Some -Books of the Week
BRILLIANT as is all the work of the editors and their colleagues in New Chapters -in the History of Greek Literature, Second
Series, edited by J. U. Powell and E. K. Barber (Clarendon Press, 15s.), and its predecessor, the most shining geni is undoubtedly the chapter on Menander. KnoWn to us till
recently as the chief poet of the Athenian New Comedy,
transmitted' through the Latin' Comedies of Plautus and Terence, he was thought by some of us comnicinplaeeand
even vulgar. But now by the aid of, at most, seven hundred lines of one play, a few fragments of others, stray lines, lists of titles and such sketchy material, Professor Gilbert Murray gives 'us, with the sure touch of a maktercirafts- man, a portrait of the gentle; witty Athenian man of letters living in a world where all that he could value was falling in ruins. And we have reconstructed for us from the fragments the terrors and the tragedies, the humorous and pathetic paradoxes ,Of so topsy-turvy a world as that which the Macedonian triumphs created for a man of culture. And at last we realize how the materialism of Rome managed to capture the form, nay to portray the very characters, without appreciation of the spirit within them.. The way in which from the very dustheaps of Egypt, from tombs, from paving stones, from every_ substance on which men have inscribed their thoughts, scholars are patiently remaking the mosaic of the life and letters of ancient Greece is amazingly shown in this symposium of scholars. Lyric poetry, history, private letters, medical treatises, and a great deal of hitherto unknown music have been rescued and after treatment,. both scientific and artistic, pieiented to connoisseurs in this invaluable book.
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