86 THE BPLENDOUR OF GREECE 



courtesans in the modern sense. And so on. It is 

 always very difficult to settle such questions when 

 there are no statistics. As far as we can positively 

 say, moral ideas and practice were much the same 

 in the old civilizations as in modern cities. It is 

 precisely one of the points on which there has been 

 least progress. 



Apart from a certain harshness in some things, 

 which we might expect in a people so recently (com- 

 pared with the older civilizations and ourselves) 

 issued from barbarism, the great defect of the Greeks 

 (not merely Athens) was that the mass of the people 

 were left uneducated. This is the fundamental defect 

 of every civilization, ancient and modern, and the 

 world will never go well until it is remedied. The 

 Athenian democracy was ignorant, and blundered 

 badly. It would be enough to quote the fact that 

 it killed Socrates, one of the greatest and most exalted 

 of moralists. It also drove from Athens men of science 

 who dared to suggest astronomical truths which were 

 against the narrow creed of the people. Certainly we 

 must not admit all the strictures against the Athenian 

 democracy. The great artists and architects and 

 dramatists could not have lived and worked without 

 the support or consent of the people. They, appa- 

 rently, loved great and beautiful things. But they 

 were left in ignorance, while the philosophers talked 

 in their gardens to select circles, and when the time 

 of trial came the democracy failed. 



The first blunder was imperialism. In its greatest 

 days Athens was a city-state of some 300,000 or 

 400,000 people, of whom every adult male (if Athenian) 

 had a vote. It was, as I said, bound in a League with 

 the other city-states of Greece. As it became rich 



