The Chief Periods of European History: Six lectures read in the University of Oxford in Trinity term, 1885 — John Shaqi
The Chief Periods of European History: Six lectures read in the University of Oxford in Trinity term, 1885Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
The Chief Periods of European History: Six lectures read in the University of Oxford in Trinity term, 1885
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Europe -- History
The history of Europe before the Roman power is in truth the history
of the stages by which the Greek mind made its way to this general
supremacy over the civilized world, and in some sort beyond the
bounds of the civilized world. Within the range of this supremacy of
the Greek mind comes the narrower range of the political supremacy
of powers which were either Greek from the beginning or which had
become Greek by adoption. The supremacy of the Greek mind has never
ceased, and is still abiding. Greek intellectual dominion has formed
one side of the whole modern world; the advance of Greek political
power has wrought the lesser, but by no means unimportant, work of
forming one of the nations of the modern world. The modern Greek
nation, meaning thereby something more than the inhabitants either of
the existing Greek kingdom or of the continuous Hellas of old times,
is the fruit of old Greek colonization, followed up by Macedonian
conquest. I said years ago that Alexander was the founder of the
modern Greek nation, and I say so still. This saying may seem to shut
out the work of earlier Greek colonization, above all in those lands
of Sicily and southern Italy which we have spoken of as having been
admitted by adoption within the immediate Greek world. The truth
is that Greek colonization has nowhere been fully lasting, it has
nowhere left its abiding traces on the modern world, except where
Macedonian conquest came to strengthen it. This enables us to fix
a boundary for the lands which were permanently admitted within the
immediate Greek world. That boundary is the Hadriatic. West of the
Hadriatic Greek life has died out. The outlying Greek colonies in
Gaul and Spain, deep as was their influence on Gaul, had ceased to
be Greek before the great nations of modern Europe came into being.
Even southern Italy and Sicily, where Greek life was strengthened by
their long connexion with the Greek Rome on the Bosporos, have ceased
to be Greek for some ages. The lands in which a series of invaders
of whom Pyrrhos of Molottis was the last and greatest strove in vain
to set up a Western Greek dominion, have fallen away from the Greek
world. But the work which Alexander of Epeiros failed to do in the
West was largely done by his more famous nephew and namesake in the
East. If a great part of Alexander’s conquests were but for a short
time, another great part of them was abiding. The work of Alexander
and Seleukos fixed a line fluctuating between the Euphrates and the
Tigris, as a long abiding boundary of European dominion. It fixed
Tauros, the boundary of Alexander’s first Asiatic conquests, as a
far more abiding boundary of European life. I have had to point out
in two hemispheres, but I must point out again, how very nearly the
actual range of the modern Greek nation agrees with the range of old
Greek colonization east of Hadria. It has advanced at some points and
it has gone back at others; but its general extent is wonderfully
the same.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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