there is of darkness in man's condition, and of injustice and pain sometimes in the march of events. And it was at the same time impossible that their quick sensibilities should be exempt from suffering over the calamities of life. But if the question is one of determining the moral characteristic that predominated in them, and that is most often observable in their literature, it seems very evident that this is not finally to be identified with the mournful conception of things to which the moderns have frequently given expression, and which shows itself also in certain Latin authors. In a moment of affliction or revolt, they might doubtless have exclaimed with Theognis: 'The best thing for a man is not to be born, never to see the shining light of the sun; once born, the best thing is to break through the gates of Hades as soon as possible, and to lie down in the tomb, heaping earth upon his head."2 But it is a long way from chance lamentations, which now and then escape from the least melancholy natures, to a gloomy habit of thought and feeling. All the poetry of the Greeks is, in a word, the poetry of life. Their constant ideal is an ideal of youth and beauty, which they ceaselessly strive to realize, and upon which they love to fix their thoughts. The great cause of habitual sadness-that is to say, a profound sense of the constant disproportion between what we conceive and what we accomplish, between what we desire and what we obtain-this inward cause of the modern lament, the Greeks scarcely knew. Certain thinkers among them may have had some notion of it, but the Greek race, in its entirety, delighting in its own thoughts and feelings, and prompted by nature to an ever active optimism, has been, more than any other, a friend to life.25

Such, in its general traits, is the Hellenic type as we conceive it. The history of Greek literature, when viewed from above and as a whole, is simply a development of these fundamental observations.

24 Theognis 425-428, Bergk.

25 Aristotle (Problems 30.1) asks himself why it is commonly true that men who are superior in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts, are melancholy. Doubtless his observation chiefly concerned the Greeks; yet it was not confined to them. If it is quite correct-and that may be doubted, the conclusion drawn from it should simply be that the great men of Greece did not wholly escape a natural law; but one must be careful not to regard melancholy as a trait of the national character.

It is obviously hard to define the general character of an age or a nation, and indeed almost impossible to represent it in precise concepts; for the intuitive grasp of the whole, that clearly is demanded, can hardly be given in such terms. But as science can work only with definite terms, our sole resource is, through these, to stimulate an appreciation of the whole, approaching it from various sides. First of all, then, we must discover the appropriate concepts; and as consistency forbids our abandoning the philological standpoint, we may not borrow them, say, from the philosophy of history; rather, this last should acquire them by the philological method, so as not to lose itself in empty formulas and fancies. On the other hand, if philosophers often stretch and strain the facts to suit preconceived notions and fit into a system, this does not warrant us in following certain philologists who deem all historical speculation useless-the needful thing is the rigorous grounding of speculation in fact. But again, nothing is more faulty than the attempt to characterize a race or a period directly from individual facts. The procedure will generally result in a one-sided and biased estimate; for, the motion of life being free, the spirit of the whole and of the

[1 Professor Gildersleeve says of Boeckh (Hellas and Hesperia, p. 42): 'His teaching made a passionate classicist out of an amateurish student of literature. Boeckh was a great master, the greatest living master of Hellenic studies, and if I became after a fashion a Hellenist, it was due not merely to the catalytic effect of his presence, but to the orbed completeness of the ideal he evoked, and though the fifty odd years that have elapsed since I sate in his lecturerooms have witnessed the elimination of many of the results of his studies, the human results abide.' No results of Boeckh's activity are more permanent than his Encyclopädie und Methodologie der Philologischen Wissenschaften, a posthumous publication containing his theory of literary and linguistic scholarship. Herein is evoked his ideal in its 'orbed completeness.' His general characterization of antiquity (Encyclopädie, pp. 263-300) has not been surpassed. The translation appears with the consent of Messrs. B. G. Teubner, Leipzig.-EDITOR.]

general does not find uniform expression in all the particulars. Thus the idea of cosmopolitanism occurs in Socrates and the Stoics, but is not characteristic of antiquity; it anticipates the modern conception of life. Again, the thought expressed by Socrates at the end of the Platonic Symposium, that a good tragic poet will be a good comic poet, too, is similarly isolated in antiquity. These examples show how mistaken is the attempt to derive the ruling ideas of antiquity from single instances; we must draw our inferences from the entire body of facts. And the sources are easily found. One should try to comprehend the great spheres of life in their proper nature-the State, private life, art, and learningeach for itself, and each in relation to the others. The characteristic element will in every case be found by an induction based upon all the included forms, just as the character of these forms will be inferred from the individual phenomena. Now induction is never complete, so that this in itself makes the problem only approximately soluble. Furthermore, the particulars themselves can be rightly understood only in the light of a general survey of antiquity; thus we are again confronted by the circle inherent in the nature of philological investigation, a circle which in turn can be only approximately avoided. In characterizing antiquity we cannot, of course, make explicit the inductive process that has led to each several thought.

Now it might not in general seem admissible to speak so sweepingly and without distinction of a character of antiquity, when this term embraces the most varied nationalities. In the ancient Orient, in so far as it is historically related to the Occident, we find highly civilized peoples, such as the Indians, Persians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, and Jews. To these must be added the Egyptians and Carthaginians and the barbarians of the West. And in the province of classical antiquity itself, as the term is commonly used, we have to reckon with the difference between Greek and Roman. How can one detect a common character in this variety? But a closer inspection tells us that ancient civilization reached its high-water mark in Hellenism, and here attained to classic perfection. Hellenism represents the real character of antiquity, which in essentials, though stamped with a definite bias, appears again among the Romans. To gain an understanding of antiquity, therefore, we must begin with the culture of the Greeks as a basis. On the one hand, Greece stands opposed to the Orient, from which the Greeks, like the rest of the Indo-Germanic peoples, took their origin; there the character of antiquity did not come to full development, but

may nevertheless be seen in the germ. On the other hand, we have a contrast in modern civilization, with Roman civilization as the intermediary link. . . .

The Greek spirit, like spirit in general, developed gradually, and when we go back to the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, the divergence of Greek culture from Oriental is very slight. In the first period, commonly called Pelasgic, the religion of the Hellenes-cult as well as myth,-and also their communal and family life, has many analogies with the Orient. At this point we find primitive relations containing the germ of all possible developments; here are the beginnings of what is human, fettered in nature to a lower form of consciousness which operates almost entirely as an instinct. The Greeks, however, achieved their freedom from the shackles of nature, while the pertinacious and inflexible Oriental culture remained prisoner. Nevertheless, even among the Greeks the balance in the intellectual life was on the side of nature, and not until modern times did a purely spiritual consciousness finally become predominant. Accordingly, the most general difference between ancient and modern culture is this: relatively speaking, in antiquity it is nature that rules, and in modern times, spirit. Nature develops according to necessary laws; while spirit, though subject indeed to laws, is nevertheless free. The culture of antiquity, then, is characterized rather by necessity, and that of modern times by freedom. In comparison with the Orient, to be sure, the Greeks attained a high degree of freedom; all their culture rests upon the development of the free spirit of man. But the human race makes its escape from necessity by a gradual process, and the Greeks succeeded in raising themselves only to the level of individual freedom; for since in nature everything is individual, and the realm of pure spirit is the universal, the culture of antiquity is predominantly individual, while modern culture strives after universality. But the peculiarity of the Greeks lies in the way they developed human nature to an untrammeled perfection of individuality, apprehending the universal only in so far as it is inseparable from individual culture. And this explains the fact that in every realm of life they produced a great variety and multitude of distinct forms; whereby, indeed, they brought to perfection that culture of antiquity based upon the principle of nature. The multiplying tendency is inherent in nature, since there everything separates into many varied shapes and forms; whereas the principle of unity is spirit, and hence in the development of mod

ern times a striving after unity is uppermost-the universal can be brought to pass only when the parts are united. To the contrast between multiplicity and unity corresponds another that has often been applied to the relation between ancient and modern times, namely that of the real and the ideal. Ancient culture as a whole is more realistic than modern, for in antiquity even the most ideal aspirations assume a realistic form. Analogous is the distinction between the external and internal, and the subjective and objective. The natural is external, objective; and the purely spiritual, internal, subjective. Among the ancients, then, even the inmost emotions assume an external shape; subjective feeling asserts itself less than objective perception and representation. Herewith we have the differences between ancient and modern times reduced to seven categories:

By applying these pairs of contrasted concepts to the several spheres of ancient life, we may present a general view of antiquity, approaching our object from every angle. Yet we should not forget that the contrasted ideas are not mutually exclusive, and that in antiquity particular individuals advanced beyond the limits of the general development, while modern civilization, on the other hand, has in more than one respect fallen behind, or indeed on occasion retrogressed.

I. On its first appearance in the Orient the State seems to have been wholly under the dominion of nature, being formed by a natural artistic instinct in man (who is a ov toλitikóv) out of the family, and upon the model of the family, into the organized tribe. Larger kingdoms arose when one tribe held a number of others together by force. In the absence of any free and conscious principle, occupations undertaken by the individual for society were handed down as an inheritance. Thus arose castes-for they were no invention of the priesthood. Among the early Greeks we find similar conditions. There each state originally consisted of