The great task of Hellenism was the education of the nation that ruled it. This was begun in times out of mind, when the Greek character and Greek weights and measures were adopted on the Tiber, and the first temples in the Greek style arose in Roman market-places to the gods of Greece. The Latins had nevertheless preserved their national characteristics and had tolerated no Greek settlement on their shores. Now the question was no longer one of ousting the Greek language, but rather of adopting the whole of Greek civilisation. Greek scholars, hearing Marcus Cicero speak, lamented that the last advantage of their nation had been taken from them, not without justice. And yet through the winning of this soul the West was won for Greek civilisation, even though it was no less determined that the Hellenes should one day be called Romæi.
It was of cardinal importance to the history of the world that the Hellenistic kingdoms were too weak to enter into the decisive struggle carried on between Rome and Carthage, first for Sicily, (which was utterly lost to the Greeks,) and then for the mastery of the West.
Rome had already banished Greek influence from Italy. This momentous fact of the weakness of Greece was the result of Alexander’s untimely death and of the impossibility of maintaining the unity of the empire, the struggle for which had lasted fifty years and allowed of the rise of three great powers which mutually held one another in check. By the time Rome had overcome Hannibal, Egypt had been so enfeebled by misgovernment that it put itself, ingloriously but prudently, under the protection of the Roman republic. Macedonia succumbed, not without honour. The king of Asia no longer had the power to extend his influence to Europe; he forfeited to Rome the countries to which he owed that title. But the fall of the empire, now called Syria, involved the strengthening of that nationality which Alexander, rightly estimating its value, had desired to gain over by a share in the government. With the Arsacid monarchy, Philhellenes though they called themselves, a foreign nationality and an intolerant religion flung Hellenism back beyond the Euphrates. The Roman senate undertook the government of the Greek provinces reluctantly, rightly thinking that the result would be as detrimental to their own people as to the subject provinces. It is none the less true that a more ruthless set of blood-suckers has hardly ever fallen upon a defenceless prey. Despair made the Asiatics see a deliverer even in that savage Cappadocian Mithridates, thus bringing disaster upon disaster. Rome herself was utterly out of joint, and finally Greece had to furnish a stage for the decisive struggles of the Roman revolution. Rhodes, the last city that had enjoyed some degree of immunity, was pillaged by the liberators who had murdered Cæsar. How hardened men were to such catastrophes we have recently learnt when it became known that, in the time of Sulla, northern barbarians burned the temple at Delphi; a thing that had been entirely forgotten in the traditions handed down to us. It has also come to light that probably at that time the whole amount of capital accumulated and secured in countless institutions was lost, the festivals of the gods, the games, the banquets all came to an end; the guilds collapsed, even those of the musicians and actors, who had provided themselves with charters from all the powers; wide stretches of the country lay desolate. Some few individuals acquired property which in the sequel became enormously valuable, and this fact in itself was a hindrance to any healthy revival.
Augustus was the deliverer who ultimately brought peace and order: and the Greeks did extravagant homage to their saviour. He deserved it, no doubt, but fresh sap could no longer rise in the decrepit and mutilated tree. Hellenism had seen everything perish that fire and sword could destroy; the sole thing left intact was the intellectual heritage of her forefathers. With them she took refuge, they proved themselves victorious even over the Romans, her lords. Thus was consummated the process which determined the future of the world, the process by which the nation not only resigned all political aspirations, but blotted out the whole of the last three centuries, insisted on speaking as Plato or Demosthenes spoke, or even like Herodotus and Lysias, forgot even the deeds of Alexander in contemplating Salamis and Marathon, and actually went so far as to dispute the possibility of progress in poetry and philosophy (inclusive of the several sciences) beyond that of the classic age, which it chose to conclude with the Attic period. Imitation was now the only safe way, the very principle of progress was challenged. This was the case even more in theory than in practice; the plastic arts, for example, still continued to do original work, because artists are seldom burdened with literary culture. But in the whole sphere of language the results could not fail to be disastrous, for the gulf between the educated classes,—who, by virtue of schooling and study, could twist their speech into the mode of three centuries ago and more,—and the populace,—whose speech, thus deprived of all ennobling influences, rapidly degenerated,—presently became so wide that they hardly attempted to arrive at a common understanding. The difficulty of artificial modes of speech made it necessary for rhetoric and the art of style to take the first place in the schools, and words gradually stifled ideas. Nor was novelty in the latter thought desirable, they were all the more welcome if they were as classic as the words. The whole object of life was really nothing more than a repetition of forms, and of substance (so far as there was any substance), hallowed by antique usage. Even so obsolete an institution as the gymnastic games was revived, the old religious worship was laboriously restored; in the second century after Christ, Apollo began once more to dispense oracles in verse. The authority of Homer was exalted to an extravagant pitch; every one knew him who had been to school at all. In extensive circles the use of Homeric phrases passed for poetry, the Homeric Olympus for religion, and now, for the first time, he took the place held to-day by the Old Testament among those who have no other book. This is most plainly manifest in Christian polemics.
Under the liberal and Philhellenic government of the dynasty that came to the throne with Nerva, the world prospered; in a material sense Asia has never been happier. The age could boast of orators who spoke like Demosthenes and Plato in one. A certain amount of philosophical training prevailed among educated men; lovable and able individuals are not lacking; such men as Plutarch, who paints that copy of real Hellenism which the heroes of the French revolution adopted instead of the original, and who transmits to Montaigne, for example, a large portion of the worldly wisdom of the Greeks. The work of compilation by which astronomy and geography are summed up by Ptolemy, grammar by Herodian, and medicine by Galen, is of the utmost value from the standpoint of history. A shallow Semitic pamphleteer like Lucian copies the graceful forms of antiquity with such skill, that in the Renaissance and the days of the Éclaircissement he passes for a leading representative of the Greek spirit. But the age is in its dotage for all that; there is natural science without experiment, abstract science without unbiassed examination, knowledge without philosophy. The deeper souls have reached a point at which their strength lies in resignation. Hope, the only treasure of all those in Pandora’s box to remain with man in the youth of the nation, has now fled. None have now a living faith save those who renounce the world. The Platonic Eros is no longer a force, and the Agape is known only to those to whom Paul has revealed it. Men’s souls are weary; presently their bodies too begin to sicken. Æsculapius is the only god of heaven whose worship flourishes side by side with that of the emperors, the gods of the empire; the feeble health of the individuals of whom we hear most becomes a disquieting factor; under Marcus Aurelius the first great wave of mortality sweeps over the empire. From this point the downward course is rapid, especially when, with Severus, the empire falls into the hands of barbarian generals. Nor must it be forgotten that Augustus greatly circumscribed the eastern half of the empire, which he permitted to remain Greek. He romanised the Danube provinces, Illyria, Africa, and even Sicily. Every year the East sent a strong contingent to the West, and though the fact contributed the largest share to the assimilation of Greek culture by the West (in Rome, for example, the language of the Christian congregations was Greek until some time after this), these emigrants were none the less permanently lost to the Greek nation. In the East the ancient nations were astir; as early as the second century an Aramaic literature begins, in Phrygia inscriptions appear in the vulgar tongue; in spite of Longinus, the Palmyra of Zenobia is not a Greek city any more; there is an alarming increase of spiritual force in barbarian religions; even in that which came across the frontier from the Parthians. In those circles into which Gnosis, so-called, leads us, which did not consist wholly of ignorant persons, the Greek element is only one of many. The imperial army becomes more and more a force that makes for barbarism. No wonder that civilisation collapses, with the empire out of joint, and the ravages of the Germans—whom the classicism of the age dubs Scythians, in the phrase of Herodotus—just beginning. By their misdeeds at this period the Goths and Vandals richly earned the secondary sense attached to their name, though it has been mistakenly associated with the devastation of Italy and Africa. They reduced Greece to a desert, they destroyed Olympia; worse still, they annihilated the prosperity of Asia. The athletic games which had taken the place of the gymnastic contests of antiquity, but had always retained something of the spirit of the latter, practically came to an end. All that peace had allowed to come into being—temples, monuments, and theatres—was destroyed to build inadequate walls. Far and wide the thin stratum of the educated classes that overlaid a people half estranged from civilisation perished entirely. Some sort of order was restored by Diocletian and Constantine, but the place of the Greek king had now been taken by the oriental sultan; the free man had died out. Then came the church, which presently forbade freedom of thought. Origen was a thinker and philological student almost without peer among his contemporaries. Eusebius had no equal among the scholars of his day. It was therefore not the fault of Christianity if these two men had no successors, but gave place to the purblind, and barely honest superstition of Athanasius and the vulgar abuse of Epiphanius. On the contrary, Christianity showed its affinity with Hellenic civilisation by the very fact that they withered together. Its earthly victory should dazzle the eyes of those least of all who believe in the kingdom of God that Jesus preached. Of this there is hardly a trace at the council of Nicæa.
The qualities that were at work in the decay of civilisation were essentially Greek—satisfaction in present achievement, and reverence for authority. The classicist movement allowed them to gain exclusive sway. Hand in hand with them went a fine sense of form; the imitative faculty has never attained greater triumphs. Christianity also submitted to the yoke of classicist rhetoric; the impressive sermons of the great Cappadocians bear witness to this, no less than the childish Symposium of the Virgins of Methodius. In league with the church, this formal culture has the great merit of having preserved a large portion of the literature of antiquity as an aid to education. The Greek faculty of abstract thought showed itself mighty for good and evil. In the midst of the terrible third century, it was able to take refuge in the purer air of immaterial conceptions, though at the cost of the delight in the visible world characteristic of the Ionic school.
There was little of Plato but his name and the mysticism of his old age in this last great philosophical movement which called itself after him; and it was never more alien to the Greek spirit than when it tried by fantastic necromancy to hold fast the ancient system of religion. The same mode of thought practically prevailed to the same extent on Christian soil, not only in the many circles which the church had repudiated; orthodox dogma is itself but one of these systems, though one that was canonised and preserved for centuries together with the whole body of classical civilisation. This torpor is naturally repellent to us, especially when we contrast it with the active progress of the Roman church which takes the task of civilising the West out of the hands of imperial Rome and surpasses all she has done. Nevertheless, there is a certain grandeur in the spectacle of this ancient and mummified civilisation preserving the Greek nation from utter wreck, in the face, ultimately, of enslavement to a barbarous race and a stern and aggressive religion. But if such a great political and intellectual future as we should wish them is ever to smile upon the Greeks, or rather, the Romæi, it will not come by way of the repristination of any obsolete form whatsoever, it will not be brought about directly by the spirit of antiquity, whether Greek or Christian; but the whole nation must become new by the assimilation of the modern culture of the West. The West, it must be borne in mind, did not imitate the Hellenes, it made a right use of its heritage from them to liberate itself and renew its youth. This service they still render, and will continue to render, to the individual man. By lifting their eyes to the glory of Greece, whether it be Homeric or Doric, Athenian or Hellenistic, men will evermore gain strength to be free and to enter willingly into the service of the Idea, and thus, if they have strayed from the right path, will learn to find their way back to nature and to God.
Politically the Greeks did not gain the mastery of the world, they did not even attain to national unity; but a homogeneous civilisation for the whole world, nevertheless, came into being through them. In such a civilisation for the future we too believe, and we labour to realise it because we desire and advocate the fellowship and concord of many nations, countries, and languages. But the civilisation of the world knows no stronger tie than the groundwork common to all genuine civilisations; and that is our heritage from Greece.
