men are trying to be civilized--or, as the Greeks would say, to lay
hold upon "the true, the beautiful, and the good," without even the
absolute minimum of those things which people of a later age will
believe separate a "civilized man" from a "barbarian." The gulf
between old Athens and, for instance, new Chicago is greater than
is readily supposed[*]. It is easy enough to say that the Athenians
lacked such things as railways, telephones, gas, grapefruit,
and cocktails. All such matters we realize were not known by our
fathers and grandfathers, and we are not yet so removed from THEM
that we cannot transport ourselves in imagination back to the
world of say 1820 A.D.; but the Athenians are far behind even our
grandfathers. When we investigate, we will find conditions like
these--houses absolutely without plumbing, beds without sheets,
rooms as hot or as cold as the outer air, only far more drafty. We
must cross rivers without bridges; we must fasten our clothes (or
rather our "two pieces of cloth") with two pins instead of with
a row of buttons; we must wear sandals without stockings (or go
barefoot); must warm ourselves over a pot of ashes; judge plays or
lawsuits on a cold winter morning sitting in the open air; we must
study poetry with very little aid from books, geography without
real maps, and politics without newspapers; and lastly, "we must
learn how to be civilized without being comfortable!"[+]

[*]See the very significant comment on the physical limitations
of the old Athenian life in Zimmern's "The Greek Commonwealth," p.
209.

[+]Zimmern, ibid.

Or, to reverse the case: we must understand that an Athenian would