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In ancient Greece, from the retreat of Xerxes, when they were in their infancy, to the age of Alexander the Great, when they reached their maturity, we find a period of no less than one hundred and fifty years elapsed.
This state of suspense and uncertainty existing in Italy when Sulla took his departure for Greece in the beginning of 667 has been already described: the half-suppressed insurrection, the principal army under the more than half-usurped command of a general whose politics were very doubtful, the confusion and the manifold activity of intrigue in the capital.
Place: the temporal mood of the Oversoul, playing through that particular facet of the dodecahedron, which is Greece. The combinations and interplay of these two, plus the energies for good or evil of the souls there incarnate, give as their resultant the whole life of the race.
It directs us to look back through all the ages of modern human history, through the great days of ancient Greece and Rome, back through the times when Egypt and Assyria were names of renown, through the days when Nineveh and Babylon were mighty and populous cities in the zenith of their glory.
This belonged to the time of our great poets, those few really cultured Germans, the time when the magnificent Friedrich August Wolf directed the new stream of classical thought, introduced from Greece and Rome by those men, into the heart of the public schools.
"But I should have said 'Go. Then you never understood me in Greece? All our talks told you nothing about me? And now Robin is here you thought I should ask you not to go!" She turned round. She seemed almost passionately surprised. "Perhaps in a way I wished to think that." "Why? Did you wish to despise me?" "Rosamund! As if I could ever do that."
We are beginning to see that Greece came to many of her gods through instruction from the Asiatic continent, and that her originality in religion lay chiefly in her refinement of nature worship and in the beautiful marble forms in which Greek genius enshrined her divinities.
And all this was done by one, not descended from Lydians or Phoenicians, but who could pretend to some share of the virtues of Alexander and Philip, whom he was allied to by birth; men who conquered the world by judging that empire was to be purchased by money, not money by empire. Certainly it became a proverb, that not Philip, but his gold took the cities of Greece.
Although it may be held that every religion, no matter how dull and poor, presupposes a latent mysticism, because it supposes an Unknown beyond the reach of sense, there are religions very slightly mystical in fact those of savages, strictly utilitarian; among barbarians, the martial cults of the Germans and the Aztecs; among civilized races, Rome and Greece.
See also the late work of Curtius; Ritter's History of Philosophy; F.D. Maurice's History of Moral Philosophy; G. H. Lewes' Biographical History of Philosophy; Hampden's Fathers of Greek Philosophy; J.S. Blackie's Wise Men of Greece; Starr King's Lecture on Socrates; Smith's Biographical Dictionary; Ueberweg's History of Philosophy; W.A. Butler's History of Ancient Philosophy; Grote's Aristotle.
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