Primitive Athens as described by Thucydides / by Jane Ellen Harrison.

  • Jane Ellen Harrison
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Primitive Athens as described by Thucydides / by Jane Ellen Harrison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    22/194 (page 4)
    scholiasts and second-hand lexicographers, but of classical writers who knew and lived in Athens, of Thucydides, of Pausanias ? Second, To that literary testimony, what of monumental evidence has been added by excavation ? It is to answer these two questions that the following pages are written. It is the present writer’s conviction that contro- versy as to the main outlines of the picture, though perhaps at the outset inevitable, is, with the material now accessible, an anachronism; that the facts stand out plain and clear and that between the literary and monumental evidence there is no dis- crepancy. The plan adopted will therefore be to state as simply as may be what seems the ascertained truth about the ancient city, and to state that truth unencumbered by controversy. Then, and not till then, it may be profitable to mention other current opinions, and to examine briefly what seem to be the errors in method which have led to their acceptance.