The ‘Sophocles’ Statue: A Reply

I trust I may be allowed to answer briefly the long criticism which Professor Fr. Studniczka has devoted, in the first part of this volume, to my essay ‘Poet or Lawgiver.’ The views expressed in that criticism are not new to me. As soon as my paper appeared, I sent a copy of it to Dr. Studniczka; he answered me by a long letter giving his reasons for dissenting from my theory. Indeed—to use a phrase of his own—my learned contradictor felt so ‘confident’ in the strength of his arguments, that he proposed I should make use of them to write myself, in this Journal, a recantation of my essay—a liberal offer which I was unable to accept, not out of any personal feeling, but simply because a careful study of Dr. Studniczka's case has utterly failed to shake my well-founded conviction.At the beginning of his paper, Dr. Studniczka remarks that, of all the arguments brought forward by me, the only one which might have decided the question ‘turns out to be a worthless relic from the dead stock of E. Q. Visconti's Greek Iconography.’ This is not stating the case fairly. I never pretended to upset the traditional theory by any sensational revelation of unknown material. I simply contended—and contend—that the existing documents had been wrongly interpreted, and some of them badly published; therefore, to facilitate a more correct interpretation, I collected them once more and laid them before the eyes of the reader, in accurate reproductions; as, for instance, the Florence herm of Solon, hitherto only known to archaeologists by the untrustworthy print in Visconti.