What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation? — Themes and Context

en necessarily an unity, owing to the isolation of its land from neighbours, and to the fact that its great high-road, the Nile, traversed the whole country. We now know this to be false, and that the reduction of Egypt first to two, and then to one state was not accomplished till after ages of separation among its _nomes_, and was accomplished not by natural necessity but by the genius of a conqueror. As regards the physical peculiarities of that country, they are all to be found again on the Indus, with its affluents from far inland Alps bringing down a periodical inundation, with its great delta spreading from Hyderabad, with its long course through a desert which affords it not a rivulet of increase: yet the peoples of the Indus have never thriven and waxed great like the Egyptians. So far as our evidence leads us, we may assert that had the Egyptians been settled on the Indus, and the population of the Indus on the Nile, the respective parts played by these rivers in civilisation would have been reversed. I am equally convinced that had the Greek race been settled on the Adriatic, with many fiords and islands, and over against Italy, instead of Asia Minor, or on the west coast of Italy, with its headlands and bays, its great and fruitful islands within sight,--these circumstances would have been equally favourable to their genius, whereas they were not sufficient to raise the Corsicans and Sardinians, perhaps the best situated of all, from a very low level among nations. I will not cite Sicily, drawn from its obscurity by the Greeks, for they were already great in the scale of nations when they transformed that splendid island, long undistinguished under Sikels, Sicans, Phœnicians, into a brilliant province of Hellenedom. It may perhaps occur to some of you that the special qualities of the race came from its being a purer branch of the great Aryan stock than its brethren; that it was pre-eminently Japhet dwelling in the tents of Shem, unalloyed with the dross of lower races, whose animalism has survived in the defects of other Aryan stocks that dwelt among them. But the very opposite seems to be the case. The more we study the Greek language, the more we are impressed with the number of strange roots, which point to a non-Aryan origin. Many of the words in commonest use, such as βασιλεὑς and τὑραννος, are not to be explained from Aryan roots, and anyone who has studied such place-names as Tiryns, Assos, and their congeners will fairly conclude that the Greeks were not purer from admixture than the Slavs or the Celts.[1] After all that has been adduced, therefore, to account for the intellectual supremacy of the Greeks, we are compelled to fall back on the ultimate fact--which has not been explained--that they possessed a national genius denied to their brethren and their neighbours. It is as yet an ultimate fact that the human race is not promoted, except in numbers, by heat and moisture. Some have been higher from the earliest moment that we can observe, or infer, their conditions. Others have remained lower in spite of the most favourable circumstances. This is a riddle which no historian has yet solved. But is it stranger, I ask, than the sporadic and unaccountable appearance, in a settled and known society, of individual genius? This is the parallel case wherewith I cannot explain, but only vindicate my position. Is it stranger that one nation should emerge into history with exceptional gifts than that there emerges into life, according to no law that we know, individual genius? If you look back at the family history of those that have made or upset empires, that have added new domains to science, that have created the poetry of the world, you will find no law or reason to explain their sporadic appearance, like that of brilliant meteors across the orderly stars of the sky. They generally come from undistinguished parents; they have undistinguished brothers and sisters; they do not transmit their great qualities, save in some rare occasions, as if to show that there is even here no prohibitive law. They may be single, or eldest, or youngest, children, or in the middle of a large family. They need not be noted for physical health. There was once a posthumous and yet prematurely born infant, so puny and wretched that, but for the sorrows of the widowed mother, little pains would have been taken to keep it alive, for it was her first born. Charitable neighbours nursed it with amazing care, and so saved its miserable spark of life from extinction. After a delicate and monotonous youth, the child went to Cambridge; he was known in later years as Sir Isaac Newton.