This race had dwelt for some ages in Greece, and from thence occupied by emigration the shores of Asia Minor, Sicily, and Southern Italy, with a part of Africa. Pythagoras, the father of Italian philosophy, had migrated from Samos to Crotona, having visited Egypt, examined and gathered from all the stores of its knowledge. A century later Herodotus, the father of Greek history, migrated likewise from his country Halicarnassus, and after spending many years in extensive travels through Egypt and Western Asia settled at Thurii. In the succeeding century Plato travelled in like manner with similar purposes. He was familiar with Sicily as with his own Attica, not to speak of Egypt or Phœnicia. These three great men, Pythagoras, Herodotus, and Plato, are specimens herein of the cultured Greek, the gentleman, as we should call him. Thus though Greece proper was a very small country, the whole region from middle Italy, including Sicily, and the rich coast-land of Northern Africa from Carthage to Egypt, with [pg 378] again Phœnicia and Syria, and the continent to the depth of perhaps a hundred miles round the three sides of Asia Minor watered by the sea, were in a larger sense the Greek's country, a field of Grecian thought, and enterprise, and observation, a sphere in which his mind was enlarged, and his judgment of men and things matured.[323] Generally speaking these regions were singularly favoured as to richness of soil and convenience of situation. Herodotus himself has marked the climate of Ionia as the most beautiful and best-tempered of the earth; and with a far wider knowledge of its regions we should not venture to dispute the justness of his remark. Some modern writers are wont to dwell on the effect which climate exercises upon man's mind. However this may be, it is certain that the race whose energies were diffused over this region was most highly gifted with natural endowments. When out of the world which Christianity has mainly formed, and from the bosom of nations which have grown through the struggle of a thousand years, and with perpetual competition among each other, into a rich civilisation, we look back on that ancient and simpler world, we find in Hellenism the most perfect expression of the natural man, as a plastic, artistic, poetical, philosophical, and generally intellectual [pg 379] race, wherein matter was most completely permeated by mind. The language which they used even yet presents a very perfect image of such a race, as not being formed from the corruption of other idioms, but a mother tongue, the most brilliant of the Aryan sisters. In its union of strength with beauty, of pleasing sound with accurate sense, in its power to convey the most subtle distinctions of philosophic thought, or the most radiant images of sensuous loveliness, the gravest enunciations of law, or the tenderest dreams of romance, it was well calculated to be the organ of a people wherein bodily form and immaterial intellect alike culminated. The language which we use ourselves is full of nerve and vigor, with a certain northern force and a habit of appropriating the material stores of other languages by incorporating their words, which suits well the descendants of sea-kings, who have provinces all over the world; but it is without inflexions, deprived of cases and genders, defective in marking time, whereas the Greek in all these is most rich and flexible: the one resembles the torso of a Hercules without its limbs, the other an Apollo as he touches the earth in his perfect symmetry. Then compare its sound with that of the old Hellenic tongue, and we seem to hear the poet's “stridor ferri tractæque catenæ,” beside the voice of a lute; while as to texture, it is like the train of a railway matched with the golden network, fine as the spider's web, indissoluble [pg 380] as adamant, which the poet feigns to have been wrought by Vulcan: the English imprisons thought in a rude and cumbrous iron, while the Greek exhibits it in a rich and ductile gold. As was the language, so was the people. Fond of society and intercourse, skilful, crafty, commercial, enterprising, with a most human and genial intellect, with a keen and critical judgment, and a vivid imagination. When such a race turned itself to a scientific consideration of the world, it might well produce what we are now to pass in review, the Greek philosophy.
And here it is well to lay down first the standing-point of the Greek mind. The Hellenic religion was a natural religion, inasmuch as according to it man had no need to raise himself above the surrounding world and his own nature in order to connect himself with the Deity. As he was originally constituted, he felt himself related to it: no inward change in his mode of thought, no struggle with his natural impulses and inclinations, was required of him for this purpose. All that to him was humanly natural seemed to him to have its justification in regard to the Deity likewise; and so the most godlike man was he who worked out most completely his powers as man, and the essence of religious duty consisted in that man should do for the honour of the Deity what is in accordance with his own nature.[324]
But this natural religion of the Greeks differed from that of others in that neither outward nature as such, nor the sensuous being of man as such, but human nature in its beauty, as illumined by mind, is its point of excellence. The Greek did not, like the Eastern, lose his independence before the powers of nature, nor revel like the northern savage in boundless liberty, but in the full consciousness of his freedom saw its highest fulfilment in obedience to the general order as the law of his own nature. And as the purely Grecian deities are the ideals of human activity, he thus stands to them in a calm and free relation, such as no other nation of antiquity felt, because they are the mirror of his own being, but his being exalted, so that he is drawn to them without purchasing this at the cost of the pain and toil of an inward struggle.[325]
How the features of his own land served to image out to his fancy the Greek's religious attitude a poet has told us in exquisite verses, worthy of the beauty which they describe; the apotheosis of nature.
“Where are the Islands of the Blest?
They stud the Ægean sea;
And where the deep Elysian rest?
It haunts the vale where Peneus strong
Pours his incessant stream along,
While craggy ridge and mountain bare