The Meeting of the American His- torical Association at Indian- The Cortes of the Spanish Kingdoms Horace Walpole's Memoirs of the Reign of George the Third, II. 496 The Literature of the Russo-Japa- Privateers and Pirates of the West DOCUMENTS—American Commercial Conditions, and Negotiations with Austria, 1783-1786, contributed for Commercial Treaties, 1776– 1786, by Edmund C. Burnett 567 . 102 104 105 REVIEWS OF BOOKS BOOKS OF ANCIENT HISTORY BOOKS OF MEDIEVAL AND MODERN EUROPEAN HISTORY BOOKS OF AMERICAN HISTORY 107 110 INI 112 114 115 117 117 119 121 123 125 127 129 131 133 134 136 137 139 143 144 146 148 150 151 154 156 180 The American Historical Association supplies the REVIEW to all its members; the Executive Council of the Association elects members of the Board of Editors. Correspondence in regard to contributions to the Review may be sent to the Managing Editor, Professor J. F. Jameson, Carnegie Institution, Washington, D. C., or to the Board of Editors. Books for review may be sent to the Managing Editor. Subscriptions should be sent to The Macmillan Company, 41 North Queen St., Lancaster, Pa., or 66 Fifth Ave., New York. The price of subscription, to persons who are not members of the American Historical Association, is four dollars a year; single numbers are sold for one dollar; bound volumes may be obtained for four dollars and a half. Back numbers or volumes of the REVIEW may be obtained at the same rates. COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY THB NRW RRA PRINT, LANCASTER, PA The American Historical Review ATHENS AND HELLENISM1 imagine Athens during the last quarter of the fourth century contemporary rulers. Neither the defeat on land at Chaeronea, nor the more decisive defeat on sea at Amorgos; neither the murder of Phocion, nor the persecution of Theophrastus; neither the misery of its poor, nor the materialism of its rich, shook in the least its high prestige among the Macedonian generals who had surrounded Alexander. The reason is not far to seek. With one hundred thousand inhabitants Athens was still the most populous city in the Greek world, as well as the busiest centre of the world's trade. It had never been so beautiful as now; for to the religious edifices of the Periclean age had been added the secular buildings constructed during the administration of Lycurgus—the marble theatre and stadium, the ship-houses and dockyards, the many sightly residences; it was now the greatest museum of the plastic arts in the world—one vast depository of statues of gods and men in marble and bronze, the accumulation of five or six generations of continuous effort; in the suburbs, at the three points most easily accessible from the city, were the gymnasia—courts for exercise and parks for recreation, pleasant retreats from the dust and bustle of the city, places of resort for the idle youth and the idler poor, the busy philosophers and the busier courtesans. Nowhere was there such a theatre and such music, such oratory, rhetoric, and philosophy. There was less homogeneity of culture than in the fifth century B.C., for in the interval an intellectual aristocracy had arisen with scientific interests that the populace did not share; but there was much greater refinement of feeling and elegance of living than ever before, and the comedies of Menander, though they conformed in plot, characterstudy, diction, subject, sentiment, and ideas to the taste of an educated élite, brought their rich store of suggestions to the same kind of audience as had greeted Aristophanes. It is not without meaning that in the Samia an old nurse is made to quote Euripides's Auge, and in the Epitre pontes a slave expounds a new-fangled, modish, rationalistic philosophy; it is not without significance that all the youth of Attica, urban and rustic, rich and poor, educated and less educated, lived together in Athens and in the forts by the harbor and frontiers for the entire period of their nineteenth and twentieth years; it is pregnant with import that both from above and without-for to Athens, as of old, came everybody who had anything new to communicate-a flood of ideas and impressions kept pouring in upon the Athenian populace, to stimulate discussion, compel fresh determinations of the values of human activities, and suggest more adequate universal syntheses. The upper classes sought to impose upon society an ordered propriety, which was irksome though not strait-laced, but they did not practise what they preached, and among the masses much of the old abandon persisted, fostered by the democratic inclination to live and let live ós ēK 20 TOS Botletai. Nothing new was sound, nothing old was classic, nothing distinguished was immortal, except it had received the stamp of Athens. “Athens”, said the most illustrious of the successors of Alexander, “is the one beacon tower of the world, from which the fame of men is flashed forth to the ends of the earth.” 1 A paper read at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in New York, December, 1909. AM. HIST. KLV., VOL. XVI.-I. (1) It is doubtful whether Antigonus I. had ever seen Athens with his own eyes, but he was no worse off, probably, than Ptolemy, Seleucus, Ophelas, and Lysimachus, but to all alike had come a glimmer of the wit, gaiety, refinement, and fascination of Athenian life with the famous courtesans-Thais, Glycera, Pythonice, Lamia -whom the spoils of the Persian Empire had attracted to their camps. Hence on settling down in Egypt Ptolemy sought to make Alexandria a new Athens. The hetaerae of Athens came without an invitation; the poets and scientists hesitated on receiving one, and a few only eventually accepted. He got the Attic laws with the Attic law-giver Demetrius, and for them he created "guardians ” as in Athens. He constructed phylae on the Attic plan, and one of the Alexandrian demes was named Sunium. In the vicinity of Alexandria he laid off an Eleusis, and had Timotheus, an Eumolpid, come to inaugurate a branch of the Mysteries there. It was an Athenian, Demetrius, who wrote the hymn-book, and an Athenian, Bryaxis, who created the cult-statue for the new deity Serapis whom he put at the head of the religion in which he sought to unite |
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