The Life of Greece

Summary

The Life of Greece, published in 1939, is the second volume of Will Durant's Story of Civilization. Its long subtitle promises a history of Greek government, industry, manners, morals, religion, philosophy, science, literature and art from the earliest times to the Roman conquest, and the book keeps that promise by refusing to separate politics from the rest of life. Durant begins not in Athens but on Crete, with the palace at Knossos that Arthur Evans had been excavating since 1900, and then moves to Mycenae, Troy and the world reflected in the Homeric poems. From there he follows the rise of the city-states: Sparta's military discipline under the laws credited to Lycurgus, Athens under Solon's reforms and the tyranny of the Peisistratids, and the scattering of Greek settlements from the Black Sea to Sicily and southern Italy, where the first philosophers and lyric poets appear. The Persian Wars, told largely through Herodotus, bring the Greeks to a moment of shared danger and victory. The center of the book is fifth-century Athens under Pericles. Durant describes the democracy and its exclusions, the economy of free labor and slaves, the Parthenon and the sculpture of Phidias, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the comedy of Aristophanes, the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, the medicine of the Hippocratic school, and the sophists who unsettled inherited belief. The Peloponnesian War, with the plague at Athens and the debacle in Sicily, appears as a self-inflicted catastrophe, and the trial and death of Socrates as its moral epilogue. The fourth century brings Plato and Aristotle, the oratory of Demosthenes, Philip of Macedon's conquest and Alexander's campaigns to the Indus. The last part surveys the Hellenistic kingdoms, the Museum and Library at Alexandria, the mathematics and astronomy of Euclid, Archimedes, Aristarchus and Eratosthenes, the anatomists of Alexandria, the rival schools of Zeno and Epicurus, and finally Rome's absorption of Greece. Durant writes as an open admirer who regarded Greece as the fountainhead of Western reason and art, but he does not idealize it. He records slavery, the seclusion of citizen women, pederasty, factional massacres and the endless wars between cities, and he treats the failure of the Greeks to unite as the root of their loss of freedom. His religious judgments reflect the naturalistic outlook he held at the time, and his scholarship is that of the 1930s, before the decipherment of Linear B in 1952 changed the picture of Mycenaean Greece. For students, the book is best used as an orientation that sends them to the sources it narrates: Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, the tragedians, Plato, Aristotle and Plutarch.

Top Lessons

• Why the cities could not unite

  Durant repeatedly returns to a single weakness: Greek freedom rested on small independent cities that could not stop fighting each other. Students can follow the theme from the rivalries after the Persian Wars through the Peloponnesian War to Philip's victory at Chaeronea and weigh whether the same independence that made Greek creativity possible also made Greek conquest inevitable.

• The trial of Socrates as a test of a city

  Durant presents the condemnation of Socrates as a defeated and anxious democracy striking at a man it blamed for unsettling the young. Reading his account beside Plato's Apology lets students separate the charges, the political setting after 404, and the philosopher's own defense, and ask what a community owes to a citizen whose questions it finds threatening.

• Glory beside slavery and exposure

  The Periclean chapters set the Parthenon and the tragedies beside slave labor, the confinement of citizen wives, and the exposure of unwanted infants. Durant reports these practices plainly and mostly without sermon. Students should practice holding admiration and moral judgment together, distinguishing what Durant describes, what he excuses, and what Scripture and the Greeks' own moralists said about such things.

• From the gods of Olympus to the schools of philosophy

  Durant traces a movement from civic religion and the mysteries through the sophists' skepticism to the Stoic and Epicurean schools, which offered individuals peace of mind once the free city no longer gave life its meaning. Students can compare this story with Paul's address to the Athenians in Acts 17, where Stoics and Epicureans meet the Christian proclamation.

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Medical Lens

A general history with recurring medical episodes rather than a history of medicine. Durant's chapters on fifth-century Athenian science describe the Hippocratic physicians, their rejection of supernatural explanations for disease, case-history method and humoral theory, alongside temple healing at shrines of Asclepius. The plague of Athens in 430 B.C., known chiefly from Thucydides, enters the narrative of the war and killed Pericles; its identity remains debated, and any modern diagnosis is a reading, not a fact. Socrates' death by hemlock in 399 B.C. is narrated from Plato's Phaedo. The Hellenistic chapters describe Alexandrian anatomy under Herophilus and Erasistratus, whose human dissections (and the ancient report that they vivisected condemned criminals) are among the earliest known. The Stoic and Epicurean schools appear as philosophies of tranquility for troubled souls. All medical claims reflect 1930s secondary scholarship and should be checked against Thucydides, the Hippocratic texts and modern histories of ancient medicine.

• Chapters on science and medicine in Periclean Athens

  Hippocrates of Cos and the Hippocratic writings, the Oath, the doctrine of the four humors, and the contrast between observational medicine and the incubation cures of Asclepian temples.

• Account of the Peloponnesian War, early years

  The plague that struck crowded Athens in 430 B.C., its symptoms and social effects as Thucydides described them, and the death of Pericles.

• Chapter on Socrates' trial and death

  The execution of Socrates by a draught of hemlock, narrated after Plato's account of his last day.

• Chapters on Hellenistic science at Alexandria

  Herophilus and Erasistratus, their study of the brain, nerves and vessels by human dissection, and the ancient report of vivisection of criminals.

• Chapters on Stoicism and Epicureanism

  Zeno and Epicurus offering disciplines for freedom from fear and disturbance in the unsettled Hellenistic world.