THE AGE OF PERICLES[1].
The debt which the modern world owes to the best age of ancient Greece is well summed up in some words which the late Professor Green wrote in his "Prolegomena to Ethics":—"When we come to ask ourselves what are the essential forms in which, however otherwise modified, the will for true good—which is the will to be good—must appear, our answer follows the outlines of the Greek classification of the virtues. It is the will to know what is true; to make what is beautiful; to endure pain or fear; to resist the allurements of pleasure (i.e., to be brave and temperate),—if not, as the Greek would have said, in the service of the State, yet in some form of human society;—to take for oneself, and to give to others, of those things which admit of being given and taken, not what one is inclined to give or take, but what is due."
Accepting this as a concise description of the Hellenic ideal, we find that the period during which it was most fully realised was that which we are accustomed to call the age of Pericles. The period so named may be roughly defined as extending from 460 to 430 B.C. Within those thirty years the
- ↑ Glasgow, March 1889. From the author's MS.
