Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/374

368 Lycurgus—followed by the rise of Greek civilization and culture—the most notable event in the world's history. Here we have a race as superior to us as we are to the negroes—a great race, for whose origin we can no more account than we can explain the birth of Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon. The curve shows the progress of the Greek race as represented by its great men—leaders then and now in war, in

 The numbers are given on the left side, the ordinates or height of the curve above the base line representing the number of eminent men born in each half century. Thus there were five preeminent men born between 600 and 550 and 241 in the second halt of the eighteenth century. As men attain eminence about fifty years later than they are born, the periods of productivity are one place further to the right.

statesmanship, in philosophy, in literature, in art—and its more sudden decline in the third and second centuries before Christ. But the supremacy relinquished by the Greeks was grasped by the iron hand of the Romans, who in the centuries just before Christ rise rapidly and then fall. The relation of Greek to Roman civilization is shown in a separate figure.