Contents. (etext transcriber's note) |
What Have the Greeks Done
For Modern Civilisation?
The Lowell Lectures of 1908-09
By
John Pentland Mahaffy
C.V.O., D.C.L. (Oxon.), etc.
Of Trinity College, Dublin
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
Copyright, 1909
BY
J. P. MAHAFFY
Printed in the United States of America{iii}
SANCTÆ MEMORIÆ
UXORIS CARISSIMÆ
CUJUS DULCI CONSORTIO
INGENII SUI PRIMITIAS
ABHINC JAM ANNOS XL
DEDICAVIT
NUNC SERUM LABOREM
CONSECRAT AUCTOR
PREFACE
THESE lectures, delivered in Boston at the invitation of the Curator ofthe Lowell Institute, in December and January, 1908-9, are now publishedowing to many requests both from those that heard them and from thosethat did not. They are an attempt to cover the whole field of Greekinfluence, not only in the various arts in which such influence isgenerally realised, but also in those departments of thinking in whichmoderns arrogate to themselves an unquestioned superiority. Yet it willbe found, even in the following necessarily brief and popular sketch,that, as regards thinking, the Greeks were as supreme in science as inother departments, and, though they did not discover the powers of steamor electricity, they nevertheless carried out in mechanics works that nomodern builder, with all his vaunted control of nature, has yetequalled, and so in other pursuits, not only Greek form, but Greekthough