The Historians' History of the World 04

Something has been said in another place of the large number of Greek historians. Mr. Clinton lists forty-seven by name who flourished prior to 306 B.C.; and this without including the historians of Alexander. Among these are such more or less familiar names as Cadmus of Miletus, Hecatæus, Hellanicus, Ctesias, Ephorus, Theopompus, Dinon, and Anaximenes. But of the entire list of earlier writers only three are represented by extant works in anything but the most fragmentary condition. These three bear the famous names Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon. All of these lived within the same century; and each of them left a detailed account of a relatively brief but highly significant period of Grecian history. The story of Herodotus closes with the year 478 B.C.; Thucydides deals with twenty-one years of the Peloponnesian War, though taking an incidental glance at earlier history; Xenophon, taking up the account of the Peloponnesian War where Thucydides leaves off, continues the record to the death of Epaminondas in the year 362 B.C.

Curiously enough, there is no Greek historian after Xenophon, for about two centuries, whose works have been preserved; and the records of Grecian history for all other periods than those covered by Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon are mostly preserved in the writings of authors who lived long after Greece had ceased to have importance as an autonomous nation. But of course these writings drew upon contemporary records; and being made at a time when it was possible to check their accounts with numerous histories that are now lost, they have almost the same significance as if they were themselves contemporary sources. These later writings are comparatively few in number. By far the most important of them is the general history of Diodorus, to which reference has so frequently been made. Justin’s abridgment of Trogus Pompeius is also of value; as are the biographies of Plutarch and of Cornelius Nepos. The chronicle of Eusebius supplies many gaps in the record, particularly as regards the earlier periods of Grecian history; and the same is true of the work of Pausanias, which, though dealing primarily with geography, makes important historical allusions here and there; as, for example, in regard to the Messenian wars. The lives of Alexander the Great by Arrian and by Quintius Curtius, based on the now lost works of Alexandrian contemporaries, furnish us full records of the age of the Macedonian hero. For the post-Alexandrian epoch the fragments of Polybius are the chief source for the periods which they cover. But these are so meagre that our main reliance must be placed upon the general historians Diodorus and Justin, here as for so many other periods.

Oddly enough, no single work except the general histories has come down to us that deals with the history of Greece as a whole; that history can be reconstructed only by piecing together the various fragmentary records, and he who would know Grecian history at first hand has chiefly to attend to the authorities just mentioned. When one has read Diodorus and Justin, Plutarch and Nepos, and Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Arrian, and Curtius, one has appealed to the chief among first-hand sources of Grecian history. We have already had occasion to refer to some of these at considerable length, and fuller notes concerning them will be found in the present bibliography; but there is one of them whose work is so important and whose position as a factor in the history of literature is so unique that we are justified in giving more extended attention to him here. This is, of course, the oldest and in some respects the most remarkable of all, Herodotus; an author whom we encounter almost everywhere in the old Orient and who serves as almost our sole witness for the great events through which Greece attained a dominant place among the nations,—the events, namely, of the so-called Persian or Median Wars.

Herodotus, the celebrated father of history, or, as K. O. Müller styles him, the father of prose, was born at Halicarnassus, in Asia Minor, about 484 B.C., and died at Thurii, Italy, about 424 B.C. Halicarnassus was a colony of Doric Greece, and therefore Herodotus was related in his ancestry rather to the Spartans than to the Athenians. His work, however, was not written in the Doric dialect but in the Ionic, which at that time was the accepted vehicle of literary productions in Greece, being the dialect generally employed by Homer, Hesiod, and the long line of logographers. The style of Herodotus has been recognised by critics of all succeeding ages as almost perfect of its kind.