Suppose, for the sake of easy memory, that the Middle Ages begin in A. D. 313, finish in 1313. The first date is marked by Constantine's Edict of Milan, virtually establishing Christianity as the religion of the Roman world empire. The second date emphasises the sudden death of Emperor Henry VII at Buonconvento in Tuscany during his Italian campaign, as the irreparable failure of the last attempt that could be undertaken, with a reasonable chance of success, to enact the plan of Roman-Christian unity under whose spell the Latin West and the Germanic North had dreamed and laboured all through those thousand years. Of this phase of history Dante is the witness and an actor, a victim and the judge as well.

For the scholar of ancient history, the ‘polis’ is the most important and most worthy subject of study. By ‘polis’ we mean that well-known type of Greek city which with its territory constituted an autonomous state and, in this respect, was quite similar to the centres of the Italian Renaissance. Ancient Hellas was made up of a great number of such ‘polis’ cities. Each of them had its own freedom, its individual pride as an independent republic. But in the over-all picture we recognise in the institution of the polis the ground that nourished the dynamic and in a sense revolutionary spirit of the ancient Greeks. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Cleisthenes and Themistocles, Pericles and Alcibiades, Protagoras and Democritus, Plato and Aristotle were the sons of polis cities. We may even assert that these men could be what they were only in the emancipated and inspired atmosphere of the polis. No other ancient culture could have given them birth. If we consider the Greek polis from the point of view of universal history we come to a rather astonishing conclusion: the polis differs from all other comparable cultural institutions in Asia, Egypt, and Europe by a very fundamental and special trait: Europe knew only a primitive, barbarian, rustic way of life. People were either roving nomads or tillers of the soil who lived in simple villages.

Literature and art, which previously had been considered as cultural traditions, became, during the nineteenth century, objects of historical knowledge; the feeling of contemporaries was ‘that history would be the hallmark of the nineteenth century, and would lend it its name, just as philosophy had given its name to the eighteenth’. Of the many perspectives from which a work of art can be viewed, there was none more constant thereafter than that of history.

On the basis of studies of the last fifty years, the term ‘Mediterranean’ has come to acquire an ethnographic, linguistic, and religious value, besides its purely physical and geographic meaning. If anthropology today speaks of a ‘Mediterranean race’—located between the extreme west of Europe and the peninsula of Malacca—archeology speaks of a ‘Mediterranean civilisation’. Of this civilisation, perhaps even the Indian revelations of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa do not mark the ultimate limit. It derived from a particularly evolved Neolithic, reached its apogee on the island of Crete in the Bronze Age, and spread from there all through the basin of the Mediterranean, continental Greece and Asia Minor (where alternate contacts and conflicts, not necessary to specify here, had characterised for millennia the relations between peoples of various races). This civilisation was succeeded by a more composite one, called the Mycean, with the Achaeans as its fulcrum, a people who had already proved their maritime and warlike skill in Anatolia, between the shores of the Black Sea and the Sporades. Linguistics, in turn, speaks of a ‘Mediterranean idiom’.

Von Frisch's discovery of the methods by which bees communicate is a landmark in human achievement comparable with Champollion's elucidation of hieroglyphics, and Professor Benveniste has performed a service in introducing it to the notice of readers of Diogenes. Nevertheless the very importance of the facts discovered makes it desirable to discuss their interpretation from a somewhat different standpoint.

Perhaps nothing is more indicative of an advanced civilisation than informed interest in the arts. There have always been connoisseurs and persons of taste; more recent, however—it goes back only two or three generations—is the academic discipline which has brought the serious historian into a domain which had long been reserved for the enthusiast, the lover of virtu, and the artist. When Nietzsche noted Burckhardt's and Taine's success in combining the history of art with that of civilisations, he wondered whether this was a symptom of decadence. Little inclined to propose, easy tasks to modern man, he perceived a mortal danger in ‘pedantic’ simplifications and did not doubt that the need for ‘scientific’ explanations in matters of art would have as its counterpart a growing paralysis of the creative faculties. To the extent that this meant hypertrophy of memory, it would gradually enervate the fecundity of talent; was it even certain that it always favoured the development of sure and keen taste?

Scientific progress does not consist solely in the discovery of new truths; it also includes the exposure of mistakes. Often errors turned out to be necessary before the truth could finally be discovered. The history of science is thus not only a history of valuable finds, but also one of vagaries, gropings, and failures. There are some mistakes, however, which scarcely belong to the long series of honourable scientific errors and carry a wholly different meaning: these are the mistakes made by scientists or pseudo-scientists who, driven by the will-to-power, have abused science for the temporary achievement of their ambitions.