To Think About It!

I’m re-reading Edith Hamilton’s little book, The Echo of Greece.  I first read this book in the early 1970’s and have read it a number of times since.  I commend it to you.  Edith Hamilton (1867-1963) was an educator and an author.  She graduated from, and then  taught at, and later became head of, the Bryn Mawr School (a private college prep school for girls) in Baltimore, Maryland.  After her retirement from Bryn Mawr she began a second career as an author, publishing her first book at the age of 62.  She has been described as the classical scholar who “brought into clear and brilliant focus the Golden Age of Greek life and thought….”  Her books, another wrote,  brought the “refuge and strength of the past” to those of us who live “in the troubled present.” 

Perhaps reading Hamilton’s book again, I’ll find some “refuge and strength” as I attempt to live humanly “in the troubled present” of our American life.  I’ve just read the first chapter this morning and I want to share a few of the things that jumped out at me.

Hamilton suggests that the Greeks sought the truth and they never thought it could be found by escaping from the real.  The Greeks sought in every aspect of their living, even  in  their art, to keep within the limits of the real world.  To put it simply, the Greeks didn’t make up stuff.  They didn’t live in a fantasy world.  Truth was essential for their life and it was real and objective.  That is a bit of  “refuge and strength” for me as I attempt to live humanly “in the troubled present” where truth and what is “real” doesn’t seem to matter very much.  A troubled world where “truthiness”—“the truth we want to exist”—seems to run rampant, even at the highest levels of our government.

“The Greeks,” Hamilton wrote, “were the first who thought about slavery,” which was universal in the world back then.  Then she adds this phrase, “To think about it was to condemn it…”  The Greeks thought about it—about slavery—“and by the end of the second century, two thousand years before our Civil War, the Greeks denounced slavery as an intolerable wrong.”  The Greeks thought about it!  They thought profoundly about it—about slavery, and about politics, and about freedom, and about society.  To think about anything has enormous power.  To think about anything and everything is better than not to think at all. Let us THINK about IT—whatever it may be—for to think about it makes all the difference.

"The Thinker"--Rodin