werful writers, gives us rather
an exaggerated notion of the Greeks, if we attempt to apply a lofty
manner and a magnificent culture to the Homeric period. They had a
good deal of piratical boldness, and, after the formation of their
small states, gave examples of spurts of courage such as that at
Marathon and Thermopylae. Yet these evidences were rare exceptions
rather than the rule, for even the Spartan, trained on a military
basis, seldom evinced any great degree of bravery. Perhaps the gloomy
forebodings of the future, characteristic of the Greeks, made them fear
death, and consequently caused them to lack in courage. However, this
is a disputed point. Pages of the earlier records are full of the
sanction of deception of enemies, friends, and strangers. Evidently,
there was a low moral sense regarding truth. While the Greek might be
loyal to his family and possibly to his tribe, there are many examples
of disloyalty to one another, and, in the later development, a
disloyalty of one state toward another. Excessive egoism seems to have
prevailed, and this principle was extended to the family and local
government group. Each group appeared to look out for its own
interests, irrespective of the welfare of others. How much a united
Greece might have done to have continued the splendors and the service
of a magnificent civilization is open to conjecture.

The Greeks were not sympathetic with children nor with the aged. Far
from being anxious to preserve the life of the aged, their greatest
trouble was in disposing of them. The honor and rights of women were
not observed. In war women {212} were the property of their captors.
Yet the home life of the Greeks seems to have been in its purity and
loyalty an advance on the Oriental home life. In their treatment of
servants and slaves, in the care of the aged and helpless, the Greeks
were cold and without compassion. While the poets, historians, and
philosophers have been portraying with such efficiency the character of
the higher classes; while they have presented such a beautiful exterior
of the old Greek life; the Greeks, in common with other primitive
peoples, were not lacking in coarseness, injustice, and cruelty in
their internal life. Here, as elsewhere in the beginnings of
civilization, only the best of the real and the ideal of life was
represented, while the lower classes were suffering a degraded life.

The family was closely organized in Greece. Mo