references were due to the reader. He will find the abbreviations in my references fully explained in the Index. These materials have not been gathered or systematised by any previous historian; Hertzberg, for example, confines himself strictly to Greece proper under the Romans-a mere fraction of the history of later Hellenism, and Boissier, in his interesting book on Cicero and his friends, has never once considered the point of view taken in my Sixth Chapter on the same subject. Indeed, since I wrote the opening of this Preface I have encountered a practical illustration of the difficulty there is in including all the evidence in such a history, and of the strong probability that the increased activity of antiquarians and travellers will furnish us constantly with new facts, or with corrections of our former deductions. Mr. Flinders Petrie, in searching a small and insignificant necropolis at Kurob some six hours' ride from Medinet-el-Fayoum, found a number of mummies of the Ptolemaic epoch in cases of the usual appearance. They were all he tells me) distinctly anterior in style to those of the Roman period. On examining these cases with care, he found that they were made of layers of papyrus glued together, in some cases only laid together, and varnished within and without. Perceiving that much of this papyrus showed traces of writing, he took several cases to pieces, and thus gathered a large quantity of fragments, covered with Greek and demotic writing: the Greek fragments he kindly sent to Mr. Sayce, with whom I examined them in August 1890. We have identified fragments of the Phado of Plato, written in a beautiful hand, and not posterior to 250 B.C., also a considerable passage from the lost Antiope of Euripides, and a passage on the duties of the comrade (pinéraiρos), by some rhetor earlier than Alexander's time. These texts, which we shall presently publish in Hermathena, and which I need not now discuss, show that even under the second Ptolemy Greeks had settled in the country parts of Egypt, and had with them such plenty of books that some of them were used as waste paper. A large number of letters, dated in the reigns of the second and third Ptolemies (284-224 B.C.), and written in good Greek, but in a very difficult cursive script, attest the same conclusion perhaps even more strongly. Lastly, there were used among the waste paper what seem to be the records of the Græco-Egyptian Probate Court at Crocodilopolis, the capital of the nome or district called. Arsinoe drafts of wills, with the date, the name and description of the testator, and the names and descriptions of the witnesses. In two of three cases the details of the bequests are to be made out, though in lacerated fragments. This series of documents, in good Greek, and written in all sorts of hands, presents us with formulæ constantly recurring, but still varied both in their place and even in their expression, so proving that they were not the work of lawyers composing them for ignorant people, but the dictation of educated men. Pending my publication of these texts, in the the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique I cannot enter into further detail; but this I must say, that they modify considerably the estimate I had formed of the depth and breadth of Greek influences in Egypt. As the reader will see in the note to p. 202, I was already beginning to doubt the ancient view which confines Greek life (outside Alexandria) to Ptolemais and Arsinoe; now that view seems to me completely exploded. Indeed Arsinoe, which is commonly understood to mean a town, was used as the name of a district. As I am writing these words there comes to me the just published exhaustive monograph of M. Th. Reinach on Mithridates, which I should have gladly used in discussing that king. These sudden additions to our evidence and to the sifting of it are the delight and the despair of historians-the delight of those who are ready to abandon accepted views and popular prejudices, the despair of those who cling to them, who pretend to give a final judgment on things but partially known, regarding a correction as merely a demonstration that they were wrong, not as the means of escape from a cherished error, and an enlargement of our common knowledge. The present scholarship both of Germany and of England has been positively vitiated by the fashion among its Professors of taking criticism as an act of hostility, and pursuing the critic with such rancour, that no quiet man thinks it worth his while to set his neighbour right, or expose, however gently, a piece of literary imposture, at the cost of being annoyed and maligned for the rest of his life. As I have now acknowledged my obligations to Mr. Petrie and his important discovery, so I trust I have nowhere omitted to acknowledge my conscious obligations to previous authors; it is impossible to do so adequately to those colleagues-Mr. Louis Purser and Mr. Bury-who have helped me with advice and correction all through the book. Το appropriate the work of a colleague, or to utilise |