of Bion, are later additions not found in the early manuscripts of his poems.

وو

(36) From our slight acquaintance with Bion's life we are left in doubt whether he accompanied his friend Moschus to the court of Alexandria; but it is probable that he did. In his beautiful lamentation for the death of Adonis we have an imitation of the melancholy chant of the Egyptians, named maneros, which they sang through the streets in the procession on the feast of Isis, when the crowd joined in the chorus "Ah, hapless Isis, Osiris is no more.' The tale has been a good deal changed by the Sicilian muse of Bion, but in the boar which killed Adonis, we have the wicked Typhon, the Hippopotamus, as carved on the monuments; we have also the wound in the thigh, and the consolations of the priests, who every year ended their mournful song with advising the goddess to reserve her sorrow for another year, when on the return of the festival the same lament would be again celebrated. The whole poem has a depth and earnestness of feeling which is truly Egyptian, but which was very little known in Alexandria.

397, &c.

(37) To the Alexandrian grammarians, and more particularly to Aristophanes, Aristarchus, and their Scholiast. pupil Ammonius, we are indebted for our present in Iliad. x. copies of Homer. These critics acted like modern editors, each publishing an edition, or rather writing out a copy, which was then recopied in the Museum as often as called for by the demands of the purchasers of books. Aristophanes left perhaps only one such copy or edition, while Aristarchus, in his efforts to correct the text of the great epic poet, made several such copies. These were in the hands of the later scholiasts, who appealed to them as their authority, and ventured to make no further alterations; we therefore now read the Iliad and Odyssey nearly as left by these Alexandrian critics. They no doubt took some liberties in altering the spelling and smoothing the lines and though we should value most highly a copy in the rougher form in which it came into their hands, yet on the whole we must be great gainers by their labours. They Plutarch. divided the Iliad and Odyssey into twenty-four Vita books each, and corrected the faulty metres; but Homeri. one of their chief tasks was to set aside, or put a mark

;

Cicero,

against, those more modern lines which had crept into the ancient poems. It had been usual to call every old verse Homer's or Homeric, and these it was the business of the critic to mark as not genuine. Aristarchus was jocosely said to have called those lines spurious which he did Epist. iii. not like; but everything that we can learn of him 11. leads us to believe that he executed his task with judgment. From these men sprang the school of Alexandrian grammarians, who for several centuries continued their minute and often unprofitable studies in verbal criticism, and always looked back to Aristarchus as their head, as the philosophers did to Plato or Aristotle. Very few of them cultivated the highest branch of criticism, that of tracing the methods by which a great author produced his beauties and gave excellence to his writings. Some few of them wrote on the second branch, that of explaining his thoughts when time had thrown a shade over the meaning of his words. But most of them busied themselves on the lowest criticism, that of comparing the manuscripts to determine what words he wrote; and they were in search for blunders in the copy as much as for beauties in the work.

(38) It was not by the critics and grammarians alone that the text of the ancient authors was altered and made modern. Every copier uses not only his eye but his judgment, and if he sees in the manuscript before him a word which he does not quite understand, he is tempted to change it for one which in his opinion makes sense. In this way those writers that were most popular and most often copied would be the most altered. The orators and tragedians of Athens were left with the peculiarities that belong to the age and country in which they wrote; but the Æolic digamma was removed out of Homer, and the drinking songs of old Anacreon appeared in a dress not unsuited for the supper tables of Alexandria.

Never

(39) These were the palmy days of criticism. before or since have critics held so high a place in literature. The world was called upon to worship and do honour to the poet, but chiefly that it might admire the skill of the critic who could name the several sources of his beauties. The critic now ranked higher than a priest at the foot of Mount Parnassus. Homer was lifted to the skies that the critic

Such

might stand on a raised pedestal among the Muses. seems to be the meaning of the figures on the upper Bartoli, part of the well-known sculpture called the Apotheo- Admiranda sis of Homer (see Fig. 255). It was made in this reign; and at the foot Ptolemy and his mother, in the

Rom. Antiq.

characters of Time and the World, are crowning the statue of the poet, in the presence of ten worshippers, who represent the literary excellences which shine forth in his poems. The figures of the Iliad and Odyssey kneel beside his seat, and the frogs and mice creep under his footstool, showing that the latter mock-heroic poem was already written and called the work of Homer.

(40) It has sometimes been made a question how far the poet and orator have been helped forward and guided by the rules of the critic; and at other times it has been thought

that the more tender flowers of literature have rather been choked by this weed which entwines itself round them. But history seems to teach us that neither of these opinions is true. While Aristarchus was writing there were no poets in Alexandria to be bound down by his laws, no orators to be tamed by the fear of his lashes, and, on the other hand, none wrote at his bidding, or rose to any real height by the narrow steps by which he meant them to climb. It would seem as if the fires of genius and of liberty had burned out together, as if the vices which were already tainting the manners of the Alexandrians had also poisoned their literary taste. The golden age of poetry had passed before the brazen age of criticism began. The critics wrote at a time when the schools of literature would have been still more barren without them.

Suidas. De Simpli

(41) Another pupil of Aristarchus was Pamphilus, the Alexandrian physician, who wrote on plants and But their uses, both in agriculture and medicine. cibus, lib. Galen speaks very slightingly of him, and says that vi. proem. he ran after fabulous stories of wonderful cures, and that he trusted as much to the power of Egyptian charms and amulets as to the medicinal properties of the herbs that he wrote about. Pamphilus used to employ incantations to increase the effect of his medicines; and to add to the weight of his opinions he said they were taken from the writings of Thrice-great Hermes.

Tzetzes in

Suidas.

(42) Nicander, the poet and physician, is also claimed by Alexandria, though part of his renown was shed Lyco- upon Pergamus, where he lived for some years phronte. under King Attalus. He has left a poem in quaint and learned phrase, on poisons, and the poisonous bites and stings of animals, and on their remedies. Before this time Aratus had written an astronomical poem, and Manetho an astrological poem; and thus, in the place of poetry, we now only meet with science put into verse, without earnestness or feeling, or any aim after purity and loftiness of thought. Nor did these scientific poets pay much attention to style; they did not seem aware that their writings were works of art, and that, like paintings and sculpture, they would be little valued unless the worth of the form were greater than that of the substance.

vi.

(43) But by far the greatest man in Alexandria at this time was Hipparchus, the father of mathematical Ptolemy, astronomy. Aristillus and Timocharis had before lib. iii. iv. made a few observations on the fixed stars, but Hipparchus was the first to form a catalogue of any size. His great observations were made with a fixed armillary sphere, or rather a fixed instrument having a plane parallel to the equator, and a gnomon parallel to the earth's pole. If he was the inventor of this instrument, it was at least made upon principles known to Eratosthenes, and contained in his Theory of Shadows. With this instrument he noted the hour of the equinoctial day on which the sun shone equally upon the top and the bottom of the equatorial plane; that hour was the time of the equinox. By making many such observations he learned the length of the year, which he found was less than three hundred and sixty-five days and a quarter. He found that the four quarters of the year were not of equal length. He also made the great discovery of the precession of the equinox, or that the sidereal year, which is measured by the stars, was not of the same length as the common year, which is measured by the seasons. Thus he found that the star Spica Virginis, which in the time of Timocharis had been eight degrees before the equinoctial point, was then only six degrees before it. Hence he said that the precession of the equinox was not less than one degree in a century, and added, that it was not along the equator, but along the ecliptic. He was a man of great industry, and unwearied in his search after truth; and he left a name that was not equalled by that of any astronomer in the fifteen centuries which followed. But these astronomical discoveries about the length of the year were not received by the unenlightened; in some minds they clashed with religious opinions. priests in the temple of Amun kept a lamp always burning before the altar of their god; and they had observed or fancied that its never-ceasing flame consumed every year less oil than it had in the past year. Hence they declared that the years were always growing shorter; and the doctrines of the priests give way very slowly before the calculations of the man of science.

Plutarch. De Oraculis.

The

(44) Hero, the pupil of Ctesibius, ranked very high as a