Excerpt from The Claim of Antiquity: With an Annotated List of Books for Those Who Know Neither Latin Nor Greek
The modern world is busy. Ancient Greece at times seems ages away: the world of books is too large for any one person to master. What claim, then, has this dead people on our time?
The claim of Greece may be put in Shelley's words: 'Although the scheme of Athenian society was deformed by many imperfections which the poetry existing in chivalry and Christianity has erased from the habits and institutions of modern Europe, yet never at any other period has so much energy, beauty, and virtue been developed; never was blind strength and stubborn form so disciplined and rendered subject to the will of man, or that will less repugnant to the dictates of the beautiful and true, as during the century which preceded the death of Socrates; of no other epoch in the history of our period have we records and fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the divinity in man.' This is the judgement of a great poet, and one not inclined to accept received opinions. Is it not natural that any one interested in what humanity has achieved should wish to know something of a people of which such words can be spoken by such a judge? Or take another writer, John Stuart Mill. He writes: 'The Greeks are the most remarkable people who have yet existed... They were the beginners of nearly everything, Christianity excepted, of which the modern world makes its boast...
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