accepted, and the city was surrendered to him. On the evening of the same day Thucydides and his ships sailed into Eion, but not until Brasidas had taken possession of Amphipolis: another night, and he would have seized Eion.'1 The gist of the story contained in this extract is plain. The Spartan general Brasidas seized the important town of Amphipolis, and the Athenian general came too late to save it. But who would guess that the Athenian general Thucydides was the historian Thucydides who wrote these words, and that the episode which he here describes with such detachment and neutrality earned him perpetual exile under pain of death from the country which he passionately loved? Thucydides has told the bare facts, objectively, as if they related to some one else, without a comment, without a word of protest, excuse, explanation or regret on the crowning disaster of his life. He writes of himself in the third person. This is not the way in which modern generals describe their mishaps, but it is the Greek way. Thucydides has forgotten himself and his feelings; he sees only the disastrous day when he sailed up the Struma with his ships and found the gates of Amphipolis closed against him. He ignores himself so far that he does not call it disastrous, though disastrous it was for himself and his country. With the same detachment he speaks of the enslavement of Melos (p. 223 f.) and the tragedy of Syracuse (p. 240), though he thinks, and makes us feel, that the one was the crowning crime, the other the crowning disaster of his country. He narrates the plain facts and leaves the reader to draw his inferences. If we did not know that he was an Athenian, we could hardly tell from his history whether he took the side of Athens or Sparta in the war; so entirely are he and his feelings kept in the background. Yet he was an ardent patriot, and he is describing the war in which his country lost supremacy and empire. No historian of the war of 1914-18, whether on the Allied or the German side, is likely to write of it in this way.

The art of Homer has the same quality of detachment. He is a Greek, writing of a ten years' war between Greeks and Asiatics, yet most of his readers sympathize with Hector rather than with Achilles. He himself preferred neither, but saw and felt equally for both; with the hero who fought the losing battle for Troy, and with him who lost his friend, and, intoxicated with sorrow, could see and feel nothing but a passion of revenge. It would seem hardly possible to write the close of the 22nd Book of 1 Thuc. iv. 104, 105, 106 (tr. Jowett, mainly).

the Iliad (p. 33 f.), where the heroes meet, without taking sides; we, no doubt, should take Hector's side. But Homer stands apart from the quarrel, and sees both men and the feelings of both, writing with the pen of the Recording Angel, not of the Judge. What he or Thucydides thought in each case can only be guessed at. They have presented the facts without comment, and the facts tell their own tale, explain themselves, carry with them the feelings they should evoke, and shine by their own light, like the phosphorescence of the sea.

I have laid special stress on Greek' truthfulness'. It is the parent, not only of Greek science and philosophy, which are the children of a desire to see things in themselves as they are, and not as the seer wishes them to be, but also, in part, of Greek Literature, where truth is never sacrificed to beauty or sentiment or emotion, and where neither the light nor the shade on the canvas of life is ignored, but both are depicted with an evenhanded justice. It is the lesson which Europe began at the Renaissance to relearn from Greece, and which she has been perfecting ever since.

There are of course other teachers of this lesson. But the Greeks were the first to bring 'truthfulness' into the world, and they are peculiarly free from its dangers. For, like all qualities, it has its defects. It may be exclusive, blind, dour: and modern veracity, because it has to fight its way against falsities and obscurantism, has often worn the shape of an unlovely protestantism. Not science only, but those writers who have reflected the scientific spirit in literature, have often been narrow and hard. Truth has not come naturally to them, but has been achieved by a struggle, of which they bear the marks. Thus the truthfulness of French realists and of their English followers has often been struggling and tasked', and their world barren of the colour of real life. The Greeks escaped these dangers. They did not have to establish the claims of truth against a hostile world and they are unscarred by conflict. Their truthfulness is not a protest, but a gift of nature. Homer does not force himself to do justice to Hector; Thucydides and Herodotus are not consciously struggling to be impartial to the national enemy. They are following the natural bent of their minds. And it is this spontaneous and effortless veracity that they teach us.

But it is dangerous to talk of qualities and to dissect a writer or a people. The living being vanishes, and isolated limbs remain

on the dissecting table. We shall see the Greeks as they were, if we think of them, not as incarnations of simplicity or beauty or truthfulness, but as human beings, entering on the common inheritance of life with the clear eye, the open mind, the eager enjoyment, the generous receptivity of children, and yet with the faculties of full-grown men. Such are the beings who will meet us in the following pages.1

The gods are a stumbling-block to some modern readers of Greek Literature, though only in the early stages of their study. Any one who feels this difficulty may remember three things. First, we witness in Greek Literature the rapid advance of a people from a crude polytheism to a monotheism as lofty, in its way, as our own. Thus we meet many stages of the theological belief. In Homer the gods are beings with human passions and superhuman power: Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle regard God much as we might. Second, the theme of Homer, of Tragedy, of Greek Literature as a whole, is not theology, but the fortunes of the human spirit moving among the changes and chances of life. Theological machinery is far more integral a part of Paradise Lost than it is of any Greek poem. It is on the human beings that the Greeks' eyes were fixed, and that our eyes should be fixed in reading them. Third, in Greek Tragedy, where the legends drew after them the old theology, though the poet might not believe in it, a reader who wishes can often substitute for the deity in any play some such conception as the Power behind the Universe, the Moral Law, the Laws of Nature, without any loss to the total effect.

II
HOMER

Si on me demandoit le chois de tous les hommes qui sont venus à ma connoissance, il me semble en trouver trois excellens au-dessus de tous les autres. L'un, Homère.-MONTAIGNE.1

Homer,

Whose poem Phoebus challenged for his own.

By great Homer set,

Not to impugn his undisputed throne,

MILTON.

The many-hearted by the mighty-hearted one.

R. BRIDGES: Ode on the Tercentenary Commemoration of Shakespeare.

We are high in the air; beneath us a blue sea studded with islands. On its eastern shore fertile valleys ascend from the seacoast to the high table-land of Asia Minor. In the west, across some 120 miles of water, is the Balkan Peninsula, an Alpine land set in the sea' in the north high mountains; then ancient Greece commences in the plain of Thessaly; then more mountains; then, across a strip of sea, the Peloponnese.

We can prophesy something about the inhabitants of these lands. The mountains of the north will breed a hardy, wild race, remote from the influences of civilization. But in the south and east the people of the sea-girt and indented coasts will be sailors, with all that this implies of intercourse with other nations, and stimulus from the sight of strange habits and men. Yet when they return from the sea, each to his own green valley, they will find themselves cut off from their neighbours by mountain walls, and, in the seclusion of small communities, will develop their own nature and grow to be individualists at heart. They will never be a rich people; there is too much rock and too little cornland or pasture. But in compensation, if scenery counts for anything, they will learn what beauty is from the bright and clear air, the vivid sea, and the sharp outlines of their hills.

Let us now see the inhabitants of Greece. It is the year 2000 B.C. In the island of Crete we see a city and a rich palace with frescoed walls, the home of the rulers of a maritime empire. Elsewhere, in this Minoan Age', mists hide the life of these lands. Five hundred years pass, and we are at the opening of the Mycenaean Age'.

1 Essays, ii. 36. The essay contains an admirable tribute to Homer.

The civilization of Crete has developed and spread. On the hill-tops of Mycenae and Tiryns, in the swamps of Boeotia, and, built above the ruins of older cities, on a low hill called Troy at the mouth of the Dardanelles, we see elaborate fortresses of huge, unmortared stones. They are inhabited by a dark-haired race, skilful in goldsmith's work, wearing bronze armour.

Now turn the eyes northwards to Macedonia, and note those tribes on the move before the pressure of other tribes. We can see them moving with their herds down the Vardar valley; later following the sea-coast under the snows of Olympus, among which their imagination will place heaven, and through the defile of Tempe into Thessaly, where some find a home. More follow and yet more, breaking successively over valley after valley, and filling them as the sea fills rockpools, till, hundreds of years after the time when we first saw the wanderers, Greece is theirs from Olympus to Cape Malea.

These invaders are governed by kings supported by a council of chiefs; their decisions must be brought before the tribesmen and ratified by them. We recognize the elements of our own constitution, though their relative importance has changed.

The tribal names are perhaps preserved in the Greek lands which they conquer-Hellenes, Thessalians, Boeotians, Achaeans, Phocians, Dorians. They mix with the inhabitants of the land in various proportions; in Attica the natives predominate, in Sparta the invading Dorians keep their race pure. Mycenae is destroyed; Mycenaean culture is submerged; and the native languages give way to the Aryan tongue of the invaders, which we call Greek.

Greece once conquered the conquest takes centuries-the migrating tribes push across the sea, to the western coast of Asia Minor, where three groups of settlements, Aeolian, Ionian, Dorian, preserve the name of tribes. In one of these migrations Troy is destroyed, and its siege, blended with memories of earlier battles, forms the subject of the first epic of Europe, sung in the metre that its conquerors had brought with them from the north.1

Greek literature begins with Homer and presents us at once with a great poem and an unsolved problem. When and where was 'Homer written? Is it a composite work of many poets or, in the main, from one hand? Probably the Iliad dates from the ninth century and was written on the coast of Asia Minor, but no one has yet proved whether it was composed by one or by many poets. The more general view is that it is composed of 1 The historical sketches are printed in italics.