THE EXPANSION OF GREEK HISTORY 



BY JOHN PENTLAND MAHAFFY 



[John Pentland Mahaffy, Professor of Ancient History, University of Dublin, 

 since 1871. b. Chaponnaire, on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, 1839. Trinity 

 College, Dublin, B.A. 1859; M.A. 1863; Fellow, ibid. 1864; D.D. ibid. 1886; 

 Mus.D. ibid. 1891. Author of Commentary to Kant's Critique; Social Life in 

 Greece from Homer to Menander; Rambles and Studies in Greece; A History of 

 Classical Greek Literature; The Story of Alexander's Empire; The Greek World 

 under Roman Sway; Problems in Greek History; The Empire of the Ptolemies.] 



MR. CHAIRMAN, AND GENTLEMEN, I feel it no small honor to be 

 selected for the prominent duty of delivering an opening address on 

 this momentous occasion. For we may call it a great intellectual mar- 

 riage of Europe with America, to which all the sciences, both histor- 

 ical and positive, are invited with equal hospitality. And thus while 

 some are sending their inquiries across vast realms of space, others 

 like ourselves are reaching back across millenniums of time; while 

 some are probing the constitution of the minutest atoms of matter, 

 others like ourselves are exploring the rudiments of human society. 

 Both studies are essential to the progress of this our twentieth cen- 

 tury. For if the civilized man differs broadly from the savage, in that 

 he is in process of understanding and controlling the forces of nature, 

 he differs more essentially perhaps in this, that he strives with eager 

 interest to comprehend the annals of the past the long struggles, 

 the successes, the failures of our forerunners to emerge from a con- 

 dition a little higher than the brute into a condition a little lower 

 than the angels. This vast study is of necessity to be prosecuted in 

 compartments, if for no other reason because our race has been 

 fertile in devising languages, wherever human society began its organ- 

 ization. Their number is enormous. The best judges, Terrien de la 

 Couperie, Archibald Sayce, have told me that there are not less than 

 eight hundred known, not to speak of the hundreds that may have 

 disappeared. And without knowledge of his speech, we can gain but a 

 superficial knowledge of the speaker. Our happy lot in this Section is 

 to be concerned with Greek not only the most perfect of all the 

 organs of communication ever devised by man, but one in which our 

 knowledge has in this generation attained an enormous expansion, in- 

 somuch that our investigation of that people and its civilization has 

 been as progressive as any study that could be named. The number 

 of new texts discovered is such that no living man can know them all. 

 Each one of us that has explored has added scores of new words to the 

 Greek Lexicon, dozens of new facts to our knowledge of the Greeks; 

 and so we may say with truth, that while the literature of the other 

 great classical language, Latin, has stood still, or gained but trifling 

 increment, Greek is growing by leaps and bounds, giving the lie to the 

 narrow scientist, who would thrust it from its high place in our edu- 



