imaginary
want of the literary critic, but answering to nothing real? Are they to
be summarily disposed of as resting upon some tacit assumption of that
old-grannyism which delights in asseverating that times are not what
they used to be? Is the contrast an imaginary one, due to the softened,
cheerful light with which we are wont to contemplate classic antiquity
through the charmed medium of its incomparable literature? Or is it a
real contrast, worthy of the attention and analysis of the historical
inquirer? The answer to these queries will lead us far into the
discussion of the subject which we have propounded, and we shall best
reach it by considering some aspects of the social condition of ancient
Greece. The lessons to be learned from that wonderful country are not
yet exhausted Each time that we return to that richest of historic
mines, and delve faithfully and carefully, we shall be sure to dig up
some jewel worth carrying away.

And in considering ancient Greece, we shall do well to confine our
attention, for the sake of definiteness of conception, to a single
city. Comparatively homogeneous as Greek civilization was, there was
nevertheless a great deal of difference between the social circumstances
of sundry of its civic communities. What was true of Athens was
frequently not true of Sparta or Thebes, and general assertions about
ancient Greece are often likely to be collect only in a loose and
general way. In speaking, therefore, of Greece, I must be understood
in the main as referring to Athens, the eye and light of Greece, the
nucleus and centre of Hellenic culture.

Let us note first that Athens was a large city surrounded by pleasant
village-suburbs,--the demes of Attika,--very much as Boston is closely
girdled by rural places like Brookline, Jamaica Plain, and the rest,
village after village rather thickly covering a circuit of from ten
to twenty miles' radius. The population of Athens with its suburbs may
perhaps have exceeded half a million; but the number of adult freemen
bearing arms did not exceed twenty-five thousand. [67] For every one
of these freemen there were four or five slaves; not ignorant, degraded
labourers, belonging to an inferior type of humanity, and bearing the
marks of a lower caste in their very personal formation and in the
colour of their skin, like our lately-enslaved negroes; but intelligent,
skilled labourers, belonging usually to the Hellenic, and at any rate
to the Aryan r