Ancient Greece: A Study (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Excerpt from Ancient Greece

The study of the language, art, and culture of a dead civilization must always be an unprofitable and unproductive study except to antiquarians and lexicographers. To call the language, art, and culture of Ancient Greece dead is to beg the very question at issue. Different views may be held to-day as to the vitality of the Greek culture that has come down to us, but much that the ancient Greeks themselves achieved was destined, consciously or unconsciously, for posterity. Thucydides rightly or wrongly said that his history was 'an everlasting possession, not a prize composition that is heard and forgotten'. Plutarch, speaking of the great public buildings of Athens, says:

'The works of Pericles were the more marvelled at seeing that they were achieved in but a little time though they were designed for the ages. Each building at the moment of its completion had the stability of age, while in fullness of growth it was as though modern and newly created; thus a freshness still blooms upon it, keeping it in appearance unsullied by time, as if some ever-fresh breeze and unaging spirit were in its very substance.'

The truth that Plutarch wrote five centuries after these buildings were erected is not rendered less true to-day by the ravages of time.

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