Roy Lotz's Reviews > The Life of Greece

Edward Gibbon, never the optimist, in his long chronicle of the collapse of the Roman Empire defined history as “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Will Durant thinks this is a terrible mistake, and his series on the Story of Civilization can in part be seen as a corrective to the Gibbonian view.

Gibbon so often saw the worst in humankind: war, rebellion, deceit, mutiny, betrayal, mania, persecution, dogma, and any other crime you care to name. The heroes in Gibbon’s history are the few brave and compassionate souls who fought against the relentless tide of circumstances, only (at best) to slow the inevitable ruin of the empire. When Gibbon is not tracing out the long history of some martial campaign, with its dreary catalogue of victories, defeats, and slaughters, he is describing some horrid revolt at home, some cloak-and-dagger scheme for power, in which innocent after innocent are put to the sword—the bloody affair inevitably ending with some wretched villain clothed in the purple, destined to be hewn down by another villain. For Gibbon, everything worthwhile—philosophy, art, literature, science—happens in spite of the course of history, not because of it.

As I said, Durant holds the opposite view. Durant is here interested in tracing out the progress of civilization. By this term, “civilization,” Durant means many things: lasting peace, strong morals, good government, moderate religion, the development of the fine arts, and the advance of knowledge. He is much more interested in styles of pottery than types of weaponry; he would rather dwell on a piece of music than a naval battle. Thus, in this volume, we find an enormous amount of space given over to the playwrights and poets, to architectural styles and the progress of painting, to philosophy and mathematics. And although Durant does largely subscribe to the “great man” view of history—or at least the “great man” view of civilization—he takes many opportunities to depict the daily lives of the Greeks. Indeed, compared with Gibbon, Durant’s tone and subject are often intimate, familiar, even mundane.

Durant is a writer of rare caliber. He somehow manages to be both eloquent and direct, both sophisticated and easygoing, both erudite and approachable. His prose is welcoming; you can spend hours reading this book, and never tire. Yet unlike other books that are easily read, Durant’s prose is never plain or merely functional, but always sparkles with wit and charm. Consequently, this book (and I’m sure the others in this series) can be profitably and enjoyably read by anyone, bookworm or neophyte.

Of course, this book is not without its flaws. The most obvious and forgivable is that Durant has many outdated opinions. Even for the time this book was published—1939—Durant had an old-fashioned turn of mind. He is a lover of tradition, and is typically skeptical of modern scholarship. But this leads to his more serious shortcoming: his credulity of tradition. Many stories are related in these pages that I suspect are apocryphal, or at least not very well supported by the record. History is relentlessly mythologized, and this is doubly true of Greek history, which is half myth to begin with; so I think much more skepticism is needed than what Durant brought to bear.

Doubtless, part of this is due to Durant’s background. He is not a specialist in any sense of the word, but rather explicitly scorns specialization. It was his opinion that a “synthesis” was needed of the many “analytic” works in existence; that somebody with a broad background and a philosophical turn of mind was required to gather up the scattered materials of historical research into one grand fabric. The ultimate purpose of this venture is perspective—to see the subject from as near a universal point of view as possible. But as Durant admits himself, the huge mass of information makes errors inevitable.

Yet the occasional error is not the gravest possibility for a venture of this kind. By writing from such a high vantage point, Durant risks mischaracterizing his subject entirely, as inaccurate generalizations and apocryphal tales are easy to accept when one isn’t well-acquainted with the original data. Otto Neugebauer, in his excellent Exact Sciences in Antiquity (1949), seems to be responding directly to Durant when he says:

I do not consider it as the goal of historical writing to condense the complexity of historical processes into some kind of “digest” or “synthesis”. On the contrary, I see the main purpose of historical studies in the unfolding of the stupendous wealth of phenomena which are connected with any phase of human history and thus to counteract the natural tendency toward over-simplification and philosophical constructions which are the faithful companions of ignorance.

Neugebauer’s approach is quite opposite to Durant’s. Neugebauer aims not to simplify or generalize, not to gather up what we know into a single narrative, but by patient scholarship to reveal the incredible and irreducible richness of every phase of human culture. Thus, instead of summarizing Babylonian mathematics, he deciphers a single Babylonian tablet for the reader, allowing us an indirect glimpse at the primary material, repeatedly reminding us how little we actually know about these bygone civilizations.

Yet admirable and impressive as is Neugebauer’s work, and as persuasive as is his pedagogical philosophy, I think works like Durant’s are necessary. Somebody has to attempt, however imperfectly, the task of weaving together all of the disparate threads. One single mind, however limited, has to endeavor to tell the whole story. Of course Neugebauer is right that the final product will be riddled with errors, and perhaps is doomed from the start. But works like Durant’s and Gibbon’s allow us to develop a sense of history, to feel in our bones the many generations that have lived and died before us, to sense our own small place in a progression of works and deed that did not begin with us, and will not end with us.