INTRODUCTION

EUROPE HAS NEARLY FOUR MILLION square miles ; Lancashire has 1,700 ; Attica has 700. Yet this tiny country has given us an art which we, with it and all that the world has done since it for our models, have equalled perhaps, but not surpassed. It has given us the staple of our vocabulary in every domain of thought and knowledge. Politics, tyranny, democracy, anarchism, philosophy, physiology, geology, history—these are all Greek words. It has seized and up to the present day kept hold of our higher education. It has exercised an unfailing fascination, even on minds alien or hostile. Rome took her culture thence. Young Romans completed their education in the Greek schools. Roman orators learnt their trade from Greek rhetoricians. Roman proconsuls on their way to the East stopped to spend a few days talking to the successors of Plato and Aristotle in the Academy and Lyceum. Roman aristocrats imported Greek philosophers to live in their families. And so it was with natures less akin to Greece than the Roman. S. Paul, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, who called the wisdom of the Greeks foolishness, was drawn to their Areopagus, and found himself accommodating his gospel to the style, and quoting verses from the poets, of this alien race. After him, the Church, which was born to protest against Hellenism, translated its dogmas into the language of Greek thought and finally crystallized them in the philosophy of Aristotle.

Then for a time Greek influence on the West died down. An intellectual and political system repugnant to its genius mastered the world, and Hellenism, buried in Byzantine libraries and imprisoned in a language that Europe had forgotten, seemed to have finally passed away. A few centuries go by ; suddenly we find Italy intoxicated with the Greek spirit, as with new wine ; poring over it, interpreting it, hopelessly misunderstanding it ; leaving Pre-Raphaelite art in order to dig up its broken statues, forgetting the magnificent monuments of Gothic architecture in order to imitate its Parthenon, deserting Dante in order to hunt for its crabbed manuscripts, at the expense of fortune and of life. Even then the revivifying power of Hellenism was not spent nor its work done. Two centuries later, a poor tradesman’s son born among the ‘ugly Brandenburg sand-hills’ and educated in the stagnant German universities of the day, catches a glimpse of the meaning of Greek Art, never forgets the vision through weary years as schoolmaster and librarian in provincial German towns, professes Romanism that he may follow the gleam to Italy, and there living in perpetual communion with Greek sculpture, ‘ opens a new sense for the study of art and initiates a new organ for the human spirit With Winckelmann the race starts anew, and has run unbroken to our own day. He handed the torch of Hellenism to Goethe, and it became the law of life and the standard of beauty to the profoundest poet of the modern world. Goethe passed it on to Nietzsche, and the great rebel and prophet of our age found in pre-Socratic Greece the nearest likenesses to his ideal humanity. Continually laid aside— it is too tremendous and fatiguing for the world to live up to ; continually rediscovered—for the world cannot live without it: that is the history of the Greek genius. What is the nature of this genius

a paupere terra missus in imperium magnum?

What qualities made it great and give it permanence ? Why did it attract men so various as Cicero, S. Paul, Pico della Mirandola, Nietzsche ? Why does it attract us ? How does its literature stand to ours ? What were the secrets of its success ? Are they secrets of value to us, or have we far outstripped it ? What view of life, if any, does Greece represent ? Is Hellenism identical with, or antagonistic, or complementary to Christianity ? Are any of us Hellenists now, and what is Hellenism ? Has it a genuine message for us, or are its ideals as dead as its language ? What relation has it to modern thought, and in particular to that spirit of science which we regard as peculiarly the child of our own times ? What changes came over Greece, as the years passed ? How far are Homer and Herodotus, Herodotus and Thucydides, Thucydides and Aristotle, really akin ? What spiritual development transformed the sixth into the fifth century and the fifth into the fourth ?

These are obvious questions which we might naturally expect every student of Greece to have answered, in some sort, by the time he leaves his public school : they are so obvious indeed, that if he has no answer to them he may reasonably be said to have hitherto studied in his sleep. Yet many persons survive to a far later stage than their schooldays, and gain a real acquaintance with Greek literature, and receive in examinations the official stamp of success, and yet remain in a comfortable vagueness about both the questions and the answers to them.

To such people the following book may be of use ; for it was written with the idea of helping its readers, by agreement or disagreement, to give some definiteness and coherency to the fleeting impressions, which are often all that is left after ten years’ study of the Greeks. It does not deal directly with all the questions mentioned above, but it touches on most of them. For it is an attempt briefly to suggest what are the qualities that make Greece notable, to outline the main elements in its genius, so far as that genius is revealed in its literature. Of politics we shall not attempt to treat.

The most obvious cavil against any attempt to define the genius of a race is that races have no genius, and least of all that race which we compendiously call The Greeks. Are we going to label with a chill and narrow formula that wide range of glowing activity ? Phidias and Cimon and Alcibiades and Aristotle, Hesiod on his Boeotian farm, Pindar celebrating athletic victories, Socrates questioning in the market-place, Archilochus blackening the characters of his enemies ; or again, the common Athenian following Xenophon from Cunaxa with the Ten Thousand, listening to the tragedies at the Great Dionysia, drinking himself drunk in honour of the god, walking in the mystic procession to Eleusis, voting for the Sicilian expedition or for the condemnation of Pericles ? Could any race be summed up in a few phrases ? And shall we attempt it in the case of the Greeks ? No doubt it is a rash attempt to make. Yet there is such a thing as the English character, though there are many Englishmen and though they behave in very different ways. It is true to say that Englishmen are lovers of law and custom, though Shelley was English ; that they are sober and unexcitable, though the story of the South Sea Bubble would not lead one to suppose it. So too there is a definite Greek character, which no one would confuse, for instance, with the Roman.

If we agree to this, our next difficulty is to decide whom we mean by the Greeks : do we mean Dorians, Ionians, Aeolians; or, narrowing the field to the larger communities, Athenians, Spartans, Thebans, Asiatic Greeks ? Again, are we thinking of the average citizen, or of the philosopher and poet and artist : in Athens, for example, do we take account of Cimon and Thrasybulus) and the ordinary man whom we meet in the private speeches of the orators, or only of Thucydides and Plato and their peers ? Again, from what ages are we taking our ideas of the Greek spirit : are we excluding everything before Homer and after Demosthenes ? If so, are not our conclusions valueless, for they ignore half the manifestations of that stupendous élan vital : and if not, how shall we bring into one fold Thucydides the historian and Aristides the rhetor, the audience of the Funeral Speech and the Graeculus esuriens of the Roman empire ? Here are three difficulties at the outset, which may be taken in turn.

Firstly : by the Greek genius we shall mean a spirit which manifested itself in certain peoples inhabiting lands washed by the Aegean sea : it appears to have been only partly determined by race : Athens was its heart, and little or nothing of it is to be seen at Sparta : but Pindar possessed it though he was a Theban, Aristotle though he came from Stagira, Thales though he was born and lived in Asia, and Homer though his birthplace is not known. Perhaps this definition evades the difficulty : but it seems to suit the facts.

Secondly : in defining this spirit we shall keep our eyes fixed on what is admitted to have been its most brilliant season of flower, the years between 600 and 400 b. c. ; without forgetting that a hundred years passed before the most influential philosophies of Greece came to birth and its far-reaching permeation of the world began.

This of course is an arbitrary limitation, and many books about the Greeks have stumbled and many criticisms on them blundered, because their makers have either tacitly stopped at Aristotle, and omitted developments subsequent to him, or have forgotten that there were movements in Greece which have left no literature behind, or at best only a literature of fragments. They deny that the Greeks were mystics, and Neoplatonist ghosts rise to confront them ; or that they were ascetics, and there are the Orphies with their fast days and Pythagoras with his beans ; or that they were austere moralists, and the Stoics give them the lie ; or that they had a missionary spirit, and Cynic philosophers wander over the face of the earth preaching...