CONTENTS.

CHAPTER V.

LUCIAN.

XV

PAGE

I.-Lucian, the Satirist.-The First of the Moderns.-More Greek than the

Greeks of his Time.-His Life. II.—His Onslaughts upon the Moribund Religion.

-His Dialogues. III.-The Broad Burlesque which he sometimes Employs

against Gods, Philosophers, and Men of Letters. IV.-His Later Fame.-His

Notion of Hades.-His Treatment of Gross Superstitions.-Alexander the

Medium. Various Writings of his. V.-His Wit, Comparison between it and

the Same Quality as Exhibited by Others.--His Denunciation of Science.-His

Exhibition of the General Condition of the Greek Man of Letters in those Times 830

CHAPTER VI.

PROSE WRITERS-Continued.

I.—Literary Trifles not the Only Interests.-The New View of Moral Great-

ness.-The Life of Epictetus. II.-Marcus Aurelius.-His Work as a Writer.

III.-Philostratus, and his Discussion of Literary and Artistic Subjects. IV.-

The Final Gatherings from Antiquity.-Athenæus, and his Collection of Anec-

dotes.-Ælian.-Some Historians. V.-Pausanias.—Longinus, and his Literary

Criticism. The Later Philosophy. VI.-In 529, the Closing of the University of

Athens, and the Conversion of the Temple of Hermes into a Monastery. VII.—

Further Fragments.-The Threshing of Threshed Straw
- 845

CHAPTER VII.

THE GREEK ROMANCES.

I. This Confusion, Great as it was, Led to an Attempted Reorganization of

Literary Work in the Romances.-The Method of Composition: Prominence of

Love, Wildness of Incident, etc. II.-Iamblichus Xenophon of Ephesus.-Apol-

lonius of Tyre.-Heliodorus.-The Modern Descendants of these Romances.

III.-Achilles Tatius.-Chariton. IV.-Longus and his Pastoral.—The End - 860

The Independence of the Greek Literature-Its Influence-Its Artistic Qualities. The People; their Earliest History. The Country; its Geography-The Possible Influence of Climate, etc. The Language.

foreign admixture, adopting, to be sure, the forms which are employed independently by every other race that makes use of letters as a method of expression, but developing them more completely than has been done elsewhere. Starting in this way free in the main from outside influences, it grew under the hands of the most wonderful people that the world has ever known, to be the model for succeeding civilizations. In literature, as everywhere, the best wins; and in studying the literature of Greece we are really studying not merely forms of expression, rich thought, wise comment and explanation that are unfailing sources of delight and instruction, but also the foundations of nearly all the work that has been done since in every civilized country. The lines that the Greeks drew without rule or precedent have acquired an

authority which has given them the force of literary canons to inspire
and direct subsequent work of the world. The quality that character-
izes their literature has proved a model for their successors; it has been
absorbed, at times, with much conscious effort that has blurred the
force of its influence, and the ultimate consequence of the whole ripen-
ing of modern civilization has been to bring men back to wonder and
admiration of their unparalleled performance. Naturally, Greek litera-
ture is not a unit; when we speak of some of its most brilliant successes
we should properly define it as Athenian literature; and, too, the later
work of the Alexandrians, which was the only instance of the Greeks
imitating instead of directly producing, has been the main source of
modern inspiration; yet it is to be remembered that even then they
were Greeks copying themselves, and not outside barbarians laying on
an artificial polish. And, too, it is towards the best of the native Greek
literature that men have gradually made their way with ever growing.
respect. They have at times lost the way and have given their devotion
to what was second-best, but with a wider knowledge has come frank
reverence for only the most characteristic of their productions. As
the tracks where the first settlers strayed become the streets of the
established city, so have the different paths of the Greeks become high-
ways on which alone modern men have been free to move.
Their epics,
their lyrics, their drama, their histories, their philosophy, have left
their mark on the taste of later generations. They imposed the laws
which have ruled since their day, not so much by legislation, however,
as by doing naturally what has been afterwards attempted by earnest
effort. Their unconscious ease has been succeeded by the more or less
deliberate attempts of those who have seen in the beauty of Greek
work an ideal as well as a model. This, then, marks the important
difference between the literatures of Greece on the one hand and on
the other that of Rome and modern civilizations, that the first grew up
untrammeled, as the natural expression of direct vision, while ever
since men have seldom felt themselves free from the necessity of refer-
ring to the foundations of literary art.

Yet the general resemblance in the growth of different literatures can not be always explained as imitation. The path in which the Greeks trod has been followed independently by different races, among which we find that uniformly poetry precedes prose, and that the epic appears before the drama, so that we may safely conclude that the course of the Greek letters was in accordance with a form of develop ment that marks all literature, that there is a uniformity in the actions. of different races as there is between individuals, and that in both the difference is in the accomplishment rather than in the ends aimed at. To what extent this hypothesis is true, will be seen in the further study

THE ORIGIN OF THE GREEKS.

3

of Greek writings, but, granting a general analogy, we shall nowhere find the same brilliant performance that we find in Greece. Its whole literature is distinguished by a keen artistic sense that is made up of freshness and truth to nature. Everywhere the Greek shunned exaggeration. Unlike the Sanskrit writers he was impressive without being grandiose; unlike the Chinese, he was simple without being puerile, and when we compare the Greek with more familiar literatures that have been built upon it, the difference becomes even plainer. As Taine has well said in his Philosophie de l'art en Grèce, "A glance at their literature in comparison with that of the East, of the middle ages, and of modern times; a perusal of Homer compared with the Divina Commedia, Faust, or the Indian epics; a study of their prose in comparison with any other prose of any other age or any other country, would be convincing. By the side of their literary style, every style is emphatic, heavy, inexact and unnatural; by the side of their weird. types, every type is excessive, gloomy, and morbid; by the side of their poetic and oratorical forms, every form not based on theirs is out of all proportion, ill devised, and misshapen." Possibly this statement exemplifies the faults it names with profusion, but it also conveys the truth that the Greek work is distinguished by proportion, by modera

tion.

This moderation was a quality that it possessed from the beginning, in, say, the tenth century before Christ, until the classic Greek literature faded out of existence in the sixth century of our era, for so long was its life. What then were the conditions in which we find it appearing? The Greeks belonged to the Aryan family, the great branch of the human race that included Kelts, Slavs, Teutons, Lithuanians, Iranians, Indians, Latins and Greeks, or, possibly, more exactly, the races that first spoke these languages. The early home of the Aryans was long held to be the high plateau, north of the Himalayas, in Central Asia, but of late this hypothesis, which rested rather on ignorance of the facts than on definite knowledge, has been much shaken, and it has been. held with plausibility that the once heretical notion that it had its home in Europe has some interesting arguments in its favor. Together with this hypothesis, which seems to have owed its origin to the general impression that Asia, with its historical antiquity, must have been the mother of nations, there has also succumbed any wide confidence in a remote special connection between the Italians and the Greeks. In the absence of definite knowledge this theory has flourished, as a bit of inheritance from the loftier repute, doubtless, of Greek and Roman antiquity, but it is only a hypothesis by no means firmly established. It has been maintained that the two races, besides their common inheritance, owned reminiscences of a union merely between themselves sub