138 GREEK LANGUAGE 



The diabolical ingenuity of lago would have awakened less repul- 

 sion in him than the avoto. of Othello. The conception of virtue as 

 a mean shows that at bottom the Greek is hostile to, or incredulous 

 of, absolute moral truth. Metaphysics rather than ethics is the 

 Greek sphere. It was a half-Oriental who made moral good every- 

 thing, the rest nothing. 



Greek character is marked by lack of stability, of sustained en- 

 deavor, of indomitable will, of seriousness, of gravity, of patience 

 under discipline. 1 Romanus (not Graecus) sedendo vincit. Gusts of 

 passion sweep the Athenian from the moorings of reason; and he 

 returns to his better self only when he sees the shipwreck he has 

 wrought. The possession of the empire of the intellect did not confer 

 upon the Hellene that power to withstand the blows of fortune which 

 in the Roman moved the admiration of Polybius. In the crises of 

 character he often reverts to the elemental creature whose veneer 

 was his delight in the art of Sophocles. The complacent Ionian was 

 the victim of the palsied will; indeed defective will-power lies at the 

 root of much of the defect of Greek character. If the senses of 

 the Greek gave buoyancy to the movement of his intellect and rarely 

 descended to the baser uses of appetite, his mobility often degenerated 

 into loquacity, his acumen to quibbling and disputatiousness, his 

 love of rhetoric to pretentious frivolity. Markedly individual in 

 his personality, his self-love made him belittle the success of others 

 and made him a stranger to the finer forms of sympathy. 



Such is the normal type of the Greek. But the race is not homo- 

 geneous. The Dorian is almost an alien intrusion, and between 

 him and the other Greeks there is a discrepancy of kind (not merely 

 of culture) that I would explain on the ground of ethnological differ- 

 ence. In the northwest originally dwelt only half-Hellenic tribes that 

 were to become factors in the later life of the nation. The Dorian is 

 the Roman on Greek soil, and, like the language of the Romans, 

 Doric is marked by parsimony and inability to form compounds. 



Diversity and individuality, a wide range of capacity, a just 

 balance of faculties, characterize the Hellene. Such as he was he 

 remained the same in his intellectual physiognomy from first to last. 

 If resistance to centralization stimulated his energies, it worked his 

 political ruin. A world-empire was indeed secured at the price of 

 national independence and of national ideals, the loss of which de- 

 stroyed the national consciousness of the possession by the Hellenic 

 stock of a common language, religion, and customs. Yet the essential 



1 Contrast the relatively few words in Greek with the many words in Latin that 

 indicate the quality of persistence in effort: sedulus, assiduus, industrius, diligens. 

 laboriosus. strr nuns. There are comparatively few words in Greek for earnest, 

 grave, dignifi^ri; many for insolent (to the Latin the "unusual" man), shameless; 

 e. g. Bpafffa, d.at\yf)s, &$e\vp6s, lra/j.6s, av6d$ns, v&piffr-fis. The difference between the 

 two peoples is s n in the frequent use of virtus, consilium, ratio. 



