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the miraculous statue; men and women for centuries left their names and hymns of praise expressive of their admiration inscribed on the gigantic monument, and told how they had beheld its stupendous size and heard its divine song. Homer resembles this Memnon statue. If all who have for millennia repaired to this marvellous monument of the earliest ages of Greece in order to listen to the sounds of the dawning of European poetry, could have left us their names inscribed at his feet, what a catalogue it would be!

But however incalculably great is the influence which the treasures of ancient literature have exercised and are still exercising-thereby, at the same time, bearing an elevating testimony to the immortality of the creations of the human mind, even beyond the life of the language in which they are written-yet they present another aspect which is calculated to stir our hearts, if not more strongly, at all events more deeply. The authors of past ages tell us a great deal that is suggestive and instructive, in the same way as they imparted it to their compatriots, for whom they designed it; but in doing so they, in addition, betray something else which they could not intend at all. Involuntarily they afford us, by a casual description, or an unintentional word, that was superfluous for them but is invaluable to us, a picture of the life of their time; and what results from the careful collection of all these minute traits is the lesson that human thought and volition, from the earliest times of which a record has come down to us, have been subject to a mighty trans

formation. Accordingly the writings of ancient times are no longer mere literary productions for us to enjoy, and to enjoy so much the better the nearer they come to our own time and the more congenial they are to our minds, but they are monuments which we study, and which, on the contrary, we grasp at the more eagerly the older and more alien they are to us. The consciousness of the importance of literature in this sense is of very recent date; nay, I may say it is not even now sufficiently developed. It is true the study of antiquity has been in vogue ever since the revival of learning at the beginning of the modern era, but its object was not to gain from the reports of the authors an idea of the condition of mankind in their days, but inversely to gain that knowledge of the state of antiquity which was requisite for the purpose of understanding the authors. Even down to the last century Homer was judged by the standard of poets in general. He was ranked, let us say, by the side of Tasso or Milton, in the same way as we may mention Shakespeare and Schiller together. At length F. A. Wolf came forward with the question whether Homer had had any knowledge of the art of writing, and more especially had practised it himself; and having negatived it, he argued that such extensive poems could not possibly be produced by a single person from memory. He then endeavoured to show that we have in them the work of many individual singers, who composed short detached pieces and recited them to the cithern, as the singers mentioned in Homer himself were wont to do. No

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doubt he had not yet found the right solution, and the question as to the origin of the Homeric poems continues even now to be discussed over and over again; but it is indubitable that the matter of these poems cannot possibly have sprung from one head. The Trojan war is not a true history dressed up by the poet, still less is it his own invention; but in reality it is, with all its details, a primitive popular belief, much older than any line of any existing epic. Achilles and Odysseus are not imaginary poetical characters, but were demigods of the Greeks in primeval times; and mythology, with all its oddities, far from being invented by the poets for the purpose of ornamenting their poetry, was, on the contrary, the sacred conviction of that primeval age. The stories of Hera struck by Zeus in his anger and suspended in the clouds, of Hephaestos, who wishes to come to the rescue of his mother, and whom Zeus seizes by the leg and flings down to the earth, where he alights in Lemnos and is picked up half dead, formed in the age of Voltaire the subject of sneering criticism; they were, in his eyes, insipid fancies, which a polite poet at the court of Louis XIV. would certainly not have indulged in. But there is no doubt that, whoever was the Homer of these and similar poems, he fervently believed in the truth of precisely such legends. They were sacred to him and his audience; they were already then ancient and not understood; they conceal some deep mysterious meaning; how and when may they have originated? Here the problem of the formation of myths, of the origin of

faiths, the solution of which has only just begun, is exhibited to our view.

While an unexpected background became thus visible behind a book which thousands had read and fancied they understood, the present century has resuscitated an even remoter antiquity, and gained for the investigation of primitive times a new subject, the very extent of which alone cannot but raise astonishment, and of which our ancestors dreamt as little as of the great technical inventions of our age.

We now know monuments and writings compared with which all that formerly was regarded as most ancient, Homer and the Bible included, appears almost modern. The French expedition to Egypt under Napoleon I. had an importance for European science similar to that which Alexander's to the East had it gave rise to the investigation and representation of ancient Egyptian monuments, and at the same time to the discovery of that ever-memorable stone of Rosetta, which in an Egyptian and Greek inscription contained the proper nouns that led to the decipherment of the hieroglyphics. Two discoveries, indeed, concurred in bringing about this great result. The one, already previously made, was that the language of the ancient Egyptians was substantially identical with the Coptic, still preserved in the ecclesiastical literature of the Egyptian Christians; the other is Champollion's, that the hieroglyphics were a phonetic, partly even an alphabetical, writing. Those singular pictures, which had so long been thought

confused symbolical mysteries of priests, turned out to be writing once accessible and intelligible to the whole people. It was not always profound wisdom which was hidden beneath these hieroglyphics: over a picture representing oxen might be read the simple words, "These are oxen." Champollion read and translated innumerable inscriptions; he composed a grammar and a dictionary of the hieroglyphics, and already in the first of his works, masterly both for their style and matter, he communicated the decipherment of a quantity of names of Roman, Greek, and national rulers of Egypt, from which an entire history of the kingdom up to an incredibly early period began to dawn. There appeared, composed of hieroglyphics, the names of Alexandros, Philippos, Berenice, Cleopatra, Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, Vespasianus, Titus, Domitianus, Nerva, Trajanus, Hadrianus, Antoninus, Diocletianus, as well as Xerxes and Darius, Psammetichus, Shishank, and Rameses; and gradually there were gathered and identified from pyramids and rock-tombs, from the walls of temples and palaces, the whole long list of names which Manetho, a priest of the time of Ptolemæus Philadelphos, has preserved to us-a list of thirty dynasties, to the sixteenth of which, at the earliest, belonged the first Pharaoh, the contemporary of Abraham, mentioned in the Bible. The 331 names of kings which the Egyptian priests enumerated to Herodotus from a papyrus, the 346 colossal wood-carvings of Theban high-priests which they showed him, as they had succeeded each

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