Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/90

 80 Journal of Philology. it. But what Btirs one's spirit even against Niebuhr is the dictum that Greece does not survive Alexander except as an empty name. During the century and a half after Alexander, as vigorous a political life went on in Greece as had done in the wonderful century and a half before him, and the spirit of free political organization shewed itself as active ; Greek literature past indeed its youthful prime, as our own is, was yet generating at Athens and Alexandria ideas which, filtered unhappily and diluted as most of them have come down to us, yet make a large part of our literary sustenance now. It is a remarkable instance of what comes of fragmentary and particular dating, or rather of the principle upon which it rests, (that of the abstraction of particular portions of history as alone worthy of attention, without regard of their relation to the rest), that Niebuhr, who we may suppose of all in our times had the widest view and strongest grasp of past history, should so quietly, because eloquence in the Pnyx was silent, leave unconsidered the neW life which woke in internal Hellas (in J3tolia, the Achaean cities, Arcadia, &c), as political energy was travelling westwards from the shores of the uEgean sea to those of the Tyrrhenian, as well as all the philosophy at Athens and all the natural science at Alexandria, as something unworthy of Greece, or not belonging to it. It is very proper to close a particular History of Greece with the close of the period during which the political life and the literature were closely associated with each other ; because the history of such a period is capable of being exhibited in a manner, both as to interest and instruction, which the history of other periods will not admit of; but if, after the classic period of a nation, its history is to be considered null, we must give up all hopes of ever having history in such a shape as shall enable us to draw from it valuable conclusions, or observe in it laws of human nature. On the subject of epochs in the Italian towns, the chapter of Scaliger (De Em. Temp. p. 385), to which Niebuhr refers, is very amusing, and Niebuhr's treatment of it not a little singular. "The original Roman system," Scaliger says, " was to mark times by the Consuls, and not by the years of the city. But most of the other Italian cities had made out or knew their first year, and dated time from that. The foundation-years of the colonies, and the birth-years of the municipia, being thus known in each part of Italy, it was a matter of shame that the origin of Rome should be so little known, as for Ennius to mistake it by no less than 100 years. Cato, first among the actual Romans, was ashamed of this igno- rance and supinoness, and so proceeded to calculate the origin of the city correctly." The induction upon which Scaliger founds his assertion that city epochal reckoning was the rule in Italy before the origin of Rome was satisfactorily reckoned, is the citation of what he considers three instances of such reckoning, the one of the time of Tiberius, the second of the time of Justinian, and the third of the year 105 B. C, from a colonial founda- tion epoch, 90 years before. This latter, to begin with it first, is a date on a stone, and considering that Puteoli was in a Greek part of Italy, tho