f progress, that we may better
understand the reasons for its emergence and may more truly estimate its
revolutionary effects. In the ancient world the Greeks, with all their
far-flung speculations, never hit upon the idea of progress. To be sure,
clear intimations, scattered here and there in Greek literature, indicate
faith that man in the past had improved his lot. Aeschylus saw men
lifted from their hazardous lives in sunless caves by the intervention of
Prometheus and his sacrificial teaching of the arts of peace; Euripides
contrasted the primitive barbarism in which man began with the civilized
estate which in Greece he had achieved--but this perceived advance never
was erected into a progressive idea of human life as a whole. Rather,
the original barbarism, from which the arts of civilization had for a
little lifted men, was itself a degeneration from a previous ideal
estate, and human history as a whole was a cyclic and repetitious story
of never-ending rise and fall. Plato's philosophy of history was
typical: the course of cosmic life is divided into cycles, each
seventy-two thousand solar years in length; during the first half of each
cycle, when creation newly comes from the hands of Deity, mankind's
estate is happily ideal, but then decay begins and each cycle's latter
half sinks from bad to worse until Deity once more must take a hand and
make all things new again. Indeed, so far from reaching the idea of
progress, the ancient Greeks at the very center of their thinking were
incapacitated for such an achievement by their suspiciousness of change.
They were artists and to them the perfect was finished, like the
Parthenon, and therefore was incapable of being improved by change.
Change, so far from meaning, as it does with us, the possibility of
betterment, meant with them the certainty of decay; no changes upon earth
in the long run were good; all change was the sure sign that the period
of degeneration had set in from which only divine intervention could
redeem mankind. Paul on Mars Hill quoted the Greek poet Aratus
concerning the sonship of all mankind to God, but Aratus's philosophy of
history is not so pleasantly quotable:

"How base a progeny sprang from golden sires!
And viler shall they be whom ye beget." [1]

Such, in general, was the non-progressive outlook of the ancient Greeks.

Nor did the Romans hit upon the idea of progress in any form remotely
approaching our modern meaning. The