Problems in Greek History E-Book

J. P. Mahaffy

• Herausgeber: Jovian Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 274

Beschreibung

There are scientific problems and literary tasks which can be worked out once for all, or which, at least, admit of final solution, to the lasting fame of him that finds that solution, as well as to the permanent benefit of civilized man. There are others, more numerous and far more interesting, which are ever being solved, finally perhaps in the opinion of the discoverer, and even of his generation, but ever arising again, and offering fresh difficulties and fresh attractions to other minds and to newer generations of men...

Leseprobe

PROBLEMS IN GREEK HISTORY

J.P. Mahaffy

JOVIAN PRESS

Thank you for reading. If you enjoy this book, please leave a review.

All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

Copyright © 2017 by J.P. Mahaffy

Published by Jovian Press

Interior design by Pronoun

Distribution by Pronoun

ISBN: 9781537823218

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

APPENDIX.

CHAPTER I.

~

Our Earlier Historians of Greece.

§ 1. THERE ARE SCIENTIFIC problems and literary tasks which can be worked out once for all, or which, at least, admit of final solution, to the lasting fame of him that finds that solution, as well as to the permanent benefit of civilized man. There are others, more numerous and far more interesting, which are ever being solved, finally perhaps in the opinion of the discoverer, and even of his generation, but ever arising again, and offering fresh difficulties and fresh attractions to other minds and to newer generations of men.

I will cite the largest instances, as the most obvious illustration of this second class. The deep mysteries of Religion, the dark problems of Knowing and Being, which have occupied the theologian and the metaphysician for thousands of years, are still unsettled, and there is hardly an age of thinking men which does not attack these questions afresh, and offer new systems and new solutions for the acceptance of the human race. Nor can we say that in these cases new facts have been discovered, or new evidence adduced; it is rather that mankind feels there is more in the mystery than is contained in the once accepted explanation, and endeavours by some new manipulation of the old arguments to satisfy the eternal craving for that mental rest which will never be attained till we know things face to face.

But perhaps these are instances too lofty for my present purpose: I can show the same pertinacious tendency to re-solve literary problems of a far humbler kind. How striking is the fact that the task of translating certain great masterpieces of poetry seems never completed, and that in the face of scores of versions, each generation of scholars will attack afresh Homer’s Iliad, Dante’s Divina Commedia, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, and Goethe’s Faust! There are, I believe, forty English versions of Faust. How many there are of the Iliad and the Divina Commedia, I have not ascertained; but of the former there is a whole library, and of the latter we may predict with certainty that the latest version will not be the last. Not only does each generation find for itself a new ideal in translation,—the fine version of the Iliad by Pope is now regarded with scorn,—but each new aspirant is discontented with the earlier renderings of the passages he himself loves best; and so year after year we see the same attempt made, often with great but never with universally accepted success. For there are always more beauties in the old masterpiece than have been conveyed, and there are always weaknesses in the translation, which show after a little wear.

This eternal freshness in great masterpieces of poetry which ever tempts new translators, is also to be found in great historical subjects, especially in the history of those nations which have left a permanent mark on the world’s progress. There is no prospect that men will remain satisfied with the extant histories, however brilliant, of England or of France, even for an account of the periods which have long since elapsed, and upon which no new evidence of any importance can be found. Such is likewise the case with the histories of Greece and Rome. No doubt there is frequently new material discovered; the excavator may in a month’s digging find stuff for years of speculation. No doubt there is an oscillation in the appreciation even of well-sifted materials: a new theory may serve to rearrange old facts and present them in a new light.

But quite apart from all this, men will be found to re-handle these great histories merely for the sake of re-handling them. In the words of the very latest of these attempts: ‘Though we can add nothing to the existing records of Greek history, the estimate placed upon their value and the conclusions drawn from them are constantly changing; and for this reason the story which has been told so often will be told anew from time to time so long as it continues to have an interest for mankind,—that is, let us hope, so long as mankind continues to exist.’

§ 2. Perhaps the history of Greece has more right than any other to excite this interest, since the effects of that country and its people are probably far greater, certainly more subtle and various, than those of any other upon our modern life. It is curious that this truth is becoming recognized universally by the very generation which has begun to agitate against the general teaching of Greek in our higher schools. Nobody now attributes any real leading to the Romans in art, in philosophy, in the sciences, nay, even in the science of politics. If their literature was in some respects great, every Roman knew and confessed that this greatness was due to the Greeks; if their practical treatment of law and politics was certainly admirable, the theory of the latter was derived from Hellenic speculation.

And when the originality of our Roman teachers is reduced to its very modest proportions, there is no other ancient nation that can be named among our schoolmasters except the Hebrews. Here there has been great exaggeration, and it has not yet been sifted and corrected, as in the case of Rome. It is still a popular truism that while we owe all we have of intellectual and artistic refinement to the Greeks, in one great department of civilization, and that the highest, we owe them nothing, but are debtors to the Semite spirit,—to the clear revelation and the tenacious dogma conveyed to the world by the Jews. Like many such truisms, this statement contains some truth, but a great deal of falsehood. When we have surveyed the earlier centuries, we shall revert to this question, and show how far the prejudice in favour of the Semite has ousted the Greek from his rightful place. Even serious history is sometimes unjust, much more the hasty generalizations of theologians or mere literary critics. For the history of religion will be found to rest, like everything good which we possess, partly upon a Greek basis; but of course mainly on that portion of Greek history which has only recently risen into public notice among our scholars,—I mean the later and the spiritual development of the nation when the conquests of Alexander had brought the whole ancient world under its sway.

So the subject is still quite fresh, and even the evidence of books is as yet unexhausted, not to speak of the yearly increment we obtain from the keen labour of many excavators. The Mittheilungen of the German Institute at Athens, the Bulletin de Correspondance hellénique, the English Hellenic Journal, and even the daily papers at Athens, teem with accounts of new discoveries. A comparison of the newest guide to Greece, the Guide-Joanne (1891), with the older books of the kind will show the wonderful increase in our knowledge of pre-historic antiquities. These recent books and reviews are following in the wake of Dr. Schliemann, whose great researches have set us more new problems than we are likely to solve in the present century.

§ 3. What I purpose, therefore, to do in this Essay is to review the general lines followed by the great historians of Greece of the last three generations; to show the main points in which each of them excels, and where each of them still shows a deficiency. I shall then notice some current misconceptions, as well as some errors to be corrected by interesting additions to our evidence, even since the last of our larger histories has appeared; and in doing this shall specially touch on those more disputed and speculative questions which are on principle omitted in practical and non-controversial books. By this means we shall ascertain in a general way what may be expected from any fresh attempt in Greek history, and where there still seems room for discovery or for the better establishing of truths already discovered, but not yet accepted in the current teaching of our day. Whatever occasional digressions may occur will all be subordinate to this general plan, which is in fact an essay, not upon Greek history, but upon the problems of Greek history. We shall conclude with some reflections upon the artistic lessons of Greek life which are at last becoming accessible to the larger public.

§ 4. I need not go back to the period of Universal Histories, such as that of Bossuet or of Rollin, which were only adequate before special studies had accumulated vast materials from the records of each separate nation. In our own day there are not wanting universal histories, though even the acknowledged genius and the enormous experience of Ranke were insufficient for the task as it now presents itself. The first larger Greek histories known to me are those of Gillies and of Mitford,—the former now totally forgotten; the latter only remembered because it stimulated a great successor to write his famous antidote.

Yet the work of Gillies, first published in 1786, was continued by the author, thirty-five years later, down to the reign of Augustus, when the sixth edition, a stately book in eight volumes, was published. There is no lack of merit in the work; but the writer’s standpoint will be apparent from the opening of his Dedication to the King: ‘Sir, the history of Greece exposes the dangerous turbulence of democracy, and arraigns the despotism of tyrants. By describing the incurable evils inherent in every form of republican policy, it evinces the inestimable benefits resulting to liberty itself from the lawful domination of hereditary kings.’ One might imagine Gillies a Hellenistic author dedicating his work to a Ptolemy or a Seleucus.

It is clear enough, though I know not the details of his life, that the horrors of the French Revolution had sunk deep into his soul. This is quite certain in the case of Mitford, a gentleman of fortune, whose education in Greek was early interrupted, but whose long residence at Nice brought him into contact with St. Croix and Villoison, two of the most famous Grecians of that day. After his return in 1777 from France, he found himself a man of leisure and importance, in the same Yeomanry corps with Gibbon, whose friendship he gained, and at whose suggestion he wrote his once popular history.

Mitford wrote in a Tory spirit, and with a distinct feeling of the political significance of Greek history as an example to modern men. He had upon his side the authority of almost every great thinker produced in the days of Hellenic greatness. All these speculators, in their pictures of ideal, as well as their criticisms of the actual, States, regard thorough-going democracy as an evil, and its abuses as the main cause of the early decay of Hellenic greatness. They all point with respect and pride to the permanence and consistency of Spartan life as indicating the sort of government likely to produce the best and most enduring results. Mitford, therefore, not only deserves the credit of having taken up Greek history as a political study, but he undoubtedly represents the body of learned opinion among the Greeks themselves upon the subject. The literary classes, so far as we can judge from what is extant of their works, were not usually radical or democratic, and it was very natural, in a generation which had witnessed the awful results of a democratic upheaval in France, to appeal to this evidence as showing that the voice of history was against giving power to the masses, and taking it from the classes, of any society.

What popularity Mitford attained can only now be inferred from the editions of his work demanded, coupled with the all-important fact that he called forth two tremendous refutations,—the monumental works of Thirlwall and of Grote.

§ 5. It is very curious that these two famous histories should have been undertaken (like Gillies’ and Mitford’s) nearly at the same time, and both of them by way of correction for the strong anti-republican views of Mitford. It is also remarkable that each author explicitly declared himself so satisfied with the work of the other that he would not have entered upon the task, had he known of his rival’s undertaking. This, however, seems hard to fit in with the dates, seeing that Thirlwall’s book began to appear many years earlier than that of Grote. In any case the former represents a different kind of work, or I should rather say an earlier stage of work, and therefore comes logically as well as chronologically first.

The Bishop of St. David’s was a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, a scholar trained in all the precision and refinement of the public schools, a man accustomed to teach the classics and to enforce accuracy of form and correctness of critical judgment. He had also what was then rather a novelty, and what separates him from his distinguished Oxford contemporaries—Gaisford and Clinton—a competent knowledge of German, as well as of other languages, and a consequent acquaintance with the recent studies of the Germans, who were then beginning to write about classics in German instead of using the Latin language.

John Stuart Mill, who, when a young man, belonged to a debating society along with Thirlwall, thought him the very best speaker he had ever heard. The qualities which attracted Mill were not passion or imaginative rhetoric, but clear, cold, reasoning powers, together with a full command of the language best suited to express accurately the speaker’s argument.

These are the qualities which made all Thirlwall’s work enduring and universally respected. His episcopal charges were certainly the best delivered in his day, and his history, without ever exciting any enthusiasm, has so steadily maintained its high position, that of recent years it is perhaps rather rising than falling in popular esteem.

But the absence of passion, since it checks enthusiasm in the reader, is a fatal want in any historian. The case before us is a remarkable instance. Both the learning and fairness of Thirlwall are conspicuous. It is difficult for any competent reader to avoid wondering at his caution in receiving doubtful evidence, and his acuteness in modestly suggesting solutions which have since been proved by further evidence. Of course the great body of our materials, the Greek classics, lay before him; the pioneers of modern German philology such as Wolf, Hermann, K. O. Müller, Welcker, were accessible to him. In ordering and criticising these materials he left nothing to be desired, and the student of to-day who is really intimate with Thirlwall’s history may boast that he has a sound and accurate view of all the main questions in the political and social development of the Hellenic nation. But he will never have been carried away with enthusiasm; he will never remember with delight great passages of burning force or picturesque beauty such as those which adorn the histories of Gibbon or of Arnold. He has before him the type of a historian like Hallam, whose work would be the most instructive possible on its period, were it not the dullest of writing. It would be unfair to Thirlwall to say he is dull, but he is too cold and passionless for modern readers. To use the words of Bacon:Lumen siccum et aridum ingenia madida offendit et torret.

The mention of these qualities in Thirlwall suggests to me that I ought not to omit some mention of the great work of a very similar student—this, too, stimulated by Mitford—I mean the Fasti Hellenici, ‘a civil and literary chronology of the Greeks from the earliest times to the death of Augustus.’ It is not, properly speaking, a history, but the materials for the fullest possible history of Greece, with all its offshoots, such as the Hellenistic kingdoms of Hither Asia, arranged and tabulated with a patience and care to which I know no parallel. Any one who examines this work will wonder that it could have been accomplished within the fifteen years during which the several volumes appeared. It is astonishing how difficult the student finds it to detect a passage in the obscurest author that Clinton has not seen; and his ordinary habit is not to indicate, but to quote all the passages verbatim. The book is quite unsuited for a schoolboy, but to any serious enquirer into the history of Greece it is positively indispensable. The influence of Gaisford, then probably the greatest of Greek scholars, obtained for the book the adequate setting of the Clarendon Press. Clinton worked with a calmness and deliberation quite exceptional; and though he knew no German, had so completely mastered his subject that the Germans have since indeed translated, re-edited, and abridged him: they have never been able to supersede him. Even when he is wrong or obsolete, he can be corrected by the full materials he has laid before the reader. But the perfect coldness of his reasoning, the absence of all passion, the abnegation of all style, make the book unapproachable except to a specialist.

§ 6. For the same reason Thirlwall’s great and solid book was ousted at once from public favour by the appearance of Grote’s history. Two minds more unlike can hardly be imagined, admitting that they were both honest and hard workers, and that both knew German as well as Greek, Latin, and French. Instead of a cold, calm college don, loving cautious statement and accurate rendering as the highest of virtues; instead of a mild and orthodox Liberal both in religion and politics,—we have a business man, foreign to university life and its traditions, a sceptic in religion, a Positivist in philosophy, and above all an advanced Radical in politics, invading the subject hitherto thought the preserve and apanage of the pedagogue or the pedant. Of course he occasionally missed the exact force of an optative, or the logic of a particle; he excited the fury of men like Shilleto, to whom accuracy in Greek prose was the one perfection, containing all the Law and the Prophets. What was far worse, he even mistook and misstated evidence which bore against his theories, and was quite capable of being unfair, not from dishonesty, but from prejudice.

He lived in the days when the world was recovering from its horror at the French Revolution, and the reaction against the monarchical restorations in central Europe was setting in. He was persuaded that the great social and political results of Greek history were because of, and not in spite of, the prevalence of democracy among its States, and because of the number and variety of these States. He would not accept the verdict of all the old Greek theorists who voted for the rule of the one or the enlightened few; and he wrote what may be called a great political pamphlet in twelve volumes in vindication of democratic principles. It was this idea which not only marshalled his facts, but lent its fire to his argument; and when combined with his Radicalism in religion and philosophy, produced a book so remarkable, that, however much it may be corrected and criticised, it will never be superseded. It is probably the greatest history among the many great histories produced in this century; and though very inferior in style to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, will rank next to it as a monument of English historical genius.

There are chapters of speculation, such as those on the Greek myths and their historical value, on the Homeric question, on Socrates and the Sophists, which mark an epoch in the history of their respective subjects, and have been ever since gradually moulding even the most obstinate opponents, who at first rejected his theories with scorn. There are chapters of narrative, such as that on the battle of Platæa, or the Athenian defeat at Syracuse, where he so saturates himself with the tragic grandeur of the events, and with the consummate art of his great Greek predecessors, that his somewhat clumsy and unpolished style takes their colour and rises to the full dignity of his great subject. But the greatest novelty among the many which adorn his immortal work is his admirable apologia for democracy,—for that form of government where legislation is the result of discussion; where the minority feels bound to acquiesce in the decision of the majority; and where the administrators of the law are the servants, not the masters, of the nation, appointed with defined powers to terminable magistracies, and liable to indictment for exceeding or abusing these powers. He occupied the whole body of the book in illustrating how the voluntary submission of the free citizen to control of this kind, the alternation in the same men of commanding and obeying, and the loyalty and patriotism thus engendered, were far higher social factors than the enforced or unreasoning submission of the masses to the dictates of a monarch or a close aristocracy.

§ 7. To the first great objection,—that of the Greek theorists,—that the greatness of democracies is but transient, and must rapidly degenerate into the fickle and violent rule of a mob, he might have answered, that these theorists themselves never contemplated human institutions as permanent, and even assumed that the ideal State of their dreams must be subject to exhaustion and decay. Still more might he have urged that not a long life, but a great life, was the real test of the excellence of the body politic, and that centuries of Spartan respectability had done nothing for the world in comparison with the brief bloom of Attic genius.

Another and more serious objection to the position that Athens was a typical democracy, and that its high culture was the direct result of its political institutions, he seems to me to have practically ignored. The Athenian citizen, however poor, had indeed equal rights with every other citizen, could succeed to the same high offices, and appeal to the same laws. But the Athenian citizen, however poor, was a slaveholder, and the member of an imperial class, ruling with more or less absolutism over communities of subjects, treating as manifest inferiors even the many resident aliens, who promoted the mercantile wealth of his city. Hence, after all, he was one of a minority, controlling a vast majority of subjects and slaves with more or less despotic sway. Lord Redesdaletells us that this was the point which his brother Mitford thought of capital importance, and which prompted him to write his history. He met, all through revolutionary France, and among the democrats in England, perpetual assertions that Greek democracy was the ideal at which modern Europe should aim, and he felt that these enthusiasts had considered neither the size of modern States, nor the essential difference just stated between the Athenian and the modern democrat.

And it is to me certain, that many of the virtues as well as the vices of the Athenian arose from his being an aristocrat in the strictest sense,—the member of a privileged and limited society ruling over inferiors, with the leisure obtainable by the poorest slaveholder, and the dignity always resulting from the consciousness of inherent superiority. And yet with all this, the type of perfection which the Greeks, as a people, ever held before them was not the polished democrat of Athens, but the blunt aristocrat of Sparta. This latter was admired and copied, so far as he could be copied, in like manner as the English aristocrat has been admired by all the nations of the world,—not because he lives under free institutions, but because he shows in him the traditions and the breeding of a dominant race long accustomed to the dignity and the splendour of ancient wealth and importance.

As Grote could see no superiority whatever in aristocracy over democracy, so he ignored completely this, the aristocratic side of all the Hellenic democracies.

§ 8. But, when he comes to treat of the despots, or tyrants, who overthrew governments and made themselves irresponsible rulers, he falls in with all the stock accusations of the aristocratic Greek writers,—Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch,—and represents these despots as an unmixed evil to their country. He treats them in a special chapter as a sort of epidemic at a certain epoch of Greek history, whereas the facts show that through the whole series of centuries, from the dawn of history to the conquest by Rome, despots were a constantly recurring phenomenon all over the Greek world. We find them mentioned by scores, and in every corner of Hellas and Asia Minor. Even Sparta ceased in time to form the almost solitary exception. This persistence of tyrants shows that either the people who tolerated them were politically fools, or that despotic government had really some good points, and recommended itself at least as an escape from greater evils. The political value of this phase of Greek life I shall treat more fully in the sequel.

We hear, of course, of many violent and vicious despots in Greek history; and these are the cases always cited as proving the unsoundness of that form of government. But if a list could be procured of the numerous tyrants who governed wisely or moderately, and who improved the manners and the culture of their subjects, it would probably comprise an immense number of names. The good specimens passed by without notice; the criminal cases were paraded in the schools and upon the stage: and so a one-sided estimate has passed into history. This estimate was taken up with warmth, and paraded with great amplitude by the Radical historian. And yet the very history of Europe since he wrote has shown us strong reasons to doubt that every nation is best managed by a parliamentary system. But on this point Grote had no misgivings. The will of the majority was to him the inspired voice, and he trusted to better education and larger experience to correct the occasional errors from which not even the fullest debate will save an excited populace.

§ 9. These observations, though meant as strictures upon the sanguine enthusiasm of Grote’s Radical views, are not to be understood as detracting from the charm of his work. It is this very enthusiasm which has led him to understand and to interpret political movements or accommodations completely misunderstood by many learned continental professors; for he was a practical politician, accustomed to parliamentary life,—above all to the conservative effects of tradition and practice, even in the face of the most innovating theories. He has, therefore, put the case of an educated democracy with more power and more persuasiveness than any other writer; and for this reason alone his book must occupy a prominent place even in the library of the mere practical politician.

§ 10. Far more serious are the objections to his last volume, on the life and conquests of Alexander the Great. So unequal, indeed, is this episode, which to him was a mere appendix to the story of independent Greece, that a fabulous anecdote prevails of his publisher having persuaded him against his will to pursue his narrative beyond the battle of Chæronea. Here it is that the calmness and candour of Thirlwall stand out in marked contrast. The history of the great conqueror and of the recovered independence (such as it was) of Greece, are treated by the scholar-bishop with the same care and fairness which mark all the rest of his work. But Grote is distinctly unfair to Alexander; his love of democracy led him to hate the man who made it impossible and absurd for Greece, and he shows this bias in every page of his twelfth volume.

As regards the subsequent history, which embraces the all-important development of federal government throughout Greece, he does not condescend to treat it at all. His great work is therefore incomplete in plan, and stops before the proper conclusion of his subject. Of course he would have found it hard to panegyrize his favourite democracies when he came to the Hellenistic age. There the inherent weaknesses of a popular government in days of poverty and decay, in the face of rich and powerful monarchs, showed themselves but too manifestly.

But he will not confess this weak point; he even covers his retreat by the bold assertion in his preface that Greek history from the generation of Alexander has no interest in itself, or any influence on the world’s history—a wonderful judgment! However great therefore and complete the work of Grote is on the earlier periods, this may be added as a warning,—the reader of Greek history should stop with the death of Philip of Macedon, and read the remainder in other books. It is indeed necessary for schoolmasters to limit the bounds of Greek literature in school studies, and so with common consent they have admitted nothing later than the golden age. But the vast interest and paramount importance of Greek ideas in the culture of the Roman world have tempted me to sketch the subject in my Greek Life and Thought from Alexander to the Roman Conquest and Greek Life under Roman Sway. Any reader of these volumes will at least concede the vastness, the importance, and the deep interest of the period which Grote despised. But so intricate are the details, and so little arranged, that to write upon it is rather pioneer’s work than anything else.

§ 11. Let us now, before passing to his successors, turn back to the very beginning of the subject, and say a word on his treatment of the elaborate mythical system which the Greeks prefixed to their historical annals. Here the Positivism of the man was sure to bear fruit and produce some remarkable results. He gives, accordingly, with all deliberation and fulness of detail, a complete recital of the stories about the gods and heroes, telling all their acts and adventures, and then proceeds to argue that they are to be regarded as quite distinct from, and unconnected with, any historical facts. He argues that as there is in the legends a large quantity of assertions plainly false and incredible, but intertwined indissolubly with plausible and credible statements, we have no right to pick out the latter and regard them as derived from actual facts. There is such a thing as plausible fiction; and we have no guarantee that the authors of incredible stories about gods and their miracles did not invent this plausible kind as well. Rejecting, therefore, all historical inferences from the Greek legends, he merely regards them as conclusive evidence of the state of mind of their inventors,—a picture of the Greek mind in what Comte called the ‘theological stage.’

It is remarkable how fully Thirlwall states this view of the Greek myths, and how clearly his cautious mind appreciates the indisputable weakness of all such legends in affording proper and trustworthy evidence. But when we come to persistent bodies of legend which assert that Oriental immigrants—Cadmus, Danaus, Pelops, &c.—brought civilization to yet barbarous Greece, Thirlwall, with all his doubts, with all his dislike to vague and shifting stories, cannot make up his mind to regard these agreeing myths as mere idle inventions. Moreover, he urged the point, which Grote omitted to consider, that early art might so corroborate a story as to make its origin in fact morally certain.

No doubt both historians were considerably under the influence of Niebuhr, whose rejection of the old Roman legends, which were often plausible fiction, produced a very great sensation in the literary world. Nor did they live to see the great discoveries in early art and prehistoric culture which have since been made by the archæologists. It seems to me, therefore, that as regards the incunabula of Greek history these great men came at the moment when little more than a negative attitude was possible. The mental history of the nation in its passage from easy faith to utter scepticism was expounded by Grote in a masterly way; but for the construction of the myths he would not admit any other than subjective causes. Here, then, was the point on which some further advance might fairly be expected.