Gilbert Murray: The Value of Greece

Gilbert Murray · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 19 pages

Gilbert Murray's essay opening R.W. Livingstone's collection The Legacy of Greece, twelve essays by Murray, W.R. Inge, J. Burnet and others, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921, pages 1–23. The front-page illustration is Charles Meynier's Apollo and Urania, and Evelyn De Morgan's Cassandra appears within.

Murray opens by conceding, at length and without flinching, everything that can be said against his subject. If the value of a life on earth is measured in dollars and miles and horse-power, ancient Greece counts as a poverty-stricken and minute territory, its engines and implements nearer to the spear and bow of the savage than to the telegraph and the aeroplane. Even setting material things aside and taking the actual achievements of the race in conduct and knowledge as the standard, the average clerk going to town and glancing idly at his morning newspaper is probably better behaved and infinitely better informed than the average Athenian who sat spellbound at the tragedies of Æschylus. Only by another standard, he argues, does the great age of Greece appear extraordinary — the standard of the spirit, to which the thing achieved is little and the quality of mind that achieved it much, which cares less for the sum of knowledge attained than for the love of knowledge, and less for good policing than for one free act of heroism. By that measure, he suggests, one can understand why Greek literature was the basis of education throughout later antiquity, why its rediscovery, fragmentary and imperfectly understood as it was, could intoxicate the keenest minds of Europe into a kind of spiritual rebirth, and why further exploration might still be worth men's lives. The essay then turns to the question it has raised against itself — whether such a standard is legitimate and reasonable at all — and works towards its answer from there.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.9 MB, 19 pages)