The Legacy of Greece | Page 3

his children if ever they were in need; always to
help his patients to the best of his power; never to use or profess to use
magic or charms or any supernatural means; never to supply poison or
perform illegal operations; never to abuse the special position of
intimacy which a doctor naturally obtains in a sick house, but always
on entering to remember that he goes as a friend and helper to every
individual in it.
We have given up that oath now: I suppose we do not believe so much
in the value of oaths. But the man who first drew up that oath did a

great deed. He realized and defined the meaning of his high calling in
words which doctors of unknown tongues and undiscovered countries
accepted from him and felt to express their aims for well over two
thousand years.
Now what do I want to illustrate by these three instances? The rapidity
with which we are now at last throwing off the last vestiges of the yoke
of Greece? No, not that. I want to point out that even in the realm of
science, where progress is so swift and books so short-lived, the Greeks
of the great age had such genius and vitality that their books lived in a
way that no others have lived. Let us get away from the thought of
Euclid as an inky and imperfect English school-book, to that ancient
Eucleides who, with exceedingly few books but a large table of sand let
into the floor, planned and discovered and put together and re-shaped
the first laws of geometry, till at last he had written one of the great
simple books of the world, a book which should stand a pillar and
beacon to mankind long after all the political world that Eucleides
knew had been swept away and the kings he served were conquered by
the Romans, and the Romans in course of time conquered by the
barbarians, and the barbarians themselves, with much labour and
reluctance, partly by means of Eucleides' book, eventually educated; so
that at last, in our own day, they can manage to learn their geometry
without it. The time has come for Euclid to be superseded; let him go.
He has surely held the torch for mankind long enough; and books of
science are born to be superseded. What I want to suggest is that the
same extraordinary vitality of mind which made Hippocrates and
Euclid and even Denis of Thrace last their two thousand years, was also
put by the Greeks of the great age into those activities which are, for
the most part at any rate, not perishable or progressive but eternal.
This is a simple point, but it is so important that we must dwell on it for
a moment. If we read an old treatise on medicine or mechanics, we may
admire it and feel it a work of genius, but we also feel that it is obsolete:
its work is over; we have got beyond it. But when we read Homer or
Aeschylus, if once we have the power to admire and understand their
writing, we do not for the most part have any feeling of having got
beyond them. We have done so no doubt in all kinds of minor things, in

general knowledge, in details of technique, in civilization and the like;
but hardly any sensible person ever imagines that he has got beyond
their essential quality, the quality that has made them great.
Doubtless there is in every art an element of mere knowledge or
science, and that element is progressive. But there is another element,
too, which does not depend on knowledge and which does not progress
but has a kind of stationary and eternal value, like the beauty of the
dawn, or the love of a mother for her child, or the joy of a young
animal in being alive, or the courage of a martyr facing torment. We
cannot for all our progress get beyond these things; there they stand,
like light upon the mountains. The only question is whether we can rise
to them. And it is the same with all the greatest births of human
imagination. As far as we can speculate, there is not the faintest
probability of any poet ever setting to work on, let us say, the essential
effect aimed at by Aeschylus in the Cassandra-scene of the
Agamemnon, and doing it better than Aeschylus. The only thing which
the human race has to do with that scene is to understand it and get out
of it all the joy and emotion and wonder that it contains.
This eternal quality is perhaps clearest in poetry: in poetry the mixture
of knowledge matters less. In art there is a constant