Without overlooking the differences between Greek and Italian, classic and modern, which are relative and not absolute, it is instructive to note the great likeness between these two epochs.  The limits of their culture will stand out more clearly, if, by the aid of Helbig’s researches and Burckhardt’s masterly account of the Renaissance, we range the chief points of that likeness side by side.

They were epochs in which an icy crust, which had been lying over human thought and feeling, melted as if before a spring breeze.  It is true that the theory of life which now began to prevail was not absolutely new; the stages of growth in a nation’s culture are never isolated; it was the result of the enlargement of various factors already present, and their fusion with a flood of incoming ones.

The Ionic-Doric Greek kingdom widened out in Alexander’s time to a Hellenic-Asiatic one, and the barriers of the Romano-Germanic Middle Ages fell with the Crusades and the great voyages of discovery.  Hellenism and the Renaissance brought about the transition from antiquity and the mediaeval to the specifically modern; the Roman Empire inherited Hellenism, the Reformation the Renaissance.  Both had their roots in the past, both made new growth which blossomed at a later time.  In Hellenism, Oriental elements were mixed with the Greek; in the Renaissance, it was a mixture of Germanic with the native Italian which caused the revival of classic antiquity and new culture.  Burckhardt says[1]: 

Elsewhere in Europe men deliberately and with reflection borrowed this or the other element of classical civilization; in Italy, the sympathies both of the learned and of the people were naturally engaged on the side of antiquity as a whole, which stood to them as a symbol of past greatness.  The Latin language too was easy to an Italian, and the numerous monuments and documents in which the country abounded facilitated a return to the past.  With this tendency, other elements—­the popular character which time had now greatly modified, the political institutions imported by the Lombards from Germany, chivalry and northern forms of civilization, and the influence of religion and the Church—­combined to produce the modern Italian spirit, which was destined to serve as the model and ideal for the whole western world.

The distance between the works of the Greek artists and poets—­between Homer, Sophocles, and Phidias on the one hand, and the Alexandrian Theocritus and Kallimachos and the Pergamos sculptures on the other—­is greater than lies between the Nibelungenlied and the Minnesingers, and Dante and Petrarch.  In both cases one finds oneself in a new world of thought and feeling, where each and all bears the stamp of change, in matters political and social as well as artistic.  If, for example, by the aid of Von Helbig’s researches,[2] we conjure up a picture of the chief points in the history of Greek culture, we are astonished to see how almost every point recurred at the Renaissance, as described by Burckhardt.