Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/43

I Lastly, we live in an age in which great store of material has been added to the treasures we already possess. For three centuries after the revival of learning scholars were chiefly busied in recovering the literature of antiquity, and in purifying it from the corruption with which the ignorance or carelessness of fifteen centuries had overlaid it. The process is still going on; but the work of the nineteenth century has been mainly of another kind. It has lain partly in the interpretation of this literature, with the object of getting at the real life and thought of the Greeks and Romans; partly in the collection of thousands upon thousands of inscriptions, whether already published or newly found, and in the ordering of them in such a way as to make them easily available for use. And though in the following chapters it will not often be necessary to refer to these vast collections, it may be here pointed out that of all material for the details of the history of the inscriptions are the most valuable. They are the work of the very men whose customs, laws, or virtues they commemorate, and they have not passed through the perilous process of being worked up into book-history. And if to all this be added the results of the excavation of the buildings and monuments of antiquity, and the light thrown on much that was once obscure by the modern sciences of Comparative Philology and Anthropology, we must allow that never, since the revival of learning, has such a fair field been open to the student of Greek and Roman life.

The vast amount of detail is, in fact, apt to