ng
else, written mainly if not exclusively, for scholars. And the effect
of fundamental political discussion was the same in ancient as in
modern times. The whole customary ways of thought were at once shaken
by it, and shaken not only in the closets of philosophers, but in the
common thought and daily business of ordinary men. The 'liberation of
humanity,' as Goethe used to call it--the deliverance of men from the
yoke of inherited usage, and of rigid, unquestionable law--was begun in
Greece, and had many of its greatest effects, good and evil, on Greece.
It is just because of the analogy between the controversies of that
time and those of our times that some one has said, 'Classical history
is a part of modern history; it is mediaeval history only which is
ancient.'

If there had been no discussion of principle in Greece, probably she
would still have produced works of art. Homer contains no such
discussion. The speeches in the 'Iliad,' which Mr. Gladstone, the most
competent of living judges, maintains to be the finest ever composed by
man, are not discussions of principle. There is no more tendency in
them to critical disquisition than there is to political economy. In
Herodotus you have the beginning of the age of discussion. He belongs
in his essence to the age which is going out. He refers with reverence
to established ordinance and fixed religion. Still, in his travels
through Greece, he must have heard endless political arguments; and
accordingly you can find in his book many incipient traces of abstract
political disquisition. The discourses on democracy, aristocracy, and
monarchy, which he puts into the mouth of the Persian conspirators when
the monarchy was vacant, have justly been called absurd, as speeches
supposed to have been spoken by those persons. No Asiatic ever thought
of such things. You might as well imagine Saul or David speaking them,
as those to whom Herodotus attributes them. They are Greek speeches,
full of free Greek discussion, and suggested by the experience, already
considerable, of the Greeks in the results of discussion. The age of
debate is beginning, and even Herodotus, the least of a wrangler of any
man, and the most of a sweet and simple narrator, felt the effect. When
we come to Thucydides, the results of discussion are as full as they
have ever been; his light is pure, 'dry light,' free from the 'humours'
of habit, and purged from consecrated usage. As Grote's history often
reads