What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?

Preface


THESE lectures, delivered in Boston at the invitation of the Curator of the Lowell Institute, in December and January, 1908-9, are now published owing to many requests both from those that heard them and from those that did not. They are an attempt to cover the whole field of Greek influence, not only in the various arts in which such influence is generally realised, but also in those departments of thinking in which moderns arrogate to themselves an unquestioned superiority. Yet it will be found, even in the following necessarily brief and popular sketch, that, as regards thinking, the Greeks were as supreme in science as in other departments, and, though they did not discover the powers of steam or electricity, they nevertheless carried out in mechanics works that no modern builder, with all his vaunted control of nature, has yet equalled, and so in other pursuits, not only Greek form, but Greek thought, has been the greatest and the clearest that the world has yet seen.