The Life of Greece

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MY purpose is to record and contemplate the origin, growth, maturity, and decline of Greek civilization from the oldest remains of Crete and Troy to the conquest of Greece by Rome. I wish to see and feel this complex culture not only in the subtle and impersonal rhythm of its rise and fall, but in the rich variety of its vital elements: its ways of drawing a living from the land, and of organizing industry and trade; its experiments with monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, dictatorship, and revolution; its manners and morals, its religious practices and beliefs; its education of children, and its regulation of the sexes and the family; its homes and temples, markets and theaters and athletic fields; its poetry and drama, its painting, sculpture, architecture, and music; its sciences and inventions, its superstitions and philosophies. I wish to see and feel these elements not in their theoretical and scholastic isolation, but in their living interplay as the simultaneous movements of one great cultural organism, with a hundred organs and a hundred million cells, but with one body and one soul.

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