Since the first edition of the present work there has appeared, in Dr. G.B. Grundy's _Thucydides and the History of his Age_ (1911) a new recognition of the fundamental character of economic conditions in Greek as in other history. Dr. Grundy, finding no academic precedent for his sociological method, has urged as new truths propositions which for economic historians are or should have been axioms. The result, however, is a really stimulating and valuable presentment of Greek history in terms of causal forces. The chapters on Greece in Dr. Cunningham's _Western Civilisation_ (1898), though they contain not a few explanations of Greek culture-phenomena on the old lines, in terms of themselves, are helpful for the purposes of the present inquiry, since they really study causation, as do Meyer's _Wirthschaftliche Entwickelung des Alterthums_ and some other recent German treatises, of which Dr. Cunningham makes use. Much use, however, remains to be made of these and previous expert studies. Boeckh's great work on the _Public Economy of the Athenians_, which, though containing economic absurdities, hardly deserves even in that regard the strictures passed on it by the first English translator (Sir G.C. Lewis, 1828; 2nd ed. 1842; superior American ed. tr. from 2nd German ed. by A. Lamb, 1857), has not very fruitfully affected the later historians proper. The third German edition by Fränkel, 1886, typifies the course of scholarship. It corrects details and adds a mass of _apparatus criticus_ equal in bulk to the whole original work, but supplies no new ideas. Heeren's section on Greece in his _Ideen_, etc., translated as a _Sketch of the Political History of Ancient Greece_ (1829), and also as part of Heeren's _Thoughts on the Politics_, etc., of _the Ancient World_, is too full of early misconceptions to be well worth returning to, save for its general view. On the other hand, Grote's great _History of Greece_, though unmatched in its own species, and though a far more philosophical performance than that of Mitford (which Professor Mahaffy and the King of Greece agree in preferring for its doctrine), is substantially a narrative and critical history on the established lines, and does not aim at being more than incidentally sociological; and that of Bishop Thirlwall, though in parts superior in this regard, is substantially in similar case. At several points, indeed, Grote truly illuminates the sociological problem--notably in his view of the reactions between the Greek drama and the Greek life. Of the German general histories, that of Holm (Eng. tr. 4 vols. 1894-98) is a trustworthy and judicious embodiment of the latest research, but has no special intellectual weight, and is somewhat needlessly prolix. The history of Dr.