But with regard to a remote age the case is different. Here
our difficulty is to understand the social conditions, so unlike those
with which we are acquainted, and as society is greater than man, so
we feel that society, and not individual men, should occupy the chief
place in the picture. Not that individuals are to be suppressed or
neglected, but their subordination to the large historic background
must be well maintained. The social, religious, and philosophic
conditions amid which they played their parts should dominate the
scene, and dwarf by their grandeur and importance the human actors who
move across it. The higher historical style now demands what may be
called compound narrative, that is narrative having reference to two
sets of phenomena--one the obvious surface events, the other the
larger and wider, but less obvious, sociological condition. A better
example could hardly be given than Grote's account of the mutilation
of the Hermae. The fact of the mutilation is told in the briefest way
in a few lines, but the social condition which overarched it, and made
the disfiguring of a number of half-statues "one of the most
extraordinary events in Greek history," demands five pages of
reflections and commentary to bring out its full significance.
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