Greek culture has received no less attention than Greek politics.  The Homeric problem continues to exert an irresistible attraction.  Every expert from Wilamowitz to Gilbert Murray and Walter Leaf adds to our comprehension of the epic; but no positive results have been established, and Holm uttered the gloomy 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 Empire, and the whole world hoped that the master would write it; but he contented himself with a survey of the provinces.  The closing years of his life were devoted to a gigantic