There is no department of Greek life where we feel its modernness more intensely than when we come to consider political and social philosophy. The Greeks, and the Romans that learned from them, write and talk like thoroughly modern men; the discussions of Aristotle and the treatises of Cicero are quite fit to instruct us in the present day on the possibilities of organising human society. The rights of women, for example, are a topic with which they were perfectly familiar. Pass into what are justly called the Dark Ages or early Middle Ages, and you feel that the world has gone centuries back and not forward. The reign of superstition, the tyranny of the priest, the miseries of the churl, the childishness of art, the utter stagnation of literature, the substitution of fortresses for free cities, violence for law, savage rudeness for polished urbanity--these are the astounding conditions of an Europe most of which once had enjoyed real civilisation. Among other causes of this strange retrogression in history, not the least is the disappearance of Greek life and culture into the East, where Constantinople still adhered to great Hellenic traditions at least in law, in language, and in art. All that Roman life and thought had borrowed from Greece was unable to make Latin culture fruitful and permanent, because it _was_ borrowed from Greece and not really assimilated; so it came to pass that, compared with the brightness and buoyancy of Greek culture, the reign of the Latin through civilised Europe was an epoch of standstill, of formalism, of intellectual barrenness, of ossification. So long as the Romans were mere docile pupils of the Greeks, they made great progress in the arts of life; as soon as they felt themselves the acknowledged masters of the world and came to look down upon their teachers, their inborn coarseness and want of genius began to reassert itself, and but for the influence of an Oriental creed, domesticated among them by the Greeks, they would have relapsed, along with their barbarian invaders, into intellectual insignificance.