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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
A feature of the new Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World by M. Rostovtzeff should not escape attention for its implications in a matter of historical method. This work—a κτῆμα ἐς αἰεί —contains, in fact, not one story, but two stories. What is called Summary and Epilogue (pp. 1026-1312) is in method and problems something completely different from the bulk of the study (ch. III-VII). Rostovtzeff, who is a historian of splendid intuition rather than of close reasoning, has obviously not perceived this fact. He has not clearly delimited the two subjects, thereby adding a difficulty to his critic, who runs the risk of being Over-schematic.
1 Cf. Sechs ungedruckte Aufsätze über das klassiche Alterium, 1896 (= Werke III, p. 171)Google Scholar.
2 Griechische Kulturgeschichte, IV 3, p. 573Google Scholar.
3 Apud Gercke-Norden, , Einleitung III, 2 ed. 1914, p. 140Google Scholar. Cf. Münzer, F., Die politische Vernichtung des Griechentums, 1925 (‘Erbe d. Alten,’ IX)Google Scholar.
4 CAH VII, 700Google Scholar.
5 For the history of the idea of Hellenism cf. my essay ‘Genesi storica e funzione attuale del concetto di Ellenismo,’ Giornale Critico della Filosofia italiana, XVI, 1935, 10–37Google Scholar. On Droysen also my article ‘Per il centenario dell’ Alessandro Magno di J. G. Droysen,’ Leonardo, Dec. 1933. Cf. the objections, which I cannot accept, by Hampl, F., Gnomon, 1937, 474Google Scholar.
6 Cf. the remark of Toynbee, A., A Study of History, I 2, p. 7Google Scholar. ‘Intrinsically the Seleucid Monarchy and not the Ptolemaic Monarchy is the field in which the pearl of great price awaits the historical explorer.’
7 Cf. now the important remarks by Walbank, F. W. in Class. Rev. LVI, 1942, 81–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 1925, p. 104. Cf. Tarn's note in Hellenistic Civilisation, 2 ed., p. 2Google Scholar.
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