This analysis is and must be subjective. Every one has to make his own,
just as every one has to apprehend for himself the form of a work of
art. But however the historian may analyse the plot and group it into
acts, it must be borne in mind that the action is continuous, and that
the first emergence of the Greek city-state in the Aegean and the last
traces of municipal self-government in the Roman Empire are phases in
the history of a single civilization. It may seem a paradox to call this
civilization a unity. But the study of Greek and Latin literature leaves
no doubt in one's mind that the difference of language there is less
significant than the unity of form, and that one is really dealing with
a single literature, the Hellenic, which in many of its branches was
imitated and propagated in the Latin language, just as it was to a
lesser extent in Hebrew, or later on in Syriac and Arabic. The unity is
even more apparent when, instead of confining our attention to
literature, we regard the whole field of civilization. It is not really
possible to draw a distinction between Greek history and Roman history.
At most one can say that at some point Greek history enters on a phase
which it may be convenient to distinguish verbally by connecting it with
the name of Rome. To take the case of the Roman Empire--the reader may
possibly have been surprised to find the Roman Empire treated as the
third act in the tragedy of Greece; yet when one studies the Empire one
finds that it was essentially a Greek institution. Institutionally it
was at bottom a federation of city-states, a solution of the political
problem with which Greek society had been wrestling since the fifth
century B. C. And even the non-municipal element, the centralized
bureaucratic organization which Augustus spread like a fine, almost
impalpable net to hold his federation of municipalities together, was
largely a fruit of Greek administrative experience. As papyrology
reveals the administrative system of the Ptolemaic Dynasty--the Greek
successors of Alexander who preceded the Caesars in the government of
Egypt--we are learning that even those institutions of the Empire which
have been regarded as most un-Greek may have been borrowed through a
Greek intermediary. Imperial jurisprudence, again, interpreted Roman
municipal law into the law of a civilization by reading into it the
principles of Greek moral philosophy. And Greek, not Latin, was still
the language in which most of the greatest literature of the Imperial
period was written. One need only mention works which are still widely
read and which have influenced our own civilization--Plutarch's _Lives_,
Marcus Aurelius' _Meditations_, and the New Testament. They are all
written in Greek, and who will venture to assert that the age in which
they were written falls outside Greek history, or that the social
experience which produced them was not an act in the tragedy of Hellenic
civilization? Even statistically the Empire was more Greek than anything
else. Probably a considerable majority of its inhabitants spoke Greek as
a lingua franca, if not as their mother-tongue. Nearly all the great
industrial and commercial centres were in the Greek or Hellenized
provinces. Possibly, during the first two centuries of the Empire, more
Greek was spoken than Latin by the proletariat of Rome itself. The Greek
core of the Roman Empire played the part of Western Europe in the modern
world. The Latinized provinces were thinly populated, backward, and only
superficially initiated into the fraternity of civilization. Latinized
Spain and Africa were the South America, Latinized Gaul and Britain the
Russia of the Ancient Greek world. The pulse of the Empire was driven
by a Greek heart, and it beat comparatively feebly in the non-Greek
extremities.