the savage, living for himself alone, could not have it, nor the civilized 'barbarian' living in a vast empire ruled by a King and his personal servants. To the Athenian at least, self-rule by discussion, self-discipline, personal responsibility, direct participation in the life of the polis at all points - these things were the breath of life." (KITTO, p. 128)

"The polis was made for the amateur. Its ideal was that every citizen (more or less, according as the polis was democratic or oligarchic) should play his part in all of its many activities - an ideal that is recognizably descended from the generous Homeric conception of arete as an all-round excellence and an all-round activity. It implies a respect for the wholeness or the oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization." (KITTO, p. 161)

With regard to the word kalos, Kitto notes that a modern person would say: "How charming of the Greeks to turn Virtue into Beauty and Vice into Ugliness! But the Greek is doing nothing of the sort. It is we who are doing that, by dividing concepts into different, though perhaps parallel, categories, the moral, the intellectual, the aesthetic, the practical. The Greek did not: even the philosophers were reluctant to do it." (KITTO, p. 170)

"Hamartia, 'a bad shot', does not mean 'Better luck next time'; it means rather that a mental error is as blameworthy, and may be as deadly, as a moral one." (KITTO, p. 171)

"Their ideal was not a specifically knightly ideal, like Chivalry or Love: they called it arete - another typically Greek word. When we meet it in Plato we translate it 'Virtue' and consequently miss all the flavor of it. 'Virtue', at least in modern English, is almost entirely a moral word; arete on the other hand is used indifferently in all the categories and means simple 'excellence'. It may be limited of course by its context; the arete of a race-horse is speed, of a cart-horse strength. If it is used, in a general context, of a man it will connote excellence in the way in which a man can be excellent - morally, intellectually, physically, practically." (KITTO, pp. 171-172)

"The Greek hero tried to combine in himself the virtues which our own heroic age divided between the knight and the churchman. That is one reason why the epic survived to be the education of a much more civilized age. The heroic ideal of arete, though firmly rooted in its own age and circumstances, was so deep and wide that it could become the ideal of an age that was totally different." (KITTO, p. 172)

"The sharp distinction which the Christian and the Oriental world has normally drawn between the body and the soul, the physical and the spiritual, was foreign to the Greek - at least until the time of Socrates and Plato." (KITTO, p. 173)

"But it is the Games local and international, which most clearly illustrate this side of the Greek mind. Among us it is sometimes made a reproach that a man 'makes a religion of games'. The Greek did not do this, but he did something perhaps more surprising: he made games a part of his religion." (KITTO, p. 173)

"To Pindar, physical, moral and intellectual excellence - and, be it added, plain Wealth - were all parts of the one whole; one reason, perhaps, why Pindar can make a man feel, while the spell is on him, that he is the only real poet who has ever written." (KITTO, p. 175)

About the Persians of Aeschylus: "But every detail in the play is seen to be not only natural but also necessary when we realize that Aeschylus had no intention of writing a 'historical' play, but a play rather on the idea of Hybris (in this case, the wanton defiance of the will of Heaven shown by Xerxes) is inevitably punished by Heaven. In the play, Xerxes is overthrown by Zeus, the Greeks being only the intermediaries, and the very soul of Greece too.. It is not the event, but its inner meaning, that Aeschylus is dramatizing; and if the historical events, in any particular, do not express the inner meaning clearly enough, Aeschylus alters them, thus illustrating in advance the dictum of Aristotle that poetry is more philosophical than history." (KITTO, pp. 183-184)

About the Agamemnon of Aeschylus: "Those bits of the story which he does not want, the story of the war, for instance, or the seduction of Clytemnestra by Aegisthus, he throws away, and those which he does want he uses not in chronological order, but in the order that suits him.... He is, in this special sense, creating something new, the Form is entirely under his own control. His theme, crime punished by crim that must be punished by crime, he states a first, a second, a third time, with ever increasing tension, and the result is a logical, beautiful and powerful structure. All Greek plays are, in this way, built on a single conception, and nothing that does not directly contribute to it is admitted.... There are said to be as many Hamlets as there are actors capable of playing the part; such a thing coul dnot be said of any Greek tragedy. The relation between the meaning and the form is so logical that any wayward interpretation can be convincingly disproved. If it does not account for every detail of the play, it is wrong, for the true interpretation explains everything." (KITTO, pp. 185-186)

"Plato, like some of his predecessors, drew a sharp distinction betwen knowledge and opinion. Knowledge is not what a man has been told, shown or taught; it can only be what he has found out for himself by long and rigorous search. Moreover, only the permanent, not the transient, can be the material of knowledge; only what 'is', not the objects of sense which are always 'becoming' something else. Plato in fact reaches a position not very far from that of the Psalmist who says 'The knowledge of God is the beginning of wisdom' - though he reaches this position by a very different road. The knowledge of 'what is' comes only through a life given up to intellectual striving, the introduction to which is the study of mathematics, for this leads the mind away from gross objects of sense to the contemplation of things more real. The unchanging Realities we can apprehend by the mind only: the senses can show us only transient and imperfect copies of Reality. Of the Realities, or the Ideas, the highest is The Good, and although Plato does not formally identify The Good with God, he speaks of its divine nature in such a way that formal identification would make but little difference. Such is the Knowledge having which a man cannot do wrong; it is the knowledge of Being, of The Good, virtually of God. It is something much richer and wider than our current, purely intellectual 'knowledge', for a moral as well as an intellectual passion is its driving-force, and its object is the Truth that embraces everytjing...." (KITTO, pp. 193-194)

"Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides were philosophical poets if ever there were such, and myth, even 'immoral' myth, was their natural medium." (KITTO, p. 201)

"In the Agamemnon Aeschylus does not show us the streets and the market, ordinary citizens' houses, goatherds, cooks, and scullions about the palace. We do not infer that these things did not exist, nor that Aeschylus had not an interest in such things. We can see at once that these things do not come into his play because there was no reason why they should. All classical Greek art had a very austere standard of relevance." (KITTO, pp. 223-224)

"The 'lover' is the erastes: and in the Funeral Speech the grave Pericles, 'the Olympian' as Aristophanes called him, said to the Athenians, 'You must be erastae of Athens.' That is, 'Let Athens be to you something that thrills you to the very marrow.' - Not the remark of a cold man. The doctrine of the Mean is characteristically Greek, but it should not tempt us to think that the Greek was one who was hardly aware of the passions, a safe, anaesthetic, middle-of-the-road man. On the contrary, he valued the Mean so highly because he was prone to the extremes." (KITTO, p 252)

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