But he
stuck to his guns.
How did she account for David and Solomon, Moses and the Prophets? They
had sprung from a shepherd race. Yet surely there was genius,
literature. Greece owed nothing to progress. She had preceded it. Her
thinkers, her poets, her scientists had draws their inspiration from
nature, not civilization. Her art had sprung full grown out of the soil.
We had never surpassed it.
"But the Greek ideal could not have been the right one, or Greece would
not so utterly have disappeared," suggested Mr. Allway. "Unless you
reject the law of the survival of the fittest."
He had no qualms about arguing with his uncle.
"So did Archimedes disappear," he answered with a smile. "The nameless
Roman soldier remained. That was hardly the survival of the fittest."
He thought it the tragedy of the world that Rome had conquered Greece,
imposing her lower ideals upon the race. Rome should have been the
servant of Greece: the hands directed by the brain. She would have made
roads and harbours, conducted the traffic, reared the market place.
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