In reviewing books myself, I have often been amazed at their inaccuracy. Youthful writers have to make mistakes for want of knowledge and experience, but I have found older writers making just as bad mistakes from indolence or carelessness.
There is a brilliant volume by Mahaffy on The Greek World under Roman Sway. It came out in 1890, and I reviewed it then. At page 391 I came on something quite incredible about the Proconsul of Asia reserving an exceptional privilege for the Christians. The author cited an inscription in support; so I looked this up, and found it was about the citizens of Chios. Of course, the Greek X is Ch; and I presume he made his note of this inscription in that form, and then took his Xians for Christians on the analogy of Xmas for Christmas.
One day Maspero was speaking to me rather strongly of a blunder that a friend of mine had made. I turned to a great work of his own, that was lying on the table, Les momies royales de Deir el-Bahari, and pointed to the hieroglyphic ka in one of the hieratic texts he had transcribed there. He looked at it for a minute, and then wrote down the hieroglyphic cha. He said that he pronounced cha as ka, and this must have led him into writing the wrong sign.
I found mistakes of quite another kind in the article on “Navis” in the third edition of Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. The article was written by the present Provost of Eton; and, as he was headmaster at the time, he ought to have asked the boys to instruct him in the art of cribbing. He gives himself away by copying the misprints in the books from which he cribbed. On page 219 he cites Plato, Leges, iv. p. 507 instead of 707; and there is the same misprint in Cartault, Trière Athénienne, page 234. On page 223 he cites Polybius, xx. 85 instead of Diodorus, xx. 85; and there is the same mistake in Graser, De veterum re navali, page 53. On the same page he cites Diodorus, 1. 61; and Graser, page 52, has 50, 61 by mistake for 506, 61, which is the reference to the page and line in Hoeschel’s excerpts. On page 217 he prints a passage in Lucian, Navigium, 4, and says he took it from Josephus, Antiquitates, iv. 8. 37. He took the passage in Lucian from Breusing, Nautik der Alten, page 57, and took the reference to Josephus from another passage that Breusing prints on the same page.
Now and then I make mistakes myself. In my Ancient Ships, note 214, I quoted a passage from Procopius, and added, “Apparently the gonia is here the mast-head, as in Herodotus, viii. 122.” I should not have said that, if I had thought of Herodotus, i. 51; but I did not think of it until the book was out. However, it was only a single sentence in the middle of a very long note; and I hoped no harm was done. Some while afterwards I was at the Royal Academy, when the students were being lectured on Greek Sculpture. The lecturer was speaking of the trophy of the Æginetans, as described by Herodotus, viii. 122; and he told them that the grouping of the things was clear, if the gonia was a mast-head, as had lately been suggested.
There is no stopping a mistake after it has started. In the preface to my Ancient Ships I gave the history of a blunder that was made by Scheffer in 1654, and is now in four authoritative books of reference. In fact, when I am told that all authorities agree, I feel certain that one of them has blundered, and the rest have followed him without inquiry.
Guglielmotti has made a pleasant mistake, which these authorities are sure to copy some day: namely, that Alexander the Great was a distinguished German archæologist of the Nineteenth Century. Graser printed an account of his model of a war-ship of the time of Alexander the Great—“aus der Zeit Alexanders des Grossen.” Guglielmotti mentions it in his treatise Delle due Navi Romane, etc., and says, page 67:—“Non dai condottieri della nuova età, Bernardo Graser ed Alessandro de Grossen, egregi giovani, i quali hanno trattati, etc.”
Until I discovered it in Jal, Archéologie Navale, vol. ii, page 654, I never knew that “Sea Cheers” was an order given on English ships. Nor could I explain the ritual at All Saints’ Church in Margaret Street, until I got a hint from Baedeker, Londres, page 146:—“Cette église appartient à la secte des Puséystes.” This was in the edition of 1873. I got it while I was at Harrow, and found I was at “une des principales universités d’Angleterre,” page 245.
A foreigner once described to me a very interesting survival of our feudal institutions, which he had observed while travelling in a train. At one station they waited, and waited, until a man came running along, carrying a Caduceus, which he handed to the driver; and then at last the train went on. He took the Caduceus to be the symbol of some great lord’s permission to them to travel across his lands. And certainly the Staff did look rather like a Caduceus on some of the older lines that were worked upon that system.
My father used to tell me of a foreigner, who went into the refreshment-room at Swindon, had some soup, and was handed someone else’s change. On returning to the carriage, he extolled this English system, by which a passenger was entitled to a certain amount of refreshments, with a refund for the balance, if he did not take the whole amount.