388 CLASSICAL LITERATURE 



suffered many mischances. The text in passing through the hands 

 of scribes either unintelligent or too intelligent has often become 

 something other than it originally was: it has been padded with 

 inept glosses; its meaning has been misapprehended, and the false 

 explanations that from generation to generation have gathered 

 about and over the text have beclouded the eye of the reader so that 

 he has not read the clear truth. He must, as George Herbert says, 

 "Copie fair what time hath blur'd." 



And yet even these unfavorable conditions have had their good 

 effect. The fragmentariness and the perversion of the literary record 

 have ever stirred the scholar to earnest endeavor. They have evoked 

 the spirit of criticism, and have developed in the guild of classical 

 philologians methods of accurate research, methods that in time 

 have become models for all forms of historical inquiry as well as 

 of philological inquiry in other fields. Again: these conditions have 

 lent singular preciousness to every smallest item in the tradition. 

 Each little thing, each sound, each word, each phrase, each idiom, 

 each thought, each turn,- each littlest thing has become important 

 because of its possible significance in the reconstruction of the whole, 

 that great edifice, the House of Ancient Life. We love and study 

 the little because it is a member of the whole. Perhaps at times the 

 idea of the whole has been lost sight of, in the student's concentration 

 on the fragmentary and intrinsically petty. Of the scholar that 

 goes astray for such small things, let us say what Hugutio 1 said 

 in the twelfth century of a Latin verse, the writer of which had sinned 

 in the quantity he gave sincerus, "Lot it and its writer be erased 

 from the Book of Life, and be not enrolled among the Righteous 

 (Abradatur cum suo auctore de libro vitac ct cum justis non scribatnr).'' 



One who speaks upon the problems of classical literature finds be- 

 fore him avast field, in which scholars have been toiling for more than 

 twenty-three centuries, with varying ideals, aims, and methods, meet- 

 ing and solving problems of the most diverse character. At the earliest 

 period, in the times of the creation of classical literature and in the 

 times immediately subsequent when the speech in which literary works 

 were composed was still a living tongue, scholars were concerned 

 mainly with the interpretation of poets, with the explanation of obso- 

 lete words and of other obscurities. Then came an age of criticism and 

 of comprehensive learning, when the ancient texts were collected, class- 

 ified, edited, further explored and explained, the texts of prose writers 

 as \\ell as of poets, an age of scientific scholarship, from the frag- 

 mentary remains of which we still have much to learn; then followed 

 an age of scholarship in the service of education, with its excerpts, 

 anthologies, its limited editions of classical authors, its handbooks 

 1 Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, p. 040. 



