Indeed, the great sources of a nation’s happiness and power must always lie about the domestic hearth. There or nowhere are sown, and for many years cherished by culture, all those virtues which bloom afterwards in public, and form the best ornaments of the commonwealth. Men are everywhere exactly what their mothers make them. If these are slaves, narrow-minded, ignorant, unhappy, those in their turn will be so also. The domestic example, small and obscure though it be, will impress its image on the state; since that which individually is base and little, can never by congregating with neighbouring littleness, become great, or lead to those heroic efforts, those noble self-sacrifices, which elevate human nature to a sphere in which it appears to touch upon and partake something of the divine.
By minutely studying, as far as practicable, those small obscure sanctuaries of Greek civilisation—the private dwellings of Attica--I hoped to discover the secret of that moral alchemy by which were formed
Those dead, but sceptred sovereigns who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.
In these haunts, little familiar to our imagination, lay concealed the germs of law, good government, philosophy, the arts, and whatever else has tended to soften and render beautiful the human clay. That this was the case is certain; why it should have been so, we may perhaps be unable satisfactorily to explain; but that is what we shall at least attempt in the present work, and for this purpose, it will at the first glance be apparent, that the most elaborate delineation of the political institutions of Athens must prove altogether insufficient. These were but one among many powerful causes. The principal lay deeper in a combination of numerous circumstances:—a peculiarly perfect and beautiful physical organization; a mind fraught with enthusiasm, force, flexibility, and unrivalled quickness; a buoyancy of temper which no calamity could long depress; consequent, probably, upon this, a strong religious feeling ineradicably seated in the heart; an unerring perception of the beautiful in art and nature; and lastly, the enjoyment of a genial climate, and an atmosphere pure, brilliant, and full of sunshine as their minds.
Races of men, though not in precisely the same manner as individuals, yet exhibit, at particular periods of their history, a freshness, a vigour, a disinterestedness, like that of youth; and, because this state of feeling may more than once occur in the course of their career, they seem to spring, like Æson, out of convulsions and apparent dissolution to a state of perfect rejuvenescence. Calamity and suffering purify whole communities as they do individuals. In the boiling and commotion of revolutions the impurities of the national character bubble upwards and are skimmed away by the iron hand of misfortune. These political convulsions are, in fact, so many efforts of nature to expel some disease lurking in the constitution, and which, though the race be immortal, might, if suffered to remain in the frame, produce a lethargy worse than death. This truth we should bear constantly in mind; for among the characteristics of the Athenian constitution, not the least remarkable are the many efforts it made to right itself, and adapt its framework to the changing circumstances of the times.
In the present inquiry we must, as I have already said, discover, if we can, how much Hellas owed to its climate, to its position on the globe, and to the physical organization of its inhabitants. It would be absurd to infer with some writers, that the influence of these circumstances is imaginary, because Greece seems to remain where it was of old, and the constitution and temperament of the people to be likewise unchanged. But this is not the case. Greece no longer occupies in the map of the world the position it occupied in antiquity. It has been lifted out of the centre of civilisation, to be cast upon its outskirts, or, which is the same thing, civilisation has shifted its seat. Nor are the Greeks any longer what they formerly were, though perhaps by a fortunate combination of circumstances they might still be rendered so. At present there is the same difference between them and their ancestors as between a jar of Falernian, and an empty jar. The clay, indeed, is there, beautifully moulded, and the purple hue of life is on the cheek; but tyranny from the battle of Cheronæa,
“That dishonest victory
Fatal to liberty!”
until now has been draining out the soul. In the day when Hellas was itself its children walked in light, in the first beautiful light of the morning, which long seemed to shine only upon them; and now, perhaps, after the revolution of a cycle almost equal to the Great Year, they may, probably, be approaching another dawn.