themselves with perfect abandon.  Again we see them at their evening rendezvous, at the banquets where philosophers, poets, sophists, painters, artists of every sort,—­in fact, the whole Bohemia of Athens,—­gather round them.  We get hints of all the stages of the revel, from the sparkling wit and the jolly good-fellowship of the early evening, to the sodden disgust that comes with daybreak when the lamps are poisoning the fetid air and the remnants of the feast are stale.

We are not to look upon the letters of Alciphron as embodying a literary unity.  He did not attempt to write one single symmetrical epistolary romance; but the individual letters are usually slight sketches of character carelessly gathered together, and deriving their greatest charm from their apparent spontaneity and artlessness.  Many of them are, to be sure, unpleasantly cynical, and depict the baser side of human nature; others, in their realism, are essentially commonplace; but some are very prettily expressed, and show a brighter side to the picture of contemporary life.  Those especially which are supposed to pass between Menander, the famous comic poet, and his mistress Glycera, form a pleasing contrast to the greed and cynicism of much that one finds in the first book of the epistles; they are true love-letters, and are untainted by the slightest suggestion of the mercenary spirit or the veiled coarseness that makes so many of the others unpleasant reading.  One letter (i. 6) is interesting as containing the first allusion found in literature to the familiar story of Phryne before the judges, which is more fully told in Athenaeus.

The imaginary letter was destined to play an important part in the subsequent history of literature.  Alciphron was copied by Aristaenetus, who lived in the fifth century of our era, and whose letters have been often imitated in modern times, and by Theophylactus, who lived in the seventh century.  In modern English fiction the epistolary form has been most successfully employed by Richardson, Fanny Burney, and, in another genre, by Wilkie Collins.

The standard editions of Alciphron are those of Seiler (Leipzig, 1856) and of Hercher (Paris, 1873), the latter containing the Greek text with a parallel version in Latin.  The letters have not yet been translated into English.  The reader may refer to the chapter on Alciphron in the recently published work of Salverte, ‘Le Roman dans la Grece Ancienne’ (The Novel in Ancient Greece:  Paris, 1893).  The following selections are translated by the present writer.

H.T.  Peck

FROM A MERCENARY GIRL

PETALA TO SIMALION