10: Bicknell, _The Prehistoric Rock Engravings in the Italian
Maritime Alps_, Bordighera, 1902; _Further Explorations_, 1903. I begin
to suspect that the stippled and shaded enclosures which accompany the
drawings of oxen, ploughs, and men with hoes may represent the
cultivation plots.]

[Footnote 11: I owe valuable information about the Gipsies to my friend
Dr. John Sampson, of the University of Liverpool; but he is in no way
responsible for this interpretation of it.]

[Footnote 12: _Odyssey_ ix. 428 (Greek: pelor, athemistia eidos).]

[Footnote 13: _Odyssey_ ix. 214-15:

(Greek: andr' epeleusesthai megalen epieimenon alken,
agrion, oute dikas en eidota oute themistas.)]

[Footnote 14: Horace, _Epode_ xvi. In his 'better land'--

Non huc Argoo contendit remige pinus,
Neque impudica Colchis intulit pedem....
Iuppiter illa piae _secrevit_ litora genti,
Ut inquinavit aere tempus aureum;

AEre, dehinc ferro duravit saecula; quorum
Piis secunda, vate me, datur fuga.]

III

THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE AND ROME

It might appear the height of paradox to preface a discourse on the
Ancient World by asserting the conviction that the only genuine and
important history is contemporary history. Yet reflection on this
doctrine will show that it is not only consistent with a serious and
steady interest in what is called Antiquity (and indeed in the past in
general), but its only rational basis and justification. Were the past
really past it were dead--dead and done with, and it were wisdom for us
who are alive to let the dead bury their dead. Much of what has been
done and suffered under the sun is indeed gone beyond recall, and is
well buried in forgetfulness. In such forgetfulness lies the fact and
evidence of progress. 'Vex not its ghost'; no necromancy will or should
evoke the departed spirits or avail to make them utter significant
speech to living men. The chain of links which once bound stage to stage
of human history is somewhere for ever broken; and as we retrace, in the
memory of the race or in that of individual, the Ariadne-clue which we
here call 'the unity of History' it vanishes somewhere beyond our vision
into the dark backward and abysm of time. True, of late Archaeology and
Anthropology have cast their search-lights into the darkness, piercing a
little deeper than of old into the mists that surround the origins of
our civilization; but before that dimly illu