The Ghost of Greece

HELLENISM (272 pp.)--Arnold J. Toyn-bee--Oxford ($4.50).

This book implies a moral stated by Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

To Toynbee, an astronomer of the past who views history as a multitude of ever-turning cultural constellations, the rise and fall of Greco-Roman civilization is merely an episode lasting roughly from 1000 B.C. to 600 A.D. Toynbee traces the course of Hellenism's bright star lucidly, a little offhandedly, treating it largely as an object lesson for the present. Hellenism's central characteristic was the worship of man--exemplified by the ludicrously human crew of Olympian divinities and, later, by a more sophisticated secular humanism. This man worship, which has thrilled so many historians of Greece, chills Toynbee (an Anglican with a yen for syncretism). To him, it is a form of idolatry that appeals to man when he has mastered nature but has not yet realized that he cannot master himself.

The political embodiment of Greek humanism was the city-state, which provided order instead of anarchy, freed the individual from the frenzied worship of nature gods, and destroyed the rigid cult of the family, including the blood feud. The major demerit was that the Hellenes soon "took to worshipping their city-states as gods, instead of treating them simply as public utilities." Inevitably, this produced the first Hellenic martyr, Socrates, who compelled Athens "to choose between respecting his conscience and taking his life."

The judicial murder of Socrates was a mirror of the city-states' violent dealings with each other. Finally, the Hellenes united against the Persians, and even this alliance (the Confederacy of Delos, founded in 478 B.C.) was characteristically betrayed when the Athenians rifled the common treasury. This act offers Historian Toynbee an interesting and ironic sidelight. The Athenians used the funds to stave off mass unemployment by building public works. Thus the monuments that crown the Acropolis testifying to the glory that was Greece are actually the result of a kind of grandiose PWA project subsidized with stolen funds.

80 Persian Wives. A century after the great Atheno-Peloponnesian War (431 B.C. to 404 B.C.) all but destroyed the city-state, Macedonia's Alexander steered Hellenism off on another tack. Under the tutelage of Aristotle, he envisioned the brotherhood of man in a single universal state to which, in Toynbee's view, the earlier Hellenes had been so suicidally blind. In carving out his empire, he directed 80 of his highest-ranking officers to marry Persian women. But the experiment in marital one-worldism was shortlived. The Hellenic world continued to writhe in violent separatist agonies until Rome's Augustan peace was imposed upon it in 31 B.C.

This patched up Hellenism, but it could not revitalize it spiritually. Into the deserted streets of the spirit crept Stoicism and Epicureanism, cool in faith, cooler in comfort. Astrology was in vogue together with "archaism," an aping of the past for the sake of novelty. The death of Hellenism in the fall of the Roman Empire was not caused by a "triumph of religion and barbarism," says Toynbee, taking issue with Gibbon. As Toynbee sees it, Christianity did not put the torch to the classic world; it lit one for it in the sightless dark.

Dangerous Demon. The comparisons with modern history that stud Toynbee's pages are not dogmatically pounded home, but they are plain. The worship of the city-state has its evident counterpart, as Toynbee sees it, in modern nationalism--today the world's "dominant religion." Hellenism's worship of man, which reasserted itself in the West through the Renaissance and 18th century rationalism, still lies buried but not extinct beneath the surface; it may again burst out. Just what it is that bound Hellenism inescapably to humanism, or how the present can guard against it, Toynbee does not say; he merely warns that "the Modern World must exorcise this demon resolutely if it is to save itself from meeting with its Hellenic predecessor's fate."

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