Greece has been the great civiliser, the oecumenical teacher, the disturber and regenerator of slumbering societies. She is the source of most of the quickening ideas which re-make nations and renovate literature and art. If we reckon up our secular possessions, the wealth and heritage of the past, the larger share may be traced back to Greece. One half of life she has made her domain,—all, or well-nigh all, that belongs to the present order of things and to the visible world." _S. H. Butcher, Some Aspects of the Greek Genius, pages 9-43._ "The part assigned to [the Greeks] in the drama of the nations was to create forms of beauty, to unfold ideas which should remain operative when the short bloom of their own existence was over, and thus to give a new impulse, a new direction, to the whole current of human life. {1637} The prediction which Thucydides puts into the mouth of the Athenian orator has been fulfilled, though not in the sense literally conveyed; 'Assuredly we shall not be without witnesses,' says Pericles; 'there are mighty documents of our power, which shall make us the wonder of this age, and of ages to come.' He was thinking of those wide-spread settlements which attested the empire of Athens. But the immortal witnesses of his race are of another kind. Like the victims of the war, whose epitaph he was pronouncing, the Hellenes have their memorial in all lands, graven, not on stone, but in the hearts of mankind. … Are we not warranted by what we know of Greek work, imperfect though our knowledge is, in saying that no people has yet appeared in the world whose faculty for art, in the largest sense of the term, has been so comprehensive? And there is a further point that may be noted. It has been said that the man of genius sometimes is such in virtue of combining the temperament distinctive of his nation with some gift of his own which is foreign to that temperament; as in Shakespeare the basis is English, and the individual gift a flexibility of spirit which is not normally English. But we cannot apply this remark to the greatest of ancient Greek writers. They present certainly a wide range of individual differences. Yet so distinctive and so potent is the Hellenic nature that, if any two of such writers be compared, however wide the individual differences may be,—as between Aristophanes and Plato, or Pindar and Demosthenes,—such individual differences are less significant than those common characteristics of the Hellenic mind which separate both the men compared from all who are not Hellenes. If it were possible to trace the process by which the Hellenic race was originally separated from their Aryan kinsfolk, the physiological basis of their qualities might perhaps be traced in the mingling of different tribal ingredients. As it is,