Let not the reader imagine that he finds in me one of those who delight in reducing the antiquity of history, and who advocate the more recent date in every controversy. There are nations whose culture seems to be undervalued in duration; to me, for example, those arguments are most convincing[76:1] which place the great Sphinx at the Pyramids in an epoch before any written records, even in Egypt, so that it remains a monument of sculptured art many thousand years before the Christian era. But the Greeks were mere children in ancient history, and they knew it[76:2]. FOOTNOTES: [54:1] Printed in C. Müller's _Geographi Graeci_. [55:1] We shall soon come to a similar instance in Xenophon's _Anabasis_. [55:2] The Greek name is [Greek: logopoioi], seldom [Greek: logographoi], which usually means a speech-writer. Cf. below, § 31, a passage from Clinton which also applies here. [57:1] The solitary exception is Sir G. Cox, whose _History of Greece_ has found little favour, in spite of its originality. He will not set down any date earlier than 660 B.C. as worthy of acceptance; and I think he is right. But he also rides the solar theory of the myths to death, and so repels his reader at the very outset of his work. [58:1] The arguments of Busolt (G. G. i. 86) which I had intended to discuss, will be antiquated by the appearance of his 2nd edition, which is now in the press, and which discusses the prehistoric conditions by the light of evidence which has accrued since the first publication of his important work. But for the printers' strike (November, 1891) I should probably have been able to quote his revised and amended views. Holm's appears to me a reasonable view. After stating that Apollodorus (ii. 7), Diodorus (4, 33), Plato (_Legg._ iii. 6, 7), and Isocrates (_Archidam._ 119) are all at variance, he adds (i. 181): 'One of these is just as historical as the other; the current traditions are not better than the accounts of Plato and of Isocrates; they are all mere tales (_Sagen_) which can neither be proved or refuted.' Here we have the attitude of Grote, pure and simple, but applied to a quasi-historical period. [59:1] Will it be believed that E. Curtius paraphrases this remark ([Greek: ap' oudenos hormômenon anankaiou pros pistin]) by 'zuerst wissenschaftlich bearbeitet von Hippias'?