Various contributing authors

“ The translations of Horace in all languages are almost innumerable, perhaps because he is among the most untranslateable of poets. Where the beauty of the poetry consists so much in the exqui- site felicity of expression, in the finished terseness and perspicuity of the Odes, or the pure idiomatic Latin of the Satires and Epistles, the transfusion into other words almost inevitably loses either the meaning or the harmony of thought and language. In English the free imitations of Pope and of Swift give by far the best notion of the charm of the Horatian poetry to an unlearned reader. ”

“ To understand the Aeneid fully requires great labour and every aid that can be called in from the old commentators to those of the present day.
Virgil was the great poet of the middle ages too. To him Dante paid the homage of his superior genius, and owned him for his master and his model. Among the vulgar he had the reputation of a conjurer, a necromancer a worker of miracles ; it is the fate of a great name to be embalmed in fable. ”

“ PANDO'RA (Πανδώρα) , i. e. the giver of all, or endowed with every thing, is the name of the first woman on earth. When Prometheus had stolen the fire from heaven, Zeus in revenge caused Hephaestus to make a woman out of earth, who by her charms and beauty should bring misery upon the human race (Hes. Theog. 571, &c. ; Stob. Serm. 1) . Aphrodite adorned her with beauty, Hermes gave her boldness and cunning, and the gods called her Pandora, as each of the Olympians had given her some power by which she was to work the ruin of man. ”

“ The greater part of a year was consumed in the voyage; but Ovid beguiled the time by the exercise of his poetical talent, several of his pieces having been written on shipboard. To one like Ovid, accustomed from his youth to all the luxury of Rome, and so ardent a lover of politeness and refinement (Ars Am. iii. 121) , painful indeed must have been the contrast presented by his new abode, which offered him an inhospitable soil, a climate so severe as to freeze even the wine, and the society of a horde of semi-barbarians, to whose language he was a stranger. Life itself was hardly safe. ”

“ From that time Maecenas himself resided constantly either in his magnificent palace on the Esquiline, or in some of his luxurious villas in the neighbour- hood of Rome. Horace was one of his chosen society.
This constant transition from the town to the country life is among the peculiar charms of the Horatian poetry, which thus embraces every form of Roman society. He describes, with the same intimate familiarity, the manners, the follies, and vices of the capital ; the parasites, the busy cox- combs, the legacy-hunters, the luxurious banquets of the city ”

“ It was thus he acquired that intimate knowledge of the female heart, and of all the shades of the amatory passion, which appears in so many parts of his writings, and which he afterwards embodied in his Art of Love, for the benefit of his contemporaries and of posterity. His first attempts in verse seem to have been in the heroic metre, and on the subject of the Gigantomachia, but from this he was soon diverted by his passion for Corinna, to which we owe the greater part of the elegies in his Amores. How much of these is to be set down to poetic invention? How much is to be taken literally? ”

“ A work, like the present, embracing the whole circle of ancient history and literature for upwards of two thousand years, would be the labour of at least one man’s life, and could not in any case be written satisfactorily by a single individual, as no one man possesses the requisite knowledge of all the subjects of which it treats. ”

“ It is chiefly misfortune that swells the page of human history. The very dearth of events justifies the inference that his days glided away smoothly and happily, with just enough of employment to give a zest to the pursuits of his leisure, and in sufficient affluence to secure to him all the pleasures of life, without exposing him to its storms and dangers. His residence at Rome, where he had a house near the Capitol, was diversified by an occasional trip to his Pelignan farm, and by the recreation which he derived from his garden, situated between the Flaminian and Clodian ways. ”

“ More space, relatively, has been given to the Greek and Roman Writers than to any other articles, partly because we have no complete history of Greek and Roman Literature in the English language, and partly because the writings of modern German scholars contain on this subject more than on any other a store of valuable matter which has not yet found its way into English books, and has, hitherto, only partially and in a few instances, exercised any influence on our course of classical instruction. ”

“ The idea of reviving the industry of a country by an elaborate poem, which few farmers would read and still fewer would understand, requires no refutation. Agriculture is not quickened by a book, still less by a poem. It requires security of property, light taxation, and freedom of commerce. Maecenas may have wished Virgil to try his strength on something better than his Eclogues; and though the subject does not appear inviting, the poet has contrived to give it such embellishment that his fame rests in a great degree on this work. ”

“ The lament for his brother's death is a most touching outburst of genuine grief, while the elegy which immediately follows, on the transformation of Berenice's hair into a constellation, being avowedly a translation or close imitation of Callimachus, is a curious and valuable specimen of the learned stiffness and ingenious affectation of the Alexandrian school. It is impossible not to admire the lofty tone and stately energy which pervade the Peleus and Thetis ”

“ He obtained possession of the Armenian king, and carried him to Alexandria, where he celebrated his triumph with extraordinary splendour. Antony now laid aside entirely the character of a Roman citizen, and assumed the pomp and ceremony of an eastern despot. His conduct, and the unbounded influence which Cleopatra had acquired over him, alienated many of his friends and supporters ; and Caesar, who had the wrongs of his sister Octavia to revenge, as well as ambition to stimulate him, thought that the time had now come for crushing Antony. ”

“ A Greek philosopher, a native of Eretria, the son of a man named Cleisthenes, who, though of noble birth, belonging to the family of the Theopropidae, was poor, and worked for a livelihood either as a builder or as a tent-maker, both which trades were learnt and practised by Menedemus. According to Diogenes Laertius, he seized the opportunity afforded by his being sent on some military service to Megara to hear Plato, and abandoned the anny to addict himself to philosophy. ”

“ It has been long felt by most persons engaged in the study of Antiquity, that something better is required than we yet possess in the English language for illustrating the Biography, Literature, and Mythology, of the Greek and Roman writers, and for enabling a diligent student to read them in the most profitable manner. ”

“ Their shameless conduct soon disgusted the provinces as well as the capital; the people again regained their power, but the consequence was an anarchy and not a government; and as neither class was fit to rule, they were obliged to submit to the dominion of a single man. Thus the empire became a necessity as well as a blessing to the exhausted Roman world. Sulla's laws respecting criminal jurisprudence were the most lasting and bear the strongest testimony to his greatness as a legislator. He was the first to reduce the criminal law of Rome to a system ”

“ The Fasti is a sort of poetical Roman calendar, with its appropriate festivals and mythology, and the substance was probably taken in a great measure from the old Roman annalists. The study of antiquity was then fashionable at Rome, and Propertius had preceded Ovid in this style of writing in his Origines, in the fourth book. The model of both seems to have been the Αἴτια of Callimachus. The Fasti shows a good deal of learning, but it has been observed that Ovid makes frequent mistakes in his astronomy, from not understanding the books from which he took it. ”

“ It did not escape the penetration of Sulla that many of the evils under which the Roman state was suffering, arose from the corruption of the morals of the people; and he therefore attempted in his legislation to check the increase of crime and luxury by stringent enactments. The attempt was a hopeless one, for vice and immorality pervaded alike all classes of Roman citizens, and no laws can restore to a people the moral feelings which they have lost. Sulla has been much blamed by modern writers for giving to the Roman state such an aristocratical constitution ”

“ The principal feature in the traditions about Hermes consists in his being the herald of the gods, and in this capacity he appears even in the Homeric poems; his original character of an ancient Pelasgian, or Arcadian divinity of nature, gradually disappeared in the legends. As the herald of the gods, he is the god of skill in the use of speech and of eloquence in general, for the heralds are the public speakers in the assemblies and on other occasions. ”

“ On the contrary, a Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography is peculiarly useful for the lives of those persons who do not occupy so prominent a position in history, since a knowledge of their actions and character is oftentimes of great importance to a proper understanding of the ancient writers, and information respecting such persons cannot be obtained in any other quarter. Accordingly, such articles have had a space assigned to them in the work which might have been deemed disproportionate if it were not for this consideration. ”

“ The secret of this matrimonial fickleness is explained by the fact that Ovid had a mistress. Filial duty dictated his marriages; inclination threw him into the arms of Corinna. This cause may even have been divided with another. Ovid was a poet, and to a poet in those days a mistress was indispensable. What Roman of the Augustan age would have ventured to inscribe an elegy to his wife! The thing was utterly impossible. But elegiac poetry was then all the vogue at Rome, from its comparative novelty. Catullus, who introduced it from the Greek, had left a few rude specimens ”

“ Nay, Bayle (art. Ovide) has pushed this argument so far as to think that the poet's life would not have been safe had he been in possession of so dangerous a secret, and that silence would have been secured by his assassination. The conjecture that Ovid's offence was his having accidentally seen Livia in the bath is hardly worthy of serious notice. On the common principles of human action we cannot reconcile so severe a punishment with so trivial a fault; and the supposition is, besides, refuted by Ovid's telling us that what he had seen was some crime. ”

“ It has been said, that Alciphron is an imitator of Lucian; but besides the style, and, in a few instances, the subject matter, there is no resemblance between the two writers: the spirit in which the two treat their subjects is totally different. Both derived their materials from the same sources, and in style both aimed at the greatest perfection of the genuine Attic Greek. Bergler has truly remarked, that Alciphron stands in the same relations to Menander as Lucian to Aristophanes. ”

“ His devotion to love and to Corinna had not so wholly engrossed him as to prevent his achieving great reputation in the higher walks of poetry. Besides his love Elegies, his Heroical Epistles, which breathe purer sentiments in language and versification still more refined, and his Art of Love, in which he had embodied the experience of twenty years, he had written his Medea, the finest tragedy that had appeared in the Latin tongue. The Metamorphoses were finished, with the exception of the last corrections ”

“ In a penetrating and unbiassed conception of phenomena, in acuteness of reflection and combination respecting them and within their limits, in compass and certainty of experimental knowledge, he may have stood near Aristotle, if he did not come quite up to him : the incessant endeavour of his great master to refer phenomena to their ultimate grounds, his profundity in unfolding the internal connections between the latter, and between them and pheno- mena, were not possessed by Theophrastus. ”

“ The assertion of Herodotus further obliges us to take into consideration the fact, that in the earliest Greek theology the gods do not appear in any de- finite forms, whereas Hesiod strives to anthropo- morphise all of them, the ancient elementary gods as well as the later dynasties of Cronus and Zeus. Now both the system of the gods and the forms under which he conceived them afterwards became firmly established in Greece, and, considered in this way, the assertion of Herodotus is perfectly correct. ”

“ HE′SIODUS (Ἡσίοδος) , one of the earliest Greek poets, respecting whose personal history we possess little more authentic information than respecting that of Homer, together with whom he is frequently mentioned by the ancients. The names of these two poets, in fact, form as it were the two poles of the early epic poetry of the Greeks; and as Homer represents the poetry, or school of poetry, belonging chiefly to Ionia in Asia Minor, so Hesiod is the representative of a school of bards, which was developed somewhat later at the foot of Mount Helicon in Boeotia, and spread over Phocis and Euboea. ”

“ The relative length of the articles containing the lives of historical persons cannot be fixed, in a work like the present, simply by the importance of a man's life. It would be impossible to give within any reasonable compass a full and elaborate account of the lives of the great actors in Greek and Roman history; nor is it necessary: for the lives of such persons are conspicuous parts of history and, as such, are given at length in historical works. ”

“ Ancient mythology furnishes numerous instances in which Aphrodite punished those who neglected her worship or despised her power, as well as others in which she favoured and protected those who did homage to her and recognized her sway. Love and beauty are ideas essentially connected, and Aphrodite was therefore also the goddess of beauty and gracefulness. ”