THE ANCIENT GREEKS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9715, 10 February 1910, Page 4

THE ANCIENT GREEKS.

In his new volume, "What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?" Dr Mahaffy combats the idea that the Greek mind was so possessed by form and beauty that it had no place for introspection and remorse. He denies that the gloom of the Middle Ages, reflected in such a play as "Everyman," was a medieval invention. It had its full place in the Greek mind, but had a different kind of issue in Greek art. Dr Mahaffy writes; —"It is in my opinion false to say that the ureek was not just as experienced as any modern man in the great problems and the inevitable sorrows of human life. The whole of GreeK tragedy consists in the representation of these dolours, and if Professor Villari wants proof that the terrors of conscience, the agonies of remorse, were perfectly known to the Greeks, I ask him to turn to the picture of the tyrant's soul in the eighth book of Plato's 'Republic,' or to Xenophon's 'Hiero.' The Greeks were not at all that simple, joyous, spontaneous set of grown-up children who appear in many of our 1 books upon the subject.

. . But they had the good sense —or shall I say the genius—to confine their art to what ir ought to convey. They felt that marble and . bronze shouldnot be used to represent the violet emotions of tragedy, the violent moments in human life, and when they lost their reserve their sculpture had begun its decadence. The 'Laocoon,* with the two little men representing his children, is, indeed, a work of art of which a modern sculptor might well be proud. it would

not have been approved by the Greeks of the Golden Age, and Phidias would have looked upon the group with contempt, in spite of its technical excellence."