Greek people

“ Shall we now leave the domain of historic events, of which the land of Greece presents so large and varied a store, and consider that other feature of national life and development which has made Greece the most notable of lands—the intellectual growth of its people, the splendor of art and literature which gave it a glory that glows unfading still? ”

“ I remember well the saying of one in this place with whom geographical insight is an instinct, that neither the Greeks in any other land nor any other people in Greece could have been what the Greeks in Greece actually were. The mission of the Greek race was to be the teachers, the lights, the beacons, of mankind, but not their rulers. ”

“ The history of Greece shall remain until the end of time, and as the peoples of the world grow intelligently and intellectually more enlightened they will come to the appreciation of the fact that the Greek people has contributed more material in paving the way to the spiritual freedom and the individual liberty of the world than any other nation on the face of the earth, and that the Greek spirit is still living and ruling in principle in the very heart of the civilized world. ”

“ Speaker, more than 2,500 years ago the people of Greece began to formulate the ideas that now serve as the foundation for our system of government, science, philosophy, law, literature, and art. The gift of Greek culture to the world, and the special debt this nation owes to Greece, is priceless. The Greek tradition that began in the mists of time with Homer led to the Golden Age and later to the intellectual and aesthetic enrichment of the Roman Republic and Empire, the European Renaissance, and our own nation's founding principles. ”

“ It was under the protection of the old gods, whose fall is about to be consummated, that the Greeks achieved marvellous deeds, nurturing the gifts of the intellect which the Almighty bestowed on their race, like faithful gardeners, and making them bring forth marvellous fruit. In the realm of thought the Greek is sovereign of the nations, and he has given to perishable matter a perfection of form which has elevated and vivified it to immortality. Nothing more beautiful has ever been imagined or executed, before or since, or by any other people, than was produced by Greece in its prime. ”

“ The natural causes which tended to unite the Greeks as a people were a common descent, a common language, and a common religion. Greek genius led the nation to trace its origin, where historical memory failed, to fabulous persons sprung from the earth or the gods; and under the legends of primitive and heroic ancestors lie the actual migrations and conquests of rude bands sprung from related or allied tribes. These poetical tales, accepted throughout Hellas as historical, convinced the people of a common origin. ”

“ The Greek civilization sprung from mythology and ended in anarchy. In the East the Greeks were called the people of youth. Their religion was of the savage type. Their gods were immortalized men; they loved and hated, transgressed and suffered; they resorted to stratagems to compass their ends; they were a kind of exalted but unscrupulous aristocracy.
Greek patriotism was narrow; each city was politically independent, and the citizen of one city was an alien and a stranger in the territory of every other. ”

“ Nowhere out of the old continuous Hellas does the Greek people, none the less Greek because largely Greek by adoption, spread from sea to sea. Throughout a large part of eastern Europe and western Asia the Greek is the representative of European and civilized life on the whole sea-coast. ”

“ It has been my experience in studying conditions for the last six years, that the Greeks in the United States know very little or nothing of the American history, government, political, social, customs and habits of the American people, which, also, unfortunate as it may appear, yet it is the truth, that only a very limited number of Americans whom I have found all over the United [Pg 146] States, are well informed of the doings in Greece, and still fewer well acquainted and unprejudiced as to the historical and classical importance of the Greek nation. ”

“ These phases of European social life are clearly discerned in the development of the Greek states. The Greeks were recognized as having the highest intellectual culture and the largest mental endowments of all the ancients, characteristics which gave them great prestige in the development of political life and social philosophy. The problem of how communities of people should live together, their relations to one another, and their rights, privileges, and duties, early concerned the philosophers of Greece ”

“ Some of the Greeks of to-day are the lineal descendants of the Athenians and Spartans, but the ancient Greek standards of conduct, the Greek ideals, died twenty centuries ago, to be resurrected, it is true, by the renaissance, and to enjoy the glorious privilege of a new and wider sphere of life,—but among an alien people, and under a northern sun. ”

“ The Greek language, once the tongue of a petty people, grew to be a universal language of culture, spoken even by barbarian lips, and the art, the science, the literature, the principles of politics and philosophy, developed in isolation by the Greek mind, henceforth became the heritage of many nations. ”

“ Here and there among the Gentile members there is one with the regular features of the born Greek, perhaps shaded with the pale thoughtfulness of the philosopher or distinguished with the self-confidence of wealth; but not many great, not many mighty, not many noble are there; the majority belong to what in this pretentious city would be reckoned the foolish, the weak, the base and despised things of this world; they are slaves, whose ancestors did not breathe the pellucid air of Greece but roamed in savage hordes on the banks of the Danube or the Don. ”

“ The foundation of this world seems to be the Myth; and as the world grew it developed in terms of Myth. The Greek mind had only one background. Athletics and Statuary, Epic and Drama, Religion and Art, Skepticism and Science expressed themselves through the same myths. In this lies the fascination of Greece for us. What a complete cosmos it is! And how different from any other civilization! Modern life, like modern language, is a monstrous amalgam, a conglomeration and mess of idioms from every age and every clime. The classic Greek hangs together like a wreath. ”

“ It is no wonder that the Greeks could not adopt the standards and contrivances of other nations, while their own standards and contrivances resulted from such refined and perpetual balancing and shaving of values. This refinement has become part of their daily life; and whether one examines a drinking cup or a dialogue or a lyric, and whether the thing be from the age of Homer or from the age of Alexander, the fragment always gives us a glimpse into the same Greek world. ”

“ They loved the sea and were at home upon it, and this sea-faring life developed the same spirit of freedom and independence.
The mild climate relieved the Greeks of many cares which come to those who live in harsher lands, but the atmosphere was clear and bracing, which stimulated clear thinking. The Greeks were the first great thinkers in the world; they were possessed of a passion for knowing the truth about all things in heaven and earth, and few people have sought truth with greater courage and clearness of mind than the Greeks. ”

“ The Greeks, with their rich imagination and artistic feeling, filled the world with divine figures, well-defined types of Greek character, ideals of Greek thought. Greece alone has constructed a true pantheon, a community of gods all individualized, but all compacted into a family or a body of government. ”

“ The exact degree of their ethnical kindred with the Greeks is a scientific question which need not here be considered; but the facts that they are more largely intermingled with the Greeks than any of the other neighboring nations, that they show a special power of identifying themselves with the Greeks, a power, so to speak, of becoming Greeks and making part of the artificial Greek nation, are matters of practical history. ”

“ To every god and every hero it was consistent with Grecian ideas to ascribe great diversity of human motive and attribute: each indeed has his own peculiar type of character, more or less strictly defined; but in all there was a wide foundation for animated narrative and for romantic incident. The gods and heroes of the land and the tribe belonged, in the conception of a Greek, alike to the present and to the past: he worshipped in their groves and at their festivals ”

“ In no period of history have there ever been formed a greater number of new political communities, under such variety of circumstances, personal as well as local. And a few chronicles, however destitute of philosophy, reporting the exact march of some of these colonies from their commencement,—amidst all the difficulties attendant on amalgamation with strange natives, as well as on a fresh distribution of land,—would have added greatly to our knowledge both of Greek character and Greek social existence. ”

“ If we reflect how deeply the feeling of an intercourse between men and a divine race superior to themselves had worked itself into the Greek character—what a number of fables, some beautiful, some impure, it had impregnated and procured credence for—how it sustained every form of polity and every system of laws, we may imagine what the effects must have been of its disappearance. ”

“ That city may be one of the renowned centres of the Greek motherland; it may be Athens or Sparta, Thebes or Argos; but it may also be the Iberian Zakynthos or the Campanian Kymê, Kyrênê on her terrace by the Libyan sea or far away Olbia by the banks of Dnieper. Every scattered member of the great brotherhood comes there of equal right; all are alike at home in the gathering of the united folk; all throng to the common hearth of the common gods of Hellas and her children. ”

“ The history of Greek civilization may be divided into two periods. The first lasted until the days of Alexander; it included the early experiments made by Greek states in the art of governing themselves, the repulse of the Barbarian, the great days of Athens, the disastrous Peloponnesian War. Through all this period Greece was learning how to do things. She was in the making and was creating what was to live as long as men should love what was great, but she was living for herself. ”

“ It is, indeed, one of the best features in the Greek character that the owner of wealth has so often been, and still so often is, the promoter of the culture of his race. As in Germany in the last century, and in Hungary and Bohemia at a more recent date, the national revival of Greece was preceded by a striking revival of interest in the national language. ”

“ Man, man, Greek is the only living bridge between the present and the past!"
Then, snatching up a handful of newspapers from Athens, he continued, "Some folks call Greek a dead language. Poor souls! They don't know any better. These things should interest you. They are fresh from Athens; not a week old." And then he read aloud from them, a bit of politics, an advertisement, lines from the bargain counter, as if to show that one touch of shopping makes the whole world kin. "But no heroes, man, no heroes! There's no Aristotle now, no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Apostle Paul!" ”

“ Gods, heroes, and men—religion and patriotism—matters divine, heroic, and human—were all woven together by the Greeks into one indivisible web, in which the threads of truth and reality, whatever they might originally have been, were neither intended to be, [p. 488] nor were actually, distinguishable. Composed of such materials, and animated by the electric spark of genius, the mythical antiquities of Greece formed a whole at once trustworthy and captivating to the faith and feelings of the people ”

“ They had a landscape of mountain and valley, of river and sea and numberless bays—some "narrow enough for the butterflies to cross and yet navigable for the largest vessels." Wooed by the beauty of their landscape and clime, the Greeks gave to the world the highest expression of what culture could do for a people. ”

“ Accordingly, we should not say that the Greek civilization with its language, its art, its science, its philosophy, its eloquence, its literature, its civil and military life, was the outgrowth of the Greek genius, the native faculty of the Hellenic race, but rather that this genius, this spiritual faculty, this unrivalled intellectual-artistic endowment of the Greeks, was the continuous resultant at each moment in the history of the race of the collective culture-experiences through which, up to that moment, it had passed. ”

“ Yet the home life of the Greeks seems to have been in its purity and loyalty an advance on the Oriental home life. In their treatment of servants and slaves, in the care of the aged and helpless, the Greeks were cold and without compassion. While the poets, historians, and philosophers have been portraying with such efficiency the character of the higher classes; while they have presented such a beautiful exterior of the old Greek life; the Greeks, in common with other primitive peoples, were not lacking in coarseness, injustice, and cruelty in their internal life. ”

“ Even the shrill song of the humble grasshopper held sweet music for the Greek. He revelled in the loveliness and colour of life. He was inspired by the glory of the human form. He extolled the majesty of man. The Hebrew mind was nursed by meditation; the Hellenic drew its nourishment from contemplation. Nature was the Greek’s sole guide in taste as well as in conduct; from nature he learnt the canons of the beautiful as well as the laws of right and wrong. Hence no country has produced greater poets than Greece, or fewer saints. ”