I.

During the two centuries that ended with the close of the Peloponnesian war, a single race, weak numerically, and weakened still further by political disunion, simultaneously¹ developed all the highest human faculties² to an extent possibly rivalled but certainly not surpassed by the collective efforts of that vastly greater population which now wields³ the accumulated resources of modern Europe. This race, while maintaining a precarious⁴ foothold on the shores of the Mediterranean⁵ by repeated prodigies⁷ of courage and genius, contributed a new element to civilisation⁸ which has been the mainspring of all subsequent progress, but which, as it expanded into wider circles and encountered an increasing resistance from without, unavoidably lost some of the enormous elasticity⁹ that characterised its earliest and most concentrated reaction. It was the just boast of the Greek that to Asiatic refinement¹⁰ and Thracian valour he joined a disinterested¹¹ thirst for knowledge unshared by his neighbours on either side.5 And if a contemporary of Pericles could have foreseen all that would be thought, and said, and done during2 the next twenty-three centuries of this world’s existence, at no period during that long lapse¹² of ages, not even among the kindred Italian race, could he have found a competitor to contest with Hellas the olive crown of a nobler Olympia, the guerdon due to a unique combination of