Indeed, how can there be conflict, when, as in the case of each
contributor to the present volume, the two interests in question,
Anthropology on this side and Classical Archaeology and Scholarship
on that, are the joint concern of one and the same man? Dr. Evans
both is a leading authority on prehistoric Europe, and likewise, by
restoring the Minoan age to the light of day, has set Greek history
in a new and juster perspective. Dr. Lang is an anthropologist of
renown, and no one, even amongst his peers, has enriched the science
with so many original and fertile hypotheses; nevertheless he has found
time (and for how much else has he found time as well!) not only to
translate Homer, but also to vindicate his very existence. Professor
Murray can turn his rare faculty of sympathetic insight now to the
reinterpretation of the music of Euripides, and now to the analysis of
the elemental forces that combine and crystallize in the Greek epic.
Principal Jevons is famous for his brilliant suggestions in regard
to the early history of religion; but he has also laboured in the
cause of European archaeology, and his edition of Plutarch’s _Romane
Questions_ is very precious to the student of classical antiquities.
Professor Myres, whilst he teaches Greek language and literature as the
modern man would have them taught, and is a learned archaeologist to
boot, yet can have no greater title to our respect than that, of many
devoted helpers, he did the most to organize an effective school of
Anthropology in the University of Oxford. Finally, Mr. Warde Fowler,
living embodiment as he is in the eyes of all his friends of the
Humaner Letters, both is the historian of the Graeco-Roman city-state,
and can wield the comparative method so as to extort human meaning from
ancient Rome’s stately, but somewhat soulless, rites. Unless, then,
dual personality of some dissociated and morbid type is to be
attributed to these distinguished men, they can scarcely fail, being
anthropologists and humanists at once, to carry on nicely concerted
operations from both sides of their subject, just as the clever
engineer can set to work on his tunnel from both sides of the mountain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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