"The actor -- who is always a male -- is not disdained as in Rome, but is much honored. He is exempt from military service, and is allowed safe passage through the lines in time of war. He is called hypocrites, but this word means answerer -- i.e. to the chorus. Only later will the actor's role as an impersonator lead to the use of the word as meaning hypocrite.

"Actors are organized in a strong union or guild called the Dionysian Artists, which has members throughout Greece. Troupes of players wander from city to city, composing their own plays and music, making their own costumes, and setting up their own stages.

"When real individuals are represented on the stage, like the Euripides of the Ecclesiazusae and the Socrates of the Clouds, the masks imitate, and largely caricature, their actual features. The masks have come down into the drama from religious performances, in which they were often instruments of terror or humor. In comedy they continue this tradition, and are as grotesque and extravagant as Greek fancy can make them. Just as the actor's voice is strengthened and his countenance enlarged by the mask, so his dimensions are extended with padding, and his height is enhanced by an onkos, or projection on the head, and by kothornoi, or thick-soled shoes, on his feet.

"It is a lively audience, not less or more mannerly than such assemblages in other lands. It eats nuts and fruit and drinks wine as it listens. Aristotle proposes to measure the failure of a play by the amount of food eaten during the presentation. It quarrels about seats, claps and shouts for its favorites, hisses and groans when it is displeased. When moved to more vigorous protest it kicks the benches beneath it. If it becomes angry it may frighten an actor off the stage with olives, figs, or stones.

"Aeschines is almost stoned to death for an offensive play. Aeschylus is nearly killed because the audience believes that he has revealed some secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries. A musician who has borrowed a supply of stones to build a house promises to repay it with those that he expects to collect from his next peformance.

"Actors sometimes hire a claque to drown out with applause the hisses they fear, and comic actors may throw nuts to the crowd as a bribe to pace.

"The Greek drama is a study of fate, or of man in conflict with the gods. The Elizabethan drama is a study of action, or of man in conflict with man. The modern drama is a study of character, or of man in conflict with himself.

"The Athenian audience knows in advance the destiny of each person represented, and the issue of each action. Religious custom is still strong enough in the fifth century to limit the theme of the Dionysian drama to some story from the accepted myths and legends of the early Greeks. There is no suspense and no surprise, but instead, the pleasures of anticipation and recognition.

"Dramatist after dramatist tells the same tale to the same audience. What differs is the poetry, the music, the interpretation, and the philosophy. Even the philosophy, before Euripides, is determined in large measure by tradition.

Throughout Aeschylus and Sophocles the prevailing theme is the nemesis of punishment, by jealous gods or imperson fate, for insolent presumption and irreverent pride (hybris). The recurring moral is the wisdom of conscience, honor, and a modest moderation (aidos).

"In later life he lived on Salamis, loving the solitude of its hills, and its varied prospects of blue sea. Plato wished to be a dramatist and became a philosopher. Euripides wished to be a philosopher and became a dramatist.

"He took the entire course of Anaxagoras. He studied for a while with Producus, and was so intimate with Socrates that some suspected the philosopher of having a hand in the poet's plays. The whole Sophistic movement entered into his education, and through him captured the Dionysian stage.

"The case is no different with the other forms of Greek literature. Of the hundreds of tragic dramatists who won prizes at the Dionysia, we have a few plays by three. Of the many comic writers we have one. Of the great philosphers we have two.

"All in all, not more than one-twentieth survives from the critically acclaimed literature of the fifth-century Greece. From the earlier and later centuries even less. Most of what we have comes from Athens. The other cities, as we can tell from the philosophers that they sent to Athens, were fertile in genius too, but their culture was sooner engulfed by barbarism from without and from below, and their manuscripts were lost in the disorder of revolution and war.

"After some sixty years, war ended this interlude of liberty as it had ended another through Gelon I. In 409 the Carthaginians, who had kept alive three generations the memory of Hamilcar's defeat of Himera, invaded Sicily with an armada of fiteen hundred ships and twenty thousand men under Hamilcar's gradson, Hannibal. He laid siege to Selinus, which had become pacific under prosperity, and had neglected to keep its defenses in repair. The surprised city appealed for help to Acragas and Syracuse, whose comfortble citizens responded with Spartan leisureliness. Selinus was taken, all the survivors were massacred and mutiliated, and the city became a part of the Carthaginian empire.

"Hannibal proceeded to Himera, captured it with ease, and put three thousand prisoners to torture and death to appease the shade of his grandfather. A plague decimated his troops and took off Hannibal himself as they besieged Acragas, but his successor mollified the gods of Carthage by burning alive his own son as an offering.

"The Carthaginians took the city, took Gela and Camarina, and marched on toward Syracuse. The terrified Syracusans, interrupted in their banquets, gave absolute power to their ablest general, Dionysius. But Dionysius made peace with the Carthaginians, ceded to them all southern Sicily, and used his troops to establish a second dictatorship (405).

The Spartans were not eager for war, knowing the strength and valor of the Athenian fleet. But the old racial antipathy between Dorian and Ionian inflamed them, and the Athenian custom of establishing in every city democracies dependent upon the Empire seemed to the landowning oligarchy of Sparta a threat to aristocratic government everywhere.

"Nevertheless he sent envoys to all the Greek states, inviting them to an Hellenic Conference which would seek a peaceful solution of the problems that were leading to war. Sparta refused to attend, feeling that her acceptance would be construed as an acknowledgment of Athenian hegemony, and at her secret suggestion so many other states rejected the invitation that the project fell through.

"An indecisive battle took place, in which the navies of Corcyra and Athens fought against those of Megara and Corinth. In 432 Potidaea, a city in Chalcidice tributary to Athens but Corinthian in blood, attempted to expel the Athenian power. Pericles sent an army to besiege it, but its resistance continued for two years, and weakened the military resources and prestige of Athens. When Megara gave further help to Corinth Pericles ordered all Megarian products excluded from the markets of Attica and the empire.

"Megara and Corinth appealed to Sparta. Sparta proposed to Athens a repeal of this Megarian decree. Pericles agreed on condition that Sparta permit foreign states to trade with Laconia. Sparta refused. Instead, she laid down as a prerequisite to peace, that Athens should acknowledge the full independence of all Greek cities -- i.e. that Athens should surrender her Empire.

"The Athenian fleet laid waste the coastal towns of the Peloponnesus, while the Spartan army invaded Attica, seized the crops, and ruined the soil. Pericles called the population of Attica within the walls of Athens, refused to let his troops go out to battle, and advised the excited Athenians to bide their time and wait for their navy to win the war.

"His caluclations were strategically sound, but they ignored a factor that almost decided the conflict. A plague killed a fourth of the soldiers and a great number of the civilian population. The people, desperate with the combined sufferings of epidemic and war, accused Pericles of responsibility for both. Cleon and others indicted him on the charge of misusing public funds. Since he had apparently employed state money to bribe the Spartan kings to peace, he was unable to give a satisfactory accounting. He was convicted, deposed from office, and fined the enormous sum of fifty talents ($300,000).

"About the same time (429) his sister and his two legitimate sons died of the plague. The Athenians, finding no leader to replace him, recalled him to power (429) and, to show their esteem for him, and their sympathy in his bereavement, they overrode a law that he himself had passed, and bestowed citizenship upon the son that Aspasia had borne to him.

"Three factors turned this pledge of a half century of friendship into a brief truce of six years -- the diplomatic corruption of the peace into 'war by other means,' the rise of Alcibiades as the leader of a faction that favored renewed hostilities, and the attempt of Athens to conquer the Dorian colonies in Sicily.

"Sparta's allies refused to sign the agreement. They fell away from Sparta and transferred their alliance to Athens. Alcibiades, while keeping Athens formally at peace, maneuvered them into a war with Sparta, and united them in battle against her at Mantinea (418).

"The boy was troublesome, but intelligent and brave. At twenty he fought beside Socrates at Potidaea, and at twenty-six at Delium (424). The philosopher seems to have felt a warm attachment for the youth, and called him to virtue, says Plutarch, with words that 'so overcame Alcibiades as to draw tears from his eyes, and disturb his very soul. Yet sometimes he would abandon himself to flatterers, when they proposed to varieties of pleasure, and would desert Socrates, who would then pursue him as if he had been a figitive slave.'

"The wit and pranks of the young man became the shocked and fascinated gossip of Athens. When Pericles reproved his immodest dogmatism by saying that he too had talked cleverly in his youth, Alcibiades answered, 'Pity I couldn't have known you when your brain was at its best.'

"The next morning he entered the house of the frightened magnate, bared his body, and begged Hipponicus to scourge him in punishment. The old man was so overwhelmed that he gave the youth his daughter Hipparete in marriage, with a dowry of ten talents. Alcibiades persuaded him to double it, and spent most of it on himself.

"He lived on a scale of luxury never known in Athens before. He filled his home with costly furniture, and engaged artists to paint pictures on the walls. He kept a stud of racing horses, and often won the chariot race at Olympia. Once his entries took the first, second, and fourth prizes in one contest, whereupon he feasted the whole Assembly.

"There Athens would find grain, materials, and men. There she would control the foreign food supply of the Peloponnesus. There she might double the tribute that was making her the greatest city in Greece.

Alcibiades leaped to his opportunity. He argued that the Sicilian Greeks were hopelessly divided, even within each city -- that it would be a simple matter -- given a little courage -- to annex the whold island to the Empire, that the empire must continue to grow, or begin to decay -- that a little war now and then was a necessary training for an imperial race. Nicias pled with the Assembly not to listen to any man whose personal extravagance tempted him to wild schemes of aggrandizement. But the eloquence of Alcibiades and the imagination of a people now dangerously free from moral scruples won the day.

"An excited investigator brought forward the unreliable evidence of aliens and slaves that the prank had been perpetrated by a drunken party of Alcibiades' friends, led by Alcibiades himself. The young general protested his innocence, and demanded to be tried at once, that he might be convicted or cleared before the departure of the fleet. His enemies, foreseeing his acquittal, succeeded in postponing the trial.

"So in 415 the great flotilla set sail, led by a timid pacifist who hated war, and by an audacious militarist whose genius of leadership was frustrated by the divided command, and the dread, among the crews, that he had incurred the enmity of the gods.

"The fleet had been gone some days when new evidence, as unreliable as before, was brought out to the effect that Alcibiades and his friends had participated in an impious mimicry of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Urged by an enraged populace, the Assembly sent the swift galley Salaminia to overtake Alcibiades and bring him back for trial. Alcibiades accept the summons and went aboard the Salaminia. But when the vessel stopped at Thurii he secretly made his way to shore, and escaped.

"The Athenian Assembly, baffled, pronounced judgment of exile upon him, with confiscation of all his property, and a decree of death in case the Athenians should ever capture him. Bitter at the thought that his plans for empire and glory had been frustrated by a condemnation which he continued to call unjust, Alcibiades took refuge in the Peloponneus and, appearing before the Spartan Assembly, proposed to help Sparta defeat Athens and establish there an aristocratic government.>P>"He advised them to send a fleet to help Syracuse and an army to capture Deceleia -- an Attic town whose possession should give Sparta military command of everything in Attica but Athens. The silver mines at Laurium would cease to finance Athenian resistance, and the subject cities, foreseeing the defeat of Athens, would stop their payment of tribute.

"Even so his good looks and personal fascination ruined his plans. The Queen fell in love with him, bore him a son, and proudly whispered to her friends that he was the father. He excused himself to his intimates on the ground that he could not resist the chance to establish his race as kings over Laconia.

"King Agis, who had been away with the army, started home, and Alcibiades conveniently secured a commission in a Spartan squadron that was sailing to Asia. The King disowned the child and sent out secret orders for the assassination of Alcibiades.

In 414 a Spartan fleet under Gylippus helped the Sicilian navy to bottle up the Athenian ships in the harbor of Syracuse, cutting them off from any supply of food.

A final chance to escape was lost because of an eclipse of the moon, which frightened Nicias and many of his soldiers into awaiting an opportunity more satisfactory to the gods. On the next day, however, they found themselves surrounded, and were forced to give battle. They were defeated, first on sea and then on land. Nicias, though ill and weak, fought bravely, and at last surrendered to the mercy of the Syracusans.

"Just as recovery seemed assured, the oligarchic faction, which had never favored the war and, indeed, looked to a Spartan victory to revive aristocracy in Athens, organized a revolt, seized the organs of government, and set up a supreme Council of Four Hundred (411). The Assembly, cowed by the assassination of many democratic leaders, voted its own abdication. The rich supported the rebellion as the only way of controlling the class war that had crossed the lines of the war between Athens and Sparta -- much as the strugle of the middle classes against aristocracy united the liberal factions in England and America in the American Revolution.

"Once in power, the oligarchs sent envoys to make peace with Sparta, and secretely prepared to admit the Spartan army into Athens. Meanwhile Theramenes, leader of a center party of moderate aristocrats, led a counterrevolution, and replaced the Four Hundred -- which had ruled some four months -- with a Council of Five Thousand (411).

"For a brief while Athens enjoyed the combination of democracy and aristocracy which seemed to Thucydides and Aristotle (aristocrats both) to have been the best and fairest government that Athens had known since Solon. But the second revolt, like the first, had forgotten that Athens depended for its food and life upon its navy, whose personnel, barring a few leaders, had been disfranchised by both revolutions. Incensed at the news, the sailors announced that unless the democracy were restored they would besiege Athens.

"On the next day the decisive battle was fought. All but eight of the 208 Athenian ships were scuttled or taken, and Lysander ordered the execution of three thousand Athenian captives. Learning that Lysander had issued orders for his assassination, Alcibiades sought refuge in Phrygia with the Persian general Pharnabazus, who assigned him a castle and a courtesan. But the Persian King, persuaded by Lysander, ordered Pharnabazus to kill his guest. Two assassins besieged Alcibiades in his castle, and set fire to it. He came out naked and desperate, seeking the privilege of fighting for his life. But before his sword could touch his assailants he was pierced by their arrows and javelins. He died at the age of forty-six, the greatest genius and most tragic failure in the military history of Greece.

"Lysander, now absolute master of the Aegean, sailed down from city to city, overthrowing the democracies and setting up oligarchic governments subject to Sparta. Entering the Piraeus unresisted, he proceeded to blockade Athens. The Athenians resisted with their accustomed bravery, but within three months their stock of food was exhausted, and the streets were full of dead or dying men.

"Lysander gave Athens bitter and yet lenient terms. He would not, he said, destroy a city that had in time past performed such honorable services for Greece, nor would he enslave its population. But he demanded the leveling of the Long Walls, the recall of the oligarchic exiles, the surrender of all but eight of the surviving Athenian ships, and a pledge to support Sparta actively in any further war.

"They assassinated all Athenians who were distasteful to them politically or personally. They put an end to freedom of teaching, assemblage, and speech, and Critias himself, once his pupil, forbade Socrates to continue his public discourses. Seeking to compromise the philosopher to their cause, the Thirty ordered him and four others to arrest the democrat Leon.

"Under his guidance the Assembly behaved with unwonted modeeration. It decreed death for only the highest surviving leaders of the revolution, and allowed them to escape this sentence by exile. It declared a general amnesty to all others who had supported the oligarchs. It even repaid to Sparta the hundred talents that the ephors had lent to the Thirty.

"But he could not forget that when he had gone into exile his son had stayed in Athens with Socrates, and had become a drunkard. It did not appease Anytus to observe that Socrates had refused to obey the Thirty, and (if we may take Xenophon's word for it) had denounced Critias as a bad ruler.

"To Anytus it seemed that Socrates, more than any Sophist, was an evil influence both on morals and on politics. He was undermining the religious faith that had supported morality, and his persistent criticism was weakening the belief of educated Athenians in the institutions of democracy. The murderous tyrant Critias had been one of Socrates'pupils. The immoral and treasonable Alcibiades had been his lover. Charmides, his early favorite, had been a general under Critias, and had just died in battle against the democracy.

"Socrates is a public offender in that he does not recognize the gods that the state recognizes, but introduces new demonical beings. (the Socratic daimonion). He has also offended by corrupting the youth.'

"The trial was held before a popular court or dikasterion, of some five hundred citizens, mostly of the less educated class. We have no means of knowing how accurately Plato and Xenophon have reported Socrates' defense. We do know that Plato was present at the trial, and that his account of Socrates' 'apology' agrees in many points with Xenophon's.

"Socrates, says Plato, insisted that he believed in the state gods, even in the divinity of the sun and moon.

'You say first that I do not belive in gods, and then again that I believe in demigods...You might as well affirm the existence of mules, and deny that of horses and asses.'

And then he referred sadly to the effects of Aristophanes' satire:

'Strange, indeed, would be my conduct, o men of Athens, if I who, when I was ordered by the generals whom you chose to command me at Potidaea and Amphipolis and Delium, remained where they place me, like any other man, facing death -- if, I say, now when, as I conceive and imagine, God orders me to fulfil the philosopher's mission of searching into myself and other men, I were to desert my post through fear of death...'
'If you say to me -- Socrates, this time we will let you off, but upon one condition, that you are not to inquire and speculate in this way any more, I should reply:
'Men of Athens, I honor and love you. But I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone whom I meet, after my manner, and convincing him, saying:
'O my friend, why do you, who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth?
'Wherefore, O men of Athens, I say to you, do as Anytus bids, and either acquit me or not. But whatever you do, know that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times.'"

'I would have you know that if you kill such a one as I am, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me. For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by the God. And the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. And as you will not easily find another like me, I would advise you to spare me.'

"He felt that he had but a few more years to live, and that 'he relinquished only the most burdensome part of life, in which all feel their powers of intellect diminished." Instead of accepting Crito's proposal, he examined it from an ethical point of view, discussed it dialectically, and played the game of logic to the end. His disciples visited him daily in his cell during the month between his trial and his execution, and he seems to have discoursed with them calmly until the final hour.

"Plato pictures him as fondling the hair and head of the young Phaedo, and saying, 'Tomorrow, Phaedo, I suppose that these fair locks will be cut' in mourning. Xanthippe came in tears, with their youngest child in her arms. He comforted her, and asked Crito to have her escorted home.

"'You die undeservedly,' said an ardent disciple. 'Would you then,' Socrates answered, 'have me deserve death?'

"After he was gone, says Diodorus, the Athenians regretted their treatment of him, and put his accusers to death. Suidas makes Meletus die by public stoning. Plutarch varies the tale. The accusers became so unpopular that no citizen would light their fires, or answer their questions, or bathe in the same water with them. So that they were at last driven in despair to hang themselves. Diogenes Laertius reports that Meletus was executed, Anytus exiled, and a bronze statue put up by Athens in memory of the philosopher.

"Athens was exhausted in body and soul. Only the degradation of character by prolonged war and desperate suffering could explain the ruthless treatment of Melos, the bitter sentence upon Mytilene, the execution of the Arginusae generals, and the sacrifice of Socrates on the altar of a dying faith.

"All the foundations of Athenian life were disordered. The soil of Attica had been devastated by the Spartan raids, and the slow-growing olive trees had been burned to the ground. The Athenian navy had been destroyed, and control of trade and the food supply had been lost. The state treasury was empty, and private fortunes had been taxed almost to extinction. Two thirds of the citizen body had been killed.

"The damage done to Greece by the Persian invasions could not compare with the destruction of Greek life and property by the Peloponnesian War. After Salamis and Plataea Greece was left poor, but exalted with courage and pride. Now Greece was poor again, and Athens had suffered a wound to her spirit which seemed too deep to be healed.

"Two things sustained her -- the restoration of democracy under men of judgment and moderation, and the consciousness that during the last sixty years, even during the War, she had produced such art and literature as surpassed the like product of any other age in the memory of man.

"Anaxagoras had been exiled and Socrates had been put to death, but the stimulus that they had given to philosophy sufficed to make Athens henceforth, and despite herself, the center and summit of Greek thought. What before had been formless tentatives of speculation were now to mature into great systems that would agitate Europe for centuries to come. The haphazard provision of higher education by wandering Sophists was to be replaced by the first universities in history -- universities that would make Athens, as Thucydides had prematurely called her, 'the school of Hellas.' Through the bloodshed and turmoil of conflict the traditions of art had not quite decayed. For many centuries yet the sculptors and architects of Greece were to carve and build for all the Mediterranean world.

"The repated division of some estates had impoverished many families to a point where they could no longer contribute their quota to the public mess, and therefore lost the rights of citizenship. The formation of large properties through intermarriage and legacies had creatd in the few remaining 'Equals' a provocative concentration of wealth. Aristotle writes: 'Some Spartans own domains of vast extent, the others have nearly nothing. All the land is in the hands of a few.'

"The two brothers met at Cunaxa, between the converging Tigris and Euphrates. Cyrus was defeated and slain, and all of his army was captured or destroyed except a contingent of twelve thousand Greeks whose quickness of mind and foot enabled them to escape into the interior of Babylonia. Hunted by the King's forces, the Greeks chose, in their rough democratic way, three generals to lead them to safety.

"Among these was Xenophon, once a pupil of Socrates, now a young soldier of fortune, destined to be remembered above all by the Anahasis, or Ascent, in which he later described with engaging simplicity the long 'Retreat of the Ten Thousand' up along the Tigris and over the hills of Kurdistan and Armenia to the Black Sea. It was one of the great adventures in human history.

"We are amazed at the inexhaustible courage of these Greeks, fighting their way on foot, day by day for five months, through two thousand miles of enemy country, across hot and foodless plains, and over perilous mountain passes covered with eight feet of snow, while armies and guerrilla bands attacked them in the rear and in front and on either flank, and hostile natives used every device to kill them, or mislead them, or bar their way.

"They pushed ahead to lend aid, and in a moment they heard the soldiers shouting: 'The sea! the sea!' and passing the word along. Then all the troops of the rear guard likewise broke into a run, and the pack animals began racing ahead. And when all had reached the summit, then indeed they fell to embracing one another, and generals and captains as well, with tears in their eyes.

"For this was a Greek sea, and Trapezus a Greek city. They were safe now, and could rest without fear of death surprising them in the night. The news of their exploit resounded proudly through old Hellas, and encouraged Philip, two generations later, to believe that a well-trained Greek force could be relied upon to defeat a Persian army many times its size.

"When Artaxerxes II learned that Agesilaus was easily defeating all Persian troops sent against him, he dispatched messengers with abundant gold to Athens and Thebes to bribe these cities into declaring war upon Sparta. The effort readily succeeded, and after nine years of peace the conflict between Athens and Sparta was renewed.

"The united fleets of Athens and Persia under Conon destroyed the Spartan navy near Cnidus, and put an end to Sparta's brief domination of the seas. Athens rejoiced, and set to work energetically, with funds supplied by Persia, to rebuild her Long Walls.

"Sparta offered to surrender the Greek cities of Asia to Persian rule if Persia would enforce among the mainland Greeks a peace that would protect Sparta. The Great King agreed, withdrew his financial support from Athens and Thebes, and compelled all parties to sign at Sardis (387) the 'Peace of Antalcidas,' or the 'King's Peace.'

"All the Greek cities of Asia, along with Cyprus, were declared the property of the King. Athens signed under protest, knowing that this was the most disgraceful event in Greek history. For a generation all the fruits of Marathon were lost. The Greek states of the mainland remained free in name, but in effect the power of Persia had engulfed them.

"His modesty and integrity, his almost ascetic life, his devotion to his friends, his prudence in counsel, his courage and yet self restraint in action, endeared him to all the Thebans despite the military discipline to which he subjected them.

"He did not love war, but he was convinced that no nation could lose all martial spirit and habits and yet maintain its freedom. Elected and many times re-elected boeotarch, he warned those who proposed to vote for him: 'Bethink yourselves once more. If I am made general you will be compelled to serve in my army.'

"After Leuctra, Epaminondas and Pelopidas marched into the Peloponnesus, freed Messenia from its century-long vassalage to Sparta, and founded the city of Megalopolis as a stronghold for all Arcadians. Even into Laconia the Theban army descended, -- an event without precedent for hundreds of years past.

"In this way, and through the eviction of peasant debtors, the ownership of Attica passed into a few families, who worked many of the large estates with slaves. The mines at Laurium were reopened, fresh victims were sent into the pits, and new riches were transmuted out of silver ore and human blood. Xenophon proposed a genial plan whereby Athens might replenish her treasury through the purchase of ten thousand slaves and their lease to the contractors at Laurium.

"The growth of commerce and the accumulation of wealth in money instead of in land, rapidly multiplied the number of bankers in Athens. They received cash or valuables for safekeeping, but apparently paid no interest on deposits. Soon discovering that under normal conditions not all deposits were reclaimed at once, the bankers begn to lend funds at substantial rates of interest providing, at first, money instead of credit.

"They acted as bail for clients, and made collections for them. They lent money on the security of land or precious articles, and helped to finance the shipments of goods. Through their aid, and even more through speculative loans by private individuals, the merchant might hire a ship, transport his goods to a foreign market, and buy there a return cargo -- which, on reaching the Piraeus, remained the property of the lenders until the loan was repaid.

"As the fourth century progressed, a real credit system developed. The bankers, instead of advancing cash, issued letters of credit, money orders, or checks. Wealth could now pass from one client to another merely by entries in the banker's books. Businessmen or bankers issued bonds for mercantile loans, and every large inheritance included a number of such bonds.

"Some bankers, like the ex-slave Pasion, developed so many connections, and acquired by a discriminating honesty so widespread a reputation for reliability, that their bond was honored throughout the Greek world. Pasion's bank had many departments and employees, mostly slaves. It kept a complex set of books in which every transaction was so carefully recorded, that these accounts were usually accepted in court as indisputable evidence. Bank failure were not uncommon, and we hear of 'panics' in which bank after bank closed its doors.

"The rising and half-alien bourgeoisie of Athens, trained to practical calculation rather than to mystic feeling, had little use for the traditional faith. The patron gods of the city won from them only a formal reverence, and no longer inspired them with moral scruples or devotion to the state. Philosophy struggled to find in civic loyalty and a natural ethic some substitute for divine commandments and a surveillant deity. Few citizens cared to live with the simplicity of Socrates, or the magnanimity of Aristotle's 'great-minded man.'

"Bachelors and courtesans increased in fashionable co-operation, and free unions gained ground on legal marriage. 'Is not a concubine more desirable than a wife?' asks a characer in a fourth-century comedy. 'The one has on her side the law that compels you to retain her, no matter how displeasing she may be. The other knows that she must hold a man by behaving well, or else look for another.'

"The life of thought endangers every civilization that it adorns.

"In the earlier stages of a nation's history there is little thought. Action flourishes. Men are direct, uninhibited, frankly pugnacious and sexual.

"As civilization develops, as customs, institutions, laws, and morals more and more restrict the operation of natural impulses -- action gives way to thought -- achievement to imagination -- directness to subtlety -- expression to concealment -- cruelty to sympathy -- belief to doubt -- the unity of character common to animals and primitive men passes away.

"Behavior becomes fragmentary and hesitant, conscious and calculating. The willingness to fight subsides into a disposition to infinite argument. Few nations have been able to reach intellectual refinement and esthetic sensitivity without sacrificing so much in virility and unity that their wealth presents an irresistible temptation to impecunious barbarians.

"Around every Rome hover the Gauls.

"Dionysius sent an embassy to Carthage to demand the liberation of all Greek cities in Sicily from Carthaginian rule. Anticipating a refusal, he invited these cities to expel their foreign governments. They did. Still enraged by the memory of Hannibal's massacres, they put to death, with tortures seldom used by Greeks, all Carthaginians who fell into their hands.

"Dionysius did his best to stop the carnage, hoping to sell the captives as slaves. Carthage ferried over a vast army under Himilcon, and war went on at intervals in 397, 392, 383, and 368.

"He attacked Etruria and took a thousand talents from its temple at Agylla. He planned to plunder the shrine of Apollo at Delphi, but time did not permit.

"Greece mourned that in the same year (387) liberty had fallen in the west, and in the east had been sold to Persia by the King's Peace. Three years before, Brennus and the Gauls had stood in triumph at the gates of Rome.

"Everywhere the barbarians on the fringe of the Greek world were growing stronger. The ravages of Dionysius in southern Italy paved the way for the conquest of its Greek settlements first by the surrounding natives, and then by the half-barbarous Romans.

"The harassed city, which had borne with him as an alternative to subjection by Carthage, accepted hopefully the succession of his son to the throne. Dionysius II was now a youth of twenty-five, weak in body and mind, and therefore, thought the crafty syracusans, likely to give them a mild and negligent rule.

"Doubtless the young autocrat put his best foot forward and concealed that addiction to drink and lechery which had drawn from his father the prediction that the dynasty would die with his son.

"Plato led him towrd philosophy by its most difficult approaches -- mathematics and virtue. All the court began to study geometry, and to stand in diplomatic awe over figures traced in the sane. But Philistius, eclipsed by Plato's ascendancy, whispered to the dictator that all this was merely a plot by which the Athenians, who had failed to conquer Syracuse with an army and a fleet, would capture it through a single man.

"At this juncture, with Greek impulsiveness, the Syracusan Assembly that he had convened removed Dion from command, lest he should make himself dictator. Dion withdrew peaceably to Leontini, but the forces of Dionysius, liking this turn of events, made a sudden attack upon the popular army, and defeated it.

"The leaders who had deposed him sent appeals to Dion to hurry back and take charge. He came, won another victory, forgave the men who had opposed him, and then announced a temporary dictatorship as necessary to order. Despite the advice of his friends he refused a personal guard being 'quite ready to die rather than live perpetually on the watch against friends and foes alike.'<P:>"It was Dion's aim to establish a constitutional monarchy, to reform Syracusan life and manners on the Spartan model, to rebuild and unify the enslaved or desolate Greek cities of Sicily, and then to expel the Carthaginians from the island. But the Syracusans had set their hearts on democracy, and were no more hungry for virtue than either Dionysius.

"A friend of Dion murdered him, and chaos broke loose. Dionysius hurried home, recaptured Ortygia and the government, and ruled with the bitter cruelty of a despot deposed and restored.

"The Syracusans appealed for aid to their mother city, Corinth. The call came at a time when a Corinthian of almost legendary nobleness was waiting for a summons to heroism. Timoleon was an aristocrat who so loved liberty that when his brother Timophanes tried to make himself tyrant of Corinth, Timoleon killed him.

"Hearing of Syracuse's need, he organized a small force of volunteers, sailed to Sicily, and deployed his little band with such strategy that the royal army yielded after a brief taste of his generalship, and without killing any one of his men. Timoleon gave the humbled tyrant money enough to take himself to Corinth, where Dionysius spent the remainder of life teaching school and sometimes begging his bread.

"Timoleon re-established democracy -- tore down the fortifications that had made Ortygia a buttress of tyranny -- repulsed a Carthaginian invasion -- restored freedom and democracy in the Greek cities -- and made Sicily for a generation so peaceful and prosperous that new settlers were drawn to it from every part of the Hellenic world.

"Having lived for three years with the relatives of Epaminondas in Thebes, Philip had imbibed there a modicum of culture and a wealth of military ideas. He was strong in body and will, athletic and handsome, a magnificnt animal trying, now and then, to be an Athenian gentleman.

"Like his famous son he was a man of violent temper and abounding generosity, loving battle as much, and strong drink more. Unlike Alexander he was a jovial laugher, and raised to high office a slave who amused him. he liked boys, but liked women better, and married as many of them as he could.

"For a time he tried monogamy with Olympias, the wild and beautiful Molossian princess who gave him Alexander. Later his fancy traveled, and Olympias brooded over her revenge. Most of all he liked stalwart men, who could risk their lives all day and gamble and carouse with him half the night. He was literally (before Alexander) the bravest of the brave, and left a part of himself on every battlefield.

"He had a subtle intelligence, capable of patiently awaiting his chance, and of moving resolutely through difficult means to distant ends. In diplomacy he was affable and treacherous. He broke a promise with a light heart, and was always ready to make another. He recognized no morals for governments, and looked upon lies and bribes as humane substitutes for slaghter. But he was lenient in victory, and usually gave the defeated Greeks better terms than they gve one another.

In the army they served as cavalry, riding the sturdy horses of Macedonia and Thrace, and trained by Philip to fight in a close formation that could change its tactics at once and as one at the commander's word.

"Beside these was an infantry of rugged hunters and peasants, arrayed in 'phalanxes' -- sixteen rows of men pointing their lances over the heads -- or resting them on the shoulders -- of the rows ahead of them, making each phalanx an iron wall.

"The lance, twenty-one feet long, was weighted at the rear, so that when held aloft it projected fifteen feet forward. As each row of soldiers marched three feet before the next, the lances of the first five rows projected beyond the phalanx, and the lances of the first three rows had a greater reach than the six-foot javelin of the nearest Greek hoplite.

"The Madedonian soldier, after hurling his lance, fought with a short sword, and protected himself with a brass helmet, a coat of mail, greaves, and a lightweight shield. Behind the phalanx came a regiment of old-fashioned archers, who shot their arrows over the heads of the lancers. Then came a seige train with catapults and battering rams.

"He worked hard, and his only distractions were courtesans and boys. His secretary complained, 'What can one do with Demosthenes? Everything that he has thought of for a whole year is thrown into confusion by one woman in one night.'

"After years of effort he became one of the richest lawyers at the Athenian bar, learned in technicalities, convincing in discourse, and flexible in morals. He defended the banker Phormio against precisely such charges as he had brought against his guardians, took substantial fees from private persons for introducing and pressing legislation, and never answered the accusation of his colleagues.

"Twice Demosthenes indicted Aeschines on the charge of receiving Macedonian gold, and twice failed to convict him. Finally, however, the martial eloquence of Demosthenes, and the southward advance of Philip, persuaded the Athenians to forego for a time the distribution of the theoric fund, and to employ it in war.

"In 338 an army was hastily organized, and marched north to face the phalanxes of Philip at Boeotian Chaeronea. Sparta refused to help but Thebes, feeling Philip's fingers at her throat, sent her Sacred Band to fight beside the Athenians. Everyone of its three hundred members died on that battle field. The Athenians fought almost as bravely but they had waited too long, and were not equipped to meet so novel an army as the Macedonian. They broke and fled before the sea of lances that moved upon them, and Demosthenes fled with them. Alexander, Philip's eighteen-year old son, led the Macedonian cavalry with reckless courage and won the honors of a bitter day.

"Philip was diplomatically generous in victory. He put to death some of the anti-Macedonian leaders in Thebes, and set up his partisans there in oligarchic power. But he freed the two thousand Athenian prisoners that he had taken, and sent the charming Alexander and the judicious Antipater to offer peace on condition that Athens recognize him as the general of all Greece against the common foe. Athens, which had expected harsher terms, not only consented, but passed resolutions showering compliments upon the new Agamemnon.

"Philip convened at Corinth a synedrion, or assembly, of the Greek states, formed them (except Sparta) into a federation modeled on the Boeotian, and outlined his plans for the liberation of Asia. He was unanimously chosen commander in this enterprise. Each state pledged him men and arms, and promised that no Greek anywhere should fight against him.

"Under the circumstances they were fortunate to find so reasonable a conqueror, who proposed to withdraw from the scene of his victory, and leave to the conquered a large measure of freedom.

"Indeed Philip, and Alexander after him, watchfully protected the autonomy of the federated states, lest any one of them, by absorbing others, should grow strong enough to displace Macedon. One great liberty, however, Philip took away -- the right of revolution. He was a frank conservative who considered the stability of property an indispensable stimulus to enterprise, and a necessary prop to government.

"He had laid his plans well, except for Olympias. In the end his fate was determined not by his victories in the field but by his failure with his wife. She frightened him not only by her temper but by participating in the wildest Dionysian rites.

"One night he found a snake lying beside her in bed, and was not reassured by being told that it was a god. Worse, Olympias informed him that he was not the real father of Alexander. That on the night of their wedding a thunderbolt had fallen upon her and set her afire. It was the great god Zeus-Ammon who had begotten the dashing prince.

"Discouraged by such varied competition, Philip turned his amours to other women. Olyumpias began her revenge by telling Alexander the secret of his divine paternity. One of Philip's generals, Attalus, made matters worse by proposing a toast to Philip's expected child by a second wife, as promising a 'legitimate' (i.e. completely Macedonian) heir to the throne.

"Alexander flung a goblet at his head, crying, 'Am I, then, a bastard?' Philip drew his sword against his son, but was so drunk that he could not stand. Alexander laughted at him; 'Here is a man preparing to cross from Europe into Asia, who cannot step surely from one couch to another.'

"A few months later one of Philip's officers, Pausanias, having asked redress from Philip for an insult from Attalus, and receiving no satisfaction, assassinated the King (336).

"Timotheus of Miletus wrote an epic, but it did not accord with an argumentative age, and remained as unpopular as his early music.

"Dramatic performances continued, but on a more modest scale and in a lower key.

"The impoverishment of the public treasury and the weakened patriotism of private wealth reduced the splendor and significance of the chcorus. More and more the dramatists contented themselves with unrelated musical intermezzi in place of choruses organically united with the play.

"The name of the choragus disappeared from public notice, then the name of the poet. Only the name of the actor remained. The drama became less and less a poem, more and more a histrionic exhibition. It was an era of great actors and small dramatists.

"The general retirement of the fourth-century Greek from public to private life inclined his interest from affairs of state to those of the home and the heart. The comedy of manners appeared. Love began to dominate the scene, and not always by its virtue. The ladies of the demimonde mingled on the boards with fishwives, cooks, and bewildered philosophers -- though the honor of the protagonists and the dramatist was saved by a marriage at the end.

"These plays were not coarsened by Aristophanes' vulgarity and burlesque, but neither were they vitalized by his exuberance and his imagination. We know the names, and have none of the words, of thirty-nine poets of the Middle Comedy. But we may judge from their fragments that they did not write for the ages. Alexis of Thurii wrote 245 plays. Antiphanes 260.

"Similar men appeared in the democratic interludes of Syracuse. The oligarchic states did not suffer them. The Athenian orators were clear and vigorous in language, averse to ornate eloquence, capable, now and then, of noble patriotic flights, and given to such dishonesty of argument and abusiveness of speech as would not be tolerated even in a modern campaign.

"The heterogeneous quality of the Athenian Assembly and the popular courts had a debasing as well as a stimulating effect upon Greek oratory, and through it upon Greek literature. The Athenian citizen enjoyed bouts of ortorical invective almost as much as he enjoyed a prize fight. When a duel was expected between such word warriors as Aeschines and Demosthenes, men came from distant village and foreigh states to hear them. Often the appeal was to pride and prejudice.

"The case of Cresiphon, repeatedly postponed, finally came to trial before a jury of five hundred citizens. It was, of course, a cause celebre. All who could came, even from afar, to hear it. In effect the greatest of Athenian orators was fighting for his good name and his political life.

"Aeschines spent little time attacking Cresiphon, but turned his assault upon the character and career of Demosthenes, who replied in kind with his famous speech On the Crown.

"Every line of the two orations still vibrates with excitmement, and is hot with the hatred of enemies brought face to face in war. Demosthenes, knowing that offense is better than defense, charged that Philip had chosen the most corruptible of the orators as his mouth pieces in Athens.

"It was a powerful speech. Not a model of order and courtesy, but so eloquent with passion that the jury acquitted Cresiphon by a vote of five to one.<>P>In the following year the Assembly voted Demosthenes the disputed crown. Aeschines, unable to pay the fine that was automatically levied upon so unsuccessful a persecution, fled to Rhodes, where he made a precarious living by teaching rhetoric.

"As patriotic devotion yielded to private loyalties, architecture took on a more modest scale, and became increasingly secular. The great choral forms of music and dance made way for private performances by professionals. Painting and sculpture continued to adorn public buildings with the representation of gods or noble human types, but at the same time they entered upon that service and portrayal of living individuals which characterized the succeeding age.

"As in earlier centuries, painting was called in to aid other arts. Now it acquired an independent status and dignity, and its masters received commissions from all the Greek world. Pamphilus of Amphipolis, who taught Apelles, refused to take any pupil for less than twelve years, and charged $6000 for the course.

"Mnason, dictator of Locrin Elatea, paid ten minas for each of the hundred figures in a battle scene by Aristides of Thebes, making $100,000 for one painting. The same enthusiast gave Asclepiodorus $360,000 for a panel of the twelve major Olympians.

"Lucullus paid $12,000 for a copy of the portrait that Pausias of Sicyon had painted of Menander's mistress Glycera. A picture by Apelles, says Pliny, sold for a sum equal to the measures of whole cities.

"Apelles meanwhile had captured the plaudits of the Greek world by his painting of Aphrodite Anadyomene -- i.e. Aphrodite rising from the sea.

"Alexander sent for him, and sat for many portraits. The young conqueror was not satisfied with the representation of his horse Bucephalus in one of these pictures, and had the animal brought closer to the panel for comparison. Bucephalus, looking at the picture, whinnied. Whereupon Apelles remarked, 'Your Majesty's horse seems to know more about painting than you do.'"

Could one say that Ancient Greek appreciation of art is a measure of their degree of civilization?

"When he died (353), his devoted sister and wife, Artemisia, held a famous oratorical contest in his honor, and summoned the best artists of Greece to collaborate upon a tomb that should be a fitting memorial to his genius. But her grief over the death of Mausolus weakened her, and she died two years after him, before she could see the completed monument that was to give a word to every Western tongue.

"Xenocrates wrote a history of geometry -- Theophrastus a history of natural philosophy -- Menon a history of medicine -- Eudernus histories of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy.

"The problems of religion, morals, and politics appearing to be more vital and pressing than the problems of nature, men turned with Socrates from the objective study of the material world to a consideration of the soul and the state."

"Plato loved mathematics, dipped his philosophy into it deeply, dedicated the Academy to it, almost, in Suracuse, gave a kingdom for it. But arithmetic was for him a half-mystical theory of number. Geometry was not a measuring of the earth, it was a discipline of pure reason, a portal to the mind of God. Plutarch tells of Plato's 'indignation' at Eudoxus and Archytas for carrying on experiments in mechanics, 'as the mere corruption and annihilation of the one good of geometry, which was thus shamefully turning its back upon the unembodied objects of pure intelligence to recur to sensation, and to ask help from matter.'

"In this way, Plutarch continues, 'Mechanics came to be separated from geometry, and repudiated or neglected by philosophers, took its place as a militry art.

"Nevertheless, in his own abstrct way, Plato served mathematics well. He redefined the point as the beginning of a 'line' -- formulated a rule for finding square numbers that are the sum of two squares -- and invented or developed mathematical analysis -- i.e. the proof or disproof of a proposition by considering the results that follow from assuming it. The reductio ad absurdum is one form of this method.

"Now all the seeds that had been planted in two hundred years sprouted into great systems of metaphysical, ethical, and political speculation. Athens, too poor to maintain its state medical service, nevertheless opened private universities that made it, as Isocrates said, the 'school of Hellas,' the intellectual capital and arbiter of Greece.

"Named Aristocles -- 'best and renowned' -- the youth distinguished himself in almost every field. He excelled in the study of music, mathematics, rhetoric, and poetry. He charmed the women, and doubtless the men, with his good looks. He wrestled at the Isthmian games, and was nicknamed Platon, or broad, because of his robust frame. He fought in three battles, and won a prize for bravery.

"He wrote epigrams, amorous verses, and a tragic tetralogy. He was hesitating between poetry and politics as a career when, at the age of twenty, he succumbed to the fascination of Socrates. He must have known him before, since the great gadfly had long been a friend of his uncle Charmides. Now he could understand Socrates' teaching, and enjoy the sight of the old man tossing ideas, like an acrobat, into the air, and impaling them on the prongs of his questioning. He burned his poems, forgot Euripides, athletics, and women, and followed the master as if under an hypnotic spell.

"He found some comfort at Megara in the home of Eucleides, and then at Cyrene, perhaps with Aristippus. Thence he appears to have gone to Egypt and studied the mathematical historical lore of the of the priests.

"About 395 he was back in Athens, and a year later fought for the city at Corinth. About 387 he set forth again, studied the Pythagorean philosophy with Archytas at Taras and with Timaeus at Locri, passed over to Sicily to see Mt. Etna -- formed a friendship with Dion of Syracuse -- was introduced to Dionysius I -- was sold into slavery -- and was back safe in Athens in 386.

"With the three thousand drachmas raised to reimburse his ransomer, and which Anniceris refused, Plato's friends now bought for him a suburban recreation grove named from its local god Academus.

"The comic poets of the time satirized the students as affected in their manners and overnice in their dress -- with elegant caps and canes, and a short cloak or academic gown -- so old are the manners of Eton, and the black robes of scholarship. Women were admitted to the student body, for Plato remained to this extent a radical, that he was an ardent feminist.

"The chief studies were mathematics and philosophy. Over the portal was a warning inscription -- medeis ageometretos eisito -- 'Let no one without geometry enter here.' Perhaps a considerable measure of mathematics formed a requirement for admission.

"Most of the mathematical advances of the fourth century were made by men who had studied in the Academy. The mathematical course included arithmetic (theory of number), advanced geometry, 'spheric' (astronomy), 'music' (probably including literature and history,) law, and philosophy.

"The Dialoges were written independently of one another, and perhaps at long intervals. We must not be shocked by slips of memory, much less by changes of view. There is no design unifying the whole, except as the continuing search of a visibly developing mind for a truth which it never finds.

"Because he is a poet, he has most difficulty with logic. He wanders about seeking definitions, and loses his way in perilous analogies. Nevertheless he makes a beginning. He examines the nature of language, and derives it from imitative sound. He discusses analysis and synthesis, analogies and fallacies. He accepts induction, but prefers deduction. He creates, even in these popular dialogues, technical terms -- essence, power, action, passion, generation -- which will be useful to later philosophy.

"He names five of the ten 'categories' that will make up part of Aristotle's fame. He rejects the Sophist view that the senses are the best test of truth -- that the individual 'man is the measure of all things.'

"If we could be conscious only of individual things, thought would be impossible. We learn to think by grouping things into classes according to their likenesses, and expressing the class as a whole by a common noun. Man enables us to think of all men -- table of all tables -- light of every light that ever shone on land or sea. These Ideas (ideai, eida) are not objective to the senses but they are real to thought, for they remain, and are unchanged, even when all the sense objects to which they correspond are destroyed.

"Men are born and die, but man survives. Every individual triangle is only imperfectly a triangle, sooner or later passes away, and therefore is relatively unreal. But triangle -- the form and law of all triangles -- is perfect and everlasting.

"All mathematical forms are Ideas, eternal and complete. Everything that geometry says of triangles, circles, squares, cubes, spheres would remain true, and therefore 'real', even if there had never been, and never would be, any such figures in the physical world.

"Abstractions also are real in this sense. Individual acts of virtue have a brief existence, but virtue remains as a permanent reality for thought, and an instrument of thought. So with beauty, largeness, likeness, and so forth. These are as real to the mind as beautiful, large, or like things are real to the sense.

"Individual acts or things are what they are by partaking of, and more or less realizing, these perfect forms or Ideas. The world of science and philosophy is composed not of individual things, but of Ideas.

"History, as distinct from biography, is the story of man. Biology is the science not of specific organisms, but of life. Mathematics is the study not of concrete things but of number, relation, and form independently of things and yet as valid for all things.

"The Dialogues of his middle period turn more and more from metaphysics to morals and politics. 'The greatest and fairest sort of wisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of states and families.' The problem of ethics lies in the apparent conflict between individual pleasure and social good.

"Plato presents the problem fairly, and puts into the mouth of Callias as strong an argument for selfishness as any immoralist has ever given. He recognizes that many pleasures are good.

"Justice may be defined as the co-operation of the parts in a whole, of the elements in a character, or of the people in a state, each part performing its fittest function properly.

"The Good is neither reason alone nor pleasure alone, but that mingling of them, in proportion and measure, which produces the Life of Reason. The supreme good lies in pure knowledge of the eternal forms and laws.

Morally 'the highest good is the power or faculty, if there be such, which the soul has of loving the truth, and of doing all things for the sake of truth.' He who so loves truth will not care to return evil for evil. He will think it better to suffer injustice than to do it. He will 'go forth by sea and land to seek after men who are incorruptible, whose acquaintance is beyond price.

"As he grew older he became incapable of seeing any beauty apart from goodness and truth. He would censor, in his ideal state, all art and poetry that might seem to the government to have an immoral or unpatriotic tendency. All rhetoric and all nonreligious drama would be barred. Even Homer -- seductive painter of an immoral theology -- would have to go.

"Like a blue blood, he despises the plutocratic oligarchy, 'the men of business pretending never so much as to see those whom they have already ruined, inserting their sting -- that is, their money -- into anybody else who is not on his guard against them, and recovering the principal sum many times over. This is the way in which they make drones and paupers to abound in the state.'

"And then democracy comes into being, after the poor have conquered their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder they give an equal share of freedom and power. The democrats turn out to be as bad as the plutocrats. They use the power of their number to vote doles to the people and offices to themselves. They flatter and pamper the multitudes until liberty becomes anarchy, standards are debased by omnipresent vulgarity, and manners are coarsened by unhindered insolence and abuse.

"The new city, says Plato, must be placed inland, lest foreign ideas undermine its faith, foreign trade its peace, and foreign luxuries its self-contained simplicity. The number of free citizens shall be limited to the conveniently divisible number of 5040. In addition to these will be their families and their slaves.

"The citizens shall elect 360 guardians, divided into groups of thirty, each group administering the state for a month. The 360 shall choose a Nocturnal Council of twenty-six, which shall meet at night and legislate on all vital affairs. These councilors shall allot the land in equal, indivisible, and inalienable parcels among the citizen families.

"The guardians 'shall provide against the rains doing harm instead of good to the land and shall keep them back by works and ditches, and make irrigation streams furnish even to the dry places plenty of water.'

"To control the growth of economic inequality, trade is to be held to a minimum. No gold or silver is to be kept by the people, and there shall be no lending of money at interest. Everyone is to be discouraged from living by investment, and is to be encouraged to live as an active farmer on the land. Any man who acquires more than four times the value of one share of land must surrender the surplus to the state. Severe limits are to be placed upon the power of bequest.

"Women are to hve equal educational and political opportunity with men. Men must marry between thirty anbd thirty-five, or pay heavy annual fines. They are to beget children for only ten years.

"Drinking and other public amusements are to be regulated to preserve the morals of the people.

"To accomplish all this peaceably there must be complete state control of education, publication, and other means of forming public opinion and personal character. The highest official in the state is to be the minister of education. Authority will replace liberty in education, for the intelligence of children is too undeveloped to excuse us for leaving to them the guidance of their own lives.

"Literature, science, and the arts are to be under censorship. They will be forbidden to express ideas which the counclors consider hurtful to public morals and piety. Since obedience to parents and the laws can be secured only through superntural sanctions and aids, the state shall determine what gods are to be worshiped, and how, and when.

"Plato is not only a pra-existent Christlich, as Nietzsche called him, but a pre-Christian Puritan. He distrusts human nature as evil, and thinks of it as an original sin tainting the soul.

"He breaks up into an evil body and a divine spirit that unity of body and soul which had been the educated Greek ideal of the sixth and fifth centuries. Like a Christian ascetic he calls the body the tomb of the soul.

"He takes from Pythagoras and Orphism an Oriental faith in transmigration, karma, sin, purification, and 'release.' He adopts, in his last works, the other-worldly tone of a converted and repentant Augustine. One would almost say that Plato was not Greek if it were not for his perfect prose.

"It was his fate that he was a logician as well as a poet. He was the most brilliant reasoner of antiquity, subtler than Zeno of Elea or Aristotle. He loved philosophy more than he loved any woman, or any man. In the end, like Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor, he concluded to a suppression of all free reasoning, a conviction that philosophy must be destroyed in order that man may live.

"He had come to Athens from his native Stageirus, a small Greek settlement in Thrace. His father had been court physician to Philip's father, Amyntas II, and had taught the boy some anatomy before sending hm to Plato. The two rival strains in the history of thought -- the mystical and the medical -- met and warred in the conjunction of the two philosophers.

"Perhaps Aristotle would have developed a thoroughly scientific mind had he not listened so long to Plato (some say for twenty years). The doctor's son struggled in him with the Puritan's pupil, and neither side won. Aristotle never quite made up his mind. He gathered about him scientific observations sufficient for an encyclopedia, and then tried to force them into the Platonic mold in which his scholastic mind had been formed.

"Aristotle married Hermeias' daughter Pythias (344) and was about to settle in Assus when Hermeias was assassinated by the Persians, who suspected him of planning to help Philip's proposed invasion of Asia. Aristotle fled with Pythias to near-by Lesbos, and spent some time there in studying the natural history of the island. Pythias died after gving him a daughter.

"Later Aristotle married, or lived with, the hetaira Herpyllis. He maintained to the end a tender devotion to the memory of Pythias, and at his death asked that his bones be laid beside hers. He was not quite the emotionless bookworm that one might picture from his works.

"In 343 Philip, who probably had known him as a youth at Amyntas' court, invited him to undertake the education of Alexander, then a wild lad of thirteen. Aristotle came to Pella and labored at the task for four years.

"In the morning he taught advanced subjects to regular students. In the afternoon he lectured to a more popular audience, probably on rhetoric, poetry, ethics, and politics.

"He collected here a large library, a zoological garden, and a museum of natural history. The school came to be called the Lyceum, and the group and its philosophy were named Peripatetic from the covered walks (peripatoi) along which Aristotle like to move with his students as he discoursed.

"A sharp rivalry developed between the Lyceum, whose students were mostly of the middle class, the Academy, which drew its membership largely from the aristocracy, and the school of Isocrates, which was frequented chiefly by colonial Greeks. The rivaly was eased in time by the emphasis of Isocrates on rhetoric, of the Academy on mathematics, metaphysics, and politics, and of the Lyceum on natural science. Aristotle set his pupils to gathering and co-ordinating knowledge in every field -- the customs of barbarians -- the constitutions of the Greek cities --the chronology of victors in the Pythian games and the Athenian Dionysia -- the organs and habits of animals -- the character and distribution of plants -- and the history of science and philosophy.

"His curious mind is interested, to begin with, in the process and technique of reasoning. So acutely does he analyze these that his 'Organon,' or Instrument -- the name given after his death to his logical treatises -- became the textbook of logic for two thousand years.

"He longs to think clearly though he seldom in his extant works, succeeds. He spends half his time defining his terms, and then feels that he has solved the problem.

"If we would understand Alexander we must always remember that he bore in his veins the drunken vigor of Philip and the barbaric intensity of Olympias. Furthermore, Olympias claimed descent from Achilles. Therefore the Illiad had a special fascination for Alexander. When he crossed the Hellespont he was, in his interpretation, retracing the steps of Achilles. When he conquered Hither Asia, he was completing the work that his ancestor had begun at Troy.

"Even on the march his wild energy found vent in shooting arrows at passing objects, or in alighting from, and remounting, his chariot at full speed. When a campaign lagged, he would go hunting and, unaided and on foot, face any animal in combat. Once, after an encounter with a lion, he was pleased to hear it said that he had fought as though it had been a duel to decide which of the two should be king. He liked hard work and dangerous enterprises, and could not bear to rest. He laughed at some of his generals, who had so many servants that they themselves could find nothing to do. 'I wonder,' he told them, 'that you with your experience do not know that those who work sleep more soundly than those for whom other people work. Have you yet to learn that the greatest need after our victories is to avoid the vices and the weaknesses of those whom we have conquered?'

"He grudged the time given to sleep, and said that 'sleep and the act of generation chiefly made him sensible that he was mortal.' He was abstemious in eating, and until his last years, in drinking, though he loved to linger with his friends over a goblet of wine. He despised rich foods, and refused the famous chefs who were offered him, saying that a night march gave him a good appetite for breakfast, and a light breakfast gave him an appetite for dinner.

"Perhaps in consequence of these habits his complexion was remarkbly clear, and his body and breath, says Plutarch, 'were so fragrant as to perfume the clothes that he wore.' Discounting the flattery of those who painted or carved or engraved his likeness, we know from his contemporaries that he was handsome beyond all precedents for a king, with expressive features, soft blue eyes and luxuriant auburn hair. He helped to introduce into Europe the custom of shaving the beard, on the ground that whiskers offered too ready a handle for an enemy to grasp.

"Possibly at Aristotle's suggestion he sent a commission to explore the sources of the Nile, and he gave funds generously for a variety of scientific inquiries. Whether a longer life would have brought him to Caesar's clear intelligence, or the subtle understanding of Napoleon, is to be doubted. Royalty found him at twenty, after which warfare and administration absorbed him. In consequence he remained uneducatd to the end. He could talk brilliantly, but fell into a hundred errors when he wandered from politics and war. With all his campaigns he seems never to have gained such acquaintance with geography as the science of his time could have given him.

"He rose at times above the narrowness of dogma, but remained to the last a slave to superstitution. He put great confidence in the soothsayers and astrologers that crowded his court. Before the battle of Arbela he spent the night performing magic ceremonies with the magician Aristander, and offered sacrifices to the god Fear. He who faced all men and beasts with a very ecstasy of courage was 'easily alarmed by portents and prodigies' even to changing important plans.

"He could lead many thousands of men, could conquer and rule millions, but he could not control his own temper. He never learned to recognize his faults or limitations, but allowed his judgment to be soaked and drowned in praise.

"Sexually he was almost virtuous, not so much on principle as by preoccupation. His incessant activity, his long marches and frequent battles, his complex plans and administrative burdens, used up his resources, and left him little appetite for love. He took many wives, but as a sacrifice to statesmanship.

"He was gallant to ladies, but preferred the company of his generals. When his aides brought a beautiful woman to his tent late at night, he asked her, 'Why, at this time?' She replied, 'I had to wait to get my husband to bed.' Alexander dismissed her, and rebuked his servants, saying that because of them he had narrowly escaped becoming an adulterer.

"He had many of the qualities of a homosexual, and loved Hephaestion to madness. But when Theodorus of Taras offered to sell him two boys of great beauty, he sent the Tarentine packing, and begged his friends to tell him what baseness of soul he had shown that anyone should make such a proposal to him. He gave to friendship the tenderness and solicitude that most men give to love.

"At Tarsus, in 333, Alexander being ill, his physician Philip offered him a purgative drink. At that moment a letter was brought to the King from Parmenio, warning him that Philip had been bribed by Darius to poison him. Alexander handed the letter to Philip, and as the latter read it, Alexander drank the draught -- with no ill effect.

"His reputation for generosity helped him in his wars. Many of the enemy allowed themselves to be taken prisoner, and cities, not fearing to be sacked, opened their gates at his coming.

"Nevertheless, the Molossian tigress was in him, and it was his bitter fate to be ruined by his occasional paroxysms of cruelty. Havng taken Gaza by siege and assault, and infuriated by its long resistance, Alexander cause the feet of Batis, its heroic commandant, to be bored, and brazen rings passed through them. Then, intoxicated with memories of Achilles, he dragged the now dead Persian, tied by cords to the royal chariot, at full speed around the city.

"At Chaeronea he was the first man to charge the Theban Sacred Band. At the Granicus he indulged to the full what he called his 'eagerness for encountering danger.' This, too, became an uncontrollable passion. The sound and sight of battle intoxicated him. He forgot then his duties as general, and plunged ahead into the thickest of the fight. Time and again his soldiers, fearful of losing him, had to plead with him to go to the rear.

"He was not a great general. He was a brave soldier whose obstinate perseverance marched on, with boyish heedlessness of impossibilities, to unprecedented victories. He supplied the inspiration. Probably his generals, who were able men, contributed organization, training, tactics, and strategy. He led his troops by the brilliance of his imagination, the fire of his unstudied oratory, the readiness and sincerity with which he shared their hardships and griefs.

"Without question he was a good administrator. He ruled with kindness and firmness the wide domain which his arms had won. He was loyal to the agreements which he signed with commanders and cities. He tolerated no oppression of his subjects by his appointees.

"The northern tribes in Thrace and Illyria revolted.

"Aetolia, Acarnania, Phocis, Elis, Argolis renounced their allegiance.

"The Ambraciotes expelled the Macedonian garrison.

"Artaxerxes III boasted that he had instigated the killing of Philip, and that Persia now had nothing to fear from the immature stripling of twenty who had succeeded to the throne.

"When the glad tidings of Philip's death reached Athens, Demosthenes donned festal garb, placed a garland of flowers upon his head, and moved in the Assembly that a crown of honor should be voted to the assassin Pausanias.

"The Greek states hastened to renew their allegiance. Athens sent him a profuse apology, voted him two crowns, and conferred upon him divine honors. Alexander, appeased, declared all dictatorships abolished in Greece, and decreed that each city should live in freedom according to its own laws. The Amphictyonic Council confirmed him in all the rights and honors that it had given to Philip. A congress of all Greek states except Sparta, meeting at Corinth, proclaimed him captain general of the Greeks, and promised to contribute men and supplies for the Asiatic campaign.

"Alexander returned to Pella, put the capital in order, and then marched north to suppress the rebellion of the barbarian tribes (335). With Napoleonic swiftness he led his troops as far as the modern Bucharest, and planted his standrds upon the northern bank of the Danube.

"At Issus he met the main force of the Persians, 600,000 men, under Darius III. Once more he won by using his cavalry for attack, his infantry for defense. Darius fled, leving his purse and his family behnd him, to be treated the one with gratitude, the other with chivalry.

"After peaceably taking Damascus and Sidon, Alexander laid seige to Tyre, which was harboring a large Phoenician squadron in the pay of Persia. The ancient city resisted so long that when at last he captured it, Alexander lost his head and allowed his men to massacre eight thousand Tyrians, and to sell thirty thousand as slaves.

"Knowing that religion is stronger than politics, he crossed another desert to the oasis of Siwa, and paid his respects to the god Ammon -- his very father if Olympias could be believed. The pliant priests crowned him Pharaoh with the ancient rites, and so eased the way for the Ptolemaic dynasty.

"Returning to the Delta, Alexander conceived or approved the idea of building a new capital at one of the Nile's many mouths. Perhaps the Greek merchants at near-by Naucratis suggested it as providing a more convenient depot for the enlarged Greek trade that might now be expected betwen Egypt and Greece.

"Here again his good judgment left him, and he burned the magnificnt city to the ground. His soldiers looted the houses, ravaged the women, and killed the men. Perhaps they had been infuriated by seeing, on their approach to the town, eight hundred Greeks who, for various reasons, had suffered mutilation at the hands of Persians by the cutting off of legs, arms, or ears, or the gouging out of the eyes. Alexander, moved to tears by this sight, gave them lands, and assigned dependents to work for them.

"Still insatiate, he attempted now what Cyrus the Great had failed to accomplish -- the subjugation of the tribes that hovered on the eastern borders of Persia. Perhaps in his simple geography he hoped to find, beyond the mystic East, the ocean that would serve as a natural frontier for his conquered realm.

"Entering Sogdiana, he came upon a village inhabited by the descendants of those Branchidae who, in 480, had surrendered to Xerxes the treasures of their temple near Miletus. Fevered with the thought that he was revenging the pillaged god, he ordered all the inhabitants slain, including the women and children -- visiting the sins of the fathers upon the fifth generation.

"His campaign in Sogdiana, Ariana, and Bactriana was bloody and bootless. He achieved some victories, found some gold, and left enemies everywhere behind him. Near Bokhara his men captured Bessus, who had slain Darius. Alexander, suddenly making himself the avenger of the Great King, had Bessus whipped almost to death, had his nose and ears cut off, and then sent him to Ecbatana, where he ws executed by having his arms tied to one, and his legs to the other, of two trees had had been drawn together by ropes, so that when the ropes were cut the trees pulled the body to pieces.

Sadly he turned back, loath to face west again, and forced his way through hostile tribes with such personal bravery that his soldiers wept at thsir inability to realize all his dreams.

"He had now spent nine years in Asia, and he had changed the continent by his victories less than it had transformed him by its ways. He had been told by Aristotle to treat Greeks as freemen, 'barbarians' as slaves. But he had been surprised to find among the Persian aristocrats a degree of refinement and good manners not often seen in the turbulent democracies of Greece. He admired the manner in which the Great Kings had organized their empire, and wondered how his rough Macedonians could replace such governors.

"He concluded that he could give some permanence to his conquests only by reconciling the Persian nobles to to his leadership and using them in administrative posts. More and more charmed by his new subjects, he abandoned the idea of ruling over them as a Macedonian, and conceived himself as a Greco-Persian emperor governing a realm in which Persians and Greeks wold be on an equal footing, and would peaceably mingle their culture and their blood. The long quarrel of Europe and Asia would end in a wedding feast.

"Already thousands of his soldiers had married native women, or were living with them. Should he not do likewise, marry the daughter of Darius, and reconcile the nations by begetting a king who would unite both dynasties in his veins?

"He broached the plan to this officers, and suggested that they, too, should take Persian wives. They had been a long time away from home, and the Persian ladies were beautiful. So in one great nuptial at Susa (324) Alexander married Statira, daughter of Darious III, and Parysatis, daughter of Artaxerxes III, attaching himself in this way to both branches of royalty, while eighty of his oficers took Persian brides. Thousands of similar marriages were soon afterward celebrated among the soldiers.

"Then he retired to his rooms, and refused to see anyone. His soldiers, stricken with remorse, came and lay down before the palace, saying that they would not leave until he had forgiven them and reaccepted them into his army. When at last he appeared, they broke into tears and insisted on kissing him. After being reconciled with him they went back to their camp shouting a song of thanksgiving.

"Deceived by this show of affection, Alexander dreamed now of further campaigns and victories. He planned the subjugation of hidden Arabia, sent a mission to explore the Caspian regions, and thought of conquering Europe to the Pillars of Hercules.

"But his strong frame had been weakened by exposure and drink, and his spirit by the conspiracies of his officers and the mutinies of his men. Back in Babylon, he abandoned himself more and more to drink. One night, reveling with his officers, he proposed a drinking match. Promachus quaffed twelve quarts of wine, and won the prize, a talent. Three days later he died.

"Shortly afterward, at another banquet, Alexander drained a goblet containing six quarts of wine. On the next night he drank heavily again. Cold weather suddenly setting in, he caught a fever, and took to his bed. The fever raged for ten days, during which Alexander continued to give orders to his army and his fleet. On the eleventh day he died, being in the thirty-third year of his age (323).

"Advantage was taken of Alexander's death to bring an accusation of impiety against Aristotle. Heretical passages from his books were brought in as evidence. He was charged with having offered divine honors to the dictator Hermeias, who, being a slave, cold not have been a god.

"Aristotle quietly left the city, saying that he would not give Athens a chance to sin a second time against philosophy. He withdrew to the home of his mother's family in Chalcis, leaving the Lyceum in the care of Theophrastus.

"The Athenians passed sentence of death upon him, but had neithr opportunity nor need to execute it. For either through a stomach illness aggravated by his flight or, as some say, by taking poison, Aristotle died a few months after leaving Athens, in the sixty-third year of his age. His will was a model of kindly consideration for his second wife, his family, and his slaves.

"The death of Greek democracy was both a violent and a natural death in which the fatal agents were the organaic disorders of the system. The sword of Macedon meely addd the final blow. The city-state had proved incapable of solving the problems of government. It had failed to preserve order within, and defense without. Despite the appeals of Gorgias, Isocrates, and Plato for some Dorian discipline to tame Ionian freedom, it had discovered no way of reconciling local autonomy with national stability and power. Its love of liberty had seldom interfered with its passion for empire.

"The class war had become bitter beyond control, and had turned democracy into a contest in legislative looting. The Assembly, a noble body in its better days, had degenerated into a mob hating all superiority, rejecting all restraint, ruthless before weakness but cringing before power, voting itself every favor, and rating property to the point of crushing initiative, industry, and thrift.

"And while democracy was producing chaos in Athens, monarchy was producing chaos in Macedonia -- a dozen wars of succession, a hundred assassinations, and a thousand interferences with freedom -- with no redeeming glory of literature, science, philosophy, or art.

"The weakness and smallness of the state in Greece had been a boon to the individual, if not in body, certainly in soul. That freedom, costly though it was, had generated the achievements of the Greek mind.

"Individualism in the end destroys the group, but in the interim it simulates personality, mental exploration, and artistic creation. Greek democracy was corrupt and incompetent, and had to die.

"In many ways it was right. Greek civilization did not die with Greek freedom. On the oontrary it conquered new areas and spread in three directions as the formation of vast empires broke down the political barriers to communication, colonization, and trade.

"Still enterprising and alert, the Greeks moved by hundreds of thousands into Asia and Egypt, Epirus and Macedon. Not only did Ionia flower again, but Hellenic blood, language, and culture made its way into the interior of Asia Minor, into Phoenicia and Palestine, through Syria and Babylonia, across the Euphrates and the Tigris, even to Bactria and India.

"While the source of a virile and independent citizenry was drying up in the villages, industry and the class war were progressing in the towns. Slave dealers accompanied the armies, bought unransomed captives, and sold them at three or four minas ($150 or $200) a head in the great slave markets of Delos and Rhodes. The cosmopolitan spirit of the age was negligent of racial distinctions. Casual labor, which could be thrown upon public relief whenever it ceased to be privately profitable, was in many circumstances cheaper than slave labor that had to be continuously maintained.

"Some governments nationalized certain industries but the governments paid as low wages as the private employer, and squeezed all possible profit from the labor of their slaves. The gulf between rich and poor widened. The class war became bitterer than before.

"The mythology of the ancient local gods survived among the peasantry and the simple townfolk, and in the official rites. The educated used it for poetry and art, the half-liberated attacked it bitterly, the upper classes supported it as an aid to order, and discountenanced open athism as bad taste.

"Skepticism, however, is uncomfortable. It leaves the common heart and imagination empty, and the vacuum soon draws in some new and encouraging creed. The victories of philosophy and Alexander cleared the way for novel cults. Athens in the third century was so disturbed by exotic faiths, nearly all of them promising heaven and threatening hell, that Epicurus, like Lucretius in first century Rome, felt called upon to denounce religion as hostile to peace of mind and joy of life. The new temples, even in Athens, were now usually dedicated to Isis, Serapis, Bendis, Adonis, or some other alien deity.

"Superstition spread while science reached its apogee. The number seven was unspeakably holy. There were seven planets, seven days of the week, seven Wonders, seven Ages of Man, seven heavens, seven gates of hell. Astrology was rejuvenated by commerce with Babylonia. People took it for granted that the stars were gods who ruled in detail the destinies of individuals and staes. Character, even thought, was determined by the star or planet under wich one had been born.

"Education spread, but spread thin. As in all intellectual ages it stressed knowledge more than character, and produced masses of half-educated people who, uprooted from labor and the land, moved about in unplaced discontent like loosened cargo in the ship of state.

"Egypt, Rhodes, Seleucia, Pergamum, and other governments issued currencies sufficiently stable and similar to facilitate international trade. Bankers provided public and private credit. Ships were larger, made four to six knots per hour, and shortened voyages by crossing the open sea.

"On land the Seleucids developed and extended the great highways left as part of Persia's legacy to the east. Caravan routes converged from inner Asia upon Seleucia, and opened out thence to Damascus, Berytus (Beirut), and Antioch.

"Enriched by trade, and enriching it in turn, populous centers rose there and at Babylon, Tyre, Tarsus, Xanthus, Rhodes, Halicarnassus, Miletus, Ephesus, Smyrna, Permamum, Byzantium, Cyzicus, Apamea, Heracleia, Amisus, Sinope, Panticapaeum, Olbia, Lyimacheia, Ahydos, Thesalonica (Salonika), Chaleis, Delos, Corinth, Ambracia, Epidamnus (Durazzo), Taras, Neapolis (Naples), Rome Massalia, Emporium, Panormus (Palermo), Syracuse, Utica, Carthage, Cyrene, And Alexandria.

"One busy web of trade bound together Spain under Carthage and Rome, Carthage under Hamilear, Syracuse under Hieron II, Rome under the Scipios, Macedonia under the Antigonids, Greece under the Leagues, Egypt under the Ptolemies, the Near East under the Seleucids, India under the Mauryas, and China under the Hans.

"The routes from China passed through Turkestan, Bactria, and Persia, or over the Aral, Caspian, and Boack Seas. The routes from India passed through Afghanistan and Persia to Seleucia, or through Arabia and Petra to Jerusalem and Damascus, or across the Indian Ocean to Adaria (Aden)then through the Red Sea to Arsinoe (Suez), and thence to Alexandria.

"It was too deeply and anciently itself to yield its soul. The masses of the people continued to speak their native tongues, to pursue their long-accustomed ways, and to worship their ancestral gods.

"Beyond the Mediterranean coasts the Greek veneer grew thin, and such Lennenic centers as Seleucia on the Tigris were Greek islands in an Oriental sea. There was no such fusion of races and cultures as Alexander had dreamed of. There were Greeks and Greek civilization on the top and a medley of Asiatic peoples and cultures underneath. The qualities of the Greek intellect made no entry into the Oriental mind. The energy and love of novelty, the zest for worldliness and the passion for perfection, the expressiveness and individualism of the Greek effected no change in the Orental character.

"On the contrary, as time moved on, Eastern ways of thought and feeling surged up from below into the ruling Greeks, and through them flowed westward to transform the 'pagan' world. In Babylon the patient Semitic merchant and the temple banker regained ascendancy over the volatile Hellene, preserved the cuneiform writing, and forced back the Greek language into second place in the business world. Astrology and alchemy corrupted Greek astronomy and physics. Oriental monarchy proved more powerful than Greek democracy, and finally impressed its form upon the West. Greek kings and Roman emperors became gods in the manner of the East, and the Asiatic theory of the divine right of kings passed down through Rome and Constantinople into modern Europe.

"Through Zeno the East insinuated its quietism and fatalism into Greek philosophy. Through a hundred channels it poured its mysticism and its piety into the vacuum left by the decay of the orthodox Greek faith. The Greek readily accepted the gods of the Orient as essentially identical with his own. But as the Greek did not really believe, and the Asiatic did, the Oriental god survived while the Greek god died.

"The Greeks offered the East philosophy, the East offered Greece religion. Religion won because philosophy was a luxury for the few. Religion was a consolation for the many. In the rhythmic historic alternation of belief and unbelief, mysticism and naturalism, religion and science, religion returned to power because it recognized the secret helplessness and loneliness of man, and gave him inspiration and poetry. A disillusioned, exploited, war-wearied world was glad to believe and hope again.

"The first conflict is dead history, and may be briefly dismissed. Matthew Arnold believed the second conflict to be one of the lasting cleavages of human feeling and thought.

"In the original division of Alexander's empire Judea (i.e. Palestine south of Samaria) had been awarded to Ptolemy. The Seleucids never accepted this decision. They saw themselves separated from the Mediterranean, and coveted the wealth that might come from the trade tht passed through Damascus andf Jerusalem. In the resultant wars Ptolemy I won, and Judea remained subject to the Ptolemies for more than a century (312-198).

"Judea was left a large measure of self-government under the hereditary high priest of Jerusalem and the Great Assembly. This gerousia, or Council of Elders, which Ezra and Nehemiah had formed two centuries back, became both a senate and a supreme court.

"Into this simple and puritan life the invading Greeks brought all the distractions and temptations of a refined and epicurean civilization. Around Judea was a ring of Greek settlements and cities -- Samaria, Neapolis (Shechem), Gaza, Ascalon, Azotus (Ashdod), Joppa (Jaffa), Apollonia, Doris, Sycamina, Polis (Haifa), and Acco (Acre).

"Just across the Jordan was a leagued decapolis of Greek cities -- Damascus, Gadara, Gerasa, Dium, Philadelphia, Pella, Raphia, Hippo, Scythopolis, and Canetha. Each of these had Greek institutions and establishments -- temples to Greek gods and goddesses, schools and academies, gymnasiums and palaestras, and nude games.

"From such cities and from Alexandria, Antioch, Delos, and Rhodes, Greeks and Jews came to Jerusalem, bringing the infection of a Hellenism devoted to science and philosophy, art and literature, beauty and pleasure, song and dance, drinking and feasting, athletics and courtesans and handsome boys, along with a gay sophistication that questioned all morals, and an urbane skepticism that undermined all supernatural belief.

"How could Jewish youth resist these invitations to delight, this easy liberation from a thousand irksome restraints? Young wits among the Jews began to laugh at the priests as moneygrubbers, and at their pious followers as fools who allowed old age to come upon them without having ever known the pleasures, luxuries, and subtleties of life. Rich Jews were also won over, for they could afford to yield to temptation.

"But his successor, Antiochus IV, thought of Judea as a source of revenue. He was planning great campaigns, and needed funds. He ordered the Jews to pay in taxes one third of their grain crops and one half of the fruit of their trees.

"Ignoring the usual inheritance of the office, he appointed as high priest the sycophantic Jason, who represented the Hellenizing party in Jerusalem and sought permission to establish Greek institutions in Judea. Antiochus heard him gladly, for he was disturbed by the diversity and persistence of Oriental cults in Greek Asia, and dreamed of unifying his polyglot empire through one law and one faith. When Jason went about these matters with insufficient haste Antiochus replaced him with Menelaus, who gave him larger promises and a fatter bribe.

"Under Menelaus Yahweh was identified with Zeus. Temple vessels were sold to raise funds, and in some Jewish communities sacrifices were offered to Hellenic deities. A gymnasium was opened in Jerusalem, and Jewish youths, even priests, took part, naked, in athletic games.

"Antiochus, not dead but humiliated, moneyless, and convinced that the Jews had obstructed his campaign against Egypt and were conspiring to return Judea to the Ptolemies, marched up to Jerusalem -- slaughtered Jews of either sex by the thousand -- desecrated and looted the Temple -- appropriated for the royal coffers its golden altar, its vessels, and its treasuries -- restored Menelaus to supreme power -- and gave orders for the compulsory Hellenization of all Jews (167).

"He commanded that the Temple be rededicated as a shrine to Zeus, that a Greek altar be built over the old one, and that the usual sacrifices be replaced with a sacrifice of swine. He forbade the keeping of the Sabbath or the Jewish festivals, and made circumcision a capital crime. Throughout Judea the old religion and its rites were interdicted, and the Greek ritual was made compulsory on pain of death. Every Jew who refused to eat pork, or who was found possessing the Book of the Law, was to be jailed or killed, and the Book wherever found was to be burned.

"Jerusalem itself was put to the flames, its walls were destroyed, and its Jewish population was sold into slavery. Foreign people were brought in to resettle the site, a new fortress was tuilt upon Mt. Zion, and a garrison of troops was left in it to rule the city in the name of the King.

"On the day of the Bacchanalia the Jews were compelled to deck themselves with ivy like the Greeks, to take part in the processions, and to sing wild wongs in honor of Dionysus.

"Many Jews conformed to the demands, waiting for the storm to pass. Many others fled into caves or mountain retreats, lived on clandestine gleanings from the fields, and resolutely carried on the ordinances of Jewish life. The Chasidim circulated among them, preaching courage and resistance.

"A detachment of royal troops, coming upon some caves in which thousands of Jews -- men, women, and children -- were hiding, ordered them to come forth. The Jews refused. Because it was the Sabbath, they would not move the stones that might have blocked the entrance to the caves. The soldiers attacked with fire and sword, killing many of the refugees and asphyxiating the remainder with smoke. Women who had circumcized their newborn sons were cast with their infants over the city walls to death.

"The Greeks were surprised to find the strength of the old faith. Not for centuries had they seen such loyalty to an idea. The stories of martyrdom went from mouth to mouth, filled books like the First and Second Maccabees, and gave to Christianity the prototypes of its martyrs and its martyrology.

"When Apelles, an agent of Antiochus, came to Modin, where these six had sought refuge, he summoned the inhabitants to repudiate the Law and sacrifice to Zeus. The aged Mattathias came forward with his sons and said: 'Even should all the people in the kingdom obey the order to depart from the faith of their fathers, I and my sons will abide by the Covenant of our ancestors.'

"As one of the Jews approached the altar to make the required sacrifice, Mattathias slew him, and slew also the King's commissioner. Then he said to the people: 'Whoever is zealous for the Law, and wishes to support the Covenant, let him follow me.'

"Many of the villagers retired with him and his sons to the mountains of Ephraim. There they were joined by a small band of young rebels, and by such of the Chasidim as were still alive.

"Soon afterward Mattathias died, having designated as captain of his band his son Judas, called Maccabee. Judas was a warrior whose courage equaled his piety. Before every battle he prayed like a saint, but in the hour of battle 'he was like a lion in his rage.'

"The little army 'lived in the mountains after the manner of beasts, feeding on herbs.' Every now and then it descended upon a neighboring village, killed backsliders, pulled down pagan altars, and 'what children soever they found uncircumcized, those they circumcized valiantly.'

"These things being reported to Antiochus, he sent an army of Syrian Greeks to destroy the Maccabean force. Judas met them in the pass of Emmaus. Though the Greeks were trained mercenaries fully armed, and Judas' band was poorly armed and clad, the Jews won a complete victory (166). Antiochus sent a large force, whose general was so confident that he brought slave merchants with him to buy the Jews whom he expected to capture, and posted in the towns the prices that he would ask. Judas defeated these troops at Mizpah, and so decisively that Jerusalem fell into his hands without resistance.

"The Chasidim consented. The Maccabeans refused. Judas announced that Judea, to be safe from further persecutions, must achieve political as well as religious liberty. Intoxicated with power, the Maccabeans now took their turn at persecutions, pursuing the Hellenizing faction vengefully not only in Jerusalem but in the cities that bordered the frontier.

"In 161 Judas defeated Nicanor at Adasa, and strengthened himself by making an alliance with Rome. But in the same year, fighting against great odds at Elasa, he was slain. His brother Jonathan carried on the war bravely, but was himself killed at Acco (143).

"The only surviving brother, Simon supported by Rome, won from Demetrius II, in 142, an acknowledgement of Judean independence. By popular decree Simon was appointed both high priest and general. As these offices were made hereditary in his family, he became the founder of the Hasmonean dynasty.

"He was a plain, blunt soldier capable both of generous feeling and of realistic thinking. While other inheritors of Alexander's realm spent half their lives in war, and dreamed of undivided sovereighty, Ptolemy devoted himself to consolidating his position in an alien country, and to promoting Egyptian agriculture, commerce, and industry.

"In his old age he found time to write astonishingly truthful commentaries on his campaigns and to establish, about 290, the Museum and Library that were to make the fame of Alexandria. In 285, feeling his eighty-two years, he appointed his second son, Ptolemy Philadelphus, to the throne, yielded the government to him, and took his place as a subject in the young king's court. Two years later he died.

"Ptolemy Philadelphus died in 246, after a long and largely beneficent reign. Ptolemy III Euergetes was another Thorthmes III, intent on conquering the Near East. He took Sardis and Babylon, marched as far as India, and so effectually disorganized the Seleucid Empire that it crumbled at the touch of Rome. Ptolemy IV Philopator so loved his father than he imitated his wars and his triumphs. The Egyptians, now armed and conscious of their strength, began from this time onward to break down the authority of the Greeks on the Nile. Philopator gave himself to amusement, spent much time on his spacious pleasure boat, introduced the Bacchanalia into Egypt, and half persuaded himself that he was descended from Dionysus. In 205 he wife was killed by his mistress, and shortly afterward Philopator himself passed away.

"By far the most interesting aspect of Ptolemaic Egypt is its extensive experiment in state socialism. Royal ownership of the land had long been a sacred custom in Etypt. Doubtless this system of socialism had been evolved because the conditions of tillage in Egypt required more co-operation, more unison of action in time and space, than individual ownership cold be expected to produce.

"Industry operated under similar conditions. The Ptolemies opened up valuable gold deposits in Nubia, and had a stable gold coinage. All commerce was controlled and regulated by the government. Retail traders were usually state agents distributing state goods.

"Ptolemy I, after taking Jerusalem, carried with him into Egypt thousands of Jewish captives, who were freed by his successor. At the same time he invited well-to-do Hebrews to establish their homes and businesses in Alexandria.

"By the beginnong of the Christian era there were a million Jews in Egypt. A large number of these lived in the Jewish quarter of the capital. It was no ghetto, for the Jews were free to live in any quarter but the Brucheum, which was restricted to official families and their servitors. They chose their own gerousia or senate, and followed their own worship.

"In 169 the high priest Onias III built a great temple at Leontopolis, a suburb of Alexandrdia, and Ptolemy VI, his personal friend, assigned the revenues of Heliopolis for its maintenance. Such temples served as schools and meeting places as well as for religious services. Hence they were called by the Greek-speaking Jews synagogai, i.e. places of assembly. Since few Egyptian Jews after the second or third generation in Egypt knew Hebrew, the reading of the Law was followed by an interpretation in Greek.

"When Rome began to import Egyptian grain, it was the Jewish merchants of Alexandria who carried the cargoes in their fleets. The Greeks, perceiving their failure to Hellenize the Jews, feared for their own future in a state where the majority remained persistently Oriental, and bred so vigorously. Forgetting the legislation of Pericles, they complained that the Jewish law forbade mixed marriges, and that the Jews for the most part kept to themselves. Anti-semitic literature multiplied.

"Manetho, the Egyptian historian, gave currency to the story that the Jews had been expelled from Egypt, centuries back, because they had been afflicted with scrofula or leprosy. Feeling mounted on both sides until, in the first century of the Christian era, it broke out into destructive violence.

"The Jews did what they could to allay the resentment against their amixia -- their social separation -- and their success. Though they clung to their religion, they spoke Greek, studied and wrote about Greek literature, and translated their sacred books and their histories into Greek. To acquaint the Greeks with the Jewish religious tradition, and to enable the Jew who knew no Hebrew to read his own scriptures, a group of Alexandrian Jewish scholars begin, probably under Ptolemy II, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.

"The kings favored the undertaking in the hope that it would make the Jews of Egypt more independent of Jerusalem, and would lessen the flow of Jewish-Egyptian funds to Palestine.

"Legend told how Ptolemy Philadelphus, at the suggestion of Demetrius of Phalerum, had invited some seventy Jewish scholars to come from Judea about 250 to translate the scriptures of their people -- how the King had lodged each of them in a separate room on Pharos -- and had kept them without intercommunication until each had made his own rendering of the Pentateuch -- how all the seventy versions, when finished, agreed word for word, proving the divine inspiration of the text and of the trasnlators -- how the King rewarded the scholars with costly presents of gold -- and how from these circumstances the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible came to be known as the hermeneia kata tous hebdomekonta -- the Interpretation according to the Seventy -- in Latin, Interpretatio Septuaginta (sc. Seniorum) -- in a word, the 'Septuagint.'

"Ptolemy I tried to unite the Greek and native faiths by identifying Serapis and Zeus. Later Ptolemies encouraged the cult of themselves as gods to offer a common and convenient object of worship to their heterogeneous population.

"Those Egyptians who were not courting office paid little attention to these artificial cults. The Egyptian priests, shorn of their wealth and power, and dependent for their sustenance upon grants of money from the state, waited patiently for the Greek wave to recede.

"In the end it was not Hellenism that won in Alexandria, but mysticism. Now were laid the foundations of Neo-Platonism and the medley of promissory cults tht competed for the Alexandrian soul in the centuries that surrounded the birth of Christ. Osiris as Serapis became the favorite god of the later Egyptinans, and of many Egyptian Greeks. Isis regained popularity as the goddess of women and motherhood.

"No student with a mind of his own will join in any sweeping judgment about Hellenistic decay. Youth cannot last forever, nor are its charms supreme. The life of Greece, like every life, had to have a natural subsidence, and accept a ripe old age.

"The kings proved more tolerant and helpful to research than the democracies. Alexander sent to the Greek cities of the Asiatic coast camel loads of Babylonian astronomical tablets, most of which were soon translated into Greek. The Ptolemies built the Museum for advanced studies, and gathered the science as well as the literature of the Mediterranean cultures into the great Library.

"Returning to Syracuse, he devoted himself monastically to every branch of mathematical science. Often, like Newton, he neglected food and drink, or the care of his body, in order to pursue the consequences of a new theorem, or to draw figures in the oil on his body, the ashes on the hearth, or the sand with which Greek geometers were wont to strew their floors.

"He was not without humor. In what he considered his best book, The Sphere and the Cylinder, he deliberately inserted false propositions (so we are assured), partly to lay a joke upon the friends to whom he sent the manuscript, partly to ensnare poachers who like to appropriate other men's thoughts. Sometimes he amused himself with puzzles that brought him to the verge of inventing algebra, like the famous Cattle Problem tht so beguiled Lessing. Sometimes he made strange mechanisms to study the principles on which they operated.

"But his perennial interest and delight lay in pure science conceived as a key to the understanding of the universe rather than as a tool of practical construction or expanding wealth. He wrote not for pupils but for professional scholars, communicating to them in pithy monographs the abstruse conclusions of his research. All later antiquity was fascinated by the originality, depth, and clarity of these treatises.

"Hieron turned over to Archimedes his suspicion and crown, presumably stipulating that the one sould be resolved without injuring the other. For weeks Archimedes puzzled over the problem. One day, as he stpped into a tub at the public baths, he noticed that the water overflowed according to the depth of his immersion, and that his body appeared to weigh -- or press downward -- less, the more it was submerged.

"His curious mind, exploring and utilizizng every experience, suddenly formulated the 'principle of Archimedes' -- that a floating body loses in weight an amount equal to the weight of the water which it displaces. Surmising that a submerged body would displace water according to its volume, and perceiving that this principle offered a test for the crown, Archimedes dashed out naked into the street and rushed to his dwelling, crying out 'Eureka!eureka! -- I have found it! I have found it!

"Home, he soon discovered that a given weight of silver, since it had more volume per weight than gold, displaced more water, when immersed, than an equal weight of gold. He observed also that the submerged crown displaced more water than a quantity of gold, equaling the crown in weight.

"He concluded that that the crown had been alloyed with some metal less dense than gold. By replacing gold with silver in the gold weight which he was using for comparison, until the compund displaced as much water as the crown, Archimedes was able to say just how much silver had been used in the crown, and how much gold had been stolen.

"At the Lyceum the industrious Theophrastus of Lesbos carried on the empirical tradition. The Peripatetics were scientists and scholars rather than philsophers. They devoted themselves to specialist research in zoology, botany, biography, and the history of science, philosophy, literature, and law.

"It is to Theophrastus that Atheniaeus attributes the tender sentiment that 'it is through modesty that beauty becomes beautiful.' Diogenes Laertius describes him as 'a most benevolent man, and very affable.'

"One of the few events in Theophrastus' life was the issuance of a state decree (307) requiring the assembly's approval in the selection of leaders for the philsophical schools. About the same time Agnonides indicted Theophrastus on the old charge of impiety. Theohrastus quietly left Athens. but so many students followed him that the storekeepers complained of a ruinous fall in trade.

"A like sequence has occurred more than once in history and may be taking place today. Thales corresponds to Galileo -- Democritus to Hobbes -- the Sophists to the Encyclopedists -- Protagoras to Voltaire -- Aristotle to Spencer -- Epicurus to Anatole France -- Pyrrho to Pascal -- Arcesilaus to Hume -- Carneades to Kant -- Zeno to Schopanhauer -- Plotinus to Bergson.

"We have tried to show that the essential cause of the Roman conquest of Greece was the disintegration of Greek civilization from within. No great nation is ever conquered until it has destroyed itself.

"Deforestation and the abuse of the soil -- the depletion of precious metals -- the migration of trade routes -- the disturbance of economic life by political disorder -- the corruption of democracy and the degeneration of dynasties -- the decay of morals and patriotism -- the decline or deterioration of the population -- the replacement of citizen armies by mercenary troops -- the human and physical wastage of fratricidal war -- the guillotining of ability by murderous revolutions and counterrevolutions -- all these had exhausted the resources of Hellas at the very time when the little state on the Tiber, ruled by a ruthless and farseeing aristocracy, was training hardy legions of landowners -- conqquering its neighbors and competitors -- capturing the food and minerals of the western Mediterranean -- and advancing year by year upon the Greek settlements in Italy.

"These ancient communities, once proud of their wealth, their sages, and their arts, had been impoverished by war, by the depredations of Dionysius I, and by the growth of Rome as a rival center of trade. The native tribes that, centuries before, had been enslaved by the Greeks or pushed back into hinterland, increased and multiplied while their masters cultivated comfort through infanticide and abortion. Soon the native stocks were contesting the control of southern Italy.

"The Greek cities turned to Rome for help.

"Pleased with so inexpensive an escuse for seizing the Dalmatian coast, Rome dispatched an expedition which reduced Illyria to a Roman protectorate almost as easily in 229 B.C. as in A.D. 1939. Coreyra (Corfu), Epidamnus (Durazzo), and other Greek settlements became Roman dependencies. Since Greek trade had also suffered from Illyrian piracy, Athens, Corinth, and the two leagues applauded Rome as a deliverer, accepted her ambassadors, and admitted the Romans to participation in the Eleusinian mysteries and the Isthmian games.

"In 216 Hannibal annihilated the Roman army at Cannae, and marched up to the gates of Rome. While Rome faced the greatest crisis in the history of the republic, Philip V, King of Macedon, signed an alliance with Hannibal and prepared to invade Italy (214). In the conference at Naupactus (213) the Aetolian delegate appealed for the unity of all Greeks, in this First Macedonian War, against the rising power in the west.

"Philip heard him politely, and became for a moment the idol of Greece. But his treaty with Hannibal specified that in return for Philip's attack upon Italy, Carthage, if successful in the present war, would help Philip to subdue all mainland Greece to Macedonia.

"Perhaps because the terms of such an agreement became known to the Greek states, most of them, including Agelaus' Aetolian League, entered into a pact with Rome against Macedon, and kept Philip so harassed at home that his invasion of Italy was indefinitely postponed. Rome signed a treaty with Philip so that she might give all her attention to Hannibal, and three years later the elder Scipio overwhelmed the Carthaginian at Zama.

"As the last great century of Greek civilization came to an end Egypt, Rhodes, and Pergamum appealed to Rome for help against Philip. Rome responded by inviting the Second Macedonia War. Opposed by nearly all of Greece as well as by Rome, Philip fought with the ferocity of a beast at bay. He used every treachery, stole whatever he found to his purpose, and treated captives with such cruelty that every man in Abydos, when Philip's siege was proving irresistible, killed his wife and children and then himself.

"In 197 Titus Quinctius Flaminius, a patrician of the type that made Polybius a pro-Roman enthusiast, so overwhelmed Philip at Cynoscephalae that suddenly all Macedonia -- indeed, all Greece -- lay at the mercy of Rome.

"Mummius carried off to Italy whatever wealth could be moved, including the works of art with which the Corinthians had adorned their cities and their homes. Polybius talls how Roman soldiers used world-famous paintings as boards for their games of draughts or dice.

"The League was dissolved, and its leaders were put to death.

"Greece and Macesonia were united into one province under a Roman governor.

"Boeotia, Locris, Corinth, and Euboea were subjected to annual tribute. Athens and Sparta were spared, and were allowed to remain under their own laws.

"The party of property and order was upheld everywhere, and all attempts to wage war, or make revolutions, or change the constitution, were proscribed.

"Every Greek colony poured the elixir of Greek art and thought into the cultural blood of the hinterland -- into Spain and Gaul -- Etruria and Rome -- Egypt and Palestine -- Syria and Asia Minor -- and along the shores of the Black Sea.

"Alexandria was the port of reshipment for ideas as well as goods. From the Museum and the Library the works and views of Greek poets, mystics, philosophers, and scientists were scattered through scholars and students into every city of the Mediterranean concourse.

"Rome took the Greek heritage in its Hellenistic form -- her playwrights adopted Menander anbd Philemon -- her arts used Greek craftsmen and Greek forms -- her law absorbed the statutes of the Greek cities -- and her later imperial organization was modeled upon the Greco-Oriental monarchies.

"Hellenism, after the Roman conquest of Greece, conquered Rome even as the Orient was conquering Greece. Every extension of Roman power spread the ferment of Hellenic civilization. The Byzantine Empire wedded Greek to Asiatic culture, and passed on some part of the Greek inheritance to the Near East and the Slavic north.

"The Syrian Christians took up the torch and handed it to the Arabs, who carried it through Africa to Spain.

"Byzantine, Moslem, and Jewish scholars conveyed or translated the Greek master pieces to Italy, arousing first the philosophy of the Schoolmen and then the fever of the Renaissance.

"Since that second birth of the European mind the spirit of Greece has seeped so thorougly into modern culture that 'all civilized nations, in all that concerns the activity of the intellect, are colonies of Hellas' today."

"Our handicrafts -- the technique of mining -- the essentials of engineering -- the processes of finance and trade -- the organization of labor -- the governmental regulation of commerce and industry -- all these have come down to us on the stream of history from Rome, and through Rome from Greece.

"Our democracies and our dictatorships alike go back to Greek examplars. Through the widened reach of states has evolved a representative system unknown to Hellas -- the democratic idea of a government responsible to the governed -- of trial by jury -- and of civil liberties of thought, speech, writing, assemblage, and worship, have been profoundly stimulated by Greek history.

"These things above all distinguished the Greek from the Oriental, and gave him an independence of spirit and enterprise that made him smile at the obeisances and inertia of the East.

"Our schools and universities, our gymnasiums and stadiums, our athletics and Olympic games, trace their lineage to Greece. The theory of eugenic health and natural living, the pagan ideal of a shameless enjoyment of every sense, found their historic formulations in Greece.

"Christian theology and practice (the very words are Greek) stem in large part from the mystery religions of Greece and Egypt, from Eleusinian, Orphic, and Osirian rites -- from Greek doctrines of the divine son dying for mankind and rising from the dead -- from Greek rituals of religious procession, ceremonial purification, holy sacrifice, and the sacred common meal -- from Greek ideas of hell, demons, purgatory, indulgences, and heaven -- and from Stoic and Neo-Platonic theories of the Logis, creation, and the final conflagration of the world. Even our superstition is indebted to Greek bogies, witches, curses, omens, and unlucky days.

"The oratorio and the opera owe something to the Greek choral dance and drama. The theory of music, so far as we know, was first explored and expounded by the Greeks from Pythagoras to Arixtoxenus.

"Our debt is least in painting. But in the art of fresco a direct line can be traced from Polygnotus through Alexandria and Pompeii, Giotto and Michelangelo, to the arresting murals of our own day.

"The forms and much of the technique of modern sculpture are still Greek, for upon no other art has the Hellenic genius stamped itself so despotically.

"We are only now freeing oursleves from the fscination of Greek architecture. Every city in Europe and America has some temple of commerce or finance whose form or columnar face came from the schrines of Greek gods. We miss in Greek art the study of character and the portrayal of the soul, and its infatuation with physical beauty and health leaves it less mature than the masculine statuary of Egypt or the profound painting of the Chinese.

"Greek mathematicians laid the foundations of trigonometry and calculus, they began and completed the study of conic sections, and they brought three-dimensional geometry to such relative perfection that it remained as they left it until Descartes and Pascal. Democritus illuminated the whole area of physics and chemistry with his atomic theory.

"In a mere aside and holiday from abstract studies Archimedes produced enough new mechanisms to place his name with the highest in the records of invention. Aristarchus anticipated and perhaps inspired Copernicus. Hipparchus, through Claudius Ptolemy, constructed a system of astronomy which is one of the landmarks in cultural history.

"Eratosthenes measured the earth and mapped it. Anaxagoras and Empidocles drew the outlines of a theory of evolution.

"Aristotle and Theophrastus classified the animal and plant kingdoms, and almost created the sciences of meteorology, zoology, emnbryology, and botany. Hippocrates freed medicine from mysticism and philosphical theory, and ennobled it with an ethical code.

"Herophilus and Erasistratus raised anatomy and physiology to a point which, except in Galen, Europe would not reach again until the Renaissance.

"Never had men examined nature so critically and yet so affectionately. The Greeks did no dishonor to the world in thinking that it was a cosmos of order and therefore amenable to understanding. They invented logic for the same reason that they made perfect statuary. Harmony, unity, proportion, form, in their view, provided both the art of logic and the logic of art. Curious of every fact and every theory, they not only established philosophy as a distinct enterprise of the European mind, but they conceived nearly every system and every hypothesis, and left little to be said on any major problem of life.

"Realism and nominalism, idealism and materialism, monotheism, pantheism, and atheism, feminism and communism, the Kantian critique and the Schopenhaaurian despair, the primitivism of Rousseau and the immoralism of Mietzsche, the synthesis of Spencer and the phychoanalysis of Freud -- all the dreams and wisdom of philosophy are here, in the age and land of its birth.

"And in Greece men not only talked of philosophy, they lived it. The sage, rather than the warrior or the saint, was the pinnacle and ideal of Greek life. Through all the centuries from Thales that exhiliarating philosophical bequest has come down to us, imspiring Roman emperors, Christian Fathers, Scholasstic theologians, Renaissance heretics, Cambridge Platonists, the rebels of the Enlightenmen, and the devotees of philosophy today.

"But those who cherish freedom, reason, and beauty will not linger over these blemishes. They will hear behind the turmoil of political history the voices of Solon and Socrates -- of Plato and Euripides -- of Pheidias and Praxateles -- of Epicurus and Archimedes. They will be grateful for the existence of such men, and will seek their company across alien centuries."