Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/19

Rh what an Athenian jury would have thought of him. There is more flesh and blood in the Greek of the anthropologist, the foster-brother of Kaffirs and Hairy Ainos. He is at least human and simple and emotional, and free from irrelevant trappings. His fault, of course, is that he is not the man we want, but only the raw material out of which that man was formed: a Hellene without the beauty, without the spiritual life, without the Hellenism. Many other abstract Greeks are about us, no one perhaps greatly better than another; yet each has served to correct and complement his predecessor; and in the long-run there can be little doubt that our conceptions have become more adequate. We need not take Dr. Johnson's wild verdict about the 'savages' addressed by Demosthenes, as the basis of our comparison: we may take the Voyage d'Anacharsis of the Abbé Bartelemi. That is a work of genius in its way, careful, imaginative, and keen-sighted; but it was published in 1788. Make allowance for the personality of the writers, and how much nearer we get to the spirit of Greece in a casual study by Mr. Andrew Lang or M. Anatole France!

A desire to make the most of my allotted space, and also to obtain some approach to unity of view, has led me to limit the scope of this book in several ways. Recognising that Athens is the only part of Greece of which we have much real knowledge, I have accepted her as the inevitable interpreter of the rest, and have, to a certain extent, tried to focus my reader's attention upon the Attic period, from Æschylus to Plato. I have