Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/394

 XVIII THE LATER LITERATURE, ALEXANDRIAN AND ROMAN I From the Death of Demosthenes to the Battle of Actium Among the many stereotyped compliments which we are in the habit of paying to Greek Hterature, we are apt to forget its singular length of life. From the prehistoric origins of the epos to Paul the Silentiary and Musaeus in the sixth century after Christ there is not an age devoid of delightful and more or less original poetry. From Hecataeus to the fall of Byzantium there is an almost uninterrupted roll of historians, and in one sense it might be held that history did not find its best expression till the appearance of Polybius in the second century B.C. Philosophy is even more obviously rich in late times ; and many will hold that if the great- est individual thinkers of Greece are mostly earlier than Plato, the greatest achievements of speculation are not attained before the times of Epictetus and Plotinus. The literature of learning and science only begins at the point where the present book leaves off. It may even be said that the greatest factor in imaginative literature. Love, has been kept out of its rights all through the 370