Charles Morris - "Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15)"

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Richard F. Burton - "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Authors of Greece

T >> T. W. Lumb >> Authors of Greece




The bitterness of this is intense in a man who generally refrains from
anything undignified in a public speech.

The cause of this disunion is bribery. In former times

"it was impossible to buy from orators or generals knowledge of the
critical moment which fortune often gives to the careless against the
industrious. But now all our national virtues have been sold out of
the market; we have imported in their place the goods which have
tainted Greek life to the very death. These are--envy for every
bribe-taker, ridicule for any who confesses his guilt, hatred for
every one who exposes him. We have far more warships and soldiers and
revenue to-day, but they are all useless, unavailing and unprofitable
owing to treason."

To punish these seems quite hopeless.

"You have sunk to the very depth of folly or craziness or I know not
what. Often I cannot help dreading that some evil angel is persecuting
us. For some ribaldry or petty spite or silly jest--in fact, for any
reason whatsoever you invite hirelings to address you, and laugh at
their scurrilities."

He points to the fate of all the cities whom Philip flattered.

"In all of them the patriots advised increased taxation--the traitors
said it was not necessary. They advised war and distrust--the traitors
preached peace, till they were caught in the trap. The traitors made
speeches to get votes, the others spoke for national existence. In
many cases the masses listened to the pro-Macedonians not through
ignorance, but because their hearts failed them when they thought they
were beaten to their knees."

The doom of these cities it was not worth while to describe overmuch.

"As long as the ship is safe, that is the time for every sailor and
their captain to be keen on his duties and to take precautions against
wilful or thoughtless upsetting of the craft. But once the sea is over
the decks, all zeal is vain. We then who are Athenians, while we are
safe with our great city, our enormous resources, our splendid
reputation--what shall we do?"

The universal appeal of this white-hot speech is its most noteworthy
feature. The next year the disgraceful peace was ended, the free
theatre-tickets withdrawn. All was vain. In 338 Athens and Thebes were
defeated at Chaeroneia; the Cassandra prophecies of the great patriot
came true. In 330 one more triumph was allowed him. He was attacked by
the traitor Aeschines and answered him so effectively in his speech
_on the Crown_ that his adversary was banished. A cloud settled over
the orator's later life; he outlived Alexander by little more than a
year, but when Antipater hopelessly defeated the allies at Crannon in
322 he poisoned himself rather than live in slavery.

Of all the orators of the ancient world none is more suitable for
modern use than Demosthenes. It is true that he is guilty of gross bad
taste in some of his speeches--but rarely in a parliamentary oration.
Cicero is too verbose and often insincere. Demosthenes is as a rule
short, terse and forcible. It is the undoubted justice of his cause
which gives him his lofty and noble style. He lacks the gentler touch
of humour--but a man cannot jest when he sees servitude before the
country he loves. With a few necessary alterations a speech of
Demosthenes could easily be delivered to-day, and it would be
successful. Even Philip is said to have admitted that he would have
voted for him after hearing him, and Aeschines after winning applause
for declaiming part of Demosthenes' speech told his audience that they
ought to have heard the beast.

Yet all this splendid eloquence seems to have been wasted. The orator
could see much that was dark to his contemporaries, and spoke
prophecies true though vain. But the greatest thing of all was
concealed from his view. The inevitable day had dawned for the
genuinely Greek type of city. It was brilliant but it was a source of
eternal divisions in a world which had to be unified to be of any
service. Its absurd factions and petty leagues were really a hindrance
to political stability. Further, the essential vices of democracy
cried aloud for a stern master, and found him. Treason, bribery,
appeals to an unqualified voting class, theft of rich men's property
under legal forms, free seats in the theatre, belittlement of a great
empire, pacifism, love of every state but the right one--these are the
open sores of popular control. For such a society only one choice is
possible; it needs discipline either of national service or national
extinction. Its crazy cranks will not disappear otherwise. Modern
political life is democratic; those who imagine that the voice of the
majority is the voice of Heaven should produce reasons for their
belief. They will find it difficult to hold such a view if they will
patiently consider the hard facts of history and the unceasing
warnings of Demosthenes.

* * * * *

No account of Greek literature would be complete without a mention of
the influence which has revolutionised human thought. It is a strange
coincidence that Aristotle was born and died in the same years as
Demosthenes. His native town was Stagira; he trained Alexander the
Great, presided over the very famous Peripatetic School at Athens for
thirteen years and found time to investigate practically every subject
of which an ancient Greek could be expected to have any knowledge.

His method was the slow and very patient observation of individual
facts. He is the complement of Plato, who tended to neglect the fact
for the "idea" or general law or type behind it and logically prior to
it. Deductive reasoning was Plato's method--that of the poet or great
artist, who worships not what he sees but the unseen perfect form
behind; inductive reasoning was Aristotle's method--that of the
ordinary man, who respects what he sees that he may by patience find
out what is the unseen class to which it belongs. This latter has been
the foundation-stone of all modern science; in the main the
resemblance between Aristotle's system of procedure and that of the
greatest liberators of the human mind, Bacon and Descartes, are more
valuable than the differences.

It would be difficult to mention any really great subject on which
Aristotle has not left some work which is not to be lightly
disregarded. His works are in the form of disjointed notes, taken down
at his lectures by his disciples. As a rule they are dry and precise,
though here and there rays of glory appear which prove that the master
was capable of poetic expression even in prose. A rather fine hymn has
been ascribed to him. As we might expect, he is weakest in scientific
research, mainly because he could not command the use of instruments
familiar to us. That a human being who possessed no microscope should
have left such a detailed account of the most minute marks on the
bodies of fish and animals is an absolute marvel; so perfect is his
description that it cannot be bettered to-day. Cuvier and Linnaeus are
great names in Botany; Darwin said that they were mere schoolboys
compared with Aristotle--in other words, botanical research had
progressed thewrong way.

Many works have appeared on Ethics and Philosophy; few of them are
likely to survive as long as Aristotle's _Ethics_ and _Metaphysics_
Sometimes our modern philosophers seem to forget their obligation to
resemble human beings in their writings. We hear so much of mist and
transcendentalism, problems, theories, essays, critiques that a book
of Aristotle's dry but exact definition seems like the words of
soberness after some nightmare. The man is not assaulting the air; his
feet are on firm ground. This is how he proceeds. "Virtue is a mean
between excess and defect." In fact, his object appears to have been
to teach something, not to mystify everybody and to cover the
honourable name of philosophy with ridicule.

It is the same story everywhere. Do we want the best book on
_Rhetoric_ or _Politics_? Aristotle may supply it, mainly because he
took the trouble to classify his instances and show the reason why
things not only are of such a kind, but must inevitably be so. A
course of Aristotelian study might profitably be prescribed to every
person who thinks of talking in public; he would at least learn how to
respect himself and his audience, however ignorant and powerful it may
be; he would tend to use words in an exact sense instead of indulging
in the wild vagueness of speech which is so common and so dangerous.
This dry-as-dust philosopher who cut up animals and plants and wrote
about public speeches and constitutions found time to give the world a
book on Poetry. Modern scientists sometimes deny their belief in the
existence of such a thing as poetry, or scoff at its value; no poetic
treatise has yet appeared from them, for it seems difficult for modern
science to keep alive in its devotees the weakest glimmerings of a
sense of beauty. Herein their great founder and father shows himself
to be more humane than his so-called progressive children. His
_Poetics_ was the foundation of literary criticism and shows no sign
of being superseded.

Turning his eyes upwards, he gave the world a series of notes on what
he saw there. Not possessing a telescope, he could but do his best
with the methods available. Let us not jeer at his results; rather let
us remember that this same astronomer found time to observe the
heavens in addition to revolutionising thought in the brief compass of
sixty-two years.

For the miracle of miracles is this man's universality of outlook. It
makes us ashamed of our own pretentiousness and swollen-headed pride
when we reflect what this great architectonic genius has performed.
Just as our bodies have decreased in size with the progress of
history, so our intelligences seem to have narrowed themselves since
Aristotle's day. Great as our modern scientists are, there is not one
of them who would be capable of writing an acknowledged masterpiece on
Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetry, Metaphysics as well as on his own
subject.

Nor have we yet mentioned this stupendous thinker's full claim to
absolute predominance in intellectual effort. His works on Medicine
were known to and appreciated by the Arabs, who translated them and
brought them to Spain and Sicily when they conquered those countries.
Averroes commented on them and added notes of his own which
contributed not a little to the development of the healing art. More
than this, and greatest of all, during the later Middle Ages
Aristotle's system alone was recognised as possessing universal value;
it was taken as the foundation on which the most famous and important
Schoolmen erected their philosophies--Chaucer mentions a clerk who
possessed twenty books, a treasure indeed in those days; it provided a
European Church with a Theology and the cosmopolitan European
Universities with a curriculum. Greater honour than this no man ever
had or ever can have. Thus, although the Greek city-state seemed to
perish in mockery with Demosthenes, yet the Greek spirit of free
discussion which died in the great orator was set free in another form
in that same year; leaving Aristotle's body, it ranged through the
world conquering and civilising. If in our ignorance and bigotry we
try to kill Greek literature, we shall find that, like the hero of the
_Bacchae_, we are turning our blows against our own selves, to the
delight of all who relish exhibitions of perfect folly.


TRANSLATIONS:

Kennedy's edition is the best. It is vigorous and reads almost like an
English work.

Butcher's _Demosthenes_ is the standard introduction to the speeches.

Many reminiscences of Demosthenes are to be found in the speeches of
Lord Brougham.

ARISTOTLE

_Politics_. Jowett (Oxford).
Welldon (Macmillan).

_Poetics_. Butcher (Macmillan).
Bywater (Oxford).

Both contain excellent commentaries and notes.

_Ethics_. Welldon.

_Rhetoric_. Welldon. (Contains valuable analysis and notes.)

The article on Greek Science in the _Legacy of Greece_ (Oxford) should
not be omitted.

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