Greeks and Barbarians (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from Greeks and BarbariansThere have been many explanations of ancient Greece and its peculiar spirit. If I may say so, the only original thing about the explanation offered in this book is its want of originality, for it is the explanation of the Greeks themselves. They believed that Hellenism was born of the con¿ict between the Greeks and the Barbarians. As Thucydides puts it (i. Greek and Barbarian are correlative terms and Herodotus wrote his great book, seek ing, as he says, digressions of set purpose, to illustrate just that. About such an explanation there is obviously nothing startling at all. It is indeed (at first sight) so colourless and negative, that it must be dissatisfaction with it which has provoked all the other explanations. Scholars must have said to themselves, What is the use of repeat ing that Hellenism is the opposite of Barbarism? We know that already. But they knew it only in a formal or abstract way. It is but the other day that classical scholars have begun to study the Barbarian and to work out the contrast which alone can give us the material for a rich understanding of the Greek himself. Without this study one's ideas of the Greek could not fail to be somewhat empty and colourless. But any one who cares to read even the meagre outline which these essays supply will hardly complain that there is a lack of colour.The subject indeed is so vast that one is compelled to be selective and illustrative. Even to be this is far from easy. For instance, it seems extraordinary to write upon the meaning of Hellenism without a chapter on Greek art. Such a chapter, however, is excluded by the design of this book, which must dispense with illustrations whereas in dealing with literature I could always drive home my point by simple quotation. Then again it may appear a little old-fashioned and arbitrary that I confine myself to the centuries before Alexander. But after all it was, in these centuries that Hellenism rose into its most characteristic form - and in any case a man must stop somewhere.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.