The Historians' History of the World 04

Some of these myths Professor Mahaffy has made it his business to attempt to dispel. We have already had occasion to refer to his criticism on the eulogists of Thucydides. Again, in a matter of much broader scope, Professor Mahaffy long ago pointed out that the popular notion which regarded the Greek as the type of brave man was a most palpable illusion. He called attention to the fact that in some of the most important of Grecian battles—as, for example, that in which the Spartans won against the Corinthians, in the time of Agesilaus—the total death roll was sometimes only half a dozen men. He noted the childish way in which the Greek leaders were wont to keep up the courage of their men by harangues and bombast, and the way in which each side strove to frighten the other by loud shoutings and clashing of arms as it advanced. “These,” he said, “are not the characteristics of men who are brave in the modern sense of the word.” Again, he asked if it is conceivable that a modern body of warriors would have been repelled year after year by the walls of Athens, when only a handful of men, so to say, were within to defend them.

Advancing still further in the same iconoclastic spirit, Professor Mahaffy pointed out that some of the dearest traditions of Grecian history had been interpreted and foisted on the world through the minds of prejudiced participants, rather than in a spirit of fairness and equity. Thus the battle of Marathon, which we are accustomed even now to hear spoken of as the great decisive contest between the East and the West, will with difficulty bear this interpretation if one will consider it without prejudice. At the best, it was certainly a far less important and decisive battle than that of Platæa, but it chanced that the Athenians were the victorious combatants at Marathon, whereas at Platæa the Spartans bore the honours of the day; and since the Athenians, through their literature, served as the mouthpiece of Greece, it is not strange that the event in which they chiefly figured should have been unduly magnified, and the memory of it transmitted in distorted proportions to posterity. It is vastly to the credit of modern scholarship that it should be able to revise certain judgments on such matters as these, that have come down to us with all the accumulated inertia of generations of repetition.

It must not be supposed, however, from what has just been said, that Professor Mahaffy’s task in dealing with the history of Greece is altogether, or even chiefly, iconoclastic. The fact is quite otherwise. Critical as he can be on occasion, Professor Mahaffy nevertheless is, on the whole, an ardent and sympathetic admirer of the people who have furnished the theme of his life studies; but his laudatory judgments may be accepted with the more confidence because of the evidence he has given us that in considering the Greeks he does not allow himself to be carried utterly away by his enthusiasm, nor to forget that the Greeks, despite their national genius, were after all very human, and only properly to be understood when judged by some such practical standard as we apply to peoples of our own generation.

Professor Mahaffy knows his Greece of to-day at first hand quite as well as he knows ancient Greece through studies of the classics. He has described most charmingly his rambles in Greece proper; and latterly he has made the Ptolemaic epoch peculiarly his own, and his writings on this period take rank as among the most important contributions to a subject which most students of Grecian history have distinctly neglected.