The Historians' History of the World 04

The qualities that were at work in the decay of civilisation were essentially Greek—satisfaction in present achievement, and reverence for authority. The classicist movement allowed them to gain exclusive sway. Hand in hand with them went a fine sense of form; the imitative faculty has never attained greater triumphs. Christianity also submitted to the yoke of classicist rhetoric; the impressive sermons of the great Cappadocians bear witness to this, no less than the childish Symposium of the Virgins of Methodius. In league with the church, this formal culture has the great merit of having preserved a large portion of the literature of antiquity as an aid to education. The Greek faculty of abstract thought showed itself mighty for good and evil. In the midst of the terrible third century, it was able to take refuge in the purer air of immaterial conceptions, though at the cost of the delight in the visible world characteristic of the Ionic school.

There was little of Plato but his name and the mysticism of his old age in this last great philosophical movement which called itself after him; and it was never more alien to the Greek spirit than when it tried by fantastic necromancy to hold fast the ancient system of religion. The same mode of thought practically prevailed to the same extent on Christian soil, not only in the many circles which the church had repudiated; orthodox dogma is itself but one of these systems, though one that was canonised and preserved for centuries together with the whole body of classical civilisation. This torpor is naturally repellent to us, especially when we contrast it with the active progress of the Roman church which takes the task of civilising the West out of the hands of imperial Rome and surpasses all she has done. Nevertheless, there is a certain grandeur in the spectacle of this ancient and mummified civilisation preserving the Greek nation from utter wreck, in the face, ultimately, of enslavement to a barbarous race and a stern and aggressive religion. But if such a great political and intellectual future as we should wish them is ever to smile upon the Greeks, or rather, the Romæi, it will not come by way of the repristination of any obsolete form whatsoever, it will not be brought about directly by the spirit of antiquity, whether Greek or Christian; but the whole nation must become new by the assimilation of the modern culture of the West. The West, it must be borne in mind, did not imitate the Hellenes, it made a right use of its heritage from them to liberate itself and renew its youth. This service they still render, and will continue to render, to the individual man. By lifting their eyes to the glory of Greece, whether it be Homeric or Doric, Athenian or Hellenistic, men will evermore gain strength to be free and to enter willingly into the service of the Idea, and thus, if they have strayed from the right path, will learn to find their way back to nature and to God.

Politically the Greeks did not gain the mastery of the world, they did not even attain to national unity; but a homogeneous civilisation for the whole world, nevertheless, came into being through them. In such a civilisation for the future we too believe, and we labour to realise it because we desire and advocate the fellowship and concord of many nations, countries, and languages. But the civilisation of the world knows no stronger tie than the groundwork common to all genuine civilisations; and that is our heritage from Greece.

BRIEF REFERENCE-LIST OF AUTHORITIES BY CHAPTERS

[The letter a is reserved for Editorial Matter.]

Chapter XXXVII. The Reign of Terror in Athens

b Connop Thirlwall, History of Greece.

c Xenophon, Hellenics.

Chapter XXXVIII. The Democracy Restored

b George Grote, History of Greece.

c Connop Thirlwall, op. cit.

d Aristophanes’ Plays

.

e Euripides’ Plays.

f Lysias’ Orations.

g Thucydides, History of the Grecian War.

h Plutarch, Lives of Illustrious Men.

Chapter XXXIX. Socrates and the Sophists

b William Mitford,

History of Greece.

c Plato’s Phædo (translated by Henry Carey).

d George Grote, op. cit.

e Xenophon, Memorabilia and Apologia Socrates.

f Claudius Ælianus, Varia Historia (translated by A. Fleming).

g

Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library.

Chapter XL. The Retreat of the Ten Thousand

b William Mitford, op. cit.

c Xenophon, Anabasis and Catabasis.

d Plutarch, op. cit.

e Friedrich D. Schlosser, Weltgeschichte.

Chapter XLI. The Spartan Supremacy