But now we must take a look at the very remarkable part which Greece was playing at this moment, 500 B.C. or so, and had played for some years and was to play for many to come. I expect you will have wondered that I have not spoken about Homer and the famous Siege of Troy, and other great men and great events which happened long before this time. Troy began to be besieged very shortly after 1200 B.C. Homer lived at some time between 800 and 900 B.C. We have left them far behind.
The reason why I did not pick them up and fit them into their place in the story when we came to the years of their happening is that the part played by Greece in the making of this great story—that is to say, in the making of the world—is different from the part played by any other people. It is such a different part that it is almost another story, although it does really fit into the great story and is a very important part of it.
The other great peoples that we have been talking about, the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Persians, conquered vast countries, founded vast empires. The Greeks did nothing of this kind. They were fine and accomplished soldiers, as we have seen, but the various states were too disunited for them to be able to bring their forces together or to keep them for any length of time together.
The genius of Greece
But for many centuries they were by far the most accomplished people in the world; their artists, both painters and sculptors, were far ahead of the rest; their thinkers went deeper and with more clear insight and wisdom than any others into the many problems and puzzles that life and the world set for us; they had finer sculptors, finer orators, finer poets, probably they had finer musicians; we have seen that they had a finer battle formation.
In fact, in cleverness and in all the arts and sciences the Greeks were not only superior to all those about them, but they were superior to all that have been since—even to ourselves, though we have had all these years in which to learn. We have learnt to make trains go, and the telephone and poison gases, and guns that will shoot twenty-five miles, and other things of that kind. But we are not the equals of the Greeks of 500 B.C. in art, oratory, poetry or philosophy. Had it not been for the Greek philosophers we cannot tell what our philosophy might have been, for it is built up on the foundations they laid; but we may doubt whether it would have been nearly as far-seeing or as interesting.
And that is really the most important part that the Greeks took in the making of the story—a part quite different from that of the great empire-makers, and yet, as I think you will agree, a bigger part than any of theirs. For it made, or did a great deal to make, the thought of the world what it is to-day. It did a great deal to make the thought of the world what it was all down the pages of the story, say from 1200 B.C. onwards. I mean that it made men think about things—about art and philosophy and music, and about life in general—as they do think. Had it not been for the Greeks we should be thinking differently, and probably not nearly so wisely, about all these things. That is the greatest work that the Greeks have done in the world.
You may remember that we said the disasters which befell the Jews, and their scattering throughout the other nations, made them able to take their religious ideas with them, and to sow those ideas, as it were seeds from which plants should spring, amongst those nations into which they were driven. Something like the same kind of scattering happened to the Greeks, and so enabled them to carry their ideas over a great part of the world. Of their own accord they would, no doubt, have carried them far. If you look at the map of Greece, you will see that not only has the country the sea on three sides of it, but that it is cut up, and cut into, by a wonderful number of bays and gulfs of the sea, so that it would have a very great length of seashore if all were added together. Naturally that meant that the Greeks were great sea-goers. They were a great "maritime" people, as we should say—from mare, which is Latin for sea. A good deal of their excellence in art we may suspect that they derived from those ancient Minoans whom we saw masters of Crete very long ago. The Minoans, as the Minotaur legend showed us, were masters of Athens also. They were the great sea-power in very ancient times. They left evidences of their art at Mycenæ in Greece. The Greeks, following the Minoans in art, perhaps followed them also in the skilful management of ships. We know, at all events, that they went far and wide on the Mediterranean in ships, certainly as great traders, probably often as pirates, and, whether the one or the other, taking their thoughts, their arts, their culture with them.
The expansion of the Greeks