A history of classical Greek literature / by J.P. Mahaffy.

  • John Pentland Mahaffy
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A history of classical Greek literature / by J.P. Mahaffy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    5 these—published during a course of forty years, during many changes and chances in the history of the nation—the same leading ideas, to which he holds with narrow and stupid tena- city. He is ever painting the sorrows and miseries of Greece through internal factions, through internecine wars, and, in his earlier days, through the unjust and tyrannous supremacy ot Sparta after the defeat of Athens in 404 b. c. The only remedy for the resulting poverty, discontent, and savagery throughout Hellenic lands is an union either under Sparta and Athens, or under either of them, or under some single head such as Philip j and this is the alternative which in later years he recognised as the only possible one. But the whole profit he saw in such an union, and the main chance of its benefiting Greece, was by producing at once an invasion of Persia, and plundering its enormous wealth for the benefit of the Greeks. He exhibited a very just estimate of the Persian power, chiefly derived, it would seem, from the experiences of Xenophon in the Anabasis, or from Agesilaus' campaigns, and he saw that the conquest was not difficult. But when he ever indulged the hope, which be- came with him a sort of monomania, that the conquest of Persia would make every poor Greek rich, and every discontented one happy, so that the natural superiority of the race would find due scope for its exercise, he was totally incapable of appre- hending the necessary reaction which so vast a conquest must produce upon the conquerors, and how inevitably the very culture which he taught and reverenced must alter and lower itself to embrace a vaster area. Had these natural consequences been within his vision, he would have recoiled in horror from his pet scheme, for nothing was further from his mind than Hellenism in the later sense.* He held indeed that culture more than race was the distinctive feature of real Greeks, but for all that, he would not have hesitated to place the most ignorant Spartan far above the most enlightened Macedonian or Egyptian. Herodotus approached far nearer to the later conception of Hellenism than Isocrates. § 444’ Preoccupied with these notions, surrounded by dis- tinpished pupils and friends, but treated with indifference, and I imagine with contempt, by the Athenian public, the vain The same is the case with Xenophon ; cf. his Agesilans, c. 7, sub fin.
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