my Ancient Greek Historians (1909) I dwelt on
the modern origin of the idea (p. 253 sqq.). Recently Mr. R. H. Murray,
in a learned appendix to his Erasmus and Luther, has developed the
thesis that Progress was not grasped in antiquity (though he makes an
exception of Seneca),--a welcome confirmation.]

I

It may, in particular, seem surprising that the Greeks, who were so
fertile in their speculations on human life, did not hit upon an idea
which seems so simple and obvious to us as the idea of Progress. But if
we try to realise their experience and the general character of their
thought we shall cease to wonder. Their recorded history did not go back
far, and so far as it did go there had been no impressive series of new
discoveries suggesting either an indefinite increase of knowledge or a
growing mastery of the forces of nature. In the period in which their
most brilliant minds were busied with the problems of the universe
men might improve the building of ships, or invent new geometrical
demonstrations, but their science did little or nothing to transform the
conditions of life or to open any vista into the future. They were
in the presence of no facts strong enough to counteract that profound
veneration of antiquity which seems natural to mankind, and the
Athenians of the age of Pericles or of Plato, though they were
thoroughly, obviously "modern" compared with the Homeric Greeks, were
never self-consciously "modern" as we are.

1.

The indications that human civilisation was a gradual growth, and that
man had painfully worked his way forward from a low and savage state,
could not, indeed, escape the sharp vision of the Greeks. For instance,
Aeschylus represents men as originally living at hazard in sunless
caves, and raised from that condition by Prometheus, who taught them the
arts of life. In Euripides we find a similar recognition of the ascent
of mankind to a civilised state, from primitive barbarism, some god or
other playing the part of Prometheus. In such passages as these we have,
it may be said, the idea that man has progressed; and it may fairly be
suggested that belief in a natural progress lay, for Aeschylus as
well as for Euripides, behind the poetical fiction of supernatural
intervention. But these recognitions of a progress were not incompatible
with the widely-spread belief in an initial degeneration of the human
race; nor did it usually appear as a rival doctrine. The old legend of
a "golden