Books: The Ghost of Greece

HELLENISM (272 pp.)—Arnold J. Toyn-bee—Oxford ($4.50).

This book implies a moral stated by Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

To Toynbee, an astronomer of the past who views history as a multitude of ever-turning cultural constellations, the rise and fall of Greco-Roman civilization is merely an episode lasting roughly from 1000 B.C. to 600 A.D. Toynbee traces the course of Hellenism's bright star lucidly, a little offhandedly, treating it largely as an object lesson for the present. Hellenism's central characteristic was the worship of man—exemplified by the ludicrously human crew of Olympian divinities and, later, by a...