epics
are epics of an African people and Helen, the cause of the Trojan
war, must henceforth be conceived as a beautiful brown skin girl.

In the press and periodicals of our country we read that the classics
are doomed and about to pass out of our lives, but the classics can
never die. I sometimes dream of a magical time when the sun and moon
will be larger than now and the sky more blue and nearer to the world.
The days will be longer than these days and when labor is over and
there falls the great flood of light before moonrise, minds now dulled
with harsh labor and commercialism will listen to those who love them
as they tell stories of ages past, stories that will make them tingle
with pleasure and joy. Nor will these story tellers forget the
classics. They will hear the surge of the ocean in Homer and march
with his heroes to the plains of Troy; they will wander with Ulysses
and help him slay the suitors who betrayed the hospitality of the
faithful Penelope; they will escape from Priam's burning city with
AEneas, weep over Dido's love, and help him to found a nation beside
the Tiber. And the translators who shall again bring into life the
dead tongues will not let prejudice cloud their brains or truth make
bitter their tongues. The heroes of Homer shall, like the Prince of
Morocco, wear the livery of the burnished sun and be knit by binding
ties to the blood of Afric's clime from whence civilization took its
primal rise.

Permit me now, ladies and gentlemen, to show definitely the debt which
Greece owes to the Minoan and Mycenean civilizations. Crete, as I have
said before, appears to be the center from which the Mediterranean
culture radiated. It is the "Mid-Sea Land," a kind of half-way house
between three continents, and its geographical position makes it the
logical cradle of European civilization. It is near the mainland of
Greece, opposite the mouths of the Nile and in easy communication with
Asia Minor, with which it was actually connected in late geological
times. As I mentioned before, the civilization expanded in every
direction and at the time of the conquest it had firm hold upon
Greece, appearing at Mycenae, Tiryns, Thebes, Orochomenos, and other
places. That some vanguard of Aryan immigrants came into contact with
this culture at its climax is plain from the evidence furnished by
Homer. That they mingled with the inhabitants is certain. The later
onrush about 1200 B.C. destroyed in part the civili