The genius for assimilating might seem to imply a collateral weakness--the danger of absorption or degeneration into the nations whose ideas are adopted and developed. There are cases in the history of man where a conquered race has abandoned its language and religion and adopted those of its conquerors. There are other cases where the conqueror has been absorbed and the subject race has reasserted itself in spite of dominant language and legislation intended to secure its ultimate absorption. It is one of the salient features of the Hellenic race that, though very receptive of foreign ideas, though always ready to profit by the discoveries of neighbours, it never abandoned its primacy in type, and was never absorbed into any other population, except perhaps in isolated cases and after centuries of separation from the mother stock. The Eretrians whom Darius brought as prisoners to Asia and settled in the rich fields of Babylonia were doubtless in the long run absorbed by the surrounding nationalities, but they were still recognisable when Alexander conquered his Empire nearly two hundred years later, and possibly they too may have kept up the affecting custom of the people of Posidonia (Pæstum in Italy) at the other extremity of the civilised world, who were indeed, as Strabo tells us, centuries later, barbarised out and out by the Samnites, but who nevertheless still met once a year to lament their fate, and to deplore their loss of Hellenic life. Apart from these few and small exceptions, this race has absolutely refused to be absorbed by any other, however civilised, however dominant, and has remained the same in language and in characteristics from the days when Homer composed for the Achæan chiefs, down to this day, when every scholar or student looks upon Athens as the goal of his pilgrimage. The permanence of the Greek language is a great and striking evidence. There was never, I suppose, a generation of Greeks from the 8th century B.C. to the 20th A.D. which did not understand Homer; but if you are disposed to ascribe this to sentimental causes, then I say that the earliest Attic prose differs from the Attic prose of to-day so little as to afford us an unique example of persistency. Let me state it in this way: Herodotus, if you recalled him from his grave and put a Greek newspaper of to-day into his hands, would at first find the type novel, but would presently recognise in it his own alphabet. He would then discover a dialect of his Greek, as he heard it at Athens, and though he would doubtless call it very vulgar, and even barbarised, he would in a day or two read it quite fluently. So far as my knowledge goes, you will find nothing like this in Europe.