ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE"

PROFESSOR MURRAY soon convinces his readers that he is equal to his subject, has something fresh to say about it, and is able to say it with a quite uncommon vigour. How plain and practical, for instance, is his answer to that somewhat puzzling question,—What has caused the survival of the small fragment of Greek literature that we possess? "It has secured its life by never going out of fashion for long at a time ; by appealing steadily to the book-trade throughout a number of successive epochs of taste." Of course there are

cases of what looks like preservation by accident. A great -classic has survived, say, by a single copy. But that may well have been because there were more copies of him than of another who was not quite so great. When we get below the first rank chance probably plays a great part, but, on the whole, the fittest—judged by some very catholic standard of t ness—have survived.

We must own that we are not so well satisfied with Professor Murray's treatment of the Homeric poems as we are with his volume in general. He does not seem to us sound on the great cardinal doctrine of the "Indivisible Supremacy." His theory is that the two poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, came to be known as Homer because they, and they only, were selected for recitation at the great Pan-Athenaic festival. And why were they selected ? Because "they were far more elaborately worked up' than their brethren." This does not tell us much ; it is more to the point to say because "they have more unity ; they are less like mere lays ; they have more dramatic tension and rhetorical ornament." This is all Tight. But why have they these superior qualities? Not because they were more "worked up." What Greene or Marlow wrote could never have been worked up into Shake- speare. No; they were superior because they were the work -of superior genius.

At the same time, much that Professor Murray says about the Homeric poems is admirable. On the text, on the dialect, on the subject-matter, on the indications of time and of surrounding social and political conditions, he is most in. atructive. But he rises to his best in his description of what he calls "moral growth." We object, indeed, to his saying that this "moral growth is one of the marks of the last

working over the poems," but nothing could be better than -what follows :— " It gives us the magnificent studies of Helen and Andromache, not dumb objects of barter and plunder, as they once were, but women ready to take their places in the conception of /Eschylus. It gives us the gentle and splendid chivalry of the Lycians, Sarpedon and Glaucus. It gives us the exquisite character of the swineherd Eummus ; his eager generosity towards the stranger who can tall of Odysseus, all the time that he keeps professing his incredulity ; his quaint honesty in feeding himself, his guest, and even Telemachus, on the young inferior pork, keeping the best, as far as the suitors allow, for his master (Z, 3, 80; 1r, 49); and his emotional breach of principle, accompanied -with much apology and justification, when the story has entirely won him : Bring forth the best of the hogs ! ' (C, 414). Above all, it seems to have given us the sympathetic development of Hector The scenes in Z, the parting with Andromache, the comforting of little Astyana.x frightened at his father's plume, the calm acceptance of a battle which must be fatal, and of a cause which must be lost — all these are in the essence of great imagination ; but the absolute masterpiece, one of the greatest feats of skill in imaginative literature, is the flight of Hector in X. It is simple fear, undisguised ; yet you feel that the man who flies is a brave man. The act of staying alone outside the gate is much ; you can just nerve yourself to it. But the sickening dread • A History of Ancient Greek Literature, By Gilboa Murray, M.A. London : 'W. Heinemann.

of Achilles distant oncoming grows as you wait, till it simply cannot be borne. The man must fly ; no one can blame him ; it is only one more drop in the cup of divine cruelty, which is to leave Hector dead, Troy burned, Astyanax butchered, and Andromache her enemy's slave."

(We have omitted Professor Murray's contrast between an old poet who hated Hector and his sympathetic successor and improver.) When our author gets to the firmer ground of writers whose personalities are known to us his criticism is uniformly ad- mirable. Here is what he says of Simonides

"If one could use the word 'perfect' of any work of art, it might apply to some of Sinionides's poems on the events of the great war—the ode on Artemisium, the epitaph on those who died at Thermopylm. They represent the extreme of Greek

salphrosyne '—self-mastery, healthy-mindedness—severe beauty, utterly free from exaggeration or trick—plain speech, to be spoken in the presence of simple and eternal things : Stranger, bear word to the Spartans that we lie here obedient to their charge.' He is great, too, in the realm of human pity. The little frag- ment on Dame adrift in the chest justifies the admiration of ancient critics for his unsurpassed pathos.' On the other hand, he is essentially an Ionian and a man of the world, one of the fathers of the Enlightenment. He has no splendour, no passion, no religious depth. The man who had these stood on the wrong side in his country's life-struggle ; and Greece turned to Simonides, not to Pindar, to make the record of its heroic dead."

The comparison and contrast here suggested between Simonides and his illustrious contemporary Pindar is worked out in what is perhaps the finest and most subtle piece of criticism in the whole volume. The one defect in Pindar's greatness, that which makes him in a way "ineffectual," to use the epithet which Matthew Arnold applied to Shelley, is that he wanted what Simonides had in so eminent a degree, the practical application of his genius to real life :—

"Often in thinking over the best pieces of Pindar—the majestic organ-playing, the grave strong magic of language, the lightning. flashes of half-revealed mystery—one wonders why this man is not counted the greatest poet that ever lived, why he has not done more, mattered more. The answer perhaps is that he was a poet and nothing else."

And again :—

"The strange air of abject worldliness which he sometimes wears, comes not because his idealism forsakes him, but because he has no sense of fact. The thing he loved was real heroism. But he could not see it out of its traditional setting ; and when the setting was there, his own imagination sufficed to create the heroism."

Scarcely, if at all, inferior to this is the chapter on Thucydides. Incidentally Professor Murray brings out a side of the great historian's character which is commonly ignored, and even discredited. That he was elected General in the ninth year of the war, that he somehow failed in relieving Amphipolis, and suffered disgrace and twenty years of exile in consequence, every one knows. The common explanation is that he was a man of letters out of his place, and that want of practical ability made him lose a great opportunity. Professor Murray has a quite different reading of the affair. Thucydides, in his view, was a man of action. He set before himself the task of writing the story of the war absolutely as it was. "But he meant to do more than study it ; he would seek to win it." His opportunity came when Brasidas was attacking the Athenian dependencies in Thrace. Thucydides might have saved the important towns of Amphipolis and Eion. For that he had only to appear in the Strymon with his squadron. But that was not enough for him. He played for a larger stake. He would not only save a couple of towns, he would destroy Brasidas, and this by raising against him the Thracian tribes, to whose chiefs he was akin. Unfortunately he had a feeble col- league, disaffected dependencies, and an opponent of com- manding genius. So the great coup failed. He saved Eion, but Amphipolis was lost, and his countrymen, judging by results—as they could hardly help doing—rewarded him with twenty years of exile. Professor Murray's excursion into the domain of the historian is not unprofitable.

On the style and the closely connected subject of the text of Thucydides Professor Murray does not commit himself. That the style as it stands is a very strange phenomenon, "long passages of masterly expression, with short ones of what looks like gibberish," and in consequence that the text must have been much tampered with, he admits. But Dr. Rutherford's bold attempt at restoration he cannot accept.

The most important positive evidence that we have, the corn- parison of the treaty of B.C. 420 (V. 47) as it stands in Thncydides, and as it still exists on the atone on which it was engraved, shows a number of differences in points of detail, but "no difference in meaning." On the whole we may con- clude that the text is corrupt, but not sp as to interfere with the general value of the work. Of the historian's character he speaks with emphatic praise. "It needs some blindness not to feel the implication of a very earnest moral standard through- out." "The essential fairness and coolness of the writer's mind remain unbroken." "He seems to be a man with strong personal opinions, and a genius for putting them aside." And then comes a remarkably fine passage, which shows Professor Murray's power of sympathy, a quality in which he surpasses, we think, all his predecessors :—

"The men of the early fourth century are living among ruins, among shattered hopes, discredited ideals, blunted and bewildered aims. The best of them 'has seen the madness of the multitude. He knows that no politician is righteous, nor is there any champion of justice at whose side he may fight and be saved.' In public life he would be a man fallen among wild beasts.' It is better that he retires under the shelter of a wall while the hurrying wind and the storm of dust and sleet go by.' Testifying solitarily among these is the old returned exile of the time of Pericles. His life is over now, with- out distinction, his Athens ruined beyond recognition, the old mis- tress of his love dead and buried. But he keeps firm the memory of his real city and his leader—the man whom they called a dema- gogue because he was too great for them to understand ; who never took a gift from any man ; who dwelt in austere supremacy; who, if he had only lived, or his counsels been followed, would have saved and realised the great Athens that was now gone from the earth. Other men of the day wrote pamphlets and argu- ments. Thucydides has not the heart to argue. He has studied the earlier and the mythical times, and prepared that marvellous introduction. He has massed all the history of his own days as no man ever had massed history before. He knows ten times more than any of these writers, and he means to know more still before he gives out his book. Above all, he is going to let the truth speak for itself. No man shall be able to contradict him, no man show that he is ever unfair. And he will clothe all his story in words like the old words of Gorgias, Prodicus, Anti- phon, and Pericles himself. He will wake the great voices of the past to speak to this degenerate world."

Of Professor Murray's treatment of Herodotus, the Dramatists, of Plato, we can only say that it is equal to those portions of his work that we have selected for notice. Nor can we do more than mention some fine specimens of translation that are scattered throughout the volume. We have seldom found a book that has given us more pleasure than this.