The Historians' History of the World 04

If it be true that the style is the man, then we may feel that after all, despite the meagre contemporary records as to his life, the man Herodotus is well known to us; for his great work, possibly the only one that he ever composed, has come down to us intact. Not indeed that the actual manuscript of his own production has been preserved. No author of classical Greece has come down to us directly in this sense. But in that day the individual copyist did in a small way what the printing-press to-day accomplishes on a larger scale. And of the numerous copies that were made of Herodotus in succeeding ages down to the period of the Renaissance, something less than a score are still preserved. Most of these date only from the fifteenth, fourteenth, or, at the earliest, the tenth century. There are, however, two or three that are undoubtedly still more ancient, though probably none that was written within a thousand years after the death of the author himself. The fact of numerous copies made in different ages by different hands being available for comparison, however, makes it reasonably sure that we have in the carefully edited editions of modern scholarship a fairly accurate representation of what Herodotus actually wrote.

This work, then, is commonly spoken of as the History of the Persian War

. It is really much more than that. Starting with the idea of the Persian War as a foundation, Herodotus has built a structure which might, perhaps with more propriety, be termed a history of the world as known in his day. The work itself makes it clear that, in acquiring material for its composition, the author travelled extensively in Asia and in Egypt. He visited Babylon, and gives us the description of an eye-witness of the glories of that famous capital; and he sojourned long in Egypt, saw with his own eyes the Pyramids and other monuments of that wonderful civilisation, and heard from the priests fabulous tales of the past history of their country.

When one reflects what must have been the range of observation of the average stay-at-home Greek of that day, one readily understands how much of what Herodotus saw in these foreign lands had the charm to him of absolute novelty. He had but to recount what he had seen and heard—a fair degree of literary skill being of course presupposed—to produce a narrative which would have all the charm for his compatriots of a fascinating romance. The marvels of his actual observation in Babylon and in Egypt must have seemed to him more wonderful than anything he could conceivably invent. Therefore, even had his sole object been—as quite probably it was—merely to make an entertaining narrative, he had no inducement to depart from the recital of the truth as he saw and heard it. That, in point of fact, he did thus cling to the truth is admitted to-day on all hands. There were periods, however, within a few hundred years of his own epoch, when Herodotus was considered by even the best authorities of the time as a bald romancer. The Greeks and Romans of about the beginning of our era, with Plutarch—or a “false Plutarch”; the question of authenticity is an open one—at their head, did not hesitate to stigmatise Herodotus as a writer of fables. “Plutarch” even went further and asserted that he was a malignant perverter of the truth as well.

Such detractions, however, did not at all alter the fact that the story of Herodotus had an abiding interest for each succeeding generation of readers, and it is one of the curious results of modern exploration and investigation to prove that very often where Herodotus was supposed to have invented fables he was, in point of fact, merely narrating, in the clearest manner possible, what he had actually seen.

Mixed with these recitals of fact, to be sure, there is much that is really fabulous, but this is chiefly true of those things which Herodotus reports by hearsay, and explicitly labels as being at second hand. Whether fact or fable, however, the entire story of Herodotus has at once the fullest interest and the utmost importance for the historian of to-day. For where it tells us facts about the nations of antiquity, these are very often facts that would otherwise be shut out absolutely from our view; and where he relates fables, he at least preserves to us, in a vivid way, a picture of the mental status and the intellectual life of a cultivated Greek in the period of the greatest might of that classical nation.