“In the matter of slavery; all nations had slaves; some treated them very cruelly, some with moderate cruelty. The Greeks alone argued whether it was right to have them--and ‘cranks’ occasionally proposed emancipation. You get strong testimony, sometimes indignant testimony, that the Athenians were too soft altogether in their treatment of slaves. As soon as you get to Carthaginian or Roman history you get appalling cruelty (the 6000 crucified by Crassus, the gladiatorial games, the habitual leg-breaking of slaves, etc.); such things seem never to have occurred in Greece. As soon as you get to Alexander you get, of course, the Oriental despotic touch--fantastic vanity and cruelty; and at length the recurrence of human sacrifice. “The greatness of Greece comes out only in the art and literature and thought; not in the political and social history--except in dim flashes. By all means emphasize clearly to start with that the Greeks of, say, the ninth century, were practically savages, and those of even the sixth and in places right on to the fifth and fourth were in many things on the ‘Lower Cultures’ level. Clothes like Polynesians; tools very poor; religion ... fragments of the Polynesian all about, when you got outside the educated Attic world. But the _characteristic_ is that, on this very low level, you have extraordinary flashes of very high inspiration, as the poetry and art and philosophy witness. Also, an actual achievement in social life--what one calls ‘Hellenism,’ _i.e._, republicanism, simplicity of life, sobriety of thought, almost complete abolition of torture, mutilation, etc., and an amazing emancipation of the individual and of the human intellect. It is impossible to speak, really, of the ‘Greek view’ of anything. Because all the different views are put forward and represented: polytheism, monotheism, atheism; pro-slavery, anti-slavery; duty to animals, no duty to animals; democracy, monarchy, aristocracy. The characteristic is that _human thought got free_. (Not absolutely, of course; only to an amazing extent.) This emancipation was paid for by all sorts of instability; awful political instability, because stability in such things is produced exactly by the opposite--by long firm tradition and cohesiveness. “It is not fair to say I idealize the Athenian mob; see, for example, my _Euripides and his Age_. But I don’t think it was like our music-hall mob. It was much more artistic, much more intellectual and yet more primitive, more indecent but less lascivious; more capable of atrocious misconduct; also probably more capable of idealism. But we don’t really know much about the crowd. It is only a hostile average-sensual-man background against which the philosophers and poets stand out. There was no ‘city mob,’ as in Rome. They were nearly all small farmers or craftsmen. I can’t help thinking that their badness was more like the faults of a superior South Sea Islander than like the viler side of the ‘crowd’ to-day.” § 4