  THE VALUE OF GREECE TO THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD HISTORY I The Relationship between Ancient Greek and Modern Western Civilization OXFORD PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE Transcriber’s NoteShort fragments of Greek text have a thin dotted blue underline. The transliterated version appears in a transient pop-up box when the mouse hovers over the words. Longer Greek phrases and poems are followed by the transliterated version in braces. In spite of many differences, no age has had closer affinities with Ancient Greece than our own; none has based its deeper life so largely on ideals which the Greeks brought into the world. History does not repeat itself. Yet, if the twentieth century searched through the past for its nearest spiritual kin, it is in the fifth and following centuries before Christ that they would be found. Again and again, as we study Greek thought and literature, behind the veil woven by time and distance, the face that meets us is our own, younger, with fewer lines and wrinkles on its features and with more definite and deliberate purpose in its eyes. For these reasons we are to-day in a position, as no other age has been, to understand Ancient Greece, to learn the lessons it teaches, and, in studying the ideals and fortunes of men with whom we have so much in common, to gain a fuller power of understanding and estimating our own. This book—the first of its kind in English—aims at giving some idea of what the world owes to Greece in various realms of the spirit and the intellect, and of what it can still learn from her. The Editor. October 1921. |
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