IT is somewhat curious that as attacks on classical study
grow continually more vigorous, so the output of books connected with it seems steadily to increase. The number of classical school-books is now legion, more learned volumes follow one another rapidly, and the present year has seen the completion of three works each of which exhibits in a different way the zeal and ability of English scholars. The chief of them both in general interest and importance is the new
* (1) Corpus Poetarum Latinorunt. Edited by Professor Postgate, Vol. IL, Part V. London: G. Bell and Sons. [Os. net.)—(2) An Introduction to Greek Epigraphy. By Dr. E. S. Roberts and Professor E. A. Gardner. Vol H. Cambridge: at the University Press. [21s. J—(3) A Chapter In the History of Annotation. By Dr. W. G. Rutherford. Loudon: Mo.cmilLtu and Co. r2.5s. net.]
edition of the Corpus Poetarunt Latinorunt, of which the first part appeared in 1893, and which has now reached its termination. No one with any taste for Latin poetry can fail to cherish a certain affection for the old Corpus, and for the pious memory of William Sidney Walker, who edited it single-handed in 1827. It is a clumsy and perhaps not very accurate volume, but familiarity had made us tolerant of its bulk and tender to its errors. "Books." however, "have their day," even the stoutest of them, and the two slimmer volumes of the present edition must now finally oust their almost nonagenarian predecessor, to which they are beyond question in every way superior. The work, indeed, which Professor Postgate, with the aid of seventeen other scholars, has now brought to an end is wholly admirable. The print is of the clearest, the ample breadth of the pages gives room for annotation, and, above all, the text has been revised with scrupulous care and supplemented by an apparatus criticus which in the briefest space affords all reasonable information. .Praise, however, is needless, for the earlier parts have already won universal approval; and we have only to add that this concluding part, in which Mr. J. D. Duff is responsible for Juvenal and Professor A. E. Housman for Martial, seems to be fully equal to them, although many will regret that, while a writer like Nemesianus is included in it, Ausonius and Claudian are shut out. Possibly they may belong to what the introduction calls "the post-mortem period" of Latin literature ; but the merits of Claudian are beyond question, and, although the editor goes somewhat out of his way to sneer at Ausonius, we cannot forget that he wrote :— " Collige, virgo, roses, dum flos nevus et nova pubes, Et memor eats aevum sic properare tram," and that among the delightful verses he addressed to the Professors of Bordeaux are to be found such happy phrases . as that Jffentis agitator meae which is still the perfect definition of a good teacher. It appears, however, that Professor Postgate has some hope of publishing a third volume which shall contain not only these writers and some works of uncertain authorship, but also Prudentius and other Christian poets ; nor, we think, would such a volume receive a less warm welcome than the present ones so richly merit. In attractiveness Greek epigraphy cannot, of course, compete with Latin poetry ; but the second volume of his Introduction to it which the Master of Caius has now published in conjunction with Professor E. A. Gardner is as clear, careful, and learned as the former one which he edited by himself in 1887, and, together with it, will form an invaluable guide to all students of a subject which fresh discoveries are continually making more important. We miss, however, in this new volume, which deals only with later inscriptions from about the fourth century B.C., those examples of archaic Greek script which made many pages of its predecessor almost fascinating in their mystery. Indeed, trying to read some of the inscriptions there exhibited has all the charm of making out a complicated cipher, and the pranks played by some ill-behaved letters of the primitive Greek alphabet would stir the envy of the most erratic schoolboy who ever scrawled a Greek exercise. Still, even decently written inscriptions are often so defaced and mutilated as to present a sufficiently pretty puzzle, and the skill exhibited in their restoration, as illustrated in this volume, is sometimes marvellous, while they often convey information of high value to students of law, history, or manners, and certainly "bring facts nearer home" to every one. A list, for instance, of the tribute exacted by Athens from her subject States in 453 B.C. does unquestionably give a sense of actuality to history, although to say that "such quota lists parade before us the greatness of the Athenian empire more vividly than the narrative even of Thucydides " seems to be the language of exaggeration. No such dull record, though it stand graven in the stone for ever, is so truly vivid as the living words of a great writer, nor does the bodily eye always convey the clearest sense of reality. We do not understand history more genuinely because we can still see the sherd on which some voter scratched " Themisthocles," or still read an in- scription which commemorates Marathon. The names of Aristophanes and Sophocles confronting us on a base give- no new vigour to their verse, nor does a record of the sums ex- pended on "the chryselephantine statue of Athena sculptured by Pheidias " convey any fresh insight into Greek art. Epigraphists, however, may well be pardoned if they magnify their own office. The human mind somehow clings to the material, and these stone records of Athens do give a certain feeling of familiarity which nothing else can afford. We seem to come into actual touch with Athenian life when we read, exactly as the Athenians them- selves read it, some announcement that the people had voted to give Alexander a golden crown at -the cost of ninety-seven stators, that some Guild had resolved to put up a portrait of its treasurer, or that some tribe formally thanks a aorague for his liberality in order that others may be "emulous of like glory." And how many essays on ancient religion is it not worth to see the accounts which show how Athenian statesmen financed a war by "borrowing" from the treasuries of the gods and solemnly crediting their accounts with interest at one-tenth of the current human rate, or to peruse a list of the property of some goddess which includes such articles as "a worn shift," "a female himation richly bordered with sea-purple," and "a frog-green coat" ? Or, again, we turn a page and contemplate a tombstone that still innocuously imprecates "fever, quartan ague, and elephantiasis" upon those who disturb it, or a leaden plate which "in archaic flovcrrpoctiaM, writing" still records the desire of some unknown zealot to send no less than six ladies to the devil. It is not only the student of Greek history who finds food for meditation in such inscriptions as these. They come home to every one who has a natural interest in his kind, and "finds nothing alien that is human," even although it be Greek.
The third book on our list is one of the most curious, and. at the same time most courageous, works that a scholar has ever written. It completes -the two volumes of Scholia Aristo- phanica which were published by Dr. Rutherford in 1896, and are so cold and dry that, like a brut champagne iced to freezing-point, only the most educated taste can appreciate their unquestioned excellence. They are volumes which few read for pleasure, but which look well upon the shelf and which dignify a reference, for, as we all know, to quote the scholiasts is a sure means to overawe the vulgar. But now common folk need no longer live in dread of those departed pedants. The great scholar who devoted two volumes to emending and elucidating their comments on Aristophanes now, with a heroism unparalleled in the annals of learning, publishes the proof that he has spent all his labour upon vanity. For page after page he records, classifies, and analyses the "stuff" which, when Alexandrine learning had become "distorted and devitalised " at Rome, incapable professors—" smatterers and miss-the-matters" he calls them —jotted down on the margin of their texts in order to illus- trate their "lecturettes." Their notes were those of men whose ideal was "literary affectation, mechanical erudition, and copybook philosophy," and who lived in an age when "educated persons, from Emperor to schoolmaster, and schoolboy too, trudged along the same old road, floundering in a sludge of rotten learning," while "pedantry and inanity had the crown of the causeway "; and Dr. Rutherford, having himself "floundered in the sludge," and happily found his feet at last, is resolved to warn other students from the same treacherous and fatal path. With equal industry and learning he sets the scholia before our eyes so that we may judge for ourselves of their infinite stupidity and utter emptiness. Nor is the toil which he has bestowed on this mass of rubbish without a clear purpose. He knows how grave is the risk that "contact with the alert and adventurous Greek mind" may soon "cease to play any considerable part in English education," and he believes that this risk arises from that "smother of annotation" which often in modern teach- ing serves only to " obscure " the living word. He attacks the scholiasts, but he has an eye on the schoolmasters and scribblers of to-day. Deterrent, indeed, as his subject appears at first sight, and tedious as it may be to wade through his discussion of the twenty-one tropes or the twelve figures of rhetoric, yet the whole work deserves the careful study of all interested in the teaching of Greek literature. For the "sins of the rhetors, their damnable dogmas of Atticism and imitation, their stale teaching, perplexed and finical, paltry yet pretentious, and their 'crazy rules to make men wits by rote,' " are certainly not unknown either in our schools or Universities. How to teach Greek, or any other, literature is a difficult problem with which Dr. Rutherford
unhappily does not deal, but if he fails to show us the right road, he has at least given us a forcible and much needed warning against taking the wrong one.
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