Machines or Mind? The Essay that Launched the Loebs – Antigone

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An open forum for Classics

Antigone

– An Open Forum for Classics

W.H.D. Rouse

The essay that follows was written by the Classicist and educational pioneer W.H.D. Rouse (1863–1950) in 1911, and was commissioned for the newly-founded Loeb Classical Library Series, of which he was an editor. These iconic volumes, issued in green cloth for Greek and red cloth for Latin literature, and with a facing English translation of an immense range of Greco-Roman authors, were designed to make Classical literature accessible to a broad audience. Rouse’s pamphlet, separately published alongside the first volumes in 1912, was designed to promote the series indirectly, by promoting the enduring importance of the Classics, the clarity of Greek and Latin, and the empty distractions of the brave new world in an age of increasing uncertainty. The essay was freely available on request to the publishers (Heinemann) for several decades. We are pleased to reprint it here, not least as a striking specimen of the infectious enthusiasm of a true believer.[1]We have inserted a number of paragraph breaks, as well as illustrations. The original can be read here.

MACHINES OR MIND?

What is the use of Greek and Latin literature? I have to answer this in a very few pages: therefore I must be dogmatic. But I shall say nothing that I am not prepared to prove, in detail, against any challenge: in most cases I have the proof already written.

First I will ask another question: What is the use of machines? The world is full of machines: railways, telegraphs, telephones, motors, flying-machines, talking-machines, adding-machines, type­writers—no end to them. Why are they made? To save time, space, trouble, money. They are often a nuisance to everybody around, they spoil one’s eyes and ears, offend the senses, make life dangerous; worst of all, the better the machine, the less it uses our intelligence. It is quite possible to argue that they do more harm than good: but suppose they are all good, suppose time, space, money, labor is saved, what then?

Two designs for machines: a maritime assault mechanism and a device for bending beams, Leonardo da Vinci, c.1487-90 (Morgan Library, New York, USA):

The question then comes, How am I to use the time, space, money, labor which has been saved? In making more machines? In sloth, eating, drink­ing, self-indulgence? In quarrelling with my neigh­bor, and destroying what I cannot understand?

Here is the question which the world has not faced. So much time has been saved, that thousands of people who used to be working all day now have leisure; and they do not know what to do with it. They are often ignorant, violent, intolerant, and they are so many, that the few wiser who ought to guide them are forced to follow. To what end?

He who can show the world how to use its leisure will be a greater benefactor than Watt, Stephenson, Edison, Wright, or any maker of machines. Civili­sation lies in the mind and soul, not in machines. The most highly civilised nation of history was Athens in the years 500 to 400 BC, and they hardly knew what a machine was.

Plato’s Academy, as depicted in a mosaic from the the House of T. Siminius Stephanus (National Archaeological Museum, Naples, Italy).

We offer you the classical literatures to employ your leisure. They will not earn you one shilling of money, or build one electric tram; but they will fill your mind with wisdom and beauty. There is the use of Latin and Greek literature.

Your mind cannot live without them. All the great intellectual impulses begin in Greece; the modern world only grows crops from the Greek seed. All the great political ideas come from Greece or Rome: the very notions of law and empire are theirs, and without them a modern empire is only an organised horde, like Gengis Khan’s, or an organised shop, a gigantic trust, greed, blood, and iron. All poetry and philosophy has its roots there. Your very books and newspapers are full of allu­sions to Greece and Rome: cut them out, and it would be like a world without the electric force.

I will now take these topics in more detail, and show, first, what you can get from the translations, and then what you can get from the texts.

One of the most beautiful libraries in the world: Admont Abbey, Styria, Austria.

Poetry cannot make a machine, but it is the food of the imagination: it expresses the highest part of man, his eternal hopes and fears, his most intimate feelings, his speculations on the universe, and on his own great end. There is one epic poet, Homer, the Greek. Other Greeks imitated Homer, but they never came near him; Vergil wrote what he called an epic, and so did Milton, but they are not epics. The epic poet depicts a real world in action: there it is, as clear as if we saw it with our eyes; clearer indeed, for the art of the poet lies in that he can, by selection, bring his world within focus for our eyes,...