HELLAS AND CIVILIZATION. 



403 



of the Assyrian, Egyptian, Hellenic, and Italian 

 line of schools, yet rises far above any other 

 known to us, except the Japanese. Even in 

 modern times, when obtrusive European com- 

 merce has thrust itself upon her at the cannon's 

 mouth, China has but grudgingly accepted a 

 little opium, and a few cheap but inferior West- 

 ern manufactures. Accordingly, the Celestial 

 mind, shut in upon itself, unwidened by a 

 broader experience, and confined from genera- 

 tion to generation in its own varied but monot- 

 onous grooves, has only risen to the highest 

 place among the second order of civilizations, 

 with Egypt, Assyria, Mexico, Peru, and old 

 Japan. And, while the group of islands to its 

 east, easily permeable by European ideas along 

 its extensive seaboard, has suddenly sprung into 

 fresh life under the quickening influence of West- 

 ern thought, producing in half a century that 

 new Japan which astounds us by its growth like 

 Jonah's gourd, China still remains only touched 

 by our commerce upon its eastern edge, with the 

 great central mass of population and of thought 

 wholly uninfluenced by the new culture of the 

 outer barbarians. 



In this case, again, Hellas presents us with 

 the exactly opposite picture. Had she merely 

 possessed the internal advantages above de- 

 scribed, without any special facilities for extra- 

 Hellenic commerce, for intercourse with men of 

 other types and minds, doubtless the Hellenes 

 would always have remained at much the same 

 stage at which the Japanese remained before the 

 touch of Western commerce roused them into 

 their present marvelous development of an adopt- 

 ed culture. But Hellas, on the contrary, stood 

 exceptionally well situated for communication 

 with extraneous nations. Inland from her Ionic 

 coast lay the semi-Hellenic peoples of Asia Minor. 

 Southeastward, the sea-going Phoenicians could 

 bring to her shores the purple of Tyre and the 

 ivory of the East in exchange for her timber, her 

 dye-stuffs, her metals, and her slaves. Farther 

 on toward the Asiatic side stretched the valley 

 civilizations of Assyria and Babylon. More di- 

 rectly southward, the great basin of the Nile 

 opened up its mouths to her later commerce. 

 Just opposite her southwestern extremity, Cyrene 

 was foreordained to be the granary of her silphi- 

 um trade ; while due westward again Corcyra, 

 Magna Graecia, Sicily, and the remoter Celtic 

 coasts formed the inevitable goals of her coloniz- 

 ing energy. Nor must we forget the Etruscan 

 culture, original or derivative, to the northwest; 

 nor the great commercial mart of Carthage on 



the confines of the two main Mediterranean 

 basins, both of which ministered to her great- 

 ness. The navigation and trade of Hellas, origi- 

 nally confined to her own immediate shores and 

 islands, inevitably spread at last in all these di- 

 rections, with the gradual growth of seamanship, 

 till finally the whole Mediterranean, with its out- 

 lier the Euxine, became in the well-known phrase 

 " a Greek lake." 



Now, before the rise of her wider commercial 

 relations with foreign countries, Hellas does not 

 present any of the peculiar Hellenic traits which 

 we find in her later times. The Homeric Achaians 

 are fine secondary Aryan warriors, differing from 

 the primitive Aryan, whose mode of life has been 

 preserved for us in language and recovered by 

 philology, only in a few minor particulars ; and 

 they are nothing more than this. I know it is 

 fashionable to find in the cycle of Homeric bal- 

 lads all the traits of the developed Hellenic intel- 

 ligence in a rudimentary form ; but this fashion 

 marks itself out at once as a remnant of the ex- 

 ploded classical spirit, which regarded " Greece 

 and Rome " as special and exceptional social 

 phenomena, differing fundamentally from every 

 other known historical state. Doubtless the "Ili- 

 ad " and the "Odyssey" contain a number of splen- 

 did poems ; but to the eye of an impartial spec- 

 tator, who knows the contents of the Mahabharata 

 and the Ramayana, or our own old English epic 

 of Beowulf, they do not materially differ from the 

 nascent poems belonging to other half-differenti- 

 ated members of the great Aryan family. It is 

 true the Hellenic mythology, the rhythmic spirit, 

 the profound though limited sense of the sub- 

 lime, may be clearly seen already in the Homeric 

 chants. But all that we regard as the great heir- 

 looms bequeathed by Hellas to humanity, her 

 sculpture, her painting, her philosophy, her his- 

 tory, her natural science, ljer mathematics, her 

 political economy, all these are as absolutely 

 wanting in the story of Achilles and Agamem- 

 non as in the story of Rama or of Grendel's 

 mother. Indeed, it is only fair to add that many 

 of them are much more wanting in the former 

 than in the latter cases. The causes which pro- 

 duced the historical Hellas apparently came into 

 full action for the most part at a period posterior 

 to the main conception and composition of the 

 famous Achaian epics. The natural development 

 of trade and navigation formed, I believe, the 

 principal reason for this new birth of a hitherto 

 unexampled culture. 



Yet already in the Achaian period the foun- 

 dations of Hellenic commerce had been laid. 



