[Sidenote: This period much neglected by English historians.]
This is more specially to be desired as we have no great English history of these times. It is but another instance of what has been so often urged in these pages. Greek history has been in the hands of people with literary and scholastic interests. So long as there are great authors to be translated, explained, panegyrized, all the most minute events are recorded and discussed with care; but as soon as we come to an epoch certainly not less important in human affairs, perhaps more decisive than any that had gone before in shaping the future history of the world, we are deserted by our modern historians, because the Greeks had lost that literary excellence which makes their earlier records the proper training for the schoolboy and the collegian[156:1]. We are now reduced to Diodorus, Plutarch, Arrian, Strabo, for our materials, and there are those who think that the moral splendour and unfailing interest of the famous _Parallel Lives_ do not atone for the want of Attic grace and strength which marks the decadence of Greek prose literature. Yet surely to the genuine historian, to whom all these records are merely sources of information on the course of affairs and the characters of men, literary perfection should only be an agreeable accident, an evidence, if you like, of that day's culture, not a gauge to test the pre-eminence of one century or one nation over another.
[Sidenote: Alexander's place in history still disputed.]
§ 64. Accordingly, the character of Alexander and his work have not yet been sufficiently weighed and studied to afford us a perfectly clear picture, which might carry conviction to the majority of readers, and finally fix his place in history. As I said above[157:1], Grote's picture of him--the only recent study of the period in England previous to my own _Alexander's Empire_ and _Greek Life and Thought_--is so manifestly unfair that no candid judge will be satisfied with it. If any other writer had used against Demosthenes or Pericles such evidence as Grote cites and believes against Alexander, the great historian would have cried shame upon him, and refuted his arguments with the high satisfaction of supporting an unanswerable case.