I would have no one admire a thing - a statue, a poem, a personality - because it is Greek. But I would have those who read this book love such things because they are human. For antiquity is nothing: however long ago King Minos died, while he lived he was flesh and blood; though the ashes of Perikles have been for ages no more than a handful of the world's dust, he lived once, not a name, not a shadowy figure of history, but a human being. The men and women of to-day are no more than that, and no less.

That is why to admire Greek sculpture, Greek literature, Greek art as a whole, to study them, even to love them, solely as art, is not to understand them wholly. To proclaim the Greeks the greatest artists of all time is cold gospel; they were so, they are still, not because they are so long dead, but because they were once so intensely alive. It is their eternal modernity that matters.

S. C. Kaines Smith, from the preface to Greek Art and National Life (1915 - second edition)