r community of like dimensions which has ever
existed; but it is also true that there has been no other community, of
which the members have, as a general rule, been so highly cultivated,
or have attained individually such completeness of life. In proof of
the first assertion it will be enough to mention such names as those of
Solon, Themistokles, Perikles, and Demosthenes; Isokrates and Lysias;
Aristophanes and Menander; Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides; Pheidias
and Praxiteles; Sokrates and Plato; Thukydides and Xenophon: remembering
that these men, distinguished for such different kinds of achievement,
but like each other in consummateness of culture, were all produced
within one town in the course of three centuries. At no other time and
place in human history has there been even an approach to such a fact as
this.

My other assertion, about the general culture of the community in which
such men were reared, will need a more detailed explanation. When I say
that the Athenian public was, on the whole, the most highly cultivated
public that has ever existed, I refer of course to something more than
what is now known as literary culture. Of this there was relatively
little in the days of Athenian greatness; and this was because there was
not yet need for it or room for it. Greece did not until a later time
begin to produce scholars and savants; for the function of scholarship
does not begin until there has been an accumulation of bygone literature
to be interpreted for the benefit of those who live in a later time.
Grecian greatness was already becoming a thing of the past, when
scholarship and literary culture of the modern type began at Rome and
Alexandria. The culture of the ancient Athenians was largely derived
from direct intercourse with facts of nature and of life, and with the
thoughts of rich and powerful minds orally expressed. The value of this
must not be underrated. We moderns are accustomed to get so large a
portion of our knowledge and of our theories of life out of books,
our taste and judgment are so largely educated by intercourse with the
printed page, that we are apt to confound culture with book-knowledge;
we are apt to forget the innumerable ways in which the highest
intellectual faculties may be disciplined without the aid of literature.
We must study antiquity to realize how thoroughly this could be done.
But even in our day, how much more fruitful is the direct influence of
an original mind