Page:Thucydides, translated into English Vol 1.djvu/32

 XXVlll THUCYDIDES the use of writing was common in Hellas before the Per- sian war. The Greelc was not weighed down by records of his ancestors extending, as in Egypt, over many thou- sand years. The tradition of the Trojan war was the cloud which bounded his horizon ; nothing which came before was known to him ; nothing which followed had any real hold on his imagination. There may have been great actions performed in the Dorian settlement of the Peloponnesus or in the Messenian wars, but they made no impression on the mind of Hellas, which seemed to be absorbed and satisfied by the tale of Troy commemorating the common action of the whole people. That in the sixth and seventh centuries b.c. the practice of writing on stone or marble was rare, and still rarer that of writing on papyri and skins, seems to be proved negatively by the silence of Homer, the scarcity of written monuments, the late rise of prose composition. But the interval between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars was prolific in inscriptions. At Athens, and probably in other centres of Greek life and religion, they must have been as numerous as the gravestones in a modern church- 3'ard, and had as little sacredness in the eyes of posterity. And to pursue the homely simile a little furlher, as it is uncommon to meet with a tombstone of the seventeenth century in any parish churchyard and in any church which is not a cathedral, so in ancient times Greek inscriptions were liable to be constantly removed and were rarely pre- served, except in a great temple such as the Parthenon at Athens, or the temple of Apollo at Delphi. There was not room enough for all ; and the earlier and more valu- able ones were buried under the accumulations of a later generation to which they yielded place. It is probably trace some kind of growth. But, while we await further evidence tending to bridge over the gap between 'Mycenaean' and Hellenic civilization, the remarks in the text hold good ; and no archaeological discovery is ever likcl}' to account for the higher qualities of * Hellenic civilization and Hellenic art.']