the new speculation, the expansion of gnomic wisdom is not a retrogression to the age of Hesiod: it is part of the profounder attitude towards the inner and the outer life. But in the age of enlightenment, when the piecemeal logic of the maxim ceased to carry enough of that truth to contain the greater complexity of ethics, it still dominated literature. The Greeks were not men who appeased their souls by aphorisms nor did they reduce every phase of life to the terrors of a truism; nevertheless what had once been a brilliant moral aperçu they retained in oratory and the drama in art as a foil against obsolescent ideas, in part also as a pure conventionalism; just as much of their pessimism is mere literary veneer. "The drama is full of external and internal conventions that in large measure determine its character. We think at once of the constant presence of the chorus on the stage which necessitates the closest interrelation of the parts; of the limitations caused by the number of the actors; of the avoidance of scenes of actual murder; of the sheer restriction of the theme which, except in the case of the parts of a trilogy following each other in immediate succession, prevented the complete portrayal of the transformation of character as it crystallized into will under the pressure of fate or of the conflict of duty and desire. The unrepresented antecedents of tragedy constitute so large a feature that the play itself resembles only the climax of a modern drama. Then, too, as Mr. Brander Matthews has shown, the dramaturgist was not independent of the actor. Hamlet was no doubt 'fat and scant of breath' because Burbage was waxing stout. Tradition expressly reports that Sophocles wrote with Tlepolemus in mind.

"Above all, invention was under bonds to tradition and to myth, which is not the same thing as tradition. But uûoos was vivified by diabeσis. The framework was permanent; originality clothed the skeleton with flesh. Into this Frankenstein the poet put his own soul. Living and working in the myth, he shaped details to the exigencies of his imagination, fashioned his fixed dramatic personages to different psychological values. But the freedom of individual conception was invaded by the law of his art, which made constant the actors in the struggle of antagonistic forces.

"And because of the inevitableness of the tragic personages, the end was constant. The dramaturgist may voice the changing aspirations of each age with its deepening intellectual and moral ideals, he may subtilize the lineaments of moral physiognomy; his very range may be wider than that of the modern playwright in whom the one passion of love eats out the rest; he may attain variety by creating different aspects of the same traditionary character - yet his theme was set by religious prescription, and it moved steadily towards a foreordained end. Because that end is known in advance, the poet relies in some measure on what stands outside the drama,' and does not depict with the precision of Shakespeare, the march to the end; nor does he make the conclusion evolve itself with inevitable cogency from the scene he stages. Because the end is predetermined it is lame in comparison to the peripetia, lame in comparison with many modern dramas; though something may be said to show that all great works of literature show an ultimate subsidence of emotion. However that may be, I am concerned here with the larger aspect of the question. The fate of Greek tragic art is involved in the permanence of the same dramatis personae. The doers of tragic deeds remained the same because of the similarity of the legends most appropriate for tragic representation. This danger of similarity of theme is common to literature

.

and to painting; as Leonardo da Vinci says in his Trattato della pittura: 'a face, motion, or an entire figure must not be repeated in another. picture.' And yet all the three great Attic dramatists dealt with the story of Oedipus, Philoctetes, Ixion, Palamedes, and Telephus. The heroes of Aeschylus and Sophocles are distinguished by majesty of soul and of station; in Euripides they preserve only the trappings of their heroic estate. Bereft of their nobility through rationalization, they shrink to the stature of common men with the complex impulses of common life; but their deeds are fixed by tradition and the doers have a religious inevitableness. Orestes and Electra must still wear the guise of princely national figures; even as the heroes of the Border ballads keep on fighting, though they have been dismembered.

"No people had a more distinctly national art than did the Greeks in their tragic drama; but the very nationality of that art, because it was rooted in the past, was its undoing. It was the sentiment of the past that prevented the Greeks from utilizing the fruitful motive of Agathon's 'Flower,' the caprice of tragic art, the one drama in which all the personages and incidents were fictitious. The successors of the Tragic Three were Hellenic Levites, guardians of the heroic art, and their conservatism, enforcing a religious convention, of which it was an expression, crippled all effective progress. Dramatic invention found an outlet in the Platonie dialogue and in a realistic comedy that was under no bonds to an over-exacting past. For six centuries indeed the tragedies of the great Attic masters held the stage, but tragedy had been devitalized by its refusal to abandon a subject-matter that voiced with authority the sentiment of the past.

"Tragedy, and lyric, and the epic as well, owed much of their enduring value in the estimation of the Greeks to their expression of veneration for the past. And yet the Egyptian priest, the exponent of an immemorial antiquity, said, 'Solon, you Greeks are always children.' Goethe bade us look upon the ancients as children, and another no less sympathetic worshipper of Hellas has said that the Greeks had no past. Measured by the sense of age that has come upon the modern world, the Greeks represent to us an immortal and irrevocable adolescence. Yet to themselves the past was forever present; they lived for the reintegration, not for the disintegration of the forces consecrating their tradi tions; and no people has so indelibly wrought into a literature so inexhaustibly young such large collective sympathies with the past. Greece, too, had its Mayflower motive, for the foundation of cities had been a theme of poets long before it became the theme of civic genealogists. The Olympic victor who had attained the summit of human felicity, as he listened to Pindar's triumphant ode, soon lost himself in his heroic counterpart; the spectator as he sat crow led against his neighbor in the Dionysiac theatre beheld, in mythic semblance of his greater self, the traditional heroes of his race move in awful majesty to their self-wrought doom. Then, too, the continuity of the past was upheld by the survival at Athens of families not superior before the law, but still retaining social prestige by reason of their place in the Olympian and heroic peerage. The petty conflicts of common life, its graver disharmonies, the impulses that incite to ambition and vengeance, the intensities of a national life which affected an over-rapid translation of thought into action, all the aspects of the drama of life were ennobled, when, by the visualizing power of art, they were transferred to the mythical world and embodied in actors divine and of the seed of gods. The past was

the counterfeit presentiment of the present. The best-known fables may have been known only to the few, but the majority of spectators of the tragic contests were aware that the play was to deal with the ancestry of the race. With each returning spring the Athenian knew that at the Dionysiac festival he might again behold, in the full splendor and authority of the present, Agamemnon king of men, Priam bereft of so many goodly scns, Helen whose invincible beauty was the spring of desolation; yes the gods themselves, not mere wraiths, but fashioned into living forms and speaking a language worthy of their high estate.

"The vision of the poet is immediate in proportion to its imaginative quality. Yet in this fictive world of tragedy, where imagination has freest scope, and in every other form of literature, these Greeks, who were possessed by the passion for innovation, restrict the impulse to originality. In motive, scene, and phraseology the Greeks are possessed by the passion for imitation; and their literature is unique in the coextension of spontaneity with a 'commemorative instinct' that links its various forms by a chain of associative reminiscence. . . .”

Reminiscent phraseology is, at least, less the expression of an inevitable perpetuity of artistic perfection in each single detail than an illustration of that imitative character of Greek literature as a whole which is a result of the superlative advantage possessed by that literature - the priority of its masterpiece. For the best came first. It is the reverential regard for Homer that made language courtesy to its sovereign; it is again the sentiment of the past, rather than the intrinsic superiority of each particular phrase, that prompted recourse to the epic. 'Imagi nation was forever haunted by the types of humanity established in clear outline by Homer.' Homer was the 'captain and teacher of the charming tragic company' said Plato; and Homer had the power of continually adjusting himself to the spirit of each successive age. It was through the influence of Homer that imitation became organic and literary reminiscence inherent in Greek literature. The address is printed in full in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. XVII (1906).

SECOND SESSION.

THURSDAY MORNING, December 28.

The Association was called to order shortly after 9.30 A.M. and resumed the reading of papers.

9. The Terms cyma recta and cyma reversa, by Professor Allan Marquand, of Princeton University.

The Greek words kûμa and Kuμáтɩov, as architectural terms, were presumably selected because of the frequent wave-like form of such mouldings. Greek usage, however, soon disregarded the form and used these terms to designate any form of crowning moulding. The Latin cymatium and the Italian cimatio also signified a crowning moulding, regardless of its form.

The distinction between the regular and the reverse wave moulding was first made by Alberti, de Re Aedificatoria, (Lib. vii, Cap. vii) and was designated gola

diritta and gola reversa by his successors, Vignola, Palladio and Scamozzi. This terminology had some influence on the architectural literature of northern Europe, but a more national terminology has recently prevailed in France and Germany. In England the distinction first appears as cima recta and cima reversa in Leoni's translation of Palladio (1715) and as cyma recta and cyma reversa in Stuart and Revett's Antiquities of Athens (1762). Whether theoretically justifiable or not, the terms cyma recta and cyma reversa have been accepted by the best English and American authorities, and there seems to be no immediate prospect of their being replaced by more specifically English terms.

See also American Journal of Archaeology, vol. X, p. 85, and 282 ff.

10. Emendation on Caesar, Bellum Gallicum, vi, 30, 4, by Professor Walter Dennison, of the University of Michigan.

The disputed passage is, Sic et ad subeundum periculum et ad vitandum multum fortuna valuit. This is the reading of the a-class. In the manuscripts of the B-class we find in place of multum the unsatisfactory variant, tumultum. Multum in this specific statement is weak and arouses suspicion of its correctness. For this reason and in conformity with Caesarian usage the reading mortem is suggested.

This paper appears in Classical Philology, vol. I, p. 290 f. It was discussed by Professors Sihler, Sanders, Radford, Knapp, Cole, and the author in reply.

11. Ancient Sinope, by Dr. David M. Robinson, of the Johns Hopkins University.

This paper, part of a monograph on Sinope, concerned itself with a description of Sinope and of its environs in the light of a visit there in June, 1903, with a brief résumé of its history, and with its cults.

The southern shore of the Black Sea is like a central mounting billow of the ocean with the hollow trough on each side. The billow and the two hollows, taken together, form the entire southern shore. The outline is symmetrical, so that the crest of this colossal land wave is the middle point of the whole seven hundred miles. The summit of the crest, however, is somewhat flattened, and just at the eastern edge, before it begins to fall away, throws out in a northeasterly direction an altar-shaped promontory which is perhaps a score of miles wide across the top. The projecting easterly horn of this altar is itself a little lofty promontory, upon the low landward neck of which is built Sinope. The Sinopean promontory, called to-day Boz-tepé, is about six hundred feet in height, with precipitous sides and a broad level fertile table-land at the top. Its outline somewhat resembles that of a boar's head, with the highest point at the snout in the extreme east. It is two miles in length from the neck out, and one mile in width. The cretaceous deposits, lying as they do over the volcanic formation, seem to say that the whole promontory was at an early period below the level of

the sea and afterwards was slowly heaved up into its present position. In the north central part of the nearly level plateau there still exists a lake, very shallow at present, but which must have been a crater. The sea dashing against the varying hardness of the trachyte, the black volcanic breccia, the red chalky scaglia, the shelly limestone and the sandstone has chiselled out a mass of sharp projections around the coast, and down at the water-line and below it has hollowed out caves and holes, the xoxides of Strabo xii, 545. Descending from the promontory by a gentle slope (cf. Polybius iv, 56) one finds to-day on the site of the ancient Sinope an inner town (Sinub or Sinob) marked off by two walls running across the narrow isthmus, one near the promontory, the other near the mainland. Inside these walls are the Turkish castle and the prison, where once the Sinopean acropolis stood. Outside the walls northeastward is the Greek and Christian quarter. The two walls across the isthmus have been built out of the most heterogeneous materials. In the wall nearest the mainland, on the inside, are arches indicating the remains of a Roman aqueduct, perhaps the one built by Pliny the Younger (cf. Pliny, Ep. x, 90, 91). This part of the wall is better built than the rest, and probably goes back to Roman date, whereas the greater portion of this same wall, as well as of the others, was constructed by the Genoese and later by the Turks.

The main factor in the making of Sinope was its double harbor, in both ancient and modern times the best on the southern shore of the Black Sea. In ancient times the southerly harbor was improved, and ruins exist of a mole which seems to be as old as Mithradates the Great, who was born at Sinope. No river flows into either harbor to silt it up, but the northerly one has been shallowed by sand deposits and is no longer usable by vessels of modern draft. It is impossible to give a clear picture of Sinope with its stoas, gymnasium, market-place, great palace of Mithradates, and temple of Serapis in their proper relative positions, since no ruins of these nor any mounded outlines are to be seen. Leaving the task of reconstructing the ancient town as impossible with the present data, this paper turned to the history of Sinope. The very briefest summary must suffice here.

The uncertain figures of Assyrians move in the morning mist of its primitive traditions. Men from Miletus found a colony there, but the Milesian dawn of Greek colonial light is quickly clouded by Cimmerian darkness, and then is rekindled. Then come the blank annals of some 180 years on whose last pages the figure of the barbarian tyrant Timosilaus becomes distinct. The Attic rescue follows and the reënforcement by the 600 new colonists of Pericles. Democratic independence displaces tyrannic subjection. Anon its colonial dependencies are disturbed and excited by Xenophon's Ten Thousand, who have forced their way from the heart of Asia to the sea and along its shore. The great cynic, Diogenes, matures the fearless powers which Athens admired, and the comic poets Diodorus, Dionysius, and Diphilus, who woke its laughter, bringing Sinopean culture to its flower. With Rhodian help its fortifications resist the engines of Mithradates II, but fall before the sudden onset of Pharnaces, his son. The power of the Pontic conquerors brings Sinope to the climax of its political strength under Mithradates the Great, whose linguistic acquirements were only second to his intense military genius, which baffled the utmost power of Rome for nearly half a century. Then comes with Lucullus the inevitable Roman yoke.