Category: History - Ancient
These lectures, delivered in Boston at the invitation of the Curator of the Lowell Institute, in December and January, 1908-9, are now published owing to many requests both from those that heard them and from those that did not. They are an attempt to cover the whole field of...
These lectures, delivered in Boston at the invitation of the Curator of the Lowell Institute, in December and January, 1908-9, are now published owing to many requests both from...
2. Part 2The permanence of the Greek language is a great and striking evidence. There was never, I suppose, a generation of Greeks from the 8th century B.C. to the 20th A.D. which did no...
3. Part 3It is not the proper province of art to attain to a perfect representation of nature, but a representation of perfect nature. For example, the more the art of sculpture develope...
4. Part 4Thus we see in Jacques Carrey’s now invaluable drawings of the Parthenon--for they were done a few years before its disaster--that he could not even copy Phidias’s work before h...
5. Part 5As I think it easier to impress a modern audience with the importance of Greek prose style in this particular branch of its excellence, I shall put it in the foremost place. Not...
6. Part 6But if the Greeks here showed the modern world the model of the highest perfection in the prose essay, they would not have been Greeks if they had not also shown us the perfecti...
7. Part 7There is a very widespread belief that the arch was invented and first used in Italy, and high authorities, like Viollet-le-Duc in his famous _Entretiens sur l’architecture_, pu...
8. Part 8The two æsthetic qualities requisite for success in painting are obviously a sense of form, and a sense of colour; without a natural appreciation of the beauty inhering in each...
9. Part 9NOTE.--I thought that I could not bring before the audience the character of this decoration adequately, except by showing some of the designs, and some of the furniture, on a s...
10. Part 10Nor were the laws of optics and the correction of the illusions of sight neglected. Euclid wrote a work on the subject which is now lost; but the praise of it by competent men o...
11. Part 11What is this evidence? It is not to be found without some reflection, for, as I have said, it is below the surface. There is no commoner phrase in the mouth of Greek revolutioni...
12. Part 12Thus you have a conglomerate of civilised communities, all speaking the same language and with similar ideals of culture, not separated by hostile creeds, and with the power, wh...
13. Part 13If you think this old-world and idle speculation, I need only refer you to Descartes, the father of modern scientific metaphysic, who held that his two universal factors, extens...
14. Part 14Hence in a season of calm weather Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And hear the childr...
15. Part 15Mathematics, school of Pythagoras, 153, 155, 156, 161, 167; theory of Descartes, 154; arithmetic, 153, 154; geometry, 158; mathematical physics, 162; library of Greek, 166; pure...