The Extant Odes of Pindar | Page 6

single impulse ever given to morality came from Palestine, yet the ground which nurtured the seeds of Christianity was as much Hellenic as Hebrew. It would be impossible here to enter on an exhaustive comparison of the ethical capacities of the two races, but before we pronounce hastily for the superiority of the Hebrew there are surely some difficulties to surmount. We may well ask, for example, Would Hellas ever have accepted as her chief national hero such a man as David a man who in his life is conspicuous by his crimes not less than by his brilliant gifts, and who dies with the words of blood and perfidy on his lips, charging his son with the last slaughterous satisfaction of his hate which he had sworn before his God to forego? And though the great Hebrew prophets teach often a far loftier morality than this, they cannot have been nearly so representative of the feeling of this nation as were Aeschylus and Sophocles and Pindar of the feeling of theirs. The Hebrews of the prophets' age 'slew the prophets,' and left it to the slayers' descendants to 'build their sepulchres,' and at the same time to show their inherited character still more unmistakeably by once more slaying the last prophet and the greatest.[3]
In truth in the literature, the art, the life generally of Hellas in her prime, the moral interest whenever it appears, and that is not seldom, claims for itself the grave and preponderant attention which it must claim if it is to appear with fit dignity. But it is not thrust forward unseasonably or in exaggeration, nor is it placed in a false opposition to the interests of the aesthetic instincts, which after all shade into the moral more imperceptibly than might be generally allowed. There must be a moral side to all societies, and the Hellenic society, the choicest that the world has seen, the completest, that is, at once in sensibilities and in energies, could not but show the excellence of its sensibilities in receiving moral impressions, the excellence of its energies in achieving moral conduct.
This, however, is no place to discuss at length questions in the history of ethics. Yet it must be remembered that in the ancient world departments of thought, and the affairs of men generally, were far less specialized than in modern times. If the philosophy of Hellas be the most explicit witness to her ethical development, her poetry is the most eloquent. And scarcely at any time, scarcely even in Aristotle, did Hellenic philosophy in any department lose most significant traces of its poetical ancestry. But enough here if I have succeeded in pointing out that in the great poet with whom we are concerned there is an ethical as well as a poetical and historical interest, supplying one more reason against neglect of his legacy of song.
Yet indeed even now there remains a further question which to the mind of any one who at present labours in this field of classical scholarship must recur persistently if not depressingly, and on which it is natural if not necessary to say a few words. If the selection of Pindar in particular as a Greek poet with claims to be further popularized among Englishmen may be defended, there is still a more general count to which all who make endeavours to attract or retain attention to Greek literature will in these times be called upon to plead by voices which command respect. To such pleas this is not the place to give large room, or to discriminate in detail between the reasonable and unreasonable elements in the attacks on a system of education in which a preeminent position is allotted to the literature of antiquity. While fully admitting that much time and labour are still wasted in efforts to plant the study of ancient and especially of Greek literature in uncongenial soil, while admitting also most fully the claims, and the still imperfect recognition of the claims, of physical science to a rank among the foremost in modern education, I should yet be abundantly willing that this attempt to help in facilitating the study of a Greek author should be looked on as implying adhesion to the protest still sometimes raised, that in the higher parts of a liberal education no study can claim a more important place than the study of the history and the literature of Hellas. The interest which belongs to these is far wider and deeper than any mere literary interest. To the human mind the most interesting of phenomena are and ought to be the phenomena of the human mind, and this granted, can there be any knowledge more desirable than the knowledge of the most vigorous and sensitive and in some ways also the most