There is a deep relation between the attitude that is taken towards the historic past and the conception that is formed of death, and this relation is expressed in the _disposal of the dead_. The Egyptian denied mortality, the Classical man affirmed it in the whole symbolism of his Culture. The Egyptians embalmed even their history in chronological dates and figures. From pre-Solonian Greece nothing has been handed down, not a year-date, not a true name, not a tangible event—with the consequence that the later history, (which alone we know) assumes undue importance—but for Egypt we possess, from the 3rd millennium and even earlier, the names and even the exact reign-dates of many of the kings, and the New Empire must have had a complete knowledge of them. To-day, pathetic symbols of the will to endure, the bodies of the great Pharaohs lie in our museums, their faces still recognizable. On the shining, polished-granite peak of the pyramid of Amenemhet III we can read to-day the words “Amenemhet looks upon the beauty of the Sun” and, on the other side, “Higher is the soul of Amenemhet than the height of Orion, and it is united with the underworld.” Here indeed is victory over Mortality and the mere present; it is to the last degree un-Classical. ----- Footnote 3: In the original, these fundamental antitheses are expressed simply by means of _werden_ and _sein_. Exact renderings are therefore impossible in English.—_Tr._ Footnote 4: The attempts of the Greeks to frame something like a calendar or a chronology after the Egyptian fashion, besides being very belated indeed, were of extreme _naïveté_. The Olympiad reckoning is not an era in the sense of, say, the Christian chronology, and is, moreover, a late and purely literary expedient, without popular currency. The people, in fact, had no general need of a numeration wherewith to date the experiences of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, though a few learned persons might be interested in the calendar question. We are not here concerned with the soundness or unsoundness of a calendar, but with its currency, with the question of whether men regulated their lives by it or not; but, incidentally, even the list of Olympian victors before 500 is quite as much of an invention as the lists of earlier Athenian archons or Roman consuls. Of the colonizations, we possess not one single authentic date (E. Meyer. _Gesch. d. Alt._ II, 442. Beloch. _Griech. Gesch._ I, 2, 219) “in Greece before the fifth century, no one ever thought of noting or reporting historical events.” (Beloch. I, 1, 125). We possess an inscription which sets forth a treaty between Elis and Heraea which “was to be valid for a hundred years from this year.” What “this year” was, is however not indicated. After a few years no one would have known how long the treaty had still to run. Evidently this was a point that no one had taken into account at the time—indeed, the very “men