Modern poets can never praise Greek poetry too much; modern philosophers, Greek philosophy; modern orators, Greek oratory. But the shift away from ancient studies as the basis of all education has tended to leave such employments in the hands of the conservative, or at least of those whose imaginations live largely on the past, and has thus contributed to the notion that practical affairs—economy and polity—are not properly to be studied in Greek literature. To the extent that knowledge has been multiplied since Aristotle’s day, this is, of course, true. We cannot look to the Greeks for information which they did not have, and it would be most un-Greek to neglect superior sources of knowledge merely on the ground that other sources were better established in an old tradition. Undoubtedly this alienation of men of affairs from ancient studies has been due less to the deficiencies of the Greeks than to the deficiencies of the teachers of Greek, who, so long holding a vested interest in education everywhere, permitted themselves, like other vested interests, to fall into sluggish routine and tyranny, a pitiless round of grammar without sense and of words without life. The reaction against their monopoly has been, like most reactions so forced, excessive. In our discovery that we had overvalued the scanty amount of grammar and prosody which unwilling students actually carried away from their compulsory struggles with Greek, with the mere letter of its language without any deeper spirit or meaning, many have come to undervalue the Greek world as a laboratory in which, better than anywhere else in history, we may study human beings vividly and rationally engaged in the conduct of human life.