The Legacy of Greece

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Title: The Legacy of Greece Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Author: Various
Editor: R.W. Livingstone
Release Date: August 6, 2007 [EBook #22259]
Language: English
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The Legacy of GREECE
Essays by GILBERT MURRAY, W. R. INGE, J. BURNET, SIR T. L. HEATH, D'ARCY W. THOMPSON, CHARLES SINGER, R. W. LIVINGSTON, A. TOYNBEE, A. E. ZIMMERN, PERCY GARDNER, SIR REGINALD BLOMFIELD
Edited by
R. W. LIVINGSTONE
[Illustration]
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD BY JOHN JOHNSON PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

In spite of many differences, no age has had closer affinities with Ancient Greece than our own; none has based its deeper life so largely on ideals which the Greeks brought into the world. History does not repeat itself. Yet, if the twentieth century searched through the past for its nearest spiritual kin, it is in the fifth and following centuries before Christ that they would be found. Again and again, as we study Greek thought and literature, behind the veil woven by time and distance, the face that meets us is our own, younger, with fewer lines and wrinkles on its features and with more definite and deliberate purpose in its eyes. For these reasons we are to-day in a position, as no other age has been, to understand Ancient Greece, to learn the lessons it teaches, and, in studying the ideals and fortunes of men with whom we have so much in common, to gain a fuller power of understanding and estimating our own. This book--the first of its kind in English--aims at giving some idea of what the world owes to Greece in various realms of the spirit and the intellect, and of what it can still learn from her.
THE EDITOR.
October 1921.

CONTENTS
PAGE
THE VALUE OF GREECE TO THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD. By GILBERT MURRAY, F.B.A., Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford 1
RELIGION. By W. R. INGE, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's 25
PHILOSOPHY. By J. BURNETT, F.B.A., Professor of Greek in the University of St. Andrews 57
MATHEMATICS AND ASTRONOMY. By Sir T. L. HEATH, K.C.B., K.C.V.O., F.R.S. 97
NATURAL SCIENCE. By D'ARCY W. THOMPSON, F.R.S., Professor of Natural History in the University of St. Andrews 137
BIOLOGY. By CHARLES SINGER, Lecturer in the History of Medicine in University College, London 163
MEDICINE. By CHARLES SINGER 201
LITERATURE. By R. W. LIVINGSTONE, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford 249
HISTORY. By ARNOLD TOYNBEE, Kora??s Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language, Literature, and History in the University of London 289
POLITICAL THOUGHT. By A. E. ZIMMERN, late Wilson Professor of International Politics, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth 321
THE LAMPS OF GREEK ART. By PERCY GARDNER, F.B.A., Merton Professor of Classical Archaeology in the University of Oxford 353
ARCHITECTURE. By Sir REGINALD BLOMFIELD, F.S.A., R.A. 397

THE VALUE OF GREECE TO THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD
If the value of man's life on earth is to be measured in dollars and miles and horse-power, ancient Greece must count as a poverty-stricken and a minute territory; its engines and implements were nearer to the spear and bow of the savage than to our own telegraph and aeroplane. Even if we neglect merely material things and take as our standard the actual achievements of the race in conduct and in knowledge, the average clerk who goes to town daily, idly glancing at his morning newspaper, is probably a better behaved and infinitely better informed person than the average Athenian who sat spellbound at the tragedies of Aeschylus. It is only by the standard of the spirit, to which the thing achieved is little and the quality of mind that achieved it much, which cares less for the sum of knowledge attained than for the love of knowledge, less for much good policing than for one free act of heroism, that the great age of Greece can be judged as something extraordinary and unique in value.
By this standard, if it is a legitimate and reasonable one to apply, we shall be able to understand why classical Greek literature was the basis of education throughout all later antiquity; why its re-discovery, however fragmentary and however imperfectly understood, was able to intoxicate the keenest minds of Europe and constitute a kind of spiritual 'Re-birth', and how its