and even of W. Christ, from whose Geschichte der Griechischen Litteratur I have taken a great deal of my chronology and general framework. But there are two teachers of whose influence I am especially conscious: first, Mr. T. C. Snow, of St. John's College, Oxford, too close a friend of my own for me to say more of him; and secondly, Professor Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, of Göttingen, whose historical insight and singular gift of imaginative sympathy with ancient Greece seem to me to have changed the face of many departments of Hellenic study within the last fifteen years.
My general method, however, has been somewhat personal, and independent of particular authorities. I have tried—at first unconsciously, afterwards of set purpose—to realise, as well as I could, what sort of men the various Greek authors were, what they liked and disliked, how they earned their living and spent their time. Of course it is only in the Attic period, and perhaps in the exceptional case of Pindar, that such a result can be even distantly approached, unless history is to degenerate into fiction. But the attempt is helpful even where it leads to no definite result. It saves the student from the error of conceiving 'the Greeks' as all much alike—a gallery of homogeneous figures, with the same ideals, the same standards, the same limitations. In reality it is their variety that makes them so living to us—the vast range of their interests, the suggestiveness and diversity of their achievements, together with the vivid personal energy that made the achievements possible. It was not by 'classic repose' nor yet by 'worship of the human body,' it was not
