OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 7 
that animates a detective officer in seeking the hidden 
evidences of crime. If some other historian a century 
ago told the same story that we are trying to tell, he 
probably told it from fewer sources of information than 
we can now command; but if this is not the case, if a 
century has passed without increasing our direct infor- 
mation upon the story in hand, it has at least been a 
century of added human experience in general, so that 
even when we work upon the same materials as our 
predecessor we are likely to arrive at somewhat differ- 
ent conclusions. Our first rule, then, is never to rest 
contented with the statements of earlier historians, 
unless where the evidence behind such statements is no 
longer accessible. This is especially likely to occur 
with ancient history, for the various agencies for re- 
cording events were much less complete and accurate 
before than since the Christian era. We have a hun- 
dred ways of testing Macaulay’s account of the expul- 
sion of the Stuarts, where we have one way or no way 
of checking Livy’s narrative of the Samnite Wars; in 
the one case our knowledge is like the light of midday, 
in the other it is but a twilight. 
There are periods, however, in ancient history, con- 
cerning which our authorities are luminous, and the 
picture is doubtless, on the whole, as correct as those 
which can be framed for modern periods. The literary 
monuments of Greek life in the age of the Pelopon- 
nesian War—the narratives of Thucydides and Xeno- 
phon, the works of the great tragedians, the wit and 
drollery of Aristophanes, the dialogues of Plato, the 
speeches of Andokides and Lysias — with the remains 
of sculpture and architecture, bring that ancient society 
wonderfully near to us. Other periods in Athens and 
