A history of classical Greek literature / by J.P. Mahaffy.

  • John Pentland Mahaffy
Date:
1910
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: A history of classical Greek literature / by J.P. Mahaffy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION. In revising and correcting this new edition of my second volume, I have sought to supply such references as might add to its usefulness, and to remove a few notes which are now antiquated. When it first appeared, there were fewer facilities for ascertaining the best texts and editions of the Greek prose authors, and hence this sort of information made the book of value to students. Now we have so much official bibliography, that it is not worth while adding it to each author in this book. The progress in our knowledge, so far as Germany is concerned, appears periodically in Bursian’s Jahresberichi; the frequent discoveries, especially in Egyptian papyri, are given in Professor Wilcken’s Archiv.fiir Papyrusforschung. But even those who cannot read German will find an excellent catalogue in Mr. Kenyon’s Palceography of Greek Papyri (1899), which will doubtless presently appear in a new edition. Yet most of the additions to our inheritance of classical Greek prose are but scraps and fragments, so that there is not much of really literary value to be here announced. The most important is, no doubt, the large passage from a lost Greek historian dealing very deliberately with the years 396-5 b.c., and thus covering a period already known to us through Xenophon. Into the controversy as to the authorship I shall enter in the second part of this volume. Other fragments are a scrap of Antiphon’s famous defence of himself (cf. Her7nes, pp. 103 some