178 LATIN LANGUAGE 



that the atoms of which the universe is composed return after the 

 completion of some magnus annus into the precise position which 

 they occupied at its commencement, this is the common assump- 

 tion of ancient philosophers and poets: 



Magnua ab Integra saeclorum nascitur ordo. 



If we compare this theory with modern philosophies of history, 

 the broad distinction is that, whereas we proceed on the postulate 

 or working hypothesis that the world is progressive, the belief in 

 progress was in ancient times conspicuous by its absence. Develop- 

 ment, indeed, they knew; but only development in the downward 

 direction, degeneration, and that only within the limits of one 

 cycle. Thus at bottom their philosophy of history was static. The 

 Eleatic conception of "Being" as against "Becoming" expresses 

 the deeply rooted conviction of antiquity. If Plato had been sketch- 

 ing the history of modern Europe he would probably have seen in 

 the period which followed the decline and fall of the Roman Empire 

 the commencement of a new cycle; he would have compared the 

 inroads of the barbarians to the migrations which changed the face 

 of Eastern Europe at the commencement of the Hellenic period ; and 

 he would have ended by predicting a decline and fall of the civiliz- 

 ation of the West, including, perhaps, that of the great Atlantis, 

 whose existence he seems to have divined some nineteen centuries 

 before the time of Columbus. Yet such a conception would have 

 ignored a cardinal fact in the case. It was not in utter nakedness that 

 modern Europe entered on her career. Much, no doubt, of the spiritual 

 wealth of ancient Hellas had been lost, many a "cloud of glory" 

 had been dispelled, at any rate for a time, but much of it lived on in 

 other forms, reborn in the institutions, the art, and the philosophy 

 of Rome. Thus it comes about that so large a part of our spiritual 

 inheritance is Greek. The Renaissance of Greek studies in the four- 

 teenth and fifteenth centuries would not have been able to galvanize 

 into life a culture that was utterly dead; it was because part of that 

 culture was alive, albeit in Roman forms, that its second rebirth was 

 possible. And even for this second rebirth we are indebted prin- 

 cipally to the genius of Rome working in Italians like Petrarch, 

 Politian, and Poggio. When we think of these things, how to the 

 same Rome which one of her poets of imperialism apostrophized in 

 the words, 



Fecisti patriam diversis gentibus unam, 



we owe also our connection at two points with the intellectual con- 

 quests of Greece, we may well pause before we accept as final the 

 verdict which one of the greatest of living scholars has summed up in 

 the ungrateful phrase "das seelenmordende Rom." 



