Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

CHAPTERS iT

FESTIVALS I. NATIONAL FESTIVALS

Even at the present day we admire and shall always admire Greek civilization, and live on the remembrance of it, since our own civilization is indissolubly connected with the spirit of antiquity. How greatly Greek science and art have fructified modern life and continue still to do so is, perhaps, not quite so obvious at the moment merely because it has become a commonplace in the passing of the centuries. But there is no perfection on this earth ; even the Greeks were not perfect ; indeed, politically, they were great blunderers, and their internal distraction, their petty party-politics, their continually jealous squabbles perhaps find their counterpart in the internal political history of Germany. In a word, the Greeks lacked the political or national centre. Even the famous athletic sports in Elis, the north-western district of Peloponnesus, were not such a centre, although they certainly in course of time had lost their local character and became the possession of the whole nation, so that time was reckoned by olympiads, the interval of four years between festival and festival, throughout Hellas from 776 B.c. These and other games are certainly called national, but only because the whole nation (more correctly all the tribes) took part in them; nevertheless, they were unable to realize a national union, though as long as the Ekecheiria (the truce of God) lasted, that is, during the five festal days, a certain unity existed.

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