DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.14696#0013
Preface
IX
The episodical character of the book with its sections and
subsections is due, at least in part, to the circumstances in which
it has been composed. I have throughout been in full work as
College Lecturer in Classics and University Reader in Classical
Archaeology, responsible therefore for a good deal of teaching,
examining, and organisation. Such a life, however congenial, tends
to produce a certain mental attitude, the habit of thinking in
compartments. Term-time leaves but scanty scraps of leisure for
research, and the mind is more or less jaded when vacation is
reached. Under such conditions anything like sustained flight or
long-continued effort becomes doubly difficult. And I do not
doubt that a better book on the same subject will some day be
written by a man with larger leisure and clearer outlook.
But I do not wish to leave the impression that I have found
the writing of Zeus irksome or unduly fatiguing. On the contrary,
it has been a perpetual delight to come back and back again to a
central theme, which so obviously serves to illuminate a dozen
departments of classical study and in turn receives much illumina-
tion from them. A task of this kind, though it can never be other
than a financial failure, carries with it its own reward.
Not the least pleasurable part of the undertaking has been my
growing sense of indebtedness to many friends. Some, alas, I can
no longer thank as I should wish to do for their inspiration and
their help. Of those whose names appeared in the Preface to
Volume I six have since died. James Hope Moulton, a greater
man even than Cambridge knew him to be, lived a life of self-
sacrifice and in April 1917 died a heroic death—or rather, as he
hi mself phrased it in those dark days, et? rrjv Xa/jL-rrpav airrfK-Oev:
I count myself lucky to be able to include a passing reference to
his name. C. H. XV. Johns, learned and lovable to the last, was
taken from us in August 1920: I shall not soon forget how, shortly
before the end, he sat propped in his study-chair and bidding me
hold up the big folio—for his own arm was half-paralysed—read
aloud to me a cuneiform text (p. 482 f.) and furnished it there and
then with an ample commentary out of the depths of his know-
ledge. Otto Gruppe too is gone—a grave loss to learning—leaving
as one of his latest writings a brief but masterly paper on ' Die
Anfange des Zeuskultus' (Neue Jahrb. f. klass. Altertum 1918
xli—xlii. 289—302). E. Babelon, J. R. McClean, A. Wright—the
list lengthens. But it is a list which, happily, is balanced and
more than balanced by an increasing number of scholars able and
IX
The episodical character of the book with its sections and
subsections is due, at least in part, to the circumstances in which
it has been composed. I have throughout been in full work as
College Lecturer in Classics and University Reader in Classical
Archaeology, responsible therefore for a good deal of teaching,
examining, and organisation. Such a life, however congenial, tends
to produce a certain mental attitude, the habit of thinking in
compartments. Term-time leaves but scanty scraps of leisure for
research, and the mind is more or less jaded when vacation is
reached. Under such conditions anything like sustained flight or
long-continued effort becomes doubly difficult. And I do not
doubt that a better book on the same subject will some day be
written by a man with larger leisure and clearer outlook.
But I do not wish to leave the impression that I have found
the writing of Zeus irksome or unduly fatiguing. On the contrary,
it has been a perpetual delight to come back and back again to a
central theme, which so obviously serves to illuminate a dozen
departments of classical study and in turn receives much illumina-
tion from them. A task of this kind, though it can never be other
than a financial failure, carries with it its own reward.
Not the least pleasurable part of the undertaking has been my
growing sense of indebtedness to many friends. Some, alas, I can
no longer thank as I should wish to do for their inspiration and
their help. Of those whose names appeared in the Preface to
Volume I six have since died. James Hope Moulton, a greater
man even than Cambridge knew him to be, lived a life of self-
sacrifice and in April 1917 died a heroic death—or rather, as he
hi mself phrased it in those dark days, et? rrjv Xa/jL-rrpav airrfK-Oev:
I count myself lucky to be able to include a passing reference to
his name. C. H. XV. Johns, learned and lovable to the last, was
taken from us in August 1920: I shall not soon forget how, shortly
before the end, he sat propped in his study-chair and bidding me
hold up the big folio—for his own arm was half-paralysed—read
aloud to me a cuneiform text (p. 482 f.) and furnished it there and
then with an ample commentary out of the depths of his know-
ledge. Otto Gruppe too is gone—a grave loss to learning—leaving
as one of his latest writings a brief but masterly paper on ' Die
Anfange des Zeuskultus' (Neue Jahrb. f. klass. Altertum 1918
xli—xlii. 289—302). E. Babelon, J. R. McClean, A. Wright—the
list lengthens. But it is a list which, happily, is balanced and
more than balanced by an increasing number of scholars able and