The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-10-06
HERCULANEuM.
What Much-Mnlioned Man Will un-

! What Much-Millioned Man Will Un-
 cover the Buried City.
 Most people imagine that Hercula- neum, buried by eruption of ve- suvius in 70 A. D., has been as care fully and completely excavated as it's neighbor, Pompeii, but this is not SO. It lies nearer to Naples, and it's site was the sooner covered with houses. Two or more villages now stand above it. or rather above the hardened mud seventy feet below which sleeps the little Graeco-Samnite town. When the curiosity of the eighteenth century started to explore and to dig through this mud houses were already in ex- istence above the trenches and tun- nels then cut, and the excavators had to go with caution and eventually to be contented with very partial execu- tion of their task. Indeed one corner merely of the city was dug out, and then the matter was left for want of funds and for fear of trouble with the owners of the soil above, Little was done in the nineteenth century; and while excavation has been busy in other parts of ths-classical lands, and it neighbor, more happily situated for the explorer, has been revealed in it's entirely, nothing has been added to the knowledge of Herculaneum.
 Herculaneum was not so much smothered as overflowed by wave on wave of mud that preserved things by covering them up before cinders and scorlae had time to set anything alight. The town itself was inhabited, there is reason to believe, by a more cultivated class of people than the pleasure seekers of Pompeli, whose one anxiety, as their inscription prove, was that gladlators might be many and sport good. The paintings and sculptures that have been recovered from Herculaneum are of greater artistic value; and, to put the matter beyond question, while, Pampeii has not yielded single manuscript, the one house In Hereulaneum that has been thoroughly explored contained numerous rolls of papyri. Unfortunate 1 ly, the house belonged to a man who specialized in Epieurean philosophy, 1 for the rolls were all works by philo- sophers of this school. But the houses Tn Herculaneum are numerous, and it is against all reason to suppose that they were all inhabited by students of Epicurus and his doctrines,
 | Under the mud waves there may lie the lyric poets of Greece, whose loss makes, perhaps, the worst gap in all ancient literature, Sappho, Alcaeus, Simonidesthe critics speak of them, but they are hardly more than names. There also may be the lost yriters of tragedy, such as Phrynichus, whose 1 songs, so Aristophanes tells us the veterans of Marathon hummed as they went through the streets at night, and of the old Comedy, the revals of Arls- tophanes himself, Cratinus and Amelp- sians. There, too, may lie the writers of the New Comedy, whose loss the an- cient critics would have accounted as the worst we have to suffer,
 Nor are the poets the only writers men would wish to recover. The his- torian of Greece and Rome, because of his scant material has to piece to- gether much of his story from in- scriptions and later authorities. He has the 'impenetrable stupidity of Diodorus and the anecdotes of Put arch, but he would like to read the rise of Athens as recorded by Hellan- ieus, and the story of Sicily as told by the ''pusillus Thucydides,' Phisistus, who took part in his own subject mat ter and was the contemporary of Dionysus. Not least, he would wish to see Alexander and his successors as they appeared to those with whom they lived. If his interests were more with Latin literature, he might then hope to find in Herculaneum the lost Civil Wars" of Sallust, and the lost Decades" of Livy Something, too might be found that would give new knowledge if not of early Christianity yet perhaps of the early Christians.
 To test these speculations one chiei thing is wanting~-lnoney The assist ance of the Italian Parliament would be needed. Even then the sum requir' ed would large, perhaps a quarter or million, perhaps more. Want ol money, and that alone, has prevented the attempt being made but the money should be found somehow Here is the greatest romance of ex- caVation and discovery Naiting'-Lon' tdon Spectator.