ABOUT THIS BOOKThese lectures are a plea for Greek studies—not as a field of scholarship, not as a mental discipline, not even as the key to one of the two greatest literatures of Europe, but as indispensable to the spiritual life of our civilization. They are based on three assumptions: first, that Huxley was right in his belief that “no human being, and no society composed of human beings, ever did, or ever will, come to much unless their conduct was governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal”; second, that the chief weakness of this age is a vague mind and a feeble grasp, so far as ethical ideals are concerned; and third, that Greece offers us a corrective of our errors and a guide in our uncertainties.