education in which a preeminent position is allotted to the literature
of antiquity. While fully admitting that much time and labour are
still wasted in efforts to plant the study of ancient and especially
of Greek literature in uncongenial soil, while admitting also most
fully the claims, and the still imperfect recognition of the claims,
of physical science to a rank among the foremost in modern education,
I should yet be abundantly willing that this attempt to help in
facilitating the study of a Greek author should be looked on as
implying adhesion to the protest still sometimes raised, that in
the higher parts of a liberal education no study can claim a more
important place than the study of the history and the literature of
Hellas. The interest which belongs to these is far wider and
deeper than any mere literary interest. To the human mind the most
interesting of phenomena are and ought to be the phenomena of the
human mind, and this granted, can there be any knowledge more
desirable than the knowledge of the most vigorous and sensitive and in
some ways also the most fruitful action of human minds that the world
has known hitherto?

But again, we are told that the age we seek thus toilsomely to
illustrate and realize is too remote to justify the attempt, that our
civilisation is of too different a type from the Hellenic, and that a
gulf of three-and-twenty centuries is too much for our sight to strain
across. But is not the Hellenic life at least less remote now to
Western Europe than it has ever been since the Northern invasions?
Though the separation in time widens does not the separation in
thought decrease? Is not one civilisation more like another than it
can be to any barbarism? And shall not this same Physical Science
herself by accustoming us to look on men in large masses at once, and
on the development of humanity as a process of infinite duration, as