"The Athenians are too brilliant to be good, and scorn stupidity more than they abominate vice. They are not all sages, and we must not picture their woman as all lovely Nausicaas or stately Helens, or their men as combining the courage of Ajax with Nestor’s wisdom; history has remembered the geniuses of Greece and has ignored her fools (except Nicias); even our age may seem great when most of us are forgotten, and only our mountain peaks have escaped the obscurity of time. Discounting the pathos of distance, the average Athenian remains as subtle as an Oriental, as enamored of novelty as an American; endlessly curious and perpetually mobile; always preaching a Parmenidean calm and always tossed upon a Heracleitean sea."
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CH. XIII The Morals and Manners of the Greeks, Sec V Character, P.377
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization
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The Story of Civilization
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