Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/18

xiv even by the mere possession of high intellectual and æsthetic gifts, that they rose so irresistibly from mere barbarism to the height of their unique civilisation: it was by infinite labour and unrest, by daring and by suffering, by loyal devotion to the things they felt to be great; above all, by hard and serious thinking.

Their outer political history, indeed, like that of all other nations, is filled with war and diplomacy, with cruelty and deceit. It is the inner history, the history of thought and feeling and character, that is so grand. They had some difficulties to contend with which are now almost out of our path. They had practically no experience, but were doing everything for the first time; they were utterly weak in material resources, and their emotions, their desires and fears and rages, were probably wilder and fierier than ours. Yet they produced the Athens of Pericles and of Plato.

The conception which we moderns form of these men certainly varies in the various generations. The 'serene and classical' Greek of Winckelmann and Goethe did good service to the world in his day, though we now feel him to be mainly a phantom. He has been succeeded, especially in the works of painters and poets, by an æsthetic and fleshly Greek in fine raiment, an abstract Pagan who lives to be contrasted with an equally abstract early Christian or Puritan, and to be glorified or mishandled according to the sentiments of his critic. He is a phantom too, as unreal as those marble palaces in which he habitually takes his ease. He would pass, perhaps, as a 'Græculus' of the Decadence; but the speeches Against Timarchus and Against Leocrates show