THE LIFE OF GREECE—Will Durant—Simon and Schuster ($3.95).
For more than a century the study of ancient Greece has been thinning out in Europe and the U. S., becoming a luxury or a slightly silly passion, a rare specialty with scholars, a cliché or nothing to the people at large. Greek is hard to learn (though not much harder than German) and U. S. education has generally dispensed with it. Available translations are often out of date or poor and first-rate writers have had more pressing interests than to improve upon them. People who feel like studying mankind's past have been attracted to anthropology, not to Thucydides. In art the "primitive" has seemed more fruitful than the Classical.
In The Life of Greece, therefore, Will Durant bears the burden of proof. His subject is one which fed and instructed the best minds of several robust centuries (16th, 17th, 18th) and stimulated the liberal revolutionaries who founded the U. S. and French republics. Durant does not capitalize on that. His treatment of Greek literature is more warmly informative than the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but it is commonplace in taste and no match for the subject. His illustrations are less than adequate (no papyrus, no comic masks, no small pottery) though such selections as the archaic mask of "Agamemnon" (see cut) are fresh and effective. But throughout his big book he does show, with more restraint in analogy-making than could be expected after his previous books, that the history of Greek politics is relevant to the nakedly political world of 1939.
Athens. The skills and habits on which "civilization" rests did not suddenly appear in Greece; they had been kicking around the Eastern Mediterranean for at least 1,000 years. This is made clear in Durant's history, the first written since full publication in 1936 of Sir Arthur Evans' great report on archaic Crete. The almost Parisian graces of Crete's strange society were remembered by the tough fighting tribes who displaced it, settling in Attica and on the Aegean islands. In one variety of toughness—the kind that rebels against concentration of riches and power —the Athenians were remarkable. About 600 B.C. they produced a statesman who averted bloody revolution by sage persuasion.
"Solon's peaceful revolution," says Durant, "is one of the encouraging miracles of history." He introduced a graduated income tax, created a popular assembly to check the old-fashioned aristocratic council, made the entire citizenry a panel from which jurors were chosen. The quarrelsome Athenians might not have stuck to these laws if a dictator, Peisistratus, had not enforced them for a generation; after that they became habitual. About 507 B.C. another persuasive political thinker, Cleisthenes, extended an Athenian device which for pure democracy has never been equalled: selection of legislators by lot from the whole list of citizens over 30. It was then that Athenians began feeling their oats.