ART. III.—1. Aristotle on the Constitution of Athens. Edited by F. G. Kenyon, M.A., Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. London, 1891.

2. Hermathena: A Series of Papers on Literature, Science, and Philosophy. No. XVII. Dublin, 1891.

THE

HE present century has been rich in important additions to our store of classical knowledge. In 1816 Niebuhr found a palimpsest in the Library of the Chapter at Verona containing a copy of the Epistles of St. Jerome; under this writing he deciphered the text of the Institutes of Gaius, and thus immensely enhanced the value of what is perhaps Rome's greatest bequest to us, her system of jurisprudence and law. Shortly afterwards, the discovery of a great part of Cicero's treatise De Republica,' by Cardinal Mai, in a Vatican palimpsest, supplied a further proof of the matchless powers of the great Roman orator in every department of literary achievement, and contributed not a few choice blossoms to a future florilegium of the wit and wisdom of Cicero. Hardly had this precious piece of flotsam from the sea of time received the last polish from the hands of scholarship, before the four now famous orations of Hyperides, existing piecemeal in papyri, purchased by Mr. Harris Warden and Mr. Stobart at Thebes in Egypt about 1850, created for us a new figure in literature. Hyperides had hitherto been but a name in lists and lexicons, like those of Harpocration and Pollux, ever since the loss or destruction in the capture of Buda Pesth by the Turks of the codex of Hyperides, which had been the ornament of the library of the King of Hungary. Quite recently large additions to his remains have been made by the papyri of the Archduke Rainer. This acquisition was soon succeeded by one which was in some respects even more interesting, the papyrus fragment of three pages containing a portion of Alcman's marvellous old hymn to the Dioscuri, with its strange laconisms, and its curious companion pictures of Agido and Hagesichora. It was found by M. Marietti in 1855 in a tomb near the second pyramid; it is quite unique among Greek poems in its tone and style, and affords a new and amazing proof of the myriad-minded versatility of ancient Hellas.*

A century rich in real literary gains is naturally also fertile of forgeries, and some of these have had a temporary success. As Ireland's fictitious plays of Shakspeare imposed on Garrick,

* It is printed in the fourth edition of Bergk's 'Poetæ Lyrici Græci,' vol. iii. pp. 30-45. who

who actually put 'Shakspeare's Vortigern' on the stage, so the sham-antique ballads of Surtees took in even the great master of ballad lore and maker of ballad poetry, the inimitable Sir Walter Scott himself a fact which can only be put beside Scaliger's belief in the genuineness of two comic Latin fragments of great alleged antiquity, submitted to him by Muretus, who himself had written them. Ever since Onomacritus wrote the poems of Orpheus, the literary forger has been from time to time at work; but in recent ages he has not been so successful as those artists whom some suppose to have fabricated the Homeric poems under Pericles. The Rowley MSS. of Chatterton and the Ossian of Macpherson, though they had many enthusiastic believers in their authenticity, had however only a temporary triumph; and quite recently the Greek Simonides and the Jew Shapira have failed egregiously in their attempts to impose their sham antiques on the learned world. We shall again have occasion to refer briefly to the Shapira MSS., to point out the characteristic notes of disingenuousness which marked the manner in which they were presented to the public, and to put before our readers, by way of contrast, the history, so far as we know it, of the leaves which contain the 'Constitution of Athens,' and which certainly are not a modern forgery. We may here remark that the tendency of modern literary criticism is towards undue scepticism about the monuments of antiquity which we possess, rather than too great readiness to accept fabricated imitations of them as genuine. The Germans are leaving no nook in Helicon unrifled in their wild chase of the 'Unecht.' The method of Wolf's Prolegomena has fascinated his countrymen. Kirchhoff has dissected the Odyssey, as Wolf the Iliad, and Fick has rewritten it in its original Æolic.' It has been attempted to show that the 'De Corona' is an awkward fusion of two different speeches written on two different occasions, and on two incompatible plans. Thucydides, Plato, and Xenophon have been treated in the same way-unskilful patchwork all. Quite recently a book was written to show that the Annals' of Tacitus were by Poggio Bracciolini, and indeed we are approaching the paradox of Hardouin, who maintained that all the classics except a very few were written by a committee of scholars under Severus Archontius in the thirteenth century.

6

The scholar's dream of literary treasure-trove used to carry him to the palaces of Turkey, the monasteries of Macedonia, or the temples of Asia Minor; but of late Africa has been asserting *We believe the exceptions were Homer, Herodotus, Cicero, Pliny, Virgil (Georgics'), Horace ('Satires' and 'Epistles').

Vol. 172.-No. 344.

Y

her

her claim to her old reputation of being the constant source of surprises. Egyptian papyri have been the vehicle of most of our recent acquisitions, and bid fair to yield a further and still more abundant harvest. Mr. Flinders Petrie has recently exhumed a great pile of mummy-cases at Gurob in the Fayoum. These contain quantities of waste paper stuffed into the interstices between the thin planks or strips of wood which form the walls of the cases, apparently for the purpose of giving to them a greater appearance of solidity, and of enabling the carpenter to economise his timber. Among these bundles of waste paper have been lying for centuries parts of old MSS. of Plato's 'Phædo' and of the Antiope' of Euripides. Professor Mahaffy has succeeded in eliciting from these papyri some new fragments of a play very celebrated in antiquity. He has published them in the Dublin Hermathena,' and promises full details in the forthcoming Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy. The preliminary labours of deciphering, involving, no doubt, frequent appeals to the art of emendation, have been skilfully performed by Professor Mahaffy and Mr. Sayce, and have been supplemented by the critical sagacity of Mr. Bury, who has made many excellent corrections in the text. The fragment which probably came first in the play contains a speech in which one of the sons of Antiope encourages his mother, and bids her not to fear the approach of her uncle, the tyrant Lycus: 'Surely,' he urges, 'if Zeus is our father, as you say, he will deliver us in the hour of peril; the time for escape is past, the fresh blood of Dirce (wife of Lycus, whom they had slain) will convict us of her murder; we must do or die; we must slay the tyrant.' The leaf ends with the entrance of Lycus on the stage, but his speech is quite fragmentary. The only other portion of the MS. which is continuously legible presents to us Lycus a captive in the hands of his sons, and about to be slain by them, when Hermes appears as Deus ex machinâ,' and forbids the death of Lycus, whom he commands to hand over the sceptre to Amphion. This, as we know from the argument given by Hyginus, was he concluding scene of the play, and there is no doubt whatever that Mr. Flinders Petrie has become possessed of some new and genuine portions of a lost play of Euripides, which the affected phrase of Persius,

"Antiope ærumnis cor luctificabile fulta,"

would alone show to have been most pathetic, and to have been admired as such by the ancient world. But the newly-acquired portions of the play have very little interest except of an antiquarian kind, and contrast badly with the fragments of the

'Antiope,'

Antiope,' already known and published. Naturally too: for nearly all the latter have owed their preservation either to the thought they conveyed, or the beauty of the language in which it was expressed, and have come down to us from Plato or Stobæus; whereas the recently found verses are indebted for their survival to the merest chance, and do not happen to contain any of the characteristic excellences of the poetry of Euripides, hardly indeed a thought or expression which deserved to survive. We would give all the speeches of a Deus ex machinâ' in Euripides for that one so Euripidean half-line which the taste of Stobæus has preserved for us from this very play,

κέρδος ἐν κακοῖς ἀγνωσία,

a pregnant anticipation of Gray's touching couplet, now one of our household words,

'Where ignorance is bliss,

"Tis folly to be wise.'

Professor Mahaffy, perhaps feeling this, rests on its great antiquity the claim of the MS. on our attention :

"The papers found along with these remains of Euripides' famous play are dated in the early years of Ptolemy III., viz. before 230 B.C. As we have found no dates later than this reign in any of the cases, it is extremely improbable that the present literary fragments can be more recent; nay rather, the natural inference that a play of Euripides would take longer than ephemeral documents would to turn into waste paper is strongly corroborated by the character of the writing. From a palæographical point of view the hand is very old, possibly generations older than the company in which it was found.' But we cannot share the confidence with which the Professor claims such an enormous antiquity for the codex. At least we cannot admit the cogency of the reasoning by which he seeks to establish his opinion. The papers found in the mummy-cases along with the Euripidean fragments are very numerous, and are all of the same kind,-wills, agreements, receipts, leases, copies of statutes and decrees referring to rating and taxation; in a word, documents dealing with property and business transactions. Mr. Sayce has given specimens of them in the same number of Hermathena.' Now it seems to us that nothing is more likely than that these documents once formed the contents of some Registry of Deeds, which at last got rid of the portions of its stock which had become useless, by selling them as waste paper, or perhaps by throwing them away. Such documents as these are precisely those which retain longest a right to be preserved. We are far from admitting that the natural infer

ence is that a play of Euripides would take longer than these papers, which Professor Mahaffy strangely calls ephemeral, to turn into waste paper. On the contrary, we think that many years, perhaps hundreds of years, might elapse before the officials of a public Registry of Deeds would hold the instruments deposited with them to be so worthless as to justify them in throwing them away. They may have lain in the Registry for hundreds of years after they were deposited there, and then at last have become waste paper. Then it was that the old wills and deeds became mixed with the rubbish of a far later age, and helped a mutilated copy of the Antiope' and of some dialogues of Plato to impart an appearance of solidity to a jerry-mandered coffin. These fragments must of course be very old, but they are not necessarily older than, for instance, the treatise on the Constitution of Athens;' at least the arguments in support of the great antiquity which Professor Mahaffy claims for them must be drawn from the character of the handwriting alone.

But even if the Petrie papyri had all the antiquity claimed for them, and a great deal more interesting contents, they would still have been completely eclipsed by the extraordinary 'find' of the British Museum. Whether the treatise on the 'Athenian Constitution' is by Aristotle or not, is perhaps to scholars the most important question connected with it, and will afterwards be considered carefully; but even if we put the questions of age and authorship aside, the discovery is full of interest and importance. It is a singular, and even unique incident, that some unknown scholar living in Egypt in the time of Vespasian should have copied, or employed persons to copy, on the back of a farm bailiff's accounts, the remains of what he believed to be the treatise of Aristotle so often quoted and so widely celebrated, and that that MS. should have escaped all notice until towards the end of the nineteenth century it came into the hands of the authorities of the British Museum, and was by them deciphered, printed, and published. These authorities have not thought it wise to give us any information as to the person or persons from whom the MS. has been obtained, or the place where it has been preserved. We believe, however, that their reticence is a good sign, and that it arises from a conviction on their part that the same source is likely to yield more treasures, and a desire not to attract rival bidders or encourage dishonest manufacture. For all we know they have been obliged to be a little lax in their interpretation of certain Khedival laws, and have felt themselves constrained to give ear to the crafty counsel of Ulysses to Neoptolemus, and to lend themselves