Excerpt from The Book of History, Vol. 7: A History of All Nations From the Earliest Times to the Present With Over 8000 Illustrations
Greek and Roman civilisations are two component parts of one great whole. Politically the form of state and the ideas of government which we meet in Greece and Italy are substantially the same. Greek literature, art, and science survived with abundant vitality throughout the period which we roughly call Roman; in half of the Roman empire Greek was the universal language, and every educated Roman of the later period spoke and wrote Greek almost as easily as Latin. Roman literature was modelled upon Greek; every Roman poet thought it a matter of duty to imitate some Greek original. The Christian fathers wrote both in Greek and Latin, and thus Christian thought was passed on into the Middle Ages strongly tinged with both Greek and Roman ideas.
Yet Rome was very far from being merely an outgrowth of Greece. Rome grew from her own root, and Greek ideas were grafted on to her stock only after it had attained a certain maturity of its own. Rome made an independent contribution to the great whole which we may call Mediterranean civilisation, and thus also to the civilisation which we may call modern and European. The Roman spirit, though it came to be so greatly affected by the Greek spirit as to tempt us to call it Gr?co-Roman, did in reality survive all through the history of the Roman people, and it is the object of this section to trace it continually at work.
Let us begin by asking what was the peculiar contribution of the Romans, as distinct from that of the Greeks, to that great Gr?co-Roman whole on which our modern civilisation is so largely based? We can separate it from the other chief contributing element if we steadily bear in mind two facts. First, Rome became guardian of Greek civilisation after the political and material decay of Greece; she supplied the military force and the organising genius which saved the choicest products of the Greek spirit for centuries from destruction at the hands of semi-barbarous peoples of the east and wholly barbarous peoples of the north; and when at last the invaders broke through the barriers she had planted, her spirit was still so completely in the ascendant as to move them with an awe which secured the immortality of her long-guarded treasures. Secondly, the Roman genius for public and private law supplied a common basis of orderly life for the whole Gr?co-Roman world. Mommsen, the great historical exponent of Roman law, defined law as state interference in the interests and passions of humanity.
Applying this to the work of Rome in the world, we may say that in her a state power at last arose, after long periods of tentative and unintelligent government, which did so effectually interfere among the interests and passions of humanity in that Gr?co-Roman world that we still feel it at work among us.
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