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We believe that, so far from possessing any stronger principle of vitality than the Roman institutions, those of Greece Proper (meaning those originally and authentically Greek) had any separate advantage only when applied locally. They were essentially enchorial institutions, and even physically local (i.e., requiring the same place as well as the same people); just as the ordinances of Mahomet betray his unconscious frailty and ignorance by presuming and postulating a Southern climate as well as an Oriental temperament. The Greek usages and traditionary monuments of civilization had adapted themselves from the first to the singular physical conformation of Hellas–as a ‘nook-shotten'[3] land, nautically accessible and laid down in seas that were studded with islands systematically adjusted to the continental circumstances, whilst internally her mountainous structure had split up almost the whole of her territory into separate chambers or wards, predetermining from the first that galaxy of little republics into which her splintered community threw itself by means of the strong mutual repulsion derived originally from battlements of hills, and, secondarily, from the existing state of the military art. Having these advantages to begin with, reposing upon these foundations, the Greek civil organization sustained itself undoubtedly through an astonishing tract of time; before the ship Argo it had commenced; under the Ottoman Turks it still survived: for even in the Trojan aera, and in the pre-Trojan or Argonautic aera, already (and perhaps for many centuries before) the nominal kingdoms were virtually republics, the princes being evidently limited in their authority by the ‘sensus communis’ of the body politic almost as much as the Kings of Sparta were from the time of Lycurgus to the extinction of the Peloponnesian independence.

Accidents, therefore, although accidents of a permanent order (being founded in external nature), gave to Greece a very peculiar advantage. On her own dunghill her own usages had a tenacity of life such as is seen in certain weeds (couch-grass, for instance). This natural advantage, by means of intense local adaptation, did certainly prove available for Greece, under the circumstances of a hostile invasion. Even had the Persian invasion succeeded, it is possible that Grecian civilization would still have survived the conquest, and would have predominated, as actually it did in Ionia, etc.

So far our views seem to flow in the channel of Mr. Finlay’s. But these three considerations occur:

1st. That oftentimes Greece escaped the ravages of barbarians, not so much by any quality of her civil institutions, whether better or worse, as by her geographical position. It is ‘a far cry to Loch Awe’; and had Timon of Athens together with Apemantus clubbed their misanthropies, joint and several, there would hardly have arisen an impetus strong enough to carry an enemy all the way from the Danube to the Ilyssus; yet so far, at least, every European enemy of Thebes and Athens had to march. Nay, unless Monsieur le Sauvage happened to possess the mouths of the Danube, so as to float down ‘by the turn of tide’ through the Euxine, Bosphorus, Propontis, Hellespont, etc., he would think twice before he would set off a-gallivanting to the regions of the South, where certainly much sunshine was to be had of undeniable quality, but not much of anything else. The Greeks were never absolute paupers, because, however slender their means, their social usages never led to any Irish expansion of population; but under no circumstances of government were they or could they have been rich. Plunder therefore, that could be worth packing and cording, there was little or none in Greece. People do not march seven hundred miles to steal old curious bedsteads, swarming, besides, with fleas. Sculptured plate was the thing. And, from the times of Sylla, that had a strange gravitation towards Rome. It is, besides, worth noticing–as a general rule in the science of robbery–that it makes all the difference in the world which end of a cone is presented to the robber. Beginning at the apex of a sugar-loaf, and required to move rapidly onwards to the broad basis where first he is to halt and seek his booty, the robber locust advances with hope and cheerfulness. Invert this order, and from the vast base of the Danube send him on to the promontory of Sunium–a tract perpetually dwindling in its breadth through 500 miles–and his reversion of booty grows less valuable at every step. Yet even this feature was not the most comfortless in the case. That the zone of pillage should narrow with every step taken towards its proper ground, this surely was a bad look-out. But it was a worse, that even this poor vintage lay hid and sheltered under the AEgis of the empire. The whole breadth of the empire on that side of the Mediterranean was to be traversed before one cluster of grapes could be plucked from Greece; whereas, upon all the horns of the Western Empire, plunder commenced from the moment of crossing the frontier. Here, therefore, lies one objection to the supposed excellence of Grecian institutions: they are valued, upon Mr. Finlay’s scale, by their quality of elastic rebound from violence and wrong; but, in order that this quality might be truly tested, they ought to have been equally and fairly tried: now, by comparison with the Western provinces, that was a condition not capable of being realized for Greece, having the position which she had.