which later historians generally regard as essential.
Ernst Curtius and Victor Duruy.
The value of autopsy in verifying old authors.
It is in the last two features—the interpretation of the legends, and the personal acquaintance with the country—that the more recent attempts excel the older masterpieces. Ernst Curtius spent several years in Greece, and published a
complete and scholarly account of the Peloponnesus before he produced his history. Duruy gives life and colour to his narrative by references to his personal experiences in Greece. To visit and study the scenes of great events is now so easy and so habitual to scholars, that we may count it one of the necessary conditions for any future history which is to take a high place in the ever-increasing series of Hellenic studies[25:1]. In his opening chapters Ernst Curtius breathes such freshness and reality into the once dry preamble of geographical description that we feel we have attained a fresh epoch, and are led to expect great things from an experience gained upon the spot, which can verify the classical descriptions by the local features which remain. It is of course idle to think that this kind of familiarity will compensate for imperfect study. The modern Greek antiquarians, living upon the spot, have not yet shown themselves equal to many who have never seen what they discuss. Nevertheless, this is certain, that new force, and directness, are attained by a personal acquaintance with the coasts, the mountains, the rivers of Greece, and that many a wrong inference from ancient texts may be avoided by knowing that the scene of the events precludes it.
Example in the theatre of Athens.
Its real size.
No landscape for its background.
§ 13. Here is an example. It is commonly inferred from a passage in Plato's Symposium, which speaks of thirty thousand citizens being addressed
by Agathon in his plays, that the theatre held that number of spectators. This is copied into book after book, though I have long ago called attention to the impossibility of maintaining such an interpretation[26:1]. I need not urge the absurdity of speaking from an open-air stage to thirty thousand people. The actual theatre is now recovered, and any one who has seen it and possesses reasonable common-sense will perceive that about fifteen thousand people was the utmost it could ever have contained[26:2]. To expect a larger crowd to hear any performance of human voices would be ridiculous. What the passage, therefore, means is that the whole population of freemen in Athens were in the habit of enjoying the drama,—not, of course, all at the same moment. Other fancies, which have given rise to eloquent musings concerning the picturesque view of the sea and islands enjoyed by the Athenian as a natural background to his tragedy, can be disposed of in the same way by simply sitting even on the top row and making the experiment[26:3],—not to speak of
