The Greeks’ sense of personal achievement, of a man’s obligation to make the most of his natural gifts, led them to give to the works of their hands the same care and attention that they gave to the structure of political life. In the Greek view, anything worth doing was worth doing well, and the remains of their humblest pots have a remarkable distinction. Even objects so utilitarian as coins are little masterpieces of relief sculpture in gold or silver.

When Greek art dealt with animals, as it often did, it displayed dogs alert to every scent and sound, lions leaping on their prey with savage mastery, horses elegantly on the move. This art found its material in the real world, but the artist felt that to do justice to what he saw, he must impart to it an order and balance. What was true of high sculpture was no less true of humbler arts such as decorations on pottery. The explanation in each case is that art was intended to perpetuate something visible by revealing what was most important in it.

The Greeks were a people who lacked inhibitions in speaking about themselves, and as might be expected, they delighted in words. They had at their disposal a wonderfully subtle, expressive and adaptable language, and they made full use of it. With the Greeks, as with many peoples, poetry came before prose. Poetry, in fact, became almost a second religion, and it was created with all the care and insight that was accorded to the visual arts. Poets were highly esteemed. A poet, said the philosopher Socrates, was "a light and winged and holy thing." Greek poets wrote about all sorts of subjects: farming, local lore, the weather. If a man, any man, had something important to say he often said it in verse — which in the early days meant that he said it in song, for almost all Greek poetry was originally sung or spoken to music.

Mask of a satyr

Poetry was the Greeks’ immediate response to a wide range of experience, and to reflect this variety they invented or perfected many of the poetic forms we know today. They seem to have begun with the heroic epic, which is objective storytelling in verse of exciting and tragic events. They followed this with a more personal, more emotional poetry, which was sung to the lyre and is called lyric for this reason. At their high noon the Greeks invented both tragedy and comedy, the first dealing with the darker and more difficult relations between the gods and men, the second viewing with derisive ribaldry all manner of human foibles. Even in later years they continued to write charming poetry, though its strength had become diminished and its subjects less majestic.

The most striking quality of Greek literature, poetry and prose alike, is that it is as alive and relevant today as it was when it was first written. We cannot fail to respond to the extraordinary power with which it presents issues of perennial urgency. We may admire it for its technical skill, but what binds us to it is its profound humanity, its wise appreciation of human values. It deals with precise issues in a universal way, and it gains our attention not by arguing for this side or for that but by presenting a situation in full, in all its powerful implications. Its extraordinary immediacy and directness drive home its imaginative thoughts with an irresistible power, and behind it we feel the living force of people who were eager to examine their destinies with the utmost candor and passion.

Mask of a youth

Plato

Aristotle

If in their practical way the Greeks needed astronomy for navigation and an understanding of weights and stresses for building, they strengthened and broadened this technical knowledge with theories and general principles about the nature of matter and space and motion, which they expressed in mathematics, especially in geometry. Then they often reaped the benefits in other fields: Pythagoras set a firm foundation for music, for example, by discovering the numerical ratios of the lengths of string that would produce a seven-note scale.

While Greek science was developing on a theoretical basis, it also saw the need for observation and experiment. When medicine flowered in the fifth century B.C. under the inspiration of the great physician Hippocrates of Cos, its first task was the collection of data from which deductions could be drawn. Thus, in the identification of diseases, a Greek doctor set great store on the correct description of symptoms, and proceeded from that point to do what he could to effect a cure. Medicine was of course very much in its infancy, and doctors were much better at diagnosing a complaint than in knowing what to do for it, but at least they had made a great advance over the old days when illnesses were thought to be curable by amulets, magic charms and the like. In surgery the beginnings were primitive enough, but by experimenting on animals and learning something about the principles of physiology, the Greeks were able to deal with fractures and dislocations, which were common among athletes, and with wounds, especially head wounds, received in war.

The spirit which inspired Greek researches into nature was also at work on human actions, and it made the Greeks the first true historians. Their accounts of past events gradually changed from legend to verifiable fact; "What I write here," said Hecataeus of Miletus at the beginning of the fifth century B.C., "is the account of what I thought to be true; for the stories of the Greeks [of other centuries] are numerous, and in my opinion ridiculous."

In pursuing truth for its own sake the Greeks were hampered by no rigid theology. Since they were not tied to creeds, they were free to ask questions about the scheme of things. Such inquiries, far from being thought impious, were often regarded as a quasi-religious activity because they showed the wonderful workings of the gods. As the philosopher Xenophanes said, "The gods did not reveal everything to men at the beginning, but men, as they seek in time, find something better." Thales, a thoroughly rational man, who was able to foretell an eclipse in 585 B.C., nevertheless insisted that "all things are full of gods," and this was the usual Greek attitude.

Thus Greek art and Greek science fitted in happily with Greek religion; indeed, religion did much to inspire and sustain the poets and philosophers. Though Greek gods might seem to modern minds often to fall below the standards demanded of divinity, they had something impressive in common. They were all to a high degree embodiments of power, whether in the physical world or in the mind of man. From them came literally everything, both visible and invisible, and it was the task of the mortals to make the proper use of what the gods provided.

The Greeks took all the familiar steps to keep in contact with their gods. They offered prayers and hymns and sacrifices; they consulted all kinds of oracles; they had countless shrines containing images of the gods. They hoped that the gods would be kind to them, and they spoke of them in the language of friendship. They had no very clear doctrines. Even on the subject of life after death they varied from thinking that the dead were unsubstantial ghosts to imagining an Elysium beyond the Western Sea.

Because the gods were the sources of power, men honored every kind of power and wished to display it in their own lives. This applied equally to war, the arts, athletic games and thought. If a Greek did well in any of these, he was making a proper use of his divinely provided gifts and to that extent he was getting nearer to the gods. This is what Aristotle means when. he says: "We must be immortal as far as we can." Thus the Greeks stood in an ambivalent relation to their gods, at once eager to be as much like them as possible, yet knowing that humans must not attempt this too eagerly, lest they imagine that they were gods.

This ambivalence proved of great value. From it came the characteristic Greek mixture of energy and moderation, both in life and the arts. While the Greeks zestfully tried every form of action, they tempered it with the maxim "Nothing in excess," and they praised the desirability of the Mean, the middle state between attempting too much and not attempting enough. Needless to say, they did not always achieve the Mean, but it was at least an ideal, and it set its mark on their civilization. They felt in themselves a driving strength which came from the gods, and they knew that it was their task to make the most of this, not by seeking pleasure and sensation (though of course they enjoyed these as the reward for their efforts) but by shaping their lives to rational and desirable ends. As the Greeks set out to make the best of their natural gifts and to be worthy of their human nature, they dedicated themselves to noble toil, to creating something new and splendid, to keeping their bodies as fit as their minds, to making order out of disorder, and to living in harmony with their fellow citizens.