A question of considerable interest has been raised regarding tlie pro])er reading in Ac IP". Are we to read here 'Grecians' or 'Greeks'? Were those to whom the men of Cyprus and Cyrene ))reached Jews or Gentiles, Grecians or Greeks? Internal evidence and the mass of MS autiiority seem to conflict. The reading 'EXXijctcrrds of TR is upheld by B D^ L and indirectly by K*, and has tlie support of almost all the cursives. It is also retained by WII. On the other hand, internal
GREECE
GREECE
515
evidence seems to demand the reading "EWrjves of a^ A D, which is accepted by Scrivener, Lach- mann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, and the text of the IIV. Why call attention to the fact that the men of Cyprus and Cyrene preached to Grecians when that had already been done ? If the writer intends to refer to a new departure in missionary enter- prise, the context seems to demand the reading ' Greeks ' (cf. F. H. A. Scrivener, Introd. to Criti- cism of NT-*, 1894, ii. 370 f.; for the other point of view see Westcott-Hort, Introd. to Gr. NT, 1882, App. p. 93f.). W.F.Boyd.
GREECE (or Hellas ; Lat. Grcecia, Gr. "EXXas).— The southernmost part of Avhat is now called the Balkan Peninsula was the cradle of a race whose ideas contained the germs of our present W^estern civilization. As the religious life of mankind divides itself into the time before and after the dawn of Christianity, so the rational and political life of mankind divides itself into the time before and after the expansion of Hellenism. The mental activity of the Greeks in the great classical period, culminating in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., made not only the Hellas of later times but all the world their debtor. The language they spoke, the art and literature they created, the spirit of liberty they fostered, and the philosophical temper in which they faced the problems of life, form essential elements in the finest modern culture. If criticism is, as M. Arnold said, 'a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in i\\Q yio\:\di\Essays in Criticism, London, 1895, i. 38), the contribution of Greece can never be neglected.
Like Palestine, the other ancient home of great ideas, Hellas proper was a small country. The Hellenic part of tlie peninsula (to the south of Macedonia and Thrace), with the isles of Greece, was much the same in extent as the modern Greek kingdom — about 250 miles in greatest length and 180 in greatest breadth. In a large sense, how- ever, Hellas was an ethnological rather than a geographical term, for it embraced every country inhabited by the sea-loving and enterprising Hellenes — all their settlements on the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean, on the shores of the Hellespont, the Bosporus, and the Euxine Sea. As the west coast of the homeland was mountainous and harbourless, while the east was full of gulfs, bays, and havens, Greece turned her back on Italy and her face to the ^gean and Asia Minor, so much so that in the 6th and the beginning of the 5th centuries B.C. the centre of gravity of Hellenic civilization is to be looked for in Ionia rather than in Attica, the most famous names in science, philosophy, and poetry being at that time associ- ated with the Asiatic coast or the neighbouring Cyclades. But the Ionian Greeks, isolated by the estranging sea and weakened by internal jealousies, were unable to ofi'er a successful resistance to the Persian advance, and the glory of saving European culture is due to the Athenians who fought at Marathon and Salamis.
In the classical period, Greece was an aggregate of self-governing city-States, of which Aristotle surveys no fewer than 158. These States combined for once, with brilliant results, in face of the Asiatic peril, but they never afterwards seemed to be capable of united action. Wasting their strength and resources in fratricidal wars which gave now Athens, now Sparta, now Thebes, a temporary hegemony, they proved in the day of reckoning too feeble to resist the military power either of the Macedonian monarchy or of the Roman republic. The career of Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, closed the Hellenic and opened the Hellenistic period of history. It created a
world-Empire and a world-culture, both of which borrowed their best features from a Greece which was 'living Greece no more.' While the new order reinforced the old Hellenic elements in Asia Minor, it brought into being a vast number of Greek cities — the conqueror himself is said to have founded seventy — in lands hitherto barbarian. It made Greek the language of literature and religion, of commerce and administration, throughout the Nearer East. And when the Romans became the sovereign people, it was Greek rather than Roman ideals that they sought to make eflective through- out their Oriental dominions. ' The desire to become at least internally Hellenised, to become partakers of the manners and the culture, of the art and the science of Hellas, to be — in the foot- steps of the great Macedonian — shield and sword of the Greeks of the East, and to be allowed further to civilise this East not after an Italian but after a Hellenic fashion — this desire pervades the later centuries of the Roman republic and the better times of the empire with a power and an ideality which are almost no less tragic than that political toil of the Hellenes failing to attain its goal' (T. Mommsen, The Proviiices of the Bom. Emp.^, 1909, i. 253).