prophecy that we shall never
know whether Homer existed, who he was, or what he wrote. On the other
hand we have gained a deeper insight into the early mind and soul of
Greece, thanks in large measure to a group of English scholars with Jane
Harrison at their head. Rohde's _Psyche_, the most illuminating treatise
on any branch of Greek religion, has traced the conception of
immortality through the ages. The later editions of Zeller's _Philosophy
of the Greeks_, first published in 1851, kept pace with the progress of
scholarship, and remains one of the glories of German scholarship. The
more recent work of the Austrian Gomperz has won almost equal
popularity, without placing its predecessor on the shelf. In the realm
of literature the most interesting event has been the recovery of the
poems of Bacchylides and Herondas, fragments of Sappho and Pindar,
Euripides and Sophocles and Menander; and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, which
have already produced undreamed-of treasures, may well have in store for
us further glad surprises. The attempt to assess the influence of
economic factors, courageously undertaken by Boeckh and somewhat
neglected after his death, has in recent years been renewed, with the
fruitful results familiar to us in Zimmern's realistic picture of Athens
in the fifth century.

The history of Roman studies since Niebuhr is largely the record of the
activity of a single man. The most personal and popular of Mommsen's
works, the _Roman History till the death of Caesar_, the greatest effort
of his genius though not of his scholarship, was published as far back
as 1854, and carried his name all over the world. He next turned to
special departments of research, pouring forth in rapid succession his
treatises on Chronology, Coinage, the Digest, and above all the
_Staatsrecht_, the largest and in his opinion the most important of his
works, and perhaps the greatest constitutional treatise in historical
literature. Meanwhile the _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_, which he
edited for the Berlin Academy, was the main occupation and the most
enduring monument of his life. He had devoted himself to Latin epigraphy
and had edited the Sammite and Neapolitan inscriptions before the
publication of the Roman History. The first instalment of the Corpus
appeared in 1863, and the great scholar lived to hail the appearance of
nearly twenty volumes, half of them edited by himself. The Inscriptions
rendered possible a history of the Emp