But the typical Greek has his limitations. Although Homer and Sophocles have a sense of the Divine in relation to human life, they are both polytheistic. Though in both we find ideal relations between men and women represented or suggested, and though Athens and the Parthenon by their very names imply a lofty conception of womanhood, Greek so ciety was disfigured by an attitude to homo sexual impulse that often resulted in words and actions at once base and grotesque; nor should one forget that the leisure of cultivated men was made possible by the labor of slaves. And though both of these poets attribute human failure to human blindness of heart rather than to fate or divine prejudice, the Greeks did not in the main identify divine providence with divine good will. Xschylus, it is true, may al most be termed monotheistic; and Plato has been called by the Jews themselves the Greek Moses, as by English scholars he has on oc casion been styled a Puritan. But lEschylus said that his plays were only morsels from the Homeric banquet, while Plato, in spite of the criticism passed on the ancient epic poems in the is heavily indebted to them, and, closely as he approaches Hebraism or the modern spirit in his deepest reflections, he still remains a pagan. It was left for the Hebrews and Christianity definitely to assert a pure monotheism for transmission to modern times; to develop the idea of the fatherhood of God; and thus to establish upon a firm foundation the principles governing the relations between men and women, women and women, men and men. Again, the joyous Greek was not the joyful Christian; nor was death to him the beginning of life. And again, the mediaeval doctrine of "the gentle heart," from which our modern conceptions of lady and gentleman are mainly derived, was neither Greek nor Roman. While these conceptions owe much to classical anti quity, to the Homeric and tragic heroes and heroines, to the "Highminded Man" of Aristotle, to the Virgilian 2Eneas (who was borrowed from the Greeks); they owe more to the Provencal and Italian, and to the Germanic and Celtic, attitude to woman; at the core they are Christian.
The Greek culture of the most vital period has been handed down to us by intervening civilizations. From Greece it passed to Alex andria, and from Alexandria to Rome. Graeco Roman culture was succeeded and preserved by that of Byzantium, and then, during the decay of learning in southern Europe, was preserved in Ireland and England and in Arabia and Syria, whence it returned to the Continent in the later Middle Ages. It has on three oc casions reasserted itself with special force: at Rome under the Emperor Hadrian; in the 13th century in Europe; and again in Europe be ginning with the Italian Renaissance, this last, however, being mainly Latin in character and but secondarily Greek. Still, if we regard the Renaissance as extending to our own day, we find a better and better understanding and as similation of . Hellenism, until in poets like Shelley and Goethe we discover an approxima tion to the Greek spirit almost as close as that achieved by the Roman Cicero, Virgil and Horace. All five are, so to speak, not Greeks proper of the triumphant age, but, like Lucian and Plutarch, late and provincial imitators who nevertheless have in them something of the original Hellenic genius.
What has Greek culture done for the world? Shelley in his enthusiastic way exclaims: We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece. But for Greece, Rome — the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis of our ancestors would have spread no illumination with her arms, and we might still have been savages idolaters; or, what is worse, might have arrived at such a stagnant and miserable state of in stitutions as China and Japan [in 18221 pos sess.° If pressed, Shelley would have to admit that European law was the invention of Rome; and that, so far as concerns religion, the func tion of the Greeks under the Roman Empire was that of formulating and transmitting, not of producing it. The Christian liturgy may
have originated among Christian Greeks; ecclesiastical music is essentially Greek; the most original literary efforts of the early Christian era, the hymns, were composed, some in Greek, and some in Latin; and the New Testament was written in the commercial Greek (adapted) that had spread during the supremacy of Athens, and was the general means of communication for the eastern Medi terranean. For all that, the customary attri bution of intellectual culture to the Greeks, and religious culture to the Hebrews, is in the main justified— if we remember that the dif ference between the two races is one of degree and emphasis rather than kind, that the Greeks were not unreligious, nor the Hebrews unin tellectual. Strictly considered, the gifts of the two races to civilization cannot be regarded apart. Thus, as Renan points out, the Hebrews discovered various literary types as well as the Greeks. And yet we are safe in deeming the main literary types, and, as Shelley says, the arts in general, a bequest of the Greeks to the world. It was they who provided the models which have aroused the enthusiasm of man kind; for the epic and mock-epic, the poems of Homer; for tragedy, lEschylus and Sopho cies; for romantic tragedy and tragicomedy, Euripides; for political comedy, Aristophanes• for the character-sketch, the rhetoricians and Theophrastus; for domestic comedy, Menan der; for history, Herodotus and Thucydides; for the dialogue, Plato; for the oration, Demosthenes; for lyrical poetry, Pindar; for pastoral, Theocritus. The satire, so far as we know, was another invention of Rome. But i what is often thought to be the peculiar type of modern literature, the prose novel, never theless has its prototypes in the last produc tion of the Greek genius, the romances of Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius and Longus. Even our scientific monographs, and the various types of literary criticism, in verse as well as prose, go back to Aristotle and his successors at Alexandria. In the main, Greek art has given us a conception of orderly structure, when we have been willing to accept it, pervad ing all human activity and achievement. The Greek, in his city-state built upon a hill, de veloped a sense for architecture which re appears in every other art and in all domains of life. The words and sentences of his oration or his drama are arranged like the stones in each section of his citadel and hill-crowning temple, and the several parts are fitted together in order due, like the face and divisions of the Parthenon. The nomadic Hebrew originally dwelt in tents under the stars of the desert. His architectonic sense is relatively weak. But his Psalms have expressed the grief and exultation of mankind; it is he who gave the final meaning to the Greek Logos, the Word incarnate and undying; and the Greek words Christ and Christian take us back not only to Rome and Greece, but, through Rome and Greece, to . Palestine. In any case they lead us to the Mediterranean sources of all modern civilization.
For all special points con nected with Hellenic culture, consult Pauly Wissowa, der Classischen Altertumswissenscha f t, ( 1894, etc.) ; and Muller, 'Handbuch der Klassischen Altertums wissenschafe (1892, etc.). In general, consult Butcher, Some Aspects of the Greek Genius' (1893) ; Cooper, The Greek Genius and its Influence' (1917; contains a bibliography); Moore, The Religious Thought of the Greeks from Homer to the Triumph of Christianity' (1916) ; Rohda, (1903) ; Stabart, The Glory that was Greece> (1911); Thomp son, The Greek Tradition' (1915) . • Botsford and Sillier, Civilization' (1915).