TOGETHER WITH AN EXCURSION IN QUEST OF THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS TWO STUDIES IN ARCHÆOLOGY, MADE DURING A CRUISE AMONG THE GREEK ISLANDS BY W. J. STILLMAN BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1888 BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1888 Copyright, 1887, By W. J. STILLMAN. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge : Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co....

In times when the feverish ambition of our people so generally climbs to distinction by ways offensive to the true intellectual and moral life, and when we find the old standards of human dignity so often forgotten; it renews one’s faith in the future of humanity to meet a man whom neither the “Olympian dust” nor that of California has been able to deflect from that line of perfect rectitude of life which, if existence is to be anything but an indecent scramble, we must recognize as entitling th

The series of papers herewith committed to the more or less permanent condition of book form were originally (less some development of their arguments) printed in the Century magazine, being the results of an exploring visit to Greek lands taken as a commission for that periodical. I have sought in them to solve, in a popular form, certain problems in archæology which seemed to me to have that romantic interest which is necessary to general human interest; and while necessarily, in such a study,

THE ROUTE OF ULYSSES. What remains for exploration to find on the surface of our little earth? The north and south poles, some outlying bits of Central Africa, some still smaller remnants of Central Asia,—all defended so completely by the elements, barbarism, disease, starvation, by nature and inhumanity, that the traveler of modest means and moderate constitution is as effectually debarred from their discovery as if they were the moon. What then? I said to myself, searching for adventure. Let u

The changes of the conditions of existence in what we call civilization resemble, a good deal more than we generally imagine, the progress of a horse in a tread-mill. Comparing the evidences of a higher prosperity which history affords with what we now find in Ithaca, we have ample ground to suppose that, while our part of the world has made certain advances, this has rather retrograded. A scanty population, the greater part of the island indeed uninhabited; ruins of great cities where now there

The mythical world which had for its centre Ithaca, and for its chief people Penelope and Ulysses, was out of all proportion larger than the Europe of to-day; for it comprised the whole known world, from the shadows of Cimmeria to the clouds that gave birth to the Nile. Its geography, however, has a value to archæology and prehistory which has not been fully recognized. The date and place of origin of the Odyssey will never be determined with any high degree of certainty, but in dealing with epo

In the year 1820, before the struggle between the Hellenic population of the Turkish empire and the Porte had begun, and when all that attracted the notice of the civilized world to modern Greece was the little preserved to us of her art,—occasionally and fragmentarily found in the ruins of her great communities,—a peasant of Melos whose name was Theodore Kondros Botoni, working in his field to enlarge it by clearing away the débris of the walls and structures of ancient Melos (which had been bu