world of things. Of nothing is it so true that emotion is created by
expression. The enormous volume of expression developed in modern
times by a few great poets and a countless number of prose writers has
reacted upon men and women; so certain is it that thought follows
language, and life copies art. And so here more than elsewhere, though
the rule applies to the whole sphere of human thought and action, we
have to expect in Greek literature to find much latent and implicit
which since then has become patent and prominent; much intricate
psychology not yet evolved; much--as is the truth of everything Greek
--stated so simply and directly, that we, accustomed as we are to more
complex and highly organised methods of expression, cannot without
some difficulty connect it with actual life, or see its permanent
truth. Yet to do so is just the value of studying Greek; for the more
simple the forms or ideas of life are, the better are we able to put
them in relation with one another, and so to unify life. And this
unity is the end which all human thought pursues.

Greek literature itself however may in this matter be historically
subdivided. In its course we can fix landmarks, and trace the entrance
and working of one and another fresh element. The Homeric world, the
noblest and the simplest ever conceived on earth; the period of the
great lyric poets; that of the dramatists, philosophers and
historians, which may be called the Athenian period; the hardly less
extraordinary ages that followed, when Greek life and language
overspread and absorbed the whole Mediterranean world, mingling with
East and West alike, making a common meeting-place for the Jew and the
Celt, the Arab and the Roman; these four periods, though they have a
unity in the fact that they are all Greek, are yet separated in other
ways by intervals as great as those which divide Virgil from Dante, or
Chaucer from Milton.