ould expect after pralaya, if that
pralaya had been at all disastrous. With the ancient Greeks,
the plebeian qualities were not all virtues by any means;
they retained through their great age many of the vices of
plebeianism. They won their successes for the most part on
sporadic impulses of heroism; shone by an extraordinary
intellectual and artistic acumen. But taking them by and large,
they were too apt to ineffectualize those successes, in the
fields of national and political life, by extraordinary venality
and instability of character. I shall draw here deeply on
Professor Mahaffy, who very wisely sets out to restore the
balance as between Greeks and Persians, and burst bubble-notions
commonly held. Greek culture was extremely varied, and therein
lay its strength; you can find all sorts of types there; and
there are outstanding figures of the noblest. But on the whole,
says Mahaffy--I think rightly--there was something sordid,
grasping, and calculating: _noblesse oblige_ made little appeal
to them--was rather foreign to their nature. Patricianism did
exist; in Sparta; perhaps in Thebes. Of the two Thebans we know
best, Pindar was decidedly a patrician poet, and Epaminondas was
a very great gentleman; now Thebes, certainly, must have been
mighty in foregone manvantaras, as witness her five cycles of
myths, the richest in Greece. In her isolation she had doubtless
carried something of that old life down; and then, too, she had
Pindar. Nor was Sparta any upstart;--of her we have only heard
Athenians speak. But outside of these two, you hardly find a
Greek _gentleman_ in public life; hardly that combination of
personal honor, contempt of commerce, class-pride, leisured
and cultured living;--with, very often, ultra-conservatism,
narrowness of outlook, political ineptitude and selfishness. The
Spartans had many of these instincts, good and bad. They reached
their cultural zenith in the seventh century or earlier;
probably Lycurgus had an eye to holding off that degeneration
which follows on super-refinement; and hence the severe life he
brought in. My authority makes much of the adoration the other
Greeks accorded them; who might hate and fight with Sparta, but
took infinite pride in her nonetheless. Thus they told those
tales of the Spartan mothers, and the Spartan boy the fox
nibbled; thus their philosophers, painting an Utopia, took
always most of its features from Lacedaemon.

All of which I quote for the lig