HELLAS AND CIVILIZATION. 



'405 



totle, by Phidias, by Thucydides, not by the un- 

 known and irrecoverable Athenian or Spartan 

 who would accurately represent the average of 

 his race. 



Indeed, it would not b*e too much to say that 

 every country which has ever been great in liter- 

 ature or aesthetic pursuits has also been great at 

 the same time in commerce and industrial arts. 

 The grand epoch of Athens was the epoch of her 

 naval supremacy. The rise of trade in Alexan- 

 dria was accompanied by the rise of her philo- 

 sophic schools, her poets, and her scientific thiak- 

 ers. When the centre of the commercial world 

 was transferred to Italy, Rome shared with the 

 still active mercantile cities of the eastern Medi- 

 terranean the literary and artistic greatness of the 

 Hellenic cycle. 1 During the middle ages and the 

 Renaissance, the Italian trading towns, which 

 still retained the chief commerce of Europe, pro- 

 duced their greatest poets, painters, and thinkers. 

 As soon as the stream of traffic was diverted to 

 the Atlantic seaboard, our own Elizabethan out- 

 burst began to dazzle us with its rapid and unex- 

 pected flashes. Wherever we look, we see that 

 intellect can only be produced by practical gains 

 of brain-connection, made slowly generation after 

 generation in the ordinary course of life, and 

 finally culminating in a general average of high 

 intelligence, varied by those exceptional devia- 

 tions which we know as genius. 



So it must have been in the case of Hellas, 

 too. The rude Achaian warrior could only beget 

 a Plato or a Euclid by slow increments of intelli- 

 gence acquired in practical life. For Hellas was 

 really a busy mercantile country. If we look at 

 the historical states, we shall see clearly that the 

 great Hellenes were citizens of the trading seaport 

 towns — of Athens, Corinth, the Ionian coast, 

 Syracuse, Alexandria, Magna Grsecia ; not of mili- 

 tant and inland Sparta, of mountain-girt and iso- 

 lated Thessaly, of wild iEtolia and Epirus, beyond 

 the range of Hellenic trade-lines, and cut off from 

 participation in the great Hellenic island-studded 

 sea. And if any man really doubts that litera- 

 ture, science, and art, do in fact follow the course 

 of commerce, let him consider wherein does the 

 Greece of to-day differ from the Hellas of Pericles, 

 and wherein does the Spain of Alfonso differ from 

 the Spain of Lope and Calderon and Cervantes. 

 Is it not at least a fact that whenever commercial 

 and political greatness have deserted a country, 



1 1 am glad to see that, since the above passage was 

 written. Prof. Goldwin Smith has vindicated, in a brill- 

 iant paper, the commercial character of early regal 

 Eome. 



through altered conditions, every other species of 

 greatness has languished and died, so soon as the 

 lingering effects of the prime impetus have had 

 time slowly to fade away ? 



Of course many other minor points contrib- 

 uted to the formation of the Hellenic character. 

 But these we may safely pass over in a rapid 

 sketch like the present, for two sufficient reasons : 

 In the first place, they appear of comparatively 

 slight importance, when contrasted with the op- 

 portunity for commercial intercourse and varied 

 national life given to Hellas by its geographical 

 position and its natural features. In the second 

 place, they have for the most part already re? 

 ceived more than their due share of attention 

 from historians in general. Thus there can be 

 no doubt that the love of autonomy, the strong 

 feeling of civil independence, which made the Hel- 

 lenic cities so diverse in their modes of govern- 

 ment, depended ultimately upon the peculiar con- 

 figuration of the country, cut off into innumerable 

 unconnected valleys, or divided into hundreds of 

 petty islands. Hence, a,s many authors have 

 pointed out, no one central authority could arise 

 over the whole ; no one conquering king could 

 impose his yoke, even over the six separate basins 

 of Peloponnesus, as he could over the narrow 

 flats of the Nile, or the wide alluvial plains of 

 the Euphrates and the Ganges. The army and 

 the fleet of Xerxes shatter themselves in vain 

 against the countless barriers of Hellenic moun- 

 tains and Hellenic straits ; and it is only when 

 the Macedonian and Roman stage is reached, that 

 a common conqueror or a common government 

 becomes possible at all. But these facts are 

 paralleled more or less closely in a hundred other 

 cases. The Swiss communities successfully main- 

 tained their joint independence and their several 

 autonomies in their narrow valleys for hundreds 

 of years. The Scotch clans only gave way before 

 the centralizing influence of General Wade's road- 

 making. Agra, Delhi, the Duab, the Punjaub, the 

 whole vast plain country of the Ganges and In- 

 dus basins, submitted tamely enough to Patan or 

 Mogul ; but the Deccan, with its mountain-val- 

 leys and naturally isolated districts, was the last 

 portion of the Mussulman empire to be acquired 

 even in name, and the first to break up into 

 minor kingdoms, when that unwieldy and half- 

 digested organization crumbled into decay. Yet, 

 when we look more closely into the question, we 

 see that the autonomy and separateness of the 

 Hellenic states have little to do with our interest 

 in their history. We do not specially care for 

 the fact that Celtic clans or Bornean Dyaks have 



