Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/124

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1 1 4 Rcvicti's of Books rather than the general reader, will welcome. In the slight changes of text common to book and magazine which have been made necessary by these expansions and additions, several flippancies of expression, which originally offended the more judicious reader, have' been eliminated. Alexander, for instance, in rebuking Aristotle for publishing the " acro- amatic doctrines," no longer figures as "one of the earliest opponents of university extension." The book would have gained in dignity if this eliminating process had been carried beyond the original first three maga- zine articles. In its illustrations the book gains decidedly upon the magazine, though its gain is chiefly in its loss. It loses the flamboyant and utterly un- historical full-page illustrations by Castaigne and Loeb, which were such a feature of the magazine articles, which doubtless caught the eye of the "groundlings," but which illustrated anything and everything except Alexander's career. The invaluable illustrations from coins and portrait statuary generally remain in the book. We miss unwillingly the Boston head of Alexander, found at Ptolemais, and even the so-called "Dying Alexander" of the Uffizi, but more than either the Etruscan statuette of the Tyrian Hercules, or the bronze statuette of Alexander in armor, with the Lysippus portrait touch. We miss also the drawings by Harry Fenn (can one ever forget the view of Budrum from the rock tomb?), and cannot reconcile ourselves to accepting in their place the unauthenticated and really useless drawings of the Acropolis of Sardis (p. 196), the scene on the coast of Asia Minor (p. 242), and the Gygean Lake (p. 246), which are evidently meant to vary the monotony of busts and coins. The maps of the book are generally better than those of the magazine, and for two new ones, "The Persian Empire about 500 B. C, and the Empire of Alexander the Great" (p. 192) and "Alexander's Crossing of the Hydaspes and Battle with Porus " (p. 440), we cannot be too grateful. We would, however, gladly exchange Thorwaldsen's " Triumph of Alexander " (p. 180), which is well enough as a paginal head-piece in the Cenfury Magazine, but worthless as historical illustra- tion, for the meanest Macedonian coin. Perhaps, however, publishers' amenities lie back of the singular choices and variations from the Century' s wealth of illustrative and ornamental material. Nor must the book be denied its right to ornament pure and simple, regardless of illustrative ac- curacy. The book is the best popular history of Alexander extant. It is the best kind of a popular history, written by a Greek scholar of minute and expert detailed knowledge, who has at the same time a broad and sound historical philosophy. It is written from within outwards, — centrifugally, after mastery of the original and primary, as well as of secondary and modern sources. In general its tendency is rather too romantic. It gives too much weight in many cases to the imaginative traditions about Alexander which were incorporated in the work of Kleitarchos, and which were passed on by Diodorus, Curtius Rufus, and Plutarch, when they are not substantiated and even when they are contradicted by the