serve as a stimulus to the hero's own nature, without determining the result of the stimulus-though it is noteworthy that the initial impulse is not derived from them. And lastly, they point out in clear and impressive language the course of the story. Shakespeare, in Macbeth and Hamlet, introduces less noble and less probable forms of the supernatural for the same purpose. The oracles of Sophocles, like the ghosts and witches of Shakespeare, are but means to an artistic end. The representation of their effect upon the characters is not the end of the drama, and must not be so regarded. They embody the final teaching of the poet as little as the words of particular dramatic characters, in particular circumstances, express the poet's own unbiased thought and feeling.

The central conception of the Oedipus Rex is plainly not more fatalistic than the philosophy of Aristotle. Oedipus is the architect of his own fortune as truly as the magnanimous man of the Ethics is the architect of his. If any reader finds the doctrine hard, he may remember that Sophocles himself completed it, somewhat as the Christian Church completed Aristotle, and in the death of Oedipus at Colonus crowned the law with grace. Nevertheless, for the understanding alike of Greek philosophy and Greek art, it seems necessary to recognize the relation between these two ideal conceptions-the magnanimous man of the Nichomachean Ethics, ideal for life and happiness, the tragic hero of the Poetics, ideal for misery and death. According to Aristotle, the man who is truly happy in this world is the wise man who sees in all their aspects the facts or the forces with which he is dealing, and can balance and direct his own impulses in accordance with that vision. He is a general, victorious, not only because he is courageous, but because he has planned wisely; an artist who makes of his life something as perfect as a Greek temple or a Greek play. In the Oedipus Rex, Sophocles had already shown the reverse. The man who sees but one side of a matter, and straightway, driven on by his uncontrolled emotions, acts in accordance with that imperfect vision, meets a fate most terrible and pitiful, in accordance with the great laws established by the gods.

This philosophy of Aristotle and Sophocles is clearly suggested in the drama itself. 'May destiny still find me,' sings the Chorus, 'winning the praise of reverent purity in all words and deeds sanctioned by those laws of range sublime, called into life throughout the high, clear heaven, whose father is Olympus alone; their parent was no race of mortal men, no, nor shall oblivion ever lay them to sleep; the god is mighty in them, and he grows not old.'

XII

THE CHARACTER AND EXTENT OF GREEK

LITERATURE 1

BY ULRICH VON WILAMOWITZ-MOELLENDORFF

The literature of Greece is the only one in the civilized world that developed wholly out of itself. It brought forth in profusion not only perfect works of art but rigorously exclusive artistic types and styles, through which it became the basis and model of the European and of various extra-European literatures. Greek literature is the vessel that contains, or has contained, the fundamental works of all science; for it was the Greeks, and no others, that brought science as such into the world. These incomparable advantages-which nevertheless in the final analysis are relative-interfere with an absolute appraisal of Greek works and their authors; for when a work has served as a pattern during two thousand years, to see it as it appeared to the man who once created it is no easy matter; and to see in him an agonizing, striving, erring human being is even harder. Nothing more effectually obscures a human figure than to deify it, and nothing seems so far removed from the accidents of genesis as a classic work of art-in both cases exaltation occurs at the expense of life. But, in point of fact, Homer is classic at the date when he is first known to us; and at the birth of Christ Greek literature is already classic to the same extent and in the same sense as a hundred years ago when the historical study of it began; this last is not older. The relation of Goethe to the Greeks is not essentially different from that of Virgil and Horace, who, together with Cicero, produced the first classical literature in another tongue upon the Greek foundation. Through the mediation of this daughter, Greek literature dominated the Occident even

[1 This extract, by the leading classical scholar of to-day in Germany, and probably in the world, is translated from Die Griechische und Lateinische Literatur und Sprache (pp. 1-4). B. G. Teubner, Berlin and Leipzig, 1905. (Die Kultur der Gegenwart, ihre Entwickelung und ihre Ziele, herausgegeben von Paul Hinneberg, Teil I, Abteilung VIII.)-EDITOR.]

in the long interval when Western Europe was without knowledge of the original works; and when the original works became known after the fifteenth century, they were still primarily viewed with the eyes of the Romans, or of Greeks of the Roman era, who stand under the same spell of classicism. But when Winckelmann, with an energy conscious of its aim, made bold to return to the genuine Greeks, and undertook to draw for sculpture the line of its historical development, and when the next generation in turn carried this movement over to literature, it was only the absolute estimation of the classic originals that rose; for in regard to historical knowledge, no one as yet was expected to trace the process by which the Greek people came into being the history and results of this process. And so the origin of Greek literature and its types was identified with the absolutely normal and natural, the gaps in historical knowledge were bridged with philosophical abstractions, and what had been effected by definite, concrete conditions, and by the individual power and will of important men, became the product of immanent natural laws. The types of Greek poetry and artistic prose-epic, elegy, ode, tragedy, comedy, epigram, history, dialogue, oration, epistle-appeared as natural forms in the arts of discourse. In all this the interpreters still stood under the spell of the ancient theory. An actual science of history the Greeks did not produce; their thought was bent upon abstracting rules from observation, and then working with these abstractions; and so they actually regarded those types, which had grown up among them historically, as conceptually pre-existent. The first man to compose a tragedy was not the inventor-he was 'the first one to find it,' as they said. Preliminary stages, of course, were recognized, but then they represented imperfect forms which had best be forgotten. The decisive moment is that in which the type 'attains to its own true nature.' From the moment when tragedy has reached this point-from that moment on for ever one can compose tragedies only after this pattern; and their success or failure is measured as they give better or worse expression to the idea of tragedy. Starting with this view, the moderns came to an extravagant overestimation of the finders or inventors or better, of the classic works,-and to a depreciation of everything subsequent; precisely as scholars, following the ancient purists, regarded the entire evolution of the language after Demosthenes as decadent. In truth it often looked as though Greek literature had ended with Alexander. And yet more unjust was it when, from among the works of a later age, that was preferred which seemed to come nearest to the classic, that is, nothing more

or less than pure imitation. Moreover, there was still another great want; for the philologists had recognized only in principle that historical understanding and historical evaluation must grasp each work and each author first of all in terms of his own age and his own intention, and hence independently of later estimates quite as much as of distorted historical tradition or secondary reconstructions of texts. As for schoolmasters who identify the literature with the authors employed in the service of education-where the standard is a fixed rule, preferably of the narrowest description— we need not consider them. It is naïve presumption when these ignoramuses put on the air of philologists.

But in reality the history of Greek literature is still in its beginnings, and indeed, considering its youth, this could not be otherwise. An account that should turn away from classicism simply on principle has in fact never been attempted. And indeed, such an account could not as yet by any possibility be written. First of all, the extant works must be understood; and therewith the artistic forms, and the principles in accordance with which they were composed, must be grasped, before they can be genetically explained and their history written. And the individual personalities of the authors must be seized before they can be arranged in historical connection, and hence before any judgment can be pronounced upon them. But for much the larger part of the extant literature this process has scarcely begun. Yet before one tries to understand the works in question one must possess them. But for whole masses of the literature we have only inadequate texts, while for other sections, as the Christian writers from the fourth century on, the texts are inaccessible. To secure these, Greek philology has striven with vigor and success. But not all the civilized nations have supplied large numbers of willing and able collaborators for the undertaking; and furthermore, precisely from the most important periods only too many works are lost; these it is necessary to restore so far as we have the power-so far as, with our best efforts, the task is not utterly hopeless. Much, indeed, has already been accomplished, yet the fact remains that not even the fragments have been completely assembled; and this is only the first step. For the history of literature the second step is to trace out subsequent influences, and it is almost more important than the other. Still further, Greek literature is all-embracing; it will not do to limit the term to belles-lettres (a conception for which the Greeks had no equivalent), and to exclude the special sciences. But now we must remember that the works on medicine, astronomy, and mechanics

cannot be understood without a knowledge of these sciences. Here the collaboration of various specially trained investigators is demanded-something long needed, but now, thank Heaven! no longer wanting. The culture of the twenty-first century will look down with pity, let us hope, on the small extent of our present knowledge, and will rectify many of our judgments; but it unquestionably will hand on to its future more to do than, under the most favorable circumstances, its advantage will amount to in comparison with us. True it is, the feeling of one's own inadequacy in the face of such a task is not quieted by the thought that in any case the problem can at the moment obtain but an inadequate solution; yet to the man who reads as well as the man who writes we may apply the utterance of Hippolyte Taine—who knew what it was to read and write: 'The keenest pleasure of a toiling spirit lies in the thought of the toil hereafter to be accomplished by others.'

It could not be otherwise than that, in accordance with the extant materials, the treatment of them should be widely varied; for on the one hand it is impossible to set such works as we have constantly in the centre, so as to make the accidental circumstance of their preservation more or less determine the question of relative importance; and, on the other hand, investigation has not everywhere managed to survey the motive forces to such an extent that one may find an historical thread by which to order all the particulars. The single principle of following each literary type separately would, of course, preserve unity, but this very procedure would completely involve us again in the ancient schematism. Accordingly, what would on artistic grounds be the only satisfying method has here been renounced, and the attempt has been made to treat each period in accordance with the status of the materials and of our knowledge. If this procedure seems to subordinate the classical period as compared with what is subsequent thereto, let the reader recall not merely the sum total of the extant writings, and the length of the periods, but also the fact that the opposite injustice has only too long prevailed.

The periods are automatically divided according to the great sections of history. The first is the Hellenic, from about 700 B. C. to the Persian wars, to which is attached the Attic, delimited about the year 320 by the death of Alexander, Aristotle, and Demosthenes. If we speak of the fourth century, the age embraces but eighty years, and the same is true of the fifth. The glory of Athens was brief. Then come the three Hellenistic centuries, separated from one another by, say, the year 222 (beginning of Polybius), the year 133