262 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. {vi. ii 



•which is filled by the products of Athenian intellectual 

 activity during tlie two centuries succeeding the victory 

 of Marathon; when we remember that the foundations of 

 philosophy, of exact science, of sesthetic art in all its 

 branches, of historic and literary criticism, and of free 

 political discussion, were then and there for ever securely 

 laid ; when we consider the widely ramifying influences, now 

 obvious and now more subtle, of all this intense productivity 

 upon Roman ethics and jurisprudence, upon the genesis of 

 Christianity, upon the lesser Eenaissance of the thirteenth 

 century, and the greater Eenaissance of the fifteenth ; when 

 we see how inseparably the life of Athens runs as a woof 

 through the entire web of European life down to our own 

 times ; — when we come to realize all this, we shall begin to 

 realize how frightful was the danger from which we were 

 rescued at Marathon and at Salamis. 



Probably at no subsequent time has European civilization 

 been in a position of such imminent peril. In the life-and- 

 death struggle between Eome and Carthage, the military 

 superiority belonged so decidedly to the more highly-evolved 

 community that even the unrivalled genius of Hannibal was 

 powerless to turn the scale.^ One of the most conspicuous 

 features in Roman history, from the conquest of Spain by 

 Scipio to the conquest of the Saxons by Charles the Great, 

 was the continual taming of the brute force of barbarism, 

 and the enlisting it on the side of civilization. In the 

 earlier times there seems to have been real danger in the 

 invasions of Brennus and of the Cimbri, and perhaps in that 

 of Ariovistus. But with the conquest of Gaul and the 

 more subtle process of Eomauization which the Teutons 

 underwent, the danger from these sources disappeared, until, 

 when the great struggle with outer barbarism came in the 

 fifth century, we see the Empire saved on a Gaulish field by 

 the prowess of the West-Goth. The battle of Chalons seems 

 * See Arnold, History of Rome, voL iiL p. 68. 



