Introduction

Many Greeks admired the moral code of the Persians and the wisdom of the Egyptians. The debt - material, intellectual and artistic - which the Greeks owed to the peoples of the East was rarely forgotten. Epic poetry, history and drama; philosophy in all its branches, from metaphysics to economics; mathematics and many of the natural sciences - all these begin with the Greeks. The Greeks of the classical period habitually divided the human family into Hellenes and barbarians. Gentile and Barbaros were very different conceptions; the one purely racial and religious, the other only incidentally racial and not in the least religious. Before the Greeks, the Hebrews had created religious poetry, love-poetry, and the religious poetry and oratory of the Prophets, but literature in all its other known forms was created and perfected by the Greeks.