ern Greece both mean
much to us, but usually we are content to accept them as independent
phenomena, and we seldom pause to wonder whether there is any deeper
connexion between them than their name. It is the purpose of these pages
to ask and give some answer to this question.

The thought that his own Greece might perish, to be succeeded by another
Greece after the lapse of more than two thousand years, would have caused
an Ancient Greek surprise. In the middle of the fifth century B.C.,
Ancient Greek civilization seemed triumphantly vigorous and secure. A
generation before, it had flung back the onset of a political power which
combined all the momentum of all the other contemporary civilizations in
the world; and the victory had proved not merely the superiority of Greek
arms--the Spartan spearman and the Athenian galley--but the superior
vitality of Greek politics--the self-governing, self-sufficing city-state.
In these cities a wonderful culture had burst into flower--an art
expressing itself with equal mastery in architecture, sculpture, and
drama, a science which ranged from the most practical medicine to the most
abstract mathematics, and a philosophy which blended art, science, and
religion into an ever-developing and ever more harmonious view of the
universe. A civilization so brilliant and so versatile as this seemed to
have an infinite future before it, yet even here death lurked in ambush.

When the cities ranged themselves in rival camps, and squandered their
strength on the struggle for predominance, the historian of the
Peloponnesian war could already picture Athens and Sparta in ruins,[1] and
the catastrophe began to warp the soul of Plato before he had carried
Greek philosophy to its zenith. This internecine strife of free
communities was checked within a century by the imposition of a single
military autocracy over them all, and Alexander the Great crowned his
father Philip's work by winning new worlds for Hellenism from the Danube
to the Ganges and from the Oxus to the Nile. The city-state and its
culture were to be propagated under his aegis, but this vision vanished
with Alexander's death, and Macedonian militarism proved a disappointment.
The feuds of these crowned condottieri harassed the cities more sorely
than their own quarrels, and their arms could not even preserve the
Hellenic heritage against external foes. The Oriental rallied and expelled
Hellenism again from the Asiatic hinterland, whil