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...Durant Demurrers...
...Life of Greece, therefore, Will Durant bears the burden of proof. His subject is one which fed and instructed the best minds of several robust centuries (16th, 17th, 18th) and stimulated the liberal revolutionaries who founded the U. S. and French republics. Durant does not capitalize on that. His treatment of Greek literature is more warmly informative than the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but it is commonplace in taste and no match for the subject. His illustrations are less than adequate (no papyrus, no comic masks, no small pottery) though such selections as the archaic mask of "Agamemnon" (see cut) are fresh...
Athens. The skills and habits on which "civilization" rests did not suddenly appear in Greece; they had been kicking around the Eastern Mediterranean for at least 1,000 years. This is made clear in Durant's history, the first written since full publication in 1936 of Sir Arthur Evans' great report on archaic Crete. The almost Parisian graces of Crete's strange society were remembered by the tough fighting tribes who displaced it, settling in Attica and on the Aegean islands. In one variety of toughness-the kind that rebels against concentration of riches and power...
...Solon's peaceful revolution," says Durant, "is one of the encouraging miracles of history." He introduced a graduated income tax, created a popular assembly to check the old-fashioned aristocratic council, made the entire citizenry a panel from which jurors were chosen. The quarrelsome Athenians might not have stuck to these laws if a dictator, Peisistratus, had not enforced them for a generation; after that they became habitual. About 507 B.C. another persuasive political thinker, Cleisthenes, extended an Athenian device which for pure democracy has never been equalled: selection of legislators by lot from the whole list of citizens...
...Durant's erudite wife says their house in Great Neck, L. I., is a "factory." The great popularizer planned to work five years on The Life of Greece, cut it to four-and-a-half to get the book out before election year. First draft was written in what Durant calls "the butcher's book," a mighty ledger. He scattered no less than 2,500 source references (to some 200 sources) through the 671 pages of The Life of Greece. Along with these impressive grace notes are other devices, beginning with the price, calculated to put the stuff...