Let us take an atlas of the classic world and find our way among the neighbors of ancient Greece. By Greece, or Hellas, we shall mean all lands occupied, in antiquity, by peoples speaking Greek.

We begin where many invaders entered-over the hills and through the v legs of Epirus. Here the ancestors of the Greeks must have tarried many year, for they set up at Dodona a shrine to their thundering sky-god Zeus; late as the fifth century the Greeks consulted the. oracle there, and read divine will in the clangor of caldrons of the rustling leaves of the sacred oak. Through southern Epirus flowed the river Acheron, amid ravines so dark a deep that Greek poets spoke of it as the portal or very scene of Hell. In Homer day the Epirots were largely Greek in speech and ways; but then new wav of barbarism came down upon them from the north, and dissuaded them fro civilization.

Farther up the Adriatic lay Illyria, sparsely settled with untamed herdsm who sold cattle and slaves for salt.' On this coast, at Epidamnus (the Roman Dyrrachium, now Durazzo), Caesar disembarked his troops in pursuit of Pompey. Across the Adriatic the expanding Greeks snatched the lower coasts fro the native tribes, and gave civilization to Italy. (In the end chose native tribes would sweep back upon them, and one tribe, almost barbarous till Alexander’s time, would swallow them up, along with their motherland, in an unprecedented empire.) Beyond the Alps ranged the Gauls, who were to prove very friend) to the Greek city of Massalia (Marseilles); and at the western end of the Mediterranean lay Spain, already half civilized and fully exploited by the Phoenicians and Carthaginians when, about 550, the Greeks established the timid colony at Emporium (Ampurias). On tire coast of Africa, menacing) opposite Sicily, was imperial Carthage, founded by Dido and the Phoenicia tradition said, in 813; no mere village, but a city of 700,000 population, monopolizing the commerce of the western Mediterranean, dominating Utica, Hippo, and three hundred other towns in Africa, and controlling prosperous land mines, and colonies in Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain. This fabulously wealth metropolis was fated to lead the Oriental thrust against Greece in the west, as Persia would lead it in the east.

Farther east on the African coast lay the prosperous Greek city of Cyrene, against a dark Libyan hinterland. Then Egypt. It was the belief of most Greeks that many elements of their civilization had come to them from Egypt; their legends ascribed the foundation of several Greek cities to men who, like Cadmus and Danaus, had come from Egypt, or had brought Egyptian culture to Greece by way of Phoenicia or Crete. Under the Sake kings (663-525) Egyptian commerce and art revived, and the ports of the Nile were for the first time opened to Greek trade. From the seventh century onward many famous Greeks – Thales, Pythagoras, Solon, Plato, and Democritus may serve as examples – visited Egypt, and were much impressed by the fullness and antiquity of its culture. Here were no barbarians, but men who had had a mature civilization, and highly developed arts, two thousand years before the fall of Troy. "You Greeks," said an Egyptian priest to Solon, "are mere children, talkative and vain, and knowing nothing of the past." When Hecataeus of Miletus boasted to the Egyptian priests that he could trace his ancestry through fifteen generations to a god, they quietly showed him, in their sanctuaries, the statues of 345 high priests, each the son of the preceding, making 345 generations since the gods had reigned on earth. From the Egyptian cults of Isis and Osiris, in the belief of Greek scholars like Herodotus and Plutarch, came the Orphic doctrine of a judgment after death, and the resurrection ritual of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis. Probably in Egypt, Thales of Miletus learned geometry, and Rhoecus and Theodorus of Samos picked up the art of hollow casting in bronze; in Egypt the Greeks acquired new skills in pottery, textiles, metalworking, and ivory; there, as well as from the Assyrians, Phoenicians, and Hittites, Greek sculptors took the style of their early statues-flat-faced, slant-eyed, closefisted, straight-limbed, stiff;` in the colonnades of Sakkara and Beni-Hasan, as well as in the remains of Mycenaean Greece, Greek architects found part of their inspiration for the fluted column and the Doric style. And as Greece in its youth learned humbly from Egypt, so, when it was exhausted, it died, one might say, in the arms of Egypt; at Alexandria it merged its philosophies, its rites, and its gods with those of Egypt and Judea, in order that they might find a resurrected life in Rome and Christianity.

Second only to Egypt's was the influence of Phoenicia. The enterprising merchants of Tyre and Sidon acted like a circulating medium in the transmission of culture, and stimulated every Mediterranean region with the sciences, techniques, arts, and cults of Egypt and the Near East. They excelled and perhaps instructed the Greeks in the building of ships; they taught them better methods in metalworking, textiles, and dyes;' they played a part, with Crete and Asia Minor, in passing on to Greece the Semitic form of the alphabet that had been developed in Egypt, Crete, and Syria. Farther east, Babylonia gave to the Greeks its system of weights and measures, its water clock and sun dial, its monetary units of obol, mina, and talent, its astronomical principle instruments, records, and calculations, its sexagesimal system of dividing r year, the circle, and the four right angles that are subtended by a circle at its center, into 360 parts, each of the 360 degrees into 6o minutes, and each of the minutes into 6o seconds; it was presumably his acquaintance with Egyptian a Babylonian astronomy that enabled Thales to predict an eclipse of the sun Probably from Babylonia came Hesiod's notion of Chaos as the origin of things; and the story of Ishtar and Tammuz is suspiciously like those of Aphrodite and Adonis, Demeter and Persephone.

Near the eastern end of the commercial complex that united the classic world lay the final enemy of Greece. In some ways – though few – the civilization of Persia was superior to that of contemporary Hellos; it produced a type of gentleman finer than the Greek in every respect except that of intellectual keenness and education, and a system of imperial administration that easily excelled the clumsy hegemonies of Athens and Sparta, and lacked only the Greek passion for liberty. – From Assyria the Ionian Greeks took a measure of skill in animal statuary, a certain thickness of figure and flatness of drapery in their early sculpture, many decorative motives in friezes and moldings, and occasionanally a style of relief, as in the lovely stela of Aristion. – Lydia maintained intimate with Ionia, and its brilliant capital, Sardis, was a clearinghouse for the traffic in goods and ideas between Mesopotamia and the Greek cities on the coast. The necessities of an extensive trade stimulated banking, and caused the Lydian government, about 680, to issue a state-guaranteed coinage. This boon to trade was soon imitated and improved by the Greeks, and had effects as momentous and interminable as those that came from the introduction of the alphabet. – The influence of Phrygia was older and subtler. Its mother goddess, Cybele, entered directly and deviously into Greek religion, and its orgiastic flute music became that "Phrygian mode" so popular among the populace, and so disturbing to the moralists, of Greece. From Phrygia this wild music crossed the Hellespont into Thrace, and served the rites of Dionysus. The god of wine was the chief gift of Thrace to Greece; but one Thracian city, Hellenized Abdera, sought to even the balance by giving Greece three philosophers – Leucippus, Democritus and Protagoras. It was from Thrace that the cult of the Muses passed down into Hellos; and the half-legendary founders of Greek music – Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris – were Thracian singers and bards.

From Thrace we move southward into Macedonia, and our cultural circumvallation of Greece is complete. It is a picturesque land, with a soil once rich in minerals, plains fertile in grain and fruit, and mountains disciplining a hard stock that was destined to conquer Greece. The mountaineers and peasants were of mixed race, predominantly Illyrian and Thracian; perhaps they were akin to the Dolians who conquered the Peloponnesus. The ruling aristocracy claimed Hellenic lineage (from Heracles himself), and spoke a dialect of Greek. The earlier capital, Edessa, stood on a vast plateau between the plains that stretched to Epirus and the ranges that reached to the Aegean. Farther east lay Pella, capital-to-be of Philip and Alexander; and near the sea was Pydna, where the Romans would conquer the conquering Macedonians, and win the right to transmit Greek civilization to the Western world.

This, then, was the environment of Greece: civilizations like Egypt, Crete, and Mesopotamia that gave it those elements of technology, science, and art which it would transform into the brightest picture in history; empires like Persia and Carthage that would feel the challenge of Greek commerce, and would unite in a war to crush Greece between them into a harmless vassalage; and, in the north, warlike hordes recklessly breeding, restlessly marching, who would sooner or later pour down over the mountain barriers and do what the Dorians had done-break through what Cicero was to call the Greek border woven on the barbarian robe, and destroy a civilization that they could not understand. Hardly any of these surrounding nations cared for what to the Greeks was the very essence of life-liberty to be, to think, to speak, and to do. Every one of these peoples except the Phoenicians lived under despots, surrendered their souls to superstition, and had small experience of the stimulus of freedom or the life of reason. That was why the Greeks called them all, too indiscriminately, barbaroi, barbarians; a barbarian was a man content to believe without reason and to live without liberty. In the end the two conceptions of life – the mysticism of the East and the rationalism of the West – would fight for the body and soul of Greece. Rationalism would win under Pericles, as under Caesar, Leo X, and Frederick; but mysticism would always return. The alternate victories of these complementary philosophies in the vast pendulum of history constitute the essential biography of Western civilization.

What type of man, and what kind of civilization, did this code produce? First of all, a man of strong body, at home with hardship and privation. A luxury-loving Sybarite remarked of the Spartans that "it was no commendable thing in them to be so ready to die in the wars, since by that they were freed from much hard labor and miserable living:" Health was one of the cardinal virtues in Sparta, and sickness was a crime; Plato's heart must have been gladdened to find a land so free from medicine and democracy. And here was courage; only the Roman would equal the Spartan's record for fearlessness and victory. When the Spartans surrendered at Sphacteria, Greece could hardly believe it; it was unheard of that Spartans should not fight to the last man; even their common soldiers, on many occasions, killed themselves rather than survive defeat. When the news of the Spartan disaster at Leuctra – so overwhelming that in effect it put an end to Sparta's history – was brought to the ephors as they presided over the Gymnopedia games, the magistrates said nothing, but merely added, to the roster of the holy dead whom the games honored, the names of the newly slain. Self-control, moderation, equanimity in fortune and adversity-qualities that the Athenians wrote about but seldom showed-were taken for granted in every Spartan citizen.

If it be a virtue to obey the laws, the Spartan was virtuous beyond most men. "Though the Lacedaemonians are free," the ex-king Demaratus told Xerxes, "yet they are not free in all things; for over them is set law as a master, whom they fear much more than thy people fear thee." Seldom – probably never again except in Rome and medieval Jewry – has a people been so strengthened by reverence for its laws. Under the Lycurgean constitution Sparta, for at least two centuries, became always stronger. Though it failed to conquer Argos or Arcadia, it persuaded all the Peloponnesus except Argos and Achaea to accept its leadership in a Peloponnesian League that for almost two hundred years (560-380) kept the peace in Pelops' isle. All Greece admired Sparta's army and government, and looked to it for aid in deposing burdensome tyrannies. Xenophon tells of "the astonishment with which I first noted the unique position of Sparta among the states of Hellas, the relatively sparse population, and at the same time the extraordinary power and prestige of the community. I was puzzled to account for the fact. It was only when I came to consider the peculiar institutions of the Spartans that my wonderment ceased." Like Plato and Plutarch, Xenophon was never tired of praising Spartan ways. Here it was, of course, that Plato found the outlines of his utopia, a little blurred by a strange indifference to Ideas. Wearv and fearful of the vulgarity and chaos of democracy, many Greek thinkers took refuge in an idolatry of Spartan order and law.

They could afford to praise Sparta, since they did not have to live in it, They did not feel at close range the selfishness, coldness, and cruelty of the Spartan character; they could not see from the select gentlemen whom they met, or the heroes whom they commemorated from afar, that the Spartan code produced good soldiers and nothing more; that it made vigor of body a graceless brutality because it killed nearly all capacity for the things of the mind. With the triumph of the code the arts that had flourished before its establishment died a sudden death; we hear of no more poets, sculptors, or builders in Sparta after 550. [Gitiadas adorned a temple of Athena with excellently wrought bronze plates; Bathycles of Magnesia built the stately throne of Apollo at Amyclae; and Theodorus of Samos built for Sparta a famous town hall. After that Spartan art, even by imported artists, is hardly heard of any more.] Only choral dance and music remained, for there Spartan discipline could shine, and the individual could be lost in the mass. Excluded from commerce with the world, barred from travel, ignorant of the science, the literature, and the philosophy of exuberantly growing Greece, the Spartans became a nation of excellent hoplites, with the mentality of a lifelong infantryman. Greek travelers marveled at a life so simple and unadorned, a franchise so jealously confined, a conservatism so tenacious of every custom and superstition, a courage and discipline so exalted and limited, so noble in character, so base in purpose, and so barren in result; while, hardly a day's ride away, the Athenians were building, out of a thousand injustices and errors, a civilization broad in scope and yet intense in action, open to every new idea and eager for intercourse with the world, tolerant, varied, complex, luxurious, innovating, skeptical, imaginative, poetical, turbulent, free. It was a contrast that would color and almost delineate Greek history.