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La Roncière, Histoire de la Marine Française, IV., by J. S. Corbett

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

BOOKS OF ANCIENT HISTORY

Prášek, Geschichte der Meder und Perser, II., by Professor A. V. W. Jackson
Frothingham, Roman Cities in Italy and Dalmatia, by Professor W. S. Davis
Seeck, Geschichte des Untergangs der Antiken Welt, III., by Professor F. A. Christie.
BOOKS OF MEDIEVAL AND MODERN EUROPEAN HISTORY

Holtzmann, Französische Verfassungsgeschichte, by Professor J. W. Thompson
Round, Peerage and Pedigree.

Jordan, Les Origines de la Domination Angevine en Italie, by Professor D. C. Munro
Göller, Die Einnahmen der Apostolischen Kammer, by Dr. W. E. Lunt.
Pérouse, Georges Chastellain, by Ruth Putnam

Cans, L'Organisation Financière du Clergé de France, by Professor J. W. Thompson

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Cans, La Contribution du Clergé à l'Impôt de Louis XIV., by the same

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FitzRoy, Acts of the Privy Council, Colonial Series, II., by Professor C. M. Andrews
Le Moy, Le Parlement de Bretagne, by Professor F. M. Fling
Marczali, Hungary in the Eighteenth Century, by R. H. Lord.
Droysen, Johann Gustav Droysen, I., by Professor Halvdan Koht
Marcks, Bismarck, I., by Professor Munroe Smith

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Radziwill, Duchesse de Dino, IV., by Professor H. E. Bourne

Lecky, Memoir of William Edward Hartpole Lecky, by Professor C. M. Andrews .
Holdich, Gates of India, by Professor G. M. Bolling
La Mazelière, Le Japon, IV., V., by Dr. K. Asakawa.

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Williams, Journal of the Perry Expedition to Japan, by the same

BOOKS OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Commons, Documentary History of American Industrial Society, I., II., by A. H. Stone.
Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia.

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Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus, vol. I., pt. II., by Dr. B. C. Steiner

Livingston, The Livingstons of Livingston Manor.

Hamilton, Colonial Mobile, by Professor Pierce Butler.

Chadwick, Relations of the United States and Spain.

Ambler, Sectionalism in Virginia from 1776 to 1861, by Professor W. E. Dodd
Adams, British Interests and Activities in Texas, by Professor J. H. Smith.
Haynes, Charles Sumner, by Professor Allen Johnson .

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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.

THE NRW Era Print,

LANCASTER, PA.

COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

The

American Historical Review

ATHENS AND HELLENISM1

O imagine Athens during the last quarter of the fourth century

TB.c. is an object of pity is to ignore the unanimous opinion of

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

1 A paper read at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in New York, December, 1909.

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comedies of Menander, though they conformed in plot, characterstudy, diction, subject, sentiment, and ideas to the taste of an eđucated 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 Epitrepontes 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 ὡς ἕκαστος βούλεται. Bouλeral. 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."

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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