SOURCE: "Xenophon the Precursor of Hellenism," in The Progress of Hellenism in Alexander's Empire, The University of Chicago Press, 1905, pp. 1-27.

[In the following excerpt, Mahaffey uses Xenophon as a "case study" in his discussion of the transition from "Hellendom" to Hellenism in ancient Greece; he finds Xenophon exemplary of the period in both style and content.]

… [By] "Hellenism" I mean that so-called "silver age" of Greek art and literature, when they became cosmopolitan, and not parochial; and by "Hellenistic," not only what was Greek, but what desired and assumed to be Greek, from the highest and noblest imitation down to the poorest travesty. The pigeon English of the Solomon islander is as far removed from the prose of Ruskin or of Froude as is the rudest Hellenistic epitaph or letter from the music of Plato's diction, but both are clear evidence of the imperial quality in that language which sways the life of millions of men far beyond the limits of its original domain. Yet it must needs be that as the matchless idiom of Aristophanes passed out to Macedonian noble, to Persian grandee, to Syrian trader, to Egyptian priest, each and all of these added somewhat of their national flavour, and so produced an idiom and a culture uniform indeed in application, though by no means uniform in construction.

It is customary to date the origin of this Hellenism from the reign of Alexander, whose house had adopted Greek culture, and whose arms carried it into the far East; but this is to my mind a superficial view, and it is the object of my first lecture to show you that Hellenism was a thing of older growth, and that it began from the moment that Athens ceased to be the dominant centre of Greece in politics as well as in letters.

The end of the long Peloponnesian war threw out of Greece a crowd of active and ambitious men—some exiled from their homes, some voluntary absentees—in search of employment. Neighbouring nationalities—Macedonians, Persians, Egyptians—were coming into nearer view, and becoming the possible homes of expatriated Greeks. All these countries had long since sought and found mercenaries, not only among the poor mountaineers of Achæa and Arcadia, but among the aristocrats of Lesbos and Rhodes, nay even of Athens and Sparta. And now mercenary service not only became more frequent and more respectable, but the relations between the employers and the employed began to change. Earlier Persian kings and satraps had regarded their Greek mercenaries as they regarded their Indian elephants—mere tools to win victories. The relations of the younger Cyrus with the Greeks were of a wholly different kind. He endeavoured to make them friends, and to reconcile them to Persian ideas of state and of sovereignty. How well he succeeded I will proceed to show in the case of Xenophon.

But not only in the case of active men and travellers but among the stay-at-home and purely literary, there grew up in this generation a feeling that culture was more than race, and wealth better than nobility. We have Isocrates, the rhetorician and schoolmaster, saying in a passage of which he probably did not himself apprehend the deep meaning, that to be an Athenian meant, not to be born in Attica, but to have attained to Attic culture. Socrates, the most undeniable of Athenians, had already by his teaching loosened the bonds of city patriotism. He had taught wider views, and laid larger issues before men; and so we have a typical pupil, Xenophon, using the Delphic oracle, not for Hellenic, but Hellenistic purposes, compelling its assent to his schemes of ambition, and looking forward to eastern war and travel as the obvious resource for a man without a fixed position at home.

It is an exceptional good fortune for the modern historian that this figure of Xenophon, furnished with all the books he ever wrote (and some which he never wrote), stands out so clearly at this momentous epoch, when constant petty wars and rumours of wars at home were preparing Greece for the coming change. He begins his life a pure Athenian, and to the end remained entitled by his style to the name of the Attic bee. But where did that bee not gather honey? Not merely from the thyme of Attica and the cistus of the Peloponnese, but from the rose gardens of Persia and the sunflowers of Babylonia. And so in every successive work there is some new flavour in the diction and the tone of thought, till we come in the Cyropædia to that extraordinary panegyric on the methods of the Persian monarchy, even including the employment of eunuchs to take charge of the king's household.

But generalities or metaphors are not sufficient to prove my case. Let us descend into details. I say that in the main features of his life and teaching Xenophon represents the first step in the transition from Hellenedom to Hellenism. It is apparent, first, in his language; for though he writes excellent Attic Greek, he discards the niceties of style which were then invading Attic prose, and which made the essays of his contemporary Isocrates, and the orations of Demosthenes, the most artificial of all the great prose writing the world has seen. Still more he allows himself the use of stray and strange words provincial in the sense of not being Attic, picked up in his travels at Sinope or Samos or Byzantium, and often appearing but once in his works. Thus his language distinctly approximates to that common dialect which was the lingua franca of all the Hellenistic world. Hence he remained always popular, while the writers in dialect—Sappho, Theocritus, nay even Herodotus—were well-nigh unintelligible to the Hellenistic child. There is, moreover, a great diminution in his use of particles, as compared, e. g., with the prose of Plato. These delicate spices, which gave flavour to every page of Plato, very soon lost their perfume; they became as unintelligible to the later Greeks as they are to our scholars; that is to say, grammarians could still talk about them, but no man knew how to use them. And so the simpler prose of Xenophon became the highest ideal of their aspirations.

But if in this respect his life became simpler and plainer, in others it followed a contrary course. In his Socratic dialogues he had given a very complete analysis of all that could be attained in Attic life. His Socrates is not only a perfect man of high intellectual endowments, who discusses all the problems of life, but the pupils he has trained, men of high birth and independent fortune, are represented as putting his theory into practice. Ischomachus, in the dialogue or tract On Household Economy, not only gives us a famous picture of the educating of his own wife, after her marriage, but tells of the whole course of the work and the amusements of an Attic country gentleman. None of us questions that it was in this Socratic education that Xenophon laid the foundation of his all-around capacities both for intellectual and for practical life. He was not a deep philosopher, and he cared not to be; but, as Tacitus says of Agricola, another practical man, retinuit, quod est difficillimum, in philosophia modum. He had not the tastes or the ambitions of a college Don. When he had graduated, so to speak, under Socrates, he went out into the world. And there he found other nations which could do some things better than the Greeks, and could attain great happiness denied to them.

There are several blind spots in the ideal prospects of Ischomachus—the Attic gentleman. In the first place, field sports were impossible in Attica. In a land so thickly populated, and so carefully cultivated, large properties were scarce, and preservation impossible. So game was long since extirpated from Attica. But no sooner did Xenophon go to visit the younger Cyrus in Asia Minor than he woke up to the dignities and delights of hunting. This taste he kept up all his life. After his return with the Ten Thousand, he was attached to the Spartans in their campaigns against the Persian satraps, and so he had frequently the chance of poaching their splendid preserves. In later life, when Sparta desired to reward him, he obtained a sporting estate on the Arcadian side of Olympia, which he turns aside to describe (in his Anabasis V, 3) with evident delight. He writes tracts on hunting, and says that the pursuit of the hare is so fascinating as to make a man forget that he ever was in love with anything else. Now, all this side of his life he learned not from Socrates or at Athens, but from his intercourse with Persian grandees.

In another place, when speaking of order in the keeping of a household, he quotes no Greek example, but rather the great Phœnician merchantman he had seen at Corinth, where all the tackle and the freight were packed away with such neatness and economy as to make it a sight for the Greeks to visit. And so he adds that the planting of a paradise belonging to his patron Cyrus was not only far superior to anything in Greece, but, what was more astonishing, that great prince had deigned to occupy his own hands with this planting. In the laying out, therefore, of orchards and parks he found that the Greeks had everything to learn from a race of men whom they had been brought up to hate and despise. I notice, by the way, that in one point both the Attic and the Persian gardens were still undeveloped. In all his descriptions of them Xenophon is silent on the culture of flowers. Nor does he ever speak of the beauty of his fruit trees in flower. When we hear of Alexandria, in the next century, that it produced beautiful flowers at every season in its greenhouses, we see that the Hellenism of Xenophon was only incipient. Queen Cleopatra had been taught many luxuries unknown even to the younger Cyrus.

Still the very changes of residence in Xenophon's life could not but broaden his views and enlarge his tastes beyond those of the cultivated Athenian. Consider for a moment how much of the world he had seen. Starting from Sardis with the army of Cyrus, and being free from discipline as a volunteer, he travelled all through southern Asia Minor into Babylonia, where he tells us of the strange and new aspect of the country, with its wide rivers, its great deserts, its dense cultivation, and its fauna and flora so much more tropical than anything known in Greece. Then comes the battle of Kunaxa and the disastrous death of his great patron, Cyrus. The famous retreat of the Ten Thousand is what has made Xenophon's name immortal, and though, as I gravely suspect, he has much exaggerated his own importance in that arduous affair, he must certainly have had the experience of a journey over the high passes of Armenia in deep snow and arctic temperature, to contrast with the burning plains of Babylonia. He returns along the north coast of Asia Minor, encountering many strange savage tribes, whose manners and customs he notes with curious interest. Then from Byzantium he makes a tour among the barbarians of European Thrace, and thence returns to Greece, only to revert again to Asia Minor, and this time to campaign in its central provinces. He next comes home with his second patron, King Agesilaus of Sparta, through Bæotia, where the famous battle of Koronea gives him a foretaste of Bæotian supremacy. Yet of all the Greeks none were so distasteful to him as these hardy vulgarians. Not even the great and refined Epaminondas earns from him more than rare and unwilling praise, and presently our travelled Athenian departs in exile to the Peloponnese, where he seems to have spent the rest of his long life.

Thus Xenophon had studied not only all Greece, but all the borders of the Greek world in Asia Minor and Thrace; he had penetrated the great Persian empire and learned its splendour and its weakness. In fact, the whole sphere of early Hellenism was under his ken. The West only—Sicily and southern Italy—he neglects, and this is quite characteristic of the rise of Hellenism in the next generation. All the desires, the ambitions, the prospects of the Greeks of the fourth and third centuries before Christ lay eastward, not westward. To them the Romans were yet unknown and unnoticed barbarians, and the Greek West no land of large promise like the East; for apart from the tough mountaineers of Calabria and Sicily, dangerous neighbours on land, there was the Carthaginian sea-power which took care to close the avenues of trade to the fabulous isles and coasts, that loomed against the setting sun. But in the armies he commanded there were not wanting many mercenaries hailing from the far West; there must also have been many who had served in Egypt; and it was from these that he derived his great respect and admiration for that ancient civilisation. The Egyptians who fight against the great Cyrus in Xenophon's romance, who are ultimately settled by him as a colony in Asia Minor, are the bravest and best of oriental nations. Such, then, being this man's wide experience, it is well worth seeking from his writings his general views regarding the Greek world, his estimate of its strength and of its weakness, and above all, what he has said— or would have said, had we asked him—of the future prospects of the complex of states around him.

The first and most important point I notice is his firm belief in the expansion of the Hellenic race. He has before him constantly the feasibility of settling colonies of Greeks anywhere through Asia. When the Ten Thousand reach the Black Sea, and the next problem is how to occupy or provide for them, one of the ideas always recurring, and one which makes Xenophon suspected by all those who are longing for their homes in Greece, is his supposed ambition to be the founder of a new Greek city on the Euxine, where by trade, and by intermarriage with the natives, his companions might acquire a new and a wealthy home. Had not Olbia and Apollonia and Trapezus and many other Greek colonies of earlier days fared splendidly in these remote but most profitable regions, where sea and land, river and plain, combined to produce their natural wealth for the enterprising stranger? The Thracian king, who calls in his services, quite naturally makes similar offers. Xenophon is to possess a castle, marry a Thracian princess, and settle down as a magnate who brings about him Greeks for the purposes of trade and of mercenary service. Every ambitious Greek had therefore this prospect dangling before his eyes. And this gave him a new, a practical, interest in learning to appreciate the qualities of the neighbour races, hitherto set down in the lump as barbarians. The Persian grandees on their side must have found both pleasure and profit in bringing Greeks about their courts. If so far back as the days of Sappho we hear that one of the girls she had educated in charms went to exercise them in Lydian Sardis, is it not to be assumed that also this Greek influence upon the East was still waxing? The profession of Greek mercenary was not confined to men-at-arms, and among the booty brought home by the Ten Thousand there were so many women that their outcry was quite a feature in the camp in moments of excitement. It is highly improbable that many of these had followed the army from Hellenic lands in their upward march, and if not, here was an eastern element affecting the next generation of the profession of arms. The fusion of races, therefore, though slow and sporadic, was distinctly on its increase. The campaigns of the Spartan king Agesilaus in Asia Minor, where he was attended, and no doubt advised, by Xenophon, pointed to a large invasion of the East; and had he not been recalled by the miserable dissensions and quarrels of Greece, the conquest, partial if not total, of the Persian empire was in near prospect. Isocrates in more than one public letter implores the leaders of his nationality to compose their parochial disputes, and unite for the great object of becoming lords of the East.

The result he regarded as certain; but who was to accomplish this great Hellenic league for the subjugation of the East? On this question Xenophon's opinions and his forecast are not the less clear because we have to gather them indirectly from many stray indications in his works. He had had large practical experiences, besides the theoretical opinions of his master Socrates, to afford him materials for a sound judgment. In the first place, he had made essay of democracy, both the best and the worst that Greece could afford. He had lived an Athenian during the latter half of the great war which deprived his city of her supremacy, and he had seen his great master gradually alienating the majority by his trenchant criticism, till that master's life was sacrificed to the vulgar prejudices of a democratic jury. Yet Athens was the most refined and cultivated democracy that ever existed. The bitter and satirical tract On the Polity of the Athenians, still printed among the works of Xenophon, is now generally recognised as the work of an older writer, living at Athens when Xenophon was a child. But it would not have attained its place, or kept it so long, had not the readers of Xenophon felt that it expressed the opinions he was likely to hold. It is certain that the school of Socrates, even before his shameful prosecution and condemnation, were no friends of democracy. They all regarded the opinion of the majority, as such, worth nothing, and thought that the masses should be guided by the enlightened judgment of the select one or the select few. What they would have said or thought, had they made experience of the democracies of our day, is another question. They had before them a sovereign assembly which by a bare majority at a single meeting might abrogate a law or take away a human life without further penalty than the contrition and the shame which sometimes followed upon calmer reflection. There were no higher courts of appeal from the sovereign assembly, no rehearing by a second and smaller House; the Athenian demos was recognised as a tyrant, above the laws which itself had sanctioned. That such a state should carry out a large policy of conquest, based upon a confederation of friendly states, was clearly impossible. Apart from other difficulties, the conduct of military affairs by a political assembly was absurd. When a general could be appointed or dismissed by a mere civilian vote of ordinary citizens, was any prompt or elaborate campaign possible? The generals were all playing a political as well as a strategic game, and looking to their supporters at home more than to their troops abroad for support. There are not wanting parallels for all this in modern times. Great foreign conquests both then and now require something very different from the leading of a democratic assembly.

But Xenophon had other and far worse experiences of Greek democracy. As a leader of importance, selected by the majority to command an army of Greek mercenaries, he found himself in an impromptu military republic, whose city was its camp, and whose laws the resolutions of armed men swayed by the momentary gusts of passion, of panic, or of pride. At the same time, they were no mere random adventures, who regarded the camp as their only home, but men of whom the majority had not gone out from poverty, but because they had heard so high a character of Cyrus. Some brought men, some money, with them; some had run away from home, or left wife and children behind them, with the hope and intention of coming back rich men. Yet such men, though obedient enough to discipline on the march or in action, were constantly breaking out into riots in camp; officers were deposed, innocent men hunted to death in the fury of the moment. To live among such people, still more to be responsible for the leading of them, was a life of imminent daily risk. Such was the wilder democracy which Xenophon experienced, and here he had not the resource, which he strongly recommends to the cavalry general in his tract, that above all things he must "square" the governing council of his city, and have on his side a leading politician to defend him. Xenophon therefore saw very plainly what hampered and weakened the Athens of Demosthenes in the next generation, and handed over Greece to Philip of Macedon—that a democracy which exposes its executive government to constant criticism, and which constantly discusses and changes its military plans, is wholly unfit to make foreign conquests and to rule an extended empire.

There was evidently far more hope from the side of Sparta, which at this very moment—I mean during Xenophon's youth and his campaigning days—held supremacy in Greece, commanded considerable armies, and was under monarchical government. More especially under an able king like Agesilaus, Xenophon must have felt his hopes of invading the East within reach of their fulfilment. But a closer survey of the far-famed Spartan constitution showed him that here, too, there were flaws and faults which made Sparta unfit to hold empire. He has left us a tract On the Lacedœmonian Polity, in which he details to us with admiration the strict discipline of that state and especially the thorough organisation of its education of boys and men for war. The order, the respect for authority, the simplicity of life, the subordination of even the most sacred family rights to the service of the state— all these aristocratic features fascinated every cultivated Greek who lived under the sway of that most capricious tyrant, a popular assembly. But they did not appreciate the compensating advantages which democracy, however dangerous and turbulent, afforded them.

As Grote has expounded to us with complacent insistence, no Spartan would have been so fitted to take a lead suddenly in public affairs, civil or military, as the cultivated pupil of Socrates from Athens, who jumps in a moment from an amateur into a general. When Sparta obtained her empire, she had no competent civil service to manage her dependencies. Her harmosts, as they were called, were but rude and overbearing soldiers, not above venality and other corruption, but wholly unable to maintain the imperial dignity which is the only justification of a ruler from without, the only counterpoising boon for those who find their liberties impaired. And even if there had been competent rulers among the Spartan aristocracy, the method of appointment was radically vicious. For though Sparta was in name a dual monarchy, the real power lay with the five ephors—so far as we know them, narrow and bigoted men—who were more anxious to keep the kings in subjection than to appoint fit men as governors in the subject cities. Xenophon's experiences when the Ten Thousand returned to Byzantium show us how arbitrary and cruel was the rule of these governors, how absurd their mutual jealousies, how incompetent their handling of great public interests. Yet there was no remedy while the ephors appointed their personal friends, against whose crimes it was well nigh impossible to obtain redress.

With all these various experiences before him, Xenophon wrote his largest and most elaborate treatise, doubtless that on which he staked his reputation—the book On the Education of Cyrus. The fate that mocks so many human efforts has not spared the Attic bee. This voluminous book, in which the many speeches and curious digressions seem to suggest the garrulity of advancing age, has been neglected from the author's own day till now, while the Anabasis has been inflicted on every schoolboy for two millenniums. The wonder is that so little-heeded a treatise ever survived the neglect of ages. Yet no Greek book should have excited greater likes and dislikes than this. Its theme is the vindication, both theoretically and practically, of absolute monarchy, as shown in the organisation of the Persian empire. In many other of his writings—as, for example, in the Æconomicus, he sets forth the Socratic idea that if you can find the man with a ruling soul, the archic man, you had better put him in control, and trust to his wisdom rather than to the counsels of many. But now he takes as his ideal the far-off figure of the first Cyrus, whose gigantic deeds impress alike the Hebrew prophet and the Greek philosopher, and, amplifying his picture with many romantic details, gives us in the form of a historical novel a monarch's handbook for the gaining and the administration of a great empire. We never hear that Alexander the Great read this treatise. Most probably his tutor Aristotle hid it from him with jealous care. For what teaching could be more odious to the Hellenic mind? Nevertheless, in all Greek literature there was hardly a book which would prove more interesting to Alexander, or more useful to him in justifying his adoption of oriental ideas.

What is even more striking is this, that after Alexander's magnificent display of what the "archic man" could do if he possessed an acknowledged monarchy, the whole Hellenistic world acquiesced in monarchy as the best and most practical form of government. The seventh and eighth books of the Cyropœdia were in spirit but the earliest of the many tracts composed by Stoic and Peripatetic philosophers about monarchy …, and it was marvellous how even the democrats of Athens outbid their neighbours in their servile adulation of such a king as Demetrius, whose father had founded a new dynasty. Before a century had elapsed since Xenophon's treatise appeared, hardly a Greek city existed which was not directly or indirectly under the control of a king. Even the Rhodian confederacy lasted only because the surrounding kings found their finances more manageable in a neutral banking centre with vast credit, and therefore with vast capital secured in a place of safety. And so when a great earthquake ruined the city, it was all the kings of the Hellenistic world who sent contributions to restore it— kings at war or at variance one with the other, but all bound to support the financial credit of Rhodes and avert a commercial crash.

I will but notice one more feature in this monarchy which overspread the Hellenistic world, which Xenophon saw in his day and admired, though he did not fully comprehend its strange nature. It is this, that hereditary monarchy develops in its subjects a loyalty to the sovereign almost unintelligible to the modern republican. The notion that it was the highest honour not only to die for the king, but to live in his personal service, was as foreign to the old Hellenic societies as it is to the modern American. And yet among the great and proud nobility of Persia, as among that of the French monarchy, and even now in England, men and women of the greatest pride and the largest wealth are "lords-in-waiting," "women of the bed chamber," "mistresses of the robes," "chamberlains," and "maids of honour." Xenophon saw this kind of devotion at the very outset of the Anabasis (I, 5). If Clearchus, the Lacedæmonian general, saw anyone slothful or lagging behind, he struck him with his stick, but set to the work himself, in order that he might turn public opinion to his side. How different the position of Cyrus! He sees a lot of carts stuck in the deep mud of a pass, and the men set to extricate them shirking the work. Whereupon he calls upon his retinue of lords to show them an example. These, without a word, throwing off their purple headdress, dash into the mud with their costly tunics, their coloured trousers, with torcs of gold around their necks, and bracelets on their wrists, and, setting to work with a will drag out the carts forthwith. Xenophon wonders at this instance of discipline … in these young nobles. It was nothing of the kind. It was that loyalty that holds the personal service of the prince by divine right to be the noblest self-sacrifice. These Persians were proud to do the work of asses and of mules when called upon by their prince, and yet they were far greater gentlemen than the Greeks who would have been highly offended at such an order.

Starting, then, with Macedon and Persia, whose kings, like the Spartan kings, professed a descent from the gods, the whole Hellenistic world learned to regard a Ptolemy, a Seleucus, even an Attalus, as something superhuman in authority. This was the change which Xenophon foresaw as highly expedient, if not necessary to the management of a great empire.

It is, I think, well worth observing that this problem of monarchy did not occupy Xenophon merely in his old age. If the Cyropœdia shows in its style, as I am convinced, something of the prolixity of age, the Hiero, or dialogue between that tyrant and Simonides, shows much of the exuberance of youth, and accordingly it has by general consent been classed amoung Xenophon's earliest works. In the former part of this most interesting tract Hiero sets forth the dangers and miseries of the Greek tyrant's life, surrounded as he was by flattery concealing hatred and mistrust, regarded as he was by all a public enemy, whose murder would be regarded an act of patriotism. Hiero details the circumstances which he regards essential to a tyrant's safety, and therefore certain to entail his unpopularity and its consequent miseries. A tyrant must keep up a mercenary force; he must therefore levy taxes for its support; he cannot possibly travel or see the world, for fear of a revolution in his absence, and so on, through the catalogue of difficulties, which were a commonplace of Greek literature. But when all is said on that side, Simonides reposts that it is not by reason of their external circumstances, but of their own characters, that Greek tyrants have earned the mistrust and hatred of men. He goes on to show how even a monarch not hereditary, who has risen from a private station, could earn the esteem and gratitude of his subjects, and, by identifying his own interests with those of his city, make himself the acknowledged benefactor of all around him. Even the keeping of a mercenary force is justified by good practical reasons, as the protection of frontiers was always a great burden to a citizen population, and as the readiness and discipline of professional soldiers must be superior to a sudden levy of amateurs in war, if such unwilling recruits can indeed be called amateurs. With such arguments Xenophon justifies the fact that most ambitious Greeks regarded the attaining to a tyranny as the very acme of their desires. However, if this fact was known to the Ten Thousand, it justifies not a little of their suspicions that Xenophon dreamt of being not only the founder but the autocrat of a new city on the Euxine. The picture of the benevolent tyrant, shown in the Hiero, would hardly be a sufficient guarantee to them that Xenophon, as a monarch, would indeed depart so widely from the ordinary and hateful traditions of a Greek tyranny. We need only here insist that the idea of monarchy had already occupied the early attention of the author of the Cyropœdia, and that he had probably found the arguments in its favour an ordinary topic among the young aristocrats in the school of Socrates.

I confess that the extremes to which he carries his defence of the imperii instrumenta employed by the kings of Persia must be distasteful to any reasonable critic, most of all to any democrat, ancient or modern. The way in which he describes the great king absorbing all the interests and ambitions of his subjects, and making every man in the state look to the sovran as the fountain of honour and of promotion— all this savours of a Napoleonic centralisation and a Napoleonic tyranny, which, as it saps all individual independence, so it kills the growth and nurture of the highest qualities in human nature. This unpleasant side of the book may afford one reason for its systematic neglect. It is so far like one of those artificial school-exercises, so common in the next generation, where the speaker made it his glory to vindicate some villain or justify some crime. And perhaps Xenophon was infected with this "sophistic" more than his readers imagine. Nevertheless, I for one have no doubt that real convictions in favour of monarchy underlie all his semisophistical arguments.

Grote, the great historian of Greece, who was the first to inspire me, and perhaps many of you, with the love of Greek history and Greek literature, looks upon this momentous change as the death-knell of his favourite country. "'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more." And yet at no time did the Greeks do more for the letters, the commerce, the civility of all the ancient world. And hence it is that I have chosen this somewhat neglected period as the topic of my discourses.