Review - The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton

The first thing one encounters when reading Edith Hamilton's 'The Greek Way' is her love and even exuberance for her subject. Her opening remarks describe the classical greek worldview; an ability to grasp the world as it is, and still find it to be beautiful. This grasp this people had on reality would allow them to create the pictorial art, the art of the stage, here not including the dialogue and the dinner/drinking party, all still enjoyed much in the same manner today as the greeks enjoyed them in 500 b.c.e. Plato and Socrates, and the way they experienced gentlemanly society, are highlighted as the crowning achievements of greek philosophy. It is the Ideal, Hamilton seems to say implicitly, that the greeks envisioned and carried forward philosophically, that would later influence western civilization in the way it did. Later, comparisons are drawn between Aeschylus and Shakespeare, where the influence of the former on the latter is striking by the examples Hamilton presents. Hamilton here defines trajedy, elucidates pathos, and the differences between the two. She goes on to draw similarities between Virgil and Sophocles in their poetry and subjects, a valid comparison, she makes it seem. Between this first and last, Herodotus is presented as a wide-eyed surprisingly objective first reporter who documents the cogitations and remarks of subjects as diverse as the delphic priestess and Cyrus the Great of Persia. Freedom is won in the face of the Persian threat, and is the singular hallmark of the classical greeks in Hamilton's view. It affects everything the personalities Hamilton brings to light accomplish. Every work of art, every stage play, every dialectical argument can be viewed either as being in the presence of, or having the lack of freedom and democracy. There is no question, Hamilton rightly defines the greatness of these greeks as a free, democratic people. But at the close of her book, Greece has become imperialistic and desires empire. Sophocles, the old conservative guardsman, documents poetically the zeitgeist of the former and current states of things, and a new era is dawning. But Hamilton wisely leaves off here, having presented a wonderful picture of a wonderful people during a wonderful time.