quite as marked as the similarity; and this seems to indicate that the
extraordinary personal power which some men possess, or are believed to
possess, is fundamentally the same, whether it is, or whether it is not,
exercised in the service of the gods of the community; but the spirit
in which it is used, when employed in the one way, is fundamentally
opposed to that in which it is used in the other. Such power may in the
course of evolution come to be regarded, or come to manifest itself,
either as religious or as magical. But in itself, and at the start,
inasmuch as it may become either hereafter, it is at the beginning
neither. It is the power--whether of ‘suggestion’ or of actual
control--which some exceptional men exercise over others.
LECTURE V
HERODOTUS AND ANTHROPOLOGY
Earlier lectures of this course have dealt with topics suggested by
the first civilization of the Aegean, by the first literature of the
Greeks, and by the survival in Graeco-Roman culture of traces of a
quite unhellenic barbarism.
To-day we come to the fifth century and to the work of the man who
stands next after Homer as exponent, on a generous scale, of his
country’s thought and life. Homer has shown us Aegean life in a lull
between the storms of the Age of Wanderings, between the Achaean and
the Dorian Migrations. Herodotus shows us adolescent Greece, the child
of Earth and Planet, strangling, like Heracles, the snakes about its
cradle, and rising thence to strike down Giants and Monsters, and to
enter into its kingdom. This kingdom, for him, is nothing less than
the περίοδος γῆς, the _orbis terrarum_, a rim of convergent coastlands
encircling the Midland Sea, which is ‘Our Sea’.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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