are everlasting converts to every crude suggestion that presents itself, and the last opinion is always the true one. Each successive discovery flashes upon them with equal light and evidence, and every new fact overturns their whole system. It is among this class of persons, whose ideas never extend beyond the feeling of the moment, that we find partisans who are very honest men, with a total want of principle, and who unite the most hardened effrontery and intolerance of opinion to endless inconsistency and self-contradiction." 1 We may not agree with every word of this criticism, but we all know instances of the type which Hazlitt is attacking; and there is no better medicine against its dangers, than to be able to withdraw from the modern world, and view and judge it in the light of other civilisations than our own.

If so, we are driven to Greece and Rome. Not only are they "two cities set on a hill, which could not be hid; all eyes have seen them, and their light shines like a mighty sea-mark into the abyss of time." But nowhere else in European history shall we find two civilisations which satisfy the necessary conditions. They, unlike the states. which grew up on their ruins, have run their full 1 The Round Table, No. 2.

course from start to finish; they have been judged and heard the final verdict of time; because they are dead their history excites little prejudice and passion, and they resemble us sufficiently to admit of comparison, yet are sufficiently different to allow a contrast. There is no other Western civilisation of which this can be said.

The very difficulty of penetrating to their thought and life is an advantage; it is a training in insight and sympathy, and develops the faculty of getting inside other people's minds, which all men need, whether they are politicians or teachers, civil servants or merchants. The very differences of the classical civilisations from our own are instructive. Is it not salutary in the days of big federations and world empires to test and check our beliefs by comparison with peoples who built up their life within the walls of small cities and thought that there should be "a limit to the state." The comparison will not change our views, but it may save us from some of the excesses of megalomania. The achievement of Athens will remind us that bigness is not greatness, and her practice will teach us not in the state to forget the

1

1 Aristotle, Politics, 7. 4. 9. Here, and generally, I have used Jowett's translation.

individual. "It is clear," says Aristotle, "that that form of government is best, in which every man, whoever he is, can act for the best, and live happily";1 and he was uttering the principle which controlled Greek politics.

And yet the history of Greece and Rome is always reminding us of our own difficulties. This brings me to my fourth point-the sense in which the classics introduce us to modern problems. It is almost impossible to persuade those who do not know it, that classical literature is in any sense modern; they think of it as something primitive and barbarous, and they will not believe that Euripides or Seneca have at least as much in common with the twentieth century as Scott or Thackeray. So I will give a few instances to indicate how the classics teem with modern characters, situations, problems. Again, for brevity's sake I will take these instances from Greek only.

Greek history is at once more and less akin to the modern world than at first seems. We might suppose that Athens, the earliest and most complete democracy in Europe, would have many lessons to teach us; on the other hand, we might 1 Aristotle, Politics, 7. 2. 5.

think that a slave-owning society, whose women were unemancipated, was too remote from conditions of to-day to be instructive. Both these suppositions are dangerous. The Athenian woman was not such a puppet as we suppose; and if most Athenian men, like the modern French, thought that the complicated sex problem was logically solved by assigning the home and the family as the province of woman, there are plenty of signs in fifth and fourth century literature of views which we associate with the suffragette. Nor did the slave system make so much difference as we fancy. The member of our upper or middle classes, living partly or wholly on his dividends, which represent an inherited or acquired right to other men's labour, has affinities with a slave-owning Athenian; while the difference between our industrial classes and the Greek slave is spiritual rather than material.1 No doubt it is a very important difference, but it is not such as to make comparisons between ancient and modern society unprofitable. On the other hand, arguments drawn from Athens as to the fate of democracies are notoriously misleading: Athens was a small city, not a big modern

1 See A. E. Zimmern, Was Greek Civilisation based on Slave Labour?

state, and her democracy was far more complete than ours is ever likely to be. So we need here to be even more cautious than usual in our historical inferences.

Yet it is true that Greek history is instructive, and at times surprisingly modern. There is the unique spectacle of Sparta--that country of austere and Puritan heroes, who thought a state could exist without a civilisation, and, banishing equally art and commerce, literature and gold and silver, have left the world doubtful whether to admire the virtues, or to despise the narrow efficiency, of these human ants; Sparta teaches the fate of a nation which dispenses with thought and art, and affords an excellent contrast with Rome. Then there is Athens, presenting the history of the only democracy before our own which has tried to govern an empire. Glance at her closing phase, of which Demosthenes is the hero. His whole career was a struggle against Philip of Macedon's attempt to subjugate Greece, and his task was to excite a good-natured, peaceable democracy to spend on war money which they preferred to use for social purposes at home, and to sacrifice their own lives on the field of battle instead of paying mercenaries to go in their place. His speeches