The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Introduction
• Textual Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Essays On Philosophy and the Classics
• Whately’s Elements of Logic 1828
• Notes On Some of the More Popular Dialogues of Plato 1834–35
• Editor’s Note
• The Protagoras
• The Phædrus
• The Gorgias
• The Apology of Socrates
• The Charmides
• The Euthyphron
• The Laches
• The Lysis
• The Parmenides
• Two Publications On Plato 1840
• Bailey On Berkeley’s Theory of Vision 1842, 1843
• Grote’s History of Greece [i] 1846
• Grote’s History of Greece [ii] 1853
• Bain’s Psychology 1859
• Grote’s Plato 1866
• Taine’s De L’intelligence 1870
• Berkeley’s Life and Writings 1871
• Grote’s Aristotle 1873
• Appendix: Bibliographic Index of Persons and Works Cited In the Essays, With Variants and Notes

GROTE’S HISTORY OF GREECE [I]

1846

EDITOR’S NOTE

Dissertations and Discussions, II (1867), 283-334, where under the title, “Early Grecian History and Legend,” appears “(A Review of the first Two Volumes of ‘Grote’s History of Greece.’*)” with the footnote reading “Edinburgh Review, October 1846.” Reprinted from ER, LXXXIV (Oct., 1846), 343-77, unsigned, where it is headed “Art. III.—A History of Greece.—I. Legendary Greece.—II. Grecian History to the Reign of Peisistratus of Athens. By George Grote, Esq. Two vols. 8vo. London: [Murray,] 1846”; running heads “Grote’s History of Greece.” Identified in JSM’s bibliography as “A review of the first two volumes of Grote’s History of Greece in the Edinburgh Review for October 1846.” (MacMinn, 60.) There are no corrections or alterations in the copy of the Edinburgh article in the Somerville College Library.

In the footnoted variants, “59” indicates D&D, II (1st ed.); “67” indicates D&D, II (2nd ed., the copy-text); “46” indicates Edinburgh Review. For comment on the composition of the essay and related matters, see the Introduction and the Textual Introduction, xxviii-xxxiii and lxxxv-lxxxvi above.

Grote’s History of Greece [I]

the interest of Grecian history is unexhausted and inexhaustible. As a mere story, hardly any other portion of authentic history can compete with it. Its characters, its situations, the very march of its incidents, are epic. It is an heroic poem, of which the personages are peoples. It is also, of all histories of which we know so much, the most abounding in consequences to us who now live. The true ancestors of the European nations (it has been well said) are not those from whose blood they are sprung, but those from whom they derive the richest portion of their inheritance. The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings. If the issue of that day had been different, the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods.

The Greeks are also the most remarkable people who have yet existed. Not, indeed, if by this be meant those who have approached nearest (if such an expression may be used where all are at so immeasurable a distance) to the perfection of social arrangements, or of human character. Their institutions, their way of life, even that which is their greatest distinction, the cast of their sentiments and development of their faculties, were radically inferior to the best (we wish it could be said to the collective) products of modern civilization. It is not the results achieved, but the powers and efforts required to make the achievement, that measure their greatness as a people. They were the beginners of nearly everything, Christianity excepted, of which the modern world makes its boast. If in several things they were but few removes from barbarism, they alone among nations, so far as is known to us, emerged from barbarism by their own efforts, not following in the track of any more advanced people. If with them, as in all antiquity, slavery existed as an institution, they were not the less the originators of political freedom, and the grand exemplars and sources of it to modern Europe. If their discords, jealousies, and wars between city and city, caused the ruin of their national independence, yet the arts of war and government evolved in those intestine contests made them the first who united great empires under civilized rule—the first who broke down those barriers of petty nationality, which had been so fatal to themselves—and by making Greek ideas and language common to large regions of the earth, commenced that general fusion of races and nations, which, followed up by the Romans, prepared the way for the cosmopolitism of modern times.

They were the first people who had an historical literature; as perfect of its kind (though not the highest kind) as their oratory, their poetry, their sculpture, and their architecture. They were the founders of mathematics; of physics; of the inductive study of politics, so early exemplified in Aristotle; of the philosophy of human nature and life. In each they made the indispensable first steps, which are the foundation of all the rest—steps such as could only have been made by minds intrinsically capable of everything which has since been accomplished. With a religious creed eminently unfavourable to speculation, because affording a ready supernatural solution of all natural phenomena, they yet originated freedom of thought. They, the first, questioned nature and the universe by their rational faculties, and brought forth answers not suggested by any established system of priestcraft; and their free and bold spirit of speculation it was, which, surviving in its results, broke the yoke of another enthralling system of popular religion, sixteen hundred years after they had ceased to exist as a people. These things were effected in two centuries of national existence: twenty and upwards have since elapsed, and it is sad to think how little comparatively has been accomplished.

To give a faithful and living portraiture of such a people; to show what they were and did, and as much as possible of the means by which they did it—by what causes so meteor-like a manifestation of human nature was produced or aided, and by what faults or necessities it was arrested; to deduce from the qualities which the Greeks displayed collectively or individually, and from the modes in which those qualities were unconsciously generated or intentionally cultivated, the appropriate lessons for the guidance of our own world—is an enterprise never yet attempted systematically, nor attempted successfully at all. Such is the declared object of the work of which the first two volumes lie before us. “First, to embody in his own mind, and next to lay out before his readers, the general picture of the Grecian world,” is Mr. Grote’s description of his task.

In this undertaking there is work for a succession of thinkers; nor will it be brought to completeness by any one historian or philosopher. But the qualifications of Mr. Grote, and the contents of these two volumes, give assurance that he will be remembered not only as the first who has seriously undertaken the work, but as one who will have made great steps towards accomplishing it. In ascribing to him the first attempt at a philosophical history of Greece, we mean no disparagement to the very valuable labours of his predecessor and friend, Bishop Thirlwall.^[*] That distinguished scholar has done much for the facts of Grecian history. Before him, no one had applied to those facts, considered as a whole, the most ordinary canons of historical credibility. The only modern historian of Greece who attempted or even affected criticism on evidence, Mr. Mitford, made almost no other use of it than to find reasons for rejecting all statements discreditable to any despot or usurper.^[†] Dr. Thirlwall has effectually destroyed Mitford as an historical authority; by substituting (though so unostentatiously as to give no sufficient idea of the service rendered) a candid and impartial narrative, for the most prejudiced misrepresentation by which party passion has been known to pervert the history of a distant time and a foreign people. But Dr. Thirlwall’s, though highly and justly esteemed as a critical, does not attempt to be a philosophical history; nor was such an attempt to be expected from its original purpose. And though, in its progress, it has far outgrown in bulk, and still more in amplitude of scope and permanent value, its primitive design,^a the plan has not been fundamentally altered; and the most important part of Mr. Grote’s undertaking has not been, in any respect, forestalled by it.

The portion which Mr. Grote has completed, and which is now published, appears at some disadvantage, from its not including even the beginning of the part of Grecian history which is of chief interest either to the common or to the philosophical reader. Mr. Grote, in his preface, laments that the religious and poetical attributes of the Greek mind appear thus far in disproportionate relief, as compared with its powers of acting, organizing, judging, and speculating.^b He might have added, that the religion and the poetry are only those of the most primitive period, the time before which nothing is known. A volume and a half are devoted to the legendary age; and the remaining half volume does not carry us much beyond the first dawn of real history.

The Legends of Greece Mr. Grote relates at greater length than has been thought necessary by any of his predecessors. This is incident to the design, which no one before him had seriously entertained, of making the history of Greece a picture of the Greek mind. There is no more important element in the mind of Greece than the legends. They constituted the belief of the Greeks of the historical period, concerning their own past. They formed also the Grecian religion; and the religion of an early people is the groundwork of its primitive system of thought on all subjects. Mr. Grote makes no distinction between the legends of the Gods and those of the Heroes. He relates the one and the other literally, as they were told by the poets, and believed by the general public, down to the time of the Roman empire. He makes no attempt to discriminate historical matter in the stories of heroes, no more than in those of the gods. Not doubting that some of them do contain such matter—that many of the tales of the heroic times are partially grounded on incidents which really happened—he thinks it useless to attempt to conjecture what these were. The siege of Troy is to him no more an historical fact than the births and amours of the gods, as recorded in Hesiod. The only thing which he deems historical in either is, that the Greeks believed them, and the poets sung them. Whether they were believed from the first, as they were afterwards, on the authority of poets, or the poets grounded their narratives on stories already current, we have no means of ascertaining; in some cases the one thing may have happened, in some the other; in Mr. Grote’s view it is immaterial, since neither the poems nor the so-called traditions bear, in his eyes, the smallest character of historical evidence.

This is essentially the doctrine of Niebuhr; and, in the hands of that eminent investigator of antiquity, it has, by English scholars, generally been accepted as subversive of the previously received view of Roman history. But no one, not even the translator of Niebuhr, Dr. Thirlwall,^[*] had applied this doctrine in the same unsparing manner to the Greek legends. Unqualified rejection has been confined to the stories of the gods. Between them and those of the heroes, a Greek would have been unable to see any difference. To his mind, both rested on the same identical testimony; both were alike part of his religious creed; supernatural agency, and supernatural motives and springs of action, are the pervading soul as much of the heroic as of the divine legends; the gods themselves appear in them quite as prominently, and even the heroes are real, though inferior, divinities. By moderns, however, the supernatural machinery (as it is called by critics profoundly ignorant of the spirit of antiquity) has been treated as a sort of scaffolding which could be taken down, instead of the main framework and support of the structure. The history of the Trojan war has been written on the authority of the Iliad, suppressing only the intervention of the gods, and whatever seemed romantic or improbable in the human motives and characters. As much credit is thus accorded to the poet, in all but the minute details of his narrative, as is given to the most veracious witness in a court of justice; since even with him we do no more than believe his statements where they are neither incredible in themselves, nor contradicted by more powerful testimony. With this mode of dealing with legendary narratives, Mr. Grote is altogether at war. His discussion of the credibility of what are called traditions is eminently original, evolving into distinctness principles and canons of evidence and belief, which, by Niebuhr, are rather implicitly assumed than directly stated.

The following passages will give a clear idea of Mr. Grote’s main position:

The two points here insisted upon are, the large space which sheer and absolute fiction still occupies in human beliefs—a place naturally larger as we recede further into a remote and uncritical antiquity; and the tendency of any strong and widely diffused feeling to embody itself in fictitious narratives, which pass from mouth to mouth, and grow into traditions.

These points have been illustrated in a more quotable, because a more condensed form, in a fugitive publication, of which Mr. Grote here acknowledges the authorship.^[*] From this we borrow an illustration, too apt to be dispensed with,—a modern mythe, caught in the act of formation. Among the “numerous fictions” which, in the words of Mr. Moore’s “Life of Byron,” have been “palmed upon the world” as his “romantic tours and wonderful adventures in places he never saw, and with persons that never existed,”^[†] one is thus recounted, in a review of the poem of Manfred, by no less a person than Goethe.

On this Mr. Grote comments as follows:

Suppose that there had never been any authentic biography of Byron, and that his own works and the various testimonies about his personality having all perished, his name were carried down to a remote age exclusively by this writing of Goethe. The case would then be parallel with that of the heroic age of Greece; and the following passage describes what would probably have happened.

The feelings to which the early Grecian legends addressed themselves, and to which they owed not their currency only, but most of them probably their very existence, were sentiments most strong and pervading; the religious feelings of the people, and their ancestorial feelings. The two, indeed, may be reduced to one, for the ancestorial were also in the most literal sense religious feelings. The legendary ancestors of each family, tribe, or race, were the immediate descendants of deities—were immortal beings, with supernatural powers to destroy or save, and worshipped with the rites and honours paid to gods. The difference between them and the gods was chiefly this, that they had once been men, and had performed exploits on earth which were the pride and glory of other men still living, who honoured them as patrons and guardian divinities—a distinction in no way tending to abate the thirst for wonderful tales respecting the heroes.

If a story harmonized with the prevailing sentiment, to doubt its truth would never occur to any one, not even to the inventors themselves; since, in a rude age, the suggestions of vivid imagination and strong feeling are always deemed the promptings of a god. The inspiration of the muse was not then a figure of speech, but the sincere and artless belief of the people; the bard and the prophet were analogous characters; Demodocus, at the court of King Alcinous, could sing the Trojan war by revelation from Apollo or from a Muse;^* and Hesiod, in the Theogony, could declare respecting himself that he knew, by the favour of the Muses, the past, the present, and the future.^[†] Herodotus expressly says that Hesiod and Homer “were the authors of the Greek Theogony, gave titles to the gods, distinguished their attributes and functions, and described their forms;” that until taught by them, the Greeks were ignorant “whence each of the gods sprang, and whether all of them were always existing, and what were their shapes.”^* Plato invariably assumes the same thing. The poems were a kind of sacred books, like the Ramayun and the Mahabharat.

It may perhaps be said, that the eager interest here supposed in the exploits of ancestors, implies the ancestors to be at least real persons, surviving in the memory of those to whom the tales were told; and that therefore most of the heroes of legend must have really existed, however much of the marvellous in their adventures may be due to the imagination of their descendants. This doctrine would not be without plausibility, were it not the known practice of the early Greeks to create not only imaginary adventures of ancestors, but imaginary ancestors. It was the universal theory of Greece that every name, common to an aggregation of persons, indicated a common progenitor. Whether it was the name of a race, as Dorians, Ionians, Achæans; of a people, as Thessalians, Dolopians, Arcadians, Ætolians; of any of the numerous political divisions of a people, or of those other divisions not made by laws, but held together by religious rites and a traditional tie, the γένη or gentes (representing probably the units by the aggregation of which the community had, at some early period, been formed); all these,^das well as many^d names of towns and localities, were believed to be etymologically derived from a primeval founder and patriarch of the whole tribe. Even names of which the origin was obvious, did not escape the application of the theory. The names of the four tribes in the primitive Athenian constitution, Geleontes, Hopletes, Argades, and Aigikoreis, appellations so evidently derived from their occupations, were ascribed, according to custom, to four Eponymi, sons of Ion, the general ancestor of the race, whose names were Geleon, Hoples, Argades, and Aigikores. No one now makes any scruple of rejecting the whole class of Eponymi, or name-heroes, from the catalogue of historical personages. Among the Greeks, however, they were the most precious of any; they were as firmly believed in, and their existence and adventures as justly entitled to the name of tradition, as any Grecian legend whatever.

But grant that the personages of the heroic legends were real, as doubtless some warriors and rulers must have left behind them an enduring memory, to which legends would not fail to attach themselves;—could we distinguish among the names, those which belonged to actual persons, would it follow that the actions ascribed to them bore a resemblance to any real occurrences? We may judge from a parallel instance. In the earlier Middle Ages, the European mind had returned to something like the naïf unsuspecting faith of primitive times. It accordingly gave birth to a profusion of legends: those of saints, in the first place, almost a literature in themselves, of which, though very pertinent to our purpose, we say nothing here. But the same age produced the counterpart of the tales of Hercules and Theseus, of the wanderings of Ulysses and the Argonautic expedition, in the shape of romances of chivalry. Like the Homeric poems, the romances announced themselves as true narratives, and were, down to the fourteenth century, popularly believed as such. The majority relate to personages probably altogether fictitious; Amadis and Lancelot we are nowise called upon to believe in; and of King Arthur, as of King Agamemnon, we have no means of ascertaining if he ever really existed or not. But the uncertainty does not extend to all these romantic heroes. That age, unlike the Homeric, notwithstanding its barbarism, preserved written records; and we know consequently from other evidence than the romances themselves, that some of the names they contain are real. Charlemagne is not only an historical character, but one whose life is tolerably well known to us; and so genuine a hero, both in war and peace—his real actions so surprising and admirable—that fiction itself might have been content with ornamenting his true biography, instead of fitting him with another entirely fabulous. The age, however, required, to satisfy its ideal, a Charlemagne of a different complexion from the real monarch. The chronicle of Archbishop Turpin,^[*] a compilation of poetic legends, supplied this want. Though containing hardly anything historical, except the name of Charlemagne and the fact of an expedition into Spain, it was declared genuine history by Pope Calixtus the Second; was received as such by Vincent de Beauvais, who, for his great erudition, was made preceptor to the sons of the wise King, Saint Louis of France; and from this, not from Eginhard or the monk of St. Gall, the poets who followed drew the materials of their narrative. Even, then, if Priam and Hector were real persons, the siege of Troy by the Greeks may be as fabulous as that of Paris by the Saracens, or Charlemagne’s conquest of Jerusalem. In the poem of Ariosto,^[*] the principal hero and heroine are Ruggiero and Bradamante, the ancestors, real or imaginary, of the Dukes of Ferrara, at whose court he lived and wrote. Does any one, for this reason, believe a syllable of the adventures which he ascribes either to these or to his other characters? Another personage of legend, who is also a personage of history, is Virgil. If the author of the Æneid were only known to us by the traditions of the Middle Ages, in what character would he have been transmitted to us? In that of a mighty enchanter. Such is the worth of what is called tradition, even when the persons are real, and the age not destitute of records. What must it be in times anterior to the use of writing?

It is now almost forgotten, that England, too, had a mythic history, once received as genuine; and neither has this wanted the consecration of the highest poetical genius, in the instances at least of Lear and Cymbeline.

We will add, before taking our leave of this part of the subject, one argument more, which we conceive to be in itself almost decisive. Authentic history, as we ascend the stream of time, grows thinner and scantier, the incidents fewer, and the narratives less circumstantial;—shading off through every degree of twilight into the darkness of night. And such a gradual daybreak we find in Greek history, at and shortly before the first Olympiad ( 776), the point from which the historical Greeks commenced their computation of time. We cannot be far wrong in fixing this as the epoch at which written characters began to be regularly employed by public authority, for the recordation of periodical religious solemnities—always the first events systematically recorded, on account of the fearful religious consequences attaching to any mistake in the proper period^eof^e their celebration.

But if, beyond the darkness which bounds this early morning of history, we come suddenly into the full glare of day—an island of light in the dark ocean of the unrecorded past, peopled with majestic forms, and glittering with splendid scenery—we may be well assured that the vision is as unreal as Plato’s^fAtlantis^f ,^[*] and that the traditions and the poems which vouch for its past existence, are the offspring of fancy, not of memory. True history is not thus interrupted in its course; it does not, like the Arcadian rivers, sink into the ground, and, after a long disappearance, rise again at a remote point. Light first, and darkness afterwards, may be the order of invention, but it is seldom that of remembrance.

The elaborate chapter in which Mr. Grote traces the progress of opinion among instructed Greeks, respecting their own legends, is important, not only in reference to the question of credibility, but as a part of the history of the human mind. Originating in a rude age, by which they were naïvely and literally believed, the legends descended into a period of comparative knowledge and culture. With the tone of that later age, or at least of the instructed portion of it, they were no longer in harmony. Several things conspired to produce this divergence. As communications grew more frequent, and travelled men became acquainted with legends for which they had acquired no early reverence, the mutually contradictory character of the stories themselves tended to undermine their authority. The characters and actions ascribed to the gods and heroes, contained much that was repugnant to the altered moral feelings of a more civilized epoch: already Xenophanes, one of the earliest Grecian philosophical inquirers, composed poems to denounce, in the most vehement terms, the stories related of the gods by Hesiod and Homer, “the universal instructor,” as he terms him.^[*] But, more than all, the commencement of physical science and intelligent observation of nature, introduced a conception of the universe, and a mode of interpreting its phenomena, in continual conflict with the simplicity of ancient faith: accustoming men to refer to physical causes and natural laws, what were conceived by their ancestors as voluntary interventions of supernatural beings, in wrath or favour to mortals.

This altered tone in the more cultivated part of the Grecian mind, did not, however, proceed to actual disbelief in the legendary religion of the people. Mankind do not pass abruptly from one connected system of thought to another: they first exhaust every contrivance for reconciling the two. To break entirely with the religion of their forefathers, would have been a disruption of old feelings, too painful and difficult for the average strength even of superior minds; and could not have been done openly, without incurring a certainty of the fate which, with all the precautions they adopted, overtook Anaxagoras and Socrates. But even of the philosophers, there were at first very few who carried the spirit of freethinking so far. In general, they were unable to emancipate themselves from the old religious traditions, but were just as little capable of believing them literally. “The result was a new impulse, partaking of both the discordant forces—one of those thousand unconscious compromises between the rational convictions of the mature man, and the indelible illusions of early faith, religious as well as patriotic, which human affairs are so often destined to exhibit.”^[*] The legends, in their obvious sense, were no longer credible; but it was necessary to find for them a meaning in which they could be believed. And hence a series of efforts, continued with increasing energy from the first known prose historian, Hecatæus, to the Neoplatonic adversaries of Christianity in the school of Alexandria, to which the nearest parallel is the attempts of Paulus and the German rationalists to explain away the Hebrew Scriptures. Rejected in their obvious interpretation, the narratives were admitted in some other sense, which stripped them of the direct intervention of any deity. They were represented either as ordinary histories, coloured by poetic ornament, or allegories, in which moral instruction, physical knowledge, or esoteric religious doctrines, were designedly wrapt up. The succession of these rationalizing explanations is recounted at length, with great learning and philosophy, by Mr. Grote.

His opinion of the historical system of explanation has been seen in the preceding extracts. Without being more favourable, on the whole, to the allegorical theory, he yet makes a concession to it, with which, if we rightly understand his meaning, we are compelled to disagree. He says, “Though allegorical interpretation occasionally lands us in great absurdities, there are certain cases in which it presents intrinsic evidence of being genuine and correct—i.e. included in the original purport of the story;”^* and he instances the tale of Ate and the Litæ, in the ninth book of the Iliad, which, he says, no one can doubt, carries with it an intentional moral. Now, it seems to us that this remark allows either too much to allegory, or not enough.

Every reader of the Iliad, even in translation, must be familiar with this fine passage; in which Ate^g(by Mr. Grote translated “reckless impulse”)^g[†] is represented as a gigantic figure, who stalks forth furiously, diffusing ruin; and Litæ, or Prayers, daughters of Zeus or Jupiter, as slowly limping after her to heal the wounds she has made. Now, if the poet did not believe the personal existence of Ate and the Litæ;—if he employed what he knew to be a mere figure of speech, as a means of giving greater impressiveness to a general remark respecting the course of human affairs,—the passage is then rightly termed allegorical. But if, as we conceive, such employment of the language of polytheism in a merely figurative sense, neither existed nor could exist until polytheism was virtually defunct; if the use of religious forms as a simple artifice of rhetoric, would have appeared to Homer (supposing the idea to have presented itself at all) an impious profanation; if the poet, in the full simplicity of his religious faith, accepted literally the personality and divinity of Ate and the Litæ, there is then no place for the word “allegory,” in its correct acceptation. That a moral meaning accompanied in his mind the religious doctrine, and even suggested it, we at once admit: but he personified and deified the moral agencies concerned; and the story, as Müller says of the legend of Prometheus and Epimetheus (Forethought and Afterthought), is not an allegory, but a mythe.^[*] Otherwise, we must go much further, and affirm a substratum of allegory in the whole Greek religion; for the majority of its deities, including nearly all the more conspicuous of them, are undoubtedly personifications of either the physical or the moral powers of nature; and, this granted, the attributes ascribed to them would necessarily shadow forth those which observation pointed out in the phenomena over which they were supposed to preside.

The natural history of Polytheism is now well understood. Religion, though ex vi termini preternatural, is yet a theory for the explanation of nature; and generally runs parallel with the progress of human conceptions of that which it is intended to explain; each step made in the study of the phenomena determining a modification in the theory. The savage, drawing his idea of power from his own voluntary impulses, ascribes will and personality to every individual object in which he beholds a power beyond his control; and at once commences propitiating it by prayer and sacrifice. This original Fetishism, towards natural objects which combine great power with a well-marked individuality, was prolonged far into the period of Polytheism proper. The Gaia of Hesiod, mother of all the gods, was not a goddess of the earth, but the earth itself; and her physical are blended with her divine attributes in a singular medley. The sun and moon, not deities residing therein, were the objects of the ancient Grecian worship: their identification with Apollo and Artemis^hbelongs^h to a much later age. The Hindoos worship as a goddess the river Nerbudda—not a deity of the river, but the river itself;^* and, if they ascribe to it sex, and other attributes inconsistent with the physical characteristics of the natural object, it is from inability to conceive the idea of personality, except in conjunction with the ordinary human impulses and attributes. The Homeric Scamander is scarcely other than the animated river itself; and the god Alpheus, who pursues Arethusa through the ocean, is the actual river, flowing through the salt waves without mixing with them, and at length combining its waters in indissoluble union with those of the fountain it loves.

But where natural objects are not thus strikingly individualized—where the mind can at once recognise, in a multitude of things, one and the same power of affecting human interests—its tendency is not to deify the objects, but to place a deity over them, who,ⁱhimselfⁱ invisible, rules from a distance a whole class of phenomena. Bread and wine are great and beneficent powers, but the blindest fetish-worshipper never probably offered prayer or sacrifice to an individual loaf or wine-flask, but to an invisible Bacchus or Ceres, whose body, being unseen, is naturally assimilated to the human, and who is thenceforth handed over to the poets to exalt and dignify. Thus the first and most obvious step in the generalization of nature, by arranging objects in classes, is accompanied by a corresponding generalization of the gods. Fire, being a more mysterious as well as a more terrible agent, has, in some religions, been an object of direct worship; but in Homer we find the transition completely effected from the worship of fire to that of the fire-god,^jHephæstos^j . Thunder, the most awful of all, was universally received as the attribute of the most powerful of deities, the ruler of gods and men. As thought advanced, not only all physical agencies capable of ready generalization, as Night, Morning, Sleep, Death, together with the more obvious of the great emotional agencies, Beauty, Love, War, but by degrees also the ideal products of a higher abstraction, as Wisdom, Justice, and the like, were severally accounted the work and manifestation of as many special divinities.

Assuredly, these objects of worship were not conceived as ideas, but as persons, whose fundamental attributes, however, necessarily ran in close analogy to those of the ideas which they embodied. Such is the primitive type of polytheism—a thing of no human invention, but, in the strictest sense of the word, natural and of spontaneous growth. Afterwards, indeed, poets and priests did invent stories concerning the gods, more or less connected or consistent with their original attributes, which stories became incorporated with religion; and the most popular deities were those concerning whom the most impressive stories had been feigned. But the legends did not make the religion; the basis of that was a bonâ fide personification and divinization of the occult causes of phenomena. In these views we have no reason to think that we at all differ from Mr. Grote; but if there is any point in which his expositions do not quite satisfy us, it is, that they do not bring out strongly enough this part of the case; that the Greek religion appears in them too much as a sort of accident, the arbitrary creation of poets and storytellers; its origin in the natural human faculties and the spontaneous tendencies of the uncultivated intellect, being indicated indeed, but not placed in a sufficiently strong light.

With this exception, we can hardly bestow too much praise on this portion of Mr. Grote’s performance. He has overcome the difficulty, so great to a modern imagination, of entering intelligently into the polytheistic frame of mind and conception of nature. In no treatise which we could mention, certainly in no work connected with Grecian history, do we find so thorough a comprehension of that state of the human intellect in which the directly religious interpretation of nature is paramount—in which every explanation of phenomena, that refers them to the personal agency of a hidden supernatural power, appears natural and probable, and every other mode of accounting for them incredible—where miracles are alone plausible, and explanation by natural causes is not only offensive to the reverential feelings of the hearer, but actually repugnant to his reason, so contrary is it to the habitual mode of interpreting phenomena. A state of mind made perfectly intelligible by our knowledge of the Hindoos; and nowhere better exhibited than in the pictures given by near observers of that curious people, who reproduce in so many respects the mental characteristics of the infancy of the human race.^*

Though many topics discussed in Mr. Grote’s volumes are more important, there is none more interesting, than the authorship of the Homeric poems; regarded by all antiquity as the production of one great poet (or at most two, for the Iliad and Odyssey), but which the scepticism of a recent period has pronounced to be compilations made as late as the time of Pisistratus, from a multitudinous assemblage of popular ballads. Now, however, that the Wolfian hypothesis seems nearly abandoned in the country in which it arose, the notion that such productions could have been manufactured by piecing and dovetailing a number of short poems originally distinct, may be ranked along with many other conceits of learned ingenuity, in the class of psychological curiosities. We are aware of no argument on the Wolfian side of the controversy which really deserves any weight, except the difficulty of conceiving that such long poems could have been composed and handed down to posterity by memory alone; for that they were produced prior to the use of writing, is certain, from many considerations,^* and especially from the absence of the smallest allusion to such an art in the whole eight-and-forty books; though so full of notices and descriptions of almost every useful or ornamental process which can be supposed to have been in existence in that early age, that they have been said to be a summary of all the knowledge of the time. The preservation of such works without help from writing, is no doubt, at the first aspect of the matter, surprising; but only because in this, as in so many other things, we antedate our modern experience, and apply to early ages the limited standard of our own. It is well said by Plato in the Phædrus, that the invention of letters was the great enfeebler of memory.^[*] In our time, when the habit is formed of recording all things in permanent characters, and when every one relies, not on memory, but on the substitutes for it, we can scarcely form an idea of what its intrinsic powers must have been, when exercised and cultivated as a thing to be solely depended upon. Between the remembering faculties of the Homerids of Chios, and those of our degenerate days, there was doubtless as great a difference, as between the powers of eye and ear of a North American Indian and those of a London citizen. Nor was it, after all, more difficult to retain a single poem of twenty-four books, than twenty-four poems of one book each, which is much less than must have formed the stock in trade of any celebrated ἀοιδὸς. As for the poet himself, he doubtless, as he proceeded in the composition, wrote his poem, as it were, on the memory of the younger bards, by whom it is consonant to the manners of that age that he should have been surrounded.

Those who assert the essential unity of the Homeric poems, by no means deny that there may have been, and probably were, interpolations, and even additions of some length, made either by the same or by other poets, to the original plan. This is the ground taken by Mr. Grote. He rejects the Pisistratean hypothesis. He maintains, from internal evidence, the complete unity of plan and authorship in the Odyssey. He claims a like unity for the greater part of the Iliad; but argues for an amount of subsequent addition to the poem, greater than we can bring ourselves to consider probable. We shall give, in his own words, what is peculiar to his theory.

We are able to go so far with the distinction drawn by Mr. Grote, as to admit that he has discriminated well between those parts of the Iliad which^kcannot^k have been additions to the original plan, and those which possibly may. If the poem does consist of an original basis and a subsequent enlargement, the books which he has pointed out, or some of them, must be the parts superadded. But that they, or even the ninth, to which he takes such vehement exception, really were such subsequent additions^l(powerful as are some of the considerations he has urged)^l , he has not succeeded in convincing us.

It is true, the books from the second to the seventh inclusive, in no way forward the action of the poem, as dependent on the anger of Achilles: and it is remarkable that, during that interval, Zeus not only suspends the performance of his promise to Thetis in the first book, but seems absolutely to have forgotten it, and directs his conduct and counsels by totally different considerations. This last is a serious blemish in the construction of the story; but imperfection of workmanship does not prove plurality of workmen; and if the poet intended to make his poem an Ilias as well as an Achilleis, there would have been in any case a difficulty of this sort to surmount, which it is not necessary to suppose that he must have surmounted successfully. But, if not strictly belonging to the plan of the Achilleis, these books conduce in a remarkable degree to the effect of those parts of the poem which do belong to it. In no epic is the interest centred exclusively in one individual; even in the Achilleis, not Achilles only, but the Greeks generally, and even the Trojans, inspire a keen sympathy; and how much that sympathy is promoted by the preliminary books, needs hardly be pointed out. Not only does the success of the Greeks in the fourth and fifth books greatly deepen the sense of their subsequent disaster, by giving it the character of a turn of fortune; while the exploits of the principal heroes, especially Diomedes and Ulysses, augment the impression of their difficulties when those heroes are disabled; but, above all, it is in those books that we become acquainted with, and interested in, most of the leading characters of the subsequent epos. Hector especially, on whom the poet evidently intended that a strong personal interest should rest—what ground should we have had for sympathising with him, were it not for the beautiful scenes with Paris and Helen in the fourth book, Andromache and Hecuba in the sixth, and Ajax in the seventh? Without the books which Mr. Grote strikes from the original plan, there would be, if we except the amiable characters of Patroclus and Sarpedon, scarcely anything in the poem which excites a really personal interest.

With regard to the ninth book, we allow there are difficulties. The principal is the speech of Achilles to Patroclus in the eleventh book,^* which certainly seems to imply that no atonement had yet been offered, or supplication made. Mr. Grote quotes several other passages, which apparently carry a similar implication; but none which, we think, it would be difficult to get over, if this were disposed of. On the other hand, there are difficulties in his own theory. He gets rid of three subsequent allusions to the transactions of the ninth book, by pronouncing them to be interpolations; but he has overlooked one of greater importance in the sixteenth, where Achilles says to Patroclus, that the time has come at which he had said that his revenge would cease, since the enemy has now reached the ships.^† He had said this nowhere, as the text now stands, except in his answer to the embassy. If it be suggested that this passage may also be an interpolation,^m we shall still urge that it is not consonant to the character of Achilles, to suppose that he would have so far renounced his anger as to send aid to the Greeks even in that extremity, if he had received no offer whatever of atonement or restitution;—if Agamemnon and the Greeks had not yet acknowledged their fault, and humbled themselves before him. With respect to the argument from the more than human ferocity manifested by Achilles, and its conflict with the Greek sentiment of Nemesis, we cannot see the matter in the same light. It is with great hesitation that we should question any opinion of Mr. Grote on a point of Greek erudition; but we know not what evidence he has that the peculiar Greek idea of Nemesis—manifested in the famous speech of Solon to Crœsus,^[*] and which afterwards acted so leading a part in the Athenian drama—had already begun to exist in the Homeric age. We rather believe it to have been one of the points of difference between the more solemn and gloomy theology of the historic age of Greece, and the lively anthropomorphism of the Homeric Pantheon. We find no traces of it in Homer or Hesiod. We find, indeed, severe vengeance taken on mortals by the Homeric deities, not for pride or arrogance generally, but for some special affront to their own dignity; and particularly for any presumptuous attempt to dispute their pre-eminence. It is on such provocation that Thamyris is struck blind by the Muses, and the children of Niobe destroyed by the arrows of Apollo and Artemis.^[†] But no such offence is offered by Achilles in the ninth book; nor any disobedience to the divine powers. No godⁿorⁿ goddess had commanded him to lay aside his wrath, as Pallas, in the first book, restrains him from drawing his sword, and Zeus, in the twenty-fourth, enjoins him, through Thetis, to restore the body of Hector. To these intimations he is at once obedient, and is represented throughout as an eminently pious hero. Nor are we at all inclined to admit that his implacability exceeds what the sentiment of that age would allow of, in a character of vehement passion. He is not intended for a faultless hero; nor does he show any ferocity in the ninth book, at all comparable to that which he displays in the sixteenth; where, in the very act of sending forth Patroclus to aid the Greeks, he utters a fervent wish that not one Greek or Trojan might be left alive, but they two might alone survive to conquer Troy. Nor can we forget that several of the nobler characteristics of Achilles are nowhere so effectually manifested as in the ninth book; the princely courtesy, rivalling the best conceptions of chivalrous romance, in his reception of the embassy; and that abhorrence of disguise, also more resembling the knightly than the^oHellenic^o model, but so necessary to the ideal of his character, which he^p emphatically announces in the lines so often quoted:

• Ἐχθρὸς γάρ μοι κει̑νος, ὁμω̑ς ἀΐδαο πύλησιν,
• Ὅς χ’ ἕτερον μὲν κεύθει ἐνὶ ϕρεσίν, ἅλλο δε βάζει.^[*]

With regard to the tenth book, we think there is weight in what the critics have urged, that the successful nocturnal enterprise of Diomed and Ulysses is skilfully interposed, not only to break the rapid succession of one battle upon another, but to reanimate the spirits and courage of the Greeks after the disasters of the eighth book. We cannot coincide in Mr. Grote’s unwillingness to believe “that the author of the fifth book (or Aristeia of Diomedes) would condescend to employ the hero whom he there so brightly glorifies—the victor even over Ares himself—in slaughtering newly-arrived Thracian sleepers, without any large purpose or necessity;”^[†] since to kill men who were defenceless, provided they were enemies, and not ἱκέται or suppliants, had little that was repugnant to Greek feeling, even in a more advanced age; while an ambush is invariably spoken of in the Iliad as the most dangerous service, and the most decisive test of courage to which a warrior could be exposed. An Homeric audience would see, in this unchivalrous massacre, only the real intrepidity of the two heroes, in venturing alone, and for so perilous a purpose, into the camp of their sleeping enemies; and, in the Homeric point of view, it was doubtless an exploit worthy of the most distinguished warriors.

That Mr. Grote should think it possible for the two concluding books to be additions, we confess surprises us. We cannot imagine how, with the ideas of the Greeks, both in the Homeric age and subsequently, respecting the rites of sepulture, the action of a Greek epos could ever have been complete until the two heroes, whose successive deaths formed the catastrophe of the poem, had received the accustomed funeral honours. Nor would a Greek audience, we think, have tolerated that Hector, the beloved of Zeus, whose death he so unwillingly concedes to Destiny and the public opinion of Olympus, should have been abandoned by him when dead to the ignominious fate designed, and in part executed, by Achilles. We need not point out how much the character of Achilles himself would lose of its interest, without the exquisite manner in which its softer elements are called forth by the interview with^qPriam. And^q though it may be true that “the Homeric man would enter fully into the thirst of revenge felt by Achilles,”^[*] excessive and brutal as that revenge was, it is assuming too much to suppose that the Homeric man would have sympathized with Achilles exclusively. Such, certainly, was not Homer’s purpose, as there are evidences enough even in the Achilleis to prove.

The chapter on the “State of Society and Manners as exhibited in Grecian legend,”^[†] is sound and judicious; but on this subject previous writers had not left so much to be performed. A point of originality in Mr. Grote’s treatment of it is the comparison kept up between the characteristics of the heroic and those of the historical period. Thus, for example, the sense of obligation in the Homeric period is exclusively of a personal kind: “Personal feelings, either towards the gods, the king, or some near and known individual, fill the whole of a man’s bosom; out of them arise all the motives to beneficence, and all the internal restraints upon violence, antipathy, and rapacity; and special communion, as well as special solemnities, are essential to their existence;” while, in the conceptions of the citizen of historical Athens, “the great impersonal authority called The Laws, stood out separately both as guide and sanction, distinct from religious duty or private sympathies.”^[‡] In the Council of Chiefs, and the Agora or Popular Assembly, which, though with no definite function or authority, habitually accompany the Homeric kings, Mr. Grote sees the pre-existing elements of the subsequent republican governments. The following is an important remark:

Incidental remarks of this nature, on the influence of circumstances in forming the peculiar Grecian character and civilization, occur largely in the first two chapters on historical Greece, viz. on its geography, and on “the Hellenic people generally in the early historical times.”^[*] Mr. Grote does not give these speculations for more than they are worth. He does not affect to exhaust the subject, nor pretends that the causes he assigns account for the whole of the effect; but^r points out the natural tendencies of each influential fact, as it successively passes under his review. The following is a favourable specimen:

In the six concluding chapters of the second volume, Mr. Grote comprises the sum of what is known respecting the early condition of those Grecian States which have properly no history prior to the Persian invasion; and brings down the history of^sthe Peloponesian Greeks^s to the age of Crœsus and Pisistratus. The fragmentary nature of the information, and the conscientious integrity of the author, who scruples to supply the deficiency of certified facts by theory and conjecture, render these chapters, with one exception, somewhat meagre. The exception is the chapter which treats of the Legislation of Lycurgus, the earliest Grecian event of first-rate historical importance.

Although of the personality of Lycurgus scarcely anything can be said to be known, Mr. Grote entertains no doubt that such a person existed, and that the peculiar Spartan institutions were the work of a single legislator. Indeed, extraordinary as it may seem that one man, or even a combination of men, should have had power not merely to introduce, for that is little, but to give enduring vitality to so singular a system of manners and institutions, the system itself is so intensely artificial, that any more commonplace origin would be still more improbable; it bespeaks in every part systematic design.

The received view, however, of the Lycurgean reforms, and even of the Spartan institutions, Mr. Grote shows to be, in one important point, erroneous; the supposed equal division of landed property. He rejects this, not on the score of improbability, for it is not in itself so hard to believe as what Lycurgus really effected; but because no mention of it is to be found in any Greek author who lived while the Lycurgean institutions were still in force; and there is ample proof that neither Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Isocrates, Plato, nor Aristotle knew of any such equal division, either as connected with Lycurgus or with Sparta. It rests on the sole testimony of Plutarch;^[*] and Mr. Grote believes it to have been an historic fancy, generated long after by the regrets and aspirations of the patriotic party of which the reforming kings, Agis and Cleomenes, were at the head.

The peculiarity of Sparta was not equality of fortunes, but a consistent attempt to make rich and poor live exactly alike; and live not for themselves, but as the creatures and instruments of the ideal being called the State. The expedient used by the legislator to effect this, was to destroy, not private property itself, but the possibility of any separate enjoyment of it. By a stated contribution in kind from every citizen, public tables were maintained, at which all Spartans, from childhood to death, took regularly the same frugal meal. The Spartan citizen

There is indeed no such instance of the wonderful pliability, and amenability to artificial discipline, of the human mind, as is afforded by the complete success of the Lacedæmonian legislator, for many generations, in making the whole body of Spartan citizen at Sparta exactly what he had intended to make them. At Sparta, it must be said; for a Spartan out of Sparta, at least during his country’s ascendancy, was not only the most domineering and arrogant, but in spite of, or rather by a natural reaction from his ascetic training, the most rapacious and corrupt of all Greeks: no one fell so easy a victim to the temptations of luxury and splendour. Yet such habitual abnegation of ordinary personal interests, and merging of self in an idea, were not compatible with pettiness of mind. Most of the anecdotes and recorded sayings of individual Lacedæmonians breathe a certain magnanimity of spirit; although the Lacedæmonian State, which was the object of this worship, and was accustomed not to give but to receive sacrifices, was memorable for the peculiar pettiness of its political conduct—a selfishness so excessive, as, by the blindness and even the un-Spartan cowardice which it engendered, perpetually to frustrate its own ends.

Such were the Spartans; those hereditary Tories and Conservatives of Greece; objects of exaggerated admiration to the moralists and philosophers of the far nobler as well as greater and wiser Athens; because the second-rate superior minds of a cultivated age and nation are usually in exaggerated opposition against its spirit; and lean towards the faults contrary to those against which they are daily contending. To men who felt called upon to stand up for Law against Will, and for traditional wisdom against the subtleties of sophists and the arts of rhetoricians, Sparta was the standing model of reverence for law, and attachment to ancient maxims. The revolutions which incessantly menaced every other Grecian state, and from which even Athens was not wholly secure, never threatened Sparta. The steadiness of the Spartan polity, and the constancy of Spartan maxims, were to the Greeks highly imposing phenomena. “It was the only government in Greece which could trace an unbroken peaceable descent from a high antiquity, and from its real or supposed founder;” and this, we think with Mr. Grote, was one of the main causes

The reader who is conversant with the existing state of knowledge respecting the Grecian world, will gather from what has been laid before him, that as a contribution to that knowledge, the present work is of high performance and still higher promise. The author is not surpassed even by German scholarship, in intimate and accurate acquaintance with the whole field of Greek literature and antiquity; while none of his predecessors have approached to him in the amount of philosophy and general mental accomplishment which he has brought to bear upon the subject.^u

It has been made an objection to the volumes now published, that they contain a greater amount of dissertation than of history.^[*] To such objectors it may be replied, that for the times here treated of, a continuous stream of narrative is not possible; that those who desire nothing from history but an amusing story, may find such abundantly provided elsewhere; that it is as much an historian’s duty to judge as to narrate, to prove as to assert; and that the same critics would be the first to reproach a writer who should substitute for the commonly received view of the facts a view of his own, without showing by what evidence he was prepared to substantiate it. There is in this case, too, the further peculiarity, that what is brought forward as matter of evidence, is itself almost always part and parcel of the exposition of the Greek mind; and on this score alone, no one who wishes to understand what Greece was, would desire to see one page of Mr. Grote’s argumentative chapters expunged.^v

In the present volumes the style is clear, unaffected, and often very apt and vigorous. If we have a complaint to make, it would be of the too frequent employment of words of Greek or Latin origin; some of them recognised English words, though not in common use, but others purely of his own invention, and unintelligible except to scholars. In some cases, doubtless, the words are needed, and carry their explanation along with them: such a word as “autonomous,” conveying a political idea not exactly expressed by any modern word or phrase, is its own sufficient justification; and the same may be said of “gens,” a word borrowed from Roman history, to express a combination of religious and political ideas familiar to antiquity, and the same, substantially, which Niebuhr has proved that the term denoted at Rome.^[*] But many cases would be found in a careful revisal of these volumes, in which similar hard words are used to convey a meaning which might be perfectly expressed by phrases generally intelligible.^w

[* ]Preface, pp. vii-viii.

[[*] ]Connop Thirlwall, The History of Greece, 8 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1845-52).

[[†] ]William Mitford, The History of Greece, 10 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1818-20.

[a]46 [footnote:] *Its first appearance was as a contribution to The Cabinet Cyclopædia; and it is now passing through the Press in the form of eight handsome octavo volumes.

[b]46 [footnote:] †Mr. Grote gives to the first two of these contrasted attributes the epithet of “feminine,” and to the four latter that of “masculine.” [Vol. I, p. xvii.] We regret that he should have unguardedly countenanced a commonplace notion which we do not believe that he would intentionally recommend, on a subject on which just opinions are extremely important; and we reply to him in the words of the Rev. Sydney Smith, originally printed in this Journal:

“A great deal has been said of the original difference of capacity between men and women, as if women were more quick, and men more judicious—as if women were more remarkable for delicacy of association, and men for stronger powers of attention. All this, we confess, appears to us very fanciful. That there is a difference in the understandings of the men and the women we every day meet with, every body, we suppose, must perceive; but there is none surely which may not be accounted for by the difference of circumstances in which they have been placed, without referring to any conjectural difference of original conformation of mind. As long as boys and girls run about in the dirt, and trundle hoops together, they are both precisely alike. If you catch up one-half of these creatures, and train them to a particular set of actions and opinions, and the other half to a perfectly opposite set, of course their understandings will differ, as one or the other sort of occupations has called this or that talent into action. There is surely no occasion to go into any deeper or more abstruse reasoning, in order to explain so very simple a phenomenon.” [Sydney Smith, “Female Education,” Edinburgh Review, XV (Jan., 1810), 299.]

[[*] ]See Barthold Georg Niebuhr, The History of Rome, trans. Connop Thirlwall et al., 3 vols. (London: Taylor, 1828-42).

[c-c]Source,46 contemporary

[[*] ]George Grote, “Grecian Legends and Early History,” Westminster Review, XXXIX (May, 1843), 285-328. Grote acknowledges his authorship in his History, Vol. I, p. 577n.

[[†] ]Ibid., p. 289; Grote is quoting Thomas Moore, ed., George Gordon Byron, Works, 17 vols. (London: Murray, 1832-33), Vol. XI, p. 72n.

[[‡] ]Ibid.; the passage (which Grote takes from Moore) may be found in Wolfgang von Goethe, “Manfred,” Werke, 55 vols. (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1828-33), Vol. XLVI, p. 217.

[[*] ]Æschylus, Prometheus Bound, in Æschylus (Greek and English), trans. Herbert Weir Smyth, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), Vol. I, p. 234 (212).

[[†] ]“Grecian Legends and Early History,” pp. 290-2.

[[*] ]Ibid., pp. 293-4.

[* ]Odyssey, [trans. Murray, Vol. I, p. 292,] VIII, 487-91.

[[†] ]Hesiod, Theogony, in Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (Greek and English), trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 80 (29-34).

[* ]We have used Dr. Thirlwall’s translation. [History of Greece, Vol. I, p. 211.] The original words are—Ἔνθεν δὲ ἐγένετο ἕκαστος τω̑ν θεω̑ν, εἴτε δ’ ἀεὶ ἠ̑σαν πάντες, ὁκοι̑οί τε τινὲς τὰ εἴδεα, οὐκ ἠπιστέατο [οἱ Ἕλληνες] μέχρι οὑ̑ πρώην τε καὶ χθὲς, ὡς εἰπει̑ν λόγῳ· Ἡσίοδον γὰρ καὶ Ὅμηρον ἡλικίην τετρακοσίοισι ἔτεσι δοκέω μευ πρεσβυτέρους γενέσθαι, καὶ οὐ πλέοσι· οὔτοι δὲ ἐισὶ οἱ ποιήσαντες θεογονίην Ἕλλησι, καὶ τοι̑σι θεοι̑σι τὰς ἐπωνυμίας δόντες, καὶ τιμάς τε καὶ τέχνας διελόντες, καὶ εἴδεα αὐτω̑ν σημήναντες. (Herodotus [(Greek and English), trans. A. D. Godley, 4 vols. (London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1921), Vol. I, p. 340,] ii, 53.)

[d-d]46 and even the

[[*] ]This and the succeeding references to chronicles are, in order of appearance, to: History of Charles the Great and Orlando, ascribed to Archbishop Turpin; Vincent de Beauvais, Speculum Historiale; Eginhard and the Monk of St. Gall, Early Lives of Charlemagne by Eginhard and the Monk of St. Gall; John Hardyng, The Chronicle of John Hardyng; Robert Fabyan, The New Chronicles of England and France; Richard Grafton, Grafton’s Chronicle; or, History of England, from the Year 1189 to 1558 inclusive; Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland; and Geoffrey of Monmouth, The British History of Geoffrey of Monmouth.

[[*] ]Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, 3 vols. (Orleans: Couret de Villeneuve, 1785).

[* ]See [Thomas] Warton’s History of English Poetry [3 vols. (London: Dodsley et al., 1774-81), Vol. I,] §iii, p. 128n. “No man, before the sixteenth century, presumed to doubt that the Francs derived their origin from Francus, the son of Hector; that the Spaniards were descended from Japhet, the Britons from Brutus, and the Scotch from Fergus.” (Ibid., p. 137.)—(Author’s [i.e., Grote’s] Note.)

[[†] ]See Æschines, On the Embassy, in The Speeches of Æschines (Greek and English), trans. Charles Darwin Adams (London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1919), p. 184 (30-3).

[* ]Even in 1754, Dr. Zachary Grey, in his notes on Shakspeare, commenting on the passage in King Lear, Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness [III, vi, 6-7], says, “This is one of Shakspeare’s most remarkable anachronisms. King Lear succeeded his father Bladud, anno mundi 3105; and Nero, anno mundi 4017, was sixteen years old, when he married Octavia, Cæsar’s daughter. See Funccii Chronologia [Johann Funck, Chronologia (Wittenberg: Hoffmann, 1601)], p. 94.” (Author’s Note.) [Up to the quotation marks, JSM paraphrases Grote: in his note, Grote quotes Grey, Critical, Historical and Explanatory Notes on Shakspeare, 2 vols. (London: Manby, 1754), Vol. II, p. 112.]

[e-e]46 for

[f-f]46 Atlantis

[[*] ]See Plato, Republic (Greek and English), trans. Paul Shorey, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946).

[[*] ]Xenophanes, Fragment 9, in Anthologia Lyrica Graeca, ed. Ernestus Diehl (Leipzig: Teubneri, 1954), Fasc. I, p. 68.

[[*] ]Grote, “Grecian Legends and Early History,” p. 305.

[* ]Vol. I, p. 570.

[g-g]46 , or Intentional-Mischief,

[[†] ]Ibid., p. 9.

[[*] ]See Karl Otfried Müller, Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology, trans. John Leitch (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844), pp. 57ff.

[h-h]46 belong

[* ]See, for interesting details, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, by Lieut.-Col. Sleeman. [2 vols. (London: Hatchard, 1844).] (Vol. I, Chap. iii.)

[i-i]46 being

[j-j]46 Vulcan

[* ]Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology (p. 61), recently and very well translated by Mr. Leitch.

[* ]It is much to be regretted that so few such pictures are extant. We recommend, as one of the most instructive, the work already referred to, of Colonel Sleeman—a book which may be called, without exaggeration, “The Hindoos painted by themselves.”

[* ]These are fully set forth by Mr. Grote, pp. 191-7 of his second volume, and by [Karl Otfried] Müller, History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, [2 vols., trans. G. C. Lewis and J. W. Donaldson (London: Baldwin, 1840-42), Vol. I,] pp. 37-9.

[[*] ]See Plato, Phædrus, in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phædo, Phædrus (Greek and English), trans. H. N. Fowler (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947), p. 562 (274e-275a); cf. Mill’s trans., p. 90 above.

[k-k]46 cannot

[l-l]+59, 67

[* ]

• “Δι̑ε Μενοιτιάδη, τῳ̑ ’μῳ̑ κεχαρισμένε θυμῳ̑
• Νυ̑ν ὀΐω περὶ γούνατ’ ἐμὰ στησέσθαι Ἀχαιοὺς
• Λισσομένους· χρειὼ γὰρ ἱκάνεται οὐκέτ’ ἀνεκτός.”
• Iliad, [trans. Murray, Vol. I, p. 524,] XI, 607-10.

[† ]

• “Ἀλλὰ τὰ μὲν προτετύχθαι ἐάσομεν· οὐδ’ ἄρα πως ἠ̑ν
• Ἀσπερχὲς κεχολω̑σθαι ἐνὶ ϕρεσίν· ἠ̑ τοι ἔϕην γε
• Οὐ πρὶν μηνιθμὸν καταπαυσέμεν, ἀλλ’ ὁπόταν δὴ
• Νη̑ας ἐμὰς ἀϕίκηται ἀϋτή τε, πτόλεμος τε.”
• Iliad, [trans. Murray, Vol. II, p. 168,] XVI, 60-4.

[m]46 (of which, however, we perceive no signs,)

[[*] ]See Herodotus (Greek and English), trans. Godley, Vol. I, pp. 32-40 (I, 30-3).

[[†] ]See Iliad, trans. Murray, Vol. I, p. 94 (II, 595-605), and Vol. II, pp. 606-8 (XXIV, 602-25).

[n-n]46 nor

[o-o]46 classical

[p]46 so

[[*] ]Iliad, trans. Murray, Vol. I, p. 404 (IX, 312-13).

[[†] ]Grote, History, Vol. II, p. 268.

[q-q]46, 59 Priam; and

[[*] ]Ibid., p. 266.

[[†] ]Ibid., pp. 79-158 (Pt. I, Chap. xx).

[[‡] ]Ibid., pp. 107-8, 110.

[[*] ]The title of Pt. II, Chap. ii; Chap. i is entitled “General Geography and Limits of Greece.”

[r]46 he

[s-s]46 all the others except Athens,

[[*] ]Plutarch, Lives (Greek and English), trans. Bernadotte Perrin, 11 vols. (London: Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1914), Vol. I, pp. 226-8 (VIII).

[[*] ]See 43 Elizabeth, c. 2 (1601).

[t-t]46, 59 specialties [printer’s error?]

[u]46 In his remaining volumes, the next two of which, he informs us, are far advanced towards completion, he will have an opportunity of manifesting the same qualities in a more attractive field. [See Vol. I, p. xvi.]

[[*] ]See Henry Hart Milman, “Grote’s History of Greece,” Quarterly Review, LXXVIII (June, 1846), 143-4.

[v]46 [paragraph] But another task lies before him, in those more eventful portions of the history, in which the graces of narrative are possible and to be expected. He will have the advantage, seldom possessed by historians, of finding in the writers whom he consults for the materials of his tale, the most finished examples of the mode of telling it. He has only to imitate their union of distinctness with condensation, of general unity with characteristic and picturesque detail; nay, he might almost content himself, in many of the most animated scenes, with a literal translation.

[[*] ]See Niebuhr, History of Rome, Vol. I, pp. 271ff.

[w]46 [paragraph] Mr. Grote has made considerable innovations in the English orthography of Greek names, on the principle of keeping nearer to the Greek; instead of following the foreign spelling of the Romans merely because we have adopted their alphabet. [See Vol. I, pp. xix-xx.] There would be more to be said for this principle if it could be carried out consistently; but Mr. Grote concedes so many exceptions to the shocked feelings of the reader, that in the end the disturbance of old associations is almost gratuitous. He justifies the restoration of the Greek K in place of the Roman C, by the injury which the sibilant letter does to the unrivalled harmony of the Greek language; yet he not only does not venture to write Korinth or Krete, but not even Phokis or Sikyon. At all events, we can see no reason for preserving K in words in which the sound of C is precisely similar, such words as Locris or Cleomenes. There are other cases, too, to which his principle would extend, but in which he retains the Latin orthography. He writes Meno, Polemo, instead of Menon, Polemon; and why should one of the lost poems of Hesiod continue to be designated by so unpronounceable a name as EϾ? The real word is Eoiai, a name of genuine Greek sonorousness. We quite approve of retaining the diphthong ei (as Cleinias, Peisistratus,) if for no other reason than to mark the quantity: this example had been already set by Mr. Mitford. We are glad also that Mr. Grote, with the majority of recent scholars, preserves, when writing about Greece, the Grecian names of Divinities, and speaks of Ares and Demeter, not Mars and Ceres. The Roman deities mostly belonged to another mythology, had different legends, and to a great extent different attributes; and were only at a late period identified with the gods and goddesses of the Grecian Olympus. As well almost might we name these after Isis, Osiris, &c., with whom also Grecian ingenuity identified them; as it would undoubtedly have done with Thor, Odin, and Freya, if Scandinavia as well as Egypt had been known and frequented by Grecian travellers.