The World... ....of the Greeks

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 808, 21 January 1955, Page 26

The World...

....of the Greeks

N April 25, Australian and New Zealand troops landed from transports on to a beach now known as Anzac Cove, Gallipoli. They fought a campaign of courage and privation, of thirst, and snipers’ bullets and high explosives. Not 20 miles but thousands of years away another equally famous battle was fought. This time there was also courage and privation; but this time ,the invading force captured the city it was besieging by means of a wooden horse, the wooden horse of Troy. The story of Troy, of Helen whose face launched a thousand ships, and of the wooden horse, is told in the 15,000word poem, the Iliad, a‘poem so ancient that even the Greeks themselves looked on it as a poem of antiquity. "Its tale of war is a record in matchless speech of life as men lived it in a fortress town" in that age. That is how the Iliad is described by Dr. E. M. Blaiklock, Professor of Classics at the Auckland University College, (continued on next page)

in the first of a series of talks which are entitled The World of the Greeks, to be broadcast over the YC stations starting with 1YC at 8.0 p.m. on Monday, January 24. The first of the five talks is called The World of the Iliad, while the second discusses the Odyssey, that partly-mythical but partly-genuine record of a slice of pre-history, a period before David wrote his psalms and when the Pharaohs of Egypt were in the afternoon of their power. The third talk describes the Island of Lesbos, off the Greek coast, where lived Sappho, the wisest woman of the ancients, whose greatness can now only be glimpsed in some scattered fragments of her poems and the testimony of her male compatriots and successors. The last two talks on the Spartans and Athenians have a special moral for the modern world. The communist Spar-

tans were a virile race, living and dying only for the State, and sacrificing comfort and culture for physical perfection. Thus, all children were inspected at birth and the sickly thrown out to die. "The Spartan system had no room for C grade physiques." The Spartans had their glory at Thermopylae, where the 300 died to save Greece. But in the end, Sparta, for all her militarism, fell, leaving no heritage. Contrast Athens, the democracy where any. free man might be head of State for 24 hours. When the Spartans and later the barbarians destroyed the city they could not destroy the poetry, the sculpture; they could not entirely destroy the Parthenon with its gateway, "a far-seen portal whose: white colonnades stand on a base of bare blue reck with that incomparably blue sky above .and_ behind." This symbol of Athens remains when Sparta is but'a curious memory