[h] PLUTARCH, _op. cit._
CHAPTER XLVII. THE TYRANTS IN SICILY
[b] LOUIS MÉNARD, _Histoire des Grecs_.
CHAPTER XLVIII. THE RISE OF MACEDONIA
[b] JOHANN G. DROYSEN, _Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen_.
[c] L. MÉNARD, _op. cit._
[d] DEMOSTHENES, _Orations_.
[e] HERODOTUS, _History_.
[f] THUCYDIDES, _op. cit._
[g] ARRIAN, _The Anabasis of Alexander_.
[h] THEOPOMPUS, _Philippica_.
[i] TITUS LIVIUS, _Annales_.
CHAPTER XLIX. THE TRIUMPHS OF PHILIP
[b] L. MÉNARD, _op. cit._
[c] JOHN POTTER, _Antiquities of Greece_.
[d] L. A. PRÉVOST-PARADOL, _Revue de l’histoire universelle_.
[e] R. C. JEBB, in an article on “Demosthenes” in the Ninth Edition of the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_.
[f] J. B. BURY, _op. cit._
[g] GEORGE GROTE, _op. cit._
[h] B. G. NIEBUHR, _op. cit._
[i] DIODORUS SICULUS, _op. cit._
[j] WILHELM DRUMANN, _Verfall der griechischen Staaten_.
[k] PLUTARCH, _op. cit._
[l] PAUSANIAS, _op. cit._
[m] XENOPHON, _op. cit._
[n] GEORG WEBER, _op. cit._
CHAPTER L. ALEXANDER THE GREAT
[b] APPIANUS ALEXANDRINUS, _The History of Appian of Alexandria_
(translated from the Greek by J. Dancer).
[d] JUSTIN, _History of the World_ (the abridgment of the _Philippic
History_ of Trogus Pompeius).
[e] QUINTUS CURTIUS, _The Wars of Alexander_ (translated by William Young,
1747).
[f] DIODORUS SICULUS, _op. cit._
[g] PLUTARCH, _op. cit._
[h] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._
[i] ARRIAN, _op. cit._
[j] PTOLEMY LAGI, and ARISTOBULUS, as quoted by Arrian, Diodorus, etc.
CHAPTER LI. ALEXANDER INVADES ASIA
[b] GEORGE GROTE, _op. cit._
[c] J. G. DROYSEN, _op. cit._
[d] JURIEN DE LA GRAVIÉRE, _Les campagnes d’Alexandre_.
[e] ARRIAN, _op. cit._
[f] GEORGE GROTE, _op. cit._
[g] PTOLEMY LAGI, ARISTOBULUS, ANAXIMENES, and CALLISTHENES, as quoted by
Arrian, Diodorus, etc.
CHAPTER LII. ISSUS AND TYRE
[b] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._
[c] GEORGE GROTE, _op. cit._
[d] J. G. DROYSEN, _op. cit._
CHAPTER LIII. FROM GAZA TO ARBELA
[b] ARRIAN, _op. cit._
[c] QUINTUS CURTIUS, _op. cit._
[d] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._
[e] GEORG H. A. EWALD, _The History of Israel_.
[f] HENRY H. MILMAN, _The History of the Jews_.
[g] DIODORUS SICULUS, _op. cit._
[h] GEORGE GROTE, _op. cit._
[i] WILLIAM MITFORD, _op. cit._
[j] EDWARD S. CREASY, _Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World_.
[k] JOHN B. BURY, _op. cit._
[l] ADOLF HOLM, _op. cit._
[m] FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS, _Antiquities of the Jews_.
[n] KARL RITTER, _Afrika_ (in _Die Erdkunde, etc._).
[o] LOUIS A. THIERS, _Histoire du Consulat et de l’Empire_.
CHAPTER LIV. THE FALL OF PERSIA
[b] QUINTUS CURTIUS, _op. cit._
[c] GEORGE GROTE, _op. cit._
[d] JOHN B. BURY, _op. cit._
[e] ARRIAN, _op. cit._
[f] DIODORUS SICULUS, _op. cit._
[g] PLUTARCH, _op. cit._
CHAPTER LV. THE CONQUEST OF INDIA
[b] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._
[c] J. G. DROYSEN, _op. cit._
[d] DIODORUS SICULUS, _op. cit._
[e] ARRIAN, _op. cit._
[f] QUINTUS CURTIUS, _op. cit._
CHAPTER LVI. THE END OF ALEXANDER
[b] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._
[c] ARRIAN, _op. cit._
[d] J. G. DROYSEN, _op. cit._
[e] PLUTARCH, _op. cit._
[f] BARTHOLD G. NIEBUHR, _op. cit._
[g] HERODOTUS, _op. cit._
[h] POLYBIUS, _op. cit._
[i] ARISTOBULUS, quoted by Plutarch, Arrian, etc.
CHAPTER LVII. VARIOUS ESTIMATES OF ALEXANDER
[b] ARRIAN, _op. cit._
[c] CLAUDIUS ÆLIANUS, _op. cit._
[d] TITUS LIVIUS, _Roman History_ (translated 1686).
[e] GEORGE GROTE, _op. cit._
[f] GEORGE W. COX, _op. cit._
[g] L. MÉNARD, _op. cit._
[h] CHARLES ROLLIN, _Ancient History_.
[i] BARTHOLD G. NIEBUHR, _op. cit._
[k] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._
[l] J. G. DROYSEN, _op. cit._
[m] GEORG W. P. HEGEL, _Philosophy of History_.
[n] R. PÖHLMANN, in Müller’s _Handbuch der classischen
Alterthumswissenschaft_.
[o] BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER, _Alexander the Great_.
CHAPTER LVIII. GREECE DURING THE LIFE OF ALEXANDER
[b] WILLIAM MITFORD, _op. cit._
[c] DIODORUS SICULUS, _op. cit._
[d] J. G. DROYSEN, _op. cit._
[e] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._
[f] PLUTARCH, _op. cit._
CHAPTER LIX. THE SUCCESSORS OF ALEXANDER
[b] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._
[c] DIODORUS SICULUS, _op. cit._
[d] J. G. DROYSEN, _op. cit._
[e] JUSTIN, _op. cit._
[f] ARRIAN, _op. cit._
[g] B. G. NIEBUHR, _op. cit._
[h] WILLIAM MITFORD, _op. cit._
[i] GEORGE GROTE, _op. cit._
[j] PHOTIUS, Excerpts from Arrian’s _Bithynica_.
CHAPTER LX. AFFAIRS IN GREECE PROPER AFTER ALEXANDER’S DEATH
[b] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._
[c] PLUTARCH, _op. cit._
[d] J. G. DROYSEN, _Geschichte des Hellenismus_.
[e] GEORGE GROTE, _op. cit._
[f] DIODORUS SICULUS, _op. cit._
CHAPTER LXI. THE FAILURE OF GRECIAN FREEDOM
[b] GEORGE GROTE, _op. cit._
[c] J. G. DROYSEN, _op. cit._
[d] PAUSANIAS, _op. cit._
[e] JUSTIN, _op. cit._
[f] DIODORUS SICULUS, _op. cit._
[g] PLUTARCH, _op. cit._
[h] POLYBIUS, _op. cit._
[i] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._
CHAPTER LXII. THE EXPLOITS OF PYRRHUS
[b] L. MÉNARD, _op. cit._
[c] TITUS LIVIUS, _op. cit._
[d] PLUTARCH, _op. cit._
[e] Article on “Epirus,” in the Ninth Edition of the _Encyclopædia
Britannica_.
[f] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._
[g] JUSTIN, _op. cit._
[h] PAUSANIAS, _op. cit._
[i] POLYBIUS, _op. cit._
CHAPTER LXIII. THE LEAGUES AND THEIR WARS
[b] POLYBIUS, _General History_ (translated by Sir H. Spears).
[c] W. SCHORN, _Geschichte Griechenlands von der Entstehung des ätol. und
achäischen Bundes bis auf die Zerstörung von Korinth_.
[d] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._
[e] GEORG WEBER, _op. cit._
[f] OLIVER GOLDSMITH, _History of Greece_.
[g] L. FLATHE, _Geschichte Macedoniens und der Reiche welche von
macedonischen Königen beherrscht wurden_.
[h] PLUTARCH, _op. cit._
[i] EDWARD A. FREEMAN, _History of Federal Government in Greece and Italy_
(edited by John B. Bury).
CHAPTER LXIV. THE FINAL DISASTERS
[b] BARTHOLD G. NIEBUHR, _op. cit._
[c] POLYBIUS, _op. cit._
[d] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._
[e] STRABO, _Geographica_.
[f] PAUSANIAS, _op. cit._
[g] L. FLATHE, _op. cit._
[h] W. SCHORN, _op. cit._
[i] CONSTANTINE VII, PORPHYROGENITUS, Excerpts from POLYBIUS.
CHAPTER LXV. THE KINGDOM OF THE SELEUCIDÆ
[b] GEORG WEBER, _op. cit._
[c] _An Universal History_, compiled from original authors, 1799.
[d] FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS, _op. cit._
[e] DIODORUS SICULUS, _op. cit._
[f] APPIAN, _Roman History_.
[g] JUSTIN, _op. cit._
[h] ARRIAN, _op. cit._
CHAPTER LXVI. THE KINGDOM OF THE PTOLEMIES
[b] J. G. DROYSEN, _op. cit._
[c] S. SHARPE, _History of Egypt_.
[d] G. SMITH, _The Gentile Nations_.--PAUSANIAS, _op. cit._--DIODORUS
SICULUS, _op. cit._--JOSEPHUS, _op. cit._--ARRIAN, _op. cit._--PLUTARCH,
_op. cit._--JUSTIN, _op. cit._--EUTROPIUS, _Epitome of Roman History_.
CHAPTER LXVII. SICILIAN AFFAIRS
[b] L. MÉNARD, _op. cit._--DIODORUS SICULUS, _op. cit._--STRABO, _op.
cit._--PLUTARCH, _op. cit._--EDWARD A. FREEMAN, article on “Sicily,”
in the Ninth Edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_.--ADOLF HOLM,
_Geschichte Siciliens im Alterthum_.
[Illustration]
A GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF GRECIAN HISTORY
A BRIEF SURVEY OF THE SOURCES
In a previous part of this work reference has been made to the large
number of historians of Greece and to the fragmentary condition in which
their works have come down to us. Attention has also been called to the
comparatively small aid which the historian of Greece receives from
epigraphical inscriptions. There are, to be sure, various inscriptions
that give an incidental aid; as, for example, the famous inscription on
the leg of the statue of Ramses II at Abu-Simbel; an Athenian inscription
referring to the work on the Erechtheum; inscriptions from the walls of
the temples at Ephesus, at Priene, and the like. All of these, however,
give but incidental glimpses; taken together they would make but a
most meagre and fragmentary historical record. There is, however, one
inscription extant of far greater importance. This is the so-called
Parian marble or Parian chronicle, which was found originally at Paros,
was brought to England in 1627 at the instance of the earl of Arundel,
and was subsequently presented to the University of Oxford, where it
forms part of the collection of Arundel marbles.
This inscription originally comprised an epitome of the chief events
in Grecian history (with various notable omissions) from the alleged
reign of Cecrops, 1318 B.C., to the archonship of Diognetus, 264 B.C. At
present, however, the last part of the record is lost, so that the extant
portion comes only to the time of Diotimus, 354 B.C. Various parts of the
inscription are more or less illegible, and there are, as just noted,
numerous very noteworthy omissions, particularly as regards political
events. Moreover, the entire record, as pointed out by Clinton,[52]
is everywhere one year out of the way. Nevertheless, as a guide to
the sequence of events in Grecian history and as a check on the other
sources, the Parian chronicle is of the very greatest importance. It
is not known just when or by whom this inscription was made, but it is
apparently based on earlier sources that are in the main fairly reliable.
As the entire inscription of the Parian chronicle is contained on a slab
of marble only about three and a half feet in length, it is obvious that
its record must be of the most epitomised character; in short, a mere
sequence of names. For a fuller record of the events of Grecian history
we must turn to the usual sources, the manuscripts of the historians
proper. Non-historical writings are not to be altogether ignored, to
be sure. In many cases they furnish us important aids in filling in
gaps or in supplying details. In particular the dramatists and the
orators furnish important historical data; among the former, Æschylus,
Euripides, Aristophanes; among the orators, Isæus, Isocrates, Æschines,
and Demosthenes. The works of Plato and Aristotle and, to a less extent,
of other philosophers are also to be looked to here and there. But all
of these, let it be repeated, are of meagre importance compared with the
records of the historians proper.
Something has been said in another place of the large number of Greek
historians. Mr. Clinton lists forty-seven by name who flourished
prior to 306 B.C.; and this without including the historians of
Alexander. Among these are such more or less familiar names as Cadmus
of Miletus, Hecatæus, Hellanicus, Ctesias, Ephorus, Theopompus, Dinon,
and Anaximenes. But of the entire list of earlier writers only three
are represented by extant works in anything but the most fragmentary
condition. These three bear the famous names Herodotus, Thucydides, and
Xenophon. All of these lived within the same century; and each of them
left a detailed account of a relatively brief but highly significant
period of Grecian history. The story of Herodotus closes with the year
478 B.C.; Thucydides deals with twenty-one years of the Peloponnesian
War, though taking an incidental glance at earlier history; Xenophon,
taking up the account of the Peloponnesian War where Thucydides leaves
off, continues the record to the death of Epaminondas in the year 362 B.C.
Curiously enough, there is no Greek historian after Xenophon, for about
two centuries, whose works have been preserved; and the records of
Grecian history for all other periods than those covered by Herodotus,
Thucydides, and Xenophon are mostly preserved in the writings of
authors who lived long after Greece had ceased to have importance as an
autonomous nation. But of course these writings drew upon contemporary
records; and being made at a time when it was possible to check their
accounts with numerous histories that are now lost, they have almost
the same significance as if they were themselves contemporary sources.
These later writings are comparatively few in number. By far the most
important of them is the general history of Diodorus, to which reference
has so frequently been made. Justin’s abridgment of Trogus Pompeius
is also of value; as are the biographies of Plutarch and of Cornelius
Nepos. The chronicle of Eusebius supplies many gaps in the record,
particularly as regards the earlier periods of Grecian history; and the
same is true of the work of Pausanias, which, though dealing primarily
with geography, makes important historical allusions here and there; as,
for example, in regard to the Messenian wars. The lives of Alexander the
Great by Arrian and by Quintius Curtius, based on the now lost works of
Alexandrian contemporaries, furnish us full records of the age of the
Macedonian hero. For the post-Alexandrian epoch the fragments of Polybius
are the chief source for the periods which they cover. But these are so
meagre that our main reliance must be placed upon the general historians
Diodorus and Justin, here as for so many other periods.
Oddly enough, no single work except the general histories has come down
to us that deals with the history of Greece as a whole; that history
can be reconstructed only by piecing together the various fragmentary
records, and he who would know Grecian history at first hand has chiefly
to attend to the authorities just mentioned. When one has read Diodorus
and Justin, Plutarch and Nepos, and Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon,
Arrian, and Curtius, one has appealed to the chief among first-hand
sources of Grecian history. We have already had occasion to refer to some
of these at considerable length, and fuller notes concerning them will be
found in the present bibliography; but there is one of them whose work is
so important and whose position as a factor in the history of literature
is so unique that we are justified in giving more extended attention
to him here. This is, of course, the oldest and in some respects the
most remarkable of all, Herodotus; an author whom we encounter almost
everywhere in the old Orient and who serves as almost our sole witness
for the great events through which Greece attained a dominant place among
the nations,--the events, namely, of the so-called Persian or Median Wars.
Herodotus, the celebrated father of history, or, as K. O. Müller styles
him, the father of prose, was born at Halicarnassus, in Asia Minor, about
484 B.C., and died at Thurii, Italy, about 424 B.C. Halicarnassus was
a colony of Doric Greece, and therefore Herodotus was related in his
ancestry rather to the Spartans than to the Athenians. His work, however,
was not written in the Doric dialect but in the Ionic, which at that
time was the accepted vehicle of literary productions in Greece, being
the dialect generally employed by Homer, Hesiod, and the long line of
logographers. The style of Herodotus has been recognised by critics of
all succeeding ages as almost perfect of its kind.
As to the life of the man himself, comparatively little is known. A
wealth of fable is associated with his name, as with that of most
celebrities of antiquity, but the part of this which may be accepted
as historically accurate is almost infinitesimal. Certain ideas,
however, have gradually clustered about the name of Herodotus that by
common consent are accepted as representing his biography, in default
of more accurate information, which latter, presumably, will never be
forthcoming. Thus it is accepted that he was born at Halicarnassus of
parents named Lyxes and Dryo, and that he was the nephew of Panyasis,
a famous epic poet, from which latter circumstance it may be inferred
that he came of a literary lineage. It is further alleged that he left
Halicarnassus owing to the tyranny of Lygdamis, the ruler of the colony,
who had put to death his uncle Panyasis. It is believed that Herodotus
went to the island of Samos and lived there for several years; whether
he made his extensive journeys in search of knowledge thence, or at
a later period, is not ascertained. In either event it is held that
he subsequently returned from Samos to Halicarnassus, and personally
assisted in the overthrow of the tyrant Lygdamis. Even after this event,
however, it would appear that Herodotus did not find Halicarnassus a
satisfactory place of residence, as he subsequently migrated to the Greek
colony of Thurii, in Italy, where his last days were spent, and where it
is presumed he repolished and completed his history. The colony in Thurii
was first established in the year 443, but whether or not Herodotus was
a member of the first company that went out to it is in dispute; that he
finally went there, however, seems to be accepted without reserve.
These meagre facts, some of them by no means too well authenticated,
constitute practically all that is known from outside authority regarding
the actual life of Herodotus. There are, to be sure, numerous other
traditions current, some of which were doubtless founded upon fact,
and a few of which are almost inseparably associated with the name
of Herodotus. Such, for example, is the story that Herodotus read the
books of his great history before the people of Athens, and created such
popular enthusiasm thereby that the sum of ten talents (£2,000, $10,000)
was voted him from the public treasury. If this be taken as true to fact,
it would appear that the business of literature was not ill paid even in
that early day. Another tale, or possibly an elaboration of the same one,
alleges that Herodotus desired to make his history known to the Greek
world, and decided that this could best be accomplished by reading it
before the assembled multitudes at Olympia. Just when this reading was
held is not clear, but, notwithstanding this lack of date, it is alleged
that the reading created the greatest enthusiasm, and that Herodotus
divided the honours of the occasion with the winners of the Olympic games.
Another elaboration of the tale, which one would fain believe true,
asserts that the youthful Thucydides, listening to the recital of
Herodotus, was moved to tears, and fired with the ambition to follow in
the footsteps of the great writer. The cold hand of modern scepticism
has been laid rudely on this tradition, it being asserted that the
date of the birth of Thucydides is too near that of Herodotus to lend
authenticity to the story. But, be that as it may, this tale is probably
as near the truth as most of the others which we have associated with the
name of the father of history.
The work of Herodotus is remarkable, among other things, as being the
oldest complete prose composition that has come down to us from classical
antiquity. It must not be inferred from this that Herodotus was the
first Greek who wrote prose. The fact is far otherwise. The so-called
father of prose was, as is well known, preceded by a long line of Greek
writers, who composed not merely prose compositions, but compositions on
history. The names of many of these men are known, but their works have
come down to us only in meagre fragments. As such, however, they serve to
prove the wide gap which separated the best of them from their successor
Herodotus. Indeed it is doubtless because of the surpassing excellence of
the history of Herodotus that his work lived on through the labours of
successive copyists, while the works of his predecessors were permitted
to disappear through slow decay like the works of so many other and later
writers of antiquity.
If it be true that the style is the man, then we may feel that after
all, despite the meagre contemporary records as to his life, the man
Herodotus is well known to us; for his great work, possibly the only
one that he ever composed, has come down to us intact. Not indeed that
the actual manuscript of his own production has been preserved. No
author of classical Greece has come down to us directly in this sense.
But in that day the individual copyist did in a small way what the
printing-press to-day accomplishes on a larger scale. And of the numerous
copies that were made of Herodotus in succeeding ages down to the period
of the Renaissance, something less than a score are still preserved.
Most of these date only from the fifteenth, fourteenth, or, at the
earliest, the tenth century. There are, however, two or three that are
undoubtedly still more ancient, though probably none that was written
within a thousand years after the death of the author himself. The fact
of numerous copies made in different ages by different hands being
available for comparison, however, makes it reasonably sure that we have
in the carefully edited editions of modern scholarship a fairly accurate
representation of what Herodotus actually wrote.
This work, then, is commonly spoken of as the _History of the Persian
War_. It is really much more than that. Starting with the idea of the
Persian War as a foundation, Herodotus has built a structure which
might, perhaps with more propriety, be termed a history of the world
as known in his day. The work itself makes it clear that, in acquiring
material for its composition, the author travelled extensively in Asia
and in Egypt. He visited Babylon, and gives us the description of an
eye-witness of the glories of that famous capital; and he sojourned long
in Egypt, saw with his own eyes the Pyramids and other monuments of that
wonderful civilisation, and heard from the priests fabulous tales of the
past history of their country.
When one reflects what must have been the range of observation of the
average stay-at-home Greek of that day, one readily understands how much
of what Herodotus saw in these foreign lands had the charm to him of
absolute novelty. He had but to recount what he had seen and heard--a
fair degree of literary skill being of course presupposed--to produce
a narrative which would have all the charm for his compatriots of a
fascinating romance. The marvels of his actual observation in Babylon and
in Egypt must have seemed to him more wonderful than anything he could
conceivably invent. Therefore, even had his sole object been--as quite
probably it was--merely to make an entertaining narrative, he had no
inducement to depart from the recital of the truth as he saw and heard
it. That, in point of fact, he did thus cling to the truth is admitted
to-day on all hands. There were periods, however, within a few hundred
years of his own epoch, when Herodotus was considered by even the best
authorities of the time as a bald romancer. The Greeks and Romans of
about the beginning of our era, with Plutarch--or a “false Plutarch”; the
question of authenticity is an open one--at their head, did not hesitate
to stigmatise Herodotus as a writer of fables. “Plutarch” even went
further and asserted that he was a malignant perverter of the truth as
well.
Such detractions, however, did not at all alter the fact that the story
of Herodotus had an abiding interest for each succeeding generation of
readers, and it is one of the curious results of modern exploration and
investigation to prove that very often where Herodotus was supposed to
have invented fables he was, in point of fact, merely narrating, in the
clearest manner possible, what he had actually seen.
Mixed with these recitals of fact, to be sure, there is much that is
really fabulous, but this is chiefly true of those things which Herodotus
reports by hearsay, and explicitly labels as being at second hand.
Whether fact or fable, however, the entire story of Herodotus has at
once the fullest interest and the utmost importance for the historian of
to-day. For where it tells us facts about the nations of antiquity, these
are very often facts that would otherwise be shut out absolutely from
our view; and where he relates fables, he at least preserves to us, in a
vivid way, a picture of the mental status and the intellectual life of a
cultivated Greek in the period of the greatest might of that classical
nation.
Our present concern is with the part of Herodotus that deals explicitly
with the affairs of Greece. This has particular reference to the Persian
Wars, although giving many incidental references to other periods
of history. For this period of the Persian invasions Herodotus is
practically our sole source, and we have drawn on him largely at first
hand. His narrative here may be paraphrased and in some slight details
modified, but can never be supplanted. The account of Herodotus closes
with the year 478--the definitive year in which the Persians were finally
expelled from Greece. As Herodotus was six years old in 478, he must have
had personal recollections of the effect produced upon his elders by the
accounts of the battles of Thermopylæ, Salamis, and Platæa; must indeed
all his life have been associated with men who participated in these
conflicts; his account, therefore, has all the practical force of the
report of a contemporary witness.
As we have said, the period following the Persian wars--the age of
Pericles--found no contemporary historian, though the writings of the
poets and the orators to some extent make amends for the deficit; and
the art treasures that have been preserved are more eloquent than words
in their testimony to the culture of the time. The general historians
and biographers supply us with the chief details of the political events
of the time and bridge for us the gap between the Persian and the
Peloponnesian wars.
When we reach the Peloponnesian War itself we come upon the work of the
master historian Thucydides. A critical estimate of his writings has
already been given and need not be repeated here. Neither need we take
up at length the work of Xenophon, who, as already noted, explicitly
continued the history of Thucydides. We have previously had occasion
to point out that Xenophon did not equal his great predecessor in true
historical sense, or in breadth and impartiality of view. His partiality
for Sparta and his friendship for Agesilaus led him to do scant justice
to the great Theban Epaminondas, and we have previously noted how the
record of Diodorus, rather than the contemporary account of Xenophon, is
our best source for the history of the Theban hero. Nevertheless Xenophon
remains an important source for the period of which his _Hellenica_
treats. His more popular work, the _Anabasis_, describes a picturesque
incident in Grecian history, which was important rather as an adumbration
of possible future events than because of its intrinsic interest.
Coming to the Macedonian epoch we find, as might be expected, that the
picturesque life of Alexander called forth a multitude of chroniclers;
all of which, as has been said, were superseded by the later works of
Arrian and Curtius.
Recapitulating in a few words what has just been said of the original
sources of Grecian history, it would appear that the reader who has
before him the works of Diodorus, Justin, Plutarch, Nepos, Herodotus,
Thucydides, Xenophon, and Arrian will have access to the chief
fountain-heads upon which modern historians have drawn. But it will be
clear to anyone who considers these authors in their entirety that the
idea of Grecian history to be gained by reading these classical writers
alone would be a somewhat disjointed and unsatisfactory one. Many points
of chronology would remain obscure; there would be many gaps in the
story. Yet, the view thus to be gained was the only one accessible until
about a century ago. The revival of interest in the classical authors
that came about along with the general intellectual advance in the time
of Elizabeth, had led to the translation of many classical authors by
such men as Thomas North, Philemon Holland, and Arthur Golding. It had
led also, as we have noted, to the production of Sir Walter Raleigh’s
general history, which was complete for the period during which Greece
was an important nation. But there was no other attempt to unify the
story of Grecian history and give it a modern garb until more than a
century later.
Then the stimulus given to historical investigation by the success of
Gibbon’s splendid work, led to an attempt to treat the history of Greece
in a manner equally comprehensive. The man who first undertook the task
in England was William Mitford. The work that he produced was an epochal
one, replete with scholarship, yet it had certain limitations which
led directly to the production by another hand of a yet more monumental
work on the same subject. For, as is well known, the history of Grote
was written with the explicit intention of combating the conception of
Grecian civilisation that Mitford’s book had made current.
There are two quite different points of view from which the history
of a foreign nation may be regarded. One of these may be called the
“sympathetic,” the other the “antipathetic” view. It was the latter
of these which Mitford chose, or rather to which he was impelled by
temperament, in dealing with those phases of Athenian life which are
the central facts in the political history of Greece. It may be laid
down almost as an axiom that it is impossible to write a truly great
history of a great people from the antipathetic standpoint. At best,
one can obtain only a surface knowledge of a foreign people--it is hard
enough to gain a correct knowledge of one’s own race. Every people, like
every individual, is a strangely inconsistent organism. The deeds of its
diverse moods never seem to harmonise; they are as different as the two
sides of a shield or medal, and in proportion as we seize on one phase
or another of the inconsistencies, we change utterly the type of the
picture. Of course the great historian must see all sides and properly
adjust them; but the difficulty is this: it is much easier to detect the
inconsistencies than the underlying consistencies, which, after all,
are necessary to national life. Hence the antipathetic historian makes
out a strong case against the nation with relative ease, while quite
overlooking the better side; whereas the sympathetic historian, while
searching for the better side, cannot by any possibility overlook the
obvious inconsistencies.
To illustrate from the case in hand: Mitford was an ardent tory, and he
insisted on weighing Greek conduct in his own balance. He never failed
to sneer at the democratic tendency of Athens, and to point out the
inconsistencies in Athenian life. And he found ample material. Nothing
is more startling to the student who undertakes a careful survey of the
history of Greece than the glaring defects of this people. Take two or
three illustrations: The Athenians contended all along for equality of
rights, yet (1) the majority of their co-residents were slaves; (2) they
frequently denied to their best citizens the privilege of living in
Athens, banishing them, without even the charge of crime, by ostracism;
and (3) they strove all along to establish imperial power for Athens over
other cities--strove so fiercely for it that the final result was the
utter overthrow of Greece itself.
Again, the Athenian is said to have worshipped the æsthetic and the
beautiful. His poetry and art attest the truth of the claim. Yet at
table he ate with his fingers; in the streets he committed indescribable
vulgarities without concealment; and in his relations with his fellows
he indulged in practices of the most revolting kind so commonly that to
“love after the manner of the Greeks” became an opprobrious by-word among
nations. Herodotus himself records that the Greeks taught these practices
to the Persians, who to this day are reproached with them.
To go no further, here is plenty of material for the antipathetic
historian. Yet even a very brief analysis might serve to modify the first
judgment which would tend to denounce the Greeks as the most inconsistent
and disreputable of mortals.
Thus, as to the slaves, a sympathetic historian would not forget that
slavery had existed almost everywhere in antiquity, among Hamitic,
Semitic, and Aryan races alike; and that modern nations did not throw
it off for more than two thousand years after the downfall of Greece.
Nor will he forget that the last great nation to discard it was the
United States, the most advanced of democracies; and that, when the great
struggle came through which it was at last rooted out there, practically
all Europe sympathised in spirit with the slave-holder, and not with
the party that strove to free their fellow-men. These are grotesque
inconsistencies; but with the later history in mind we can scarcely hold
up the matter of slavery as an essentially Greek inconsistency.
Then consider the question of ostracism. At first sight it surely seems
difficult to bring within the pale of reason this fact of the banishment
from Athens of one great citizen after another--of Themistocles, the
hero of Salamis, of Aristides the Just, of the brilliant Alcibiades, of
Xenophon, and of Thucydides. But consider the matter a little further.
Here was a little people, numerically insignificant, who had got hold
of a unique principle. They had experienced the pleasures of personal
liberty, of free “government of, for, and by the people,” and all the
world about them looked jealously on their experiment. Always the gold of
Persia was at hand to help on an aristocratic party at home in the effort
to overthrow the democratic party by whatever means, fair or foul.
What then must necessarily be the attitude of the best citizens of
Athens toward any one of their number who gained very great popularity
and influence, and who seemed ambitious to use his power autocratically?
Why, such a person, however respected, however loved even--indeed just
in proportion to the respect and affection that he inspired--must be
regarded with apprehension. And the ballot for ostracism solved the
problem, after a fashion. It required no charge against the citizen. It
accused him of no crime. It merely gave official expression to a popular
belief that it were better for the state that this citizen should retire
for a time from its precincts. It was a confession of governmental
weakness, to be sure. A powerful unified democracy like the United States
in modern times has no need of such a law; but a weak government like
that of France still thinks itself obliged sometimes to resort to it in
case of political offenders, who are feared for exactly the same reason
that led to ostracism in Athens--as witness the case of Déroulède and his
allies. In this view then the practice of ostracism, which very probably
preserved the democratic government of Athens long after it would
otherwise have been overthrown, is not the grotesque inconsistency it at
first seems.
As to the factions of the cities, which led to what Ruskin calls the
“suicide of Greece,” they come to seem as natural as human nature itself
when one stops to reflect that Hellas was never a united country under
unified government. The Greek had, to be sure, a prejudice in favour of
his race against outside barbarians. But his keenest prejudice was for
his own city. The idea of liberty was too new for the conception of a
federation of cities to be grasped all at once. Even now, after more than
twenty-five hundred years of experiment and effort, that idea has only
in a few instances been successfully realised and practised on a large
scale for considerable periods of time--by the Greek cities themselves at
a later period; by the north Italian cities late in the Middle Ages; and
by the Anglo-Saxon race in our own day. It is not strange then that the
Athenian regarded the Spartan as a political foreigner; and the struggles
between the two were not different from the struggles that have gone on
ever since between different neighbouring states all over the world.
The appalling fact of universal carnage inconsistently disturbing the
dreams of the brotherhood of man is one of the saddest evidences of the
restricted civilisation of our race. But with all recent history in our
minds, we can hardly hold it too much against the Greek that he was not
more advanced in this regard in the year 400 B.C. than is all the rest of
the world in the year 1900 A.D.
Without going further it must be clear how very different the points of
view are from which the “sympathetic” and the “antipathetic” historian
will respectively regard a people, in particular a people of high genius
like the Greeks. And, to return to Mitford, it is hardly an unjust
criticism which has said of him that his ponderous work, despite its
learning, “is scarcely more than a huge party pamphlet.” And this is true
precisely because he viewed the Greek always from the standpoint of his
own narrow prejudice. Yet this must not be taken to imply that Mitford’s
history is valueless. The fact is far otherwise. With due allowance for
its bias, it may be read with full profit by everyone, and there are many
passages of it that are unprejudiced and authoritative, while the merits
of its style commend it so highly that we have had occasion to return to
it again and again.
But the greatest distinction of Mitford was to call forth the work of
Grote; for it was through indignation aroused by Mitford’s attitude
toward Grecian affairs that the London banker, whose recreation was
the study of the classics, was led to present a different view of
Grecian history. The intentions to combat Mitford developed finally
the conception of a comprehensive history, and when this history was
completed, a definitive presentation of Grecian affairs had been put
forward. Next to Gibbon’s _Rome_, perhaps the greatest historical work
ever produced in England is Grote’s _History of Greece_. Unfortunately,
Grote did not continue his history beyond the time of Alexander, so we
must seek other guides for the period of the decline and fall of Grecian
power. The earliest epochs of Grecian history also have been opened up
by the work of Schliemann and his successors since the day of Grote. Nor
need it be denied that in various details Grote’s theories have been
modified by later investigations. But, in the main, his work was based
upon such secure foundations, and was conceived and carried out in such a
broad and philosophical spirit, that it must stand indefinitely, like the
work of Gibbon, as a finished historical structure.
If one were to single out for particular reference the part of Grote’s
work which was most revolutionary and at the same time most satisfactory,
one would cite perhaps the earliest portion, that which deals with the
myths and traditions of Greece. It is almost a matter of course that
the chief authoritative investigators of such a subject as this are
usually scholars by profession; closet students of that type of mind
which can give years of enthusiastic devotion to the investigation of
a few pages of an obscure manuscript, and which can devote pages of
polemics to the establishment of the correct reading of a disputed text
the subject-matter of which is perhaps altogether trivial. This type of
mind is in many ways admirable, and the work which it accomplishes is
entitled to full respect, but it is not the kind of intellect one would
willingly follow as a rule in the decision of questions of more practical
import. And it is because this is the sort of intelligence which has
chiefly attacked this problem, that the discussion of it has usually
evinced so little of practicality. Moreover, another set of persons of
even more visionary cast, the poets, namely, have added their modicum
of argument along equally visionary lines, prejudiced in their view by
love of the great literature in which the mythical tales are embalmed.
But Grote combined in his own mind the qualities of secure and profound
scholarship with a full appreciation of the beauties of literature and a
rare practical knowledge of the world of everyday affairs, which gave
him perhaps a keener critical view and a clearer historical perspective
than had been vouchsafed anyone who had before attempted to deal with the
subject.
Grote was a practical banker and successful financier, turned historian
through sheer love of his subject. He applied to the subject of Greek
mythology the rules of what may be best described as sound common-sense.
He recognised that a myth is not the growth of a day, but the accretion
of perhaps many generations, or even centuries of legendary history.
He fully recognised two very essential basal principles of practical
psychology, namely, first, that quite the rarest feat of the human mind
is anything approaching pure invention; but that, secondly, scarcely less
rare is a recital, however securely founded in history, which does not
contain some elements of invention. He recognised, in other words, the
full truth of the homely saying that “where there is much smoke there
must be some fire”; but he recognised also the truth that no two persons
could ever be found who, after viewing the smoke, would agree as to the
exact proportion which it bore to the fire.
Making the application to the case in hand, Grote was convinced that
every important myth and legend must have had the prototype of at least
its outline in the actual history of some human beings in some period.
He combined with this conviction the no less certain one that in our
day it is utterly impossible to say what people or what time furnished
this historical basis of the tradition, or just what proportion of fact
is mingled with the enshrouding cloud of fable. When, therefore, Grote
came to write his history of Greece, he adopted a compromise regarding
the mythical period, which is one of the most striking illustrations of
his practical sagacity. He recited the fables as fables, labelling the
legendary period as such, and making no attempt whatever to determine
what relation any specific incident among these legends might bear to the
actual experiences of the people of prehistoric Greece. Grote’s decision
in this matter was at once received with acclaim by a large number of
readers; and though of course it by no means silenced the champions of
other views, it may fairly be said that after more than half a century
there is no other manner of treating this period which can justly
supplant that which the great historian established.
Our estimate of Grote in other fields is well illustrated by the liberal
use we have made of his work. Notes on other historians of Greece--many
of them by no means unimportant in themselves, but no one of them quite
to be compared with this master historian--will appear in the following
bibliography. It will be sufficient here to recall the names of Thirlwall
and Curtius among the general historians of Greece of the earlier
generation, and the names of Holm, Beloch, Busolt, and Bury among the
more recent writers; while for special periods the names of Droysen,
Müller, Schliemann, and Finlay have particular prominence.
FOOTNOTES
[52] _Fasti Hellenici._
LIST OF AUTHORS QUOTED, CITED, OR CONSULTED; WITH CRITICAL AND
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
=Abbot=, E., History of Greece, London, 1892-1893.--=Ælianus= Claudius,
ποικίλη ἱστορία, edited by Perizonius, Leyden, 1701, the Variable History
of Ælianus (trans. by A. Fleming), London, 1576.--=Alfieri=, V., Tragedy
on Agis IV. King of Sparta.--=Allcroft=, A. H., Decline of Hellas,
371-323 B.C., London, 1894; (in collaboration with W. F. =Masom=),
Synopsis of Grecian History to 495 B.C., London, 1891.--=Annual= of the
British School at Athens.--=Anonymous=, Der Griechisch-turkische Krieg
des Jahres 1897, Berlin, 1898; Seven Essays on the Social Condition of
the Ancient Greeks, Oxford, 1832.--=Aristobulus=, as quoted by Plutarch,
Arrian, etc. (in Müller’s Fragmenta).--=Aristotle=, Ἠθικὰ, edited by
Zell, Heidelberg, 1820, 2 vols.; Πολιτικὰ, edited by Barthélemy St.
Hilaire, with Fr. trans., Paris, 1837; Ethics, Politics (trans. by
Gillies), London, 1804.--=Arrianus=, Flavius, Ἀνάβασις Ἀλεξάνδρου, edited
by F. Schmeider, Leipsic, 1798; The Anabasis of Alexander, London.
_L. Flavius Arrianus_, born at Nicomedia about 100 A.D., died at
an advanced age during the reign of Marcus Aurelius.
In considering a career so romantic as that of Alexander, it
is quite impossible that the historian should remain a calm,
unmoved spectator of the incidents which he describes. We find,
therefore, that the numerous biographers of Alexander have for
the most part placed themselves explicitly on one or another of
opposite sides. Either, on the one hand, they have considered
Alexander as the greatest of heroes and most wonderful of
men, or, on the other hand, have regarded him as merely the
greatest of adventurers. It is tolerably easy, accordingly as
one emphasises one side or another of the facts of Alexander’s
history, to make out a seemingly good case from either of
these points of view. But what we have elsewhere said about
the sympathetical historian applies with full force here, and
it is not to be expected that anyone can have written a really
satisfactory biography of Alexander who has not been appreciative
of those points of his genius which lie quite without the range
of the ordinary adventurer. Thus it is not surprising to find
that the really great biographies of Alexander, both those of
antiquity and those of modern times, have been written from the
sympathetic point of view.
The biography of Arrian, which, by common consent, far exceeds
in importance all other writings on Alexander that have come
down to us, is certainly most judicious in spirit, and probably
as impartial as such a production could possibly be. Arrian does
not spare the faults of Alexander nor hesitate to give them full
expression, but he fully appreciates the greatness of his hero,
and he undertook to write his life, as he himself explicitly
states, because he felt that no one before him had done full
justice to his subject. Arrian frankly states his opinion that
his own production will be found not unworthy, and that, in
virtue of it, he, himself, must be entitled to be regarded as one
of the great writers of Greece. All things considered, it is,
perhaps, strange that posterity should have declined to accede to
this claim. The work of Arrian is indeed admitted on all hands
to be a production of sterling merit--certainly one of the most
impartial and judicial historical productions of antiquity. Yet,
notwithstanding the extreme importance of his subject, the name
of Arrian is comparatively little known to the general public,
whereas the name of Xenophon, whom Arrian to some extent took for
his master, is familiar to everyone, though the subject of his
chief work was of such relative insignificance.
This anomaly is, perhaps, partly explained in the fact that
Arrian did explicitly follow Xenophon as a master, since one
never expects to rank the follower on a par with the originator.
But the truer explanation is probably that Arrian lived at a
late period, after the glory of Greece, as the literary centre
of the world, had quite departed; and it has been customary to
regard all works of this later period, with their necessary
alterations of style, representing the time of degeneracy of
the Greek language, as things to be looked at askance by lovers
of that language in its purity. Then, too, perhaps, the very
importance of Arrian’s subject may have been detrimental to the
permanent popularity of his work. There was no possible reason
why any other writer should take up in great detail the story
of the _Anabasis_ of the Ten Thousand after Xenophon, since
that story, much as if it had been a mere romance, owed its
importance almost entirely to the qualities of style of the
original narrator. But the case of Alexander was quite different.
Numberless writers, as was most natural, had told his story in
the times immediately after his death. It was inevitable that
so amazing a history should continue to excite the interest of
mankind throughout all time and should be retold again and again
by countless generations of historians. Even had the biography
of Arrian proved in all respects comprehensive and satisfactory,
later generations must have demanded that the story should be
retold after the manner of their own times, but in point of fact,
the biography of Arrian, important as it is, is by no means
altogether comprehensive. It contains, to be sure, all incidents
which its author was satisfied were authentic, but it explicitly
omitted various other incidents, which, whether true or false,
must have an abiding interest from the very fact of having been
associated with the name of Alexander.
Each succeeding generation of historians must then judge for
itself, as is the prerogative of the critic, among the various
contradictory stories that have come down to us, and must weigh
anew the evidence of this side or that, and make for itself a new
story of Alexander.
=Assmann=, W., Handbuch der Allgemeinen Geschichte, Brunswick, 1853.
* * * * *
=Bachelet=, J. A. F., Histoire ancienne grecque, Paris, 1883.--=Baraibar=
(in collaboration with =Menendez Pelayo=) Poetas liricos Griegos,
Madrid, 1884.--=Becker=, Wilhelm A., Charicles, or Illustrations of the
Private Life of the Ancient Greeks (translated by Frederick Metcalfe),
London, 1854.--=Beloch=, J., Griechische Geschichte, Strasburg,
1893-1899, 2 vols.--=Bent=, J. T., The Cyclades: Life among the Insular
Greeks, London, 1885.--=Berens=, E. M., Myths and Legends of Ancient
Greece, London, 1879.--=Berg=, van den, Petite Histoire des Grecs,
Paris, 1880.--=Bergk=, T., Griechische Literaturgeschichte, Berlin,
1872-1894.--=Bernhardy=, G., Grundriss der Griechischen Litteratur,
Halle, 1836, rev. ed. 1876-92.--=Berthelot=, A., Les grandes scènes de
l’histoire grecque, Paris, 1889.--=Blackie=, J. S., Horæ Hellenicæ,
London and Edinburgh, 1874.--=Blanchard=, Th., Les Mavroyeni, Paris,
1893.--=Bluemner=, Hugo, Home Life of Ancient Greeks (trans. by A.
Zimmern), London, 1895; Technologie und Terminologie der Gewerbe und
Künste bei Griechen u. Römern, Leipsic, 1887.--=Boeckh=, A., Public
Economy of the Athenians (trans. by A. Lamb), Boston, 1857.
_August Boeckh_, born at Carlsruhe, November 24, 1785; died in
Berlin, August 3, 1867. He published an edition of Pindar with
a continuous commentary, a Latin translation, and a treatise on
Greek Versification, (1811); also _Metrological Investigations
concerning the Weights, Coins, and Measures of Antiquity_ (1838);
_A Dissertation on the Silver Mines of Laurium in Attica_, and
other treatises. He began the _Corpus Inscriptionum Grecarum_,
continued by his pupil Franz and still unfinished. His most
important work on the _Public Economy of the Athenians_, while
necessarily somewhat antiquated, retains its original importance
in many features, and as a repository of knowledge drawn from the
classical writers has not been superseded.
=Bonnet=, M., Le Philologie classique, Paris, 1892.--=Bougeault=,
Alfred, Hist. des lett. étrangères, Paris, 1876.--=Bougot=, A., Rivalité
d’Eschine et Demosthènes, Paris, 1891. =Brequigny=, L. G. O. F. de,
Vie des anciens orateurs grecs, Paris, 1752.--=Bronwer=, P. v. L.,
Histoire de la Civilisation Morale et Religieuse des Grecs.--=Brown=,
J. B., Stoics and Saints. Lectures on Later Heathen Moralists, Glasgow,
1893.--=Budge=, E. A. W., The Life and Exploits of Alexander the
Great, London, 1896.--=Bulwer=, H. L. E., An Autumn in Greece, London,
1826.--=Bulwer Lytton=, E. G. E. L. See Lytton.--=Burgess=, G., and
others, Greek Anthology, London, 1854.--=Burnouf=, E., Mémoires sur
l’antiquité, Paris, 1879; La légende athénienne, Paris, 1872; The
Science of Religions (trans. by Julie Liebe), London, 1888; Histoire de
la littérature grecque, Paris, 1869.--=Bury=, J. B., History of Greece,
London, 1900; The Double City of Megalopolis (in Journal of Hellenic
Studies), London, 1898.
_John B. Bury_, born 1861; was educated at Trinity College,
Dublin, became professor of modern history in Dublin University
in 1893; regius professor of Greek in 1898; and regius professor
of modern history in the University of Cambridge, 1903.
Professor Bury is well known for his _History of the Later Roman
Empire_ and for his edition of Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_. In
preparing the history of Greece he wavered, as his preface tells
us, between an elaborate work and the more difficult task of
presenting a well-balanced epitome of Greek history in a single
volume. He was probably wise in choosing the latter; and in so
doing he has produced a work which, while brief, may properly
be styled comprehensive and authoritative and which is also
entertaining. It does not attempt to supplant the more elaborate
works of the older writers, nor does it enter quite the same
field with the recent German productions; but it is almost the
only work which, in a single volume, gives the reader any clear
idea of the latest developments of Mycenæan history, while
carrying the story of Grecian history in general through the age
of Alexander.
=Busolt=, G., Die Griechische Gesch. bis zur Schlacht bei
Chæroneia, Gotha, 1893; (in Müller’s Handbuch der klassischen
Alterthumswissenschaft, Munich, 1892).
* * * * *
=Caillemer=, E., Études sur les antiquités juridiques d’Athènes, Paris,
1880.--=Carraroli=, D., Di leggenda di Alessandro Magno, Mondovi,
1892.--=Church=, A. J., Heroes and Kings, London, 1883; London, 1900; The
Fall of Athens, London, 1894; Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition, London,
1899; Pictures from Greek Life and Story, 1893.--=Cicero=, Tusculanarum
Disputationum Libri V. and De Oratore, Rome, 1469.--=Clarke=, E. D.,
Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa, London,
1810.--=Clinton=, Fynes H., Fasti Hellenici, London, 1851.--=Collins=,
W. L., Ancient Classics for English Readers, London, 1870.--=Conitolas=,
B., La Grèce apres la faillite, Paris, 1895.--=Constantine VII.=, Flavius
Porphyrogenitus, Ἐκλογαὶ περὶ Πρεσβειῶν (Excerpta de Legationibus), περὶ
ἀρετῆς καὶ κακίας (Excerpta de Virtutibus et Vitiis), edited by Valesius,
1634; περὶ γνωμῶν (Excerpta de Sententiis), Rome, 1827.--=Corner=, J.,
History of Greece, London, 1885, 8 vols.--=Costard=, G., Dissertation
on Uses of Astronomy in History, etc., London, 1764.--=Coulange=, F.
de, Nouvelles recherches sur quelques problèmes d’histoire, Paris,
1891.--=Cox=, G. W., A History of Greece, London, 1874, 2 vols.; General
History of Greece, London, 1876; The Athenian Empire, London, 1876; The
Tale of the Great Persian War, London, 1861; The Greeks and the Persians,
London, 1877; Lives of Greek Statesmen, London, 1885.
_George W. Cox_, born at Benares, January 10, 1827; vicar
of Bekesbourne, 1881, rector of Scrayingham, 1881-1897. His
various historical works have had great popularity, to which
the excellence of their style eminently entitles them. They
are scholarly as regards their treatment of facts, but are
essentially artistic in their presentation of these facts. No
one has treated the mythological period in a more satisfactory
way. Obviously, considering the date of their publication,
they are not to be looked to for the latest phases of Mycenæan
investigation.
=Cramer=, J. A., A Geographical and Historical Description of Ancient
Greece, Oxford, 1828.--=Creasy=, Edward S., Fifteen Decisive Battles
of the World, London, 1852.--=Curteis=, A. M., Rise of the Macedonian
Empire, London, 1877.--=Curtius=, E. von, Griechische Geschichte, Berlin,
1887, 3 vols.
_Ernst Curtius_ was born at Lübeck, Germany, September 2, 1814;
died July 12, 1896. When K. O. Müller undertook that tour of
Greece which began so auspiciously and ended so disastrously, he
had as an assistant a young German of kindred genius to his own,
afterwards to be known perhaps even more widely than himself as
an historian of Greece, in the person of Ernst Curtius. The work
which Müller was not permitted to complete was carried on by
Curtius, who devoted his entire life to the study of classical
antiquities as his master had done before him. It was Curtius
who, many years later, conceived the idea of making excavations
at the famed site of Olympia. Curtius himself, acting as envoy
for the German government, secured to that country the monopoly
of excavating there. The results of these excavations which
Curtius for a time personally conducted are full of importance
and interest, and were given to the world in a series of
ponderous volumes.
Much of the work of Curtius had this technical character, but
the one book through which he became best known, and by which
he will probably be longest remembered, was an essentially
popular history of Greece--by far the most popular exposition
of the subject that has ever been written in Germany. It is a
work essentially un-German, so to say, in its plan of execution.
It is a condensed running narrative of the events of Grecian
history, and, what is strange indeed in a German work, it is
quite unmarred by footnotes: notes there are, to be sure, but
these are relatively few in number and are placed by themselves
at the end of each volume, where they may be easily found by the
few who care to seek them out, without marring the interest and
distracting the attention of the mass of readers of the text.
It is interesting to note that this most delightful and popular
history was written at the instance of a publisher as a companion
work to Professor Mommsen’s equally famous history of Rome. The
similarity of treatment and general identity of plan of these
two famous works suggest that the publisher perhaps had no small
share in predetermining their character and scope; if so, the
world owes him two of the most important histories that have come
out of the land of historians.
Professor Curtius’ personal point of view may be described at
once as sympathetic and critical; he had the ripest scholarship,
and he early imbibed much of Müller’s enthusiasm, but he perhaps
brought to his subject a shade more of practicality than his
great master. The combination of traits made him almost a perfect
historian. As a teacher he was long regarded as one of the most
successful in the land of great teachers. Professor Boyesen, in a
popular article on the Berlin University, written for an American
magazine some years ago, described at some length a seminar of
Professor Curtius, and expressed his surprise and admiration
at the ease and fluency with which Professor Curtius carried
on what might be styled a familiar conversation in classical
Latin. Such an incident is far less novel in Germany than it
would be in France, or England, or America; for in Germany the
student is still taught to speak Latin--after a fashion--in the
Gymnasium, and the scholars are not few who learn to handle it
with relative ease as a spoken language. In the case of Professor
Curtius, then, this mastery of classical languages is perhaps
less remarkable than his practical mastery of his mother-tongue;
for there are many German professors who can speak Latin fluently
where there is one who can write German that anyone who is not a
German can read with pleasure.
=Curtius=, Quintus, De Rebus Gestis Alexandri Magni, Venice, 1471; The
Wars of Alexander (trans. by William Young), London, 1747.
* * * * *
=Dahlmann=, F. C., Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der Gesch., Altona,
1822-1824.--=Daremberg=, C. V., and =Saglio=, E., Dictionnaire des
antiquités grecques et romaines, Paris, 1873; La Médecine dans Homère,
Paris, 1865.--=Dares=, the Phrygian, Daretis Phrygii de Excidio Trojæ
Historia, L’hist. véritable de la guerre des Grecs et des Troyens, faite
française par Ch. de Bourgueville, 1893.--=Dauban=, C. A., Extraits
des auteurs anciens sur l’hist. grecque, Paris, 1888.--=Deltour=, N.
F., Histoire de la littérature grecque, Paris, 1885.--=Diodorus=,
Siculus, Βιβλιοθήκη ἱστορική, edited by L. Dindorf, Leipsic, 1828, 6
vols. The Historical Library, London, 1700.--=Diogenes=, Laertius,
φιλόσοφοι βίοι, edited by H. G. Hübner, Leipsic, 1828, 6 vols.--Lives
and Opinions of the Most Eminent Philosophers (trans. by C. D. Yonge),
London, 1848.--=Dodge=, T. A., Great Captains; History of Origin and
Growth of Art of War, Boston, 1890.--=Donaldson=, J., Modern Greek
Grammar, Edinburgh, 1853.--=Dragoumes=, N., Souvenirs historiques, Paris,
1890.--=Droysen=, J. G., Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen, Gotha, 1892;
Gesch. des Hellenismus, Gotha, 1877-1878.
_Johann Gustav Droysen_ was born at Treptow, Pomerania, Prussia,
July 6, 1808; died at Berlin, June 19, 1884. His history of
Alexander was written before any of the really great modern
histories of Greece were undertaken, and it far surpassed any
preceding effort in the fullness with which it drew upon all
sources of antiquity and in the critical acumen with which it
analysed the material thus gathered. It had, moreover, the merit
of a style of more than average lucidity, and this, added to
its other qualities, gave it at once a wide popularity and an
authoritative position which it has continued to hold to this
day. Indeed, it is only very recently that anyone has attempted
to write a history of Alexander which could be regarded as
competing in the same field with that of Droysen, except such
extended sketches as form part of such comprehensive Grecian
histories as those of Grote, Thirlwall, and Curtius.
Droysen treats his subject from a truly sympathetic point of
view. For him Alexander is a very great hero; he is thoroughly
in sympathy with the monarchical idea, and he regards Alexander
as a great benefactor of his kind, who, had he lived, would have
put the stamp of his genius still more firmly upon the most
important epoch in the history of human evolution. Even such
debatable points as Alexander’s demand that divine honours should
be paid him by the Greeks, after the oriental manner, are made
by Droysen, as we have seen, to appear altogether favourable to
his hero. It must not be supposed from this, however, that the
history of Droysen is a fulsome eulogy. It is, on the other hand,
the work of a candid critic of broad views and clear insight, who
is by no means blind to the defects of his hero, but who believes
that, in spite of these defects, the hero was not merely one of
the greatest military geniuses, but one of the greatest men of
any age.
Having treated the age of Alexander, it was not unnatural
that Droysen should go on to the study of later Greek life.
His treatment of the Hellenic age remains perhaps the most
comprehensive and scholarly contribution to this difficult
subject.
=Droysen=, H.,(in Hermann’s Lehrbuch d. griechischen Antiquitäten)
Freiburg, 1889; Untersuchungen über Alexanders des Grossen Heerwesen und
Kriegführung, Freiburg, 1885; Athen und der Westen vor der Sicilischen
Expedition, Berlin, 1882.--=Drumann=, W., Verfall der Griechischen
Staaten, Berlin, 1815.--=Dujon=, E., Problèmes de Mythologie, Auxerre,
1887.--=Du Mesnil=, A., Politik des Epaminondas, Munich, 1863--=Dunbar=,
G., in Potter’s Antiquities of Greece, Edinburgh, 1820.--=Duncker=,
M., Abhandlungen aus der griech. Geschichte, Leipsic, 1887; History of
Greece to the End of the Persian War (trans.), London and Edinburgh,
1883.--=Duruy=, V., Histoire des Grecs, Paris, 1887-1889.--=Dyer=, L.,
Studies of the Gods in Greece at Certain Sanctuaries, London, 1891.
* * * * *
=Elser=, C., Die Lehre des Aristoteles über das Wirken Gottes, Münster,
1893.--=Ely=, T., Olympos, Tales of the Gods of Greece, London,
1891.--=Eugamon=, Τηλεγονία, (Telegonia).
* * * * *
=Falke=, J. von, Greece and Rome, their Life and Art (trans. by W. H.
Browne), New York, 1882.--=Farfar=, J. A., Paganism and Christianity,
London, 1891.--=Fellows=, C., An Account of Discoveries in Lycia,
London, 1841.--=Finlay=, G., History of Byzantine and Greek Empires
from 716 to 1453, Edinburgh, 1853; History of Greece from Conquest by
Crusaders, 1204-1461, Edinburgh and London, 1851; History of Greek
Revolution, Edinburgh and London, 1861; History of Greece under Ottoman
and Venetian Domination, Edinburgh and London, 1856; Greece under the
Romans, Edinburgh, 1844. Most of Finlay’s works, dealing with the later
period of Grecian history, are properly without the scope of the present
bibliography. They treat the Byzantine epoch from a Greek point of view
and are thus complementary to Gibbon’s work. We shall have occasion to
return to them when dealing with the later Roman Empire.--=Flathe=, J. L.
F. F., Geschichte Macedoniens, Leipsic, 1832-1834.--=Floigl=, V., Cyrus
und Herodot, Leipsic, 1881.--=Fraenkel=, A., Die Quellen der Alexander
Historiker, 1884, 8 vols.--=Françillon=, R. E., Gods and Heroes,
Edinburgh, 1892.--=Freeman=, E. A., History of Federal Government in
Greece and Italy, London, 1893; History of Sicily, Oxford, 1891; article
on “Sicily” in the Ninth Edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_. The
first edition of Professor Freeman’s work on federal government, cited
above, bore the following title: _The History of Federal Government
from the Foundation of the Achæan League to the Dissolution of the
United States_; a title which suggests the difficulties an historian
may encounter when his enthusiasm leads him to enter the fields of
prophecy. For obvious reasons the author was not able to complete his
work in accordance with the original title. Unfortunately, he did not
move as far towards its completion as he might have done, as a second
volume was never published. The fragment that he has given us, however,
retains great importance in its application to that late and futile
effort of the Greeks to harmonise the relations of their antagonistic
cities.--=Furtwängler= (in collaboration with =Löschke=), Mykenische
Vasen, Berlin, 1886.
* * * * *
=Gardner=, Percy, New Chapters in Greek History, London, 1892; Manual
of Greek Antiquities, London, 1895.--=Garnett=, R., A Chaplet from
the Greek Anthology, London, 1892.--=Geddes=, William D., The Problem
of the Homeric Poems, London, 1878, 8 vols.--=Geldart=, E. M., Modern
Greek Language, Oxford, 1866.--=Gell=, W., Itinerary of Greece, with
Commentary on Pausanias and Strabo, London, 1810.--=Gerard=, P.,
L’Éducation athénienne au cinquième et quatrième siècles B.C., Paris,
1889.--=Gerhard=, E., Griechische Mythologie, Berlin, 1854.--=Gervinus=,
G. G., Gesch. des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Leipsic, 1853.--=Gibbon=, E.,
Decline and Fall of Roman Empire, London, 1853.--=Gilbert=, G., Beiträge
zur inneren Gesch. Athens, Leipsic, 1877; Handbuch der Griechischen
Staatsalterthtümer, Leipsic, 1893.--=Gillies=, J., History of Ancient
Greece, London, 1825.--=Gladstone=, W. E., Studies on Homer and the
Homeric Age, Oxford, 1858.--=Glover=, R., Leonidas (poem), London,
1737.--=Godkin=, E. L., Historical Educator, London, 1854.--=Goldsmith=,
O., History of Greece, London, 1825.
_Oliver Goldsmith_ was born at Pallas, County Longford, Ireland,
November 10, 1728; died at London, April 4, 1774. The name of
Goldsmith has been everywhere a household word for more than
a century, but probably comparatively few of the multitude of
readers of _The Deserted Village_ and _The Vicar of Wakefield_
are aware that the famous poet and novelist was also a writer
of histories. And, in point of fact, it would be going much too
far to claim for Goldsmith any such rank in the field of history
as, by common consent, he is accorded in these other walks of
literature. Indeed it might almost be said that Goldsmith was
not a historian at all in the modern sense of the word; he did
not prepare himself by any extended series of intimate personal
researches; he did not attempt to ferret out any new facts,
or bring any novel lights to bear upon the subject. To put
the matter briefly, he took up the writing of history as pure
hack-work for whatever monetary recompense it would bring at the
moment, with probably little thought beyond that. Nevertheless
Goldsmith had some of the inherent instincts of the scholar, and,
moreover, he was too great an artist not to know that truth lies
at the foundation of all art; hence, even though he wrote in one
sense carelessly, he could not do less than ground himself in at
least the main outlines of the story that he had to tell, and it
would be quite a mistake to suppose that his history of Greece
is utterly despicable as a mere narrative of facts. Generally
speaking, on the contrary, it may be depended on as to mere
statement of fact, while its manner of presentation is, it goes
almost without the saying, such as to give it a place quite aside
from the ordinary.
There are indeed times when the spirit of the writer seems
somewhat to flag, and one misses here and there that felicity of
expression and charm of narrative which one is wont to associate
with the name of Goldsmith; but, in the main, the story, as a
story of Grecian life, is told in a manner not unworthy of the
author of _The Vicar_, which is equivalent to saying that the
mere story of Greek history has rarely elsewhere been told so
well. The skill of the trained writer is shown, however, perhaps
even more in the selection and massing of materials than in the
mere matter of verbal style in the narrower sense. In particular
Goldsmith has followed out the tangled web of post-Alexandrian
history and woven it into something like a continuous and uniform
texture with a facility of literary resource that is rare indeed
among writers of history. Of course matter, rather than manner,
is the _sine quâ non_ with the historian, and it was not to be
expected that the history of Goldsmith could retain the prestige
which it once enjoyed, after such writers as Mitford, Thirlwall,
Grote, and Curtius had devoted years of effort to a more extended
treatment of the same subject. Nevertheless the history of
Goldsmith still has its utility for a certain class of readers.
Judicious selections from it are fully entitled to stand beside
the best that has been written on the subject. If, on the whole,
one regrets that Goldsmith did not take the time to give his work
greater authority, one cannot but regret also that some of the
later writers, and notably Grote, were not able to add to their
more ponderous productions something of the charm of style which
is the chief merit of Goldsmith’s history.
=Goll=, H., Kulturbilder aus Hellas und Rom, Leipsic, 1878.--=Gossellin=,
P. F., Géographie des Grecs analysée, Paris, 1790.--=Grant=, A., Greece
in the Age of Pericles, London, 1893.--=Grote=, G., History of Greece,
London, 1846-1856; Plato, London, 1865.
_George Grote_ was born near Beckenham in Kent, November 17,
1794; died at London, June 18, 1871. He was educated for a
commercial life, and as a banker became a partner in the firm of
Prescott, Grote & Co. He continued in active business until 1843,
and he three times represented the city of London in parliament,
retiring from public life in 1841. The first two volumes of his
_History of Greece_ were published in 1846, the remaining volumes
appearing successively between 1847 and 1856. His _Plato and
the other Companions of Socrates_, in three volumes, appeared
in 1865. In politics Grote was greatly influenced by his friend
James Mill, accepting his theories upon church establishment
and government. Years before the passage of the reform bill,
Grote was one of the earnest reformers who strove to further the
views of Mill and Bentham. His work as a politician, however,
was quite subordinate to his importance as a historian, for the
latter work was taken up at first as a mere labour of love, and
only carried to completion, it is said, at the instigation of his
wife. We have already commented at length upon Grote’s work in
the introduction to this bibliography.
=Grundy=, G. B., The Persian War. 1901.--=Guerber=, H. A., The Story
of the Greeks, London, 1898.--=Guhl=, E., and =Koner=, W., The Life of
the Greeks and Romans described from Antique Monuments (trans. by F.
Hueffer), London. 1877.
* * * * *
=Hadley=, J., Philological Essays, New York, 1873.--=Hahn=, J. G. von,
Folk Lore of Modern Greece, London, 1884.--=Hall=, H. R., The Oldest
Civilisation of Greece.--=Hammond=, B. E., Political Institutions of
the Ancient Greeks, London, 1895; Greek Constitutions, Cambridge,
1896.--=Harrison=, J. E., Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens,
London, 1890.--=Harrison=, J. A., The Story of Greece, New York,
1885.--=Hase=, H., The Public and Private Life of the Ancient
Greeks, London, 1836.--=Hegel=, G. W. F., Lectures on the Philosophy
of History, London, 1857.--=Heine=, H., Gesammelte Werke (Zweiter
Cyklus), Berlin, 1887.--=Helbig=, W., Die Italiker in der Po-Ebene,
Leipsic, 1879.--=Hermann=, K. F., Lehrbuch Griechischer Antiquitäten,
Freiburg, 1880; Kulturgeschichte der Griechen und Römer, Göttingen,
1857.--=Herodotus=, Heroditi Historiæ, ed. Schweighäuser, Strasburg,
1816, 5 vols.; History of Herodotus, translated by Wm. Beloe, London,
1806.--=Hertzberg=, G. F., Gesch. der Griechen im Alterthum, Berlin,
1885; Geschichte von Hellas und Rom, 1879; Geschichte Griechenlands
unter der Herrschaft der Römer, Halle, 1866-1875; Gesch. Griechenlands
seit dem Absterben des antiken Lebens bis zur Gegenwart, Hamburg,
1876-1879. Professor Hertzberg’s works have the merit of pleasant
presentation, and may be depended upon as a representative presentation
of the most authoritative views. They make no claim to any such amount
of original investigation as characterises the standard works of Grote
and Curtius.--=Hogarth=, D. G., article on “Mycenæan Civilisation” in
the _New Volumes_ of the Ninth Edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_,
London.--=Holm=, A., Gesch. Siciliens im Alterthum, Leipsic, 1870-1874;
Griechische Gesch., Berlin, 1893; History of Greece, London, 1898.
_Adolf Holm_ was born in 1830 at Lübeck; he is at present
professor of history at Palermo, Sicily. Professor Holm’s
work, combining original investigation with a fair grade of
popularity of treatment, is one of the most important of recent
contributions to the subject.
=Hopf=, Carl, Gesch. Griechenlands vom Beginn des Mittelalters (in Ersch
und Gruber’s Encyclopädie), Leipsic, 1818.--=Huellmann=, C. D., Würdigung
des Delphischen Orakels, Bonn, 1837; Anfänge der griech. Geschichte,
Königsberg, 1814.--=Hullmann=, L. D., Primi tempi della storia graeca,
1894.--=Hume=, D., On the Populousness of Ancient Nations, Edinburgh,
1753.--=Hutton=, C. A., Greek Terra-cotta Statuettes, London, 1899.
* * * * *
=Isocrates=, Archidamus, ed. by G. S. Dobson, London, 1828, 2 vols.
* * * * *
=Jäger=, O., Geschichte der Griechen, Gütersloh, 1896.--=Jahn=, O.,
Aus der Alterthumswissenschaft, Bonn, 1868.--=Jebb=, R. E., in an
article on “Demosthenes” in the Ninth Edition of the _Encyclopædia
Britannica_.--=Jevons=, F. B., Athenian Democracy, London,
1895.--=Josephus=, F., Ἰουδαϊκὴ ἀρχαιολογία, ed. by Dindorf, Paris, 1845
(trans. by W. Whiston, “The Jewish Antiquities,” London, 1737); περὶ
τοῦ Ἰουδαϊκοῦ πολέμου ἢ Ιουδαϊκῆς ἱστορίας περὶ ἁλώσεως, ed. by Hudson,
Oxford, 1720 (trans. by Whiston, London, 1737).--=Jurien de la Gravière=,
J. P. E., Les campagnes d’Alexandre, Paris, 1884; La marine des anciens,
Paris, 1880.--=Justinus=, Justini Historiarum Philippicarum Libri XLIV;
History of the World, London, 1853.
* * * * *
=Kellner=, G. C., Edle Griechen, Leipsic, 1802.--=Kertenensis=, R.,
Voyage to Dalmatia, Greece, and Asia.--=Kingsley=, Charles, Hypatia,
London, 1858.--=Kolster=, W. H., Alexander der Grosse, Berlin,
1866.--=Kortum=, J. C., Gesch. Griechenlands von der Urzeit bis zum
Untergang des achäischen Bundes, Heidelberg, 1854.--=Kruse=, F. C. R.,
Hellas, Leipsic, 1826.
* * * * *
=Lake=, W. M., A Historical Outline of the Greek Revolution, London,
1825.--=Lang=, Andrew, Homer and the Epic, London, 1893.--=Larcher=,
P. H., Traduction d’Hérodote, Paris, 1786.--=Lardy=, E., La Guerre
Greco-Turque (see Modern Greece), Paris, 1899.--=Larocque=, J., La Grèce
au siècle de Périclès, Paris, 1883.--=Laurent=, T., Études sur l’histoire
de l’humanité, Brussels, 1861-1870.--=Leake=, W. M., Researches in
Greece, London, 1814; Topography of Athens, London, 1821.--=Lebeau=,
Charles, Hist. du Bas-Empire, Paris, 1757-1786.--=Lecky=, W. E. H.,
Rationalism in Europe, London, 1870.--=Lenormant=, F., La Grande
Grèce, Paris, 1881.--=Lerminier=, E., Histoire des législatures et des
constitutions de la Grèce, Paris, 1882.--=Letronne=, J. A., Fragments
inédits d’anciens poètes grecs, Paris, 1838.--=Livius=, Titus, Annales,
Rome, 1469; ed. by Drakenborch, Leyden, 1738-1746, 7 vols. (trans.
by Philemon Holland, “History of Rome,” London, 1600; by D. Spillan,
C. Edmunds, and W. A. McDevitte, London, 1849, 4 vols.).--=Lloyd=,
W. W., Sophoclean Trilogy (in Journal Hellenic Studies), London,
1884.--=Lytton=, E. G. E. L. Bulwer, Athens: Its Rise and Fall, London,
1837.
_Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton_ was born at London,
May 25, 1803; died at Torquay, January 18, 1873. It has happened
more than once that the achievements of a man’s later life
have quite eclipsed the renown of his earlier years. It was so
in the case of Bulwer-Lytton. In mature life he came to be so
universally known as a politician and novelist that perhaps
comparatively few of his readers are aware that he ever wrote a
history. Part of this neglect is perhaps due to the fact that he
never finished the important work on Athens which at one time
was very widely and favourably known. Possibly his success as a
novelist led him to abandon his early project, or, more likely,
the distractions of other activities prevented him from returning
to a work which he must have abandoned with reluctance. In any
event the two volumes which he published on Athenian history
remain a valuable fragment. They are written from the standpoint
of an ardent admirer of all phases of Grecian life, and his
judgment must, therefore, sometimes be accepted with a certain
reserve. Yet, as a whole, his work so far as it was carried has
hardly been supplanted as an estimate of the Athenian people and
their life. It is the work of a man who, though pre-eminent as a
writer, had also large attainments as a scholar and investigator.
Whoever turns to the volumes before us must leave them with
regret that the fascinating story which they tell was never
completed. Such as they are, however, they constitute a most
valuable estimate of an artistic people by a man who was himself
an artist.
* * * * *
=Macaulay=, G. C., Translation of the History of Herodotus, London,
1890.--=MacDermott=, T. B., Outlines of Grecian History, Dublin,
1889.--=Mahaffy=, J. P., Problems in Greek History, London, 1892;
Alexander’s Empire, London, 1877; The Greek World under Roman Sway,
London, 1890; Greek Life and Thought from Alexander to Roman Conquest,
London, 1887; Introduction to Duruy’s History of Greece, Boston, 1890;
Rambles and Studies in Greece, London, 1876; A History of Classical Greek
Literature, London, 1883; The Empire of the Ptolemies, London, 1895.
_John Pentland Mahaffy_ was born at Chaponnaire, near Vevey,
Switzerland, February 26, 1839.
The student of history has occasion to deplore, over and over,
the fact that the greatest scholars so generally fail utterly to
master a lucid style of writing. It is a real pleasure therefore,
as well as a surprise, when, now and again, one comes across
a man of recognised scholarship who has also real distinction
as a writer. Such a man is Professor Mahaffy. As a scholar,
and particularly as an investigator of Grecian life in all its
phases, including prominently the age of the Ptolemies, Professor
Mahaffy has long had an established reputation. And it requires
but the most casual inspection of any of his books to show that
his capacity as a writer is of a high order.
The explanation of what might almost be said to be an anomaly
such as this is found, seemingly, in the wide sweep of Professor
Mahaffy’s interests and in the sound fund of common sense which
he brings to bear on any problem of scholarship. Too many
students of antiquity have been carried away with the beauties of
the Greek language, and brought utterly under the spell of the
classical literature, until all critical acumen that they might
once have possessed focalises and wastes itself solely on verbal
questions, leaving none for application to practicalities. Thus
it has happened that all manner of myths have grown up in the
minds of men about the word “Greek.”
Some of these myths Professor Mahaffy has made it his business to
attempt to dispel. We have already had occasion to refer to his
criticism on the eulogists of Thucydides. Again, in a matter of
much broader scope, Professor Mahaffy long ago pointed out that
the popular notion which regarded the Greek as the type of brave
man was a most palpable illusion. He called attention to the fact
that in some of the most important of Grecian battles--as, for
example, that in which the Spartans won against the Corinthians,
in the time of Agesilaus--the total death roll was sometimes
only half a dozen men. He noted the childish way in which the
Greek leaders were wont to keep up the courage of their men by
harangues and bombast, and the way in which each side strove to
frighten the other by loud shoutings and clashing of arms as it
advanced. “These,” he said, “are not the characteristics of men
who are brave in the modern sense of the word.” Again, he asked
if it is conceivable that a modern body of warriors would have
been repelled year after year by the walls of Athens, when only a
handful of men, so to say, were within to defend them.
Advancing still further in the same iconoclastic spirit,
Professor Mahaffy pointed out that some of the dearest traditions
of Grecian history had been interpreted and foisted on the
world through the minds of prejudiced participants, rather
than in a spirit of fairness and equity. Thus the battle of
Marathon, which we are accustomed even now to hear spoken of as
the great decisive contest between the East and the West, will
with difficulty bear this interpretation if one will consider
it without prejudice. At the best, it was certainly a far less
important and decisive battle than that of Platæa, but it chanced
that the Athenians were the victorious combatants at Marathon,
whereas at Platæa the Spartans bore the honours of the day; and
since the Athenians, through their literature, served as the
mouthpiece of Greece, it is not strange that the event in which
they chiefly figured should have been unduly magnified, and the
memory of it transmitted in distorted proportions to posterity.
It is vastly to the credit of modern scholarship that it should
be able to revise certain judgments on such matters as these,
that have come down to us with all the accumulated inertia of
generations of repetition.
It must not be supposed, however, from what has just been said,
that Professor Mahaffy’s task in dealing with the history of
Greece is altogether, or even chiefly, iconoclastic. The fact is
quite otherwise. Critical as he can be on occasion, Professor
Mahaffy nevertheless is, on the whole, an ardent and sympathetic
admirer of the people who have furnished the theme of his life
studies; but his laudatory judgments may be accepted with the
more confidence because of the evidence he has given us that in
considering the Greeks he does not allow himself to be carried
utterly away by his enthusiasm, nor to forget that the Greeks,
despite their national genius, were after all very human, and
only properly to be understood when judged by some such practical
standard as we apply to peoples of our own generation.
Professor Mahaffy knows his Greece of to-day at first hand
quite as well as he knows ancient Greece through studies of the
classics. He has described most charmingly his rambles in Greece
proper; and latterly he has made the Ptolemaic epoch peculiarly
his own, and his writings on this period take rank as among the
most important contributions to a subject which most students of
Grecian history have distinctly neglected.
=Mannert=, C., Geographie der Griechen und Römer, Nürnberg,
1788-1792.--=Manso=, J. C. F., Sparta, Leipsic, 1800-1805.--=Martin=,
H., Les Cavaliers Athéniens, Paris, 1886.--=Masom=, W. F., Synopsis
of Grecian History, London, 1888.--=Maspero=, G., Hist. ancienne des
peuples de l’orient, Paris, 1886.--=Mela=, Pomponius, De Situ Orbis
Libri III, ed. by Vinetus, Paris, 1572; (trans. by Arthur Golding, Rare
and Singular Works of Pomponius Mela, London, 1590).--=Melingo=, P. v.,
Griechenland in unseren Tagen, Vienna, 1892.--=Ménard=, L., Histoire
des Grecs, Paris, 1893, 2 vols.--=Merivale=, Charles, History of the
Romans under the Empire, London, 1850-1851.--=Meyer=, E., Geschichte des
Alterthums, Stuttgart, 1884-1893.--=Milchoefer=, A., Anfänge der Kunst
in Griechenland, Leipsic, 1883.--=Milligan=, W., Religion of Ancient
Greece, Edinburgh, 1882.--=Mitford=, W., History of Greece, London,
1841.--=Monceaux=, P., La Grèce avant Alexandre, Paris, 1892.--=Müller=,
I., Handbuch der klassischen Alterthumswissenschaft, Nördlingen, 1885,
etc., 9 vols., in progress.--=Müller=, A. (in Hermann’s Lehrbuch
der Griechischen Antiquitäten), Freiburg, 1880.--=Müller=, H. D.,
Historisch-mythologische Untersuchungen, Göttingen, 1892.--=Müller=,
Karl, Fragmenta Historicorum Græcorum, Paris, 1841-1870, 5 vols.; new
edition, 1883.--=Müller=, K. O., History of the Literature of Ancient
Greece, London, 1858; History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, London,
1830; Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst, Stuttgart, 1878.
_Karl Otfried Müller_ was born at Brieg, Prussia, August 28,
1797; died at Athens, August 1, 1840. If to be sympathetic
with the genius of a people is a prerequisite for the great
historian, Müller was eminently qualified to write a history
of the Greek people. He was a man of essentially poetical and
artistical temperament, and combined with these qualities a
profound scholarship. An incident of his early manhood will
illustrate perfectly his temperament. The incident occurred
during his visit to the famous art gallery in Dresden. In itself
it was nothing more than the fact of his becoming entranced by
the celebrated Raphael there. Before this picture, as he himself
writes, he stood quite enchanted, and he could scarcely bring
himself to leave it long enough to visit other portions of the
gallery. Now, of course, to any person of less impressionable
temperament who has seen the picture, it will be quite clear that
Müller, standing thus entranced before the Madonna, saw with
the inner eye of his own enthusiasm, rather than with the more
tangible organ of sense. Doubtless, in his half-hypnotic trance,
he would have been equally delighted had the veriest chromo
been substituted in the canvas for the original picture. He had
gone to see the Raphael full of enthusiastic expectancy, and he
was sure not to be disappointed. He did not see the awkward,
mechanical, old-fashioned grouping; he was quite unmindful of the
defect of drawing which had given unequal legs to the kneeling
figure at the right. He did not know that, if he had come across
this same painting unlabelled and before unheard of, he would
scarcely have given it a second thought; he only knew that it
represented an ideal--an ideal that had lingered fondly in his
mind since his earliest youth. To stand before that picture and
see it with his own eyes was to realise that ideal. Many another
person has had that same sensation before that same canvas, and
for the same reason; and with them, as with him, it was a test
of personal temperament, and not a test of the excellence of the
picture itself.
Gifted with this impressionable artistic temperament, it was not
strange that Müller’s ambitions early looked in the direction
of Greece. From his earliest youth the study of classical times
became his one absorbing passion, and long before he had reached
middle age he had come to be known to scholars everywhere as a
member of that inner circle who have made classical lore their
own. Naturally he wrote as well as studied, and his works on
Greece became classical from the moment of their issue. His
especial interest during those early years, which were to
represent the largest portion of his working life, was directed
towards the early history of the Greeks as a nation and towards
the effort to solve the riddles of that period. In particular,
his studies of the Doric race became famous, and remain to
this day practically the last word that has been said on the
subject. One must, perhaps, sometimes make allowance for Müller’s
enthusiasm and favourable prejudice, just as for Mitford’s
opposite point of view; but generally speaking, Müller’s work
is distinguished above all things, next to its scholarship, for
its fairness and the breadth of view from which the subject is
contemplated.
Oddly enough, all Müller’s important works were written before he
himself had ever visited the land of which he treated. Needless
to say, a desire to visit Greece was ever with him, but it was
long before the desire was realised. At last, however, the
opportunity came to visit Greece in a semi-official capacity;
the government granted him leave of absence from his university
work, and provided him with a draftsman to make sketches in
Greece under his direction. In the autumn of 1839 he started on
this memorable and, as it proved, fatal tour. A story is told of
his entry into Greece which will illustrate the power and charm
of his personality. A friend of Finlay, the English historian of
the later period of Greece, chanced to be on the same boat with
Müller, and, after landing, he at once reported to Finlay that a
most extraordinary man had come to Greece--a man whose name and
nationality were unknown to him, but who had surprised everyone
on the boat by seeming to speak all languages with equal facility
and to discuss all topics with a like affluence of erudition. “I
don’t know who he is,” said the narrator, “but he is somebody
quite out of the common.” Needless to say, Finlay was not left
long in doubt as to who this “somebody quite out of the common”
really was.
With what enthusiasm and energy Müller began his investigations
in the land, every part of which was so dear to him and at once
so familiar and so novel, may be easily imagined, but his labours
were not destined to reach the results that had been hoped;
for, partly perhaps through over-exertion and fatigue, he was
stricken with a fever, was brought back to Athens unconscious
and delirious, and died there on the 1st of August, 1840. His
work was thus cut short while he was yet in his prime, but even
so he will always be remembered as one of the most prominent
contributors to Grecian history of any age.
=Munro=, Observations on Persian Wars, London, 1898; article in the
Journal of Hellenic Studies.--=Mure=, William, Grecian Literature,
London, 1854.--=Murray=, A. S., Greek Bronzes, London, 1898.
* * * * *
=Nagiotte=, E., Histoire de la littérature grecque, Paris,
1883.--=Nepos=, C., De Viris Illustribus, Venice, 1471 (ed. by
Dionysius Lambinus, Paris, 1569); Lives of Illustrious Men, London,
1723.--=Nicolai=, R., Griechische Litteraturgeschichte, Leipsic,
1876.--=Niebuhr=, B. G., Lectures on Ancient History, London, 1852;
Stories of Greek Heroes, London, 1887.--=Niese=, B., Gesch. der
Griechischen und Macedonischen Staaten, Gotha, 1893.--=Nitzsch=, C.
W., Die Römische Annalistik von ihren ersten Anfängen bis auf Valerius
Antias, Berlin, 1873.
* * * * *
=Oman=, C. W. C., History of Greece to Macedonian Conquest, London, 1890;
History of Greece to Death of Alexander, London, 1891.--=Oncken=, W.,
Athen und Hellas, Leipsic, 1866.--=Osborn=, H. F., From the Greeks to
Darwin, New York, 1894.--=Overbeck=, J., Gesch. der Griechischen Plastik,
Leipsic, 1857.
* * * * *
=Paley=, F. A., An Inquiry into the Origin of Bookwriting among
the Greeks, London, 1881.--=Papatthegopoulos=, K., Histoire de la
civilisation héllenique, Paris, 1875.--=Pausanias=, Ἑλλάδος Περιήγησις,
ed. by Kühn, Leipsic, 1696; (translation by Thomas Taylor), A Description
of Greece, London, 1794.--=Perry=, W. C., Greek and Roman Sculpture,
London, 1882.--=Peter=, C., Zeittafeln der Griechischen Geschichte,
Halle, 1886.--=Perrot=, G., in collaboration with C. =Chipiez=, Histoire
de l’art dans l’antiquité, Paris, 1881.--=Philippson=, A., Thessalien
und Epirus, Berlin, 1897.--=Philostephanus Timæus=, =Sosibius= and
=Demetrius Phalereus= as quoted by Plutarch.--=Philostratus=, Τὰ ἐς
τὸν Τυανέα Ἀπολλώνιον, Venice, 1502; Life of Apollonius, London,
1809.--=Photius=, Excerpts from Arrian’s Bithynica (in Müller’s
Fragmenta).--=Pigorini=, in Atti dell’ Accademmia de Lincei.--Plato,
Republic (trans. by Henry Cary), London, 1861.--=Pliny=, Historia
Naturalis (trans. by J. Bostock and H. T. Riley), London, 1848.--=Ploix=,
C., La nature des dieux, Paris, 1888.--=Plutarch=, Βίοι Παράλληλοι,
Rome, 1470, 2 vols. (ed. by C. Sintenis, Leipsic, 1839-1846, 4
vols.); Lives, London, 1579; Lives of Illustrious Men, London, 1829,
etc.--=Pocock=, E., =Talfourd=, T., =Rutt=, J., and =Ottley=, A
History of Greece, London, 1851.--=Poestion=, J. C., Hellas, Rom,
und Thule, Leipsic, 1882.--=Pöhlmann=, R. (in Müller’s Handbuch der
klassischen Alterthumswissenschaft, Nördlingen, 1885, etc., 9 vols. in
progress).--=Pollard=, A., True Stories from Greek History, London,
1892.--=Polyænus=, Στρατηγήματα, Lyons, 1589; Stratagems of War (trans.
by R. Shepherd), London, 1793.--=Polybius=, Καθολικὴ, κοινὴ ἱστορία,
Paris, 1609; The History of (trans. by E. Grimston), London, 1693;
The History of (trans. by Sir H. Spears), Oxford, 1823 (Fragmentary
but very valuable for later period).--=Pomeranz=, B., La Grèce et la
Judée dans l’antiquité, London, 1891.--=Potter=, J. J., Antiquities
of Greece, Edinburgh, 1820.--=Poynter=, E. J., On a Bronze Leg from
Italy (in Journal of Hellenic Studies), London, 1886.--=Preller=, L.,
Griechische Mythologie, Berlin, 1899.--=Prévost-Paradol=, L. A., Essai
sur l’histoire universelle, Paris, 1890.--=Purper=, L., La résurrection
de la mythologie, Paris, 1894.
* * * * *
=Quinet=, E., De la Grèce dans ses rapports avec l’antiquité, Paris, 1830.
* * * * *
=Radet=, S. T. G., La déification d’Alexandre.--=Rangabe=, A. R.,
Greece: Her Former and Present Position, New York, 1867; Hist. lit.
de la Grèce moderne, Paris, 1877.--=Ranke=, L. v., Weltgeschichte,
Leipsic, 1883-1886, 8 vols.--=Redesdale=, Lord (in Mitford’s Greece),
Biography of William Mitford, London, 1822.--=Renan=, E., Études
d’histoire religieuse, Paris, 1857.--=Rennell=, J., Geographical System
of Herodotus, London, 1800.--=Ridgeway=, W., The Early Age of Greece,
Cambridge, 1901, 2 vols.; What People produced Objects called Mycenean
(in Journal of Hellenic Studies), London, 1886.--=Ritter=, Karl, Die
Erdkunde im Verhältniss zur Natur und zur Geschichte des Menschen,
Berlin, 1817-1818, 2 vols.--=Roberts=, W. R., The Ancient Bœotians; their
Character, etc., Cambridge, 1895.--=Robinson=, W. S., Short History
of Greece, London, 1895.--=Robion=, F., Les Institutions de la Grèce
antique, Paris, 1882.--=Rodd=, J. R., Customs and Lore of Modern Greece
(see Modern Greece), London, 1892.--=Rollin=, C., Ancient History of the
Greeks and Macedonians, London, 1881; Ancient History of the Egyptians,
Carthaginians, etc., London, 1841.--=Rose=, D., Popular History of
Greece, London, 1888.--=Ruskin=, J., Præterita, London, 1886-1900, 2
vols.; Modern Painters, London, 1843.
* * * * *
=Sardagua=, V., Storia della Grecia Antica, Verona, 1881.--=Sathas=,
C. N., Documents inédits relatifs à l’histoire de la Grèce en Moyen
Age, Paris, 1880.--=Sayce=, A. H. (in his preface to Schliemann’s
Troja, London, 1884); (in J. P. Mahaffy’s A History of Classical Greek
Literature, London, 1883); On the Language of the Homeric Poems,
London, 1881.--=Schäfer=, A., Demosthenes und seine Zeit, Leipsic,
1885-1886; Abriss der Quellenkunde der griech. und röm. Gesch., Leipsic,
1889.--=Schliemann=, H., Troja, London, 1884; Ilios, Leipsic, 1881;
Mycenæ, London, 1878; Tiryns: The Prehistoric Palace of the Kings of
Tiryns, London, 1886.
_Heinrich Schliemann_ was born at Neu-Buckow,
Mecklenburg-Schwerin, January 6, 1822; died at Naples, December
27, 1890. He was in many ways a most extraordinary man. He was
largely denied the advantages of an early liberal education, as
it became necessary for him to earn his way in the world while
yet a boy, but he made amends for this by putting into practice a
most amazing system of self-education, through which he had been
able to acquire an entire mastery of a list of languages only
limited by his own desires. French, Italian, Spanish, English,
Russian,--he learned one after another in periods of only a
few months for each; but not till relatively late in life, at
thirty-five namely, did he take up the study of Greek. The reason
for this delay, as he himself explained it, was that his interest
in Grecian history had always been so intense that he dared
not take up the study of the language lest it should prove a
distraction detrimental to his business. But now he had followed
out that business so persistently that he had become a wealthy
man and could afford to do as he wished. He acquired Greek as
quickly and as completely as he had acquired other languages,
beginning with the modern Greek and passing back in inverse
chronological order to the various classical authors. He learned
not merely to read the language, but to write it with facility
and speak it fluently, so that he could express himself in either
modern or ancient Greek almost as readily as in his native tongue.
This accomplished, he had prepared the way for an attempt which,
as he believed in later years, had been an ambition with him
all his life,--the search, namely, for the site of Ancient
Troy. Having amassed a fortune, the income from which was more
than sufficient for all his needs, he retired from active
participation in business and devoted the remainder of his life
to a self-imposed task. How well he succeeded, all the world
knows. In opposition to the opinions of many scholars he picked
on the hill of Hissarlik as the site of ancient Ilium, and his
excavations there soon demonstrated that at least it had been the
site, not of one alone, but of at least seven different cities
in antiquity--one being built above the ruins of another at
long intervals of time. One of these cities, the sixth from the
top,--or, to put it otherwise, the most ancient but one,--was, he
became firmly convinced, Ilium itself.
The story of his achievements has already been told. But it
is necessary here to point the warning that Dr. Schliemann’s
excavations--wonderful as are their results--do not, perhaps,
when critically viewed, demonstrate quite so much as might
at first sight appear. There is, indeed, a high degree of
probability that the city which he excavated was really the one
intended in the Homeric descriptions, but it must be clear, to
anyone who scrutinises the matter somewhat closely, that this
fact goes but a little way towards substantiating the Homeric
narrative as a whole. The city of Ilium may have existed without
giving rise to any such series of events as that narrated in the
_Iliad_. Dr. Schliemann himself was led to realise this fact, and
to modify somewhat, in later years, the exact tenor of some of
his more enthusiastic earlier views, yet the fact remains that
the excavations at Hissarlik must be reckoned with by whoever in
future discusses the status of the Homeric story.
If they did not prove as much as some could wish, they at least
were enormously suggestive. Had they done nothing else, they at
least furnished a mass of authentic documents bearing upon the
life of the prehistoric period of Grecian antiquity. Even more
important in this regard were the excavations of Dr. Schliemann
subsequently made at the sites of the old Greek cities of Mycenæ
and Tiryns. Ilium was not located on Grecian soil, and its
relation with Grecian history was only conjectural, but these
other cities were in Greece itself, and inspection of their ruins
has brought within the historic period some centuries of Grecian
life that hitherto were utterly obscure, or only known through
incidental references of the Homeric poems.
=Schlosser=, F. C., Weltgeschichte, Frankfort, 1844.
_Friedlich Christoph Schlosser_, born at Jever, Germany, November
17, 1776; died at Heidelberg, September 23, 1861, the Nestor
of German historians has been spoken of--not unjustly--as the
German Tacitus. More than almost any other man, perhaps, at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, he was influential
in establishing the school of what may be called scientific
history, not merely through his Writings but through his personal
influence on a coterie of pupils who included many of the
distinguished historians of the middle of the nineteenth century.
Professor Schlosser was a beautiful character as well as a
scholarly mind. The historical sweep of his mind was of the
widest, as evidenced in the subjects which he selected, while the
force of his personality is equally demonstrated by the results
that he achieved. His _Universal History_ and his _History of
the Eighteenth Century_ immediately took place as the greatest
authorities in the field at the time of their publication, and
the latter work was early translated into English.
The work on _Universal History_ was the first attempt of its
kind, of anything like a corresponding comprehensiveness, in
modern times. As originally written by Schlosser himself it had
a largely technical character, yet it so clearly contained the
elements of a great popular work that it was soon elaborated
under Schlosser’s own direction by his pupil, Dr. G. L. Kriegk,
and in this popularised form, though a bulky work of nineteen
volumes, it soon achieved a wide circulation throughout Germany.
This was about the middle of the century. Since then there have
been numerous new editions of Schlosser’s popular history, and,
even to-day, its sale probably exceeds in Germany that of any
other similar work. It occupies, indeed, a place of its own
which no other universal history exactly rivals. It has fullest
authority, yet it is essentially popular in character. It is
the narrative of the sweep of world-historic events. Its style,
though less eloquent than that of Weber, is reasonably lucid, and
the sentiments which actuate it throughout are those of which
every reader in the main approves. We shall have occasion to
recur again and again to its pages, and each such recurrence will
tend to increase one’s surprise that a work of such comprehensive
merit should never, hitherto, have been made accessible to the
reader of English.
=Schneider=, E., Les Pélasges et leurs descendants, Paris,
1884.--=Schorn=, W., Geschichte Griechenlands von der Entstehung
des ätol. und achäischen Bundes bis auf die Zerstörung von
Korinth.--=Schrader=, O., Die älteste Zeitteilung des indogerman. Volks,
Berlin, 1878.--=Schrammen=, T., Tales of the Gods of Ancient Greece,
London, 1894.--=Schuchardt=, C., Schliemann’s Excavations (trans.
by E. Sellers), London, 1891 (an admirable summary of archæological
results).--=Seignobos=, C., Hist. narrative et descriptive de la Grèce
ancienne, Paris, 1891.--=Sergeant=, L., Greece, London, 1880.--=Serre=,
P., Études sur l’histoire militaire et maritime des Grecs, Paris,
1885.--=Simpson=, W., Mycenæ, Troy and Ephesus, London, 1878.--=Sittl=,
C., Gesch. der griechischen Litteratur, Munich, 1884.--=Smith=, A.,
The Wealth of Nations, London, 1891.--=Smith=, George, The Gentile
Nations.--=Smith=, J., Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul, London,
1848.--=Smyth=, W., History of Greece, London, 1854.--=Stengel=, P. (in
Müller’s Handbuch der Classischen Alterthumswissenschaft, Nördlingen,
1876-1888).--=Strabo=, Γεωγραφικά, Venice, 1516, The Geography of Strabo
(trans. from the Greek by H. C. Hamilton and W. Falconer), London,
1854, 3 vols.--=Stern=, E. von, Gesch. d. Spart. Hegemonie, Dorpat,
1884.--=Symonds=, J. A., The Greek Poets, London, 1893.
* * * * *
=Taine=, H., The Philosophy of Art in Greece, New York, 1889; Lectures
on Art, New York, 1889.--=Tarbell=, F. B., A History of Greek Art,
London, 1896.--=Taylor=, T., The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, New
York, 1891.--=Terxetti=, A., La Grèce ancienne et moderne considerée
sous l’aspect religieux, Paris, 1884.--=Theognis=, Ἐλέγεια (Poems),
Venice, 1495; edited by Bekker, Leipsic, 1815.--=Theopompus=, Φιλιππικά
(Philippica), Theopompi Chii fragmenta, collegit, disposicit et
explicavit, R. H. E. Wichers, Leyden, 1829.--=Thiers=, L. A., Histoire du
Consulat et de l’Empire, Paris, 1845-1862, 20 vols.--=Thirlwall=, C., A
History of Greece, London, 1845.
_Connop Thirlwall_ was born at Stepney, London, January 11, 1797;
died at Bath, July 27, 1875. Bishop Thirlwall was one of those
extraordinary men who are, perhaps, much more numerous than the
world generally imagines, of whom it may be justly said that he
never accomplished half that he might have done had he focalised
his energies, and more persistently applied his capabilities. He
was almost a prodigy of learning as a child, and in adult life he
showed how the capacity to acquire knowledge was still retained
by making himself master of the Welsh tongue, and preaching in
that language when called to a Welsh pulpit. But his efforts were
never focalised for a long period on any particular field, and it
was almost by accident, and certainly by outside influence, that
he was led to produce the one work which will transmit his name
to posterity. This work of course is his history of Greece.
Such criticism as this is not intended in any sense to be
a disparagement of that history, nor indeed of Thirlwall’s
accomplishments as a whole. Applied in that sense criticism would
be absurd, for it may be doubted, even to this day, whether
Thirlwall’s is not the best general history of Greece that
has ever been written. Certainly, for the general reader, it
combines in a larger measure authority with a popular interest
of presentation than any other in the English language. But the
work was written to meet a popular demand, and while it was in no
sense a hurried or careless production, the friends of Thirlwall
always thought that it might have been given a somewhat more
authoritative cast, had it been undertaken through different
motives.
After all, however, perhaps the world is better for the work as
it stands. Ponderous histories of Greece are no novelty, whereas
readable histories of any country are never a drug on the market.
The frequency with which we have had occasion to recur to the
pages of Thirlwall in treating the history of Greece has been an
earnest of our estimate of the position which his history holds
after two or three generations of workers have searched for fresh
material in the same field.
=Thouvenal=, E. A., La Grèce du Roi Othou, Paris, 1890.--=Thucydides=,
Συγγραφή, Venice, 1502; The History of the Grecian War (trans. by
Henry Dale), London, 1852; Of the Peloponnesian Wars, London, 1856,
2 vols.--=Timayenis=, T. T., Greece in the Times of Homer, New York,
1885; A History of Greece from Earliest Times to Present, New York,
1881.--=Tozer=, H. F., The Islands of the Ægean, Oxford, 1890; Researches
in the Highlands of Turkey, 1869.--=Tsountas=, C., and J. I. =Manatt=,
The Mycenæan Age, Boston and New York, 1897.--=Tyrtaeus=, Εὐνομία, edited
by Klotz. Bremæ, 1764, Fragments 5, 6.
* * * * *
=Virchow=, R. (in Schliemann’s Ilios, Leipsic, 1881).
* * * * *
=Wachsmuth=, C., Die Stadt Athen im Alterthum, Leipsic,
1874.--=Waddington=, W. H. (in collab. with Le Bas), Voyage Archéologique
en Grèce et en Asie Mineure, Paris, 1847-1877, 6 vols.--=Walton=, A.,
The Cult of Asklepios, Ithaca, N.Y., 1894.--=Watkins=, L., The Age of
Pericles.--=Weber=, G., Weltgeschichte, Leipsic, 1857-1880; A History of
Philosophy, London, 1896.--=Wheeler=, Benjamin Ide, Alexander the Great:
The Merging of East and West in Universal History, New York and London,
1902.
_Benjamin Ide Wheeler_ was born at Randolph, Mass., July 15,
1854. President of the University of California since 1899.
President Wheeler’s earlier publications were chiefly concerned
with Greek philology, but his interest in other phases of Greek
life is evidenced by the work above cited. As a matter of course
this work is scholarly; but it is also popular in the best sense
of the word: indeed, no more readable and satisfactory account of
the life of Alexander exists in any language.
=Wilamowitz-Möllendorff=, W., von, Homerische Untersuchungen, Berlin,
1884.--=Winterton=, R., Poetæ Minores Græci, Cambridge, 1684.--=Witt=,
C., The Retreat of the Ten Thousand, London, 1891; The Trojan
War, London, 1884.--=Wolf=, F. A., Prolegomena ad Homerum, Halle,
1795.--=Wordsworth=, C., Athens and Attica, London, 1836.--=Wyse=, T.,
Impressions of Greece, London, 1871.
* * * * *
=Xanthus=, Λυδιακὰ Βιβλία δ’, Lydiaca (in C. Müller’s Fragmenta
Historicorum Græcorum, pp. xx-xxiii, 36-44).--=Xenophon=, Κύρου Ἀναβάσις,
ed. by Krüger, Leipsic, 1888, 7th ed.; Anabasis of Cyrus, London, 1881;
Ἀπομνημονεύματα Σωκράτους, ed. by Kühner, Leipsic, 1882, 4th ed.;
Memorabilia, edited by J. R. King, Oxford, 1874; Ἑλληνικά, The Hellenics,
London, 1855.
* * * * *
=Zeller=, E., History of Greek Philosophy, London, 1881.
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