Of the political institutions which throughout Hellas influenced so powerfully the developement of the national character, it is not my design in the present volumes to speak. I confine myself entirely to the other causes which rendered the ancient Greeks what they were; reserving the examination of their forms of government for a separate treatise. The subject here discussed possesses sufficient interest of itself. It has been my aim to open up as far as possible a prospect into the domestic economy of a Grecian family, the arts, comforts, conveniences, regulations affecting the condition of private life, and those customs and manners which communicated a peculiar character and colour to the daily intercourse of Greek citizens. For, in all my investigations about the nature and causes of those ancient institutions which, during so many ages constituted the glory and the happiness of the most highly gifted race known to history, I found my attention constantly directed to the circumstances of their private life, from which, as from a great fountain, all their public prosperity and grandeur seemed to spring. Indeed, the great sources of a nation’s happiness and power must always lie about the domestic hearth. There or nowhere are sown, and for many years cherished by culture, all those virtues which bloom afterwards in public, and form the best ornaments of the commonwealth. Men are everywhere exactly what their mothers make them. If these are slaves, narrow-minded, ignorant, unhappy, those in their turn will be so also. The domestic example, small and obscure though it be, will impress its image on the state; since that which individually is base and little, can never by congregating with neighbouring littleness, become great, or lead to those heroic efforts, those noble self-sacrifices, which elevate human nature to a sphere in which it appears to touch upon and partake something of the divine. By minutely studying, as far as practicable, those small obscure sanctuaries of Greek civilisation—the private dwellings of Attica--I hoped to discover the secret of that moral alchemy by which were formed Those dead, but sceptred sovereigns who still rule Our spirits from their urns.