covered any thing in this long inscription inconsistent with the belief of its antiquity ; and sonic of them have even pronounced it to be the most authentic of pagan monuments. Can it be really supposed, that a modern scholar, capable of such a forgery, would confine the labours of his life to an obscure piece of marble ? or would any author have suppressed the inestimable an cient documents, which now no longer exist, but which might have afforded rich materials for a splendid and costly volume, for the sake of giving value to a stone, which an accident might destroy in a moment ? Mr Robertson has comprised all his arguments under nine heads, which he has illustrated with much force and ingenuity. " The characters," he asserts, " have no certain or unequivocal marks of antiquity : It does not appear probable, that the chronicle was engraved for private use : It does not appear to have been engraved by public authority : The Greek and Roman writers, for a long time after the date of this work, complain that they had no chronological accounts of the affairs of an cient Greece : This chronicle is not once mentioned by any writer of antiquity : Some of the facts seem to have been taken from authors of a late date : Parachronisms appear in some of the epochas, which we can scarcely suppose a Greek chronologer in the 129th Olympiad would be liable to commit : The history of the discovery of the marbles is obscure and unsatisfactory : The lite rary world has frequently been imposed upon by spurious books and inscriptions.".
1st, The first of these objections scarcely merits any consideration. To say that an inscription has no certain or indubitable mark of antiquity, and to call every such appearance by the hard name of affectation, is to wage war with all inscriptions, whether spurious or authentic. The external marks of antiquity, however strong, can never of themselves confer the character of certainty on any monument whatever. To say too, that the letters bear no resemblance to those on the Sigean monument, which is 1000 years older, is surely no mortal thrust at the Arundelian inscription. The objector complains, that H has one leg longer than the other, that Z is in the form of a prostrate x, and that the letters 0, 0, S2, are smaller than the rest. In this form, however, [I and Z occur, times without number, on ancient monuments ; of which the reader will find a satisfactory instance in No. I. Part 2. of Chandler's inscriptions ; and as to the round letters, these, from the great space which they naturally occupy, are almost uniformly reduced, in point of size, in all the inscriptions. On the Sigean monu ment, o and p are made remarkably small ; and on the pedestal which supported the statue of Jupiter Urius, erected only A. C. 530, all these characters are exhibi ted exactly in the form of which the learned sceptic is so suspicious. With respect to the archaisms Ef4 IIaeedl, ty Avy-oerice5, &c. which the objector terms
and unworthy of the age of Ptolemy Philadelphus, only 130 years after the time of Xenophon and Plato ; we beg leave to refer the reader to the Smyrnean league, composed at most but 20 years, perhaps not so many, after the reputed date of this chronicle. But we are trifling with the reader's patience. Whoever had eru dition sufficient to construct such an extensive chrono logy from ancient records, must be supposed to have had sufficient acquaintance with these mechanical nice ties, to make them perfectly unexceptionable.
2d, The second objection is no less frivolous. We can see nothing improbable in the supposition, that a learned opulent Greek, an enthusiast in the antiquities of his native country, might have compiled, out of his common-place notes, a popular system of chronology, and engraved it on marble, either to be het as a family curiosity, or to be exhibited for the information of ordi nary people. The expense attending the gratification of so elegant a fancy could not have been serious : at all events, that consideration must be supposed to have had less influence on a magnificent lover of learning in an cient times, than on a needy modern, who could be tempted by want alone to undertake so difficult, and yet so unprofitable, a speculation. Mr Robertson gives us a long and learned catalogue of all those, who, at that period, wrote on paper, in order to prove that the com mon mode of writing was not on stones ; and, of conse quence, that the marble is not genuine ! But lie might as well have asserted, that Richer never walked on the tight rope, because the common mode is on the ground. His argument, that paper is more commodious than marble, for the purpose of writing, only proves the folly of inscribing on durable materials ; but not that it never has been done. The laws of Solon were cut in wood. The astronomical and chronological observations of the Babylonians were stamped on bricks ; and a whole poem of Hesiod was cast on plates of lead. Nay, a regular chronology, inscribed on marble, in which the xras • of the celebrated poets, musicians, priests, and other distin guished characters were marked, was kept at Sicyon : and all this, at a period when a mode of writing, at once cheaper, and better calculated for the purpose of general intelligence, was in common use.
3d, We do not presume to say, that the monument was actually erected by public authority ; though we hope to skew, in opposition to the learned objector, that there is nothing improbable in that hypothesis. The author indeed, if Selden's reading be correct, speaks of himself in the singular number. But the learned reader will recollect, that nothing was more common than for individuals to erect monuments by public authority. Of this description is No. 2. of Prideaux's Arundelian marbles, where, by a vote of the senate of Smyrna, a pri vate individual erects an inscription in memory of a friend.