The Greeks and Greek Civilization [Hardcover]

Jacob Burckhardt (Author), Oswyn Murray (Author), Sheila Stern (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1998

From one of the greatest historians of our modern age comes a masterpiece too controversial to be published in his own time. Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) portrayed ancient Greek culture as an aristocratic world based on ruthless competition for honor, which led, in turn, to a tyrannous state with minimal personal freedom.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97) is well known as the author of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which has remained in print since its publication in 1860. He is far less well known for his pioneering studies in ancient Greek history, which were an important influence on his most celebrated student, Friedrich Nietzsche, and which shaped the modernist view of Greek civilization not as an expression of the heights of human reason, but as an irrational and often dangerous construct. Burckhardt believed that the ancient Greeks' myth-laden view of their own past, full of sociopathic heroes and tragic victims, was an expression of this state of unreason: "The wildest variations and contradictions," he writes, "were not found at all disturbing."

Even less disturbing to the Greeks, he continues, was the systematic violence--and even human sacrifice--that erupted when a city like Athens wished to extend its territory or when a leader wished to extend his power. That violence, Burckhardt holds, was a natural result of the ancient Greeks' pursuit of honor, which accrued by facing and defeating danger. One such danger was the mere act of standing out in any way whatever, which could net a would-be hero a charge of being impious--witness, Burckhardt notes, the fates of Socrates and his contemporary Alcibiades. Drawing from examples of mythology, tragedy, oratory, and comedy, Burckhardt touches on themes such as Greek society's contempt for women and its apparent readiness to embrace all sorts of antidemocratic demagoguery--in the person, for instance, of the famed hero Lysander, who "combines depravity with natural gifts in a way that was typically Spartan and yet generally Greek." Burckhardt's deconstruction of classical history, ably edited by Oxford historian Oswyn Murray, reads as if it were written in our own time. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

In 1965, Murray wrote his scathing review of Palmer Hilty's translation of the Griechische Kulturgeschichte. His criticism of Hilty's selections taken from Burckhardt's lectures on Greek culture drew a letter from Moses Finley revealing that he and Sheila Stern were working on another translation with different selections. After Finley's death in 1986, the project languished until 1989, when Stern asked Murray if he would be interested in taking over the task of editing the book. This edition, the first to appear in the U.S., includes Burckhardt's most ground-breaking ideas from the German text (edited by Jacob Oeri, Burckhardt's nephew). Murray's helpful introduction succinctly explains the 19th-century context; substantial endnotes clarify the ancient sources. Although necessarily an abridgment of the whole, this fluid, smooth translation fills a gap in scholarship. Burckhardt (1818-1897) broke with the positivist Hegelian historians of his time who preferred to study the progression of events and "great men." He reconceptualized Greek culture with his new methodology and believed that how an event was perceived was more important than the event itself, which could only be presented subjectively. Through vivid examples from ancient literary texts and ethnographies, Burckhardt advocated the study of cultural history, meaning the study of writers, ideas, visual arts and other "monuments" of a society. This book will become a necessary tool in courses not only on 19th-century historiography, but on the ancient world as well.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 449 pages
• Publisher: St Martins Pr; 1st Ed. (U.S.) edition (October 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312192762
• ISBN-13: 978-0312192761
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,324,390 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Greeks and Greek Civilization by Jacob Burckardt, April 14, 2003

By 

Paolo Cappelli (Florence, Italy) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Greeks and Greek Civilization (Paperback)

Near all books about Ancient Greeks and their great Civilization, since the Italian Renaissance, explain Greek philosophy, art, poetry, architecture etc., but they do not are concerned about how the ancient Greeks lived, their laws, their everyday life, their character, their history, their way of life. The books and their authors "idealize" the greatness of the achievements as born "out of the blue". Jacob Burckardt put the great achievements of the ancient Greeks in relation with their life, so a lot of unresolved and very difficult questions can easily find their right and now obvious answers. A beautiful work, but the original was in five volumes.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars sprawling, deep, and quirky interpretation based on myth and literature, December 22, 2010

By 

Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Greeks and Greek Civilization (Paperback)

This is at times a great, often frustrating, rich yet also dry, longitudinal interpretation of the Greek cultural legacy by one of the great minds in history (of the 19C). However, it isn't for everyone, and particularly not for beginners who want an introduction to the basics. It assumes that the reader - actually the listeners as this is taken from a series of lectures and was not intended for publication as a book - had had a classical education as was traditional at the time, that is, studying the languages and literature from an early age all the way through high school. That was a time when not only the most famous characters and myths were known as a common vocabulary, but were referred regularly to in popular culture (poems, operas, paintings, etc.). The reader of the 20C might know who Perikles, Socrates, and Solon were, but it would take a classics major or serious history buff to know the names Alcibiades, Cleon, Lykurgus or hunderds of others referred to regularly. This text more or less assumes the reader has this culture and offers a subtle and deeply satisfying interpretation of how they fit into a wonderfully coherent culture that forms the basis of much of modern European culture, but it does not retell the essential stories.

That being said, if the reader is acquainted with the history and culture, the book is a spectacular overview from the mythic era (about the end of the Bronze Age, of 11 C BCE) to the Hellenism of Alexander the Great, or the 4C BCE. I read it as a review or point of view on a culture I have long studied and at its best it is a great joy.

Burckhardt begins with an analysis of how myth may have reflected the basis of prehistorical movements of Greek tribes and families. Thus the Heraclids - sons of Hercules - were supposed to have conquered the Pelopponese and so were ancestors of the Spartans and others. Then, as the culture consolidated itself to the 7 C BCE, Burckhardt explains such notions as the Polis, according to which the glory of the city was a collective responsibility of its inhabitants, leading to great city-states such as Athens, but scores of others as well. This led to the Agon competitions for glory in sport (e.g., the Olympian games) but also in generalist education as a way to seek glory for the Polis. This is pretty run of the mill stuff and takes up the first 150 pages of Burckhardt's text. It lost me many times and I was on the verge of quitting when he got to the classical age - the 5th C BCE - which is by far the best section in the book. Nonetheless, Burckhardt does advance a radical thesis - that the Greeks were not happy in democracy but extremely pessimistic - that went against the prevailing view of the 19C that viewed the Greeks as happy at a unique cultural and political moment.

For the 5C BCE, the reader gets a detailed interpretation of Athens at the height of its glory, when Greece united to beat back the Persians, then Athens set up the Delphian League as an imperialist democracy that took advantage of its allies, and ended in the tragic war with Sparta. This period - the first with an extensive literature of use to historians - saw the birth of rationalist philosophy, tragic drama, objective history based on multiple sources, and the monumental architectural forms based on the rectangle and circle that dominated the medium until the 20C. It also saw fundamental experimentation in military and administrative regimes that led not only to Alexander the Great but also was studied by the Romans before their transmission to the West. There was, in my view, no greater flowering of culture in the history of mankind, with the possible exceptions of certain periods of the Chinese, Islamic, and Indian civilizations, though the latter did not succeed in creating the same linear sense of history that leads us in the West directly back to the Greeks.

Underneath the achievements, Burckhardt uncovers the destructive impulses that underlay much of the creativity: the ruthless ambition, the breakdown of the norms of government and ethics, and the slaughter of rivals both within the Polis and between rivals city states. In this period, the ideals of the Polis, democracy, and the Agon were subverted and eventually destroyed, resulting in nostalgia for a "golden age" that was forever gone though preserved like a world under the microscope. It is a chilling picture, which led directly to the takeover by the Macedonians, who transmitted much of the culture without it creative vitality throughout the Mediterranean and beyond.

I learned a great deal from this book, indeed I pictured the wholeness of the Greek cultural ark in a way I never had before. However, reading this is very challenging. The reader must persevere through many dry and obscure passages, with references that require one to have an encyclopedia at hand. Some of it is out of date - you get no archeology at all as it is entirely literary, hence slanted to the concerns expressed by the elite of that time and interpreted by 19C Swiss bourgeoisie. The reading experience is not helped by the turgid 50-page introduction by the editor, who places Burckhardt (the founder of Kulturgeschicte, where "ideas are in the air") in opposition to the exceedingly pedantic 19C historical style of knowing more and more about less and less.

In spite of my caveats, I would recommend this book with enthusiasm.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Possibly the best thing ever written about the Greeks, January 2, 2011

By 

Timothy Mackenzie (Auckland, New Zealand) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Greeks and Greek Civilization (Paperback)

Just in reference to some of the things other reviewers have said: books like this are only out of date to the extent that recent actual archeological or scientific study favors conclusions contrary to their own. A lot of what's in this book is bolstered up by such later discoveries - comments on new comedy entirely in line with later excavated works by Menander for instance. We view the Greeks today with an early 21st Century perspective. The difference between the amount of information available to Burckhardt and the amount of information available to us upon which to present the kind of global account that Burckhardt is presenting is negligible. Certain important aspects of Greek life that Burckhardt emphasizes would be overlooked today; not because the modern sciences of philology or archeology have proven them wrong, but because they are out of sync with the academic demands of the time, many of which are mere fashion. If I'm to choose between receiving a general account of Greek culture from a run-of-the-mill baby-boomer academic, and receiving one from one of the preeminent scholars of the 19th century, venerated by Nietzsche, I'd choose Burckhardt. The book is astonishing in ways that couldn't be replicated today.