BOOKS.
A BRIDGE TO THE CLASSICS.* SOME fine day the disputants in the great controversy about the humanities will discover the existence of tho "Loeb Classical Library " and realize that its promoters and editors hove quietly achieved what both sides desire. This bilingual series of volumes, with the Latin or Greek original on the left-hand page facing a satisfactory English translation on the right, goes for to meet the views both of the classical scholars who demand the continued study of the ancient tongues, and of the moderns who, while begrudging tho time devoted by schoolboys to the dead languages, aro conscious that there is much of value and interest in the Greek and Latin authors. The classical scholar will admit that the Loeb texts are as a rule competently edited ; the names of Dr. T. E. Page, Dr. W. H. D. Rouse, and Dr. E. Cappa, the chief editors of the series, and of many of the editors of single authors, are indeed a sufficient guarantee of accurate scholarship. And the non- classical historian or man of science who cares to road the English pages in these comely little volumes will find that they are for the most part highly interesting in various ways, and not at all to be despised because they were written long ago by Greek or Latin authors. Indeed, the modernity and freahness of much of the classical writings, which cannot fail to impress any unbiassed reader, explain in great part their survival through the ages.
Take, for instance, Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War,' which has, in the hands of unsympathetic teachers, bored many generations of schoolboys. As the work of the greatest Roman, who in his middle age turned soldier to win military glory and thus further his political schemes, it is a profoundly interesting document. No other great soldier described his campaigns so well and on clearly ; Napoleon is a bad second to Cooler, and Cromwell's de- spatches, excellent as far as they go, are too brief and fragmentary to bear the comparison. Caesar fought over much of the same ground in which the armies are now entrenched. He overthrew tho Belgao in a battle of the Aisne, on the hills north of Berry-au- Bac. He routed the Atrebates in a had fight on the Sambre, near Maubeuge. He defeated the invading Germans, drove them in flight back to their own land, and followed them, building a great bridge over the Rhine which still excites the interest of military engineers. Twice he invaded Britain, as ourpresent enemies hoped to do, and he would, if time had permitted, have conquered our island. Apart from these curious and instructive incidents, many students have seen in Caesar's conquest of Gaul the origin of the unscrupulous militarism of modern Germany. Alommsen, the greatest of German historians, almost deified Caesar, and used all his literary arts to represent Caesar's Republican oppouents as meanapirited fellows who could not understand or appreciate the superman's grand design. Mommson's extravagant enthusiasm and the denunciation of Caesar as a militarist are tooth unhistorical in the true sense, but MO can well understand from the Commentaries how Caesar's drastic • (1) Caesar The Gallic War. Traaalated byy H. J. Edwards.—(2) the'. Roman Hubert, V. Translated by E. Cary.—(3) The Geography of :limbo, 1. Tranalated by H. L. Jones.—(4) &meta . lApidulae Alorales, 1. Translat d by It H. GuMmere. .—t5) Seneca** Tragedies, 11. TranalaOnt by Y. J. Itiller.—(6) The Greek Auflialogy. 11. Translated by W. E. Paton.—(7) Achilles ratios. Trauslated by a, Casette. "Loeb Classical Library." Load.; W. Ilciacmann, ICS, net cecb.1
methods may be cited for praise or blame by the opposing side; in the modern conflict that began long before this war. At any rate, the Commentaries, here admirably translated by Colonel Edwards, who is in charge of the training of cadets at Cambridge, form ono of the most remarkable books on war ever written.
Die's Roman History,° which in the spirited translation by Dr. E. Cary is to fill nine volumes, is a fairly impartial Greek writer's account of the last days of the Republic and the early Empire. The fifth volume, just issued, contains Die's narrative of the rise of the shrewd young Augustus to power, and end: with his graphic account of the sea-fight off Actium, when Augustus, " as the fight continued equal," "sent for fire from the camp" and set Mark Antony's fleet ablaze with torches fastened to javelins or pots full of charcoal and pitch hurled from engines. He had tried to avoid the use of " flame-projectors," hoping to take. the enemy's ships with their cargoes of treasure, but he failed in this, and many of his men, striving to secure the booty, "fell victims to the flames and to their own rapacity." Dio, too, is still very good reading. Strabo, the famous geographer, is necessarily technical and dull in his first volume' which details the obsolete principles of his science. But the later volumes of Dr. Horace Jones's version will be found to contain many curious scraps of information, for Strata., the well. to-do citizen of Amasia in Pontes, travelled in the age of Augustus over much of the world known to the ancients. " You could not find another peraon," he says' proudly, " among the writers on Geography who has travelled over much more of the distances just mentioned [front Armenia to Gaul, and from the Black Sea to the borders of Ethiopia] than I." And he embodied all that he had learned in the course of his travels—perhaps as companion to some great men from Pontus—in this encyclopaedic work on the Roman Empire and its fringes.
The " Moral Epistles " of Seneca! Nero's wise Minister and victim, are the polielted essays of a cultivated Roman gentleman, who adhered to the Stoic philosophy. Like Bacon, Seneca is an author to be taken in small doses, but he rewards those who read him with many a shrewd saying, elegantly expressed. In the letter " On the Futility of Learning Maxims " he says of great writers " They did not interest themselves in choice extracts ; the whole texture of their work is full of strength. There is unevenness, you know, when some objects rise conspicuous above others." His warning to preachers and orators is still pertinent : " Let them [his hoaxers] be roused to the matter and not to the style ; otherwise eloquence does them harm, making them enamoured of itself and not of the subject." And we must quote, too, his remark on Freo Will, that the wise man " escapes necessity, became ho wills to do what necessity is about to force upon him." The later Seneca,' whose tragedies delighted the learned throughout the Middle Ages and came to England from Italy at the Renaissance to exercise no small influence on early Elizabethan drama, has had little attraction for the modern world, which prefers the Greek originals that be adapted in his stilted and rhetorical Latin verse. But some of his choruses are fine, such as, in the Thyestes, the passage beginning
" Nulla son longs est ; dolor ac voluptas Invicem cedunt ; brovior voluptase" which Dr. Miller renders, in prose: " No lot eudureth long ; pain and pleasure, each in turn, give place ; more quickly pleasure." The only surviving Roman historical drama, Octavio, by an unknown author who wrote soon after the death of Nero, is translated with Seneca's conventional tragedies, to which, in its concern with a real story of crime and suffering, it affords an instructive contrast.
Mr. W. R. Paton's translation hi prose of the Greek Anthology" is not the first, and will not be the last, attempt to capture in English the fragrance of that strange and wonderful collection of occasional verse, but it is scholarly and pleasing. The second volume, devoted entirely to the sepulchral epigrams and the epigrams of St. Gregory, reminds us that melancholy ruled tho ancient world. There is a ray of hope here and there, as in Simonitlee' epigram on the Spartan deed at Plata., who, " having clothed their dear country In inextinguishable glory, donned the dark cloud of death ; and having died, yet they are not dead, for their valour's renown brings them up from the house of Hades." But most of the epigrams record a past and contemplate no future. We must conclude with a brief commendation of the lively and entertaining Greek romance, written about the year 300 by Achill. Tatius of Alexrunlriae concor g the adventures of Leueippe and Clitophon. It is far lese artistic than Daphnis and Chloe, but as a story of adventure it is briskly told, and the heroines hairbreadth escapes from one peril after another as she and the hero progress from Sidon to Alexandria, and thence to Ephesus and home again, are distinctly interesting. Mr. Geeeleo's excellent version veils one or two passages in the decent Wiecurity of Latin, but Achilles Tatius is far leas free in his language and incidents than a large proportion of the later love romances whirls descend from him and Heliodorus and Longue. He recalls vividly the forgotten days when Sidon was a Unit ing port and Ephesus a groat city, in which a Bishop, curiously enough, is represented as supervising the temple of Artemis.
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