The Greeks of Homer’s and Hesiod’s time, before the European manvantara, elsewhere begun, had reached or quickened them, were uncouth and barbarous enough; they may have stood, to their great West Asian neighbors, as the Moors of today to the nations of Europe; they may have stood, in things cultural, to the unknown nations of the north or west already at that time awakened, as the Chinese now and recently to the Japanese.  Like Moors, like Chinese, they had behind them traditions of an ancient greatness; but pralaya, fall, adversity, squalor, had done their work on them, developing the plebeian qualities.  Now that they have emerged into modern history, as then when they were emerging into ancient, we find them with many like characteristics; a turn for democracy, for example; the which they assuredly had not when they were passing into pralaya under the Byzantine Empire.  A turn for democracy; plebeian qualities; these are the things one would expect after pralaya, if that pralaya had been at all disastrous.  With the ancient Greeks, the plebeian qualities were not all virtues by any means; they retained through their great age many of the vices of plebeianism.  They won their successes for the most part on sporadic impulses of heroism; shone by an extraordinary intellectual and artistic acumen.  But taking them by and large, they were too apt to ineffectualize those successes, in the fields of national and political life, by extraordinary venality and instability of character.  I shall draw here deeply on Professor Mahaffy, who very wisely sets out to restore the balance as between Greeks and Persians, and burst bubble-notions commonly held.  Greek culture was extremely varied, and therein lay its strength; you can find all sorts of types there; and there are outstanding figures of the noblest.  But on the whole, says Mahaffy—­I think rightly—­there was something sordid, grasping, and calculating:  noblesse oblige made little appeal to them—­was rather foreign to their nature.  Patricianism did exist; in Sparta; perhaps in Thebes.  Of the two Thebans we know best, Pindar was decidedly a patrician poet, and Epaminondas was a very great gentleman; now Thebes, certainly, must have been mighty in foregone manvantaras, as witness her five cycles of myths, the richest in Greece.  In her isolation she had doubtless carried something of that old life down; and then, too, she had Pindar.  Nor was Sparta any upstart;—­of her we have only heard Athenians speak.  But outside of these two, you hardly find a Greek gentleman in public life; hardly that combination of personal honor, contempt of commerce, class-pride, leisured and cultured living;—­with, very often, ultra-conservatism, narrowness of outlook, political ineptitude and selfishness.  The Spartans had many of these instincts, good and bad.  They reached their cultural zenith in the seventh century or earlier; probably Lycurgus had an eye to holding off that degeneration which follows on super-refinement; and hence the severe life he brought in.  My authority makes much of the adoration the other Greeks accorded them; who might hate and fight with Sparta, but took infinite pride in her nonetheless.  Thus they told those tales of the Spartan mothers, and the Spartan boy the fox nibbled; thus their philosophers, painting an Utopia, took always most of its features from Lacedaemon.