But there is one aspect in which all those periods form one whole; there is one tie which binds all three together; there has been one abiding duty which has been laid on Aryan Europe in all her phases, before Rome, under Rome, and after Rome. One “question” has, in the cant of the day, been “awaiting its solution,” from the beginning of recorded history, and from a time long before recorded history. That is the question on which a shallow sneerer, in the lucky wisdom of his blindness, bestowed the epithet of “Eternal.” Happily indeed did he transfer to that abiding strife the epithet of the city whose sons bore so long and mighty a part in it. It is the “Eternal Eastern Question,” the undying question between the civilization of the West and the barbarism of the East, a question which has here and there taken into its company such side issues as the strife between freedom and bondage, between Christendom and Islam, but which is in its essence simply that yet older strife of whose earlier stages Herodotus so well grasped the meaning. It is a strife which has, as far as we can look back, put on the familiar shape of a strife between East and West. And in that abiding strife, that Eternal Question, the men of the Eternal City, Scipio and Sulla, Trajan and Julian, played their part well indeed; but it was waged before them and after them as far back as the days of Agamemnôn and Achilleus, as near to the present moment as the days of Codrington and Skobeleff. In all ages, from the earliest to the latest, before the championship passed to Rome and after it had passed away from Rome, two great and abiding duties have been laid on Aryan Europe and on the several powers of Aryan Europe. They have been called on to develope the common institutions of the great family within its own borders; and they have been called on to defend those borders and those institutions against the inroads of the barbarian from without.
When our historic scene first opens, those twofold duties were laid on a small branch of the European family, and that the branch that dwelled nearest to the lands of the enemy. It is not without a cause that those lands of Europe which lie nearest to Asia—we might almost add, those lands of Asia which are historically part of Europe—are in their physical construction the most European of European lands. Europe is the continent of islands, peninsulas, and inland seas; the lands round the Ægæan, its Asiatic as well as its European shore, form more thoroughly a world of islands, peninsulas, and inland seas than any other part of Europe or of the world. The Greek land was made for its people, and the Greek people for their land. I remember well the saying of one in this place with whom geographical insight is an instinct, that neither the Greeks in any other land nor any other people in Greece could have been what the Greeks in Greece actually were. The mission of the Greek race was to be the teachers, the lights, the beacons, of mankind, but not their rulers. They were to show what man could be, in a narrow space and in a short space of time; they were to show every faculty developed to its highest point, to give models of every form of political constitution, of every form of intellectual life, to bring to perfection among themselves and to hand on to all future ages that most perfect form of human speech, a living knowledge of which is still the one truest test of the highest culture. Greece was given to be the mistress of the world in the sense of being the world’s highest intellectual teacher; it was not hers to be the mistress of the world in the sense in which that calling fell to another of the great peninsulas of southern Europe. Deep and abiding as has been the influence of old Greece on every later age, her influence has been almost wholly indirect; it has been an influence of example, of precept, of warning; it has not been an influence of direct cause and effect. In one sense the world could never have been what it now is if the men of old Hellas had not lived and fought and thought and sung. But it is in another sense from that in which we say that the world could not be what it now is if the men of old Rome had not lived and fought, and—we will not say thought and sung, but ruled and judged the nations. It is indeed no small thought, it is one of the most quickening and ennobling of thoughts, that those men of Hellas were our kinsfolk, men of the same great family as ourselves, men whose institutions and whose speech are simply other and older forms of the speech and institutions of our own folk. The ancient lore alike of Greece and of England puts on a keener charm when we see in the Agorê before Ilios the same gathering under well nigh the same forms as we see in the Marzfeld beneath the walls of Rheims and in the Gemót beneath the walls of London. We seem more at home alike in either age when we see the ἑταῖροι, the θεράποντες, that fought around Achilleus rise again in the true gesiðas, the faithful þegnas, of our own folk, in Lilla who gave his life for Eadwine and in the men who died, thegn-like, their lord hard by, around the corpse of Brihtnoth at Maldon. Still all this is but likeness, example, analogy, derivation from a common source; we are dealing, not with forefathers but with elder brethren. The laws of Lykourgos and Solôn have passed away; it is the laws of Servius and Justinian that still abide. The empire of Mykênê, the democracy of Athens, the league of Achaia, are all things of the past. If the Empire of Rome is no longer a thing of the present, if it has passed away, if it is dead and buried, it is well to remember that there are still men living who have seen its funeral. I am myself not old enough to have seen its funeral; but I have before now seen some look amazed when I told them that I had lived on the earth for twelve years along with a man who had once been Emperor of the Romans.
The days before the Roman power may be looked on as in some sort the preface to a volume the last page of which is not written, as the porch of a building which still stands and which architects to come may still add to or take from. It is with Rome that the chapters of the book itself begin; it is Rome that reared the first still inhabited chambers of the house. Or we may rather say that the tale of the days before Rome is a summary, short and brilliant, of all that man has done or can do. The tale of Hellas shows us a glorified ideal of human powers, held up to the world for a moment to show what man can be, but to show us also that such he cannot be for long. And herein is the highest glory of Greece; herein is the highest value of the tongue and history of Greece as supplying the truest and noblest teaching for the mind of man. In no other study are we so truly seeking knowledge simply to raise and school the mind; in none do we so sharply draw the still abiding line between those who have gone through the refining furnace of those immortal studies and the barbarians—sometimes the self-condemned barbarians—who stand without. When we study the tongue, the laws, the history, of our own people, of any people of our immediate kindred, of that people who, whether conquering or conquered, were still the masters of us all, we are as it were engaged in our own work, we are busy with the toil of our own daily life; it is still something of a business, something of a calling. In our Hellenic studies we stand on a loftier height, we breathe a purer air, even as the peak of Olympos overtops the height of Alba. We master the tongue of Latium, because it is still the tongue of no small part of the business of practical life, because it meets us at every turn as an essential part of our own law, our own history, our very daily being. We master the tongue of Hellas as being in itself the first and noblest form of the common speech, as the tongue which, in its native and unborrowed strength, brought forth the greatest master-pieces of every form of lettered utterance, those master-pieces which none can know save those who can follow the very words of the poet, the orator, the philosopher himself, and who are not at the mercy of some blind guide who vainly strives to reproduce those living words in ruder tongues. After long years of familiar knowledge, we need hardly sigh for the days when those deathless works were fresh to us. The tale of Ilios and Ithakê, the oldest inheritance of the common folk, the oldest picture of the common household, is ever living, ever fresh. We can but pity the doom of those who, by their own act or by the act of others, are shut out from it.
The beginnings then of European history, more strictly perhaps the beginnings of the brilliant prologue to unbroken European history, will be found in the borderlands of Europe and Asia, among the islands and peninsulas of the Ægæan sea. I am speaking now of history in the narrower sense, of the continuous political history of man. With the strangers who lay without the great brotherhood, ancient as may have been their power, mighty as may have been their works, we have to deal only when they come across the men of our own household. We begin in short with the first beginnings of the recorded history of Greece, with the first Olympiad as a conventional date, but not forgetting times before the first Olympiad so far as our earliest pictures carry us back to yet older times. I cleave to the date which I proposed in my Inaugural Lecture. I have to be sure come across a singular objection from a critic in this place. I have been told that, by beginning with the first Olympiad, I leave out all Mahometan history. There are then, one must think, those who believe that all Mahometan history took place before the first Olympiad. “Felices errore suo.” I can only heartily wish that it were so, and that the Ottoman was a thing as dead and gone as the Hittite. I fear that, beginning with 776 B.C., nay even if we begin with the mystic year 476 A.D., we shall still have all Mahometan history in front of us, and that the needs of our tale will drive us to take not a few glimpses at that side of the world. From the very beginning we have to do with powers which filled the same place in the world which the Mahometan powers filled in after ages, the powers against which our eldest brethren had to wage the earlier stages of the strife which still is waging. With ingenious speculations as to the earliest origin, the earliest settlements, the earliest forms of speech, of the Hellenic folk, I am not, in such a summary as this, called on to concern myself. I gladly leave them to my ancient brother. I have to deal with the Greek when he appears on the stage of the world as the first champion of the great cause and as waging a strife against worthy rivals. One people alone in the barbarian world have even the shadow of a right to be placed side by side, to be dealt with as ebenbürtig, with the men of Hellas. In the men of Canaan the men of Hellas had to acknowledge rivals who were largely forerunners and in some sort masters. Greece had ships, colonies, and commerce; but Phœnicia had ships, colonies, and commerce in days earlier still. How high in all the material arts the Phœnician stood above the earliest Greek we see in our earliest picture of Hellenic life. Not to speak of lesser gifts, we all bear in our minds that it was from the Phœnician that Hellas must first have learned to carve the abiding records of man’s thought on the stone, on the brazen or wooden tablet, on the leaves of Egypt and on the skins of Pergamon. The political life of Greece was her own; that assuredly was no borrowed gift from Tyre or Sidon; yet Tyre and Sidon and that mightier Carthage whose institutions Aristotle studied had a political life of their own which brought them nearer to the Hellenic level than any other people beyond the Aryan fold. Only, if we must admit that the men of Canaan were on some points the teachers of the men of Hellas, yet it was the men of Hellas and not the men of Canaan to whom destiny had given the call to be the teachers of the world. It is a strange destiny by which the people who gave Greece the art of writing should have left to us no writings to hand down to us the thoughts and deeds of a world of their own that has passed away. Strange destiny that, while so large a part of the acts of the Phœnician are recorded by Greek and Roman enemies, while the tongue of the Phœnician may be said still to live for us in the speech of the kindred Hebrew, yet the direct memorials of so great a people should not go beyond a few coins, a few inscriptions, a few ruins of cities which once held their place among the mightiest of the earth.
Our scene then opens with the picture of the Greek while still shut up in his own special land of islands and peninsulas. We ask not for our purposes how and whence he came thither; we ask not the exact measure of his kindred in blood and speech to the other nations around him. It is enough for us that the Greek is not wholly isolated, that he is not merely one of the great Aryan family, but that he is the foremost among a group of nations who are bound to him by some closer tie than that which binds together all the branches of the great Aryan family. The exact degree of kindred between Greeks and Thracians or Phrygians we may leave to other inquirers; it is enough for us that there was the common Aryan kindred, and seemingly something more. But it is one of the leading facts of history that Greece had to deal on her immediate northern frontier, on the opposite coasts of Asia, on the opposite coasts of Italy and Sicily, with nations which, for historical purposes at least, were nearer still. Those nations had, to say the least, a power of adopting Greek ways, a power of becoming Greeks by adoption if not by birth. The boundary line between the Greek and the Epeirot, faint in the earliest days of Greece, seems for some ages to be drawn sharper and sharper. Then the tide turns; suddenly the Epeirots, the people of the oldest Hellas, the guardians of the oldest of Hellenic oracles, stand forth again in their elder character. Molottian Pyrrhos wages Western wars as a Hellenic champion and the kingdom of Pyrrhos settles down at last into a well-ordered Greek confederation.
So it is in Macedonia; so it is in Sicily; so it is in the Greater Hellas on Italian soil. All these lands, and other lands beside, become, for a longer or shorter time, part of the immediate Greek world, no less than Attica or Peloponnêsos. Greek colonization and Macedonian conquest had, each in its turn, a share in the work, and both were in many lands not a little helped by real, if unconscious, kindred on the part of those whom colonists and conquerors found already in possession. Every colony, every conquest, not only won new lands for the Greek settlers themselves, but increased the Greek nation in its wider sense by multitudes who became Greek by adoption, and in whose case the work of adoption was made more easy by the existence of earlier ties of which neither side had thought. As time goes on, as we reach the days when Greek influences were most widely spread over the Mediterranean lands, we may easily trace out zones within zones, marking out the different stages by which the Greek element grows fainter and fainter. First there is the centre of all, the original Hellas itself. Then there are the genuine colonies of old Hellas, detached fragments of Hellenic soil translated to foreign coasts. Then there are the kindred lands whose people were fully adopted into the Hellenic fold. Beyond them again lie the kingdoms ruled by Macedonian princes, where a few great cities which we must call Greek by the law of adoption are planted in lands which have received at the outside only the faintest varnish of Hellenic culture. Lastly, beyond these again, there are the barbarian lands whose princes, like barbarian princes in our own day, made a show of adopting Greek speech and Greek culture, but where the foreign tastes of the princes had no real effect on their kingdoms, and which we cannot look on as forming part of the Greek world in the laxest sense. Such was Parthia; such was Pontos. Is it too much to add to the barbarian kingdoms of the East the mighty commonwealth of the West which had once been in Greek eyes no less barbarian? It is no small part of our œcumenical story to mark how far Rome became Greek and how far Rome refused to become Greek. The facts belong to a later time; yet in some sort they form part of our present survey. The Rome which brought the Greek lands step by step, first under Roman influence, then under Roman dominion, was a Rome which had already come within the magic circle of Hellenic teaching; while keeping the essential essence of the national life untouched, while remaining truly Roman in every political institution, in every detail of law and government, she became Greek for every purpose of refined and intellectual life. Nay, Rome became, like Macedonia, a disciple that gathered in fresh disciples. Wherever Rome’s political life spread, some measure, greater or less, of Greek intellectual life spread with it.
The history of Europe before the Roman power is in truth the history of the stages by which the Greek mind made its way to this general supremacy over the civilized world, and in some sort beyond the bounds of the civilized world. Within the range of this supremacy of the Greek mind comes the narrower range of the political supremacy of powers which were either Greek from the beginning or which had become Greek by adoption. The supremacy of the Greek mind has never ceased, and is still abiding. Greek intellectual dominion has formed one side of the whole modern world; the advance of Greek political power has wrought the lesser, but by no means unimportant, work of forming one of the nations of the modern world. The modern Greek nation, meaning thereby something more than the inhabitants either of the existing Greek kingdom or of the continuous Hellas of old times, is the fruit of old Greek colonization, followed up by Macedonian conquest. I said years ago that Alexander was the founder of the modern Greek nation, and I say so still. This saying may seem to shut out the work of earlier Greek colonization, above all in those lands of Sicily and southern Italy which we have spoken of as having been admitted by adoption within the immediate Greek world. The truth is that Greek colonization has nowhere been fully lasting, it has nowhere left its abiding traces on the modern world, except where Macedonian conquest came to strengthen it. This enables us to fix a boundary for the lands which were permanently admitted within the immediate Greek world. That boundary is the Hadriatic. West of the Hadriatic Greek life has died out. The outlying Greek colonies in Gaul and Spain, deep as was their influence on Gaul, had ceased to be Greek before the great nations of modern Europe came into being. Even southern Italy and Sicily, where Greek life was strengthened by their long connexion with the Greek Rome on the Bosporos, have ceased to be Greek for some ages. The lands in which a series of invaders of whom Pyrrhos of Molottis was the last and greatest strove in vain to set up a Western Greek dominion, have fallen away from the Greek world. But the work which Alexander of Epeiros failed to do in the West was largely done by his more famous nephew and namesake in the East. If a great part of Alexander’s conquests were but for a short time, another great part of them was abiding. The work of Alexander and Seleukos fixed a line fluctuating between the Euphrates and the Tigris, as a long abiding boundary of European dominion. It fixed Tauros, the boundary of Alexander’s first Asiatic conquests, as a far more abiding boundary of European life. I have had to point out in two hemispheres, but I must point out again, how very nearly the actual range of the modern Greek nation agrees with the range of old Greek colonization east of Hadria. It has advanced at some points and it has gone back at others; but its general extent is wonderfully the same. It is an extent which in both ages has been fixed by the genius of the people. Nowhere out of the old continuous Hellas does the Greek people, none the less Greek because largely Greek by adoption, spread from sea to sea. Throughout a large part of eastern Europe and western Asia the Greek is the representative of European and civilized life on the whole sea-coast. The world of peninsulas and islands is the world of the Greek now, exactly as it was in the days of the Homeric Catalogue.
It is, as we held in our former course, with that Catalogue, the first written record of European politics, that our survey of Europe before the Roman Power must open. With all who can take a general grasp of history and who understand the nature of evidence, the Domesday of the Empire of Mykênê, puzzling to the mere porer over two or three arbitrarily chosen centuries, commands full belief. We ruled it in our former inquiry to be the highest example of a general rule, “Credo quia impossibile.” In the Catalogue we see the people of many islands and of all Argos, grouped under the Bretwalda of Hellas, already engaged in a stage, and not the earliest stage, of the Eternal Question. Herodotus, who better knew the meaning of the world’s history than the diplomatists of modern days, could point, in a mythical shape indeed, to stages earlier still. Whether there ever was a personal Agamemnôn and a personal Odysseus matters but little; it matters far more that the keen eye of Ælfred, who knew the relation of an overlord and his vassal princes, could see the relation between Ulixes with his two kingdoms and the Casere Agamemnôn of whom he held them. That Casere, kingliest among the kingly, βασιλεύτερος in the throng of βασιλῆες, is already doing the work of a Trajan or a Frederick; he is fighting for Europe on the shores of Asia. The work of Greek colonization has begun; Crete, to be won again ages after from the Saracen, is already won from the Phœnician; Rhodes is already admitted to Hellenic fellowship, to see in after days the might of Antigonos and the might of Mahomet shattered beneath her walls. The southern coast of Asia is still untouched; Milêtos is a barbarian city; but Achilleus has won Lesbos as his own prize, and on the mainland the work is doing which was to make the coasts of the Hellespont and the Propontis a foremost outpost of Greece and Europe, the land which was to witness the first exploits of the first crusaders and to behold the Eastern Rome rise to a fresh life under the firm rule of the Emperors of Nikaia. Deem we as we will as to minuter details, as we have in the Homeric poems our first glimpse of Aryan society in peace and war, so we have in them our first record, if only in a poetic form, of one stage of the great strife which changed the barbarian peninsula of Asia into that solid home of Grecian speech and Roman law which for ages held up against the ceaseless inroads of the Arabian conquerors. To the west, to the north, our range of sight is narrower. No colonist from Argos and its islands has made his way to Italy or Sicily; Akarnania is still part of the vague Mainland, the still undefined Epeiros; Korkyra is still a land of fable on which no settler from Corinth has set foot. But there are signs which already point to the kindred of the nations on both sides of the Ionian sea. The Sikel dwells on both coasts; even of the more mysterious Sikan we get a passing glimpse. The northern coast of the Ægæan is known; but that coast is not yet Hellenic; it significantly sends its warriors to fight on the Asiatic side. Further to the north, further to the west, all is wonder and mystery; we may as well ask whether the poet had any conception of the site of London as whether he had any conception of the site of Rome. The eyes of infant Greece are still fixed on the East; vague tidings had reached her of the wonders of the land by the river Ægypt; the men of Sidon were her visitors, her traffickers, in some sort her teachers. But the wary sons of Canaan were too wise to tell all they knew of Western lands and Western seas. The gold of Tartêssos was as yet for them only; for them only was the precious knowledge that the pillars of Hêraklês—if Greece had as yet heard their name—opened into no stream of Ocean parting the lands of the living and the dead, but into the boundless waters over which it was as yet for themselves alone to spread their sails.
Let us take another glance at the Mediterranean world at a later time, a time when our historic evidence is still meagre and scattered, but when we have begun to leave mere legend behind us. It is one of the gains or losses of the wider study of history that it often teaches us to look at this and that period with different eyes from those with which we naturally look at them when we are engaged only in the narrower study of special times and places. I well remember learning, and I well remember being startled as I learned, from the teaching of Mr. Finlay, that the age which we commonly look on as the most glorious in Grecian history, the fifth century before Christ, was in truth an age of Greek decline. The truth is that it was the greatest age in the history of Athens, and a crowd of causes lead us at every moment to mistake the history of Athens for the history of Greece. What we sometimes fail to see Herodotus saw clearly. He saw that in the general history of the world the age of the Persian wars was, for the Greek people as a whole, the scattered Greek people all over the world, an age of decline. The fact that there was a Persian war, a Persian war waged in Greece, is enough to prove the saying. That fact of itself shows that that process had already begun which is still not ended, the long and gloomy work of which Finlay steeled himself to write the story, the History of Greece under Foreign Domination. It is enough to prove Finlay’s point that Milêtos had learned to groan, as thrice-betrayed Jôannina groans still, beneath the yoke of the barbarian. The periods when Greek influences had most sway over the whole world are two, one earlier, one later, than the more brilliant times of our usual studies. The earlier is the greater; for it is the time when Hellas grew and spread and made wide her borders among the nations, by her own unaided strength, the time when Hellenic colonization carried everywhere, not only Hellenic speech and Hellenic arts, but the higher boon of free Hellenic political life. In the later period Hellenic speech and Hellenic arts are spread more widely than they had ever been spread before; but Hellenic political life is no longer carried with them. The external might of Greece is wielded for her by the kings of the adopted lands; we have passed from Hellenic colonization to Macedonian conquest. In neither of those periods was the most vigorous Greek life to be found in old Greece itself; the most brilliant recorded period of old Greece is the period between the two, the period of our most usual Greek studies. But it was the most brilliant because the outer bounds of Hellas had fallen back before victorious barbarians, and because old Greece rose up in a renewed strength to avenge the wrongs of her colonies and to ward off the like bondage from herself. The Greece of the fifth century before Christ is like the Rome of the fourth century after Christ. Its warfare is essentially defensive; it seldom gains new ground; it has much ado to defend old ground. It gains victories; it wins territories; but the victories are gained over threatening invaders, the territories that are won are won back from the grasp of those invaders. The work of Kimôn, the work of Agêsilaos, answers rather to the work of Galerius and Valentinian than to the work of those conquerors of realms wholly new who made Sicily a Greek and Gaul a Roman land.