Variety of Grecian life and intellect.--State of education and of the fine arts among the Greeks.--The origin of their philosophy and natural science.--Their political degeneracy.
It would be difficult to point out a more striking difference, a more decided opposition in the whole circle of the intellectual and moral character and habits of nations, as far at least as the sphere of known history extends, than that which exists between the seclusive and monotonous character of Asiatic intellect--the generally unchangeable uniformity of oriental manners and oriental society, and the manifold activity--the varied life of the Greeks, in the first flourishing ages of their history. This amazing diversity in the moral and intellectual habits of the Greeks appears not only in their legislation, their forms of government, their manners, occupations, and usages of life, but in their various and widely dispersed settlements and colonies, in their descent, which was composed of so many heterogeneous elements, in the first seeds of their civilization--as well as their distribution into hostile tribes and great and petty states, and even in their traditions, their history, and the arts and forms of art to which those gave rise--finally in a science, engaged in incessant strife, and marching from system to system, amid the noise and tumult of opposition. In Asia, even in those countries such as India, where the poetry, the views of life, and the systems of philosophy were extremely various, and bore in this respect an external resemblance to those of Greece; where even the country in ancient times was never permanently united into one compact empire; yet the whole way of thinking, the prevalent feeling was entirely monarchical, proceeding from, and returning again to, unchangeable unity. On the other hand, in Greece, science, like life itself, was thoroughly republican--and if we meet with particular thinkers, who leaned to this Asiatic doctrine of unity, we must regard this as only an exception--a system adopted from a love of change, or out of a spirit of opposition to the vulgar and generally received opinion that all in nature and the world, as well as in man, was in a state of perpetual movement, constant change, and freedom of life. Even the fabulous world of Grecian divinities, as it has been painted by their poets, has a republican cast; for there every thing is in a state of change, of successive renovation, and of mutual collision in the war of Nature's elements, in the hostility of old and new deities of the superior and inferior Gods--of giants and of heroes--presenting, as it does, a state of poetical anarchy. Hence, even the historical traditions of the Greeks, and the first accounts of their early seats, settlements, and the migrations of their different races, present to the eye of the historical enquirer a dense forest of truth and fiction, of fanciful conjecture, absolute fable, and ancient and venerable knowledge--a labyrinth of poetry and of history, in whose various and intricate mazes it is often difficult for the critic to find the true outlet, and to hold fast by the guiding clue of Ariadne, when he wishes to adopt a lucid arrangement, and assign to each part its due place in the system of the whole. The Greek tribes and nations inhabited not only the proper Greece, the Peninsula Peloponnesian, the contiguous islands, the Southern plains of the Continent (on whose Northern frontiers it is often difficult to draw the line of demarcation between the tribes of Greek and foreign extraction); and also the Western coasts of Asia Minor; but they had founded a number of small states and planted many flourishing colonies in the remotest corners of the Euxine, in the Lower Egypt, where, long prior to the Persian wars, many Greek settlements existed--along the Northern shore of Africa, where the flourishing Cyrene was situated, on the Southern coasts of Spain and Gaul, in Sicily, and throughout the whole of Southern Italy. Their navigation extended even to the Baltic, as the voyage of Pytheas evinces; and, though they did not circumnavigate Africa,--a thing which it is still doubtful whether the Phœnicians accomplished,--they rather surpassed than yielded to the latter nation in the activity of their trade, and the wealth and extent of their Colonies. The stupendous monuments and edifices of the Egyptians are indeed of more colossal dimensions; yet the works of Grecian sculpture and architecture, while some of them are on a very large scale, are incomparably more various, more rich in ornament, more animated, and beautiful, than those of Egypt.