The following Lectures, delivered in the Univer sity of Chicago, represent the compendium of a long and brilliant development of human culture. To obtain a brief and yet accurate survey of it is certainly a desideratum to various classes of readers, and will, I trust, satisfy a real want. The general reader, who desires to learn something of the ex pansion of Greek ideas toward the East, will here find enough for a working knowledge of a very com plicated epoch. The specialist, who has devoted himself to some department of this field, will find here those general views of the whole which are necessary to every intelligent research into the parts. More especially, the student or teacher of Christi anity will find here the human side of its origin treated in a strictly historical spirit. To all such this little volume may be as welcome as were the lectures which compose it to the large and very sym pathetic class who heard them in the summer of 1904.