New History

THE LIFE OF GREECE--Will Durant--Simon and Schuster ($3.95).

For more than a century the study of ancient Greece has been thinning out in Europe and the U. S., becoming a luxury or a slightly silly passion, a rare specialty with scholars, a cliche or nothing to the people at large. Greek is hard to learn (though not much harder than German) and U. S. education has generally dispensed with it. Available translations are often out of date or poor and first-rate writers have had more pressing interests than to improve upon them. People who feel like studying mankind's past have been attracted to anthropology, not to Thucydides. In art the "primitive" has seemed more fruitful than the Classical.

In The Life of Greece, therefore, Will Durant bears the burden of proof. His subject is one which fed and instructed the best minds of several robust centuries (16th, 17th, 18th) and stimulated the liberal revolutionaries who founded the U. S. and French republics. Durant does not capitalize on that. His treatment of Greek literature is more warmly informative than the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but it is commonplace in taste and no match for the subject. His illustrations are less than adequate (no papyrus, no comic masks, no small pottery) though such selections as the archaic mask of "Agamemnon" (see cut) are fresh and effective. But throughout his big book he does show, with more restraint in analogy-making than could be expected after his previous books, that the history of Greek politics is relevant to the nakedly political world of 1939.

Athens. The skills and habits on which "civilization" rests did not suddenly appear in Greece; they had been kicking around the Eastern Mediterranean for at least 1,000 years. This is made clear in Durant's history, the first written since full publication in 1936 of Sir Arthur Evans' great report on archaic Crete. The almost Parisian graces of Crete's strange society were remembered by the tough fighting tribes who displaced it, settling in Attica and on the Aegean islands. In one variety of toughness--the kind that rebels against concentration of riches and power --the Athenians were remarkable. About 600 B.C. they produced a statesman who averted bloody revolution by sage persuasion.

"Solon's peaceful revolution," says Durant, "is one of the encouraging miracles of history." He introduced a graduated income tax, created a popular assembly to check the old-fashioned aristocratic council, made the entire citizenry a panel from which jurors were chosen. The quarrelsome Athenians might not have stuck to these laws if a dictator, Peisistratus, had not enforced them for a generation; after that they became habitual. About 507 B.C. another persuasive political thinker, Cleisthenes, extended an Athenian device which for pure democracy has never been equalled: selection of legislators by lot from the whole list of citizens over 30. It was then that Athenians began feeling their oats.

The fun lasted for about a century, during which Athens fought off the Persians (this war, says Durant, "made Europe possible"), colonized the Mediterranean, built up an empire on sea power and trade. The 43,000 Athenians were free to litigate, make money, philosophize, fornicate and fight because most of the heavy work was done by some 115,000 slaves. Leaders and citizens alike were barbarically hardy, childishly corrupt; selling out to the enemy was a common piece of petulance. Furthermore the Athenians continually ditched and lorded it over other Greek cities, especially Sparta; and this combative local pride prevented a union, led to the desperate war with totalitarian Sparta which closed the century of invention and exhausted Greece.

The great inheritor was Alexandrian Greek Egypt, on whose "extensive experiment in state socialism" Durant is particularly good. There, as in Soviet Russia (which Durant does not mention), the land was collectivized; workers and peasants were forbidden to move from region to region; many industries were government-owned; banks were controlled by the government. It has been fashionable among historians to consider the culture of this age "decadent"; Durant qualifies that easy view considerably. Scholarship, science, and luxury arts--all now regarded as indispensable to civilization--flourished freely for the first time.

Popularizer. Will Durant does not belong with Aristotle and Bacon as a seeker of universal knowledge, but with the modern breed of synthesizers whose aim is to get knowledge into the heads of semi-educated people. He did his first popular writing for the vast E. Haldeman-Julius market. His twelve little Blue Books (5-c-) on Aristotle, Plato and other philosophers have sold 1,800,000 out of a total Blue Book sale of 200,000,000. Publishers Simon and Schuster got him to put these painless essays together in 1926 as The Story of Philosophy, which has sold some 500,000 copies.

For a long time professional scholars found "Dr."* Durant's works a source of indefinable distaste. Now they bear in mind the unfortunate experience of the great Egyptologist, Professor James Henry Breasted. Entrusted in 1935 with the reviewing of Our Oriental Heritage, 1,049-page first volume in Durant's projected The Story of Civilization (The Life of Greece is volume two), Professor Breasted rode over it in a haughty hurry. He was soon faced with a quiet public letter from Durant showing clearly that the Professor had scarcely read the book.

Durant's erudite wife says their house in Great Neck, L. I., is a "factory." The great popularizer planned to work five years on The Life of Greece, cut it to four-and-a-half to get the book out before election year. First draft was written in what Durant calls "the butcher's book," a mighty ledger. He scattered no less than 2,500 source references (to some 200 sources) through the 671 pages of The Life of Greece. Along with these impressive grace notes are other devices, beginning with the price, calculated to put the stuff over with the people. Two sizes of type are employed: large type for essentials, small type for skipping (some of the best things in the book). At the end appears an absurd and appealing glossary, defining 18 non-English terms used in the text, including bourgeoisie, elan, bizarreries.

* He got a Ph. D. at Columbia.

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