Page:Thucydides, translated into English Vol 1.djvu/19

 INSCRIPTIONS XV disappointment. In inquiries of this kind the result is seldom very great, nor always very certain. The task of reading ancient Greek inscriptions may be compared to the amusement of putting together a dis- sected puzzle, or of making out an acrostic. The ingenuity which is required in both cases is of the same kind. When all the pieces fit and all the letters fall into their places, then the solution of the puzzle has been found. And although many of the pieces have been lost and many of the words or letters are no longer legible, and fragments of different inscriptions are occasionally mixed up together, still order and consistency and exhaustiveness, in what- ever degree they can be attained, are the tests of truth. Of course, as in a cipher, the possibility of arriving at a successful result depends on the definiteness of the problem and the possibility of obtaining an answer to it from a comparison of other parts of the document or of similar documents. The broken form in which the older Greek inscriptions have been preserved to us, though impairing, is far from destroying their value. But before much use can be made of them they must be illustrated by the literary remains of antiquity. Many coincidences, slight as well as impor- tant, soon begin to appear in them which realize ancient history to us. The juxtaposition of two names, the men- tion of an office, of a ceremony, of a reward conferred on an individual or on a tributary state, send us to the pages of the historian, and they may often supply a test of the accuracy or knowledge of a great writer or of a scholiast. It may be truly said that the inscriptions of the fifth cen- tury before Christ, though not always agreeing with his narrative (see pp. Iv, Ixxix), tend upon the whole to confirm the authority of Thucydides. Again, a few letters still remain of an inscription which Herodotus records to have been engraved on the memorial (a T€$pLTnro<; ;;^ttA.Keo?) erected by the Athenians in honour of the victory which they gained over the Boeotians and Chalcidians soon after