significant, through the imperfect knowledge of the writer. In the essential requisites of fidelity, accuracy, and learning, Mr. Finlay bears a favorable comparison with any historical writer of our day; but in the literary merits of composition, in artistic beauty of form, he is greatly inferior to many. Mr. Finlay is known to the world as a distinguished Philhellene; a friend of Greece in her hour of affliction, sharing with our gallant countryman, Dr. Howe, and others, in the perils and the glory of her brave resistance to the barbarian. He has long resided in that country, we believe, and identified his interests with her dubious fortunes under the existing government; and, besides the present work, he has written on subjects of a classical and antiquarian character; his work possesses, therefore, almost the authority and interest of one written by a native of the country.

There are circumstances in the character of the Greek nation which attach a peculiar interest to every period of its history. The Greeks of the present day are the only unquestionable representatives of antiquity. Though Greece fell under the military power of Rome, many of her peculiar institutions remained untouched by the conquerors, and her population continued to a great extent homogeneous and unmixed; and though, at the downfall of the Byzantine empire, Greece was overrun and trampled under foot by Asiatic barbarians, she still preserved her language and the consciousness of her illustrious descent. Among her mountain fastnesses, while her plains were held by the dark and turbaned infidel, a heroic race, resembling the warriors of Homeric song, maintained their independence, and chanted their deeds of daring in strains that do no discredit to their inherited genius. Thus the Hellenic race was preserved; and when the hour struck which was to see the foreign yoke thrown off, and the oppressor's power shattered and dispersed for ever, the thrilling recollections of old, uttered in words that have resounded over Greece since the days of Homer, strengthened the heart and nerved the arm with the exalting consciousness that Marathon and Thermopyla were to them no themes of schoolboy learning, kindling a factitious enthusiasm, but immortal names in their own history, scenes of fame in which their own great ancestors had acted, and which they, no unworthy sons of such ancestors, were bound to emulate. The period, therefore, illustrated by Mr. Finlay's

work is characterized not merely by a scientific or antiquarian relation to the general mass of our knowledge, but has important bearings upon the present condition of living men.

There is a feature in Mr. Finlay's method of treating his subject which gives to the result of his researches a special value; he has investigated not merely the facts of history, so as to present an intelligible narrative, but has inquired into the causes of political phenomena, laying them open to the light of modern science in such a manner, that the reader sees how the vices of administration worked out their inevitable consequences in the decline of physical prosperity, and in the gradual disorganization of the elements which constitute the necessary conditions of a progressive national existence. In other words, Mr. Finlay understands the principles of political economy, and has applied them skilfully to the explanation of the facts in his narrative.

The old relations of Greece with the rest of the world were greatly modified by the conquests of Alexander. Like other ancient warriors, he set out in his career without the least shadow of right to justify his invasion of remote and unoffending nations; but unlike other ancient warriors, he sought to create a new and better era, by founding new cities, extending the commerce of the world, encouraging the arts, and establishing a great empire on enlightened political institutions. The teachings of his great master, Aristotle, had initiated him in the science of government, and now, when he attempted to consolidate his conquests, guided him into the path of wisdom, which no other ancient founder of an empire had had the sagacity to discern and to follow. The language and institutions of the Greeks were planted among the barbarians, but not forced upon them. The power and wealth of the monarchs who succeeded Alexander, and divided his empire, overbalanced the influence of the free states of Greece, and, by opening a more extended sphere of action and holding up to the view of the ambitious more glittering rewards, drew off from the small theatre of continental Greece a large proportion of her ablest men, and Alexandria became the capital of the civilized world. A more intimate intercourse with the Asiatic courts corrupted the simplicity of Grecian manners, the kings of Macedonia assailed the independence of the southern Grecian states, which it was found impossible to unite in their common de

fence against the threatening danger, the Gauls invaded the country and inflicted on it heavy calamities, and the Greek colonies in Italy fell under the Roman arms. Thus the power of Greece rapidly declined, and her commercial influence received a fatal shock from the changes in the relations of states consequent upon the military achievements and political combinations of Alexander. "Alexandria and Rhodes," says Mr. Finlay, "soon occupied the position once held by Corinth and Athens." The transfer of the language and literature of Greece from their native abodes to splendid and luxurious foreign capitals wrought a great and unfavorable change upon its character. "That divine instinct," says our author, "which had been the charm and characteristic of its earlier age, never emigrated." In the free states of Greece, literature and art had been wrought into the daily life of the people; they were part and parcel of the education of every citizen. And these peculiar circumstances gave to literary productions a simplicity and directness, and a truth to nature, which were in a great measure lost when the immediate pressure of a cultivated popular opinion was taken off from the genius of the writers; and precisely this case occurred in the brilliant capitals of the East. The general corruption of morals was hastened to an inconceivable degree by suddenly bringing the treasures of the Persian empire, estimated by our author at between seventy and eighty millions sterling, into general circulation. "It is difficult to imagine," Mr. Finlay truly remarks, "a state of society more completely destitute of moral restraint than that in which the Asiatic Greeks lived. Public opinion was powerless to enforce even an outward respect for virtue; military accomplishments, talents for civil administration, and literary eminence were the direct roads to distinction and wealth; honesty and virtue were very secondary qualities. In all countries or societies where a class becomes predominant, a conventional character is formed, according to the exigencies of the case, as the standard of an honorable man; and it is usually very different indeed from what is really necessary to constitute a virtuous, or even an honest citizen.'

Such are some of the general causes of decline from the virtues of the ancient character of the Greeks; and when these causes had brought forth their natural fruits, Rome, the great military nation, organized with a central power which

guided all the energies of the state and wielded them as by the will of one man, came into violent collision with degenerate, effeminate, divided, and disorganized Greece. The result of such an unequal conflict could not long remain doubtful. The wars with Rome excited no strong national feeling among the Greeks. The great body of the citizens saw no means of regaining tranquillity and reëstablishing the principles of justice except by submission to Rome. This feeling is strikingly shown by an expression so current in the mouths of the people, that, according to Polybius, it passed into a common proverb:— Εἰ μὴ ταχέως ἀπωλόμεθα, οὐκ ἂν ἐσώnuev,-"If we had not quickly been lost, we should not have been saved."*

For a time, the weight of subjugation to Rome was not severely felt by the Greeks. The Roman was a barbarian and a fighter from the beginning, and he never fairly laid aside the essential rudeness of his character. The moment he came in contact with the ingenious Greek, the natural superiority of intellectual abilities over the coarser character of the Roman manifested itself in a way which provoked the ill-humor of the Roman satirists, who tried to disguise the fact by calling the conquered Greeks the hardest names which their limited vocabulary could supply. But to such a degree was this a fact, that the Romans, when they became ambitious to have literature of their own, had not wit enough to do much more than translate the literature of their subjects. Plautus and Terence translated the comic writers of Athens; Cicero translated Plato, and every other Greek philosopher he could lay his hands upon; and the only original invention they ever dared to claim was that of the satire, the poorest species of literature, since it consists mainly of invective against the persons and manners of the age, and has little or no general interest for the world at large.

The Romans made but one attempt to intermeddle with the municipal institutions and local administration of the Greeks; that was at the time of the conquest of Achaia; and so little luck had they in it, that they soon gave it up. "The local institutions, says Mr. Finlay, "ultimately modified the Roman administration itself, and long before

* Mr. Finlay incorrectly translates it, "Unless we are quickly lost, we cannot be saved." The past tense of the verbs makes this translation inadmissible.

the Roman empire ceased to exist, its political authority in the East was guided by the feelings of the Greeks, and its forms moulded according to Greek customs."

Mr. Finlay's first chapter embraces the period from the conquest of Greece to the establishment of Constantinople as the capital of the Roman empire; that is, to A. D. 330. In this time occurred the Mithridatic war, which caused a partial revolt; particularly that of Athens, from the Roman power. Sylla found it no easy matter to break the spirit of these fiery democrats; and when, after a long siege, the defence of the city had become hopeless, the Athenians sent a deputation to the Roman general to negotiate the terms of a surrender, and the orators began, after the ancient fashion, to talk about their ancestors and Marathon, Sylla pettishly answered, that " he had come to Athens to punish rebels, not to study history"; and he was as good as his word. He carried the city by storm; put most of the citizens to death; allowed his soldiers to plunder the private houses ; and took great credit to himself, on the score of humanity, for not burning them all to the ground. The Piræus he utterly destroyed. It was a great misfortune to Greece, that Mithridates chose to make Greece the theatre of his war with Rome; for Sylla's campaign wrought such havoc in the wealth and resources of Athens, that she never afterwards recovered either her commercial or political importance or her population. And yet her institutions did not, even after this terrible disaster, lose the whole of their vigor; the laws and legal forms still existed, and the court of the Areopagus, according to Tacitus, even in the reign of Tiberius, resisted the attempts of Piso to corrupt the administration of justice.

The next infliction under which the much-suffering Greeks groaned was the terrible scourge of the Cilician pirates. There be water-rats as well as land-rats; and the one almost always follows hard upon the other. The defenceless state of Greece, which was one of the consequences of her subjection to Rome, lured these sea-robbers from the Asiatic coast. The cities and temples of Greece, which contained the accumulated treasures of ages, fell an easy prey to these numerous and organized marauders, who rose to such a height of audacity and power that the supremacy of Rome herself was threatened. Pompey was intrusted with author