rationalism over mythology in the last century before Christianity, and
follows a similar victory today in the first century after Christianity.
Caught in the relaxing interval between one moral code and the next, an
unmoored generation surrenders itself to luxury, corruption, and a restless
disorder of family and morals, in all but a remnant clinging desperately to
old restraints and ways. Few souls feel any longer that “it is beautiful and
honorable to die for one’s country.” A failure of leadership may allow a
state to weaken itself with internal strife. At the end of the process a
decisive defeat in war may bring a final blow, or barbarian invasion from
without may combine with barbarism welling up from within to bring the
civilization to a close.
Is this a depressing picture? Not quite. Life has no inherent claim to
eternity, whether in individuals or in states. Death is natural, and if it comes
in due time it is forgivable and useful, and the mature mind will take no
offense from its coming. But do civilizations die? Again, not quite. Greek
civilization is not really dead; only its frame is gone and its habitat has
changed and spread; it survives in the memory of the race, and in such
abundance that no one life, however full and long, could absorb it all.
Homer [Homer (9th century B.C.)] has more readers now than in his own
day and land. The Greek poets and philosophers are in every library and
college; at this moment Plato is being studied by a hundred thousand
discoverers of the “dear delight” of philosophy overspreading life with
understanding thought. This selective survival of creative minds is the most
real and beneficent of immortalities.
Nations die. Old regions grow arid, or suffer other change. Resilient man
picks up his tools and his arts, and moves on, taking his memories with
him. If education has deepened and broadened those memories, civilization
migrates with him, and builds somewhere another home. In the new land he
need not begin entirely anew, nor make his way without friendly aid;
communication and transport bind him, as in a nourishing placenta, with
his mother country. Rome imported Greek civilization and transmitted it to
