8 - The Revision of Ethical Earnestness I

Summary

‘Anthropologists have shown us what this Pagan Man really is. From the West Coast of Africa to the Pacific Isles … he meets us, with the old gaiety, the old crowns of flowers, the night-long dances, the phallus-bearing processions, the untroubled vices. We feel, no doubt, a charm in his simple and instinctive life, in the quick laughter and equally quick tears, the directness of action, the un-hesitating response of sympathy. We must all of us have wished from time to time that our friends were more like Polynesians; especially those of us who live in University towns. And I think, in a certain limited sense, the Greeks probably were so. But in the main … the Greek and the Pagan are direct opposites. That instinctive Pagan has a strangely weak hold on life. He is all beset with terror and blind cruelty and helplessness. The Pagan Man is really the unregenerate human animal, and Hellenism is a collective name for the very forces which, at the time under discussion, strove for his regeneration. Yet… one of the most characteristic things about Hellenism is that, though itself the opposite of savagery, it had savagery always near it. The peculiar and essential value of Greek civilization lies not so much in the great height which it ultimately attained, as in the wonderful spiritual effort by which it reached and sustained that height.’

Gilbert Murray The Rise of the Greek Epic 1907 p. 9.

‘No doubt the higher moral effort of man in every nation will, for the great majority, express itself in the traditional religious conventions of that nation. […]