All of which I quote for the light’s sake it throws on the past of Greece:  the past of her past, and the ages before her history.  Or really, on the whole history of the human race; for I think it is what you shall find always, or almost always.  I spoke of the Celtic qualities as having been of old patrician; they are plebeian nowadays, after the long pralaya and renewal.  As a pebble is worn smooth by the sea, so the patrician type, with its refinements and culture, is wrought out by the strong life currents that play through a race during its manvantaric periods.  Pralaya comes, with conquest, the overturning of civilization, mixture of blood; all the precious results obtained hurled back into the vortex;—­and then to be cast up anew with the new manvantara, a new uncouth formless form, to be played on, shaped and infused by the life-currents again.  In Greece an old manvantara had evolved patricianism and culture; which the pralaya following swept all away, except some relics perhaps in Thebes the isolated and conservative, certainly in Sparta.  Lycurgus was wise in his generation when he sought by a rigid system to impose the plebeian virtues on Spartan patricianism.

Wise in his generation, yes; but he could work no miracle.  Spartan greatness, too, was ineffectual:  there is that about pouring new wine into old bottles.  Sparta was old and conservative; covered her patrician virtues with a rude uncultural exterior; was inept politically—­as old aristocracies so commonly are; she shunned that love of the beautiful and the things of the mind which is the grace, as Bushido—­to use the best name there is for it—­is the virtue, of the patrician.  You may say she was selfish and short-sighted; true; and yet she began the Peloponnesian War not without an eye to freeing the cities and islands from the soulless tyranny an Athenian democracy had imposed on them:  when there is a war, some men will always be found, who go in with unselfish high motives.—­ Being the patrician state, and the admired of all, it was she naturally who assumed the hegemony when the Persian came.  But she had foregone the graces of her position, and her wits, through lack of culture, were something dull.  She lost that leadership presently to a young democratic Athens endowed with mental acumen and potential genius; who, too, gained immeasurably from Sparta, because she knew how to turn everything to the quickening of her wits—­this having at her doors so contrasting a neighbor, for example.—­Young?  Well, yes; I suspect if there had ever been an Athenian glory before, it was ages before Troy fell.  She plays no great part in the legends of the former manvantara; Homer has little to say about her.  She had paid tribute at one time to Minos, king of Crete; her greatness belonged not to the past, but to the future.