Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/46

13 events: the foundation of cities, the union of peoples, the establishment of liberty, or the victory over enemies. Yet it may be that these cheerful festivals were in part but one means of escaping from sad thoughts. The Greek view of life and death was not cheerful. Life was short and its pains predominated over its pleasures; the future was vague and uncertain. For a few exceptional heroes there was heaven; for a few outrageous sinners—such as Tantalus and Ixion—an eternity of pain; but for the ruck of mankind, if there was a future life at all, it was wrapt in mist and gloom. These views tended to lower the value set upon human life. Though a certain refinement of taste shrank from the brutalities of the arena, and gladiators were not butchered to make a Greek, as a Roman, holiday, yet the laws in most Greek states were extremely severe in the infliction of the death penalty, and wholesale executions of prisoners or rebels, of opponents in civil dissensions, were of frequent occurrence in various parts of Greece.

Yet the Greek refinement was very real, and in nearly everything that concerns our thoughts and tastes we owe an incalculable debt to Greek thinkers and artists. First, the number of the states that made up Hellas, and the variety in their constitutions gave rise to political science. The defects and want of permanence in these constitutions not only caused frequent experiments in practice, and the existence of professional constitution-makers, but gave rise to the formation of ideal constitutions, and to speculations in the principles of justice