PREFACE.
The study of Greek and Roman Antiquities has, in common with all other philological studies, made great progress in Europe within the last fifty years. The earlier writers on the subject, whose are contained in the collections of Gronovius and Grævius, display little historical criticism, and give no comprehensive view or living idea of the public and private life of the ancients. They were contented, for the most part, with merely collecting facts, and arranging them in some systematic form, and seemed not to have felt the want of anything more: they wrote about antiquity as if the people had never existed: they did not attempt to realize to their own minds, or to represent to those of others, the living spirit of Greek and Roman civilization. But by the labours of modern scholars life has been breathed into the study: men are no longer satisfied with isolated facts on separate departments of the subject, but endeavour to form some conception of antiquity as an organic whole, and to trace the relation of one part to another.
There is scarcely a single subject included under the general name of Greek and Roman Antiquities, which has not been received elucidation from the writings of the modern scholars of Germany. The history and political relations of the nations of antiquity have been placed in an entirely different light since the publication of Nieburh's Roman History, which gave a new impulse to the study and has been succeeded by the works of Böckh, K. O. Müller, Wachsmuth, K. F. Hermann, and other distuinguished scholars. The study of the Roman law, which has been unaccountably neglected in this country, has been prosecuted with extraordinary success by the great jurists of Germany, among whom Savigny stands pre-eminent, and claims our profoundest admiration. The subject of Attic law, though in a scientific pount of view one of much less interest and impotrtance than the Roman law, but without a competent knowledge of which it is impossible to understand the Greek orators, has also received much elucidation from the writings of Meier, Schömann, Bunsen, Platner, Hudtwalcker, and others. Nor has the private life of the ancients been neglected. The discovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii has supplied
