Evening star., 1933-09-10


this evaluation. They stress the fact that most
of the goods nowadays produced in abundance
by exact machines then had to be produced by
man power. To the society of that time 1t
seemed impossible to have even part OF IL
live in comfort without forced labor. AL In
ALL contend those uncritical admirers Of an
tiquity, 1t Is not to be assumed that galley
slave felt himself to be more miserable than
do many Of our proletarians, and he certainly
felt less wretched than did a great part OF our
soldiers during the World War.
I myself am not inclined to decide upon tnts
ticklish point. I know, indeed. from personal
experience how one feels, convinced Of the
senselessness Of war. yet forced to take part IN
it as a soldier; don't dare, however, TO make
any assertion about the inner attitude OF
galley slave. In my historical novels am gen.
orally very daring in equating human nature
Of former times with human nature Of today.
But to picture the dullness Of a galley slave
that I do not dare. On this point there has
come about believe. a change IN our 1nstltu-
tions that is on the credit side
But as to the external life conditions Of all
other social strata. 1t will depend ON the mood
of the observer whether he will fnd these changes
important not To me the most significant
difference between then and now appears 70
be the fact that then there was no exact ex-
perimental science, In our sense.
This modern science and technology have
transformed the external living conditions OF
humanity enormously. The area Of the inhab-
tied earth known to the white race has become
80 times larger in the last 1000 years we can
move With q speed is times greater than then;
we can cut up peoples living bodies and sew
them up again; we can turn night into day;
fly; in our vessels We can dive under
the water and stay there for days But, strange
to say. these achievements have not essentially
altered our mode Of life.
When, for example the average man Of today
takes look at Pompeii, which was destroyed
.S54 years ago 1t is not the differences sep
arating that civilization from ours that strike
him; on the contrary, when he sees the central
heating installation of the baths, or the pollt-
ical campaign inscriptions on the walls, or the
art-and-crafts factory. he will again and again
exclaim Just like us!'
Now Of course, one can also do the opposite,
and Mark Twain showed in his splendid book,
"A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur the
gap between a simple former period and our
own refined epoch But it is more pertinent
especially for him who would represent things
with exactitude, to stress the astonishing con-
gruence between antiquity and our time. Our
great historian, Theodor Mommsen, for example,
replaced the faded pompous words of the an
clients by modern ones having exactly the same
meaning. and by this method alone he made
the political history of Rome read like q sec
ton Of modern history. Even events as fam
tastically remote sounding as those about Cleo
patra produce If only you will employ Momm-
sens simple expedient, a quite modern effect.
The difference between Shakespeare's Cleo
patra and Shaw's lies in the circumstance that
Shakespeare dramatized some pages Of Plutarcn.
Shaw some pages of MOmmsen. The result Is
dumbfounding. In Shakespeare Cleopatra Is
q spoiled great lady Of year 1900, savage and
childish: in shaw a spoiled great lady Of the
year 1900, savage and childish, and P1utarch,
as well as Shakespeare, Mommsen as well as
Shaw, did no other than simply reproduce real
ity. For in the year 60 B. c. Cleopatra simply
did not act differently from the way she would
have acted in the year 1900 or in the year 1900
after Christ
h low I know, of course. to how great an
extent conventions influence the lives and
actions of men. But the nature of the human
being-his emotional qualities, his original
drives-are not altered by these conventions,
and in critical situations. when emotion is
aroused he does not act according to these con-
ventions, but then there become active in him
not his acquired qualities, but only those he
has inherited. There then act through him his
forefatherS and primeval ancestors Much has
changed in the external living conditions of
men-or little, you like. But in the real ma
ture of man, in his destructive urge, his sexual
urge his need Of asserting himself, his need OF
self-expresson and in his, alas! so weak social
instinct nothing has changed at all.
We have nnumerable portraits and statues
of antiquity; their faces all modern faces
not to be distinguished from the faces Of our
contemporaries. Between the face of a Roman
banker shown by statue in the Naples mu-
scum and the face of a certain banker living at
present in Berlin there is no difference, and the
legates on a number of Roman reliefs bear the
faces of now living Prussian generals In mu-
seums Of ancient art you will find peasants
and artisans and boxers and babies-of today.
And when you read letters dating from an
tiquity, rapidly scrawled by Cicero Pliny