62 HISTORY OF GREECE, ROME, AND ASIA 



a comparative study of divers extant remains by Dr. Dorpfeld ; the 

 same author's rehandling of the famous topographical chapter in 

 Thucydides concerning the surroundings of the Athenian Acropolis, 

 the demonstration by Mr. Grundy that Thucydides could be as fallible 

 as any ordinary writer in his account of the bay of Pylos, of the siege 

 of Plataea, or in his copy of a now extant inscription. 



If you want to estimate the results in an easy and obvious way, 

 compare any guide-book to Greece of ten years old with the newest 

 editions of the same work. Nothing now gets antiquated so quickly. 

 But if you want larger and more splendid evidence of what recent 

 research has done for our knowledge of Greece, read Mr. Frazer's 

 monumental edition of Pausanias. Twenty years ago, nay, even ten 

 years ago, such a work would have been impossible. Nor could it have 

 been done at any other time ever since the decadence of the Roman 

 Empire. But now Mr. Frazer has been able to go over the cities and 

 monuments described by the old tourist and antiquary of the second 

 century, and gives us, in most cases, if not in all, verifications and 

 illustrations from the excavations of our own day. 



It might be imagined that these discoveries affect almost exclu- 

 sively our knowledge of the art side of Greek life. That is not so. The 

 many recovered inscriptions tell us of wars and of treaties, of laws 

 and of rites, and of the social life of the people which we can restore 

 in the ruins of their temples, their theatres, and their homes. And let 

 not the title of this Department, Political and Economic History, blind 

 you to the fact that without the social life and the art of a people 

 history will ever be dull and lifeless. The Hermes of Praxiteles, the 

 bronze charioteer of Delphi, the great tomb of Sidon all these are 

 as important in understanding Greek history as are the constitution 

 of Athens or the currency of Rhodes. We live, therefore, in an era 

 of expansion even of the golden age of Greece, an expansion in depth, 

 or in quality of knowledge, even more than in the multiplication of 

 facts, such as Europe has not seen since the Renaissance, and such as 

 may never again recur, when the present still untouched sites have 

 been disclosed and the testimony of statues and of stelse has been 

 exhausted. But of this limit there is no prospect in our generation, or 

 perhaps for half a century to come. 



I have not yet said one word concerning our gains of the last 

 decade in the matter of Greek literature, which is, after all, the 

 department of human culture in which, most of all, the modern world 

 owes great and everlasting obligations to Hellas. The types of the 

 epic, of the lyric poem, of the drama, of the prose dialogue, of the 

 oration, have been fixed by the Greeks forever, and shown to us 

 in specimens of a perfection seldom equaled, never excelled. If 

 I have set down our gains in this literature last, it is not that their 

 importance is not paramount, but because the manner of their 



