§ 63. As I have said already, the death of Demosthenes is the favourite terminus for the political historians of Greece. But let us not grow weary,--let us survey the fortunes of the race for some centuries more, touching upon those turning-points or knotty points where it seems that the evidence has not been duly stated or weighed. [Sidenote: Droysen's _Geschichte des Hellenismus_.] In approaching the work and the character of Alexander, we come upon a new authority among modern historians, whom we have not yet encountered. Droysen, who unfortunately devoted the evening of his life to Prussian history, employed his brilliant abilities for years in researches upon the history of Alexander and of his immediate successors. His latest work on this period is no doubt the fullest and best to which we can refer, and it seems a very great omission that it has not been as yet translated into our language. [Sidenote: This period much neglected by English historians.] [Sidenote: Nature of our authorities.] This is more specially to be desired as we have no great English history of these times. It is but another instance of what has been so often urged in these pages. Greek history has been in the hands of people with literary and scholastic interests. So long as there are great authors to be translated, explained, panegyrized, all the most minute events are recorded and discussed with care; but as soon as we come to an epoch certainly not less important in human affairs, perhaps more decisive than any that had gone before in shaping the future history of the world, we are deserted by our modern historians, because the Greeks had lost that literary excellence which makes their earlier records the proper training for the schoolboy and the collegian[156:1]. We are now reduced to Diodorus, Plutarch, Arrian, Strabo, for our materials, and there are those who think that the moral splendour and unfailing interest of the famous _Parallel Lives_ do not atone for the want of Attic grace and strength which marks the decadence of Greek prose literature. Yet surely to the genuine historian, to whom all these records are merely sources of information on the course of affairs and the characters of men, literary perfection should only be an agreeable accident, an evidence, if you like, of that day's culture, not a gauge to test the pre-eminence of one century or one nation over another. [Sidenote: Alexander's place in history still disputed.]