Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Modern History Europe: From Charlemagne to the Present Time
But now appeared a new culture. A widely diffused Euro pean civilization had been rising slowly, through Obscure periods of time. It borrowed from the East; but from the first it had its own peculiar traits: it was marked by diversity, freedom, and active energy, and intellectually by moderation and naturalness.2 In the hands of the Greeks, about 500 b.c., this culture burst into sudden bloom. Then for nearly two hundred years it wrestled with Persia in war; and finally, through the genius of Alexander, it welded. East and West into a gracco-oriental world.
In the end, however, the huge passive East would have absorbed the small Greek creative element, had not the latter found reenforcement from the second peninsula of Southern Europe. Rome, drawing largely from the Greek culture, gave a Latin civilization to the western Mediterranean coasts, and then combined the Latin West with the older Greek East into a Graeco - Roman world. The Roman Empire embraced the Mediterranean fringe of the three old-world continents, - a broad belt stretching from the Euphrates to Britain, between the southern deserts and the northern waters of the Rhine, the Danube, and the Black Sea. In language and culture, the West remained Latin, and the East, Greek; but in politics and law and in patriotic sentiment, the fusion was complete.
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