In the debate between ancients and moderns it is not at all clear that the
ancients carry off the prize. Shall we count it a trivial achievement that
famine has been eliminated in modern states, and that one country can now
grow enough food to overfeed itself and yet send hundreds of millions of
bushels of wheat to nations in need? Are we ready to scuttle the science
that has so diminished superstition, obscurantism, and religious intolerance,
or the technology that has spread food, home ownership, comfort,
education, and leisure beyond any precedent? Would we really prefer the
Athenian agora or the Roman comitia to the British Parliament or the
United States Congress, or be content under a narrow franchise like
Attica’s, or the selection of rulers by a praetorian guard? Would we rather
have lived under the laws of the Athenian Republic or the Roman Empire
than under constitutions that give us habeas corpus, trial by jury, religious
and intellectual freedom, and the emancipation of women? Are our morals,
lax though they are, worse than those of the ambisexual Alcibiades, or has
any American President imitated Pericles, who lived with a learned
courtesan? Are we ashamed of our great universities, our many publishing
houses, our bountiful public libraries? There were great dramatists in
Athens, but was any greater than Shakespeare [Shakespeare, William
(1564-1616)], and was Aristophanes [Aristophanes (450?-385 B.C.)] as
profound and humane as Molière [Molière (Jean Baptiste Poguelin; 1622-
1673)]? Was the oratory of Demosthenes [Demosthenes (385?-322 B.C.)],
Isocrates, and Aeschines [Aeschines (389-314 B.C.)] superior to that of
Chatham [Chatham, William Pitt, Earl of (1708-1778)], Burke, and
Sheridan [Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816)]? Shall we place Gibbon
below Herodotus [Herodotus (5th century B.C.)] or Thucydides? Is there
anything in ancient prose fiction comparable to the scope and depth of the
modern novel? We may grant the superiority of the ancients in art, though
some of us might still prefer Notre Dame de Paris to the Parthenon. If the
Founding Fathers of the United States could return to America, or Fox and
Bentham to England, or Voltaire and Diderot [Diderot, Denis (1713-84)] to
France, would they not reproach us as ingrates for our blindness to our
