The Historians' History of the World 04

Our present concern is with the part of Herodotus that deals explicitly with the affairs of Greece. This has particular reference to the Persian Wars, although giving many incidental references to other periods of history. For this period of the Persian invasions Herodotus is practically our sole source, and we have drawn on him largely at first hand. His narrative here may be paraphrased and in some slight details modified, but can never be supplanted. The account of Herodotus closes with the year 478—the definitive year in which the Persians were finally expelled from Greece. As Herodotus was six years old in 478, he must have had personal recollections of the effect produced upon his elders by the accounts of the battles of Thermopylæ, Salamis, and Platæa; must indeed all his life have been associated with men who participated in these conflicts; his account, therefore, has all the practical force of the report of a contemporary witness.

As we have said, the period following the Persian wars—the age of Pericles—found no contemporary historian, though the writings of the poets and the orators to some extent make amends for the deficit; and the art treasures that have been preserved are more eloquent than words in their testimony to the culture of the time. The general historians and biographers supply us with the chief details of the political events of the time and bridge for us the gap between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars.

When we reach the Peloponnesian War itself we come upon the work of the master historian Thucydides. A critical estimate of his writings has already been given and need not be repeated here. Neither need we take up at length the work of Xenophon, who, as already noted, explicitly continued the history of Thucydides. We have previously had occasion to point out that Xenophon did not equal his great predecessor in true historical sense, or in breadth and impartiality of view. His partiality for Sparta and his friendship for Agesilaus led him to do scant justice to the great Theban Epaminondas, and we have previously noted how the record of Diodorus, rather than the contemporary account of Xenophon, is our best source for the history of the Theban hero. Nevertheless Xenophon remains an important source for the period of which his Hellenica

treats. His more popular work, the Anabasis, describes a picturesque incident in Grecian history, which was important rather as an adumbration of possible future events than because of its intrinsic interest.

Coming to the Macedonian epoch we find, as might be expected, that the picturesque life of Alexander called forth a multitude of chroniclers; all of which, as has been said, were superseded by the later works of Arrian and Curtius.

Recapitulating in a few words what has just been said of the original sources of Grecian history, it would appear that the reader who has before him the works of Diodorus, Justin, Plutarch, Nepos, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Arrian will have access to the chief fountain-heads upon which modern historians have drawn. But it will be clear to anyone who considers these authors in their entirety that the idea of Grecian history to be gained by reading these classical writers alone would be a somewhat disjointed and unsatisfactory one. Many points of chronology would remain obscure; there would be many gaps in the story. Yet, the view thus to be gained was the only one accessible until about a century ago. The revival of interest in the classical authors that came about along with the general intellectual advance in the time of Elizabeth, had led to the translation of many classical authors by such men as Thomas North, Philemon Holland, and Arthur Golding. It had led also, as we have noted, to the production of Sir Walter Raleigh’s general history, which was complete for the period during which Greece was an important nation. But there was no other attempt to unify the story of Grecian history and give it a modern garb until more than a century later.

Then the stimulus given to historical investigation by the success of Gibbon’s splendid work, led to an attempt to treat the history of Greece in a manner equally comprehensive. The man who first undertook the task in England was William Mitford. The work that he produced was an epochal one, replete with scholarship, yet it had certain limitations which led directly to the production by another hand of a yet more monumental work on the same subject. For, as is well known, the history of Grote was written with the explicit intention of combating the conception of Grecian civilisation that Mitford’s book had made current.