breathe for a while the pure atmosphere of abstract thought which we find in Greek mathematics."

While only about one-fourth of the projected volumes have been published, both the range and the quality of the series may be judged. The topics are by no means exclusively literary. Mr. McCartney discusses ancient warfare, by land and sea, in a book based pretty largely on Vegetius but with many parallels drawn from modern military and naval history. The intellectual curiosity of the Greeks is illustrated by Professor Smith in his volume on mathematics. They sought no practical aim, but to discover the secrets of beauty. The usefulness of Astronomy, to Plato, was that "in the midst of these studies an organ of our souls is being purged from the blindness and quickened from the deadness occasioned by other pursuits,—an organ the preservation of which is of more importance than a thousand eyes, because only by it can truth be seen." Mr. Taylor, in his book on Greek biology and medicine, emphasizes the same "clear spirit of scientific investigation." Like modern scientists, the Greeks re jected all supernaturalism in their effort to find the sources of life. After a brief account of Greek science before Aristotle, Mr. Taylor writes of Aristotle's development of scientific method, his first-hand investigations, his faith in an order in nature, and his usefulness in a modern time when "the vast complexity of research forces most scholars, as well as scientists, into a sort of rodent specialism." Greek religion is discussed by W. W. Hyde especially from the point of view of survivals in Modern Greek. He has little to say about the influence of early religious ideas on the literature and thought of western Europe, but he brings out very clearly the intellectual freedom which led the Greeks, even in their religion, to avoid dogma and creed. In Roman Politics, by Professor Abbott, a scholar widely known for his work in the field of Roman institutions, society, and politics, we have a spirited treatment of a subject important because of the influence of Rome upon modern legal and political institutions. In Language and Philology, R. G. Kent supplies a useful and non-technical compendium, giving good reasons, abundantly illustrated, for the importance of Latin study to an understanding of the English language.

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It is, however, not through institutions but through personalities that our debt to Greece and Rome is most vital. Such a volume as Professor Showerman's Horace is an admirable illustration. His theme is a great communion of twenty centuries "; the impressiveness of the story consists in its revelation of what the author calls the dynamic power of Horace, a power which is the property of the few but is at the roots of all human progress. This thesis is developed with eloquence in a book that must inspire the enthusiasm of every reader. The interpretation of the life and thought of Horace, made clear largely through paraphrases of his poems and by Professor Showerman's admirable verse translations, is followed by chapters on "Horace through the Ages" and "Horace the Dynamic." One is tempted to quote passages that illustrate the felicity of style of the author, or to point out examples of his power to handle without pedantry the results of minute research. The book itself is a testimony to the

truth of the author's statement that the immortality of literature and the arts is "the work of the passionate few whose enthusiasms and protestations never allow the common crowd completely to forget, and keep forever alive in it the uneasy sense of imperfection." Mr. Showerman's book has sent at least one reader back to his Horace.

To the writing of his account of Virgil, Professor Mackail has brought the fine qualities apparent in his earlier writings on poetry, as well as his experience as a translator. The outstanding quality of his book is that it is a treatise on the nature and mission of poetry, the work of Virgil being drawn upon for illustration. His treatment of Virgil in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is less satisfactory. The task was a difficult one, partly because of the great amount of material, but no ancient writer save Aristotle has exerted such a tremendous influence, and it is precisely this topic that we should expect to find the principal part of the treatment of Virgil in a series such as the one in which Mr. Mackail's volume appears. Instead, we find rather vague treatment of such topics as Virgil's World, its meaning for and its likeness to our own world" and "The Italo-Roman ideal, created by Virgil and continuing to our own day, as the hope of the world." Even these topics, ambitious as they seem, are briefly and somewhat mechanically treated; they do not compare with the fine analysis of the minor poems that is one of the attractive features of the book.

A similar unevenness of treatment is apparent in the volumes on Catullus, by Professor Harrington, and Cicero, by Professor Rolfe. The biography of Catullus is marred by a certain flippancy of style; we come on more solid ground in the chapters dealing with the influence of the poet in the Renaissance and modern times, but even here there is little illumination, the treatment consisting, in the main, of parallel passages. In part, of course, this thinness is inevitable; Catullus has no such intellectual appeal as Virgil and Horace. Such is not the case, however, with Cicero, whose influence was not only stylistic but philosophical, and was of amazing extent. Yet Professor Rolfe devotes 119 pages to the biography and contemporary influence of Cicero, and only 49 pages to the Middle Ages and modern times. Section IX of his book, entitled "The Deistic Movement," begins with Montaigne and the next paragraph treats, with curious results, Ascham, Queen Elizabeth, Sidney, and Samuel Johnson. The entire treatment of the subject from the Renaissance on is confused and incomplete.

In Mr. Gummere's Seneca, as in most other volumes of the series, we find a well-written and interesting biography. Such a series, however, cannot be tested merely as a group of biographies, since such information may be had in the encyclopedias, nor can it be tested by parallels that may be found or imagined between ancient times and our own. Mr. Gummere's treatment of Senecan influence in Chaucer, Montaigne, and Emerson is adequate for the purposes of a brief handbook; his treatment of Bacon is unsatisfactory, and he does not give us a clear-cut exposition of Seneca's philosophy and scholarship. In this respect his book suffers in comparison with the scholarly and illuminating discussion of Aris

totle's Poetics, by Professor Lane Cooper. Here we have a brief but very clear statement of what the Poetics is, the plan of the work, and definitions of the principal terms. All this is accomplished in 62 pages. So, too, the treatment of the influence of the Poetics since the Renaissance, while owing much to the work of Spingarn and others, is built on the foundation laid by the preliminary exposition, so that the book as a whole conforms admirably to the plan of the series of which it is a part. Professor Cooper introduces little that is new, of course, and little that he has not presented more extensively in his other books, but he has made a very useful introduction to an important subject, and his treatment of it is truly Aristotelian, having a beginning, a middle, and an end."

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High praise, also, can be given to the last book to be mentioned here, Euripides, by F. L. Lucas. The introduction, by R. W. Livingstone, gives the point of view of the series in terms that show how thoroughly he has grasped the idea of the general editors. Euripides is important to our times, he says, because of recent translations that have made him almost a contemporary of ours, and also because the twentieth century sees in him its own critical spirit, its hatred of cruelty and religious shams, its sympathy for women and for the oppressed. Mr. Lucas states his theme in the assertion that "the working of a great spirit is a silent, subtle thing"; its influence is displayed not merely in the few or many literary works in which we find imitations of the master, but also in ways that are imponderable. Thus Mr. Lucas, like Professor Showerman, brings us into contact with a great spirit. Like Mr. Showerman, also, he has a style of distinction. There are frequent ironic thrusts at modern statesmen and others; he knows, and illustrates by his writing, the difference between pedantry and learning; to him the parallel passage method resembles the work of "some horrible little anchorite building himself a hovel with the noble fragments of an ancient temple frieze." It is not the judgment of literary men upon the classics but the humanization of scholarship that has so increased, in recent years, the appreciation of Euripides. One is tempted to quote part or all of the eloquent closing paragraph of this book, but instead here is a passage that illustrates the point of view of the new return to the classics, and gives hope that as such ideas are extended we may indeed witness a new renaissance: "Indeed, the defence of the classics is not that they are venerable and mouldy antiques, the sources of modern civilization; there is little living water in 'sources'; let the dead bury their dead and pedants pedants. Euripides matters today not as an ancient but as a modern, not because he inspired Menander and Seneca and Plutarch but because he can inspire us. . . . For about two millennia he has been too modern for men fully to understand."

Some of the limitations pointed out in these brief notes are due to the difficulties of the task assumed by the authors of the books in this series. The life and personality of an ancient author, or the way in which his work was received in his own time, or classical thought on some subject

like medicine or warfare, are well done, for the authors of these books are classical scholars of distinction. When it comes to dealing with the delicate and complex questions of classical influence on medieval and modern thought and literature, too many of the writers seem unaware of the mass of learning accumulated by investigators in modern languages and literatures and modern history. Papers that have appeared in the classical journals are duly cited; other studies, in journals of modern philology, appear infrequently. It is surely a prime object of this series to sharpen in us the perception of the continuity of classical thought; the medieval and modern portions of the books ought therefore to be even more carefully done than the biographical and critical chapters. The books are more useful to the general reader than to those who desire & careful appraisal of this stream of influence that courses through the ages. It is pleasant to be able to commend without stint the variety and interest of the topics, the intelligence with which the series has been planned, the distinguished character of several of the volumes, and the attractive form in which the publishers have presented the books.

II

The problem of our debt to the classics is approached from a somewhat different angle in a second series of great importance. It consists of selections from Greek literature, chosen in order to illustrate Greek conceptions of history, economics, religion, and other topics, and accompanied by an introduction that is both a commentary and a survey of influence on modern thought. The series is edited by Earnest Barker, of King's College, London, and five volumes have already appeared.*

The two volumes by Mr. Toynbee illustrate very well the method and scope of the series. The books consist of introductions and translations from Greek historical literature. At first sight, therefore, they are collections of source material. They are much more than this, however, because of the skill with which the editor has carried out his scheme of organization. His purpose has been to give the philosophy of life held by a great people and expressed through their historical writings, rather than to supply a connected narrative of the external events. The effectiveness with which this has been done can scarcely be indicated within the limits of a brief review; only one or two illustrations can be given here. The first volume, Greek Historical Thought, consists of four parts: Prefaces from the Historians; the Philosophy of History; the Art of History, and Epilogues. The titles given to his selections by Mr. Toynbee add greatly to the interest of the book. The section on the philosophy of history, for example, opens with a group of selections under the title of Mutability. This group contains a brief translation from the Iliad

* "The Library of Greek Thought." New York, E. P. Dutton & Company. Volumes published: Greek Historical Thought, and Greek Civilization and Character, by Arnold J. Toynbee; Greek Economics, by M. L. W. Laistner; Greek Literary Criticism, by J. B. Denniston; Greek Religious Thought, by F. M. Cornford.

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by Gilbert Murray, followed by Herodotus' account of the pity of Xerxes for the swift passing of the generations of human life, by Thucydides' account of the defeat of Athens in Sicily, and by several selections from Polybius entitled "The Burden of Macedon," "The Burden of Rome," and The Fulfillment of Scripture." The suggestion of biblical titles is followed also in the next group: "The Authorized Version," "The Wisdom of Solon," "The Parable of Polycrates," "The Revised Version," The Day of Judgment," "The Titan in Harness," and "Rationalism." To the freshness and vitality of the organization of his books Mr. Toynbee adds other qualities. His Introduction should be read by all who are interested in theories of history and theories of translation. "A civilization," he remarks, “is never a mere product of physical transmission or local environment. It is a communion of saints (and of sinners) compassed about by that great and ever-increasing cloud of witnesses that have already joined the majority of mankind; and membership in it is therefore a matter of spiritual rather than of material affiliations." He finds the materials of history, therefore, in literature as well as in chronicle, on which one may compare Mr. Trevelyan's brilliant essay in the Yale Review for October, 1924, and he makes good his faith by including some admirably chosen translations of Greek poetry by Gilbert Murray. Again, our relations to the past, in view of what has been said above, are seen not to be merely chronological: "The remote past embodied in foreign civilizations may be subjectively nearer to the life of our own day than is the recent past out of which our life has arisen. In other words, chronological priority and posteriority have little or no subjective significance except within the single span of a given civilization." The purpose of his study, he says, is to attempt "to find an equation between two independent civilizations."

Upon these ideas of history is based Mr. Toynbee's theory of translation. Since his purpose is to equate two civilizations which, he holds, have much in common, he is interested in "translating (say) Plutarch himself, and not merely Plutarch's writings, from the Hellenic world into ours." Plutarch, he figures, would, if so "translated," have been born in 1846 and "would be destined to die in 1925 as a last great survivor of the Victorians." Therefore, we cannot expect to appreciate Plutarch if we depend solely upon North's or Langhorne's translations. For the selections from all authors included in his book, excepting the poets, Mr. Toynbee has made new translations, clothed in the language of today, seeking to avoid a form which would strike the reader as a translation and not an original. His purpose is to clothe in living language his conception of an historical vision that "reveals to us a profoundly significant and profoundly moving repetition of human experience on the heroic scale."

The other volumes so far published in this series deal with Economics, Criticism, and Religion. In the first of these, by M. L. W. Laistner, we find an excellent introduction treating of the relation between ethics and politics in Greek thought, and separating, so far as is possible, the eco