The Legacy of GREECE


Essays by Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D’Arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield


Edited by
R. W. LIVINGSTONE

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE
UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD
BY JOHN JOHNSON
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

In spite of many differences, no age has had closer affinities with Ancient Greece than our own; none has based its deeper life so largely on ideals which the Greeks brought into the world. History does not repeat itself. Yet, if the twentieth century searched through the past for its nearest spiritual kin, it is in the fifth and following centuries before Christ that they would be found. Again and again, as we study Greek thought and literature, behind the veil woven by time and distance, the face that meets us is our own, younger, with fewer lines and wrinkles on its features and with more definite and deliberate purpose in its eyes. For these reasons we are to-day in a position, as no other age has been, to understand Ancient Greece, to learn the lessons it teaches, and, in studying the ideals and fortunes of men with whom we have so much in common, to gain a fuller power of understanding and estimating our own. This book—the first of its kind in English—aims at giving some idea of what the world owes to Greece in various realms of the spirit and the intellect, and of what it can still learn from her.

The Editor.

October 1921.

[ix]

CONTENTS

• PAGE
  
• THE VALUE OF GREECE TO THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD. By Gilbert Murray, F.B.A., Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford 1
• RELIGION. By W. R. Inge, D.D., Dean of St. Paul’s 25
• PHILOSOPHY. By J. Burnett, F.B.A., Professor of Greek in the University of St. Andrews 57
• MATHEMATICS AND ASTRONOMY. By Sir T. L. Heath, K.C.B., K.C.V.O., F.R.S. 97
• NATURAL SCIENCE. By D’Arcy W. Thompson, F.R.S., Professor of Natural History in the University of St. Andrews 137
• BIOLOGY. By Charles Singer, Lecturer in the History of Medicine in University College, London 163
• MEDICINE. By Charles Singer 201
• LITERATURE. By R. W. Livingstone, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford 249
• HISTORY. By Arnold Toynbee, Koraés Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language, Literature, and History in the University of London 289[x]
• POLITICAL THOUGHT. By A. E. Zimmern, late Wilson Professor of International Politics, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth 321
• THE LAMPS OF GREEK ART. By Percy Gardner, F.B.A., Merton Professor of Classical Archaeology in the University of Oxford 353
• ARCHITECTURE. By Sir Reginald Blomfield, F.S.A., R.A. 397