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Though the partial renascence in art and letters which took place in the long peaceful reign of Hadrian was on the whole a Greek, or, at all events, a Graeco-Roman movement, an attempt at least towards a corresponding movement in purely Latin literature, both in prose and verse, was made about the same time, and might have had important results had outward circumstances allowed it a reasonable chance of development.
If this hypothetical man represent the ascending line of life that is to say, if he promise all that which is highest in a Graeco-Roman sense, then it is likely that he will be condemned as wicked if introduced into the society of men representing the opposite and descending line of life.
The age with which we have been dealing fell within the most flourishing period of Roman, or rather Graeco-Roman, taste and craftsmanship. A hundred years later both taste and execution were declining, and by the age of Constantine two centuries and a half after Nero not one artist could pretend to achieve such work as had belonged to a multitude between the reigns of Augustus and Hadrian.
To my mind they are synonymous, for Man only came into being when he ceased to be animal by developing the idea of citizenship. In my view, the source of all our troubles is found in that commonly accepted duality. He didn't exist in the progressive ancient world. The dualism of Man and State began with the decline of Graeco-Roman civilisation, and was perpetuated by the teaching of Christianity.
Feudalism, established in Western Europe after the downfall of the Roman Empire, however modified by the Church and by reminiscences of Graeco-Roman civilization retained by the conquered, was a barbaric constitution. The feudal monarch, as far as he governed at all, governed as proprietor or landholder, not as the representative of the commonwealth.
could never mean to our brown companions what they meant to us; but they put on a polite air of being interested in the Graeco-Roman ruin, and were so gentle and friendly that one could almost feel they were fellow-men. Very likely they were; at any rate, until we are at war with them I shall believe so.
In this great movement, Christianity found a preparation for its coming in the Greek world, without which its spread must have been much more doubtful. In the Graeco-Roman religion the advances which appear in Christianity are already prefigured.
After all is said, we are descendants in the spirit of those gentiles for whom Paul's message was nonsense. Intellectually, we are the sons of Plato and Aristotle, of Archimedes and Justinian. During the Middle Ages, the ideas of the period of the Graeco-Roman decline were mingled with the social ideas of feudalism.
Replacing nothing he thus plunges the world into darkness and barbarism. He destroyed the Graeco-Roman civilization and the world reverted to utter darkness for four centuries. Then Charlemagne came and there was a renaissance of civilization and law, and literature.
These and similar building operations made Rome one of the show places of the Graeco-Roman world. They also provided for the Romans a level of stability and security far beyond that of their neighbors in that part of the unstable Italian peninsula.
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