is a feeling of attachment to one of those men who symbolize best the
higher thoughts and aspirations of the country and most deeply impress the
hearts of their fellow citizens. Despite efforts to write the history of
peoples exclusively from the social point of view, history has been, and
will continue to be, mainly a record of great names and great deeds of
national heroes.

The Greeks, for us and for themselves, are not so much the people who lived
in the various city-states of Hellas, nor the people dominated and more or
less influenced by the Romans and later the Mohammedan conquerors, nor
even the present population in which the old pure Hellenic element is in a
proportion much smaller than is generally thought. Greece is what she is,
lives in the life of men and shapes the minds and souls of peoples,
through her great heroes, through her various gods, which were nothing
but divinized heroes. Greece is for us Apollo, as a symbol of whatever
is filled with light, high, beautiful and noble; Heracles for what is
strength, energy, organization, life as it should be lived by human beings.
Leonidas stands for us as a symbol of heroic deeds; Demosthenes as a symbol
of the convincing powers of oratory and Pericles as the crystallization of
Grecian life in its totality of beauty, learning and social and civic life.
Greece is a type, is an attitude, is a protest against oppression, is an
aspiration towards beauty, is an inspiration and a guide for men who live
in the higher planes of feeling and thought. But Greece is not all that as
a people; Greece is all that through men converted into symbols.

So it is with other peoples.

Rome still signifies for us the defense of the bridge against the powerful
enemy; a man taking absolute power over the State and then surrendering it
to the people from whom it came. Rome is Republican virtue, and imperial