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

  • John Pentland Mahaffy
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

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

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    because the work is professedly that of an Athenian aristocrat hostile to the democracy, and nevertheless defending the expe- diency of the policy of the demos. Both these suggestions seem to me absurd; for all the evidence we have concerning Critias shows him to have been a rhetor of far greater skill than the author of our tract, and we may be certain he would not have written in defence of the demos from any point of view. As to Alcibiades, there seems to me one sentence in the work directly aimed at him : ‘ I indeed excuse democracy in the populace, for it is natural that anyone should benefit him- self ; but whosoever does not belong to the populace, and yet prefers living in a democratic to living in an oligarchical polity, has [evidently] laid himself out for crime, and knows that it is easier for a miscreant to pass muster in a democratic than in an oligarchical state.’ This is the reflection of an oligarch upon his fellows who adopt radical or whig politics, and play the part of democratic leaders. Passing, then, from this resultless enquiry, we come to another cloud of controversy about the original form and scope of the tract, some explaining its direct question-and-answer style as implying a familiar letter; others (Cobet and C. Wachs- muth) maintaining that an older dialogue has been cut down into an argument by an inexpert writer ; others again, such as Kirchhoff, analysing the work sentence by sentence, and de- claring it a mere congeries of badly connected fragments. But Kirchhoff has dissolved in his crucible even the de Corona of Demosthenes ; nor do I think that any ordinary speech, for example, of Andocides, would afford him fewer points of attack than this tract. If it be indeed an early essay in Attic prose, when no model existed for an argumentative treatise except, perhaps, a few dialogues of Zeno, we may fairly expect to find a conversational style with question and answer, as well as rapid transitions without strict logical nexus. And indeed, Rettig, in a careful tract,* has shown that, with a few trans- positions of paragraphs at the close, the whole tract may be brought into a reasonable shape. Turning to the matter of the work, the reader will find it one of the most interesting and instructive documents of the age, and * Die Planmassigkeit dcr 'A.9t]yvdwy roKireia (Wien, 1877).
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