terranean to be the birthplace of the highest type of
human civilization, the centre from which a unity of the spirit was to
spread, until, by material force as well as by the conquering mind, the
European or Western man was recognized as in the forefront of the race.
The supremacy of the Greek lay in his achievement in three directions,
as a thinker, as an artist, and as the builder of the city-state. For
our present purpose the first and the last are the most important and
the first the most important of all.

The city-state was important as the first example of a free,
self-governing community in which the individual realized his powers by
living--and dying--with and for his fellows. This new type of human
community was of the highest moment in the sequel. In many points it was
a model to the Romans, and thus became a fulcrum for the upward movement
of the Western world. In the works, too, of the Greek philosophers,
especially of Plato and Aristotle, it inspired the earliest and some of
the deepest reflections on the nature of social life and government. But
it never acquired the permanence of the political units needed to build
up the European Commonwealth. For this nations were required, and the
Greeks were a race and not a nation. The [Greek: polis] lacked the
size, the variety of elements, and the territorial basis on which a
modern nation rests.

It is rather in their achievements as thinkers and as artists, above all
in their science and philosophy, that we find the most fundamental and
lasting contribution of the Greeks to the unity and progress of mankind.
When these became allied to the tenacity, the organizing and legal
genius of the Romans, a firm centre of civilized life was established,
which has survived the shocks of two thousand years of growth and
conflict and will survive the upheaval of the present. The Greek
unification was in the world of thought and art; the Roman attempted a
corresponding work of organization in the human world which lay nearest
to him in the countries round the Mediterranean Sea. Both efforts were
of priceless value and continuing effect, but both were, from the
conditions of the problem, imperfect solutions, the brilliant but
precocious sketches of adolescent genius. The Greek, working at first on
the material accumulated by generations of Chaldean and Egyptian
priests, discovered from their crude, unorganized, and inexact
observations of geometry and astronomy the elements