The Glory That Was Greece: A Survey of Hellenic Culture & Civilisation (Classic Reprint)

With the progress of research, classical scholarship tends more and more towards narrower fields of specialisation. Real students are now like miners working underground each in his own shaft, buried far away from sight or ear-shot of the public, so that they even begin to lose touch with one another. This makes an occasional survey of the whole field of operations not only necessary for interested onlookers, whether they happen to be shareholders or not, but also serviceable to the scholars themselves. The task of furnishing it, however, is not an easy one. No man nowadays can be as fully equipped in archaeology, history, and literary criticism as were great writers of general history in the last century like George Grote and Theodor Mommsen. We are driven, therefore, to one of two courses: either to compile encyclopaedic works by various writers under slight editorial control, or else to sacrifice detail and attempt in a much less ambitious spirit to present a panorama of the whole territory from an individual point of view. The former plan is constantly producing valuable storehouses of information to be used for purposes of reference. But they tend to grow in bulk and compression, until, like the monumental Paully-W issowa, they are nothing but colossal dictionaries. The writer who attempts the second plan will, of course, be inviting criticism at a thousand points, tie is compelled to deal in large generalisations, and to tread upon innumerable toes with every step he takes. Every fact he chronicles is the subject of a monograph, every opinion he hazards may run counter to somebodys
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology.

Forgotten Books' Classic Reprint Series utilizes the latest