both of great value as evidence for the internal conditions of Athens at the beginning of the struggle with Macedon. The Plataicus (373 B.C.) and the Archidamus (366 B.C.) throw light upon the politics of Boeotia and the Peloponnese respectively. The Panathenaicus (339 B.C.), the child of his old age, contains little that may not be found in the earlier orations. The Philippus (346 B.C.) is of peculiar interest, as giving the views of the Macedonian party.
Not the least remarkable feature in recent historical criticism is the reaction against the view which was at one time almost universally accepted of the character, statesmanship and authority of the orator Demosthenes (q.v.). During the last quarter of a century his character and statesmanship have been attacked, and his authority impugned, Demosthenes. by a series of writers of whom Holm and Beloch are the best known. With the estimate of his character and statesmanship we are not here concerned. With regard to his value as an authority for the history of the period, it is to his speeches, and to those of his contemporaries, Aeschines, Hypereides, Dinarchus and Lycurgus, that we owe our intimate knowledge, both of the working of the constitutional and legal systems, and of the life of the people, at this period of Athenian history. From this point of view his value can hardly be overestimated. As a witness, however, to matters of fact, his authority can no longer be rated as highly as it once was, e.g. by Schaefer and by Grote. The orator’s attitude towards events, both in the past and in the present, is inevitably a different one from the historian’s. The object of a Thucydides is to ascertain a fact, or to exhibit it in its true relations. The object of a Demosthenes is to make a point, or to win his case. In their dealings with the past the orators exhibit a levity which is almost inconceivable to a modern reader. Andocides, in a passage of his speech On the Mysteries (§ 107), speaks of Marathon as the crowning victory of Xerxes’ campaign; in his speech On the Peace (§ 3) he confuses Miltiades with Cimon, and the Five Years’ Peace with the Thirty Years’ Truce. Though the latter passage is a mass of absurdities and confusions, it was so generally admired that it was incorporated by Aeschines in his speech On the Embassy (§§ 172-176). If such was their attitude towards the past; if, in order to make a point, they do not hesitate to pervert history, is it likely that they would conform to a higher standard of veracity in their statements as to the present—as to their contemporaries, their rivals or their own actions? When we compare different speeches of Demosthenes, separated by an interval of years, we cannot fail to observe a marked difference in his statements. The farther he is from the events, the bolder are his mis-statements. It is only necessary to compare the speech On the Crown with that On the Embassy, and this latter speech with the Philippics and Olynthiacs, to find illustrations. It has come to be recognized that no statement as to a matter of fact is to be accepted, unless it receives independent corroboration, or unless it is admitted by both sides. The speeches of Demosthenes may be conveniently divided into four classes according to their dates. To the pre-Philippic period belong the speeches On the Symmories (354 B.C.), On Megalopolis (352 B.C.), Against Aristocrates (351 B.C.), and, perhaps, the speech On Rhodes (? 351 B.C.). These speeches betray no consciousness of the danger threatened by Philip’s ambition. The policy recommended is one based upon the principle of the balance of power. To the succeeding period, which ends with the peace of Philocrates (346 B.C.), belong the First Philippic and the three Olynthiacs. To the period between the peace of Philocrates and Chaeronea belong the speech On the Peace (346 B.C.), the Second Philippic (344 B.C.), the speeches On the Embassy (344 B.C.) and On the Chersonese (341 B.C.), and the Third Philippic. The masterpiece of his genius, the speech On the Crown, was delivered in 330 B.C., in the reign of Alexander. Of the three extant speeches of Aeschines (q.v.) that On the Embassy is of great value, as enabling us to correct the mis-statements of Demosthenes. For the period from the death of Alexander to the fall of Corinth (323 –146 B.C.) our literary authorities are singularly defective. For the Diadochi Diodorus (books xviii.-xx.) is our chief source. These books form the most valuable part of Diodorus’ work. They are mainly based upon the work of Hieronymus of Cardia, a writer who combined exceptional opportunities for ascertaining the truth (he was in the service first of Eumenes, and then of Antigonus) with an exceptional sense of its importance. Hieronymus ended his history at the death of Pyrrhus (272 B.C.), but, unfortunately, book xx. of Diodorus’ work carries us no farther than 303 B.C., and of the later books we have but scanty fragments. The narrative of Diodorus may be supplemented by the fragments of Arrian’s History of the events after Alexander’s death (which reach, however, only to 321 B.C.), and by Plutarch’s Lives of Eumenes and of Demetrius. For the rest of the 3rd century and the first half of the 2nd we have his Lives of Pyrrhus, of Aratus, of Philopoemen, and of Agis and Cleomenes. For the period from 220 B.C. onwards Polybius (q.v.) is our chief authority (see Rome: Ancient History, section “Authorities”). In a period in which the literary sources are so scanty great weight attaches to the epigraphic and numismatic evidence.
Bibliography.—The literature which deals with the history of Greece, in its various periods, departments and aspects, is of so vast a bulk that all that can be attempted here is to indicate the most important and most accessible works.
General Histories of Greece.—Down to the middle of the 19th century the only histories of Greece deserving of mention were the products of English scholarship. The two earliest of these were published about the same date, towards the end of the 18th century, nearly three-quarters of a century before any history of Greece, other than a mere compendium, appeared on the Continent. John Gillies’ History of Greece was published in 1786, Mitford’s in 1784. Both works were composed with a political bias and a political object. Gillies was a Whig. In the dedication (to George III.) he expresses the view that “the History of Greece exposes the dangerous turbulence of Democracy, and arraigns the despotism of Tyrants, while it evinces the inestimable benefits, resulting to Liberty itself, from the steady operation of well-regulated monarchy.” Mitford was a Tory, who thought to demonstrate the evils of democracy from the example of the Athenian state. His History, in spite of its bias, was a work of real value. More than fifty years elapsed between Mitford’s work and Thirlwall’s. Connop Thirlwall, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, afterwards bishop of St David’s, brought a sound judgment to the aid of ripe scholarship. His History of Greece, published in 1835–1838 (8 vols.), is entirely free from the controversial tone of Mitford’s volumes. Ten years later (1846) George Grote published the first volumes of his history, which was not completed (in 12 vols.) till 1856. Grote, like Mitford, was a politician—an ardent Radical, with republican sympathies. It was in order to refute the slanders of the Tory partisan that he was impelled to write a history of Greece, which should do justice to the greatest democracy of the ancient world, the Athenian state. Thus, in the case of three of these four writers, the interest in their subject was mainly political. Incomparably the greatest of these works is Grote’s. Grote had his faults and his limitations. His prejudices are strong, and his scholarship is weak; he had never visited Greece, and he knew little or nothing of Greek art; and, at the time he wrote, the importance of coins and inscriptions was imperfectly apprehended. In spite of every defect, however, his work is the greatest history of Greece that has yet been written. It is not too much to say that nobody knows Greek history till he has mastered Grote. No history of Greece has since appeared in England on a scale at all comparable to that of Grote’s work. The most important of the more recent ones is that by J. B. Bury (1 vol., 1900), formerly fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, afterwards Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Mitford and Bury end with the death of Alexander; Gillies and Grote carry on the narrative a generation farther; while Thirlwall’s work extends to the absorption of Greece in the Roman Empire (146 B.C.).
While in France the Histoire des Grecs (ending at 146 B.C.) of Victor Duruy (new edition, 2 vols., 1883), Minister of Public Instruction under Napoleon III., is the only one that need be mentioned, in Germany there has been a succession of histories of Greece since the middle of the 19th century. Kortüm’s Geschichte Griechenlands (3 vols., 1854), a work of little merit, was followed by Max Duncker’s Geschichte der Griechen (vols. 1 and 2 published in 1856; vols. 1 and 2, Neue Folge, which bring the narrative down to the death of Pericles, in 1884; the two former volumes form vols. 5, 6 and 7 of his Geschichte des Altertums), and by the Griechische Geschichte of Ernst Curtius (3 vols., 1857–1867). An English translation of Duncker, by S. F. Alleyne, appeared in 1883 (2 vols., Bentley), and of Curtius, by A. W. Ward (5 vols., Bentley, 1868–1873). Among more recent works may be mentioned the Griechische Geschichte of Adolf Holm (4 vols., Berlin, 1886–1894; English translation by F. Clarke, 4 vols., Macmillan, 1894–1898), and histories with the same title by Julius Beloch (3 vols., Strassburg, 1893 –1904) and Georg Busolt (2nd ed., 3 vols., Gotha, 1893 –1904). Holm carries on the narrative to 30 B.C., Beloch to 217 B.C., Busolt to Chaeronea
