‘Es ist das schoene Vorrecht der historischen Forschung, die Verstorbenen in der Erinnerung der Nachwelt wieder aufleben zu lassen. Erscheint es billig, dass die Namen derer, welche sich hohe Verdienste um ihr Volk erworben, der Vergessenheit nicht anheimfallen, so ist es menschlich, denen überhaupt nachzuforschen, welche einst in weiten Kreisen von der Mit- und Nachwelt genannt und gefeiert worden sind.’

With these words, used by Dr. Koehler in regard to the once famous ‘condottiere,’ Diogenes, in the third century B.C., I beg to introduce to the reader a personage who, although perhaps of limited interest, was once celebrated and powerful and had the honour of calling himself the friend of Julius Caesar. His son moreover did his best to prevent a deed, the failure of which would probably have changed the direction of the history of the world,—the murder of Caesar.

The passages in ancient writers which relate to the man of whom I speak are well known, but they have not hitherto been rightly connected with one another, or thoroughly understood.

Since the time of Wolf there has been one point in the ‘higher criticism’ of the Homeric poems on which all scholars have been agreed: it is that in the ninth century B.C. there was no reading public in Greece. Further, since the time of Wolf, the majority of critics have assumed, without attempting to prove, that a poem can be delivered orally only if it is short enough to be delivered at a single sitting; and that a longer poem is by its very length shown to have been designed for a reading public and not for oral delivery. No one maintains that the Iliad, as we have it, could be recited at a single sitting (except Buchholz, Vindiciae Carm. Hom. I. 8). It follows therefore that the present shape of the Iliad is due to the demands of a reading public; and that if there was an Iliad at all in the ninth century, its length must have been such as was compatible with the conditions of an oral delivery. To account for the evolution of the Iliad as we have it, from a poem or poems short enough to be recited at a single sitting, various theories have been proposed. They may be distributed into two classes: theories of aggregation, and theories of expansion. According to the former class, the Iliad is an aggregation of lays or ballads, composed independently of each other by different poets, but related to the same subject, and exercising a natural attraction on each other. The theory of aggregation is based on the analogy of what was supposed, but is now denied, to have occurred in the history of other literatures; it is not based on a study of the conditions under which literature developed in the earliest Greek times.

§ 1. Introductory. The history of Euboia during its occupation by the Latins is, according to Mr. Freeman, ‘the most perplexed part of the perplexed Greek history of the time.’ If we turn for information on the subject to Finlay, our one English authority on the period, we find no attempt at a consecutive account of it, merely some allusions; the history of Negroponte is a missing chapter in Finlay, which the present paper is an attempt to supply. It is also hoped that it will help to clear up some of the perplexities which beset the subject.

Before Hopf the history of this island was almost a blank. Historical investigations concerning the Franks in Romania may be divided into three periods, represented by Ducange in the seventeenth century, Buchon 1825–1846, and Hopf 1850–1870. Buchon's publication of the (with which Ducange indeed had become acquainted, but not until his Histoire de Constantinople sous les Empereurs français had been published), his discovery of the Livre de la Conqueste in Brussels, the new documents, treaties and diplomas, which he brought to light, opened a new era and stimulated a fresh study of the ‘perplexed’ history. Nothing was required now but German diligence and exhaustiveness to ransack archives and fill up the gaps, and German accuracy to correct the slips made by that französische Nonchalance of which Hopf says even Buchon was occasionally (stellenweise) guilty.

The object of the present paper is to give some account of the scheme of political and social reform for the Peloponnese, which was propounded in the year 1415, by Gemistos Plethon, in the form of two pamphlets, addressed respectively to the emperor of Constantinople, Manuel Palaeologus II., and to his son, Theodore II., who at that time held the office of Despot of the Byzantine province of the Morea. These are entitled and . They were first printed at Antwerp in 1575, as an appendix to the first edition of Stobaeus, W. Canter being the editor; but the manuscript from which this text was derived was imperfect, and the first complete edition was that of Dr. Ellissen of Göttingen, who published the ‘Addresses,’ after a collation of a manuscript existing at Florence—with a German translation, and an excellent Introduction and notes—in 1860, in the fourth part of his Analekten der mittel- und neugriechischen Litteratur. The first person however who in modern times drew the attention of scholars to the importance of their contents was Prof. Fallmerayer, in his Geschichte der Morea, published in 1830. Though the proposals which they contain never were, and in all probability never could have been carried into effect, yet a greater interest attaches to them than to mere paper schemes and imaginary systems, because they were intended to be adapted to the circumstances of the case.