in Helleno-Semitic laboratories, was the mind of the Hellenised Jew.

The second part of the great Græco-Persian struggle offers a more remunerative field than the first to historical research. The authority for it is of much more various character, and the events occurred in an age when the habit of making documents of lasting nature, such as inscriptions, which may any day be restored to us by the spade, was more widely diffused over the Hellenised world. Moreover, the facts being still greatly in dispute, and new facts coming to light every day, no final judgment has yet been arrived at on the great issues of the period. If, therefore, we welcomed Mr Grundy's book as possibly closing a cycle of criticism, we would extend a different welcome to the first volume of Dr Kaerst's 'Geschichte des hellenistischen Zeitalters' different both because this work opens rather than concludes criticism, and because it is less a statement of historical facts than a weighty essay on a central theme. The theme is political, -the idea of direct personal imperialism, governing as well as reigning. This, according to Dr Kaerst, was the advance made in the fourth century on the previous kingships, which were either mere chieftainships, with suzerainty added, or theocratic royalties without government. Macedon introduced a new thing to the world; Philip ensured its dominance; Alexander gave it expansion and bureaucratic organisation. The careers of those two mighty men are therefore treated by the author only in so far as they illustrate the development of this idea, and their personalities are left severely alone. There is little attempt at narrative history, and none at a comprehensive record. We have to do with essays by the able student of politics who wrote on the Theoretic Basis of Ancient Kingship' in the Historische Bibliothek.' The result is a singularly brilliant and interesting piece of work, to be strongly recommended to all advanced students of this period. It is not a history, but a most instructive commentary on history from one, and that a most important, point of view. The author's central idea seems to us perfectly sound in itself. The introduction to the world at large, and the development therein of personal imperialism, was the work of the Macedonian Empire, and a most momentous work. Its immediate effect on

society could hardly be more justly and temperately estimated than by Dr Kaerst.

But to derive full value and no harm from these studies, the reader must bear in mind that a form of political government, however momentous, is a means, not an end. In Dr Kaerst's suggestive preparatory section, dealing with Greek society before the rise of Philip, he clearly treats the Tós as the end to which all else in Hellenic life was a means. For this the philosophers thought and wrote. This is what has mattered ever since. Yet did Aristotle regard a political organisation of the community as the one end of all life? did he not rather regard it as a means to the best life of the individual—γεινομένη τοῦ ζῆν ἕνεκα, οὖσα δὲ τοῦ εὖ ζῆν ? There is something very German about Dr Kaerst's supreme faith in a form of polity. Man, as he knows him, exists to be governed. On this side the North Sea we have perhaps less reason to regard government as an end, or even as a universal means; but, of course, it is a most potent determinant of the national mind. The Tóλs had much to do with the formation of the Hellenic type of free intellect; and the imperialism of the 'Hellenismus' had a most appreciable effect on the minds which combined to evolve Christianity. But though, perhaps, the modern world owes to the Hellenistic period its monarchical bureaucratic system, that is a debt transient and inconsiderable compared to the mind of Paul of Tarsus.

If Dr Kaerst, however, writes of a means as an end, the particular means to which he devotes himself is so important, and is appreciated with so much insight and knowledge, that his limitation does not in the least prevent us from regarding his book as a most valuable contribution to the study of the political problems of the Hellenistic age. The author seems to have felt, justly enough, that the detailed history of the first establishment of Macedonian Empire does not call for re-examination at present. Since Niese published his Geschichte der griechischen und makedonischen Staaten,' and, for that matter, even since J. G. Droysen began to publish his 'Geschichte des Hellenismus' in 1836, next to no new evidence for Macedonian history has been discovered. Egypt has not yielded from her sands a page of the lost historians of either Philip or Alexander; and while

waiting for Theopompus and Anaximenes, for Ptolemy, Aristobulus, Clitarchus, and Callisthenes, we have squeezed dry the contemporary Greek writers, and the GræcoRoman historians de seconde main.

This dearth of new evidence, however, even for the earliest stages of the second struggle with Persia, should not be lasting. The excavator must soon make a beginning on Macedonian soil, and he has pretty nearly all western Asia still to examine. Even already for the later stages new documents come in fast. Had Mr Hicks and Mr Hill carried down their collection of Greek inscriptions as far as the first edition went, i.e. past the death of Alexander to the establishment of Roman Empire in Asia, they would have had to add so much that the second issue would have been too unwieldy for students' use. Their very proper curtailment of a book intended for those in statu pupillari is most significant of the promise that is in the Hellenistic period. We suspect that in the near future nine-tenths of the students of Greek history will be working on Seleucid and Ptolemaic questions by the new light of marbles, papyri, and topographical surveys of Asiatic and African localities.

Taken as a whole, Hellenic research will probably be most fruitful henceforward in the record of the Greeks outside the Greek peninsula, from the opening of the literary period to the era of Christianity. If we had to provide ten first-rate Hellenists with as many essaysubjects in pure history, we should distribute among them some such list as this :

1. The relations of the Anatolian Greek cities with native powers from the earliest times. 2. The sources and working of Oriental influence in archaic Greek art. 3. The first Greek commerce with the outer world. 4. Greek commerce in its later relations to Phoenician trade. 5. Greek relations with Celtic peoples. 6. The carliest European colonisation of inner Asia. 7. The intellectual output of the Hellenistic age outside Alexandria. 8. Greek ideas, economical, social, political, in their application to non-Greek peoples. 9. The relations of the cities of Magna Græcia with Italian peoples and powers. 10. Greek religious doctrine and ritual in the age immediately preceding Christian evangelism.

Such a list makes no pretence to be exhaustive, and

its items overlap at more points than one. It is framed to exclude at any rate certain large fields of Greek history which appear to have become stale and unprofitable. The internal politics of Greece proper, and its relations with the original colonies, that is, the history of the Athenian and Spartan Leagues, are the chief of these. It is framed to include, on the other hand, all the earlier and later relations of Greeks with barbarians.'

On the literary side the most profitable line of study is probably what we have described already as Quellenkritik; for the labours of scholars of the Meursius type have long ago made search in the classics almost useless. Outside the literary province much will depend on the future explorations of archæologists, and a little on explorations already made. Those fortunate and indefatigable Oxonian scholars, Mr Grenfell and Mr Hunt, have already amassed much material for the history of Ptolemaic and Græco-Roman Egypt, some of which, including the remarkable Tebtunis find, is still unpublished; while nothing has yet been worked into a standard history. This should throw much light on the eighth subject which we proposed above, and some light also on the tenth. But, while there is much more evidence to come from the Egyptian sands, a vast field in Asia has hardly been explored at all. Despite the digging of Fellows, Newton, Humann, and Heberdey, the primitive deposits have yet to be discovered, even on the most accessible Anatolian coasts. In the interior of the peninsula, Professor Ramsay, with his predecessors and followers, has not been able to see anything below ground, nor as yet all above it. There are two districts, for example, in Cilicia Tracheia still quite unknown. Our ignorance of Syrian archæology, even after Renan and De Vogüé, is extraordinary. Absolutely nothing worth mentioning is known of the antiquities which must survive in the soil from the period of Sidonian supremacy; and while the basin of the Orontes and the north of Syria generally must have been sown thick with Hellenistic townships, we can assign sites to only about half a dozen out of the few names that we know, and are doubtless ignorant of the existence of two-thirds of the cities that were actually founded.

It is the main deterrent to all scholars anxious to

write on the history of the 'Hellenismus,' that the topographical scaffolding is so imperfect. How much more might be marked on the Hellenistic map than can be marked at present may be inferred from Palestine and the Fayum. In the first of these districts, since we happen to have the extra group of authorities on Jewish history, we can cover the map with Hellenistic names; in the second, an insignificant oasis, the labours of the papyrus-seekers have resulted in locating about ten Ptolemaic communities where literary authority justified the placing of only three. How then are we to deal at present with the history of a region so populous as that of which Antioch was the capital, wherein too we are ignorant, not only of almost all the remains of the Hellenic civilisation, but also of the Aramaic, the more necessary of the two for the understanding of the ground on which Christianity arose?

If we penetrate into the interior of Asia, the darkness thickens. Where were the military Greek colonies with which Polybius says Media was girt? Where are the remains of the early Parthian power? Hekatompylos, its capital, has vanished from modern sight as completely as though it had never been. Alexander founded at least seven important colonies in what is now Afghanistan. No actual evidence has been discovered of the position of any one of these, although we may be pretty sure that modern Herat, Candahar, and Kelat-i-Ghilzai, not to say Kabul, stand on or near certain of their sites. North of the Oxus, where authorities attest the foundation of at least eight cities during Alexander's reign, we are hardly better off, in spite of the occupation of the country by a European power. A German engineer, von Schwarz, has been over the ground, equipped with a knowledge of the scanty literary authorities; but for want of power to excavate, and perhaps of an 'archæological eye,' he has adduced nothing but circumstantial topographical evidence-the sort of probability which depends on natural lines of communication, and natural adaptabilities for town life. Yet we know that not only have Alexander's foundations there, and perhaps also in the Merv oases, to be reckoned

* Mr Grenfell's geographical introduction to 'Fayum Towns and their Papyri.' (Egypt Exploration Fund, 1901.)