Greek Lands and Letters

Cicero, at one time studying Greek oratory in Rhodes, at another speaking Greek as the language best adapted to a Sicilian audience, suggests with sufficient definiteness the eastern and western boundaries of ancient Hellas. Leaving out of consideration more remote colonies, we may content ourselves with including in the Greater Greece of antiquity all the Mediterranean lands and waters from Sicily and Lower Italy, in the west, to Cyprus and the coast of Asia Minor, in the east. The Riviera, or seaboard of the eastern side of the Ægean, is sharply differentiated from the continuous highlands of the interior, which suggest, a short distance inland, a boundary line between Europe and Asia. For a maritime people like the Greeks this was a barrier more effectual than the highway of the Bosphorus. In the early historic times, when the sun rose over these mountains of Asia Minor he left behind him the Oriental and looked down at once upon the Cis-montane Greeks, and it was upon Greeks that he was still shining when his setting splendour lit up the Bay of Naples—the “New-town” of that day—or the ancient Cumæ and the heights of Anacapri or the islands of the Sirens and the golden brown columns of Poseidon’s temple at Pæstum.

The seaboard, too, of Macedonia and Thrace belonged to Greece by reason of their water-front on the Ægean. And to the south, the encroachments of the Greeks upon the preserves of the Nile-god were so extensive for centuries before the time of Alexander that we need not wonder either at Egyptian reminiscences in Greek art or at the increasing evidences of Hellenic life in Egypt.

The Greeks, compared with the hoary antiquity of the Egyptians, are late comers. The essential difference, however, is not a matter of centuries or millennia. The Egyptians, perhaps because the details are foreshortened by the vast distance, seem to possess a chronology, but no real history. There were revolutions, rather than evolution. The Greeks were young, too, individually as well as chronologically. From Homer down through the classic period we hear “the everlasting wonder-song of youth.” Plato makes an Egyptian priest say to the Athenian law-giver: “O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are ever children; no Hellene is ever old!” We find the Greeks of the historic period on the intellectual watershed between antiquity and the modern world. From data now well established we may push back their life far beyond recorded chronology, and, if we anticipate even by a little the nucleus of the Homeric poems, we possess a practically unbroken continuity of their history and language for three thousand years down to the present day. Greek history is often confined within perfectly arbitrary dates. In reality, the death of Alexander in 323 B. C., the closing of the schools of philosophy in 529 A. D., and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 A. D. only break its course into convenient chapters.