of Diogenes the Stoic, and a long time at school with Aristarchus, composed a chronography reaching from the capture of Troy to the present day. He expounded a period of 1040 years, recounting the taking of cities, the expeditions of armies, the wanderings of nations, the incursions of barbarians, the course of naval operations, public games, treaties, battles, the acts of kings and other celebrated men, the removal of tyrants -an epitome of all that is told diffusely; and he preferred to set it forth in metre, and chose the comic,1 for the sake of clearness, and seeing that it would thus be most easily committed to memory. He takes an illustration from life. If a man wants to carry a number of logs, he could not do it unless he tied them together, so a metrical story has its advantage over prose. He then having gathered the chronicle of time into this summary, paid the compliment of dedicating it to king Philadelphus, which becoming known all over the world conferred immortal glory on that Attalus whose name appeared in the dedication.

But I, hearing that you alone of present kings show royal graciousness, thought I would make trial of it myself, and present myself to see what a king is like, that I might have it to tell to others. Wherefore I chose for a supporter of my project him who both established your father in his kingdom, as we hear, and who is truly in all respects honoured by you also I mean Apollo the Didymæan, the prophet and leader of the Muses. Trusting in him I come to your hearth, which is well-nigh free to all literary men, and may he help my undertaking! For from the scattered materials in various histories I have written for you in epitome the colonisations and foundings of cities, and the ways by sea and land over all the earth. Passing over the obvious things briefly, I have dwelt upon the less known, so that you may have, O king, a short description of the whole habitable earth, the peculiarities of great rivers, and the situation of the two continents; also what are the Greek cities in each, who founded them, and when, who the surrounding barbarians are—nomadic, or tame, and of their manners and customs, which of them are the most inhospitable and savage; the amount of populations, and their various laws and habits, and the richest trading marts,

1 So Strabo says, p. 677

III

HIS DEDICATION

59

as also the islands, [and so on]; so that he who hears [it read] will not only be diverted, but will get, if nothing else, this useful information, to know where he is, and where his own country lies, and from what mother city it received its inhabitants. To sum it all up, without undertaking the wanderings of Ulysses told in story, but remaining comfortably at home, he may learn not only the life of foreign races, but the cities and the laws of all nations. But my book receiving you as its illustrious sponsor and benevolent patron, will pass through the labour of its birth into life, and will herald your glory, O king, to all, carrying your good report from place to place even to the ends of the world.

And now at the outset I will enumerate the authors on whose authority I have made my statements. I place most reliance in Eratosthenes, the most eminent of geographers, as to climate and configuration of lands, in Ephorus and Dionysius of Chalcis on the founding of cities, in Demetrius Callatianus, the Sicilian Cleon and Timosthenes [then the MS. is mutilated and illegible for some lines] Timæus, and what Herodotus has said. In other cases I have brought my own diligent inquiry and personal observation to bear, having seen not only the cities in Greece and Asia, but knowing the regions of Adria and the Ionian Sea, and having travelled as far as Tyrrhenia and Sicily to the west, as well as through most of Libya and Carthage.

He then proceeds at once to his description of Europe. A scrap of the following part (on Asia) is also preserved.

The very curious and instructive passage above translated shows us that we are dealing with a society more like that of the last century than any that went before. Literary men were seeking out noble patrons, and carefully informing them that their patronage was not only profitable to the recipient, but honourable to themselves. Under these circumstances we may be sure that the flattery of the Hellenistic authors Idid not fall short of the exhibitions to be seen in the dedications of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless in the present instance commentators justly, I think, refuse to believe that our author would have addressed Nicomedes II

in these terms, seeing that this Nicomedes had put to death his father Prusias, a monster of iniquity. This parricide, however palliated by the circumstances of the case, would have afforded a curious commentary on the poet's allusions to Apollo as the patron of both father and son.

It is indeed novel, nay, positively comical, to find the authors of 'handy guide-books' dedicating them to kings, and speaking of the celebrity which this would confer. In our day the compiler is neither so ambitious nor so self-important. But we must imagine Scymnus writing not for an old and settled society, like that of Athens or Argos, but for those new and outlying kingdoms, where many Syrians, Gauls, Armenians, Jews, entered Greek cities, got civic rights, and desired to acquire Greek civilisation in a hurry. To these people compendious short-cuts to knowledge would be as important as they now are to the Americans who make rapid fortunes in new western cities of the States. These rough-andready business people find themselves suddenly with wealth enough to live cultivated lives, but no antecedents to enable them to do it. And so they must strive to attain by the shortest route manners and ideas foreign to their birth and breeding.2 Here then compendiums are in high favour, and many a millionaire would be very proud to accept such a dedication as that which I have just transcribed.

I have been so long studying the outskirts of Hellenism and the surface of its culture, that it is high time to turn back to its centres, old and new, and to the deeper aspects of its thinking, and consider what progress was made both in Greece and in Rome by the philosophy of the age.

I See the whole story of his revolt (aided by Aristomenes) told in Appian, Mith. 3 sq. Mommsen decides in favour of Nicomedes III. 2 The reader to whom this most interesting phase of modern society is not familiar may study it in Mr. Howell's Rise of Silas Lapham.

CHAPTER IV

THE ACCLIMATISATION OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY IN ROMAN

SOCIETY

NOTHING is more remarkable in the history of Greek philosophy than its diffusion and vitality in the period before us, in spite of the insignificance of the men who were then the recognised leaders of the schools. The succession of the various scholarchs has been a subject of curiosity ever since the Christian era, and has given rise to many tracts, down to the famous essay of Zumpt.1 But in almost every case we now find a mere name sustaining the responsibility or at least occupying the place of a Chrysippus or an Epicurus. Perhaps the first thing that strikes us when we scan the list of these names in Diogenes, in the columns of Clinton, or in the labyrinthine footnotes of Zeller, is that they hail from all parts of the Hellenistic world. It is hard to say that any portion of Alexander's empire was more prolific in philosophers than the rest. My impression is that perhaps Greece proper was somewhat poorer and Syria somewhat richer than the average, but I will not venture to assert this positively. The coast of Cilicia was perhaps more likely to produce Stoics, owing to

1 Uber den Bestand der philos. Schulen, etc. Berlin, 1843 (Trans. of the Berlin Academy).

the causes adduced in a previous volume of this social history; but certain it is that Babylon, Seleucia on the Tigris, Tyre, Sidon, Gadara, Apamea, Antioch, Soli, Alexandria, Tarsus, Cyzicus, Heraclea, and a hundred other cities, sent philosophers into the world, who, while they settled at Rome or Athens or Rhodes, nevertheless did not belie their origin, and were known as the glory of their native cities. But though these men were acute or laborious enough to gain reputation by their books, or even to rise to the position of head of an Athenian school, we cannot find that they made any permanent advance in real thinking, with one notable exception.

The fact is that most of the scholarchs mentioned are remarkable for the number of their years, so that the schools must have been usually presided over by old men. The natural tendency of this condition of things is, first, to make the teaching conservative, clinging to the traditions of former days and revolving round the ideas acquired in the professor's youth; second, to make it timid, not daring to face new problems, or even to defend the startling paradoxes, the extreme views, which had been boldly asserted in the rejuvenescence of Greek philosophy. This timidity often took the form of contracting the outworks, and sacrificing the points most liable to attack-nay, even of conceding to the opponents that they were in some respects right, or to the sceptics that, after all, nothing was certain. It may, therefore, be said of the second century B. C. that it was the period when the schools were very strictly preserved, but when the sceptical school of Pyrrho, which had been blown

1 Greek Life and Thought, p. 142. If the edict referred to above (p. 40) was really issued by Antiochus Sidetes against young men learning philosophy, this may be another reason why so many Syrians appear as philosophers at Athens and in the West in this and the next generation.