rting element in
the world always drag it down again and again, and drag some men down
always, so that after all progress was impossible, and for some men
should not even be attempted? As a matter of fact, Plato and Aristotle
do limit their exhortations to a narrow circle of cultured Greeks, and
even with them they doubt of success.

Now this despondency came partly, I think, through the very
sensitiveness of the Hellenic nature. The spectacle of the ever-baffled
struggle in Nature and Man they felt at times almost intolerable.
Aristotle saw that this perpetual failure in the heart of glorious good
made the very essence of tragedy. The tragic hero is the man of innate
nobleness who yet has some one defect that lays him open to ruin. Man is
set in a world full of difficulties, a world much of which is dark and
strange to him: his action and those of others have results which he did
not, and in his ignorance could not, foresee; he is not strong enough
for his great task.

All the Greek poets have this deep sadness. Homer has it, in and through
his intense feeling for the beauty and energy of life. There has never
been such war-poetry as Homer's, and yet there has never been any which
felt more poignantly the senselessness in war. 'And I must come here',
Achilles says to his noble enemy at the close, 'to torture you and your
children.'

In the next place, the sadness of the world could not be lightened for
the Greeks by the vision that the modern theory of evolution has opened
up to us of the long advance in the history of life on the planet. Even
their knowledge of history in the strict sense was scanty, and it is
only a long view of history that is likely to be comforting. What
history they did know could bring them little comfort. In the first
place it showed them a series of great civilizations, rising and
falling, and those that had fallen seemed at least as good as those that
followed them. A Greek like Plato knew of the Homeric civilization,
simpler indeed, but fresher and purer than his own. And he believed,
what we now know to be the fact, that even before the Homeric there had
been a wonderful island-culture, what we call the Minoan, flourishing
before the Homeric. 'There had been kings before Agamemnon.'

And behind Minos and Agamemnon lay the great, and by that time the
ossifying, kingdom of Egypt, compared to which the Greeks were, and felt
themselves to be, but children. Plato had seen, finally, the
dege