has shown itself in practice.  And though undoubtedly the greatest single impulse ever given to morality came from Palestine, yet the ground which nurtured the seeds of Christianity was as much Hellenic as Hebrew.  It would be impossible here to enter on an exhaustive comparison of the ethical capacities of the two races, but before we pronounce hastily for the superiority of the Hebrew there are surely some difficulties to surmount.  We may well ask, for example, Would Hellas ever have accepted as her chief national hero such a man as David a man who in his life is conspicuous by his crimes not less than by his brilliant gifts, and who dies with the words of blood and perfidy on his lips, charging his son with the last slaughterous satisfaction of his hate which he had sworn before his God to forego?  And though the great Hebrew prophets teach often a far loftier morality than this, they cannot have been nearly so representative of the feeling of this nation as were Aeschylus and Sophocles and Pindar of the feeling of theirs.  The Hebrews of the prophets’ age ‘slew the prophets,’ and left it to the slayers’ descendants to ‘build their sepulchres,’ and at the same time to show their inherited character still more unmistakeably by once more slaying the last prophet and the greatest.[3]

In truth in the literature, the art, the life generally of Hellas in her prime, the moral interest whenever it appears, and that is not seldom, claims for itself the grave and preponderant attention which it must claim if it is to appear with fit dignity.  But it is not thrust forward unseasonably or in exaggeration, nor is it placed in a false opposition to the interests of the aesthetic instincts, which after all shade into the moral more imperceptibly than might be generally allowed.  There must be a moral side to all societies, and the Hellenic society, the choicest that the world has seen, the completest, that is, at once in sensibilities and in energies, could not but show the excellence of its sensibilities in receiving moral impressions, the excellence of its energies in achieving moral conduct.

This, however, is no place to discuss at length questions in the history of ethics.  Yet it must be remembered that in the ancient world departments of thought, and the affairs of men generally, were far less specialized than in modern times.  If the philosophy of Hellas be the most explicit witness to her ethical development, her poetry is the most eloquent.  And scarcely at any time, scarcely even in Aristotle, did Hellenic philosophy in any department lose most significant traces of its poetical ancestry.  But enough here if I have succeeded in pointing out that in the great poet with whom we are concerned there is an ethical as well as a poetical and historical interest, supplying one more reason against neglect of his legacy of song.