Note 168 — THE TEMPLE ON THE ACROPOLIS BURNT BY THE PERSIANS.

Footnote 168: (return) The entire argument on the question of the month is open to the objection that too much weight is given to such men as Tzetzes and all the tribe of minor scholiasts, whose opportunities for accurate knowledge were, in many respects, vastly inferior to those of scholars of our own day. It is easy indeed to say that their testimony is worth nothing. But where shall we stop? It is urged that the connection of the Lenaea with an Attic month Lenaeo arose from an attempt on the part of the commentators to explain names as they found them. It is said that this conflict of the authorities proves that there never was an Attic Lenaeo. This may be true; and the man who will prove it to be so, and furthermore will give us the accurate history of the Attic and the Ionic calendars, will do a great service to Greek scholarship. But he must have at hand better sources than we possess to-day. Though the later Greek commentators on the classics have made many amusing and stupid blunders, though we need not hesitate to disregard their teaching when it comes into conflict with better authority, or with plain reason, still they have told us that which is true. They often furnish us with all that we know of older and better authors, whose works were their authority. Therefore, unless I have found testimony against them, I have followed their teaching. Both here and elsewhere I give their words for what they are worth; not that I rank Proclus with Thucydides, or the Et. Mag. with Aristophanes,--but from the conviction that so remarkable a concurrence of testimony in so many different writers has not yet been successfully explained away, and could not indeed exist unless their testimony were founded on a basis of fact.