the ceremonial completion of death and the denial of all historical duration.

In opposition to this mighty group of Egyptian life symbols, we meet at the threshold of the Classical Culture the custom, typifying the ease with which it could forget every piece of its inward and outward past, of burning the dead. To the Mycenaean age the elevation into a ritual of this particular funerary method amongst all those practiced in turn by stone age peoples, was essentially alien; indeed its Royal tombs suggest that earth burial was regarded as peculiarly honorable. But in Homeric Greece, as in Vedic India, we find a change, so sudden that its origins must necessarily be psychological, from burial to that burning which (the Iliad gives us the full pathos of the symbolic act) was the ceremonial completion of death and the denial of all historical duration.

From this moment the plasticity of the individual spiritual evolution was at an end. Classical drama admitted truly historical motives just as little as it allowed themes of inward evolution, and it is well-known how decisively the Hellenic instinct set itself against portraiture in the arts. Right into the imperial period Classical art handled only the matter that was, so to say, natural to it, the myth.7Even the “ideal” portraits of Hellenistic sculpture are mythical, of the same kind as the typical biographies of Plutarch’s sort. No great Greek ever wrote down any recollections that would serve to fix a phase of experience for his inner eye. Not even Socrates has told, regarding his inward life, anything important in our sense of the word. It is questionable indeed whether for a Classical mind it was even possible to react to the motive forces that are presupposed in the production of a Parsifal, a Hamlet, or a Werther. In Plato we fail to observe any conscious evolution of doctrine; his separate works are merely treatises written from very different standpoints which he took up from time to time, and it gave him no concern whether and how they hung together. On the contrary, a work of deep self-examination, the Vita Nuova of Dante, is found at the very outset of the spiritual history of the West. How little therefore of the Classical pure present there really was in Goethe, the man who forgot nothing, the man whose works, as he avowed himself, are only fragments of a single great confession!

After the destruction of Athens by the Persians, all the older art works were thrown on the dust heap (whence we are now extracting them), and we do not hear that anyone in Hellas ever troubled himself about the ruins of Mycenae or Phaistos for the purpose of ascertaining historical facts. Men read Homer but never thought of excavating the hill of Troy as Schliemann did; for what they wanted was myth, not history. The works of Aeschylus and those of the pre-Socratic philosophers were already partially lost in the Hellenistic period. In the West, on the contrary, the piety inherent in and peculiar to the Culture manifested itself, five centuries before Schliemann, in Petrarch — the fine collector of antiquities, coins and manuscripts, the very type of historically sensitive man, viewing the distant past and scanning the distant prospect (was he not the first to attempt an Alpine peak?), living in his time, yet essentially not of it. The soul of the collector is intelligible only by having regard to his conception of Time. Even more passionate perhaps, though of a different coloring, is the collecting bent of the Chinese. In China, whoever travels assiduously pursues “old traces” (Ku-tsi) and the untranslatable “Tao,” the basic principle of Chinese existence, derives all its meaning from a deep historical feeling. In the Hellenistic period, objects were indeed collected and displayed everywhere, but they were curiosities of mythological appeal (as described by Pausanias) as to which questions of date or purpose simply did not arise — and this too in the very presence of Egypt, which even by the time of the great Thuthmosis had been transformed into one vast museum of strict tradition.

Oswald Spengler
The Decline of the West