The ancient Greek historians (Harvard lectures) by J. B. Bury.

254 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS LECT.

posterity leads us to another, though closely related,
conception which has only in recent times become
alive and real for us. It is remarkable how little
the Greeks and Romans thought or speculated
about the future of the race. The shortness of the
period over which their historical records extended,
their doctrine of cyclical recurrence, and the widely
spread belief in a decline from a golden age, may
have hindered them from taking a practical interest
in the subject; though they contemplated long
periods of time, for instance the magnus annus,
equivalent in duration to 12,954 ordinary years.
Tacitus, in a very interesting passage, asks: What
do we mean by using the terms ancient and
modern? "The four hundred years, which separate
us from Demosthenes, seem long in comparison
with the brevity of human life; but they are almost
a vanishing quantity if you compare them with the
duration of the ages (ad natiuramn saeculoruirn);
why, if you consider even the magnus ann2iS,
Demosthenes, whom we call an ancient, seems to
belong to the same year, nay the same month, as
ourselves." This passage stands almost alone, I
think, in its appreciation of historical perspective.
But such flashes of consciousness of our position
in time did not awaken any serious or persistent
curiosity about the future fortunes of the race.
The Greeks were imbued with what may justly be
called a progressive spirit; but they did not associate their labours for the improvement of civilisation with any notion of an indefinite advance of the