CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS 



activity during the two centuries succeeding the 

 victory of Marathon ; when we remember that 

 the foundations of philosophy, of exact science, 

 of aesthetic art in all its branches, of historic and 

 literary criticism, and of free political discus- 

 sion, were then and there forever securely laid ; 

 when we consider the widely ramifying influ- 

 ences, now obvious and now more subtle, of all 

 this intense productivity upon Roman ethics 

 and jurisprudence, upon the genesis of Chris- 

 tianity, upon the lesser Renaissance of the thir- 

 teenth century, and the greater Renaissance 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 Euro- 

 pean civilization been in a position of such im- 

 minent peril. In the life and death struggle 

 between Rome and Carthage, the military supe- 

 riority 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 

 ^ See Arnold, History of Rome ^ vol. iii. p. 63. 

 13 



