PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE
UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD
BY JOHN JOHNSON
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
In spite of many differences, no age has had closer affinities with
Ancient Greece than our own; none has based its deeper life so largely
on ideals which the Greeks brought into the world. History does not
repeat itself. Yet, if the twentieth century searched through the past
for its nearest spiritual kin, it is in the fifth and following
centuries before Christ that they would be found. Again and again, as we
study Greek thought and literature, behind the veil woven by time and
distance, the face that meets us is our own, younger, with fewer lines
and wrinkles on its features and with more definite and deliberate
purpose in its eyes. For these reasons we are to-day in a position, as
no other age has been, to understand Ancient Greece, to learn the
lessons it teaches, and, in studying the ideals and fortunes of men with
whom we have so much in common, to gain a fuller power of understanding
and estimating our own. This book--the first of its kind in
English--aims at giving some idea of what the world owes to Greece in
various realms of the spirit and the intellect, and of what it can still
learn from her.