It would be foolish to demand that modern writers should have the simplicity of Homer or the age of Pericles, or to pretend that they cannot be great without it. Every age must and will have its own literature, reflecting the minds and circumstances of those who write it. Nor is the advantage entirely on the side of the Greeks. A drama of Shakespeare or a novel of Tolstoi, with their long roll of _dramatis personae_, are more like life than a Greek tragedy with its absence of byplot and its few, central, characters. A modern historian would have recorded and discussed aspects of the history of fifth-century Greece which Thucydides ignores. Modern literature may claim that, with less intensity, it has greater amplitude and a more faithful presentation of the complexity of life. On the other hand the Greeks are free from that dominance of the abnormal which is one danger of modern literature; they do not explore sexual and other aberrations or encourage their readers to explore them. They are also free from that dominance of the unessential, which, in life as in literature, is a more innocent but more subtle and perhaps equally ruinous vice. That is why their simplicity is refreshing and salutary. _Porro unum necessarium._ In life human beings return from a distracting variety of interests to a few simple things; or, if they do not return, run the risk of losing their souls. In literature, which is the shadow of life, they need to do the same. * * * * * The simplicity of Greek literature is accompanied by the highest literary art. Nothing could be more surprising. The primitive conditions that preserve simplicity are apparently incompatible with technical perfection, which is a late-born child of literature and the creation of matured taste, long experiment, and patient work. But in Greek, and perhaps only in Greek, _naïveté_ and art go hand in hand. There is something almost uncanny in Homer's union of the two: it is a paradox that the character of Achilles, the death of Hector, the primitive cunning of Odysseus, should be portrayed in such a metre and such a vocabulary; it seems unnatural that so highly wrought and refined a medium should be used to depict the life and ideas of a society which is nearer to savagery than to civilization. But unnatural or not, so it is.