Mosaics of Grecian History | Page 3

to Law Studies, "is dry, terse, and exact--not fitted, perhaps, for the historical tyro, but most acceptable to the advanced student who is in quest of things."
GEORGE GROTE, Member of Parliament, and a London banker, who wrote a history of Greece in twelve volumes, published from 1846 to 1855, has been styled, by way of eminence, the historian of Greece, because his work is universally admitted by critics to be the best for the advanced student that has yet been written. The London Athen?um styles his history "a great literary undertaking, equally notable whether we regard it as an accession of standard value in our language, or as an honorable monument of what English scholarship can do." The London Quarterly Review says: "Errors the most inveterate, that have been handed down without misgiving from generation to generation, have been for the first time corrected by Mr. Grote; facts the most familiar have been presented in new aspects and relations; things dimly seen, and only partially apprehended previously, have now assumed their true proportions and real significance; while numerous traits of Grecian character; and new veins of Grecian thought and feeling, have been revealed to the eyes of scholars by Mr. Grote's searching criticism, like new forms of animated nature by the microscope."
The general character of the work has been farther well summed up by Sir Archibald Alison. He says: "A decided liberal, perhaps even a republican, in politics, Mr. Grote has labored to counteract the influence of Mitford in Grecian history, and construct a history of Greece from authentic materials, which should illustrate the animating influence of democratic freedom upon the exertions of the human mind. In the prosecution of this attempt he has displayed an extent of learning, a variety of research, a power of combination, which are worthy of the very highest praise, and have secured for him a lasting place among the historians of modern Europe."
We may also mention, in this connection, the valuable and scholarly work of the German professor, Ernst Curtius (1857-'67), in five volumes, translated by A. Ward (1871-'74). His sympathies are monarchical, and his views more nearly accord with those of Mitford and Thirlwall than with those of Grote.
The work by William Smith, in one volume, 1865, is an excellent summary of Grecian history, as is also that of George W. Cox, 1876. The former work, which to a considerable extent is an abridgment of Grote, has been brought down, in a Boston edition, from the Roman Conquest to the middle of the present century, by Dr. Felton, late President of Harvard College. President Felton has also published two volumes of scholarly lectures on Ancient and Modern Greece (1867).
The works devoted to limited periods of Grecian history and special departments of research are very numerous. Among the most valuable of the former is the History of the Peloponnesian War, by the Greek historian Thucydides, of which there are several English versions. He was born in Athens, about the year 471 B.C. His is one of the ablest histories ever written.
Herodotus, the earliest and best of the romantic historians, sometimes called the "Father of History," was contemporary with Thucydides. He wrote, in a charming style, an elaborate work on the Persian and Grecian wars, most of the scenes of which he visited in person; and in numerous episodes and digressions he interweaves the most valuable history that we have of the early Asiatic nations and the Egyptians; but he indulges too much in the marvelous to be altogether reliable."
Of the numerous works of Xenophon, an Athenian who is sometimes called the "Attic Muse," from the simplicity and beauty of his style, the best known and the most pleasing are the Anab'asis, the Memorabil'ia of Socrates, and the Cyropedi'a, a political romance. He was born about 443 B.C. The best English translation of his works is by Watson, in Harper's "New Classical Library."
The work of the Greek historian, Polybius, originally in forty volumes, of which only five remain entire covered a period from the downfall of the Macedonian power to the subversion of Grecian liberty by the Romans, 146 B.C. It is a work of great accuracy, but of little rhetorical polish, and embraces much of Roman history from which Livy derived most of the materials for his account of the wars with Carthage.
In the first century of our era, Plutarch, a Greek biographer, wrote the "Parallel Lives" of forty-six distinguished Greeks and Romans--a charming and instructive work, translated by John and William Langhorne in 1771, and by Arthur Hugh Clough in 1858.
A history of Greece, in seven volumes, by George Finlay, a British historian, long resident at Athens, is noted for a thorough knowledge of Greek topography, art, and antiquity. The completed work embraces a period from the conquest of Greece by the Romans