** 26th book of 2021: History does not leap, it saunters. **
History’s allure is either to understand how the world works, or experience worlds otherwise inaccessible. Contrasted with Gibbon’s style of *‘natural connection of causes and events broken by frequent and hasty transitions’ * Durant prefers sauntering through antiquity’s streets, languidly painting an image of culture, literature, and thought, while only lightly touching on the endless accumulation of wars and succession.
Greece, in Durant’s telling, was a rowdy culture that treasured logic, boldness, and beauty. * The greek was no effeminate esthete…. he thought of art as subordinate to life, and living as the greatest art of all. * Yet in places like In Arcadia, *to be unable to sing was counted as a disgrace. * Greece even had its own Kanye West in the form of Zeuxis: * He was a character, and painted with a swashbuckling brush. At the games he skirted about in a checkered tunic, on which his name was embroidered in gold. * These vignettes give a view of ancient Greece in its living, breathing glory; Greece was a society composed of the same clay of humanity we live with today, but shaped by vastly different hardships, triumphs, and ambitions.
Two historical currents Durant focused on were the rise reason out of religious superstition, and the fragility of early political systems. For reason, as Durant draws explicit parallels to modernity: * Though myths may differ, reason remains the same. In Greek culture as well as in Greek art, Form and order are the essence of the classic style …. The typical Greek writer, like the typical artist cuts his matter down to brevity, rearranges it into clarity, transforms it into a complex simplicity. He is always direct, and seldom obscure. He shuns exaggeration and bias, and even when he is romantic in feeling he struggles to be logical in thought. *
Durant recounts how democracy emerged from the primordial soup of Agean city-states, but was often disrupted by class-warfare, tyranny, or other external events. In the end * The death of Greek democracy was both a natural and a violent death, in which the fatal agents were the organic disorders of the system. The sword of Macedon merely added the final blow…. [Greek democracy] had discovered no way of reconciling local autonomy with national stability and power. *
There are likely better books to understand the political history of Ancient Greece, but Durant’s text serves as a nice excursion into the past for novice reader.
Hat tip to Roy Lotz for the rec and on skipping the first book in this series