Book II - Wilbourhall.org

xxvi INTRODUCTION. [ii.making little or no effort to correct any but themost obvious blunders. But these learned personswere great men, patriarchs and bishops, and weredevoted students. Monks were the copyists, men ofslight learning, which was dangerous to them, menwho cared nothing at all about what they did, butonly about getting it done. By the tenth century,the scholia, the work of various earlier scholars,which we shall have occasion to notice, had beencollected and appended to the text page by page.But the copyists had often mixed up the commentarywith the text, and this fertile cause of blunders hadbeen at work now for many centuries, having probablybegun to vitiate the original at a time considerablyanterior to the Christian era.Just as an early English classic is modernised inordinary editions, so the aspect of the textof Thucydideshad been graduallj'^ altered since the fourth centuryB.C. ;their day inthe majority.the copyists introducing the forms in use inplace of forms no longer understood byThere are many phenomena in the textof Thucydides which make it probable that he wrotehis work in the old Attic alphabet, consisting oftwenty-one letters, and wanting ^, xp, w, instead of inthe Ionic alphabet of twenty-four letterj.This longeralphabet, though only officially adopted at Athens in403 B.C., was, it is true, in private use since thePersian Wars ; and before the end of the PeloponnesianWar, it was probably the regular alphabet inall but state documents. But it is remarkable thatThucydides uses certain forms which Avere certainlyobsolete at the end of the Peloponnesian War. Thus