64 HISTORY OF GREECE, ROME, AND ASIA 



on the shores of the Euxine, where there were long since Hellenic 

 cities, which communicated with Greece by sea, but all through the 

 body of Asia Minor, notably in Syria and Palestine, in Mesopotamia 

 along the Tigris and Euphrates, nay, even on the Oxus, and within 

 range of the Turanian steppes, there were established settlements of 

 Greek soldiers and traders, with privileges to attract them there, but 

 also with the duty of guarding the new Greek civilization of the 

 East from mountain robbers and from national revolts. I know not 

 what the possibilities are of successful excavations in Syria on the 

 site of Antioch ruined by so many earthquakes, of Apamea, of Baalbec, 

 of Gerasa, in the Decapolis of Judaea. But of this I feel sure, in that 

 crowd of settlements made under the Seleucid house, both of Mace- 

 donians and of Greeks, the evidences we should find would be of 

 the same character as those of the Fayum. We should find that the 

 Grseco-Macedonian settlers, including the Persians, who were dis- 

 tinctly admitted to the ruling caste, lived in the midst of the ab- 

 origines, trading with them, intermarrying with them, quarreling with 

 them, while they were protected from absorption by their Hellenistic 

 speech, and by special courts conducted according to Hellenistic law. 

 The discoveries of the last fifteen years, inaugurated, I am proud to 

 say, by the two volumes of Petrie Papyri which it was my unique 

 good fortune to lay before the world, have manifested to us an aspect 

 of the Hellenic mind of which we knew but little in former days. True 

 it was that these outlying settlements, living as the Hungarians do 

 among the Slovaks, or the Germans among the Poles, kept up their 

 aristocracy of intellect, as well as of race, by the constant reading of 

 the old Greek masterpieces. It is through the fragments recovered 

 from them that we now know what the texts of Homer, and Pindar, 

 and Euripides, and Plato, and Demosthenes were like in the second and 

 third centuries before Christ; and let me add that if there is ample 

 evidence of the considerable rehandling and reediting of the Homeric 

 text in the second century B. c. which tradition long since ascribed to 

 the great Alexandrian critics, we have also indisputable proof that 

 in the rest our medieval copies represent with excellent fidelity the 

 great masters as they were read in these early books. It is not, how- 

 ever, the establishing of our old faith in the great classics against the 

 suspicions of tampering and of corruption which concerns me here. 

 It is rather the new and interesting fact in this fresh appendix (if I 

 may so call it) to our Greek histories, that of these people we have 

 not only the classical books they read, we have the papers of every- 

 day life. We now know how they made their marriage settlements 

 and their wills, their loans and their contracts, their reports and their 

 complaints; we have now an insight into their official systems of 

 taxation and administration, their banking and their general finance. 

 These are commonplace matters. These letters and reports cannot be 



