Some of these myths Professor Mahaffy has made it his business to attempt to dispel. We have already had occasion to refer to his criticism on the eulogists of Thucydides. Again, in a matter of much broader scope, Professor Mahaffy long ago pointed out that the popular notion which regarded the Greek as the type of brave man was a most palpable illusion. He called attention to the fact that in some of the most important of Grecian battles—as, for example, that in which the Spartans won against the Corinthians, in the time of Agesilaus—the total death roll was sometimes only half a dozen men. He noted the childish way in which the Greek leaders were wont to keep up the courage of their men by harangues and bombast, and the way in which each side strove to frighten the other by loud shoutings and clashing of arms as it advanced. “These,” he said, “are not the characteristics of men who are brave in the modern sense of the word.” Again, he asked if it is conceivable that a modern body of warriors would have been repelled year after year by the walls of Athens, when only a handful of men, so to say, were within to defend them.
Advancing still further in the same iconoclastic spirit, Professor Mahaffy pointed out that some of the dearest traditions of Grecian history had been interpreted and foisted on the world through the minds of prejudiced participants, rather than in a spirit of fairness and equity. Thus the battle of Marathon, which we are accustomed even now to hear spoken of as the great decisive contest between the East and the West, will with difficulty bear this interpretation if one will consider it without prejudice. At the best, it was certainly a far less important and decisive battle than that of Platæa, but it chanced that the Athenians were the victorious combatants at Marathon, whereas at Platæa the Spartans bore the honours of the day; and since the Athenians, through their literature, served as the mouthpiece of Greece, it is not strange that the event in which they chiefly figured should have been unduly magnified, and the memory of it transmitted in distorted proportions to posterity. It is vastly to the credit of modern scholarship that it should be able to revise certain judgments on such matters as these, that have come down to us with all the accumulated inertia of generations of repetition.
It must not be supposed, however, from what has just been said, that Professor Mahaffy’s task in dealing with the history of Greece is altogether, or even chiefly, iconoclastic. The fact is quite otherwise. Critical as he can be on occasion, Professor Mahaffy nevertheless is, on the whole, an ardent and sympathetic admirer of the people who have furnished the theme of his life studies; but his laudatory judgments may be accepted with the more confidence because of the evidence he has given us that in considering the Greeks he does not allow himself to be carried utterly away by his enthusiasm, nor to forget that the Greeks, despite their national genius, were after all very human, and only properly to be understood when judged by some such practical standard as we apply to peoples of our own generation.
Professor Mahaffy knows his Greece of to-day at first hand quite as well as he knows ancient Greece through studies of the classics. He has described most charmingly his rambles in Greece proper; and latterly he has made the Ptolemaic epoch peculiarly his own, and his writings on this period take rank as among the most important contributions to a subject which most students of Grecian history have distinctly neglected.
Mannert, C., Geographie der Griechen und Römer, Nürnberg, 1788-1792.—Manso, J. C. F., Sparta, Leipsic, 1800-1805.—Martin, H., Les Cavaliers Athéniens, Paris, 1886.—Masom, W. F., Synopsis of Grecian History, London, 1888.—Maspero, G., Hist. ancienne des peuples de l’orient, Paris, 1886.—Mela, Pomponius, De Situ Orbis Libri III, ed. by Vinetus, Paris, 1572; (trans. by Arthur Golding, Rare and Singular Works of Pomponius Mela, London, 1590).—Melingo, P. v., Griechenland in unseren Tagen, Vienna, 1892.—Ménard, L., Histoire des Grecs, Paris, 1893, 2 vols.—Merivale, Charles, History of the Romans under the Empire, London, 1850-1851.—Meyer, E., Geschichte des Alterthums, Stuttgart, 1884-1893.—Milchoefer, A., Anfänge der Kunst in Griechenland, Leipsic, 1883.—Milligan, W., Religion of Ancient Greece, Edinburgh, 1882.—Mitford, W., History of Greece, London, 1841.—Monceaux, P., La Grèce avant Alexandre, Paris, 1892.—Müller, I., Handbuch der klassischen Alterthumswissenschaft, Nördlingen, 1885, etc., 9 vols., in progress.—Müller, A. (in Hermann’s Lehrbuch der Griechischen Antiquitäten), Freiburg, 1880.—Müller, H. D., Historisch-mythologische Untersuchungen, Göttingen, 1892.—Müller, Karl, Fragmenta Historicorum Græcorum, Paris, 1841-1870, 5 vols.; new edition, 1883.—Müller, K. O., History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, London, 1858; History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, London, 1830; Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst, Stuttgart, 1878.
Karl Otfried Müller was born at Brieg, Prussia, August 28, 1797; died at Athens, August 1, 1840. If to be sympathetic with the genius of a people is a prerequisite for the great historian, Müller was eminently qualified to write a history of the Greek people. He was a man of essentially poetical and artistical temperament, and combined with these qualities a profound scholarship. An incident of his early manhood will illustrate perfectly his temperament. The incident occurred during his visit to the famous art gallery in Dresden. In itself it was nothing more than the fact of his becoming entranced by the celebrated Raphael there. Before this picture, as he himself writes, he stood quite enchanted, and he could scarcely bring himself to leave it long enough to visit other portions of the gallery. Now, of course, to any person of less impressionable temperament who has seen the picture, it will be quite clear that Müller, standing thus entranced before the Madonna, saw with the inner eye of his own enthusiasm, rather than with the more tangible organ of sense. Doubtless, in his half-hypnotic trance, he would have been equally delighted had the veriest chromo been substituted in the canvas for the original picture. He had gone to see the Raphael full of enthusiastic expectancy, and he was sure not to be disappointed. He did not see the awkward, mechanical, old-fashioned grouping; he was quite unmindful of the defect of drawing which had given unequal legs to the kneeling figure at the right. He did not know that, if he had come across this same painting unlabelled and before unheard of, he would scarcely have given it a second thought; he only knew that it represented an ideal—an ideal that had lingered fondly in his mind since his earliest youth. To stand before that picture and see it with his own eyes was to realise that ideal. Many another person has had that same sensation before that same canvas, and for the same reason; and with them, as with him, it was a test of personal temperament, and not a test of the excellence of the picture itself.
Gifted with this impressionable artistic temperament, it was not strange that Müller’s ambitions early looked in the direction of Greece. From his earliest youth the study of classical times became his one absorbing passion, and long before he had reached middle age he had come to be known to scholars everywhere as a member of that inner circle who have made classical lore their own. Naturally he wrote as well as studied, and his works on Greece became classical from the moment of their issue. His especial interest during those early years, which were to represent the largest portion of his working life, was directed towards the early history of the Greeks as a nation and towards the effort to solve the riddles of that period. In particular, his studies of the Doric race became famous, and remain to this day practically the last word that has been said on the subject. One must, perhaps, sometimes make allowance for Müller’s enthusiasm and favourable prejudice, just as for Mitford’s opposite point of view; but generally speaking, Müller’s work is distinguished above all things, next to its scholarship, for its fairness and the breadth of view from which the subject is contemplated.