agency of subservient “tyrants” utterly collapsed.  “It is,” Mr. Tarn says, “a strange case of historical justice.  As regards Macedonia, Antigonus had followed throughout a sound and just idea of government, and all that he did for Macedonia prospered.  But in the Peloponnese, though he found himself there from necessity rather than from choice, he had employed an unjustifiable system; he lived long enough to see it collapse.”

The main interest to the present generation of the career of this remarkable man consists in the fact that it is illustrative of the belief that a man of action can also be a man of letters.  As it was in the days of the Antigonids, so it is now.  Napier says that there is no instance on record of a successful general who was not also a well-read man.  General Wolfe, the hero of Quebec, on being asked how he came to adopt a certain tactical combination which proved eminently successful at Louisbourg, said, “I had it from Xenophon.”  Havelock “loved Homer and took pattern by Thucydides,” and, according to Mr. Forrest, adopted tactics at the battle of Cawnpore which he had learnt from a close study of “Old Frederick’s” dispositions at Leuthen.  There is no greater delusion than to suppose that study weakens the arm of the practical politician, administrator, or soldier.  On the contrary it fortifies it.  Lord Wolseley, himself a very distinguished man of action, speaking to the students of the Royal Military Academy of Sir Frederick Maurice, who possessed an inherited literary talent, said that he was “a fine example of the combination of study and practice.  He is not only the ablest student of war we have, but is also the bravest man I have ever seen under fire”; and on another occasion he wrote:  “It is often said that dull soldiers make the best fighters, because they do not think of danger.  Now, Maurice is one of the very few men I know who, if I told him to run his head against a stone wall, would do so without question.  His is also the quickest and keenest intellect I have met in my service.”

[Footnote 103:  Antigonos Gonatas.  By W. Woodthorpe Tarn.  Oxford:  At the Clarendon Press. 14s.]

XXIII

ANCIENT ART AND RITUAL[104]

"The Spectator,” August 9, 1913

Any new work written by Miss Jane Harrison is sure to be eagerly welcomed by all who take an interest in classical study or in anthropology.  The conclusions at which she arrives are invariably based on profound study and assiduous research.  Her generalisations are always bold, and at times strikingly original.  Moreover, it is impossible for any lover of the classics, albeit he may move on a somewhat lower plane of erudition, not to sympathise with the erudite enthusiasm of an author who expresses “great delight” in discovering that Aristotle traced the origin of the Greek drama to the Dithyramb—­that puzzling and “ox-driving” Dithyramb, of which Mueller said that “it was vain to seek an etymology,” but whose meaning has been very lucidly explained by Miss Harrison herself—­and whose “heart stands still” in noting that “by a piece of luck” Plutarch gives the Dionysiac hymn which the women of Elis addressed to the “noble Bull.”