374 CLASSICAL LITERATURE 



been called these "piping times of Papyrus." The immense literature 

 called forth by the discovery of Aristotle's Constitution of Athens has 

 brought us sensibly nearer to a complete conception of Greek his- 

 toriography. In Bacchylides we have recovered not only a charming 

 poet, but a standard by which to measure Pindar, and a clue to the 

 history of the dithyramb. Herondas enlarges our conception of Greek 

 realism. Timotheus, besides enabling Wibmowitz to reconstruct the 

 obscure history of the vojuos, teaches us that a contemporary of 

 Lysias and Xenophon could outbid in fantastic euphuism the most 

 conceited Elizabethan, the most "precious" frequenter of the 

 Hotel cle Rambouillet. We are no longer wholly dependent on 

 Plautus and Terence for the restoration of Menander. The latest 

 edition of Blass's Attic orators can illustrate in detail the contrast 

 between the gentlemanly urbanity of Hyperides and the tense, 

 professional eloquence of Demosthenes. And the tantalizing bits of 

 Sappho that come as the one pennyworth of Hellenic bread to an 

 intolerable deal of Hellenistic and Ptolemaic sack remind us that 

 the greatest gap of all that made by the loss of Greek lyric may 

 be filled any day. 



But the modern science of classical philology is not content thus 

 to wait upon the inheritance of the tomb. It has the courage of its 

 methods. Its "hope treads not the hall of fear." It undertakes by 

 sheer pertinacity in sweat-box interrogation of the extant witnesses, 

 and by the exercise of the detective ingenuity of a Sherlock Holmes in 

 the combination of data, to recover Greek literature for itself without 

 waiting for the aid of Egypt or any other foreign nation. 



From this point of view the science of Greek literature consists of 

 such work as Professor Wilamowitz' reconstruction of what he naively 

 styles "die ewige Poesie " of an entire lost Hesiodic epic from seven 

 lines of fragments and a few remarks of the scholiast on Pindar; or 

 Blass's detection of fragments of early Attic prose imbedded in the 

 Protrepticus of lamblichus, or the restoration of the writings of 

 the Sophists from the polemic of Plato and his imitators, or the 

 reconstruction of the plots of Euripides' lost plays, or the recovery 

 of the lost post-Aristotelian philosophic literature, by the analysis of 

 Cicero's philosophic works and the moral essays of Plutarch, Dion 

 Chrysostomus, and Epictetus, or the determination of the literary 

 chronology of the fourth century by logarithmic tables of Platonic 

 particles and the polemical allusions in Isocrates. Only when all 

 our losses have been thus made good, and the iniquity of oblivion 

 repaired, can the "scientific" history of Greek literature be written, 

 wo arc told. 



To be distinguished from this philologian's science of literature 

 is the conception of Taine. Hennequin. Posnett, and Brunetiere. 

 who would understand by the phrase something analogous to the 



