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From, A. Toynbee, History,
in R.W. Livingstone (ed.), The Legacy of Greece, Oxford University Press, 1921.
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Page 6
II
Ancient Greek Civilization as a Work of Art
Civilizations are the greatest and the rarest achievements of human society. Innumerable societies have been coming into being and perishing during many hundreds of thousands of years, and hardly any of them have created civilizations. One can count the civilizations on one's fingers. We have had perhaps three in Europe: the Minoan in the Aegean Islands (the dates 4000-1100 B. C. roughly cover its history); the Greek or Graeco-Roman round the coasts of the Mediterranean (its history extends between the eleventh century B. C. and the seventh century A. D.); and our modern Western civilization round the coasts of the Atlantic, which began to emerge from twilight in the eighth century A. D. and is still in existence. Then there are the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Lower Mesopotamia, which were first dominated by Ancient Greece and then amalgamated into the single Middle Eastern civilization of Islam; and there are the civilizations of India and China. Even if we count as civilizations the societies existing in Mexico and Peru before the Spanish Conquest, the total number of known independent civilizations, compared with the total number of known human societies, is very small. And it is so because the achievement is astonishingly difficult. There are two constant factors in social life—the spirit of man and its environment. Social life is the relation between them, and life only rises to the height of civilization when the spirit of man is the dominant partner in the relationship—when instead of being moulded by the environment (as it is in the tropical forests of Central Africa and Brazil), or simply holding its own against the environment in a kind of equilibrium (as it does on the steppes of Central Asia or Arabia, among the nomads), it moulds the environment to its own purpose, or 'expresses' itself by 'impressing' itself upon the world. The study of a civilization is not different in kind from the study of a literature. In both cases one is studying a creation of the spirit of man, or, in more familiar terms, a work of art.
Cf. A History of Ancient Greece * Ancient Greek Political Theory * Greek History Resources
Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome
A History of Greek Philosophy * Greek Orthodoxy - From Apostolic Times to the Present Day
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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/toynbee-history.asp?pg=6
