Our estimate of Grote in other fields is well illustrated by the liberal use we have made of his work. Notes on other historians of Greece—many of them by no means unimportant in themselves, but no one of them quite to be compared with this master historian—will appear in the following bibliography. It will be sufficient here to recall the names of Thirlwall and Curtius among the general historians of Greece of the earlier generation, and the names of Holm, Beloch, Busolt, and Bury among the more recent writers; while for special periods the names of Droysen, Müller, Schliemann, and Finlay have particular prominence.
FOOTNOTES
[52] Fasti Hellenici.
LIST OF AUTHORS QUOTED, CITED, OR CONSULTED; WITH CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Abbot, E., History of Greece, London, 1892-1893.—Ælianus Claudius, ποικίλη ἱστορία, edited by Perizonius, Leyden, 1701, the Variable History of Ælianus (trans. by A. Fleming), London, 1576.—Alfieri, V., Tragedy on Agis IV. King of Sparta.—Allcroft, A. H., Decline of Hellas, 371-323 B.C., London, 1894; (in collaboration with W. F. Masom), Synopsis of Grecian History to 495 B.C., London, 1891.—Annual of the British School at Athens.—Anonymous, Der Griechisch-turkische Krieg des Jahres 1897, Berlin, 1898; Seven Essays on the Social Condition of the Ancient Greeks, Oxford, 1832.—Aristobulus, as quoted by Plutarch, Arrian, etc. (in Müller’s Fragmenta).—Aristotle, Ἠθικὰ, edited by Zell, Heidelberg, 1820, 2 vols.; Πολιτικὰ, edited by Barthélemy St. Hilaire, with Fr. trans., Paris, 1837; Ethics, Politics (trans. by Gillies), London, 1804.—Arrianus, Flavius, Ἀνάβασις Ἀλεξάνδρου, edited by F. Schmeider, Leipsic, 1798; The Anabasis of Alexander, London.
L. Flavius Arrianus, born at Nicomedia about 100 A.D., died at an advanced age during the reign of Marcus Aurelius.
In considering a career so romantic as that of Alexander, it is quite impossible that the historian should remain a calm, unmoved spectator of the incidents which he describes. We find, therefore, that the numerous biographers of Alexander have for the most part placed themselves explicitly on one or another of opposite sides. Either, on the one hand, they have considered Alexander as the greatest of heroes and most wonderful of men, or, on the other hand, have regarded him as merely the greatest of adventurers. It is tolerably easy, accordingly as one emphasises one side or another of the facts of Alexander’s history, to make out a seemingly good case from either of these points of view. But what we have elsewhere said about the sympathetical historian applies with full force here, and it is not to be expected that anyone can have written a really satisfactory biography of Alexander who has not been appreciative of those points of his genius which lie quite without the range of the ordinary adventurer. Thus it is not surprising to find that the really great biographies of Alexander, both those of antiquity and those of modern times, have been written from the sympathetic point of view.
The biography of Arrian, which, by common consent, far exceeds in importance all other writings on Alexander that have come down to us, is certainly most judicious in spirit, and probably as impartial as such a production could possibly be. Arrian does not spare the faults of Alexander nor hesitate to give them full expression, but he fully appreciates the greatness of his hero, and he undertook to write his life, as he himself explicitly states, because he felt that no one before him had done full justice to his subject. Arrian frankly states his opinion that his own production will be found not unworthy, and that, in virtue of it, he, himself, must be entitled to be regarded as one of the great writers of Greece. All things considered, it is, perhaps, strange that posterity should have declined to accede to this claim. The work of Arrian is indeed admitted on all hands to be a production of sterling merit—certainly one of the most impartial and judicial historical productions of antiquity. Yet, notwithstanding the extreme importance of his subject, the name of Arrian is comparatively little known to the general public, whereas the name of Xenophon, whom Arrian to some extent took for his master, is familiar to everyone, though the subject of his chief work was of such relative insignificance.
This anomaly is, perhaps, partly explained in the fact that Arrian did explicitly follow Xenophon as a master, since one never expects to rank the follower on a par with the originator. But the truer explanation is probably that Arrian lived at a late period, after the glory of Greece, as the literary centre of the world, had quite departed; and it has been customary to regard all works of this later period, with their necessary alterations of style, representing the time of degeneracy of the Greek language, as things to be looked at askance by lovers of that language in its purity. Then, too, perhaps, the very importance of Arrian’s subject may have been detrimental to the permanent popularity of his work. There was no possible reason why any other writer should take up in great detail the story of the Anabasis of the Ten Thousand after Xenophon, since that story, much as if it had been a mere romance, owed its importance almost entirely to the qualities of style of the original narrator. But the case of Alexander was quite different. Numberless writers, as was most natural, had told his story in the times immediately after his death. It was inevitable that so amazing a history should continue to excite the interest of mankind throughout all time and should be retold again and again by countless generations of historians. Even had the biography of Arrian proved in all respects comprehensive and satisfactory, later generations must have demanded that the story should be retold after the manner of their own times, but in point of fact, the biography of Arrian, important as it is, is by no means altogether comprehensive. It contains, to be sure, all incidents which its author was satisfied were authentic, but it explicitly omitted various other incidents, which, whether true or false, must have an abiding interest from the very fact of having been associated with the name of Alexander.
Each succeeding generation of historians must then judge for itself, as is the prerogative of the critic, among the various contradictory stories that have come down to us, and must weigh anew the evidence of this side or that, and make for itself a new story of Alexander.
Assmann, W., Handbuch der Allgemeinen Geschichte, Brunswick, 1853.
Bachelet, J. A. F., Histoire ancienne grecque, Paris, 1883.—Baraibar (in collaboration with Menendez Pelayo) Poetas liricos Griegos, Madrid, 1884.—Becker, Wilhelm A., Charicles, or Illustrations of the Private Life of the Ancient Greeks (translated by Frederick Metcalfe), London, 1854.—Beloch, J., Griechische Geschichte, Strasburg, 1893-1899, 2 vols.—Bent, J. T., The Cyclades: Life among the Insular Greeks, London, 1885.—Berens, E. M., Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece, London, 1879.—Berg, van den, Petite Histoire des Grecs, Paris, 1880.—Bergk, T., Griechische Literaturgeschichte, Berlin, 1872-1894.—Bernhardy, G., Grundriss der Griechischen Litteratur, Halle, 1836, rev. ed. 1876-92.—Berthelot, A., Les grandes scènes de l’histoire grecque, Paris, 1889.—Blackie, J. S., Horæ Hellenicæ, London and Edinburgh, 1874.—Blanchard, Th., Les Mavroyeni, Paris, 1893.—Bluemner, Hugo, Home Life of Ancient Greeks (trans. by A. Zimmern), London, 1895; Technologie und Terminologie der Gewerbe und Künste bei Griechen u. Römern, Leipsic, 1887.—Boeckh, A., Public Economy of the Athenians (trans. by A. Lamb), Boston, 1857.