The chances are you know that it was Shakespeare who invented the phrase that “all that glitters is not gold” and who warned us against people who want their “pound of flesh”. But did you know that it’s thanks to him that we can speak of a “fool’s paradise”, “elbow room” and coming back “full circle”?
Credit Shakespeare for enabling you to say that you need to be “cruel only to be kind”. Likewise, if you’ve shrugged at criticism and dismissed it as being “neither here nor there”.
It wasn’t Shakespeare, however, who first expressed the thought that “all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players [actors]”. Those were his words but the image can be traced back to the Roman philosopher, Seneca, who wrote that “life’s like a play”.
Seneca’s point was that, when it comes to life, “it’s not the length but the excellence of the acting that matters”. And if you nod and respond that, yes, it’s the quality rather than quantity that matters, remember that Seneca said that before you.
Shakespeare was a prodigious inventor of words and phrases not only because he was creative but also because he knew his classics. Like every genius, his creativity was based on assimilating the best that came before him and making it his own.
Oscar Wilde, famous for his punchlines, knew that well. He took what Seneca and Shakespeare said about life and made it his own: “The world is a stage but the play is badly cast.”
Knowledge of the classics is knowledge of one’s own civilisation. To put it that way, however, is to suggest that it’s a pastime for those who have the leisure and high-mindedness to enjoy it. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Dolly Parton, the country-and-western singer, was praised for her earthy, homespun wisdom when she said: “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”
But it was the emperor Octavian Augustus who said it first. Two thousand years later, the Christian apologist GK Chesterton would have certainly known he was echoing Augustus when he wrote: “And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.”
Did Parton know? It doesn’t matter. It’s a mark of belonging to a civilisation when its treasures are almost as invisible as the air, so much are they part of us.
In the US, some pro-choice activists have reacted to the recent Supreme Court ruling, which struck down Roe vs Wade, by proclaiming they will organise a sex strike (at least against men) until Roe is restored. Interesting but hardly original: it’s the plot of The Lysistrata, a play by the Greek playwright Aristophanes, when the women conspire to put an end to the Peloponnesian war.
Oh, it was in that play that it was first said: “Those impossible women! […] The poet was right: can’t live with them or without them.”
If you’ve every comforted yourself with the thought that “time brings all things to pass”, thank that other Greek playwright, Aeschylus, for the words.
It was Aeschylus who first wrote “I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees” and Julius Caesar who elaborated that as “Better a chief in a village than second in Rome” before Mussolini came up with “Better one day as a lion, than a thousand as a sheep”.
By the way, as Mussolini’s example shows, knowing your classics won’t make you a better person. It will, however, give a pithier expression to your thoughts.
To belong to a civilisation is not just to be an heir to treasures and wisdom. It’s also to be an heir to the problems that gave rise to such wisdom- Ranier Fsadni
It was Aristophanes who first described old age as a second childhood. We think such thoughts and believe them ours, or, at least, modern.
But it was Euripides who first called travel an education in itself and who advised us all to develop a bullshit detector (“A man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe”).
It’s in Euripides, not Adam Smith, that we find the first praise of a division of labour. It’s Aeschylus who first observed that, in war, truth is the first casualty and his Roman follower, Cicero, who just as correctly observed that, in war, it’s the laws that are the first casualty and Tacitus who said that “the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws”.
They got there before, in the 20th century, when Friedrich Hayek said that emergencies “have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded” and libertarians railed at COVID-related restrictions.
To belong to a civilisation is not just to be an heir to treasures and wisdom. It’s also to be an heir to the problems that gave rise to such wisdom.
It was Aristotle who warned us that one swallow does not make a summer. It was Plato who told us “the empty vessel makes the loudest sound” and to him we owe the maxim on how to judge a politician: “The measure of a man is what he does with power.”
One of the greatest fruits of this civilisation is the impulse that none of us should feel limited by it.
The Roman playwright and former North African slave, Terence, wrote: “I am human: nothing human is alien to me.”
He had been preceded by the Greek statesman, Demosthenes, perhaps the first person ever to declare: “I am a citizen of the world.”
That was the same Demosthenes who taught us to say that “the facts speak for themselves”.
ranierfsadni@europe.com