LITMIR.BIZ

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Rome is a summary, short and brilliant, of all that man has done or can do. The tale of Hellas shows us a glorified ideal of human powers, held up to the world for a moment to show what man can be, but to show us also that such he cannot be for long. And herein is the highest glory of Greece; herein is the highest value of the tongue and history of Greece as supplying the truest and noblest teaching for the mind of man. In no other study are we so truly seeking knowledge simply to raise and school the mind; in none do we so sharply draw the still abiding line between those who have gone through the refining furnace of those immortal studies and the barbarians – sometimes the self-condemned barbarians – who stand without. When we study the tongue, the laws, the history, of our own people, of any people of our immediate kindred, of that people who, whether conquering or conquered, were still the masters of us all, we are as it were engaged in our own work, we are busy with the toil of our own daily life; it is still something of a business, something of a calling. In our Hellenic studies we stand on a loftier height, we breathe a purer air, even as the peak of Olympos overtops the height of Alba. We master the tongue of Latium, because it is still the tongue of no small part of the business of practical life, because it meets us at every turn as an essential part of our own law, our own history, our very daily being. We master the tongue of Hellas as being in itself the first and noblest form of the common speech, as the tongue which, in its native and unborrowed strength, brought forth the greatest master-pieces of every form of lettered utterance, those master-pieces which none can know save those who can follow the very words of the poet, the orator, the philosopher himself, and who are not at the mercy of some blind guide who vainly strives to reproduce those living words in ruder tongues. After long years of familiar knowledge, we need hardly sigh for the days when those deathless works were fresh to us. The tale of Ilios and Ithakê, the oldest inheritance of the common folk, the oldest picture of the common household, is ever living, ever fresh. We can but pity the doom of those who, by their own act or by the act of others, are shut out from it.

      The beginnings then of European history, more strictly perhaps the beginnings of the brilliant prologue to unbroken European history, will be found in the borderlands of Europe and Asia, among the islands and peninsulas of the Ægæan sea. I am speaking now of history in the narrower sense, of the continuous political history of man. With the strangers who lay without the great brotherhood, ancient as may have been their power, mighty as may have been their works, we have to deal only when they come across the men of our own household. We begin in short with the first beginnings of the recorded history of Greece, with the first Olympiad as a conventional date, but not forgetting times before the first Olympiad so far as our earliest pictures carry us back to yet older times. I cleave to the date which I proposed in my Inaugural Lecture. I have to be sure come across a singular objection from a critic in this place. I have been told that, by beginning with the first Olympiad, I leave out all Mahometan history. There are then, one must think, those who believe that all Mahometan history took place before the first Olympiad. “Felices errore suo.” I can only heartily wish that it were so, and that the Ottoman was a thing as dead and gone as the Hittite. I fear that, beginning with 776 B.C., nay even if we begin with the mystic year 476 A.D., we shall still have all Mahometan history in front of us, and that the needs of our tale will drive us to take not a few glimpses at that side of the world. From the very beginning we have to do with powers which filled the same place in the world which the Mahometan powers filled in after ages, the powers against which our eldest brethren had to wage the earlier stages of the strife which still is waging. With ingenious speculations as to the earliest origin, the earliest settlements, the earliest forms of speech, of the Hellenic folk, I am not, in such a summary as this, called on to concern myself. I gladly leave them to my ancient brother. I have to deal with the Greek when he appears on the stage of the world as the first champion of the great cause and as waging a strife against worthy rivals. One people alone in the barbarian world have even the shadow of a right to be placed side by side, to be dealt with as ebenbürtig, with the men of Hellas. In the men of Canaan the men of Hellas had to acknowledge rivals who were largely forerunners and in some sort masters. Greece had ships, colonies, and commerce; but Phœnicia had ships, colonies, and commerce in days earlier still. How high in all the material arts the Phœnician stood above the earliest Greek we see in our earliest picture of Hellenic life. Not to speak of lesser gifts, we all bear in our minds that it was from the Phœnician that Hellas must first have learned to carve the abiding records of man’s thought on the stone, on the brazen or wooden tablet, on the leaves of Egypt and on the skins of Pergamon. The political life of Greece was her own; that assuredly was no borrowed gift from Tyre or Sidon; yet Tyre and Sidon and that mightier Carthage whose institutions Aristotle studied had a political life of their own which brought them nearer to the Hellenic level than any other people beyond the Aryan fold. Only, if we must admit that the men of Canaan were on some points the teachers of the men of Hellas, yet it was the men of Hellas and not the men of Canaan to whom destiny had given the call to be the teachers of the world. It is a strange destiny by which the people who gave Greece the art of writing should have left to us no writings to hand down to us the thoughts and deeds of a world of their own that has passed away. Strange destiny that, while so large a part of the acts of the Phœnician are recorded by Greek and Roman enemies, while the tongue of the Phœnician may be said still to live for us in the speech of the kindred Hebrew, yet the direct memorials of so great a people should not go beyond a few coins, a few inscriptions, a few ruins of cities which once held their place among the mightiest of the earth.

      Our scene then opens with the picture of the Greek while still shut up in his own special land of islands and peninsulas. We ask not for our purposes how and whence he came thither; we ask not the exact measure of his kindred in blood and speech to the other nations around him. It is enough for us that the Greek is not wholly isolated, that he is not merely one of the great Aryan family, but that he is the foremost among a group of nations who are bound to him by some closer tie than that which binds together all the branches of the great Aryan family. The exact degree of kindred between Greeks and Thracians or Phrygians we may leave to other inquirers; it is enough for us that there was the common Aryan kindred, and seemingly something more. But it is one of the leading facts of history that Greece had to deal on her immediate northern frontier, on the opposite coasts of Asia, on the opposite coasts of Italy and Sicily, with nations which, for historical purposes at least, were nearer still. Those nations had, to say the least, a power of adopting Greek ways, a power of becoming Greeks by adoption if not by birth. The boundary line between the Greek and the Epeirot, faint in the earliest days of Greece, seems for some ages to be drawn sharper and sharper. Then the tide turns; suddenly the Epeirots, the people of the oldest Hellas, the guardians of the oldest of Hellenic oracles, stand forth again in their elder character. Molottian Pyrrhos wages Western wars as a Hellenic champion and the kingdom of Pyrrhos settles down at last into a well-ordered Greek confederation.

      So it is in Macedonia; so it is in Sicily; so it is in the Greater Hellas on Italian soil. All these lands, and other lands beside, become, for a longer or shorter time, part of the immediate Greek world, no less than Attica or Peloponnêsos. Greek colonization and Macedonian conquest had, each in its turn, a share in the work, and both were in many lands not a little helped by real, if unconscious, kindred on the part of those whom colonists and conquerors found already in possession. Every colony, every conquest, not only won new lands for the Greek settlers themselves, but increased the Greek nation in its wider sense by multitudes who became Greek by adoption, and in whose case the work of adoption was made more easy by the existence of earlier ties of which neither side had thought. As time goes on, as we reach the days when Greek influences were most widely spread over the Mediterranean lands, we may easily trace out zones within zones, marking out the different stages by which the Greek element grows fainter and fainter. First there is the centre of all, the original Hellas itself. Then there are the genuine colonies of old Hellas, detached fragments of Hellenic soil translated to foreign coasts. Then there are the kindred lands whose people were fully adopted into the Hellenic fold. Beyond them again lie the kingdoms ruled by Macedonian princes, where a few great cities which we must call Greek by the law of adoption are planted in lands which have received at the outside only the faintest varnish of Hellenic culture. Lastly, beyond these again, there are the barbarian lands whose princes, like barbarian princes in our own day, made a show of adopting Greek speech and Greek culture, but where the foreign tastes of the princes had no real effect on their kingdoms, and which we cannot look on as forming part of

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