ing at night in the gardens, listening to the
grasshoppers, playing the lute in the clear of the moon, going to
drink at the spring at the mountain, carrying with him some wine that
he may drink while he sings, spending the days in dancing--these are
Greek pleasures, the joys of a race poor, economical, and eternally
young."

=Simplicity of Greek Life.=--In this country men are not melted with
the heat nor stiffened with cold; they live in the open air gay and at
slight expense. Food in great quantity is not required, nor warm
clothing, nor a comfortable house. The Greek could live on a handful
of olives and a sardine. His entire clothing consisted of sandals, a
tunic, a large mantle; very often he went bare-footed and bare-headed.
His house was a meagre and unsubstantial building; the air easily
entered through the walls. A couch with some coverings, a coffer, some
beautiful vases, a lamp,--this was his furniture. The walls were bare
and whitened with lime. This house was only a sleeping place.

THE PEOPLE

=Origin of the Greeks.=--The people who inhabited this charming little
land were an Aryan people, related to the Hindoos and the Persians,
and like them come from the mountains of Asia or the steppes beyond
the Caspian Sea. The Greeks had forgotten the long journey made by
their ancestors; they said that they, like the grasshoppers, were the
children of the soil.[47] But their language and the names of their
gods leave no doubt of their origin.... Like all the Aryans, the
primitive Greeks nourished themselves with milk and with the flesh of
their herds; they moved about under arms, always ready to fight, and
grouped themselves in tribes governed by patriarchs.

=The Legends.=--The Greeks like all the other ancient peoples were
ignorant of their origin. They neither knew whence their ancestors had
come nor when they had established themselves in Greece, nor what they
had done there. To preserve the exact memory of things as they occur,
there is need of some means of fixing them; but the Greeks did not
know how to write; they did not employ writing until about the eighth
century B.C. They had no way of calculating the number of years. Later
they adopted the usage of counting the years according to the great
feast which was celebrated every four years at Olympia; a period of
four years was called an olympiad. But the first olympiad was placed
in 776 B.C., and the chronology of the Greeks does not rise beyond
thi