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# 2025-06-02 - The Lessons of the Past by Edith Hamilton
I am posting an abridged version of an essay I found in the
little free library.
> Edith Hamilton is among the world's leading authorities on the
> Graeco-Roman civilization, a study which has occupied her for more
> than half her years (she was born in 1867). Her "The Greek Way"
> and "The Roman Way" have become classics in the field. She
> received her advanced education at Bryn Mawr College and the
> universities of Leipzig and Munich. She was headmistress of the
> Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore from 1896 to 1922. In 1957, in
> recognition of her devotion and scholarship, the Greek government
> made her an honorary citizen of Athens.
Is there an ever-present past? Are there permanent truths which are
forever important for the present? Today we are facing a future more
strange and untried than any other generation has faced. ... In such
a position can we afford to spend time on the past? That is the
question I am often asked.
I urge it without qualifications. We have a great civilization to
save--or to lose.
The point which I want to make is... that Socrates found on every
street corner and in every Athenian equivalent of the baseball field
people who were caught up by his questions into the world of thought.
To be able to be caught up into the world of thought--that is to be
educated.
There is today a clearly visible trend toward making it the aim of
education to defeat the Russians. That would be a sure way to defeat
education. Genuine education is possible only when people realize
that it has to do with persons, not with movements.
When I read educational articles it often seems to me that this
important side of the matter, the purely personal side, is not
emphasized enough; the fact that it is so much more agreeable and
interesting to be an educated person than not. The sheer pleasure of
being educated does not seem to be stressed. Once long ago I was
talking with Professor Basil L. Gildersleeve of Johns Hopkins
University, the greatest Greek scholar our country has produced. He
was an old man and he had been honored everywhere, in Europe as well
as in America. He was just back from a celebration held for him at
Oxford. I asked him what compliment received in his long life had
pleased him the most. The question amused him and he laughed over
it, but he thought too. Finally he said, "I believe it was when one
of my students said, 'Professor, you have so much fun with your
mind.'" Robert Louis Stevenson said that a man ought to be able to
spend two or three hours waiting for a train at a little country
station when he was all alone and had nothing to read, and not be
bored for a moment.
What is the education which can do this? What is the furniture which
makes the only place belonging absolutely to each one of us, the
world within, a place where we like to go?
[The Greeks] had a passion for thinking things out, and they loved
unclouded clarity of statement as well as of thought. The Romans
did, too, in their degree. They were able to put an idea into an
astonishingly small number of words without losing a particle of
intelligibility.
Just what the teaching in the schools was which laid the foundation
of the Greek civilization we do not know in detail; the result we do
know. Greek children were taught, Plato said, to "love what is
beautiful and hate what is ugly." When they grew up their very pots
and pans had to be pleasant to look at. It was part of their
training to hate clumsiness and awkwardness; they loved grace and
practiced it. "Our children," Plato said, "will be influenced for
good by every sight and sound of beauty, breathing in, as it were, a
pure breeze blowing to them from a good land."
All the same, the Athenians were not, as they showed Socrates when he
talked to them, preoccupied with enjoying lovely things. The
children were taught to think.
Basic to all Greek achievement was freedom. ... At Marathon and at
Salamis overwhelming numbers of Persians had been defeated by small
Greek forces. It had been proven that one free man was superior to
many submissively obedient subjects of a tyrant. Athens was the
leader in that amazing victory, and to the Athenians freedom was
their dearest possession. Demosthenes said that they would not think
it worth their while to live if they could not do so as free men...
Freedom of speech was the right the Athenians prized most and there
has never been another state as free in that respect.
But those free Greeks owned slaves. What kind of freedom was that?
The question would have been incomprehensible to the ancient world.
There had always been slaves; they were a first necessity. The way
of life everywhere was based upon them. They were taken for granted;
no one ever gave them a thought. The very best Greek minds the
thinkers who discovered freedom and the solar system, had never an
idea that slavery was evil. It is true that the greatest thinker of
them all, Plato, was made uncomfortable by it. He said that slaves
were often good, trustworthy, doing more for a man than his own
family would, but he did not follow his thought through. The glory
of being the first one to condemn it belongs to a man of the
generation before Plato, the poet Euripides. He called it, "That
thing of evil," and in several of his tragedies showed its evil for
all to see. A few centuries later the great Greek school of the
Stoics denounced it. Greece first saw it for what it is. But the
world went on in the same way. The Bible accepts it without comment.
Two thousand years after the Stoics, less than a hundred years ago,
the American Republic accepted it.
A reflective Roman traveling in Greece in the second century A.D.
said, "None ever throve under democracy save the Athenians; /they/
had sane self-control and were law-abiding." He spoke truly. That
is what the Athenian education aimed at, to produce men who would be
able to maintain a self-governed state because they were themselves
self-governed, self-controlled, self-reliant. Plato speaks of "the
education in excellence which makes men long to be perfect citizens,
knowing both how to rule and be ruled." Pericles said "We do not
allow absorption in our own affairs to interfere with participation
in the city's; we yield to none in independence of spirit and
complete self-reliance, but we regard him who holds aloof from public
affairs as useless." They called the useless man a "private"
citizen, /idiotes/, from which our word "idiot" comes.
They were free because of willing obedience to law, not only the
written, but still more the unwritten, kindness and compassion and
unselfishness and the many qualities which cannot be enforced, which
depend on a man's free choice, but without which men cannot live
together.
The Athenians in their dangerous world needed to be a nation of
independent men who could take responsibility, and they taught their
children accordingly. They thought about every boy. Someday he
would be a citizen of Athens, responsible for her safety and her
glory, "each one," Pericles said, "fitted to meet life's chances and
changes with the utmost versatility and grace." To them education
was by its very nature an individual matter.
That kind of education is not geared toward mass production. It does
not produce people who instinctively go the same way.
The Greeks can help us, help us as no other people can, to see how
freedom is won and how it is lost. Above all, to see in clearest
light what freedom is. [Greece] rose because there was in the Greeks
the greatest spirit that moves in humanity, the spirit that sets men
free.
Plato put into words what that spirit is. "Freedom" he says, "is no
matter of laws and constitutions; only he is free who realizes the
divine order within himself, the true standard by which a man can
steer and measure himself." True standards, ideals that lift life
up, marked the way of the Greeks.
> The time for extracting a lesson from history is every at hand for
> them who are wise. --Demosthenes
TEXT Edith Hamilton
HTML The Greek Way
DIR Echo of Greece
See also:
DIR Greece and The East by William Stearns Davis
DIR A Day In Old Athens by William Stearns Davis
DIR A Victor of Salamis by William Stearns Davis
tags: article,history,political
# Tags
DIR article
DIR history
DIR political