thought struggles out of the mythical and poetic mode. We see the interaction of Greek intellectual supremacy
and the irresistible military might of Rome, in many -ways a tragic story, and one which is full of significance for
our own time. Not less resonant for us is the twofold breach of continuity at beginning and end of our work. The
polished society which produced the palaces of Minoan Crete -was destroyed, and the splendours of Mycenaean
Greece, the imposing citadels, the ivory and the gold, found no successors in the next three hundred years of low
artistic standards, depopulation, and poverty. The fall of Rome was followed by an age of barbarian invasions,
universal insecurity, destruction of cities and works of art. High civilization, once achieved, can be lost: that is
among the reflections suggested by the study of the classical world.
The ancestors of the Greeks, like those of the Romans, belonged to the great Indo-European family of peoples,
which spread in the course of many centuries from an original home somewhere near the Caucasus into India,
Iran, and Europe. They began to enter Greece from the north about 1900 B.C. From the great steppes they
entered a world in which the sea was of primary importance for communications; the land of Greece is
mountainous, broken up into a multitude of separate small plains, river valleys, and islands. The fierce
particularity of classical Greece, in which every city as a matter of course had its own coinage and even its own
calendar, with jealous hostility and intermittent war the rule between neighbouring cities, is clearly connected
with the terrain. Italy, too, is not a country of great navigable rivers: the Romans were astonished by the broad
and equable rivers of Gaul. The climate of Greece is temperate, although the Aegean Sea is notorious for sudden
storms, and a man needed little-by the standards of the wet and chilly North-for reasonable comfort. Open-air
gatherings and a life largely lived out of doors came naturally in such surroundings. However spectacular the
public buildings on the Acropolis, the life-style of a classical Athenian was very modest. The Greeks themselves
said that poverty was their great instructor in hardihood and self-reliance.