Marathon, but admitting many digressions. There were
still more philosophical poems. Aratus of Soli wrote
on Phcenomena or 'Things Seen in the Sky,' with an
appendix on the signs of the weather ; Nicander, on
natural history, and on poisons and antidotes, as well
as on the origins and legends of various cities. Neither
of these two poets appeals much to our own age, which
prefers its science neat, untempered with make-believe.
The extraordinary influence and reputation enjoyed by
Aratus in antiquity appear to be due to the fact that he
succeeded in annexing, so to speak, as his private pro-
perty, one of the great emotions of mankind. In the
centuries following him it almost seems as if no cultured
man was capable of looking long at the stars without



LEARNING AND RESEARCH 387

murmuring a line from the Phcenomena. The greatest
man of learning of the whole Ptolemaic age, Eratos-
thenes, kept his geography and chronology, and his
works on the Old Comedy, to a prose form. His
little epos about the death and avenging of Hesiod, and
his elegy Erigone, are on legendary and what we should
call ' poetical 'subjects.

In Prose, learning and research set the prevailing tone.
The marches of Alexander had thrown open an immense
stretch of the world to Greek science, and the voyages
of his admiral Nearchus, and of men like Polemon and
Pytheas, completely altered ancient geography. Our
chief handbooks are a Tour of the World and a PeriphU
or 'Voyage-round' various coasts, current under the
names of Skymnus and Skylax respectively. The scien-
tific organisation of geography was carried out by men
like Eratosthenes and Hipparchus, involving the inven-
tion of systems for calculating latitude and longitude, and
the use of trigonometry. Mathematics, pure and applied,
were developed by a great number of distinguished men,
including Euclid, in the time of Ptolemy I., and Archi-
medes, who died in 212. Mechanics — the machines
being largely of wood, and the motive power generally
water or mere gravitation, though in some cases steam —
flourished both for military purposes and for ordinary
uses of life. There is a curious passage in the extant
works of HfiRO, describing a marionette-machine, which
only required setting at the beginning to perform un-
aided a four-act tragedy, including a shipwreck and a
conflagration.

Learning was very especially applied to literature.
There were two great libraries in Alexandria — the first
by the museum and the palace ; the second, both in age



388 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

and importance, near the temple of Serapis. They were
projected by the first Ptolemy with the help of Deme-
trius of Phalerum, actually organised by the second
(Philadelphus) ; and they formed the centre of culture
for the next centuries. Zenodotus, Callimachus, Eratos-
thenes, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus were
the first five librarians ; what institution has ever had such
a row of giants at its head ? The most immediate work
of these libraries was to collect and preserve books ;
every ship visiting Alexandria was searched for them,
and neither money nor intrigue was sp2ired in acquiring
them. The next task was to form a catalogue raisonne —
the work mainly of Callimachus, in 120 volumes;^ the
next, to separate the genuine works from the spurious,
and to explain the difficult and obsolete writers. The
other kings of the time formed libraries too, that of the
Attalids at Pergamus being the most famous. Pergamus
was a greater centre of art than even Alexandria, but
in literature proper it was at a disadvantage. It had
started too late, when Alexandria had snapped up most
of the unique books. It had no papyrus. The plant
only grew in Egypt, and the Ptolemies forbade the
export of it ; so that Pergamus was reduced to using
the costly material which bears its name, 'parch-
ment.' In criticism generally Pergamus was allied
with the Stoic schools ; and devoted itself to inter-
preting, often fancifully enough, the spirit rather than
the letter of its ancient writers, and protesting against
the dictatorship of Aristarchus and the worship of exact
knowledge.

One of the first fields for the spirit of research and

* n/j'aKes rCiv iv irda-rj Traidela dLaXaiMxf/dvTuv Kal Sjv avv^ypatpav.



FOURTH-CENTURY HISTORIANS 389

learning was naturally the record of the past. Soon
after the death of Thucydides, and before that of
Xenophon, the Greek physician Ktesias, who was
attached to Artaxerxes, wrote Persian and Indian his-
tory and a ' Periplus,' with a view, partly of correcting
the errors of Herodotus, partly, it is to be feared, of
improving upon his stories. He was more important
as a source of romance than as a historian. The
Sicilian general Philistus wrote in banishment a
history of his own times ; he made Thucydides his
model, but is said to have flattered Dionysius II. in
the hope of being restored. He was killed in Dion's
rising in 357.

The characteristic of the historians of the later
fourth century is that they are not practical statesmen
and soldiers, but professional students. Two disciples
of Isocrates stand at the head of the list. Ephorus
of Kyme wrote a universal history reaching from
the Dorian Migration to the year 340. He was a
collector and a critic, not a researcher ; he used
previous writers freely and sometimes verbally ; but
he rejected the earliest periods as mythical, and
corrected his sources by comparing them. Being an
Isocratean, he laid great stress both on style and on
edification. Polybius says his descriptions of battles
are ' simply ridiculous ' ; but Polybius says much the
same of all civilians. A large part of Ephorus has
been more or less transcribed in the extant history of
Diodorus Siculus.

The other Isocratean who wrote history was a more
interesting man, Theopompus (born 380). He was a
Chian, and had the islander's prejudice against the
Athenian Empire, while other circumstances prejudiced



390 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

him still more against the military despots. His two
great works were Hellenica, in twelve, and Philippica, in
fifty-eight books. Like other verbose men, he liked to
preach silence and simplicity. He was possibly a pro-
fessed member of the Cynic sect ; at any rate, he was
a hater of the world, and a despiser of the great. He
believed that all the evils of Greece were due to her
' three heads,' Athens, Sparta, and Thebes, and that kings
and statesmen and ' leaders of the people ' were gener-
ally the scum of society. He is praised for his skill
in seeing secret causes and motives — chiefly bad ones
— behind the veils of diplomacy, and his style is almost
universally admired. The so-called Longinus, On the
Sublime, quotes his description of the entry of the Great
King into Egypt, beginning with magnificent tents and
chariots, ending with bundles of shoe-leather and pickled
meats. The critic complains of bathos ; but the passage
reads like the intentional bathos of satire. His military
descriptions fail to please Polybius, and it is hard to
excuse the long speeches he puts into the mouth of
generals in action.

The Sicilian TiM^US was a historian of the same
tendency, a pure student, ignorant of real warfare, who
wrote the history of his own island in thirty-eight books.
He, too, took a severe view, not only of kings and
diplomats, but also of other historians ; ^ but he pos-
sessed the peculiar merit of having thoroughly mastered
his sources, including inscriptions and monuments, and
even Carthaginian and Phoenician archives. Polybius
also praises the accuracy of his chronology.

Turning aside from special histories like the Atthis
of Philochorus and the Samian Chronicle of Duris, we

' Hence his nickname 'E7ri7-tV"'«)s, Diod. Sic. 5. i, and Ath. 272.



HISTORY. POLYBIUS 391

find the old rationalism of Herodorus revived in a
quasi-historical shape by Euhemerus and his follower
PAL.EPHATUS. They reduced myth and religion to
common-sense by the principle that the so-called gods
were all mortal men who had been worshipped after death
by the superstition or gratitude of their fellow-creatures.
Euhemerus had the great triumph of finding in Crete
what he believed to be a tomb with the inscription, Zav
Kpovov {' Zeus, son of Cronos'). And we find an inter-
esting product of the international spirit of the time —
the spirit which was to produce the Septuagint and the
works of Philo — in the histories of Berosus, priest of
Bel in Babylon, and Manetho, priest of Serapis in
Alexandria.

But the greatest of the later Greek historians is,
without question, Polybius of Megalopolis (about 205-
123 B.C.). His father, Lycortas, was general of the
Achaeans, and the first forty years of the historian's life
were spent in military and diplomatic work for the
league, especially in its resistance to Rome, In 166 he
was sent to Rome as a hostage, and for sixteen years he
was kept there, becoming a close friend of the Scipios.
He followed the younger Africanus on most of his
expeditions, and saw the fall of Numantia and of
Carthage. In his last years he was the principal
mediator between Rome and Greece, possessing the
confidence of both sides, and combining in a singular
degree the patriotism of the old Achaean cavalryman
with a disinterested and thorough - going admiration
for Rome. His history started from 264 B.C., where
Timaeus ended, and led up to his own days in the
first two books ; then it expanded into a universal
history, giving the rise of Rome, step by step, down



392 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

to the destruction of Carthage and the final loss of
Greek independence. As a philosophic historian, a
student of causes and principles, of natural and geo-
graphical conditions, of customs and prices, above all
of political constitutions, he is not equalled even by
Thucydides. He combines the care and broadness of
view of a philosophic modern writer with the practical
experience of an ancient historian. Only the first five
books of his history are extant in a complete form ; the
next thirteen, in extracts. As for the style of Polybius,
Dionysius classes him among the writers "whom no
human being can expect to finish." That is natural
in the professional Atticist, who could not forgive
Polybius for writing the current common Greek of
his time. But it is odd that modern scholars, especi-
ally if they have read the Atticist historians and Poly-
bius close together, should echo the rhetor's protest
against the strong living speech of the man of affairs.
Polybius does not leave the same impression of per-
sonal genius as Thucydides ; but he is always interest-
ing, accurate, deep- thinking, and clear-sighted. He
has one or two prejudices, no doubt — against Cleo-
menes for instance, and against the ^tolians. But
how he sees into the minds and feels the aims of
almost all the great men he mentions ! His Aratus
and his Scipio are among the most living characters
of history ; and his Hannibal is not Livy's theatrical
villain, but a Semite of genius, seen straight and
humanly. Polybius was prosaic in temperament ; he
was harsh in criticising other historians. But, apart from
his mere scientific achievement, he has that combina-
tion of moral and intellectual nobleness which enables
a consistent patriot to do justice to his country's



THE AUGUSTAN AGE 393

enemies, a beaten soldier to think more of the truth
than of his own hindered glory. How different from
the splendid but jaundiced genius of Tacitus, or the
mere belles lettres of the Isocratean Livy !



II

The Roman and Byzantine Periods

The establishment of the Roman Empire shifted the
intellectual centre of gravity, and threw upon Greek lite-
rature a certain definite and somewhat narrowing task.
Greece became essentially the paid teacher of the Roman
world. In the East, indeed, the great Hellenistic civili-
sation founded by Alexander remained to some extent
self-sufficing and independent of Rome ; and in the East,
Greek literature retained much creative power and original
impulse. But our remains of the first two centuries A.D.
consist chiefly of the books that were read in Rome; and
for the most part the Western world was calling so loud
for the Greeks to come and educate her that they forgot
everything else in this mission. The original poets al-
most cease. Babrius, the fabulist, is no poet ; Oppian's
poem on fish. is seldom very interesting. Only the senti-
mental elegy, now contracted into epigrams about eight
lines long, really flourishes. MeleAger of Gadara wrote
spontaneously ; he was scholar and educator enough to
form the collection from which our Palatine Anthology
has been gradually built up ; but he was also a real
and exquisite poet in a somewhat limited domain. His
numerous little love-poems are full of sweetness, and
there is great tenderness in his elegies on death. Yet
even in Meleager signs of the age are not wanting.



394 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

There is something faint in his emotion, something con-
tracted and over-refined in his range of interests. And
a certain lack of spring and nimbleness amid all his
grace of diction and versification seems sometimes to
betray the foreigner. One suspects that, at home in
Gadara, Greek was only his second language, and that
he had talked Aramaic out of school. Perhaps his most
ingenious work is the Proem to the Anthology, describing
that metaphorical Garland :

'â– 'â– Whereunto many blooms brought Anyt^,
Wild flags ; and Mosro many, — lilies white;
And Sappho few, but roses."

Antipater of Sidon was nearly equal to him ; Crina-
GORAS is always good to read. And, as a matter of
fact, there was work of this kind produced, much of it
beautiful, much of it offensively corrupt, right on to the
days of Palladas in the fifth century, of Agathias and
Paul the Silentiary in the sixth.

One cardinal obstacle to poetry in imperial times was
the non-correspondence between metrical rules and real
pronunciation, ^schylus and Sophocles had based their
poetry on metre, on long and short syllables, because that
was what they heard in the words they spoke. Aristo-
phanes of Byzantium (257-180 B.C.) noticed, besides the
divisions of long and short, a certain musical pitch in the
words of an Attic sentence, and invented the system of
accents for the instruction of foreigners in pronunciation.
It is hard to realise the exact phonetic value of this * pitch-
accent ' ; but it is certain that it did not affect poetry
or even attract the notice of the ear in classical times,
and that as late as the second century B.C. it was some-
thing quite different from what we call accent, to wit,



POETRY UNDER ROMAN EMPIRE 395

stress-accent. But in the fourth century after Christ
the poet NONNUS, an Egyptian Greek from PanopoHs,
in his Dionysiaca, begins suddenly to reckon with accent.
Dividing his hexameters into halves at the caesura, he
insists that in the second half the accent shall not fall on
the ante-penultimate syllable ; while in the first half
before the caesura he mostly insists that it shall fall
on the ante-penultimate. The accent must by his time
have become a stress-accent, and the ingenious man is
attempting to serve two masters, A verse like

ovpavov vylrtfieSovToi;
dtcTTCocrat Ai6<; eSprjV

is in metre a good hexameter ; by accent it is next

door to

" A captain bold of Halifax,
Who lived in country quarters " —

that is to say, to the so-called ' politic ' verses scanned by
accent, which were normal in Byzantine times, and were
used by the vulgar even in the fourth century. Quintus
of Smyrna, an epic poet preceding Nonnus, does not
observe these rules about accent ; but Coluthus, Try-
phiodorus, and Musaeus do. The Dionysiaca made an
epoch.

In prose there is much history and geography and
sophistic literature from the age of Augustus on. Dio-
dorus Siculus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Josephus the
Jew are followed by the Xenophon of the decadence,
Arrian ; by Appian, Dion Cassius, and Herodian. Arrian
wrote an Anabasis of Alexander, like Xenophon's Anabasis
of Cyrus, and devoted himself to expounding Epictetus
a great deal better than Xenophon expounded Socrates ;
this besides tactics and geography. Above all, Plutarch



396 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

(46-120 A.D.) wrote his immortal Lives, perhaps the most
widely and permanently attractive work by one author
known to the world, and the scarcely less interesting
mass of treatises which are quoted under the general
name of Moralia. . He was no scientific historian, and
the value of his statements depends entirely on the
authorities he chances to follow ; but he had a gift of
sympathy, and a power of seeing what was interesting.
As a thinker he is fundamentally a bon bourgeois, and
has his obvious limitations ; but he is one of the most
tactful and charming writers, and one of the most lovable
characters, in antiquity.

In pure literature or 'sophistic' we have many names.
Dion Chrysostomus, Herodes Atticus, and Aristides are
mere stylists, and that only in the sense that they can
write very fair stuff in a language remarkably resembling
that of Demosthenes or Plato. The Philostrati are more
interesting, both as a peculiarly gifted family, and for
the subjects of their work. There were four of them.
Of the first we have only a dialogue about Nero and the
Corinthian Canal. Of the second we have the admirable
Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the Neo-Pythagorean saint
and philosopher who maintained a short-lived concur-
rence with the founder of Christianity; also a treatise
on Gymnastic, and some love-letters. Of the third and
fourth we have a peculiar series of * Eikones' (Pictures),
descriptions of works of art in elaborate poetical prose.
They are curious and very skilful as literature, and are
valued by archaeologists as giving evidence about real
paintings. The description of pictures was a recognised
form of sophistic, which flourished especially at the
revival of art under the Antonines, and lasted on to the
days of Longus and Achilles Tatius.



PLUTARCH AND LUCIAN 397

Among the Sophists we must class the oft- quoted
Athen^us, a native of Naucratis, in Egypt, who wrote
his Banquet-Philosophers, in fifteen books, about the end of
the second century. The guests are all learned men of
the time of Marcus Aurelius, and the book gives their
conversation. An extraordinary conversation it is. They
discuss every dish and every accessory of banqueting in a
spirit compounded of ' Notes and Queries ' and an anti-
quarian encyclopaedia. All that there is to know about
wine vessels, dances, cooking utensils, eels, the weak-
nesses of philosophers, and the witticisms of notorious
' hetairai,' is collected and tabulated with due care. What-
ever sources Athenaeus used, he must have been a man
of enormous reading and a certain sense of humour ; and
the book, misleading as its devotion to convivial subjects
makes it, forms a valuable instrument for the study of
antiquities.

The greatest of the second -century Sophists was

LuciAN. He and Plutarch are the only writers of the

period who possess a real importance to the world, who

talk as no one else can talk, and who continue to attract

readers on their own merits. Lucian has been compared

to Erasmus in general cast of mind. He is learned,

keen-eyed, before all things humorous ; too anxious for

honesty, too critical, and too little inspired, to be carried

into the main currents of his time. He lived through

the great reformation and literary revival of Marcus, but

he seems not to have shared in it. He read philosophy

deeply and widely, but always as an outsider and with

an amused interest in its eccentricities. To judge from

the amount of personal apologia in his writings, he seems

to have suffered much from personal attacks, especially

on the part of the Cynics, whose combination of dirt,
27



398 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

ignorance, and saintliness especially offended him. He
was intended by his father for a sculptor, but broke away
into literature. He began as a rhetorical sophist of the
ordinary sort, then found his real vocation in satirical
dialogues, modelled on Plato in point of style, but with
the comic element outweighing the philosophical. In
the last years of his life he accepted a government office
in Egypt, and resumed his rhetorical efforts. He is an
important figure, both as representing a view of life which
has a certain permanent value for all ages, and also as
a sign of the independent vigour of Eastern Hellenism
when it escaped from its stat« patronage or rebelled against
its educational duties.

In philosophy, which is apt to be allied with educa-
tion, and which consequently flourished under the early
Empire, there is a large and valuable literature extant.
There are two great philosophic doctors. Galen was
a learned and bright, though painfully voluminous,
writer, as well as a physician, in the time of Augustus.
Sextus Empiricus, a contemporary of Caligula, was a
member of the Sceptic school ; his two sets of books
Against the Mathentatici, or professors of general learn-
ing, and Against the Dogmatici, or sectarian philo-
sophers, are full of strong thought and interesting
material. There are two philosophical geographers —
Strabo in the Augustan age, Ptolemy in the time of
Marcus. The former was strongest on the practical and
historical side, while Ptolemy's works on geography
and on astronomy are the most capable and scientific
that have come down to us from ancient times. An-
other ' geographus,' Pausanias, who wrote his Tour
of Greece {nepirj'yr]ai<i E\Xd8o<i), in ten 'books, under the



ROMAN PHILOSOPHY 399

Antonines, seems to have travelled for pleasure, and
then, after he had come home, compiled an account
of what he had seen, or ought to have seen, out of some
book or books at least three hundred years old ! That
is the only way to explain his odd habit of not mention-
ing even the most conspicuous monuments erected after
150 B.C. Nay, his modern critics assure us that some-
times when he says '/ was told' or '/ myself saw,' he
is only quoting his old traveller without changing the
person of the verb. This is damaging to Pausanias per-
sonally, but it increases the value of his guide-book ;
which, if often inaccurate and unsystematic, is a most
rich and ancient source of information, quite unique in
value both to archaeologists and to students of custom
and religion. It was Pausanias, for instance, who
directed Schliemann to Mycenae.

In philosophy proper, the professional Stoic is best
represented to us in the Lectures and the Handbook of
Epict£ti:s, a Phrygian slave by origin, and a cripple,
who obtained his freedom and became a lecturer at
Rome. Expelled thence, in 94 A.D., by Domitian's
notorious edict against the philosophers, he settled at
Nicopolis, in Epirus, where he lived to enjoy the
friendship of Trajan, and, it is said, also of Hadrian
(117-138 A.D.). Epictetus illustrates the difference of
this age from that of Plato or also of Chrysippus,
in that he practically abandons all speculation, and
confines himself to , dogmatic practical ethics. He
accepts, indeed, and hands on the speculative basis
of morality as laid down by the earlier Stoics, but his
real strength is in preaching and edification. He
called his school a ^^ healing- place for diseased souls!'
Such a profession is slightly repellent ; but the breadth



400 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

and concreteness of the teacher's conceptions, his sub-
limity of thought, and his humour, win the affection of
most readers. Yet picturesque as the external circum-
stances of Epictetus are, they are dimmed by comparison
with those which make the figure of Marcus Aurelius
so uniquely fascinating. And the clear, strong style of
the professional lecturer does not attain that extraordi-
nary power of appeal which underlies the emperor's
awkward Cojiii/mnings with Hiinsclf. With Marcus,
as with so many great souls, everything depends on
whether you love him or not. If the first three chapters
win you, every word he writes seems precious ; but
many people, not necessarily narrow-minded or vicious
in taste, will find the whole book dreary and un-
meaning. It would be hard to deny, however, that
the ethical teaching of the old Stoa, as expounded by
these two men, is one of the very highest, the most
spiritual, and the most rational ever reached by the
human intellect. Marcus died in i8o; the great philo-
sopher of the next century was born in 204, Plotinus,
the chief of the Neo-Platonists. Though he professes