The Greek 'World under Roman Sway, from Polybius to Plutarch.
By J. P. Mahaffy. (Macmillan and Co.)—Tho year AB B.C. witnessed the greatest event of the ancient world. In that year the heritage of Greece fell to the Roman Republic. As Professor Mahaffy points out, it might well have been other- wise. Had Alexander not died in the full flush of success, the great empire which spread round the Mediterranean as a vast lake, from the Western ocean to the Eastern deserts, from the frontiers of Northern frost to those of Southern heats, might have been Macedonian in polity, not Roman. But the fall of Corinth did not entail the ruin of the Greek race, though it undoubtedly did involve the eventual degradation of Greece proper. Hellenism, though prostrate, was not dead, and even drew renewed vigour from the passing of the Hellenic world under the iron dominion of Rome. It is the history rather, perhaps, of the Hellenic intellect than of the Hellenic provinces under Roman sway, that Mr. Mahaffy has set himself to narrate in this volume. The subject is one of great interest, and has been little studied. In Mr. Mahaffy's hands it is not merely adequately treated from the point of view of scholarship, but with a grasp and philosophic power too often lacking in work of this kind. The Romans began by admiring the Greeks, but soon came to despise them. Cicero, to whose Hellenism a most valuable chapter is devoted illustrating an aspect of the great orator's intellectual life scarcely noticed by his panegyrists, was an ardent lover of Greek literature and of the intellectual qualities of the Greek race. But their fickleness, their want of sincerity, and their general untrustworthiness excited his unmeasured contempt. Mr. Mahaffy imputes these defects to their political annihilation by Rome. But there must have been deeper causes, for to the principal Hellenic cities a very large measure of local independence was left. Probably the dispersal of the Greeks over the whole East had as much to do with their degradation, by destroying the bonds of political unity, as Roman oppression. When the course of history brought about the establishment of the Byzantine Empire, it outlasted that of Rome by a thousand years. Of the social life and characteristics of the Greek cities, especially in Asia Minor, a graphic picture is drawn in Mr. Mahaffy's tenth and eleventh chapters, and the translated extracts from Dion Chrysostom, the scarcely read traveller and orator of the second century on poverty and the choice of books, display a blended good sense and humour as modern as the picturesqueness of many of his descriptions.
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