Could I offer you a clearer proof of the modern character of this civilisation, which had not only a youth and an age of gold, but then a silver autumn or a Martinmas summer, when Plutarch lived in his little deserted town, surrounded by a complete and terrible decadence? And it may not be out of place to remind you that even with many differences of age, of place, and of circumstances, the same moral causes that produce decay in one civilisation are likely to produce it in another. The societies that fell into these vices were not ignorant or uneducated. The average Greek public was probably better trained in the knowledge of great ideas and the enjoyment of great literature than any public nowadays. Grote said very deliberately that the ordinary Attic citizen who attended the assemblies where Pericles and Theramenes and Demosthenes spoke, and where many others of like culture joined in the debate--that such a man was better educated, in the political sense, than the average member of the House of Commons in his day; and Grote had attended to the business of that House for ten years of his life. It was then, moreover, an assembly of English gentlemen, of the middle and upper classes, with a strong aristocratic flavour. What language would he have used had he compared his Periclean citizen to the House of Commons of the twentieth century? But in any case, we may say one thing with certainty, and it is one of the greatest lessons which the Greeks have to tell us: Intellectual culture by itself is no certain antidote to decadence in any society--nay, not even in that of Boston, Massachusetts. The moral conditions of refined Attic life in these dying days are best known from the remains, or from the Latin translations of the society plays of the famous Menander. The life which Menander portrayed has been discussed and estimated in a chapter of my _Greek Life and Thought_, and you will there see at length how trivial, how selfish, how immoral, how ignoble that life was. If such was indeed the true character of Attic society in Menander’s days, we may well congratulate the world that the Macedonian conquerer arose to show the world that there were greater ideals than to while away one’s time in the rotten refinements of decadent Athens.