66 HISTORY OF GREECE, ROME, AND ASIA 



the great masterpieces. That is a universal rule in this our mortal 

 life, where our powers of comprehension are very limited. If we 

 carry it to its extreme limit we arrive at the word of Scripture, or of 

 the Koran : " Seek first the kingdom of Heaven, and its righteousness, 

 and all other things shall be added unto you." But if our education 

 is to comprehend not merely the perfect form of Greek literature, 

 but the realities of Greek life; if the complete history of that people, 

 whose world-influence waxed rapidly according as the perfection of 

 its artistic life began to wane, be our object, then the view of the 

 schoolmaster and the grammarian must make way for larger con- 

 siderations. Nay, more, this narrow view has misled the world upon 

 the very issues raised by the pedants. What is decadence, and what 

 is inferiority? We will all concede that there is an inimitable grace 

 in the dialogue of Aristophanes, which even Menander could not 

 equal, but are there not other perfections in Greek life? The two 

 masterpieces, for example, that stand out in the Greek sculpture of the 

 Louvre in Paris are the great Nike" of Samothrace, and the exquisite 

 Venus of Melos. They both come from the post-classical age. The 

 marble sarcophagus from Sidon, which commemorates some com- 

 panion of Alexander (probably that Philokles who was Sidonian 

 King, and High Admiral to the first Ptolemy), is the most splendid 

 and perfect specimen of that kind of art we have yet recovered. 

 That, too, is post-classical. The purist schools had banished from their 

 course, as a writer of decadent Greek, the immortal Plutarch, whom 

 even Shakespeare thought worthy of translation to his stage, with 

 hardly a word of alteration. And when these people conceded to us 

 Theocritus, the great father of the pastoral idyl, as a master, probably 

 because of his difficult Doric dialect rather than his novel subject, 

 why did they conceal from us the exquisite Euboeic adventure (his 

 seventh discourse) of Dion Chrysostom, or the late born, but not the 

 less precious, Daphnis and Chloe, whose very author is a mystery? l 

 It is through widely different circumstances that the narratives of 

 the Synoptic Gospels, documents of the highest moral quality, have 

 maintained their fame, yet let none of you imagine that their literary 

 excellence did not contribute largely to this permanent influence. 



But I need not rest my argument for the expansion of our study 

 of Hellenic into Hellenistic times on these literary grounds, nor is it 

 a mere protest against ignoring great works of literature and of art 

 under the bonds of a narrow and false theory. The political lessons 

 of this later age of Greece have only recently risen into the apprecia- 

 tion of men. When Grote comes to record complimentary votes 

 passed at Athens to a Macedonian ruler or his officer, he thinks it 

 high time for the historian of Greece to lay down his pen in disgust, 



1 These matters are set forth in my Silver Age of Greece, in which I have sought 

 to rescue from oblivion these forgotten masterpieces. 



